InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "And I recall his yellow cat!"

Laura Moon (spitandviolets) wrote in mirage_rpg,
@ 2009-02-05 16:23:00

Entry tags:

andy gallagher, complete, day 31, laura moon

Who: Laura Moon and Andy Gallagher
What: Insomnia!
When: Day 31, very late night
Where: Laura's room, C112.
Rating: PG-13 for language and gory details
Status: Complete

If there was one thing that Mirage already knew about Laura, it was that she no longer had any concept of or any care for the concept of time. It had not supplied the undead woman with a clock. It didn't matter. When the sun was down, Laura was active and the rest of the world was not. When the sun was up, well, sometimes she didn't have a choice, and others she debated with herself as to whether or not she should be doing something. Thus, it was very dark, and possibly late or early.

Laura did not remember her own wake and funeral very well. She was not there, exactly. It was a distant memory, like watching herself from across the room. She remembered when her best friend spat on her face, and she remembered the violets. She also remembered the pose in which she'd been put to rest. At the moment, she was practicing it on her bed, bored, as usual, and cold, as usual. Her body was rigid, laying on her back on the plush, black coverlet, arms crossed over her chest, hands folded. Since she did not need to breathe, she was not breathing. Her eyes were closed but she did not sleep. Her hair was fanned out around her. Only the outfit, a pair of jeans and a black tanktop, which made her look even paler than usual, was out of place for a wake.

Having just retired from her computer, she was expecting Andy. When he would arrive, however, was uncertain. Drunk people ran on their own schedule. When she got drunk, when she was alive, she drank a lot. That, in fact, had been the death of her. Literally. Maybe she'd try to brighten Andy's mood with that story. The likelihood that he wanted to hear about her death, however, was probably not high. L was unique in that respect. Still, maybe she'd have another friend, someone else who wouldn't mind that she was dead and cold.

Focusing on the movements of the lights of humans, she managed to zero in on Andy's with only minor difficulty. Rising from the bed as a zombie from the grave, Laura sauntered to the door, opening it just as her guest arrived. She said nothing, holding the door open for him, dark eyes studying his face.

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brain_ninja
2009-02-08 07:39 pm UTC (link)

All at once, Andy realized that using her for a sounding board was a bad idea. He'd done a stupid thing. Well, what else was new for today? He supposed it served him right for taking up another woman on another offer to spend time with her. He'd probably never get it right and even if he was alive, when he did die, it'd be alone. That was fantastic. Just fucking great.

"I didn't mean to offend you," he slurred lazily, looking up at her with apologetic eyes. "God, I'm a real fuck up these days. I mean, I always was, but I'm breaking my own records left and right in this place. I'm bitching about being alive to a dead woman. Real fuckin' sensitive." He sighed. "You're trying to make me feel better and I'm paying you back by being a dipshit. I'm sorry. And you know...I'm really not so...emo," he muttered.

He wasn't. Most of the time, Andy loved his life. It didn't matter to him that he was a nobody and it didn't matter to him that he lived in the back of a van with only a bong, a disco ball, and Doors CDs for company. To Andy, life was just there. You lived it and you loved it and then you kick the bucket. If you didn't love it, at least you shouldn't waste it by dwelling on this sucky bullshit. He never had, really, until all the craziness with the psychic thing and Webber...and Tracy. And now this place. Starting over should've been easy for him, but he'd never bothered trying and he was flopping around in the effort like a fish out of water. Because of it, he was hurting feelings and making people mad.

This wasn't the person Andy was and it certainly wasn't the person he wanted to be.

Laura offered him a cigarette and he opened his mouth to protest, until she lit it and he could smell that it wasn't a cigarette at all; it was a clove. "Yeah, actually, if you don't mind," he replied. Why not? He was already cheating death and his lungs could take a massive hit and hold for almost a full minute. A clove certainly wasn't gonna kill him.

When she sat on the arm of his chair, resuming the stroking of his face and moving her fingers through his hair, he relaxed a little once again. She might just be using him for his warmth, but it was a gentle touch and it was somehow oddly reassuring. It reminded him a little of the way Tracy used to touch him right before or after sex. He figured that wasn't Laura's intention, but there was a morbid familiarity to the touch, anyway, so he let her continue.

"Yeah, it makes sense," he countered. "I've done all those things; I know how they feel."

Andy paused, hesitating for a moment before pulling himself up onto the opposite arm of the chair. He put a hand on her cheek and when it felt just as icy as her hands, he had to make an effort not to recoil. Cold hands were nothing terribly out of the ordinary, after all. Everybody got cold hands once in a while. Icy, even. But her face... He moved his hand away, then, putting both his hands on her mostly bare shoulders, running them down her arms. Every inch of her was so cold. He couldn't imagine how uncomfortable and awful that must feel...

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spitandviolets
2009-02-08 08:29 pm UTC (link)

She paused a moment to listen to his words. A small smile actually cracked across her frigid face. "You didn't offend me," she replied, shrugging a little. "I don't get offended. I was only attempting to put things into perspective for you. But, if you keep calling yourself a fuckup and a dipshit, I might get angry. It's funny which emotions you can remember after you're dead; tends to be only the really powerful ones. So, please, don't worry about it. I'm fine. You didn't offend me. I accept that I'm dead. I don't love it, but I accept, and I move on. I pass for human most of the time. It's enough."

It wasn't quite enough. She would have liked a lot more than passing for human, but every day that someone didn't realize, without her telling them, that she was dead was a pretty good day. It was enough. Days, however, didn't mean so much to her anymore. Time passed very strangely. Everything was just one long eternity with no foreseeable end. In it, people were born, lived, slept, ate, did all of the things that people needed to do, and died. That was what the world, and time, looked like at this point. With Andy and his insomnia, it must have looked pretty similar.

Grabbing one of the cigarettes, Laura placed it in his mouth. Leaning forward, she lit it with her own. That had been one of her favorite tricks, back in the day. She smirked at him and nodded. "You know, you should avoid this crap. It's going to kill you one day." A chuckle. There was dark irony in that someplace. She hoped that he could find it, though he was probably too drunk. Hopefully he wouldn't take offense. Cloves, though, were just as deadly as normal cigarettes. Shadow had given her a pamphlet once.

"I've done all of those things too, albeit not for quite some time. Good to know that I'm not just naming off more things that you can't relate to. Sometimes I just assume that everybody in the world knows all about getting intimate with people. It was a bad habit of mine; seems that it still is."

Laura's first instinct was to pull away when he put his hand on her cheek. She hadn't been expecting that, not at all. She always reached out to people, though Andy was only the third person she'd touched since dying. As he recoiled she felt it, and she wasn't surprised in the least. Her skin was cold, unexpectedly so, and it was a little bit clammy and sticky at the same time. It couldn't have been pleasant. His warmth, though, was enough to make her stay as still as a statue, not pulling away from his warming caress. It was wonderful, better than anything she could imagine. Even Shadow, her own husband, hadn't been daring enough to touch her like that when she came back. I think there are several aspects of our marriage we're going to have to work on. 'Baby, you're dead.' That's one of those aspects. The conversation echoed in her brain. Laura breathed out as his hands rubbed down her arms. Her eyes had fallen shut, for once completely at a loss for words.

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