Re: By the bonfire: Holly/Trav
Despite initiating contact with his hand extended plainly out with fingers splayed, Travis didn't really know what he was doing. He was by no means a professional, if one could be a professional with psychic phenomena. He wasn't even certain that he could trigger the ability on command. Travis had only done this a time or two before, and both of those occasions had been a complete and horrific accident. Nobody wanted to share memories of quiet intimacy with some old plumber they met at the gas station. But it'd happened, and right now, Travis was expecting the worst.
His palm felt dewy with anxiousness, his fingers flexed wide, twitching almost-nerves with the need to detach from the rest of his body despite the beer he'd drank down before this. Travis couldn't say for sure what was going to happen, maybe nothing at all. And that might have been for the best because he didn't want to scare away one of the few people that he considered a friend. Still, he was somewhat confidant in the fact that Holly might not scare that easily.
Also, the thing was that Travis was just a little buzzed, which meant that he was mostly sober enough to be a little worried about sharing something incriminating or embarrassing about his own self. It wasn't really that Travis felt he had a lot to hide, but the pain that he had was his. The good memories, those from the other Repose, those were his too. He didn't know how he felt about sharing things like that, but it was all something that he was willing to risk in order to share his secret with Holly in this moment. He knew all too well that some things grew toxic when you kept them to yourself for too long. Travis didn't want this to be one of those things. So, first he took a deep breath, and then he took Holly's hand.
The bad memory rode the coattails of their bonfire reality in a seamless transition. Maybe it should have been a little disorienting to suddenly feel like you were a part of the ghostly past of somebody else, but it wasn't disorienting at all. In the memory, which felt much more present than past, Travis didn't even have a sense of himself, so there was no quarreling of identity to get tripped up on. It'd happened like this before , and it was very first hand. Travis could taste the blood in his sinuses, he recognized the smell of stale alcohol that soured in his nose like a warning.
He felt the pain when Dad hit him, but instead of everything going black, Travis found that he was brought back to the bonfire again. He knew what it felt like to get hit, and he knew what it felt like to get hit by guys pretending to be his dad, but knowing what it felt like didn't save him anything. The pain that came in that blink of a moment before the bonfire came back into his view was enough to jerk Travis away.
"What the fuck!" Plenty alarmed and trying to come to terms with being back at the bonfire in his own body with his own memories, Travis leaned forward to spit on the ground, fully expecting to be spitting out blood. But there was nothing there, even when he went to wipe his nose on his sleeve, no red to be seen. He shook his head and swayed a little, like he could feel his brain rattle. "Your Pop's a fucking asshole, man." And because he figured that might take some explaining, Travis rubbed at an ache he could still feel in his jaw when he lowered his voice to add, "He used to hit you, yeah? I was expecting the worst, but I wasn't expecting to get hit in the face, goddamn."