Re: Diner: 1AM-ish
Billy was pretty sure, like, more than ninety percent this time, that the idea of real was more like an ideal. New York had been a bubble. The Upper West Side, a smaller bubble within that. His family home. His bedroom. Each one a different layer of reality that slightly altered the makeup of how he acted, the things he said, what he thought. None of them were any less real than the others, he didn’t think. And then he’d landed face-first in the mess of metaphysical detritus that was Repose, and his reality had shifted into a dozen different microcosms all over again. Even with ill-prepared knowledge of the supernatural trailing behind him like a streaking comet, he hadn’t been prepared for the different sort of reality that awaited him in the crater that he’d carved out here.
“I’ve never been offered a choice,” he explained, his hand landing back flatly on the tabletop next to the mug. He tilted his head back a little and twisted his chin until his neck popped on one side. His joints felt like bits of gravel scraping together. “Maybe I’m just not interesting enough as myself.” It wasn’t self-pitying, or deprecating. Billy’s shoulders were rounded in an easy slump where he leaned back in the booth, and he looked like he was really considering it. But then he grinned back - a lazy, unbound expression that curled until his cheek dimpled on one side. “My heel was perfectly fine. I spent a night on the beach with my own Patroclus. Then morning came, and I was in the rec centre’s locker room with a stranger. Not exactly tangled under the sheets. But hey,” and he shrugged again, and huffed a laugh through his nose. “He was still hot. Does it matter what causes it? Like, really, would it make a difference? If we all left, either new people would show up with magic and trauma, or we’d all go find someplace else to fuck up.”
It was the sort of philosophical question that he would have been really hard pressed to give a shit about rn. He drained a little more of his coffee that tasted burnt, boozey, and saccharine all at the same time. “Who? People who care what other people think about them,” he said, eyebrow up like it was obvious. “And I didn’t ever think I couldn’t feel, for the record. I think I just forgot how to see it. Maybe it was wishful thinking? Or maybe it was completely fucking random, man.”