Re: log: dylan & max
He looked worried when she said that she hadn't talked to anyone for half a year. Dylan knew about that, although he'd blindly rejoined the life that this world had laid out for him, he operated through it with a mechanical lack of intimacy. She was the first time that he'd really talked to anyone about it, even if larger truths were left unsaid. Neither of them had to tell the other that it'd been bad for them on the other side, a look said it all.
Things felt real again gradually, Dylan discovered. By now, it was difficult to obsess over the possibility that none of this was real, because it felt right and real and frighteningly momentary. He'd been lucky in some ways because the hotel had taken him back in the middle of his torture and not at the end of it. He hadn't been reprogrammed, he'd still been himself, although he'd begun to come to terms with the fact that he would die there. But he hadn't died, and it didn't feel right to be optimistic about it because of everything that had happened, everything that he'd seen and been a part of while over there... but right now, in the booth, he realized that he might be able to afford a little hope. The hotel had proven to be more prone to revolving doors rather than pitching someone back into the same hell again and again.
He took a breath, and cracked a grin when she suggested that she was too old for him now. "Maybe you were just too young before," he said without worrying about the consequences of heavy flirtation.
"And yeah," he straightened and shrugged into his answer, finding it easier to analyze everything that came in the After. "I thought it was a trick at first, you know, but... California wasn't anything like where I was. It still took time to believe in it, but I just kept my head down and did my job, and when the journal came back, that kind of cemented it. I came here a couple months later."