Tweak

InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Ni!"

Richie Trashmouth Tozier (trashmouthloser) wrote in snapthread,
@ 2020-02-01 18:31:00

Entry tags:

dan torrance, richie tozier

WHO: Dan Torrance and Richie Tozier
WHAT: A comprehensive tour of Starklandia and beyond.
WHERE: COFFEE, to start
WHEN: Noon, when they agreed upon.

Richie was feeling better than he had in — er, well. A week or so, probably. He was done being basically attached by the hip to Steve. Who, while being one of the hottest and kindest and most ridiculously ab-ed people in town that deserved a lot of respect and equal parts kindness, was not who Richie would have chosen to spend an entire week with. He liked Steve, quite a lot and had since his own arrival in this strange town when Steve had found him bleeding and crying like an overwhelmed idiot in the courtyard and taken him home and offered him a shower, a hot meal and a bed.

But he didn’t want to sleep with Steve. That was the thing.

So anyway, now that he’d spent about a day with the person he did want to sleep with, he was in much better humor. Not that Richie Tozier was ever in poor humor, to be fair. If you squinted enough (which he did, pretty much constantly) everything was funny pretty much all the time.

He showed up more or less on time — having only been a little distracted by mostly nothing on the way, and glanced around the shop, offering Dan a bright smile when he spotted him. They’d never met in person, but when a town only had a handful of people in it, it wasn’t hard to spot out the new ones. “Well, if it isn’t my biggest fan.” Or, well, only fan, at this point.

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trashmouthloser
2020-02-02 03:29 am UTC (link)

Right, besides dead. Richie wasn't dead back home, at least he hadn't been when he'd ended up here, but he'd sort of been of the opinion that it was going to happen sooner rather than later. That didn't mean he was any better now at showing up places on time. Not unless he was being micromanaged by a manager or fiancee, anyhow.

He couldn't help it. He tried most of the time, he really did.

But he wasn't so late, just a few minutes, and that sort of thing barely mattered at all.

Only celebrity, Richie was too kind fo point out, even though he smiled a little self deprecatingly. This poor town got B-List at best, and they didn't even know it. "The options are limitless," he said dryly, because the place was pretty empty at the moment, beside Clint -- who had pushed a cup of coffee in Richie's direction before going back to his phone -- it was likely everyone was still holed up with their People. Which was fair, he supposed.

He ended up plunking himself down at the table nearest the window, just because it was the sunniest spot.

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doctoring
2020-02-02 04:29 am UTC (link)

The table by the window it was, and that's where Dan carried his coffee - when he sat, the steam and the scent of roasted beans invigorated his senses a little, which was welcome. "So you're supposed to tell me all about the town?" Dan prompted. He would poke around on his own too, see what was what, but it would be beneficial to hear the details from someone firsthand.

His eyes were pale blue, a lake frosted over, and he watched Richie over the rim of his coffee cup - sandy lashes blinked though, as something swarmed in front of his line of vision...

Shadows, inky tendrils creeping - a slow creep, a fluid one, like oiled silk. He blinked again, looking at Richie like he could bore holes into his forehead.

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trashmouthloser
2020-02-02 10:52 pm UTC (link)

Richie wrapped his hands around the whole of his cup, warming them up, because he was still the idiot who didn't bother with gloves in the winter unless he was yelled at to do it, first. He was getting pretty tired of the cold, not used to it anymore, despite having grown up in an area that knew frigid temperatures. California had spoiled him.

"Yeah, I figured I'd offer a tour. Not that it's big enough to, you know, not figure out yourself. But there's these doors--" he paused, coffee cup half way to his mouth, and blinked at Dan. "Is there something on my face?"

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doctoring
2020-02-02 11:13 pm UTC (link)

Dan was used to the cold. This particular part of town seemed very cobbled together, like, just a bunch of buildings waiting for people to move into them - it was interesting in its own way, even if it was different from what he was used to in his small town. Wintry trees looked like ballet dancers - they were so still even in gusts of wind, and it looked like the whole world was kissed by ice.

In the landscape of his mind though, the hedge maze was dark, a constant repeat of crunching in the fresh snow that erased footprints and set the world anew once more - secrets were buried there, and even further back, shoved into their lockboxes.

Is there something on my face-- Dan snapped out of it, because he could have sworn one of those boxes rattled with interest. "No," he said, but it probably didn't sound convincing. He was just...surprised, that was all. "What about the doors?"

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trashmouthloser
2020-02-03 12:39 am UTC (link)

Richie didn't care for winter. If he had any single, stupid, complaint about this place it was the fact that weather still somehow existed. Which didn't make any fucking sense, considering he'd basically been told that it was a pocket dimension that existed outside of both time and space. And yet here they were, like assholes, sitting through winter.

Yeah. That response didn't seem convincing at all, and Richie frowned, used his free hand to wipe at his cheek just in case, but came up with nothing. "Okay," he said, slow. Maybe this guy was just weird. Richie supposed being dead recently could do that to a guy. He hadn't shown up all there either. Sometimes life, or a lack of it, just fucked people up. "Er-- they exist? Like this weird house, you know? You open a door and it takes you to some place random."

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doctoring
2020-02-03 12:55 am UTC (link)

...he hadn't shown up all there either

That observation floated, gossamer alphabet soup that came and went, a flicker that blipped; errant thoughts were always like that in public places (for example, the guy behind the counter was definitely thinking of his husband). Dan bristled a bit, but he supposed he shouldn't have been surprised. When he was a kid and exhibited behaviors out of the norm, doctors thought he was autistic. Or mute (he didn't talk much, anyway). They thought he didn't have any friends because he was just one weird little person; they didn't understand the Shining, nor did anyone believe him.

And while he was perfectly willing to admit that he was awkward, he could tell that there was something about Richie too. Something dark, yes, but beyond that - it didn't make any sense to dance around it. "You have the Shining?" he said, though it came out like a question. "Has anyone ever told you?"

Asked as he sipped his coffee, blowing on it a little first to cool it.

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trashmouthloser
2020-02-03 01:00 am UTC (link)

Richie blinked, uncertain about what exactly was being asked of him. The Shining? He had absolutely no idea what that meant, none at all. So he took a drink of his coffee and tried to figure out how to respond to something that apparently took precedence over the concept of multiple dimensions behind doors.

"Uh," he said, and yes, that was about as eloquent as Richie got. Dan was very lucky to be able to be sitting across from such an intelligent, well-worded man. "I dunno, man. I've been using moisturizer lately. I heard it brings a nice natural glow. That's probably it."

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doctoring
2020-02-03 01:20 am UTC (link)

Oh, right. One of those awkward Dan Torrance moments again - boy, Dick woulda gotten a good laugh about this. His mentor would have also been intrigued, though - because here was this person, tall and gangly and looking like he would rather be on a tropical island and drinking in some Vitamin D from the warming rays of the sun. This person who had no idea that he had shadows cloaking his mind, darkness sinking into his skin.

"I'm sorry, I'll get back to the doors - I just..." He squinted, trying to think of how to phrase what he wanted to say, and ask all the questions he wanted to ask. "The Shining - it's...what we call powers of the mind back home. Like psychic powers, that sort of thing. I was born with it and I can sense...something happened? To you?"

Lockboxes, sitting there on the dusty floor. Chains rattled, like the ghost of Christmas past.

"There's something...in you." Which he realized sounded creepy, but did Richie really not know? That was dangerous.

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trashmouthloser
2020-02-03 01:31 am UTC (link)

Oh.

Well.

There was this, then, wasn't there.

"I want to say psychics don't exist," he said after a second, pushing his glasses back up his nose to really get a good look at Dan, like really pay attention to him now because this was fucking different, wasn't it. A guy from his own universe, with more to him than met the eye. A familiar kind of story. "But a few months ago I killed a killer clown from outer space, so what the fuck do I really know." Yeah, no shit, something had happened to him.

"In me?" he repeated after a beat. "What do you mean?"

The sad part was, he was pretty sure he did know, okay. He'd just been ignoring it.

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doctoring
2020-02-03 01:45 am UTC (link)

"You want to say psychics don't exist but you know they do," Dan replied with a wry smirk. He met the blue of Richie's eyes (windows to the soul) and yeah, what he felt was something that had rooted in there deep. Clinging like a damp blanket.

He dropped his gaze, down through blonde lashes and into his coffee cup. "It's like a darkness, I guess - like a hitchhiking one. It just kind of latched onto you, didn't it?"

The details weren't known - he could look, of course. But Dan thought that might be pretty damn rude. And besides, 'killer clown from outer space' sort of spoke volumes anyway.

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trashmouthloser
2020-02-03 01:55 am UTC (link)

"Touche," Richie said after a beat. It wasn't even that weird anymore. Not after Pennywise. Not after this place, either. Because people around here were fucking wizards and had superpowers and shit. Richie had shown up, looking like the only homeless scrub with nothing genuinely special about him in the entire place. Nothing felt surprising anymore, not really.

He looked away too, toward the window where the sun was shining in, making the winter feel like something of a lie when all he got was warm from it instead of biting cold. "I got caught up looking at something that I wasn't supposed to," he explained, wondering if maybe he ought to be as worried as Beverly was. It'd been easy. Easy to ignore because he had other things to focus on -- good shit instead of bad for once. But sometimes the dreams were bad, and sometimes he saw things that seemed like they ought to be true and that wasn't getting better, he knew that. "It went on forever." That maybe wasn't an important detail, but it was true. Rich knew that it'd been a matter of minutes at best, but it'd felt like life times. No time, existing outside of it in a way that a place like Starklandia never did.

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doctoring
2020-02-03 02:07 am UTC (link)

It was funny that Dan had originally referred to it as darkness, but the more he pressed ever-so-gently? The more he could see that what was festering in Richie's mind, buried deep beyond shelves and shelves, windows and walls, however his mindscape actually looked (it could be a hedge maze like Dan, a cathedral like Rose, a library like Abra) was something bright.

Something that was definitely nasty, something that burned like fiery stars. A little piece of a place that went on forever.

"You can still see things?" he asked in a rumble. "Precognitively?"

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trashmouthloser
2020-02-03 02:31 am UTC (link)

It wouldn't be a library for Richie. Not a maze or a cathedral or anything so organized or structured. It'd be something busier, louder.

Now that they were apparently focusing on his head, Richie could kind of feel that push, like someone trying to -- not open a door, but maybe peek behind a curtain? He didn't know what to do with that, because it was weird and unfamiliar, and so he had to pinch at the bridge of his nose, his glasses lifting slightly to make room for his fingers. "What the fuck," he said, not really bothered so much as -- well. He didn't know.

"Sometimes?' He asked it though, like he wasn't sure. Not really. "It's like. Stuff that could happen or maybe should have or -- I don't know. It's all jumbled. Wrong. This place makes it hard to tell? Because it's --you know." The deadlights had nothing on a place that wasn't meant to exist in the first place. Even still, sometimes he felt like if he waited long enough, whatever was in there might catch up. Or maybe not? "It happened to my friend. When we were kids. She said she had dreams, saw terrible shit. But it went away. Because we killed it." So it stood to reason that it would for him, too. That's what he'd been banking on.

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doctoring
2020-02-03 02:53 am UTC (link)

"That makes sense. I mean, that you wouldn't be seeing much of the future in a place that's kind of its own little pocket dimension." The future was difficult to hold anyway - you couldn't hold it, was the problem. Things changed, they shifted, possibilities upon possibilities in one complex mess. "But you obviously have something going on," Dan continued.

He couldn't exactly reach in and grab it - couldn't touch it, couldn't even really see it, not without concentrating. And COFFEE (screaming, in all caps, yes we sold coffee here) probably wasn't the place for it. Especially if Richie could start to feel his attempts, like Dan suspected he would - it really was kind of a strange sensation at first.

But, speaking of coffee, he sipped at what was in his mug even if it had gone a little lukewarm; he was almost done anyway. "Do you...have a plan or anything? To make sure it goes away?"

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trashmouthloser
2020-02-03 11:31 pm UTC (link)

That was exactly it. There was no seeing any future here, because this place did whatever it wanted. And maybe the Deadlights never could have accounted for something so absurd. But that didn't mean his head didn't start trying to make up the difference sometimes. Or something? Rich honestly couldn't tell, he just knew that sometimes when he woke up from a bad dream, sometimes he felt more unsettled about how real it felt than other times.

"You know," he said, finishing off his coffee in one long swallow, "I'm really fucking mad that this conversation wasn't about moisturizer."

He set his cup back down, glanced out the window again with a squint. "My friend, Bev, she talked to a wizard. He's apparently got wolf magic." Richie didn't know what the fuck that meant, and wondered if it would even matter. Different universes didn't always seem to be compatible from what he could tell -- the wizards from all the places hadn't been able to fix the fact that he'd been attached to Steve all last week. "Otherwise, I dunno. My favorite option has always been waiting things out."

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doctoring
2020-02-03 11:43 pm UTC (link)

Waiting it out might not have been what Dan would have suggested per se, but it wasn't his business - still, he wasn't about to just sit around, having learned all of this, and not see if he could do anything. "I don't know what wolf magic is," he said, sounding both confused and amused. "It might work though. Probably worth a try, at least?"

As long as it didn't make the problem worse, but Dan was going to assume the risks had already been gone over, if there were any at all. Magic was a tricky thing, however. It was seldom free.

His finger traced the edge of his coffee cup, thoughtful. "I'll help too. If you want. I don't have a way to remove a presence like that but I can at least take a look at it to see what you're dealing with. Not here though."

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trashmouthloser
2020-02-04 01:29 am UTC (link)

"I don't either," Richie said with a grin. Because, fuck, if they couldn't laugh, what was even the point? He refused to be so scared of something in his own head that he couldn't even be himself anymore. He'd done that to himself for almost his entire life -- and he'd be damned if something he didn't even choose himself did that for him, too. "Guess we'll see. Hopefully the teeth aren't too big."

Richie knew jack all about magic, but he did know the wizards in town to be good, helpful people. Remus was a good sort and Sirius too. They took care of Eddie in times when Richie hadn't been able, or hadn't been the right candidate for the problems at hand. And Bill was -- Bill was good. One of the people Richie would turn to first in a real crisis, maybe. Even though, he supposed to hadn't occurred to him with this particular issue.

He considered the offer, unsure, but then eventually shrugged. "Why the hell not." Definitely not here though. He didn't want to be some kind of weird spectacle.

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doctoring
2020-02-04 01:42 am UTC (link)

Dan wasn't keen on being some weird spectacle either - and who knows what he'd see when he pulled back the curtain of Richie's mind, when he dug a little deeper. Besides, to even allow him to do that required a significant amount of trust anyway. It would be better if they had some privacy.

"You'll be okay," he assured, hand patting Richie's - his wrist, actually, and Dan's thumb swiped over the pulse point. He didn't have to press there to know that Richie was anxious, and who could blame him? This was all entirely unknown. "I've - seen darkness too. Evil. I lived in it, and I was chased by ghosts - I couldn't outrun them so I tricked them and locked them up instead."

They resided there, in his head. Back in their dreary boxes, wrapped in chains. "Point is, I've seen a lot of bad things and come out on the other side so you can too."

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trashmouthloser
2020-02-04 02:03 am UTC (link)

Uh, yeah. Of course he was anxious. Who wouldn't be? But then, Richie was pretty good at dealing with anxiety and not making a scene about it at this point so -- well. There was that. He maintained that this place needed either a lot more weed or a proper supply of xanax, though. He'd really have liked either both or at least one of those things more than once since arriving.

Richie couldn't help himself though, he tapped his fingers against the table, a quiet non-beat and leaned forward a little, curious. It was true enough, trust would be necessary for something like that. And right now? It wasn't really there. All Richie really knew about this guy was that he was from his own world and had seen his Netflix special. But so had a couple other million people. "Should I be assuming that's nothing at all like ghostbusters?"

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doctoring
2020-02-04 02:25 am UTC (link)

"It's nothing at all like Ghostbusters," Dan confirmed, with a little smile. He twisted the coffee cup around and around in work-worn, calloused hands, looking down into it. Yeah, he'd open up a bit - he had to, if he wanted Richie to trust him. At the very least, he ought to show that he wasn't just bullshitting when he said he had experience with this sort of thing.

So, best to start from the beginning. There probably wasn't a better place, anyway.

"When I was a kid my dad took a job at the Overlook Hotel," he started. "It was in Colorado. Up in the mountains. He was a writer, was kind of having trouble finding work, so, he thought he could get things done if he took me and my mom there with him to be the groundskeeper during the winter off season."

If the Earth had a pulse it rose through the mountains, creating something kind of bold silhouette. The Overlook was the backdrop, a snowy wasteland cut off from all human contact. "We weren't alone in the hotel," he continued, voice a quiet murmur. "It was...infested, actually. With bad spirits, evil ones. Ones that I could hear and see and they tried to kill me but that didn't work, and then they went for my dad. They corrupted him, twisted him into something awful." Not that he had been great to begin with, but anyway. "He tried to kill me and my mom but she got us out. He died there though."

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trashmouthloser
2020-02-04 11:40 pm UTC (link)

Richie had already known it -- of course he had, that there were things in this (their) world that were abnormal and horrible and couldn't be explained away by anything natural. There were things out there that were just evil, and there always would be.

He hated it.

There wasn't much worse than evil that changed people, either. He thought, momentarily, of Derry, the way that none of the adults there had ever cared about much of anything, had turned a blind eye to violence and hate, and even their own children going missing.

And then he paused. "The Overlook?" he repeated, thinking of strange carpeting and elevator doors opening up to a rush of blood -- him and Eddie coated and sticky with it. "I've been there," he said, surprised.

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doctoring
2020-02-04 11:57 pm UTC (link)

"Wha - what?"

Dan's brain stuttered. He sat there, gormless as a goddamn guppy because he couldn't seem to get his synapses firing again. How could anyone have been to the Overlook? Well, sure, there were countless 'guests' over the years - Dan had met them all, had soaked up the ghosts that screamed and screamed, drawing them into his being, his blood. Had he missed something? Was it during the summer season, when those who stayed there were just left to deal with the odd occurrences and nothing more?

No. It couldn't be. He tried to get his hands to stop shaking, so he placed them in his lap rather than on the table. "When were you there?"

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trashmouthloser
2020-02-05 03:25 am UTC (link)

That look of almost stupid surprise was fair, Richie figured. The Overlook probably wasn't a very popular vacation destination, not really. It was niche as anything, and considering only a few people in town were from their Earth, the odds that someone else had been there should have been infinitesimal at best.

And yet.

"Me n' Eds," he explained slowly. "You remember those doors I was talking about? It was around October here, but I don't really know what time it was there." He felt kind of bad for putting his new friend into a state of nerves. It was probably how Richie would feel if Dan ever said he'd been to the Neibolt house. "Creepy twins. An elevator opened up and there was just like this -- uh. Gush of blood. Not a great time."

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doctoring
2020-02-05 03:45 am UTC (link)

That was just...weird. Really, really weird. And Dan thought he was used to weird, but apparently he still had a lot to learn. "So the doors open to... technically our home worlds too?" he asked, fingers scratching at his stubbly jaw, a contemplative sort of gesture. "The twins, they were - I thought only I could see them," his brow furrowed. "They were like...my own fears. Of being killed, my mother being killed."

Or at least, that was what he'd thought - he hadn't exactly wanted to talk it over with a shrink or anything (and he'd been sent to plenty of shrinks as a kid. Nothing helped). They weren't real. The fact that someone else saw them was incredibly disturbing, like one of those doors opened into his own head or something.

Interesting coffee date, this was. "Well, I guess - I'll be checking out the doors sooner rather than later, then."

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trashmouthloser
2020-02-06 12:39 am UTC (link)

"I don't know," Richie said. He didn't exactly know much about it. Only that he'd shown up there, thinking he was going to get some hotel fun in, and had wandered around for hours in horror trying to figure the fucking way out as things got weirder and weirder. Walking around in squishy blood shoes hadn't really made him a happy camper.

The point was... well. What a fucking small world.

Or had it been some kind of premonition? Richie didn't like that thought at all, and so pushed it away, about as hard as he could.

"It's -- they don't really work that way. You can open the same door five times and get five different places behind it each time. I haven't run into it again. And at the time it was -- every place you went to was back fuckin' news, man." He paused, momentarily. "It's suggested no one goes alone. Just in case. You know?"

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doctoring
2020-02-06 01:01 am UTC (link)

Well, okay - Dan supposed he could see the danger in opening a door to one dimension, one out of like billions and billions. The multiverse wasn't exactly a new concept - he'd read about it, of course, maybe dabbed in some sci-fi books that weren't too heavy on the quantum physics, but he was far from an expert. A lot of this would probably be experimentation.

"Yeah, alright," he agreed and, just like that, another thought lit up in neon scrawl for him. That was how it worked sometimes - he just got impressions, and alphabet soup, and emotion, and... "It was a premonition," he told Richie, because maybe the guy wanted to push it away, but Dan yanked it right back to the forefront. "You...yeah, you should probably let me look sooner rather than later."

The sooner this mess got sorted out, the better off Richie would be anyway.

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trashmouthloser
2020-02-06 01:08 am UTC (link)

Sure, yeah, Richie had seen some episodes of Stargate while trying to sleep too, back in the day. But that didn't mean he really knew shit about anything in this regard. He'd had some bad experiences with the doors and some good ones and even a few mediocre ones. But it was all just travel. There was no real explaining it or getting it to work for him, so far as he could tell.

Even though sometimes he felt like he was just picking the right door for what he needed. Not always, but sometimes.

"Of what?" Richie asked, trying to deny the concept. Because denial was better, right? Accepting he had a problem was exactly fucking that -- a problem. This wasn't some twelve step.

Still. If Richie refused now, Beverly would have his ass. That was just fact. "Yeah. Maybe."

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doctoring
2020-02-06 01:16 am UTC (link)

Just think, if Richie got really good at this premonition thing (though Dan had looked into the future before and knew it was a tricky thing), maybe he could more accurately tell people what doors to pick for what they needed. That way it wasn't as much of a guessing game - but at any rate, Dan wouldn't put the cart before the horse. The guy seemed pretty in denial - it wasn't just a river that flowed through Egypt.

"Alright, well, let me know," he nodded, sliding his cup toward him - it was empty, so he'd do the owner a solid and return it, save him a trip from coming all the way out to the table to collect it. "I'm not going anywhere. Probably."

There was a twinkle in his eye that said he was kidding, but hey. You never could tell, right?

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trashmouthloser
2020-02-06 01:28 am UTC (link)

No. Denial was also a forest in Norway. Or something. Richie wasn't going to get into it this second, he had enough shit on his plate. His plate doth runneth over with shit. It was a thing.

"No, I suppose you aren't," Richie said, squinting a little. He didn't know for sure. No one knew for sure. But Dan sort of seemed like he'd be sticking around. Not that there was a type. But sometimes it felt like there was. He had no fucking idea what he was thinking about, so he pushed his cup toward Dan too, because why make that extra trip.

"I'll text you," he decided. He'd talk to Bev about it first, because she was his person when it came to all this shit. She'd know what to do. Or at least what to make Richie do -- which was really just giving Richie the opinion that he was interested in hearing.

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