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Tweak says, "Im not wearing underwear today"

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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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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