InsaneJournal

WHO Eleanor Shellstrop & Colt Vahn • WHERE A Jazz Club • WHEN A few days after Eleanor's return
Eleanor and Colt bond over feeling displaced, and how weird shit is. WARNINGS Language, canon violence

It was late enough that the crowd was drowsy and checking their watches, but Colt was perfectly happy to sit on his stool at the bar. Soon, people would begin to go home, but this bar - a little jazz club, good for anonymity and an atmosphere of chill - would stay open for another couple of hours. He liked it. He liked most bars, truthfully. Dance clubs, lounges, pubs - sign him the fuck up. But Colt’s favorite places would always be the languid ones, the ones with live music, the ones dark like a bruise and forgotten by the sparkling crowd.

He was a people-person, but he didn’t mind being lonely, now and again. It cleared his mind. With a rattle of his whiskey (ice, of course, he wasn’t that hardcore) he took a look around the place, enjoying a good people-watch. When an unfamiliar blonde woman took the seat next to him, he flashed her a smile, but didn’t press; Colt was flirty but not obnoxious. He glanced over the network, seeing if there was anything good being argued about.

Eleanor had spent the last couple of days meeting up with people and dealing with the weird sensation of time, trying to figure out how long she had been back home while only a couple of weeks had passed in Vallo. The notion made her head swim, and more than once she had cussed out Jeremy Bearimy for having really stupid time rules.

But tonight, she'd slipped into the first bar she hadn't recognized, wanting a break from emotional reunions. In truth, she could have just been on vacation for as short as the time away had been but disappearances hit harder in Vallo. She got that. It didn't make it any less overwhelming.

Glancing around the bar it looked classier than she was used to but that didn't stop her from ordering a margarita. Maybe it would be a fancy margarita. As she waited for the drink she turned toward the direction of the musicians and commented to no one, "Ugh. I hate jazz."

Colt sputtered over his drink and gave her an expression of amused horror. “Awwww, hell no. These guys? They’re artists.” Give him a saxophone player who knew what he was doing any day of the week. Sure, he liked rock n’ roll with the best of them but Colt liked his shit smooth.

Now that he was looking straight at her, he thought he recognized her from something on the network. He scrolled back a few days (not particularly surreptitiously; he’d held up on a “one minute” finger as he did so) before he found what he was looking for. “There we go. Eleanor Shellstrop, back from the dead again, and hating on the best genre of music there is.” He tsked.

Turning her head toward the source of disagreement, Eleanor raised a brow. "They're just playing nonsense for an hour, these sort of songs go on and on and on and…"

As if they were somehow aware of Eleanor's criticism the band's song faded to applause from around the club, which only served to annoy her more as they then started into the second one. But when Colt indicated that he knew her, she stared at him, trying to remember his name. "That's me, boomeranging around and hating what is clearly the worst genre of music. And you're Colt… Something-or-the-other. Of Murder Mansion fame."

“One of these days,” he mused, unoffended, “I’m gonna be known as Colt Something-or-the-other, Hottest Man in Vallo.” He shrugged, took a swig of whiskey. “...but that ain’t gonna be today. Yeah, Murder Mansion was my gig. I mean, I was there; the party was all Dorsey’s.” Colt suddenly wanted to clarify that he was not, in fact, in favor of violent rampages, cannibalism, or the mansion’s awful color scheme.

“You drinking to you being back?” he asked, sliding a gaze over at her, voice neutral. Colt often played at being a big ol’ buffoon, but he wasn’t one, not by a long shot. Dorsey had made him Head of Security for a few reasons, after all, and Eleanor drinking by herself when any number of people were thrilled she was back? It felt off, somehow.

That easy-going attitude certainly had appeal, and Eleanor smirked before casting an appraising glance at Cole. "Well, you're definitely up there," she said, before toning down the compliment. "I'd definitely say top twenty."

She turned her attention away from him as the bartender conveniently dropped off her margarita, which looked no more classy than if she'd gotten it from Galahd. "Yeah, something like that. And hitting pause on the emotional reunions." She meant to keep her tone light, but the last sentence waivered toward grumbling which somehow made her feel guilty and so she attempted to swallow that down with a drink.

He smiled through the compliments with a put-on ‘aw shucks’ expression, but her later word choice didn’t go unnoticed. “Nothing wrong with alone time,” he said, leaning back against the bar and gazing out to where the saxophone player was really getting into it. “Everyone’s gotta recharge their batteries some way. And leaving, coming back…”

Colt paused, took a drink. “That’s a lot of emotions flying at you at once,” he finished. No one liked being reminded how temporary shit was. That’s why he’d wound up in a Loop.

"Tell me about it," Eleanor muttered, taking another drink. "It's like, you're dead and in the afterlife and maybe going to get out of the bad place and then you end up here and everything is crazy but you get used to it. And you think, maybe I'm here for a reason, right?"

She followed Colt's gaze to the saxophone player who seemed to be losing himself in the music and for just a moment Eleanor may have understood the appeal, but then she turned her attention back to her own thoughts. "And then this place sends you away and you're back in the afterlife, but now you get to the point where you've had enough time to fully live and you're perfectly content or will be after just one more margarita… And then you're here. Again."

Would Colt understand everything she just said? Probably not. But she didn't find herself too concerned about that.

Colt didn’t understand all of that, but he got the gist. He thought. Maybe. After a beat, he dragged his whiskey over the bar and lifted it, but didn’t quite drink. “Sounds to me, a bystander who don’t know shit, that you’ve got a lot of faces,” he observed, “and it’s tiring to having to switch ‘em around depending upon where you are, who you’re talking to and what you’re hoping for.”

Colt knew a little about that. Or at least, he knew the pain between wanting to want something… and not actually being sure you did. That back and forth, hard reset… the Loop had messed with his mind that way for years. Got real old.

Eleanor may not have put it that way on her own, but it made sense. "Something like that," she agreed. "It's definitely tiring. Like I'm happy to be back here, I am. Even more if my girlfriend will talk to me again. But that doesn't change the fact that back home, everything was finished. And now it's not."

Yeah, that probably didn't make sense. "I don't know, man. It's a trip." She stared intently at her margarita, as if that might hold the answers. "At least when they started the experiment over before, they wiped my memory. Not that I'd want my memory wiped here. Definitely don't want that. But you kind of know what I mean?"

“Emotional whiplash, yeah.” Or close enough. “Hard to get your shit together and figure out an arc when time’s not even gonna do you the courtesy of being linear.” She wasn’t near the end of her margarita, so Colt signaled the bartender and asked him to put in an order of fried mozzarella sticks for them. Cheese could cure a lot of ills, in his experience.

“So you were in a place of acceptance, and that wasn’t good enough for the universe, so it called a redo. That kinda what it felt like?”

"Yeah, man," Eleanor nodded eagerly, noting that Colt asked the bartender if they could get an order of mozzarella sticks. She liked this dude already, willing to share appetizers. "Emotional whiplash. I had died, gone to the bad place thinking it was the good place, then we got to the actual good place and it turned out that was really boring because an eternity of good just is. So we put this door in so that when you got to the point where you were ready to move on, you could just…"

Disappear seemed too harsh. So Eleanor went with the description she'd held onto from Chidi. "Be the wave, returning to the ocean. And I was ready to be that wave, washed up by the sea. And then I was back here. And it's not that I'm not grateful but…"

“...but you’re not a wave,” Colt finished, his fingers wet with the condensation coming from the glass. “So yeah, that’s an adjustment.”

He didn’t pity her - pity wasn’t the word for it, and he felt like Eleanor would have resented it, anyhow. But he empathized, could taste the iron of her disappointment, and then the guilt for feeling that disappointment.

“I got stuck in my first Loop due to a botched military experiment,” he said after a beat. “I was in there for fifteen years. Left my wife behind, left my kid behind… spent all that time in there trying to figure out a way out.” He looked back at her, and smiled a smile that wasn’t the least bit happy. “Got out, eventually. My kid was a grown woman who didn’t know me, my wife had died of cancer, and the government had disavowed the project, so I got shoved into an asylum to shut me up.” He shrugged. Accepted a plate of hot mozzarella sticks, and pushed it gamely over to Eleanor so she could grab one. “So when the first rich asshole offered to give me a job working in the Loop - you bet your ass I went back in. Because it was what I’d learned to know. Changing back and forth like what you’ve been doing… a mind’s not supposed to just roll with that. You’ve got some Big Think to do to come to terms with this shit. You don’t have to know how you feel about it yet. You know?”

Wow. That was a whole lot of Colt's background that Eleanor hadn't known, and it was a lot. "That sucks," she said, unable to filter that into anything less blunt. But at the same time, he seemed to understand what she was feeling and wasn't judging her for it. And that?

That somehow felt like some of the weight had fallen off her shoulders.

She took a mozzarella stick and then took a bite, before cursing at how hot it was. (Did she say fuck or fork? Who even knew at this point.) So she cooled her mouth down with the rest of the margarita and then waited before taking a second bite. Looking over at Colt she said, "Thanks, man."

Maybe not the most profound statement, but it was genuine.

Colt shrugged, happy to help, not one to feel particularly profound one way or another. Sometimes it was just nice to know that shit one was wading through had been waded through before. He’d been glad to have found that in his relationships back home. It was one of the reasons he and Frank had bonded as quickly and as hard as they had - while getting out of jail wasn’t the same as getting out of an asylum, it was enough alike that he and Frank had had a lot to talk about.

He’d been grateful for that lifeline. It was nice to be able to throw it out to someone else.

“The real question,” he said, grabbing a cheese stick and giving it a little blow of air, “is did you get all your stuff back?”

"Oh yeah, the important stuff," Eleanor confirmed, grateful that the conversation had moved to less emotional topics. "My girlfriend…"

She paused for a moment, briefly debating qualifying that but deciding it was too much of a hassle to explain Marina right then. "She saved that for me. Including my cat. Priorities and all."

Even without an explanation, that called for another drink and she signaled for another, finishing the mozzarella stick and reaching for a second. "This place is a trip," she mused, thinking of Bruiser, and other random things she had acquired that had either been saved or disappeared.

Colt noticed the hesitation over the label, but hell, he’d been there, so he didn’t comment. “It’s a fuckin’ trip,” he agreed, cool as cucumber. “Never a dull moment, and when it is dull, you’re waiting for it to kick back up again.” He stabbed the air with his half-eaten cheese stick demonstratively.

“That’s why you eat, and drink, and hang out with friends in between waves. And try to duck the rest.” He leaned back in his chair, enjoying a particularly noodly saxophone solo. “Looks like you understood the assignment, Eleanor.”

"Yeah, well so did you, Colt." She hadn't gotten to know him during her first go around in Vallo. That was clearly going to change on the second. She hadn't been looking for company, but now she was glad to have found it.

"Every bit except the jazz."

“It’s a good thing you’re funny, ‘cause your taste in music is shit,” Colt observed lightly, and took a swig of his beer. As far as he was concerned, they could vibe here until Eleanor felt less wobbly. He was out of the Loop. Time was more precious than it was… might as well spend it doing something worthwhile.