dǫçţǫŗ şɭęęƥ (shone) wrote in valloic, @ 2020-05-09 20:29:00 |
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Entry tags: | !: action/thread/log, ₴ inactive: dan torrance |
Who: Ava & Dan
What: Ava drops by, tastes the stealthy mashed potatoes (for science)
When: A few nights ago
Where: Mortuary in the woods
Rating: Cauliflower
Status: Complete
After a lifetime career made of showing up places uninvited, Ava didn’t really consider that she probably should have texted Dan until she was outside his door, debating whether or not to knock. She was plagued with a dozen what if…s that she had to shake off, accept that she was actually welcome before she could convince herself to retreat instead. Texting would reveal intention, and Ava wasn’t so great with broadcasting hers, liked leaving most of her decisions concealed away from judgment or the prying eyes of others. Even if those eyes, these days, were people watching out for her (as Shepard put it) instead of at her. Still. There were a lot more eyes than she was quite comfortable with, especially with how public so many aspects of her life suddenly became. And with everything happening all at once this last week, Ava found herself too overwhelmed to process it all properly, wishing she could wind it back and take it a bit more slowly. While everyone was seemingly patient with her fumbles, Dan, at least, felt like somebody who understood feeling completely out of depths. But it really - wasn’t advice she was seeking so much wanting to spend time with somebody who was both less socially or emotionally demanding, to give herself a break without feeling like she was actively pushing everyone away. And because she missed him. So she finally knocked, immediately shoving her hands back into the pockets of her new sweater, slowly bouncing from heel to heel as she waited. It wasn’t like a lot of visitors dropped by the mortuary - but sometimes it happened, because Sabrina had a good number of friends in Vallo. Besides, there was also that celebration that just occurred, and Dan surprisingly still had leftover s’mores supplies (and knowing Sabrina, they’d be gone in short order too). So he wasn’t surprised to hear the knock - maybe a little surprised, when he flexed psychic muscles, the Shining lit up like a Christmas tree, to sense that it was Ava outside. Well. Surprised and relieved - she didn’t seem to eat normal meals, and he was all for trying to get his people on some kinda path that led to substantial things and not simply M&M’s or cereal. He’d been in the process of making dinner right now, attempting some of those shared Ignis tips in order to disguise the vegetables in a manner that was decidedly more stealthy than what he’d gone with before. He answered the door, his smile warm, and it crinkled baby blues at the corners. “Come on in,” he said, stepping back. “Allison’s not here, if you’re looking for her. It’s just me for now.” Until the hungry wolves descended for dinner. It took effort, but not as much as usual, not to immediately apologize for her being there or try to come up with some reason to justify it. But they’d never done anything to make her feel unwelcome, and she returned the smile with a quick one of her own as she entered, politely kicking some dirt off her boots as to not track it in. Ava peeked around the curiously at the mention of Allison, looking for signs that the other woman had moved in yet, nodding in acknowledgment of her absence. Maybe it’d give her an opportunity to run some mother’s day gift ideas by him. “Guess you’re fine,” she commented wryly, not too skilled at hiding the hint of smirk that accompanied it even as she turned away. “Too much is happening,” she admitted, hoping that he’d paid enough attention to the situation on the network and with Hope’s arrival that she wouldn’t have to elaborate. Ava had a tendency to spin the wheels in her head enough, and right now she just wanted a break from it. Calm. She tilted her head toward the kitchen, trying not to be so unsubtle in her sudden interest in it and the smell she picked up. “Was I interrupting?” “A lot has happened lately,” Dan agreed. He too could get overwhelmed - with his skillset especially, that meant the Shining sometimes ensured his head was like a storm. Jagged streaks of electricity and timbers creaking, thoughts of others washing over him like a wave - they didn’t have the same abilities, per se, but he at least knew what it was like to not know what to do with all that overload. Well, it was a safe place here - he could promise that much, at least. “It’s okay though, you weren’t interrupting,” he promised. “In fact - I could use some help?” He had a pot on the stove, holding out a fork. “Taste this and let me know if the cauliflower is obvious?” It was mixed in there, with mashed potatoes. He had chicken baking in the oven too, roasting drumsticks (everyone liked the drumsticks), but that didn’t have any clever veggies sneaked in there. Basically it was what it said on the tin. Ava shuffled around the kitchen, trying to determine a place she could stand and be mostly out of Dan’s way, but intangibility did have that benefit of avoiding being bumped into. She wasn’t sure what he meant by helping at first, couldn’t say she had much experience with cooking other than throwing things in a microwave, but she was willing to give whatever he requested a shot. Because if Ava retained anything from her brief stint at childhood here, it was the desire not to disappoint him or Allison. Except… “Cauliflower,” she repeated, taking the fork with far more ease than the days before and skeptically sniffing the food first for any offending trace. Ava wasn’t necessarily against vegetables, but she was a dedicated fan of mashed potatoes, and something seemed off about trying to pass off one for the other. Except it also seemed like a clever tactic, and Ava complied with giving it a taste, considering for a few drawn out seconds to hold him in suspense. “Needs salt.” Dan chuckled, taking the fork back. “I’m a firm believer in seasoning,” he promised. No way would he not add salt and pepper - sure, those were standard white people seasonings but you kind of had to add more to mashed potatoes. Garlic powder, onion powder, maybe some basil. Besides, anything to mask the cauliflower - which apparently blended well if the only comment was about salt, so, he’d take it as a win. “If you didn’t have dinner plans, you could join me?” he asked. “It’s almost done. You’re looking well, by the way,” he tacked on there. Not so twitchy. Or glitchy. Maybe the arrival of Ava’s friend had something to do with it. “Texture’s different, but not bad,” she observed after further consideration, feeling like she needed to contribute a bit more of an opinion. Her standards of food were fairly low, but she could at least recognize that Dan’s cooking was a far step above what she was used to. SHIELD had kept her on a fairly strict and regulated diet that certainly didn’t believe in seasoning. She’d take a bit of subterfuge cauliflower over that any day, and nodded a bit hesitantly at the invite. Not because she wasn’t grateful and she certainly was hungry, but it further reminded her of the woman back at her place and her lack of knowing quite what to do with her. Luckily Hope was more than self-sufficient and capable, because Ava wasn’t exactly cut out to play host. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t be so willing to offer up her hideout as a place to stay at all. But she owed Hope far more than that. She owed a lot of people more than she quite knew how to give. “Oh,” she was slightly surprised he noticed, staring down at her hands as she turned them over. They still blurred in response, but she wasn’t breaking up so badly. “It’s… decoherence?” Ava grew up hearing a lot of terms that she wasn’t sure that most of the public was familiar with, but didn’t want to insult Dan’s intelligence either. “The more I use my,” and she really hated calling them such because she always viewed it far more as a disease, “abilities, the more separated from myself I become. The harder it is for me to go back together.” Was this bordering on too much information? It seemed fair to let him know what was going on with her, ease some worries. “But Bill built me a chamber to stabilize that. Stitch me back together during the night. It’s not a cure,” she frowned, because she knew how much it upset Bill to be unable to develop more to help her. As brilliant as he was. “But it takes the edge off. Slows the deterioration.” Dan nodded; it made sense to him - he wasn’t a physicist by any stretch of the imagination, but still, he got the general gist. “I’m glad you have the chamber here, then,” he said, grabbing a potholder to remove that roasted chicken from the oven. There would be plenty of everything (deceptive mashed potatoes included) whenever Sabrina and Allison returned from where they were, but he’d eat with Ava now - she seemed to live off of cereal and other things he would classify as ‘not real,’ so, this was definitely better by comparison. Hopefully the new arrival who lived with her now would stock the shelves and fridge with actual sustenance. He plated enough for the both of them. “Do you have trouble sleeping?” Really, he had no idea how to ‘cure’ her - it involved molecules and atoms and terms like that, stuff not in his wheelhouse, but maybe he could help with other aspects. “Yeah,” she sounded uncertain, fidgeting with the cuff of her sleeve and wondering if there was more she should be doing to help. But Dan seemed to have everything covered. “Glad.” She knew she was meant to be, but there was that space inside herself that she had blocked off and didn’t want to touch again. Not after what happened with Hope last time, her entire family, her last chance at help gone before it even began. Hope said it had taken five years to set the world back right, but it was five years that Ava knew that she didn’t have left. So she was probably dead back home, and she couldn’t muster up more than hollow indifference toward it. Not like she wanted to go back. Which meant it was lucky she was here instead. And it was right here and now that she wanted to focus on, appreciating the opportunity just to have a hot meal provided by somebody she cared about. She took her seat across from Dan, pushing messy strands of hair back from her face to eat. “Mn,” she tilted her head in thought of his question, wondering how obvious it was. “In a lot of ways,” she wasn’t really sure if it was just an accumulation of all her various problems, or a single point of pressure that made everything else that much worse. Ava took a small bite of chicken, chewing slowly. “When it’s finally time to relax, inside my head feels like…” she shrugged, unable to quite describe, instead demonstrating with allowing her hand to fritz out in erratic streaks. “All I’m left with is the pain. And guilt.” She folded her hand back in her lap, quietly picked up her fork again with the other. “But I’m used to it.” As someone who was dead back home, there was no way Dan wanted to return either - the very thought was enough to give him a headache, one that throbbed from his temples down through every pulse point. These were reminders that he was dead and had given everything up to save her, he had nothing to return to, and Abra had to go on without him. Without her father. He missed her, but she was safe now - she had life left, he didn’t. Here he did have a lot left - or more like, he had what he actually built. People he cared about. That was reason enough to want to remain firmly planted in this world, strange glimpses of the future showing him that it was sparkling enough to stick around for. “I know what that’s like,” he said in a rumble; his voice was quiet, rough, sandpaper on glass. “I can - take a crack at it if you want?” Dan looked up. “Better sleep, I mean. For you.” “Think I’m a bit too old for bedtime stories now,” her pale eyes reflected her amusement, even as she stuffed a forkful of lie-potatoes into her mouth to disguise her smile. She continued poking around at them for a bit. The offer was tempting, even though she wasn’t quite sure what it entailed. She trusted Dan. Even if she didn’t quite understand things that were… magical in nature. If that’s what he was proposing. Guess she wouldn’t know unless she asked. “How’d that go, then?” Stealthy Potatoes™ actually were pretty good, or at least Dan thought so - he’d at first been terrible at cooking (because homelessness did not pave the way for three squares meals a day), but then improved once he’d been on his own and actually had steady income and a steady place to live. It hadn’t been much, but it was something. Besides, his mother had been pretty good at this whole cooking thing - she taught him some tricks, growing up, here and there. He didn’t want to embarrass her by eating Hot Pockets everyday, wherever she was in the beyond. “It’s part of my...skill set?” he said, after cutting into the rest of the chicken he had on his plate. “The Shining, I mean. Psychic abilities. I just kind of ease the brain into a sleep state - deep, dreamless sleep. You’d feel well rested after that. And I won’t go poking at anything else,” he added, if that soothed some concerns. “Our minds are actually landscapes and houses, scenes out of memories, nightmares. Everyone has a different way of cataloging things. But helping you sleep doesn’t involve looking at any of that.” Ava was vaguely aware of Dan’s abilities, at least the extent he had explained them to her before. Tracking people down, as he had when she was a child, and the stuff about ghosts and locking them away. But not ghosts like her, though both trapped between the tangible world and somewhere else. A lingering defiance of reality. Ava wasn’t quite sure where the similarities began and ended, where science and magic could quite cross over without creating an even greater interference, if she should go about mixing them at all. Bill never would have recommended this, he stuck to theories with mathematical basis. Even Hope would probably be skeptical. But if Dan had experience with these things, she had no reason to deny his help when nothing else had. He wouldn’t hurt her. That wasn’t a blind confidence she would put in much anyone, here or back home. She wasn’t even quite sure when he earned it. Ava stared down at her plate, realizing she had cut her chicken into far too small of chunks, but feeling oddly accomplished by it. It wasn’t always she could get the utensils to cooperate. “I don’t really have any secrets anyway,” she brushed off the concern of him poking around in her mind despite his promise. “Not mine, at least.” Government ones, a whole dirty list of them that kept her permanently on the run to avoid recapture and silencing. But the tight leash they had kept on her, her lack of even having much of a life outside of the training, the experiments, and the missions, meant that her memories were otherwise very empty. Boring. She couldn’t imagine any house or landscape in her head would be of much interest to anyone at all. “Would I need to be… here?” she asked, not sure how that’d exactly work. Him having to visit her every night seemed like way too much of a hassle. Unless it was some remote physic thing. Which still felt like a lot of effort of him to go through. For her. “I can come to you,” he said. “Or do it...remotely. My reach extends pretty far.” He’d been able to communicate with Dick, and Abra, across miles and miles - he’d even tried reaching for Abra here, when he first arrived. It didn’t work, of course, because she wasn’t of this world - it was different, visiting her as a spirit. He wasn’t dead here. He had no way of reaching her. But anyway, back to the matter at hand. “I can come over and be there in person for the first time, just so you can see what it’s like?” he offered. “Then if you’re comfortable we can work out something ongoing.” He would never hurt Ava. Not only because she was his friend, because she’d been through so much already, but because he just - wasn’t that type (he wasn’t his father). Using the Shining for good things was what he focused on, because blotting them out hadn’t worked in the past and he’d already hurt enough people. His list of debts to repay was still miles long. She hoped the generated quantum field that was essential for her sleeping arrangement didn’t cause any bad interference with whatever psychic process, but at least he’d be able to get an idea of what he was working with over at her place. A hideout that had seen far more visitors since its arrival than she ever would have felt comfortable with before. Instinct itched at her to disappear instead, cut ties and just run again because at least that was what she was used to, not a bunch of relationships she couldn’t quite figure out how to balance without stressing herself out more. But she was making progress, and honestly, it was no way to repay the people that had been so patient with her. “Yeah, okay,” she agreed finally, “Whenever works for you. Now that I’m working. I probably need to keep a better schedule.” Which meant no more midday crashing because she had finally burnt herself out. Ava realized her food was cooling off quicker than she was eating it, taking some time to catch up with it. She didn’t want Dan to think his efforts went unappreciated when it was probably the best meal she had in awhile. Cauliflower notwithstanding. “So nobody in your world ever tried…” Ava knew she wasn’t fully aware of Dan’s past, although he told her the bits about struggling with substances, like Klaus. “Utilizing you? Because that’s the sort of thing… well, SHIELD really loved collecting weapons.” “Oh - no, not me,” he replied, also catching up on the consumption of chicken and potatoes. There were plenty of leftovers for the others too, and he’d be sure to mark them accordingly in the fridge. “I kept it hidden for so long anyway. When I was a kid, I tried to tell people - but they never believed it, doctors always thought something was wrong with me.” That he was autistic, mainly - or mute, that his refusal to talk wasn’t just due to trauma brought about by hungry ghosts but some other easy-to-diagnose problem. If it didn’t fit within the confines of their medical books, they didn’t want to hear it. Which was fine. Dan stayed quiet after that. “It was Abra they wanted,” he added. “She’s fourteen. Brightest Shine I’ve ever seen. But the True Knot, they were kind of this - family, I guess? Cult? Of psychic vampires. They wanted Abra to feed off of, to use her as a way to keep them young and healthy because her steam would last them awhile. We all went toe to toe - it wasn’t pretty.” “Feed off her…” Ava whispered, not sure how that worked but also not wanting to know. “And that’s how you died, then?” she concluded, patching together some of the information he’d given her before. “Protecting the girl.” Ava chewed on the tines of the fork, not sure why the thought worried her when he was sitting there, perfectly okay now. Just like she was. A lot of people showed up in this world from the dead. But they didn’t understand why some people suddenly left it again, either. Where would they go if they were already gone? And she didn’t want Dan to go, she didn’t want any of them to go. Allison or Sabrina and now Hope, as selfish as that felt. Because the other woman’s family wasn’t even here, after how hard she fought to reunite them. She had watched half the world disappear into dust, and she couldn’t figure out how to brace herself for loss again while also trying to open herself up. She hated that she was getting so attached, and yet had never felt so… okay. “Dan,” she looked up from her plate, not sure how to voice her worries. “Thanks for…” being there, watching out for her, offering to help her with her sleep. Ava hesitated, eyes darting off to the side. “The chicken.” She hoped he understood what she actually meant. Dan smiled a little, ruefully. “Yeah, that’s how I died.” And he didn’t regret it either. Abra had so much left to experience, the world would benefit from her bright light, whereas Dan was this washed up bachelor who had lost everything - his mother, Dick (his mentor), Billy (his best friend); he couldn’t save his father, so he had to save the only family he had left. He also got what Ava meant - and it wasn’t solely about the poultry. But no need to actually say that. “You’re welcome,” was all he did say, and then they could go ahead and switch to lighter conversational topics - it was nice having her here, in the surprisingly quiet house, and not something he’d take for granted. |