Joey McCoy is a total daddy's girl. (imanursenota__) wrote in vascaptiolog, @ 2013-12-17 19:34:00 |
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There was only so much time that could pass before the elephant became apparent in the room. Joey had told Tate only her half of the story, which hadn't entirely been hers to tell, and she'd painted Stiles in a pretty ugly light. At the time, Joey felt strongly that he deserved it. She was still frustrated with him, but in the interest of getting through this experiment as smoothly as possible, Joey had let her hard feelings fall to the wayside. When Tate had offered to come stay with her, she'd taken him up on it. A couple of weeks ago, she wouldn't have found anything about spending time alone in the church with Allison and Stiles uncomfortable. That was then. This was now. All the same, given what little information Tate had on Stiles and the fact that Stiles had next to none on Tate — which, really, went for Joey as well, if she thought about it...which she didn't — being in the same place with the two of them was...well, awkward, at best. "Impish," she announced, placing her blocks on the Scrabble board and looking up at Tate expectantly. "Not too bad, huh?" She felt a little badly excluding Stiles from the game, but at the same time...she didn't. Playing Scrabble with Tate had become Joey's new meditation. She was challenged to think about something other than the situation in which she found herself while feeling relaxed by being allowed to break Lydia's Don't-Be-Too-Smart rule because Tate didn't make her feel like a loser for it. "Batter up." Tate could think of two distinct reasons why killing Stiles to free Joey would be a bad idea. First of all, Joey was at most three feet away from Stiles at all times and Tate wasn’t going to let Joey see something like that happen if he could protect her from it, let alone by his hand and right in front of her face. Secondly, Stiles and Joey were tethered by some kind of bond that Tate didn’t fully understand. Hurting Stiles could easily mean hurting Joey or if it didn’t, who’s to say that Joey wouldn’t be left tethered to a dead body for however long this thing lasted. Tate didn’t have anything personal against the guy, even after the dicks from management tried toying with his head to make him jealous; he just wanted what was best for Joey. He tore through the forest looking for her after she had gone missing, panicked tears caked to his face as he covered every inch of ground he could, trying hard not to think about losing the only thing he had in this place so soon. Trying not to think about how he tried to watch her, to protect her from them and how it didn’t matter at all in the end. He was powerless. Tate felt better the instant he saw her message to him in the journal; frankly he was going to come by the church to check on her whether he was invited or not, but it was easier this way. Now he was allowed to spend as much time with her as he wanted to with the comfort of knowing she wanted him to be there just as much. Impish. He looked at her blocks and grinned at her. He liked that word and better yet, he liked that he didn’t have to let her win when they played because she was actually smart. As he picked up his own blocks to manipulate her word, he gave a casual side-glance to Stiles. Again, he had neutral feelings for the boy, but he couldn’t wait for this thing to be over so he could finally rip Joey away for himself once and for all. Stiles wasn’t enjoying any part of being tethered to another person. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Joey, because he did, even if she was pissed at him and didn’t really like him anymore. It was that Peter fucking Hale was in Vas Captio, off doing god knew what to god knew who. Or plotting to do god knew what to god knew who. It wasn’t like they had a great history with Peter behaving. Sure, he’d been flying under the danger radar for awhile now, but before that he’d caused a hell of a lot of problems. And they’d been in the process of plotting how to take the guy down and now he couldn’t be involved because he was tied to someone else and he couldn’t have her even more in danger than she already was by being in on the plan. Or even just knowing about the plan. Anyone knowing about the plan who wasn’t part of the plan was a liability and a target, and he couldn’t have Joey being either of those things. So while she and Tate -- whom he already didn’t trust and he didn’t even have a definitive reason about why he didn’t trust him yet -- played Scrabble, Stiles tried to come up with Plan B. And Plan C. And Plan D. Most of which involved the Winchester’s in some manner or another, and another that involved Chloe and her crossbow, and he was already convinced that it might not be enough. As much as he hated to admit it, Stiles wasn’t sure they were going to be able to pull this off no matter how badly he wanted to kill Peter. It was too quiet and that more than anything else was making Joey antsy. She was trying to play it off because she didn’t necessarily want to make things any weirder than they already were, but… “Can somebody other than me say something? Please? That would be amazing,” she blurted out, giving a sheepish sort of look as she shrugged, eyes moving back and forth between the two boys. “It’s too quiet.” If Tate was going to spend time here, he should probably talk to Stiles, since this was where Stiles lived and if she was stuck to Stiles, Stiles should probably talk to Tate, since Tate was her new friend and he wasn’t probably going anywhere so long as she was here. At least, she hoped not. But if they weren’t going to do it themselves, then she was going to make them. Apparently Joey was feeling an awkward tension, Tate wasn’t getting it but then again, Joey did have that thing about being insecure all the time and that whole thing between her and Stiles before his arrival. Well, if this was her crack at trying to not make this an awkward encounter; she just made a giant leap in the wrong direction. He smiled anyway and shrugged back to show that there wasn’t a particular reason for the quietness. “It’d be killer if we could have some music in this place. That’d liven it up.” It was a half-truth; he really did miss music, and of all the horrible things that the management could’ve stripped them of, music was a brutal one. Mostly though, he wanted to shift the blame for the silence away from the group onto something else while opening an alleyway for discussion. Two birds; one stone. “I keep hoping to find a CD player or a radio or something in the thrift store but there’s never anything there. The constant silence all the time? That’s torture.” Truthfully Stiles hadn’t been paying that much attention to the conversation until Joey’s plea that someone say something. It hadn’t been an awkward silence for him. He blinked a couple of times, glancing over to the pair. Of all the things he missed, music wasn’t really on the top of the list. Scott and his dad pretty much tied for first place, followed closely by his bed, his jeep (which was hopefully not wrecked beyond repair), and, he was kind of surprised to realize, Scott’s mom. “Maybe one will turn up,” Stiles said, glancing at Tate. “A couple of people have gotten things from their homes here. Rachel’s piano and Chloe’s crossbow.” No discernable pattern yet, but he was pretty sure that Lydia would point out that it would take more than two points of origin to determine if there was a pattern, even if he didn’t necessarily agree. The pattern was usually laid out with the first oddity, even if it wasn’t recognized right away. No, he was sure that there was some kind of pattern that he just wasn’t seeing. Yet. “Oh, that’s true,” Joey pointed out, looking from Stiles back to Tate when the former mentioned the things that some people had gotten from home. “God, that’d be nice,” she added softly. Not that either of them would recognize — or even like — anything that would have come from her music collection, since it was well after their time. She did sort of hope that one of them got some tunes from their time, though. Joey really liked retro classical. “I miss my medical books,” she admitted, instantly regretting saying it in front of Stiles because that had been Lydia Rule Number One: no books. “Everything I’ve seen here is so damn old, it’s like completely obsolete; I can’t learn anything from that crap,” she muttered. Her eyes moved away from Tate and back to Stiles, lifting her eyebrows. She was inviting him, without words, to share what he missed from home. He didn’t know whom either of those people were personally but he flicked his eyebrows up anyway in consideration. They sounded like gifts from the management, which was interesting since they clearly weren’t the type to operate without an some kind of angle. “Rachel, she’s the performer doing the Christmas thing, right?” He asked Stiles. “She any good?” Tate picked up Joey’s cue to share something about himself but he decided to ignore it anyway. “You like medicine? You know there’s a clinic over at the gym, maybe the doctor there has something you could borrow. He might even let you help him out if someone gets hurt.” Of course that would be Lydia’s number one rule. She pretended she was a shallow person because she thought guys would be intimidated by how smart she really was. And truthfully, a lot of them would be. Stiles wasn’t intimidated by intelligence, but he was a little intimidated by Lydia. Not nearly as much as he had been once upon a time. But when Joey mentioned medical books, he smiled at her, nodding. “Mostly I just miss my dad. But I wouldn’t want him to show up here considering.” He thought for a moment. “I miss my jeep, even if it’s wrecked all to hell now.” He looked down at his hands. “And my laptop. I miss that.” Mostly because it was his main tool for research, but it wasn’t like this place had Wi-Fi anyway, so it wouldn’t have done him any good to have it. He glanced at Tate, shrugging. “I haven’t actually heard her sing, but I have a feeling she’s pretty good.” Mostly because he knew she was on Glee. But that was another one of those things he hadn’t shared with anyone. “You know Dr. Collins?” Joey nodded along with Stiles. "Yeah...I miss my phone. I had everything on there. Pictures of my family, all my favorite music...too bad I can't just charge it, so we'd have some music to break the monotony," she muttered. Looking back at Tate, Joey nodded. "Yeah, my dad's a doctor. I always thought it was cool. I'd rather be a nurse...that's what I was planning on going to school for in the fall, but now I'm here, so..." her voice trailed off and she shrugged, looking down. If she ever got to go home, she'd probably still do it, but the longer she was stuck here, the less confident she felt about the possibility that she'd ever get out. "I don't really know Dr. Collins, no, but Kaylee's friend, Dr. Tam, offered to let me observe and, like, shadow him and stuff, so that's cool. I'm kind of torn because I really want to, but the only way I can is if somebody gets hurt and I don't want that, so...yeah..." She personally preferred the idea of learning from Simon to learning from Will, because Simon was from the future, too, so his tools, techniques, and best practices would probably be more in tune with what she'd see at home, anyway, she thought. Joey paused again and then looked back and forth between the two of them. "What do you guys wanna do? When we get out, I mean?" “I’ve seen him around the gym a couple of times.” He answered casually. Actually, he had only seen the man once when he decided to check out the gym on his own one night. The doors were unlocked and he wasn’t in the mood to sit bored and alone in his cabin. Plus, the gym had hot showers. He saw the clinic while he was there and assumed the guy must have been the town doctor. Tate never put that much thought into a set path for a future. He hated the pressure that high school put on him to decide his entire life in four years. Everyone was in such a rush to make up their minds and everything was so big and important and stressful. In the end though, it didn’t really matter. He had nothing to go back to in L.A and there was something freeing even in that thought. It was like he had a fresh start here. He didn’t want to go back there. Tate shook his head, “I haven’t decided yet. There’s still so much out there I don’t know about.” He would’ve expanded on that had he and Joey been alone, but they weren’t and as much as Joey seemed be pushing for it, he wasn’t interested in making this a trio. Casual neutral was the best he had to offer Stiles. This scene already bored him and he wanted to end it, but his hands were completely tied and that fact alone was irritating. “Do you like Kurt Cobain?” He asked, brightening up a little at Joey’s mention of music. Stiles glanced between them, noting the exact moment it became a two-person conversation and he became third wheel Stilinski. It was cool, though. He was sort of used to that. It was familiar. Not exactly something he loved, but he could deal. He’d dealt with worse by far. He wasn’t interested in really becoming friends with Tate, anyway. There was something that just felt...off about him. He reminds you of Matt, a voice in the back of his head spoke up, sounding an awful lot like Scott. Great. Now he was hearing his best friend. Which admittedly, was better than hearing, say, the voice of Jennifer Blake or Jackass Whittmore. But it did sort of make him think maybe he was starting to lose his mind. Then again, it was probably just the distinct lack of sleep. “That’s true. I guess I’ve known for a long time, but I know most people don’t have that luxury. You have time to mull it over. All the time in the world, apparently, while we’re stuck here,” she offered with a small smile. Joey felt the switch from a group conversation to excluding Stiles, as well, but she wasn’t sure if that had been intentional on Stiles’ part and she didn’t want to force him into continuing to converse with them if he didn’t want to. So, she focused on Tate and gave him a quizzical look. “Not by name...give me a song and I’ll know better that way,” she suggested. He wouldn’t give it any thought, but he wasn’t going to tell her that either. None of it mattered anymore anyway; all that mattered was this right now. Besides, even if there had been a chance of him having a future back home, he wasn’t the type to plan it all out. He wouldn’t let himself become the kind of guy who would. Tate’s eyes widened at Joey “You don’t know Cobain? Nirvana?” He thought of the most popular song he could think of off of the top of his head. “Smells Like Teen Spirit?” His brow dropped hard as he waited for a response. Even if you didn’t listen to Nirvana, everyone knew Cobain. “Lithium?” Stiles rubbed at his eyes, doing his best to suppress a yawn. He wasn’t all that surprised that Joey didn’t know who Cobain was, considering when and where she was from. He had no idea when or where Tate was from, but he suspected they were a lot closer timeline wise than Joey was to either of them. He leaned his head back against the pew behind him as the two of them continued to talk, their voices growing distant and fuzzy as he began to drift off involuntarily. He didn’t want to go to sleep, but it was tugging at him involuntarily despite his lack of desire. Within moments he’d passed out completely. “Oh! Yeah, I know that song,” Joey exclaimed, proud of herself for recognizing it, especially after the pained look on Tate’s face when she hadn’t been sure of the artist by name. “To be fair,” she pointed out, “that stuff came out hundreds of years before I was even born, so I think it’s pretty good that I know as much as I do as it is; I can’t be perfect,” she laughed. Stiles had gotten quiet and she felt badly that he felt excluded, so Joey turned to ask him a question only to close her mouth again with a click of her teeth. She turned back to Tate and gave him an awkward facial shrug. “I think we bored him to sleep,” she whispered, smirking a little. “Oops.” Joey looked over the Scrabble board and yawned, too. “Finish this game and then sleep?” she wondered, her doe eyes fixating on Tate’s as her eyebrows arched curiously. Tate smiled brightly at Joey’s outburst, if there was any one she would’ve known it would’ve been that one. That’s the one everyone knows and it was a shame, but he’d forgive her for it because he liked her. He’d kill for some of his CDs and his CD player right now so he could give her a taste of real music. Tate’s eyes flicked over to Stiles when Joey called attention to the fact that the guy had fallen asleep during their conversation. “I think so.” He said mildly as he looked back down at the game board. Stiles didn’t belong there anyway, he was an irritating reminder that Tate couldn’t help Joey out of this situation because, of course, he couldn’t just snap the kid’s neck to free her. Tate placed down the word bricks and spelled out “Pious”. He didn’t have many useful bricks left; it looked as though she would win this time around. He wasn’t tired yet but he liked that she’d rather him sleep near her than in the cabin. It made him feel more comfortable about the experiment. He yawned back. “Deal.” |