(ง'̀-'́)ง (future_dust) wrote in zenithrp, @ 2016-05-22 22:33:00 |
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Entry tags: | #day 035, jim, juno |
Who: Juno & Jim
Where: Their room
When: After this
It was hard for Juno to be aware of all the ways in which this could potentially be another layer of ‘fucked up’ when she hadn’t been able to imagine anything but herself strapped to a board or chained to a wall being tortured to death for however long she lasted. With that in mind, this entire thing felt unreal and amazing despite the obvious fact that technically they were all here against their will. Even the weird rooming assignments hadn’t fazed her as much as they would have otherwise, although as she made the way to the room she was supposedly, theoretically, having to share with Jim, Juno was frowning something fierce. What really concerned her was sharing the showers, that was what made her uncomfortable beyond description. Maybe she could take her showers when everybody else was asleep, and Jim would have to deal with her coming back into the room at that hour. Probably three in the morning, just to be safe.
Truth be told, Juno really wanted to change, although she knew for a fact she had nothing weather-appropriate in her bag, but she’d try. Asking Jim if he wanted to come along was the logical step, even as she could barely look at any of his person let alone his face when she asked.
Juno swiped the bracelet against the sensor, causing the door to open. Okay, this was pretty cool, but she wasn’t going to say anything. In fact, the second she dragged her burning feet into the room, holding both the hoodie and the leather jacket over her shoulder, Juno became completely speechless.
There was only one bed. She looked around, looked for doors that lead elsewhere, there was nothing. Her bag was by the closet, next to Jim’s, she suspected. And still only one queen-size bed. Or king-size? It didn’t matter. It was only one. Only one, and they were two. Juno dropped the clothes onto one of the ugly chairs and dropped her shoulders immediately after. Her stomach felt uneasy. This was some bullshit.
Jim took one look at the room and gave the kind of testy sigh that he usually heard from one of his siblings during long family road trips with their kids. “Yeah, this is cute, I see what They were going for,” he muttered as he looked for a closet to hang his coat up. “I can see how They would’ve felt like we get way too much privacy as it is…”
He’d lived in community for years now with other men, and sometimes in very close quarters—sharing a bathroom, no big deal, and he was used to being packed away into very small sardine-can rooms that only fit a single twin bed and a straight-backed chair. On the Camino, hostel-type housing in bunk beds with six or eight to a room, no big deal either. Sharing a bed was very much a big deal.
“We’ll figure something out, we can…” The floor was bare wood except for a thin carpet under the bed itself, not particularly plausible for sleeping on, and working out an airport-layover bed by pushing the chairs together didn’t seem like a great solution either. “If we have to sleep in shifts we can do it, that’s about on a level with a typical punishment back at the mansion. Before the Industrial Era it was considered a totally normal sleep pattern to sleep in small bursts of a few hours each, actually—you’d have the siesta in the afternoon, a few more hours of sleep after the evening meal, and then wake up again in the night to do other stuff, which the French called dorveille. Talking, journalling, praying, uh, marital relations, and at least some people used that time to go steal from their neighbours. Then they’d go back to sleep for a few more hours before dawn.”
He opened the closet door, for a moment entertaining the happy idea that there might be something in there that would solve the problem, like a sleeping bag or something. There wasn’t, but there was a selection of clothes in the closet, new and pressed with Zenith’s usual attention to detail. “Oh, check it out, they left us clothes. Very...Island Casual. I guess that’s something.”
Juno, too, made for the closet while Jim spoke, not even bothering to open her suitcase now that she knew absolutely nothing within it (except perhaps the underwear) would help her out in this place. Jim had still not stopped talking, so she placed both hands on her hips and looked his way to listen. She almost laughed when there was a history lesson attached to a possible solution, then changed her mind and made for one of the ugly chairs to pull off her boots before they fused with her feet. Juno raised her brow at this ‘shifts’ thing.
“I don’t know, man. I’ve got my schedule, you’ve got yours… And then there’s the people we hang out with, we might miss them if we’re napping like toddlers every few hours. I can’t even imagine…” Though that might go well with her decision to take showers when everyone was asleep. “Maybe we can try for now, until we find something to make another bed out of? Like a pool raft or like those mats on the poolside lounge chairs if there are any...I don’t know. More bed linen?”
She tossed her boots onto the floor with a sigh of relief, hanging her head back for a second. Wiggling her toes, Juno looked up at Jim again. “And we’d take shifts sleeping on the shitty bed, obviously.”
When Jim mentioned the contents of the closet, Juno hopped back on over, opening the drawers to check inside. Beachwear, pool wear, summertime crap she’d never worn before. Not in New York. “Jesus Christ I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many bikinis in my life.” it wasn’t lost on her that things looked to be somewhat in her taste, whenever possible. Even if most of it were bathing suits. “If you’ve got a Hawaiian shirt with that collar you wear I’m gonna laugh forever.”
“Why stop there, why not a whole Hawaiian cassock and a full set of bamboo-print vestments,” Jim said, going through the hangers in the closet. “But a pool raft would totally work for a temporary bed, that’s a good idea. We’ll figure something out, anyway. I’m just glad we’re not doing Naked and Afraid in the mountains in October in order to learn the true meaning of friendship or something, which is what my best guess was last night.”
He had no intention of actually wearing the collar down here, because it wasn’t 1873 and he wasn’t Father Damien in Molokai, and with no air conditioning in this place he knew it was going to be a delicate balance between sweating to death and getting a wicked sunburn. “I don’t usually like hot weather that much—I loved summer up north in Kugluktuk because you got sunshine and flowers and stuff but the temps stayed cool, it was like early spring or fall. But this is kind of...nice? I might enjoy the vacation thing here before I burst into flames from the merciless gaze of the sun? That feels really weird to say.”
“Just bamboo print?” Juno scoffed. “Pineapples, hibiscus flowers and bamboo or go home.”
Juno chuckled at what Jim said next, picking up pieces of clothing and checking them out, then putting them away again. “I thought for sure I’d wake up chained or tied to some torture bed or something. Or that they’d build a true to life mannequin of my dad that yelled out his greatest hits…” she looked away absently, voice fading. “Maybe he’d have red laser eyes…”
A smile came over her features as she tried to fit her suitcase in the closet. “I’ve always wanted a vacation somewhere sunny. I’m not used to it, but I think I’ll be alright.” she eyed Jim. “Too bad you’re too blanco to enjoy it without barrels of sunscreen.”
“Way, way too blanco,” Jim agreed, putting his jacket on a hanger in the closet. The thought of Zenith creating mannequins of everybody’s least beloved relatives in loving Madame-Tussaud’s-like detail was sort of depressingly plausible. And he could even imagine everybody getting back to the mansion to find one of those things in every room, and the fact that ideas like that made sense to him was proof enough that everybody really did need a vacation from that place.
His sweatshirt and the long-sleeved t-shirt he’d worn layered underneath both felt gross and sweaty already, so he found the empty laundry hamper tucked neatly in the back of the closet and shed the layers down to the plain t-shirt he had underneath. Between the single bedroom and the communal bathrooms he didn’t know where they were supposed to get changed, but they would work it out. Somehow. “I wonder if we’re still on the hook for chores or what. Maybe this really is a vacation and the magic laundry elves will take care of this. Are you gonna do that Halloween party thing they were talking about?”
Juno had to laugh at Jim’s agreement, picking up a bathing suit that looked fairly alright and deciding she might as well shower and change into vacation-appropriate clothing before long. Even her jeans were starting to chafe - no one wore thick skinny jeans on an island, she suspected. The problem was, much as it was with Jim, where to change and how to shower. Juno had half a mind to bum the use of a private restroom off of either Marco or Lennon, though Marco was closer. All the same, she peeled off her socks with one hand against the closet for balance, tossing them into the laundry basket much like Jim had - were they supposed to share the hamper? Well. It was shared now.
Jim’s wonderings had Juno shrugging. “I have no clue, but we’ll see soon enough I guess. If there’s a washing machine somewhere, then we’re on the hook.” She thought about his other question for a while. “I guess I might as well. I never really celebrated Halloween before, why not now?”
“Really, no Halloween celebrations? I thought that was just for British people and weird Protestants,” Jim said, taking a moment to sit down on the bed and see how thick the duvet was. They could probably fold it over a few times to cushion the floor a bit, if worst came to worst and one of them was sleeping on the floor with a pillow and blanket. But then his brain caught up with his mouth a little and he remembered that it probably wasn’t much of a fun holiday for someone who lived in a city the size of New York and also didn’t drink. “Or was it just a circumstantial thing? I never really come up with fun costumes or anything but I like the whole atmosphere, the movie marathons and the decorations. How happy goths get.”
Juno shrugged, looking away. “My family wasn’t much for celebrations. Or for me, really. And I’ve managed to either be working or broke to the point of poverty every time since I left home so yeah.” she explained as she watched Jim sit on the bed. “Looks fluffy, huh? Yeah, my last job was being a bartender. Halloween? Is only slightly less annoying than St. Patrick’s to me at this point.”
There was a chuckle at ‘how happy goths get’ and Juno rounded the bed to sit on it as well. Nice consistency. “I think this is as good a time as any to really celebrate it though. The costume, the...whatever else happens. I’d say drinking but don’t think I’ll be doing that much.” She shrugged. Just transforming into someone else sort of sounded exciting enough for Juno right now. “The candy. I hope there’s candy.”
“Oh, okay, bartenders hating Halloween is pretty much the most legitimate reason there is,” Jim said, figuring that he shouldn’t poke at the part about her family. “We always had a bonfire at my parish for Halloween, when I was a kid. My older brother would drive us around from house to house, because out in the country everything was so far apart that you couldn’t really walk it, but the country people give a crazy amount of candy. Just pouring it into your bag. And at the end of the evening it’d usually be starting to snow, little flurries, and we’d roll up to the church where they had the bonfire going. I think the idea was to keep the older kids occupied so that they didn’t just take a two-four of Molson out to the woods and get plastered. So on the one hand, even I’ll admit that church activities on Halloween are pretty inherently uncool, but on the other hand, giant fire and more free candy. It balanced out,” he said, leaning over to check out the gift baskets on the bed. “Polaroid cameras and...wow, they gave everybody laptops? Grant funding springs eternal for these people, I guess.”
While Jim spoke Juno went over to sit on the other side of the bed, eyeing the care packages with a healthy amount of suspicion. She wondered what this shit was now, but was soon distracted by Jim’s tale even as she started unwrapping it. “Yeah a bonfire and a bunch of candy sound pretty good to me.” she agreed, not saying anything about the part about getting ‘plastered’. She looked over at the stuff Jim had already pulled out of his box with disbelief. “Aww they want us to make holiday memories.” she said, sounding as cynical as she felt. Juno opened the laptop and turned it on, unsurprised when it asked for her login information just like it had on the network back at Zenith. As she typed it up she realized the network itself looked very similar, and was probably to be used in the same way. “I hope we can keep these, honestly.”