eyemind | event } ya gotta be a dolphin

Entry tags:

event } ya gotta be a dolphin

WHO: All the little fishies!
WHAT: An underwater adventure
WHERE: Kupra City, or you can stay on Navi if ya want
WHEN: Dec. 20-Jan. 2 16
WARNINGS: Use ‘em in your threads if needed! And if you end up taking an extended dip in the big drink, please report it on the death page.

[Hello, passengers! Hope you're all ready for an announcement, 'cause Navi's voice is getting beamed into your head right about ... now.]

Attention, passengers.
We'll be landing soon on the planet Umora, at Kupra City.
We'll be docked for two weeks, local time.
Please stand by for atmospheric entry.

[Is it just your imagination, or does Navi sound more tired than normal? Either way, it's now time to BUCKLE IN, CHAPS. It's not a particularly rough landing, just your standard amount of turbulence, though it may seem a little jarring to those who aren't used to space travel.

Upon docking underwater and disembarking, passengers will find a bank counter just past the terminal, where your new windfall of Navigems can be exchanged for credits (the universal currency).

Have fun! And do try not to drown … ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Alex just grins back at him in the same easy way that she had back in easier and less fraught times before everything had gotten so bitter and bitey and sharp between them. She'd missed this honestly, missed the easiness of things before there had been Sexy James Bond and finding out that Coralee Strand was alive.

"I would say that I'm protective of people yes. I don't know how nurturing in. I try and be empathetic as often as I possibly can though."

"Your interviews reflect that. Your Michelle Obama interview was excellent."

His features soften, "I am fascinated by people's attachments to objects. They're talismans. Representations of our deepest attachments. Protective is another word for nurturing."

His voice softens, "But you are empathetic. You haven't tossed me out on my ass knowing my history."

"What would you like to tell me? That's it. Don't apologize." there's an edge to that, "Tell me something you want to share with me about you. The first thing that comes to mind."

“I mean of course I wouldn’t, Richard. You’re more than just your history you know. And you and I we—“ Alex just frowns for a moment because he doesn’t remember that either, and what he’d said and what had been left hanging there implied before she had cut him off from it. “We’re friends. And from my end we’ve worked together for a long time. And one thing that I don’t do is turn my back on my friends. No matter what.”

Hell, Nic was still her best friend and she’s pretty sure that the two of them have close to strangling the other more than once over the last year.

But of course when Richard wants him to tell her something, Alex’s mind goes entirely and embarrassingly blank. So blank that she’s pretty sure that even he can her the echoing vastness of it.

Then, Alex’s gaze lands upon the bottle of bourbon that they’d both been having drinks from. “I only started drinking bourbon because of you.” Which makes Alex flush as soon as she says it because it sounds exceptionally dumb indeed.

Richard?

Richard favors her with a soft chuckle as he stares at the bottle, "...I shouldn't be surprised. It's what I used to call an "old man" drink. I started drinking it because my favorite professor did. I wanted to be taken seriously as his TA."

He takes another swig, "Then I turned into an old man and..."

studying her he nods slowly, "Favorite food. I suppose you found out I cook. Does this place let you cook or does the computer prepare it?"

Alex's smile softens at the chuckle, and if anything it becomes more warm. There's rarely a filter between her brain and her mouth, and that rarity only increases when it comes to her having any liquor in her system, so she can't help but to say: "I've missed that, you know. Your laugh." The laugh that she's never heard her make with anyone else so privately (if only very rarely, because he's still the subject of her show) Alex calls it 'her laugh' but she really needs to stop thinking of it in that way given everything else.

So, Alex shifts her focus to the question that he'd asked her. "We cook our own food. Well, someone cooks our food. I don't. Cooking is something that's well beyond my purview; the one time I tried it aboard was a complete disaster. I couldn't even make those stupid hello fresh things we got for promoting on the show work. But yeah, I remember that you can cook. You've made me dinner a few times when we were working late at your father's house." Before things had gotten terrible between them again.

"My favorite food changes, but I love mac and cheese. I love pho and spicy things. You already know that my biggest food group is coffee, just from working with me before."

My father's house.

He flinches and something crosses his face. He has never crossed the threshold of that house he never will he wants to sell it and-

Honestly the smile filters in and he thinks about Coralee and his hands flex. He wants to hold something. He wants to be held.

"I do recall frequent trips to coffee places the times we have worked together."

She knows so much about him. It's fascinating the only person who knew this much was Coralee and apparently Alex knows even her. The desire to hold her to be held by the woman sitting next to him fills him and he turns away briefly, one more swig to kill whatever thought stirred in his mind.

"Are we safe here? Is this a safe place?"

He can't leave her he feels responsible, he realizes. And he would even if-

The idea that Coralee could arrive, that she could be here and with him again makes him turn away and wrap his arms around his chest.

"Sorry. I know how much you hate it. I'll try not to bring it up again." His father's house and everything that comes along with it. She doesn't want that to wound him anymore tonight than it already has. Hurting Richard Strand is always something that it's been hard for Alex Reagan to do, and it goes doubly so now when he hasn't done the things that Richard had done to her back home. He didn't leave her in a fit after Coralee. He didn't lie to her over and over.

Yes, Alex isn't an idiot and she knows that he did, but this one hasn't yet. And maybe he won't. God, this is just such an entirely weird situation and she wishes that Martin was still here so that Alex could have talked to him about that. How does one do this when so much of their shared history is gone. Well, at least it could be worse when it comes to things--they could have slept together or something and had him not remember it. She's pretty sure if that had been the case it would have destroyed her in every sense of the world.

"Is anywhere really safe, Richard? There's dangers back home, more for us even than the normal person. But I don't think Navi intends to do us harm or anything like that if that's why you're asking."

"You can count on me Alex Reagan." He studies her, "I don't pretend to know you as well as the Richard you know but if something does happen you can count on me. And so can this Jon person and whoever...is tied to me."

He frowns, then snorts, "Psychologically linked. Tannis Braun would be thrilled."

He pauses, "...I can only assume you know him."

Alex can't help the corners of her lips from twisting upwards for a moment, because she can very clearly recall how Richard had responded when they'd run into Tannis Braun and how literally jealous Richard had been over the psychic. Honestly, Richard Strand hiking several hours out to see the cabin with her in a full three piece suit and dress shoes will never not be something that makes her laugh. More bad days had been salvaged by Alex's recall of that day than she wanted to admit too. "We've met. We ran into him in Los Gatos after Sebastian Torres was taken. They hired Tannis to find him."

And then defensively, Alex raises her hand to stop Strand's tirade before it can gather up steam. "Yes, I know you think he's a charlatan and that he's taking advantage of people with his act, you don't need to tell me. You really don't like him." Which is probably very much an understatement.

"But Richard, you can definitely count on me too. And whoever else you're partnered with. I'm your friend and I care about you, okay?"

Does she?

She apparently is tied to him now and he feels that weariness. That age and looking at her and how ...what? How deflated she looks? How ...

He knows nothing about her. You can count on me.

"I want to take the Burbon bottle with me." Drinking himself into a stupor sounded like a plan, "Or I could just finish it here. Because somehow you know my whole life and I know...nothing about you except that you had a toy eeyore. You are a mystery. Alex Reagan."

For a moment, Alex doesn't know what to say. This isn't like back home where the two of them could simply just disappear for several weeks when they both got too angry and things became too bad between them. Frankly, she doesn't want it to be that way if it doesn't have to be. Alex Reagan is someone who hopes and she is hopeful that maybe the two of them can entirely bypass the worst parts of their relationship.

"Well,I have an idea then, Richard." Alex starts, and she picks up the bottle of bourbon and fills the glasses to a very generous level, one that's probably closer to a triple shot than a single one. "If you're interested anyway. You say you don't know anything about me, and I'm an open book, and that I know everything about you and I don't. I mean, I know how you take your tea. I know what you eat for breakfast. I know all of this stuff about your family, but there are a lot of things that I don't know about you either. So, I have a proposition."

Alex just picks up her glass, and raises it. "How do you feel like a good old fashioned drinking game? We can play questions where you can ask me whatever you want and I'll ask like...low stakes questions. And if either one of us doesn't want to answer, we do a shot. Deal?"

Intriguing. Turning to face her he pulls off his tie and tosses it to the ground. It's another sort of look she might not have seen - an amused rougish look that he favors the women he picks up at academic conferences.

He gestures toward the drinks.

"Who goes first? Do you want to flip a coin?"

"You can ask first. It only seems fair." Alex just shifts a bit so that she's more comfortable with one leg underneath the other, and she picks up her glass and takes a sip of it before she looks at the bottle and gets up. When she returns, she's filled two water bottles. "Just in case. It definitely seems smarter to make sure we have water now than when we're drunk."

Because there isn't a single doubt in Alex's mind that they are going to be exceptionally wasted by the time this is over.

When Richard Strand was just heading to college, Raiders of the Lost Ark had come out. That had been a bit of a balm - a swashbuckling academic, a beautiful woman. When Indy was revealed to have an overbearing father whose words bordered on abuse (though nothing so close) he felt he had a kindred spirit.

Then he'd met Amber, Charlie's mother - and real life had made him buckle down. For the first time in years however he had a flash of that, sitting in the theater watching Marion stare down Henry Jones Jr.

Folding his hands and staring at the alcohol he studied his drink, then her.

"Your most embarrassing interview." Softballs. Soft. Balls.

For a moment, Alex just blinks, but then again she really shouldn't have been surprised after the question that he'd thrown at her earlier about her comfort object. There are one or two on the tapes that Alex can think of (especially the one where Nic's sleazy friend totally hit on her and made her so uncomfortable that she lost her mind and went onto the roof of the studio to smoke a joint with after) but she can think of one that might amuse him.

"Dirk Abruzzi, if we're talking with the show. He was such an a pig. He slipped me the key to his hotel room like I was going to meet him afterwards. I almost dumped my glass of water on his head. Definitely went home and took a shower."

Then, Alex colors and she reaches out and takes a drink. "When I was in college, I hosted a radio show. When I was a sophomore, the hotshot reporter on the station got sick when he had an interview scheduled with Marilyn Manson. I was definitely trying to seem older and cool and I did a few shots with the band. But I hadn't eaten all day and I definitely ended up throwing up on his shoes."

He looks genuinely amused at that, "...Somehow I'm not surprised you interviewed someone like that." He rolls his eyes, "I'm not sure how I feel about the singer but throwing up on a famous person works."

He presses his lips together in a smirk, "Though you seem like you like to get in over your head."

It's kind of cute.

"When did you lose your virginity?"

Cut to the quick. His eyes go dark, cold, a wall up over his feelings.

Edited 2021-01-06 06:30 (UTC)

"Yeah well..." Alex smirks at him and is in the middle of taking a sip of the bourbon when he asks the question. She chokes on it, and coughs for a few seconds before she just stares at him with one of her brows raised. Granted, she knows now who his was, but Alex only does because Strand had been the one who had told her in a fit of anger.

"Seriously? Jesus, Richard." Alex just shakes her head for a moment before she does chose to answer the question.

"When I was seventeen. Jane Walsh, while my parents were away for the weekend. But for the record, I never would have asked you that!"

"...You weren't paying attention when I-"

Well. She clearly wasn't paying attention. All to the good. Shaking his head before fixing his gaze on her he gestures.

"So far I seem to be winning. I'm the only one asking the questions."

"No, I heard you tell me about it. But I didn't ask. You offered." Alex shakes her head in disbelief for a moment because Jesus some things about Richard Strand simply didn't change, even when things were meant to be easier between them. "I wouldn't ask you about that. There are some lines even I wouldn't cross." Not many, not really, not anymore but there were in fact some.

But she doesn't want to fight with him. She's fucking tired of fighting with him and that had been the worst part of the last year for Alex; how they were so very rarely on the same team.

So, she choses to deescalate this at least a little bit. "What's your favorite ice cream?"

Does he feel bad. Yes.

He feels bad the way she talks and perhaps it was low. The idea that suddenly his life was knowledge - perhaps public knowledge - hit harder than he thought. It brought back up Coralee and Charlie and Cheryl and his life. His whole rotten life.

That was what he did. He pushed people away.

But perhaps that was a low blow. He had always prided himself on not being misogynistic. About not...being mean when it came to personal issues.

He inhaled.

"Teaberry." He reached into his chest cracking open the seal around his personality, "My mother used to take my sister and I-" he winced, "To the ice cream parlor in town. It was one of the few places you could get teaberry ice cream. She would sit and listen to the two of us talk about our day - Cheryl would order chocolate and I'd order teaberry and we would mix the two."

He nods slowly. It is a happy memory that he's unearthed for her, staring at his hands before looking at her, "You can't get it anywhere but North Eastern US states but if you can conjure images of ...a classic 1950s style ice cream parlor and two kids very happy for a treat I suppose you have a solid image of my childhood."

God. It was so much information his throat twisted but his features remained passive. It was a positive memory. He and Cheryl babbling at their mother. Jaqueline Strand sitting there in her yellow top and curly blonde hair with the pearls his father gave her around her neck.

"...What's yours?"

"I've never heard of teaberry," Alex admits easily, even though it sounds like it could be one of the hipster flavors that happened to be anywhere around Seattle. But honestly, she appreciates what he's telling her, and she smiles softly at him because of it. Normally, Alex knows that he would be loathe to mention anything about his sister or mother or family, but it's so easy for Alex to picture little Richie Strand sitting there with something called 'teaberry' even if it may or may not actually have tea in it in a 50s style ice scream party out of something from Happy Days or Grease.

As for her own favorite, it's decidedly less classic than his is. "Ben and Jerry's coffee coffee buzzbuzzbuzz. I mean, it's what I reach for most often you know, and one of the few things that I always have in my freezer." Other things Alex normally has in her freezer: coffee, ice and vodka. She doesn't cook so she doesn't normally remember to keep something in there of a food-like sort of thing. Well, maybe sometimes hot pockets, but Alex sure isn't going to tell Strand that.

"But when like it's time to go out for ice cream? There's this cute little shop in Pike's Place by the studio. They have this amazing raspberry lime Rickey that I love. If you want I'll take you there when we're home. They do small batch stuff from premium ingredients. I know that they have a really good Earl Grey and Lavender one I've thought of suggesting to you loads of times.

"Earl Grey and Lavender."

Let this go Richard. You can do this because he did hit below the belt and honestly, "That's a good expresso flavor, a good coffee flavor as well if you haven't had it."

Don't address the rest. Sitting there quietly he studies her features, "...What was your favorite place to go? as a child?"

Honestly, Alex would have thought that he liked it because she knows he's drank Earl Gray more than a few times during their working relationship, and so mixing it seemed like a good idea in the form of ice cream.

But she doesn't bring it up again and instead goes on to answer the question he posed to her. "Like once a month, my Dad and Grandpa would wake me up and take me fly fishing with them. I'm not a fan of the woods, not really. Even like...before. But it was on my Grandpa's property. We would do catch and release fishing because I couldn't bear to kill them. So we would just take polaroid's of them and stuff. Then let them go. I stopped when I was a teenager because I didn't want to get up at three in the morning but I miss it. Nowhere ever felt as peaceful as that did."

It was why Alex had gone into the woods to her friends cabin when she was concerned that she was going to die from the Unsound. It hadn't worked, not in the same way. Id anything, Alex had only forgotten just how much the world was louder and more intense in the dark in the woods. But Alex hadn't ever been there truly alone before, and she'd never been there when there was the concern about demons.

"What about you?"

"I love the woods." he shrugs, "Camping was one of the few things my father and I would do."

He would take him out and turn him away from the fire. Teach him not to fear the darkness. The complicated relationship between an abusive father and his son. Richard wasn't stupid. He knew his father wasn't a good man and a normal father wouldn't keep his son looking out into the darkness.

He took Charlie camping and he had never done that.

Not in a million years.

It had been Coralee who would let the fire die and stare into the starlight...

He shakes his head, "...I presume since you've seen and know everything about me you've seen just how big my father's house in Seattle is. He liked to build homes near the woods.

Truthfully, the ocean scares me."

There's something deep and primal about it. Something that makes him feel like hew ants to lose his grip on his carefully constructed skepticism and dive beneath the waves.

"...You're not really afraid of demons are you? It hasn't gotten that bad?"

"I've been there. Several times actually, over the last few months that I was at home." And she'd seen Richard and Ruby put it back together and make it livable as Strand had moved into the PNW because that's where all of Coralee's disappearances had come from. She probably doesn't need to say it, but she does anyway as she tries to buy some time around the question that he'd blatantly asked her.

She knows that Strand had pushed on her boundaries around demons back when he'd showed her the exorcism of Jessica Wheldon, and she doesn't know if they'd had the conversation about how much Alex hated demons or not. Sometimes all of the things that they'd discussed, particularly in the early days all ran together. But he definitely doesn't know about all of the ways that this had just devoured her whole and Alex has a choice to make: she could lie or she could tell him the truth and Alex really hates to lie.

But that doesn't mean that Alex can't talk around it, and she does. "A lot has happened, and the Exorcist was always the thing that scared me the most when I was a kid. And I mean..." Alex just swallows, and for a moment panic threatens to well up in her before she slams back the bourbon because she can't help it and if she thinks of the nightmare that was shared here, she's going to go entirely insane. So, she just pours herself a shot and does it.

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