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suitably_heroicAtton’s hands were steady as he slid his key in the lock. Mainly through sheer force of practice, of always remembering to hide that kind of thing, but still - he was proud of it. For about five seconds; then the door swung open and he found himself confronted with the truly furious expression of his drummer.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Jill snapped.
“Uh,” Atton said. “I lost my phone?”
She smacked him upside the head. And, okay, he would let her have that one. “Sure you have,” she said. “Fuck! I thought you were done pulling this shit!”
You know what? So had he.
“Yeah,” he said, reaching up to rub the part of his head she’d just thumped. She had quite some muscle on her; it was a bad idea pissing off a drummer. It hurt. “Look. Maybe, hypothetically–” Oh crap, don’t say hypothetically, “... Really, I had a, uh, what do you call them–”
“Panic attack?” she filled in, and smacked him again. “Then why didn’t you come talk to me? I could’ve told you– I would have– are all space guys this completely emotionally immature?”
He thought of some space people he’d met at Fandom over the years and felt a nearly irresistible temptation to say ‘yes’, but she’d probably just smack him again and it was really starting to hurt and wait did she just call him a space guy? “You know,” he realized.
“Dane’s been my best friend for almost twenty years,” she said irritably. “Of course he told me. I don’t know why you didn’t. You know I own like fifteen issues of UFO Magazine, right? You helped me move them!”
“Okay, but all that stuff is just local military tests and weather–” This time, he ducked the incoming hand before it could make impact. “I’m sorry, okay? I told him, he didn’t say anything, I thought the worst, welcome to my brain! The second I sense a worst case scenario rearing its ugly head, I get in the car and hit the gas, because–” Because it was easier than dealing with the fallout, and if you left the party early, then at least being miserable was your choice.
But that was threatening to develop into a rant, and she was definitely making expressions. Not the good kind, more the kind that said she was clearly growing tired of his bullshit. And who could blame her? He was tired of his bullshit. “Can I please just enter my own apartment?” he finished lamely.
Jill’s eyes narrowed. Something dropped further down the pit of his stomach. She looked over her shoulder. “What do you think?” she said. “Should we let him in?”
“It’s fine.”
Dane’s voice seemed casual, easy, but there was at least 25 percent less chipper than there usually would be. Atton recognized the tone: keeping up appearances.
The pit widened a little further, but at least Jill moved out of the way, and Atton shuffled into the apartment with his head held down. He hated this. He’d spent a lifetime walking away from people before things could get to this point (and two times not doing it, with terrible results each time). In this moment, he understood exactly why, and why he couldn’t do it anymore, and why he heavily regretted it anyway.
You would care. Otherwise you wouldn't be miserable. You'd just be numb.
And there Dane was on the couch, surrounded by some freshly-packed bags, his lanky body sort of splayed all over the cushions like he was desperately trying to sell that he was fine. Atton didn’t need the Force to know that he wasn’t, obviously. This was one of those stupid things they had in common, the stupid desire to shove everything under fifteen layers of masks, and they’d both just gotten better and better at reading what was going on without having to push and ask about it and make things awkward.
Except. Oh. Poodoo.
Packed bags.
Dane looked at him and sat up. Abruptly. “No, no, no,” he said, “College buddy trip, remember? Jill and I are heading out of town for a week to do stupid reunion stuff. I’m not– This is not because of that.”
Just like that, Atton deflated. The pit in his stomach did a weird little vibrating thing, as if it didn't know which direction to drop into right now. “Oh. Right.”
“Sorry,” Dane said. “Your timing is, uh. Just a couple more hours and we would’ve been out of here.”
He should’ve sent Summer a larger cake.
“Yeah, sorry about that.” Atton shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket. The leather one. After last week, the old one, the Fandom one, had been declared unsalvageable. Trashed. He missed it for a second, then didn’t. “Look, I might have overreacted. A little bit.”
“You gave me five minutes,” Dane said. And then, casually: “I need a little more than five minutes for ‘the roommate you have a massive crush on is actually an alien from space’.”
Atton stared at him.
(Okay, it wasn’t like he hadn’t known, but he’d been operating under the expectation nobody would bring it up until he figured out what to do with it, that it’d just be one of those things they ignored…)
Dane sat back again. “See,” he said, satisfied. “Now you know what that feels like.”
“I hate you two,” Jill sighed, closing the door and striding past them into their dinky little kitchen. “You know you’re both the oldest and yet somehow the most immature people in my life? How are you both grandpas and toddlers?”
“Jill,” both of them said at once. Dane looked at her with a pleading in his eyes; Atton ran his fingers through his hair and made the executive decision that this wasn’t the time to have any further difficult conversations than the immediate one.
Again.
“Look, outside of that other stuff,” he said - smooth, Rand, “I really am sorry. I thought you were planning to declare me ‘too weird’ or ‘too insane’ and move out, so I moved out first. Uh, metaphorically speaking. I was planning to come back. Eventually. There was just a crisis back at the school, and it was easier to let myself be distracted by that than to come here and…” He waved an awkward hand at Dane, and immediately wondered why he'd done that, as if he could capture this whole mess with a gesture or something, “...deal with the possibility of coming home to an empty apartment.”
“Which you would have if you’d kept being a dumbass for a while more,” Jill called from the kitchen, pointing at him with… a jar of mustard? Oh. Right. Probably sandwiches for the road.
He needed to stop getting distracted.
“Which I would have if I’d continued to be a dumbass, yes, thanks for editorializing,” Atton said. “But I stopped. So please don’t move out.”
“I’m not going to move out,” Dane told him. “I just need you to communicate, okay?”
Jill snorted loudly in the kitchen.
“Jill,” they called.
“I’m not good at communication,” Atton said. “You know that.”
He should know that, at least, after all this time. Unless Atton had somehow been less of a trainwreck than he thought he was, which, considering both conversations he’d had on the topic yesterday, seemed unlikely.
“I don’t think that’s true,” Dane said, his stupid brown eyes going all earnest on him. Was he a pod person? It was completely possible that his roommate was a pod person. Pod person and an alien sharing an apartment in New York City, that sounded like the start of a sitcom, and now even his internal narrative was ranting. “I think you do just fine when you let yourself calm down for five seconds. And you can calm down, you know. I’m really not planning on going anywhere. I like it here, despite the, uh, the other stuff. I’ve stayed with enough shitty people to know a good deal when I have one.”
Space. Atton almost wished the guy would actually yell at him for a minute. He knew how to handle anger. This? This, he didn’t have much of a reference for.
Okay, sure, he’d been building a reference library since the day a half-naked Jedi walked into his cell block, but he’d gone out of his way to avoid having to add to it very much. That was starting to bite him in the ass, he realized. System overloaded, frying a few power converters, kind of bite in the ass.
“Okay,” he said.
“Jill and I are going to finish packing up and we’re going on this road trip,” Dane said, “But I’m going to come back and you’re going to come back and without all that space stuff happening all the time, you’re going to relax, man.”
“Oh, am I now?” Atton said, tilting his head.
“Yep.”
And what could he do but laugh? A little desperate, a little relief, a lot of deep embarrassment at the… at how stupid the whole situation was. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Okay.”
“Well, I’m still thinking about throwing this pan at his head,” Jill called from the kitchen.
“Jill.”
“What? I’m allowed to have feelings too!” Beat. “And you owe me an explanation about the weather balloons!”
And that was how, a bare few hours later, Atton found himself on the subway back to the Portalocity station, overthinking his life all over again, with The Guy From That Stupid Band singing in his ear.
In this strange town. In this strange hemisphere.
[[ open for phone calls etc. nfb due to distance. ]]
“Where the fuck have you been?” Jill snapped.
“Uh,” Atton said. “I lost my phone?”
She smacked him upside the head. And, okay, he would let her have that one. “Sure you have,” she said. “Fuck! I thought you were done pulling this shit!”
You know what? So had he.
“Yeah,” he said, reaching up to rub the part of his head she’d just thumped. She had quite some muscle on her; it was a bad idea pissing off a drummer. It hurt. “Look. Maybe, hypothetically–” Oh crap, don’t say hypothetically, “... Really, I had a, uh, what do you call them–”
“Panic attack?” she filled in, and smacked him again. “Then why didn’t you come talk to me? I could’ve told you– I would have– are all space guys this completely emotionally immature?”
He thought of some space people he’d met at Fandom over the years and felt a nearly irresistible temptation to say ‘yes’, but she’d probably just smack him again and it was really starting to hurt and wait did she just call him a space guy? “You know,” he realized.
“Dane’s been my best friend for almost twenty years,” she said irritably. “Of course he told me. I don’t know why you didn’t. You know I own like fifteen issues of UFO Magazine, right? You helped me move them!”
“Okay, but all that stuff is just local military tests and weather–” This time, he ducked the incoming hand before it could make impact. “I’m sorry, okay? I told him, he didn’t say anything, I thought the worst, welcome to my brain! The second I sense a worst case scenario rearing its ugly head, I get in the car and hit the gas, because–” Because it was easier than dealing with the fallout, and if you left the party early, then at least being miserable was your choice.
But that was threatening to develop into a rant, and she was definitely making expressions. Not the good kind, more the kind that said she was clearly growing tired of his bullshit. And who could blame her? He was tired of his bullshit. “Can I please just enter my own apartment?” he finished lamely.
Jill’s eyes narrowed. Something dropped further down the pit of his stomach. She looked over her shoulder. “What do you think?” she said. “Should we let him in?”
“It’s fine.”
Dane’s voice seemed casual, easy, but there was at least 25 percent less chipper than there usually would be. Atton recognized the tone: keeping up appearances.
The pit widened a little further, but at least Jill moved out of the way, and Atton shuffled into the apartment with his head held down. He hated this. He’d spent a lifetime walking away from people before things could get to this point (and two times not doing it, with terrible results each time). In this moment, he understood exactly why, and why he couldn’t do it anymore, and why he heavily regretted it anyway.
You would care. Otherwise you wouldn't be miserable. You'd just be numb.
And there Dane was on the couch, surrounded by some freshly-packed bags, his lanky body sort of splayed all over the cushions like he was desperately trying to sell that he was fine. Atton didn’t need the Force to know that he wasn’t, obviously. This was one of those stupid things they had in common, the stupid desire to shove everything under fifteen layers of masks, and they’d both just gotten better and better at reading what was going on without having to push and ask about it and make things awkward.
Except. Oh. Poodoo.
Packed bags.
Dane looked at him and sat up. Abruptly. “No, no, no,” he said, “College buddy trip, remember? Jill and I are heading out of town for a week to do stupid reunion stuff. I’m not– This is not because of that.”
Just like that, Atton deflated. The pit in his stomach did a weird little vibrating thing, as if it didn't know which direction to drop into right now. “Oh. Right.”
“Sorry,” Dane said. “Your timing is, uh. Just a couple more hours and we would’ve been out of here.”
He should’ve sent Summer a larger cake.
“Yeah, sorry about that.” Atton shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket. The leather one. After last week, the old one, the Fandom one, had been declared unsalvageable. Trashed. He missed it for a second, then didn’t. “Look, I might have overreacted. A little bit.”
“You gave me five minutes,” Dane said. And then, casually: “I need a little more than five minutes for ‘the roommate you have a massive crush on is actually an alien from space’.”
Atton stared at him.
(Okay, it wasn’t like he hadn’t known, but he’d been operating under the expectation nobody would bring it up until he figured out what to do with it, that it’d just be one of those things they ignored…)
Dane sat back again. “See,” he said, satisfied. “Now you know what that feels like.”
“I hate you two,” Jill sighed, closing the door and striding past them into their dinky little kitchen. “You know you’re both the oldest and yet somehow the most immature people in my life? How are you both grandpas and toddlers?”
“Jill,” both of them said at once. Dane looked at her with a pleading in his eyes; Atton ran his fingers through his hair and made the executive decision that this wasn’t the time to have any further difficult conversations than the immediate one.
Again.
“Look, outside of that other stuff,” he said - smooth, Rand, “I really am sorry. I thought you were planning to declare me ‘too weird’ or ‘too insane’ and move out, so I moved out first. Uh, metaphorically speaking. I was planning to come back. Eventually. There was just a crisis back at the school, and it was easier to let myself be distracted by that than to come here and…” He waved an awkward hand at Dane, and immediately wondered why he'd done that, as if he could capture this whole mess with a gesture or something, “...deal with the possibility of coming home to an empty apartment.”
“Which you would have if you’d kept being a dumbass for a while more,” Jill called from the kitchen, pointing at him with… a jar of mustard? Oh. Right. Probably sandwiches for the road.
He needed to stop getting distracted.
“Which I would have if I’d continued to be a dumbass, yes, thanks for editorializing,” Atton said. “But I stopped. So please don’t move out.”
“I’m not going to move out,” Dane told him. “I just need you to communicate, okay?”
Jill snorted loudly in the kitchen.
“Jill,” they called.
“I’m not good at communication,” Atton said. “You know that.”
He should know that, at least, after all this time. Unless Atton had somehow been less of a trainwreck than he thought he was, which, considering both conversations he’d had on the topic yesterday, seemed unlikely.
“I don’t think that’s true,” Dane said, his stupid brown eyes going all earnest on him. Was he a pod person? It was completely possible that his roommate was a pod person. Pod person and an alien sharing an apartment in New York City, that sounded like the start of a sitcom, and now even his internal narrative was ranting. “I think you do just fine when you let yourself calm down for five seconds. And you can calm down, you know. I’m really not planning on going anywhere. I like it here, despite the, uh, the other stuff. I’ve stayed with enough shitty people to know a good deal when I have one.”
Space. Atton almost wished the guy would actually yell at him for a minute. He knew how to handle anger. This? This, he didn’t have much of a reference for.
Okay, sure, he’d been building a reference library since the day a half-naked Jedi walked into his cell block, but he’d gone out of his way to avoid having to add to it very much. That was starting to bite him in the ass, he realized. System overloaded, frying a few power converters, kind of bite in the ass.
“Okay,” he said.
“Jill and I are going to finish packing up and we’re going on this road trip,” Dane said, “But I’m going to come back and you’re going to come back and without all that space stuff happening all the time, you’re going to relax, man.”
“Oh, am I now?” Atton said, tilting his head.
“Yep.”
And what could he do but laugh? A little desperate, a little relief, a lot of deep embarrassment at the… at how stupid the whole situation was. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Okay.”
“Well, I’m still thinking about throwing this pan at his head,” Jill called from the kitchen.
“Jill.”
“What? I’m allowed to have feelings too!” Beat. “And you owe me an explanation about the weather balloons!”
And that was how, a bare few hours later, Atton found himself on the subway back to the Portalocity station, overthinking his life all over again, with The Guy From That Stupid Band singing in his ear.
In this strange town. In this strange hemisphere.
[[ open for phone calls etc. nfb due to distance. ]]
