I'm good at shooting people, cracking wise, and pretending to know how to fight.

It was tempting just to stay in Sia's world indefinitely. Like coming back to the island would suddenly make the Sparkle is missing thing real. But it had been weeks now, and that grey tick on his phone was still grey and a single tick, message sent but not delivered, and there was only so much time Atton could spend yelling at gnomes and repressing the increasingly thick concern that was beginning to threaten to choke him in his sleep.

So... he came back to the island. Gave half a thought to picking up his Caritas shift again, even, but that felt like a step too far.

But Sparkle hadn't brought his stupid plant over to Toronto yet. And if Atton was gone for much longer, it would probably wither and die or something and that thought gave him such a sense of physical pain that he'd finally just hopped in the stupid portal and walked here blindly. Mind clear.

Okay, blank.

He found Pauline still alive, but sagging. He dove into the kitchen with his blank head and came back with some water - poodoo, how much water did that plant need? - and clumsily spilled some onto the earth until something in the Force, somewhere, gave a little twitch of just-about-enough.

And then he was left standing in an empty apartment.

That... it wasn't the first time, this year. For years, he'd shared this place with Sparkle, and there had always been life in it. Someone pottering around cleaning things, maybe, or messing around in the kitchen, or curled up in an impossible configuration on the couch with a bag of chips. Even when Sparkle hadn't been there, there'd been an oh-he'll-be-back-in-a-few-hours in the air.

But that had changed a while ago.

He felt another clench of worry at the thought, and then a clench of something messier and more complicated, like that time this summer Sparkle had come back and he'd just--

Sparks was going to come back. He'd said he wasn't going anywhere. (Atton hadn't believed it. Not really. But he'd said.)

"Right, I'm just..." he said, feeling lost, and then walked to the fridge, got out their remaining drinks, and stuffed them in his bag. Looked down the hall at Sparkle's room, and... no. That grey tick mark was going to go green eventually, he wasn't going there, nope, none of that.

He texted Sia - you need anything from the island? and walked back towards the door. There was nothing for him here right now.

And Pauline seemed perkier, anyway.

[[ can be open if you catch him on the way out ]]

Atton'd been feeling... better... since coming back from Skyrim. He wasn't sure what brought it on - maybe hitting some kind of rock bottom right before the trip and venting his spleen had done it, maybe getting laid had done it, maybe... something. He wasn't sure.

He wasn't going to hope it'd last; experience told him the chances of that were low.

But today, he felt all right. He had energy, even, enough for super-ambitious things like 'going to the store and finally buying some milk' (which he probably shouldn't be feeling good about) and, now, finally settling in to touch up some of the scratches on the Ebon Hawk. Keres hadn't been too nice on the Hawk's paint job, and the ice hadn't done it much good either.

So, yeah. Just a couple of hours of hanging around his ship (his ship, which he was never letting out of his sight ever again) painting over scratches and rifling through wiring with his head set on a kind of nice level of blank. It wasn't exactly flying high on contentment or anything, but at least he could breathe.

[[ open! ]]