smilestopscars | Room 210, Friday Afternoon

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Room 210, Friday Afternoon

It'd been almost two weeks. Ezra was starting to be okay. Which was to say, he'd repressed the hell out of the fact that he'd seen ––

You know what? No. Let's just not go there. He'd been thoroughly over it once he'd stopped shaking and wanting to puke his guts out (after he'd felt like he already had). And that had been the very same day already, so. He was done with it, and had been for almost two weeks.

(The less said about said two weeks, though, the better. Unless you happened to be a fan of questionable coping methods.)

Things were just fine now. He'd just finished packing up a box of his winter stuff that he needed to send up to Currant to Ava for safekeeping, and was currently just standing by the window, looking up towards the sky. Maybe today he'd go out exploring.

Get into trouble.

[ooc: Open door, open post. ETA: Dante thread going NSFW, no surprise to anyone.]

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"Well, you were always straightfroward enough to be a little lacking in imagination in some respects, darling," Ezra replied mildly.

Dante snorted softly. "I've got plenty of imagination," he said. "I just actually share it from time to time."

He slanted a look back at Ezra. "But fine. Specify your heart out."

Ezra sighed.

"I don't feel like it anymore."

"Right," Dante said.

He sat up. Eyed Ezra again, and for once, didn't actually blurt the first thing on his mind. Just maybe the second. "Don't, Ez." And he didn't mean 'don't feel like it', no. "It's been a long few fucking months."

Ezra finally looked over. He also instantly looked a lot more tired than he had just moments before.

"And does something make you think that's somehow escaped my notice?"

"No, I don't think you miss much," Dante said. "But you don't say shit. You just act like a fucking asshole."

Ezra rolled his eyes, but there was something tired and resigned about that, too.

"I've barely been here enough to act like anything."

"It was enough," Dante said.

He pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them. Let them go a few seconds later, because that'd been more visibly self-protective than the casual sprawl he'd been hoping to go for.

"You think people out here didn't care about you?"

"I think," Ezra sighed, shaking his head just a little bit, "people care a lot about various things and people, whether you want them to or not. And whether it's any good for them or not. I don't see how that's relevant to anything."

He wasn't the one who'd gone out and died.

"You're fulla shit, Ezra."

That came out matter-of-factly, didn't it?

"I mean, that's not news to me, I just usually try to ignore it. But you're fulla shit."

"Mostly flesh and blood and bones, actually."

Mostly matter-of-fact, but a little dry too.

"You're fucked up about Kathy," Dante said, rolling his eyes. "Maybe something else before that, I don't fucking know, 'cause you won't tell me."

He slid to the edge of the bed. "You wanna keep on being an ass, that's on you."

Ezra's voice was remarkably level. "I never said those things aren't true."

Well, the Kathy thing, anyway. Not that that was hard when this was the first time they'd even met since then.

"No, you just talk around it and take potshots at me," Dante said, looking at Ezra over his shoulder.

"Fuck," he muttered, a moment later. When his eyes went up to the ceiling, it wasn't a rolling of the eyes; he was looking for something resembling composure. "I probably shouldn't be pissed," he said. "You're the only one who bailed these past couple of months who has the decency to return his texts."

Ezra was rolling his eyes. It was what he knew how to do, under the circumstances.

He was watching Dante, though. Finally pushing himself up on his elbows, at least. "You do realize you seem to be talking about some figment of your imagination, don't you? I can't be bailing and taking potshots at anyone at the same time."

"Seriously, I'm gonna punch you in the head if you keep giving me shit," Dante said. Though it was more 'matter-of-factly' than 'angry'. "Kathy bailed. Anders bailed. And you bailed. I guess you coming back to take potshots actually makes you the winner of that set."

He ran a hand through his hair. Damn it, see? He needed a drink. He'd known he was gonna need one.

"Why did you even come back?"

Because somewhere there was something innately fucked up about Ezra being the one who came back, kind of like how Kathy dying and Dante living was fucked up too.

"Well no one expects me to murder people here."

He mostly said it just because he was starting to feel all too tired to listen to Dante right now. At least give him a new track to get stuck on.

"I'm sure you see how that might feel like incentive."

(Wasn't even the real reason. But it was a contributing factor all the same.)

Probably a good thing that comment about Dante's track hadn't been voiced out loud, or Dante really would've punched him.

As it was, looking at Ezra right now, spitting out something else that still sounded like bullshit-- he just really missed Anders right now. He reached up, rubbed the bridge of his nose.

"Sure," he said.

Maybe it sounded like bullshit and maybe it wasn't the real reason (there was no real reason he'd been able to pinpoint and trust him, he'd tried) but it was still something he didn't like saying out loud to people.

So, Ezra shrugged.

He raised his arm. Pointed at the door.

"You know the way out."

"Yeah, I do."

Dante turned his gaze back away from him, hoping Ezra wouldn't catch him pinchin the bridge of his nose so tight it hurt. He didn't exactly want the guy catching him hurting, especially right now, but his fucked up brain didn't seem to care.

He snagged his pants off the floor with his other hand.

Stupid. Real fucking stupid.

Ezra let his arm drop back down. He kept watching, but he didn't say anything.

He wondered if he was even going to stay after this.

Same thing Dante would've been wondering, if it hadn't been for Ada. There was too much hope on this fucking island; it got in your head and fucked you up.

He got his pants on quick and easy, frustrated only marginally by the way his fingers briefly lost their way and got all tangled up over the button of his pants.

Well. Maybe more than marginally. It made him drop his hands back down to the mattress for a second. He squeezed it, staring back up at the ceiling. Then back over his shoulder, at Ezra.

He was quickly losing track of what he was feeling about this whole fucked up meeting at all.

Ezra wasn't helping. He just looked on, his face largely unreadable, a little resigned. He'd said something. It had gone over about as badly as he could've guessed.

He didn't feel very inclined to say anything further.

No, he wasn't helping. But he also wasn't doing the opposite. If Ezra'd made another shitty comment, Dante coulda just walked out of here and gotten outrageously drunk and gone right back to pretending he didn't give a shit about the guy. If he'd done something helpful, they would've gone back to talking.

Dante was hurting, and he was tired, too, and he'd successfully managed to avoid feeling this raw for weeks now, and the only person left on the island with any hint understanding this whole fucking mess was this asshole right here.

Dante'd made a bunch of stupid choices today already.

Might as well give in and make another one, scooting back, curling back onto the bed without saying anything. Not his usual sprawl, either.

This was not what Ezra had expected. Which some might have been able to guess from the way he'd purposefully said a shitty thing.

His eyebrow raise was instant. Wasn't easy to figure out what the hell he was supposed to do with this.

Slowly, he decided the first course of action was to slump back down. He could figure out the rest from there.

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