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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"Yes," Ezra agreed, as he cleaned himself up. "Fuck, indeed."

Cheapest of cheap puns, but Dante laughed anyway.

He was still a little out of it, which meant he wasn't even faking being comfortable just yet. "It was nice," he mused, because words, whatever.

It hadn't even been meant as a pun. That was how lazy Ezra was feeling.

"Yes, it was." He shifted a little, let his arm flop so that the backs of his fingers could just barely brush against whatever bit of Dante's skin they happened to end up against. It was just a stray bit of... something. Foxes were touchy.

Funny. Ezra hadn't seemed very touchy - or touchable, really - for a long time. So Dante's eyes darted towards that hand for a moment before he shrugged it off.

Metaphorically speaking. He had no inclination to move right now, or honestly, even discourage any of that. "Should've come here sooner," he said casually.

Dante should've. Or Ezra should've come back sooner. Whichever.

Ezra was looking up at the ceiling. He did shrug – or maybe he just shifted. It was really a question of whatever the equivalent of semantics was for body language.

"Well, things have been happening, darling."

"You gonna start in on that when there's no booze nearby?" Dante asked, slanting a sideways look at him. "Now that's being a bad host."

It was a decidedly more relaxed answer than Ezra would've gotten before the endorphins had hit Dante's system, at least.

Ezra picked up his hand again, for nothing but to hold up one finger. "One, I resent the accusation that there's no alcohol present in this room," he said, without even glancing over.

Sure, he wasn't a big drinker himself, but there was a certain image thing (along with the kind of company he kept) that demanded he was generally stocked on things like these.

He held up another finger. "Two, I didn't specify which things."

"There's been a whole bunch of things," Dante said, who couldn't have given less of a shit about his image if he tried. "I can't think of a single one that doesn't lead to drinking."

"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.)

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