goneawayworld | You Can't Keep Kicking Yourself Out of Bed, Kicking Yourself in the Head [Closed]

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You Can't Keep Kicking Yourself Out of Bed, Kicking Yourself in the Head [Closed]

Who: Dan and Bunny
What: Dan and Bunny discuss Planker, sleeping with Price, whatever the heck happened to Kokichi, etc.
Where: The Gardens
When: Directly after the Pride party, before daemonplot.
Warnings/Notes: References to substance use, sex, poor decisionmaking.

Dan should probably shower. He showered this morning, but that was before he got covered in glitter and a little bit of vodka and a whole bunch of sex pheromones from hooking up with a Jorg staffer at the party and then immediately hooking up with Price right afterwards, and now he's sparkly and sweaty under his uniform.

He's sobered up enough by now that he can look back at sleeping with Price as exactly the kind of horseshit decision he always makes when he's stressed out, but, unfortunately, he's actually going to have to deal with the fallout. Usually, when he hooks up with someone who might catch feelings of some variety or other, he skips town immediately afterwards. It's a fantastic way of ducking out of the consequences of playing messy games with people's hearts.

It's not available on the Rig.

Dan heads to the Gardens because while Bunny's been off on a milk run mission - corporate wouldn't give Dan details, and Dan wasn't about to press enough to make it look suspicious - there's no one Dan would rather talk to at this moment, and maybe, just maybe, Bunny's gotten back by now. Dan's been avoiding most people since the mission into Planker's brain, wrestling with his combination of feeling deeply betrayed and with his own guilt for having kicked off a scheme that got a man killed, and now he's going to have to add avoiding Price to his list of folks to dodge, and that leaves Dan just wanting to talk to the only person here he doesn't just respect, but actually trusts.

"Anyone here?" he asks, hoping Bunny will be back and heading for the oak tree in the back that they tend to canoodle under, mostly sheltered from the Jorg's eyes.

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"Just got back."

Bunny went through the combo punch of waking up with a start to relaxing immediately as he recognized the voice that woke him as Dan. Any surprise wakeup makes his fur stand on end. Only Dan being that surprise can make his fur lay right back down.

Bunny slips out from under the tree looking ragged. A patch of fur on his left flank is singed, and if he didn't have a fur coat there'd be bags of exhaustion under his eyes, but Dan knows him well enough to see it in his tired posture, in that Bunny came straight back for a nap first instead of to find Dan first.

"The milk run soured," he says, ruefully, leaning in to touch his nose to Dan's forehead. A yard away though the smell on Dan hits him with a barrage of information - among it, that Dan got into what Bunny considers a particularly inadvisable bed.

He finishes giving Dan's forehead a rabbit kiss, but snuffles the whole time, info gathering. He leans back with an eyebrow raised. "Do you wanna tell me about it, or should I start asking questions first?"

He raises an eyebrow back and waves it off.

"I should ask questions first." He reaches out to wrap his arms around Bunny's waist, continuing that forehead rabbit kiss for a second and then gingerly touching above Bunny's flank to examine the singe there. Dan frequently using talking about other people to deflect, but here it's just sheer concern for his sweetheart's wellbeing.

He sighs and leads Bunny back to the oak tree so they can touch each other out of immediate corporate eyesight. "Are you just exhausted or did some things get real heavy emotionally?"

"I'm just tired. Someone with a dose of Stuff had thought too hard about kimono dragons and coconut crabs at the same time."

Bunny shudders at the way those two animals never should have been made to combine, as he pulls Dan under the shelter of the trees roots and curls bodily around him. His heart is still accelerated post-fight, post startled wakeup, only now starting to slow. He's all right, Dan's all right, and now that Dan is all right with him here it'll be easier to calm down and sleep knowing his aren't the only ears listening.

"It wasn't very interesting. Just bloody. Someone almost got a robot arm." Maybe that was a bit emotionally heavy. But more importantly. "You smell like you just took a roll in the hay with Price."

If Dan won't volunteer the information, he'll just have to call it out

"That sounds like a terrible combination. As if big lizards with rotmouth ain't terrifying enough." He smiles and joins in on the cuddling, resting his face again on that spot space under Bunny's neck, where the fur is softest. "Was the robot arm at least high tech?"

Mac would probably want a robot arm. Dan winces as Bunny can smell his most recent sexual history on him.

"Price and Gretchen in less than two hours." Dan sighs. "I'm regretting the former, a little. Gretchen's always quality." That's another deflection. "I'm worried that if I avoid him, he'll take it as evidence that he's inherently a bad person unworthy of dignity, but I'm also worried if I don't avoid him he'll get emotionally attached."

A kiss to Bunny's cheek. "And I only have room for emotional attachment to you."

"It would have been." Lavender and basil twines up in the gaps of the roots around them, giving them more cover against being spotted and blotting out the smells of Gretchen and Price. Nobody will notice those but Bunny, so long as Stacia stays human shaped, but he will notice, and need to go rolling in some of the lavender and basil later to get the glitter off. That, everybody could notice.

Anyway it's worth it to get the balm of contact with someone he trusts, when his nerves have so recently been so rattled, but the scent of someone he so does not trust is intruding on what Bunny would like to be a private retreat. Gretchen, he's indifferent to, but Price -

"I don't know why you'd make yourself vulnerable to his moods like that. He's not a safe person to be vulnerable to."

"I don't feel I was vulnerable with him." Dan doesn't see his body, or what he does with it, that way. "Bunny, he's like what Kokichi might could have ended up turning into. Ain't no one else on this Rig treats him like a person with feelings of his own, and then they act like it's an inevitable outcome when he lashes out looking for evidence that they're right."

Dan takes a deep breath, filling his lungs with the lavender and basil. He knows Bunny will understand Dan's approach here, or at least understand that for Dan, it's coming from a place of affection for other people, even - maybe especially - the ones that make themselves hard to love and trap themselves in vicious cycles. He thinks of Nadia calling them slurs and spitting her homeless shelter food at their feet in anger, screaming at them when they didn't supply her drugs, alienating her sheltermates. Price may just be someone who got trapped in that cycle much later in life and after getting some degree of power, who learned to make the anger more subtle but still pushed away where he could.

"He's been bringing me breakfast in bed every morning. He's just that desperate for some kind of person to argue with him that he ain't fundamentally broken. He seems like he wants it proven that he's bad so he can understand why he deserves to be alone, but also like he wants it disproven so he can get some human contact." Dan pets some of the basil leaves. "I might could have fucked that up by using him as a distraction just because I been pissed at Stacia and the others."

"That's what I'm talking about, though. I'm worried about what happens when you reach the limit of how much of a connection you want to give, compared to how much he wants. I can wish he'd had better in life before now and also not trust him not to turn manipulative. He reminds me of Nadia more than Kokichi."

The difference being that Nadia was fully chaotic, riding the waves of her own pain and with her rage her only ammunition.

"He was already better than her at manipulation when they were the same age," Bunny mutters, not wanting to give away too much of what he saw in Price's memories when those weren't his to share. "Even being in someone's sights is being vulnerable to them."

It comes down to this, a lot, the centuries that Bunny has spent being intangible and at arms length with all of mortality, raising his standard for what is and isn't vulnerability so much higher than Dan's. Bunny snuggles a little tighter around Dan, wondering if Dan will ever really understand how much of a leap it was for Bunny to engage in the vulnerability of intimacy with Dan at all, even when he thought this would just stay friendship. Just to befriend mortals, just to speak to them enough for a connection to emerge is a vulnerability itself, and here he is, building a few too many ties with a few too many mortals. With the deepest tie a person can make between him and Dan now.

He sighs a little, sadly, thinking of Kokichi, vanished back to who knows what torment. Thinking of Stacia, her betrayal of Dan that she calculated worth it, of the ways Price's past were sad and hurtful when it didn't have to be.

"Did you talk to her yet?" He asks, responding to Dan's diversion of the point to Stacia.

"Oh, he's manipulative alright. He tried to suicide scare me by jumping off the Rig roof, and I know that was just to provoke a reaction out of me." Dan snorts and waves it off. He's a manipulator himself; he can see it coming, usually. That's why getting played by Stacia rattled him so much. "He reminds me a lot of Nadia, too, if Nadia had had certain advantages younger and got her kicks controlling people instead of taking meth."

He takes a deep breath into Bunny's fur and snuggles tighter, until they're completely entwined. He has an idea of how difficult it was for Bunny to be vulnerable like this, but he can never know totally. He just knows that while Dan's great fear when they started was attraction, Bunny's speech about why he shouldn't have put his heart in a mortal's hands - that lives in Dan's head. Not in a haunting way, but in a way to keep himself conscientious of how Bunny deeply knows that every relationship he builds here with Dan, with Stacia, with Dave, so on, means the inevitable loss of someone who cannot even truly know what it is to accept that loss.

"No. I'm avoiding her," Dan confesses. "Not because I'm angry, but because I don't want to rehash why I'm upset that Planker, of all people, died."

"Tried to -" Bunny tries to crane back to look at Dan, but they're cramped under the tree, so he compromises by pulling Dan closer, stroking his hair. "That's exactly what I'm talking about. What does he get out of putting you under that kind of stress? What endgoal does he have with you, how does it all roll out when he can't control you and wants to?"

What endgoal Price has with anyone is a mystery he perhaps doesn't want answers to. He only wants to keep a close eye on Price without getting that eye turned back on him, the way he's used to being at the periphery of mortal experience in his world.

It's easier to shut his eyes and calm his heart rate working through the problem of Stacia, whose danger now clearly lies in being a user, less than a controller. "Are you more upset he died, or more upset that you didn't want to contribute to his death, and Stacia used you to make it happen?"

"Pretty sure he just wanted me to prove somehow that I did care if he lived or died, and wasn't just toying with him out of meanness." It alarmed Dan at the time, but once he had a sense of what Price was doing it didn't stress him out.

"What I got out of him was just an aching loneliness, Bunny. Ain't no one deserves to feel that, and I don't mind giving him a little relief from it. Won't nobody else here do it." Dan would put himself in the lion's reach a hundred times to take a thorn from its paw, and ultimately, Price doesn't scare him. He figures Price overestimates how much he can hurt Dan. Dan smoothes Bunny's fur, though, feeling Bunny's heart rate jack up and hair rise.

So, what he doesn't say, is that he really needs to stop avoiding Price just because they had ill-advised sex.

It's harder to talk about Stacia and Planker.

"Both. Planker was a damn son of a bitch, but he was a person too. I've seen folks turn it around. I've seen people see what they been and decide to be better the next day. Now he won't never get the chance." Dan shrugs. "And I'm upset that I was crystal clear that I wasn't up to murdering nobody needlessly, and then I just got used as a means to a vengeful end. You know I don't believe in vengeance."

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You Can't Keep Kicking Yourself Out of Bed, Kicking Yourself in the Head [Closed]

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