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

[hallelujahjunction]

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.

Comments

[bringinghopewithme]

"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.

[hallelujahjunction]

"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."

[bringinghopewithme]

"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?"

[hallelujahjunction]

"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."