strangetrip | [GP] All we can do is learn to swim

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[GP] All we can do is learn to swim

Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim. - Vicki Harrison

"You're sure?" Regina already knew the answer but demanding that Sam tell her what she already knew satisfied something petty in her. Or maybe just something hurt that hoped he'd have a different answer than her locator spell had already provided.

"Yeah." Sam half-rolled his eyes at her as he leaned across the pink bar counter to grab bottles of beer from the Silver Bar ice bin -- probably the results of Rebekah's last work-effort at the Inn -- for himself and his newly arrived companion.

Briefly, Regina considered burning a hole in the seat of his jeans, but it wouldn't bring Rebekah or any of the absent ones back. Instead, she took refuge in straightening her A-line and walking around the stylish counter Sam lay across like he was surfing the waves of grief. She took down a bottle of pointlessly pricey champagne, and then found the precise cut-crystal glasses Rebekah and Miss Fisher had preferred for their afternoon indulgences. She poured herself a glass and one for the person who dared her openly bitter expression.

"So who all are we missing?" they both said at once, glared at each other and sighed. They both knew the answers, in their own way and for their own reasons. And neither of them wanted to say.

Rebekah Mikaelson. Henry Winchester. Jack Robinson. Phryne Fisher. Dorothy Williams. Angua von Uberwald. Jaime Vegas. Harry Dresden. Lydia Martin. Raleigh Becket. Yasmeen. Joanna Beauchamp. Constance Bonacieux D'Artagnan. Lindsey McDonald.

"Grief is like the ocean," Sam clearly quoted from some fucking where, and Regina tuned him out until he added, "All we can do is learn to swim. Rebekah told me that."

Now Regina rolled her eyes; they weren't friends. "Shut up, Sam."

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"Mostly! I mean, kind of. If I hadn't gone, they'd have been destroyed." Was that really a choice? If you went went somewhere because you had to? On a few seconds' reflection, Sora thought yes: he could have chosen to let the Heartless eat them.

If he'd been some kind of monster or something. "I mean, a couple times I just crashed or did the 'anywhere but here' thing, but mostly yeah. I kind of figure I end up where I need to be, you know?"

"Wouldn't melting the butter make it easier too?" She was genuinely curious. She had, on occasion, tossed her butter and sugar into the microwave when it didn't want to blend properly.

Caroline shrugged and tipped some of her bottle into River's cup. "That was smart. We're going to be short on pastries unless someone else wants to take up the role. I don't know if anyone else bakes. Ignis and Carlos cook, but they left the baking to Dot."

Her brain wanted to start planning, but she knew that if she let it, it would begin to wonder about bartending schedules and how to keep the horses. And then things would hurt. She drank more instead.

"Yes, but it alters the texture of the cookie, makes it significantly flatter and chewier." Sometimes that was desirable, sometimes not. "Which is also why dough gets refrigerated prior to baking, to inhibit spread as the butter in the dough melts."

That all made sense (and explained why her cookies were sometimes so chewy). "Neat." She chopped the butter into cubes and dumped it into a bowl. With Ignis being, you know, blind, there was no one to see or question why she - indifferent college student and sometime unlicensed massage therapist - could wield a knife like a pro. "Butter's ready. What's next?"

A word here, a summoning spell there, a thank you in Kitty and Ignis's general direction, and Regina and Corbie found themselves seated in the back corner with water, vanilla ice cream, and Irish whiskey.

"Try the whiskey on the ice cream," Regina suggested, recalling her own introduction to the treat. Simple, but the vanilla smoothed the sharp whiskey and brought out its bouquet. Emma hadn't explained it like that, and neither would Regina. It was enough to say, "It's good."

Things were weird.

Not the sort of weird that Peter Parker was getting accustomed to. The kind of weird where people from all over the place just sort-of showed up here out of nowhere. Or the kind of weird that resulted in baby animals suddenly appearing and then disappearing just as quickly. This was the kind of weird that he didn't like. The sort of weird that was firmly rooted in reality. The kind of weird he'd experienced first with his parents when he was very small, and then again, with Uncle Ben when he was older.

Loss. That was the sort of weird Peter was sure he was never going to get used to.

But there were some things he was used to now. He'd been uneasy about going into the bar his first day here, even with Butters' encouragement, but now, it came easy to him. Walking with the same casual ease as he did when walking to the school cafeteria, he finds a stool at the bar, and takes a seat. There seems to be more people here than usual. Peter's not entirely sure how he feels about it. But today, it does appear to be staffed.

"Uh, excuse me," Peter says, hoping he's not interrupting the bartender from anything too important. "Can I have a coke, please?"

Moving almost on autopilot, Kitty filled River's glass, acknowledged an order from Regina, filled it, and returned to where she'd been like an unquiet ghost with nowhere to rest.

"That's a hideous thought," came her response, as though she'd never stepped away from the conversation at all.

"A little," Sam agreed and took the beer with a nod of thanks.

"But there's also something about cutting the problem down to size, you know? If you start using words like 'existential angst,' it seems like you'll never get through it. If you say it 'sucks', well, losing your wallet sucks, but it's not that big of a deal in the end."

Intimately familiar with sounds that substituted for words that didn't exist, Kash just nodded in response to Snow and waited to see if she had more to say.

When she did, she might have dagger-dagger-daggered him for the grunt he let out. Mama's the only one left meant the same as I let myself love you and you're gone. And it meant I'm afraid of being alone again but I don't want anyone to know it. Tack on why bother? and is this really better than not caring? and it's not fair.

Mama's the only one left felt a lot like Z's everything for the way it put the entire weight of a shattered life on one set of shoulders, sturdy or not.

For the first time, Kash considered that one by one Vox Machina could return to Exandria and leave him here alone and Pike's the only one left or Vax, Vex, or Percy. It moved him to say something he'd never thought to hear himself say, and never planned to say again, or admit to having said.

"She doesn't have to be." Not quite no she's not, but neither of them was the sort to take that kind of assertion well.

The number of people who ordered anything but alcohol was non-zero but otherwise negligible, and, in that sense, it was significant. It drew Kitty out of her internal montage and back into the world, in much the same manner as she materialized when she phased back into solid matter.

She blinked briefly as though adjusting her eyes to sight again, tilted her head, and then smiled--not automatically, but genuinely, at the teenager sitting on her bar stool.

"Sure thing. You can have something stronger if you want. No one cares, since there's no drinking age in half the worlds people are from," she said, but didn't let it stop her from filling up a tall glass from the soda gun for him.

"We haven't met yet." Which was also significant. Kitty knew everyone. "I'm Kitty."

"Yeah, I know," Peter says with a nod. Kitty was pretty and it makes him a little nervous. He smiles back, in his own awkward, crooked kind of way.

"I'm Peter. I've been here for about, uh..." He has to stop and think about it now. "Three months now?" That sounds about right. He hopes it doesn't sound too weird. Sometimes when he tells people how long he's been here, it kinda feels like he's talking about how many months he's served of a prison sentence. And this wasn't prison, even if sometimes it felt like it.

When Kitty sets the glass down in front of him, his brows furrow, and he looks up at her face with a frown. There's nothing really perceptibly wrong when he looks at her. But when he does, he gets a tiny scratch at the back of his neck. It's not one of his Spidey-senses. Maybe it's just intuition.

"Hey, Kitty." He pauses there, hesitating. "Are you -- are you doing okay?"

Snow's breath hitched, something which only seemed to make her mad from the way her scowl deepened. And even though she knew what he meant, she had to ask, "Then why's everyone else always going away?"

That was not entirely accurate. It was she who had left home, so long ago now, leaving her bear and her fox and her brother behind. It was she who had disappeared from that grassland, abandoning Charming. It was she who had disappeared from Gotham, and Bear and the others who could not follow. But she had not had a choice in those matters. And her mother had left, even if by dying. And her father had abandoned her to Mrs. H. And dammit, that was what it felt like, under everything.

She considered that while she found a ginger ale for herself and opened the bottle, deciding that he had a point.

"That is a logical course of action." Drinking until she had to haul him bodily back to their room did not, but she didn't comment. instead she considered leverage and various weight bearing devices she might use to assist her.

"That is one of the nicest explanations for this place that I've come up with," River sipped her drink. There was a lightness to her tone that didn't match her eyes.

"You'll hate the others."

"I'm not sure anyone needed as many cookies as that young woman baked." There were any number of them in the freezer, along with cakes and pies and an assortment of other goodies.

"I think the novelty of a real 'American refrigerating machine'," that last bit was a direct quote from Dot but there was no sarcasm in River's voice. "May have pushed her over the edge. Modern marvels freezers and she made use of ours."

River wasn't much of a planner, more of a figure out where you needed to go and leap for it sort. She sipped her alcohol laced tea.

"Should I ask who you lost?"

That stung, and he frowned both at her words and at the fact that Yasmeen's going bothered him. He barely knew her really, but then she had KNOWN him and that had been the part that mattered. He wasn't sure they were close but they'd been something.

Friends maybe.

"How?" Though he figured there we no more answers to that than how they got here.

Corbie blinked and considered that idea for a moment. Then she shrugged and poured the liquid over her scoop of ice cream. It was all going to the same place anyway, and it wasn't like she'd never put anything questionable in her mouth before.

Her doubts went away when she tasted it.

She grinned. "Oh, this is dangerous."

Edited 2017-10-09 23:55 (UTC)

Snow shrugged. "Checked out." That was all the innkeeper ever said when this happened. "And Raleigh. And a lot of others."

"How is..." he stopped before he said Regina. He knew that this would not be something she took well. Being as it was out of the thing she could control. "Your mother."

"Rebekah's gone," Snow said. "She's taking it hard." Snow had not particularly cared for Rebekah, though she hadn't had a particular reason. Certainly it wasn't a matter of disapproval, but still the woman had not been any friend of hers.

"Were you close with any of the ones who checked out?" Sam asked after a few moments. Feeling sorry for himself never did any good, and as much as he wanted to rage and punch things, other people had suffered too.

"Try me." Kitty winced at how jaded her own voice sounded. She gave River an apologetic look. "What I mean to say is that I've probably been in or seen worse."

Trinket was worried, but not quite as worried any more when Snow clung to him that way. He was a very good bear to cry on to feel better, Vex had told him. And Vex knew, because she'd cried herself out into his fur more times than she would admit to anyone, and Trinket, of course, would never tell.

Vex sat down on the other side of Trinket while he nuzzled at Snow, one hand kneading through his fur, as she waited for the tension to leech its way out of Snow's body.

Kash was learning, bless him, and Vex was about to give him a pleased smile as encouragement, reward, something, but that didn't sound like his usual grumping to keep people from getting close.

"Misery? What happened?" If people were hurt, he'd be in the thick of it, so it wasn't that. Same if they were under attack, but she'd have been able to hear a fight, if that was it. Whatever it was was big, and not a physical problem, if Vex had to guess.

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[GP] All we can do is learn to swim

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