a man was protesting gas prices by flying a balloon without a license. cops were following along down on the ground while it flew about a hundred meters in the desert.
While I support protests, firstly, I don't know that he has a proper understanding of why gas prices are so high and secondly, I don't know that this is the best way to protest anything, ever.
I think I had the better afternoon. The silliest thing Animal Crossing has is a robot octopus villager my daughter will not stop cooing over.
like i said: stupid as shit. how does a balloon even figure into that? he's burning more gas than if he just yelled in front of a city building or a gas station.
was it a fully mechanised robot, or more of a bionic cephalopod?
oh, she's a regular seamstress, is she? that's always a good skill to have. i can't find my way around a phone half the time, but i can definitely sew a mean stitch myself. saves me quite a lot on mending fees.
may i ask why your family is as huge as it is? if it's alright.
She's all self-taught. I have no idea how she ended up this skilled at it. I know the normal parent thing is to go 'she gets it from me' but she didn't, she's just good at it. She does all the repairs when clothes get torn in our house.
I'm one of two adults in my family that isn't caught up in a very niche, very weird form of Christianity that involves having a lot of kids. Thankfully I got out of that and found both the light of Allah and the significantly gentler reality of the world as a whole a while back.
[ what's one god compared to another? johnny's not in the business of believing in gods, never mind angels. all of her experiences with the holy have always been—unhappy.
unhappy's a compromise of a word. ]
i have to say, having been in a similar position before, it's both a blessing and a curse to be out in the world.
Wouldn't know what the usual is. Never had the usual high school experience myself. I'll take your word for it.
[ she doesn't check the envelope. johnny catches it as it slides across the table, smoothly taking it off the linoleum and pocketing it with practiced ease, not once taking her curious gaze away from the younger man's face.
and he is a man; maybe a few years older than a high schooler, likely held back. always good to know that rick doesn't lie to her as often as he used to. mild threats can be effective, she presumes, when applied with the correct pressure. ]
What about the non-usuals, then? Do they give you any trouble?
[That one's harder to answer, especially given everything that had happened that spring and he scratches briefly at his jaw, a scar that looks a little like the starburst of a nerve cell there, visible briefly before the fluff of his hair covers it again] Don't really have any non-regulars, just some customers are more regular than others.
[He shakes his head, back to fidgeting with a ring] And no trouble with the law, not since Hopper got reinstated as police chief. [Which is maybe saying too much, but he's not going to take it back, either, because that's even more suspicious.]
It can be, same as any kind of relationship, which is why it's also WORTH the trouble sometimes. But I mostly don't these days, just like in general. Don't really have the time, and not super eager to put anybody in the line of fire of the next colorful megalomaniac that tries to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge or whatever.
At least that would be simple. No, October the year I started high school was when everything went to shit.
[Dad finally arrested for something he couldn't wiggle out of -not necessarily a bad thing- which was a change, and one that definitely made him more of an outcast than he had been before, plus mom going missing, which was definitely a bad thing, and something else to add to the list of ways to try and break him, and it had also been the first time someone had gotten bold enough to start an actual fight instead of the usual name calling bull, it hadn't been a good year in general, and had been enough to sour him on the whole month.
turning out a good deed for a bad person. would that cancel things out, or would that make things matter even more?
[ rhetorical in spirit, moot in practice. she's pretty sure where she's headed when her time on earth is done. ]
i'm in st catherine's general. just past triage, but not quite in the scary ER cots. they don't ask very many questions here, not very nice for a hospital.
[ the new testament is funny, given how half of it is fictive and the other half is made up of character testimonies. that's what happens when men ghostwrite for a dead man.
fiction and symbolic cannibalism. and people are surprised when angels are the way they are. ]
i'm happy for you, truly. gentle fathers are a rarity from what i've heard. kind ones, too.
(the manual part of the book earns a laugh, even if marc doesn't bother to say as much. )
Everything? No. The important bits? Probably, but I was a kid.
( and they stopped speaking more-or-less as soon as marc turned eighteen, and didn't manage to reconcile before elias's passing. )
He'd probably say it wasn't anything unique to him.
( that what elias tried to teach marc about being a good person wasn't anything special, anything complicated. he knows for a fact that he'd disapprove of moon knight, of everything marc did — "I leave justice for God." )
I hated him for it at the time. I thought it made him weak.
you have employees. that's somehow the most left-field thing you've said to me.
[ people to work with? yes. people who work for? that's fairly uncommon, at least on her side of things. maybe it's time to change her mindset on that front. she could do with some staff. ]
i hope to not be your enemy, then. but a house? how many floors? what's the school district like?
( "don't think enjoyment", she says, and he's not sure if that makes it better or worse. a lot of people, he's found, have expectations surrounding moon knight, the sort of ones that he's done little to dissuade, the sort that in his worst moments, he's leaned into.
he, now — moon knight, not marc spector — is the result not so much of a careful cultivation of appearances, but what happens when it becomes necessary to form something cohesive out of actions and consequences. not deliberate, but resignation. )
With the amount I've died, you'd think curiosity had played a part. ( 'curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought it back' and all that, but in many respects, marc is a deeply uncurious man. he's learned to live with questions he's afraid of the answers to.
which is to say, he's never had the professional curiosity anyone might expect of someone in their line of work. never wanted to learn from anyone else. his has always been anger and giving into frustrations. disappointment. want. whenever he tries to speak to anyone else — like reese — his suggestions of how to deal with problems and the ensuing responses have only ever served to highlight the maladjustment. the no-one ordinary of it all. )
You don't need to owe me a favor.
( a yes, fine, but oblivious to the undercurrent. )
i'll concede that. but perhaps the curiosity lies somewhere else. not over you, but maybe the circumstances of you.
[ what makes a person? is it a nicely shaped face without any deformities? is it a healthy body and sound mind? is it an awareness of being, of existing while surrounded by others just like the self?
personhood and identity are troubling matters for someone like her. even in her thoughts she is not johnny or joanna or mary; she's never any of the names they give her when she's prowling among the sated flock and the placid sheep. she's just her. the girl. that one, with a finger pointing her out from a line of well-groomed heads bowed forward in both reverence and fear.
the circumstances of you — in the circles they move in, it's often the only thing that people care to watch for. ]
maybe i'd like to. owe you one, that is. i have favours to spare.
[ He always knows when it's not the moon that's calling to him.
Elias is irritable, all through the daytime hours. He drives with the window down and jaw set, muscle jumping every quarter mile, annoyed at the temperature, the others on the road, the fact she says so little to him; the fact that they're almost at state lines but he can't even get a full bar of reception on his phone. He runs his tongue over his teeth all through lunch, nursing nothing but a lukewarm beer and a burger he doesn't touch, throwing down a crumpled heap of bills without so much as a tip and a thank you, when he usually manages a gravelly both.
He doesn't usually talk so much, either. Asks if she minds that he smokes, maybe, or if she's got a job that needs doing without him. Silent and still, corded muscle and sharp eyes — not frustrated noises, anger roiling in his gut, an unfathomable pinprick of need pinching every nerve, making comments about every perceived slight and measure.
It's the middle of the night. The moon is high and full. He sits there on the edge of the motel bed, feverish, sweating, and runs a hand through his damp hair. It's only gotten worse. ]
M'sorry. [ His eyes are stuck to the floor when he says it. Elias's head hangs low, shoulders hunched beneath his threadbare tee. ] I fucked it all up.
[ Maybe she knows what he's talking about. Maybe that doesn't matter. ]
Think I better spend the night outside.
[ Hoarse. Hungry. Better when he's an animal, four legged, pawed and fanged, a maw that bites the hand that feeds. Better when he's let loose, so he doesn't— So he can focus on something else. Birds. Mice. The way a twig snaps in the darkness.
Anything else, other than the hot pulse in Johnny's veins, how alive all that muscle and sinew is. How he can hear her heart inside her ribcage. How he can hear something else there, beyond that, if he concentrates, if he tells himself he believes for a single minute in heaven or hell. ]
[ you're driving down the highway in the middle of the night, and a wild dog runs across the asphalt. you skid straight to the ditch, wheels kicking up gravel and dirt; something breaks your headlights, and something slams into the car doors hard enough to dent the metal.
the air bags don't deploy. your head bounces forward, like one of those dashboard toys with spring coils attached to the neck. red drips down from somewhere; gravity tells you where it stops but not where it begins.
just outside the door, something else is breathing with you.
you can almost hear god sighing. you can almost feel him shake his head, as something breaks your windshield and snarls.
—
not a dog, but a man.
there are stranger things to worry about, of course. oil spills on black tar, an engine sparking, a car turned belly-up and groaning under its own weight. johnny crawls over the glass, bleeding into the road with the grace of a child. not a dog, but a man; she hit him at full speed, the impact throwing him a ways off from where she thought they'd started. there's blood and scraps of cloth ahead, several feet from where the man is wheezing and groaning.
rasping cough; broken ribs, then. probably bleeding into his stomach, probably dying — but he's not. she knows how death sounds, how it tastes, how it sours the air and turns it bitter in the mouth. a heartbeat stronger than a horse's, she thinks wildly, hysterically. when johnny looks up to the moon in a daze, it winks at her, curved and heavy.
huh. would you look at that.
not a man, then, but a dog.
—
she watches over him for two nights with a gun aimed at his head. on the third night, wild-eyed and keening, he stops biting at the leather and metal. she holds his head in her lap, her own scratches pink-raw and healed over, as she feeds him pieces of meat. well-done is no good. the wetter and redder the cut, the easier it goes down his throat.
not a dog, but a wolf.
—
the car is her idea, but the execution is all his.
—
"i've picked up a stray," she tells clemments over the phone. the screen is cracked through; she's surprised it still registers her touch when she taps on the glass. "might take a detour."
"is it safe?"
"is it ever?"
clemments laughs with the roughness of a chronic smoker. "just be back in time for the c-suite conference. i need you to shake down a few well-dressed thugs."
a hum and a nod. to her left a shower turns on, then off, then back on again. johnny wiggles her toes; the last of her visible bruises are gone. "get me a room for two. not at the four seasons, alright? one of the nicer hotels, with a view."
"champagne? one bed?"
"two beds. a bible."
—
not a wolf, but a man. he calls himself elias.
johnny, she names herself. doesn't explain any further, and he doesn't ask; she appreciates that he doesn't. no isn't that a boy's name? or is that really your name?, just a confused little wrinkle between his eyebrow and a shaky nod.
it's easy enough to convince him to take the wheel; easier if she spoke to him in the divine tongue, but she doesn't trust the magic that's poisoned him. it's poison that tastes like overripe apples, with a faint sourness that sticks to her teeth. an old magic, maybe just as old as the ghost chain-wrapped around her bones. life is complicated enough.
elias is both old and young. both nervous and steel-cold. it's the nature of the beast, pun not intended — two halves of the same mind not quite at war with each other, but not making for good neighbors either. they're nasty ride-alongs, poorly mannered, the type to put their feet up on the dashboard with a bristling grin.
she has money and a crushed kidney that needs healing. thankfully she has one left intact, and he has a driver's license. he knows how to read.
you killed my car. you get to drive.
—
it takes almost two weeks for things to break. ]
Outside is where all the people are. In here, you just have to worry about me.
[ he's pale at the gills but flushed high on the cheeks, shaking like a fever. sweating like it too; when she presses the back of her hand to his forehead, he's as hot as high noon. overhead the cheap fluorescent lights buzz and blink like flies.
johnny crouches down so she can look up at him, her arms loosely wrapped around her knees. two weeks of endless roads and dingy motel rooms, and her shirts remain pristine white. ]
Tell me what happens. Tell me what you need.
Edited (phrasing choices i swear im done) 2025-05-26 22:39 (UTC)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
@conspiracy_realist, a.
a man was protesting gas prices by flying a balloon without a license. cops were following along down on the ground while it flew about a hundred meters in the desert.
riveting, in the worst way possible.
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I think I had the better afternoon. The silliest thing Animal Crossing has is a robot octopus villager my daughter will not stop cooing over.
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was it a fully mechanised robot, or more of a bionic cephalopod?
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@conspiracy_realist, b.
oh, she's a regular seamstress, is she? that's always a good skill to have. i can't find my way around a phone half the time, but i can definitely sew a mean stitch myself. saves me quite a lot on mending fees.
may i ask why your family is as huge as it is? if it's alright.
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I'm one of two adults in my family that isn't caught up in a very niche, very weird form of Christianity that involves having a lot of kids. Thankfully I got out of that and found both the light of Allah and the significantly gentler reality of the world as a whole a while back.
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unhappy's a compromise of a word. ]
i have to say, having been in a similar position before, it's both a blessing and a curse to be out in the world.
it's so confusing to me still.
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@jukebox_hero.
Wouldn't know what the usual is. Never had the usual high school experience myself. I'll take your word for it.
[ she doesn't check the envelope. johnny catches it as it slides across the table, smoothly taking it off the linoleum and pocketing it with practiced ease, not once taking her curious gaze away from the younger man's face.
and he is a man; maybe a few years older than a high schooler, likely held back. always good to know that rick doesn't lie to her as often as he used to. mild threats can be effective, she presumes, when applied with the correct pressure. ]
What about the non-usuals, then? Do they give you any trouble?
Anyone in law enforcement?
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[He shakes his head, back to fidgeting with a ring] And no trouble with the law, not since Hopper got reinstated as police chief. [Which is maybe saying too much, but he's not going to take it back, either, because that's even more suspicious.]
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@ultraviolents
i can't say i've learned to like tequila yet. this may be worth trying if it'll change my mind.
where are we meeting?
@imadebreakfast
so why do it? why date anyone, really? it seems like a lot of trouble.
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But I mostly don't these days, just like in general. Don't really have the time, and not super eager to put anybody in the line of fire of the next colorful megalomaniac that tries to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge or whatever.
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@jukebox_hero
[ oh, she's interested now. ]
and why would that be? you turn into a werewolf on halloween?
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No, October the year I started high school was when everything went to shit.
[Dad finally arrested for something he couldn't wiggle out of -not necessarily a bad thing- which was a change, and one that definitely made him more of an outcast than he had been before, plus mom going missing, which was definitely a bad thing, and something else to add to the list of ways to try and break him, and it had also been the first time someone had gotten bold enough to start an actual fight instead of the usual name calling bull, it hadn't been a good year in general, and had been enough to sour him on the whole month.
But anyone who needs to know that already does.]
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@inumbrated
the phials need to be visible. it's divine sacrament; hiding it means the demons don't see it.
think of it as a lighthouse, frank. or a neon sign that says, attack here.
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@gotten
turning out a good deed for a bad person. would that cancel things out, or would that make things matter even more?
[ rhetorical in spirit, moot in practice. she's pretty sure where she's headed when her time on earth is done. ]
i'm in st catherine's general. just past triage, but not quite in the scary ER cots. they don't ask very many questions here, not very nice for a hospital.
[ or very nice, depending on the need. ]
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[ Just as rhetorical — he's made his peace with his lot after death, too. ]
not very nice, indeed. i'll try to call more nurses in when i arrive, shall i?
so, a juice box, a little salt — nothing else you need?
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@vestments
ah. the manual part of the book.
[ the new testament is funny, given how half of it is fictive and the other half is made up of character testimonies. that's what happens when men ghostwrite for a dead man.
fiction and symbolic cannibalism. and people are surprised when angels are the way they are. ]
i'm happy for you, truly. gentle fathers are a rarity from what i've heard. kind ones, too.
do you remember everything he's taught you?
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Everything? No.
The important bits? Probably, but I was a kid.
( and they stopped speaking more-or-less as soon as marc turned eighteen, and didn't manage to reconcile before elias's passing. )
He'd probably say it wasn't anything unique to him.
( that what elias tried to teach marc about being a good person wasn't anything special, anything complicated. he knows for a fact that he'd disapprove of moon knight, of everything marc did — "I leave justice for God." )
I hated him for it at the time. I thought it made him weak.
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@vestments
you have employees. that's somehow the most left-field thing you've said to me.
[ people to work with? yes. people who work for? that's fairly uncommon, at least on her side of things. maybe it's time to change her mindset on that front. she could do with some staff. ]
i hope to not be your enemy, then. but a house? how many floors? what's the school district like?
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( it'd been deliberate, but. )
Two floors. Her kids are grown, I didn't look at schools.
( he wouldn't have looked at them anyway. marc's selfless gestures generally don't have quite the degree of thought behind them that they should. )
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i read capper as crapper at first... felt
wheeze
Re: wheeze
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shrugs
( "don't think enjoyment", she says, and he's not sure if that makes it better or worse. a lot of people, he's found, have expectations surrounding moon knight, the sort of ones that he's done little to dissuade, the sort that in his worst moments, he's leaned into.
he, now — moon knight, not marc spector — is the result not so much of a careful cultivation of appearances, but what happens when it becomes necessary to form something cohesive out of actions and consequences. not deliberate, but resignation. )
With the amount I've died, you'd think curiosity had played a part. ( 'curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought it back' and all that, but in many respects, marc is a deeply uncurious man. he's learned to live with questions he's afraid of the answers to.
which is to say, he's never had the professional curiosity anyone might expect of someone in their line of work. never wanted to learn from anyone else. his has always been anger and giving into frustrations. disappointment. want. whenever he tries to speak to anyone else — like reese — his suggestions of how to deal with problems and the ensuing responses have only ever served to highlight the maladjustment. the no-one ordinary of it all. )
You don't need to owe me a favor.
( a yes, fine, but oblivious to the undercurrent. )
hehe
[ what makes a person? is it a nicely shaped face without any deformities? is it a healthy body and sound mind? is it an awareness of being, of existing while surrounded by others just like the self?
personhood and identity are troubling matters for someone like her. even in her thoughts she is not johnny or joanna or mary; she's never any of the names they give her when she's prowling among the sated flock and the placid sheep. she's just her. the girl. that one, with a finger pointing her out from a line of well-groomed heads bowed forward in both reverence and fear.
the circumstances of you — in the circles they move in, it's often the only thing that people care to watch for. ]
maybe i'd like to. owe you one, that is. i have favours to spare.
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— sun bleached flies.
Elias is irritable, all through the daytime hours. He drives with the window down and jaw set, muscle jumping every quarter mile, annoyed at the temperature, the others on the road, the fact she says so little to him; the fact that they're almost at state lines but he can't even get a full bar of reception on his phone. He runs his tongue over his teeth all through lunch, nursing nothing but a lukewarm beer and a burger he doesn't touch, throwing down a crumpled heap of bills without so much as a tip and a thank you, when he usually manages a gravelly both.
He doesn't usually talk so much, either. Asks if she minds that he smokes, maybe, or if she's got a job that needs doing without him. Silent and still, corded muscle and sharp eyes — not frustrated noises, anger roiling in his gut, an unfathomable pinprick of need pinching every nerve, making comments about every perceived slight and measure.
It's the middle of the night. The moon is high and full. He sits there on the edge of the motel bed, feverish, sweating, and runs a hand through his damp hair. It's only gotten worse. ]
M'sorry. [ His eyes are stuck to the floor when he says it. Elias's head hangs low, shoulders hunched beneath his threadbare tee. ] I fucked it all up.
[ Maybe she knows what he's talking about. Maybe that doesn't matter. ]
Think I better spend the night outside.
[ Hoarse. Hungry. Better when he's an animal, four legged, pawed and fanged, a maw that bites the hand that feeds. Better when he's let loose, so he doesn't— So he can focus on something else. Birds. Mice. The way a twig snaps in the darkness.
Anything else, other than the hot pulse in Johnny's veins, how alive all that muscle and sinew is. How he can hear her heart inside her ribcage. How he can hear something else there, beyond that, if he concentrates, if he tells himself he believes for a single minute in heaven or hell. ]
cracks knuckles
the air bags don't deploy. your head bounces forward, like one of those dashboard toys with spring coils attached to the neck. red drips down from somewhere; gravity tells you where it stops but not where it begins.
just outside the door, something else is breathing with you.
you can almost hear god sighing. you can almost feel him shake his head, as something breaks your windshield and snarls.
—
not a dog, but a man.
there are stranger things to worry about, of course. oil spills on black tar, an engine sparking, a car turned belly-up and groaning under its own weight. johnny crawls over the glass, bleeding into the road with the grace of a child. not a dog, but a man; she hit him at full speed, the impact throwing him a ways off from where she thought they'd started. there's blood and scraps of cloth ahead, several feet from where the man is wheezing and groaning.
rasping cough; broken ribs, then. probably bleeding into his stomach, probably dying — but he's not. she knows how death sounds, how it tastes, how it sours the air and turns it bitter in the mouth. a heartbeat stronger than a horse's, she thinks wildly, hysterically. when johnny looks up to the moon in a daze, it winks at her, curved and heavy.
huh. would you look at that.
not a man, then, but a dog.
—
she watches over him for two nights with a gun aimed at his head. on the third night, wild-eyed and keening, he stops biting at the leather and metal. she holds his head in her lap, her own scratches pink-raw and healed over, as she feeds him pieces of meat. well-done is no good. the wetter and redder the cut, the easier it goes down his throat.
not a dog, but a wolf.
—
the car is her idea, but the execution is all his.
—
"i've picked up a stray," she tells clemments over the phone. the screen is cracked through; she's surprised it still registers her touch when she taps on the glass. "might take a detour."
"is it safe?"
"is it ever?"
clemments laughs with the roughness of a chronic smoker. "just be back in time for the c-suite conference. i need you to shake down a few well-dressed thugs."
a hum and a nod. to her left a shower turns on, then off, then back on again. johnny wiggles her toes; the last of her visible bruises are gone. "get me a room for two. not at the four seasons, alright? one of the nicer hotels, with a view."
"champagne? one bed?"
"two beds. a bible."
—
not a wolf, but a man. he calls himself elias.
johnny, she names herself. doesn't explain any further, and he doesn't ask; she appreciates that he doesn't. no isn't that a boy's name? or is that really your name?, just a confused little wrinkle between his eyebrow and a shaky nod.
it's easy enough to convince him to take the wheel; easier if she spoke to him in the divine tongue, but she doesn't trust the magic that's poisoned him. it's poison that tastes like overripe apples, with a faint sourness that sticks to her teeth. an old magic, maybe just as old as the ghost chain-wrapped around her bones. life is complicated enough.
elias is both old and young. both nervous and steel-cold. it's the nature of the beast, pun not intended — two halves of the same mind not quite at war with each other, but not making for good neighbors either. they're nasty ride-alongs, poorly mannered, the type to put their feet up on the dashboard with a bristling grin.
she has money and a crushed kidney that needs healing. thankfully she has one left intact, and he has a driver's license. he knows how to read.
you killed my car. you get to drive.
—
it takes almost two weeks for things to break. ]
Outside is where all the people are. In here, you just have to worry about me.
[ he's pale at the gills but flushed high on the cheeks, shaking like a fever. sweating like it too; when she presses the back of her hand to his forehead, he's as hot as high noon. overhead the cheap fluorescent lights buzz and blink like flies.
johnny crouches down so she can look up at him, her arms loosely wrapped around her knees. two weeks of endless roads and dingy motel rooms, and her shirts remain pristine white. ]
Tell me what happens. Tell me what you need.
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