Great googly moogly, it's all gone to [extremely loud incorrect buzzer]

[officerdown]

Who: Henry, Scar, Heather, Envy, probably Lust
Where: Goldenrod-- Shark House
When: 16 August, around sunset
Summary: After a moderately harrowing journey, Henry and Scar, newly friends, return to the Goldenrod house seven years after their disappearance unannounced and more than a little worse for wear.
Warnings: None for now

Comments

Outside

[officerdown]

Scar doesn't navigate cities with the same steadfast ease that he does the rural routes, or even the towns. He keeps a low profile and silent footsteps, often taking a longer route to avoid the main streets.

Whatever thread Scar is still hanging on by, it creaks precariously when the Goldenrod house comes into view. He's already conquered Violet, though. The site of this house is a cake walk by comparison.

What's in it, though...

He stares at the unassuming facade, eyes passing right over the front door to take note of each--

"Window."

There, on the second story. A wide open window and their best chance at maneuvering inside, according to Scar's insomnia-addled, malnourished logic. He leaves Henry's side on light feet, testing the familiar ledges of the first floor exterior to make his way up toward his chosen point of entry.

[exeggutorhead]

A few days ago, in the early morning, there had been a ten second video clip posted to the network. It featured Henry's terrified claim that he was about to die while Scar swiftly caught up to him as he ran. Envy did absolutely see this video...and then dismissed it as something he'd dreamt right before he fell asleep after staying up all night.

After all, it's been years. He's long given up on his best friend reappearing again, especially not at the same time as Scar of all people.

Clearly a dream! No need to get his hopes up enough to go check again. No need to tell anyone about it. Surely he wouldn't have been the only member of the house who saw the video, right? RIGHT?

WRONG

With no idea anybody was on their way (and definitely not on their way up the side of the house), Envy and Heather have gotten all cozy for a night of scary movies in bed. They've got pajamas. They've got popcorn. They've got I Am Legendary playing on a propped up 'Gear because Envy insisted on a zombie movie again.

He absently tosses a popcorn kernel at the screen as the horde descends to start trying to get in the house.

"Come on, he started it!"

Guess whose side the anime zombie villain is on. Still, it's a climactic scene, and no matter who you're rooting for, with the music going it's hard not to be a little on edge.

[foolishwren]

"I can't figure out if this is the version with the ending that was true to the book or the ending that got all focus group'd to death," Heather remarks through a mouthful of popcorn, blissfully unaware of the figurative nuclear bomb currently climbing towards their window. "If it's the latter, we should try to find the other one-- oh shit. They're so fast, haha."

She's more lounging than snuggling-- the temperature is still summery, and even if she hadn't lived through a real-life horror story herself, she's never been the type to cling during a chiller. But the climax is coming up and hey, the building tension is pretty effective! So her attention is glued to the screen.

If something made a super loud noise right now, she might even jump!

[no_ufo_ending]

"Window?" Henry's voice is small as he watches Scar disappear around the side of the house. He's standing at the front door and hesitating because it has been so long, but he doesn't assume there's no other way to get in.

But Scar is already out of sight.

Henry bites his lips. Okay...well. Okay. He'll let his friend do it his way. Henry tries the doorknob and finds the door unlocked. He quietly enters and is greeted with familiar smells and familiar walls. Pokemon toys scattered all over the house. Their posters and pillows and everything that was theirs. He smiles to himself. Why was he ever worried?

Laughter drifts down the stairs and Henry stops at the bottom of them, his hand on the banister. They're home! They're right up stairs and he can see them! Henry wasn't one to get excited, but he took the stairs two at a time on silent feet. In no time he is outside their door. He sees the dim light flickering from beneath it. He can hear the tinny sound of the movie playing through a small speaker.

He knocks once but doesn't wait for an answer. He pushes the door open and sticks his head and one arm inside as though he's delivering a cheerful wakeup call.

"I'm here!"

[officerdown]

The climb isn’t as easy as it ought to be. Scar still can’t snuff out the quiver in his limbs, and his backpack is stuffed with camping gear. He makes it, though, sweat dripping down his back.

Maybe he would be sweating less if he wasn’t wearing a winter coat.

In August.

Food for thought.

Scar manages to toss one arm, then the other over the threshold of the window, pulling his not insubstantial weight through—

"Oh my God."

Girlies, there is a serial killer half in and half out of your window, staring like a deer in the headlights. Roll initiative.

[exeggutorhead]

One knock is not nearly enough warning when there's not supposed to be anyone else in the house.

It's one of those magical little Johto coincidences that a loud scare chord, Henry's face and arm appearing in the doorway, and then also an enormous brick wall of a man speaking directly behind their heads happen simultaneously.

"FUCK!"

The popcorn bowl is airborne, the contents raining down on Envy, Heather, and Scar's heads. Envy twists ungracefully to the side, legs tangled in the blanket, as he instinctively gets his back out of the 'line of fire'. Scar has that blanket to thank for not being very probably kicked in the side of the head.

[foolishwren]

Henry bursting through the door at this moment... would have been startling. Like, a 6 out of 10.

Scar physically manifesting in the window would have been very startling. 10 out of 10.

Henry bursting through the door, and Scar physically manifesting in the window, and a vampire-zombie jumpscare happening on the screen of the PokeGear all at the same time is an event that sends Heather's adrenaline shooting straight through the stratosphere. 2334596237 out of 10.

Heather screams and does a literal backflip off the bed. It's not a cool graceful backflip-- it's like a ragdoll g-mod backflip. Only the fact that she wasn't fully under the blanket allows her to escape Envy's tangled fate-- she is upright and snatching Envy's bedside lamp before she can even realize who and what have interrupted the previously-lowkey movie marathon, and it is only the fact the intrusion is coming from two separate physical locations (and therefore splitting her attention) that stops her from bringing it straight down on Scar's x-marked noggin.

"WHAT!"

[no_ufo_ending]

Envy yells. Heather yells.

Henry yells.

"It's me!" Henry bumps the door the rest of the way open when he raises his injured hand to join his other in the universal No Weapons gesture.

Then he sees Scar in the window. See, Henry thought maybe Scar was going to a window to throw little pebbles against it to get the residents' attentions. Not...this. Henry frowns a little, his brow gently creasing. He looks across the room, through the chaos, and at his traveling companion.

"Why would you do this"

[officerdown]

Like a human horseshoe peg, Envy's popcorn bowl lands squarely on Scar's head. Perhaps a glimpse into Scar's state of mind that he carries on ignoring it.

"I didn't think..." the door... would be...? Open?

I didn't think might be the most accurate answer of all, here, incomplete though the thought may be.

🙃

[officerdown]

When Scar finally manages to break away from the unlikely living room crowd, the straight face he has religiously maintained since emerging from the shower gets more difficult to hold with every step. He reaches the bottom of the stairs with trepidation he doesn't entirely understand.

He has his water bottle. The thing that brought him downstairs in the first place. He's wearing his own pajamas. He's clean, which really does feel like a freshly shed skin when he's been in the woods for days. That's as helpful as anything can be, right now.

They need to speak. Privately. Sooner rather than later, so his heart can stop eating his lungs. He has to submit himself to the mortifying ordeal of asking out the woman he owns a house with.

She had moved his things back into her room. He had noticed that. That's good, right?

He is too damn old to feel like this.

[a_sin_for_him]

Lust excuses herself at the top of the stairs for only a moment, just long enough to change into her own nightclothes. And she does remember to excuse herself and change in the bathroom, the scent of hot shower and shampoo still strong in it.

She needs to remember all those little considerations. Even if she's only been with two other men - one and a half, really, Craig hadn't been a romantic partner - she'd grown accustomed to being more casual and open with all sorts of things. The last thing she wants is to make Scar uncomfortable or make him feel as though she's pushing him. There are no expectations, god knows he's in a raw state right now.

It will just be an adjustment for her.

It may have been seven years, but it isn't as though she's forgotten. How could she? He's burned into the core of her, along with the memories of their time together. It hadn't been easy, being together, but what precious thing ever is? And anyway, she understands so much more now. About feelings, about relationships, about sharing a life with someone else.

None of that is for thinking about tonight. It only takes a few moments for her to change into pair of black cotton pajama pants and an oversized Eeveelution t-shirt, to rejoin him and soon shut the door of her room behind them. When the latch catches the rest of the world is blocked out, and all that remains is the two of them. Here they are, again after all this time.

If ever there was a miracle...

"I'm still feeling a bit languid from the tea," she admits, though likely doesn't have to.

[officerdown]

Everything becomes entirely too real when the latch of the door catches. Every word he tested and turned over in the shower vanishes. He casts around every corner of his mind for them, but they're long gone, leaving him a slack jawed fool holding himself up against her bedroom wall.

"It's no matter."

Scar's voice is unsteady.

He can't imagine wanting to be anything other than as sharp as he could possibly be, right now, but perhaps forcing all of his overstrung nerves to quiet down would have been a good thing.

"I had. Many more words in my head fifteen seconds ago," he confesses quietly, because when all else fails, the truth oozes out of him whether he wants it to or not.

He threw his phone battery in a pond, Lust.

"So I may as well still be, too."

[a_sin_for_him]

Lust shakes her head.

"It doesn't matter." Let them both be muddled and without pre-written addresses. "This is strange and new for both of us."

Somehow, even after all these years, she's still encountering wholly new situations.

"But we've weathered worse and stranger."

If he were another man, she would have asked why he didn't contact her immediately. But she knows why. He'd needed the time to settle his thoughts, to come to terms with finding seven years gone in the blink of an eye. That's hardly something she can begrudge him.

What difference did a week or so make, all things considered.

The Espurr have followed, and a pair of them have already gotten up on the bed to settle in. The other two seem more interested in watching their trainer and the giant man she's brought to their room.

[officerdown]

Worse, yes. Stranger? The jury is still out. The limbo is torturous. This is a new kind of importance, a new set of teeth sunken into him that has nothing to do with life or death, though his racing heart would beg emphatically to differ. If what once was will remain only that…

He had told himself he would be fine. That he would manage, the same as he always used to. Now, the very real possibility that it has been so long that love remains only as a memorial, that he will never have the chance to live all that he so desperately buried until this latest world-tilting loss, is splitting him in two.

He had planned to be measured, to tread carefully, to follow her lead, to be patient as she absorbed the shock.

Planned.

That thing that he is historically just So The Best at, when it comes to Lust.

"I am always going to be yours."

Brutal honesty bursts out of Scar when nothing else remains. He won't beg. He won't make the desperate case that he can be better now, certain as he is that he can. The gaping wound of lost time, the fact that this is both more and less sudden for her than it is for him, is the only thing that keeps his impulsive, reckless, stupid body from rushing into hers and never letting go.

His eyes spill everything, though, wild and desperate and boring into hers, finally seeing color where it had once been smothered out as long as she had known him in this life.

All he can do is place every unguarded piece of himself in her hands, and pray.

"If you would still have me."

[a_sin_for_him]

"Oh...."

It shouldn't surprise her that he questions it. It's been seven years. She certainly hadn't lived them all like a vestal priestess out of some old story.

But that didn't matter either. None of it changed how she felt for Scar. She may have lived her life but she'd never stopped loving him. Something she'd made quite clear, that no matter who else worked their way into her heart, it was a shared space. Which had been perfectly alright, as it happened, both men had also had a woman that already lived in their hearts. She doesn't think she could be with anyone who gave themselves to her completely. Not besides Scar. Just as he's the only man she'd give herself to completely.

And both of those men were long gone anyway. Missed, yes, but not in the same way.

In turn, she offers the truth plainly to him. It comes easier, now. The words don't stick in her throat, they aren't offered in a stilted manner. Maybe some of it's the tea, but not all of it. After losing him for so long there's a realization that too little had been said when she had the chance. Thank god she has another one.

"Of course I will, you silly man. You could be gone seven decades and I'd still feel the same. What we have...that doesn't go away, I don't think."

[officerdown]

A dam breaks, a rubber band snaps, the great and terrible knot in his chest unties itself, threads on either end pulled to reveal a pointless length of string that was never tied to begin with.

It really doesn't go away. Scar feels he's emerged on the other side of a storm, above it, even, seeing its shape and ferocity clearly for the first time. Home has been stripped out of both of them, the opposite grooves cut by its loss slotting Scar and Lust together into one, gapless form. He has her missing pieces. She, his. With precious little overlap to soothe two exposed nerves tangled permanently together, everything is terrible and lovely.

Scar isn’t so foolish about the messy complications of love and loss that he doesn’t know just how peculiar, just how exceptionally rare, this is.

The only words he had left are already out. His hands are threaded together behind his back, a desperate, subconscious attempt to hide just how fidgety they are. How restless he is. Downstairs, he had been blessed with the distraction of the cats. They may still be here, but it isn't enough for him to tear his eyes off her. It feels exceptionally self indulgent, letting the instinct to just watch her finally do as it will, but even this is new. A great many things are new, and he wants to find the words to tell her. He will, eventually, but he knows she can forgive him for being struck dumb for a moment, a slow smile forming on his lips like parting clouds after nothing but rain.

[a_sin_for_him]

Lust can certainly forgive him, and takes the time to simply look at him. So many years she's only had photographs, and the gratitude she'd taken what she had. They were memories that could be held in the hand, solid and real and unquestionable. Insurance, in a way, that those memories couldn't be lost or taken from her. They're there, in clear definition and living colors. The shade of his eyes, the line of his jaw, the breadth of his shoulders. They could never fade from her mind because they were always refreshed by rainy afternoons paging through her photo album.

Now he's here, and she can't recall if she's ever seen him smile quite like this. Even in tender moments, he could be something of a rock with an edge of the grim to him. She sees no edge right now, just something...sweet and true.

But she begins to feel a little silly, just standing here staring at one another.

"We don't have to keep standing here the whole night, you know."

There is, in fact, a very comfortable and spacious bed just across the room. They can stare moon-struck at one another there.

[exeggutorhead]

What a night.

What a night.

Envy's quiet all the way upstairs, and all the way back into he and Heather's bed. He lets her shut the door behind him while he sweeps all the damn popcorn off the sheets and onto the floor to be dealt with in the morning, if a Pokemon doesn't eat it first.

But oh boy, once that door is shut and they're actually in bed? The haziness from the tea is mostly out of his system, and there is a whole lot more to think about than there had been earlier that night when the only question had been about which ending I Am Legendary was going to have.

He finally speaks up, voice low enough that they're definitely not going to be overheard.

"So. I guess they do like each other."

Heather if they don't talk about all of the everything that's just happened right this second he's going to pass away.

[foolishwren]

WHAT A NIGHT INDEED.

In fact, after giving Henry the FIERCEST hug and even an obnoxious sisterly smooch to the top of his head before bidding him goodnight, Heather had barely spoken a word on the way upstairs. When Envy crawls into bed beside her, she's laying on her back in the exact same position she'd first flopped down in, staring at the ceiling.

That had been a lot to go down in the space of like, four hours.

"... Are we sure that's the same Scar that was here last time? This one expressed, like, an emotion."

This is whispered in a faint, perplexed tone, like she's contemplating the mysteries of the stars beyond the ceiling.

"A happy emotion."

[exeggutorhead]

For a second, Envy's mouth opens. Then closes. His eyes widen.

"What if it's the other one?"

Although as soon as the horrifying thought exits his mouth, he realizes that whatever had just happened could not possibly have happened with the other Lust he'd met.

"No...that doesn't make sense. Also he knew all of us. Maybe Henry did some weird...emotion giving social magic to him in the woods."

[foolishwren]

IT'S TRUE... And Henry had been so calm and confident around Scar, too.

But then, if anybody is aware of the unlikely-friendship-building power of traveling together in a magical technicolor world of fantasy creatures, it's the people in this house.

Sounding a little less mystified now, Heather rolls over onto her side to face Envy.

"Getting them both back on the same day is crazy, right? Like. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop."

[exeggutorhead]

He nods quickly, bringing one hand up to run back through his hair.

"It is crazy. I thought I'd forgotten what month it was or something, or like they'd disappear if we left the room or something."

Of all the two people who could have come back at the same time, Henry and Scar were probably the least likely. Henry had at least come back once already...but Envy hadn't thought they'd ever see Scar again.

"I can't believe they just showed up like. Oh we're great buddies now. I didn't know Scar could make friends."

And Henry had used to be terrified of the guy!

[foolishwren]

"YEAH, I thought if I fuckin' blinked, Henry would like... despawn!"

She's still whispering, but fervently.

"And that's besides worrying that Scar was going to like, shoot through the roof like a cannonball before Lust got home!"

HE DEFROSTED A TURKEY.

"Envy, I had like four aneurysms tonight."

[exeggutorhead]

"Me too! I didn't even think I was gonna get him off the floor in here until he actually stood up!"

His whispers are rising in pitch as he continues.

"I didn't have any idea what was gonna happen when she got here. She just hung up on me."

He exhales heavily.

"What if he'd run off into the woods after I called?"

[foolishwren]

Likewise, Heather is talking faster and faster. She even reaches out and grabs his shoulder for emphasis, unblinking.

"We would all be dead. She'd get home, see him NOT there, and then she'd go back out, buy a gun off the black market, come back, and shoot us execution-style."

She may or may not have experienced a complete Occurrence At Owl Creek-style mental vision of this as she sat on the floor with her Tea (tm) waiting for her friend and roomie to get home.