milliways_bar | (no subject)

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So often back in her world, Rae is already at work when the sun rises in the morning. Dawn is her favorite time of day, and yet she so rarely gets to see it - really see it - to take in the ending of darkness and bask in the beginning of light. To witness the daily reminder that no darkness lasts forever.

But today she gets to, thanks to Milliways. She is seated on the picnic table near the back door of the bar, with her hands wrapped around a faintly steaming mug of tea, looking out towards the lake and the mountain beyond it, and the brilliantly-colored sky above them. The surface of the lake reflects the brilliant, fiery oranges and reds of the sky in each glimmering wavelet, and the snow-covered peak of the mountain glows golden where the early light touches it.

The early December chill feels good against Rae's skin, still warm from her pre-dawn run around the lake. She is relatively well-rested, her muscles warmed but not wearied by her run, and - almost startlingly - she feels at peace.

Sunshine knows better than to question peace when it comes. So she sits, basking in the sunrise and her own peace while they last.

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Sunshine sees that reaction reflected more in Matt's shadows than actually on his face, but doesn't comment on it, letting is pass unremarked-upon.

"Sometimes there are slow times," she remarks, lightly. Rae is in a slow time herself, thank all the listening gods. "But there'll always be a need. You do what you can."

(Because you must.)

Matt bobs his head once in agreement to that, the refrain she shared with him before repeating in his own mind.

What you can do, you must do.

"I'm sure it'll pick up." For both of them. "For now, I've got a few other things keeping me busy. Like a cat."

"Iiiit's probably a good thing the cat-sitting happened during a slow spell, then," she chuckles lightly. "Fortuitous. Cat-sitting during a busy spell might be one thing too many."

"You might be right," Matt admits. "He's not terrible, as roommates go, as long as you let him do what he wants."

"'Not terrible so long as you let him do what he wants' sounds like a wretched roommate," she remarks, grinning into her tea.

"I bet he never helps with the dishes, or the rent, or grocery shopping..."

"Well, he does help out with the laundry," Matt says thoughtfully.

"And by 'help' I mean he likes to lay in the basket on top of the clean clothes."

She gestures as though that explained everything. "He keeps the warm, clean laundry warm for you - that's totally helping! And very thoughtful of him."

Matt smiles and gives a tilt of his head, the gesture indicating 'if you say so'.

"Still, I'll be glad when he's back home where he belongs." And Claire will be doubly-glad and then some.

"Of course you will," she agrees, understanding a bit of the person-used-to-living-alone's urge to not have some (however semi-welcome) intruder in one's personal space.

"I could probably do cat-sitting, if I had to," Rae remarks, wry. "My half-brothers haven't turned out half-bad despite their best efforts, and I survived keeping my mother from massacring her professionally-helpless sister and her four kids for two years while they stayed with us."

It hadn't really been just her mother that had driven Sunshine's immediate desire to get her own place following graduation.

"Only if you really have to," Matt recommends.

"Sounds like you earned your own space, surviving all of that," he notes with a small chuckle.

After growing up in an orphanage surrounded by far too many others, sharing a room with just Foggy had been a blessing. Having his own space now is something of a miracle.

Claire is there, but hers isn't a presence he'd call an intrusion; it's been good, having her there. And, given the circumstances he has no right to complain regardless.

The cat, on the other hand... Matt's fault or not, it's quickly coming the time when it needs to go back to its own apartment.

"Eh, it was... one of those situations that it's almost okay after you get far enough away from the experience of it?" she replies, unsure how to word the feeling.

"I think part of Aunt Evie's reluctance to leave was from needing to catch up after seventeen years of separation, and the need to get her feet under her. She'd not seen my mother since their parents had disowned my mother for marrying my father," but that strays too close to uncomfortable subjects, "and she had recently lost her husband to the Wars. The obituary was how we found her again, really. And... grief and relief mix oddly, and it didn't help that she had a personality that clashed pretty badly with my mother's. I know a bit of what that's like, and could sympathize, but I was absolutely ready to have my room to myself again."

Seventeen year-olds, especially those trying to get past their experimenting with inadvisable drugs to avoid abject despair phase, need their space.

Matt notes the part about her father, but doesn't comment or react to it.

Working on his coffee he listens to Rae describe the family situation, nodding in the end.

"I suppose it's good that your mother and sister got to reconnect like that, but I don't blame you at all for being glad when her stay was over."

"It's good that my mother found her sister again, and staying with us probably saved my aunt and cousins' lives from being a lot harder than it would've otherwise been," Sunshine shakes her head a little. "But seventeen year old me didn't care much about family connections from out of the blue."

Rae has expressed her opinion on the particular stupidity and miopic priorities of seventeen year-olds before. The world is a safer place because people aren't who they are at seventeen forever.

"Mainly seventeen year old Rae Seddon wanted her room back and her cousins to stop making it difficult to slope off and go get high," Rae remarks, wry, "or blowing her cover when she came back way after curfew."

"Well, as a general rule seventeen year olds aren't really well known for their selflessness or reasonable attitudes and responses," he notes, just as wry.

Her admission is a bit surprising, but given that he can tell her system is clean now it doesn't draw much reaction. As said, teenagers don't make the best decisions.

"Yeaaaah," Rae agrees, dry. "Really I'm lucky to have survived."

Anyone - not just teens - can be selfish, irrational little creatures when they're scared enough, and her teens were a very bad time in her world, the latter days of the Wars. She has been clean since then, for nearly a decade now.

"I still get solstice cards from my cousins, and some little gift each year from my aunt," she remarks, "so maybe I didn't completely convince them I was worthless, at seventeen. Which just reminds me I need to start thinking of solstice gifts. It'll be here before I know it."

"I imagine still being on the holiday card list is a good sign," Matt muses. It can't be said that he knows this for sure, but it seems a reasonable assumption to make.

"Will it?" he asks of solstice, a bit surprised. "Time is definitely passing faster here than it is in my world." It's been maybe only a couple of months since he received the gifts from Rae for the last solstice.

"It always moves faster here than at home for me, too," she replies, then adds, wry. "And not just because I stay here so often."

She's been working on that.

While Matt was here time crawled at a practical standstill, but it still passed leaving him well behind in his world. And since his door has returned his side of things hasn't gotten very far towards catching up.

"Have you been around here much?" he asks, thinking of all the time she'd spent in Milliways avoiding her world, and of her having to go back after everything so that she could heal at a normal-rate in her own world. Considering how well she seems now, he has to assume she spent quite a bit of time on her side of the door getting better.

"Not as much as I had been, I promise," she replies. There's a definite smile in her voice, though a wry one. "It's been nearly three months back home, since... the Goddess was put into custody, but it's been nearly a year here."

Matt feels a slight pang of guilt over the judgement he inadvertently passed on her before when they'd talked about others hiding from their world in Milliways.

He nods, allowing that small skirt around what happened with the goddess to pass without reaction.

"It's been maybe the same since I got my door back. I've been in a few times since," including the time he and Claire helped her, "and I'd guess about a year has passed here as well."

Rae did not feel his censure entirely unjust; she has always hated her own cowardice.

"I suppose it's because the outside area was modeled on a place on Earth that we apply the Earth's calendar at the end of the universe," she remarks, caught by minor curiosity. "I mean, if the outside environs were based on some place in another world - some other planet - would we use that place's local calendar to suggest how long had 'passed' here?"

"Interesting thought," he says, mulling it a moment. "I'll admit, I'm glad it isn't. This place is has enough strangeness in it without adding alien environments to it."

"It makes what is literally an alien landscape less alien, I suppose," she grins, then adds as a thought hits her, "Though it's not all Earth-based. There's the labyrinth up in the mountains, which... is weird as they come. Apparently it connects bits of dozens of worlds and one has to maneuver, finding their way from one bit of one world into another bit of a different world, and so on, to find their way through."

"Got dropped in there and had to evade a hungry minotaur once," Rae adds, wry. "Only briefly, thankfully."

Some events, like surviving her professionally helpless aunt and her four children, become almost amusing once you've got enough space between you and them.

"A labyrinth. With a minotaur." It almost feels like he should be more surprised, but... Milliways.

"I haven't done much outside," he admits. "I have to say, that doesn't inspire me to take in the great outdoors much more."

Give Matt the city any day. Really.

"The labyrinth isn't something one finds by accident, I don't think," she replies, wry. "The lake area and the forest are kind of worth it, when you don't want to be around people for a while. There's an inlet along the lake that... somehow connects to the Caribbean? It's always warm and tropical there, anyway. Fantastic place to warm up when winter it being bitter."

Sunshine smiles. "And sometimes there are cherry trees, in the spring, and good advice to be found."