wearying of the—!

she scoffs, lightly jabbing his side with her elbow. “exhibitionist” lyra replies in a wine scented croon. she looks down at the now almost empty wine bottle and runs her thumb over the label. there’s some kind of… intimacy in sharing a bottle, at least from her point of view. she’s done so with lovers, with friends, even coworkers when shit got rough. a bottle on her own was– a mistake each and every time. especially before the twins. she even began to fear for the worst at certain points. this on the other hand? it felt exactly right. 

her gaze floats from the bottle over to erik. a squint, grin stifled by a thoughtful sip. 

“perhaps… you got the available sick days?”

exhibitionist. all he can do is wink at her. he is not going to say a damn thing to implicate himself. neither confirm nor deny, just smile and act cute and coy about it. lyra knows him better than most people - maybe even his own siblings. she can figure it out.

he lets his suggestive grin hang for a couple seconds too long, his eyes trailing up her throat as she takes a long sip of the wine they’re sharing. he can’t help but wonder if they’re enabling one another. if this is okay. if they’re truly in control of whatever it is that drives them to do shit like this. in the end, he’s not sure if it matters. he’s okay, she’s okay, they’re okay. they’re safe. they’re okay. it’s fine to cut loose every once in a while, right?

“if i got a note from a doctor, they’ll make the sick days. just outta thin air. amazing how they can just... do that.”

he’s being sarcastic. heavily sarcastic. it’s annoying that he even needs a note. he should be able to take leave whenever he damn well pleases, shouldn’t he? yeah, definitely. he grins at his self-satisfying conclusion that he’s just made up in his own head.

Sidney, Sidney, Sidney…

He might be the most beautiful thing she’s laid eyes on in a while. Beautiful as in attractive - but beautiful in his own right, too. She’s been dying to tell him so, but a certain gap between their lives suggests it’s something better left unsaid.

Anna knows that ‘good’ doesn’t really, necessarily mean good. Sidney is only appeasing her. Telling her what she wants to hear. For now, she doesn’t accuse him of anything - only listens, affirms.

“–Tired, antsy,” she echoes. These are the most honest things he’s said in the past few minutes. Sidney is something of a liar, or at least a fabricator. It leads her to wonder what kind of person had a hand in raising him, that he feels the need to dodge her.

“… To be honest, I’m a little antsy, too,” she admits, with a sheepish smile. Anna glances down at his frames on the kitchen table, then back to Sidney, with his freckled cheeks. His asymmetrical gaze.

“Well… you first. What’s got you wound up?”

What hasn’t got him wound up? Wound so tightly that the slightest bit of torque could cause him to snap completely? What hasn’t completely upended his sanity, his security, his sense of reality lately? He could give her an itemized list a mile long and still not quite sum it up.

His glasses lay abandoned on the table. He doesn’t need them at the moment, doesn’t want to put them back on. The kitchen is spacious and brightly lit by the sunlight that filters in through the partly-drawn curtains. It’s a safe place. No peripheral vision required.

He narrows his eyes just slightly. He smiles, then looks off to the side. Anna vanishes from his view. He’s thinking just a little too hard for what should be a simple question.

“My dad,” he says finally. He sighs. As if it could have been anything else. Anything at all. He wishes he could have something normal to stress over, but with the way his life has gone nothing seems to faze him anymore. Nothing except his family. His fucked up family.

Oh shit, oh fuck. He is. He is losing blood. A lot of blood, and with alarming speed. He feels woozy, not quite in the beginning stages of passing out but definitely in the beginning stages of wanting to pass out. Wishing he could lose consciousness so he doesn’t have to watch this play out.

“Oh God, oh God-” Cassius moans, blinking back the tears that gather in the corners of his eyes. He has both hands pressed to the gushing wound as though that’s going to do anything at all. He doesn’t know who this guy is, but he desperately needs him to not leave right now, oh fuck--

Sad lately. A little depressed. Unhappy with his general circumstances during this phase of his life. But he isn’t quite sure he wants to tell her that up front. It’s a little... melancholy, and the last thing he wants is to bring the mood down.

“Good,” he says.

“Tired,” he says after a pause.

He takes his glasses off and wipes them off on his shirt. With his peripheral vision gone, he takes stock of what’s in front of him. Anna. Just Anna. He smiles.

Paxton’s brows furrow; he had opened his mouth to correct Sidney, but he’s baffled by the latency in his response. It hasn’t taken him very long to notice that Sidney hasn’t been ignoring him, rather there’s a marked delay in his comprehension. He usually gets things after a few seconds, but sometimes it just passes through him. It’s concerning, to say the least.

“… Right,” Paxton sighs again as he replaces his frames, standing from the desk and making a start for Sidney’s bedroom.

“Come on, show me then.”

Sidney doesn’t seem to notice his lapse in situational awareness - or, he just doesn’t care. He beams at his father and follows him out of the study. Just moments after he was told not to run, he takes off down the hall again at top speed. He very nearly trips over himself as he enters his bedroom.

“It’s there-!” Sidney exclaims, pointing at the offending spider that’s taken a shine to the Beach Boys poster pinned to his wall. It scuttles across Brian Wilson’s face. Sid grimaces.

lyra’s title falling from his lips lands a smile on hers. “a note for a well deserved break is one that won’t weigh heavily on my conscience.” after all it wasn’t as if he was asking her for a prescription. lyra had that happen more than she liked, causing her to reevaluate what exactly her ‘type’ was. thankfully, those were worries of days long gone. this was now. she didn’t have to experiment and test the waters, no longer settling for the unknown. there was finally some solidarity. the kids, her job, the incredibly handsome man in front of her. 

“we’ll just say you got strep from frenching a library water fountain.” she gently taps the tip of his nose before grabbing the bottle. “they’ll buy it.” she takes a drink and then pauses, “–right?”

the prescription-grabbing tendency was never his scene. it’s his brother’s. his sad degenerate brother who he’s pumped full of narcan more times than he can count. erik, conversely, has managed to avoid his family’s tendency to spiral wildly out of control. his worst vice is occasionally having half a bottle of wine and then immediately going to bed to sleep it off. wild party animal. no wonder someone as fun as lyra chose such a stick in the mud fun-loving wild guy like him. every day is an adventure.

tonight is most definitely one of those rare drinking-a-little-too-much occasions. one of those he-is-being-far-too-cautious-and-is-safe-to-cut-loose nights where he thinks he’s being adventurous.

“hey, how’d you know about that? voyeur.”

he grabs the bottle right back from her, takes a baby sip, then gives it back. petty little-

cj wraps his finger around a dirty blonde curl resting on his forehead, tugging gently while his attention rests 20 feet ahead of him. a young child in overalls has just snuck a twenty from his mother’s pocketbook, she’s distracted, making small talk with another mother. it reminds him why he’ll never father children. all they do is take. all just an endless cycle of wanting and needing and taking. its exhausting. 

his gaze flickers over to uriyah, hooded eyes creasing with a smile. 

“you wanna get dinner?”

uriyah sees the child, pretends not to. a secret smile softens his expression. that kid’s got potential, a bright future in freelance crime. reminds him of his sister and her sticky fingers. reminds him of himself in the early days, just starting out. he could never have any of his own. it’s too much responsibility and, frankly, he can’t see himself not fucking up and turning his children into tiny, terrible copies of himself.

it’s still cute to see, though. still makes him forget his exasperation for a moment. when he finally looks at cj, he lets out a breath. he can’t get his scowl back. he’s still smiling.

Paul Leskowitz is lucky. So, so damn lucky. Lucky that he has someone like Belle to see him through the worst of... whatever this is. Ever since he found that damn game, ever since he started those recordings, he’s just felt... off. Strange. Not quite all there. 

Memories have resurfaced, come, gone, been buried again only to reemerge at the worst possible moment. It’s a vicious cycle of remember-forget-remember, and through it all he hasn’t had the energy for much else.

Summer means no work, and no work means he has all the more opportunity to sit at home and let himself go. Lock himself in his room. Sit in front of his TV. Play his Playstation until the logo is burned into his retina.

He can’t make sense of it - that damned game. Not without Belle’s help. But even with her help, it doesn’t make much sense to him at all. She’s been around for so long, but she’s not him. Her memory isn’t a replacement for his. She’s another piece to the puzzle, not a solution.

“Heh, yeah. Yeah... thank, uh... thank god.”

Distracted. Detached. Not all there. He badly needs a haircut, but he’ll settle for a thorough brushing. It’s more than he could manage on his own anyway.