there are nights you say you don't remember [open!]

[tedandroses]

Who: Teddy and (you?)
When: backdated from just post-Event through May (and into the first weeks of June if it works better for where you want to run into Teds!)
Where: Around Solvunn, in the Horizon, Nocwich
What: Post-event feels; May-early June catchall
Warnings: Nothing major: some feelings of derealization. Re-remembering distressing events. If that needs to be upgraded I'll mention in the subject lines.


Teddy opens her eyes, blinking. The sky was falling down, and --

Their cheek is pressed into the dust, hard against the rock, and when they try to push themself to a sit, it feels like they haven't used their joints in -- they were thinking years, but no, that's wrong; the whole thing was wrong. They were trying to wake up. They were trying to...

Oh. Oh god.

It comes crashing back like a wave: the storms, the crater, the fog. And the memories. All the memories Teddy still -- or can now recall -- the terror of knowing they were losing. Pushed roughly to the forefront: not just the things they'd lost but those they'd given up to Sam in desperation to not lose it forever.

Sam -- Teddy shouldn't even know Sam. Much less, feel the instinctive urge to thank him as he's hit by an onslaught of memories of his home and family that tumble over each other so intensely he sits back down hard. He shouldn't know -- so much -- about so many things --

People are moving. People are telling them things; their voices don't feel like real sounds, but some part of Teddy's brain interprets it for her, and she gets back to her feet and allows herself to be directed toward the carts going to Solvunn. Her eyes catch on even more familiar forms, even beloved, heading in other directions, and she knows she's never looked at them here: can feel that her body recalls but does not know being embraced, jostled, laughed with.

That knowing feels like a great wave lifting them off their feet and shoving them underneath the water over and again. (They shouldn't know what the ocean feels like.) They want to be sick. They want to scream. They can't do any of it: just let it roll them over. They sit, silent and finally, blissfully unthinking for the ride. It's not until they're back in Solvunn, safe under blankets, that they burst into stifled, hiccuping sobs until they can't breathe.


Far above, the Abraxas skies are blue and cloudless like Teddy's never seen.

>> HORIZON
>> SOLVUNN
>> NOCWICH

[OTA! If there's nothing that catches your eye/you want something slightly different let me know at wingedvoices and I'll start one!]

Comments

[satanicpanics]

“Here? Jesus Christ, no. I literally mean the cops back home. An officer searched my van once, found a joint, and no joke—I saw the guy smoking it in his own patrol car thirty minutes later.”

Short of the alternate dimension that lurks beneath Hawkins, Indiana isn’t particularly noteworthy. Eddie has spent all his life with that belief, an he refuses to change his mind now. “Yeah, that’s one good thing about it. Beer is like…crazy easy to get,” he concedes. “I was working at a dive bar—heavy emphasis on the dive—before I was eighteen.”

But that was the 80s, and Eddie is still unaware just how much may have changed twenty years later. Chances are, a seventeen year old wouldn’t be hired as a bar back, and he wouldn’t be able to slip his friends drinks any time the owner wasn’t looking.

“But besides that? Not a whole lot about Indiana worth mentioning, so…”

Besides the alternate dimension beneath his small town, but he trails off, taken in by the guitars and literally everything else about this cozy space Teddy has created. He and Nanaue have a good thing going on with Goat Destroyer, and Nanaue came back from the emergent reality with some crazy drumming skills, but Eddie misses playing with other people, just jamming and figure out what works and what doesn’t. He still plays solo more often than not, and there’s something sort of sad about that. But now is his moment to fix it.

“Don’t mind if I do.”

With a grin, he steps right up and reaches for the middle guitar—the Superstrat, just like Teddy expected he might. He’s a free spirit, sure, but when it comes to some things, he’s very predicable.

“She’s beautiful,” he sighs, immediately beginning to pick out an old blues riff. Start off slow, start off easy, launch into the shredding after a bit of a warm-up. He paces the “stage” as he plays, and this is clearly Eddie in his element.

“Man, you have good taste in guitars. I wanna hear the others too. Get up here and join me.”

[tedandroses]

Teddy doesn't quite follow that all the way to the being told about marijuana legalization part, but it's fine; they're distracted by laughing at hypocritical cops. "Of course you fuckin' did. Jesus. Real subtle." They roll their eyes. "I feel like half of cops are just the guys from high school who fucked with anyone half interesting, because they don't know what to do with themselves when they get out of school and find out you can't just get paid to do that in most other jobs, and they can pass the physical."

It's a respectable job, and a better alternative to some others, but even in places as half-step-from-desperation as the places Teddy grew up in, and as many chances as she had to not be both as privileged and lucky as she is, she's pretty sure she could never be a police officer. Not for fucking long, anyway.

Teddy laughs, lifting their eyebrows. There were some places they played at 18 where they had to get big sharpie x's on their hands just entering; the idea of someone serving alcohol at 17 is pretty insane. They have no idea whether that's an Indiana thing or an 80s thing: both seem possible.

She grins when Eddie picks up the Superstrat, both glad to be right and genuinely pleased to see what he does. The grin relaxes into something like impressed delight, nodding along as Eddie starts with a blues progression and kicks the performance up a notch.

(If Eddie had his own character sheet, they're pretty sure they'd be able to SEE the Charisma stat spin up a few numbers.)

They almost jump a little when he gestures them up.
"Helps to have absolutely no limits but my imagination," Teddy smirks to hide that they're pleased by the remark. It's a very subjective thing, but it does bode well for them playing together that the things they like in guitars are things he likes too. "It'd be my honor." They do a little flourish at him and head over, frowning at the guitars in a half second of indecision -- this or that? -- and goes for the 12 string; almost checks the tuning before realizing they don't imagine their guitars out of tune so it never ends up being a problem.

Teddy picks up the chord progression Eddie was riffing through after listening for a moment, taking the role of rhythm at first. She adds a little oomph with the strum pattern to give him a foundation to riff around, picking a few walking notes between chords to add a little syncopation and take advantage of the paired strings.