GIRLS NIGHT, GIRLS NIGHT!

[guidemyway]

Who: Various!
What: Girls Night!
When: Early in the month!
Where: Ruby's House

Content Warnings: N/A Will update as necessary



[A few days after putting the ad up on the bulletin board, the promised evening has arrived. Ruby has a banner hanging up on the patio of her cabin that reads “GIRLS NIGHT” and every once in awhile she can be seen at the door checking for new arrivals, or poking her head up at a window to do the same.

Her cabin is interesting to say the very least. She did her best to clean up all the clutter but it's pretty obvious she isn't exactly the cleanest person in town. Her giant scythe and snowboard are hanging by the door. And there's a green gem sword on display above her fireplaces' mantle with a little hand carved plaque that reads “The Protector of Mantle.” There's also a framed photograph of her looking a couple years younger with her team from home. The kitchen is a bit of mess with a few obvious scorch marks, melted bits on the counter, and just signs that there had been more than one fire in there.

But she had managed to gather up as much as she could for the big party. Including a handful of basic snacks like cookies, chips, and whatever she scrounge up that didn't require any actual cooking skills. There are a handful of games like Risk, Connect 4, and a partially torn up game of twister. There's even an old red and blue boom box playing some hits from the 80's and 90's courtesy of Kate Marsh like Eye of the Tiger, Can't Touch This, I Don't Want To Miss a Thing, If You Want To Be my Lover, and Hit Me Baby, One More time, and many more!]

[OOC: Feel free to make a top level! I'll have one up soon myself! Anyone is free to mingle or try to infiltrate the party.

Feel free to contact me at jjabarrett on plurk or discord for any plotting]

Comments

[ployboy]

He doesn't have mood swings.

Tim can feel eyes on him and he turns to make his point, met by green. It's always the green that makes him so agitated. "Stealing a look at the weapons," he clarifies. It's still a good cover and he's bound to grab for it another time.

[flambeaux]

He raises his eyebrows dubiously.

"Now, I don't claim to know every one of them well, but every lady with a weapon in this town has been all too happy to show it when asked, and even when not asked. I seen what Miss Wynonna's packin'."

Not a brag, judging by the way his shoulders hunch a little (from the cold, surely). Louis is not a man excited by guns or hot women, apparently, and prefers them not pointed at him.

"Ain't any looks worth stealin', except the gross ones you claim not to pursue. Quit lyin' to me, boy. It's tirin'."

And he does look tired, the tired curve to his shoulders such a human thing, like the rest of the human gestures he clings to out of habit. It's the weight of all his own damn lies on them.

[ployboy]

Ah, and there it is. Wynonna's name brushes off some of that mask of Tim's; even Louis' skepticism goes thankfully in one ear and straight out the other because Tim smirks. He smirks like he's one heartbeat away from illumination and then his teasing is immediately too much for him; he turns away again and his lips rest as that neutral... downturn.

Give a little, get a lot.

Winnie's packing heat.

Got it.

Mister du Lac is then sounding like Jack, maybe, and Tim is feeling like

his freedom is so close. Always so close, always unattainable. To cross one line is to endanger several others getting erased and his morality is always a cement shade of gray. The noise of the party is already lost to the power of the natural soundproofing of snow. Tim opens his mouth--

closes it with a click of teeth.

Another look to Mister L and the weight of the night and his own demons accompanying him, and Tim figures he has to thank the man for gloves.

Has to pay him for the kindness of the gloves.

(He just wants to be believed,)

"You know how I'm paranoid?" he leads, bold in his charge. And Despair and Self Worth and Alienation begin to write the longhand of the equation of everything-- the proof of pointlessness is staggeringly simple. Tim's eyes harden. He stands taller, even, as if he'd somehow be able to prove himself-- formidable.

Give a little, get a lot.

[flambeaux]

Tim shouldn't be smiling about guns so easily. Wynonna's was scary-looking.

He throws him a crooked smile with too much teeth. A warning for Tim, who seems addicted to pressing recklessly on. At least Tim is leading with a truth this time.

"No, I couldn't tell." Wounded bird came crashing into his house shaking like those tiny little dogs, and if Louis didn't suffer his own anxieties, he'd wonder if Tim was on something. Being at the business end of his collapsible stick wasn't great either.

"Go on."

[ployboy]

Forfeit is his right to bullshit in the face of the bullshitter.

Yet there's a soft ache to bury himself in comfort. Tim's eyes show vulnerability where his body doesn't, some yet undead part of his soul still searching and wishing to be understood though he knows he's alien to the world of humanity and he hasn't spoken the language of civilians in years. Tim shifts, his weight letting his boot sink a centimeter further into crunching snow. It isn't that he's stalling so much as

"I don't know what else I'm supposed to say," he says, and it's a tiny, detached sort of voice. A kid who did admit to stealing from the cookie jar. A sinner who's confessed to the Father.

And he knows there's some... more, expected of him and that he's failing to meet or even grasp, and it can't not feel like salt on an open wound when it's difficult enough to admit to delusion.

[flambeaux]

"You asked a question leadin' into what I thought was an explanation. So you're paranoid. I noticed. Why?"

There are times when Louis tries to exact something like contrition out of people. Maybe it's a Catholic thing. But there are other times when he just wants to know why a person does a thing, and he picks at it like a particularly difficult passage in a book.

"I'd ask if they teach that at ninja school, but you say you dropped out."

cw brain washing up in here, bad self talk, paranoia and other mental health issues e t c

[ployboy]

Tim swallows back the urge to explain, that is the explanation. Left with nothing but the fact that he's never voiced the idea before, that nobody has heard him say these things before, he's drowned in a shame that sparks hot color back into his face.

It's not paranoia if everyone is out to get you, is what the Riddler had piped up.

In his subconscious.

Because the Riddler is Tim's subconscious and he couldn't make this shit up if he tried.

His eyes light up with conviction, dim with hesitation.

First of all, it was ninja camp and not ninja school, and Tim has never been so out of practice with making words happen.

He's never told anyone, it's-- painful, and humiliating, and maybe exactly what he deserves for being such an ass. He says, "That's... just it."

It's irrational and wrong and harmful in every way (and that makes it, sometimes, good). A compulsion isn't what drives a detective to action. Not... usually.

"I get it in my head that every..."

Everything. Everyone. Everybody. Everything. Everything.

How can it not be in his head? He agreed with the equation. The self loathing is nothing new but it's rarely been written so loudly on his face. His guilty, stupid, deluded face.

"That something is going to happen. And I know it's better to be near, and try, than to be... out, and not get there until it's too late."

The weak ramblings of a crazy man, is all Tim hears.

[flambeaux]

"The problem is, Tim, that your actions hurt others and disturb privacy and the peace. Goin' make others paranoid at this rate." Why does he feel like he's patiently explaining to Claudia why she can't eat that beat cop on the corner?

I think he's the one who's scared. Louis can just hear Claudia's voice rallying against absurdity. Louis wishes he had her impetus for truth, her clarity. But she can be cruel. Louis, for his part, knows what it is to hate himself. No one self-flagellates like Louis.

"It's hard to talk about the demons that plague us." In Louis's opinion, Rorschach is crazy; Tim is... troubled. "Nothin's happenin', Tim. They're not in danger, and you wouldn't've been either if you hadn't broken in. And you're not in any now. I promise."

Louis is poorly equipped to offer the support Tim needs. He already failed his own family, both of them. But like a fool he tries anyway.

[ployboy]

Oh, there's a hard and scornful type of pull at his lips. Tim isn't one for jittery laughter, his disquiet manifesting in all sorts of other ways. But he can't help that Louis' words are funny.

Funny to him, because he remembers the last day he knew happiness very well. And he remembers the lesson he learned, every spoken word right down to the screaming match with The Night himself over the forever-wound of the violation. Goin' make others paranoid at this rate, and Tim thinks it's funny but he knows that it's not.

He displaces the scratch at the back of his throat with a single cough. He doesn't have the vocabulary for how wrong Louis is in assuming Tim fears the dangers of now. It's so close-- but-- what's the phrase? Close, but no cigar.

"Yeah," he manages. To his credit, it isn't a dismissive utterance.

But this is:

"Wait, are we goin' back to your place or t'mine?"

(Ah... phrasing.)

[flambeaux]

Louis gets an inkling that his words are falling on willfully deaf ears. Not the first time no one has listened to him, his family (human and vampire ones) turning away to careen down whatever path they were set on anyway. Why do they even ask his opinion when he'll be wrong anyway? Why did he always fail them? (It was not always, but it feels like it was.)

Louis groans and brings his hand to pinch the bridge of his nose like he has a headache coming on. His gestures are quick, appropriate for the surprise in his exasperated response, but also a little too quick, like he's forgotten to slow them down.

"No, we're just walkin' and keepin' you and the ladies out of trouble. You're lucky you've been shown mercy for breakin' and enterin' at least twice now. Don't you dare tell anyone where I live, by the way. It's not fit for entertainin' guests, and I like to visit with people on my own terms."

He's still in the same rat-infested house Tim accidentally-on-purpose broke into, though the rat problem is more of a... supplemental diet now. It's no surprise that the put-together Louis would deter visitors due to the house's condition, but really he also wants to keep his resting place a secret. Vampire 101. Even when he and Lestat would have parties at their address, their coffin room was accessed by a secret mechanism only they knew about. Louis doesn't have that luxury here.