boogie wonderland; ota

[questioningmermaids]

Who: Holland March + open, Holland + Huaisang
What: March spends some time contemplating, talks distilling with Huaisang
When: Nov 2nd
Where: Community hall

Content Warnings: usual cw for alcoholism

i. Weapons cleaning + contemplation;

His supplies are running low. There's only so much you can scavenge in a place like this, but when you chain smoke like a chimney and drink like a fish eventually what you can scrounge up is going to disappear. He's got a little left, sure, courtesy of a gas station raid and the basement Huaisang's got, but supplies aren't infinite.

It gets him thinking. Makes him antsy. March enters the community hall like he usually does, a frequent visitor like most of the small little community they've all managed to put together, but he's never really done much. Drank some coffee, chatted. It's hard to tell if he even realizes he's the village idiot.

Today, though, he's set up in a little corner and is making sure his gun is cleaned along with sipping his morning caffeinated sludge. He's less animated than usual, less talkative, simply staring into space as his hands go through the motions. If not interrupted, he'll eventually speak.

"We're really fucked here, huh? Completely." Holland knows he should curve the negativity, but it's starting to get to him more than he'd like admit. He's been adamant they're all probably going to die within the month since day one but there's less of a joking tone towards it this time.

He wants to help sure. Pitch in, even. Mostly he's just worried about how tiny his booze stash is getting.

After coffee there's a far less depressing revelation, said just as solemnly.

"...Should I hunt?"

ii. Huaisang;

"We gotta do something."

March doesn't bother to announce himself when he opens the door to Huaisang's place, spending far more time there than he probably should. His scarf is taken off, the hat is dumped unceremoniously onto the floor.

"Hey. Huaisang? Huaisang, we gotta do something. You know what I did today? Math. You know what that math was for?"

He's already flopping onto the nearest available surface, aviators still on.

Comments

[fanoperator]

"Sounds horrible, why would you do math?" Huaisang grimaces sympathetically at him, nose wrinkled. He's all bundled up on the couch in pretty much the entire house's supply of blankets, since he is now officially out of firewood in the house, would rather suffer than cut his own firewood, and even his naturally shameless conscience feels guilty about making someone else do it for him. He has no capacity to live alone. He 'lives' in the community center, at least for now. This is just the house where he goes to sketch and have a little privacy and where he stashes the alcohol he scavenged.

[questioningmermaids]

"It was horrible. Where's the firewood?"

Not important. Not to the conversation, but March has to ask. It seems a bit counter-intuitive to wrap all those blankets around your body when you can just light something. True to March, if he isn't extremely quiet he's just sort of rambling:

"Right--math. So, we're gonna run out soon, you know. The basement. The bottles." It's not like they've cornered the market on all the booze, sure, but that's also not important.

[fanoperator]

"I don't have firewood," Huaisang says, a quiet tone that's not quite apologetic and not quite sulky. He's not sorry about the problem and he's not asking March to solve it for him, but he does feel bad about being a failure at this (among other things).

"Oh. Yes. I know." Huaisang's a little surprised that March has only just done this math and that it required math. It's immediately obvious to Huaisang that the bottles are Not Enough. He doesn't particularly want to know how soon they will run out. He's already doing his best to ration. He already hid several bottles where March doesn't know about them, since it is valuable as a disinfectant and Huaisang's not sure March knows about rationing, so he wants to have emergency bottles. Huaisang likes having contingency plans. "Was there more to the math than that?"

[questioningmermaids]

"You don't--" He doesn't have firewood. March doesn't bother to hide the stare he gives Huaisang, stopping only because he's marveling at the look on the other's face. He's not sure anyone's been able to fully look like that in the history of mankind.

He's going to have to chop firewood because of that perfectly round face, is what he's hearing. But there are more important matters, like throwing his hands up in a partial flail to emphasize the seriousness of the situation, voice raising considerably in pitch as he does so.

"What are we gonna do?!"

[fanoperator]

"Oh, well. Brew more. Probably. It's not hard. And we already have plenty of empty bottles to work with. What we need are some big buckets, the bigger the better. I haven't seen any barrels around, barrels would be nice, but I suppose we can get started with just some large cooking pots." Huaisang has already thought all this through. He's never done it before, but he knows how it works. He just hopes he hasn't forgotten anything important about how it works.

"We can use fruits or grains, and there's lots of bags of white sugar, which I don't know how that works but it'll probably work. Anyway, the important thing is that it can't freeze. That's the only reason I haven't started yet, really. I don't have any way to keep it at a steady temperature. It has to be warm. Not summer-hot, but certainly ... spring-warm. Consistently."