hext | in the night

[ she isn't asleep (when is she ever, lately), and he knows it. he knows he won't be interrupting her attempt to rest. what he doesn't know is these late night rambles save her, more often than not, from the darkest kind of misery; she's busy sliding into a tar pit of memories and regrets and fears becoming so real she can feel them like fingertips dragging cool and clammy up along her skin, tugging, pulling her down.

peter is the branch, appearing just in time to lift her out. ]

i understand, i think. williamsburg.
small, tangible problems. daylight problems. nothing insidious, just... clear shapes, things you didn't like, but you could identify. even predict.

i miss traffic jams, i think? and knowing i could get around them, but not doing it because — propriety.
i miss... knowing who to be angry at.

[ about fifteen seconds later: ]

charcoal? frosting??

I'm pretty sure it's just normal frosting, only a slightly off shade of gray because charcoal

uh

"assists kidney health"...

Jury's out on whether it's just food coloring.

[ he answers in reverse, because it's easier than admitting that ooh, traffic jams are a good one. easier than admitting that he misses that feeling of swinging across the city, easier than admitting that he even misses the days when he didn't have enough money to buy more ingredients to make more web fluid, so he had to get the subway, and truthfully, wearing the suit underneath normal clothes was pretty hot and uncomfortable during rush hour.

easier than admitting that ingredients never seemed like it was the right word for that, but was there a better word? not really.

but— knowing who to be angry at. peter oscillates between being angry at himself, for ending up here in the first place. for being reckless and stupid. that gets interrupted by being angry at being stuck here, for not being able to figure out a way to fix this yet. the rest of the time, he wants to blame kraven (and vermin), but—. ]

I'm pretty sure traffic jams are the result of impatient drivers are the result of bad traffic cops are the result of poorly planned roadworks.

but me? I like to blame Mayor Fisk.

Edited 2019-10-11 22:53 (UTC)

now i want to try one, and i can't.
you are the worst.

[ a pause. pointedly: ]

doesn't that mean we should blame robin here?

[ AS WANDA HAS DONE FROM DAY ONE. ]

imagine disappointment and regret
now imagine eating it

that's what an $8 bagel tastes like

[ but lbr, that's mostly because it's $8. GENTRIFICATION.

also a pause. ]

sure. maybe.

[ wanda might be able to feel the sigh, and the brow furrow, and the fact that peter definitely runs a hand through his hair and just kind of. takes a moment. he's torn: it'd be easy to blame robin, but— ]

I don't think this is all on her, you know? she's a kid. she was 17.
I think she's made some mistakes, made some bad choices but she's been here for 20 years
(yeah, yeah, I know. "apparently".)
but then I think of some of the choices I made when I was 17 and at the time, I know I thought I was doing the right thing
kinda, anyway.
some of those choices led to the worst mistakes of my life and there's not a day that I don't wish I'd done something different
I don't think I can ever make up for that, but it doesn't mean I can't do better, you know?
the same's true for her. whatever her role in all of this is.

can you imagine if previous groups really DID go the way we've been told? if everyone really does just devolve into distrust? into killing each other?
I can't imagine what it's gotta be like to watch that

which means that as a group, we've got to be better too

Edited 2019-10-12 10:37 (UTC)

[ she grits her teeth, long and silent, down on all her own past mistakes.
life-losing, nearly world-ending mistakes. ]

do you think it helps us do better as a group — for those in power to withhold so much information from us at the start?
how does a group not devolve into distrust after that...

No. I don’t.

[ is the first message he sends and he almost doesn’t follow it up — at first, he thinks wanda has a point, but then there’s a second thought, a little more nagging. isn’t it kind of hypocritical of him? would he be able to say he wouldn’t do the same thing, in their position? doesn’t he make those kind of decisions every day for other people? he hides things about who he is, what he does and what he can do because he’s ‘protecting’ people.

oy, thanks for the existential crisis, wanda.

eventually, then: ]

I kind of get it though. All that power, that feeling of responsibility. They probably didn’t even think about how we’d feel about it. Probably didn’t even think that trust entered the equation. If I had to guess, it was about the

(okay, I kind of hate saying these next words?)

The greater good. Their perception of it, I mean.

[ there's a lot more he could say to that, about that, but let us just SKIP PAST THE UNCOMFORTABLE TOPICS. ]

And from the sounds of it, it doesn't sound like it really matters if we trust THEM, just that we trust each other, right? Which... isn't on them. It's on us.

But I don't have an answer to that question.

in the night — inbox.

MURDER MOST FOUL

soz...

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