mitsubishievo | everything zen - I don't think so [for Alex]

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everything zen - I don't think so [for Alex]

Going to the forest didn't have the effect he wanted it to. He was still shaky and off-put, this psychic constipation that he almost never had to deal with and certainly hadn't had since the demon had tried to destroy him and Ronan and everything they were. Had that been two years ago or three now? Sometimes it was hard to remember.

Sometimes, Kavinsky thought it didn't really matter.

Today was no better or worse than when he'd woken with the pitch in his blood, that glossy black that he hadn't really had since he'd arrived in Darrow and was still getting used to dreaming here. He wasn't sure if that was a good sign or not. Either way, he wasn't up for dancing.

Skip out with me he texted Alex. They weren't due on a stage for hours, and he was hanging out in Arch. He accompanied it with a selfie, him hanging half backwards off his chair, the picture taken upside down, sticking his tongue out and looking stupid with the sound board behind him. Let's just chill.

There was maybe a part of him that hoped she could do something, but he wasn't about to ask. Joseph Kavinsky did not ask for things. He had always been the knowledgeable outlier, the fount and sage, and anyway this wasn't exactly some ghost bullshit, was it? He'd figure it out.

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It's a ridiculous fucking photo, which is pretty much what she's come to expect of him. Alex is out at Black Elm, fresh out of the tub, her hair still wet and she leans her hip against the kitchen counter as she texts him back.

okay but i'm at home. come pick me up. And then, a moment later. danny's at work.

making me leave my comfy chair...good thing i like u

Kavinsky was already unfurling from the chair and leaving the studio, locking up behind himself as he headed to his car. He dumped his phone in the console and headed off, navigating easily enough off toward Alex and Darlington's place.

When he arrived, he slid out of the car and just leaned against it, waiting for her to come out and join him. He fished his cigarette case out of his jacket pocket and popped one of the black paper spliffs between his lips to light up.

By the time he pulls into the driveway, Alex has twisted her wet hair up into a knot on top of her head and pulled a soft black sweater on with her jeans and boots. She clatters out onto the front steps, pulling the front door shut behind her and turning her key in the lock.

"Where we going, sugartits?"

"Might just drive around a bit, now you've gotten me out," he said with a lazy shrug. He circled back around the car and slid into the driver's seat, starting it up, turning the music up so it was a noisy concert of bass and vibration and drowning out everything else.

The smoke of his cigarette quickly filled the car, pungent but not unpleasant in that sharp, clove and marijuana way. He fished his altoids tin out and put it on the dash in front of the passenger seat, in case Alex wanted a bump of something too.

Settled into the passenger seat, Alex states at the altoid tin for a long time, warring with herself for a long moment about how much she wants to open it.

"He won't forgive me twice," she says.

"Suit yourself," Kavinsky said, but he didn't move the case from where it seemed content to stick to the dashboard as if they were in a high-octane vehicle, hurtling around like Kavinsky had never learned to have a care for himself or others.

Truthfully, this was him with a modicum of preservation. But in a sports car, you just had to go fast.

"He gonna get tetchy if you smell like smoke?" His grin was sharp, feral, a little teasing. "You can point his complaints at me, I don't mind."

"I barely stopped him going to the cops after the fentanyl," she says, staring out of the window for a long moment. "But smoking's okay. Weeds okay, too. It's the hard stuff he hates." She shrugs. "You can't really blame him."

Kavinsky rolled his eyes expansively. He wasn't afraid of the cops any more here in Darrow than he ever had been in Virginia, but he wasn't about to get into that.

"Oh, I absolutely can blame him, but that's probably shitty of me, right?" He shrugged one shoulder, propping his elbow against the window with his fingers loose on the steering wheel.

"I'll get over it someday." He shrugged again. "Probably when he stops being shitty at me."

"Maybe a little bit shitty," she says, leaning her head against the window. "I did nearly kill myself." That hadn't been Kavinsky's fault, either; she'd taken enough drugs in her life that she should have known what she was doing when she took that fentanyl and went under. "But, yeah, I know. He's pretty unreasonable where you're concerned. He's better than he used to be about that, but he's not changing his mind about you."

"I don't expect him too," Kavinsky said. Most people didn't, and he'd been given a great gift in Darrow that there weren't too many people left that remembered the layers of his shittiness over the years. Newt and Blue were about it, any more.

Kavinsky didn't really know where he was driving, but he was, inevitably, drawn toward the forest.

"Wanna see a dream in action?"

Alex knows a little about Kavinsky's dreaming but she's never seen him do it. She thinks about it for a moment. She probably ought to know better, but she also thinks that he wouldn't knowingly put her in danger.

"Sure," she says.

"Good," Kavinsky said with the sort of shark grin that fit more on the boy he'd been when he arrived in Darrow than the young man he'd grown into over the last five years. "Otherwise you'd have to get out and walk."

Kavinsky didn't really know how the forest would react to Alex's magic--or whatever they wanted to call what she did. Probably, they didn't need to go all the way out to the forest. But he could pull the pieces together out there, could let things fall into place more easily. And it was more interactive for someone that wasn't in the dream with him, anyway, since the whole place was already sort of a dream. No need to sleep, he could just call things to them.

But it was more fun not to tell her any of that. Maybe he'd be struck by inspiration if he kept things a surprise.

"You wouldn't do that to me and you know it," says Alex, rolling her eyes at him but smiling too. "I don't think that I really knew how pretty it was out here until we moved out to Black Elm."

"It's not bad," Kavinsky said. He was slowing down now, looking for the specific pull off he always used so he could hike out to where the forest sat in the rest of Darrow's regular outlying forestry.

"I'd say I grew up in cities, but I fuckin' didn't. Henrietta wasn't a fuckin' city, and I spent almost a third my life there. But it was in the Blue Mountains, so we had all this...nature shit, you know?" He shrugged his shoulder and pulled off at the dirt shoulder he wanted, killing the engine on the car. "I guess it wasn't so bad. Just small town bullshit, and that makes everything worse."

"I grew up in L.A," says Alex, lifting her head and raising both hands and pulling her hair back into a knot on her crown as he slows the car. "Well. Van Nuys, so the fucking valley. New Haven was a fucking trip."

"I mean, that's also, like, going from palm trees and highways to fuckin' old school redbrick, that's a different sort of thing altogether. One of my boys back home was from SoCal, and when his folks and he moved out, he was like, what the fuck sort of Deliverance shit am I living in now?"

He tossed his phone and wallet into the center console, because once they got into the forest, the phone wasn't going to work anyway. He shoved his keys into his jacket pocket and unfurled from the driver's seat, the smoke from his spliff finally exhuming from the inside of the car along with him as he stretched in a series of joint crackles and soft, contented noises.

"C'mon, slowpoke. It's nature time."

"Fucking nature," says Alex, rolling her eyes as she hauls herself up out of the car. She shoves her hands into his pockets. "Is it...supposed to feel different out here?" She can't put her finger on it, but there's something, definitely; these woods feel different from the ones around Black Elm.

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everything zen - I don't think so [for Alex]

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