2019-03-05 - Supply Run

The internet says it takes twenty-one days for something to become a habit. So this can't be habit yet. But it's a rhythm after a couple of days: wake up, go through the motions of whatever Logan's life is like now, sit outside and read in the rare moments that the weather cooperates, sometimes bite nails and stare off into the middle distance worriedly, try not to talk about the big things in case it makes them sit up and take notice, work very hard not to make judgey eyes at the drinking (and turn a blind eye to whatever else), pretend it's normal to sleep in the same (water)bed as your widowed brother-in-law, rinse, repeat.

After four or five days of this, Emily comes in from one of the 'sit outside and read' spells, thumbnail rubbing along the pages of her paperback to make them flipflipflip against each other with a rippy sound, filtering toward where Logan is doing Logan-things - fixing something? "Did you know vitamin D deficiency can lead to hair loss?"

The internet was full of liars, take it with a grain of salt. Either that or Logan just develops habits faster than normal people, because that's what this was for him. What Emily was to him now. A routine, something he got familiar with far too quickly, something to cling to in the middle of the night but he was asleep so it was okay. In those four or five days, he was as used to her there in his peripheral as the ghost that taunts him, a presence that he'd ultimately feel empty without. But much like Lucy's ghost, Emily was a bad habit to make.

He was up on a stool in the kitchen, tools scattered haphazardly across the counter. One of the cabinet doors was loose and it was his job to fix it. So there he was, screwdriver in hand, dressed in a pair of worn jeans and a t-shirt, casting a look over his shoulder to squint at her and her paperback as she comes into the kitchen. "They make stuff for that," he says simply, matter-of-factly. "Multivitamins or whatever. We can go down to the pharmacy later and pick something up."

Emily fucks with the tools, because they're there. The paperback sits among them for now, and she moves them around, initially with no apparent rhyme or reason, but then makes it starts to work out from smallest-to-largest. Mostly, this just makes noise in the background, metal-noise and wood-noise and countertop-noise. The thing they make for that? "Yeah, it's called sunshine?" They live in the Pacific Northwest, so she should probably get over herself, but still. "So I'm gonna walk to the pharmacy." She looks up, eyeing Logan's occupation, eyeing Logan. "The news said the sun is going to come out for an hour."

There's a flicker of a glance towards his tools as she starts to fuck with them, the faintest twinge of annoyance seen in the tightening of his jaw. But it's gone in another instant, as he refocuses on the task at hand, circling the screw into the hole. "You live in the wrong place for sunshine, Em," is a pre-programmed response, as he tests the swing of the door to make sure the screws weren't too tight. Satisfied, he closes the door, and hops off the stool. "Did the news say if it was an entire consecutive hour, or will it be one of those five minute peeks spread through the day? We can walk if you want. Just bring the umbrella."

"I know," that she lives in the wrong place, but she shrugs about that; what're you gonna do. Emily's definitely aware that she's irritating him, but she keeps doing it anyway, because she can't give up halfway through. All the way down to an Allen wrench, there's always an Allen wrench, and she lines it up in the space in front of the stool he just quit. Ta-dah. "I tried to move somewhere sunny once. It didn't work." He knows that story.

"Okay," about the umbrella. She pivots on her heel and walks off to do that. She meant right now . She gets her coat, too, and his coat.

She forgot about the screwdriver, still wielded in his hand. Logan casts a look back to his tools, all lined up in a pretty row, and then back to the organizer herself. His brows go up - it was not a comment on her attempts to live somewhere in the sun, but rather the way she so abruptly turns to get the umbrella. "Em, I still gotta.." he starts, and then finishes with a sigh, tossing his screwdriver onto the counter. It goes bouncing over the other tools, tumbling through the line she made; the Allen wrench drops to the floor with a metallic clatter. He'll get it later - or maybe her new-found OCD will make her straighten it up for him.

"Sunshine is overrated, you know," he says as he fetches his slicker off the hook by the door. "You go somewhere else, and you end up missing the rain."

Emily could psychic it right back onto the counter for him, but she doesn't. Maybe she doesn't know about it, or maybe she's just onto other things already, neglecting to listen to what he's still gotta do. Coat, umbrella, quick glance out the window to make sure it's not raining right this second - it's not - and she's out the door, waiting under the eaves while he's talking about missing the rain. "You know what's not overrated? A full head of hair." She looks at Logan's hairline - no, she squints at Logan's hairline, then lifts her brows like the situation is kinda dire up there, and wheeeeeels on around to put her feet to the sidewalk.

She needs to work on not sounding like she wants to fight him all the time, it's true. "When have you ever gone somewhere else?"

Logan sticks his sleeves through his slicker but leaves it unbuttoned; it might not be raining right now but the threat of rain was still on the horizon and in the scent of the air. He follows her out the door regardless, meeting her stare up to his hairline with a flat, unamused expression. "I could shave my head bald and no one would even bat an eye," he remarks. The beauty of being a man, perhaps. Yet when she wheels around, he sneaks fingers through the hair on the top of his head, just a quick swipe through.

His hand drops into his pocket afterward, a brief focus on the sidewalk disappearing beneath his feet as he follows her out onto the sidewalk. "I've been to other places. We took that road trip down to San Fran once," though the we in this situation was most certainly not him and Emily, even if he was talking like she should remember. "Went to Disney, too. Practically the sunshine capital of America, Disneyland."

"We can get razors at the drug store." Emily pauses at the edge of the sidewalk, watching a car roll down the street, turn the corner, disappear out of sight. "I'll help you." Shave his head, she means. Really, is it any less safe to let her attack his head with a razor than to let him do it himself? She falls into a step off the curb, crossing the street before they get to the dog that barks at everything .

She stops halfway across the street, in the middle of the street, and fortunately it's a quiet midday so there's not likely to be a big traffic jam. She could just let it go, but "No, we didn't." That's all. She starts walking again. "Did you buy mouse ears?"

"I'm not letting you Bic my head," is the knee-jerk response, an immediate shut-down of her offer. "I take a multi-vitamin every day. I'm not losing my hair, I think I would know if I was losing my hair," he pauses at the corner to let the car go by, before he steps out onto the street with her. When she stops in the middle of it, he continues on, turning to walk backwards and stare at her as though she's lost her mind.

"Summer 2015, we still had the yellow Volkswagen," Lucy had a thing for Beetles, "We stopped for the night at Shasta-Trinity, we put down the seats and slept in the backseat. Don't you remember the pictures? It's like you could see the whole galaxy at night," he frowns, then turns on his heel to continue on his way, his other hand shoved into his pocket. "Of course we bought mouse ears. I spent almost a hundred dollars on those stupid thigns."

Emily's judgey eyes look at his forehead again, stay there while he insists things about vitamins and hair-loss, and there's so much argument in the lack of her argument that she's pretty sure she wins the argument.

She opens her mouth to do it again, too, to argue her case about this whole thing 'we' did, but this time there's not even an argument made in the lack of pursuit. If he doesn't get it, she doesn't make him. She just shades her eyes with her hand against the sun for a second, then drops it and makes the sun hit her right in the face, trotting up onto the opposite sidewalk a yard or two behind him now. "Oh good. You'll need something to keep your head warm." When she shaves it. She smiles; it says she's sorry, Logan, but this is just how it has to be.

Logan's got his focus on the sidewalk, watching his sneakers eat up the pock-marks and dips. He doesn't see the judgey-eyes, but he feels them like a thousand ton weight on the back of his head. It makes his shoulders tense, the sag less prominent as he draws them back, squares them. Resolute. Except for the fact that he reluctantly accepts her plan with a mumbled: "Whatever." He takes his hand out of his pocket long enough to sweep his fingers through his hair again, perhaps to capture it in a memory. "I don't know where the damn things are anymore. Probably the attic," the room where he never goes, where he and Lucy used to sleep. "I've got hats," he says after a moment, lifting his gaze to lock on her and the sorry smile she's wearing. "I get to shave yours, too? What's good for the goose.."

"I'll find them." Let Emily loose in the attic. She'll break everything.

She stops walking for a second during that eye-lock, hooking a brow upward, a brief stall between one step and the next. "Okay," she comes back with, like she's totally that cavalier about all that hair. She takes a page out of his book, though there's more effort on her part, since she unknots the messy-bun it lives in these days, shakes it loose, pushes it forward over her face till she's a gingery Cousin It, the shape of her face only just visible beneath the carrot-colored curtain. "Scissors. Razors. Vitamins. We should throw in zip ties and coloring books to see if we can make the cashier blink at us," while she spits out some hair and walks again.

"No. You won't," is the response, immediate and firm. There was no argument in his tone. It was not a suggestion that she wouldn't be able to find them. Simply that she wasn't allowed. And he continues to walk.

Until she stops, that is, and he slows in his own step and wheels about again to face her. "Why do you keep stopping?" There was mild annoyance in the question, until she unravels her hair from the bun and lets it over her face. That earns a silent stare .. and the sudden crack of a grin, a real grin, upon his face. As rare as the sunshine in Gray Harbor, it was almost uncomfortable; as strange and alien a thing as the laughter that follows, rumbling there in his chest at her joke about the zip ties. "Gotta get the Flintstones vitamins if you want a real reaction," he quips. "Do they even still sell those?"

From behind her hair, Emily goes, "Hmmmm," and doesn't answer why she keeps stopping. Though probably 'wearing her hair like a mask' plays into it somewhat, because it's not easy to walk like that, and she has to spend excessive amounts of time watching where her sneakers land. Maybe she smiles under there while Logan laughs, but she's committed now (and should be, to a padded room), so it stays hidden. But her voice is less sharp-edged after. "Now don't you wish you'd let me shave your head already?"

A skinhead and a disheveled Cousin It walk into a pharmacy...

"Ask them if you can buy ether over the counter. I dare you."

There's an old-fashioned bell above the door that goes 'ding!' as Logan shoves it open. He lets Carrot-top-Cousin-It in first, and he follows behind, rolling his eyes at her dare. Yet there was a laugh that follows them in like a breeze, faint but deep from the belly. I dare you she said. This was a bad idea. He knows everybody here.

"Afternoon, Logan," comes a voice from behind the counter, a middle-aged woman in a white coat who's been here forever. Part cashier, part pharmacist, she holds a startled sound in when she sees the redhead that accompanies him, her hand going up to her throat. She turns as white as a ghost, really.

"Hey, Mary. You remember Emily, right?" He plunks an elbow on the counter, pretending not to notice the wide-eyes that this woman was casting in Emily's direction. "I'm working on this project up at the house. You got any ether you can sell me, over the counter?"

Emily blows some of the hair off her face once her name's been dropped, then - from somewhere - dredges up a socially correct smile. Or, well, as socially correct a smile as exists under the circumstances, while she parts her hair down the middle with both hands, peeling it back like curtains to save Mary from having a heart attack, tucking it behind her ears and revealing her face. No, dear, it's not Lucy back from the dead, just the other one. She says, "Hi, Mary," and chokes on a laugh at Logan.

So she doesn't have to look at this, so she doesn't ruin it with laughing, she goes looking for supplies . Chewable vitamins for kids. No zip-ties, not at the pharmacy, but latex gloves seem like a good alternative, she snags a box. They do have one ancient coloring book, sun-faded, on a forgotten bottom-shelf, so she takes that. Hmmmmm, a box of condoms. And, oh look, here's a map on sale from the Forestry Service. She clutches these things to her chest in a mess, she makes her way back to the counter and drops them there.

"Oh.. I. Yes. Of course it is. Emily." This is from Mary, who flutters a hand in front of her face and attaches a similarly socially correct smile to her face. The color will return to her cheeks momentarily, probably, but not before her eyebrows spike at the question. "Ether? I.. No, I don't think.." she stumbles through the words, mostly because of the items that Emily proceeds to drop upon the counter.

But wait. "You forgot something," Logan grumbles, looking completely put off before he turns and trudges down the aisle. It's there, away from Mary's prying eyes, that he can let that grin crack through again, wiping it away with a swipe of his palm over his mouth before he picks up a bottle of KY and holds it aloft. "Mary, you got any bigger bottles of this stuff in the back?"

Emily repeats to Mary, in a low but important voice, "I forgot something." Is it razors? Because she did forget razors. Pooh. She stands there, in a coat that doesn't fit her, with her hair wrecked from the performance on the walk here, with this sordid shopping list scattered on the counter in front of the pharmacist who has seen neither hide-nor-hair of her since she was skulking around town (while under scrutiny for possibly helping her brother-in-law murder her sister), and she smiles like this is all perfectly normal.

When Logan comes back, though, she has to turn her back on Mary, leaning her elbows behind her on the counter, directing her attention over there. Also keeping Mary from seeing the amused brightness in her expression - as opposed to the insane brightness in it. "It's too bad they close the ice cream counter all winter," she muses aloud, as if apropos of nothing. Nothing at all.

"I guess we can always just buy a few," Logan remarks of the lube, collecting all the little bottles of KY on the shelf and tucking them into the crook of his elbow. He swipes an empty squirt bottle for good measure, and a box of Gilette's on his way back to the counter, spilling it out onto the collection that Emily's already amassed. "Remember when they used to sell the pretzel cones?" he remarks of the ice cream counter, before he glances down to the items.

"Really?" He picks up the box of Trojans, aiming a frown in Emily's direction. "These aren't magnums," he sighs at her, and tosses the box back. CATCH! "Trade 'em out."

Leaning on both elbows makes it hard to catch things that come her way out of the blue, so the box sails her way, hits her in the rain-coat, and lands on the floor at her feet with a cardboard-on-tile clap . In a small voice that Mary can definitely hear, Emily says sulkily, "But I thought you said you'd try, even though they pinch. For me." Still, she doubles over and swipes the box off the floor, putting it back on the counter before she goes back for the big guns. "Do you think flavored, then?"

They don't have flavored condoms at this little drugstore, alas, so she gets Tic Tacs as a fall-back. They clatter noisily when she tosses them and the magnums among this mess. "We'll be paying cash, Mary."

Logan can't look at Emily; if he did, the jig would be up and he'd lose it. So instead, he trains his focus on the antique cash register, and presses his tongue between his molars. He bites down hard enough to keep the smile off his face. "I changed my mind. I don't want to cut off the circulation and have it fall off," he hisses back a response to that small voice of hers, while Mary looks onto the both of them, caught somewhere between confusion and disgust. This was going to be the talk of the town for the next two weeks, how Logan dragged his dead wife's sister turned new lover into the pharmacy to purchase goodies for their weekend tryst.

"So no ether then?" he asks of Mary, rolling his eyes slowly up to her, brows steadily lifting. He doesn't blink. "What about lye?" The box of big boy condoms comes clattering atop the bottles of lube, and he reaches into his pants to pull out his wallet. "I guess we can always go to the hardware store next. I need a new shovel anyway," he decides. But before he's ready to cough up the cash? He snags a box of strawberry flavored bubblegum, tossing it among the mess that Mary is ringing up. He flicks a glance down to Emily. "And some duct tape."

Emily breathes out through her nose, like she's so disgusted with Logan that she needs that long exhale to set herself right again. "Coward," is the withering word for a man who won't let the circulation be cut off; she passes a look across the counter to Mary for back-up on this, long-suffering. No ether? "That's a problem," she says, and makes oooooone more trip down an aisle, leaving Logan there to pony up the dough. She returns with NyQuil capsules, putting it down at the same time that Logan's adding strawberry gum. "Great minds."

She'll just take that bag full of evidence, Mary, and say, "You've been very helpful." Then nod gravely (get it? *grave*ly?) about the hardware store, just going all in here by slipping an arm around Logan while he talks of duct tape and shovels and lye, tilting her still-mussed head into his shoulder dreamily. "And a longer garden hose, new pinking shears, we should have made a list." Maybe they'll even get in the paper at this rate.

Logan snorts through his nose, likely in an effort to stifle a laugh, but the effect makes him sound irritated rather than good-humored. "You mean smart. Once it falls off, you can't put it back on again. Isn't that right, Mary?" The question is posed as he shells out the money .. and then a little extra for the NyQuil capsules that get added to the pile. He doesn't even tense when Emily's arm slinks around him; she'd note the way he settles unconsciously, leaning at the hip into her. "Right, well. We better hurry then, it'll be midnight before we know it. Have a good one, Mary," he throws a wave and then settles his hand on the small of Emily's back, guiding her out the door and pulling it shut behind him.

He'll get about two steps away from the pharmacy's door before he bursts into laughter, having to stop to bend over at the waist. It hurt to laugh like this, but he couldn't stop either. "Jesus, the look on her face!"

Emily says softly, as if this is for Logan's ears alone and not intentionally loud enough for Mary to hear it, "What do you think the garden hose is for?" She makes sure the door is extra-shut, shoo-shooing Logan away from it so no one comes along and sees them dissolving and ruins the whole thing. For extra safety, she pops open the umbrella and turns her back to the street, shielding them from any prying eyes that might want to know they're not actually planning... whatever that made it look like they were planning.

The bag gets lowered to her feet for a moment, collapsing down upon itself so the contents are partially visible, colorful boxes and tubes. And she laughs, the good kind of tears sliding out of the corners of her eyes in the process. For a while, that's all, just laughs and occasionally toe-nudges that bag. Finally, she bends down and gets out the gum and gives him some, knocking him in the face, then the abdomen, then the knees with the umbrella during this process. Then again in reverse when she straightens back up. "The next time it's not raining, we have to go to the hardware store," for an encore. Here, eat some gum.

It was a good thing that Emily was such a quick thinker and hides them behind the umbrella; inconsiderate Logan certainly wasn't putting any thought towards keeping up appearances. There were tears springing in the corners of his eyes, laughter tempered only somewhat by the repeated knocks of the umbrella into various body parts. "Goddamn, you're murderous with this thing," he chuckles, swatting the umbrella the second time it smacks him in the abdomen, pushing it outward so it doesn't bump him in the chin again.

The gum helps slow the laughter into something more of a trickle than a flood. It occurs to him then, as he's unwrapping his piece and folding it onto his tongue: "I don't think I've laughed like that in.. so long," the chuckle that ends those words is far more dry. The words that follow are quieter. "Makes me almost feel normal." There's a subtext there, an unsaid thanks felt in his tone.

"Ah!" The wind almost gets the umbrella when Logan swats it, and Emily does lose a gum-wrapper during the ensuing struggle. The scrap of paper goes running down the sidewalk, and she has to chase it about six feet - which really means that Logan is just likely to get popped in the face one extra time, that'll teach him - before she stomps it under her sneaker. Re-folding the umbrella, she collects the errant litter, puts it in her pocket, and comes back over to pick up the bag full of their stuff, just in time for Logan to start sobering up.

One last pass of her fingers under her eyes, one last sniff at the laugh-tears, and Emily regains her composure. But a good laugh leaves a mark, and there's color in her face that's been missing in the gray days since she turned up on his doorstep. She nods at what he says and what he doesn't, tilting her head along the sidewalk, the way they came. "I might," slowly, as if falteringly, as if this is about to get DARK again, "still," she even swallows a lump in her throat, "shave your head," whisper, "while you're asleep." Her brows twitch in a challenge at him, since she has the bag full of NyQuil and razors.

"Jesus fuck, ow," That last smack to the face with the umbrella leaves him rubbing at the scruff on his chin, and he backs off to let her chase her litter while mumbling something under his breath about her being a dirty hippie. It seems she wasn't the only one affected by that good laugh; his eyes were a little brighter, far more blue than gray, and the corners of his mouth still turned upward in a subtle crinkle. He falls into step to make the walk back to the house, but his shoulders don't sag quite so much, and he doesn't even put his hands in his pockets. Maybe they'd make it back with no dark clouds looming.

The challenge is met with a lift of his chin and a hint of sparkle to his eyes. "I guess we'll just have to see which one of us falls asleep first," he remarks, reaching over to flip some of her hair back over her eyes. "Come on, Cousin It. Race you back home." He was going to hold onto this moment as long as he could.

Logan rolls Athletics (7 4 4 2 1) vs Emily's Athletics (4 3 2 1)
Marginal Victory for logan