2019-05-31 - & A Cherry On Top

A lot of people probably left the theater pretty confused and angry and whatever. They got fucked with, it was awful, everyone is all dazed and wounded, et cetera. The walk home for these two was probably among the least angsty, all things considered, since Emily can do the shieldy thing and Logan can do the burny thing. They got a couple zaps and zings, but it's not like they need to go the hospital or whatever.

Which is why, swinging through the door in the immediate aftermath of that chaos, Emily can say with a shrug, "That really could have gone a lot worse." She didn't take an arrow to the knee, but she got a good graze across her bicep and is eyeing it while she nudges the door closed with her foot. "I mean, it wasn't my favorite Macbeth ever, but I've seen worse, for sure. Can you fix this?" Her arm, she means.

It is a strange day when these two could be considered the least angsty of the bunch, but this was probably an 'up' point on the bell-curve that is their life, even with the murderplay. Logan fidgets with a burn hole in his one good collar shirt, where the wicked witch with the flame hands had lobbed a fireball his way. It could've gone a lot worse. At least this means he didn't have to get dressed up to go anywhere ever again - Sorry, Em, I don't got the good clothes!

But his head hurts and his brain feels swimmy; it's been a long time since someone's gotten into his mind, and this many attempts in such quick succession was taking its toll on him. To say he wasn't 'all here' was perhaps an understatement, and those haunted blue eyes of his stare at her for a long time as though he were seeing right through her before he registers what Emily was saying at all. "What?" Can he fix this? "Oh. Uh.. yeah. Sure." There was some hesitance, but he lays his hand across her bicep and breathes out.

The flesh knits itself back together again easily, leaving just a faint pinkened sliver. It was like she hadn't even gotten hurt at all. "That was a fucking tragedy." Duh.

To say that Emily's surprised by the impact this has had on Logan would be an understatement. Like, the whole five minutes it takes to walk from the theater to the house? She obviously just assumed he was fine, because she's fine, and it's only when she's locking the front door and they're in here with the light that she stops, frowning with a head-tilt, to notice that he's not as fine as she is. At least she doesn't immediately start calling him names for not just taking it like a man, geez, so yes; it's a peak, not a valley. "Are you okay?" Genuine concern isn't her forte, but she tries to make sure it comes across as something other than accusatory.

Especially since he's nice enough to fix her arm for her, which saves the effort of stealing money out of his wallet to pay for Band-Aids. "Yeah, I can't tell if you're trying to be funny or not right now." She squints at him, trying to discern this while she goes around turning on all the lights in the whole downstairs. Electric bills for days!

There's a noticeable knit to his brow, but he tries to focus on the situation at hand - her arm, and then the fact that she's turning every fucking light on down here - before he responds to her question. She goes around turning all the lights on, and he goes around turning over half of them off, before he finds some balance between ALL THE ELECTRICITY and none of it, folding his arms over his chest. "No," he finally answers her question, then flinches when the word comes out of his mouth. "I mean, yes." Because he's a fucking man. It's abruptly followed by the truth: "I don't know." And that's when he sinks into the nearest chair and shoves his fingers through his hair.

"She was in my head," his voice is low, quiet. "The one that was staying here? She wanted me to make people suffer. She said They'd leave us the fuck alone," his hands drop to his lap and he drops his gaze with it, watching as he flexes his fingers. "This town was always fucking deranged but this is.. beyond insanity."

Emily looks at one of the lights he turned off. To her credit, she waits till Logan is sitting down with his back to that one in particular before she turns it back on from across the room, like maybe he won't notice and domestic tranquility will continue to reign supreme. (But then why turn it back on in the first place, Emily?) Anyway, all that happens quickly in the background, leaving her with plenty of time to look surprised and confused at the honest answer to his okay-ness... then the about face... then the middle ground.

"Tonight?" Of all that stuff 'she' said about 'Them,' leaving her blinking while she half-sits, half-leans against the arm of Logan's chair, patting him on the shoulder helpfully. "I think that was kind of their whole bit? Like, we were supposed to turn on each other and offer up some kind of sacrifice?"

It was probably a good thing that the only way that Logan was going to shut that light off again was by breaking it. He feels the glow on his back and it tightens his jaw, but he manages to keep his mouth shut about it. One lamp, it was one lamp. The pat to his shoulder wasn't very helpful though - which is why, when she sits on the arm of the chair, that he wraps his arm about her and pulls her over onto his lap. "Yeah. Tonight," and he thinks about lying and leaving it at that.

"And the other morning. The last morning she was here," he admits finally through gritted teeth. "You were gone. And she wouldn't fucking stop. And that's why I told her to leave." His whole expression is troubled.

How could it not be helping? Emily's shoulder-pats are totally awesome, though! She gives him one more, just in a show of generosity, and also because it helps make sure she doesn't fall off during the shift from the arm of the chair to Logan's lap. She gets halfway through heel-toeing off her shoes, one of them hitting the floor with a muffled thump and the other still hanging on to her foot, when he decides to tell the truth, and she opens her mouth with a quick retort. "Why didn't you - " But that's not the point, so she inhales and leaves that unfinished.

A little warily, "You don't believe her." She finishes with the shoes, the other one drops, and she knuckles the side of his chin, like she can make him stop grinding his teeth if she just pokes him in the jaw a few times. "Right?"

Another day, another time, and Logan would totally appreciate that shoulder pat and it would absolutely be awesome and make everything better. But what was helping now was Emily's ass in his lap, the weight of her against him, and the smell of her hair when he leans in to nuzzle his nose there and inhale. She doesn't finish the thought, but he answers it anyway: "Because you were gone. And by the time you got back? We had bigger things to worry about," like her not being okay. Because of where she'd been.

But that question that she finishes, that doesn't have an immediate answer. His brows twitch, and he leans back with a longer sigh, looking up to the ceiling. "I think it's pretty fucking obvious now that that's not how shit works. That .. it doesn't fucking matter what you do or who or what you give them, they're just gonna want more," and that was the God honest, bone deep truth. His eyes drop to her own, dark blue. So troubled. "So I know that. I do. And I know you'd never fucking forgive me for hurting somebody else to try and save you."

"Okay." That's Emily letting him off the hook for not sharing his angst with her, though the ripple of trouble it pushes across her forehead should suffice to convey how narrowly he dodged this particular bullet. When he leans back, she leans forward, tucking in with her feet wedged in between his legs and the arm of the chair, finding the new burn-hole in his shirt with her finger and making it worse by fiddling with it. The shirt was already ruined, right? 'Cause, if not, it definitely is now.

She peeks up to catch his eyes when he looks down, nodding a vigorous little bob of her head at that. Slowly, "Don't let that dumb bitch make you hurt about this, Logan. You did the right thing. You're not a villain. Okay?" She wriggles her finger in the shirt-hole, scritchyscritching his skin through it. "Those people are just fucked up. In waaaay worse ways than we're fucked up."

They could wear their troubled brows together; he leans to press a kiss in the center of her wrinkles, and then touches his own brow to the side of her head. He shifts to make room for her feet and cinches his arms more firmly about her, all too aware of the hole she was widening in his shirt. But he doesn't mind; in fact, he helps make it worse, mentally pulling out a few more threads. "I always hated this shirt," he remarks. Too bad he burned his only other nice one, the one he wore at Lucy's funeral.

He angles back when she looks up at him, his lips pulling into a deeper frown. It's only somewhat relaxed by the wriggle of her fingers, the feel of her nails against his skin. "I don't know," he admits. "I didn't do anything, but that didn't stop me from thinking about it. 'Cause Em, I.." There's a hard swallow. "I'd never hurt anybody else, but I'd let them tear me apart if I thought I could save you. And I don't know if that makes me better or worse." He manages to snort a dry laugh with his next words: "Don't worry though, I know you don't wanna be white knighted like that."

"I know. God forbid you own clothes that don't look like you found them in a dumpster." Not that Emily's a fashion plate, but she has to go outside enough that she's got, like, a small but reliable wardrobe. She probably shouldn't be picking on him while she's absolutely sitting here, digging around in the hole, only dimly aware that he's helping. Like, she could try to figure out that he's unraveling threads? But she doesn't care. It's just something to do, now hanging her finger in the hole and tugging on it idly.

"That's really." She frowns at him. This is not a compliment. "Romantic. Of you. But yeah." The white-knight thing. "Plus, it's exactly what you said. It wouldn't end there, anyway. If you were gone, I'd be." She rips that hole a little bigger, tug tug. "Ruined." She peers into the hole, pulling it over to her eye and looking through it for no reason. "So no martyring yourself, okay? I kind of need you a lot."

"I'm not going to stop you if you want to get me new clothes," Logan remarks, not about to get defensive of his shitty clothes while she's sitting in his lap. Besides, he was trying to have a deep conversation with her dammit. The wrinkles in his brow deepens as she frowns at him - and he frowns right back. "Romance is my middle name," says the guy who doesn't buy her flowers, but would sacrifice himself to dark forces for her own well-being. Super romantic. That's Logan.

He has more to say, but the sudden peek of her eye through the hole they made in his shirt catches him off-guard. Words are swallowed and out comes a bark of a laugh, steadily deepening into a rolling chuckle. "I love you," he says, because those are the only words that matter in the moment, and he brushes the shirt away from her face to cup her cheeks into his hands, turning her face up to his own so that he can plant a kiss against her lips.

Emily, so seriously while she's still peering around in the shirt, "Oh, I know." That his middle name is Romance. "You've pretty much swept me off my feet the past few days, going to the park and the boardwalk and a play?" She sounds totally impressed with all his romantic ability to walk out the front door sometimes - even if the park wasn't an intentional 'together' outing and the play sort of turned into a nightmare. "Romantic Logan obviously killed Hermit Logan and - "

Whichever Logan got all schmoopy and kissed her gets rewarded with a kiss back, and she hooks her shirt-free arm around his shoulders amid the gesture, kind of combining a hug into the same gesture. With a follow-up peck, she notes, "I'm not gonna get you new clothes. I'm waiting this out. If you ruin them all, you won't have anything to wear. Which is sort of an ideal situation." She can't quite tear his shirt off with one arm around his shoulders, but rest assured; it's coming to that. "For me. Might be weird for your guests, but it might also be a selling point? Handsome proprietor cooks nude?"

"Whoa now, Romantic Logan does not kill. Romantic Logan just handcuffed Hermit Logan to the bed in the basement, so you could do dirty things to him later," mumbles Incredibly Romantic Logan against the weight of her lips. And she can't quite tear his shirt off with her arm around his shoulders anymore than he could tear it off with his arms around her waist... but the shirt has definitely got to go. So if hole gets bigger and new tears form while he curves her against him and sinks into her lips, it's only because he wants to make her dreams come true. "My dick might be too big to risk standing in front of an open flame but we could try it and see if it brings in more people?" he jokes against her mouth, and sneaks his fingers underneath the hem of her shirt, dragging up along her spine.

"We don't have guests tonight," he adds, pulling at her bottom lip with his teeth before he fits his lips to hers again, lingering with intent. "Maybe we'll keep hermit Logan down there, and you can do dirty things to Romantic Logan up here." A first.

The filament in the light bulb behind them snaps, snuffing out the glow. Surely, it was just the result of an old bulb that Logan needs to fix later.

AND THEN THEY WONDER WHY THEY KEEP GETTING FUCKED WITH. Oh well. At least Emily doesn't break the lights. She just turns a couple of them off. So maybe the neighbors won't see everything going on in here, 'cause she still doesn't know how to use the remote control that closes the blinds on the front window (plus someone stole the batteries out of that thing). Anyway, the point is: if they quit using their abilities for stupid things like sexytimes, they'd probably be much happier people who wouldn't have to contemplate deals with devils just to get by.

"Okay, but Romantic Logan better wait here a minute. Because all of the Emilys that live in this house know that Housekeeper Logan bought ice cream, and we're absolutely about to make a huge mess in your living room." She drags what's left of his shirt off before she climbs off his lap, shaking a stern finger at him to reiterate, "Wait." And there's a trail of clothes left between the kitchen and back, because if Emily is getting to fool around somewhere other than the basement? She's going all-in, right down to, "And chocolate syrup!"

That's how you get ants.