2020-02-25 - Blurry

It's another one of those days -- that is, the one where Magnolia has zero clients and Lark is spending the night at a friend's house and Kevin is pulling a late night at the Record. So, that means there's nothing else to do but sit in her office in her Reindeer PJs -- because Christmas in February (forget that it's almost March) is a thing. She has her fuzzy feet on the desk, and is casually cleaning out a pint of Chunky Monkey ice cream while streaming the second Hobbit movie on Netflix.

She has totally forgotten that she sent Levi a text like a few hours ago reporting on her state of loneliness and boredom, so his inevitable appearance will be a fun surprise.

And lo and behold, here Levi is! In the flesh! One assumes, anyway. Considering the goings-on with the two of them and other members of their family, it's not totally a given, but Magnolia will just have to trust precedent. There's a cursory knock on the door, but her brother does not wait for any reply before he opens the door, and when he opens it, there's a moment where he just takes in her appearance.

"Waiting on a meeting with Santa's elves to try and figure out who kidnapped Rudolph?" he guesses with a little smirk as he starts further inside.

The cursory knock and then the opening door has her almost biting on the spoon in her mouth in surprise. She tucks her feet almost immediately off the desk, leaving Levi with just a little flash of those fuzzy slippers. Then he's delivering his quip, and his sister snorts a short breath that includes a low, "Ha. Ha. Ha."

She drops the spoon into the almost-empty pint container. "Look, what's the point of spending like twenty bucks on PJs that you only wear for, at most, 25 days? It's a waste." She then throws out her arms wide, leaning back a bit more in her chair as she does. "You're just jealous, because you never gonna be me, Oliver Jones." But then, she flops forward and pushes her chair back. "Um. Forgot I texted you." Beat. "Want some Spaghetti-Os?"

Levi grins, coming over to sit in the chair across from her and leaning back a little bit. "I mean, do you really want me to answer that?" he counters, but he nods after a moment, conceding the point. "You're right," he says, "I am jealous." It sounds joking, and certainly good-natured, though maybe there's some truth there somewhere.

His eyebrows raise when she admits that she forgot she'd texted, and a little snort of amusement escapes him. "Just what every brother wants to hear from their sister," he remarks, but there's another nod at her question. "That's the best offer I've had all day," he replies, "as sad as that sounds, so yes. Thanks."

Now Magnolia settles into a bit of rueful amusement. "You probably shouldn't be that jealous. I'm out of clean socks." Now she hauls herself up to her feet with a little squeak of the chair, and she steps up to Levi to give his shoulder a bit of a passing punch -- a very gentle one. "Look, I love you, but seriously... my brain is so fried lately that I'm lucky there's still functioning brain cells."

She starts to pad past him toward the little archway that leads into the kitchen and thus the rest of the apartment. She moved in with Kevin after New Years, but she still maintains the lease because her job is here. So, now her kitchen is sparse. But there's two cans of Spaghetti-Os. She takes them off the shelf and gets a pot from the cupboard. "Alright, so... we haven't really, um, talked... since the cassette tape..."

"Ew. Maybe don't lead with that one." Levi makes a little bit of a show of ducking away from the 'punch' with a sound of outrage, but obviously it isn't as though it's hurt him, and he laughs a moment later. After a moment, he gets up, too, following her toward the kitchen. He sheds his coat, hanging it neatly on the back of a chair as he passes, and even brushes the shoulders a little bit so that they'll lay flat, but it's an absent gesture, borne of habit rather than any need the coat has to remain unwrinkled. It's a puffer coat, so it isn't likely to do that anyway.

He turns to look at her again as she brings up the tape, and there's a moment of silence that isn't just the incidental silence of moving rooms and taking off coats. "Yeah," he concedes after a moment, "we haven't." He reaches up to scratch his head, taking another moment or two before he adds, "Kind of crazy, right?" It's a non-committal statement if ever there was one. "Do you know what he was talking about?"

"Could of been worse. I could have mentioned I'm also out of -- nope, nevermind." Mags flashes Levi a quick smirk. Now she's getting out a can opener -- the hand-crank kind. Decanting spaghetti-o's is not that much of a to-do. She's got one can open and dumped into the pot before she glances back toward Levi. "Yeah. Crazy." Her lips press together. She starts in on the second can, but Levi's question stops her. "Which part?"

She taps the can-opener on the unopened can. "I've been thinking about it... what he was saying... and then I went over to see Isabella and she told me about something about Movers -- you know, like us and Dad," those who can use the Physical aspect of the Glimmer, "can open Doors to the Other Side. What if this isn't some kind of ghost, or shade, or some fucking Dark Man playing with us. What if he's actually over there, Levi?" She meets Levi's eyes, her own mouth set in a hard line.

Her truncated statement has Levi laughing, even if only a little bit. He's still preoccupied by the other topic, so it's less of a laugh than he might usually have, but still. It's something. It fades when she goes on, and he shrugs, but he doesn't interrupt her, letting her speculate. There's a little bit of doubt in his expression as she does, and his head tips to the side with a thoughtful air.

"Why would he be in there?" he finally says slowly, hesitatingly. "That doesn't make sense, Mags." Why doesn't in make sense? Well, maybe the implications are not something he's able to contemplate now. "I mean, we had his funeral." As though that would negate what she'd said in any way, that by virtue of holding a funeral, he must be dead. He sits back, his face a little whiter than normal as it all sinks in. "What are we supposed to do about it if it is true?"

Magnolia cranks open the second can and dumps it into the pot with an audible glomp. Now she gets out a wooden spoon and starts to stir up the contents even while she heats the burner up under the pot with its vibrant red sauce and O-shaped noodles. "I don't know, Levi." The words seem to answer everything at once, but then she steps aside to lean against the countertop beside the old stovetop. She crosses her arms over the bemused reindeer on her shirt, shuffling her feet a bit.

"If it's true? If he's in there?" She presses her lips together. "Then we go over there and we get him." She glances up to Levi. "Right? If Dad's alive over there, we wouldn't leave him there." There's a tiny hint of plea there that is most unusual in Magnolia's voice. "Right?"

He could have guessed where this was going, but even still, when she says it he still looks surprised. Surprised, and a little pained. He reaches up to rub his forehead with the back of his hand, looking around as though he could find something else to say that would mean they wouldn't have to go searching the Veil for their maybe-dead-but-actually-possibly-not-dead father. Of course, there is nothing to be found, and so he sighs, turning back to his sister.

"Right," he says, a little bit reluctantly, but what else can he say? He does, however, have to add, "How are we supposed to find him?"

The look on Levi's face droops Magnolia's shoulders a bit. She looks aside into the pot of canned pasta, watching it heat. She's quiet for a long moment, letting that silence settle between them before her brother confirms, even a bit reluctantly, that if their dad was in the Veil, they'd go get him. She glances back over to him, and her lips tighten into a little frown. "Isabella seems to think we can actually do it... make a doorway into the Veil. And we know where Dad disappeared, so... maybe we go open a Door there, and see if we end up the same place he did. It's a start, right?"

"Yeah. It's a start." Now that he's agreed that they don't really have an option but to go into the Veil and retrieve their father, Levi is at least a little less skeptical of the whole thing. Not that he's not skeptical, mind you. Just a little less so. He reaches up to rub his forehead again, a frown touching his face as well as he continues, "But we need to have more of a plan than that, Mags. What are we going to do if we don't end up in the same place? How are we going to get out again? I'm not saying we shouldn't go, but we have to think this through a little bit, yeah?"

The dwindling skepticism is a good thing -- she will wear him away to optimistic success at some point in this whole thing. She starts to stir up the Spaghetti-Os and then nods him to a cabinet. "Bowls?" Then she frowns thoughtfully, looking into the pot with her arms crossed in front of her. "I don't know." She glances aside toward Levi now, puffing out a short breath. "The one time I actually went into the Veil." She hesitates and counts mentally. "Okay, two times -- I always ended up somewhere close to where I went in. Like, the opposite of where I was. And I opened the door the second time, so... maybe if I can open it there, I can open it back."

Levi nods once, standing up and heading toward the cabinet. It gives him something to do with his hands, so that's always a plus. As he opens the door, he glances over his shoulder at her briefly. He turns away a second later, but it's clear that he's listening.

"Okay," he says slowly, and this time at least, it's more thoughtful than skeptical. Not not skeptical, but less so. "That's a good thing." Another brief pause; then: "I guess that's not the sort of thing you can really test very well. Since if it doesn't work, then..." He trails off. He probably doesn't need to go on.

Magnolia takes the bowls in turn and scoops the Spaghetti-O's into them. Then a bowl is handed to Levi and she keeps one for herself. Spoons are swiftly procured, and the twins can now eat -- as if eating might serve as a distraction. "So... we get some people together and see what happens." She chews on her lip. "Maybe there's a reason Dad is reaching out now, and now is the time to do it." Or something is tricking them and will soon eat their face, but like Levi's chosen omission, Mags omits that, too.

Levi takes the bowl with a nod of thanks, digging in. It does give him something to focus on, which is nice, and he examines the Spaghetti-Os much more closely than any children's pasta dish ever needed examined. Ever. "Yeah," he says after he's swallowed a couple of bites, "I guess that makes sense." He looks up at her again then, studying her face for another second or two before he continues, but he can't deny that she might be right. "Anyway, we can start planning. I'm not going without a solid plan."

"You always were the overly cautious one. I mean, I tried countless times to convince you to ditch school, but you always had perfectly good excuses." Didn't stop Magnolia from ditching without him though. Then she sighs out a breath while she moves around the circular pasta in its ain't-no-way-this-is-made-from-real-tomatoes sauce. "Look, I know that this is a crazy idea, and maybe we should just pretend none of it is possible, but... I don't know." She looks up at him with a tight little frown. "We won't go anywhere without a solid plan. And we will definitely won't go alone."

Levi makes a little bit of a face at her, but there's a smile lurking somewhere in there as well. It's small, sure, and a little exasperated, but it's there. "One of us had to be," he points out, before he leans back, letting out a little sigh. "But I guess sometimes I feel like I missed out on some things because of it." He shrugs, taking another bite of his dinner.

His expression softens a little bit when she looks at him like that, however. "No," he says in a voice that's quieter, but certainly still audible. "No, we can't really do that, can we? Not at this point." Not when they've actually heard their dad. Or maybe their dad. It's possible. "At least we'll know for sure."

"We should have really been better about sharing the mischief-making responsibilities. We really are crappy twins." Magnolia tilts a little smile toward him. "Hey, we're not even thirty yet-- plenty of time to get into trouble. Want to go TP someone's house?"

Then she reaches for his arm, giving in a small squeeze before she commits herself to at least a couple bites of Spaghetti-O's. "Want to watch some TV, help me finish the ice cream, and maybe pretend we're not living in the weirdest town in the world?"

Despite the topic of conversation, her suggestion -- or 'suggestion' -- draws a laugh from her brother. "Maybe for our thirtieth birthday," he says. "So that we can say goodbye to our twenties in a really Jones-ish way." Or at least one Jones, because he never really did anything of the sort.

The offer of TV and ice cream is a good one, however, and he finishes up his bowl, too, before he stands. "That sounds like exactly what I want to do," he says with a nod, and then reaches for her bowl. "Here. You cooked, I'll clean." They may not have made a lot of mischief together, but they were usually a good team.