open up now (don't you think it's time?)

[fingersandteeth]

Who: Steven Durante + the other Rockets
Where: Goldenrod Rocket Base in the starter + Tyler's thread, Handsome Jack's place otherwise
When: Late February, immediately after the fossil heist + 10
Summary: Someone is having a quiet crisis following their very first heist! Also, fall-out from some personal revelations + meeting a new Rocket.
Rating: PG-13, with some threads going up to R in terms of language and conversational subjects. Anything too wicked goes to an inbox.

Steven Durante's quieter than usual on their way back from Dirk's Fossil Heist. He keeps looking at his hands. And when it comes to turning in the bag of fossils and collecting their rewards, he doesn't even bother asking if he, Connie, and the other Steve will get promotions from this.

Sure, when the time has come for them to claim their weird abomination fossils, he immediately jumps to claiming one the Pokedex claims is called a 'Dracozolt'--but otherwise, he seems unusually subdued. Something is definitely on his mind and has been since... well, even before Steve P and Connie caught up with him and Dirk.

Dirk might be able to hazard a guess as to what's bothering him. Anyone else probably has to ask.

Comments

[thedifferencebetween]

Jack is pretty sure he knows what's got Steven a bit glum.

He gets it, he does. As far as heists go....eh, there have been better. But there's been way worse, too, so...

"Look, I know there wasn't much as far as awesome perks for all that work, but...hey, we all were able to work together and not get caught, and we got...money. Money's always good!"

He's in the middle of cooking dinner, wearing a cheesy apron with the text 'KISS THE COOK' emblazoned on it. He always likes to cook after a heist, and Steven had said he likes being cooked for, so here they are.

"First time out's never that great in the reward department. I mean, granted, usually...usually we get Pokemon that aren't nightmare abominations from a child's imagination, but...hey, nobody else has got any like that! Unique is kinda cool."

And Jack's been a little snitty over the fact that Mr. Eats Babies got a beautiful magical rainbow unicorn, too. Well he sure doesn't have...um... an unholy abomination that can't actually walk!

[fingersandteeth]

Steven, sitting at the kitchen table--and not, you know, in the dining room, because even if it's night, he'd rather be in the same room as Jack for this--looks up to Jack, surprised.

"It's not that," he says, before correcting himself a moment later. "Okay, it's not just that. I am glad we worked together so well, that's going to come in handy for the next heist we do--" Look at you, Steven, already talking like heists are a matter of course. "--and money is definitely always good, especially if it lets me pay more often. I wanted that promotion, of course, so I could get my own room at the base, but I guess it doesn't really matter if I just sleep over here practically every night I'm in town. It's not like I've been here that long. It's been less than a month! It's just..."

He looks back down at his hands. Flexes them.

"When Dirk and I dealt with the security guards. We didn't use our pokemon. They could be used to identify us and battles take too damn long. So Dirk, he knocked his out with one of his fancy Santas. And I..."

Steven takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. "I choked mine. I choked mine until he lost consciousness. I wasn't-- I couldn't think of how else to do it. And I-- I've never-- and it was--"

There's a sense of tension in the air during the brief moment of silence that follows. A feeling like something has been stretched to a breaking point and is about to snap.

"Good," Steven says finally. "It felt good."

[thedifferencebetween]

Oh.

Jack keeps his attention on the wok full of stir fry he's got on the burner, stirring the contents casually.

This is very, very familiar. Suddenly he's taken back to that office in Concordia, full of adrenaline from people trying to kill him and desperately racing to save Elpis and all its people. He can see the Meriff's office, those weird aquarium walls and the red velvet wall paneling. It had smelled like leather and gun oil and tobacco.

And then it had smelled like gunfire. The Meriff's first, and then Jack's instinctive response.

And the feeling that had come with it.

"Yeah," he finally says, casually but not dismissively. "Yeah, it does feel good. And you'd never done it before, huh. It can be a hell of a surprise, when you're suddenly in that moment and it clicks for ya."

[fingersandteeth]

Steven isn't sure what he expected Jack to say to that. Maybe make a joke about Steven discovering a new fetish? He was crass enough and it could have cut the tension in the air. (And maybe... maybe it wouldn't have even been inaccurate.) Or maybe-- maybe he'd have been just a little dismissive about it--not in a mean way, just in a thoughtless way--because at thirty-seven years old, shouldn't Steven know by now that he would enjoy doing that?

Jack's had a hard life. Steven doesn't know the half of it. But that means that Jack gets that sometimes people can't be normal or respectable, can't have normal or respectable reactions to things, no matter how much they'd want to be. He didn't think it would freak Jack out to know that Steven did like choking the guard, or he wouldn't have even told him. He'd have never told Liam, even before things went to hell between them.

But this. This understanding... this sympathy and understanding...

It undoes him. He almost wants to cry from sheer relief. Because Jack gets it.

(Jack always gets it.)

"No," he says, softly. "I've never done it before."

[thedifferencebetween]

"And now you got some new stuff about yourself to process."

Jack's tone stays the same, not making a big deal but clearly invested in this conversation.

"Good news is, you've got time and a safe place and all that stuff to work it through."

He shuts off the burner and moves to grab a couple of plates to dish up dinner, casting a sympathetic and encouraging look in Steven's direction as he does so. He figures they can just eat here in the kitchen, he doesn't really want to break up this conversation. It's an important one.

Because Jack has suspected that Steven is the same kind of person he is. But repressed as hell. He gets that! He spent most of his life trying so hard to ignore and stamp out those parts of him that screamed out to just destroy whatever was in his way. Until that moment he finally did use violence, and everything changed.

"Me, I was in the middle of a pretty big crisis. This was back before I was president of Hyperion, I was just a department head overseeing the colonization and taming of Pandora, I was in the middle of building my space station. And there were these assholes who wanted to blow up the moon, they took over my space station, everybody was trying to kill me....it was bad times!"

Jack dishes up dinner and sets a plate in front of Steven before joining him.

"And there was this guy who ran the major moon colony, he was part mayor, part sheriff, called himself a Meriff. Yeah, super stupid. I thought he was helping us, since he ran a freaking moon colony and lived on the moon, but...nope, the asshole sold us out. I was so fucking pissed...I told him to just get the hell off Elpis, get out of Hyperion territory, never come back. Banishment! Which I think is incredibly fair for basically selling out an entire planet's worth of innocent people for a quick buck and a shiny new gun. Anyway...I go to leave his place, let him get his shit and get out...he shoots me. Doesn't do any damage, but he was trying to kill me. I didn't even really think? I was just so pissed off and so terrified I turned and I shot him. Perfect shot, dude's dead before he lands back in his chair."

Finally he pauses, to let this all sink in for Steven. Plus he's hungry and dinner is in front of him, he wants to eat.

[uber_marionettist]

It takes Dirk a bit to loop back around to the Steven issue. He has a lot on his mental plate, and frankly, noticing and responding to other peoples' emotions in a timely manner is not and never has been a skill of his. At least, not unless he's predicted that outcome ahead of time, or standing in unreadable (or easily-read-into) silence is an appropriate response.

Since none of those apply here, it takes him a bit.

Eventually, however, he gets through the rigamarole of the Rocket bosses, the deep and dissonant feeling of ambivalence evoked by the fish that god forsake, and some leftover stitching he had to do on the plush rump of a particularly putrescently coloured smuppet before he comes to decide that actually, Steven was acting pretty fucking weird. Normally he wouldn't care. He really wouldn't.

But he figures if he's going to be keeping track of this guy, and others like him, he has to... put in some kind of effort to know what he's working with, and what's going on.

So now he's got to fucking find him.

[fingersandteeth]

As Dirk doesn't have this revelation until sometime early the next morning, that means that he's going to need to find exactly where Steven's been sleeping. Unfortunately, he's not in the rocket dorms. There is an autographed poster of Handsome Jack and some dog Pokemon (the same one Dirk got for Christmas) above one of the desks, however, so Dirk can probably guess which bed would otherwise be his.

He's not in the dorm. But knowing what Dirk knows about 'night time fun buddies,' it's easy enough to guess where Steven is probably sleeping tonight instead.

Or rather with whom.

And indeed, Steven is pretty sleep-rumpled when he answers Jack's door, wearing a bathrobe that isn't quite sized for him.

"Dirk?" he asks, blinking blearily through his glasses. "Is everything all right? You should come in. It's freezing out here."

This icon is happening a lot

[uber_marionettist]

........ okay, see.

Dirk had assumed, and we all know what they say about assumptions, but he'd assumed that the guy answering Jack's god damn fucking door was going to be Jack.

The plan, at that point, was to just ask if Steven was there. If the answer was no, Dirk still had to fucking find him. If the answer was yes, then he could fuck off and go worry about something else--you know, like a sane person.

He did not, at any point, assume or anticipate that Steven was going to answer someone else's door in a bath robe that didn't belong to him, looking every bit as postcoital or post-somnal or post-whatever as Dirk is privately disgusted to know he is.

Great.

"I stopped by to make sure you weren't having some kind of post-criminal mental break, not to stay for brunch."

OH GOOD

[fingersandteeth]

"I mean, brunch isn't ready yet," Steven says. "Jack's still in the middle of cooking--that's why I got the door, so he wouldn't have to step away from the stove and risk it burning. And if we're going to be talking about that, then I insist you come inside, because some of us are trying to maintain a reasonable cover.

"Also," he adds, opening the door a little wider and giving Dirk a pointed look, "we've got mimosas."

[uber_marionettist]

He could be sewing puppet ass right now. He could be up to his wrists in wires and sheet metal. He could be in the park with Acorn, petting his horse.

Instead, he chose this.

"Pants-shitting Christ, you're serious. Okay, fine. I'm coming in. But I'm laying down some rules. All pants stay on. Yours, mine. Jack's. If this is happening in anything called a 'breakfast nook,' I'm leaving."

Dirk takes a step forward, but as he passes through the threshold, he gives Steven a pointed look of his own--or what might be a pointed look, through the shades. Maybe he didn't mean for the morning sun to reflect off of it in just that way.

"And I don't partake of addictive substances, whether or not their psychoactive properties have been normalised by the casual societal performances around the rituals of their use." Pause. Another footstep. "That includes coffee."

it amuses me that connie is more okay with violence (tho not murder) than steven

[conniemaheswaran]

Connie was too busy preoccupying herself with freaking out over the fact that she just committed Grand Theft (and felt good while doing it, what the hell) to notice Steven's own personal crisis. So when Connie knocks on Jack's door, smiling, she's not exactly expecting an emotional heart-to-heart.

"Hey, Durante! It's Connie. Can I come in?"

steven d is/was most freaked out about his own personal capacity for such than in general

[fingersandteeth]

"Of course you can," he says, opening the door and ushering her inside. "Do you want to sit in the living room? We've got a fire and it's unreasonably cold outside anyway. Snow shouldn't exist outside the mountains. Or we can head out in a bit and play tourist instead, if you'd like? But I did promise you a story."

Given that it's afternoon by now, Steven's actually dressed in real clothing, that he did not borrow from Handsome Jack. In this case, a button-down shirt and slacks. He's got the glasses he'd worn in their conference call back on again.

Since she didn't notice Steven's personal crisis while having her own, Connie won't exactly have the context for how he's actually doing a lot better than he was last night. He is, though. Talking with Jack really did help him.

[conniemaheswaran]

"Wow. This is a really nice pad," Connie says as she steps inside, craning her neck to get full view of the place. "Then again, most pads look nice after weeks of sleeping in a cramped caravan or on hard earth."

such is the way of pokéworld,

"Yeah, I think I'll just chill by the fireplace for now. I'm used to colder, but I think I need to sit down after that hike."

[fingersandteeth]

"Even the dorms would," Steven agrees, closing the door behind her. Not that, you know, he's slept in them since before the Rattata Race, but still.

He'll either take a seat on the leather couch perpendicular to hers if she takes a couch or next to her and sort of tilted towards her if she's on the rug closer to the fire.

"So," he says. "Do you still want that story I said I'd tell you? About being kidnapped by fairies? I told it to Jack last night, more or less, so it wouldn't be the first time."

[conniemaheswaran]

"You know, if I'd been any other human kid, I'd probably ask you to stop talking down to me. But I'm not, and we're living in a videogame anyways, so... yeah." Living around the Gems has a tendency to raise the ceiling on your disbelief. "I'm listening."

[breakyourlife]

Steve doesn't really know the other Steven well enough to know what's usually like, and in truth he's not exactly the best when it comes to reading other people's emotions. Perhaps it's a blessing that his own reward has left him more subdued than usual.

The thing is, he isn't actually here to see Steven. He figured maybe seeing the other guy to get exactly the same messed up Pokémon he did might help, so seeing other Steven is definitely something that catches him off guard. You can practically see his brain rebooting. He's very confused by the unexpected face.

"Oh, hey. I thought Jack lived here."

It's probably pretty safe to say he hasn't caught on.

[fingersandteeth]

Oh. It's the Other Steve(n). The third (maybe?) Steve(n)?

"He does," this Steven tells him, just a bit awkwardly. "But I stay over a lot. We're-- well. Together now. You should come in. It's much colder than it needs to be out here and we've got a fire in the fireplace. I can go find Jack for you."

(Unlike Dirk, Steve P isn't graced with the sight of Steven D in a bathrobe and pajama pants. He's definitely in real clothes by now.)

[breakyourlife]

"Oh."

The younger of these two Steve(n)'s face heats up, and honestly that 'oh' was perilously close to coming out as 'ew'. He's at that age where it's great to date, and there's no juicier gossip than the love lives of other teens, but it's super embarrassing to think of adults still being interested in that sort of thing. Unless it has the potential to humiliate your nemesis more than it does you, obviously, which isn't the case here. He's trying not to think too hard about it.

"No, uh... it's okay. I just thought maybe since he wound up with the same kind of Pokémon he'd know what to do with it? Mine seems... really sad."

[fingersandteeth]

"You came all the way over," Steven D says, holding the door a bit more open and stepping back, "so the least I can do is get you something warm to drink before you head out again. And-- I don't actually know if Jack's figured out what to do with his. We've been pretty busy since the heist. But I'd be willing to help you brainstorm, if nothing else? Because they are really sad, all of them, and I don't think that muddy woman is a reputable scientist."

[breakyourlife]

Steven D's right. It cold, and who is Steve P to turn down a free drink? Once he brushes off the thought of the two older Rockets being an item (and... living together...?), it's an easy enough decision to step inside.

"She seemed like a pretty good scientist to me," P mutters, unconvinced, following the elder Steven to whichever room he was taking him to. "No one I know could make actual living dinosaurs."

Unsurprising, since Steve P is literally a high schooler. He's technically probably seen weirder shit than that growing up in the town he has, but he's also never once clocked onto it. Arcadia is collectively extremely oblivious.

Start of March

[asmywitness]

Well, this continues to be weird as shit.

Tyler now owns a pair of weird animals - a small round bird that won't stop staring at him, and a stubbornly excited rottweiler-style puppy. He has no idea what either of these Pokemon are but the bird has settled quite contentedly on his shoulder to stare at him from there and his dog is barking happily, despite Tyler desperately making shushing noises to keep it quiet, he doesn't want anyone to know he's here yet let him panic in peace for a bit.

He has no idea this is someone's old room. The Handsome Jack poster in the corner has not caught his notice yet.

Re: Start of March

[fingersandteeth]

So of course, this is the best time for someone to just-- suddenly open the door.

The man entering his room is Latino, just short of six feet, with a a build that basically amounts to walking brick. He's fairly clean-cut, with wire-rim glasses, and seems to be every bit as startled by Tyler's presence as Tyler is by anything else.

His mouth moves, but it's not like Tyler can hear anything that's coming out.

[asmywitness]

Tyler doesn't even look up at the door opening, still trying to calm the dog - it's only when the dog looks away that he does, and he jerks violently upright at the sight of someone else there.

He's not actually that much shorter than the intruder; only a couple of inches, but with a much softer, fat-covered silhouette and strikingly Asian features. Which are currently covered in panic, that he's trying to mask with a deep scowl. His hands come up automatically - but not in protest. He's... signing, rapid-fire strings of movement as he stares the stranger down.

The Houndour is still bouncing between them both excitedly, leaping up to press its chunky paws on Steven's knees before it bounces back to do the same to Tyler.

[fingersandteeth]

The man who came through the door frowns and retrieves a small notebook from his coat pocket, along with a pen. He writes something down and turns it to face Tyler.

SORRY, it reads. I DON'T KNOW VERY MUCH SIGN LANGUAGE.

[asmywitness]

...well, that's still progress. Tyler's tension doesn't visibly ease, when his eyes flick down and scan the writing, but he does reach out and rather politely take the pen and paper from Steven - who will be able to see how both of Tyler's hands seem quite heavily stained with ink.

First, though, he bends down, picks up his Houndour and puts it on the bed. And when it tries to stand again, he pushes down on its butt and holds one hand up in a 'wait' sign. And then flips to a new page in the notebook and starts writing.

His handwriting is extremely neat, and quite small to make the most of the small space. I'm Tyler, I'm 24, I'm deaf and I can't lip-read. I just woke up here and I have no idea what's happening. I don't know what the bird and dog are, but I assume they're Pokemon since I DO know what Team Rocket is.