[text: recipients - all]

[hasaheart]

As per usual every morning with his first cup of coffee, Cain checks his tablet and the list of names cataloguing all the residents/fellow prisoners of Taxon, old and new and present. He doesn't get past the letter A. His mug, his tablet fall from limp hands; the hot coffee spilling over his legs doesn't register until much later.

Once his hands stop shaking, he sends a text message to Glitch. Az is gone. She's gone.

Another few minutes later, he writes another message, hesitating for a moment before sending it. What does it matter? Who cares? Was she ever here to begin with? What's to say she was? When he's gone and Glitch is gone (like DG), and everyone who ever knew her is gone, who will have a clue she was ever here?

He swallows through a painful lump in his throat, and clicks the 'send' icon on the tablet screen.

For those of you who knew her, Azkadellia has gone home. For those of you who didn't, she was just like the rest of us. She had a past, and was making the most of her present, to the best of her abilities. She was family. She'll be missed.

Comments

[aintnoconvict]

It's a Thing reserved for Moments because of Reasons and he ducks his head, bunching fabric in his hands briefly and again stops himself from saying it. Maybe later, after much alcohol, but for now he folds it down as a silent prayer.

Please please please, gods, please don't leave me, don't ever.

He draws back with a pat to Cain's arm and a quick nod, looking up at him with too-sharp eyes.

"Right, okay, that's established." He gestures to the bar with a ambitious grin. "Let's go experiment with the warming properties of booze, my inital findings lead me to believe further testing with a wider sample array is in order."

[hasaheart]

Wyatt nods, and gives a squeeze to Glitch's shoulders before letting go and heading to the bar for his first order of the evening.

"I'll have what he's having," he tells the barkeep with a thumb pointed in his friend's direction. Barkeep nods and serves up two fingers of nearly golden, molten amber. "Thanks. You know what?" He glances at his curly-headed partner-in-crime and brother-in-arms.

"Make that three of the same." Why pretend they're here to talk.

The barkeep complies, and Wyatt takes a seat beside Glitch's bar stool and slides one of the tumblers his way. "Something something, reliability and validity, right?"

Just because he's surrounded by geniuses five days out of seven doesn't mean he didn't pay attention in the class room (nor that he doesn't pay attention when his genius friends talk, and afterwards look stuff up on his own if needed).

[aintnoconvict]

As the glasses line up Glitch's smile finds a little more stability, and he deftly collects the one directed his way.

"Precision and accuracy," he says - elaborates, expounds, elucidates - and takes a sip. "Which we can also test later, there's a snooker table in the other room."

But that sounds like effort, and despite his usually hyper-kinetic tendencies he is feeling decidedly sedentary.

"...or just sit here and get stewed. That sounds like a more reasonable expectation for this project."

[hasaheart]

It's fucking cold, and Wyatt for one isn't planning on moving an inch until he feels warm again. This may take a long while, but that's the plan.

And...and, okay, his brain needs to take a godsbedamned holiday already. "Yeah, I'm not bending over any kind of table to handle any sort of big stick, Glitch. Not nearly drunk enough yet."

Speaking of which: he does ease up on the teasing snark-banter, and raises his tumbler. "How about a toast?"

[aintnoconvict]

The side-eye is so tremendous Glitch's head swivels to transform it into a proper look. Stop that, sir.

At the suggestion of a toast he lifts his own glass. "Right. Um. To Azkadellia: for...showing us all that we shouldn't let the past define the present."

That sounds hollow, but it's too soon for the big words and feelings and she's still something abstract in his mind. He knew what to do at DG's departure and the heartbreak and guilt and anger came easy. For him this is a much quieter pain, something more like numb regret. Hollowness.

"May her life be lived on her own terms-- something. I'm miserable at these."

[hasaheart]

Wyatt shrugs his eyebrows, the skin above them crinkling slightly in a mix of approval of the toast, and uncertainty: where to go next, what to say, what to do. He touches the sides of their glasses together, and gives a soft, quiet "To Az," in return, then tips the rim to his lips for a sip. He'd down the entire thing if he could, if he didn't already have heartburn of a both poetic and literal kind.

"...do you ever wonder..." he says, slowly, beginning and ending on a stifled sigh. "--if you're next?"

[aintnoconvict]

Yeah, conservative drinks for now, though at the question Glitch goes for a second, slightly more ambitious one.

"I used to," he begins, shrugging a little. "But a while back I figured out - or decided, or something - that I'm not going at all."

He's pretty sure that's an intensely unhealthy attitude to have but it's what he latched on to. Why else him? Why would he stay when everyone else kept going away?

[hasaheart]

The sigh Wyatt gives at that couldn't possibly be any heavier, or the floor would crack beneath his bar stool. It's horrible. It feels horrible, to the core of him, and wrong on so many levels (too many), to think Glitch (of all people, Glitch) have lost hope of ever going home. And there's that pang of guilt, again, the sense of wrongness and shame, because where Glitch has lost hope, here sits Wyatt with an even darker secret.

He presses his right hand flat to the polished counter, hiding the tremor under the guise of feeling the faint grain. Instead he picks his glass up with his left, drinks. The whiskey burns like fire, but that's good. It's good. Nothing ever burned like this when he was locked up.

"I don't..." he says, stops himself, and starts again. "I don't want..."

No. No go.

[aintnoconvict]

There's no way for Glitch to stop himself from covering his friend's hand with his own, fingers carefully curling for a moment before relaxing and just being there. He looks over and up, tyring to decide how that sentence ends.

I don't want you to go is too obvious, and as has been established Glitch is the word-waster. To be next as well, there's no reason...which brings him to a conclusion.

"You don't want to leave," he surmises quietly, his tone impassive.

[hasaheart]

Glitch's hand is a warm, solid presence, a shield against the void that threatens to swallow him whole even now. He bites the inside of his lip, shaking his head at Glitch's observation. He's right. He's very nearly always right, and that's both good and bad, because now it's out there and Wyatt doesn't know whether to feel relieved or terrified.

"I'm so scared," he confesses in the hushed tones of dirty secrets revealed.

"I don't..." No go again, it seems, but he pushes on this time, strengthened by the touch of his friend's hand. He turns his own hand palm up, fingers closing around and twining with Glitch's fingers. "I don't want to forget."

[aintnoconvict]

That fear is familiar and tangible and terrible and Glitch quietly draws a breath through his teeth, focusing all his attention on his friend. He squeezes those fingers maybe a little tighter than necessary and leans in a bit, offering what little refuge he can.

Yeah, forgetting's a fear but for so long it has also been a reality, and at some point Glitch even turned it into an asset. Forgetting has protected him, and a large part of the trauma of getting a working mind back was remembering and adapting to that. None of this matters, he'd told the Witch/DG an annual ago, and for a while he'd let a cold, objective part of himself believe that. Now he's caught in between, head and heart locked in an endless dance around whatever the truth is.

It's the season still, the one of horrors sliding slowly into the one of regrets, and Glitch finds himself daring to invoke one of his greatest ones.

"DG told me," he begins carefully, because he wants the right words and because it still hurts and it will always hurt. "Over and over again she said to make the most of this place, to jump at every day and live it. No regrets, no--"

Breathe.

"She didn't want to forget either, and always refused to believe she would. And maybe...we don't know." He brings his other hand around to settle on Cain's wrist, covering the bracelet. "In any case I'm not letting you go, and if I'm not going anywhere then that's that."

See? He can be irrationally stubborn too.

[hasaheart]

No regrets. No regrets. Wyatt nods into his glass, brow knitted in obvious pain. The rest of his face attempts an outward show of placid stillness, comes up short. He misses DG, damn it, but he misses her, and he doesn't even need to imagine how Glitch must be feeling. He knows all about loss: he doesn't need imagination.

He drains what's left in that first glass of his, then pushes it away in favor of the next one. His hand stays curled around his friend's. "That's... That's what I've been trying to do," he tells Glitch, still quiet and still and trembling faintly.

"I wake up, and I try to make the most of the day, but I can't... I can't think ahead. I don't make plans, I make preparations. Just in case. And it's-- It's good because I can focus on the here and now, but... It's good and bad, because I go to bed worrying about whether I'll still be here in the morning, or if someone else will be gone."

He shakes his head. Blinks slowly. Sighs deep and soft, dismissing his own jumbled train of thought. "I'm such a mess."

[aintnoconvict]

Glitch likewise finishes his drink, then quite deliberately rests his zippered head on his friend's shoulder. He listens, he nods, he reaches for his second glass and straightens, peering at Cain with a searching expression.

"You're a mess, I'm a wreck," he points out. "And-- really checking the tablet's a special torture I make myself do most of the time. And I think by now I'm only making plans to see how they'll get screwed up. Like now I've gotta figure out what to do with my Thursdays since consulting my brain with Maddy's off the table."

Yeah we're just going to try and skirt around that whole wrinkle of this.

"So I'll plan, you'll prepare. What are the most recent preparations?"