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hange he was so scared

come over i h ate these thinbgs

yeah sorry I need a minute

[It's a good job this is a text conversation because he.

He needs to just fucking scream into his pillow for a few minutes.]

im calling bill come over when you cna

[He only wants to take a few minutes, but-- he can't. In the end, he manages five minutes of screaming, followed by about fifteen minutes of crying, before he forces himself to go to Hange's cabin.

He arrives red eyed, and bangs on her door.]

Hange lets him in. Has Rhys been in her room before? The door opens on a large, cozy laboratory, dense with stuff. There's one door off to the left, to Hange's bedroom, and two doors off to the right - the kitchen and bathroom. The ceiling is all big beams and suspended by cables between beams is a mountain bike and pair of skis.

What Rhys will see coming in: the opposite wall all windows. A big ol' sphere made of clay masks sits on this table, and a mint plant that looks very happy and leafy, and a glass nudibranch, and glassware and microscopes and a hand-spun centrifuge. There's a woodstove in the corner, a kettle on top of it, and a couple of armchairs (one of which definitely smells like Betelgeuse) adjacent to that, with a round tea table between them. Hange takes Rhys by the shoulders and pushes him in that direction.

"Sit."

"Hey. Yeah. Sitting."

Rhys would normally want to pick through all of Hanges stuff, but right now he's too absorbed in what just happened to even really take it in.

He drops into the Betelgeuse seat, sinking into it while staring blankly into space,

"I just-- what does this mean for him? He was alive, but he vanished, so-- he wouldn't just get thrown back into the Netherworld, would he? You asked for him to be alive, that's literally the last thing that happened to him--"

Rhys falls quiet again, because it's not as if Betelgeuse was any happier alive, he seemed like he was just in pain.

Hange doesn't sit yet. She goes and rustles around in one of the cabinets (her tables are lab tables, built on top of cabinets - lots of storage), pulls out a bottle of booze, and pours some for Rhys.

"I don't know. I don't know. Fuck, I don't know what this means for him. I feel like - if he just got dumped - he'd be returned to default, right?"

Bill knocks, but he's going to try the handle without really waiting. He's out of 'uniform' on the other side of the door, as it were, just a black triangular plate with whiplike tendrils. For Bill this is like showing up to work in a t-shirt with the middle finger emoji on it.

Some of his limbs are holding a blender pitcher of margarita. It is actively dripping. There's 1 straw. This is not for sharing.

The door is unlocked and un-barred. Hange was halfway over to open it, and stops when Bill invites himself in.

"Hi."

The action is apparently centralized around a tea table flanked by two cozy-looking armchairs, in the corner of the big main laboratory/room. Bill can ?float? Bill can ?sit on the table? Hange grabs a cushion from the unoccupied armchair and plumps it, then sets it down on the table for him. Then she vanishes into her kitchen, and emerges with an orange, which she offers him. No comment on the tentacle action we have going here.

Rhys glances over as the door opens, and despite everything, he manages a kind of bleak smile at the sight of Bill, because yep, that's pretty much exactly how he's feeling about this right now too.

"Hey dude. The fucking Admiral, right?"

He picks up the glass of booze that Hange poured him, glancing down at it bleakly,

"I almost-- I almost hope he doesn't remember us. I can't imagine how hard it'd be for him to go back to being invisible if he remembered that this place existed."

Bill makes a grumbly non-verbal sound and starts heading up to hang out in a corner of the ceiling. No pillow, only become corner spider.

Oh, an orange.

Bill squints tiredly at the orange, takes it with one long delicate spaghetti. He's been dragging his usual little communicator-bag along the ground behind him, and he reaches inside of it to retrieve a little movie-theater-sized bag of peanut M&Ms. Puts in Hange's hand in place of the orange. Okay. Deal.

"HE'S PROBABLY DEAD."

Oh, oh, M&Ms. Lark fed some of these to her. Hange rips the rag open and eats a few and vanishes into her kitchen again to retrieve bread, cold sausage, apricot preserves that are almost the last of what she bought in Constantinople.

"Getting bumped off the barge means a return to, uh, default, right? He's probably dead and I hope he doesn't remember us."

Hange pushes the sausages towards Rhys. Eat. Eat them.

"I should have made him tell me how to get to the Netherworld." Rhys comments, quietly furious with himself. He straightens the plate of sausage a little, which is enough like eating that it might distract people from the fact that he's not in the mood to eat right now, "He would have done anything for me. I could have made him tell me, and then I'd be able to go after him. At least I'd be able to try."

He knocks back the last of his drink, before wiping his mouth and glancing back towards the bottle.

Sausage he can take or leave, but another drink...

Not the kind of dead he meant, exactly, but Bill is remembering his conversation with Beetlejuice about the mechanics of the afterlife and how no one vanishes the way they would in a normal universe... eh.

Bill has gone up to skulk in the ceiling with his orange, which is coming apart under the attentions of four or five moving wires. He likes oranges because they have many many parts to take apart, it's like a puzzle became a fruit. Reminds him of Credence, too. Long story.

"IF HE COULDN'T ESCAPE USING THE NETHERWORLD, YOU'RE NOT GOING TO BE ABLE TO FOLLOW HIM USING IT EITHER."

Hange's room has thick exposed joists, under a slanted, whitewashed ceiling. Bill's Christmas gifts of mountain bike and skis are rigged to hang up among the beams so he has company.

The hostess seems to have gotten quiet, herself. She eats a sausage with stony, contemplative air and then follows Rhys' gaze to the booze and makes a tipping gesture with one hand. Help yourself.

Rhys will accept the invitation and absolutely help himself to a second glass.

"He never tried. He didn't even like talking about it because he hated the Netherworld and loved the Barge."

And maybe it wouldn't have worked either way, but Rhys could have tried. He puts the booze bottle back down, sulking into the glass.

"HE NEVER TRIED?"

Okay, that was a little bit of an anger shriek. No, no, okay, no, there's no point. Bill gathers himself and starts making a line of orange segments on one of the joists, as if he's setting up a firing squad.

"FORD DISAPPEARED ONCE. HAD TO START ALL OVER."

Woah buddy. Bill has that pitcher of margarita, but Hange pours him some bourbon and reaches the glass up over her head. Drink more.

"People don't usually turn up again, do they?"

"He didn't want to go back there." Rhys insists quiet and stubborn, "It would have been giving up on the chance to be alive again."

Talking about the possibility of him showing up again softens the blow a little. Having Betelgeuse arrive again with no memory of them would be bad, but-- he's pretty sure even an amnesiac Betelgeuse would jump back in on three friendships with zero prompting.

"WOULDN'T HOLD YOUR BREATH FOR IT, BUT BUCKY BARNES HAS COME BACK ABOUT FIVE TIMES NOW..."

So it can happen.

Bill looks at the bourbon. What does he trade for this? Hm. He's decided these are bartender rules, and he will repay her afterwards. He reaches to take the drink, sets it on the rafter.

Hange is thinking of the future. There's a fundamental coldness to her sometimes, and it lets her do things like this. A little less than a year's worth of work might be gone, but less than a year's worth of work is tantamount to nothing. She's failed worse, and harder.

"Yeah," she replies vaguely to Rhys. "You know, I was never all that clear on if his afterlife was so lonely because that was how it was built, or if he just - didn't meet people, or couldn't cultivate them somehow... Bill, keep Gortys' deal, but if I disappear from the barge, promise to raise the roof until another wardens donates mine to me."

"Wait, what are you guys doing with Gortys's deal?"

Rhys asks, glancing up between them, still nursing his drink.

"I WAS GOING TO BRING BACK MY STUPID HOME DIMENSION."

His enthusiasm for that idea kind of goes back and forth. Right now he's firmly on: Nah, fuck em.

"LOOK, DON'T MAKE A DECISION RIGHT NOW. LET'S SEE WHAT HAPPENS."

Hange's communicator beeps, and from his position in the ceiling, Bill's eye flicks towards it.

“I’ll leave it as is right now.”

She is Determined, not that she looks it at the moment, hunched over the tea table, head resting heavily in hand. This will Happen. Also she’s not answering that.

3/3

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