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[14thcommander]

It's Hange, Hange, Hange! Were you looking for me? I'll get back to you posthaste. Or when it's convenient.

[ communicator & actionspam it's all good ]

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[14thcommander]

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."

[therushingsky]

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

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

[tetractys]

"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.

[14thcommander]

“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.

[therushingsky]

"Fucking. Stupid." Rhys says, low and soft, "Tiffany was telling me-- the list of things she's tried to do with her deals that he won't give her. We can make and unmake whole universes, but she asks him to use her deal to do anything about this place, and gets blown off."

The fact that she's still waiting for an inmate who disappeared years ago to return feels. Pretty significant right now. He takes another swig of liquor, placidly ignoring Hange's blinking communicator.

[tetractys]

"WE NEED TO BURN THIS PLACE DOWN."

Very casual, as if arson is a trip to the grocery store. Bill floats down to peer at the comm resentfully, drink in hand. It's still not his, he doesn't actually pick it up -

"HEY. IT'S THE BIG GUY. WERE YOU WAITING ON SOMETHING FROM HIM?"

[14thcommander]

"Eeuuhhhhh..."

Responsibly, she should probably say something about this.

Hange does not want to be responsible. She wants to wallow for at least twelve hours. She does not scold Bill or Rhys for the seditious sentiments.

"Uh, I asked him about Betelgeuse, if he'd really disappeared..."

She sort of reaches for the comm like enh! but it is a weak and drunken reach, a not-very-invested reach.

[therushingsky]

"With all of us inside it."

Rhys agrees, because what's the point in trying to do it right? What's the point in trying not to hurt anyone? People get hurt anyway. People work and work and disappear.

He finishes his drink, then reaches for the liquor again.

"His cabin's definitely gone. Unless the Admiral is just evicting people other than me now, that only means one thing."

[tetractys]

"SURE, YEAH. I MEAN, FULL DISCLOSURE, YOU COULD PUNT THIS THING THROUGH A STAR AND I'D COME OUT FINE ON THE OTHER SIDE- "

Bill drifts down, bumps the comm with a few tendrils to center it to how he's looking at it.

" ... BULLSHIT."

He picks it up, hustles it over to Hange. "YELL AT HIM."

[14thcommander]

"Gghhhnnn."

Hange makes a somewhat drunk noise. As she is prodded. It requires some grinding of knuckles in her eye before she can see properly, and parse the message Bill is showing her.

"Hey. Hey. What the hell?"

[therushingsky]

"What?"

Rhys has just poured himself another drink as they've been chatting, and he leans forward to peer at the communicator, squinting to read it upside-down.

He makes out one word. The only one that matters.

"Holy shit-- Is that for real? Does this mean he isn't-- Holy shit he isn't dead!"

There's a rush of absolute joy-- It'll take a minute for this being the most savage dumping of his life to catch up to it.

[tetractys]

"WHAT?"

Bill crowds in now, too.

"...YOUR DEAL!"

Okay, look, Beetlejuice is his friend, but at the moment nothing has actually changed for Bill about never seeing him again because he vanished, so. He's got priorities.

[14thcommander]

"I..."

Hange is feeling a really cosmic mix of emotions right now. Is this... happiness? Is this...... drastically increased stress??? Is this......... DECREASED stress? What IS it? She should be bouncing off the walls, but instead she just sits there, trying to parse this.

"Oh! You can keep Gortys' deal! This is great!"

She knows what emotion to have about that.

[therushingsky]

Rhys laughs, a tiny explosion of loose relief, before his mood settles a little bit.

"Haa-- that asshole. I can't believe he just bailed on us."

Thinking of Betelgeuse alive and on a pleasure cruise or something, It's so much less bad than thinking of him-- reset. As lonely as he was before he arrived.

Still, it's not great. He takes another drink.

[tetractys]

"OR HE GRADUATED AND THEN, FELL OFF THE SHIP, LIKE WARDENS CAN DO TOO."

Bill is back in the rafters, has skipped the straw, and is drinking straight from the blender.

[14thcommander]

"You're right. It'd be - really unlike him to leave his friends." Leave us, she doesn't say. She asks the Admiral about it.

[therushingsky]

Rhys, who is still reeling from being kinda proto-dumped by Betelgeuse before the mirror event, just kind of shrugs.

"I don't know. Pretty sure graduates get to choose where they go.
And he was very much mid-freak-out at the time."

And he's selfish - Rhys doesn't say out loud.

Either he loves you, or you're background noise.

[tetractys]

"HE WAS?"

[14thcommander]

"Can you talk us through exactly what happened, Rhys?"

[therushingsky]

"Sure."

Another drink for the story? Don't mind if he does.

"He came to my cabin to apologise for the whole-- vampire sex shit. We had this whole talk about it and he was really emphatic about making it right and not doing it again and making it up to me, and how he didn't care about sleeping with sexy boy vampires anymore, he only wanted me, yadda yadda yadda..."

Just going to knock back his drink, before coughing a little, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

"So-- I forgive him, and we talk about how he's going to turn human again. And we talk about how excited he is, and then-- it happened. Big light show, like you'd expect from him, and then he's on the bed, and his hair is all soft, and he-- he can tell what he smells like for the first time, and he was just--"

Rhys crinkles his nose, thinking about it.

"Disgusted. Just instantly disgusted. And then he started crying, and apologising, and talking about what a monster he was. I don't know. It happened pretty quickly, maybe he said he had to get out? But I just thought he meant-- go back to his cabin, or spend some time in zero or something. Then he said he loved me, and then he vanished."

He tops his glass up again. Rhys's voice has gotten pretty fucking hazy at this point, but the booze is also going down a lot quicker now that he's already pretty far along.

"Said his name a few times, then I messaged Hange."

[tetractys]

"AND THAT'S WHAT GRADUATED HIM."

[14thcommander]

"It sure looks that way. We talked about doing this, him trying out human form for a while. I asked the Admiral to do it. That's the last thing I did for him."