Open][ Eventually we all have to grow up... supposedly

[screwedontight]

Who:Seth and you
Where: Various locations.
When: Second week of August 7th- 12th
Rating: PG-13. Changed if more
Summary: Some people never learned how to deal with emotions
The Story:
If there's anything that Seth realizes he hates more than zombies and fucking culebra? It's walking up to remember shit that he doesn't remember doing, since technically it was him and it wasn't him. Absolute rock bottom in his mind?

Finding himself as some kind of damn bird and attending school of all damn things. There's nothing he can do when the events have him out of his mind, and nothing he could fight back against, and he's quickly learning that is worse than any manner of monster that can exist in Wonderland. As part of the kidnapped or an event.

So he's definitely feeling out of sorts, and unlike himself, and he's handling things the best way he knows how.

There's alcohol involved and sometimes blowing shit up. If he can find a fight? It would be the trifecta in what he's dealing with.

Or more importantly, how he's not dealing.

Drinking

Maybe it's a good thing but not all the drinking is done with a bottle, a tumbler, and drinking alone. So he's hanging out the bar, avoiding Lux a bit just so he doesn't embarrass Chloe as he is want to do. He's trying to limit himself but keep a low, angry buzz is likely no better than heavily drinking until he passes out, but at least that is what he's working on.

Blowing shit up

Sometimes he's on the beach. Sometimes in the hedge maze. There's times when he heads out to the cave. Hanging out around there? Likelihood is, Seth is either blowing things up or is setting up with some serious firepower to do just that.

Once or twice he might be set up just above the waterline on the beach, still in a suit and tie, laid out in the sand with what is fashioned after a SAW .50 cal machine gun in front of him. He's focusing on the horizon, as they can see it, firing towards it over the water. He's been careful not to put the boats in the line of fire, mostly pretending that it's seeing what might happen but it's really just enjoying the sound and the smell of gunpowder.

It is both traumatic and comforting, and he's indulging in what he can to help him cope with this.

Hangovers are fun

A couple of days, or closer to afternoons, that week Seth can be found in the kitchen cooking up a fried food bounty of eggs, bacon, sausage and hashbrowns. He's not the best cook in the world, but he isn't entirely incompetent - when it comes to cooking, at least. He's bleary eyed and looks like he hasn't saved in a couple of days, but that damn suit is still in place looking much better than he does. Of course, when the top button happens to be undone, there's an odd pendant around his neck that is new, and he's often toying with the leather and metal, vervain filled bracelet that lays beneath his cuff.

Comments

[screwedontight]

Seth considers that, staring out at the ocean, thinking about it. "I... I don't know. I've been facing all that shit here. Didn't help my brother was here first and talking shit," he says with a mirthless chuckle.

"But yeah, I can see what you mean. I just thought for so long that zombies were the worst."

[thesamurai]

"Zombies aren't even the worst place about home anymore, and I kill fifty every day."

You get used to a certain kind of predictable enemy day in, day out.

"Being here does widen the circle for terrible and bizarre shit, no doubt about that."

[screwedontight]

"Especially if your world is fairly limited in it all. Mine was until right before I came here," he admits, shaking his head. "But then blowing up shit there seemed to help as well."

He glances at Michonne. "Your world? Was it the one with that white picket fence town a while back?"

[thesamurai]

"Yeah," she breathes out. "White picket fences." She looks out at the water for a few minutes, then glances back at him. "I think we lost it. I came back here and what I know is that we had an all-out war. Lot of people died."

Her son died, but that's for her to keep to herself, at least for now. "So, bein' here really isn't any worse than bein' there."

[screwedontight]

Seth picks up one of the grenades, rolling it over and over in his hand, considering the texture, the way it felt, the way it could end so much.

Just like the pistol he'd put to Chloe's head because of things in that event, things that echoed her world according to everything they've been told. A world where a kid he knew drove his car into a house to try and protect someone else. Where his best friend had died so she wouldn't harm the man she loved.

"Given how that event went..." He draws a breath, sighs out as he shakes his head. "I'm sorry. Despite it all, I want to be here but if it kept being like that..." Again he shakes his head, still finding it hard to talk about, and he hadn't lived it but for three days... and a year of aftermath but he's coping with that himself. Badly.

[thesamurai]

"I feel like a broken fuckin' record, but that's the thing that gets me about this place. Not just for me, for everyone. We go through some of the worst shit imaginable and when it's over, it's over. We deal with the fallout. But someone has to go back to that shit eventually. We lose sight of that, I think. All of this that we go through? It's someone's reality."

She used to vocalize that a lot more, but always in relation to people thinking shit with zombies was a fun exercise in hypotheticals. For her, it's real, not a game, not a scary movie. But it's like that for everyone else, too.

[screwedontight]

Seth pauses then, considering that. "I don't think about that often enough. Except, honestly, your world. Clementine's. Some, I guess, in their worlds they're not so bad so long as we don't get our memories screwed. But some of them..."

He shakes his head. "I just never hope it's mine. If it's mine it's going to be bad. I wonder how they chose which ones. Some people talk about never encountering theirs. I've been here over a year, and others from my world had been here longer than me, but thankfully, nothing. For others though... Maybe this is the best place."

[thesamurai]

"I was here two and a half years before my card was up, so I dunno. I used to think it was random. Mixed back. Past few months though, they've been pretty serious. Who knows."

No one has ever started to even remotely understand what the hell Wonderland's about and she has no idea if anyone ever will.

[screwedontight]

"Yeah, noticed that too. Makes you wonder if it's ramping up for a reason."

And for any reason he can try and even think of, none of it is good.

"But that is the sad truth. Honestly, I don't think we'll ever know."

[thesamurai]

"One time, shit went haywire. Bunch of people showed up on one day and then about a week later just left. The closets have stopped working on their own before, things happen here outside of events that just seems like...glitching. Like the magic's unstable."

[screwedontight]

"Okay see, there was something right after I got here that made me think an event was starting and then nothing. It's happened a few times since then. I always thought it was to keep us on our toes but..."

Now he has to wonder, and all he can think of is not good.

"So what happens if this place loses its hold on whatever reality it has?"

[thesamurai]

"Figure either we all get dumped back home at once, or the magic stops working and we're stuck here forever. One of those options is better than the other."

[screwedontight]

"That depends on if magic stops working means we don't have closets and electricity," he points out. Because here forever, even without those he cares about, he is learning to cope with. Survival of the fittest is going to get ugly.

[thesamurai]

"Then it'd be my world minus walkers. Hope someone other than me has been stashing supplies, seeds, things we can plant," she says in return. She's always prepared, always ready for it.

[screwedontight]

"Things we can plant? No. Hadn't thought of that because I lived on fast food most of my life," he notes, not even pretending that isn't the truth. "Never had anyone with homecooked meals and all. Stockpiling weapons, some rations.

"There's some though I think are caching whole communities into a few rooms."

[thesamurai]

"I'd be one of those people. Even have stuff stashed in random places outside, just in case we have to get out of the mansion. It stays put, long as I don't leave for good."

She lives with Regina now, but she's kept her room as a sort of storage unit, stocked full of bottled water MREs, canned food, clothes, weapons from guns to crossbows, ammo. Seeds, grains, things to plant. All of it.

"Lost too much being unprepared once. I'm not counting on it never happening again."

[screwedontight]

"Shame we can't find a way to make any of it public property so that wouldn't happen," he says, having already considered this problem a time or two. "Even if left in the public rooms, I don't think it would change that it's ours."

That is a sentiment he can understand. "Wonder if it would help to start a list of those doing the same. Least then those we know would know who to turn to if we're gone."

[thesamurai]

"Put it in a public place for everyone to see and access. Like the library. It didn't go any damn where when Evie left. She never claimed it as hers, it's for everyone. Same with the gyms. Someone made them, but they've never gone away."

Somehow that worked, it had to work again.

[screwedontight]

"Exactly. There's public places that some have made and they pass on. So what determines that? Do we have a clue?"

All he can do is keep asking questions of those that have been in this place for a long time and see what they've learned. Maybe then they can learn something about it all. Maybe.

[thesamurai]

"Declaring it, maybe? Putting it out there at large so everyone knows it." But that's just a guess, not a fix.

"Maybe we go straight back to Old Testament laws. You kill someone, we cut off your hands." Since plain old executions wouldn't make a lasting impression.

[screwedontight]

"Worth a try. Anything we can do to circumvent this place, I'm all for it." If he can put one over on whoever is behind this place, he will.

He snorts at that, a brow jerking and showing perhaps amusement, or truly consideration, about it. "Then they just go and kill themselves and come back whole though."

[thesamurai]

"Even knowing you can come back, it'd take a real damn sociopath to casually kill themselves. Death by event though, I can see that."

Just letting something kill you, sure. But it's hard to actually do it yourself, even with something at stake.

[screwedontight]

"As someone that is a criminal and a self assessed bastard? I am not prepared to say there aren't sociopaths among us. Now me? I'm doing everything I can not to die, because I'm not going to be the first one that doesn't come back," he says, making it clear why.

"But it's not that hard to die if you're not fighting against it. Like you said."

[thesamurai]

"In general, seems like most of the time, all we can do is wait things out. See what happens. I hate it, but I don't know what to do about it," she admits.