somethingwithturquoise | MHA #4; Saturday [07/08].

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MHA #4; Saturday [07/08].

As Summer had suspected from all the dreams she'd been having and that stupid urge to go traipsing through the woods to find some dumb rock, Morty had shown up at her apartment last night after getting ice cream for himself (you'd think, wouldn't you, that if you were going to come back from the dead temporarily to crash at your sister's place for a weekend, you could at least bring her some ice cream, too, but nooo~oooo), and they ordered pizza and she totally schooled his ass at Italian Plumber Franchise Racing Game, and she had to ban fighting games because he was such a button masher, and now it was Saturday, and she was just trying to figure out what to do with him now.

"Like," she said, as he sat on her couch, legs folded underneath him, tongue slightly out of his mouth as he intently button mashed against the video game itself since Summer refused to deal with it anymore, "what do you even want to do? Should I, like, take you to the park or something?"

"I'm fourteen, Summer, you don't need to take me to the park."

"I don't know!" she argued back. "It's been a while. Like, a really long time, you're practically a baby to me at this point. I don't know. There's an arcade at the bowling alley. I'm friends with the guy who runs the place, I can probably get you some free play in exchange for some weed, or something?"

There was a pause, filled with a clattering of buttons on the controller, before the computer totally demolished Morty, the fatality screen came up on her TV with a booming voice reminding him of how much he sucked, and then he sighed and set the controller down in his lap and looked up at Summer.

"We don't need to do anything, Summer," he said. "Maybe I...maybe I just wanted to come...and...and...and, you know, hang out with my sister again."

"Morty," said Summer, "we never hung out together."

Morty looked down at his hands and the controller in his lap for a moment, before looking over at her hopefully. "Sometimes we did!" he insisted. "Y-you know, not...often, or anything, but sometimes we did! And...and it was really nice, when we did and we got along, and I thought, y-you know, it's pretty cool, having a sister like you. You...you weren't perfect, and you're....you're definitely a bitch sometime, but you're not bad, either, and maybe....maybe I just wish...we could have spent more time just...just hanging out, you know?"

And Summer looked at Morty for a moment, and she felt a little twinge of guilt for all the ways in which she'd made either of her Morty's life a living hell, and how it was kind of nice, wasn't it, that even despite all that, he still just wanted to come visit and hang out?

"Yeah, okay," she said, reaching over to ruffle his hair as she moved passed him on the couch and plopped down to pick up the other controller, "but I swear to god, if you just button mash again, we're switching back to a shooter."

"But I'm not as good at those!"

"Explain to me again how that's my problem."

He totally did start button mashing again, but Summer, for now, decided to let it slide.

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Oh, Stark was definitely going to be asking this Morty for the story of why the other Morty needed to find a dead Morty to replace. After Stark turned that information around in his brain for a bit.

"We could do that," he said, only the barest hint of suspicion in his tone. "Morty. Let's go find snacks. And vodka."

Maybe lots of vodka.

"Go ahead," Zhaan said when he looked over at her for confirmation. "We'll be fine here unsupervised."

Stark nodded and headed out the door, waiting for Morty to follow.

Morty was starting to form a few questions of his own as all of this transpired, while also wondering when Summer had apparently started turning into their mom, which may or may not have been the catalyst for him squeaking out, as he got up from the couch, "C-can....can we get whatever we want? For the snacks?"

"Yeah," said Summer, "sure. Whatever you want, Morty."

"Whoo-hoo!" he said, fists lifted in victory and that was all he needed to go hurrying eagerly after Stark, already trying to make a plan for the buttload of snacks he was going to drag back and totally binge on for the rest of the day.

Summer waited until she could be sure their footsteps had receded down the hallway before letting out a sigh, reaching over to pick up a bottle of vodka that was about half full, popping it open, and making quick work out of diminishing about half of that half.

(See, Morty? Not like Beth, then it would have been wine).

"See?" she said, holding the bottle up to inspect its decreased volume. "Running low."

She then offered the bottle out to Zhaan. "But now that it's just us girls..."

Edited 2023-07-08 22:38 (UTC)

"Are you sharing, child?" Zhaan asked, brows (such as they were) raised as she held put a hand.

"Were you hoping to get me alone?"

The 'child' made Summer want to pull the bottle back and state that she changed her mind, actually, but that would only just prove the point, wouldn't it? So she just quirked a brow and shrugged as she put the bottle in Zhaan's hand.

"Obviously, I am," she said. "And I just feel we can speak more freely, now that we are."

And, more importantly, now this interaction was happening on her terms, dammit.

Nearly everyone was a child to Zhaan. She'd probably enjoy meeting the few people on the island who were significantly older than she was.

"And what would you like to speak of?" Zhaan had some thoughts of her own but she was curious. Stark was extremely fond of this young woman. "I'm happy to answer questions. After," she said, lifting the bottle to her lips, "a drink. And perhaps as a few of my own."

There was at least one person significantly older than she was that would greatly enjoy meeting her, actually!

"Oh no," Summer informed her, folding her arms in front of her a little and leaning on the counter, "I'm good. You're the one who came to see me. What were you hoping to get out of it?"

"You're important to him," Zhaan said. "The last time I was able to be here I met a few others Stark called friend. I simply wanted to meet you. See you for myself. And offer my thanks."

And with that fairly innocuous answer (or maybe because of the vodka), Summer seemed to sort of relax a little. Some of the tenseness she's been feeling in her spine and shoulders definitely slid away, and she almost felt a little bit of embarrassment over her initial response creep into her. Of course Zhaan would want to meet Stark's friends while she was here, and Summer was pretty much his best friend right now...

The jello machine dinged and a light switched to green, and so Summer turned to open it up and start taking out the shots.

"Who did you get the chance to meet last time?" she wondered. "And who else were you planning to meet this time? Have you Anakin before? Maybe Travis?"

"I've heard both of those names," Zhaan told her. She was watching the jello process with interest. "I only met a few people on my last visit. Liam, who I understand has left. Annie."

Someone else it seemed best not to mention.

"You seem to be closest to him, now."

Summer shrugged a little. "I mean," she said, as she worked on plucking the shots out of their molds and putting them onto a little tray, a small selection of colors and flavors: red for strawberry, blue for blueberry, purple for grape, orange for...well, orange, "yeah, I guess. He is one of my best friends, and we've known each other for a while now..."

"I'm glad he has friends here still." Zhaan was still watching the jello process with an air of vague amusement.

"How long have you known him then? He seems very fond of you." Had she said that already? If so perhaps it bore repeating.

Did it, though?

"Oh, god," said Summer, shaking her head a little. "I don't even know anymore. A while, I know that much. More than a few years now..."

She knew it was probably after everything with Faye that their friendship really cemented itself in as a definitely thing, and clearly they were friends before that, too, but it wasn't like Summer could remember exactly how long it had been.

"You may have known him longer than I did before I went to meet my Goddess," Zhaan said lightly. Was it a forced lightness? Who could say.

"With everything it was less than 2 cycles, I think, that we actually spent together on Moya."

"Huh."

Summer...wasn't sure what she was supposed to do with that information. If anything. Probably nothing. But Zhaan's presence seemed to loom so massively over so much about Stark that the idea that she'd somehow actually known him longer than she had was just...

Fucking bonkers.

She held out the tray for Zhaan to take her pick of a jello shot.

"So what happened?" she wondered. "When you....went to meet your Goddess. Is it rude of me to ask?"

"He hasn't told you?" Zhaan asked as she picked up a blue shot. When you had a brand...

"Moya was dying, entwined with another ship when they met inside a wormhole. Someone needed to separate the two. I was already very ill. I volunteered. He was with me, at the end, as much as he could be with so many closed off passageways between us."

Pffft. Color branding, how gauche, Summer would never.

She wondered now if Stark had told her, and it just got shuffled to the back of her memory, because that did seem vaguely familiar, but honestly? It could just be similar to something in the jumble of her own memories, too.

She plucked up a red shot for herself.

"I'm sorry," she said. "That sucks. But...at least there was some meaning to it, right? That it wasn't just senseless or entirely meaningless."

"I was able to save the people I loved," Zhaan agreed. "And I was ready. I know, at least in Stark's experience, that is vanishingly rare."

"Summer," she added after a brief pause. "How am I meant to consume this?"

"Traditionally," said Summer, after a moment of her own and a faint smile, "with these ones in the cup, you just use your tongue to loosen in and them, fwoop, right down the hatch."

And, naturally, she went ahead and demonstrated, running her tongue along the edge and then tilting her head back to pour it in and swallow, then held up the empty cup as proof.

"Ta-daaaah. You could also squeeze the cup or dig it out with your fingers, but those are clearly inferior methods."

Zhaan let out a delighted laugh and followed suit with her own shot.

"That is a very amusing sensation. Thank you. And Stark does this often with you?"

Her brows were raised again.

That laugh felt an awful lot like an approval that Summer hadn't even realized she was aiming for, so she just going to smirk for a moment with a sense of accomplishment before nodding at the tray that she'd set on the counter and grabbing another one, this time purple, for herself.

"Well, there's plenty more," she said, "and I can always whip up extras, so help yourself. Obviously, I don't know how you metabolize alcohol, but keep in mind that they can kind of sneak up on you, though."

Did she secretly hope they actually really snuck up on Zhaan? Maybe. But that laugh got Summer thinking that she'd probably be a lot of fun in that state, actually. Looser, at least, and less likely to make Summer feel like her every move was being judged and critiqued.

"And some of the fancier ones," she said, "use molds rather than the cup, so you don't have to go through the whole....extraction process, with those, but, yeah, every Wednesday, I make them for my bar shift, and Stark's one of my regulars," could that be any more downplayed than that? Probably, actually, the faint grin on her face seemed to work as an interesting contrast to it, "so...he usually tries most of them, too."

"No need to worry about my alcohol tolerance," Zhaan said. "I can hold my own."

Or she could when she was alive. She hadn't really tested it on any of these visits.

"Only most? He's usually open to new things. Or do you get him too intoxicated to continue?" She saw that grin. She'd seen similar smiles on Stark's face.

"Oh, no," said Summer, with a dismissive wave of her hand before employing a good mix of the squeeze and tongue techniques on her next shot. "Nothing like that. I just put really gross shit in them sometimes."

"Oh? Like the foods in the classes you've been teaching together?" Zhaan asked before picking up one of the purple shots.

She was going to stick with the tongue method.

"He seems to enjoy those. I'm just pleased he seems happy."

"Exactly like the foods in our classes," Summer confirmed, glad that Zhaan already had context for the sort of monstrosities she was referring to. "Shrimp and weird cheese and mayonnaise and all sorts of things that no one likes to associate with jello or alcohol."

But that happiness on her own part seemed to falter a little, as she then frowned a little thoughtfully at her now empty cup.

"And he is," she said, "I think, but I also think he has a long way to go still on not depending on other people for his happiness, you know? But he's getting better. I think."

She was going to need another shot before she could let this next phrase past her lips, an orange one this time.

"It's a work in progress."

"He is unused to happiness."

Summer probably didn't need to be told that. Zhaan was going to say it anyway.

"Much more used to losing it than holding on to it. I would take back the pain I caused him if I could."

MHA #4; Saturday [07/08].

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