They were in the refrigerator for fuck's sake. What'd you do, make a verbal announcement?
He should be watching his step. The ground beneath his feet is too soft and unsteady for Wes to push this hard against a man he's so recently and so terribly betrayed. But the project is a day and a half of work wasted, and if he dumps everything he's back to square one with no idea of what better product Deerington might see fit to provide him at this time of year.
There's a bottle of bathtub gin in there too but none of you been helpin yourselves to that.
There's a sense of responsibility on his part that frustrates him more than it might if he'd been more careful with his samples, but whoever's to blame his gruffness is, as always, a veil for concern.
And frankly, he doesn't know what to expect when he finds Wes at the shop. There's only so many things he's tried with any of the samples he's discovered and stewing or powdering those mushrooms has not been among his limited experiments.
Parked somewhat urgently out front he flicks the lights when he strides through the door and stares intently into Wes' eyes when he has the man's attention. Looking for some sign of familiar side effects.
He doesn't know how many ways there are to explain that any reasonable person would deem food stored in a refrigerator safe for consumption. This is Deerington, after all, and Wes is not particularly well known for his voracious appetite or his tendency to snack. What is familiar, though, is a certain proclivity to take things that are available without much regard to ownership. Sometimes, even, to take things that aren't so readily available.
Wes rolls his eyes at the phone. He's not quick to destroy his hard work, but he does take the simmering pot off the hot plate and dump it out the back of the store, in the drain of the alleyway. The powder that he's gathered sits in a jar, and he hasn't quite decided how to dispose of that when the lights overhead flicker as announcement of Logan's arrival. Stubbornly, he crosses his arms as the man makes his hasty approach.
Different from what? It's been a hard few months. Almost enough to make a man forget his own keel. Tell me what they do, and I'll know if I'm feeling it.
Different from anything. Seeing things, maybe? he squints into Wes' eyes, but his glare isn't angry so much as it is urgently looking to find something there. Something he doesn't recognize amongst the colour of Wes' eyes.
He points to the mirror. Look at yourself. Anything changed? They do something to your head. I don't know what exactly. But they change the way you see yourself. You start to look like.... other people see you. I don't know what it does if you rub it into your skin, or inhale it, or fuckin' smoke it. I just know what it'll do to you if you consume it.
He almost wishes he hadn't asked. Logan's explanation is as much as Wes could have hoped for when it's clear the man has not fully explored the mushrooms' properties either. Yet the anticipated effects leave just enough uncertainty in his mind to let him grapple with the answer. Wes turns toward the mirror as instructed, taking a wide-eyed view of himself. It's hard to say if anything has changed. He, like Logan, is not a man inclined to terribly much vanity. Perhaps Wes has recently found himself a little more interested in the image he presents, but at the end of the day there's a certain framework he's taken to be unchanging. He can focus a little more attention on his hair or his teeth, but the lines are etched for good.
Or are they? What would anyone else see when they looked at Wes? Would they perceive him a man more or less touched by past experience? Older or younger? Wiser, or truly naive? He stares at his reflection for so long it might appear he's high, but eventually he steps back. I can't tell. I don't know what any of you see. I feel fine. I only touched the powder to move it into a jar.
In his experience it feels like a hallucination. Glimpses of yourself that don't align with the reality you hold in your mind. So despite the intensity of the gaze with which he looks at Wes for signs that he might be feeling those effects, he knows full well there's little he could spot from the outside looking in. No way of knowing how the man's own image might be shifting towards someone a little younger. A little blonder. A little more wide eyed in his innocence. Thinner too perhaps. More like the gangly shape of younger man who hasn't quite filled out his frame. The gap between his front teeth just faintly more pronounced than the smile Wes likely knows.
You're probably fine... he says, his shoulders sinking a little as the tension in him dissolves. It's some amount of assumption to say so of course. He's handled them himself to no ill effect, but then, he doesn't often react to a lower dose of things that might irritate others. You're gonna come with me and get more though. I had a plan for those. And they take a lot of lookin' to find. He grumps. Besides I want you to see where they come from. It's perhaps framed like a lesson to be learned, but in truth these things are still something of a curiosity to Logan. The kind which he's more than willing to share.
Despite his frown, Wes doesn't feel nearly as put out as he'd like to portray. He still wants to insist that Logan take responsibility for the mistake, but whatever moral high ground he thinks he holds dissolves almost instantly in the face of the steady and firm gaze he's paid. Wes knows that he still has plenty more to make up to the man than will be absolved by a little foraging. And in truth, he doesn't mind the idea of the time spent. Not in the woods surrounding Lake Tomie, nor with Logan in particular. He's felt disconnected from almost all of them over the past few months, but somehow the emergence of spring has loosened those manufactured feelings of jealousy and neglect and left the tall man simply wanting for a return to some measure of normalcy.
Now? He can't let himself fully acquiesce without a note of agitation, even if just for show. Wes opens his hands as if to indicate his own work, but with the pot dumped and the powder stored he's back to square one and with no alternative ingredient from which to make the concoction. He sighs with enough force to make his breath audible and looks around. Let me lock up.
Maybe it's only his imagination, he thinks, but when Wes reaches for his Fluid and his keys, his reach seems to surpass them. It's a minor misjudgment of the planes of his own body, but easily ignored as he shoos Logan out the door to wait alongside the statue of the deer.
For his own part Logan too might be treading a little more gently than he's usually apt to treat the man, knowing full well there's still a rawness to the wounds that exist between them. A thing he's apt to let time and experience knit back together because he can't imagine there's any combination of words, or actions that can hasten that process for either of them. Wes certainly isn't the first person leave him nursing a sense of betrayal. He's not even someone Logan's known the longest. And for that he has to reason with himself that if he can forgive men like Scott and Chuck, and Mac. He can forgive Wes too.
In fact, if there's anything that gives him hesitation to do so it's only the thought of been made a fool for laying that trust at the other man's feet again so soon. For that, he rolls his eyes, putting on a gruffness that feels too lazy to run deep.
Take your time. Truck's out front, he says, lighting up a cigar on his way out and swiping that empty jar back into his posession.
Wes does as he's encouraged, pausing in front of the mirror for several private moments with Logan waiting out front. Free from the man's oversight, he takes another look. It's difficult to say with the afternoon shadows passing by the windows of the darkened shop, but it seems that his eyes are brighter. Or are they simply lighter? Is the gap in his front teeth widened, or is he simply so unaccustomed to smiling that he hasn't seen the boyish feature in a long time? It frustrates him to realize the vanity in wanting to know. Would someone else view him kinder or more harshly? Would they focus on his every imperfection or give more weight to the things about him that might still be good? With no certain answers, he passes through the door and jams the key in the lock behind him.
Logan's truck is easy to spot, and Wes climbs into the passenger's side and immediately assumes a slouched posture. Half-turned with one leg bent under the other, he keeps the man in his sights with a kind of unintended but curious intensity. He doesn't mean it to be expectant, but it must look that way from how reluctant Wes is to break that contact when he's still learning about Logan. Still judging how patient the man might be in the face of dropped words and confused meaning. He's in no hurry, but once they're settled and the journey's started, Wes leans closer toward the dashboard to sign in front of the older man, where he only needs adjust his line of sight a little to the right.
If the mushrooms are dangerous, what do you want with them?
if nothing else, he's a patient sort. The man looks right at home with himself sitting in that truck, with his arm stretched across the bench seat, letting the ash of his cigar flutter away out the side window. He lets the engine turn over when Wes locks up but the drive doesn't take them south to the park or even toward the lake and cabin. Instead, he heads north east towards the church.
It's a fair question, but one he wonders if Wes asks out of some suspicion about him. I wanna know dangerous they are, he says. Always managing to distill a complicated thing to an almost overly simple answer. It's an unsatisfying thing for some people. He can read as much on their faces. And if he bothers to explain himself further it as sure a sign as anything that he's doing his best not to be withholding. He takes that cigar between his teeth when he signs.
There's stuff out there that's native this place. It's grownin' here on it's own. It's not from any other world so far as I can tell. Sure as shit not from any Earth I know. He pauses to exhale a lungful of smoke and take the tatter-paged journal out from under the truck seat to drop it in the space between them. I know there's a lotta weird shit that goes on here. But a whole new eco-system? I've never known any illusionist who could manage that kind of detail. Makes me wonder about this place.
Because you think you're impervious to it, Wes thinks to himself. He's never been more glad to know that the strange psychic connection between them has faded. It's not fair, even if he does think it's accurate. Logan has every right to treat his body as testing grounds for whatever poisoned vegetable crosses his path. Doesn't give anyone else the right to carve him up for parts. But the dissonance feels profound when the other man can't seem to stop displaying a genuine lack of care for his own wellbeing. Wes satiates himself with as much self-assurance as he can muster that Kurt would agree.
The notebook, though, proves a distracting curiosity. He looks at it, then at the other man, then back and forth twice more. Pointedly. As if to say that he isn't sure what he is and isn't allowed to touch these days. But as Logan goes on, Wes sets his hand on it. At first like he means to test their boundaries, and then simply because he's too caught up in the explanation of what's going on, and what the other man's response to it has been.
Do you think the rest of it has been an illusion? It's difficult to parse the difference. He doesn't have the experience the others do in drawing out the boundaries around such a broad possibility. Wes opens to the front page of the journal and peers at the notes. You ate them, didn't you? What did you see?
The way Deerington reshapes his ability to heal has, in some ways, reshaped his worth. If he's not safe to someone as a shield they can carry with them, he's content, at least, to be their canary in a coal mine.
I don't know if that's the right word. I'm no magician. But that's what folks call it right? Like we're livin' in someone else's dream. Some place conjured up by Sodder's head. He shrugs. Maybe that was true once. But I wonder if it's... you know.. taken root. He hopes that metaphor lands, but without resorting to poetic comparisons he wouldn't know how else to describe this place and it's various phenomenon.
Just like I told you. You hallucinate something. Things other people see in you. It only lasts a little while. Probably less still in slow doses.
Strange to think of hallucinating inside of a hallucination, Wes remarks. While the man may be more clever than he lets on, he's no philosopher. His own search for God or meaning has not been an extensive one. He's never felt particularly tortured by ideas beyond the scope of his comprehension. Instead, he's found a philosophy that's workable to him and mostly let himself stand there, embracing futility as a comfort to his own actions. But the why and how of their being here in Deerington and what separates truth from illusion in a place like this is enough that it could easily undo those lines he's guarded himself with.
Instead, he shifts in his seat and wags his hand to dismiss Logan's words. No, you're avoiding my question. What did you see? He points an insistent finger at the other man, drawing the point from the tip of his gesture. By now they've all seen different sides of one another. They've dealt with child forms, doppelgangers, and idealized visions. But to imagine what Logan saw differently when he faced himself as others know him is a curiosity to Wes.
He throws Wes a sharp look out of the corner of his eye. The younger man's no fool. Logan knows well what he's looking for. And it's not the question that irritates him so much as the way he finds his own throat still restricts defensively around something he'd probably have explained more easily some weeks ago. He reaches across the dash and flips down the passenger side visor.
You tell me, he says. Anything seem different? Of course, maybe dried and powdered and every so faintly inhaled or absorbed through the skin isn't enough to to anything and the question doesn't have an answer to satisfy either of them.
With a gruff sigh, he leans an elbow out the window. It was Kurt, he says. Who I saw first. So. You can imagine what I saw.
Some weeks ago, Logan's expression would not have met Wes with the same kind of venom it carries now. In better times, the younger man might've met it with a grin or hopeful insistence. Now, he lets his leg slide from the bench seat and into the footwell, and corrects his posture to face forward. Some amount of openness fades from him at the action, along with a sense of hope that feels at once almost naive. He sets his jaw and pays a glance in the small rectangle or a mirror, but what he sees isn't the question that he asked. Wes is sure now that his eyes are too green, his face too youthful. Something about where he's been seems forgotten in the arc of his lips, and he flips the visor back up with an air of distaste.
Right, he agrees, but doesn't push the point. He doesn't know what Kurt might see that he himself can't perceive. The other man has known Logan for years, and Wes has only gotten the barest glimpses at the ways their lives have intersected and shaped one another's since long before this place. But he doesn't have to imagine very hard what Kurt might see when he looks at anyone: possibility, potential, hope. Their partner's admiration is fierce and earnest, and if that changes anything about the planes of Logan's face or the expression he wears, Wes thinks he can imagine it easily. It can't be so very different from the memory of the man sat back on his knees in the clearing beside the cabin, or the way he seemed when he held Wes on the Titanic on his birthday.
The taste of the memory sours in his mouth like stolen sugar, and he watches buildings pass.
What Kurt saw of him wasn't uncomplimentary. He should be flattered, he supposes. But instead what he sees in the mirror now is just the void between what the younger man wants him to be and what Logan knows he is.
Passing through the town they don't head south towards the lake and the woods. They don't even turn off towards the parks department. Instead they head north east towards the church. Passing the same vast fields the two of them one trod in the desperate, futile search for Kurt.
He can almost feel that shared memory hanging over the both of them when he pulls into the church road and kills the engine. Handing Wes the empty jar he kept from the kitchen he climbs out of the truck and heads up the grave yard path. C'mon. he says, taking a cigar between his teeth. Those things only grow in one place around here
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text | un: LUCKY 1/3
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The mushrooms.
text | un: LUCKY 3/3
Wes.
Wes.
The jar of mushrooms.
In the fridge.
They're gone. Did you take the mushrooms? Did you EAT the mushrooms?
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I'll replace them.
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[Well. That doesn't sound exactly like anyone's ingested them. So maybe this is fine. Yeah. Fine.]
Did you put it on your skin?
Did JP put it on HIS skin yet?
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Why were YOU helpin yourself to whatever you find in there? Is this where my fuckin beer goes too?
Where are you? Manes? Stay there. Lemme see what the hell you did with em
And don't do anything with it in the meantime.
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I've boiled a few and I've dried and powdered a few. That's it.
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Wash your hands.
Dump the water.
Don't inhale.
They're not god damn groceries.
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He should be watching his step. The ground beneath his feet is too soft and unsteady for Wes to push this hard against a man he's so recently and so terribly betrayed. But the project is a day and a half of work wasted, and if he dumps everything he's back to square one with no idea of what better product Deerington might see fit to provide him at this time of year.
action:
There's a sense of responsibility on his part that frustrates him more than it might if he'd been more careful with his samples, but whoever's to blame his gruffness is, as always, a veil for concern.
And frankly, he doesn't know what to expect when he finds Wes at the shop. There's only so many things he's tried with any of the samples he's discovered and stewing or powdering those mushrooms has not been among his limited experiments.
Parked somewhat urgently out front he flicks the lights when he strides through the door and stares intently into Wes' eyes when he has the man's attention. Looking for some sign of familiar side effects.
Well? You feel any different?
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Wes rolls his eyes at the phone. He's not quick to destroy his hard work, but he does take the simmering pot off the hot plate and dump it out the back of the store, in the drain of the alleyway. The powder that he's gathered sits in a jar, and he hasn't quite decided how to dispose of that when the lights overhead flicker as announcement of Logan's arrival. Stubbornly, he crosses his arms as the man makes his hasty approach.
Different from what? It's been a hard few months. Almost enough to make a man forget his own keel. Tell me what they do, and I'll know if I'm feeling it.
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He points to the mirror. Look at yourself. Anything changed? They do something to your head. I don't know what exactly. But they change the way you see yourself. You start to look like.... other people see you. I don't know what it does if you rub it into your skin, or inhale it, or fuckin' smoke it. I just know what it'll do to you if you consume it.
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Or are they? What would anyone else see when they looked at Wes? Would they perceive him a man more or less touched by past experience? Older or younger? Wiser, or truly naive? He stares at his reflection for so long it might appear he's high, but eventually he steps back. I can't tell. I don't know what any of you see. I feel fine. I only touched the powder to move it into a jar.
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You're probably fine... he says, his shoulders sinking a little as the tension in him dissolves. It's some amount of assumption to say so of course. He's handled them himself to no ill effect, but then, he doesn't often react to a lower dose of things that might irritate others. You're gonna come with me and get more though. I had a plan for those. And they take a lot of lookin' to find. He grumps. Besides I want you to see where they come from. It's perhaps framed like a lesson to be learned, but in truth these things are still something of a curiosity to Logan. The kind which he's more than willing to share.
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Now? He can't let himself fully acquiesce without a note of agitation, even if just for show. Wes opens his hands as if to indicate his own work, but with the pot dumped and the powder stored he's back to square one and with no alternative ingredient from which to make the concoction. He sighs with enough force to make his breath audible and looks around. Let me lock up.
Maybe it's only his imagination, he thinks, but when Wes reaches for his Fluid and his keys, his reach seems to surpass them. It's a minor misjudgment of the planes of his own body, but easily ignored as he shoos Logan out the door to wait alongside the statue of the deer.
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In fact, if there's anything that gives him hesitation to do so it's only the thought of been made a fool for laying that trust at the other man's feet again so soon. For that, he rolls his eyes, putting on a gruffness that feels too lazy to run deep.
Take your time. Truck's out front, he says, lighting up a cigar on his way out and swiping that empty jar back into his posession.
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Logan's truck is easy to spot, and Wes climbs into the passenger's side and immediately assumes a slouched posture. Half-turned with one leg bent under the other, he keeps the man in his sights with a kind of unintended but curious intensity. He doesn't mean it to be expectant, but it must look that way from how reluctant Wes is to break that contact when he's still learning about Logan. Still judging how patient the man might be in the face of dropped words and confused meaning. He's in no hurry, but once they're settled and the journey's started, Wes leans closer toward the dashboard to sign in front of the older man, where he only needs adjust his line of sight a little to the right.
If the mushrooms are dangerous, what do you want with them?
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It's a fair question, but one he wonders if Wes asks out of some suspicion about him. I wanna know dangerous they are, he says. Always managing to distill a complicated thing to an almost overly simple answer. It's an unsatisfying thing for some people. He can read as much on their faces. And if he bothers to explain himself further it as sure a sign as anything that he's doing his best not to be withholding. He takes that cigar between his teeth when he signs.
There's stuff out there that's native this place. It's grownin' here on it's own. It's not from any other world so far as I can tell. Sure as shit not from any Earth I know. He pauses to exhale a lungful of smoke and take the tatter-paged journal out from under the truck seat to drop it in the space between them. I know there's a lotta weird shit that goes on here. But a whole new eco-system? I've never known any illusionist who could manage that kind of detail. Makes me wonder about this place.
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The notebook, though, proves a distracting curiosity. He looks at it, then at the other man, then back and forth twice more. Pointedly. As if to say that he isn't sure what he is and isn't allowed to touch these days. But as Logan goes on, Wes sets his hand on it. At first like he means to test their boundaries, and then simply because he's too caught up in the explanation of what's going on, and what the other man's response to it has been.
Do you think the rest of it has been an illusion? It's difficult to parse the difference. He doesn't have the experience the others do in drawing out the boundaries around such a broad possibility. Wes opens to the front page of the journal and peers at the notes. You ate them, didn't you? What did you see?
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I don't know if that's the right word. I'm no magician. But that's what folks call it right? Like we're livin' in someone else's dream. Some place conjured up by Sodder's head. He shrugs. Maybe that was true once. But I wonder if it's... you know.. taken root. He hopes that metaphor lands, but without resorting to poetic comparisons he wouldn't know how else to describe this place and it's various phenomenon.
Just like I told you. You hallucinate something. Things other people see in you. It only lasts a little while. Probably less still in slow doses.
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Instead, he shifts in his seat and wags his hand to dismiss Logan's words. No, you're avoiding my question. What did you see? He points an insistent finger at the other man, drawing the point from the tip of his gesture. By now they've all seen different sides of one another. They've dealt with child forms, doppelgangers, and idealized visions. But to imagine what Logan saw differently when he faced himself as others know him is a curiosity to Wes.
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You tell me, he says. Anything seem different? Of course, maybe dried and powdered and every so faintly inhaled or absorbed through the skin isn't enough to to anything and the question doesn't have an answer to satisfy either of them.
With a gruff sigh, he leans an elbow out the window. It was Kurt, he says. Who I saw first. So. You can imagine what I saw.
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Right, he agrees, but doesn't push the point. He doesn't know what Kurt might see that he himself can't perceive. The other man has known Logan for years, and Wes has only gotten the barest glimpses at the ways their lives have intersected and shaped one another's since long before this place. But he doesn't have to imagine very hard what Kurt might see when he looks at anyone: possibility, potential, hope. Their partner's admiration is fierce and earnest, and if that changes anything about the planes of Logan's face or the expression he wears, Wes thinks he can imagine it easily. It can't be so very different from the memory of the man sat back on his knees in the clearing beside the cabin, or the way he seemed when he held Wes on the Titanic on his birthday.
The taste of the memory sours in his mouth like stolen sugar, and he watches buildings pass.
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Passing through the town they don't head south towards the lake and the woods. They don't even turn off towards the parks department. Instead they head north east towards the church. Passing the same vast fields the two of them one trod in the desperate, futile search for Kurt.
He can almost feel that shared memory hanging over the both of them when he pulls into the church road and kills the engine. Handing Wes the empty jar he kept from the kitchen he climbs out of the truck and heads up the grave yard path. C'mon. he says, taking a cigar between his teeth. Those things only grow in one place around here
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