Chapter Text
After scrambling upright and confirming it was not, in fact, Blue that fell into the pond – just a rock he was trying to skip – you decide you’re too keyed up to lay back down. Especially when you try anyway and realize you’re hyper aware of the discomfort; there’s a stone right in your back, the sun is so bright and there aren’t any clouds to blot it, your music is too much or too little or both and the grass itches more than it tickles, and you can feel it through your hood on your neck…
You end up joining Blue in figuring out how to skip rocks after a few minutes. Not that you’re any good at it either, but you used to skip rocks when you were younger, and you remember the theory of it. At the very least, you’re having an easier time than Blue, who’s struggling to gauge his strength and the right angle. It’s a bit – it’s a little endearing, maybe.
Then you wonder, what about his cooking earlier? Oatmeal isn’t exactly a gourmet dish, but it tasted just right, and the apple – to your tired, untrained eye – looked really evenly cut. Not a trace of skin or seed. That’s not really something easy to accomplish without practice, which he said he didn’t have, so… what’s the deal there? Is it because cooking may be a “necessity” to whoever picks up a PTR, and skipping rocks just… isn’t?
You look over to Blue, about to ask about that – because seriously, what is the cut-off point here – but… He’s got a rock in hand and is squinting at the pond, making aborted swings of his hand as he thinks about how he’s gonna try with this one.
“… You’re aiming a little high,” you say instead. Blue blinks and looks down at you with a huh? You crouch and pick up another rock – this one nicely flat – and do your best to demonstrate without actually tossing it. For now. “It’s less with your arm and more your wrist, I think? You’re supposed to – flick it.” You do throw it, this time – and the rock skids over the surface for a moment before sinking to join the dozens you’ve both already thrown. “Like that, but, y’know. Better. You’re supposed to try and line it up with the surface as much as possible. I – I think. I haven’t skipped rocks in ages.”
He watches the ripples for a moment, then you as you demonstrate with a second stone – this more successful than the last, but still not quite skipping – and tries himself with the rock in his hand. It skiis over the water surface, before splashing into the drink. He hums in satisfaction, and bends to pick up another stone. You – think that might have been an almost exact copy of your throw, actually… huh.
You’re not thinking about that any more. Instead, you focus on remembering how you used to do this, because – when you were a doom-and-gloom teen, thick in your edgy phase – skipping rocks used to be a fun way to get all your pent-up angst out without embarrassing yourself in front of people. You used to think you looked like one of those dumb TV stars, standing on a beach, sea-wind in your hair and so cool…
Now though, you just feel a little spark of pride when your rock hops over the water and plunges in with a satisfying bloop. With that first one – and an exclamation from Blue about how he’s been trying for ages, how’d you do that?! – the muscle memory starts coming back to you, and those single skips are easier and easier to achieve.
When you manage to toss one that skips thrice, by complete accident, Blue gives you star-hung look again, and you… you end up curling into yourself and just watching, from then on. You don’t know why, it’s just – uncomfortable. That’s all. You shake the grass from yourself, pluck a little less than a handful out of your hoodie’s, well – hood. How it all got there is a bit of a mystery, but… maybe you actually fell asleep earlier? That might explain why you couldn’t get comfortable again, and why that splash startled you so badly. And hell, you aren’t exactly a peaceful sleeper – you’ve been trapped in your blankets often enough to know that much.
Idly, you play with some of the blades you’ve pulled from your hood. Some of them catch and scratch on your fingertips; they might be the sort you can make a whistle out of, if you felt like it. But you don’t remember how to do that – less so than skipping stones, and that was a hard thread to follow already – so you just tie them up in little knots instead to keep your hands busy.
Not long after, Blue’s figured out how to get the rocks to skip at least once, consistently - god is he ever proud of himself for that! You give him a thumbs up and the best grin you can when he whips around to look at you, and soon enough Blue’s got it down to three skips. When he decides to try skipping larger stones – ones that line the edges of the pond as boundary markers – you make the executive decision that it’s time to go; the sun’s at its peak anyway, and you really don’t want to annoy the park-keepers more than this already will.
You take your time walking still, because Blue is no less fascinated by his surroundings, and you prefer the greenery to the oncoming ghost town that is your city. Maybe people were a bit too much, but it was still better than all the eerie stillness. The silence.
You may or may not have started walking even slower as the city and all its emptiness comes into view, to the point that Blue actually prods you with your name. “Do you want to stop and rest again?”
“No, no, sorry – it’s just… it’s gonna be weird, with how quiet it’ll be.” You reply. He tilts his head, brow furrowing. And why wouldn’t he be confused? This is probably the loudest anything’s been for him! Ever! “I, um – I like that it won’t be crowded, like – the streets didn’t have any people earlier? But it’s just… I’m realizing now that it’ll be a little strange, that’s all. I haven’t gone out since quarantine started, and it should be rush hour right now, but…” You indicate the dead streets around you. “It’s just a little strange, that’s all. I didn’t really think about it earlier, but now that I am…”
Blue hums as his head tilts. You’re still walking, at a normal speed now, but you feel a very real rush of relief that your first second-hand store isn’t too far. It’s still a solid twenty minutes out, sure, but that’s not awful. That one normally has the basic necessities – some mattresses pulled out of dumps, but hey. Yours was pulled out of a dump site and it was serving you just fine.
“I guess I didn’t notice,” Blue says. You jerk a little, then turn to face him. “Sorry – I turned down my hearing. It sounded so much louder before but like this… It feels like I’m deaf.” He grimaces. “It’s better when I can hear more. You know, we don’t have to—”
“We’ve covered this,” you interrupt immediately.
Blue puts his hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay. I just mean that I don’t need one right now…”
“Yes you do,” you reply. “Is it even comfortable trying to rest when you’re standing up? ‘Cause it doesn’t seem like it would be.”
… Though, you should probably message TK about borrowing their car for real this time. When Blue gives up with a weak protest – and a half-lidded gaze that you can’t really read with half their face masked – you nudge him lightly, to signify your victory.
“By the way, I’m gonna message a friend to see if we can borrow their car. Is that okay? They might come out here anyway.” You say, watching Blue expression closely.
He doesn’t really react much, thankfully, only looking away to mull it over. “I can carry the mattress, you know? They aren’t that heavy.”
You look at Blue’s gangly, scrawny limbs. Then their equally scrawny body. Then back to their face.
“… What? I can! But, I guess it’d be faster…” He turns it over a little bit more, then nods. “Sure. I’m okay with that. Just, maybe not for too long?”
“Yeah. It might take a bit to find one in your size, but if the first two don’t have anything, we’ll go to the warehouse – it will definitely have. How’s that?”
Blue nods again, slowly. “… I can handle that, yeah.”
You give him a reassuring pat on the shoulder, then pull out your phone to do what you probably should have done yesterday, when you were first given Blue, and ask TK if they can do you a favor.
They respond seconds after you’ve sent your request – and are quite happily teasing you about texting them purely because you want something. Is it your fault they’d toss everyone else’s missed shifts onto you?
After a little bit of a back and forth, TK concedes to loaning their car to you – under the condition that they drive, because they’ve ‘never seen you drive’ and TK would ‘rather not scrape you off the driver’s seat when the car survives and you don’t.’ You’re almost certain it’d be fine, and tell them as much. They just ask where to meet you.
… You’d give the point to them, if only because you’re not sure when your license expires, and you haven’t touched a car at all since you got it. Not you’d admit that to TK.
You give them the address to the first store, then make mention that they’ll probably be driving around all day, since this is mattress hunting for a new roommate – you’ll explain when they get here, since they already tacitly agreed, no take-backs! (Unless they really can’t help, of course.)
TK understandably proceeds to flood your phone with messages. After you silence it and put it back into your pocket, you spot Blue just… staring. Blank-faced, right at you. He’s walking right next to you still, just – nothing on his face.
“… Blue?” You try. He doesn’t immediately respond. “Blue? You okay?”
The PTR jolts back to life almost literally. “Huh? Oh! Sorry, sorry. I’m okay. First time I’ve seen you actually use that, not just glance at it.” You relax a little as he pauses. He hadn’t looked like that when he’d gotten curious earlier, but hey – maybe phones were just different. Or more familiar? “That was your friend?”
“Mmhm. TK. They’ll be meeting us at the first store, so we can look around it for a while. They live a bit far out, right now.”
“Ah, okay.” He says, and… that’s it. He goes right back to focusing on the walk, and examining the city. You’d question it, but – he’d reacted about the same earlier, with Benji and her owner, hadn’t he? And it’ll be easier when he’s actually talking to TK, just like it was when Blue actually started talking to Benji’s owner, and petting the dog.
For now, you two just continue the walk in relative quiet. After a few minutes, Blue remarks on one of the office buildings – it really is just all glass, isn’t it? – and whatever tension that bled into your shoulders releases as you confirm that yeah, those walls are all glass.
Not too much later, you arrive at the store, and push open the door for Blue. The inside is brightly lit but cramped – shelves and shelves and shelves of stuff border the edge of hazardous, and the only employee seems to be the cashier who offers a not-entirely-chipper good afternoon. You return the greeting, then let him get back to whatever he’s reading.
You turn to Blue to let him know where to look, but the PTR has disappeared from your side – off and lost in the aisles, you’re pretty sure. You sigh, not entirely with resignation, and make your way off to the back. Blue’s either gonna be lost for a while in all the weird crap that turns up in these kinds of stores, or he’ll find you in a few minutes.
Your money is on the former. You pull your phone back out and – after making sure there weren’t any super recent notifications, and that the last one was TK threatening to give all your dirty laundry to this new roommate, you turn your notifications back on. So you don’t leave TK in the dust for half an hour; that’d be rude.
When you’re done snickering at all their yelling and threatening and you better not be dragging me out here for nothing’s, making sure the read receipts are on, you go back to what you came here for:
Looking for the mattresses. There are some, leaning dangerously straight against the wall, and the sizes are tagged on them are tagged in inches.
After double-checking Blue’s not nearby – mostly because you’d just ask him instead – you go onto the Phenomenology website and start looking for Blue’s height. There’s a lot on the general information page that you weren’t expecting, honestly; a lot that doesn’t really seem general. You’ve skimmed over a good number of very not-general paragraphs – about their inner wiring, personally debugging your PTR, the confirmation process on purchase and delivery for a recycled one, how they recycle a PTR, before you hit on the fact that they’re six foot four inches.
… You nearly scroll back up before deciding – not right now – and just… closing it. You can find out how they simulate the entire death of a person and then put something else in its shell later on! So that’ll haunt your sleep at night, because you need to imagine your roommate being brainwiped and sold.
You try very hard to take comfort in the fact that there was none of the mentioned delivery confirmation for Blue.
Then you take comfort in just staring death at the beds as you do a little bit of mental math. Mental math is fine.
Seventy six inches total. He’ll need one of those eighty inch mattresses, then… and probably a wider one? Considering how much of him is just those gangly limbs. And while these ones smell not-quite reassuringly of bleach and mothballs – they’re clean, at least – you’re not sure if Blue has a preferred softness. You rub sanitizer into your hands as you approach one of the two that are marked with the appropriate eighty-inches. This first one feels like it’s got rocks stuffed into it instead of springs, and never mind the sound it makes. Even if Blue made himself deaf, you can feel the mattress protesting your pushing, and it makes your bones rattle and your teeth tingle. You don’t even want to imagine what that’d feel like to someone mostly made of metal.
The other option of the two is missing a couple of springs in the corner – so was Lucy’s, but you found those in the nightstand, so you can just repurpose those – but aside from that, seems alright. It’s even got something like a padded cover on it. It’s lumpy, though – and the torn corner is leaking cotton and… something glittery?
… Maybe not, then.
You give yourself a thorough look over to make sure you don’t have any fiberglass on yourself – you seem clean, nothing glitters or catches your eye, at least – but you decide on a second shower when you’re home anyway. Just in case. Just in case.
Either way; neither of these. One of them screamed like nails on a chalkboard, and the other bled a hazard.
You wander off into the aisles instead; either TK will message you and you’ll have to find your way to the front, you’ll stumble into Blue, or you’ll find something just weird enough to distract yourself until one of the former is true.
Aside from a general idea of larger items being in the back, you’re not sure that there’s any kind of organizational system. At the very least, you’ve found what seems to be a busted vacuum cleaner cozying up to the empty husk of a computer tower. Or maybe a model of one? You have no idea; all you know is you push the buttons, and they click pleasantly, yet hollowly. Not even the disc drive pops open, though you feel a spring engage, somewhere in there.
You shuffle along the aisles until you find the obligatory creepy children’s toys aisle. It has to be intentional that the vintage, worn-down dolls – and only those ones – are sitting upright and leering down at you, malice in their unblinking, unfeeling eyes.
… Creepy things.
A little further down is what seems to be a de facto garden decoration zone; there’s dismantled bird baths, hoses, shovels and trowels piled together, and – nearly hidden between two shelves – a small collection of statuettes swarming a single, smiling gnome. You nudge one of a giraffe closer, hissing get ‘im! into its chipped ear, and scuttle off before anyone catches you playing with them.
… Is it your fault they were clearly having an uprising against their grinning overlord? Less gnomes, more cute statues of random, bizarre things, you say. Equality among garden décor! Or something.
You shake off your silliness and go back to something more serious: wandering the aisles. If you’re lucky, there’ll be something you won’t contract lead poisoning from that you might like. If you’re not – well, Blue will definitely be having a good time in the mess. The idea makes you smile, just a little. There’s enough weird shit here to keep both of you occupied until TK arrives, and then there’ll be enough weird shit in the next pawn shop to stop things getting too awkward. If nothing else, you can volunteer to buy one horrible and tacky thing for TK, to make up for the short notice. Or if they’re feeling particularly cruel, they’ll make you buy one awful, tacky thing to put in your window for the next month or so.
Hopefully they’re feeling merciful after your little disappearance. You’ll find out.