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“Today’s Halloween,” JR offers.
The deck of the crashed yacht is cold, LOMAT’s morning mists swirling around them and Legion.
“What’s Halloween?” Legion asks. He’s forgotten how to play poker. He’s got room for the holiday, at least, but he’s staring at the cards in front of them with a blank expression in his eyes.
JR picks up the cards in a hurry. They’ll remember where they were later, but they don’t want to freak him out with a game he can’t remember how to play. “Spooky time,” JR says. “The only holiday that exists other than April Fools.”
Legion absorbs this. Halloween. April Fools. JR.
April Fools doesn’t count. He doesn’t know what that is, so it’s not taking up a slot; he can keep this pair of things safely in his head together. Halloween. JR. Halloween is a holiday. JR is the person in front of him. They have a spiral for a face.
(Not that Legion knows what a regular face looks like, right now.)
“Cool,” he asks. “What do we do for Halloween?”
“Carve pumpkins,” JR says. They’re reminiscing, now, wandering down some memory hole in their head. They’re picking their words carefully. Everything has to be mediated through themselves or Halloween, or else it’ll slide out of Legion’s thoughts like soup through a sieve or freak him out and they’ll switch to a version of him that doesn’t have room for Halloween or doesn’t recognize them. “Dress up in costumes. Eat candy.”
“Can we do any of that now?” Legion looks around for pumpkins, candy, or costumes. He doesn’t see any.
“Maybe,” JR says. “There’s not a lot left around here, the doggo made a huge mess, but…”
The swirl of their face pulses as they think, and something orange and round appears on the table.
“That’s a pumpkin,” Legion says, forgetting about Halloween entirely. Pumpkins, JR.
“Yep,” JR says. “Wanna make a face with it?”
Legion knows that’s something you can do with pumpkins if you have the right tools. Apparently, he has the right tools—sharp objects, a scoop—and only remembers that now.
“Yes,” he says.
They carve a smile into the pumpkin, toothy and sharp eyed. JR isn’t smiling, because they don’t have a face, but they have a vibe of someone who would be smiling if they had a face.
He forgets about the pumpkin entirely when JR takes the cards out, and the game continues as though there had been no interruption.
But JR can look at the pumpkin, and JR can remember, even as Legion absolutely destroys them at poker with the single-minded focus of someone who knows absolutely everything about poker. JR hadn’t known there was a Legion who could carve pumpkins. They’re glad to know it.