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“This is pretty fucking high.” John says, flatly. It's the most he can manage as his thoughts scatter like marbles the moment he actually looks down over the edge. Now that he has, it's getting increasingly difficult to move away. Or at all.
“It is.” He hears Rose over his shoulder. She’s doing that uneven half-smile she does when she can't quite suppress a smirk, he can hear it in her voice. He can appreciate the effort, at least. It's better than giving him the Kubrick stare, which is what she has been doing behind his back this entire time, like a creep. Under any other circumstances, he would welcome the opportunity to tease her about being weird and menacing and stuff, but he's too preoccupied with being completely frozen in place at the moment.
“I mean, way higher than it looked like from down there," he clarifies the obvious, as a last-ditch attempt to appeal to her humanity while keeping at least a scrap of his dignity to his name. Being this stiff and nervous in front of her is already doing irreversible damage, no matter how well he thinks he hides it. She can practically smell it on him. Growing up with a Strider will do that to you, apparently. And (lucky her!) she's had plenty of those to practice on.
“I guess,” She comes closer until they’re both standing side by side at the cliffdrop. She leans forward and peers down with her arms crossed over her chest, unfazed. Only then does John finally draw back.
He doesn’t say anything when she turns to him with a light shrug. Rose doesn’t either, just stares him down with an expression that turns slowly from expectant to impatient the more her eyebrows rise under her bangs. John’s feet burn from this rock that’s progressively getting too hot to stand on.
“So, what will it be, chicken?” she says eventually, and John's eye twitches.
“Can you give me a second? I’m just thinking. Of something.” he rolls his eyes, mostly at her, but also at how overly defensive that sounded.
“Sure. All the seconds you need. Who am I to get between you and your somethings. Take your time, it's not like we’re giving ourselves melanoma from standing in the scorching sun all this time.”
They probably are giving themselves melanoma, whatever that is. The sun is blinding and disorienting, and he thinks he's well past the point of getting a respectable sunburn going already. There’s no doubt about Rose, she’s bright pink practically everywhere, even after applying half of her own and Jade’s sunscreen. Either way, if they sit here twiddling their thumbs for five more minutes they will both get cooked alive.
John steals one last, bitter glance at where Jade and Dave are lounging peacefully, cool and unbothered on a rock much closer to the water, under the only patch of shade for what is probably miles, provided by, you guessed it, yet another fucking rock. Dave, who is lying flat on his back, in a way that truly only he can make look comfortable, props himself up on his elbows and says something to Jade, who sits cross-legged beside him. Her hair, still dripping wet, is pulled up in a bun over her head, as she’s hunched over two rolling papers that she has stuck together, attempting to tap the contents of a grinder into them with one hand while shielding her damn near arts-and-crafts project from the wind with the other. Dave watches her struggle for a moment, and eventually reaches to help her, only to have his hand swatted away without so much as a glance. He raises it defensively and slumps back again.
When he lifts his head, his eyes meet John’s. Dave gives him a lazy, one-handed thumbs up, and John sighs deeply. It is the fastest way down, he guesses, and the thought of cannonballing straight into the cool water below is starting to sound awfully nice compared to the heatstroke he's about to be hit with if he doesn’t get out of the sun soon. But fuck him, it's a long way down.
“Yeah, Rose, I don’t know about this one."
She sighs and says something under her breath that sounds a lot like ‘pussy’.
“What?”
“What what?”
“I heard that.”
She lets her hands drop in an exasperated, distinctly Striderian manner, and levels him with a blank stare.
“If it's so easy why don’t you do it, huh? Go right ahead, I don’t mind at all,”
“I think I'm okay.” she states wryly.
“Please, I insist! Show me how it's done.”
“Well, it's not my dare, is it?”
Ah, yes. The root of the problem, the catalyst for his misery: Truth or Dare. It was a matter of time before this dumb, month-long game put him in a position where he would be standing on the edge of a boulder with a steep 40 feet plunge between him and something vaguely resembling a beach, he really should have known. The moment it dawned on them to play this universally regrettable, stupidly competitive game, he had already unknowingly signed his fate. Who is he to defy a dare? God forbid. He hasn’t known peace in months. Whose idea was this again? He fears it might have been his.
This has gone on for long enough. “Alright, fine! Fuck.” he snaps. He spins on his heel and stomps away.
“Tapping out?” Rose asks, unimpressed.
John scoffs and stops a few feet away, shaking the nerves out. “You wish.” He drops to the ready. “Strap in.”
About 40 feet below them, the tip of Jade’s joint sparks and sizzles as she inhales. John and Rose were arguing loud enough to draw her and Dave’s attention from all the way down here. She exhales deeply, and sinks further into her snug pile of backpacks and towels.
“Mm-hmm,” she hums, satisfied, as the familiar buzz settles in. She lets the waves of soothing heaviness wash warmly over her limbs as her muscles unwind and her body slowly eases itself into puddle-mode.
“God bless Mr. Captor.”
“Amen.” Dave adds. Not that he's ever met the guy, but his stuff is good, that much is undeniable.
Jade passes the joint over, puts a hand over her eyes and squints up at where the noise was coming from. John is out of view, having walked too far back to be visible from this angle, but she can clearly see Rose, standing at the cusp of the drop with her hand on her hip, staring at where he must be. “Ya think he's gonna fall and break all his bones?”
Dave pinches the last of the joint between his thumb and forefinger and brings it to his lips, perched up on one elbow and trying to make out what is happening up there. He gives up eventually and lays back with an arm behind his head, wiggling until he is comfortably splayed over the flat surface of the rock. Behind his shades, his eyes are closed, voice tight as he breathes out the hit.
“Nah. He ain’t gonna do it.”
Jade hums again. She stretches her legs out and leans back on her arms. She basically has a front row seat to the sight of Rose’s body tensing suddenly, before the top of John’s head re-emerges, running at full speed straight towards her. He pauses briefly right before colliding bodily into her, hooking one arm under her knees and another around her shoulders before she has time to process the situation. She yelps, uncharacteristically dumbstruck, as she is scooped off her feet with one swift movement. “What the hell—!” is all she manages before John leaps, throwing them both right off the edge.
Dave springs up, choking and coughing out a cloud of smoke at the collected, dignified shriek of horror his sister lets out as she abruptly finds herself in mid-air, quite a long way from ground level, while Jade’s jaw drops in astonishment as she watches her friends frantically cling to each other in a panic while rapidly plummeting down to her eye level, and then past it. Only in the short, silent moment while the ripples of the water swell and spread away from the point where the two of them barreled through the surface of it does the scene register in her mind.
“Holy fuck?!” She’s so caught off guard that for a few seconds she’s frozen in openmouthed disbelief, marveling at what she just witnessed, but when John and Rose both shoot up to the surface, pale in the face and gasping for breath, she can't help herself. The fact that Dave is shocked speechless for once, wide-eyed and deathly still with a stupefied expression so exaggerated that it looks like an illusion coming from him, doesn’t help, nor does the ample amount of THC in her system. She bursts into a peal of uncontrollable laughter.
“HA!” John exclaims at Rose’s general direction and wheezes, still extremely out of breath. “Who’s a pussy noAURGH—” Rose splashes a sheet of water directly into his open mouth.
“What the HELL is wrong with you, you psychOUGH—” he gets her back immediately, still spitting out the lungful of water he's choking on.
Jade thinks she might die here. There are tears prickling at the corners of her eyes, and she’s lightheaded and suffocating from laughing too hard.
Next to her, after ensuring he won’t need to perform impromptu CPR for the first time in his life on neither his sister nor his best friend, Dave lets his shoulders drop and gradually settles back to a slouching position. The joint has long died in his hand. He pushes his damp hair back, huffs out a stunned laugh and takes a second to collect his thoughts before speaking.
“I'm so mad I didn’t record that.”