zenderael_rl | [EVENT]

He snapped back around to shout, "And where the fuck do you get off telling me skepticism is unfuckingscientific!"

She jumped, visibly startled by his outburst. Then she crossed her arms again. "Your brand is, yeah."

She may not have shouted back, but her temper was beginning to rise.

"We don't have the same fucking evidence, Jordan! New species cropping up in town is not a reasonable leap to 'they're from a fucking video game'! And I don't know if you realize but I have basically been in radio silence from the world the whole time monsters were showing up."

Floodgates: opened.

"Even if they look and sound like the ones in Zen? Have the same offensive capabilities?" The look she gave him was irritated-skeptical, but there wasn't much bite behind her words. She'd more or less passed Duncan off as impossible to convince, so she wasn't even going to try.

"Plants and insects don't have offensive capabilities in the game! You're talking about the monsters and I just said I didn't hear about those until one attacked me!"

"Whatever." It was all a blur of what-the-fuck to her with few time points to stand out -- namely, Rhys felling that tree, finding out Alex was moving on his own, trying to and failing to kill him...

She looked up at the ceiling again, desperate enough to consider what would happen if she climbed back up and shot through the vents.

That was dumb.

Whatever. Whatever?

"Fuck you," he shot back, lowering to a normal volume again. He walked back to the door, glared at it, and then turned on her again suddenly. "I think I know now why you didn't want me to know you in real life. Because I'd figure out what a bitch you were."

Duncan did not normally use gendered insults. That particular one very rarely made it out of his mouth. But his social justice muscles were not caught up to his anger, so there it was.

He'd regret it later.

She bristled, then turned to face him. "Yes, that's exactly it," she hissed, fingers clawing into the sleeves of her jacket. "I'm a bitch. Anything else you'd like to get out while we're here? Make yourself a little less useless, maybe?"

"The fuck do you want me to do?" He swept his arms out at the room. "There's no fucking way out, and even if we did get out, there's a level 100 raid boss in the next goddamn room!"

That Rhys was probably fighting, if he wasn't already dead.

"Aren't your friends out there? Try a little harder."

"You think I'll help them by making myself a target?" he demanded. "I'm about as useful on either side of that door. I can't fight that fucking thing."

But he did pull out his cell phone and start typing out a text to send Mal, Gabe, and Rhys (not Theresa, she didn't have a cell), to ask if they were safe and someplace out of the line of fire.

"Anything's better than sitting around waiting to die." Fuck, he was such a defeatist. How much of Ravi was actually him?

She noticed his phone and said sharply, "Don't text Rhys."

If a) this wasn't Duncan and b) he wasn't pissed at her, he might have noticed how out of the blue it was for Jordan to refer to Rhys by his name rather than his online handle.

"We're not." If they were in here, they were relatively safe, and there was nothing to draw Kharveryos's attention to them. They weren't waiting to die so much as simply...waiting. If you asked him, he wasn't defeatist, he was just being practical.

His head snapped up when she said it, his face confused, but he obligingly deleted Rhys's name from the list of recipients before sending the text out. "Why?"

Depending on how long this went, they might die from hypothermia.

"It might distract him," was her minimal answer, glare averted.

Gabe responded first, and Duncan typed back an answer right away. "Okay," was all he said, kind of skeptical in tone, like 'okay whatever you say buddy,' but he didn't press or question any further.

Satisfied with his response, she started to pace the width of the room to keep as warm as she possibly could, leaving Duncan to his phone in silence.

She did want to text Rhys, to see if he was all right, but there was no point. If he was fighting (he was totally fighting) he wouldn't be able to answer. Most likely he wouldn't even notice receiving a text in the first place. Noelle, too. How useful were arrows in this situation? Was she struggling with the cold, too?

Well both of his friends were okay out there, that was a relief. But he was certainly not, he realized, as he noticed how difficult it was getting to type thanks to the cold turning his fingers stiff. He sent off the text he was working on and let out a slow breath, watching the condensation form in the air.

He hated Kharveryos, he decided.

He also decided that Jordan was right, he did need to do something, because he was not properly equipped to do nothing in weather like this.

The tables outside had tablecloths. Did they keep those in here? They'd be thin and cheap, but it was better than relying on what he was wearing to keep his own body heat in. He started moving, scanning the shelves, pausing to answer Gabe and Mal when his phone went off.

He found a plastic tub nestled between a shelf and a stack of folding chairs that he probably wouldn't have seen if he wasn't looking as closely as he'd been and pried it open to check the contents. He dug through cheap centerpiece arrangements until he found a corner of white that led to a small stack of folded tablecloths.

"Hey," he called out to Jordan, as he dug them out of the tub one at a time, dropping them to the floor beside him. He wasn't petty enough not to give her something to keep warm with; he'd worked out most of his anger by calling her a bitch. "Come here."

Meanwhile, the opposite was occurring in Jordan; her worries and frustration were steadily rising, each feeding the other into a silent anger that chipped at her ability to keep a cool head. She'd eventually stopped pacing and crouched down in front of a folded table, holding her knees to her torso as she ignored the childish urge to scream and physically lash out.

Duncan's voice snapped her attention away -- at least, for the moment -- and she lifted her head to look at him. Her eyes narrowed at the cloths on the floor, but she got up and walked over, looking as if she might cry at any minute. (She wouldn't.)

He stood, pulling a couple of tablecloths with him, trying to organize them to be roughly layered with each other. "Here." He held them up for her to take.

She glared at the tablecloths, but took them with a muttered, "Thank you," stepping away so she could throw them around her shoulders.

She turned her glare back to the door, then to the door knob, and after a brief moment, she walked up to it. What if Rhys fought himself to death? You didn't notice wounds in Fury. What if the greycloaks had already come and smuggled him away?

Jordan kicked the door. Then she kicked it again, and again. The tablecloths slipped off, pooling around her feet, and still she kicked and slammed the door with the palm of her hand.

If Rhys hadn't questioned her-- If he'd just turned her like she'd asked, they wouldn't be in this position--!

He sat against the shelves, wrapping himself up in another pair of tablecloths, his rifle laying on the floor beside him. It wasn't much, but it was better than standing around freezing. It kept him from losing heat at the very least.

He had his phone out again by the time Jordan made it to the door. He fumbled it when her kicking startled him. He stared for a minute, just watching, not sure if he should say anything. He didn't want her to turn that on him...

He quietly picked his phone up again and, after a second, decided to try Nadir. They really needed to get out of here if Jordan was cracking already.

Edited 2012-07-13 05:25 (UTC)

She was only at it for another minute or so. Her palms could only take so much against an ice cold door. They stung, but at least she had warmed herself up, if only slightly.

She slipped back down, crouching in front of the door with her head against it, and let out a pathetic laugh. "Now I'm the violent one..."

"Whatever helps you feel better," Duncan told her, without any hint of mockery in it. He glanced at his two remaining texts from Gabe and Mal and decided not to respond. He wanted to know it was Nadir the next time his phone went off.

He tucked the phone away in a pocket and folded his arms over his knees, resting his chin on them. "I'm sorry I called you a bitch."

Her shoulder jerked with a silent laugh. "It's true. I am."

"Yeah, well, I'm still sorry," he said. "It was a shitty thing to say."

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