Meeting Across the River - [New Jersey, 2009]

[allmhadadh]

It was dark again when Scotty woke up, half-twisted in sheets and still a little groggy.  It actually took him a few moments of laying there in that darkness to get his bearings, and remember where he was, and remember when he was

Comments

[haroldlee]

Aaaah, fuck. Consciousness. Fuck off

[allmhadadh]

"Uhm... 7:03PM, accordin' t' yer clock." Scotty nodded his head in the direction of the coffee maker; it was finished, and he already had a mug he'd scrubbed out in hand. He hadn't been up long, only about twenty minutes now. And he still felt mildly groggy. But the headache was just a tiny, uneasy buzz deep in his skull, and easily ignored. "We're a bit backwards, but coffee's fresh. How'd ye sleep?"

[haroldlee]

"Like death and not enough," Harold replied with the ghost of a smile. He pulled a mug from a cabinet and rinsed the dust off it, washing quickly, before pouring one of his own.

He leaned back against the counter and downed about half of the cup in one.

"You?"

Oh, right.

"Any noise out of Neil?" Truth be told, now that he had two iotas of consciousness to rub together, he was pretty uncomfortable with the idea of the dude in his apartment. Which was stupid, considering he didn't even want the thing anymore, but it was true. The guy left destruction, love stains and pissed-off prostitutes in his wake.

[allmhadadh]

"Well enough; odd dreams." Scotty took another sip of coffee, just trying to basically order his world in his mind. Food, clothing, shelter, paperwork, employment. Not necessarily in that order. "He's doin' a'right, I think; gone, but breathin' steady, decent if nae slightly weak heartbeat."

He paused a moment, thinking. "This is yer time, aye? How hard's it gonna be fer me t' find legal employment? An' if I canna do that, illegal?"

[haroldlee]

Neil Patrick Harris had been dreaming.

He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of a tall, bizarre red bus with an impossibly high cieling. A chandalier hung from it, swaying heavily with each twist and turn of their journey. His shrunken head was hung by its hair by the driver's seat, and for some reason, spoke with a Jamaican accent.

Eyes wide, Neil listened raptly. His head - who kept calling him Ernie, for reasons that made perfect sense to Neil at the time - was about to reveal the meaning of life when the bus jerked sharply to the right to avoid a unicorn.

Reality bent, and their bus stretched out into the ether, squishing them both paper-thin.

NPH rolled over in his troubled sleep, clutching at the bed beside him for his lost pixie. Sniffing and clawing a handful of bedcovers, he mumbled thickly. "Dave's not here, man."

[allmhadadh]

Well, whatever blondie was dreaming seemed to have disturbed him. But at least he wasn't as still and lifeless as he had been the last time Scotty had checked on him, so Scotty took that as a good thing.

He frowned a bit, sitting down on the edge of the bed and giving a leather-clad shoulder a not-too-hard shake. "Wake up."

[haroldlee]

Wait, wasn't this dude supposed to have wings?

Neil groaned and opened one bleary eye, his addled mind superimposing dragonfly wings on Scotty's back for an instant before they fizzled away.

Huh.

Not knowing quite why, Neil Patrick Harris kicked and dragged himself across the bed using a fistful of sheet and attempted to curl around the not-pixie sitting beside him. The motion rattled his brain in his skull, sending vicious furrows of pain across his being.

"Goway."

It was awfully contradictory. Not that he could tell at that moment.

[allmhadadh]

"I canna right now, ye need t' pull yer head t'gether." Regardless, probably as something of an apology for the goose-egg on Neil's head, Scotty petted at a spot of blond hair not on said goose-egg. "We're gonna take ye t' a hotel, give back th' car an' let ye go. I dinna really want ye t' go get all fucked-up again, but we canna very well keep ye here forever."