Logs:Old Habits

Old Habits
Dramatis Personae DJ, Polaris	2023-08-14 (The day after the world's most awkward orgy and a horrible end to the night.)
Location <NYC> Freaktown - Riverdale - The Bronx
This slim strip of a waterfront park runs the length of the Hudson shoreline through the entire neighborhood, little more at any given place than a footpath punctuated with benches. Freaktown's stretch of it is strung with a colorful chaos of string lights and fluttering pennants throughout, sprouting along the way a picnic area, a playground, a skate park, and even a small but serviceable dock. Freaktown is quieter than usual at the tail end of communal supper. It isn't a terrified hush, though many residents are justly afraid after the events of last night, but more of a shaken exhaustion. The sun set a short while ago, but the western horizon still flares brilliant pink and orange and purple where it fades toward a passably starry night that isn't here yet. Polaris has been out here since finishing her kitchen shift, sitting out at the end of the pier. She's wearing a black ribbed tank top and comfortable faded jeans, a red bandana keeping her bobbed hair out of her face, her boots set aside so she can dangle her bare feet over the edge of the pier. There's a loop of tightly knitted steel wire drifting in the air in front of her, lazily distorting its way through various cat's cradles. DJ likely hasn't slept -- certainly not much of anyone was sleeping last night, and he's since been firmly ensconced in the house where the injured have been tended. He's now wandering down, red-eyed and more than slightly wilted, the khakis and red polo he's still wearing both somewhat rumpled. He hesitates as he approaches, stopping at the far side of the pier to just look at Polaris a moment before heading over. His steps are slow, and he folds himself down to sit cross-legged beside her when he reaches the pier's end. It's likely Polaris noticed DJ well before she turned to gaze adoringly up at him, pleased but unsurprised. "Hey." Her voice is quiet, almost drowned out by the river, but when she repeats the word it doesn't sound like it's much for fear he didn't hear her. It's actually just a different, more concerned "Hey", in her Carebears register (she probably had to stop herself from adding "friend"). "Did you eat?" The woven-wire cord pools down into her outstretched left hand. "I --" DJ's brows furrow like he can't quite remember. "I think..." He's digging knuckles against his eyes, slow to drop his hand to his lap. His eyes fix heavily on the wire in Polaris's hand; it takes an effort before he looks up to her face. "Uh -- someone gave me a tamale. I don't know when that was. When did tamales happen?" Polaris winces. "That was lunch. I mean, it's good you ate something, but you need way more than that." Her tone is more solicitous than censorious, and she glances over her shoulder in readiness to fetch him way more food. Then she looks at his face and subsides. "It's good you were able to help, too. 'Good'." She repeat with air quotes. "Sucks that you needed to, but..." The wire drifts up into the air again, looping on itself in the air and draping over her bandana in veil-and-circlet fashion. She lays her hand on his knee. "Are you okay? Other than the, you know, starvation and the trauma." DJ doesn't exactly flinch at Polaris's touch, but he does tense under her hand briefly. He blinks as he looks down at her hand, only slowly moving his to cover it. Then dropping his hand back to the pier like he's thought better of this gesture. "Can we -- talk. I know it's been a long day already so if you're not in a mood to..." He presses his lips together and meets her eyes again. "It's not an emergency, but it is serious." Polaris withdraws her hand, looks briefly unsure what to do with it, then just plucks the makeshift circlet off of her head again to occupy it. "Yeah. Yeah, for sure, we can talk." She's tugging the sort-of chain into a cat's cradle the old-fashioned way, now, with her actual fingers. "I'm not in the mood to make you stew in something that's upsetting you. What's up?" DJ folds his arm tight around his chest, then drops it, fingers pressing down against the wood beside him. "I -- was at Dusk's party last night," he starts, and then frowns before clarifying: "The one he ran." Though this half-clarification only deepens his frown. "The sex one. I was -- I don't really know what I was doing there. I didn't sleep with anyone, but I -- almost did. I think." He does not, admittedly, sound extremely sure, though he's struggling hard not to continue backtracking. "I mean, I kissed them. I think I was --" His eyes scrunch shut for just a moment and then open again. "-- I'm sorry. I should never have disrespected you or Hive that way, and I just -- just." He shakes his head slowly. "Am. Sorry." Somewhere in the midst of this awkward confession Polaris has turned to look directly at DJ. Her wide hazel eyes grow wider and wider as her expression passes rapidly through amusement, perplexity, anger, and hurt. "What," she wants to know, "the fuck. I mean were you--drunk? Or high--I'm not asking that to judge you I was high as a kite--or cycling? You don't seem manic are you doing stealth mania?" "No! I wasn't -- I mean Ryan was high but I don't think..." DJ blushes, his head bowing. "I don't know. I don't think I'm doing mania, either." He takes a second to stop, to consider, before venturing a little more confidently: "I'm not doing mania. I don't have an excuse, I just -- just messed up. I didn't feel like myself at all that night but that's not any... I'm sorry." "Ryan?" Polaris sputters, setting everything ferrous around them a-shiver. "Did he come onto you--wait, don't answer that I don't want to know." She looks away across the river still glittering with dusk. "I get things have been really hard. With the raid, and Hive, and it's not like the rest of your shit has gone away." She blinks hard, lightly sunburnt shoulders hunching. "But if you wanted sex, I was right here. And you know I--" Her voice breaks, and the tears break free, too--quieter than DJ might have had cause to expect. "Maybe you don't know. How badly I want you to fuck me senseless." She's probably flushing more than is obvious to see in the twilight, but she's also frowning through her tears, suddenly pensive. "Have you talked to Wendy at all? Lately?" DJ is opening his mouth to answer, but closes it again right quick. "I didn't want --" he starts to protest then, but quiets as if suddenly realizing how silly this objection sounds in context. His shoulders hunch, too, and then carefully relax. "... I do want you," he says instead, quiet. "I just --" He quiets again at Polaris's tears and almost starts to lift his hand toward her, but stops short of actually touching her sunburnt shoulder. His hand drops back to his lap, and he sits up a little straighter, blinking in some sudden confusion: "Wendy? Not since training, I -- don't think she ever really -- got. Used to me." "I know you want me, and I know it's not that simple, and that's why I haven't tried to--" Polaris scrubs at her eyes impatiently with one forearm. "Fuck. I know, that's not the point. The point is you stopped and you told me and you would have--" She swallows. "The point is I love you and I'm probably fixating on the wrong thing because I'm stressed the fuck out." She drops the cat's cradle, looping the chain around her wrist like a bracelet. "Just. You said you didn't feel like yourself. What did you feel like?" Once more DJ opens his mouth, closes it again. This time the silence is considerably longer, his brows creasing into a frown as he stares out at the river. "Someone else," he answers finally, heavier. "I don't know. Maybe everything with the raid and Dusk just --" His head shakes, and now he sounds a little wry. "Spent half the war just dissociating wildly, sometimes old habits..." But this just trails off, his shoulders tightening. "I'm sorry. I'll do better." Polaris bites her lower lip, frowning. "Look...I don't blame you, not really. I'm mad, but I'll get over it. If you were going to dissociate wildly somewhere last night--I'm glad it was with someone who would have taken care of you." She tilts over toward DJ and leans her shoulder against his. Then tips her head over onto his shoulder. "Even if I do kinda want to slap him around a little right about now. My mood might improve if you actually have supper..." "If you slapped him around right now he'd look very pathetic about it in his chair and it wouldn't feel satisfying at all, you should wait," DJ advises Polaris solemnly. His head tips down, forehead bonking lightly against the top of her head. "C'mon." He stands up, offering Polaris a hand to her feet. "If you eat with me, I might even spend more than three minutes wolfing it down before I get back to work." "Man, you've got way too much faith in me if you think I could take him when he's healthy." Polaris turns her face in against DJ's shoulder. "I look forward to getting my ass handed to me, and then maybe making him feel slightly bad about it, if he even remembers." She untucks herself a little reluctantly and looks up at him when he rises, her eyes strange in the last of the dying light. After only the barest hesitation--likely no one else would have even clocked it as such--she pulls herself up by his hand. "And sometime when you're not running off one solitary tamale and none sleep, you have got to tell me more about your 'old habits'." DJ squeezes at Polaris's hand. "Sometime." His eyes meet hers for a moment, and there's a small unresolved twitch at the corner of his mouth that fades as he shifts to offer Polaris the crook of his mechanical arm. "I have faith in you," he replies lightly. "Now, whether you could take Alma..."