checkingout | sleeping is giving in, no matter what the time is [open]

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sleeping is giving in, no matter what the time is [open]

Who: Sam Winchester and Thea Queen; also OPEN if anyone else wants to join the no-sleep train with a starter
When: May 21st, sometime after this
Where: Lobby, then Dining Hall
What: Totally not a slumber party in the dining hall while we all drink coffee and try not to fall asleep won't that be fun
Warnings: Insomnia. Attempted caffeination. Probably digging up old trauma.

This is sure to go well.

Weak coffee; tablets reduced to streaming a seemingly never-ending torrent of nightmares, literal nightmares; a future of willful insomnia for an unclear amount of time; and there is statistically no way this could go wrong. Never mind that right now, Sam needs sleep more than ever - he's taken a turn for the shitty again, because if there's anything his body did not need it was a rehash of the measureless years he spent in Hell with Satan.

That was definitely a thing he needed the entire hotel to know about. Big neon sign of intended vessel for Literal Satan, just right up and branded on his forehead. All right. Sure. Cool.

He blows out a breath, bracing a hand against the lobby wall. Descending the stairs always feels like a trial all its own. Categorically, Sam's not a fan of that. Not in general. There's just no way to be inconspicuous about it - he literally looks like he's about to collapse any second, and internally he's not feeling much better. He supposes that parasomniac bullshit would have that effect. Lucky him.

But, whatever, he'll deal with it. Keep trucking on, aggressively dealing with everything because he is fine and he is well-adjusted except that no he isn't. And he won't deal with it alone, either. He's not sure what he and Thea will even have to talk about over this hotel's poor excuse for coffee, except maybe, 'boy, that nightmare sure happened to be a doozy.'

He covers his cough in his elbow and straightens up as best as he can to wait.

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Technically she doesn't want to talk about her nightmare anymore than he does, she's sure. Nothing like sitting down over shitty luke-warm coffee with someone she hardly knows and talking about how her father made her murder someone, and how she's really very terrified that it'll happen again. That sounds about as awesome as the entire hotel knowing that she's an actual murderer.

Oh wait--

Really, she'd just like to forget that it ever happened. But logically, she knows that trying to deal with it herself isn't going to bode well. Not with a history of drug abuse. Even though she's pretty sure this place doesn't even have ibuprofen. At the very least, she doesn't need to be locked in her room trying to keep herself awake. So this works.

He looks even worse in person than he does on camera, health wise. But that's not even her first thought when she comes down the stairs.

"You look a lot shorter on camera." That is her first thought as she comes up beside him, because he's honest to god an entire foot taller than she is. Her hand hovers near him some, like she wants to make sure he doesn't fall over. "Can you make it to the dining hall? Or do you need a hand?" And that is genuine concern, not sarcasm.

"Little too short to be a Stormtrooper?" Sam deadpans, but he's pretty sure the humor cracks as weakly as he feels. "I'll be fine." More straight lie, less deadpan, but he pushes himself away from the wall and stands on his own, a little demonstration of Look Ma, no hands. It's not very impressive as far as demonstrations go, and it'd probably carry more weight if he didn't look like a haggard, tired, half-dead sasquatch. With horns. Metaphorical Devil's horns.

Gotta put a positive spin on everything.

He starts moving toward the dining hall with a beautiful minimum of swaying or walking in a crooked line, which is really just phenomenal given his utter lack of crural coordination in the days prior.

"Little setback," he says, like that explains anything.

His nerd joke is not lost on her, even if she did grow up watching Gossip Girl and The OC over Star Wars. The side effects of being born into money and high social status. "I have complete faith in your ability to not fall over," she says, and she's rolling her eyes. The stubbornness reminds her of Oliver. It's a strange sort of comfort.

Despite his insistence that he's fine, she sticks kind of close to him, preparing herself for having to catch him if he stumbles. Not that she thinks her short, slim frame will be able to support his weight, but she's prepared to try.

"You chose a great time to catch the plague," she says, and she tries to insert something more cheery into her tone. It only sort of works.

"Not so much 'plague' as 'side-effect'." Most unfortunate side-effect of all time. But he is a Winchester, and therefore of the mindset to mulishly insist that he is fine and will continue stubbornly acting as if he doesn't feel like he's dying every other second of the day. "Kinda showed up here with it."

Playing it off like it's more of an inconvenience than anything life-threatening has helped - at least with his personal mindset, seeing as Cas had said a lot of scary things like subatomic and irreversible and there was the completely likely option of imminent organ failure but you know what, he's okay, he's accepted it, really.

In the absence of any kind of silver lining, he adds, "at least it's not catching."

The dining hall is the same dreary room it always is, but at least thank god he can spot the coffee from across the room. Cold, weak, terrible coffee.

"Side-effect of what?" It doesn't really occur to her that it might be a side-effect of something he doesn't actually want to talk about. She's mostly concerned that if this is the side-effect, then the actual thing must be really really awful.

She glances up (way up) at him. "That's good. I can't say I'd be very happy if you gave me the plague." There's probably not anything that can stop her from continuing to refer to it as the plague, either. Mostly because he actually literally looks like he's dying as they make their way across the dining hall.

"Looks like somebody's decided to hoard all the sugar," she observes, already taking the pot of cold coffee to pour some for the both of them. She hasn't even tasted it yet and she's already aching for her stupidly complicated Starbucks order.

"Uhhh." Well, that didn't take long. Granted, there's no way anyone here could know 'monster flu' and 'Hellgates' are connected. Not even Gabriel had figured it out right away.

He could go for the easy lie ~~thearetically~~ theoretically, but he'd rather be making friends here than otherwise, and being up-front typically comes with that package unless your name is Dean. "I tried to close the Gates of Hell?"

There's just no way to not make his life sound absurd.

Sugar's overrated, anyway. This stuff can't be any worse than the thousands of cups of gas station hydrochloric sludge he's downed while on a case, and then Sam takes a sip and immediately rescinds his previous statement. He was wrong. This stuff is worse. It's not worse because of the taste, so much - it's worse because it's cold and miserable and almost utterly flavorless and just serves as that unhappy reminder of why they're even doing this. Running away from their problems jointly, aggressively ignoring dreams and nightmares and all the assorted personal baggage.

She almost laughs, but mostly she just manages to look some weird mix of amused and surprised. "Looks like it's honesty hour," she says. Maybe it's the absurdity of the answer, or just the way he says it, but it doesn't seem like the sort of answer someone would give as a lie. "I'm going to believe you, but only because I believed my next door neighbor when he told me he was an alien from the future, and fair's fair."

And also because she's entirely too trusting of people, to the point where it leads to very awful mistakes, and given everything that's happened, it doesn't seem too far fetched anyway.

She takes a sip of her own and pulls a grimace. She's literally never had bad coffee in her life. If she weren't trying to escape wrecking nightmares, it wouldn't even be worth it. But as it is, she sits down at the end of a table with it, nudging out the seat across from her for him if he wants it.

He's not about to challenge 'alien from the future' because he's pretty sure he knows like, two of those by now. That doesn't mean he's not going to blink at her in surprise with a slightly open mouth and a faint frown. Then again, weirdness isn't a sliding scale, and the spectrum's gonna vary pretty heavily for everyone. He has to keep reminding himself of that. So instead he takes a fortifying sip of the tasteless battery acid the kids are calling 'coffee' these days. It does not taste like coffee. It tastes like misery and the tears of ducklings.

"Think we got a few of those," he says tiredly, pouring himself into the chair without a second thought. "Aliens from the future. One of them's green, can't really miss her."

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