fandomhighdorms | 4th floor common room

Lana wanders down wearing black sweatpants and an oversized sweatshirt that says "Smallville High Crows" on it. She stands in the doorway and watches Shep fondly for a moment. His hair is even more disheveled than usual and when she finally goes over to him she can't help playing with it.

"So, what are your little ones up to now?"

"You're fighting with the blond bimbo again. Which is on purpose, since I have to demonstrate positive and negative reactions between people. In a few minutes the one that looks like me will get home from work. You and I get along a lot better." He grins at her.

When he looks up from the computer he sees the t-shirt Lana's wearing. He sighs. "No, no, no... that shirt is all wrong." He sets the computer down after pausing the Sims. "You're going to make me give you your present a few days early, aren't you? Stay here."

Shep runs down the hall, leaving Lana in the common room.

In a minute he comes back with these:

He's replaced the tags in the back with "Monday" "Tuesday" "Wednesday" "Thursday" and "Friday". Like those silly underwear packs every child got at some point so their parents were sure they were changing their underwear.

"Happy Holidays."

Lana stares at them for a moment. "You are such an incredibly brat!" She laughs, shaking her head. "I can't believe you did this!"

She looks at all the shirts carefully, laughing at how he's labeled them, then smiles up at him. "But there's none for Sunday, so I must be okay like this. Unless you want to pick one for me to put on?"

"You volunteering to strip in the common room? I know a few people who'd be sorry to hear that they missed that." He smiles then sobers up a little not entirely sure how she's taken the gift. "You don't have to wear them if you don't want to. I just found them on the internet and thought they were funny." ~~He knows he has a week to come up with something else if this has pissed her off~~.

Lana raises her eyebrows at him. "You think I won't?"

She picks up the black one, turns her back on him, and shimmies into it under her sweatshirt, showing only a tantalizing glimpse of back - enough to know that the t-shirt is *all* she's wearing. She walks over to him with an impish grin. "They're great," she says and gives him a kiss.

Shep shakes his head. "Girls spend their time practicing the oddest skills."

He pulls her in and gives her a quick kiss. "Looks good on you."

"Oh, and guys don't?" Lana grinned at him.

"So, I get along better with the one who looks like you? Funny that. So when does he come home? And do I get to beat up the blonde one? I could, you know."

"Uh... no. Where I come from modisty is ... well, useless. If you need to change you just strip off and do it. And to hell with whoever else might be standing around looking."

He squints as the subject change throws him for a minute. "Oh, the Sims. I was still thinking about ~~what's not under your shirt~~ changing clothes in mixed company, I mean... nevermind."

"And yeah, go figure. Funny how I orchestrated that. He'll get home around 8:00 game time which is about fifteen of our minutes. And I haven't actually ever seen two Sims pound on each other, but I have seen one bitch-slap another." He raises his eyebrows mischieviously.

"Well...it's not like you haven't seen it before, but here where anyone can walk in... I'm not quite ready to be that immodest just yet."

She smiles at his stumbling around the whole changing thing, and just being in that sort of a mood, casually stretches, making the already short-cut t-shirt ride up even further before sitting down on the couch with him and ruffling her hair again.

"It is funny. Who would ever think we'd get along?" she teases. "And bitch-slapping, hmmm? I could get into that, I suppose."

For a second Shep considers saying, "Let me know when you are," to her comment about becoming immodest, but it's likely to get him an elbow in the ribs, so he doesn't.

Then she makes the comment about getting into slapping and all he can do is bury his face in his hand. There is no way anything that comes out of his mouth at this point is going to get him anywhere positive.

Instead he just drags one finger along the exposed stretch of her belly lightly enough to tickle her but good.

She giggles and squirms as he tickles her, but doesn't pull away. Instead, she moves in closer, leaving him in absolutely no doubt that she's only wearing a t-shirt, and running her fingers up under his shirt to trace patterns on the skin of his back.

"I have this feeling tickling doesn't work so well on you, so this will have to do for now," she says still giggling.

He shifts so Lana can reach under his shirt better and sets the laptop on her lap. "Here, you be you for a while."

Lana leaves one hand under his shirt and stares at the screen. "I... gosh I have no idea what to do. I'm just having fun watching you play with me."

She blushes when she realizes what she's said. "I mean... Oh God... there's no way out of that one, is there? Just... tell me what you want me to do."

"You know one of these days we'll have a conversation that doesn't sound like a script to a bad porn movie."

He points to the screen. "Okay, this is you. Now click on what you want to do. If you click on the fridge you can eat. If you click on the computer over here you can either play a game or look for a job or study." He points to the little indicators on the bottom, "You want to keep these as much in the green as possible. If the one for the bathroom gets all red... don't do that okay. Just click on the toilet when it gets about three-quarters there. The hygeine one will respond to the bathtub or the hottub."

Lana shakes her head. "It's all your fault, you know. I actually have normal conversations with other people. It's only around you that everything comes out... the way it comes out."

She looks at the game. "Okay. That doesn't sound too difficult. Do I - does *she* have a job? Ooh, and hot tub? That sounds like fun. Or should I wait till the one who looks like you gets home?"

"You don't have a job yet. I didn't think you'd want the job as a waitress. Blonde Bimbo is a thief." He grins. He generally didn't let people get under his skin, but this time... he was still pretty annoyed.

"And I can't get the two of them in the hot tub together yet. They don't know each other that well yet. We're only about four days into the game. If I'd offered to get into a hot tub with you four days after meeting you this semester you would have slapped me."

"I'll have you know I was a damn good waitress at the Talon. Yes, I ran the place, but that didn't mean I didn't waitress. But... well, maybe I'll look and see what jobs are available."

She thinks about the hot tub comment for a moment. "You're probably right. Though... how long have I actually known you anyway...? I met you here that night you and Wes were watching Jeopardy... that was..." she thinks back. "That was November 15th... Four days later was the next time I saw you... and you bled all over me. At that point I would have agreed to just about anything if it would have fixed you. Even going in a hot tub." She grinned at him.

"Yes, well, extenuating circumstances and all. But *earlier* that day? You would have kneed me in the groin. And you would have been well within your rights."

He pauses and thinks. "Should it scare me that you know what day we met? This is one of those girl-things isn't it?"

Shep scrolls up and clicks to see the date on his computer. "We've only known each other a month! That can't be right. I mean, is it me, or does it feel like it's been a lot longer?

"Kneed you in the groin?" Lana laughed. "Now, that might be a bit extreme. If you'd asked me to join you in a hot tub, I... well, it depends on what I thought your motives were. But I most likely would have politely turned you down, done the completely-lying 'maybe some other time' thing and disappeared quickly."

"As for remembering the date... well, Sunday the 13th is a date I'm not going to forget anytime soon, and that Thursday was the first day I had the guts to show my face anywhere, so the math is pretty easy." She looked rueful. "But you guys were really nice to me. I really needed people to just be nice, you know?"

She laughed at his expression. "Yeah, just a month. And you'd *better* be saying that because it feels like we've been good friends for a lot longer than that and *not* because you're thinking, 'Oh God, won't she *please* go away, it's been sooooo long.' "

He gives her an 'oh please' look.

"I'm doin' the math! We meet in the common room on like... a Thursday, Saturday I nearly get my arm taken off. I spend the next week in the hospital and the week after that stoned on pain-killers. The week after that I start going back to classes and study hall where I run into you and Han... you know what came after that. And now we're just a week past that. That's a lot in a month! Even when you're in an insane asylum like this place!"

"And you're easy to be nice to. Especially when I didn't have the first clue who you were... But sometimes when your life gets shaken up the best people to be around are those who don't know you or your drama and aren't judging based on that. So..." He shrugs, not sure what else to say about that.

She smiles at him. "It has been a pretty whirlwind, crazy month. And I still don't know how we ended up... well, where we ended up. With Han and... everything." She blushes and ducks her head a little.

"And thanks for that. My life was pretty... all over. I was seriously thinking I just wasn't going to make a go of it here. And I almost stayed in Smallville when I went back for Thanksgiving. But yeah, it was a lot easier to be with people who didn't know anything about it - or me. Why do you think I wasn't in my own common room? Though..." She looks around the room with a smile. "I think I've spent more time here this past month than I've spent in my own this whole semester."

"It's not too bad as institutionalized rec rooms go." Shep shrugged. He'd seen better, but he'd also seen far worse.

"And for what it's worth, I'm glad you stuck it out."

"Me too."

She reached up and played with his hair a little absently while she thought about the past month. "I've certainly... *experienced* a lot more than I would have at home." She gave him a flash of a mischievous grin, but was mostly contemplative.

She glanced down at the computer screen, "Uh oh, I'd completely forgotten about these guys. Did I mess anything up?"

"Oh, I don't know - the way you talk about home, you could have had zombies, and sword mishaps and gremlins and all that right on your front porch."

He glanced down at the computer where the Lana-Sim was in the process of Wonder-Womaning herself into her P.J.s and getting into bed. "Nah, they go all autonomous when you leave them alone. Or burn down the kitchen. But sometimes they do that when you are looking too. So far in this iteration I've kept the stove from killing anyone and I think Lana has a cooking point or two."

She elbows him. "Brat. You know I wasn't talking about that stuff. I was talking about the other... stuff." She flushes again and quickly pretends to be completely involved in the Sims.

"So, I'm going to bed here. Where's everyone else? And cooking points? What does that mean?"

4th floor common room - Sunday Afternoon

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