Fandom High Dormitories

Hey, look. Sometimes Dante still hung out here - especially when people were cranky with him for playing guitar all through their morning nap. (And maybe because this was the last week he'd be coming here at all, with grad coming up. But hush.)

He'd brought a pizza or two with him, setting them down on the coffee table in case someone else was hungry. Satisfied with his set-up, he leaned back, acoustic in hand, and gave the strings a good strum.

Did anyone really need an acoustic rendition of several of the hellektro-genre's biggest hits? Probably not. But they were getting it anyway.

[[ open! ]]

It'd been a couple of days since they'd last heard from Kathy, and Dante was restless. Worried, even. He was trying to give her some time and space to work through last week, but it was... turning out to be a lot of time.

And so, in the vaunted spirit of finding distractions elsewhere, he'd picked up some pizzas and headed down to the dorms. At least there wouldn't be shit to worry about at the dorms.

Now, there were a bunch of pizzas laying around, Dante's feet up on the table, and a drink the narrative would charitably call soda in his hand.

[[ open! ]]

"Going on and on I have the future in my hands..."

It wasn't unusual for Dante to be humming under his breath like this. Especially not from that record; his copy had gotten lost when the Hunter demon wrecked his trailer, and he was mourning it big time.

It was just unusual because he didn't exactly feel like singing. After yesterday, even after spending the night back home and coming back this morning-- he felt a little out of it. Like his brain was running ahead of the rest of him for a change.

But he was humming his way all through the third floor common room. And through rooting through the fridge. And through stealing someone's strawberry cheesecake.

Sigh.

[[ open! ]]

So there was booze in the taps.

It wasn't exactly Dante's choice of booze - warn wine with spices and shit? Whatever - and he was beginning to get the impression the alcohol content wasn't as high as he liked it to be. Of course, that was easily solved with a swig from a bottle of rum every now and again.

By mid-morning, he'd managed to fill a large pitcher with the stuff. He draped himself over the sofa with a big mug in hand, the rum on the floor (he hadn't wanted to add it to the pitcher itself because, enh) and turned the television to the least Christmassy thing he could find. (It was a weird horror flick about elevators.)

His birthday was in five days. He was hoping to ignore that.

[[ open! ]]

"Today is so slooow," Dante muttered. He dropped his phone on his face as he laid stretched out on the sofa. "Shitting hell."

Maybe he needed to go back to the room and take a nap. Or go knock on Isabela's door. Or... did he hear rustling?

He lifted the phone back off his eyes and found... several large stacks of waffles sitting on the coffee table. Some with whipped cream, some with chocolate, some with-- "Strawberries! Sweet!"

[[ wishful thinking post is wishful. open! ]]

It was another boring-ass afternoon after classes, and Dante couldn't be bothered to go up and looking for something to do right now. So here was the other option: Netflix, some snacks scavenged from the fridge, and some drinks from his own room.

He crashed out on the sofa with the remote, browsing around until he hit the stupidest-looking horror movie he could find. Put it on, reached out, and snagged the chips off the table. "Dead," he muttered, eyeing the second person to wander into a scene. "Also dead," he added, looking at the third. "...Dead together," he said, of the cheerleader and her boyfriend.

There was something comforting in how predictable these movies were.

[[ open! ]]

One of these days, someone was going to figure out that Dante being in the gun range was a good indicator he'd been involuntarily dragged home recently. But today, he was pretty sure, was not that day.

He should probably do something about it. Find some other outlet. But he couldn't think of anything; didn't know anyone on the island he could spar with, and Ezra was gone, and this shit always left him with an excess of violence in his body. He fired multiple bullets into the target in front of him, letting Ebony and Ivory speak for him. Faster and faster, his fingers squeezing the trigger over and over until they became almost a blur.

It wasn't enough.

And the target was shredded now, anyway. He sighed. Gave the girls a twirl, shoved them back into their holsters. Went out there. Replaced the target.

Tried doing trick shots for a while instead, using the ricochet.

It'd be better if the targets could fight back, but they stayed silent, and so did Dante. Ebony and Ivory would have to do the speaking for all of them.

[[ open ]]

Dante perched his elbow on a divider at the edge of the roof, cigarette dangling between his fingers. He eyed the stretch of cheese right past the town skyline. Everything smelled like cheese, which was kind of disgusting, but he could think of a few worse smells that could be hanging in the air right now. So whatever.

Times had been pretty good lately, being a pony aside. On one hand, that was a good thing. On the other, it meant he was thinking; something he'd never really taken the time for before. Had the time for before. And it was screwing with him something good. Made it harder, for one, to keep clinging on to old anger. And, y'know-- maybe keeping it up was a bad thing for him anyway...

There he went again. Thinking. He'd spent so much time running or ready to run, his whole life this mishmash of partying and violence, and now that the latter was gone and the former had settled down into something of a shadow of itself because of it, he barely knew what to do with himself. That was a bad thing. The violence wasn't supposed to be all that he was. It should be a relief to find out that it wasn't.

He sighed and held up the unlit cigarette. Studied it.

Kathy'd always given him a ton of shit about the smoking. If he was completely honest with himself, his heart wasn't in it anymore either. Of all his vices, it felt the most pointless. When he lived hard, he tried to live like a rock song: fast, head to the wall, just going for it. Not like smoking. When he lived slow... he just wanted to hang out in bed, shoot the shit with somebody - Alana, Anders, Ada, Isabela, fuck, even Ringo, whoever - and while Kathy had always been the most vehement about getting him to drop the cigarettes, it didn't help him much there, either.

"Screw it," he said.

He chucked the cigarette over the edge of the roof, watched it fall.

"Fine, Kathy. You win."

About the smoking, sure.

Maybe about the anger, too.

He felt a different emotion kindling in his chest at the thought of it, aching to jump upwards to his face, but that, he shut down. No. Not for her. Not for anybody.

[[ open! ]]

Dante'd promised Alluka to teach her how to throw a punch. By the time the day itself rolled around, he actually regretted it; there were other things he wanted to be doing, like hang around his dorm room taking advantage of his new fridge, or maybe text Isabela and move up their date to go kicking around trouble on the other side of the Causeway.

But he was stuck with his plans now. And he wasn't even hungover today, so technically speaking, he was in the perfect position to do this.

He'd just have to keep his strength in check.

He showed up to the gym after classes had ended, armed with a Combichrist tank top and black bondage pants - which was the widest pair he owned. He wandered around stretching and poking at some of the weights. They were laughingly light for him, so it wasn't like messing around with them would do him any good. But it passed the time.

[[ expecting one, but open before and after her! ]]

After spending some time with Ada yesterday, Dante was right back to his old self - or at least close enough to fake it. He was sitting in the lobby with his feet up on the desk and a large boombox sitting next to him, blasting a cheap Best of Electro-Industrial CD so loudly it drowned out any music the island was trying to throw on in the background.

Next to the boombox sat a pile of tickets, and the ballot box for prom court voting. Because allegedly he was here to do a job.

"Yeah, yeah, I get it," Dante muttered, "I know what a parsnip is."

There was a soft plop, and another parsnip materialized in the air and dropped down on one of the chairs.

He kicked a parsnip off of the coffee table and put his feet down on it. "This place is so weird."

[[ open! ]]

So for some reason, Dante had woken up looking like a reindeer. Well, a guy in a reindeer snuggie. Point was, it was stupid and not hot, plus he'd run out of terrible 'horny' puns just about an hour into waking up. And now he needed something to do.

He wandered into the common room sometime close to noon and started poking around for food. Wasn't hard, as it turned out. Actually, it was easy to a stupid fucking degree: the last two weeks of stupidity meant that by the time he was done, most surfaces in the common room were covered in bottles of Coca Cola, cups of eggnog, cups of peppermint mocha, and a ton of latkes, cookies, and marzipan.

"Might not be a real breakfast," Dante mused, "but hey, never look a gift reindeer in the mouth, right?"

[[ open! ]]

"Nothing left to break, my life is in a thousand pieces, million reasons, why should I keep myself away? Hard to define; it always is. It's hard to scream with your throat full of glass."

Dante was humming, bobbing his head along and maybe even shifting his movements some in tune with the music in his head as he wandered around the common room with a bowl full of cereal. If there was anything funny going on with the island, he didn't know; it wouldn't be the first time he'd gotten a song stuck in his head, and it wouldn't be the last. Considering he'd been listening to this CD just last night, it wasn't weird.

He kept on humming, too, as he nudged the fridge open with his foot and dipped his head in to see if there was anything good he could poach. "T-t-t-tthuh..."

[[ open, with a minor patch of SP in an hour or two. ]]

So the whole dating thing yesterday had been pretty great. But at some point in the past twelve hours Dante had stumbled into a bathroom, eyed the mirror, and realized the hair at the sides of his head was growing long enough again that his haircut might start to approach something people would find remotely acceptable, and that just wouldn't do. Now that he had a couple of hours to himself, he was gonna go do something about that.

He eyed himself critically in the mirror. Not for the first time in his life, he wondered if he could get away with cutting the words 'fuck you' into his hair, but... nope. He wasn't that good with hair clippers. Maybe some day, though. Live the dream.

He turned the damn clippers on, set them to a reasonably close shave (but not too close. Half-bald was a bad look) and got to work trimming the hair at the sides of his head, leaving a thick strip in the middle. He spent the whole time humming something loud, tuneless and aggressive under his breath.

[[ open! ]]

There'd been a pizza delivery guy with an enormous stack of pizzas at the front door to the dorms that morning. He'd gone into some thing about how they always kept overserving and overdelivering and he was taking the pizzas back because they couldn't afford to keep doing that, blah blah blah.

Dante had knocked the huge damn pile out of Pizza Guy's hands like it weighed nothing, caught it in the other hand, and slammed the door shut in the guy's face so fast he couldn't even blink. He might have been bad at stealing, but he was pretty good at taking things. Especially if things were pizza. Of which there was now a lot, but he was a teenage boy with a supernatural metabolism; he was pretty sure he could make it work. He flopped down on the sofa on the third floor common room, open pizza box in hand (and perfectly balanced even as he went flopping). The rest, he'd put down on the table. He was planning to get to them. All of them, if he could get away with it.

Anyone who might've also wanted a slice better hurry up-- and rule out the option of sitting anywhere near this sofa, as Dante had stretched out all over it, his boots dangling over one of the arms. Mmm. Pizza. Small pleasures would get him through Loss class yet.

[[ open! ]]

You know what? Dante had actually gotten some sleep last night. Funny what the right visit to the right place could do.

That... wasn't actually stopping him from wandering a few paces into the common room and then crashing on the sofa. Sure, he had class, but that was in an hour, and someone had left a whole pack of cereal sitting around. It was practically asking him to finish it, right? Right.

He had the pack in hand a second later, his feet on the table, and his hand on the remote. Three days here and counting; he was actually somewhat relaxed for once. He was gonna enjoy it now, at least until the first demon or something jumped out and tried to go at it.

[[ open! ]]