murdercycle | inbox .

[ She should just stop responding. Leave him on read. It's not doing either of them any favors to keep going.

But it's almost like when a stray dog sits next to a restaurant, hoping for scraps — sometimes you just can't help but toss them few bites. ]

It would definitely cut down on the number of potentially embarrassing voice memos you can send, for one.

Merge Mansion, huh?
I'm more of a Gardenscapes person myself.

( if she leaves him on read, chances are it'll only be a matter of days before this happens again: nathan gets sad drunk and she wakes up to an inbox full of fresh voicemails. )

They were pretty bad, huh?

( he doesn't remember what he said exactly, but he remembers getting it wrong a lot. unfortunately, it's hard to find the erase-and-redo option when you're wasted, so her inbox is probably full of scraps, and false starts, and 'wait, fuck, siri, undo'. )

Yeah?
Merge Mansion has a grandma.

I don't know what her deal is.

I think she killed a guy.
It's kinda brutal.

[ Hence the advice. ]

I didn't listen to them, Nathan.
I

thought it would be for the best.

[ She can deal with a conversation about time wasting phone games. She can't deal with an hour of mostly incoherent babbling about a relationship she was never actually in.

So. Mobile games it is. ]

I think they got Kathy Bates to play her in ads. Like a less violent Annie Wilkes.

I mean, I'm assuming less violent. Feels like the app store wouldn't allow games about hobbling people.

That's
Pretty cool, actually.

That you didn't listen to them.

( if she had listened, nathan would be so embarrassed that he'd have no choice but to dive into a volcano, or something, so this is a pretty good outcome, all things considered. )

I was in a band called Annie Wilkes once.
Based off the chick from the movie.
The band didn't last long, but everyone was doing Stephen King bands, so I was like, might as well.
There was The 237s, Plymouth Fury, Carrie White Burns in Hell, Pennies Wise.
Everyone was doing it.

Would it be weird if I gave you my Merge Mansion invite?
You could get gems and stuff. If you want.

Don't make it a habit.
But I'm not out to laugh at or embarrass you.
I never was.

Besides, knowing when to cut bad audio is part of my job.

[ That actually feels decent. Part of therapy has been dealing with the label of "woman who turned down Nathan Explosion in front of the world", which is... not a great label to have. Sure, Jezebel and Reductress and the rest wrote articles about her empowerment and assertiveness, but there are a lot of people who aren't very chill with that perceived slight to their god.

She'll have to remember to tell her therapist about this. ]

He's a good source for band names. I can think of at least a dozen other good ones off the top of my head. Ones that would look way better on an album cover than Pennies Wise, geez.

It's not weird.
I'm always down for free gems.

Honestly, why isn't there a Dethklok game? Little gears and Facebones-es and daggers or whatever to match up. Let people decorate their own little virtual Mordhauses.

Yeah.
I know.

( the way she feels the need to clarify the fact that she wasn't out to humiliate him makes nathan wonder if was out to humiliate him, with her saying the opposite is just a reverse psychology thing... but that feels like too many layers for them right now, so he's going to have to take her at her word and accept whatever the consequences of trusting her to be honest might be. )

Me neither, you know.
I was just being selfish.

( the end of the world has given nathan some time to think on his role in things, and how his role in things was pretty much the entirety of things. it was all him, all about him. he knows that now. chances are he doesn't know much beyond that, but...

he has to put the stephen king talk and the video game talk both on hold [which is unfortunate, because he likes talking about both of those things]. since he doesn't know how much time he'll have to talk to abigail before she does the sensible thing and blocks him, he might as well get it all out there while he can.

and [mostly] sober at that. )

I didn't think about you. I was just thinking about me.
And that was fucked up.

I just really wanted to have you 'cause you're cool and hot and stuff.
But you're a person too.
I should have seen that.
And I shouldn't have embarrassed you like that.

So, I'm

Syracuse

[ Look, is she a quarter way into her third glass of shiraz? Maybe. But she supposes that they would have to have some kind of actual conversation about this, at some point or another. They have the same employer, technically — eventually Crystal Mountain is going to want another album, and Knubbler's dead. The world might have almost ended, but the music industry will live on like a cockroach after a nuke. If there's a single person left who can hum, record label fat cats will sprout from the ground to take an 80% cut.

(Abigail already has four different response emails drafted to say she can't work with Dethklok again.)

Via unsolicited text messages seems like as good a way to get their thoughts out as any other. ]

But I'm the one who started it, and I'm sorry for that. It's why I have a rule about coworkers in the first place, and I broke my own rule. Not you.

Everything was just
a lot. All at once.
From the bottom of the ocean right up through
everything else.

[ The small parts she can remember, the scars that still litter her body.
She knows she sent mixed messages, but she also knows now that they were all under pressure they didn't even realize was happening. ]

Things were weird. Life's been weird for the past however many months. So how about

we can both be Syracuse.
And we can accept each other's Albanys.
So we're square.

[ That will have to do because she can only think of about three other cities in upstate New York. ]

You're a good person, Nathan. Sometimes it's just the circumstances that are bad.

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