IC contact for lastvoyages

[cactusy]

[If I don't have an active post up, feel free to use this post to have your character call, videochat, text, or knock on Shaw's door.]

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[conning]

"No, I do, I mean--it's March 21st, it's just the year I'm not entirely sure of. This is not the way I meant to share my tragic backstory."

He is pinkening. "I know it's very unlikely that I'm older than 34."

[cactusy]

Shaw studies his face, then leans back into him, nudging his shoulder with hers.

"You want us to can it?"

[littletonoidea]

Eiffel glances between them both, and releases Neal's hand so he can raise his hand in question.

[conning]

He's about to answer Shaw, but makes a softly amused noise at the raised hand instead.

With a teacher's cadence, he says, "Yes, Douglas?"

[littletonoidea]

Eiffel can't hide the slowly re-emerging grin on his fade.

"Is now a bad time to say that I'm thirty-four and ten months?"

[conning]

"...Oh god help me." Neal frees both hands to press them against his face. It's at least amused.

[cactusy]

Shaw stays largely quiet - she just mutters something that sounds suspiciously like Thirty-three next month.

[littletonoidea]

Eiffel grins with an almost hyena-like cackle of unbridled joy. "Who's the oldest now, boys and girls?! It's ya boy Mister Douglas Eiffel, King of the Zombie Book Club!!"

[conning]

Neal laughs at that, genuine and startled, a sound that even after the better part of a year probably isn't one they're used to from him. Not laughter stronger the carefully modulated tenor he trained himself into over time.

"Wait, Shaw, your birthday is next month? Is that what I just heard?"

[cactusy]

"Early November, yeah. Though, uh-- if we're going by elapsed months instead of the calendar, it happened months ago."

[littletonoidea]

Eiffel abruptly squints at the ceiling.

"I think I came here in... it was March when I arrived," he says, thoughtfully. "But it was September on the S.S. Horrifying Nightmare, and... when I went home, I left the Hephaestus in May, but it waaaaaaas March again when I got back here."

[conning]

"The same March or the following March?"

Neal relaxes a little, feeling better now that there's some normalcy in their little circle. And since things have turned away from his own confusing personal math.

[littletonoidea]

"The March when we turned into the zombie book club," he reminds him. "I got back like ten minutes before the breach started, apparently I was only gone for a week."

[cactusy]

"I remember that," Shaw says. "I think."

Timing is always a little hard for her.

[conning]

"It's bizarre to think about how that was eight months ago. It feels like forever and no time at all." He leans against them for a second, at the dizzying thought that, once upon a time not that long ago, he was an inmate, stuck until he figured himself out, his options either being death or permanent residence. If he hadn't graduated, Shaw and Eiffel would eventually leave, and he'd be left behind.

It makes him feel slightly sick, put in those terms.

Neal rubs his face with both hands, automatically breathing in the calming count he doesn't need to think about any more.

[littletonoidea]

Eiffel's hand comes back so he can massage Neal's head as best he can reach.

"I've been here a scooch over half as long as I've been on the Hephaestus," he points out. "It's weird thinking about how long we hang out here."

[cactusy]

"Hey, did you guys even know each other before that breach?" Shaw wonders. She'd known and liked both of them very early on - Eiffel from her very first day, and Neal from a few weeks after - but she's not sure she ever so much as saw both of them in the same room before they were tossed together in Zombieland.

[conning]

"No," Neal says, smiling and closing his eyes, enjoying the massage like a cat getting scritched behind the ears. "I had certainly heard his voice before, but as for actual acquaintance, that breach was the first time we met."