the_lioness | (no subject)

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Surfacing from a deep sleep has always taken Alanna awhile, when she has the luxury of time and no one else is charged with the unfortunate task of helping her along.

This morning -- and she knows it's morning due to the bright sunlight stabbing at her eyeballs through her eyelids and the horrible scratchy tweeting sound coming from a nearby tree -- waking up takes her even longer than that, as layers and layers of haze peel away and leave her dimly aware of her surroundings.

This she knows:

1) She is lying on something hard and something soft.
2) Something died in her mouth during the night.
3) Her calf is itching.
4) A lot.
5) The something hard she's lying upon feels like an arm.
6) The arm is presumably attached to her husband, who is breathing on her ear with very bad breath.
7) There's a bottle under her foot.

Alanna grunts and slaps a hand over her eyes.

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Things that cross Raph find themselves in a world of hurt. That's the natural order of things as he knows it.

Right now? Today? This morning?
Is the most unnatural thing that Raph has experienced in sometime.

As he mentally clambers his way towards consciousness Raph becomes aware that what he's nursing is more than just the usual hangover.

He's cold.
There's something wrong with his eyes.
And he's pretty sure his arm has been amputated just above the elbow.

Alanna is also cold. She's always cold. This Gods-cursed morning she is particularly cold, except for the parts of her stretched across that arm.

With her free hand she reaches down to scratch the ridiculous itch on her leg and inadvertently kicks the bottle out of the way. Her hand brushes a hairy leg; she shoves it, just because.

"What..."

Anything else she might have wanted to say gets stuck in her throat as she starts coughing like a cat with a hairball, face screwed up to keep her eyes shut tight.

Ugh, this day just keeps getting worse. Every noise around him echoes in his ears, but somehow it does so muffled. Fuck, there's something wrong with his ears.

So now he's down an arm, his eyes are incapacitated, and his ears are compromised.

He kicks back at ... well, whatever that was that just touched his leg. At least he still has full use of those.

The kick is met with a string of hoarse curses and a groan.

Alanna attempts to roll over but only succeeds in knocking more bottles around and rolling into the owner of the arm and ornery leg. Blast it all, she thinks. Now he's breathing right in my nostril.

"Did you have to bring half the year's batch of cider to bed with you?" she mutters into his arm, wiping away a string of drool and trying to push up again.

Suddenly it's warm again, soft and warm actually.
And...if his nearly deaf ears are right, that soft and warm is coming from a woman.

...

A woman who's been drinking from a barmat and licking ashtrays, but still...no less a woman.

Abigail

He tosses his only remaining arm over who could only be Abigail.

The woman -- too compact and muscled to be Abigail, really -- goes still. His arm is heavy. Too heavy. Country living has done great things for Adam's physique, but he's still on the lean side.

Alanna has to force herself to care. Slowly, so slowly, she opens one eye... only to slam it shut again.

Too bright, too early, too Raph.

...what.

"Um."

Now that the previous narration mentions it, there is something slightly off about Abigail.

...

That is Abigail, right?

Raph very carefully reaches out and touches the face of...

....oh boy.

Silent, Alanna stays motionless as his fingers poke at her face. Only when he's in danger of investigating her eyelashes does she expend the energy to swat them away.

Her breathing increases, just a little.

"What," she croaks, "are you doing in my bed."

She peeks at his face once again, in the hopes that maybe she'd been wrong and could blame the question on a bad dream. No such luck. That's Raph's face. Raph's arm. Raph's bad breath.

Mithros.

"HOW THE...."

Talking loud enough to hear himself over the hearing impairment was just...not a good idea.

"....fuck."

Hurting this bad, being this hung over, blind, mostly deaf, and without an arm...in Alanna's bed.

He must have gone back to Tortall and Abigail must have mutilated him with his own katana.

"Um," Alanna repeats.

She blinks. There's a whole lot of wrong here she hasn't quite processed yet.

1,

2,

3.

All of a sudden she scrambles off him into a crouch, fingertips grazing the ground, and stares.

"AUGH."

The moment she moves is the moment Raph starts to get feeling back in his arm.
For a split second he's relieved, then the pins and needles begin to sink in.

"Do you see my arm?!" he asks, again just a little too loudly.

If only Raph's arm were the only bit of him she was currently seeing. Raph, for reasons unknown, is decked out in what was once his preferred fighting gear...when he was a turtle. Brown knee pads and elbow pads, matching wrist bands, and a red bandanna. The loincloth, however....is new.

As is the way the bandanna is currently turned so as to cover both his eyes and block his ears.

"IT'S HARD TO MISS."

She has to yell so he can hear. It's surely not because he's dressed as he is, since she is refusing to acknowledge that fact.

For a blessed moment, anyway.

"WHAT ARE YOU WEARING?!?"

Beat.

"WHAT AM I WEARING?!?"

The answer: silk boxers with huge red hearts stamped all over them; a very thin, well-worn tank top; one striped sock; an old, too large silver mail shirt; and a sticker that says "Hello. My name is: Annala" on her left bicep.

"I don't know...something's wrong with my eyes."

And now....now's when the pins and needles start to attack the arm that only so recently got its circulation back.

"GAH!"

Ignoring his probably well-deserved pain, Alanna looks around with wide, wild eyes. It occurs to her at last that they hadn't been in her bed. They weren't even in his bed. Instead, they'd... slept...(???) on the floor of his tent.

The last thing she remembers is coming up to talk to him about Abigail. Then there was... cider? Brow furrowed, she crawls over to Raph and rips the bandanna off his eyes.

"WHAT HAPPENED?" she yells angrily far too close to his ear.

AIEEE! THE LIGHT! IT BURNS! IT BUUUUUUURNS.

Raph claws at his eyes with both hands.
BOTH HANDS!

"I have hands!"

He'll catch up eventually. Really, he will.

Alanna gives his cheek a light slap, then outright punches his pins-and-needles arm.

"FOCUS."

She glares down at him.

"ARGH! What the fuck Alanna?!"

He finally looks up.

"What the hell are you wearing?

...

Are we on the roof?"

Now that he's more alert, Alanna is suddenly incapable of answering any of his questions.

Yes, they are on the roof. Hopefully that means they never left. With any luck, no one saw them... like this. No, she has no idea what she's wearing. The sticker is particularly puzzling, and the sock. And she has yet to realize a chunk of her hair is missing on the left side of her head.

"I could have lived happily all through my life," she grinds out at last, "without seeing you in a loin cloth and... the rest of your get-up."

Mock HER outfit, will he?

"Rest of my get up..."

Raph looks down and for the first time sees what he's wearing.

There are no words.
...
Well, okay there are words. They're just mostly of the four-letter variety.

She waits.

It gives her some extra time to balance as she stands.

"Are these yours?" Alanna asks, plucking at the boxers with sharp, jerky motions.

Raph has begun the slow, methodical, removal of knee/elbow padding process. His efforts don't stop as she draws his attention to the boxer shorts in question.

"You wanna make somethin' of it?"

That would be a, "Yes."

"WHY ARE THEY ON ME?"

That would also be a 'yes.'

He opens his mouth to bark back a retort, but...nothing comes out. Raph looks around the room. To say it looks trashed would be an understatement. Furniture is toppled, bottles are strewn, and the bed....

In the back of his mind something surfaces. A memory he hasn't thought of for years. Waking up next to...

"...oh no."

Raph goes slightly green.

He'd be forgiven for mistaking her for Abigail now, given the way she scoops up one of many bottles and throws it at his head.

"Oh NO? Oh no WHAT?"

She exhales through her teeth.

"What type of cider WAS that?!?"

While he barely dodges the bottle, he's less able to dodge gravity. In that we mean that he rolls to one side, out of the line of fire to the bottle, and then attempts to kip up to his feet...and fails pretty spectacularly.

"Ooof. Why're you askin' me?" he says through gritted teeth. His head was pounding before, but now it's performing a personal showcase of the Broadway sensation "Stomp."

"You're the one who brought it!"

"I did NO-"

The 'not' dies on her lips and her eyes narrow as she recalls the steps that led her to Raph's rooftop: NERF bow, Angry Raph, Confused Mike, bottle of cider.

She swears again. At this rate, she's going to have to go to the temple and make an offering to the Goddess the minute she sets foot in Tortall.

"This is all Mike's fault."

OBVIOUSLY.

Edited 2011-01-29 03:37 (UTC)

As she puts up more of a fight Raph just gives her more of a look. Seriously, of all the booze in the multiverse is Raph really the likely one to drink cider?

Amidst the glare, Raph attempts once again to get to his feet. When she suggests that Mike may be to blame. Raph is all for it. Especially if it means he doesn't have to duck anymore bottles.

"Little prick," he grumbles. "Always playin' pranks..."

"He said it was," her lip curls in distaste, "a bit stronger than your Jack Daniels."

HA.

"Put some clothes on. We have to kill your brother."

Her voice is steady and firm, but Alanna looks torn between an explosion of her legendary temper and getting sick all over Raph's tent. What did they do? Swallowing hard, she clutches at her necklaces and squeezes her eyes shut.

Muttering: "I'm not dead. I'm not dead. I'm not dead."

"If it's what I think it was, an' judgin' by the aftertaste in my mouth..."

Raph fights back a dry heave.
"Yeah...I'll uh...I'll just."

He nervously looks around the room for his pants, any pants,....FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GREAT AND SMALL, PANTS! When he finds a pair, he makes a hasty retreat down the hall to the bathroom.

In years past he'd have done such a thing so as to change in privacy, but this time it's just so he can force himself to throw up in the bathroom.

"Raph?"

Alanna winces at the sounds coming from within.

"You don't... think we..."

Her voice goes unusually high and squeaky there at the end.

It's not exactly a question for the ages, and yet....what is the sound of one Shang Ninja retching.

...

Yeah, it pretty much sounds like that.

Horrified purple eyes shift to the scars on her wrist.

"No. I'd be dead."

Beat.

"And not just from revulsion."

Beat.

"Right?"

Goddess and Mithros help her if the binding spell didn't extend to Milliways, after all. UGH.

"Right," says Raph as he emerges from the bathroom. He smells vaguely of mouthwash. "Ain't nothin' happened. Nothin'."

Please to be noting the 100% lack of eye contact. Also the loss of the knee and elbow pads. The mask, however, can be found hanging from the back pocket of the only pants he could find: a pair of bluejeans worn at the knees.

"Ain't no one seen nothin', ain't no one heard nothin', 'cause there ain't nothin' to seen or hear."

Got it?!

"Absolutely correct."

Alanna attempts to get her breathing under control and wonders, vaguely, if the sharp pain in her chest should worry her. Maybe the spell doesn't work until she realizes what she's done?

Mithros

Abruptly and with no grace, she plops down on the floor.

"Find my breeches and tunic, Raph. Now."

"How the fuck should I...." he takes a deep breath and holds his hands out in front of himself, as if to keep from falling over. "Fine."

Raph isn't delicate as he tears his already rather torn apart apartment look for Alanna's clothing. He finds many things, some things that make absolutely no sense what so ever, like golden koala bank that plays Who Let The Dogs Out, but what he doesn't find....are Alanna's clothes.

"You may just be shit outta luck," he concludes."

Alanna watches with a bleak expression as he throws a giant stuffed duck and a strange device Mike would immediately identify as a Flowbee over his shoulder.

Something in the back of her memory twinges; it's gone almost at once.

"Augh."

More helpfully: "Bar."

It's the next logical step. Maybe SHE knows something.

"In that get up?"
Like Raph has any right to judge, standing there bare chested, footed, and wearing torn jeans.

"There's gotta be somethin' better up here to wear. If nothin' else you shouldn't be wearin' my..." he gestures towards the boxers.

After moving a velvet painting of Jason Statham fighting Old Elvis out of the way he finds another cachet of clothing.

"We might go somethin' here." He holds up a tanktop that proclaims loudly WELCOME TO PISMO BEACH. "Er...or not."

"Better than you wearing mine," mutters Alanna.

The painting gets a brief curious glance; some things demand closer scrutiny, even in the midst of a crisis.

"Not." She inhales sharply. "Raph. We speak of this to no one. No one."

Raph slips the quasi-shirt over his head. When he sees just how little it covers he grumbles. He steels his resolve and fixes Alanna with a purposefully innocent glare.

"Speak of what?"

Message heard loud and clear, good buddy.

Yes.

Yes, that.

Alanna grunts: it is both Good and You look ridiculous.

After a few seconds of questionable balance, Alanna begins digging through other piles of stuff. Eventually she locates a velvet-collared smoking jacket that falls to mid-thigh. It will do. As soon as they are downstairs she'll hunt up her things.

"C'mon," she grumbles and heads for the ladder.

Oh like she's one to talk. Seriously, she's dressed the a walk of shame from the Grotto at one of Hef's parties.

Walk of shame.

...

Oh.

He grabs the closest pair of shoes he can find, a pair of steel toed boots, and follows her towards the ladder.

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