#arizona grace hamilton ╱ 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 ╱ 𝑓𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑒𝑑 𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟 ›› tisha

[whileurmine]

@icarian-carrion

"Right, so, we need to talk, I have a problem, I have a few problems, actually, Tisha Whileaway, if that's even your name—" Ari pointed the lit cigarette towards Tisha, an eyebrow raised accusatorily "I'm fucking with you, I know that's not your name." No, she did not smoke, but she was wearing her father's empty holster, and her father's old suspenders, and the detective look didn't really seem complete without the lit cigarette between her fingers "Now, here is what I know for sure, my father is one depressed bastard who got a bunch of mental illness and his only way of dealing with it is getting high or drunk. Here's what I also know, big boy suddenly got a dog, a therapy appointment, and all the spots where he used to hide shit in this goddamn place are empty. Sounds great, right? No!" Ari hit the nearby table, maybe just one tiny bit too hard. She meant for it to be dramatic, it almost sounded aggressive. It wasn't on purpose though, most of it wasn't. She was rushing through her words, speaking far too fast to be properly heard, every sentence one long string of sounds smashed together, but she couldn't help herself, it was the only way seh could manage to speak. "He didn't stop drinking when Ethan was born, he didn't stop drinking when I got locked up in the looney bin, he didn't stop drinking when mom left him, and he didn't stop fucking drinking when I said that if I ever saw him with a bottle in his hands again, I would cut him out of my fucking life. So, love might be beautiful and shit, you are a nice lady and all, but I don't buy it. What the fuck happened that I don't know about? Is grandma dying? Is he dying? Am I dying? Because if I'm dying and no one fucking told me and I wasted my last few days watching love is blind, I swear to God, I'll make religion be real just so I can come back and haunt his ass."

[whileurmine]

@icarian-carrion liked this for a random back and forth with a random character or two.

"ohhhh, dad's got a girlfriend." arizona laughed, too loud a laugh really, too high for anything that would usually come out of her. not that a stranger would know. "you are pretty. too pretty for him. have you been told that there are other men out there? just saying in case you don't know."

[whileurmine]

@icarian-carrion liked this for my characters doing vine quotes but actually ,, they just like that

frank came in holding a guitar that had not been tuned or used in probably a good twenty years. arizona was right behind him, a giant cardboard presentation behind her back and bluetooth speaker in her hands. the music came in through the speakers, frank pretended to play the guitar dramatically. eyebrows pulled together in pretend pain, both of them dancing—

"look at this graph!" they both yelled out along with the nickelback song. airozona pulling out the lard presentation full of graphs on it from behind her. "everytime i do it makes me laugh!" arizona was the first to lose it, bursting into laughter.

[whileurmine]

"Isn't everyone a little bit?" She shrugs with a small laugh. "Gotta warn you though, I'm one of the worse that this town has to offer. Second only to dad, maybe." The good news was that bad was relative, right? Wasn't like Arizona was trying to be part of the church crowd and their never ending rules.

Frank Hamilton's wood stove does get a laugh out of Arizona though. A very, very loud one. "He does! How did you know that?" Still halfway through another laugh, as she shakes her head, wiping a tear away as she goes on, "He has a normal one too though. He says he got the second one because he was too lazy to keep chopping wood, but I think he just doesn't wanna get rid of the old one. Boomer behavior."

"Pretty much." Tisha grins over at Arizona, like she's still trying to sell her on the idea of going for it, the idea that she could do it too. Whatever spark was there dies fast though, and Tisha presses her lips together and looks back out the windshield. "What, you think I'm some kind of liar?" She teases the younger woman. "Ah, don't worry about it. I'm glad you bothered me. This town is fucking barren, nice to meet another person here who doesn't have a stick up their ass." It's not the whole truth, but the whole truth is too diaphanous to break down to somebody's daughter the first time she meets her. "Of course he lives in a cabin. Why am I not surprised. Don't tell me he cooks all his meals on a wood stove or something, I might have to just fuckin' leave."

[whileurmine]

"So you just like travel around the country whenever you want?" Arizona asks, turning to Tisha for a split second, the hint of a genuine smile on her face. She feels pang inside her chest, a vague and distant pang pulling at heartstrings. Yearning, need, desperate and palpable and enough to have her crying on the floor of a bathroom. And then she remembers she doesn't have a car or a driver's license and she can't exactly go to the Appalachians on her skateboard. "Sounds cool or whatever." When the second sentence comes out she has already thoroughly convinced herself that it is an impossibility and thus there is no reason to care. "Is he really just showing you around? Was I bothering you for no reason?" Ari laughs, shaking her head at herself. "You just keep going, it's like an old cabin. I think it used to be grandpa's or something Hard to miss the old hermit in the middle of nowhere.'

Tisha has never been so relieved to hear her engine turn over on the first try. "Uh, something like that, yeah." She admits, pulling out of the parking lot and trying to keep her eyes mostly on the road and not on Arizona's restless legs. "I like to go on road trips sometimes. See what gets my brain going. I've been through, like... most of the Northeast, Southwest, the desert, the Appalachians. Sometimes I get a vacation rental or something. I actually broke down here. Had to wait to get this clunker fixed. By the time it was, I'd gotten used to the motel, kind of liked the scenery. Might get some decent work out of it, we'll see. Hey, you're gonna need to give me directions, I haven't been to your dad's place."

[whileurmine]

"Nice." She shoves the twenty dollar bills inside the pockets of her jeans. Total net worth raised now to twenty seven dollars fifty. "I'll get it to you as soon as possible, boss." Tipping a hat she wasn't wearing. Arizona picked up her backpack following after the other woman with a spring to her step. Laughter pushing past her lips as she settled in the passenger seat. Leg stuck bumping up and down as she tried to fight to the urge to simply raise them on the windshield. "I like your energy. I like a woman who can lie to her non boyfriend." She wasn't gonna wear the seatbelt either way, but she appreciated the energy anyway. "So, what are you, like, doing around here? You doing art about the middle of nowhere? Research on the end of the world?"

“Yeah, I’ll take that offer. Call me a regular fuckin’ patron of the arts.” Tisha pulls out her wallet, goes through the too many folded bills (so many fucking ones, because she always forgets about them when she’s paying for shit) until there’s twenty dollars to pass over to the younger woman. “Even better, we’ll get your dad to pick up dinner. Come on.” She motions for Arizona to follow her to the rust bucket of a Pontiac she’s got parked outside of her motel. Tisha kinda just wants to get Arizona somewhere that she can’t get into trouble, though she has a feeling that place doesn’t exist. “Seatbelt on the passenger side is kinda fucked up, so if your dad asks, you sat in the backseat.”

[whileurmine]

She stared. Stared and stared and stared. Perfectly still. Like a stray animal trying to figure out if the food in offer was enough of a trade-off for the potential risk. Looking at the older woman through narrowed eyes. Tisha might have been overly hopeful, yes, infuriatingly kind, unbelievably trusting, but she wasn't dumb. And she wasn't a liar.Ari knew liars, Tisha wasn't one of them. If she was behind this sort of plot, she would be trying to convince Ari that it was for the best, not that they would never. Arizona took half a step closer. Her sympathetic nervous system was shining all the red lights possible, yelling, screaming, run, run, run, something is wrong about this, run, something bad is gonna happen, run. "Nevermind." Ari decided instead. Backpack still looped around her shoulder as she took her skateboard in hands, "Nevermind, It's fine, I was wrong, actually, I'm gonna go to my room." Offering out her very best smile, as she turned on her heels, "Thanks for the info. Sorry for the pregnancy thing." And to her room she went. Slamming the door with the force of someone who had way too much energy to let their body contain any of it.

Frank came back about a good ten minutes later. A spring to his step, Bear waggling his tail excitedly by his side. "Now, look at that, Bear," His newly found smile took over his features. "The prettiest woman in the world is right here in my living room. How is that possible." The puppy, to his credit, waited very penitently, by the door until Frank leaned down and freed him from his harness, to run and jump on the couch. Frank waited, Frank let it go this one time. "Something, something, summer day, something, baby?" He was so far from the actual quote he doubted it was still recognizable, but it didn't matter anyway, not as he wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her into a kiss.

“Ari, something terrible was happening.” Tisha protests. There’s so much passion in her voice she almost forgets that she really is hiding something from her. That Ari is right, but in a way she doesn’t know she’s right. That Tisha is driving her away, and if Ari does go it’s all her fault. “He was in active addiction. He was killing himself. You know that. It’s one thing to get high like that when you��re twenty and you’re having fun, and it’s another thing when you’re forty-two with a forty-two year old’s heart and liver. Just because it was routine, doesn’t mean…” She sighs and digs in her purse, pulls a key off of the novelty ring. “If you have to go, that’s fine. You’ve always been able to come and go, and that’s not changing. Here. Take this. It’s the key to my studio, in the city. If anybody comes to get you there, you’ll know it was me and it’s my fault and you can fucking hate me forever, okay? You can decide to never fucking speak to me again.”

[whileurmine]

"Oh, yeah, no, absolutely not, no, thank you." The last part almost sang out with a small chuckle. She knew how this type of thing went, it started with her getting her hopes up and it ended with her crying in her father's arms while he tried to talk her out of taking anything else and just getting some rest. This was the type of ride Ari no longer signed up for. She knew better now. "I will, however, draw you for 20 bucks, if you want. Or a big ass KFC bucket. Do you want a KFC bucket or is it just me? Because I'm hungry as hell." Cue checking her pockets for loose dollar bills. She had four... Four fifty. Seven dollars fifty. Hardly seemed like enough. "You wanna give me a ride to the old man's place? I left my skateboard... Somewhere. Don't know where." A problem for her to deal with in a few hours when she finally came down.

Tisha nods her agreement, but she's already focused on the first page of the book. She turns each page only after a long, careful look, holding it in the crook of her arm so she can get a good look without touching any of the pages, except the corner she needs to use to turn them. "Oh, uh... yeah, no, me neither, not... I mean, it's complicated." It's always hard to explain her view on religion, so she generally avoids it unless she's as high as Arizona is now. "This is good. You know that? Not good for a hobbyist, or good for a kid. Good good. Gallery good." She doesn't stop going through the pages as she says it either. "Fuck. Look, I know you said that wasn't your thing, but all you gotta do is say the word. I've got a studio in the city, you're more than welcome to come up and get some work done, check out some galleries."

[whileurmine]

"Yes, Tisha, my father is the sheriff, my mom is a lawyer and I'm me. The road between 5150 to conservatorship is not a long and arduous climb they would have to put themselves through, it is a fucking slip and slide." She had thought about it so many times, over and over again, she had run through the possibilities until she had exhausted herself and settled on the certainties of it all happening eventually, of just enjoying the little time she had until it did. Sometimes, all she could do was shake in fear and hope, hope that her dad knew better, hope that he of all people would get it, hope that if none of those things helped than maybe the fear that she might go around yelling about all the shit he did behind people's back might be enough to deter him. Hope had never been enough. It was even harder to hold onto when her father could now wake up high on some shitty anti-depressant, claim himself a changed man and promise the same could happen to her if she just tried hard enough. "I don't like this..." Arizona stared, stared, stared. She believed Tisha, she really did. She just didn't trust it. People were always saying that they loved her, that they cared about her, they were always fucking her over anyway. "Something is fucking wrong and nobody is fucking telling me what it is and I might be fucking crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm fucking wrong." Ari shook her head over and over again, stepping back slowly. "You guys aren't tricking me. I know him. This shit is bad. Something terrible is happening and I am not gonna stick around to see it blow up." That was what she decided. She couldn't go back to her mom's, no, couldn't stay here, didn't have a place of her own, her grandmother would certanly call her dad, but this was a problem for her in five minutes. Her present self had decided she didn't want to see something awful play out in front of her, "Imma... Imma go somewhere. I don't where, but I'll call him when I get there."

Tisha practically chokes on her words. “Jesus Christ, Ari- no. Fuck. I wouldn’t keep that shit from you. That would be so fucked up.” She’s not sure if she’s more indignant about the idea of it happening or the idea that she would keep it from her. Maybe because it’s weirdly personal, the thought of getting stuck somewhere by a family scared of the way she… “Besides, they can’t do that anymore. You’re eighteen. The only way anyone could hold you against your will would be a 5150, and that’s only for 72 hours, which I would hope both of your parents understand-” she’s way off topic, the way she gets when she knows things and the information has to come out even though it’s not actually useful. A 5150 would do more harm than good, that’s what she was going to say. Ari is angry and stubborn and being held would only make her angrier and more stubborn and even more things. Frank gets that. She’s sure he does. “I’m telling you the truth, Ari. Your dad hit his breaking point. He doesn’t want to keep walking down a path that would leave you and Ethan without a father. You mean the world to him. You are the world to him. He loves you. And… I do too.”

[whileurmine]

"Heh. Same." Ari chuckles, "I don't do organized religion though, that's for suckers. No offense if you do it." Or some offense. It is usually hard to tell with her. "Here, I—" Aro moves to go find her ever present backpack, the one she abandoned on the floor when she came into the room. Instead, she stumbles forward, almost lands on the floor, laughing, "Oh, oops." Shaking her head at her herself. But she manages eventually. Pulling her latest sketchbook out before coming back to her feet, dramatically offering the notebook out to Tisha. "I like pastel colors." She adds, as if that was some profoundly important piece of context the sketchbook would make no sense without. "Also, I mean, hey, if you are leaving, live fast, die hard, or whatever they say. Who cares what people around here think."

Tisha nods slowly, but her expression doesn’t change much. “I get you.” Does she? It certainly puts a few things into perspective. “You should show me some of your stuff. When you feel like it. That describes a lot of artists I know.” She pulls a crushed pack of Kools from her pocket and lights one, offers the pack to Arizona out of habit more than anything else. “People in small towns talk a lot of shit - that’s what I’m told, anyways. I’d probably be showing up high too.” Would she, though? Not the way Frank is. She probably should’ve known something was up from the easy way he’d offered her coke. Fuck. “Well, they’ve got no reason to be jealous anyway - I’m not even staying here that long.”

[whileurmine]

"Oh, yeah, no, absolutely not, I don't do, like, consistence, or, you know, work. Or work consistently." She pretended to gag, laughing at her own antics a second later. "My life is more like a—" Ari made a small roller-coaster with her with her hands, adding in ohhh and ahhh sound effects along with cool little loop de loops. "You know?" As if what she had just said made any sense what so ever to anyone but her. "There are many reasons why you might be getting looks though, probably old man is showing up to church high so you are getting stink eye by association. Most of the town is there sunday, so you not showing up is easy to notice. There's also the chance people are mad at you because they are—" She was once again forced to pretend to be physically sick. Though this time she made it way more dramatic. Pretend throwing up in a nearby trashcan before bursting into laughter. "They might be jealous. Old man has gone around showing half the town around."

“That’s how it starts.” A smile tugs at the corner of Tisha’s mouth. “And then you wake up at thirty with a gallery bitching because they can’t sell your shit and what kind of crazy person makes something like that anyways.” She feels like she’s being tattled to, but it’s probably smart to listen to Arizona - at least mostly. “Uh… it’s good, I guess. Everyone else gives me dirty looks for missing church. Getting the feeling there’s some background here I don’t know, but…”

[whileurmine]

Ari paused, frowned, staring, staring, staring. Blinking a necessity she simply didn't have. It wasn't that she felt like Tisha was lying, it was just that it felt like— "You aren't telling me something." But she couldn't figure out what it was, information too sparse for her to be able to put it all together herself. It wasn't one missing puzzle piece; it was two or three. The unused cigarette had burned itself out to the filter, Ari turned to it only when the heat reached her fingers. Crushing it out on the ashtray beside the couch's armrest. "I don't like this." It felt like thunderstorms forming right on the edge of town, the moment when you are driving home after a family trip and you know the next innocent word you let out will start an argument, a faraway sensation on the tip of her stomach while sitting alone at a bar, that's telling her to run, run, run, something bad and is going to happen here and you don't want to be around for it. The feeling wasn't new, no, but it didn't usually happen when she was with her father. It was why she was always running back here, no matter how much Frank Hamilton fucked up. Real safety wasn't a possibility, no, but her dad was good at playing pretend that it was. "Tisha..." It was slow, like a warning, a serious kind of threat that needed time to carry its real weight. "If my mom and my dad are planning to lock me up somewhere and you know about it and don't tell me... I swear to fucking god, I'm never looking you in the eye again, okay? I am not a fucking snitch, I wouldn't tell him you told me, but if you know about that kind of shit and you don't tell me... This isn't a I'll figure out everyone meant well given enough time kinda shit, it's I'm never coming around to see him again if you are here type of one, you hear me?"

She raises her hands. “Okay, slow down-” Tisha tries to break through Ari’s mile a minute rant, partially just because she wants to stop her before she connects the right dots. She’s almost relieved when Ari asks her question, considers briefly, very briefly, saying she is just to buy them some time. Everything her stepdaughter (stepdaughter? is that what Ari is in her head, only a few months in?) says makes her heart jump again, a tiny buzzy electric shock. “I… I’m… no. No, I’m… not pregnant.” Is she trying to lead Arizona even with the way she says it? The little pauses that could say I thought I was or I could have been or even I was, a bunch of things that range from sort of true in the right light to outright bullshit, almost unforgivably bullshit if she said it out loud. “This isn’t about kids he could have, Ari. It’s about the kids he does have. You, and your little brother. It's one thing to act okay and push past it in a hospital bed with your whole family. It's another when you're laying in bed, staring up at the ceiling. All the time in the world to think, and too sore to do anything to distract yourself."

[whileurmine]

"The one and only." She bows dramatically, as if Tisha was the audience of an Opera or something. "Actually, no, there's another kid, but he came out with a... How can I say this nicely? A... paler complexion so try not to look directly at him when the sun's out because it might blind you." She laughs, shaking her head. "How's the—" Cue the air quotes, "Showing you around going? He already fuck it up in a terrible way or is he holding out hope that this is gonna be great this time around?" Another chuckle pushed past her lips. "Artist is a big word. I have a notebook in my bag where I draw sometimes when I'm bored."

Hamilton. Oh fuck. "Ah, shit. You're Frank's kid." Tisha laughs, shaking her hand even though it makes her feel like she's meeting her prom date's dad. "Sorry. I didn't realize. Uh, no, he's not my boyfriend. Just not easy to make friends around here, and he's been showing me around." Yeah, that would totally be believable... if Frank's daughter was the twelve year old she'd been picturing. "He mentioned you, actually. Said you're a bit of an artist."

[whileurmine]

Ari tilted her head at Tisha. Lips pursed in the way that asked are you for real right now? without the need for her to say. She would have stayed silent, stared; she heard that worked sometimes, leave enough room for them to fill the uncomfortable silence and people will talk their way into trouble. She was incapable of not talking though, like asking her to move a muscle she didn't possess. "He was laughing in the hospital, Tisha. I was crying and he was making Bush jokes. You really want me to buy that his mortality caught up to him, not when it happened, not when he woke up in the hospital, not when I was around but sometime right about after I left?" He was home, home from work, home away from trouble. The calmest environment there could be, right? And suddenly he wakes up and turn a new leaf? Bullshit. Bullshit. No way. There had to be something, something she didn't know about, one piece missing in this puzzle. Would they invite her mom and not her if they were doing an intervention for him? Would her mom tell her? "Something else, then," If Tisha wouldn't tell her then she could figure it out herself, if she had inherited anything from her father it, it her mind for sure. "No one is dying. No one is dying. No one is dying..." Pacing around the room as she started thinking out loud. "Can't be lose his job, you don't lose a government job while out of medical leave. Besides he is an elected official, right? Who the fuck votes for my fucking dad, by the way?" Ari turned to Tisha, as if that was a genuine question, but no response would be fast enough. She was moving in circles around the couch. Her mind three times faster than her feet. "Can't be Ethan-related, no one would tell me if it was Ethan, but mom would be losing her mind. Can't be you, right? It can't, I mean—" Ari turned on her heels abruptly, mouth hanging open. "Oh, my fucking god, are you pregnant?"

Fucking shit. Tisha can still remember the look on Frank’s face, begging her not to tell Ari why he was back in the hospital, like a kid who knows how bad he fucked up and can’t handle the broken disappointment in his parents’ eyes when they hear about it. She’d never thought about a lie. Never thought she’d need an excuse for Frank cleaning up. “Nobody’s dying.” Is what she starts with. Because at least that’s true. Tisha can’t tell her any more truths today, so she’ll start with that. “It didn’t have all that much to do with me, Ari.” Liar liar liar liar- “You saw how bad he got hurt, in that fire. If he was a little less lucky, he would never have seen you again, or Ethan. Sometimes people have to hit a breaking point. Sometimes it comes a lot later than you’d hope it would.” Half true. True that he got his breaking point late. Almost too late. “Something had to give. I think that day he realized how much it mattered if the thing that gave was him. So I found him a therapist and I got him a dog. And he found out that the why he was using wasn’t the same why a lot of people have, and… now it’s just day by day, Ari.”

[whileurmine]

"No? No boyfriend? Big guy, like, this tall—" And Arizona didn't just raise her hand in the air for that she jumped too. Letting out a laugh at her own antics. "Seen leaving bars with the only person in the world who has come in to this dumbest town instead of out." Ari chuckled. "Arizona Hamilton.' She offered out her hand. Long and dramatic, twirling her hand in the air, before offering for a handshake. "Local nightmare."

“Don’t need anybody to tell me, I’ve been through enough of them.” Tisha huffs out a laugh. “But, uh… you might have me mixed up with somebody else. I don’t have a boyfriend.” Both directions of that are stupid, because she can’t imagine anybody in this town being mistaken for her, but she doesn’t.