#ramshacklemuses; joy // wash 1

[harriedwritings]

    // closed for @ramshacklemuses // joy & wash

The angry tirade that he’d launched into had left him exhausted in all the ways. The fire had faded almost as quickly as it’d started, his limbs leaden and the space under his eyes hollow as he poured himself a coffee and plied it with sugar. He didn’t even remember the specifics of what he’d said, just that it was something to do with people judging situations without having the proper understanding required to do so. Really, he wasn’t entirely sure.

Wash hadn’t been sure this morning and he wasn’t now that he was standing, knocking on the front door of one of the people in group. She’d invited him round for dinner. Something about meeting her kid. He’d said yes. Why had he done that? He hadn’t been over at anyone’s place for dinner since...well, ever, really.

He thought.

It was frighteningly normal.

He’d called his sister for help. She’d talked him through it. He supposed it kind of made things a little easier to know that he’d never known how to go round for dinner, that the difficulty here wasn’t a direct result of Everything, it was just that it...didn’t help. For all that he knew that Joy’d been through some shit, knew some specifics of the situation (couldn’t for the life of him recall how he knew, but what else was new there?), it was weirdly startling how out of his depth he was.

But here he stood, reminding himself to knock, and knocking on her door with a lip gnawed raw and a bag of oranges clutched in his hand. He was late, a side effect of losing time management. Not too late, but late enough to be noticeable, and as he registered the door beginning to open, he was speaking,

“-- Sorry. Sorry, I...lost track of time. But oranges, though?”