first one who touches the ground loses

Octavia and Lucifer had been talking about a mainland shopping trip for a while, now, never seeming to actually get around to it. But so far, this week had been pretty calm and quiet, both for the island and within their household (... boathold?), so, hey! Might as well seize the opportunity for some quality time.

They were still on the street, for now, but getting closer to their main destination. Octavia had a takeaway cup in hand, one of those weird teas with the little balls at the bottom and the big straw.

"How long has it even been since we were last here?" she wondered, glancing up at Lucifer. "I mean, at least together."

[ooc: NFB, and for the Devil mentioned.]

So Octavia had stayed the night over on her own boat, yesterday. She wasn't proud of it, but apparently there was just something about waking up to one of her partners having turned into some sort of a blue horse-like thing that was just too much of a living fever dream for her. Thankfully, she'd had the preserve to run off to, and then her own boat to hang out on, waiting for all that to pass.

And now, this morning, she had gentle amends to make, in the form of fancy takeaway coffees and extravagant pastries from town.

(The big thing of just straight black coffee was for her. Hadn't actually slept all that much.)

"Ha yun," she called, as she was making her way down into the galley of the Rouge. "Everyone human-shaped?"

Please say yes. Everything had seemed normal back in town.

[ooc: For those two, if they are so inclined!]

The room wasn't soundproofed yet. And that was fine. It had taken Octavia two weeks to make it this far: to not just have the drum kit in boxes in the room, but to actually be assembling it.

She hadn't set it up in more than a decade, by now. It was weird how easily it came to her once she got started. Every little bit just... finding its place, at least once she stopped really trying to think about it and let instinct take over.

It didn't take that long before it was -- all there. This piece of her old life, fully intact again.

... Well, for a given definition of 'fully intact'. Octavia examined the damage, and yes, she was definitely going to have to replace some bits before she did anything else. Between having been down in the hold for years and having had the shit kicked out of it right before that, the set had clearly seen better days. She was going to have to go shopping.

(No of course that wasn't an excuse to keep from trying the kit out just a little while longer, don't be stupid. Why would she need that?)

[ooc: Open if you have any reason to be here, sure.]

Octavia had had a plan. A good plan, even! She'd come to the house early in order to get dinner and dessert ready before Lucifer showed up, and things had started out completely fine, but then --

Well, there were two bits of good news, at least:

One, dessert seemed to be mostly fine.

Two, most of the burnt food smell had already dissipated.

And maybe her order from El Burrito Loco might get here before Lucifer did? She wasn't counting on it, though. But she was going to crack open one of the Cokes she'd received from various polar bears over the course of the day (or maybe just the one bear, it wasn't like she was very well-versed in telling bears apart), and just wait and see.

[ooc: For that guy.]

It had been another weird week. But enough of the weird - both from this week, and the ones before it - had apparently passed for Octavia and Lucifer to meet up at the house again on this Sunday evening for another date night.

The previously unfurnished room on the second floor was no longer unfurnished. Octavia didn't know whether Lucifer had noticed yet, especially since she'd left the door closed after she'd been done with it. She didn't know whether it would come into play yet, anyway.

And either way, they were downstairs, sitting down properly at the dining table. A gesture towards things Lucifer liked. And Octavia had cooked, even if the main had been just a very simple salad, which they were just about finished with. The equally simple dessert was still waiting in the fridge.

"Maybe one of these weeks you could give me a lesson." A beat. "You know, for cooking. We could make a thing of it."

[ooc: For, you guessed it, that guy.]

Things around the boat were... whatever it was that passed for normal in the wake of several bouts of assorted trauma, meaning a mess of progress and stumbling backwards. Octavia was tired, all the time, and didn't think she was the only one.

And then she got a phonecall, out of the blue. It took her a moment to even pick it up, because unfamiliar numbers never called her. (And the less said about how she'd briefly thought it might be Jennifer, or Gloria, the better.) It took her even longer to parse what it was about once she'd picked it up - and then she finally remembered about the order she'd placed (on Lucifer's credit card, naturally, trusting he never looked at his expenses too closely) weeks ago, before Haven, before all of it.

And that was how she found herself out here at the mansion, opening the door for the delivery people who'd already lugged two packages - one absolutely enormous and one moderately-sized in comparison - all the way from the causeway to the house.

"It's on the second floor," she was saying. "Sorry about all the stairs."

They were already so over all the stairs. Thank goodness she knew about tipping.

[ooc: Can be open, I suppose!]

Octavia woke up with someone's arm resting over her side. Nothing unusual about that, really, or even about just any sign that she was sharing her bed with someone. So when she blinked her blurry eyes open and didn't see the bedroom wall on the Rouge but rather the drab beige of the interior of the Samsara, well, that was a sign that something was off.

It took her a moment to find her bearings, put everything together in her head, to remember yesterday and how it wasn't all just a dream. She managed to restrain herself into rolling around carefully to see that the arm belonged to Ilian. That Ilian was still here, peaceful and still and also faintly snoring.

Of course, she hadn't meant to sleep here. That much was evident even from how they were both almost fully dressed in their stret clothes as if they'd expected to go out at any moment, and then just... hadn't. Which was more or less what had happened. The boat was littered with takeout containers from most of the restaurants all across the island. What did you do when someone showed up from a post-apocalyptic world? You did your best to show them some of the good in this time, which in Octavia's case apparently meant focusing on the abundance of food, and the variety of it.

And as they'd eaten, they'd talked.

They'd talked a lot.

About everything.

About how things had gone after the conclave. About everything she could remember of what had become of members of Wonkru who'd been Trishanakru in the past (although she'd cut out some of the gore, when it was there). About her life on Fandom, complete with show-and-tell with all the little sentimental bits she kept on her boat (butterfly statues and pictures of various futures and ridiculous giant tulle boas). About his life on his farm, with his family, before ALIE and Skaikru and everything going to shit. All the things she hadn't had the energy or interest in asking about last time.

Making up for what they hadn't had on the Ground. Making up for what they were about to lose again all too soon, although of course Ilian was taking more of a 'grateful that it happened at all' approach against the way Octavia's pre-emptive grief tried to bubble up.

And somewhere in the middle of all the endless talking, laughing, crying, then talking some more, they'd both fallen asleep. Curled up a little. Not like on the farm, but close enough. Octavia knew this probably meant she had some explaining to do to Duke and Lucifer, but couldn't really feel too bad about it in the moment.

Watching Ilian's face in this moment was already crushing her heart over the thought of losing him again.

[ooc: Open, if you have some business on the lil' boat, or want to text or something.]

Octavia didn't want to be here. But as always, Haven didn't care about what she wanted, and she was just going to have to deal with that to best of her abilities.

So far, that was proving to be a lot of waiting.

Duke had headed over to the Sanguine Moon for maintenance, and Lucifer had gone off with him. Octavia, meanwhile... had felt like she preferred her own company. More or less - she'd stuck around The Grey Gull, for the moment, restlessly leafing through a copy of the Haven Herald and retaining absolutely nothing that she saw in it, while the phone pressed to her ear kept ringing and ringing and ringing for far too long.

Until, finally:

"Wildcat?"

And Octavia found herself exhaling something relieved, squeezing her eyes shut lest they do something she didn't want them to.

"Yeah," she said, just a little unsteady all the same, "it's me."

-----

It had only been about a week for Gloria, but that didn't make it a short call by any means. Especially not with the way Octavia caught herself trying to hold on to it. Eventually, though, they said their goodbyes, and she was alone again.

And the guys were still working on the boat, and Wade was still getting his shit together. And that was... fine. She still had someone else to talk to, anyway. Someone to go see.

-----

These places continued to weird Octavia out a little. Cemeteries were odd when you were used to funeral pyres. Still, there was something oddly comforting about the idea of it, too: going into the ground (not the way she had, not in a bunker), becoming part of nature again, feeding new life.

(Maybe she shouldn't think too hard on that and the bunker.)

It took a little time, but she found the right headstone. Sat down in front of it, suddenly wishing she'd brought something. She didn't know what, but. Something. A token. A gift.

"Hi, Claire," she said quietly, all the same, one hand picking at the grass without her fully even noticing. "So you're probably gonna wanna hear about Dr. Baker, huh?"

This would take a while, too.

[ooc: NFB due to distance, NFI. Happens in the middle of this.]

It had been a relatively quiet evening at the mansion, so far. But in an easy way, not a... Not a bad way. Octavia had requested for them to have their dinner - a nice salad, with a rich, chocolatey dessert - on the couch up in the bedroom, for a change. Something cozy.

Something easy about that, too, maybe.

"What did you say this green thing was called, again?" she asked, spearing one of the last bits of salad in her bowl onto a fork and holding it up for Lucifer to see.

[ooc: For that guy.]

Octavia was asleep. Octavia had been asleep a lot, this week, largely unaware of the chaos around town since her own (visceral) taste of it - or how that had progressed. She continued to be unaware even now, a little while after people had gathered in town to solve it.

Only, now --

Octavia was no longer asleep.

She woke up with a start, eyes flying wide open.

[ooc: For the two, and SP.]