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Demon Marcus, Monday

Alluka was proud of herself as she made it to work--early!--on her ATs. She thought she was a little better than she'd been last week, though it was hard to tell.

Especially when she was still so sleepy.

Yesterday had been so, so fun.

But she was worn out from it.

Alluka and her newest friend, her little dapper octopus, made sure everything was neat and tidy around the store (with a stop to find a hat for her, so she could match her octopus) and then retreated to the counter to have tea and cookies.

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Yeah, Dante had seen Alluka at the wedding yesterday. She seemed pretty okay with carnage on a regular day, so he wasn't worried - or so he told himself - but, y'know, whatever. He could stop by or something.

Casual visits were a thing.

"Hey, did you get cookies in here?"

Not the usual fare he ran into whenever he visited the store.

"Dante!" she said, looking up and beaming at him. She waved him over. "Hi! I brought the cookies, because you can't have tea without them."

Well, you could, but then it wasn't right.

"Didn't know there was a law about that," Dante said, and if his shoulders relaxed a little at how cheery she was being, well, shut up. "What've you got?"

It was adorable, that's what it was.

"Chocolate chip, shortbread, and the ones with jam in the middle of them," she said, offering him one of the jam ones. "Not all of my toys like the same kind of cookies, so I had to get a selection."

So that she could eat them all. Alluka saw nothing wrong with this.

"Did you want tea?"

Hey, now. He worked really hard to hide his protective streak.

"I think that's the first time anyone's ever said that to me," Dante said, walking up to her. "Me at a tea party? Why the fuck not."

That didn't make it any less adorable!

It was hard to imagine her getting any sunnier, but she managed it. "You don't have to," Alluka said, though now that he'd said he would, he basically did have to. "If you're here for proper shopping, I mean."

But that didn't stop her from setting his cookie down on a plate and sliding off her chair to reach under the counter for another of her tea cups and saucers. They had little kittens patterned on them, in pink and blue.

"Did you want cream and sugar in yours?"

Dante'd lost another shirt on Saturday, but he still had a bunch to go around, so he shrugged. "Just here to window shop," he said, "Got nothing better to do, so tea's good." Beat. "As long as there's a mountain of sugar in there."

"I can manage that," she said, giggling as she stood and got his tea ready. "I like mine with sugar too."

And Alluka possibly lived off of sugar. It was going to be sweet.

That was something they had in common. The more sugar, the better.

"Sweet," Dante said, grinning. He picked up his cookie and took a bite. "...Same goes for these," he said. "Strawberry. Awesome."

"They're not as fancy as the strawberry things that were at the wedding," Alluka said, dumping the amount of sugar she liked into his tea and giving it a stir before offering it to him. "But I like them. Did you try the ones that were at the wedding?"

Tea wasn't usually Dante's drink, but by the look of the amount of sugar she'd put into it, it wasn't likely to taste like tea anyway. He took the cup and sipped it-- yep, mostly sugar.

"I took a whole bunch of them," he said. "I think I still have two in the fridge."

It was the best way to drink it!

She giggled.

"I didn't take any," Alluka admitted. "Maybe I should've? But Mr. Eliot gave me a bunch of sweets to eat since the cake was ruined."

"They bought all that food and those drinks anyway," Dante said. He took another sip of his liquid sugar. "I thought it'd be sad to leave it."

He was broke, but between this and the Restaurant he now had enough liquor to last him a year, at least.

"It would have been!"

Though mostly Alluka had just wanted candy.

"It was weird how it ended up," she added, sipping her own tea. "There wasn't even a kidnapping to do the wedding attack right."

Hadn't they ever read princess stories?!

"You don't need a kidnapping for a bunch of angry assholes to show up and try to screw with you at a big party you announced in the paper," Dante said.

Philosophically.

"I know that," she said, like he was being the silly one. Alluka ate a cookie. "But if you're going to attack a wedding, you're suppose to it to either kidnap the bride so the prince can go off and save his princess and then get married or to take the bride's place and marry the prince in a nefarious scheme to take over the throne."

...

"Papa Hannibal probably would've gotten kidnapped if they'd done it right," she added, taking another bite of her cookie. "Papa Jono is better at heroics, so he'd make a better prince."

Which made Papa Hannibal the princess, yes.

Dante reached over to try and get another one of those jam-filled ones. "Outside of fairy tales, there's no supposeds to attacking a wedding," he said, "Or attacking anything. Nothing weird about that. Sometimes it happens for no reason."

He had limited patience for all the prince and princess stuff, even if he kinda liked Alluka now.

She frowned at him.

"But if it happens for no reason, then how is it every supposed to make sense?"

"It doesn't," Dante said. He took a bite out of the cookie. "A lot of things just don't make sense."

He could give her a long list of things that didn't make sense for him personally, and yet had happened to him anyway, for starters.

She looked down at her octopus for a long moment before shaking her head.

"I know that" she said. "But I still think they should."

"You can think things should do stuff all you want," Dante said, shrugging. "The world's not gonna care."

Alluka ate another cookie thoughtfully before answering that.

"Do you care?"

"About how things should be, or about what you think?" Dante said.

He sipped his tea. The cup did not exactly fit with the rest of his punk aesthetic.

"Hmmm."

She tilted her head to the side.

"Both," she said, "but the first one more."

"I think caring about the ways things should be is a great way to get disappointed at best, and completely screwed over at worst," Dante said, huddling over his cup. "You just get your hopes up about something that's not gonna happen."

He fidgeted with his cookie. "And I guess I care what's in your head? I just don't like to blow smoke up your ass."

She blinked at him.

"Um, maybe I'm wrong," since she could've misunderstood, "but, but did you answer the first question?"

He hadn't, had he?

"Are you cold? I can get a blanket for you, if you are!"

"I'm not cold," Dante said immediately. He shoved the last of his cookie in his mouth. "First question's how I cared about how things should be, right? Yeah, I answered that. Answer's no. There's no point."

Oh, Dante. Alluka looked reproachfully at him before going and fetching a blanket anyway. She set it down beside him, then said, to the blanket.

"There's no point to most of the games I play with my toys," Alluka said. "But I do it anyway."

"Yeah, but playing with toys isn't gonna get you hurt," Dante said.

You know, her. Or other people. Those people got hurt.

"It just means that I get left behind."

Maybe it was because Dante didn't talk down to her that Alluka said that to him. It was ugly and she hated it and she pretended it didn't exist most of the time.

But it was true.

"I really love getting to make friends, and meeting people, and seeing how things work," she said, laughing. "But all I'm really good at is playing with my toys and I learn really slowly, since I still love playing with my toys the best."

They made the most sense, even after a year out of her room.

"I, I don't really understand, how the world can hurt you," she said. "I don't know anything. But I think it's okay to care about things, even when they're pointless."

Dante watched her, trying to parse that. It was easy to throw out some stupid crack at her expense or that of the toys, but that'd be shitty payback after she actually tried to make him feel better last week.

So he rolled those words over in his head until they made some kind of sense.

"You ever bring your toys in to try new stuff with you?" he asked.

That last thing she said led to a whole host of things that would just leave him exhausted to talk about, and he had enough of that with Ringo. So he tried to avoid it.

She wandered back to her chair, and picked up her cute little octopus to hug him.

"Sometimes," Alluka admitted, smiling. "But if I need my hands, it gets complicated, and they don't like to be stuck in bags."

Dante shrugged. "So maybe you bring somebody with you to handle the toys," he said. "Aren't there like, video games that teach you stuff? You could do that in real life."

He wasn't sure. It wasn't like there weren't huge gaps in his education, too.

Alluka nibbled on another cookie.

"I don't understand," she said, since even trying to parse it wasn't working.

"I mean, like..." Dante waved at the toys. "If you wanna learn history, get your toys into it? Or you wanna learn how to put a car together, you let 'em help."

Beat.

"Maybe I'm missing the point."

She giggled.

"I miss it all the time," she shared. "It's okay. I forgive you."

People always forgave her, after all.

"How do you decide what you want to learn?"

"You pick things that keep you alive or seem like fun," Dante said. "That's how I do it, anyway. All the other stuff's not as important."

"How do you know the things that'll be fun?" she asked curiously, pouring herself another cup of tea. "How do you..."

Alluka struggled for the words.

"Know what to care enough about to follow? I like drawing, but I haven't looked up how to draw better. And, and I like AirTrek, but I like it because Ringo does it with me. I don't know if I'd do it by myself as much. I don't know how to be like Ringo, with it, or like Papa Jono with his music, or Papa Hannibal with his cooking."

"You don't know, I guess," Dante said. He wordlessly shoved his now-empty cup forward 'cause he'd actually like some more of the sugar-goop now, please. "I mean, I just do stuff and stick with whatever makes me feel good, right?"

Admittedly, his point of view was probably skewed - the way these things got skewed when you lived in the moment because you didn't believe you were going to live the next moment, or the one after that.

She beamed at him--he liked the tea!--as she took his cup and poured him out some more.

"But does it matter, the stuff that makes you feel good?" she asked, stirring in the sugar. "All those things matter to them, but when I draw, it doesn't matter to me, even though it's fun."

Alluka handed him back his cup, refill complete.

Dante wanted to give her a hard Yes, because of course all the stupid fun stuff he did mattered: it filled up his life with something that made it worth it. Short-term, anyway.

The thing was, Alluka didn't even know most of the stuff he did. Wasn't going to weigh that into his answer. So there was no pressing need to defend his hobbies here, like there usually was.

"Some of it," he said, cradling the cup back in his hands. "Sometimes." He eyed his tea. "I dunno. It's just stupid fun."

You wore your body out as much as possible and then you slept and then you wore it out some more and it was fun, not misery, while you did it. Did you really need more meaning than that?

"I guess so," she said, even though she was pretty sure the real answer was somewhere in the middle of all his changes of mind. "I don't know."

Alluka offered some of her tea to her octopus.

"Do you know how to fix a car?"

Dante didn't even really know how he felt about it. Kathy had tried to sell him on the importance of investing in something long-term, knowledge-wise, but... screw that.

"I know how to fix a motorcycle," he said, grateful for an easier question.

"Can you show me sometime?" Alluka asked curiously.

It wasn't something she was interested in, not even a little, but Dante knew it. Maybe it would be interesting because he had cared enough to learn.

"Sure," Dante said, shrugging a little. "I got a motorcycle sitting right in the parking lot, we can poke around. Maybe race around if there's space."

He sipped his sugary tea. It was still pretty nice.

Mondays always seem to surprise me, which is ridiculous, but true.

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Demon Marcus, Monday

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OOC