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The Perk, Saturday Morning

The morning had started off well enough. There had been company and a distinct lack of a yesterday's capes.

Then the voices had started. Quiet enough that they couldn't always be heard but loud enough to be disturbing. There wouldn't be anyone else in his apartment, Stark knew that. There was certainly nobody in the apartment next door. But that didn't make the voices stop. Looking around his apartment didn't make them stop. There was nobody there but there were voices and that had Stark on edge. He didn't like hearing things that weren't there. It worried him.

So he opted to go somewhere where there would be voices that belonged to people he could see instead of only voices that didn't seem to belong to anyone.

That was why Stark was now seated in the Perk with a very large sugary coffee and an extremely chocolatey breakfast pastry in front him. Hopefully other voices here would drown out the ones that weren't really there.

[Open coffee shop is very open and the alien would love some company]

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Hearing things had not been great for Steven. So when the sounds started up not long after Watts had left Marc swapped in pretty quickly.

Marc knew what the voices in his head sounded like, after all. Anything else was just noise.

He was in the mood for coffee and a breakfast sandwich though, so hitting up the Perk was a natural stop.

Stark nodded in his direction.

"Hello, Marc."

The lack of greeting had given it away.

If not that then waiting until he'd ordered a coffee with real milk and a sandwich with real egg would've sealed the deal.

"Stark," Marc said. "Nice to see I'm not the only person who isn't scared of mornings."

He didn't ask about the voices since at that point he assumed he and Steven were the only ones hearing them.

"I don't usually sleep late." Because he often didn't sleep well.

"Not scared of mornings. Usually they're peaceful."

Less so when there were creepy voices coming from nowhere.

Okay that and the way the barista was twitching around the same time Marc heard something was enough of a clue to make him ask, "Are you hearing this shit too?"

Stark grimaced and nodded.

"I thought it was only me, at first. But then it wasn't. But it still won't stop. I thought it would be better to be somewhere with more voices so I could hear ones I knew were real."

"You'll be okay," Marc said, with more outward kindness than he usually displayed. "Breathe through it."

Stark nodded. "It's easier knowing other people hear it."

"But sometimes...sometimes, not so much now but before, sometimes it's hard to tell if it's real or not. Or it has been. Before. When I wasn't doing as well."

"Voices like you're crazy or voices from - " Marc gestured towards the side of his head to indicate Stark's mask.

"Yes," Stark told him. "Both. I used to pretend that I was. Crazy. So I'd be left alone a little more but it only helped a little and then sometimes it just...wasn't pretend at all. It's better now. Right now."

The voices didn't help though.

"In my case it helps to know that I'm crazy," Marc said. He took a seat by Stark as long as they were talking. He gestured around them. "Means I know none of this is mine. But I guess that's harder for you with all you've got going on in your head."

"I'm not." Much. Usually. But this was said in a tone of someone who had repeated the words often and only mostly believed them.

"At least not now. But this sort of thing...this makes it harder to remember that. So I came here where there'd be more talking to listen to."

A man and a goose walk into a coffee shop...

(Stop me if you've heard this one before...)

And the man just needed to stop for a moment, a few steps into the door, to take a deep breath and just appreciate the wall of scents that hit him as soon as he did. There had been coffee, of course, back on Eos, but over the years, it became a rarity, it was hardly so fresh and aromatic, and it was almost all Ignis could do to keep himself from letting out a soft sound of appreciation, not only for the promise of actual fresh, good coffee again, but also just the sounds of a coffee shop. There had been those whispers all day, underneath all of it, but he could easily hear past those to those little things that most people took for granted: jokes that the baristas bandied back and forth behind the counter, the hiss of the steamwand before it was muffled as it submerged into foaming milk, the clatter of a cup on a saucer, a puck of espresso extracted from the head, snippets of conversation...

...interrupted, eventually, by a couple honks as Shane helpfully led him to the counter, so that he could follow the sound over and put in his order. Just a simple black coffee, perhaps something a little more, like a latte, on his way out. But for now? Following Shane over to a table, feeling around for a chair before pulling it out and having a seat, just to listen some more and to think, with the goose at his feet occasionally throwing out a few more honks before remembering that he was a goose right now, therefor making conversation a bit difficult, and settling down with quite possibly the sulkiest expression to ever be held by a waterfowl.

"You have a goose," Stark said. "Do you usually have a goose?"

Someone had missed radio this morning.

Ignis' head shifted in the direction of Stark's voice, with maybe the faint beginning of a wry expression.

"He's not usually a goose," he offered, by way of...strained explanation, "although that is what most people call him. It's Shane. Gooseman."

While Ignis took a sip of his coffee that turned into much more than a sip, because, good gods, how could he ever bring himself to call the swill he'd been drinking lately coffee?, Goose the goose let out a honk of confirmation.

"It happened yesterday," Ignis added.

"Oh. Goose is a goose? That's...I'm sorry." It was unclear, even to Stark, whether that was directed at Ignis or the goose.

"I hope it doesn't last long. I was a koala for a week, this summer."

Ignis grimaced, slightly, at the idea of having to deal with this for an entire week, while Goose seemed to express his own discontentment with such a prospect with a remarkably sad-sounding honk, although Ignis supposed a week wouldn't be too bad, considering...

"The last time I had to deal with a transformation like this," he noted, almost as if to remind himself that this wasn't really at that bad...yet, "it last just north of two months, so I suppose I'll be lucky if it's only a week."

"Someone stayed an animal for two months?" Stark asked, a horrified expression on his face that would be sadly lost on Ignis. "Who was that? When was that? I'm sure this won't be that long. They usually aren't..."

He was not sure at all but most things tended to only last a week or so.

"It was Prompto," Ignis supplied, easily enough, after another appreciative swig from his cup, one that made him wonder if he should have gotten a larger size, really. "And Gladio was also a plant for the same time period, but I hear time was moving for us quite differently, so I'm sure, were we here, it would have been only a few days, at most..."

He had been pouring over the time disparity significantly since yesterday, doing everything he could to try to figure out exactly how it worked and how it all fit together, and was...not having much success, he had to admit, but somehow, framing it in these terms actually helped it feel a little more...well, not logical, nothing about it was logical, but at least a little more...palatable.

Marc held up his hands to indicate no offense had been meant. He didn't think Stark was crazy. And even if he did, he wouldn't hold it against Stark anyway.

"Could try telling them to fuck off," Marc suggested. "I mean if this is island bullshit it probably won't make them go away. But might make you feel better to tell them where they can shove it."

"Time doesn't move the same in different places, always. It gets confusing. I try not to think about it too much."

Mostly because the time differences were hard to understand and thinking about them didn't help.

"You just came back?"

Ignis gave a small nod of his head, one that left his head tilted with an ear more toward Stark, still trying to place the voice. Without the benefit of being able to see who he was talking to, he really did have to rely solely on sound and memory, and both would be difficult if the person was someone he hadn't interacted with much before. But there was a familiarity, and whoever it was clearly recognized names he was throwing out, so...he was sure he would figure it out. If anything, he'd merely listen to radio in the morning to fill in the gaps that memory could not provide.

"Only yesterday," he said, "as a matter of fact."

Shane, helpfully, honked out a confirmation.

Stark shook his head before taking a long sip from his coffee. "I don't think that would do any good. It's fine. It should go away by tomorrow. I hope. Everything else has only lasted a day this time. I'll just try not to stay alone if I can help it."

He might end up calling in backup in the form of Travis.

Stark nodded. He hadn't yet realized that Ignis wasn't actually looking at him.

"Welcome back then. I haven't really seen Gladio since he came back. I've seen Prompto a few times. I went to his party, last weekend. But...welcome back. How long were you gone, for you?"

"Yeah, Steven wasn't great with it either," Marc said. "That's why I'm out."

Well that and in theory Saturdays were supposed to be Marc's days but Marc didn't actually give a shit about that. Helping Steven, though, that was different.

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The Perk, Saturday Morning

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