[open] a friend in need's a friend indeed

[nedofpies]

Who: Ned and OPEN
What: Random encounters & fallout from dream-walking tomfoolery
Where: House 20, the garden, anywhere around town
When: Day 89

It's been a long week. A long, mostly-sleepless, weird week during which Ned has seen far more of his friends' and neighbors' subconsciouses than he would have liked to. Plus, a creepy city made of crystals that everyone seems to have seen, but no one will claim as their own. Shady stuff. Today, he is determined to wear himself out. Perhaps if he's tired enough, whatever mojo the men behind the curtain have put on him won't be strong enough to stir him out of a deep and dreamless sleep.

It's probably a futile tactic, but he can't just do nothing.

So he is a bustle of activity - cleaning the house, walking around town, checking on the crops to see if they are holding up well (carefully, with an eye for any enterprising tigers roaming too close to the edge of the forest), keeping an eye out for new faces and an ear out for rumors of missing ones.

Comments

[zen_navigator]

"Oh. Right." Well, that clarifies quite a few things, starting with why Daneel had been so protective of Ned and ending with why Ned wants to make Daneel happy.

It doesn't bode very well for the possibility of making Ned his interim partner. People who are attached usually have more pesky qualms about throwing themselves into difficult situations in the name of progress. And then their partners have even more qualms. Nonetheless, he can respect the relationship. As far as he knows, both men are more or less reasonable and not at all apt to make plans to move to Cambridge without notice.

"How long have you been...dating?" Yeah, he's going to go with dating here. Normally he wouldn't ask, but he's trying to figure out the extent of the situation.

[nedofpies]

It's odd, the way he can lose track of time, here. Time in captivity, even after he'd mostly grown accustomed to it, isn't exactly the same as time elsewhere. Some things seem to fly by so quickly, but on the whole the days drag and weeks feel like months, and months years.

"Little over a month?" Ned isn't quite sure on which day precisely he should fix the beginning of it all. They'd sort of... fallen into it, mutually surprised by the way things were developed, both unsure and confused and hesitant for their own reasons.

Dirk, it seems, is more than willing to accept that someone like Ned and someone like Daneel can be involved romantically. He doesn't exactly spring to the congratulations, Ned notices, and there's an odd sort of neutrality to his reply that Ned can't quite suss out, but he's polite, at the very least. Ned appreciates that. It makes him feel, well, normal. Feeling normal isn't something he's altogether used to, so it's nice, to experience it.

"In fact," Ned glances at his communicator, taps at it to display the time, "I ought to get back, make sure he isn't worried I got mauled by another tiger. It was-" in the happy flush of talking about Daneel, of hearing about Jane, Ned has completely forgiven the whole pushing incident, "-good talking to you."

With that, he waves at Dirk, turns back towards the house, and the person he knows will probably be waiting for him there.