After… after all of that, with Peter, while Juno doesn’t hesitate to go out, to keep trying to figure this out… it’s a distraction, most of it. Barring that thing with Xivu Arath, which was surprisingly… good. Not fun, exactly, but it made him feel a little better, for a bit, even when he thought of his first hour here, the look on Nureyev’s face, the cold fury and the sharp hurt…
Oh, but it hurts him too, and not even the memory of Xivu Arath’s booming ’are you planning to do human marriage to me’ is enough to soothe that sting, after a while.
So at night, curled up in the corner of his bed, he tries to figure out the holophone instead of sleeping, instead of succumbing to the dreams, to that void where Peter Nureyev is someone else and reminds him how much of a mistake he’s made, how much of a fuck-up he is, tells him what he already tells himself, but in a voice that matters and hurts so much more. He fusses with the contact list, eye glazed over at all the unfamiliar names, fusses with the settings, figures out voice to text- oh, good- and finds the app store.
The app- ‘Kindling’- is on the front page, one of the first five he opens up to examine, and he downloads it on a lark. It looks like an easier way to figure out who’s who, put names to faces, than just staring at a list of contacts mysteriously loaded into his phone. It’s well into dawn hours by the time he gets around to doing anything with it, figures out how to snap a short of his face- more or less, it’s pretty blurred and the lighting is awful so he’s not much more than a smudge of black-on-brown-on-dark, which is how he feels, anyways, so who even cares. The words he puts up are even less important- ‘Juno Steel, P.I.’ and all the basic things it asked for like age and what he’s looking for.
He falls asleep picking through the faces popping up on his screen, sorting between his type and not his type- there’s more of the former than the latter, since his type is pretty broad. (He hears an echo of his own voice, a conversation with Mick from forever ago, with an active desire to do me harm, and Mick’s response, I asked about your whiskey, not your men.)
When he wakes (no nightmares, too exhausted to dream, too exhausted to hate himself for this too-brief respite) the message is on his screen, blinking up at him, and he navigates to it, thinking Rita would be proud if she could see him. All adapting to technology. Hell.
He vaguely remembers swiping right on this one early this morning- about his age (which a lot of them weren’t, go figure), not bad looking… sharp. He seemed sharp. He stretches out in the bed, bleary, and carefully starts to dictate to the phone.
[msg] Yeah.
[msg] Think anyone you ask is gonna say the same.
[msg] Haven’t met anyone who wants to be here yet.
The wait between message and reply gave Teague ample opportunity to see exactly who he’d matched with. One of the few on the app who didn’t seem barely legal, and--well, that was about all he could tell from the blurry photo. He was almost offended for a moment, seeing the quality of the picture, but then he remembered how long it had taken to get a photo of himself he was happy with and the offense faded away.
(Three hours. Two of those had been figuring out how the camera worked. The last hour was trying to find his good angle. Conclusion: all of them.)
Maybe it’s a little too eager that he replies as soon as the screen of his holophone lights up, but--he’s certainly not in the best state of mind, so the eagerness can be excused. Three days of adjusting, yes, but about six hours of sleep between all of them, kept awake by nightmares or memories of Kingsparrow Island playing on loop or reckless, baseless paranoia--he’s tired. Very tired.
[msg] Oh, I don’t know. This place seems lovely.
[msg] Full of character. Nicer than home.
[msg] Recent arrival?
He debates sending ‘nice pic btw’, but that seems facetious even to him.
