Joel is lounging around on Potato Pier, evening darkening to purple as Jimmy and Grian argue about something stupid in the background. He dips a hand in and out of the water elevator, in and out, and again; and after every splash he's seeing the same numbers.
"Time's stopped," Joel says absently. The lulling noise of the background conversation grinds to a halt.
"Sorry, what?" Jimmy asks.
"I said, the blimming-" Joel realizes what he's saying as he says it, snapped from dreamy to alert in a moment. Grian's head whips up.
Jimmy looks down at his own arm. "The time's stopped. The time has stopped? Grian?"
Already reaching for his comm, Grian says with a forcedly casual tone, "No it hasn't."
Then he blanches, eyes flicking over the screen.
"WHAT."
Joel snorts and looks out over the map. No one is noticeably freaking out yet- the only group he can see out and about this late in the day is the Clockers, busy fixing up the cliff face on their side of the No-Man's-Land with Pearl and BigB. He watches as Bdubs falls in the chicken pit for the umpteenth time. Joel snickers.
He looks up, and catches sight of Grian's expression. He stops snickering.
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"What do you MEAN," Cleo yells, "that the clocks have stopped?" One of their arms is looped firmly around Scar's shoulders, which seems prudent given his tendency to wander off and either explode or kill whoever he bumps into. He still looks slightly singed from earlier, giving an overall impression of a puppy that cannot be left alone with electric cords.
Slumped against a rough stone wall reloading a crossbow, Joel scoffs. "What do you bloody well think it means?"
"HEY," Bdubs exclaims, "Don't talk to-" Aaand he's in the horse pit.
"It's fine Bdubs." Cleo rolls her eyes. "My fault. What I meant to ask is, why are you-" she points to Grian, who squawks, "-telling us about it? Why aren't you just fixing it?"
"Well he can't, can he?" Jimmy pipes up from his seat at the dining table. "Else he would. He's in here with us, though."
Cleo doesn't stop staring at Grian, and boy is Joel glad he's not Grian right now. Both because being himself is obviously the best option always, and because an angry Cleo is a very scary Cleo.
Reluctantly, slowly, Grian nods. "I can't fix it."
No one says anything.
The dripping from the ceiling to the floor makes Joel think someone really ought to fix up the roof. They'll have the time for it, he reckons. Then Joel remembers that the Bad Boys had, in fact, bombed the clocktower not an hour before, and decides now is really not the time to mention it.
Finally: "I really can't. It's not-" Grian sighs. "I set this thing up. It can run just fine on autopilot, pretty much. If I were on the outside as an admin-" he grimaces, "...like I should be, it wouldn't be an issue. But it's like the pilot is locked inside the bathroom while the plane-" Grian stops talking.
"Crashes? While it crashes." Cleo sounds displeased. Joel starts drafting an obituary. Bdubs has clambered up from the horse pit by now and is sitting on the edge of it, nervously messing with a janky old pocket watch.
"I would really prefer not to be stuck in an airplane bathroom forever," Scar says forlornly.
"Oh for goodness' sake," Joel says. "There has to be someone on this server who can fix this. Grian can't be the first idiot who's ever done something this stupid."
"I'll take that bet," Bdubs mutters darkly. Cleo shoots him a look, and he raises both hands and scoots forward to disappear down into the horse pit again.
Cleo pinches the bridge of their nose. "Alright, let's go find out if someone else on this server has already been a bigger idiot than Grian."
(Part 1)
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part 3 to eddie’s tattoo saga, feat. girl-dads!steddie
part 1, part 2
The first time Eddie’s oldest daughter draws on his arm with her Crayola markers, Eddie immediately gets it tattooed onto him permanently.
She’s barely two so it’s mostly scribbles, but she’d never done it before, and she’d looked up at him with this big, proud, cheesing smile when she was done, and Ed had been caught so off guard with just how insanely much he loved her – that indescribable love parents felt for their children that, before becoming a parent, Eddie had thought he’d be able to beat the stereotypes and describe, but Moe proved him to be incorrect just about the second she came along – and he hadn’t known what else to do.
He doesn’t even really think about it, just takes a photo so his artist will get the colors right and has her put it in an empty spot on the sleeve he’s been working on for years.
With Eddie and Steve’s second daughter, Robbie, it goes mostly the same. She's just about two years old and draws a collection of swirling scribbles on the back of his hand. Steve advises him to not get it tattooed in the same spot, and Eddie can understand why it might not always be opportune to have permanent child-scribbles in such a visible spot, so, again, he has his artist use it to fill in a gap in the sleeve on his left arm.
When their littlest girl, Hazel, is born, Ed intentionally leaves a spot on his bicep open for whenever she feels so inclined to draw on him like her big sisters had. She takes her sweet time, so much so that Eddie starts to get nervous that she might never end up doing it at all, and he wasn’t going to ask her. It had to be a natural thing, obviously. In the end, she’s nearly five years old, sitting in his lap with a pack of markers while he reads a book to her (Charlotte’s Web, because it was the first chapter book he’d read aloud to both Moe and Robbie, and now it's Hazel’s turn), coloring inside the lines of the tattoos he already has when she gets to the empty space on his arm he’d left just for her. A little bit later, it’s filled with a marker drawing of a blue house next to a green tree, with a yellow sun above the chimney.
“It’s our house,” Hazel tells him.
Eddie calls to schedule the tattoo session the second he finishes the next chapter.
He gets the okay from his artist to bring Hazel with him to the appointment, which he hadn’t done with Moe and Robbie because they’d been too little. They hadn’t had the disposition for it either, but Hazel is their sweetest baby, all solemn and shy, and the session is right before her usual naptime, so once he’s in the chair, she just sits in his lap and quietly watches his artist work until she dozes off about halfway through the process.
Eddie spends much of that session lost in thought – he’s becoming introspective in his old age (forty-five and some change).
He’s thinking about all the tattoos he’s gotten, all the spontaneous ones he’s gotten for Steve and for their girls. He’s thinking about what that means.
In the family that Eddie and Steve have built, Steve is the one taking all those pictures and home videos and stuff. He’s the one who gets photos printed, framing their favorites and hanging them around the house and setting small ones on side tables, sticking others to the fridge with little magnets they’ve collected over the years, storing the rest in overstuffed shoe boxes he swears he’ll organize into photo albums someday (but their life is so hectic he probably won’t ever get around to it).
This is Eddie’s version of that.
This is his way of displaying to the world how much he loves his family, this thing that he’d spent years pretending he didn’t want because that was easier to sit with than the belief that it wasn’t even attainable for him, that now he gets to have.
It’s fucking incredible, is what it is, and it deserves to be documented.
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