like the forms of the shadows which traverse dreams

Later, what will haunt her is that she can’t swear to the exact moment she last knew Ellie was there. They had gone to bed together; she knows that. She’s even certain — pretty well — no, definitely so — that at some point she’d half-woken and curled closer.

She has dreams she wakes from, though, into other dreams. Vivid ones, ones that loop over and over, waking and speaking to usual people until something goes wrong, dreams that leave her uncertain for sometimes hours later that she’s ever finally awoken. So had El really explained, in the purple of predawn, that she was getting up but that Eponine should sleep? Had Eponine said I love you back, aloud, or was that just an nice thought? Was all of it?

Hey, it’s okay. I’m just going to go take care of some stuff. I love you, go back to sleep.

It’s so eerily apt , that later it will turn over and over in her mind long after she’s decided it’s okay to hold onto it.

Right now, though, none of that occurs to her. She isn’t thinking about when she last saw Ellie or what she said. She’s simply letting the silence of the house settle over her.

She knows before she knows. ( Cut for length; cw for depersonalization / mild dissociation and not-quite being sick related to grief/stress )

Eponine comes back to herself with a start almost as she’s knocking on Bev’s window. This is her own old building and her best friend; she knows the fire escapes well enough for it to be almost as rote as the walk here, so the lack of keen memory of it isn’t important enough to worry about right now.

Still — it might be the best place she could have gotten herself, and she finds herself suddenly overwhelmed with the fervent hope that Bev’s home and awake.

[dated to...whenever the fuck. very brief allusion to the Torgt disaster, so sometime after the first week of October, and Ellie and Eponine should probably talk about the uh, fact that Eddie, Jamie, Stan, El, Eponine and...Fraser? got attacked by literal retail zombies and Jamie lost a hand, but...right now? GOAT]

"So I know this wasn't quite what you were probably imagining," Eponine begins, when the guy giving away an unholy number of wood pallets has driven off, leaving them with a stack nearly Eponine's height. For free. She'd asked him to pick up an online order from the nearest hardware store and paid for the trouble, and he seemed happy as a clam.

Though, because somehow they can't avoid it, he'd paused before leaving and offered a "you, uh. You gonna be all right with all this, just you ladies on your own out here?"

Eponine distinctly dislikes being called a lady regardless of her gender, especially when it's used in such a way that suggests she might be weaker for it. She'd raised a deeply judgmental eyebrow at him, looked at Ellie, looked at the bag of drill bits, new circle saw blade and screws and bolts he'd picked up along with a couple of two by eights and a two by four, and looked back up and said, "I'm sure we'll be fine".

Hopefully they would, in fact, be fine.

"I looked up how to build a shed," she says, tone already apologetic, "and from the beginning it was all building permits, and poured concrete foundations, and -- " She waves her hands. "And then I looked at buying a shed, and -- well, first of all, half of them were at Torgt." She doesn't need to go on, she thinks. "And they were all hundreds and hundreds of dollars, and even the cheaper ones were all metal, like I think that might be too warm, I don't want goat flambe."

Bartholomew, who's been cavorting, bleats indignantly at this.

"Right?" She holds out a hand. The kid, who has become distinctly less kiddish, though not incredibly large altogether, in the last few months, comes over happily to get the nubs of her horns scritched. Without any other goats, she's very attached to her two moms. "So then I saw this list of how to construct sheds from..." She waves a hand. Construction is not her strong suit. "These things. Pallets. And one of them even looks like a lot of fun, they have a bunch of goats and they only used three pallets."

Eponine shows her phone to Ellie, with the final picture. "So, it's not ...super pretty, but. It's fun!" She glances at the supplies, some of which really are just extra. "It'll give her a place to duck in against snow, you know? And I think we can actually do all the -- screwing we have to." A millisecond later she makes a little what face as she realizes how that sounds. Never one to just let it go, she forges onward, smile curling mischievously, "You know, just us two ladies."

---

[Another pallet construction example here, but I like the ramp on the first one. Apparently, as long as you put a pallet and hay down on the floor when it's snowy, and they can go in and out, they're fine. Though they do like company, so maybe a buddy for Bartholomew one of these days. Or like, a big dog who'll tolerate a goat.]