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rowan damisch

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Try as he might, Bobby cannot remember the last time he felt this fucking tired. In a way, it doesn't seem fair. Apparently, people were having hallucinations for weeks leading up to that movie screening, and seeing awful, personal things. That chaos in the theater the night it played, there wasn't anything that pertained to him specifically; he didn't even get there until everything had already started. Still, the things he saw then have stayed with him since. Not just that unnatural version of Laura, though that, more than anything, has been hard to stop reliving when he closes his eyes, disturbing in how much sense it makes. (He always knew she was afraid of something. He supposes that, now, he knows what that was.) But while Twin Peaks was never as quaint and pleasant as it seemed on the surface, the beings in that theater, the violence and the screaming, was worse than anything he's seen before or could have anticipated.

Things seem to have settled down now, everything having gone back to normal, or whatever amounts to it here, but he doubts he's the only person who's haunted by it in some regard. In order to try to keep his mind off it, he's stopped at a diner on his way back to his apartment after work, not really ready to be alone there just yet. Besides, while this place isn't the Double R by any stretch of the imagination — no pie will ever be as good as Norma's, as far as he's concerned, and then, of course, there's no Shelly here — it has a similar sort of feeling, pleasantly familiar, maybe the closest thing he's got here to home.

Coffee is coffee, anyway. Sitting at the counter, he smiles at the waitress who fills his cup, idly skimming the menu as he says quietly to himself, "Jesus. What a week."

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Rowan likes coffee just fine, enjoys the taste even, but he doesn't get quite the same caffeine high off of it that other people do, doesn't feel "addicted" to it. But he stays up a lot of nights and, at the end of his pseudo-patrols, he needs something to do before heading off to work. And it seems the thing to do in those instances is sit in a diner and drink coffee.

Not that it's so late today, but he hasn't gotten to his late shift at work yet and sometimes he likes to treat himself to a proper breakfast. So he gives the older man next to him a raised brow of interest and decides, what the hell?

"You get caught up in that movie business?" It's a bit of an intrusive question, he guesses, but around Darrow, where these weird things happen, it also qualifies as small talk.

Bobby can't say he's expecting the question, but he also can't say he minds it, either. Back home, there was a lot of not talking about shit, but everyone seemed to know everyone else's business, too. In Darrow, there's not always any getting away from it. Weird things happen, and they do so to any number of people. Assumptions like that seem like safe ones to make, under the circumstances. Besides, rattled as he might be, at least he wasn't one of the people who'd been having hallucinations for weeks, or wound up sitting in that theater in the first place.

"Sort of," he says with a nod, turning slightly to look at the young man who's spoken. "Got called in after it started, and... then found someone I knew there."

"Called in?" Rowan echoes with mild curiosity, his brows drawing together. He knows he's seen this man's face, once or twice, and then it hits him. He could have just assumed, but now that the connection's been made, he knows for certain.

"Right, you're a cop." There's no judgment in it, like he might carry a grudge against cops as an Unsavory back home might. But at the same time, he doesn't sound happy to see him. It's simply a fact. Cops are no better or worse than regular people.

"I didn't know it was happening until practically after the fact. But I heard... I heard things."

"Whatever you heard, it was... probably true, or at least close to it," Bobby says, nodding in response to the comment about him being a cop. If it should be strange, hearing that from a stranger, it's easily counterbalanced by having spent most of his life in a small town, where just about everyone knew each other anyway, at least by sight. His own assumption is one that he wouldn't normally make but that seems safe enough now. He can barely begin to make sense of what he saw that night. Of course he'd fixated first on Laura, and the other Laura, but she wasn't the only one who'd been experiencing some sort of personal horror. He's used to things being weird and kind of fucked up, but nothing like that night.

"I'd heard a few things. People who'd been seeing things before it, stuff like that. But this was... something else entirely. Nothing like I ever want to see again."

"There seems to be a lot of that around here," Rowan says with a barely there frown. His attention comes back to his own cup of coffee, which he cradles between his hands.

He wants to help, to do good, but there's only so much that he can do without escalating things to dangerous, deadly territory. It's in his nature to kill. Or so Rowan believes. He's been twisted up by his teachers to become something other. Maybe it's a good thing that he wasn't there, but at the same time... He could have helped.

"I wish I had been there. Just to help," he says. "But at the same time I'm glad. I had a friend who was having visions and... I don't know, it sounds horrible."

"It was definitely that," Bobby replies, letting out a long, slow exhale. He barely knows the half of it, and doesn't really expect to get much in the way of details, even asking about it in an official capacity, but he has no doubt that horrible sums it up pretty well. "A girl I knew from home was there. Everyone kind of... knew she had problems, but this was something else."

Laura was hardly the only one, and he doubts other people's manifestations, for lack of a better word, were any less harrowing, but hers is the one that's stuck with him the most. All that time he knew her, she seemed so haunted by something, no matter how well she hid it much of the time. Even once he found out more about her death, he wouldn't have expected that.

Shaking his head, he says, "Shit, sorry, some introduction. Bobby Briggs."

Rowan gives it another second to consider the situation, the fact that they were even put through this in the first place by whatever controlled the city. Sometimes, it seems as sadistic and cruel as Goddard, completely without mercy. And other times, it feels like such a gift. It's hard to figure out where Rowan's feelings sit.

But then the introduction comes and it's like Rowan wakes up. He gives the man a wry grin and decides to off out his hand, because he seems a bit old school even if he isn't the first to make the gesture.

"Rowan Damisch. Nice to meet you."

"You, too," Bobby says, reaching out to shake Rowan's offered hand. "So you from somewhere else, too?" It sounds like that might be the case, the way he'd said around here, but it's still not an assumption he wants to outright make. As far as strange things about Darrow go, it's fairly low on the list, but there's still something noteworthily odd about having a whole different set of questions to run through upon meeting someone — if they're from here, when and where they're from if they aren't, how long they've been in Darrow. It's kind of necessary context, but he doesn't think there's any getting used to a place like this fully.

"Yeah. Ah, Earth, still. If that's where you're from." He assumes as much, anyway. Bobby looks like a normal human, for all intents and purposes, and he seems rightfully startled and unnerved by what happened in the theater that night. So he's clearly not used to the strange and unnatural, other than Darrow's strange and unnatural.

"But probably your future. I seem to be from everybody's future."

"From Earth, yes," Bobby says, his eyes widening a little in surprise, though his tone stays good-natured. He's seen a lot of weird shit since he got here, from everything that happened in the theater to meeting a girl who was actually dead, and heard plenty of other stories, too. People coming from places other than Earth is a difficult concept to wrap his head around, but nothing he would outright question by now. If nothing else, he thinks his own sanity might require that. "2014, for whatever that's worth."

"Yeah, I've heard of that time," Rowan replies, though it's with a faint wince, as if he's sorry. Sorry that he's from the future and things are so different from him. Sorry that Bobby's got to live in that time that's seemingly so miserable compared to the life that Rowan's lived.

"We stopped counting the years after, uh... we learned how not to die."

"Shit," Bobby blurts out, the word a short, dry laugh. "Sorry. Uh, that's a new one." Again, he thinks that it should be impossible. Once, he would have unquestionably assumed as much. Whether it's the nature of Darrow or the fact that he's started getting used to some pretty weird shit, though, he doesn't think it's untrue. There's no reason someone would make something like that up, anyway.

"How do you... learn not to die?"

Rowan winces in a friendly, understanding sort of way. Over time, the normalness of being immortal has faded away. He's well aware how it sounds when he blurts out something like that, but how else can he talk about it than to blurt? It's not the kind of thing that gets easier with some gentle build up.

"Ah, science? It's tough to explain fully, I mean the history of it, but basically these nanites were developed that live inside our bodies, healing any and all damage that comes our way. They make it impossible for us to die."

Bobby shakes his head a little, but it's only due to the strangeness of it, not any actual sense of disbelief. Again, he thinks it's too downright weird to be something made up. Rowan sounds like he means it, and besides, haven't there been all sorts of weird advances along those lines? They aren't there yet in his world, not remotely, but it wouldn't surprise him if someone were working on a similar concept.

"And that's... everyone?" he asks. "Has them, I mean. The... nanites."

"Everyone," Rowan confirms with a nod. He thinks he understands where Bobby's coming from with the question. Or he makes the assumption at least, given how he figures the older man's come from a world like the Age of Mortality, where nothing's fair.

"It helped... well, a lot of things changed with immortality. But we've eliminated poverty, war, all that kind of stuff. All of humanity benefits from what we've learned. No one's left out."

"I can't even imagine," Bobby says. Even conceptually, the world he knows was a long way off from eradicating things like that. To him, it sounds like the plot of some science fiction movie, maybe, the sort where equality is achieved but at some great cost that doesn't turn out to be worth paying. Maybe in Rowan's world, or that future or whatever, it actually works rather than needing a moral to the story.

"Those were still... very big problems for us."

Rowan nods in quiet understanding, his mouth a thin line. It's a grim look, but it's a kind of respect for a grim time. The Age of Mortality was terrible in so many ways. But Rowan had learned to admire the spirit of humanity in that time, the willingness to continue despite the odds.

That spirit which seems drained from humanity in the Age of Immortality.

"I don't know if I'm from your future or not, but... I figure it helps to know that these things are possible? It's not all hopeless."

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