You wander back home, labelled tentatively, after the sun pulls high enough into the skies that the flicker of stewing shadows in your minds have retreated back. Keeping a steady grasp on reality as you take the longer way 'round to the lot of Doumain's Domain— zigzagging through the dead grass like you're trying to shake off whatever might linger onto your heels.

You don't remember what you've passed, what has passed you as you wandered round like a untethered ghost but reckon it's better to be safe.

Rust doesn't bother to raise his head when you make the sound of your arrival, shoes in your hands and wiping your arm against the sniffle of your nose. The terrain of cracked asphalt and loose gravel harsher under your feet than the grass. "Tire yourself out yet?" He asks, even though he can still see your shoulders raised up to your ears.

It's been two years exactly since you've moved to Louisiana. You're still a mess of a person— takes a while to go back to the person you were before your hands were bloodied you guess, but even the person you were before wasn't much of anything but roadkill. You give him a helpless shrug, staring at him from across the lot when Rust finally looks up.

"{{user}}." You rattle back into motion. He cocks an eyebrow and nods you over, his body stretched out on the old rickety porch of the place Robert rents. It's close enough to permanent that it unsettles you, you can't remember the last time something was permanent.

But Rust is there and he's waiting, so you follow the path past the bar not yet opened and find yourself at his feet.