Hot water.

Ohhh yeah.

Probably too hot. There's all this health stuff Stace keeps drumming out - I'm pretty sure this isn't good for my skin, in some horrible-image-of-polluted-body-parts way, but, hell, who cares. Hooooooot.

Half my muscles have cramped up, I think. Another point in favor of not taking Martha - if this is what I get after a full day in a reasonably-spacy van, I don't think any of us would've survived the same stretch of time inside my baby. Besides, she would never had been able to get through this storm. Martha gets temper tantrums on spring mornings.

Blah. I hate it when I can't manage to sulk properly.

Don't hate much of anything right now, though. All my muscles have turned to jello.

I realize, after a while, that I'm humming something under my breath, and can't even work up the appropriate horror at finding out it's the final notes of Digital Getdown. At least it's quiet enough that I can be pretty sure the guys haven't heard it. Izzy wouldn't even recognize it, probably, but Alex would, and Alex believes in sharing information, and then I would never get to live it down.

Jesus. I can look forward to finding more of those little monsters lying around when we get back, can't I?

If we get back.

If I still have my job, when I get back. I just got back from my sabbatical; they're not gonna like this. I have a hitlist track record long enough that they might decide to keep me anyway, what with the circumstances being what they are and all, but a lot of slack had already been cut in the past year. Ah, hell.

I'll find another job. Shouldn't be too hard. If we get back, when we get back. But I like this silly gig; less so in the last two years, maybe three, but I *know* somewhere in my brain that I like it. And I'm good at it - it's got nothing to do with understanding music. It's knowing what will sell, and who to listen to; I have taste in music as common as muck. That's a good thing. I just learned to turn it around so that I don't like songs because MTV pumps them into my ears every five minutes, but the other way around.

Or, well, it doesn't really work that way, but it's a nice explanation.

Maybe it's better this way. The whole thing used to be - fun. It's gotten boring; that's not why I got out in the first place, I got out because I started to get surprise attacks by pilosophical questions I haven't bothered with since I was eighteen. Like what does it say when we let a fifteen year old boy wriggle on a bed in a music video, and what the hell is girl power about anyway, and shouldn't we hire smarter people to do our marketing for us. And do I really need to be polite to some MTV jackass. All those things Izzy would probably have some clear answer for, although Iz, well, wouldn't go where I have in the first place.

Yeah, well, I'm not Izzy. And I don't have a moral crisis, either, or at least, not a new one. I'm just scared, and a little restless, and I always think too much when I'm in the shower. It's easier to think about why my job isn't fun anymore than about the fact I may not even get the chance to check if I still have a job. I'll think about it at some point, and soon, because avoiding it won't help anyone - and sometimes I wish so, so much I was a little more like Izzy, here - but not now. I'm too tired. I'll get bleak, and drama queeny, and we really can't afford that right now. I forget I don't believe in bad things happening, when I'm tired.

I resurface a bit to find out I've somehow gotten around to howling show tunes on the top of my voice, and feel a little sorry for Iz and Alex. Ah, hell. Let'em suffer.

I really need to think about this at some point.

When I was in high school, and didn't have any idea what I'd do when I grew up - not like I do now, but back then, I was pretty much convinced twenty-seven *was* grown up - I used to get those bouts of wanting to do something, to go somewhere else, to make my life *interesting*, so strong it practically hurt. I never knew what it was I wanted to do, and I always half-suspected I just wanted to suddenly find myself inside some story, where everything is a little more interesting for some reason. But I had to believe there was *something* that would alleviate the urge, so I settled on hating high school - not the way everyone tells you they hate high school, the Daria way of '*these* are the best years of our lives?' only with more passion - and of dreaming, once I was out of the real-life cage of having to be somewhere horribly boring every day, of going someplace else - London, Canada, hell, even India, although I don't think I could've dealt with not having toilet paper. I haven't done quarter the travelling Alex has, and I still live in my home country, although a little more to the East than I used to, but once I was done with school, I put college off for two years and did some touring. I think I'll always miss that. It didn't really put that living interestingly urge completely to rest, so I suppose it might not have been the answer, but it was - something else entirely. And every time I get hit by that urge again, every time I start wondering whether my cousin was right, all those years ago, when she told me that one day I'd look back and realize those *were* the best years of my life, and whether I'm going to look around one day and realize my life is complete shite, I ask myself why the hell I ever built another real-life trap around my life in the shape of a Serious Grown Up career and people I love, and why I didn't just keep travelling, and why I never got around to making my life interesting. But those are short bouts, because my job is - used to be - *fun*, and the fact I have people worth sticking around for is one hell of a lot more than worth sticking around for them, if that makes any sense. And I was never really too interested in having my life be something special. I don't want something special. There are just those bouts.

Which is all a really long and convulted way of wondering why it is that, now that someone - Xavier's? The government? - has come around and broke my real life, now that I'm living an adventure story with some of the people I love most and on my way to someplace I've never been to, all I feel is, now that I'm tired and sore enough to realize it, scared shitless. Me, who doesn't believe in bad things happening, not really.

Oh yeah. I did say we can't really afford another person in drama queen mode right now, did I? Because I know Izzy, if anything, well enough to suspect the slot isn't really open.

I only realize the water has run cold when Alex starts hammering on the door. I suppose that wakes me up enough to snap me out of it for the next thirty minutes or so. Or, well, maybe it's just that my two nearest and dearest are extremely convenient people to have around on times like this, in that they tend to make rackets loud and weird enough that it's incredibly easy to forget anything but whatever they have going on at the moment. Not that I can really talk.

I don't really tend to let myself use diversionary tactics on myself, usually. But getting wrapped up enough in real people that your weirder moods are forgotten isn't really a tactic, right? Right. It's just a little insulting to my sense of my dramatic life, which is good for me anyway.

Half an hour later, I'm propped against the headboard, with Izzy in one of those hugs it can be so tricky to get him into and Alex leaning against our legs, my hand in his hair. We're talking, for whatever fucked up reason, about Anya stories and the possibility of Latin research. I don't even like Anya all that much. The body contact seems important.

I wonder if they believe my about everything about to be alright. I wonder if they, by any chance, don't remember I'm the idiotically naive one who doesn't believe in Bad Things Happening. I'm still scared.