I won't be on my own, I'll be here

[lordharry]

Place one down and pick it up. Build an endless wall of fragile representations of his wavering self-control and before a stiff wind can knock them down, take them up piece by piece, like every day. Since the door, since Pearl and Leo left him, Hal has tightly corseted himself to prevent himself from feeling anything.

One stiff wind and the dominoes fall. One good, hard emotion and Hal worries what he might do. The days are endless, now. His rota is clung to with ever the more strength, with Barry's unfamiliar surroundings echoing around him. Tom is not Leo, not even slightly and Annie might be easier to get along with than Pearl, but he finds he misses her eccentricities. It had almost made him feel normal.

Please.

He had begged Leo not to go. Five hundred years old and he had sat there begging a werewolf not to die. The Hal of the past would have laughed until he was blue in the face, but at this precise moment, Hal feels that plea like a broken dagger shattering the heart he has not borne in too long. Hal presses a domino in his pocket as he stands, staring accusingly at the door before him. It was one thing to lose Leo as they had known they would, but for Pearl to go, too? For them both to leave him?

No. No, the anger could not be called upon. Hal tempers his emotions with a slow breath, ignoring the memories of what the bedroom door before him had been only days ago and stepped through it to continue his daily rota, mentally preparing himself for what comes next. He tries to banish Pearl's voice in his mind, talking about the doors being theirs as they walked away from him.

It's a momentary lapse in the awareness of his surroundings that Hal pays for the instant he steps through the door into bright sun, having stepped out onto a lawn of sorts.

As old as he is, the sun hardly bothers him at all, but there's a serenity in front of him and a peace to the landscape before him that makes Hal falter and wonder, wonder if maybe this had been meant for him, too. Perhaps Tom has come to a decision and brought Hal to his end. One sharp inhalation proves that to be untrue, however, because his desires and his hunger are still there, as present as ever. He hisses, fangs coming out before he quickly remembers that he shouldn't be even remotely reminding himself that he can, and he knows that he hasn't been saved.

No. This is only more torture. Cautiously, Hal raises his guard once more and begins to look at the paradise before him as the mirage it likely is. "Show yourself," he calls, wary of the men with sticks and the other horrifying monsters that haunt hallways and past doorways. "I won't be cowed."

In the last week before the world changed

[captain_rogers]

How many hours he had spent exploring the halls and grounds of the Nexus Hotel, Steve was pretty certain he'd lost track. It surprised him to find that he was not climbing the proverbial (or literal) walls with so much time without a mission, although that might have been largely in part to do with Bucky's presence and what he recognized as a half-masochistic desire to take all the time he could with the other man without spilling the beans. Since their days in the orphanage and their meeting in one of the many Brooklyn back alleys he'd been getting beat up in, all until the war, there hadn't been a day he hadn't been sure what Bucky was up to or where Bucky was.

The war had changed that in ways Steve had never anticipated. What had come after had only driven him further apart from those nostalgia-colored memories of a childhood that was, in retrospect, far from grand.

Despite his promise to his friend that he could hitch a ride back with him, if only he could find his door, Steve had avoided much of investigating the many doors of the hotel as he worked out whether or not such a thing were even possible. That he actually wished for a moment that Stark was there to babble at him in his science-speak about dimensions or temporal paradox or whatever else might have been on the menu was a fact he thought he'd best keep to himself. Best forget entirely before he had to think on that for too long.

Instead he had toured the art gallery more than a dozen times, poked around the library, devoted early mornings and late nights when he was unable to sleep in the basement gym. In between times he unnerved the staff at the bistro with the amount of food he could pack away in a sitting, and how many times a day he could come back for a refill and still have that vaguely hungry feeling gnawing at his belly. Just then, with something unsettling and all too vague itching at the back of his neck and weighing at his shoulders, he buried himself in the cheap sketchbook and pencil he'd picked up in the hotel shop, sitting with his back against the wall of the lobby as he idly sketched bits and pieces of the people who passed through on their way to one place or another.