A/N: Happy Fourth of July! In celebration, I offer you this chapter.
/
"So, I don't know. I'm still kind of frazzled about… a lot of things," Eleanor says, avoiding eye contact with Tahani. Five hundred years and she still doesn't love vulnerability.
"I heard about your mother. It must have been difficult to see her with a, well, a new daughter."
Eleanor looks up in surprised. Everyone else had been thrilled to see her mother being better, hadn't considered that it could have felt bad for Eleanor. "It was. How did you…"
"Please. You effectively have a younger sister now. And I am rather the expert in how it feels to watch a sibling receive… preferential treatment."
"Woah. Stop right there. That kid is not my sister. She's not my mom's, and my mother did not marry that dweeb from Nevada. At least, I don't think. But still, it was weird to see my mom doting on her and calling her sweetheart and… Yuck." Eleanor shakes her head, turns back to her drink.
"At least your mum was doing it years later. In a different life, almost. And not in the same breath as, say, she was calling you stodgy and vapid and an embarrassment to the family."
Eleanor sympathizes, but she realizes for the thousandth time in the past five hundred years how perfectly suited she and Tahani are to torture each other. The one thing Eleanor is sure she corners the market on is shitty childhoods, and here's Tahani, trying to outdo her even in that.
A couple of memories unfold in her head at once: this scene is not new. In a few of the afterlife reboots, she and Tahani had developed a friendly rivalry over who had had the worst childhood. They had, in some of the reboots, made a game out of snapping up any opportunity to one-up the other.
Oh, Tahani's parents were always out? At least they had jobs, Eleanor would quip. In return, when Eleanor talked about being too poor to leave sunbaked Arizona, Tahani would pull a bait-and-switch: Boast about how her parents once took her to a private island in the Maldives… and then left her there.
"You know," Eleanor says slowly, "this isn't the first time we've had this conversation."
Tahani gives her a sideways look.
"So… Michael kind of restored my memories from the original timeline. Just, all of it."
Tahani, wide-eyed, asks, "What? What are you talking about? Tell me everything. What were we all like? How did he torture us? Why didn't he restore my memories?"
"It's… complicated. Don't worry about it. I don't know. We kind of have an ongoing game where we compete over who had the worst parents."
"That's inane," Tahani says dismissively. Then, "Because I would win every time."
It is so on.
"Yeah, right. You never even had to worry about your family's electricity bills or the mortgage or, oh yeah, having enough to eat. There is no way YOUR mom ever sent you to the third grade with no lunch and no money and said, 'Oh, you're smart and resourceful, you'll figure it out."
"We get it, Eleanor, your parents complimented you and thought you were smart," Tahani says with an exaggerated groan before smiling playfully.
Eleanor has to smile, too. "For the record, I did figure it out. That little bitch Susan Carter never saw it coming. That's what you get for flaunting your Zebra Cakes one too many times."
It's not long before Eleanor is sharing other stories from the reboots: the first time they'd really bonded, the time she'd had to be a farmer, the haunted train, the factory explosion, the time she and Jason had convinced Tahani and Chidi to try edibles, and the subsequent Taco Bell Incident of Reboot 413…
Recapping all the memories reminds her of how badly she needs to talk to Chidi. If he were here, it would be the perfect opportunity to talk, figure things out. Plus, like some kind of sap, she just wants him around.
She gives him a call, but it goes straight to voicemail. He's probably asleep, but that doesn't stop her from trying him a couple more times, playing it cool every time.
/
Hours later, and the warm and fuzzy feeling she had has definitely faded. It's possible that circling back to the game of Whose Parents Were Worse was a mistake. What's certain is that adapting it into a drinking game was a huge mistake.
They are not fun-drunk anymore. Eleanor's head is swarming with ultravivid memories of her shitty, sunbaked living room. Maybe it's just the alcohol, but she swears she can feel poison—the poison she inherited from her parents—trying to burn its way out from under her skin.
Eleanor used to like to lie to herself and say she was exclusively a Fun Drunk. Tahani, hilariously, has claimed in the past that she is a Classy Drunk. Neither one of them wants to be the type to sob sloppily in the women's bathroom after hurling, but Eleanor feels herself drifting dangerously close to that territory. She can tell Tahani is, too. Their conversation is spiraling, Tahani's lips keep quivering, and her eyes look all faraway and glassy, on the verge of tears.
She's about to say that they should get going; the ship of making smart decisions has decidedly sailed, but she doesn't want things to get worse. She opens her mouth, and then her phone rings. She's so tanked that she thinks for a second that the sound is coming from her. She sands there for a second, slowly pointing at her mouth in awe as the vibration continues, and then slowly remembers that phones exist.
When she sees Chidi's name on her screen, she can't help but smile. Maybe the fun isn't entirely gone from the night.
"Chidi!? Is that you for-real, finally?"
There's a back-and-forth where the goody-two-shoes tries to convince Eleanor to come in and get some sleep, but of course it's Eleanor, the ultimate bad influence, who wins out in the end.
"Tahani, we are picking ourselves back up," Eleanor announces to Tahani, who is so slumped over the bar that she looks like she needs to actually physically pick herself back up.
"I don't wanna," Tahani says in a very un-Tahanilike way.
"Come on, come on, come on, come on, Chidi's coming down! The night lives! We gotta liven up."
Tahani raised an eyebrow. "Oh?" Eleanor's gut twists. There is no way Tahani is onto her, she tells herself. She is way too drunk to have caught on… But then, Eleanor is drunk, too. She tries to replay her last few sentences in her head, wonders if she accidentally said Chidi's name like a puppy-lovestruck schoolgirl.
"Yeah, come on," Eleanor orders them each one more drink, as if that will help, and tries to think about what will perk them up.
Her eyes fall on the dartboard and an idea takes shape. Standing up, moving around, that could get them perked up again. Plus, Tahani likes winning.
Eleanor thinks she's just going to let Tahani. There's no way the princess can beat Eleanor, a certified bar rat, at a bar game. Eleanor has too much experience. But, as it turns out, when you're obliterated, it's very easy to lose at darts.
"Whoops," Eleanor says as her dart narrowly misses the bartender's face. How she managed that, she's not sure. The bar is behind her.
A flash of bowling with her friends in Australia, Chidi accidentally dropping the ball on his backswing and Jason doing a spin jump like a Mii in Wii Sports. She takes the memory as a sign that the game is working: she's moving past the depressing memories of her childhood.
That's all in the moment before the bartender shouts at them to get out.
I am a good person now, Eleanor thinks unsteadily. I am growing. I will not pick a fight with this bartender. I will not throw up right in his stupid face. I will not break a glass or throw a drink or cause a scene. I will take responsibility for my actions and respect this man's wishes.
What she says is, "I'm 'onna leave 'cuz we're like friggin' saints now, dude." She grabs Tahani's arm, as she's not sure Tahani has been paying attention. "Come on, sexy, there's other bars."
"There's other bars," Tahani repeats as they leave.
As they cross the threshold to the night outside, the bouncer watching to make sure they're really gone, Eleanor stops for a moment.
"Wait," she says slowly, "I feel like maybe we're forgetting something important."
"Was it… Food?" Tahani asks slowly and thoughtfully.
She and Tahani exchange a look as they try to remember, and then the feeling passes.
"It was probably food," Eleanor says, nodding. "Let's go to Denny's."