Denny flips on the light in her room, glad that she remembered to tidy up a little before work on the day she went down into the tunnel. She may enjoy getting things out of the trash and getting her hands dirty, but that doesn't mean her room has to be a pigsty. No, that would be insane.

Jessie tries to slide in, but completely fails at that. Well, of course she does. The floor is carpeted and, anyway, it's more of a reprise of an old joke that Denny had forgotten until this point. She can't help but laugh when it comes up again-- and when Jessie loses her balance in all her haste and has to brace herself on the doorframe.

"Jessie, it's... it's carpeted," she whispers, fulfilling her part of the bit.

"Yeah, yeah." Jessie flaps her hand and heads into the room. She doesn't need to take it all in. She has been here so many times that even Denny knows it's not necessary. The only thing that has really changed recently is Denny's bed since (as Denny loves to remind people) her mother sold her bedframe when she figured that Denny wasn't going to be coming home-- or, at the very least, wouldn't be living here when she inevitably moved back to Lake Wonder. Well, neither of them planned for the reality of the situation and how Denny eventually had to buy herself a new bed and stop sleeping on a stack of soup cans topped with a yoga mat. Now the soup goes under the bed, and in the linen closet.

Jessie helped her set it up when she finally got a new one and topped it with an old mattress her uncle Elmer didn't need anymore and dropped off on his way to deliver another shipment of something or other to the Max-Mart on the other side of town. Jessie knows all this because Jessie was there. Jessie is always there.

And Denny is glad for it.

Denny sits on the edge of her bed, then flops back on it until her head nearly touches the wall. She's tired. She wants to sleep. But she is also-- unsurprisingly-- trying to avoid recognizing the pain that is making her feel so exhausted.

It shouldn't hurt so much. She's been through worse. She put herself back together on her way back from Tennessee. Hell, she's been through worse with Jessie-- that time she tore open her arm on some rocks when she jumped from a tree into a river, which hurt like a bitch-- and heaven knows Jessie has been hurt enough times to know pain. Splitting her lip on a broken reed, getting hit in the face with a color guard rifle, breaking her ankle in the woods that one time. Small injuries, big ones: Jessie should be familiar. Hell, that was why they started to be friends in the first place, instead of continuing their weird elementary school enemy-hood. That was when Jessie broke her ankle in the woods because she tripped on an improperly-covered bathroom hole and Denny had to carry her back to where the rest of the camp was.

They are both familiar with injury. It's just that Denny may or may not be a little more injured than usual right now.

That might be her own fault. She wasn't really ready to fight that giant shadow grudge-creature, and it showed in the way she went down so quickly. At least nobody was dead. She almost was, though. The way Jessie put it, there was blood everywhere when she woke up in that sunken place and saw Denny. Denny doesn't want to think about what Jessie almost saw (fur, teeth, claws, a monster where Good Old Denny should have been) any more than she wants to think about what Jessie really did see (all the blood and the sludge and the horror of what happened after Denny's head hit the wall and she couldn't do anything).

But, well, she's alive, isn't she?

Denny didn't think she would be. She never thinks she will. Anything could happen. She knows that better than anyone.

Denny sighs, runs her hands through her hair, and smiles. That's right. She is alive. That's a good thing.

One day, she might not be, though, so she makes a mental note to start writing letters later, writing down all the things she has found that she can not say to anyone.

What would she say to Jessie, she wonders? Doesn't Jessie already know everything there is to know about her? Wait, no-- shit, she doesn't. Right. Jessie knows everything except for a few key things. It has to be that way for now. But she'll put that in the letter, maybe.

Jessie almost-carelessly sits on the bed next to her, making the whole thing bounce. Denny winces when she gets jostled, though she tries not to.

"Oh, shit. Sorry."

"Don't apologize. It doesn't hurt that much."

"Don't bullshit me, Denny. I know how hurt you were. I was there, remember?"

"Yeah, yeah-- I remember. You were babysitting Chase and you got abducted by the shadow cyclops thing, and I went crazy trying to save you and everyone else, like Lucky's friend Robin and that kid Anya from the trailer park. I remember."

Denny remembers other things. The terror. How she wanted to rip open the doors of the school gym where she and Lucky were when they found out Jessie had been taken. The way the walls dripped with goo, slick and black, and the way they fell down the hole. She remembers the feeling of the grudge-creature in her mouth. She remembers, almost too clearly, almost too often, the taste of her own blood between her teeth.

But it's fine.

She remembers, almost too late, that Robin wiped the memories of everyone who wasn't directly involved so that they wouldn't remember. Right. Because that's definitely the moral and correct thing to do: to make someone forget something when you don't know whether or not the remembering will be worse than the loss of memory itself. Denny, thinking of her own issues with time, wants to break something.

She doesn't. She just lays there, looking at the ceiling, breaths simultaneously shallow and deep. It doesn't hurt so much to be angry. Like all things, it will fade eventually.

Jessie squints at her, almost curious, almost doubtful, like she doesn't know how to address Denny right now. "You keep talking about those--"

"About the shadow things?"

"Yeah. You were talking about it at the bar, and on the field while you were setting up, and at the hospital, and now..."

"Yeah. Because they're real. And they reek. Or-- they were real. They're not real anymore. But they still suck."

"That gas leak really did a number on you." It's not a question. (Denny can tell when something is rhetorical.) "Why were you even down there in the first place?"

"I don't know. You would have to ask Lucky."

"Right. And you're friends with them because..."

Denny stammers, "I don't know? Shadow monsters?"

"The LARPing thing? I still can't believe you didn't tell me you were into LARPing."

"I didn't expect to be." Denny doesn't admit that she still has no clue what LARPing is or how it works, just that it's something Jessie suggested was the truth and Lucky went along with because...

Because Lucky is better at determining what does and doesn't need to be a secret, even when Denny feels it would be better to tell someone the truth to help them. That's fine. Denny has her own secrets, right? And it might be easier to let someone else figure out the rest. Lucky's good at that.

Jessie shakes her head, smiling. "You're so different than you used to be. When did you change so much?"

Denny shrugs as much as she can while lying on her back and trying not to move the shoulder she hurt. "I don't know. People change, don't they? People go through things. Even if they don't want to, everyone's got to change at least a little bit, right?"

Even if she never wanted to. Even if she wanted to stay the same forever. Even if she was perfectly fine with things staying the same, with coming home eventually, with living and dying in Lake Wonder. Denny would have been content with that. She wasn't always so weird about helping and protecting people. She didn't used to be so weird about protecting Jessie. But she is now, and she's just going to have to deal with that. People change, right? And there's nothing wrong with that.

"Do you want to watch a movie?" Jessie asks, looking at the stack of DVDs across the room, next to the small box TV on Denny's dresser. It's an old one, taken from her grandmother's house after she died and basically everything she owned came to rest somewhere in this place. Uncle Elmer couldn't take any of it with him, and it wasn't like Uncle Cliff was around to take anything.

"Oh, yeah, thank god. I thought you were never going to ask."

Jessie hops up from the bed. "What-- Legally Blonde again? Or do you want to watch something else?"

"You choose." They both know that Denny is probably going to fall asleep halfway through it. She's tired. They both know that.

But, still, they sit together on Denny's bed. Once again (or maybe for once), it's like things are normal. It's like nothing has ever changed at all.