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Light azure eyes met the old violet gaze, and as John sighed it felt like someone had released a pressure valve in the room. "...I'm dying, Munin. Slowly. I damaged my brain and its tried to heal itself, but the scarring is starting to cause damage itself. I've got about a year until I'm a drooling vegetable."

He tightened his jaw and looked down at his boots. He sighed again, a powerful sigh, as if he wished to just blow all his troubles away. "...I didn't want to tell you...futile, i know...you would've found out eventually. But..." He glanced up at her meekly, almost as if ashamed. "I...I wanted to try and be a normal family....without having it hang over our heads....I wanted to try and be normal."

He had to look away. Even with those ancient eyes, she still looked like a teenaged girl who loved her mother and brother. And here was her mother's latest boyfriend....now telling her he didn't have much time left.

John nodded a little, crossing his arms over his broad chest as he stared at the cherry strudels, watching the steam swirl off them next to the glass of juice, the beads of condensation on the outside of the glass.

"...Maybe you're not trying hard enough."

It was said a little more firmer then he meant to, and he looked up to her aplogetically. "...What I mean is...there is not real...uh...boundary for normal. There's no...set scale for it. Maybe...normal is an individual thing. And every time someone or something comes into the picture, normal changes into something else....and we need to figure out what the new normal is."

He sounded like he was grasping at straws, but he was beginning to get another headache now. He reached up to place his hand upon his temple, frowning slightly at the pain. "...Do we have any aspirin in the house?"

John Tomorrow asking for painkillers....now he was getting desperate.

John slipped into the stool she had just occupied and pinched the bridge of his nose. It wasn't so much the pain, the strangeness of it behind his eyes and appearing out of nowhere - there was the feeling of uselessness that came with it. The man was used to solving his own problems. The despair of having to be helped by others, that was hard for him...

...But he welcomed it. It was nice, people worrying about him...he'd been wandering around moping to himself that nobody would care whether he lived or died. He had to get past that. Here were friends, family, who wanted him around...it was time to stop being a jerk and just think about them, instead of himself.

When she came back he smiled thankfully to her, holding his hand out for the bottle. When she placed it in his hand, he would hold it up, squinting a little as he read the label. "...If I have to go to Akea, then Akea it is...can't remember whether I've been there, though...honey, what do I do with these?" He asked, looking back to Samantha with a worried glance. He never really took medicine, as it was...and all the things the doctors gave him were usually through the IV lines... He'd only asked for aspirin because he'd seen people on TV ask for it when they had a headache...

"Thank you, I think I will need the help...my sense of direction isn't as good as it usually is these days..." He said to her as he watched her open the lid and tip three little pills into his hand, smiling softly at the sight of her little fingers wrapping around his big stubby ones and having to forcing his hand open and up so the palm was open for her to tip the things into it...

He lifted his hand to poke the pills around in his palm with his steel hand, frowning down at them. "...How do they work?" He asked as she mentioned the side effects - if they did make him hyper, he was worried that it would cause his powers to spark out like caffeine did...

Before slapping them into his mouth, swallowing all three with little effort before looking down to the juice in Sam's hand. "...That's yours, sweetheart..."

The giant Aesir smiled warmly as Sam got all firm and stern with him. He took the juice with his steel hand and reached out with his right to tousle her hair a little before tweaking her nose as he lowered his hand, chuckling as he did - he liked treating her like a daug...like a child.

"I like it when you get all commanding like that - you remind me of your mother." He said with a grin, before drinking the juice down in two gulps, placing the glass down before smiling down to her.

"And dont worry too much about that - there's a lot of stuff i don't know!" He said with a firm nod, before pushing himself to his feet. His headache was still there, but it was a manageable one, and hopefully these 'aspirin' would help ease the pain later. "We'll go once you've finished your breakfast, honey. I'll just go wash my face..."

With that, he walked up the stairs to the bedroom.

Standing in the bathroom, looking at himself in the mirror, John wondered if the doctors had gotten their times wrong. He'd just had a headache moments before - now it had flared into a full blown migraine, and he'd spent the last few minutes dry retching at the sink, gripping its edges as his stomach tried to puke up the burger and fries he'd had for breakfast but his throat clenched tighter then a ducks butt.

"Gods dammit..." John murmured as he finally overcame the nausea and flipped the cold faucet on with a trembling hand, cupping his hands under the running water and drinking the coolness down before splashing his face with it, trying to get the redness in his face to go down. He sighed angrily at the redness of his eyes - he'd almost blown a vessel in his left one, and the veins in his neck were more prominent now, pulsing angrily at him...

After a few minutes more of splashing his face and willing himself to calm down, he decided he looked halfway respectable, and turned away from the bathroom. He grabbed his leather coat from the closet and took out his dark shades, slipping them on as he walked down to the kitchen area, spying Sam in the dining room and smirking at her, trying hard to seem like everything was fine. "So, how do you usually get to these places? You obviously don't drive - please don't tell me you teleport like Hono'o..."

John winced as she mentioned she was a portal user - his experience with portals were lacking, but the last time he used one he was deposited 500 stories above a busy marketplace. Luckily nobody got injured when he plummeted into the ground hard enough to make the ground shake...maybe one day he'll figure out a mode of transportation that was better then all this teleporting and portal use...

"I-I would like to learn that..." He said wearily, the flash of light muted by his dark glasses by still sending a stab of pain into his brain, forcing him to look away after watching her write the runes on the door. Although he was weary of portals, he didn't see why Hono'o would prefer bouncing to them....surely stepping from one place to another was way better then physically willing yourself into another place! "W-why doesn't Hono'o like portals?" He asked, leaning down to lower his glasses and peer through the portal and the alleyway beyond...