Ian
[Oh, sure, let's roll some dice. Dex+... melee? athletics? whatever, same score]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 10) ( success x 1 ) Re-rolls: 1
Ian
[lol]
Ian
It
had been a few days now since they'd arrived at the Chantry. Time
enough for the three survivors to have space to reflect on their present
circumstances. But time for reflection wasn't always useful when there
were no solid paths toward a real answer. What did they have here? A
dead node and a library full of empty books. A shell of what this place
ought to have been.
Yet it was shelter. And for some, it was
something like home (even if perhaps it no longer felt that way.) There
were beds and running water. There was the small generator that Kalen
found. There were tools. There was a pasture and a stable for the
horses. And there was space enough for the three of them to exist both
together and independently of one another, should they wish it. Mostly,
so far, it had been the latter. They shared supplies. They communicated
about the necessary things, but to a large degree they'd each preferred
their own company more than that of the other two.
Maybe Sid
noticed that Ian and Kalen hadn't been talking much either, or maybe she
didn't pay them much mind. As for Ian and Sid... they were still
practically strangers.
Ian spent a lot of his time outdoors. He
didn't seem to like being cooped up in the Chantry, spacious though it
was. Most days, he went hunting for food in one fashion or another.
That's where he'd been all morning - out exploring the Morrison
countryside with Dusk. Now the horse was out in the pasture, napping in
the shade of an overhanging tree.
And Ian was out back behind the
house, training with his sword. It was something to do. Something that
kept him occupied and moving. Something that felt like a thing he could
control.
He stood barefoot and shirtless in the grass, moving in a
manner that felt ritualized. Practicing steps and movements that he
knew by heart. But for all that this kind of thing was usually
meditative for him, today the distraction proved useless. With a
frustrated sigh, he let the katana slice through the air, making a wide,
angry sweep, then buried the edge into the ground at his feet.
Ian
closed his eyes and put his hands behind his neck, lacing his fingers
together. As he stood there, crickets sounded in the grass nearby. The
sun was high and hot today. It felt oppressive.
Sid
For
the first few days of their occupation of the dead Chantry house, Sid
was fine. Well, not entirely fine. There were repercussions for the
healings that she performed on Ian and his horse. There was a rote of
her own to recover from. There was pain but there were still things to
do. They had to explore the area, make sure the walkers that they first
encountered were the only ones for the time being. Supplies had to be
checked and they needed to see what supplies could be found or stored in
the house. Someone had to figure out how to get into the library.
Sid
approached these things with a sense of...not ease, not peace, but
quietude. She neither hid from nor approached Kalen or Ian. She'd said
all she had to say to Kalen and if he wanted to speak to her fine, and
if he didn't that was also fine. And Ian didn't shun or try to avoid
her assistance with his shoulder or his horse, which was for the best.
Sunday passed much the same. Sid performed her Pattern rending,
Quintessence restoring rote - with no Node in which to recharge what
choice did she have really? - and spent a few hours recovering. She
went to check on Lovelace at the barn, she went scouting around the
grounds. She was up. She was mobile. She was active.
Monday
dawned in a different light. When Ian and Kalen both claimed this world
was false, Sid took them at their word. Whether she trusted them or
not, she trusted the numbers even if she didn't understand or feel the
same way. The curtain hadn't dropped for her. It did sometime between
Sunday evening and Monday morning. When she woke her head felt fuzzy,
strange, like someone'd stuffed it full of cotton seeds and her body's
natural life-encouraging energy set them all to crackling and popping
and blossoming inside her skull. She thought of the things she'd been
thinking of the last few months since the virus struck. She thought of
finding Jim even though she had a feeling she wouldn't find him now.
She thought of seeing Shoshannah somewhere, tall and cool and bitterly
angry. If anyone would survive this nightmare, it would certainly be
Shoshannah. She thought of getting...he...re.....The memories of her
flight across the country were hazy suddenly, gauzy. The curtain had
fallen and taken with it everything she believed would keep her going
until something finally took her down.
It took away her hope. The
hope of seeing the one she desperately loved one last time before the
end. Hope of seeing the girl who mattered most to her in all the
world. In the bed she'd claimed when she was staying in this house on
weekends, Sid rolled over that morning, pulled her pillow to her face,
both arms clamping it down against her face. Then she screamed, and she
screamed, and she screamed until she cried herself hollow.
She
hasn't left her room since. Not for food. Not to wash. Not to look
after Lovelace. Not for anything. If Kalen and Ian aren't speaking to
each other she doesn't know it. If someone's covered up that hole in
the roof she made, Sid has no idea. Or rather, she doesn't until today.
Ian
is outside in the backyard, practicing with his sword. The sliding
glass door opens behind him but it isn't a storm brewing that meets
him. It's spring. It's spring after a desperate, terrible winter. Sid
leans heavily against the frame, glasses slid clear down her nose to
expose her dark, ageless eyes. Her red hair is an alternating mess of
stripes of grease-darkened red and terrible snarls and tangles.
She looks awful, but then she would, wouldn't she? She hasn't eaten for four days.
Ian
Ian
didn't look as badly off as Sid. He'd been showering. He'd found some
new clothes. (Not the kind of clothes he used to wear, but they were
clean and they fit.) There was new wiry muscle to offset the weight he'd
lost. And certainly he'd been eating.
None of them were well off,
right now. But Ian hadn't fully comprehended just how badly Sid was
doing until he turned around and saw her there, leaning against the door
frame behind him.
A few days earlier, he'd draped a tarp over the
hole in the roof to keep out the rain. The edges of it flapped loosely
in the breeze as the two of them regarded each other silently.
He
didn't ask her if she was okay. Obviously, she wasn't. Instead he let
his hands drop and inclined his head toward the garage. "I found a vet
clinic while I was out. Brought back some things you might be able to
use." He'd thought about her. About her healing skills and her affinity
for the horses. Maybe it was pragmatism, and maybe it was also something
like gratitude. Whatever he was capable of showing, anyway. That night
with Dusk... he'd been grateful then. Exhausted and angry at the world,
but grateful.
"There's food, too. You need to eat something."
Sid
Sid
stares at him, standing there in the sun, shirtless and leanly muscled,
sweaty from the heat. Her eyes are on the blurry dark-topped blob she
assumes is his head. It's lighter than it was a moment ago, he must
have turned.
She hears better than she sees, at least until she
has the presence of mind to push her glasses up on her nose. Ah, there
he is. Handsome young man, some might say pretty, the lines of his
cheeks, the slope of his nose. Sid only sees a boy looking back at
her. Vaguely, she realizes, she must look awful.
For a moment she considers telling she's not hungry. It wouldn't exactly be a lie. She doesn't feel
hungry. She feels a little like she did after the Hydra virus ravaged
her system. Weak. Exhausted. Wasted away. She feels like she felt in
the months after Jim walked out the door. Hollow. Empty. Lost. But
there is a raw ache in her stomach that doesn't feel like her crushed
heart or her devestated circulatory system. She doesn't feel hungry but
that doesn't mean that she doesn't need to eat. She nods. There is
truth in what Ian says, then. She needs to eat.
"Later," she
says, stepping out through the door and onto the small patio. She is
dressed in the same t-shirt she was wearing on Sunday, same tattered
jeans, too. Her feet are bare.
"I realized something," she says.
Coming closer to him, her steps are shaking but she walks a more or
less straight line. Sid is weak, but she is stubborn. Once, she
wobbles and it seems like she might topple into him, but truth is, her
goal is not the young Orphan, but the grass he's standing on.
Ian
The
grass was part of the reason he was out here. That and the trees; the
crickets; the birds... even the fucking flies. It was easy to feel alone
out here. Easy to feel like everything that mattered was dead. But the
world yet lived - its landscape tangled and wild and scrubby from the
recent droughts. It was in many ways a harsher world. But life was
there.
Ian didn't know if it was real. But it felt real enough.
Sid
felt real too, ragged and ill-kept though she was. Ian could have
smelled her coming even if he hadn't turned around, and it likely said
something about their circumstances that he was kind enough in that
moment not to cringe away. Later, Sid said, and Ian gave her a
look like maybe he didn't believe she actually intended to follow
through. But for the moment he didn't press. Instead he gave her the
space to speak.
"What did you realize?"
She looked like she might fall over at any moment, but Ian didn't attempt to reach out to her. Not yet.
Sid
"It's
all connected," she says. She doesn't reach for him, at least, doesn't
hold her hand out for his or try to put her arm around him to hold her
up. Sid knows what she's about. She's been locked away in her room,
leting herself waste away, letting herself feel every bit of the pain
and loss and heartache she's been staving off for months (actual months
as well as the months within this place). Because she always had that
hope, didn't she? That she would see Jim once more before the end. All
of that's gone and it was like losing him all over again. It was
seeing that look on his face, the pain, the sadness, the betrayal, all
over again. But in losing him completely some part of her was finally
freed.
And once freed, that part of her expanded and expounded and
came to realizations almost without Sid's conscious thought. It made
it feel more like an epiphany than it would have otherwise.
She
gets to the edge of the patio and she stops, turns her head to look at
Ian. He is so young, she thinks. So young to wear that face. So young
to be in this life. She does reach for him then, her arm stretching so
that her hand might cup his cheek. Whether he recoils or not, it
doesn't matter. She stops long before she comes near to touching him,
looks at her hand, and she almost smiles.
"It's connected. No, I mean. I already knew that," she says, frowning. "It's how
it's connected. I thought it was just things." She looks out over the
dry and dusty grounds. They should have been so lush. "People and
objects and animals and the cosmos. It's more than that. Pain is
connected to joy is connected to the sun," she lifts her chin to
look up, as if she's only just then realized the sun was shining.
Quieter, she continues. "Is connected to the earth is connected to
you...r sword." Her eyes go to the blade embedded in the grass, then
she looks at Ian. "Is connected to you. Whether we touch or not, you
and I are connected. By this place. By the people we know and the
things we feel."
She must sound mad. Sid is aware enough to
realize she must sound like she's gone crazy, and maybe she has. But
she can feel it. This understanding. "I want to see it." She steps
into the grass, dry and green mixed together, dusty and new all at
once. When she steps off, she leaves a cluster of flowers in her wake.
It's on the second step that she wavers, that her legs - long, shapely,
malnourished now - threaten to give out on her. That's when she stops
and looks at Ian. She holds her hand to him.
"Help me make a circle?"
Ian
The
other night in the library, Ian said something to Kalen about why they
were here. About why this had happened to them. Kalen may or may not
have caught on to Ian's meaning, but it didn't matter. They would each
have their own epiphanies. Sid's was perhaps more beautiful than his
own, stilted and unhinged though she may have sounded in that moment.
It's all connected, she said, and Ian did not disagree with her.
She
thought of him as a boy. He hadn't thought of himself that way even
when he actually was one - let alone now. But that was the thing about
age. It was always so relative to one's own experience. His eyes looked
older than the rest of him. Veiled and dark and worn around the edges.
They all looked that way, here.
Sid reached to touch him, and his
eyes tracked to her hand, but the gesture never made contact. Then she
began to speak. To ramble, really. Half lucid, half out of her mind. And
where she stepped, flowers grew in her wake. She was Spring. She was
Life.
(And what was he then? Autumn? What did Autumn bring? Not flowers, but more death.)
(But it's all connected.)
She
almost fell, and now Ian did reach out to her. The motion was quick -
instinctive. And then his hand was clutching hers and his other was at
her shoulder, just lightly resting to offer support.
"If I help you, will you eat something?"
Sid
Spring
gets to Autumn eventually. Without Spring there is no Autumn. Without
Autumn there is no spring. Only a single blanket of a season, a single
time of year throughout the year and all the days. There are places
like that, and they are connected, too.
Ian takes Sid's hand and
he'll find that it's warm. Her shoulder, too, through the faded and
thin fabric of her shirt is warm. She is overflowing with Life, with a
verdant eternal springtime of growth and growing things. Once she might
have fit into another Tradition, and she still might. But those who
see her, those who come into contact with her, usually guess her a
Verbena witch without much effort. It's who she was, it's what she was
meant to be.
So, they are connected now, physically and not merely
metaphorically. Ian tries to bargain with her. If he helps, will she
eat?
"Later," she says, and she gives his hand a squeeze. It's a
weak squeeze, the strength all but lost in her limbs, but it's meant to
be reassuring. For so long after Sid's Awakening she avoided contact,
she avoided touch. She was afraid of it, afraid of what could happen if
she allowed someone too close. So she forgot how to be comforting.
She forgot how to be true. Now, it would seem, she's finally
remembering.
Later. It might not be the promise that he's looking for, but it's the only one that he's going to get.
Ian
Twice
now, he has done this. Twice since the world ended, Ian has reached out
to catch someone who looked as though they might fall. But Sid did not
fall into him the way that Kalen did. Sid had already cried all of her
tears.
And they knew each other less. This was not the first time
they'd touched - she'd had to put her hands on him when she'd helped
with his shoulder - so Ian knew that her hands radiated warmth. But he
knew little else about her body - about the details of her skin or the
shape of her bones. There was distance yet between them, even as he held
her.
He wasn't the right person for this. But no one else was there to do it.
Later, she said. Later.
Ian sighed. "Alright, show me what we're doing."
A
few feet away, his sword sat abandoned in the earth where he'd left it.
His hands knew the feel of it better now than they did the two people
who slept under the same roof as him.
Sid
There
isn't much to see of Sid given what she's wearing at the moment, but
there are some things that he may or may not notice. There's the
obvious. The black ink on the inside of her left wrist, two concentric
circles surrounding a dot, two dots on the inner circle and four on the
outer. Beneath it - from Sid's point of view - are the words WE ARE
MADE OF STARSTUFF. Then there are the backs of her upper arms. There
are tattoos there, as well. They're nearly identical. Feathers.
Feathers gathered and placed like a pair of wings, the tips of the
primary feathers ending just above her elbows. They could use some more
details. Some of the feathers are completely blank. Not as easily
noticed is the long straight scar on the outside of her left forearm.
And
there is the fall of her hair. Even tangled and unwashed as it is, it
looks thick and soft and healthy. There's the paleness of her skin,
greyish from the last few days or the last few weeks or the last few
years. It's hard to say.
"Making a circle," she tells him, and
she sounds matter of fact. "It doesn't have to be perfect," she says.
Thoughtfully, she adds, "Nothing does. None of us are. We're connected
by our imperfections." She almost sounds like she's giving a lecture
and for a moment it's not so hard to imagine her before a podium. Did
Kalen tell her what she does? Does Kalen even know? Does he care to
know? So many people Sid has met don't care to know her.
The
circle of flowers is not perfect. There is a moment where she stops and
she stares back over her shoulder to see the curve that they've made of
this power that she has For a fraction of a second she was here but
not here. It was March and she was making this circle by herself
and soon green would roll out- She looks at Ian, but then she shakes
her head. "Deja vu," she says quietly.
When the circle is
completed Sid walks into the circle. A line of flowers - little white
ones, little blue ones, wildflowers born of a wildness Sid's forgotten
she has inside her - connects her to the line of the circle, but she
doesn't let go of Ian's hand.
"Do you want to see?" she asks. "I
think I can show you. Someone showed me the cosmos once," she says,
looking up at the pale brownish blue sky of autumn, then shakes her
head. "Not here, though."
Ian
Ian helped her make
this circle - held her hand while they walked in a slow arc across the
rough grass. It scratched and prickled beneath the bottom of his feet as
they moved. And everywhere Sid's feet touched down, flowers grew in her
wake. Beautiful and wild.
Ian didn't ask her why they were making
that circle. Perhaps it didn't really matter. He was doing it for Sid,
who was barely more than a stranger to him, but who had mended a bullet
wound in his horse's shoulder without any thought to the cost the act
might claim from her.
She and Kalen had fought after he'd left
that day. Ian knew that something was wrong between them - had sensed it
even before Kalen himself had confirmed it. Whatever Sid had said or
done, Kalen was hurt because of it. And likely the same could be said
for her. It wasn't Ian's business - whatever had caused that rift. He
wasn't judging her now based on what someone else may have told him
about her. He was judging what he could see and feel - as he judged
everyone.
Deja vu, she said. And Ian didn't say anything, but he looked away toward the treeline and for a moment his eyes seemed sad.
They
were inside the circle now, and Sid asked him if he wanted to see. What
exactly she meant by that, he didn't know. But he wasn't the kind of
person who closed his eyes when someone offered to show him something,
so he tilted his head and said, "Alright."
Sid
Alright.
Sid
offers him a small, quiet, tired smile. If she were stronger -
physically stronger - she would kiss him. On the hand or the cheek or
the forehead or the mouth. They are practically strangers. When this
is all over (if it ends, if they find their way out) they will
remember that they didn't know each other at all. They were strangers
sensed across a distance, connected in however an intangible way by
location, a common acquaintance, and destiny.
They're practically
strangers and they're still connected. Now, by circumstance and
history. By the things that they've been put through. They connect her
to Kalen, too, more than either of them may ever realize. She'll work
on that later.
Later food. Later Kalen. Later everything. Now?
Now
she's holding the hand of a boy who is also a man, someone like herself
who was forced to grow up well before his time. Circumstance. If only
Sid knew Time they could share those images. Eventually. Maybe. Now
is all Sid and Ian have and now Sid and Ian are inside a circle. She
turns to face him. Still holding onto his hand, she reaches for the
other. Her grip on him is warm and comfortable yet firm. She's not
going to let him go, she can't.
Connection. Everything joined in a
circle. With all the pieces placed just so, Sid takes a deep,
steadying breath. She feels Ian's heartbeat pulsing against her
fingers, feels her own finding a rhythm beside it.
In for three. Hold for three. Out for three.
Look.
[Corr
2 check out that shiny new epiphany dot! Scrying the chantry grounds:
coincidental, taking her time. Dropping WP because what else is it
for? Going two extend twice and hope that's enough for the Chantry
grounds?]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (7, 8, 8) ( success x 4 ) [WP]
Ian
This
wasn't a kind of sight that Ian had experienced before - this sense of
space, of connections. Grace had used it to find Sky for him, and now
Sid used it to show him the Chantry grounds. It was nothing he hadn't
seen himself by now - scouting and exploring and guarding against the
dead. But seen like this, it was new somehow. Like the distance between
things was both vast and small. A web of connected patterns. Trees,
earth, stones, animals. The house. The library. The horses. Kalen. The
ashes of the corpses they'd burned in a distant field.
You could
look at it a certain way: life and death. The cycle of growth and decay.
Like Leah - a girl Ian had never met - and her dead birds and her apple
tree. Death. Loss. It was a part of them all. They had each lived with
it. Moreso perhaps than any person should ever be asked to. That's what
Ian had meant, quietly, uncertainly, when he'd said to Kalen: I wonder if that's why we're here?
There was no immediate threat, for once.
Ian
continued to hold onto Sid's hands after she dropped the effect. He
blinked as his eyes refocused on the immediacy of their present
surroundings.
"That's a useful trick," he said quietly, and though the words were light his voice was not.
Sid
smelled as though she'd been crying in bed for days. Ian leaned in and
kissed her anyway: just a soft press of his lips to the high arc of her
cheekbone. Then he began to walk them toward the house, if Sid allowed
it.
"I'm getting you food. And then you're taking a shower."
Sid
They
have lived with their terrible things, and those terrible things
connect them. Sid and Kalen. They have both known such terrible,
physical pain. They have both lost people who mattered the world to
them. Sid and Ian. They both know what it's like to be cut adrift, to
lose the things that tie them by blood and bone and viscera to the
past. Ian and Kalen. Two people who find closeness difficult for
entirely different reasons.
Three people experiencing a terrible
apocalypse, alone and together and alone. Two boys and one girl who are
also a woman and two men.
Connected.
Ian leans in to kiss
Sid's cheek and he can see that her eyes are red and swollen and dry.
There are endless tracks along her pale cheeks, lines of the rivers of
her tears through the dust and dirt she went through before her
self-imposed confinement. Sid's reddish brows rise before her
expression relaxes. Before he even says anything she rests her free
hand over the plane of her stomach. Her shirt bows in significantly
when she does. She grimaces.
When she starts to turn away she
still has hold of his hand. He'll find her fingers, slender and white
and roughened from work and labor and the very act of surviving in this
world and the one they know, laced between his.
He's getting her
food and then she's taking a shower. Sid nods. "Later." Tilting her
head, she offers him the glimmer of a playful smile. "First you have to
get your sword. I knew someone else with a sword," she says as she
guides him toward it in the ground. "He was nice, too." Too? Does she mean Ian?
"He was like me in some ways and like you in some ways and sometimes
Kalen even reminds me of him." She stops beside the sword in the ground
but does not touch it. Like Arthur's sword in the stone, it's Ian's to
take. "Connected." A beat, and then, "I'm going to take a shower
while you get me food." She starts to turn, but then, "And thanks. For
the circle and the food and for staying."
Ian
Sid
implied that Ian was nice. Perhaps, in these spare, isolated moments,
he could be. Very few people would have thought to define him as such.
Perhaps not even Kalen. And likely, if Sid got to know Ian a little
better, she might choose to alter her opinion. She compared him to
someone else - someone that Ian had never met and knew nothing about.
Someone who she thought he reminded her of.
They both had swords.
(They both had scars you couldn't see.)
But
Ian carried a coldness about him that this other person did not. That
didn't necessarily make one cruel and the other kind - though often it
might seem as such. All of them were capable of both kindness and
cruelty.
Two nights ago, Ian had listened to Kalen ask him to
stay. And he'd touched Kalen's hand, but he had not kissed him. Today he
kissed the cheek of a woman he barely knew. Life was painted with these
complicated nuances.
Ian smiled a little when Sid reminded him of
his sword, and he leaned down to pluck it neatly from the earth. It
came easily, its shape an old familiar weight in his hand. He shook the
blade, once, to rid it of excess dirt, and had to release Sid's hand for
a moment so he could grab the sheath off the ground and put the blade
away.
Almost, he said: I'm not nice.
But he didn't.
For whatever reason. Instead he led them into the house and helped Sid
up the stairs, and when she was safely in the shower, he went back down
and made her something to eat.
(It was the first time in years
that he'd actually prepared food for someone other than himself. But he
wasn't going to tell her that either.)
