savetheearth | (no subject)

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(no subject)

Who: Alexander, Anthony, Bakura, Banagher, Hajime, John, Lyall, Ravindra, Reilanin & Vanessa
Where: Alex & Ravi's apartment
When: Friday, Sept. 13th (ooooh)
What: Movie night!
Warnings: --

[ and so it happened that tonight was a movie night slightly different from the one alex, anthony, john (and ravindra, when he wanted to be included) had grown accustomed to -- namely, the volume of bodies had doubled, plus two. the cats were split in opinion; adhirat sought shelter in ravi's room, while olivia got cozy with anyone who'd give her the time of day and gomez poked around and occasionally darted off.

the more the merrier -- for anthony's sake, partially, as holing up in an apartment couldn't have been very fun (thought alex) while his peers enjoyed (or enjoyed to hate) school. bakura was a friend of his, so alex was more than happy to have him over. lyall could always use a break. hajime had been an invaluable asset at the water bust and seemed like a swell guy. john was an 'of course'; a founding member of movie night and someone alex got along with splendidly. vanessa, well.

vanessa could do with the company of good people. she seemed to get along with banagher fine, too, and alex was fond of both of them.

as for reilanin, he was basically continuing to offer the branch of friendship, or something like it. he'd actually been surprised when she accepted the invitation. as a librarian, she was probably familiar with the movie they'd be watching tonight.

twilight (or the save the earth equivalent of). ]

[ ooc: more or less a mingle log! throw up your own threads, go hog wild, yeah!
here's the apartment layout for reference. they're on the second floor! ]

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Neither the knock or the voice startle him. Swimming through the amalgam of negativity and hopelessness in this conversation of theirs, he doesn't respond right away, almost forgets to. From his seat at the edge of the bed, he makes a noise, something like a grunt, to let her in. Whether she takes it for the permission that it is or not isn't something he's thought far enough for.

Written so candidly...

Reilanin, she was a candid person.

The noise is another mystery to her, and she hesitates before she widens the door and steps in, glancing behind her only briefly before she shuts the door. Her regard for the others is similarly out of mind.

She doesn't move much further in, head canted slightly to one side.

"...are you unwell?" she prods, only a step away from the door, hands resting easily at her sides, no sign of tension in them. "Did... you remember something?"

He's hunched over, elbows on his thighs and head in his hands. Just the smallest tilt and he'd be able to see her feet, but he doesn't move. Her voice is enough, almost overwhelming compared to the silence of their textual exchange.

He sucks in his bottom lip, lets it go slowly against his teeth.

" 'The hunger does not pass'," he breathes in through his nose, exhales with the rest of the sentence, " 'until it is properly sated.' "

He lifts his head, looking miserably at her. "Does that sound familiar to you?"

Closer to the head of his bed, fallen between the end of one pillow and the beginning of the next, is a leather-bound book he hasn't seemed to notice. It isn't visible to him in his current position, but it is visible to Reilanin.

It's covered in polka dots.

She steps forward again, but freezes- everything freezes- as he begins to speak, and she stares at him, face shifting from concern to blankness.

Yes, she knows them. She knows those words well. Everything about her makes it clear she does.

Reilanin's had time to think on them. Time to internalize them. She looks away from his face, anywhere but his face.

"I had been wondering... what sort of person I was becoming."

The journal is there, visible and fragrant, the faint tang of leather over- ah, she can smell it more clearly here. Orange, and pine, and... and something else. Almost medicinal. A perfume or cologne, maybe? But his scent, it's elusive. She doesn't understand it.

Her attention goes back to the book, and she walks past him, a slow pace that takes her towards the window, blind drawn. She pokes it open briefly before letting it fall again.

"It's a lot to take in," she says, paraphrasing what he had said in response.

His eyes close as a weak chuckle makes its way past his lips. He understands what she's just done.

"This is what we have to look forward to," he says, watching her with a rueful smile. There's something off about his voice, an unusual quiver to it. "Monsters shaped by what people think."

He hated it, oh god he'd hated it. He hates it now, but in a disconnected sort of way, superficially, not truly understanding the depth of being subjugated to the beliefs of others as he had previously.

"Your room's a mess."

It's disconnected, not really part of anything. She toes a sock aside as she turns back around. How does she deal with this? She's no longer in the position she was. She isn't the mentor now, very much the opposite.

But he's right. She'd wondered about it. There's that nagging feeling that there's something important in what she's remembered, or not- not important, but relevent. The conversation with the other werewolf.

"I remembered... the need to... to change myself," she says, her voice almost idle, but it's quiet in the dimness. "No, to... to learn more about another... I can't quite explain it, but how you put it just now... as though how I was could be..." She cuts off with an annoyed sound, unable to quite explain herself. "I believed..."

He realizes, as she continues speaking, that she's straying from the topic. No, not the topic, the conversation he'd remembered.

It's a neutral realization. An observation.

He drops his head, leans into his palm, the other hand hanging between his legs. "Belief. I cursed it, after your little pep talk." A snide remark born out of his dismay at the memory, not directed at her. "How... How could something like that exist?"

How could any of the fantastical developments within the 'numbers club' exist? But this was personal, far too personal, and much more abstract than detoxification magic or swords. Belief was inexplicably tied with the thoughts of people. That made it unpredictable, volatile.

"It had to have rules," he says, distressed as he holds his hands out, head lifted, eyes narrowed at the space in front of him. "You don't just-- you don't just twist reality like that, that's- that's impossible, it'd fuck everything up."

He knows more about it than she does. She doesn't remember it, belief as a thing, but it makes sense. She can feel it somehow in what she does remember, that there was power in it, that it could change things. And she'd wanted that.

Silence greets his words, putting together this development with her past echoes. Twisting reality... it feels... wrong, as he says, but there's a truth to it.

She'd wanted to twist reality. She can remember that feeling while she wrote those words. She'd wanted to, as he puts it, fuck everything up.

What kind of person...? Person...

"...do you think of yourself as human, still? ...as a person? Or do you feel... do you feel like it's how I said it would be?"

He lifts his hand towards her, fingers half-curled save his index, pointing. "No," he says firmly, though there's a thickness in his voice that can't wholly be attributed to an emotional bleed-over from his memory. "No, I don't feel like that. I will never feel like that. I'm still a person and so are you."

"Maybe it will be easier not to be."

She reaches up to tug at her hair. A nervous gesture she isn't wholly aware of. She doesn't look at him when she says it.

Gobsmacked by her words, the tenseness in his features ease off as he stares at her. His hand remains up, still halfheartedly pointing, until he recovers from his shock.

"You're talking about--" He throws a hard glance at the door, then looks at her again. "You're talking about eating people," he hisses, voice lowered so as to not be overheard.

How could she say something like that? He starts backwards. Was she already-- already that person? A person who spoke so freely of cannibalism?

She's had some time to think about it. Never coming to any conclusions, of course- she always shied away from conclusions. But standing here, talking about these sorts of things with someone else, she wonders. Her conversation with Lyall had been more a matter of facts, but this goes deeper than that.

"It's not- it's more than that."

Any further back and he'll be climbing on the bed. She looks at him and away, her normally calm expression cracking a little with a kind of dismay.

"If all of these... these things can overtake us physically... who's to say we won't gain something that affects how we feel, or what we believe? Not just- not just what we know about the world, or ourselves, but what we truly, honestly think to be true- all those years of someone else's experiences and-"

She cuts off with a strangled noise, covering her mouth. It makes her feel sick to think about it again, and the words coming out of her mouth just seem to be a substitute. She forces herself to breathe.

"I don't know what I'll be like when that happens," she says, eyes shut as she focuses on calming herself down.

He's closing his eyes and metaphorically digging his heels in as she speaks, resisting the notion that they could lose who they are. This is the same sore subject he'd gotten into an argument about with Ravindra. He's not any more happy to see it rearing its head again, but he's better equipped to address it -- at least, to know how not to address it.

Reilanin's distress doesn't go unnoticed. What was once accusation quickly dissolves into sympathy.

"Hey," he says softly, holding his hand out to her. "Come here."

She doesn't know what Ravindra was like, but for Alex, she understands that at least he worried about it, that he was concerned with who he might become. She knows that she'd already accepted it and embraced it.

Will she again? She'd seemed so sure of herself...

It almost seems as though she doesn't hear him right away, but after a moment she looks back over, not to his face, but to see his hand outstretched towards her. She doesn't seem sure what to do, if she should take it or not, and it's not at all because of him but because of her.

She does reach out to take his hand. Cold, as she expected, but she doesn't shy away and holds on to it. It isn't a firm grip, but that just seems par for the course with her.

"Sorry," she says quietly, her voice almost lost to the noise outside of the room. "She was just... she was just so resigned to it, it doesn't even feel like there's a question to it. I don't want that. I don't want you to have it, either."

His grip is cold, but firm. Since she doesn't sit, he rises to meet her, letting go of her hand to draw her into a one-armed hug. Reassuring, hopefully, or offering some semblance of comfort, with an easy way out if she doesn't want it.

"I'm sorry, too." After all, the negativity he had felt then had threatened to overwhelm him now. It couldn't have been much different for her. "We're okay. For now, we're okay. We'll figure something out."

Words he doesn't quite believe, a well-intentioned lie.

"Hey-"

The hug is unexpected. It's like holding on to someone after they've been out in the snow or after a long walk on an especially brisk fall day, cool but not unpleasantly so. Particularly because it's so warm in the apartment, with so many people in it.

She isn't averse to it. She avoids it, more often than not, but it isn't as though she's gone throughout life without hugs (her brother makes sure to give her one every time he sees her) and it's a vulnerable moment- it's actually quite welcome.

Lyall didn't seem particularly broken up about it, but something seems different in how they are. She hadn't received any echoes speaking with him- very little seemed familiar as it did with Alexander. When she spoke of believing, he'd caught on. That place, with its tall tower- he knew what she'd been talking about.

Is it possible that Lyall had been a werewolf in more... lucky circumstances?

She sighs, as much in response to his words as her own thoughts. He's practically a stranger, but becoming less so the more the days draw on. It doesn't bother her to return the hug. He might be lying. She's willing to believe it for now.

"Do you write it down in that book?" she asks, tilting her head up to look at him. She's quite short- not quite so intimidating as when she stands on her own.

They used to be strangers, connected only through her bizarre luck with emergencies -- a tenuous thread easily frayed when he'd been transfered to night shifts. They're still strangers now; he hardly knows a thing about her -- her likes and dislikes, her favorite color, her education, her family, her past -- all those casual tidbits of information that fades into the background when you get to know someone.

He knows more about who she was than who she is. That's a terrible disservice. The past had no business overriding the present.

Already looking down at her, he meets her eyes with a crinkle to his brow. "The journal?" he asks, thinking she's referring to the ledger the conversation from his memory had been made in.

"Diary, journal... same difference."

She looks at him a moment- he doesn't understand. She hesitates and looks behind him again, then pulls back somewhat so that she can tug at his arm and turn him slightly with her. "That, tucked away."

Something else to think about. She puts a knee to the ledge of his bed and leans up, taking it in hand without regard for what it looks like what she's doing, which, yes, is snooping in his room. While he's there.

"Polka-dots?"

He follows her lead without thought, hand falling to his side as she leans over his bed. The ledger she procures has him narrowing his eyes.

A sense of dread clutches his heart. He breathes in, holds it, lets it go.

"That's the book," he says quietly. "The journal I wrote in."

Something else from then, just like his ring...

"I don't know why it has polka dots on it."

Somehow the polka-dots catch her off guard, and her troubled expression is momentarily bemused. It sobers up a moment later. His ledger.

"...here."

Even curious, she can't bring herself to look in it so casually. She holds it a moment before she holds it out to him. "Objects, too...?"

Ah, it's too much. She feels tired. Once the book is handed off, she takes her turn to sit on the edge of his bed.

"...you know, the first thing I remembered was waking up. It was... mm, like waking up from a good nap. I think that's what I did. It was very peaceful." She looked up to him. "...what was yours? Do you know?"

Reluctantly, he accepts the ledger. It feels heavier than it ought to -- a conjured weight.

At her question, he opens his mouth to speak, closes it, then glances down at the ledger. "Another conversation in this," he says wearily. "With Vin and someone else, about the at--"

The attack on the Hour, made by a wolf. Referred to as a 'she'.

His lips set into a thin line. Reilanin? He doesn't know for sure, but maybe...

She doesn't need to know that right now.

"About an attack on 'the Hour'," he continues, sitting down beside her. The space between them dips with his weight. He's staring at the stitches in the polka dots, each cut from cloth and sewed on.

Those conversations, the ones he remembered, the ones he didn't, they were all in this book.

Just as he was reluctant to take it from Reilanin, he is now reluctant to flip open the pages.

"Vin?" she prompts, looking to him as he speaks and then, for whatever reason, stops. It almost makes her forget her own question, staring at him with a painfully innocent expression of concern.

She knows what she can do, but she is unaware of what she's done.

She watches him sit down, blinking at the odd pause but saying nothing to it, just a noise of acknowledgement. The Hour. She looks ahead, thinking... no, she doesn't know anything called that. Head tilting down, Reilanin looks to the floor, poking at another article of clothing there.

A ledger. She remembers writing in just such a thing, but the thing itself... will she get hers? Will it matter? She looks over to his lap where his ledger lies. "What does it have in it?"

"Ravindra, my roommate."

His thumb presses into the leather cover, then relaxes, then lifts up as he opens the ledger. Written on the first page in passable calligraphy is the name Anders Brown.

His handwriting. That Alexander's handwriting.

For a brief moment, he's confused by the discrepancy until he remembers that snippet of conversation he received back in May, in which he had told Ravindra that he would use an alias.

He pauses, then flips the page over.

Nothing.

He flips through more pages. Still nothing.

He continues turning page after page, slow, almost lethargic. Just as he's about to give up, the next page is filled to the brim with writing, the style of which does not belong to him.

There are, in fact, many styles, and all of them with names attached. Lord Romund Myron. Ermesinda. Anson Kratochvil. Shiri Qattawi. Diya Medellos. Many more.

He returns his attention to the main entry, finds himself apprehensive to read it.

It's a heavy read. The plethora of information lacking context clouds his mind. He tilts the ledger towards Reilanin, a position easier to read.

Ravindra, the Indian man out in the living room. She recals having seen him at-

She tugs at her hair again. The first aid seminar that she'd refused to fully participate in.

Glancing aside, she twists that one section of hair and then lets it be, hands back in her lap. He's going through the pages without her watching, and it takes a moment for her to catch on that there's nothing to see. Frowning, she sees them pass by, one after the other, blank as can be. "But why...?" She looks up to him. Did he not know it would be like this? She glances to his pillows again and then to the book. It just appeared...?

The pages tilted towards her, she shifts to read. It's a little hard- she should have her glasses, and the light is low- but she squints and silently follows the lines.

It seems to draw on forever, as though she were reading it all again at the speed it had originally been written. It's not familiar- it is familiar-

She reaches out suddenly and shuts the book, before snatching her hand back.

Startled by her abrupt action, he flinches back and stares at her.

"What?"