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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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?"

She looks at him, just as startled, and she looks away, pushing up from the bed and stepping aside.

"...I don't want another echo."

Is it even possible to avoid them if you can see it coming? She's willing to try. "...sorry. I'm sorry."

She breathes in and looks back to him. "Should we be in here? The movie was nearly over."

"Oh."

Right, of course, that makes sense. He feels a little spark of guilt for showing the entry to her.

"No, don't worry about it," he says, shoving the ledger under his bed. "Um... You can go back if you like. They, uh." He forces a smile at her, weak and fleeting. "Might get the wrong idea."

She doesn't want another Echo.

Maybe he shouldn't be trying to connect with her. The thought leaves him with a bit of melancholy to add on top of everything else, but he understands why she wouldn't want any more instances that would trigger an Echo. He wouldn't, either.

But it feels lonely, too.

"The one boy- Anthony. I know him from the library." It's an awkward, roundabout sort of explanation- she isn't even sure why she's trying to explain it. "It wouldn't really matter much, but my job..."

It wouldn't do to have that kind of rumour going about for that reason. Not that she thinks Anthony would do anything, but...

She doesn't leave right away, hesitating to do so. She doesn't expect anything good anymore, but...

"...there's got to be something good in all of it, right?" she asks after a moment, crossing her arms in front of herself. "It's not all... like that. It can't be. If I gave up... there must have been something to give up. Right?"

He regards her with another smile, this one natural, small, and glum.

"Do you want to forget?"

She rubs an arm slowly, venturing up to her shoulder and digging in there. Even she can see how miserable he looks. Is it just at the idea that she would want to?

The phonecall comes back to her. Well, not the call so much but the feeling behind it after the echo.

Not alone.

Still, she's surprised- he sounds like he wouldn't. She tempers that surprise as best she can when she speaks. "Wouldn't you?"

He considers her question for a few seconds, then says, "No. I wish this hadn't happened, but I wouldn't be comfortable forgetting."

He bites down on his lower lip, releases it. "But it's an option. People who leave the city forget. It's like none of this ever happened to them."

It isn't an option he'd choose, but it is an option -- provided she has the funds to uproot herself like that, which not everyone has. Alex sure doesn't. It's his family far from Locke, but still viable that makes this option realistic for him.

Viable... yes, it is. It's almost arbitrary that she's here. Close enough to family, if they need help... but far enough away to be comfortable, to be left alone, left out of the daily business of her brother and father.

She could transfer. That would be no problem at all. Personally speaking, she hasn't much to lose with a big move. Even what few friendships she might have been forging, they aren't really that much. She's made no real efforts, and because of that, not much of anyone has made any real efforts with her.

Except Alexander.

Eyes on the floor again, she reaches up to push her hair back behind her ear, considering that, and considering it seriously. It had already been mentioned on the network, but she hadn't paid much attention to them. It's all viable, though.

It's the look that's been on and off his face throughout this conversation that makes her pause, it's the efforts he has made that keep her from making that snap decision. It's that feeling of loneliness that may or may not be hers- she can't tell- that's somehow eased by his being there, simply by his existence. Because he has the potential to be as much of a monster as she was.

Why couldn't they have something else in common, like a favourite book, or some point of philosophy they agreed on that wasn't I will not let myself become a monster?

She slowly sits down again beside him. Her posture is off- it looks strange for someone normally so rigid and proper.

"...is it all right? If I stay?" She puts a hand to her face to rub her cheek. "If this continues?"

Edited 2013-09-17 18:32 (UTC)