Melantha

wake

Someone is dead,

and even the trees know it.

The trees have a dark and marching confederacy and she stands at the edge of the woods. There is a road, there is always a road, it both rises and falls from where she stands, but what she knows is the wood and the verge and the bracken. Something is falling, thick flakes drifting eccentric in the bright cold air. The sun is rising. She forgets – why does she forget? – what has been done. Opens her mouth to taste the snow –

- but no, no. That is ash on her tongue.

Evergreens, tall and remarkably silent, shoulder together in their strange correspondence. The branches have the lush, sweeping, open-handed look of cedars, though somehow with a straight-spined, soldiering conspiracy, each to each, rather than the shaggy ranginess of so many iterations of trees. The wood hugs close to the verge of the road, bracken breaking into a rutted and weedy track, which is more earth than stone.

The morning - evening? - the light has that golden, nostalgic sweep to it, but the chill in the air seems somehow damp, bedewed - the morning, or evening, is all quick in her throat, and the whole world feels hushed, drawn, dampened, as if after a blanketing of snow. Oh, and there is snow, in melting mounds and strange little hummocks, in sheltered coves beneath the march of the trees. Aside from the lone caw of a single crow, the woods are silent.

Melantha

After talking to Erich about this, finally, and after hearing Tamsin describe her own really weird dreams, Melantha allows herself to slip back into it. She knows it's coming. She doesn't want to go here again, taste ashes again. It takes her time to go back to sleep, even though she took one of the clearwaters that Charlotte has gifted her with and rinsed her hair with it before going to bed. Even though she lit her little pretend-candle in her very-real shrine to let it glimmer throughout the night in her alcove, its little flickering can't keep the dream out.

Her mind forgets, at first, that she is dreaming. She doesn't remember any of this at first, is simply there, and standing, looking up, at snow falling. She opens her mouth the way she always does, aching for the touch of nature on her tongue.

The taste reminds her. And she rejects it, wanting to wake, but does not wake; we don't always get what we want. Melantha reaches up, shoulders hunching, covering her face with her mouth. For the first time in any dream, she starts spitting, all but retching, trying to get rid of the taste. This isn't wildness. This is death, all around her. The trees and the crow and the ash and the snow are all symbols of it, essences of it, and not the rich earthy sort of death that she knows is holy. These things feel like omens of murder.

Melantha looks into the woods. And she knows better than to go alone.

She closes her eyes, though she is afraid to, and starts thinking about Erich. She thinks very hard about Erich. About his hair and his haircut and his face and his arms and she realizes by the time she gets to his elbows this is stupid, dreams aren't so exacting. So she expels those thoughts and thinks instead of the feelings. The weird comfort of all their arguments and the falling-asleep-with and the strength in his arms and how he's nearly always a little too silly and playful for her and the way he lies to himself and represses stuff and then how much she loves him and how much it hurts sometimes to love anything, how raw it leaves her, and how nothing is perfect but everything is real and she knows, better than most, that what is perfect and what is everything you want is never real.

And she says his name over and over and over and over in her mind, trying to call him. She even tells him that she's about to go into some dark woods and there's a dead person somewhere and if he doesn't get here she's just going without him, because if there's any chance she could call him into being in her dreams, there's no way he'd let that one go.

She opens her eyes.

wake

The taste reminds her.

The taste always reminds her. There is the scent of snow in the air but oh that is ash; that is something - that is someone - burning. Here is a truth of the world, there is always someone, somewhere, burning. There is always some funereal pyre.

The taste reminds her and Melantha wakes, wakes within-the-dream she did not want to remember, or live again. She wakes within the dream and recognize the omens of murder: the wood, which is silent as woods were neither meant nor made to be silent. The crow. The hour, the ash. Perhaps even the road. Which is, to her vision, no more than a sinous curve of absence between the trees.

She is going to go into the looks.

She thinks and thinks and thinks to Erich. Oh,

she knows better than to go alone.

--

There is no answer, not in her mind's eye, not in her mind's ear. Not in her mind, the interstitial experience of their presence that always asserts itself when she draws that iron needle through her knuckles; bears, somehow, the bloom of blood from the wound. They are there, somehow, somewhere - her connection to pack and totem is not severed. But oh, it is as if they were sleeping, sleeping, sleeping.

And Melantha wakes.

--

Another night; another dream.

Every piece repeats itself, every piece repeats itself; right down to her experience of recognition, the way she wakes within-the-dream, the calls she extends, searching, searching, the feeling that they are - no, not gone. But instead, sleeping too deeply to be awoken.

Another night; another dream.

She is on the verge at the edge of the road, and the road winds through the dark forest, and the trees cast long, straight-spined shadows across the rutted, weedy track, and sky has the pale blue promise of dawn, or perhaps the last brilliance of evening, she opens her mouth, she always opens her mouth, she always tastes the ash.

There is a road. There is a wood. There is a low, swirling plume of black smoke in the sky.

Melantha

Every time they thread that needle and push it through Melantha's knuckles, she has to fight tears, look away, hide her face in Charlotte or Erich. She gets woozy. She puts her head between her legs. It isn't the pain when they rip it out, it's the blood, it's the openness, the bit of herself spread and raw to the world and it makes her very, very dizzy. Every time. It's worth it, though. You can endure a lot if it's for something you believe in.

Melantha knows that better than most, too.

Erich's not there when she opens her eyes, and neither is Charlotte, though there is an unspoken pact between Erich and Melantha right now to maybe not freak Charlotte out before they absolutely have to, or maybe if this is Something not to expose her mind to it, because her mind is sometimes... fragile. She already walks half in this world and half in worlds neither of them can reach.

Melantha tastes ashes. Melantha feels loneliness. Feels grief.

And wakes.

--

The morning after they all agree to try and adjust their dreams, Melantha makes sure Erich knows, and if he knows how to get a hold of Tamsin they have to let her know, too: she couldn't get Erich into her dream. So that sucks. She says again she'll try to do something different, she'll try, because the reality is:

this is going to drive her insane if it goes on long enough. She knew a woman, when she was younger, who went mad from nightmares, from not sleeping. The woman killed herself. Melantha doesn't say any of that. She just says she'll keep trying.

--

And this time she doesn't realize it's a dream until after she's tried to summon Erich.

And the next time she doesn't realize it's a dream until after she's tried to summon Erich and until after she's started walking into the wood.

And the next time she doesn't realize it's a dream until after she's tried to summon Erich and until after she's started walking into the wood and until after she's reached out and put her hand on one of the trees.

wake

The wood is lovely and dark and deep and she knows the words, everyone knows the words, knows the way they paint the world and the wood is lovely and dark and deep and silent. The cedars are so damnably silent in the snow and also; so rich, even in the midst of winter, those lush, low-sweeping branches that fringe the wood's edge are different here, dead needles underfoot, the hush of the wind swaying the treetops.

The wood feels warm; comfortingly warm beneath hands and her feet are near-silent and the hush that she is aware of only deepens as she hikes through those straight-marching trunks.

The sky is gone and most of the light; the shadows too. She loses track of the smoke in the sky, but points herself toward it or perhaps, perhaps she simply intends to go there, and so she does.

Maybe it is the scent, the acrid flare of it against her soft palette that she follows.

Or perhaps she has walked this path before; too many times before, the wend and the warp of it beneath the silent trees.

--

Soon, or perhaps not soon but some time later the smoke thickens. Billows through the air like drifts of morning mist, ghostlike between the branches. There is a clearing and she sees the clearing and in the clearing the pyre is smoldering, sputtering through the shrouded body-of-a-man wrapped in a winding cloth. Two figures at the edge of the clearing shade their eyes against stinging smoke, sort through the hewn wood and found-branches for something dry, and aged, and ready to catch light: a stoop-shouldered, humpbacked old woman,

and a boy, of eight or nine years.

Melantha

She's been dreaming for too many nights now to think of things like poetry. At least: when she's asleep. She keeps drawing what could be an anthology illustration for Robert Frost in her waking hours, sketching. The dream is depressing, is depressive, and she feels sapped by it even though nothing is happening to her. She still sleeps. She just feels flattened out, feels greyed out.

Feels like she's been walking forever when she finds them, and she is unsure of how many nights it has been now, wonders now how many times she has gotten this far, how many times she has choked on smoke, coughed it out, pulled her sleeve over her nose and mouth to try and filter out something that isn't real at all.

Her eyes sting and water. And then she just starts crying, because of the fire, and because of the man wrapped upon it, and the little boy, and the things she has lost. At least the tears moisten her eyes. She doesn't think the emotions come from the dream; they come from her, because she remembers sometimes, and it kills her. Erich was cast out, but... at least his family is still alive. And it's such a self-pitying thought she never voices it, never really even allows herself to think it, but

it's true, isn't it?

Melantha wants to talk to them, but now doesn't seem like the right time. It's a funeral. She wipes her eyes and walks over, slowly,

starts searching through the wood with them for more to put on the pyre.

wake

Their eyes are dry; the old woman and the boy. She is here because she was made to be here because she was meant to be here because she is always here. See her hands; the splinters beneath her nails. See the steady strangeness in the way she lifts her head and swings her eyes to watch Melantha as she arrives; as she finds wood. As she adds it to the pyre.

The boy, blonde haired and blue-eyed, also turns to watch Melantha as she enters the clearing and he is not steady but - something else. Stretched and withheld perhaps, tense as he watches her bend over and select the most seasoned bit of deadfall to toss onto the pyre.

Something about that motion brings the boy to life. The dull thud of the wood against the lifeless body, the hollowness within: whatever it is, he is in immediate motion, lurching out of the grasp of the old woman's gnarled hands, launching himself toward the body on the pyre, tearing at the shroud.

I hate you. That to the old woman as he evades her grasp. I hate you all. I hate him. I hate you. I hate you," that is to Melantha: direct, wild, furious but somehow without venom or rancor, oh no: Melantha recognizes all to well the impetuous, enduring grief of a child. "Everyone keeps leaving. I just want you all to stay. I hate you. I hate you."

The boy is all motion; he attacks the shrouded body then throws himself into the wood and oh the woods absorb him, as if he were one of their own. A few, brief seconds of thrashing echoes through the underbrush, see, and then nothing, nothing.

That silence again. The silhouette of a single crow flushed dark against the sky.

The crackle of the flames.

The shroud has slipped down from the body's face. An ordinary man, not remarkable anyway.

He appears to be sleeping.

The old woman is lurching toward her, three-legged - no, that is a walking stick.

--

And Melantha, wakes.

Melantha

[ONOZ]

Melantha

Blonde hair, blue eyes. Could be Erich's brother, thinks he's Erich's brother. The brother Erich doesn't have, the brother Erich insists is real, real, real though. She moves, he moves, and he throws wood, running at the pyre.

Melantha yells at him to stop, don't do that, no --!

He hates so much. And he hates her but she doesn't feel hate. She hurts with him, hates with him, yes: she understands. Everyone keeps leaving and Melantha is weeping again, openly. The boy runs. He runs into the wood and the woman is coming toward her and Melantha hates her, too, hates her because she remembers someone else, not so old, coming when her mother died, raising her, taking her away when her father died and her brothers died and her other brothers ran away.

"No!" she snaps at the woman. "I don't want you!"

And runs into the woods after the boy, runs into the dark with him, after him, for him, is him,

but wakes. There are tears on her face again.

Erich

wake

He is sleeping. He is sleeping in a room. He is sleeping in a nascent, idealized memory-of-a-room, an idea-of-things. Clapboard, windowglazing. Sun washing through trim lace curtains. The threadbare quilt beneath his fingertips, tangled in the curve of a fist. Morning always comes like this, a gullet full of light. His face slack against the pillow. Never any case, just the ticking that has the peculiar and intermediate taste of dust suspended in sunlight.

The fire’s died down. There’s a chill in the air. His first and second and third instincts are to burrow back into the cocoon of warmth trapped between mattress and quilt, but like clockwork -

- like clockwork he can hear the front door swinging open. Slamming closed after, the slap of the warped frame of the screen against the solid wood of the jam. It is morning. It is always morning.

--

The furnishings are solid and solidly plain. Hand-hewn, by clever though not fine hands. Only the ornate stand in the corner - rich, mahoghany, intricately carved - in anything more than serviceable. Dust has settled over everything; even his skin. He can taste it in the back of his mouth, on his tongue. The air is parched and dry. Everything is thirsty.

Everyone is thirsty.

Solid footsteps on solid stairs, with a beat as rapid as a rabbit's heart headed toward his room. He knows they're coming. He knows before the door swings open the face he'll see. The boy with a quick-laced grin and cheeks red from the cold -

"Ma says get up!"

- who launches himself toward the bed and the threadbare comforter and the wash of light through the half-remembered lace curtain, toward the middle of that room.

Erich

Wakefulness, sudden-slow, the way it always is on these brilliant mornings when summer's warmth is just beginning to shade into autumn. Morning is when you feel that bite in the air most. That nip, that snip, that everpresent reminder that nothing, nothing, nothing is forever,

not even those summer days stretching into summer nights, the cicadas in the trees, the stars overhead.

He is awakening. He opens his eyes and the room is so familiar and warm and it's his room, isn't it, and this is his life and that is his -- what? brother? (he doesn't have a brother.) such things are loose and liquid in the mind right now, hard to hold. He rolls onto his back and then the boy is barreling into his chest, knocking a breath loose from his ribs. Ma says get up.

"Too early," Erich mumbles. It is too early. Look how bright the light is.

wake

Too early, Erich says.

And Erich wakes up, and he's saying those words aloud and feeling the solid thud of the boy against his chest. The scent of hay in the air, the bite of something that is not winter and is perhaps spring. Or autumn; when the earth wakes, or it goes to sleep.

--

Then, again.

--

Then, again.

--

Then,

He is sleeping. He is sleeping in a room. He is sleeping in a nascent, idealized memory-of-a-room, an idea-of-things. Clapboard, windowglazing. Sun washing through trim lace curtains. The threadbare quilt beneath his fingertips, tangled in the curve of a fist. Morning always comes like this, a gullet full of light. His face slack against the pillow. Never any case, just the ticking that has the peculiar and intermediate taste of dust suspended in sunlight -

all of it. All of it.

He doesn't have a brother. He has this brother, a boy with blue eyes and blond hair who smells of hay and woodsmoke, those solid scents wrapped up into his hair, still damp from where someone tried to smooth down a cowlick.

"Lazybones."

- returns the boy, with a grin, sitting back on his haunches, ready to wrestle or something, grinning ear to ear.

"Ma says you're always sleepin'. Me, I've been up for hours. Hours and hours. You don't hurry [ ]" the name slews strange; goes warped behind his ears, somehow, " - 'll eat up all the biscuits and all you'll get is porridge."

Erich

[int+enig! IS THIS REAL LIFE.]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Erich

Time skips. Backwards, like a needle over a scratched record. He's sleeping again and it is a golden, gold-sifted room and it is morning, it is always morning, it is always the cusp of a season,

spring or fall,

beginnings or endings or beginning again,

and he is waking up because his brother-who-does-not-exist is pouncing onto him and telling him --

"I can't eat porridge," Erich says automatically. "I can't eat biscuits either. I can maybe try the gravy if there's a ton of sausage in it. Otherwise I'm gonna have to eat eggs or ... "

Like Ariadne's thread, that. Shining and golden in the murk. Murk doesn't have to be dark, see, it just means you can't see clearly. He's in a sort of murk here: it's a dream-murk because he can't see clearly through it, can't see the truth, but there's the thread and he picks it up: I can't eat biscuits and porridge, and he follows it backbackback up winding staircases and endless halls, up through the layers of his unconscious and his subconscious and his almost-conscious to remember:

hey, yeah. He can't eat anything but meat because he is a werewolf, and he is a werewolf who no longer has a home like this, he has a different home now, he has sisters, he has spirit-sisters and he has one blood-sister and nowhere does he have any brothers so, so,

so this is not real life. No. Erich sits up, he scrubs his face with his hands. "You're not my brother," he says to the boy, which is sort of a mean thing to say except well it's his dream so that's really him, right? "Are you me?"

wake

This is what he says now. This is what he will always say.

You're not my brother - - and the boy, who does resemble him in the way that all blonde-haired and blue-eyed boys must resemble Erich, when they are still young; when they are still open-featured and unfinished - sits sharply back as if he has been backhanded. Swallows hard and frowns at Erich, something

troubled

etched between his brows. As if he were momentarily unsure of where he is. As if he himself were on the verge of waking. As if there were, beyond and behind the curtains of the room, some other room, some greater room, knife edged and even more real than the room they inhabit, but -

like a dog emerging from some body of water the boy shakes it off.

"I'm not you. Jerk."

He's leaning back, unwinding his legs, jumping down to the sunstained floor, a rag-rug the only protection for bare feet against the cold. And Erich knows - somehow knows, with a deep and abiding conviction - that is is often very cold here.

"You can eat biscuits. You eat them all the time. I don't care. I hope [name-slew] gets them all." Mumbling as he backs away and grabs a hat out of the back pocket of his overalls and turns to run back the way he came."

For all that bravado, beneath it the boy still looks like he has something caught in his throat.

Like a knife, perhaps.

Something bladed.

Erich

[what is up with boyo!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 6, 6) ( success x 2 )

wake

The boy's real. Erich can feel the warmth of his skin and smell the sourness of his morning breath; can see the bits of sleep in the inner corners of his eyes. The boy's real; Erich can see his own reflection in the surfaces of the boy's irises, can see the brief and sharp contraction of the pupils as the boy absorbs Erich's question and blinks and reels. Erich does not believe that the boy is evil, nor does he seem to be a piece of Erich's mind. That flash was like the flash of another dreamer, briefly brought to consciousness that this may be a dream. A sort of subliminal panick outlined in the flash of light across his eyes.

Erich

Something there -- some shred, some grass-leaf, some tiny edge of awareness. Like a sleep awakening himself, the boy, though: that's the thing, isn't it? Erich isn't really awake. Neither of them are awake.

Erich's words are caught in his throat. Like a knife, yes. Something bladed. Or just something beating. Like his heart. Yes, his heart, a great thud of WHOA and HEY I THINK I GET IT and

just past that, doubt, doubt, doubt washing over him. He's not smart like Charlotte or Melantha, not intuitive like them, maybe he's wrong. They boy is running off: Erich calls after him, suddenly feeling-bad, "Uh, tell Ma I'll be down in a sec, okay?"

Only, when the boy is gone, Erich doesn't get up and go downstairs. He gets up: he looks for clothes, or maybe he can just imagine clothes onto his body, and if so then god don't let this be the sort of dream where he gets to school and then realizes he's not wearing pants, but anyway the point is: he gets clothes on somehow and then he goes to the window and pushes it open and looks out and --

if he can, climbs out, drops down, starts jogging in ... some direction, any direction. Starts looking for Melantha, or Charlotte, or even Tamsin.

wake

- and then,

Erich wakes up.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

eleusis

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Erich

He is sleeping. He is sleeping in a room. He is sleeping in a nascent, idealized memory-of-a-room, an idea-of-things. Clapboard, windowglazing. Sun washing through trim lace curtains. The threadbare quilt beneath his fingertips, tangled in the curve of a fist. Morning always comes like this, a gullet full of light. His face slack against the pillow. Never any case, just the ticking that has the peculiar and intermediate taste of dust suspended in sunlight.

The fire’s died down. There’s a chill in the air. His first and second and third instincts are to burrow back into the cocoon of warmth trapped between mattress and quilt, but like clockwork -

He rolls over in his own bed.

He finds himself listening for a familiar voice that he has never heard before all day long.

eleusis

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Melantha

Someone is dead,

and even the trees know it.

The trees have a dark and marching confederacy and she stands at the edge of the woods. There is a road, there is always a road, it both rises and falls from where she stands, but what she knows is the wood and the verge and the bracken. Something is falling, thick flakes drifting eccentric in the bright cold air. The sun is rising. She forgets – why does she forget? – what has been done.

Opens her mouth to taste the snow –

- but no, no. That is ash on her tongue.

Melantha wakes. No matter how many times she brushes her teeth, she cannot get the taste out of her mouth.

eleusis

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Tamsin

Why does that still clear lake remind her of the sea. Why does she stand on the scree at its edge with the wind scouring down from the heights, raw and bitter in the – failing light? Dawning light? – in the slanting light that consents to touch only the edges of this dark valley. Why does she long for it. Why does that longing –

ache

in her throat. The rip-tide roar of fire through the still-green wood. The wood is always green; it has no time to cure. The dead don’t know. It’s only the living. The water is skinned with ice, but she knows where the ice is thinnest, and when she takes the hatchet in hand -

Tamsin wakes. The rest of the day, she can feel the splintering wood of its handle in her hand.

eleusis

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Thomas

He can count the knots in the pine, all tongue and groove. Knows them the way he knows – what else do you know like that? Familiar as a waking dream except that it slides away, inevitably, invariably, when no longer in focus. Every morning he does this; looks up. Just as he’s crossing the threshold.

There’s no why lodged in his throat.

There just is.

Thomas wakes. Immediately, and entirely, wherever he slept. He wakes. He wakes. He wakes.

Melantha

D:

eleusis

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Keisha

Morning light like a waking stain on the wood.

It is a chopping block, she reminds herself. And that is why it smells so thoroughly of blood.

"The first death follows another," he says, quietly, his voice warm in the back of her mind. She always remembers the shape of his mouth. "Everyone who says differently is a liar - "

Keisha wakes. In her own bed, in the warmth of her own room.

eleusis

They have all now started dreaming. The dreams are as vivid as their waking hours; perhaps more so. This is all they recall.

[OOC: from here on, if I miss a day or miss a day with your character, your character still has the dream. It just stays static, i.e. will be the same as the last dream he/she experienced.]

eleusis

For tonight: c'est tout!

Monday, March 17, 2014

wake

Monday, March 17, 2014

Erich

He is sleeping. He is sleeping in a room. He is sleeping in a nascent, idealized memory-of-a-room, an idea-of-things. Clapboard, windowglazing. Sun washing through trim lace curtains. The threadbare quilt beneath his –

Erich wakes. He wakes, in his own bed. He wakes in his own home. He wakes.

wake

Monday, March 17, 2014

Melantha

Someone is dead,

and even the trees know it.

The trees have a dark and marching confederacy and she stands at the edge of the woods. There is a road, there is always a road, it both rises and falls from where she stands, but what she knows is the wood and the verge and the bracken. Something –

How she rises from the dream, inhaling, long and deep. Expecting the metallic tang of snow on her tongue.

wake

Monday, March 17, 2014

Thomas

The line is five deep and does not seem to move. There’s some disturbance up ahead; a dispute over the pricing of Snickers and Mug Root Beer that escalates with the slow inevitability of an avalanche and he should be irritated because Jesus fuck these things are not that complicated and all he’s here for is a box of kitchen matches except there is a sort of bubble, see, around him. The murmur of stranger’s conversations all around him muted, dampened, drawn down and out and when he looks up and catches a glimpse of his reflection in the shining slide of the cooler doors –

- he has no idea what, or whom, he sees.

wake

Monday, March 17, 2014

Keisha

It takes forever to wash the paint off her hands. It is red; it is crimson. It makes her hands look rather like they were gloved in blood. The water runs; her reflection skewed in the faucet and the mirror is cloudy, covered with steam. The water runs; sluices through the viscous –

is it paint? Is it?

Sluices through the red clings. She turns up the heat until it is scalding. Picks up a pumice stone, scrubs until her hands are raw. Scrubs: thoughtlessly, and furiously, until her hands are raw.

There is still red paint beneath her nails.

wake

And, c'est tout!

wake

Monday, March 17, 2014

Tamsin

Why does that still clear lake remind her of the sea. Why does she stand on the scree at its edge with the wind scouring down from the heights, raw and bitter in the – failing light? Dawning light? – in the slanting light that consents to touch only the edges of this dark valley. Why does she long for it. Why does that longing –

ache

in her throat. The sound of –

She comes to consciousness like a blind man comes to light. Wakes, in her own bed. In her own body. In her own place. Wakes.

Saturday, March 15, 2014

wake Erich wake

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Some mornings you wake with a dream on your tongue. The memory of it thick, see?

but just beyond remembering.

He wakes with lightning on his tongue, forked and bright. All day. All day, the salt and mercury of it linger in his mouth. Something’s coming.

Or

perhaps

something’s here.

wake Melantha wake

Saturday, March 15, 2014 Evensong

There is a name that she does not remember. It catches between her teeth. It slides beneath the root of her tongue. The glimpse of a face she does not know in the mirror over the sink of the restroom of the bar-and-grille.

The bulb is going out.

The door is swinging closed.

Everything is empty. Everything is full.

Is that a mirror, or

a window, or

– oh yes, now she remembers –

a door.

wake Tamsin wake

Saturday, March 15, 2014

The room is wrong. The window is off-center. The corners skew, and she notices it while she is brushing her teeth; a mouthful of minty foam, the scent of something missing curling soft in the air. As if everything had been taken apart while she slept, and fitted back together by someone who remembered the space, imperfectly, impatiently. Or perhaps merely: not well.

All day she thinks of paths; of winding roads; of crumbling gates. Sails, somehow, full of a westering wind, painted in the light of a falling sun.

The Blues

Calden White

Well, Eva let Calden pick the spot this time, and that is why they are not at a classy, discreet, subtly luxurious whiskey bar. They are, instead, at a blues joint where the music is loud and live and always excellent; where the air always seems a little smoky smokeless-bar-laws notwithstanding, where the furnishings are a little on the dive side and the clientele runs the gamut.

They are not by the stage, where some sultry middle-aged bluestress is bawling her heart out over dirty bass, slow drums. They are not by the bar, either, where patrons jostle for precious space and the bartender's attention. They've found a happy medium: off to the side, under an old photograph of the place circa 1970, sharing a small table with wobbly legs.

There's a well-stocked bar here. There's food, too: what passes for food, anyway. Microwaveable nommables, chips, maybe some salted almonds. Calden has a generous glass of scotch on the table. He has a plate of BBQ rib sandwiches, too, the meat unrecognizable, the bread imbued with that characteristic texture of freeze-thaw.

Eva

"Interesting choice," Éva greets Calden with the faintest of smirks as she finds the table, dark eyes rising with a distinctly wry expression to touch on the photograph over the wobbly table, then sweeping downward to take in the less-than-appetizing appearance of the freeze-thawed bread. Someone's moving after her from the bar, a shadow behind her that resolves into their waitress or possibly the tender as she removes her jacket, drapes it over the back of her chair, and slips in opposite the Fiann.

That's her drink, ordered at the bar and delivered before she has even managed to sit. Whiskey, not Scotch. Local whiskey too, neat, along with a small bowl of smoked almonds. It seems that she will not assay into the realm of the microwaveables, and prefers salty bar food when actual food is not available.

"How are you?" She asks, taking up her whiskey as the waitress leaves. Glancing down at the play of light across its surface. A brief pause, then - with a sparing directness. "Heard anything more from or about your recent guest?"

Calden White

"Best blues bar in the state," Calden replies, utterly unashamed. He rises, of course, as Eva sheds her jacket. He is a gentleman.

They take their respective seats. She has smoked almonds; he picks up one of his sandwiches and demolishes a third in a bite. For a little while they are occupied by the thanking and tipping of the waitress, and then by the simple pleasure of settling in.

She inquires of his guest, then. And Calden smiles, brief and fond, wiping his fingertips on a napkin before folding it across his mouth.

"She's down at the Caern now," he says. "Basic training. Every other weekend they let her come home with me. I usually swing by after I drop the cattle off. We go up to the ranch and the boys spoil her because they're trying to make it up to her.

"I furnished up the spare room downstairs for her. I was going to put in frilly pink, because that's what girls like, right? But she wanted raw wood and pictures of horses. So now her room looks like my dad's, and they both seem pretty happy with that.

"Maybe when she's got a better grip on her temper," he adds, "Ellie can come up and play with her."

Eva

"Girls are always more surprising that you might imagine." Éva returns; quietly.

Lifting her whiskey and taking a few smoked almonds up into one elegant hand. Sifting some of the excess salt from her fingertips as she cups the nuts themselves in her palm. There's a frission to her expression which is subtle but mostly supressed. An echo of his fondness, more distant, overlaid with that complex matrix of awareness and quietly attenuated empathy that framed her response even on the night they first met Tenderfoot.

Then, a quiet nick of her tongue against the roof of her mouth. This resolution where her focus pulls in: on Calden, in this precise moment.

"I think she's lucky she found you. And I'm glad you're able to give her - " a pause; a brief inhale. " - someplace to be home." Not call: be. She is a trial lawyer; the choice of words is deliberate, precise. " - though I'm not sure that she and Ellie will really be able to play together. Is she really a child anymore? Perhaps it's not fair to say otherwise but - "

The change is a stark one.

"I wouldn't mind them meeting. Knowing one another, but I don't know that they'll ever play."

Calden White

More surprising than he might imagine: Calden's smile widens briefly, turns a touch rueful.

"I have to admit I don't know much about them. I have four brothers and a lot more male cousins than female. I suspect you weren't the frilly-and-pink type either, though."

A small pause, then. Another bite of his sandwich, and another, and then the first is gone. He looks at the second one. Doesn't start in on it yet.

"Truth be told," he says -- with care, and with his eyes lifting to Eva's, "I sometimes suspect Ellie won't be a child for very long, either. It might be good for her to have someone like Jill around. And Jill, to have someone like Ellie."

Eva

"You're better off not to think of girls as girls," her voice is low; her eyes gleam in the faint light. She picks up the glass by the rim and lifts it to her curving mouth. Inhales; see. Draws the scent of the whiskey over her palate, then drinks. " - but as individuals. Makes it easier."

Is she teasing him? She may well be; there's no correction to be found in her tone, just a certain lilt that is not as poignant as rue, not so pointed as sarcasm. Call it: bemused.

That bemusement stills and then dies on her mouth and in her eyes as she continues. He can perhaps see a certain sort of door - well - closing. A certain composure asserting itself.

A brief breath, sharply indrawn. "I will protect the sanctity of Ellie's childhood until I have no other choice. I want her to have time. As much time as she can. And I'll fight the world for it, if I have to."

Calden White

Girls are individuals too. That's basically what Eva just told Calden, who is now wearing the faint smirk of someone who has been subtly and rounded schooled and knows it.

The conversation moves on, though, and with it that smirk. They are serious now: they are talking about her daughter. They are talking about the destiny that they both, it seems, suspect lies in store for Ellie. Eva is quietly ferocious; Calden would expect nothing less of her. Calden, however, is more measured. He is quiet a moment. He sips his scotch. He sets it down and he looks at the way the light refracts through it, scatters across the tabletop.

"Maybe if it's just the world you have to fight, you'd win," he says after a while. "But I think in the end you'd have to fight Ellie, too, if you wanted her to just stay a child a little longer."

Eva

This is not the moment where Éva gives in; perhaps there is never a moment where Éva gives in. Her eyes are subtly flashing and there is a rather steely determination to the set of her jaw. There is no concession in her face or manner; just a mild shift of her gaze, from his features, to some far corner of the room.

Then back; a lilting glance. The glass of whiskey is still held lightly in her right hand. She swirls it, an elegant motion of her wrist.

"Did I ever tell you that I met your royal?" An arched brow. The subject change is deliberate. "At a legal aid fundraiser at a gallery in Sante Fe. I was impressed.

"With her not the art."

The conversation shifts; expands; contracts, changes. They finish their drinks.

They each order another.

He is a gentleman: he walks her to her car.

She is a gentlewoman: she then gives him a ride back to his.

So it goes.