kore_logs | this city is killing me

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this city is killing me

Who: River & Daneel followed by River & Ned
What: Now that everyone is back to themselves there are people to look after and friends to make. Alliances. What have you.
When: Afternoon and evening of day 64
Where: With Daneel on the beach and with Ned in his room

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Ned is lying on his side, curled tightly around the hurt. It is lodged in his chest, a physical thing, poisonous and heavy. His eyes are open but dull, staring blankly into the dim blue shadows of the unlit room. He's sunk very low, since Daneel left. It's always been worse for him, at night. It was the same after his mother died. He'd gone through those first few months (years, if he's honest with himself) at the Longborough School for Boys wearing a mask of indifference during the day, but he couldn't keep it up when the sun was down. That was when the sadness snuck up on him, tip-toed its way into the dormitory (between the rows of other boys quietly sleeping) and hollowed him out. Left him a shell pretending to be a boy.

His lassitude is such that he doesn't even flinch when, out of nowhere, River is wrapping her arms around him. Before she speaks, he thinks maybe he's having another nightmare, like the first. Or perhaps it is another monster here to gobble him up - like so many others. He can't imagine caring one way or another. It's too exhausting. All the panic, all the grief, all the foolish hope: it isn't worth it. He doesn't want it.

But then Ned recognizes her voice and it shatters the spell of calm despair. "River?" He pulls his knees closer to his chest, squeezes his eyes shut. "What are you doing here?"

Edited 2013-04-24 00:49 (UTC)

"Taking care of my family." She makes sure not to hold so tightly as to prevent Ned from curling in tighter, since that seems to be what he wants to do; not to mention the height disparity, knees tucked or otherwise. River has always been a bit on the small side of things. "That's what I do, and practice makes perfect. Like any good thing, any art. I'll take care." A pause; River is a lot more uncertain about this than she'd like to let on.

Ned was happy and now there's this, and it isn't fair because it isn't something she can physically fight, and it's too important to just be an impartial observer. Ned is too important. So on another day, perhaps, they could commiserate over the problems of actually caring.

"I'm sorry."

The word 'family' echoes in his head, becomes like a lead weight tied around his ankle, dragging him deeper down into a grief that is cold and black and airless like the bottom of a frozen lake. Because he doesn't have a family. Doesn't get to have one. The timing is too perfect for it to be a coincidence. Jesse had been fine (for certain definitions of fine) all his time here, until Ned came along. Until he'd offered his friendship. And then just as Ned had started to rely on the existence of his jokes and his goodness and his particular smile and his way of speaking, the universe had snatched him away.

The rational half of Ned's mind knows that it isn't his fault. It's self-centered (and a little insane) to feel responsible in a matter he's only tangentially involved in. But that rational half has its shadow. Half-formed ideas about curses springing from the way his very being breaks the laws of nature, about divine punishment for his sins, about some faceless scientist engineering a sick joke (is there any difference between the three?) flicker through his mind.

And what if River is next? It makes sense, according to his tortured line of logic. The parallels are inescapable. Jesse had said he'd take care of Ned, when he was so tired and frightened of the nightmares he'd gone days without sleep. (Ned hadn't told River about the nightmares, he remembers, hadn't wanted to worry her while she had an opportunity to be quiet and tranquil and still, like a tree). Jesse had curled up next to him then, the way River is now. And Ned had been grateful for the company. Ned hadn't worried about Jesse, then, because he was a werewolf, had healing powers, could look after himself.

But apparently, he couldn't. So how is Ned supposed to just accept that River's telepathy and her ability to fight will keep her safe, when her name comes to the top of the list of things he's scheduled to lose?

Because it's a when, not an if. That, he's sure of, in this frame of mind. After twenty years of precedent he'd tried a new outlook, had let people get close. Had let River and Charles and Jesse and the rest of them convince him it was safe to do so. But it isn't. The last week has taught him that. Jesse died. Charles turned on him. What horrible thing does the Almighty have in store for River?

(He thinks of it in these terms. The old Sunday school terminology creeps its way back in under the walls, uninvited, when he's wounded and vulnerable and distracted.)

"You deserve better family than me," he whispers, wishing there were some way he could take it back, could make himself not care about River (and he does care, too much, that's the problem) or anyone. "You shouldn't have to-" he trails off, silence standing in for all this, and all River's done for him in the past. Saving him. Being kind to him. Being careful with him, patient with him, despite the fact that he's done nothing to earn it.

"Hush," she says direct into his ear, with no real weight or displeasure but rather like shushing someone who has cried to the point of hiccuping pains, "this poisonous foolishness won't tolerate."

As that's what it is: foolishness. Ned says River deserves better because part of Ned wants River to walk away, to not look back. Ned knows what abandonment feels like, knows he can live with that weight and that loss. It is uniquely different from having someone taken away, someone being hurt; if she leaves, then Ned has a chance to rebuild that distance between himself and caring, has a chance to decide he doesn't care anymore, and while she can respect the desire she wont tolerate it by a long shot.

She presses her cheek to the space between his shoulder blades and squeezes his hands through sheets and comforters. "You deserve me. You deserve happiness. You deserve protection. You deserve love." In the absence of the near dichotomy Charles and Erik represented (one mourning and fallen prey to hubris' folly, the other vanished without a trace) she finds herself swinging between the two extremes like a pendulum whose tip has been honed sharp and slicing. It's a desperate fierceness that settles into her bones. Jim Kirk is gone, Soobie is gone, Darwin is gone and she looked at Cass upon waking with the voices of so many flooding her head and still isn't sure if she was seeing or remembering.

She'd told Daneel that Ned built walls and painted them bright colors, certain the contents were much darker and that's half true; but even the walls are cracked, and the ruins are the walls, incorporating as much of the exterior as the interior it hides. She thinks about the art of cracked pottery and melted gold in the new seams, creating art out of things that were once shattered, making them worth more in the repair. She thinks about the ghosts of warmth that Ned believes he doesn't possess anymore, because he doesn't deserve, as if it were ever that clear cut.

As if terrible things didn't happen to good people, as if bad people didn't rise to power all the time, every day.

A house that once held five souls is down to two, possibly one, and River doesn't know what to do with this other than cling tightly to the ones she can. "Maybe I'm scared too," she says softly, "but nothing in this 'verse or the next can stop me."

Edited 2013-04-25 18:30 (UTC)

He hears the words, but he can't bring himself to believe them. Not yet. All the same, River's saying them, meaning them, and it had never occurred to him in all the years of solitude how much it would hurt if someone were to ever care for him.

It seems an impossible combination: River is good, River knows him, River cares about him. He cannot make the three compatible in his mind. Not all at once. He can imagine someone good who knows him but doesn't care about him, or someone who is good and cares about him without really knowing him (Daneel his mind supplies cruelly, or Jesse, or so many of the others), but how can anyone who is good and really knows him - what he is, what he's done - and still manage to care about him?

But there she is, impossibly, a stalwart if small presence curled against his back, refusing to leave.

More than her reassurances, more than her closeness, it is thought that she might be frightened, too, that stirs him from the suffocating hold of his sad stupor. It is his Achilles heel, the fatal crack in his fortifications. He doesn't want River to be scared. He knows that she is braver and stronger than he could ever be and hardly needs him to play the white knight, but being brave and strong doesn't mean happy or unafraid.

Why is he worrying about harm that might come to her, when for all he knows she is hurting right now, this second? He isn't psychic, like she is, doesn't know automatically what's happened to her and what's going on inside her. His concerns about being cursed, about her future, give way to more immediate worry.

Had she known Jesse, too? Or had someone else been hurt or killed or gone missing? Was she feeling responsible for not keeping everyone safe - him included - the way she'd so badly wanted to? Had someone hurt her, while he was a dryad, quieter and more peaceful but also more vulnerable without the ability to hear into the minds of others? He'd been so beset over the course of the week that it seems possible if not likely. River could still fight, he'd seen that when she rescued him from Charlie, but- but there was Charles and his soft words, and perhaps others like him, making it impossible. Why had he let himself get swept away by his grief, why hadn't he checked in with her immediately, made sure she was alright, first?

Ned stirs faintly, knows by now that he doesn't need to speak, that River can sense all of this, but he still wants to say something. "Are you alright?" He thinks of River's brother, so far away, thinks that if she's going to insist on thinking of him as family, that ought to go both ways. Ought to mean he's keeping her safe and happy and whole, by all rights. Or as close as either of them are ever going to get.

She hadn't intended to open a floodgate of worry that merely re-centered itself in the present instead of a possible future, but here it is and she can't turn away from it either. So instead she just touches Ned's shoulder briefly through the safety of several layers of bedclothes. "Jesse is my friend too." Jesse made art and Jesse understood art as a communicative device of suffering or insanity or whatever. Jesse is a good person, by River's measure, and she can't even do anything because of the rules and decisions on who or what is responsible when who or what is responsible can't be held accountable.

Not that she should think on that too much; if she does, then by that logic she should lock herself up for any number of deaths (she can count them all on a good day and this is a bad day, so). "I set myself to swing between True North and South, and the points of the compass have worn away. Erik is missing. Soobie is gone. The house stands empty with only ghosts of their own memories inside. Everything changes so quickly here and ...adaption takes time. Time we don't have. What if control is lost? Who will get hurt? How can it be fixed?"

A sigh. "Nothing in the 'verse can stop me. That isn't good, Ned, and neither am I."

It is strange to Ned, knowing that Jesse was River's friend, too. That she is mourning just as much as he is. The same is true of Galen, Kenzi, anyone else who knew Jesse. Ned's past losses had been intensely private ones, shared by no one around him. There had been a funeral, yes, and a conglomeration of adults who shed tears for his mother while he stood there like a stone. But then, once he was at boarding school, no one knew that his mother had ever lived, much less that she had died and left him empty and aching in ways that, even if they had known, they wouldn't have understood. None of them knew what his father had promised him or about his silence and absence stretching through all the years that followed. So it is strange to think of someone else sharing that hurt with a hurt of their own.

"Erik's missing?"

He hadn't known that, hadn't realized. Hadn't thought to check in. Ned knows that Erik and River are close, that he is close with Charles as well - and how must he be handling it? Ned has never been able to hold a grudge: not really, not for any length of time. He can't stand the thought of so many frightened friends, so many mourning lovers, so many people like River and Daneel left rattling around in empty houses that used to be full of people.

The weight of it (all that loss, all that sadness - not just him, but everyone here) descends on him, crushing the breath out of him. How are any of them supposed to put up with it? How are they supposed to just go on with their lives in this state of heightened uncertainty? He remembers what Daneel had told him earlier, about everything being temporary, about it meaning he needed to hold on more tightly to what he had in the present. But the transience of things here is on fast-forward, is too much for him to keep up with. He can't cope.

"I wish I could promise you I would never disappear," he says very quietly, "I hate that I can't make that promise. I hate that you were Jesse's friend too and he's gone. I hate that Erik's gone." And that's it, he thinks. That pressure on his chest right now isn't sadness: it's hate. "I hate this place. I hate the people behind the cameras. I hate that they can do anything they want with us."

"Good." River moves to place her head between Ned's shoulder blades, hands fisting and then relaxing against the blankets he's wrapped around. What else can she say? She knows he can't promise these things, knows that it hurts to loose and be lost, knows that she can't make any real promises of her own. All she can do, the only thing she can do, is her best and her best, in this place, is hideously limited. "Well placed, and well timed."

Maybe it isn't fair to need everyone else to be one thing or another so she can recent herself, but then again not a single blessed thing about this entire situation strikes her as fair. She should know when people vanish, should know where they go and how they get there; she could've covered half the surface of a moon back home with knowing, and here it's trapped, contained in a bubble that would make her panic if she didn't find other outlets for her frustration.

If she didn't think it would be useless to scream at the sky. Amusing to her captors to see her strain against invisible chains. She knows how the humor of such men turn, how they tell themselves they work with the greater good in mind while also telling themselves that the person they're changing is barely worth that title at all.

River refuses to be useless, or amusing, so River fights the compulsion to let lose and get lost, to chase the echo of her own screaming in her mind until she remembers all the words for starlight in any language she's ever heard. She refuses to be a victim, refuses to accept and swallow and lose herself to madness or panic.

What would happen then? What of the people she promised to protect? It wouldn't get her home, she knows that much - those keeping them here care very little for the effects their lab rats have on the cage, on the other rats. If they care at all it's selective and conniving and untrue. All the things River doesn't want to be the tool of again.

"When it settles I'll give you a gift. A word. To you and one other. Like a break. Full stop. A safety measure."

Little by little her presence, her voice is uncurling the cold fingers of despair from around his ribcage. He still aches with sadness for Jesse, and now for Erik and the others who are gone, but at least, for the moment, River is demonstrably here with him and not going anywhere.

The hatred, too, budding and hard-edged, warms him from the inside. River doesn't discourage it, doesn't draw away in disappointment or fear. Because she is River, who knows what he is thinking without an effort, he knows she knows just how deep that hatred goes. How far he thinks it could go, if he ever had means and opportunity to exercise it against the people who brought them here and put them through this. She can see that, and still she isn't pulling away. She approves. Thinks he has a right to be angry, a right to feel wronged, and that means more than he can say.

"A word?"

Ned doesn't know what it means, doesn't know the significance, but River says it like it's important, so he believes her. What he doesn't know is...

"Safety for you or safety for me?"

Edited 2013-05-03 23:53 (UTC)

"For you in the instance. For both in the long run." She'd never forgive herself if she lost control or had it wrested from her just to hurt Ned. "When things settle, not a warning bell now, just a thought, a sign. It sounds like a song but so much does." She isn't concerned that she'll come unhinged now but it remains something to consider.

Simon had known. It makes sense to give it to Charles (she'll need Charles to find it in the first place) and Erik is still the only person she's met that she would trust with the ignition. But Simon had known, so Ned should know, because ...there are friends and there is this. These people, her family, her crew.

"One wish to have one wish to give; take you to the stars too."

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this city is killing me

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