adventure without risk is disneyland [closed]

[commentboxtroll]

Date & Time: 4/22 through 5/3
Location: From Exsilium to southern UE territory and back again.
Characters: Caesar Silverberg, Collette, Asami Sato, Stephanie Brown, Ellie Linton, Nash Latkje, Gamora, Balder, Nathan Summers, Khisanth, guest-starring Clive.
Summary: Over the channel and through the wastes to the UE's house we go.
Warnings: Violence, spiders, swearing highly likely.
Notes: Any format goes. Feel free to start your own threads outside the subsections; those are just guidelines, not rules. Timeline and info is here if needed (or there are any further questions).

[ on a boat. ]
[ wastelands. ]
[ spiders. ]
[ onward. ]
[ civilization. ]
[ compound. ]
[ space. ]

Comments

[whatsupcroc]

She was, wasn't she? Her chin comes up a little more, and she giggles. "Cooking is both easier and harder than I thought," she admits. It's something concerete to focus on. "But I haven't killed Caesar with it so far, so I can't be too terrible."

The cooking doesn't matter so much. Thinking more proactively about all of what Nash has said makes it easier to calm down and breathe . Adjusting to really knowing what it meant to work with people that much more fragile than you was something she could handle. Learning what she could give herself as goals here, ongoing, was going to depend on being able to work with the people she had here as teammates.

And Nash is also right: it's not bad remembering and reacting like a friend. These people are important to her. It's okay to be unnerved by them being hurt; but she does need to keep the faith. Not to mention reiterate to Ellie why throwing herself on Collette when she was conscious was poorly spent effort, or find some better plan of action to cover the noncombatants, like Caesar.

[latkje]

Nash shakes his head, in some good humor. "You don't know that. The slow deaths are the worst ones."

It seems like she's doing better— he raises to his toes, then back down again. The truth is this is the kind of stuff he was never trained for. Nash never wanted to be the sort of person written by what other people told him to do, but he had to wonder how he kept winding up here, alone in the wild, trying to make someone who was better than him learn how to see that.

Oh, well. It's better than getting peed on by dogs.

[whatsupcroc]

"Yeah," she agrees, amiable enough, "They really are." She might not be thinking of poisoning, mind briefly brushing on a old-new hurt with cancer, but regardless of cause, watching someone slip away like that...

No, she was doing it again. Forcibly steeling herself, Collette pulls her thoughts out of the bad places they're trying to go. "Sorry you've had to see any of those." In case he had. She doesn't know. What seems more reasonable, from what she knows of his world? There's so little, and most the framework is filled in by a lacking understanding of parts of her world in times long past.

Then there's magic on top of that, she reminds herself, And whatever else is there that Caesar doesn't bother mentioning.

She's paying enough attention now to take personal stock of herself, glancing down and pulling one leg in closer to examine the hole through the fabric at her thigh. "Hey Nash," she asks, voice steadier than it's been before now, "You don't happen to have a travel sewing kit or anything, do you?"

[latkje]

"Jeez. Let me check." He usually does have a needle and thread on him, at the least, but it's been a while and he's not sure if it's in the right pocket. (Not the right pocket. Words mean different things— that's why Nash liked them.)

After a moment of patting himself down theatrically, he produces a needle and a small spool of white thread.

[whatsupcroc]

She ends up giggling at the display, giving up on too much of an attempt at wiping snot and encrusting salt off her face as she watches Nash's melodramatics. "You're silly," is her proclamation, followed by, "This is going to look like such a hack job. Is that white?"

White on black and green was going to end up making her feel like Sally from the Nightmare Before Christmas. All patched up and holding herself together!

Not too ill-fit an association altogether, she figures, though she's less prone personally to trying to poison people to get away. (Details.)

[latkje]

"It's the easiest thread there is to find. I'm not really picky, since I always look good."

He can observe the metaphor, without her having to speak it aloud. Everyone needs to stitch themselves together, in times of war, or loss, or loneliness. Sometimes literally. But sometimes the literal stitching was the easiest kind to do.

[whatsupcroc]

Her fingers skirt the largest tear on her thigh, skirting past the memory of watching and realizing where the spider's fang had gone. It's a disconcerting memory, seeing your own blood but never feeling it, knowing logically what's happened with that illogical lack of pain and no lightheadedness, not yet.

She holds her hands out for the needle and thread. "Do you really?" She smiles. "Lucky. I hear some people actually have to work for that."

Collette knows what the end result will be, but it's better than sitting there and staring at the tears like that will make them go away. They're not the kind of wounds that heal all on their own, ignored in day to day existence. "Are you any good at mending, Mr. Always Looking Good? I'm not. My brother's better than both me and his wife, which is funny, since she still insisted on patching up whatever she could." Except for their awwkard little family. Phillip's wife hadn't been interested in working with that, not once the terrible edge of grief had faded from the loss of their mother, and the reality of "this might be longer than we thought" when a family of their own started taking over most her waking thoughts.

[latkje]

Well, that's a big question, whether or not she meant it to be. Twenty years ago, life had taught Nash that it was much easier to break something than to stitch it back together. Or maybe Nash had taught himself that, maybe it was his sister's locket, maybe it was swords through the chest. Those are the sorts of hows and whys he doesn't try to talk his way out of.

He tells himself, sometimes, that like garden flowers turned to dirt, you had to break things down to let them grow. Other times he told himself that being grown-up meant having things you were content not to know.

He doesn't say that, though. Instead he shrugs, ambivalent. "I've got quick fingers. But it's not the same thing."

[whatsupcroc]

Collette turns red-rimmed eyes up to look at his face. She considers what he says. She looks like she's concentrating, enduring that whole thinking proposition she tells Caesar she doesnt't like to do.

"No," she concludes. "It wouldn't be. If it's what you've got to work with, though? It's better than nothing."

Now that, she decides, is probably actually true. She also doubts they're speaking entirely at the surface level. Different meanings in a conversation... ah-hah. At least she wasn't so desperately caught up in the emotions of helpless confusion and pain as she had been earlier.

"I've got stubborness. Guess that's going to have to work for now." She holds out a hand. Needle, please.

[latkje]

There are, of course, certain philosophical sects devoted to the sacred idea of nothing. Nash thinks those sects are weird. He doesn't bring them up: there's a time to be contrary.

"It's not a half-bad thing to have." He reaches out, needle in hand.

[whatsupcroc]

"Think it's got much of a trade in value?" she jokes, taking the needle. Stubbornness has served her well enough over the years. Right now, it waws stubborn will pulling her back together and prompting her into smiling, once more wiping her nose off on her sleeve. she ignores the not so pretty smear of snot it leaves behind, but she can at least breathe normally now.

Okay, now to address the tear in the fabric over her thigh... Collette looks at it, pushing the edges together while poking at the skin of her leg. Okay, she should probably start there. Her legs wouldn't be telling her if they hurt or were cold without her paying attention as it was, so minimalizing their potential for harm was top of her list. Morphing fixes so much of that, but it doesn't change fifteen years of necessary precautions.

[latkje]

"I think it's worth more if you hold onto it," he says, quietly. "And hold on," he adds, louder, while his hand fishes in another pocket somewhere, pulling out a sheet of paper.

"If you put this under the tear, it might help you keep from stitching the skin." Not that he'd tried it before. He usually took his clothes off before trying to fix them.

[whatsupcroc]

She watches him dig around for whatever it was he wanted, surprised to see paper come out of his pocket. More surprised at the idea: it never would have occurred to her.

It's something between hearing him say stubbornness is worth more when held onto and watching him pull paper out of a magician's pocket that she reaches her own conclusions. For a girl who looks like she's been crying (for the obvious reason that she had been crying) to look seriously up at him, then break into a shy smile, it's got nothing to do with actual shyness. Collette is nothing if not gregarious and outgoing.

it's got more to do with the sincerity behind what she says. "I like you." Not attracted to, not anything untoward (he really was old, and blonds weren't her thing, anyway), but a simple statement of fact. Sure, she says she likes everyone, but she figures Nash can get the difference between being affable and open to possibility, and to having made a decision after weighing the other factors that come up over time.

And that's it. Not even a thank you, just, I like you. Collette accepts the paper, not sure how she's supposed to retrieve it after she's fixed a hole, but not particularly sure she cares. Holding the needle between her teeth, she works on shimmying the paper into the gash in the material, telling herself that the paper mess soon to be on her leg was worth it.

[latkje]

"Careful, careful. The missus will overhear." He doesn't misinterpret her, but Nash usually said things by not saying them. (He trusts she's noticed by now.)

Nash's gaze hangs somewhere beyond both of them for a minute. A quiet minute. And then he says, "We should leave soon. On a mission like this, you want to keep everyone accounted for."

In the same mirthless tone, he adds, "You're welcome."

[whatsupcroc]

She smiled, handing the needle back over. "Yeah, yeah, I'm a real homewrecker. Lend a hand while I get better paws on this situation?"

Morphing back to something usual for her around camp was a good sign. Once he had the needle and thread, Collette would begin the disconcerting, unpredictable process of morphing coyote.

[latkje]

Well, he doesn't know the protocol for this one. Really he doesn't know the protocol for teenage girls at all— he'd messed it up with his sister right when she turned sixteen.

"Should I look the other way, or something?"

[whatsupcroc]

"Only to save your own stoma--" She was abruptly cut off as her mouth changed too much to produce the human sounds she'd been using, coming out as a strange, mangled whine as Collette went from teenage girl to adult coyote.

She shook herself off once the morph finished, a minute in total, and perked up her ears.

< Mostly, > she comments, < People look away to save their own stomachs. Ready to go? >

[latkje]

If Nash was disgusted, he didn't show it— not on his outsides. The truth was: he'd been around.

"But there's apparently no saving their ears." He nodded, curtly.

[whatsupcroc]

< Of course not! I'll talk no matter what. To Caesar's dismay. >

She laughed in her mind, the sense of amusement carrying with her words. There was an illusion of sound with how her body stretched and changed, but no real actuality. The mind tried to fill in the blanks where things should have been, though grass beneath a morpher, or the environment around them they touched, always reacted as it should.

Collette dipped her head down, then shook herself, pointing her nose back toward camp. Time to go. She felt... much more grounded, now.

< Thanks, > she tosses back, ears perked forward, feet moving forward. It's about what she figures she wants to say.