C'est la mort. (Open)

[lazyinlove]

Date & Time:Tonight, around 7.
Location:The viewing windows.
Characters:Anyone who knew Peace or who might stop to pay respects at a memorial even if they didn't know her.
Summary:A memorial gathering for an Exsile who ceased to exist with the most recent world change.
Warnings:Tears, cursing, bitterness? Not sure yet. People can label threads as they come up. Everyone is free to make their own and jump around. Prose and action are both fine.


It's a waste of emergency torches, but there are a few set up around anyway, lit that soft unearthly blue of emergency lighting. The flowers are paper, clumsily folded from discharge sheets, some from the prison, some from the clinic. There are no photos. All of the ones she was in before are empty spaces, or pictures of Stanley or others who'd been holding her at the time. The music is strings, playing softly from a haphazardly tossed tablet. There are no chairs. Instead, every pillow from 144 is on the ground as seating.

Stanley isn't sitting on one, though. He's standing at the window, staring down at the planet so far below. Today, he's combed his hair. It's still in his eyes because it's too long, but he's made the effort to tame it at any rate.

He's not sure how to start things off, but if someone shows up he'll greet them. That's what you do, right? So that's what he does.

"Thanks for coming."

Comments

iiiii'm not getting notifs so sorry for weird tagging

[gevurah]

[ She glances toward the pictures, but notes the empty frames where she supposes Peace is supposed to be.

It's not right; they've been tampering with the timeline, but they haven't done anything regarding Earth itself as far as she knows. What happened down there with the radiation disappearing worries her. ]

How've you been?

[lazyinlove]

No.

[It's nice of Steph to offer, but he's not going anywhere. There's all this room to sprawl out in his bunk now, and no one accidentally kicking his throat in the night. Jesse's in jail, Lisbeth is a ghost, and Mike never has much to say. It's silent there. It feels empty and cold. He doesn't want to go back there anyway.]

no worries

[lazyinlove]

[The question sounds...bizarre. It's one that people generally never ask in these situations. And it's the sort of thing that people never answer honestly.

Except that Stanley does. So he stares for a moment, shrugs, and tells her the truth.]

I was tired. But now I can't sleep.

[lazyinlove]

Better stay away from that Elmer guy.

[You know, if you don't want to put up with bright and cheery. And really, who does?]

[gevurah]

[ It's always been condolences and how-are-you-doings as far as Kate's ever known. Etiquette and all. Stanley's young, too, she worries about most of the young kids and the state of their minds in all this. ]

Try showering before you sleep.

[lazyinlove]

I wanna puke. But that's...

[Not going to help. This vigil is good. Somehow it's good to put it out there that there's a price to pay. It's good that most of these people have met Peace. Other people here know that she existed, too. Stanley shakes his head. His hands are shaking too, he notices, and stuffs them into his pockets quickly.]

I've never been in charge of one of these.

[controlledvariable]

[This isn't a grief she's familiar with. She knows how to help people coping with trauma or anger or the kind of frustration at the world that claws in and chokes you, but she's never lost anyone. She was the one being lost, and being confronted with someone else's grief is a little painful.

If this is how Stanley looks over a girl he knew for months, how must her mom have been?

(She tells herself that giving her daughter up wasn't the same, because she's not gone, just out of reach.)

She swallows the thoughts down, watching Stan instead, trying to work out the reason behind his denial; does he not want her touching the things set up for Peace, or does he not want to go back to his room?

She takes a guess at the latter.]

You need to get some sleep eventually.

[Her voice is gentle, laced with concern.]

[werewolfing]

[peter shrugs.]

Sometimes you gotta puke. Not on me, though, please.

[maybe it's easier to be philosophical about that kind of thing when you tear out of your own body and eat it on a regular basis. or he just doesn't want stanley to think there's something he's obligated to do, since he seems so paralyzed by the concept of having to do anything at all.]

Me either. The way we usually do it in my family doesn't really fit here.

[lazyinlove]

It's always cold.

[He wrinkles his nose. The small talk is a little easier. He's managing to focus on the conversation mostly and everything. There's this thick barrier of fog between them, but if he ignores it then maybe Kate won't notice it either. They can just keep talking about how shitty the showers are.]

[gevurah]

[ There aren't many solutions up here. When her mother died, she had had difficulty keeping food down as well as sleeping problems. ]

Try some stretches, then. Loosen your muscles.

[lazyinlove]

What do you do?

[He swallows, and focuses on this new topic. It's true, sometimes you can't help it. But he's not going to up chuck on someone's memory, forget about Peter's shoes. He'll just have to hold it together a little longer.]

[lazyinlove]

[As a matter of fact he'd been telling Peter and Mike earlier that his stomach was in knots,. Maybe it's common. He wouldn't know. Most of the memorials he's been to were for the elderly, and no one was that distraught. The few times classmates or kids from the neighborhood have died, they've never been close friends. He's not sure how grieving is supposed to work. But it's nice of Kate to try and help. He'll have to do better than a shrug or a nod this time.]

Okay.

[werewolfing]

Kinda big deal. Don't wash for three days, sit around and drink and remember. With the body, if they die at home. Afterwards, we burn their belongings.

[he'll just leave out the beheading part. that's probably a bit much, especially for a dude who wants to puke already.]

[gevurah]

[ She wonders if it's in good form to ask what exactly happened. Stanley is such a quiet, fragile type from her two conversations with him, and the second hadn't exactly been in the most exciting of situations. ]

Do you want to be alone?

[lazyinlove]

[He glances back up at her, then. And frowns a little, unsure. This whole situation is painful and unfamiliar territory.]

I was tired before, but... now I'm not.

[controlledvariable]

I know.

[She won't say resting will make him feel better, because it won't, but he still should try to get some sleep. Running on empty doesn't make any of it easier.]

You should try anyway. Is there somewhere else you can go, if you don't wanna stay in your room?

[lazyinlove]

Uh. You gotta go?

[He doesn't, actually. But it's not exactly fair to expect people to stick around in the first place. Especially people who never even met Peace. So he nods. Sure, yeah. He can...go stare out the window some more and wonder what's going on down there on the planet.]

[lazyinlove]

Oh...are you like, Jewish?

[Tea's family are only half Jewish, so it's a guess. Though actually, Abbud's family does something kind of like that, too. He's just pretty sure that Peter isn't Muslim. Unless the dude is adopted or something, but Stanley's never seen him praying to the sun before. And Abbud is big on the prayers.]

[lazyinlove]

...Did Lisbeth say something?

[Crap, do people not want him in the room while Jesse's away? That's a problem he never even considered. But it seems worryingly plausible. Jesse invited him there, Lisbeth mostly seemed to resent him being there, and Mike....Mike thought he was an idiot. Oh, man. He's so not interested in sleeping in the corridors.]

[werewolfing]

Nah, Roma. Gypsy.

[lest stanley think he meant he's from rome or something.]

[controlledvariable]

[Her confusion is obvious, if he's capable of looking for things like that.]

No? I just-- I thought it might be too hard, the reminders.

[Of Peace; going somewhere different can help, a little bit.]

[lazyinlove]

[The clarification is helpful, actually. He's never met anyone from that background before, so it's news to him. But it's only of fleeting interest, really. More interesting is the idea of proper traditions about death. A middle class white atheist from Baltimore doesn't grow up with the chance to indulge in many traditions. Technically his family is Swiss, but they've been American citizens for three generations.]

That sounds nice. The uh...the thing.

[lazyinlove]

[That's a relief. He sags, and leans against the wall, slowly sliding down it. Getting kicked out would've sure been the turd on top of this crap sundae. Stanley drops his face into his hands and rubs at his temples. The headache really isn't going away.]

I dunno. It'll be fine.

[He'd imposed on Giovanni once back on the planet, but people didn't have sofas here. It wasn't the same situation.]

[reassures]

[So Kate hadn't even met her. ...Even so, if Stanley was inviting people like Kate, then he had a good head on his shoulders. Nill wasn't sure of how black-and-white the world was in Kate's eyes, but for the most part she had a good head on her shoulders.]

She was a nice girl. I don't think there are any pictures left of her.

[werewolfing]

[it takes a second for peter to get past the knee-jerk reaction that no, it's a funeral, funerals aren't nice, to what stanley actually means. ritual. and considering that peter just minutes ago invoked as much of that ritual as he could, he can hardly blame stanley for thinking so.]

Yeah. That's what I was doing, at the window. Sending her off, I guess.

[he takes a breath, lets it out.]

Could do it again in English, if you want.