exsiliumlogs | don't be friends with blue it's sad forever

Entry tags:

don't be friends with blue it's sad forever

Date & Time: 1/10
Location: Snowy Exsily City, following a lost girl
Characters: Collette, Blue
Summary: Welcome back let's talk if you can actually follow telepathic directions
Warnings: Naw

He was at a point where he had little choice but to stay where he was put for much of the time, lest he ask to be moved once again. Getting old and feeble was a lot like being young; one had to rely so much more on the strength and patience of others for even simple tasks, but children had little shame in demanding it. Blue, in much the same way as any long-lived person, couldn't avoid feeling shame for his frailty; it did not serve a good purpose, he was draining resources, he needed to contribute...

Mu were naturally lacking in bodily strength as it was, but he had the blessing of a mind much greater than his muscles – even know he found strength to send his will outside of himself, to drift through the frozen city surface, unseen among those strong enough to endure the bite of cold from one home or business to another.

He sought better understanding of these people; they were strangers again, altered by all the meddling done in time so far. They deserved to be known, whether they lasted much longer than their predecessors or not.

He sought familiarity, too...A lot of good was done to him in his time in Exsilium, and it was only natural to want to know they were safe. So many important people had come and gone...maybe it was futile to try and hang onto them at this late hour, but the impulse wasn't one he could easily stifle.

So the ghost of a psychic's will flew again, searching and watching.

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Collette was a borrowed bundle of outwear, her own past-future clothing hidden behind a rattier, tattier coat. Walking along like she was perpetually in fear of finding a bit of ice under the compact snow, what little could be seen of her eyes sparkled with mischief and curiosity.

She'd been freezing for the two days she'd been back, the novelty of turning her head and being surrounded by snow on all sides keeping her entertained. Fresh snowfall would have been difficult to move through. As it is, trying to adjust to the uneven footing and slick spots had her falling and carefully standing again and again, wearing her out fast.

She exhaled in a hot rush of air, caught up in the scarf covering the lower half of her face. She half wanted to find out where Caesar was, see how he was doing and where he'd ended up living, like scratching the kind of itch that felt worse before it felt better. She doesn't. Caesar can take care of himself, and being around Feferi and Sollux after it having just been the two of them for so long is a strange, constantly startling state of affairs. Exciting too, and she's not sure if that's better than what she had before.

She wonders if he misses her. She wonders if anyone's gone skiing. She wonders if people around here serve hot chocolate, or if it's an even more priceless commodity than it had been before.

Collette pulled her hood down to adjust her hair, tucking it back in and around the scarf and her neck. The wonder thrummed most strongly through her mind, and a pleasure only tinged with sadness for what she realized she missed without having an exact reason to miss. Casting a glance upward, a smattering of icicles on an upper roof caught her eye. "Beautiful," she said, hands coming up to rest under her armpits. "It's freaking cold, but it's all so pretty too!"

She's the sort of presence that is undeniably herself, no matter how much time passes. No matter what changed. But recognition required more than just a familiar notion from one; Blue had to realize what it was that was familiar. And he did, of course, and in no time at all.

Collette.

You're here...

There was surprise in his thoughts. Her absence hadn't been so long, but his days lost in sleep made everything seem much longer.

She hasn't had a voice inside her head other than her own for the last year. Collette jerked her head up, looking around. "Blue!" She exclaimed, clapping a gloved hand back over her mouth. There was no reason to speak out loud. She'd only attract unwelcome attention, and a look around didn't bring her eyes around to anyone familiar.

Blue! she thought. Of course I'm here! Where are you?

Not far.

It's a distracted kind of reply; he's marveling more at her than she is at him. She's on her feet, her own feet, moving freely. That alone brings so many questions to mind. For how much the same he sensed around her, how much changed? How long had it really been?

But it wasn't the kind of conversation to hold like that, him disembodied and her out in the cold.

But you should get out of the cold. I will show you the way.

The notion of a map, of direction was given to her, prompting her to face this way or move that way.

Only Collette was too enthused, slow, and unfamiliar with the present landscape to navigate properly according to his prompts. She comes to a pause in consternation, standing in the middle of a narrow side street.

Blueberry, she thought at him, pursing her lips and humming under her breath. I think I'm lost. Yep. I... am totally lost!

Her laughter echoes between sensation and thought and out loud, to whatever uncaring ears are listening.

That laughter...it was something sorely missed. Even moreso, in hearing it. Blue smiled less and less as the long winter carried on and his body broke down on him. It made the laugh, the girl...something like summer. It took him out of the marveling he had begun to fall into, for as long as he followed her mind, the more he realized walking was very much on it. So how...?

His response came late as he put those things aside, taking Blueberry in stride.

But not far.

Please wait.

There was no way Blue could physically reach her, but psychically, he was halfway there. It just took an extra push...

The ghost of Soldier Blue that bloomed into light and form wore a stunned look almost immediately.

Collette...you're walking.

She had to restrain her impulse to stumble forward and hug the phantasm of Blue that manifested. "I know!" The elation she felt was almost overwhelming in that instant. I know! she repeated, thinking hard on the words, her smile hidden as it was behind a scarf wrapped around her neck.

It was seriously hard work, and I wanted to give up some of the time, but I didn't, and I'm here, and I'm still going forward. I think if Caesar hadn't been there, maybe I would have just given up. There's a sadness and an older hurt, mixed with newer confusion, when she thinks of Caesar as a concept.

The greater truth that she'd needed someone else there to thrive would have been the same, regardless of who had come along. She shoved that aside, feeling concern rise up with the pleasure of seeing some aspect of Blue once more.

Show me where to go. I want to see you.

Caesar, was it? A familiar name when it came to her. The initial shock was slowly subsiding, but it didn't show on the projection that turned to lead her the right way. Focusing on that task was enough work, and so for his part, the trek was silent, words left for when she would come to the door he waited behind.

Pointing a finger at the door caused a click, unlocking it before vanishing entirely; it came as a relief to Blue, who could push himself to sit up properly, watching for her to enter.

"I wish I could do that." Collette hadn't been as fond of the silent guide as she was of companionable silence in person. She felt too much as if she followed a ghost.

The way her heart hammers as she steps up and opens the door doesn't make her feel any better about what she may well find. Collette had never really forgotten the things she and Blue had spoken of over the... ah, has it been years? Yes and no, she realized.

Seeing him in bed, she has that sinking feeling. Batteries running low, energy running out, Blue had been slowly dying for a very long time. "Blue," she said, stumbling when she didn't pick her feet up enough crossing the threshold. "Oh no, Blue, how long have you been like this?"

His own heart skipped a beat, watching her staggering at the door, as much fearful of her falling as he is still stunned and enthralled at her standing at all. The little pinpricks of Collette's awareness of him weren't something he could ignore, but they could be pushed aside over something so much more important than himself.

Blue extends his arms to her, his eyes already glinting and wet.

"Your own two feet," he utters, mouth twitching into a smile. "Part of a dream comes real..."

Two feet that carry her closer, tracking in snow that leaves wet footprints behind. She paused to pull at the buttons of her overcoat, shedding one layer as she stood by his bedside. She lets it fall to the floor, too distracted (distraught) to try and set it on a chair.

"Yeah, it is, right like the dream we had. Blue..."

She sat on the edge of his bed, not as careful about putting herself into his arms and wrapping her arms around him, frightened of what she might feel. "I'm glad to see you."

He could tell. But more than that, he felt the swirl of emotions that joy was part of, worry and fear and relief and hope all twisted together the fibers of a rope. For his own part, Blue gave up his own happiness, sending it as the warmth he couldn't give bodily, though he could hold on tight enough to try.

"As am I," he murmured, feeling the tickle of her hair against his face, glad for that, too. "Time is relative to how long your loved ones are here or gone."

"If they have to go at all," she said, turning her face in toward his neck. Collette doesn't want to let go, and so she stayed, eyes closed and fighting back tears. She felt warm, felt a happiness past her own, and she took it in and made it part of her own. It took the harshest edges off her sadness, but it didn't numb the pain.

"Everyone does."

His voice was quiet and mild, saying it; he wanted no more of that sadness to be in his regard, but somehow it felt right to say it out loud.

"But that's alright, isn't it...? Sometimes...you learn how much a person meant to you in their absence."

After some time letting that notion settle, his hold slacked and he withdrew, hands catching the sides of her face. He had to squint to really see, to try to discern details of a girl who'd had a whole year to struggle and grow somewhere far away. Years didn't show so quickly on the young, but then, Mu barely aged at all, so there was a means to tell, if only a little.

"How long were you away?" There's a pinch of worry in his tone. "Will you tell me about it?"

You also learn how much it sucks when they're gone.

Collette blinked her eyes rapidly, driving back the tears. "Mmhmm," she said, nodding for emphasis. "I will. Anything, any of it, there was a lot -- it was hard, Blue. I think the hardest thing in my life."

Her lips twitched upward in a personal amusement, meeting with a pang of recollection -- not just her life, but her second life. Endings... she was staring at them coming up again. "We were there for just about a year. I'd never been to Paris before, it was supposed to be all romantic? It so wasn't! Mostly it was filled with flying cars and normal people, who all knew stuff I didn't, but it was easier inside the hospital. There they figured I was an oldies fan."

Blue's hands kept hold of hers as he listened, and that contact was enough to give him a better perception of those things she spoke of aloud, filled in blanks here and there, and made her talk much clearer.

And for all this, he was silent, absorbing it all like a sponge. He wished he'd been there, if only to observe, but more to support her somehow in those trials. Forcing a body to bend to the will, despite such circumstances...it's a feat not many can do, he knows. For her, the odds were so much different.

He has a way to the clearer narrative that most will never have. Collette followed her own trains of thought when trying to fill people in on stories, which were almost always less clear than the things she made up that might or might not be true.

Storytelling was an artform when it was storytelling. Fiction was easier to craft cohesively than the truth.

"Daraka was the name of the man we were helping. Mostly me, because I was in the same program, so we were kind of cheering each other on through all the hard stuff in the down time between rounds of physical torture."

She smiles, letting it be the joke it was meant to be, swallowing past the lump in her throat. It gets easier to talk, recounting the past year and not the uncertain future she still hoped for better things to find. "It was hard. Pretty boring to anyone else, too, but hard. I wanted to give up sometimes. I, um. Caesar and I started fighting a lot back where we lived. It got pretty bad."

Her own good will and innate optimism was sorely tested. She had so little to spare that her reserves were all eaten up, and the small arguments over nothing had happened again and again. "He left for a while, and we sorta... broke up after that." Her eyes aimed down into the space between them. Her feelings are much more complicated now -- warm hands on her knee, she can feel them, sensation and a pain in the heart, sometimes intermingled, sometimes not -- with them having kept a friendship alive, and built the tenuous bridge into unfamiliar territory for them both. Friends with benefits sounded like a crude approximation of something about gain, but it lacked that feeling of blatant use from either side.

She's not sure when how she loved him changed from something bright and consuming into something thrumming and warm, but she had. It was painful now in a way, knowing he'd ended it because of the mission, knowing it was up to him if it was ever going to be something defined once more.

Teenage feelings were difficult to navigate. She could just turn away, look for someone else, she supposes. She's so reluctant to let go of anything she has.

Pursuing and maintaining strong relationships, ones that could last...Blue knew it was hard. Hard, even for Mu, but it certainly wasn't the same. He didn't have his own story to relate to hers; it made this fresher territory, a pain to feel for a friend that wasn't truly his right to feel.

That Collette would give him right to know those feelings, to share them with him willingly is something he knows is very valuable, teenager or no. Those feelings were just as genuine as anyone's, made more precious by being carried by one so young.

He could feel the pain, but also the good things that contrasted it. Love didn't utterly sever those connections when damage was done, not so easily, and not in her.

His eyes, having closed for a time, absorbing this, opened, searching for her face again.

"Strong feelings..." he breathed in, then out. "Strong connections are seldom without their scars. But it doesn't make the hurt any easier to bear..."

She searches his face in turn. "I thought I was used to it," she confesses. Pain in the things that matter most, friendships, family, but she'd never ventured into relationships. Not even for a lack of desire, but exposure, time, general relatability? Those had been more difficult.

"You know that you let someone in, things don't stay smooth, they get harder. I thought I'd be fine when he'd walk away."

But denial is as true as anything else. Denial had helped with her brother, and had explained away why a father had never been meant to matter. "Turns out I wasn't so good about it after all. I mean, I'm not even sure what we are now, or if I like it, or I don't like it at all, but it feels so nice and like I matter again to him and like I'm--"

Worthwhile has nothing to do with it. Collette's core, her sense of self, finds her worthy of people's time and attention. She even has a fairly good self image, finding herself attractive. Being wanted, or desired, for who she is, she's less sure about that from Caesar. It's context more than anything else. Someone she really can't have for long, but she can pretend, for a while longer, that she can have him, or any of them, while they're all mutually here.

She smiles. Her lips quiver, but her smile doesn't fade.

"We babysat a rat named Brutus for a while!"

He had to sink back against the headboard, unable to sit upright for very long like that. His hands kept hold of hers throughout, and while his gaze drifted, following thoughts bundled tightly in the emotions roiling, ebbing and flowing from Collette. Even pain was beautiful in this way, but knowing what harm it did made it a sight he'd be happy to not find in her.

Blue let her talk as she wished, wanting but knowing better than to press the matter, to sponge it and pull it away. He knew being there mattered, and he was glad for that.

He gives her fingers a gentle squeeze, his own mouth quirking.

"For someone there? Someone you came to know?"

"Friends of a friend," she admits, squeezing back, more careful in her strength now. She stays straight where he bows backward, giving him room for the moment. There are ghosts of her mother echoing in the way they both move, a woman gone thin and balding due to the chemotherapy treatments that had accelerated the rate at which she'd been dying. Cancer was not a kind illness.

She smiles. "Caesar never got why I thought it was so funny, or that it was funny to me how she'd sneak out and sleep on his stomach. Or by his neck!"

It's a fixed bright point to focus on. Collette finds it so easy to smile over those.

"Like Rain," he said between breaths. "The mouse that came with Physis..."

Thoughts of her were always going to be near, but his heart's effort to resonate with Collette's own aches dredged up more of her. Rather, the absence of her. It wasn't the same as what Collette spoke on, but sometimes loss was loss and pain was pain.

He could still smile, though; it was somehow easy enough to do then and there.

"She had a mouse?" Collette smiled, tucking her chin in to her chest. "I liked Physis. I braided her hair when we were on the beach, and told her all about Rapunzel. Do you know the story of Rapunzel?"

Rain is a soothing concept, a memory of songs sung to someone else and a plethora of faces and experiences she'd had since arriving in this dystopian world.

"I remember," he said, closing his eyes. "She told me. She was very happy then, for what you did...And me, too."

That Physis could've lived some small time in a world where she could connect to people beyond the Shangri-La was something Blue felt very strongly about. It had frightened him to a degree, in the way something so used to being one way suddenly changes into another...but he knew it was good change. And having Collette show Physis kindness was terribly important.

"They sound alike. Physis and Rapunzel. Beautiful young girls locked way from the world..."

"Not for forever. They both get away, too! They both did." They saw more than the insides of their polished towers. Collette can empathize with that feeling very strongly, looking back at her own limitations, the ones she still faced in different ways now.

"They get to live. Isn't that awesome? I think it's the most important thing in the world. When you get that chance, and you've got people you can love, or you have loved, or who love you?"

Like you.

Most any other time, much of the emotion Blue felt for that remark would stay inside, safe, with what he let the world see carefully moderated. But Collette's aching heart and his own, resonating, made that all but impossible. It was plain in his face, the way his brow knit and his mouth twitched, how his eyes winced before they closed and were hidden in the bowing motion of his head.

"She did," he said, his voice quivering. "She got to...know what it's like. Living part of the world, not. Hidden from it."

It hurt, speaking, thinking on it. Watching Physis walk a prehistoric beach, listen to her talking with newfound friends...The absence of her was a gaping hole where all the cold from outside could blast through and sting, and it made even his gratitude bittersweet.

She could come back tomorrow, he thought, and he may never have the chance to see her.

One of his hands withdrew from Collette's, drawing up to his mouth, stifling the sound he made in swallowing hard. He looked up again, letting his fingers curl under his mouth while his eyes widened and blinked away tears.

"I never said it aloud," he said. His voice had grown smaller. "That I loved her. I'll regret that always."

Her fingers curled into the blankets. Collette didn't know whether to lean forward or give him space, watching his face, worse yet as his hand came up to his mouth. His words thrum through her, finding younger experiences to echo along with. Loves and losses without the years behind them to make them all the more poignant.

Collette pulled herself entirely on his narrow bed, wiggling between him and the wall with a focus that came with necessary concentration. Leg do this, foot do this, boots be kicked off and left to -- thump, thump -- fall to the floor.

Her reply was delayed by the very same concentration. He could feel her, not the physicality alone, but the young sort of recognition that knew that is regret and knew, too, there is never truly a too late.

"You felt it," she said, being bossily demanding, pulling him toward her side even as she leaned in. Collette tried to sneak an arm behind and over his shoulders, memories of being cradled close to her mother's chest when things felt too overwhelming and isolating to be borne alone. "So she knew. And if you say it now, she'll hear it, because you feel those things no matter where you are. She knew you loved her. You don't always need to say it out loud with your outside voice to be heard."

She felt her own regrets. A mother she hadn't told she'd loved enough while she was around. A brother who she forgot to say the same, around the arguments and sibling debates and often times hero worship when she'd been younger. Friends who had been so important here, now gone; Adam, Oz once upon a time, Snow who had shown and taught her so much. Friends who were here she should talk to before it was too late.

Even Caesar, who she'd only told him she'd loved him when he'd been passed out in the aftermath of his blindness. Some things were harder to say out loud than others.

"She knew, Blue. It'll be there with her in everything she does."

Collette's remorse intermixed with his, as his own was prompted by hers from the start. It was at once an overwhelming and comforting sensation, where pain alone is unbearable, but with the added strength of another it was proof of a life lived in earnest.

He would've had trouble resisting her move and hold if he'd had mind to, but it was a move he accommodated, letting his head dip and settle, temple to temple with hers. He blinked, letting what tears he couldn't stop go, and swallowed on the rest.

"Somehow," he murmured, "it will never seem enough. It must be the nature of love, beyond emotion."

"I don't know if it's all that," she said, keeping him close. "But I don't think you can ever have enough, when it comes to love. You want more, to do more, to be more, feel more, I don't know. Then when you can't, with some people, it feels like it never was as much as either of you deserved."

Mom. She thought of her mother, and closed her eyes, smiling as she did so. "I love you too, Blue. You've been a good friend to me, and I've always appreciated that. I mean, you took me flying, and weren't weirded out when I was a dog, and you even cared when Dean Winchester tried to kill me for the third time."

The ache in his heart sharpened and eased, giving way to the warmth that came with Collette's earnest words, and those that glossed over the most painful of them with her good humor in handling their shared past.

It made him smile, too.

"We've had a strange journey," he murmured. "But I'm glad. I'm glad I've gotten to know you...I've learned very much."

Old dogs and new tricks, made possible by young girls disguised as younger dogs.

"Me too," she admitted, feeling the warmth and letting it settle down into her bones, easing the aches in the muscles of her legs. "I don't want it to end."

There was a plaintive note in her voice, but it mellowed, facing down an inevitability that doesn't have to be so horrible. Here she was already having a chance to say goodbye, and say what she felt, and how much Blue meant to her.

"Do you believe in reincarnation?"

"Dying...and returning as something else?" The notion wasn't new, but certainly not something he'd pondered on very long.

"I don't know, Collette. For all I know...life will endure somehow." The hand closest to her moved, settling on her leg in awareness of the little aches it was giving her. "I woke here and discovered I had lived years of life somewhere else...somewhere with love and wonders different than anywhere else."

Would it be that way here? Closing his eyes to this world, opening them in another, still walking forward to an end that might be pretense?

"If not life," he murmured, "then memory..."

"Memory can lie." She doesn't seemed bothered by this. There's no heat, only acknowledgement of what she considers to be a fact. "You can always think, hey, this was so great! And it was, even if it wasn't, because you remember it that way."

Memory was mutable, as so many things in life were. Yet he was right, and she agreed: people lived on in memory long after they'd gone away.

"I think we do." She blurts it out, a confession of sorts after a silence she'd let herself fall into. "Get reborn, I mean. I think we really are part of a whole big cycle in the universe that keeps coming around. I'm not sure so much about there being enlightenment, or an end to that, but I do think we come back. Maybe as people if we did pretty well, or something else, if we caused a lot of hurt. It evens out eventually. We cover the costs of our actions sometime. You'll find Physis again, even if it's not like you are right now."

Loves come back around, in places and times where they can thrive, and in places and times where they cannot. She chooses to believe this, like in stories her mother told her as she grew up.

Memory can lie stings, but doesn't incite the anger it would've before. Rather, it succeeded in making the weight of melancholy more apparent. How much value he put to memory...how much he fought to find his, and in failing, lamented the loss and his lack of strength.

His eyes closed as he listened, open to the energy that her faith filled her words with. A child's hope...his own was old and often footsore from decades of silence and apprehension. Her certainty had a strength his own lacked; anchors in the sea, one rusting and a harsh tug from breaking, and the other fresh and strong.

"Whether that's in another chapter," he said at length, "or at some kind of end...it's some comfort." He hoped he could believe it, right at what he was certain was an end of sorts.

"To see her again...and you, and the others...I'd be very happy."

"You will," she corrects softly. "You will be very happy."

She believes in that. There's a kind of peace, one she feels herself accepting in a different way than how she's accepted embracing the now, to live in the moment because it's the only guarantee.

She'd keep doing that, but -- but.

Death didn't have to be the kind of finality that went nowhere. There could be more. Changed, different from how this was, yet it was more than the single instance of an existence.

There may be regrettable things in their lives. Those things wouldn't be the only definition, or the only chance.

"I hope we meet next time when we're both young. I think you would have been a lot of fun, as a younger guy."

Half a tease, half a serious sentiment. She smiled.

"I was a pain, if my eldest comrades are to be believed." He could say it with a smile, glancing at her from the corner of his eye. "I was the only Type-Blue then...the only one who could fly. Maybe that, and being jealous..."

"Sounds like normal teenagers to me," Collette concluded, lips quirking up in a softer sort of amusement. "Did you ever tease them when you flew?"

Edited 2014-02-06 05:52 (UTC)

His impulse, the breath that caught in his chest cut short an automatic no, of course not. But he stopped and gave it some honest thought. Blue closed his eyes, trying to place himself there, to hear...

Soldier, that's not fair!

Put me down!

"Well..." He let out his breath. "I must have. But...You weren't the first I flew with."

The last, perhaps.

"Then you weren't too much of a brat," she teased, letting her eyes close. "Unless you took them flying without asking."

She sounded amused, and she feels it, through to her cold, aching bones.

"Not regularly," he said, his mouth quirking. "That kind of carelessness was a long time ago, back in the beginning. Before Soldier was part of my name."

Before the implications of his powers grew outside of what the humans and their destructive reactions defined them as. After the deep exhale following the breakaway from Ganymede, it was inevitable for a bunch of kids with new and mysterious powers to flex their muscles, even play. Flying had been exciting then. That was before the work had begun.

Hundreds of years of work...

His body sagged, wearier with the thought.

"I want to hear more of Paris," he murmured. "Will you tell me?"

He couldn't promise to stay awake for all of it, but he was sure the way her talk could frame his dreams was something he wanted.

Collette smiled, thoughts flitting over all the good mixed in with the difficult and hard from Paris. When she starts speaking, she falls into an animated retelling of run-ins and encounters. Stories about riots, and Caesar being thrown in jail for the night due to a case of extraordinarily bad timing. Tales of therapy room incidents, medical mix-ups, losing a slipper accidentally over a fence.

There's no singular, clear narrative. Each story is fed by another memory, tangenting naturally as things recalled themselves to her prompted by what else she'd just re-lived.

She may exaggerate some of the details, but it's knowingly, and for fun. What she doesn't exaggerate are the light shows of fireworks on the nights where Paris went through rolling blackouts. Some of those memories are more warm than others, but that's a thought, an impression he'd have from what goes unsaid, not what she gives life in oral retelling.

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don't be friends with blue it's sad forever

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