sixthiterationlogs | [open] i'm caught in the cold; i'm caught in the hot

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[open] i'm caught in the cold; i'm caught in the hot

WHO: Kira Akiyama
WHERE: House 39; Riverbank, southeast bend
WHEN: June 5
OPEN TO: Credence + 2 at the house; 2 more at the river
WARNINGS: Edited as needed
STATUS: Open

There’s a calm after the hail storms that’s gotten under Kira’s skin, and a wave of heat strong enough to bake him into it. Trying to catch the sunrise early enough to do anything comfortably in the fields has proven more and more difficult--time hard to measure with the sun slipping the wrong way across horizons that it never seems to fully sink below. He’s had a lot of days dodging it in the house or in the trees, a lot of sleepless nights that don’t get darker than twilight, and even the animals are starting to grow listless and fatigued, like they don’t know the new rhythm of this world either.

Still, as far as disruptions go, this one is creeping, almost peaceful. The quiet of a world without his gifts is exacerbated by the literal quiet of people trying to survive the heat. Finding Bodhi asleep in disparate parts of the house and its surrounding area isn’t a new development, but Kira thinks he’s not the only one coping in a series of naps.

All places are about their people, he’d told Sonny and Veronica both, casual as only the deepest seated beliefs could be. With Sonny he hadn’t meant to be more than glib; with Veronica it had been something closer to advice. It was the kind of belief to draw a map with, which route he planned to maintain toward sanity.

Not always the easiest route, the way people keep disappearing on them. Ty, Ren, Casey, now Jyn--Kira gives Tim a month before he’s dead or gone, and he gives Sonny and Veronica two and three respectively, unable to determine if the rule is emotional support or his willingness to fucking sleep with them. Considering who he still has left, considering the headache he’s already getting up with after another fitful few hours on the bed, he’s leaning toward the latter.

People are just going to keep leaving, and here he will remain, wanting to claw out of his heat-damp skin and climb to the top of a canyon wall just to throw himself off. Maybe this is what happens when you sidestep fate. Maybe you get to survive, but you don’t get to live.

at the house

Kira feeds the animals before he gets to work, bringing all of them out to the porch to sort through his materials. Aurora flops in her corner with one bowl of water, and Hoshi drags himself between the sun and another, until enough water has evaporated and the heat is enough that he nests himself down into the cool ceramic. It’s already hot--the sun doesn’t stay down long enough for it to cool one day to the next--but there’s as much shade on the porch as there is in the house, and what breeze comes through the canyon can actually be felt.

He settles his materials into a few piles: pulled and reclaimed shingles, some decidedly not from his own roof; stripped siding, old boards, and most important--nails. He’d settled into a long and silent fight with Casey over the ransacking of Ren’s old house, a fight Casey had won with his disappearance, leaving Kira to finish what he’d started. Leaving Kira with an understanding of the young man he’d only thought to have in his presence--when the world leaves you alone, sentimentality isn’t an option. Ren and Jyn had known that as well, though Jyn had seemed as unable to fully shake it as Kira is.

His hands are already blistered and he’s gone inside for more water before he’s even ready to head for the roof. He’d stripped more nails from the boards with a hammer from the cache at the inn, used his knife to hold them at the heads and hammer them closer to straight. It’s too hot for the work he means to do, but he can’t do it in the few hours of dark they’re getting, and he doesn’t know when the next freak storm is going to tear through. He’s not going to wait on someone to come along and do it for him--catch him fish, bring him wood; carry him back to the inn, take him away from the village when he’s sunk too deep in other people’s problems to see his own.

He’s not coming back. None of them are, and it’s time to stop needing them to.

Working against the heat, Kira carries his materials up to the attic in shifts, doing his best to splash water on his face and hydrate between. The only reason the space hasn’t become a very big, triangular oven is the ventilation of some very noticeable holes, sunlight streaming through to the rafters. It takes some trial and error to brace the boards on the sloping roof with his shoulder, the pockets of his overalls full of old nails, and hammer them into place, but he doesn’t think he’s doing too bad a job, balancing on the beams and boarding up the holes from the inside.

The only problem is how much hotter it gets as the sun rises, and the holes close. By the time he’s sitting half-out the small window, dragging his shingles out and flipping them onto the roof for the last steps, his arms are shaking and it’s more of a struggle than ever to catch his breath. When he tries to pull himself further out to follow the shingles up onto the roof, he wobbles enough to rethink finishing the project today. Instead, he slides his legs out to hang himself down, using the last of his strength to lower himself clumsily back to the porch.

Once there, he slides down on the steps, shoulder against the support beam, and keeps sliding. Down onto his side, then rolled onto his back, back on the porch and legs sprawled on the steps. At his far-flung hand, Hoshi lifts his head and sets to cawing in his small, croaking voice. Aurora shuffles up and he can feel her tongue scraping the side of his head as the bright world dims to black.

at the river

The sun has slipped close enough to the canyon walls that the shadows have lengthened, the world dimmed enough beneath the trees that Kira chances a walk. He’s still shaky, but his brush with heat sickness hasn’t eased his restlessness, his need to prove himself more than the soft civilian who gets pneumonia in a snowstorm and heat stroke in a drought, isn’t good for defending himself from even the fucking weather.

If anyone sees fit to chide him, at least he can say he stayed by plenty of water. Not that there’s as much to go around: the old edge of the river is cracked earth and smooth, exposed pebbles. It stinks, too--the fish left on the high banks aren’t very big, but they’ve been out long enough to go to rot.

Hoshi puts up enough fuss over the exposed treasures glinting under the faded light that Kira sets him down from his perch on his shoulder. His wing seems to have healed, and he has most of his feathers--but he still holds it stiff, and Kira isn’t sure it healed right. He might prove more than a quick rescue and release, no one to teach him to fly, not enough of the right feathers yet to start trying. The little bird picks at the stones, even a couple silver-scaled minnows, but eventually he finds something that captures Kira’s attention as well.

“What have you got there,” he asks, crouching gingerly at the new edge of the water, scooping the little crow back before even he can be swept away in its diminished currents. Moving aside the rest of the pebbles with his own hand, he picks up a dull metal arrowhead, antiquated in shape but so clean, he wonders if it came from the blacksmith up-stream.

[Kira has fainted from heat-sickness in the first prompt, but your character is welcome to come along at any point after he goes out on his porch and interrupt or help.]

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Since the arrival of his sister, Ned has found himself seeking the solace of the woods more often. It isn't that he isn't exuberantly overjoyed at having her in his life; quite the contrary. He'd spent the last 17 years of his life without her in it, still catching ghastly hallucinations of her blood across his palms and fingertips, her voice still whispering in his ear when he least expected it. But with her arrival, and the revelation of Jon's true identity to both the man himself and his biological mother, he's found himself a bit .. overwhelmed.

He's a man of Winterfell. He keeps his emotions to himself, sparing only fleeting glances of elation, or sadness, or fury. Otherwise, he is The Quiet Wolf. Stoic, even-tempered, sometimes sullen and solemn. Rumored to have eyes to reflect the ice in his heart by his enemies. So just because he no longer walks on Westerosi soil does not mean it has ceased to exist inside of him, and he finds himself unable (and perhaps unwilling) to shed the mask.

The higher temperatures also drive him towards the forest, seeking out the sanctuary of the shade. His Northern blood practically boils in temperatures too warm for a thin coat of frost on tree and ground alike, and even though his clothing is less layered and lighter than anything he's worn before, he still finds himself sweltering. But the river has held no relief over recent days, drying up and withdrawing from the bank like a receding hand. That is a different curiosity entirely.

He's loitering a bit upstream from where he hears the murmuring, slowly recognizing the person the voice belongs to. He remembers the boy he pulled from the fountain, when the frigid air had reminded him of home. He remembers talk of biting insects and fevers. He meanders towards where he thinks Kira might be to see the boy crouching by the riverbank as he nears, rummaging for something in the barren bank. He sees the flicker of something dark and black in his other hand.

"Anything interesting?" he asks, staying a respectable distance away until invited to move closer.

Even young crows, in Kira's experience, have an idea of how they feel about people. Hoshi hadn't much choice in his captivity over the last few weeks, but Kira's done nothing to confine him once he felt confident Aurora would treat him gently, if she bothered him at all. Given the choice, Hoshi hasn't strayed more than a few yards from him since.

That trust seems to extend to others as well, the little bird lifting his sparsely feathered head to cock one eye at Ned, flapping his good wing somewhere between a greeting and splashing a bit of water over himself. There's no alarmed crying or move to get away, so Kira leaves him where he is, uncovering another arrowhead and lifting it to catch the light where Ned can see it.

"He found these," he says, lifting it a little higher to offer it to the other man. "Do they look at all used, to you? I can't really tell the difference."

Ned allows himself to draw closer at the silent invitation, keeping a curious eye on the young bird near the water's edge, and extending a hand for the stone being offered. No, it isn't a stone, he realizes upon closer inspection; it's very clearly an arrowhead, and a bronze one at that. He runs a finger tip against the side of it and then along its length to test its sharpness. It pricks him a bit, but nothing more than what might be sustained with a gliding piece of parchment. He glances at his nicked thumb before returning his attention to the artifact.

"Observant crow," Ned comments with a fond gaze in the bird's direction. "They're a bit worn, though .. not nearly as much as one would expect, given the length of time I assume they've spent in the water," he says, crouching down to inspect the bank himself. "They should've turned green by now, but if you look at it," he holds it out in front of both of them, "It looks almost new, as though just forged. It's still a bit sharp, which means its loss of severity is most likely due to the rushing water, not the dullness that comes with piercing skin or leather."

Ned's eyes sweep the exposed bank before landing on the bird again.

"Made a friend, eh? We use ravens back home to deliver messages. Bit different from a crow, but there's something comforting in seeing him here. The order Jon had been a part of, the Night's Watch, was often called crows, too, as they wore all black. Where'd you find 'em?"

"Ravens are ugly flash bastards," Kira says, as if for Hoshi's benefit. As if he wouldn't have just as easily scooped up a broken raven out of the leaf-litter and named it after a piece of the night sky. Still: he nudges the little bird with his wrist until he gets some kind of scraping agreement.

They're both hoarse, though Hoshi with better reason. As Ned examines the arrow, Kira wets his hand in the new edge of the river, cooling it before lifting it to his cheek. If Ravi saw him out here, he'd probably commit him to the hospital for flagrant disregard for his own life, or something. As ever is the case for such behavior, the truth lies somewhere closer to a mix of boredom and a feeling of helplessness.

His other hand still holds the second arrowhead, and beyond it, Hoshi is earnestly pushing at stones with his beak, finding another now that his first two have been taken away. "Do you think they were put here? Maybe made just to be put here?"

It would fit the way most things work, in this place.

"I will not argue you there," Ned replies with an amused quip of laughter. "They grow into beautiful things though, don't they? Something alluring in feathers the color of the night. And it seems quite fond of you, never straying too far. Have you given it a name?"

Ned sees the glisten of water at Kira's cheek, syncs it with the peripheral sight of him lifting the cool water to his skin. Now that Ned's more aware, he notices a slight flush under the surface. He will circle back to the topic, he decides.

"Made? By whom?" His brows flinch with concern as he glances from the Kira to the riverbed to the bird to the arrowhead still in his hand. He remembers the feast only weeks prior, how Jon had claimed it to be a gift from the Old Gods. He'd implied heavily that there was some .. divine intervention by something or some things unseen, but - why would they place arrowheads in the river? It does seem all too suspect, to have the water recede at precisely the moment the arrowheads would appear. And the thing itself is far too perfect, far too pristine for it to have been buried beneath water and rubble alike. Ned finally brings his attention back to Kira, this time with an undercurrent of worry in his eyes. "The theory would not be all that far-fetched, given the strange events throughout the village. But to what end?"

There's a balancing act to speaking with people like Ned, or Jyn, or Credence--the refusal to give up himself, but wanting to frame things in a way they might understand. Without his gifts, he has to guess at it, think about the cadence of voices and the words they do or don't use. What he's said in the past that trips the flow of conversation, or derails it into an inexpert explanation of helicopters to a boy who's barely lived the invention of the plane.

Kira flattens his hand and leans his head into the cup of it, still cool to the touch for a moment. His other draws a finger down the little crow's head and back, watching him try to puff up his wings and downy, patchy feathers in response. "Hoshi," he answers. "The...people I come from, in their language, it means star."

A bright point in the sky, nothing at all to do with those dark feathers, but Credence had insisted on a name at all, and it's never been an effort to do him a kindness. Easier than finding one in a conversation about their mysterious captors: "Probably to fuck with us," he adds, all pretense of couching his answers in Ned's manners abandoned. "Why do they do anything?" Why hail, why heat, why walls they can't climb and a fountain they can't understand?

"Hoshi," Ned echoes, attempting his best at imitating the delicate sounds of another tongue he hears from Kira's mouth. It's painted with the strength of his northerner accent, the 'o' a bit too drawn out, the ending too abrupt. But he remembers it with a silent promise to work at getting better. He considers the tiny thing for a moment before before raising his eyes to Kira. "It's an important thing, naming something. It's why we name our children and pets - it shows a type of ownership, a closeness of relationship and bond. Seems Hoshi here's been able to understand that."

Ned shifts himself so he's no longer bent on his long-since injured knee, instead sitting properly with a stifled groan as he stretches out the scarred leg in front of him.

"To get a reaction, if I had to guess," he replies simply and flatly. "Like insects in a cage, being observed by something greater and bigger we can't see."

For Kira, names go much deeper than that, and it's always been a particular disturbance to see his own scrawled by mysterious hands on the labels of gifts. A reminder of the power held over them, a sign of--as Ned says--ownership. They're brought here, they can be taken away. It makes him a little leery of having pets at all--how long before something happens to one of them, just to get a reaction?

Ned sitting gives him permission to just fall on his ass in the rivulets of water and exposed stones, a much better option than trying to stand. He's still getting dizzy, still tiring too easily. A nap in the cellar hasn't quite cured him, and he isn't sure this place is going to let him recover very soon.

That would require a drop in temperatures that the sun can't provide, staying above the horizon as long as it does. He hadn't quite believed it when someone said the river had changed currents, that the sky had shifted--but he can see it. He can tip his head back to look through the trees at the sun sitting low, but not below, the horizon, moving to the east instead of west. It's a measure of control that frightens him more than anything else that's happened. "What do you even do," he asks, but doesn't expect an answer, "with a force that can alter turning of the world."

Ned's fingers skim across some of the exposed stone, allowing them to both exist in the quiet trickling of water, the flapping of downy feather, the breeze that only seems to come in fleeting gasps with air far too hot for Ned's northern blood. He picks up a rock to run his fingers over the smooth surface of it, glancing over to Kira as he speaks.

It doesn't take much for him to realize he's out of his depth in even attempting to answer a question such as that, and so all he shares with the boy is a compassionate softening of his face, and a slight shrug of his shoulders.

That quickly fades and gives way to one of concern.

"Are you all right, Kira?" he asks, brows lifting together in curiosity. "Is it the heat?"

Kira doesn't know what he'd expect the lord of a keep to be--even Nicky's softer moments had been unexpected, and Nicky had only been lord of a garage, maintaining control of a few city blocks. It had still been a pointed thing, for him to drop a quilt around Kira's shoulders after a long day at the radio, or share a cigarette after a long shift of turning canned goods into some kind of meal for the other refugees.

It's weird to think of them that way. Manhattan had been home. He'd been taking refuge across the street from his mother's building.

"I'm fine," he sighs, lifting a hand idly to shoulder-height before dropping it back to the stones beneath him. "I overworked myself earlier, now I'm just tired. I figured it would be cooler here."

"You're not my child, so I won't attempt to lecture you on what might be best for you, if you're feeling ill," Ned starts, "I'd learnt that paternal hounding such as that was not always met with open, listening ears many, many times over from my own children." He lets loose a rumbling, throaty sort of chuckle. "But should there be anything you need, to assist you, you need only ask; I will fetch it for you, eh?"

Ned eyes Kira for a second longer before glancing back towards Hoshi.

"Where I'm from, and where the others of my family are from, is in the very northern part of Westeros. Wintry sort of place. We'd had an unusually long summer - about ten years or so - before I'd arrived here, but still - Winterfell, as the name suggests, is always colder than further south. The further north you go, the more frigid. This heat," he gestures vaguely to their surroundings with his hand, "is worse than what I'd experienced when I'd been in King's Landing." He pauses, then adds for explanation, "It's the, eh, capital of Westeros, and about a three-week journey down the King's Road from Winterfell. I've found myself with a spinning head on more than one occasion since the temperatures have risen."

Ned speaks--and speaks--of fatherly concern and duty, at such odds with Daichi's own silences that Kira smothers a laugh into the hand drawing a cool stone to his face. He lifts it further, eyes fluttering shut and pressing the smooth surface to the very thin, very flushed skin below his eye.

"Did you talk this much around your own children," he asks, not the most gracious response, but graciousness has never been one of his virtues. Having virtues has never really been one of his virtues.

Moving the stone, he presses its other side below his other eye, until it heats close enough to the skin to be of no use. Kira discards it for Hoshi's inspection, trailing his fingers again across his pluming feathers. As much work as the animals are, he's grateful of them on these long days. Maybe he could have weathered his father's silences better with a different kind of company, void of speech.

"There were times I tried, certainly," Ned replies, barely grazed by Kira's attempt at a verbal assault. "Though I don't think I often made it more than a sentence or two before their eyes would glaze over, and their minds would wander far outside of the realm of our conversation." He's raised five true born children and one natural born child - three into adolescence. Such sharp-edged words and a blade for a tongue are nothing new for Ned, though he'd never experienced such talk from Robb or Jon. Sansa had been the one to exhale her disgust, roll her eyes like stones in her skull.

"Eventually, one learns that around one's own brood, it's often best to say less with words and more with actions and looks."

"I think that's a trap to fall into when you're around people too much," he says, speaking from his own experience. Of being the brood that parents went silent around, didn't reach out to, didn't think things needed to be said but simply done. He knew his father loved him because he sat down to dinner with him every Saturday and breakfast every Sunday, and he held his tongue for the sake of family even when Kira transformed overnight into a hungover, unwashed wretch half-asleep in his pancakes.

But he knew his mother, because she spoke to him. He didn't have to rely on the gift, he got to know her in what she divulged, what she chose to show and to tell. "Some things are important to say. Some people need to hear them, even if you think you've shown it."

I love you, I'm proud of you; you can tell me what's wrong.

"I suppose, as with most things in life, it is more about balance than choosing sides. There are things, as you said, that need and should be said; there are other things that need and should be demonstrated where words might be hollow or flat." He reflects on the relationships he has with his children quietly for a moment. The Starks were known for their stoicism, for their silent, icy gazes, for their taciturn behaviors. Ned spoke when he felt it to be absolutely necessary more oft than nothing, but his actions often spoke volumes more than whatever he failed to say. There had to be a balance. A man could claim to believe in many things but never once support them with his demonstrations, as well as the opposite.

"Perhaps saying things, things that are important, should be something for me to work on moving forward."

"Just do both," he says, a little more wrung out than interactions with Ned would warrant. But the heat lives under his skin now, exhausts him, makes him look again and again at the dwindling water and the undarkening sky. But they aren't even here, maybe aren't even really anywhere, the way Mark laid it out.

They should be dead; they're not; they're Schrodinger's fucking village living in binary.

He puts Hoshi in his lap just to feel it, tell himself that it's real, it has to be, even if really being trapped here is no consolation. "If my family were here," and he doesn't mean it to be accusatory, just--no one here seems to have as much family as Ned and his children. "If were trapped here with some fucked-up second chance, I'd tell them everything. Good or bad or pointless. I'd talk to them until I ran out of breath."

"Acknowledged," Ned replies, his tone no less soft. There is a steel, an ice to the blue of his eyes - not directed at Kira, but more at himself for having not come to the same realization on his own, without assistance. It isn't that Ned hasn't wanted to do those things; it's not as though his tongue had stalled within the cavern of his mouth or that he worried how his children would take whatever he managed to reveal, but rather - that it goes against everything Ned has ever been or raised to be. The Quiet Wolf. The man with eyes to reflect the coldness in his heart.

There isn't a single person in the Seven Kingdoms who'd ever heard of Lord Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, and associated him with chatter. Many had probably never heard his voice, even if they had had the opportunity to meet him in person. Written correspondence was much of the same - only what was necessary, only what was needed in order to convey a message with as few words as possible.

But there is a great deal of truth in Kira's suggestion. Ned grits his teeth a bit as his inner conflict grows.

"I'd left so many things unsaid before I arrived here, and had all future opportunities to reveal those things stolen when I was executed," he says quietly. "I shouldn't waste a second chance, as you said." The steel of his eyes fades and melts again. "Thank you."

The way some people talk, Kira has to wonder if he didn't die on the way here. Maybe it isn't real, like Mark said--but maybe something before it was. He doesn't believe in heaven and hell, but he believes in cycles, and he believes Mark's theory enough that it scares him.

Technology, magic--at some point it's all relative. Maybe he died face down in the snow, two fire-escapes down from those antibiotics. The rioters came back, or he just fell asleep in the cold.

Now someone's making him dream about a heat wave, building something, testing him. Unplugging them at random, who fucking knows. It doesn't always feel like a second chance for him, with no one he knew, and no idea what he was supposed to be doing the first time around. "No problem," he sighs, shrugging elegantly with his hands braced on loose stones. "Any time."

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[open] i'm caught in the cold; i'm caught in the hot

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