sixthiterationlogs | [closed] gravity won’t get you through the mazes

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[closed] gravity won’t get you through the mazes

WHO: Kira Akiyama
WHERE: House 39
WHEN: September 15 [predated]
OPEN TO: Bodhi Rook
WARNINGS: N/A

Long as the trek was, and dangerous as life alone could be beyond the bounds of civilization, Kira isn’t sure he’d do it any differently. The other option would have been disappearing each day into the south of the canyon, relying on someone else to have food and relative shelter ready every time he returned. He would have been too reachable, too burdensome--and too bored.

He could have taken Tim with him. Hell, he probably could have taken Bodhi with him, if he’d just told the man they were going with little enough notice for excuses. But Bodhi had been difficult to be around in his own right--the drifting, the insecurity. Bodhi is a man without armor. He dodges, he retreats. Maybe sometimes he even absorbs--but he doesn’t hold. Kira, if he’s honest, hasn’t had his armor since he crawled through the fountain. Hasn’t had his armor since Ty moved him out of his apartment, put him in the base, and left without heeding his warnings.

The best armor is someone else to wear it, really, but nothing works that way here. Other people can’t stand between him and the feelings of more people. Other people can’t give him the energy to live, trying to process them all at once.

It isn’t a slight on Bodhi. It isn’t even really a slight on Tim, much as it seemed to turn into one--and he makes the house his first destination when he wakes up with those senses dulled back to nothing. He can’t trust that it will last, not after the few days before it came back stronger than before, but he can use the time to check in, shore up some kind of social or edible currency, make it--make it something like okay, when he has to do it again.

Kira dodges too. Tim might be the first person he really explained it to, and only because he backed himself so deep in a corner, his claws were stuck in the wood, useless for defense. Bodhi’s been with him even longer, keeping up the house, keeping it from being a place Kira shares with ghosts.

He owes it to the man not to become one, even just in habit. “Bodhi,” he calls, letting the animals and himself in through the working back door. Aurora trots deeper in the house, gently wuffing her own greeting, letting Kira know he’s caught Bodhi at home. He puts Hoshi on the back of a chair, slinging his pack down onto the table. His clothes need a better wash than they can get in a lake, but he’s kept himself fed, stayed in a house on the other side, and the restfulness of getting away sits well on him.

It’s no match for the restfulness of feeling nothing at all, standing in a house with another occupant.

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Bodhi likes his everyday disappearances, and Kira's lucky to find him home from one of them as opposed to out in the middle of the woods contemplating nothing. He comes down--unusually--from his room, a space that he rarely exhibits the slightest interest in despite Kira's careful curation of their shared home. But he didn't want to leave Jude's picture just lying around, because there seemed to be a vanishingly small chance he'd have to explain why.

With Kira gone his schedule's degraded from erratic to completely nonexistent, but he looks fine, maybe a little more underslept than usual. He certainly doesn't seem upset, just politely pleased, waving to Kira and acknowledging the dog and the bird with the same bemused glances he usually does.

Nothing's really changed: the dramatic idea that the world might collapse into another panic--or literal collapse--was his own paranoia. Maybe it's only personal if he frames it that way, or maybe their captors already know his first response to turning up the volume on the rest of the villagers. He runs away, and that's all they wanted.

They'll keep getting their way, if it keeps getting worse.

A shame when the things he misses are so--small. Bodhi looking sideways at Aurora while she bounces around him, Hoshi hopping chair to table to inspect any food left out on it. Tim's firewood stacked at the back porch like he never stopped leaving it, even with no sign of life inside. That's fucking sad, really. If he disappeared, truly disappeared, this place might become the same kind of grave Ren's did, standing empty across the path.

"I'm back," he says, and hopes to mean it. "Any of those foxes getting into things over here? I've got a few tricks to keep them messing with the house, if they have been."

"No, everything's... what do we have instead of normal?" Bodhi has heard about the foxes and been curious, so he hasn't detached himself entirely from society while Kira was gone. He's floundering a bit in his resolution to try and actually live here instead of existing here, but he's kept up that much. "Uneventful, anyway," he concludes, following the thought at his own meandering pace. And since Kira's here, he makes for the kitchen, unable to remember if there's anything put together. Probably not, since he hasn't thought about food yet today. Or... since he woke up last, which, come to think, was technically sometime yesterday, since there was a night in between. Huh.

Well, he'll get to it. "What tricks, just in case?"

Next time, he thinks, he'll try to just stay here. Bodhi drifts through almost incidentally, and assuming the place doesn't try to fall down around them, it isn't the worst thing in the world to feel him drift equally after his own thoughts. Low level anxiety can at least be acclimated to, and if he isn't used to Bodhi after all this time, who is he used to?

People long gone, probably.

Aurora eventually accepts that Bodhi isn't as enthusiastic about her existence as she is about his, and gives up with a lick to the side of his hand. "She helps," he says, nodding at the dog as he follows Bodhi toward the kitchen. "Singing helped, I guess--acting like you're not alone. And there's a game, shiritori, you say a word and the other person has to say a word that starts with the syllable yours ended in." Well, not quite, but his grasp of kana had never gotten to a point that he could reliably play by the proper rules. "Between the kanji on the peach tree and the foxes, I figured the old tricks might work on them."

Bodhi pets Aurora's ears absently. He's fond of her, in his way. He just doesn't have any real experience with pets, and he's never sure what to do.

He only makes sense of a little of what Kira's saying, but he's been traveling from planet to planet all his adult life, and despite all the Empire's efforts, that means new places, new sounds, new customs that make perfect sense to the few locals you mix with at a spaceport. He's good at picking things out in the moment and zeroing in on what he does grasp. "Just... singing?" He almost laughs. This place does such awful things to them sometimes that the mild absurdity has a hard edge to it, but it's still funny.

Kira almost laughs as well: imagine any of their problems here, solved with the hum of a tune. "I mean, I'm decent at it, I don't know if that part matters. Try not to go caterwauling down the paths, it probably won't be foxes who take offense."

He tilts his head on a lazy angle to his shoulder, stretching a bit in the closure of his self, in his return to his own space. The kitchen is where they most often meet, and it's home for that, he supposes. Tapping his foot to the grate on the stove, the ash shifts over long dead coals. "Get a towel or something," he says, "I want to clean this out before I make dinner."

"There was a vote taken once. Rook isn't allowed to sing." But he's glad everyone else has the option.

"But, um, I can cook. You've been walking all day." Well, maybe not all day, but he's back and Bodhi knows from experience that it's kind of a trip. Which isn't to say he's been relaxing all day himself, exactly, but... Actually, he's less than completely sure what he has been doing. Some chores, sure, but otherwise, well, looking at stuff, his own long walks... Maybe this isn't the most convincing way he could have offered. Especially since the larder's pretty empty just now.

"It can't be that bad," Kira says, though he'd be the first to challenge anyone's talent, at anything, just to take the piss out of them. "How are you going to teach me rude alien songs if you don't demonstrate?"

The offer is new, and not entirely unwelcome. Unless he finds a feast in his kitchen or he shows up too late to help prepare a meal at the inn, no one cooks for him. After a week of whatever he could catch and cook himself on the other side, it's a nice thing to come back to. "Alright," he concedes, "go get a towel so I can clean this out before you make dinner."

None of the walking he's done the last week tired him any more than that particular gift could, and free of it again, he's itching to get back into the swing of things.

"Fair." Well, now he has to do it. It's not like it'll be terrible, exactly, just that the whole thing might come together a bit slowly and strangely and he'll feel watched all the while. He's easy enough around Kira that the prospect is just slightly disheartening rather than a source of distress, but he's prepared to look a bit silly. He fetches the towel and then opens the icebox, which is really just storage this time of year, but better than nothing. He's in luck. Not a lot of anything, but the remains of one of Baze's rabbits, some ends of vegetables, a little bit of boiled stock, and half a loaf of bread. Something vaguely stewy. Not impressive, but dinner. "Have you seen them? The foxes, I mean. Or..." Well, he's just prepared for a lot of weirdness.

The house doesn't have a proper fireplace, just the furnace and stove, so the tools are best kept in the kitchen. While Bodhi figures out the food situation, Kira pokes the last of the char into smaller pieces, then rakes the build-up of char and ash out onto the towel. It's more dirty work than hard, and he brushes the walls and bottom of the stove clean, centering himself with the work. When the gift isn't too strong, it's the kind of thing that keeps him occupied, calm.

It's everyone else he can't rely on, to keep their moods even or their tempers steady.

"Saw plenty on the other side," he says, wrapping the towel up around the mess to carry out back. He'll take it to the hopper tomorrow, or sift it over Ren's grave. The stones are covered in moss now that the rains are back, and he wonders what else might grow.

He's neglected that grave too, every time he's run off. Not again. "It's funny," he says when he returns, fresh wood in his arms, "they were too big. Looked like normal foxes, really, but they acted like spirits." They should have been the size of weasels, maybe, but when he remembers the animal samples in the coolers with their own, maybe it makes sense. Maybe they were something grown, another feint. He should float that by Mark when he sees him.

Bodhi pulls down a frying pan, deciding the available options and not wanting to spend a lot of time on it call for the throw everything reasonably tasty in a pan and then put what comes out on some carbs method of faking his way through dinner. "I guess I wouldn't know what they're supposed to look like," Bodhi concedes. He's often mystified by how many people here either come from the same world (however vastly different their specific experiences) or improbably similar ones. He's been told what a fox is, and it sounds... ordinary, a little warm blooded predatory thing of the kind you'd find on a world like this with lots of available food at water. He's not nearly as good at animals as he is at rocks and stars, but he can grasp patterns easily enough.

"In my father's country," Kira says, always careful to specify, lest his heritage lay some greater expectation on his shoulders, "foxes are different from other animals. They're messengers of the gods, and they can take human form, so you take that into account when encountering one. You--well, you treat it a bit like a person. It's a bit like fairies, I guess."

As he explains, Kira frowns, trying to pack in the wood the way Tim or Rene might position it. Trying to pretend he learned something in all the camping he's done. He realizes Bodhi is less in need of a Western explanation than a kind he isn't sure he can give. "I don't know, maybe for you it would be like--assuming they're in tune with your Force. That they're conscious enough to feel slighted or form grudges."

What is any religion, but a way to inform group behavior? Invisible forces or foxes: hadn't he run from his own paranoia over the Observers singling him out? Hadn't he sang and made up syllable games with his dog, for his parents' stories? "They're a bit like Aurora," he adds, if he's just being descriptive for Bodhi's benefit. "Just smaller, paler, pointier."

Nothing about the story sounds at all unusual to Bodhi. Lots of worlds have local peculiarities like that--some of them just legends or exaggerations, but there's nothing that surprising about creatures that can't really be defined as sentients with a connection to the Force. Admittedly, it's easy to be accepting coming from a world of space magic and non-human intelligences. His nod says that all makes sense and he'll keep it in mind, and if he's assuming fairies are some other species on the planet Bodhi's from, that's not really going to effect how he deals with this. "If I see one I'll see how offended it is by my tone deafness." He's actually not tone deaf. More's the pity, since he can hear everything wrong with his own singing voice.

"You can take Aurora any time you like, if you want the peace of mind. She keeps her people safe."

He'd never been deeply enamored of dogs before Aurora was thrust upon him, but he's come to appreciate her in her owner's absence. Shouldn't think about it like that, really: he's her owner. He's raised her up longer than anyone, even if Casey did it first. When he sleeps alone she climbs up in the bed and sleeps against his back, and she did her best to warn and protect against the creatures on the other side.

And she saved their asses in the quake. He doesn't forget that. As Bodhi continues to work, he lets himself sink to the floor and scratch up her throat and ears, lavishing her in attention. "She's probably as close to a child as I'm ever going to have," he sighs, deeply aware of the stereotype he's played into without even trying. "Her and the bird."

Bodhi turns to say he's feeling more or less peaceful of mind, but he'll remember if it comes up, but Kira's next comment catches him off guard. Sometimes things do. There are so many carefully maintained walls, and then the oddest thing will reveal a fault in the defenses.

He gave up a lot of things when he took on Galen's mission. Didn't really recognize everything at first, but it had gradually become clear, and one reason he's as calm as he is about the valley as a rule is simply that he had nothing and no one left to lose by the end. But that doesn't mean he goes around thinking about everything that's gone. Flying comes up a lot, since he has to explain his job every so often. He's numb to that. And everyone here lost home and however they made sense of the world and whoever they belonged to. But one offhand reference and a wound he was carefully ignoring flares. Home-marriage-family wasn't even really a dream, more of an expectation since childhood that he always looked forward to as both pleasant and inevitable. He'd only just begun to wonder about those prospects at twenty-five, not enough wondering to really turn wistful.

But now they're all gone, and it's a sudden sting. He swallows, is silent a little too long, and hears himself say, "Well, there... there aren't any here, anyway. Probably a good thing."

"I'd noticed that," Kira agrees, hands slowing but not quite stilling on Aurora, looking over from his crouch. It doesn't take a gift to notice when Bodhi's caught on something, though caught on something might be part of his default state. If an object floats through the world, it eventually snags. "I think Veronica was one of the youngest people here."

He doesn't know if that makes her loss somehow worse. It probably depends on what one believes happens when a person leaves, and he isn't so sure.

Aurora shuffles her paws on the floor, backing herself up and surging forward at-will, no mind for the fact of Kira's arm trying to sling over her compact shoulders and hold her close and contained. He jostles with her and waits it out, until she presses a nervous muzzle to his shoulder and huffs. "I wouldn't wish this place on anyone, but it definitely adds to the--atmosphere, I guess. I guess they don't need us to have kids, when they can just pull people in from anywhere, but I wonder what part that plays in any of it. I think the stakes would feel much higher, but I also wonder how anyone starts to settle in, with no--future, like that."

Bodhi disentangles himself aggressively from his own disappointments. He has a lot of practice. And Kira does him the favor of talking long enough for him to try and pull himself together. He nods, figuring out how to grasp this lifeline, and finally tugs himself back up into normal discourse. It's still a grim conversation, but not quite a paralyzingly depressing one. "That is... that's strange. Didn't someone get married?" He hadn't really known either of the parties concerned beyond brief acquaintance, so he hadn't had a chance to figure it out. From the outside, it was deeply strange. "Unless someone here has a way to file taxes or give their parents an excuse to throw a party, well, why?"

Why did people get married in the village, why did he give up the numbing parties and return home, why did he let Ty back into his life--knowing, as he had for a decade, how it all ended? It didn't matter at the time, that the vision was subverted. He thought it was real. He thought he would die before he reached thirty.

He still might, honestly.

"When you look down the barrel of everything, I guess people hold on to what they can. Or they make gestures, try to be happy. I'm not waking up every day hoping for another dose of existential horror." Even Bodhi has to realize he isn't puttering around the house every day, or off solving the great mysteries of their prison. He's fucked around--literally, some days--just to pass the time. Just to have something to get up for that wasn't feeding himself, Bodhi, or the animals.

"But I'm not really--hoping for anything at all, if I'm honest. It's been a year for some of the people here, and there's still no infrastructure, no real stability. No kids, no ways out, no definite answers. We have winter on the way again and we have to deal with that--I really hope no one would waste the harvest to get married."

The look he sends back over his shoulder is almost sly, happy enough to meander down a more pointed, and Bodhi-aimed subject: "Sorry to disappoint your girlfriend, I know she wanted to walk you down the aisle to me." The tangle of misconceptions between the three of them doesn't really fill the void of a real life and family either, but amusement is something.

Edited 2017-09-08 01:21 (UTC)

Bodhi snorts, as amused at the idea that there might be an aisle here somewhere that deserves the name as by the ridiculous ribbing. He can deduce who Kira must be teasing him about, if only because of the pronoun. There are only a few people he really knows, even after all this time, and only one of them is a woman who periodically prowls around this house. "I... I can see why someone would want to be, um, involved." That's the closest word he can get to what he'd imagine a relationship here would be. It wouldn't make sense to say people were dating or going out. What in the valley could possibly constitute a date? And while there's certainly plenty of sex happening (Bodhi's detached, not oblivious), one can only assume at least some of it is more structured than just that. Probably. He'd imagine. So "involved" it is, to be interpreted as needed. "I guess I don't see the point of making it official when there's... nothing else official going on." Marriage is a social and legal construct, and they don't really have either of those things.

It's an odd, or just oddly pointed, conversation to have after his furlough in the other village. After Tim tracked him down, after he had to ask how important it really is to him, having Kira around. Why should it matter, why should either of them say anything at all? Bodhi's asking the things Kira hadn't even thought about as he packed and wandered away.

He hadn't even left Tim a note, just--the people he felt responsible for.

"I don't know, honestly. Why can't I imagine moving closer to the inn for the winter without taking you with me? Why do we spend so much time with Credence? People are social animals, we become something else when you cut us off from it."

Bodhi's transparently bashful reaction drains a lot of the enthusiasm for this debate out of him. It's not exactly news that Kira takes him into account. Kira's been looking after him for the better part of a year now. But it's still a bit disarming to hear it. "It's not... I don't mean that. Of course we find our people when we can." Bodhi left a broken world behind and joined a very odd artificial society over the course of his escape. He knows all about finding a place to land, even if he's not very good at it. "Being married is... making a public statement, and having much easier paperwork when you see about buying a house, and neither, well, maybe the first one..."

At this point, Kira can only smile as Bodhi wilts, like there was some intent in saying it so plainly. Whatever Bodhi's recovering from, as with Credence--and he will, eventually, deal with Credence--he isn't going to get any better being handled with five layers of kid gloves.

He drags himself up from the floor, though the subject doesn't necessarily require the dignity of sitting at the table instead. It just lets him hold Aurora's lolling head in his lap and corral Hoshi away from Bodhi's efforts, casting a wider net of his attention over everyone in the room. "That's just what marriage is to you, though," he points out. "I'm not saying it's important to our survival in like, any way at all, but there are plenty of people who don't just see it as a piece of paper and some benefits. For some people it's deeply religious, or it's actually about love. If you're going to cling to either of those things in the face of adversity, well, it can be a big deal to someone like that."

Yes, it's stupid and wasteful to have an actual wedding--but he can see why someone might do it anyway. There are other kinds of thoughtless action than the usual panic.

Edited 2017-09-09 15:42 (UTC)

Well, it's literally impossible to argue with that. Much as Bodhi would like there to be a functional index of motivations and behaviors, people usually aren't logical. Self among them. And he's the first to admit he's not the best at sussing this stuff out. "It does... vary a lot," he concedes, as though that were the only reason he might have missed the point. In fact, he doesn't quite give up all his ground. He's still right that it's silly. Even in such a small thing, it's rare for Bodhi to be confident enough to stick to any guns at all.

The room's beginning to smell like dinner. Nice thing about repurposing leftovers is nothing needs to be cooked through, just rendered edible. Bodhi fusses with the pan a bit while he considers. "Maybe a little bit of normality helps, too, even if it's not exactly... real?"

"Sometimes to keep surviving, you need a reason," he says, a kind of agreement. Last time he spoke to Sonny, he'd felt the way those could slip, and everything else tumbling after it. "And for some people, everything at home isn't going to cut it. I don't even--"

He stops, using the pause to push a breath through his teeth. It's been closer to a year than it hasn't, since he saw home. The one piece of it they gave him, he had to bury, afraid that the blood would spark another illness, give the observers another arrow in their quiver of disasters. And he'd just wanted it out of his fucking sight and as far out of his mind as that could drive it.

But he did pause for it, and he doesn't want to fess up to the reason. "We could get stuck here another decade, and somehow survive it, and you won't find an invite to a party for me shacking up with Tim," he admits instead. "But the idea that the three of us could make it any sort of time and still know each other, I guess that means something. I guess that has to be enough, until we can figure out a way to make something else of this place or get out of it."

"Just being alive, I mean, it feels like a good start, but that's... That's probably more of a comfort if you died before you got here. And it isn't actually enough." He's gotten better about acknowledging that in conversation. Six months of mourning himself has taken the edge off it as much as this strange, surreal afterlife. "We need something other than just waiting here to see who'll turn up and who'll disappear. I get that." He still doesn't think declaring a wedding is a reasonable response, but he's mostly forgotten the original contention. "Maybe that's just knowing each other, I don't know..."

Kira leans a bit in his chair, stretching as his body settles from the long walk home. "Don't worry Bodhi, if someone announces their upcoming nuptials, I'll be right there with you, pointing out that we don't even have rice to waste on throwing." He's already lamented the fact to Ravi, probably multiple times.

With one hand, he placates; with the other, he riles. A bit like rubbing Aurora's fur the wrong way before he brushes it flat again. "And if by some miracle we get out, you can come haunt my apartment as long as you need. I like knowing you, I'm not wishing to get out of that."

Bodhi smiles again at the gesture, though he's not quite as shocked into complaisance by the second good-natured assurance of friendship in the course of this one conversation. He does turn away from the stove entirely (it's all just warming up at this point, really, just needs the occasional stir to keep things from sticking) and lean against the counter to shrug at Kira. "I... That sounds nice, and if that's the way... I mean, if I don't wink back out of existence or... But if it was an option, I'd really have to go home myself." The offer's still very much appreciated, of course.

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[closed] gravity won’t get you through the mazes

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