sixthiterationlogs | [Locked] If they try to pull you out, would you even go?

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[Locked] If they try to pull you out, would you even go?

WHO: Karen Page
WHERE: Peggy's house
WHEN: 16 Feb 2018
OPEN TO: Peggy
WARNINGS: Discussion of killing

After talking to Bela, the red envelope and its macabre yet enticing letter inside had seemed like an inevitability.

Even so, Karen stares at it for a long, tense moment before giving in and opening the thing to confirm what she already knows. It's asking her to kill something in exchange for going home. It can't be for food. Killing simply for the sake of it, for the entertainment of the People in Charge, or simply just to prove how desperate their captives have become.

And that's really the worst part about it, Karen thinks: She is desperate. Maybe even that level of desperate.

She tucks the letter back into the blood red envelope and takes her morning shower, but there's no lingering in the hot water and no waiting for her hair to completely dry after — She knows better than anyone she shouldn't be out in the chill with a wet head, but she knows too that she needs advice. Going about her day like normal isn't going to fly, here. If she doesn't talk to somebody about this, it's either going to drive her crazy or drive her to do what's being asked.

Well-bundled, scarf wrapped snugly around her head in an attempt to protect her still-damp hair, she makes her way as quickly as she can to Peggy's bungalow and raps insistently on the front door.

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Peggy's been keeping to the house with Stella for the most part, only venturing out during abnormal hours in order to fish and check her snare traps. Ever since the letter and her temporary return home, she feels like she's had someone put a prick in her moral reserves and she's been bled dry. She needs to find something that will get her going again, but for now, she's allowing herself to linger in bed and do little apart from exist.

At the knock at the door, Peggy calls out to Stella, hoping that perhaps the other woman will be there to get the door. When it doesn't appear so, Peggy works her hair into a low-twist to make it presentable as she tugs on a sweater and heads to the door to see who's there.

The rapping continues on insistently, so she calls out a swift, "Just a moment," before she opens the door. Without makeup, a touch mussed, she knows she hardly looks presentable even though she's done her best to appear otherwise. "Karen," she says, trying to imbue herself with a warmth she doesn't feel. "Is something happening?"

There's nothing at all wrong with the way Peggy looks — She's a beautiful woman whether she's pin-perfect or a little mussed. There's even an argument to be made that she's even more beautiful a little mussed, but that's not really the point. Peggy doesn't do mussed. They aren't best friends or anything, but Karen's been here a couple of months, and that's long enough to know that this is the sort of woman who puts her hair in a full set everyday and never leaves the house without lipstick, rustic surroundings and stingy overseers be damned.

And so Karen falters with a surprised blink, but only for a couple of seconds.

"I'm sorry if I woke you," she says, something else a little surreal, when she imagines Peggy up and at 'em with the sun. "I just really need to talk to someone, and you seemed like the best person."

Reaching inside her coat, she pulls out the envelope and holds it out, her name on the front seeming somehow damning.

"It was there when I woke up today."

"No, you haven't woke me, I'm afraid I haven't had the time to get my day started," she says, and given the time of day and Peggy's general attempts to be out with the sun's rise, that's as damning as anything will get about her current state.

She's ready to open her mouth, tell Karen that she's pleased for the distraction. She even feels herself opening up, getting ready to focus on something new, but then Karen unearths an envelope and all those hopes come crashing down.

She lifts her chin, keeps her distance, and tightens her robe around herself a little more. "If you're smarter than I am, you'll burn it and continue to do so every time it comes back." After plenty of time to think about it, Peggy thinks that there's no punishment equal to what she's been going through now.

Peggy's physical reaction is immediate and obvious, like a shutter pulling down over an open window. Karen doesn't think she's completely shut out — If she knows Peggy at all, she think there will still be an impulse to help despite it all — but she doubts she'll get anymore than precisely what Peggy deems she should have.

"You got one," she surmises, and tugs her own coat in closer around her. "Do you mind if I come in?"

She quickly nods her assent before stepping backwards to give Karen room to come inside, trying to dig herself out of the dark whorl of thoughts she's already feeling herself slip into. What's happened to her is done and finished, but if she can prevent it from happening to Karen, then she will work everything in her power to do so.

"I wish I had something to offer you to drink," she admits, "because the answers to your questions certainly deserve one." She feels cynical and wrought about this, like she's been through this wringer enough times to feel suitably flattened and beat down.

"I guess it's the thought that counts," Karen allows, her smile strained as she steps inside and begins unwinding the scarf from around her head. "Although if I had access to real liquor in this place, I can't guarantee I wouldn't spend most of my time drunk." An exaggeration maybe, but with a grain or two of truth.

"When did you get yours?" she asks, wondering if that's why Peggy is so out of sorts.

"My letter?" She's choosing instead to think about this instead of thinking about what the request was, where she got her sacrifice. "It turned up, out of the blue. I ignored it, I destroyed it, but nothing happened to change it. It simply kept coming back."

She heads inside and settles in the main area, trying to idly smooth back the absent stray hairs she feels as if she can control, her stomach dropping with the awareness that they're going to be talking about something that she's not too keen to talk about, but needs to, if only to try and protect Karen. "I wish that I had kept ignoring it, honestly."

Hands still wrapped in her scarf, Karen falters. "You did it," she surmises, not sure why it surprises her. Peggy is so practical, so willing to do what needs to be done. Maybe it's just the idea of her getting her hands dirty, of being forced into anything she's not completely on board with.

"Did it ask you to kill something?" There have been various letters over time, she knows. Yet somehow Peggy's reaction seemed too extreme for anything else. And then there's the more pressing issue:

"And it didn't work."

Peggy doesn't answer, because she doesn't think she needs to. Karen is a clever woman and the instructions in the letter had been fairly straightforward. To answer the question is only giving more power to this place and what it demanded of her; that she folded and gave in is a slight on herself, not a point in favour of this terrible trap.

"It worked," she disagrees, "they weren't specific about how long you would go back. Accounting for the sleep I had, I'd say that I was there for no more than twenty-four hours, no less than twenty," she says, turning in order to busy herself. "Do you want a glass of water?" she asks, even though she's already using the pretense of filling up a glass to give her a reason to turn her back on Karen.

Blinking, Karen pushes out a scoff, and then nods slowly. "Yeah," she says, her throat suddenly bone dry despite that part of her could just spit in frustration.

"Fucking semantics," she mutters as she pushes the wet weight of her hair back from her face, and then waves a beseeching hand Peggy's way. "Sorry," she adds with a shake of her head.

"Do you think it was real?"

It shouldn't matter, really — She shouldn't still be considering it, and she feels a little ill that part of her still is. That even 24 hours could seem like enough for what's being asked.

Edited 2018-03-10 04:30 (UTC)

That's the question that Peggy has been asking herself since it happened. As soon as she'd arrived back, she'd taken down critical notes detailing the whole incident, specifically of the crime scene that she'd seen while there. "By all appearances, yes," she admits. "I arrived just after I had been taken to come here, the progression of what happened next fit in line with what I recall."

The trouble is that it had seemed cruel, awful, and like something deliberately manufactured to hurt her. "And yet, I wonder now if this experience has simply made me paranoid that anything terrible that happens is the fault of some captor," Peggy says, setting the glass of water down.

"Truthfully, yes, I think that it was real, if only temporary or a glimmer of what was to come."

"Like a preview," Karen muses, her brow pinching. It has to say something for the way this place works on a person that she doesn't stop to question how that would even be possible. Hell, time in completely relative in more ways than one, here.

The bigger question, though, is does it matter to her? Is it worth doing something that, honestly, even after everything she'd seen and done, will probably leave her fundamentally changed forever? What could she herself really accomplish in 24 hours? Who would she see? Her parents would be the obvious choice, but they're a nebulous, vague sort of concept at this point — She loves them, but they're more memory than anything tangible, it's been so long since she's laid eyes on them. So it would be... Foggy, who has proven he is just fine without Karen to look out for him. Matt's gone, and 24 hours isn't enough time to hunt Frank down.

Still, she knows that damned letter is probably going to bug the hell out of her. She knew it from the time she talked to Bela.

"I'm sorry, for what it's worth," she says, looking to the glass but not reaching for it. "That's a really shitty trick."

There's a dullness to Peggy's eyes as she thinks about it, like a lifelessness has invaded and she can't do much about it other than simply bear it. She has to believe and hope that Jack is healing, that she won't lie awake consumed by whatever mystery is at home that she's not able to dig her teeth into. She needs to stop thinking of how Daniel is so far, how Steve keeps leaving.

And she certainly needs to not think about that bloody goat and how it makes her feel, to know that she's done a horrid thing. "It's done and past," she says brusquely, because it's hardly like she can do anything to change it at this point. "The more important thing is what you plan to do with your letter," she says.

She knows that she can only give so much advice and Karen will make her own decision in the end, but she feels as if she has to at least try.

"You know, it's funny," Karen says with a bitter little huff, not quite a laugh. "I'm desperate to get out of here and get home, there's no doubt about that. But when I really stop and think about it... I don't even really know why, apart from my work."

And the work, it shouldn't be discounted. It's important. There are stories only she's been able to tell, stories that people need to hear. But she knows deep down, the ferver that's been driving her here isn't about the work, not really.

"Maybe it's just that I hate being told what to do," she allows with a tilt of her head. "I've never been good at sitting down and shutting up, even when the alternative was likely to get me killed."

Edited 2018-04-09 19:38 (UTC)

That had been the core trouble of those damned letters. On the one hand, they'd insisted that Peggy had to do something. Yet, on the other, her complicit silence in not doing anything implied that she was somehow fine with the idea of staying in this village. It had put her between a rock and a hard place and she knows how that had ended up.

"Is there no one waiting for you, at home?" Peggy asks. "Friends, family, people outside of your workplace that you'd want to make the effort to get back for?"

Karen's brow pinches and she briefly falters — Not because she doesn't know or is even afraid to say it aloud, but because she doesn't know how to say phrase a thing like that without sounding ungrateful. She isn't ungrateful for Foggy or her parents or any of the rest; she's just become a realist.

"Not really," she slowly settles on. "I was living pretty far from my family, and my friends have kind of... scattered." She pulls in a deep breath and pushes it back out. "One of them died not long ago, another is doing his own thing and being successful. And one..." She pauses again, pressing her lips together. "I honestly don't know if I'll ever see him again regardless, so." She shrugs with a vague motion of one hand. "I hadn't thought about not really having anyone outside of work before I got here, but there it is."

That does sound like a difference to her. Maybe if Peggy had arrived here just after the war, fresh from seeing the Howling Commandos off to their new post and knocking Howard into the Thames, she might feel regret, but no more. Now that she's made connections that run deeper, she still wants to get back, no matter how many friends she has made.

"Well, the only advice I can offer," she says, dredging herself from that quagmire, "is that I followed the instructions and I'm sure it doesn't take anything more than a surface investigation to see how that turned out. On the other hand, I'm not sure what will happen if you ignore it."

"I guess we'll find out," Karen allows with a slow sigh. "I think part of me will always be tempted by something like that, but I'd be pretty stupid to not learn from other people."

It's a shame that Peggy has to deal with the disappointment, and maybe even the guilt, but if Karen just ignores all of that, ignores the fact that the ends clearly don't justify the means, it's almost... rude. Like salt in a wound, in a way.

"I talked to someone else who had gotten one, not too long ago. She hadn't done anything. The letters just kept coming back. If that's what happens, I think I can handle it." It'll prey on her mind, but she can bull through.

"I can certainly tell that you're made of tougher stuff than a letter," Peggy says, with the wry tone of a person who both knows the mettle of Karen's character, but also was the one who had to learn the hard way that all her desperate strivings had simply done nothing. (Never mind that if the letter had promised her other heart's desires, she thinks she might have even taken it a step further, but she tries not to think about that).

"I'm sorry I don't have better news for you," she admits. "I would have liked to have given some."

"At least I know," Karen replies with a slight cant of her head. This had always been a possibility — She'd been skeptical of the letter's veracity from the start — but it still feels somehow like something's been irrovocably lost.

"I hate that this happened to you, but at least it's information we can all use going forward. I just wish we didn't have to fight tooth and nail for every scrap we get from these people. If they even are people."

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[Locked] If they try to pull you out, would you even go?

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