sixthiterationlogs | don't chase the rabbit

Entry tags:

don't chase the rabbit

WHO: Raleigh Becket

WHERE: Inn, Peach Tree, 7I village

WHEN: 21 March

OPEN TO: all

WARNINGS: TBD

Raleigh keeps a regular schedule, more or less. Every morning he gets up early and drops a kiss or two on Sansa (who's usually still in bed) before going and checking his lines and getting some fishing done. By the time he's brought in the morning catch, Sansa's usually awake and they can go to the Inn for breakfast and to catch up with friends and family.

If he'd been told two years ago that this kind of mundane, day-to-day existence would become his life, Raleigh would have laughed in all their faces. His life had always erred on the side of too exciting and Rangers don't really get a chance to relax for the most part. Kaiju come quicker and quicker and Jaegers have to be piloted. That's life and they're the only thing that stand between the end of the world and life as we know it. It's nice to have that burden removed, even if for a little while.

Today, Raleigh's done checking lines and making the long walk back from the house he shares with Sansa over on the other side of the settlement back over to the Inn to see about getting something that passes for brunch. He's out of the village on this side and to the peach tree when the first flash starts.

"Mako, it's just a memory. Don't go chasing the rabbit!" There's a tiny Japanese girl paralyzed with fear as a kaiju roars down the streets of a city Raleigh doesn't know. The girl cries and tries to run, gets cut off by the monster at every turn. When it looks like she's not going to escape, a Jaeger shows up and starts fighting the kaiju, taking it out, and the pilot emerges. Before Raleigh can see his face, he jerks out of the memory.

Raleigh has no idea what that's about. It's never happened before, honestly, and he walks around the peach tree a few times to try and trigger the memory again before giving up. It'd felt so tangible and real, just like the time he'd drifted with Mako and experienced that memory through her eyes, and he has no idea what could cause that kind of hallucination.

Raleigh decides to head to the Inn even faster now, wanting to compare this experience with others. He isn't quite there before he gets another memory, one of he and Yancy fighting Knifehead back in Anchorage when Yancy had died. It's a painful memory and one Raleigh really could have done without reliving. When he pulls open the door to the Inn, he immediately sees about getting a cup of tea. He could have done with something alcoholic but, unfortunately, that's not on the menu.

While he's bustling around the kitchen, he calls out to the other people around. "Anything I can get for you? Village is being weird today so I figured I would stay inside."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Nerys is skinning and jointing a rabbit when the guy comes in. His name lingers on the back of her tongue--he's been here a while, friendly, starts with an R--but human names all seem to run together in her head sometimes and sound similar, and she has to admit this time she's stuck. She'll just have to frame any conversation around not saying names.

"I could use another bowl of rinse water, please, if you get a second," she asks, looking up with a hopeful smile to make it more of a gentle request. It's been pretty quiet in here today, and it's actually sort of getting to her. Maybe it's just that chatter banishes away thinking too hard about what she's seen and heard of late.

As he approaches, she asks, conversationally, "What's today's flavor of 'being weird', if you don't mind my asking?" After a second, she remembers to set the damn cleaver down while she's talking so she doesn't look vaguely unhinged, but it's probably not as effective as she'd like.

The cleaver doesn't bother Raleigh. She's cleaning game, so it ends up being a necessity, even if it's odd to an outsider. He leaves what he's doing and gets another bowl of rinse water for her and sets it down so she can get to work. While his tea is steeping, he leans back against the counter and addresses her other question.

"Was out checking the fish lines earlier and I got...I guess a flash of home? It was just a second but I wasn't here anymore, I was back in Alaska."

"Thanks," Nerys says with another nod and smile, then rinses her hands off, wiping them on a clean towel, then covering the meat with another clean one for the time being. The nasty part is done with, all of the viscera that they're not able to eat disposed of, and it's not exactly not enough that things can't wait a few minutes while she takes a break.

Now, she doesn't know much about Alaska, other than it's on Earth, but she doesn't really need additional context to know it's not here, certainly. "That's...pretty damn unsettling. If you don't mind my asking, uh, was it like you were there, or like you were looking at it, like through a window?"

She's not sure how she would feel, seeing the station, or--Prophets--Bajor for just a moment, either way, but she suspects that the feeling of being transported would be worse. Maybe she'll put off going home for a little while.

"It was like I was there," Raleigh clarifies. "It's something that happened in my past, something I remember pretty clearly, but this was so visceral and real that it felt like I was actually in the memory again."

It felt like chasing the rabbit but that's something only Jaeger pilots understand. No civilian will ever understand that term and he wishes they could. It'd make explaining this a lot easier than it is.

"I've been here almost two years now, more or less. You'd think I'd be used to the weird shit by now but I'm not."

"Something that happened in your past," echoes Nerys, and now she's thinking that maybe she doesn't want to experience Bajor at all, if that's the case. She loves her homeworld more than she has words to say, but her pleasant memories from there are outnumbered by the other kind, and it's a ratio that's steep enough that she wouldn't put a bet on it at the dabo table. Especially if it's an experience that's visceral.

"I've been here about that long," she replies, wryly smiling, "and I'm not not used to it either. Probably because they change things up so frequently that it's never the same weird shit from week to week. Next week it'll be another thing, like vampire bats whose bites make you dream of lost love."

Actually, she hopes they aren't taking suggestions.

"Vampire bats I could do without," Raleigh says, chuckling a little at the thought of it. He doesn't think too long on it, though, because he's afraid it might come true. This place has a habit of doing that to people.

"It happened to me down by the river this morning. Have you heard anyone else saying it happened to them?"

"It's always something we could do without," Nerys agrees with a low, sardonic chuckle of her own. She reaches over to rinse off one of the small fillets that she's cut, dousing it in water and then setting it aside on the cold stone slab--closest thing they can do to refrigeration, at the moment.

She picks up his question in her mind, turns it over a little, then says, "Possibly. I'd heard some people talking in passing, but I thought they'd meant a really vivid dream, instead of this kind of momentary hallucination you're describing."

"I was definitely awake when it happened," Raleigh confirms.

"I'd been walking here, perfectly in the real world one minute and trapped in this memory in the second. It didn't jar me as much as it might because I've done it before - some of our tech back home requires you to drift and experience memories of your own and others - but it was still a damn shock to be in the past."

Admittedly, Nerys' current stance on whether or not this place is the 'real world' perhaps aligns best to that of a human writer she's never heard of: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." The village and all the weird shit has certainly not gone away, whether she believes in it or not.

She doesn't say as much, though, because it's not really the time for a philosophical debate. Nor does she ask what 'drift' means, exactly--the context he gives is enough for her to parse the notion. "Because you don't have any of the tech you had," she says, "and even if you did, you wouldn't just slip into that kind of mental state while just walking through the woods, surely?"

Edited ((quote is Philip K Dick)) 2018-04-04 21:52 (UTC)

"No. To get into the Drift, you need to be hooked into the Jaeger tech so you can form the neural link with someone. That was the whole point of it - the tech's too strong to be run with one brain, so you need two, and to link up and be in sync you needed to be able to meld with the other mind and know their memories as well as your own. It's called a neural handshake."

Raleigh's never experienced the Drift outside of a Jaeger but the way he'd experienced this was exactly the same. It couldn't be anything else.

Admittedly, Nerys is a little fuzzy on how this is meant to work, so she simply nods. The entire process sounds dangerous as hell, considering what she's heard about neural interfaces, but he's far better versed in this all than she is, having lived it.

"So it was like that, like linking up with someone," she says. "But just for a few seconds, while walking around. I...can see why that'd throw you." And why hanging out with someone with a cleaver might seem, at least, somewhat more normal.

"Yeah, exactly. It was completely disorienting. It was reliving something I had hoped to forget and it wasn't just a memory, it was actually being in it. I've never had that happen since coming here. It's like this place is trying to deliberately make us think up is down and down is up."

It should be expected, at this point, but Raleigh is still exhausted of it. He just wants to live his life without being fucked with anymore.

A bad memory, then. Nerys isn't going to pry into the content. Besides, she has so many ugly memories that would be difficult to understand even if others had the context, and she doesn't have that for him.

"It's fucked up," she agrees, and frowns after a moment more of thought. "Did you need a cup of tea or something, or someone to talk to...I mean, to get your mind off of it? I'm nearly done here."

"A cup of tea would be nice," Raleigh agrees. "I can help you finish up first, though, so we can get everything going and sit down together." He's always been the kind of guy to pitch in where he's able, even if it's something simple, and having something to do with his hands might help shake off the memories of Yancy.

"I can get the water boiling while you're working there so we're consolidating time," he says. "Sound good to you?"

"Chamomile or mint, or..." Nerys isn't sure what other kinds there are. She's still not great with Earth plants that she herself doesn't particularly enjoy eating. "Any of the other ones, I guess. And yeah, that'd be good, thank you. I'm nearly done here but it'll take some time to wash up."

She tries to be careful when butchering, being used to ensuring she leaves a very limited trace of her presence, but there's always at least some blood. It's why some people have problems with it.

"Chamomile is fine," Raleigh says. He'd liked tea well before coming to the village and it'd been a damn good thing, since that's the only thing they really have here to drink. He'd gotten into the whole tea culture in Japan and Hong Kong and while the village is a poor, poor imitation of it he can still feel a little at home with a cup of tea between his hands.

"Sometimes I wish we had something with a little more kick but saving it for special occasions seems to be working out fine so far."

In perfect honesty, Nerys would vastly prefer deka tea--Pyrellian ginger is way too much to hope for, and she's not very fond of either the tannic Earth teas or sickly-sweet jumja--but she sort of has a taste for the human peppermint now. Borne out of two long winters, really.

"Well, 'fine' is a relative term," she says, with a sardonic wink as she sets the knives and butcherblock board into the pile of washing that a team are concentrating on doing, then washes her hands. "On a lot of cold days, I'd be happy for anything hot and caffeinated, it does a lot to get you moving. But you can learn to live without a lot of things."

She's sure as hell a poster child for that.

"Yeah, I've learned to live without for a long, long time and that's even before I came here. Food was rationed and some stuff was just impossible to get," Raleigh explains. "So I get to eat things here, sometimes, that I never got back home."

Any time he gets bread, for example, it reminds him of how precious and rare it'd been after the kaiju attacks. It's much easier to get it here, even if it isn't the bread he had as a kid.

"It's amazing what a person can become accustomed to over time."

"We were on rations too, until a couple of years ago," Nerys says. Though really, 'rations' doesn't entirely cover off what the Cardassian supply chain had looked like for the duration of the Occupation; 'starvation diet' is perhaps closer. Nerys has found that it takes far too long to explain to people who don't know the history, though, and the sympathy that comes out of it is exhausting.

She washes up her hands and then pours the hot water over the tea strainers--chamomile for him and peppermint for her.

"We used to have gardens, to supplement it all. You can't grow everything, of course, but it kept us relatively healthy and made it all a little less boring."

"I like gardens. I can't say I have much of a green thumb but I got a bonsai back when everyone got presents and it's still alive," Raleigh says.

"It reminds me of a place I lived back home that I really loved. It wasn't where I'd grown up, at all, but Japan in the springtime has always been full of good memories for me. Kate keeps the gardens going here, though. There's always plenty to pull out of the kitchen garden even for a novice like me."

Nerys isn't entirely certain where Japan is, on Earth, but she gathers from what he's saying that's particularly lovely in spring, and she nods. "I'm definitely not good at gardening, personally, but we all got put to work when we were kids, so that we could get as much fruit and vegetables as we possibly could, for as much of the year as we could."

The Cardassians mainly left them to it, which strikes her as odd, in retrospect. She traces her finger around the condensation on the rim of her mug. "I remember the smell of the soil in the springtime, it was a lot like it is here--but kind of peppery, as well, if that makes any sense at all. It was a good smell, reminded you that stuff was going to grow again, and that the ground wouldn't stay hard as a rock."

"That sounds like a good idea to me." Sansa murmured from the doorway of the kitchen where she watched him with a quiet, haunted gaze. Her features were pale as though all the blood had drained from them and just recently so but her shoulders were squared and her chin lifted almost as if in defiance. Not of him, of course. No, if anything, she was relieved to see Raleigh standing there and she wanted badly to rush into his arms but she was holding herself still. Mostly because doing so meant that her knees would stay locked and it held off the feeling that she might fall apart if she took a step too soon.

It was a feeling that transported her back to another place and time when she had learned to hold herself still for fear of drawing notice to herself or how she was feeling. A feeling aided by an onslaught of memories she had never wanted to see or experience ever again. It made her want to hide but she was a little scared of leaving the Inn and making the trek back.

Not if there was a chance of seeing those things again.

When Raleigh hears Sansa, he turns around and gives her a broad smile only to have it fade a little when he sees how pale she is. She seems drawn and upset somehow and he leaves what he's doing (the tea can wait) and goes to her side. Wives come before tea every time.

"Hey, what's wrong?" he asks, sliding an arm around her shoulders and squeezing her a little in comfort. "Anything I can do?"

The words are always right there on the tip of her tongue but she bites them back with a little shake of her head as he rushes to her side. It doesn't surprise her that he does but it makes her love him almost desperately at that moment because of it. It's a good reminder that she isn't actually alone after all.

"It's okay. I'm okay." She says it as much for herself as him while reaching for his hands, needing the contact and the warmth as her fingers are practically ice cold. "I just....saw things on the way here."

Raleigh folds her in close for a moment and just holds her before responding. He'd seen things too, things he'd only ever experienced in the Drift with Yancy, and knowing that Sansa's seeing things too makes him wonder just what's going on right now. It's yet another way this place wants to fuck with them.

"I'm sorry, Sansa," he murmurs softly. "I saw my brother when I was checking the lines along the river this morning. I saw him die all over again."

Sansa feels her heart break a little when he confirms that he has been seeing things as well but more so when she hears what memory had played out for him. It's enough to have her arms tightening around him and her hands pressing against his back while she gives him a little squeeze.

"I'm sorry, my love." She murmurs back, turning her head to press her face against the side of his neck. "I know how much you even hate to talk about it. I can't imagine seeing it again."

Then she leans back to look at him. "Are you okay? Is there anything I can do?"

"Just this is enough," Raleigh says. It's a little cliche, possibly, but opening up and letting Sansa and Peggy and a few other people in has helped him heal somewhat from having lost Yancy. There's still an ache there that isn't ever going to go away but now he has a new support system and a new reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

"This place is screwing with us again. What's the point of that? Why would they show us things from back home? I don't see the point of it."

It's an ache and a loss that Sansa understands all too well. There are times when it almost makes her sad that they had bonded over the loss of a loved one because that is not an experience that she would wish upon anyone but the fact that he does understand it almost makes it easier.

"I don't know." She frowns, brows drawing together briefly as she looks past him for a moment like an answer might be just beyond his shoulder. "But it doesn't bode well, does it?"

"No. This place doesn't do anything without a reason," Raleigh says, frowning deeply. He doesn't know why this place wants to screw with them constantly but he doesn't want it to keep happening. It's bad enough it happens to him but he doesn't want it to happen to Sansa. She's had enough pain and suffering in her life. She needs happiness now and comfort - no sadness.

"Do you want to have some tea with me? We can try to forget the visions for a little while."

At one time, Sansa had wanted nothing more than a chance to be happy and have no sadness in her life but she knows now that such a thing is impossible. It's true that she is happier with Raleigh than she has ever been in her short life but there is still moments of sadness. Luckily, those moments were fleeting thanks to the man in front of them but they still existed. Mostly when she thinks of her mother and the family that don't live in the village now.

There are also moments when she feels uneasy. Just like now as she looks at her husband with a little nod of her head, the question of why these memories were happening racing through her mind. A cup of tea wouldn't banish them but she can't deny that it might make her feel a little better.

"Yes, please. Tea would be lovely."

Raleigh gets them both tea and pours it into the largest mugs he can find in the kitchen. Most of the crockery is old fashioned and small but there's a few larger coffee and tea mugs and he snags two of those because he thinks they're going to need more than a little cup of tea to get through this.

"Come on, Sansa. Let's drink some of this and try to forget about what happened. Maybe not forever, because we need to figure out what's going on, but for right now let's relax and not worry over it."

There is a small part of Sansa wishes that they had some wine or something stronger than tea to chase away the memories that had assaulted them both on their way to the Inn but she is grateful for what they have.

"Thank you." She murmurs as she takes the hot mug between her hands, letting the heat chase away some of the chills along with a shaky breath that slips from between her lips. "Do you think we'll actually be able to find answers?"

Somehow she doubts it.

"Based on what I know about this place, probably not," Raleigh says. It's sad to say it but it's true. He's been here long enough to know that answers don't come so easily in this village and while he's never going to stop asking, he asks less.

"Frustrating as hell, though, especially when it takes the things most private to us and pushes them out to the open."

"Yes, that is....troubling." Which is a rather mild way of putting it but she isn't sure that she can even begin to explain how upsetting it is to see those things again or to deal with the possibility that someone else might see them too.

She takes another sip of her drink while looking at him. "I suppose it's probably happening to everyone else?"

Which makes her worry about her family.

"I'm sure it's happening to others too," Raleigh says, reaching over to stroke her hair lightly. He doesn't want Sansa to worry about her family and honestly, the Starks have come to be sort of his family too since he's been here in the village and gotten close to Sansa. He doesn't want anything to happen to them and won't let it on his watch.

"We'll get through this, Sansa. I won't let anything happen to you or your family and even if it's just these visions, I'll do my best to keep them from coming true."

Even as she tries to take comfort in his words, Sansa can hear the whisper of doubt that lives in the back of her mind most days. She doesn't like to admit it and she rarely lets it show since it could be a weakness used against her. Then she has to remind herself that there isn't anyone here that would use it against her, so she does her best to focus on Raleigh's voice instead and lets her love for him make it stronger.

"I know you will." She tells him, believing with all her heart that he would do his best and so she follows the statement with a soft smile. "We will do our best together."

"There's nothing that we can't do together," Raleigh promises her. "Even if we have to put a little more work into it than we might have to back home. I'm not letting anything happen to you."

Maybe it's a little presumptuous to make that kind of promise here but she's his wife and he loves her. He has to make those promises.

"Do you want to go walk along the river for a little while, clear your head? We can take Akira."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

don't chase the rabbit

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Inn

Re: Inn

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject