sixthiterationlogs | [closed] move, i'm gay

Entry tags:

[closed] move, i'm gay

WHO: Kira Akiyama
WHERE: The Inn
WHEN: January 12, Midnight
OPEN TO: Casey (Son of John)
WARNINGS: None yet
STATUS: n/a

They existed in an orbit, not around each other, but perhaps the inn itself--and they spun true to their orbits no matter how the other felt about it. Kira hadn't been bluffing about his late night baths, and Casey still eschewed the hammock some nights for the floor. It was almost understandable, if Kira dipped a toe into the brow-beaten caution of the boy, let his own bones feel the fact of how much harder an escape would be, started from the clumsy hang of a hammock.

If there was a compromise, Kira's conservation of water wasn't on the table: he couldn't sleep in the grimy layer of cleaning the kitchen, of cooking for fifty. Sometimes he woke in the middle of it, the inn settling and creaking in the cold; the cold either crept into his core or eluding it entirely; his body sweating under the large blanket and piled coats, the hot weight of the cat. As far as he could tell, his dreams now were only dreams, past and present mashed up with hunger and, now, the ashen landscape of his sometimes roommate. He'd woken tonight from a journey over ash-choked Manhattan, his hands slipping on fire escapes, his jeans near to white with the flaky char coating the streets to his knees.

He'd been looking for someone, but it wasn't the obvious: they were hiding, their legs all but useless. He couldn't recall them in waking, but the dirt of the dream, the itch in his throat so close to the sickness, had driven him to soak himself back to dozing in the bathroom down the hall.

By the time the water was too cold to be of help, and he'd put himself into the second of his two sets of clothes, Casey had repositioned to the hall--as if he'd known he had some contribution to Kira leaving, or wanted to be sure of his return. It took a talent only he had, to lay across the doorway on his back, hands at his sides, and fall back asleep in such short time. Kira rolled his eyes in protest, pulled the door until it hit Casey in the hip. "I'm back, get up and get back to bed," he said, continuing to pull until he could slip through the gap.

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Casey shifted under the movement, and opened tired eyes to glance up at the owner of the voice, and then to the hard wood of the door digging into his side. He grunted and shifted, rolled to the side enough to allow more movement and for Kira to pass. Many nights his attempts to sleep were ruined by memories of the dog, dreams of home and of waking to an ash storm or buried under the snow. Other times he woke sweat drenched from nightmares of the village turning on one another the way he had seen too many camps of far smaller size do in the past.

He had woken from a fitful sleep to find Kira gone. He knew, reasonably, where the other had gone, still he slipped out of the hammock and stared around the room for a brief time, and then had laid in the hall, not to sleep but to try and coax over the cat while he waited for Kira to return, to be sure he was still alive and had not been killed for wandering off to use more water, as he assumed. He had fallen asleep when the cat had not magically reappeared. Now he was left to study Kira in a state of half conscious perplexed relief.

He waited for Kira to slip past before he slowly hoisted himself to his knees and then his feet, following like a silent, exhausted shadow.

"Bath?" A one word question, but it was some form of acknowledgement that he had guessed at where Kira disappeared to. It wasn't followed with another caution against the dangers of water waste. He had given up persuading Kira against it. The man was clearly untouchable for his water use.

"You shut her in," he replied, acknowledgment for acknowledgement: there was the cat on his bed, claws pulling little threads out of his pillow as she kneaded it. It was more supplicating behavior than he expected of an indoor-outdoor mouser, but what did he care? The cat was the cat, she annoyed him, but in a way he could appreciate.

At least of the two, she kept herself clean. "Did I wake you up when I left?"

He idled around the space, unchanged since he'd left: still not very warm, still wood paneled. The hammock now had grey and black stains from ashen hands, and he hadn't yet wiped them off. Something about them was--comforting. A sign that someone else slept there, even if Kira didn't always see it happen. For a moment he imagined spring, opening the window, enjoying the breeze--

And came to rest with his hands on the stained edges, looking out at the too-bright night. Why would he think that way, like here was a place to settle in, like he didn't owe it to Ty to at least come back and see him buried, see his family told what their son had been and done?

Before the weight of it could drag him back to the bed, he noticed the folds pushed to points by the corners of an object. The room had changed after all: a box was in the hammock, the tag picked up in his fingers reading Casey.

"I...think there's a package for you."

"No." Casey's response was almost more a grunt than a word but he was on his feet, a lingering shadow that slipped back into the room after Kira and trailed after him in a familiar habitual trend of their few interactions when they crossed paths in the waking world.

He glanced at the box in the hammock, the strange brown box that had not been there when he had slid bonelessly from the hammock and wandered into the hall. He slept light and rarely, and the idea that anyone could have slipped unnoticed past him was hard for him to process and unsettling.

"How do you know. It's your hammock." Surely the box was meant for Kira, unless it was from him. Casey was barely more than a pair of working hands in the village. There would be no reason to give him anything outside of one on one interactions.

"It--"

Kira wasn't often chilled so deeply by the village, trying as he did to take it in stride. Look like he was taking it in stride. The shadow Credence dragged after him felt familiar enough, a thing he could reconcile in his own world. Even the description of a wendigo, at the very least, was something he could understand.

Understand to be terrifying, but: nothing about the place unsettled him like the gifts. A sort of inverse of the knowledge he found missing when he went to recall it, where perhaps what was taken was used to give back--he didn't know. There where ghosts that could move objects, create illusions of them, but not manifest the boxes they had found. This one was plainer, but the name was written in the same script. The name Kira had given the young man, who had appeared without one at all.

Either he hadn't been lying about the lack, or this was to fuck with Kira as much as he. "It has your name on it," he said, lifting the package in one hand and holding the tag up in the other. "Casey."

An argument died on his lips that he didn't have a name. Casey wasn't his name, it was a thing Kira molded into one from a word he had mentioned to the other man as an answer to a question. He didn't think of it as his name, as much as something temporary to answer to. He had never had a name, and he wasn't used to being called anything consistently, yet somehow he found himself responding to it, answering to it, even lifting his head to the syllables like dog did when he whistled.

He took the box, only half glancing at the unfamiliar scribble across the tag. He recognized the letters as letters, and assumed the word said Casey, judging by Kira's comment, but he couldn't actually read it. Instead he dropped his attention to the box, and gave it a gentle shake. Something inside clinked with a familiar sound and he froze up for a moment and repeated the action, the soft chime of hollow metal shells, muted by the box but all too familiar rang again.

For a moment he forgot Kira existed. He lost track of where he was or any other purpose, and tugged the box open. There was an unusual variety of items inside, but he shoved them aside, rooting past leather, cardboard, wood and metal for a handful of brass. The moment he found them and his hands closed around them, a strange relief of tension slipped through him. He rolled them in his hand and stared, transfixed at the reflection of aurora lights over their tarnished metal surface. They were hollow, empty casings for a revolver, not a rifle, but the light weight of them and the sound of the metal on metal clink was as much 'home' as anything had ever been in his life. It was that familiarity that filled a hole in him he might have called homesickness if he had known the word or what it meant.

The box hung loosely from his other hand, contents unnoticed and forgotten for a moment, and he glanced over at Kira with a level of perplexed confusion that he had felt too many times in this camp.

"I don't understand. Where did this come from?"

While he'd heard the boxes spoken of, he hadn't witnessed any since the first week of his arrival. They appeared as strangely as the villagers, full of odds and ends--sometimes even living things--but no one had said a thing could come from before. Casey's reaction was the first he'd seen, and it felt--close. Like the contents at least carried some meaning.

Turning, Kira pushed down the edge of the hammock with both hands, lowering himself into its middle, to sit and sway with his legs caught and dangling. Ren's rejected toy had been serving as Casey's pillow, and he tugged it into his arms, to lean himself into his knees and tilt his head. "They just appear sometimes. Before you came, the lower floor was full of them, larger ones. I got most of what I own from that.

"Are those--the casings you had before? Is any of it from home?"

"Not mine, no. Same number and material, wrong weapon and size." He held his hand out after a moment, carefully balancing the cylinders to keep them from rolling to the floor. They were different but they were close enough. They were what he had been needing and missing, or at least a part of it. He pocketed them shortly after and then, at the rest of the question, took another look.

Casey ran his fingers over each item and turned it over one thing at a time. A pair of gloves he had never seen before, broken in but sturdy and leather, fingerless but efficient. A tool he had never seen before and several metal attachments for it. Familiar in design but not one he had ever had. It was far nice than his rusted tool set. A little box that when tipped, revealed the clean shine of metal of a harmonica, another familiar tool, but nothing like the old worn thing he had carried around. This one was shined and well cared for, a new quality to it he didn't know what to make of. A little metal compass, antiquated and spinning wildly. Broken? He couldn't be sure. A pair of old magnets stuck together in a corner of the box, cool to the touch, but he had no idea what they were.

He pushed each out of his way as he looked over and inspected them, and finally, carefully, picked out five wooden dice one at a time from the box and set the box beside Kira on the hammock, contents left inside. The dice he rolled about in his hand and inspected. They were wooden but smoother and far neater than any set he had made. They were not his, but they felt weighted correctly, and comfortable in his hand.

"No," He finally answered, offering the dice to Kira as well. "Some remind me of things I had and lost, but none of them were mine. Even the dice are cut too smooth. Someone better than me did those."

Lifting his head from idle inspection of the box--it looked more like the quarter bin at a swapmeet than anything Kira would call a gift--he raised a hand automatically for the offered dice. To each their own, if the place was rooting around in Casey's head for an idea of his wants and needs. They might have been lucky it wasn't a box stuffed with ash.

"I haven't gotten one of these," he said of the box, rolling the dice together in his hand. The sound and feel was satisfying, smooth wood clicking edge to edge, points rolling against his palm. When he squeezed, they bit in, but not very hard. "The boxes that aren't from anyone. I don't really know the point if it isn't returning things lost."

How much Casey's discussed the constraints of the canyon, he couldn't be sure--wasn't sure he wanted to ask. There was such a relief to being here for him, it felt wrong to push him toward distrust. He was already distrustful. "I just wonder what happens to everyone we lose on the way in. My cards, your casings."

"I've never been given things like this before." Casey's hands held the edges of the box in a grip that was equal parts too soft and too firm. His fingers bit into the material, but his palms barely pressed into it. With the dice in Kira's hands he was able to listen to the sound of them, the roll and grind of wood against wood was another familiar echo of sounds he had gone without the past few days.

The casings were barely a weight in his pocket but he knew they were there and took comfort in the knowledge. The tension slowly ebbed away from his hands and shoulders. He slipped his hand back into the box and pulled out the gloves. The leather was worn enough to be soft but not so much as to feel thin. He slipped them onto his hands and then focused on Kira with a tilt of his head.

"Others have had these boxes with names on them?" He was skeptical. Boxes, gifts, never came from no where and always had a string attached. There was no such thing as a gift. Anything given came with expectation in return. But the contents were a strange jumble of familiar and unfamiliar things.

"I have had versions of most of these items, but none of them are mine." Distrustful indeed. Casey's mind was already working along a path of questions that all went back around to the same thought. What did the mystery box want from him.

The magnets were not like any he had seen, two small magnetized bars stuck together and driving the compass crazy. He was tempted to shove them at Kira as well, but he refrained. He set the box on the floor and took a seat beside it, tilting it to slowly spill the contents.

"Could you use those, like the cards?" They had similar uses in his world. He assumed they might for Kira's superstitions and omens as well.

Sometimes Casey said more than he needed to, sometimes less, and it felt about the same--like he wasn't used to having a person listening, like it was more for his own benefit. Kira found he didn't mind either very much, and he remembers the card drawn and held between them--loneliness, as good an explanation as any.

It's not like they taught the perfect amount of information in schools. It's not like Casey seemed to have ever been. The young man didn't seem to mind the times Kira shrugged or looked away any more than he minded being saddled with a strange name, or sharing the hammock those first couple of cold nights.

After he took to the floor again, Kira had just gone back to the bed. He's only in the hammock now to lean against its back side and catch the lights, rock gently in it like nothing was so serious he needed to have his feet on the ground.

If he was calm, he's sure, Casey would be too. He rolled the dice together again, eyes returning to glance at his palm. "I guess, it's not an exact science, and I have before." Some things were less about looking and more about seeing--a flock of crows against the sky or a pattern of leaves on the ground. The cracks in the sidewalks used to speak to him, like New York itself was his a scrying board. He didn't think this place would ever manage it. Besides, it had other ways of talking to its prisoners. "Don't you want them though?"

"I can make more." Casey shrugged, making no move to take the dice back. His fingers had found the compass again, and he watched the arrow spin this way and that, tilting it in his hand with interest. He could have assumed it was the magnets fucking with it, but it seemed unsettled no matter where he moved it to.

"I think this compass is broken." He set it aside, pushing the strange metal magnets far in the other direction along the floor. That left him with the wood carving tool and the compass to look over, and he slowly twisted one of the attachments onto the polished wooden handle and inspected the tool and its parts, fascinated.

"I have only ever had broken versions of any of these." Rusted, old and brittle with poor care and overuse. He wondered what he could make with properly functional tools.

"And yet the compass bothers you," he gently teased, glancing down to where Casey had pushed it along the bed. The charge in the air that had come with the Aurora's seemed a likely cause: his cards had yet to steer him wrong, and the sun, as best it could be made out, still went from one side of the canyon to the other.

"The lights might be affecting it; besides, this place is so small it might be worthless."

Casey's fussing drew him back out of the hammock, with a backward glance at the lights. Without that future sense to draw a finger down his back, he couldn't tell if they were phenomenon or warning, or something put there to distract from something else. Coming to sit next to the box on the bed, he traced a slim finger along its edge: "What are they for?"

"The one I had was cracked, but it still pointed North." As far as he knew. It at least consistently pointed a direction, it didn't spin wildly about like it had just stepped into a bunker and didn't know which way was up anymore. He watched Kira move and then offered over the tool with one of the flat, square edged chisels attached.

"It's for sticking up people's noses and pulling out their brains." There's the tiniest quirk at the corner of his lips when he says it, deadpan serious though his voice is. Once upon a time a scientist in one of the camps had told him stories about vast expanses of wasteland that were scorching instead of cold. He couldn't fathom it, but he remembered bits and pieces about mummies and massive pyramids that towered up into the sky like the partially buried skyscrapers of the ghost cities he wandered through. It all sounded like bullshit to him. Just a story to tell kids to make them feel warmer in the deep freeze of night.

"They're carving tools for wood. You use them to cut and shave in details or drill holes. Makes creating wood screws easier." Which was just the practical use, but in his mind it was the only use people besides him would care about.

He picked up the joke with the tool, turning it around between his fingers, though it's thick handle forced him to be slow and deliberate, flipping it carefully between bony knuckles. A casing would be easier; a card or a coin. He used to drive his mother crazy, flipping and dropping pens at the front counter on long afternoons. "Explains why you seem to be missing some," he said, "I'l have to borrow a canning jar from Miss Kate for you to keep them in."

It was like a puzzle in a magazine--spot the differences, or find the words--to fit together what Casey did and did not know. No word for green or blue, but a hint of ancient Egypt. Wide-eyed at indoor plumbing, but could carve his own dice.

"You're an odd one," he added, head tilting down his shoulder and gaze following his bracing arm to the rest of the items by his hand. "But maybe that's why I keep you around."

"I kept enough." His reply came without a thought, and he let Kira toy with the wood carving tool while he picked up the box with the harmonica in it. It was nice than his old, rusted one and he trailed his fingers over the cold metal thoughtfully.

It was amusing to hear Kira call him odd, when the other was more so in so many ways, at least to Casey's mind. He wasted away water, read answers in cards, offered things without asking for anything in return and seemed to seesaw back and forth between not caring and asking things or giving glances that betrayed he didn't 'not care' as much as he wanted to. Maybe they were alike there, a little. But he made a sound at Kira's last comment that was almost a laugh, if it never made it past his throat.

"Here I thought you just kept me around to keep the room warmer." He held out his hand for the tool again, and considered questions he could but wouldn't ask, settling for an offer instead.

"I could teach you how to use it."

"That's a bonus," he snorted, "it's purely for entertainment." Even as he said it, he was rolling out the dice along the bed, prompting the stretched and rolled upright cat to come inspect them, running a hand over her like he wasn't very interested at all. "And you stay because I feed you."

Said with a finality to close the matter, no interest either for Casey's own reasons. One die had fallen further than the rest, a three, with two more in the pile at Kira's hand, a two and a five left over.

He sighed, and singled it out with both fingers. "Keep this in your pocket for me," he said, touching it to Casey's hand to bid it open.

"Carving screws doesn't sound very entertaining at all."

Casey's attention was lost to the cat for a time. He listened, but his eyes had moved from Kira and the dice to the young feline. He had still kept mostly to watching others interact with the cat, but he took a chance now, to slide his hand along the bed, closer to the cat, and tap his along the covering, trying to draw its attention to him.

He took the offered die with barely a glance, closing his hand around it until he could feel the corners dig into his palm. The gifts were a strange thing he didn't understand, and he was not wholly convinced they had come from anyone but Kira. Who else would bother? He had made himself both useful and scarce to the others.

"They're just the more useful thing to make. You can carve dice, too. And figures." He had none to offer for evidence of that. He would have to make a couple to break in the tools. He pocketed the die as he was told, without asking for Kira's reasoning.

Edited 2017-01-21 20:51 (UTC)

"Carve me like one of your French girls," Kira said, knowing Casey wouldn't understand but knowing the tone would carry. For all he didn't know, Casey wasn't stupid. As he pocketed the die, Kira scooped up the rest and leaned back, letting him at the cat.

It sniffed him with its cool nose, ears listening every which way for the shift of snow and wood, new footsteps. Deeming him familiar and part of its territory, Kira supposed, she butt her head against his hand, rubbing her scent on his fingers.

"You're hers now," he murmurs, scratching along her spine to raise it. "You'll never get away from her."

The re-purposed quote earned him a confused sideways glance from Casey as he tried to piece together the meaning with the tone. The tone did carry, though, and he watched Kira as he carefully tested out petting the cat, trying to stroke the sides of her jaw the way he would have for dog, and letting her bump against him all she wanted to.

"I wouldn't mind that." She was softer than he expected. They had always looked soft, but wild, and he had imagined their fur to be short, silky, and close to the skin like a rat's, not softer and almost dog-like.

"I haven't carved people much. Carved a few cats and dogs, though. Not much else to do with the time at night. Maybe play a little music, if the storms are loud enough."

"I'd rather listen to the storm," he says, leaning back against the wall and letting Casey have the cat to himself. It wasn't a dismissal, or the kind of sly commentary he might usually levy, even with no idea what Casey's skill was with an instrument. Kira tilts his head enough to look out the window, as if judging the likelihood one might start: it's only been snow and lights, since he arrived. Too cold for proper storms, and he wouldn't wish rain at these temperatures on anyone living here.

It would be nice to watching, though. Nice to hear on the roof, nice to sleep through. He'd drift off, wake up and roll over into--

Nothing. Maybe Casey, maybe the cat. Not the arms he'd expect, on a night like that. "There won't be storms 'til the spring, when the snow starts thawing. You can play without them if it isn't too late, I don't think anyone will mind."

The comment mostly just managed to confuse Casey. He couldn't imagine a storm being something enjoyable, even in sound. The howl, crack and slam of sleet and thunder, the shake of buildings in the ruthless wind, none of it appealed to him. Too many cold nights huddled in a corner, trying to distract himself and the dog. Spring isn't a word he understands in Kira's context, but he can piece together it's another string along that trend of people telling him how things would change. Warmer, no snow, green.

"It's a big camp. I'm not loud with it. No one has to hear it at all." He isn't used to an audience other than dog, really, and the dog had plenty of complaints when it wasn't storming. There had been a time just picking up that old harmonica would set the dog to barking and he'd have to stow it away to get the silence back.

"Don't think they'd much want to."

"Are you kidding? Kate sings all the time downstairs, just to have something to listen to. No one ever tells her off for it, they'll be glad of you." There was no storm on the immediate horizon, for all the static in the air. The dry cold had him more worried for a fire than rain or snow.

He cuts his gaze back across the room, head still tilted away but looking back to Casey. It really wasn't his place, to play with the strange authority Casey affords him, but he means it when he says, "Anyone who has a problem with it can answer to me and get told to fuck off."

He rasped a soft chuckle in response, but there was something warm and appreciative in him for the comment. Like a coat he could tug tighter around himself. Maybe he could risk a little music at some point. He considered the Harmonica, resting neatly in its folded box of hard paper, and closed it rather than pull it out to test.

Some other time, when people were not trying to sleep, perhaps. When Kira could more easily avoid him if his playing grated on humans they way it sometimes grated on the dog.

"I doubt glad, but I will settle for disinterested." He slowly began to move things back into the box with one hand, movements measured and even so as not to potentially startle the cat he was still petting with his other. And then he froze up entirely, when she deemed it appropriate time to move and stand on his leg, contemplating his lap.

"You're trapped now," he said, humming a laugh and making abortive movements to tug the blanket out from under his own ass. "If you want to just sleep up here, she'll probably stick with you for awhile."

And give Kira's ribs a break. He had bruises that were entirely from small sharp paws walking over him in the night.

His tug at the blanket rolled several items into Casey's hip, its edge trapped under him as much as Kira: "She'll settle back in if you move her, don't worry. She just wants a warm body to sleep on." She wasn't the only one, and Casey at least seemed to understand the boundary of it.

When he didn't share, Casey tended to wind up on the floor.

Casey shifted enough to let the blanket come free, carefully scooping the cat up as he moved. It took almost no effort or coaxing to get him to lay back down. The bed was warmer with two of them. It was never any more of a reason needed than that, whatever he may have implied to spectators of the past. He was pleased to find that beyond a soft protest, the cat did in fact, settle back down onto his chest when he stretched out on the edge of the bed. She was soft and warm, and lightly vibrating.

"What is she doing?" The purr was something he had wondered at, but he had never physically felt it against himself, only heard the noise that accompanied it. It didn't give him pause from rubbing the underside of her jaw gently with the backs of his fingers.

Cats were still a bit of a mystery, but one he was enjoying having a closer look into.

It wasn't by design that Kira wound up against the wall, but he did nothing to change it: better for Casey to have room to roll out of bed if the urge took him again. Kira wondered if he'd become more comfortable there because it put him between whatever might come through the door and Kira, not because it put him closer to the routes of escape.

Not that he could easily do either, under the weight of the cat. "It's purring," he answered, stretching himself along the wall and shrugging out of his coat. He leaves it as another layer against the cold, tugging the blanket up over them both until it covered Casey to the waist. "Cats make that noise to sooth themselves and others. It's a friendly sound?"

It wasn't not knowing that tilted his voice into a question, but stumbling across another thing Casey seemed to just, lack. Laid on his side, Kira slid an arm from under his coat to run his knuckles against her side, feeling the rumble they could both hear. "You're very fond of animals, aren't you."

Casey wouldn't ever put words to the reasons for his choices. He didn't even fully understand all of them himself, and he didn't try to. A lot of it was instinct and subconscious decisions that kept him alive and moving forward, but sometimes he forgot himself and his personality bled into the cracks of his carefully built rules and altered his path and choices just so.

He did like animals. He liked people, too. He just didn't trust people near as much as he trusted animals. The world he lived in didn't have many predatory animals left. Scavengers, human and animal alike. The real threats were starvation, thirst, or the earth and sky themselves. And then there were those humans who saw survival of the individual as the only law. The ones who would kill for rations, for territory, or for meat of the unsettling, stomach-turning variety.

Animals had never chased after him with a blood-crazed look in their eyes. He had never had to pry an animal's tooth from his shoulder. An occasional scratch or rat bite were the worst he had ever had from them.

He stroked the cat's fur, eyes half closed, the purr lulling and rumbling against and through him in a comfortable, calming effect. She was soft and warm, and she was letting him pet her without darting away into the shadows. He smiled, watching her squint back at him, and let his thoughts shift to warmth at his side and on his chest, and a too soft bed under his back.

"Animals make sense." He answered, his hand gently shifting to the back of her neck and shoulders. "They speak their minds." Maybe the phrasing was off, it doesn't fully occur to him. Dog always spoke without a filter. If the dog was upset, there was barking and growling. Sad, a tucked tail and flattened ears with a soft whine. Happy, a wag, and a lick at his hand. People were complicated, and their emotional cues were mixed, varied, and sometimes concealed, but animals were honest.

Tilting his head, his temple rolled across a fold in the sheet; his chin found a natural perch on Casey's shoulder; his eyes settled on the cat, then drew wide to look up through his lashes at Casey's face. Kira could almost feel the cat purring through him, the peace of it radiating out. It wasn't lost on him, that they were strewn comfortably across the bed, talking in the middle of the night.

He'd missed it. He still misses it, for the differences in the voice, for the way Casey smelled of the far back of the wood stove, and his sweat-worn clothes, and snow. The profile was wrong, the cat was new.

He wasn't Ty, and he never would be, and Kira didn't--want that. For anyone to be that, but he felt like he might sleep again until morning, like he might make it a few more hours in this place because of the approximation. "You certainly don't always," he said, muted and close. "I can tell, you know. When you're annoyed with me and you hold it back. But I guess they speak their minds without really speaking, so maybe that's what you're going for."

"Humans can't always take words." He says, his accent heavier in his words for the warmth and weight of the cat on his chest. He looks back at the eyes watching him, and his mind doesn't flick the switch that reminds him not to look. Not to remember the look of them or the look in them, or the sound and cadence to Kira's voice in what should be far more darkness lit by a colorful, dancing sky.

"Better to shut them in sometimes." For humans. For people who bristled and snapped at the wrong word, tone or look. For camps paranoid of thieves, with their weapons always plainly out where he could see them, a warning not to cross the line, not to step out of line and lose a hand or his life over a scrap of food or a handful of gunpowder. He had never been a thief, but he didn't fault them for thinking he would be one. He faulted them for not always being easy to read.

"I don't think I'm hard to read." He counters, not argumentative, but another loose thought in the warmth. He was an open book until he needed to shut it to keep his neck.

"If you were hard for me to read, you wouldn't be here," he admits, thinking of the few who baffled his abilities. "I'd rather take all your words than not know when being a shithead tips over into thinking I need a punch in the nose." Or a shot in the back, or an invisible hand at his throat.

Still settled in close, he arches a brow when he looks back up to Casey's face: "You know you can tell me to fuck off whenever you want, right?"

Maybe it didn't matter in Casey's world, but it was the kind of thing Kira required of people who took their clothes off in his presence and laid down in his bed when he asked, even for innocuous reasons.

"If I thought you needed a punch in the face I wouldn't be here. I don't stick close to violence." He chose it only as a necessity when no other options were available in his mind, and Kira didn't seem like someone he would ever feel the need to be violent toward.

"Don't try to kill me, and I won't have to punch you. Nose or otherwise." He snorts slightly, his eyes half closed again, the image of Kira's still hovering burned in them like the dancing lights when he looked at them too long.

"If I needed you to fuck off, I'd just leave."

"Well that's just avoidant behavior," he chided, reminiscent of school counselors, a whistle at the end of his words as he clicked them in his teeth. "That's you fucking off for the sake of not making me." It was supposed to be pointless, idle argument for entertainment as they drifted toward sleep, but he couldn't deny: "this place really isn't that big."

And there was no joke behind it, when he settled back down and dropped his gaze to Casey's collar, the shadows of it quite shallow in the ambient, unnatural light: "I don't really stick close to it either. Leaves a bad taste in my mouth, even when it's for my benefit."

Casey doesn't bother giving context to his history with it, and doesn't even spare a moment more to think, just pulling Kira's words down to him instead. The camp was big. It was much bigger than any camp he had been to before. But no matter the size, every camp started to feel smaller and smaller with each day he was there, and this one was at least a day longer than his usual stays. He had broken his rules so much since arriving they felt like fragments he could barely shove back in place. The dream was breaking him.

"Maybe." To all of the comments, and he lets his eyes drift from the cat to the ceiling, head tilting back. "I'd say something to you." The to you has to be specified and he knows it. He wouldn't say anything to anyone else, but Kira seemed to like the rougher edge, the sharper words. He didn't flinch away, he didn't frown irritably when Casey said something that fell off the tracks of obedient and polite. He would tell Kira is he was done putting up with something he did. He wouldn't stay in the camp either. He'd be gone, clear water or not. Back to the road. He'd find it again. He always did.

He remembers vaguely, a phrase John used to use. Something about Violence being a permanent solution to a problem that wasn't. He couldn't find the exact words.

"It's not a problem solver."

He nods, face rubbing against sheets gone thin from washing, from being the only set for the bed. The other he'd cut up as needed for rags and towels. "Once you use it, you have to keep using it."

He wonders sometimes if Ty hadn't killed that man, if anyone would have died that day. If the rioters would have come to the apartment, if Ty would have been injured. It always came back to roost. "How do you usually solve problems? By leaving?"

Follow the road, keep moving, never stop. Be good to the world that is good to you. The prayer like mantra springs to the front of his mind, and he almost voices the whole thing. The way he used to. The way John made him do every night before he covered his son up in his coat and slept with his back to something solid and his hands on his gun. His shoulders dig harder into the bed beneath them, and he closes his eyes.

"Yeah. It's a big world. If you're fast enough, and you don't stop too long, nothing can catch up to you." Not entirely true, but it had saved him in the past. He was quick, he was quiet, he could cover his tracks well.

"Sometimes with words. But I don't always have enough of those to work things out. Or people don't listen. It's safer to get gone before someone gets you. Or tries to make something of it." With violence and death threats and the hunger in everyone's eyes and cheeks and too thin forms.

Casey settles physically, but there's movement under it, like the eyes darting in sleep, trying to process old information. Settling his hand next to the cat, at Casey's hip, he doesn't call attention or greater meaning to the touch by finding somewhere better for it.

The rest of him stays under his coat, curved out toward the wall. "I just try not to go where shit's going to pop off," he says, closing his own eyes and tilting his head to rest his brow against Casey's shoulder, hiding from the lights. "Or, I guess, make the right friends.

I used to. I don't know if that's what I want, anymore. Nobody should get hurt over me, great as I am."

Friends is a word he knows. It's a word he used now and then in jest with the dog. It's just not something he's ever let himself risk having. Even allies were dangerous. He prefers the temporary kind. The ones he slips in, around, and gone before they have a chance to know him. It's getting harder and harder to be that in this camp.

Casey brushes the back of his hand lazily against the cat again. Friends seemed too heavy a burden for anyone. You would have to carry them when they were gone, unless you could make yourself forget. He frowns and shifts his head, pressing his cheek into fabric with a soft huff of breath.

"Even without them, there's always someone, somewhere, willing and stupid enough to risk themselves for a stranger." He had more times than he would like to admit. He just never stayed long after. Saving a life was a burden, and he didn't need that following him around, after.

His huff is an echo, a snort into the musk of old clothes that his nose is going dead to, appreciates as some sign of home and rest. Kira doesn't know what else to call a person he sleeps next to, abstracting the concept of friendship into verbal stimming in the witching hours. They could have gone for a walk, he could have left Casey in the hall, one of them could roll atop the other and--

He'd push him off. No he wouldn't. He'd just be a limp thing looking at the wall until they got the distance without the act.

This was better. "Wouldn't it all be kind of pointless, if people like that didn't exist? Even animals feel things, but they don't always help each other. I think it's okay for people to be complicated and dumb, if it makes them kind."

Kind resonates like a well struck chord inside of him. John told him to be kind to the world. That they had to be kind, or the world would wring them dry of all kindness, and humanity would be nothing but feral beasts, fighting for scraps in the dark and the ashes of a society Casey had never known or seen. He did his best. He tried to hold onto that abstract of kindness John had pressed upon him and pursue it. He wanted to make John proud, even as he struggled to understand pride or the reason for the emotions behind his endless march, his relentless refusal to lay down in the ash and be buried with the rest of the world.

Kind was a thing he tried to be, though he was never sure if he was, or if he was only going through the motions of a skill he only half learned.

"All that's left after is survival and violence." He's agreeing, or trying to. Kindness was necessary. John had told him as much. Never be cruel if you can be kind. Sometimes he had to compromise, to keep to the number one rule. To keep going, to stay alive for- Something. There had been a reason. Something he needed to do. Something about carrying the fire. He didn't remember anymore. The fire fell from the sky, he didn't need to carry it.

"I'd take dumb over cruel."

"Just not both," he almost grunts, mouth moving against the fold of Casey's scrubs. He wasn't asleep, not yet, but he was going to be soon. His body was either happy enough with its current circumstances, or too worn down to care, but he thinks it might be the former. When Casey does settle in, when he stops chasing the meaning of things, he's calm and easy.

"Is survival what you're trying for," he finds himself asking, chasing meanings on his own way down, catching threads to tie together: "Is that what you don't want people to make something more than?"

Is that why you leave, he doesn't add. It's pointless: no one here has any control over leaving, and if they did, Kira would be the first to try. Just because Casey's world sounded awful didn't mean there was nothing there he might want to get back to.

"Never both." He agrees, and a shudder runs just barely through him that quiets quickly. He'd rather be foolish and kind. He can't even say he survives out of a desire to be alive or not dead, but just because it's life. It's what he does.

"It's easier." He doesn't bother lying. He's always left. As far as he knows he always will. It's not exactly an itch, not an impulse that moves him. He leaves because staying is harder and more dangerous. Camps might not always end badly, but he had seen enough do so to know he didn't want to be around for another.

"If you keep moving it's safer." For sanity, for not getting caught by someone cruel and dumb, for not drowning in memories and faces. He drapes a hand behind his head, letting his other arm fall loosely between them against Kira's.

"Well, stay the night anyway," he says, shifting with Casey to accommodate the arm, to loop his own under it and rest his knuckles against the purring cat. He'd done his share of moving, even if he hadn't left Manhattan.

Casey just did what he'd tried for so many years literally, and maybe the village would grate on him when he realized he can't. At least he keeps the bed warm when Kira invites him into it.

Casey doesn't protest, relaxing more and letting the contact just exist between them. Kira was warm, the cat was soft and the gentle purr was soothing. He felt, in some weird and almost unsettling way, safer in the camp in this moment than he could remember ever being. Safer in the strange, too-soft bed with the even stranger man that kept dragging him back into it. He knew it was an illusion, and a dangerous one at that, but he let it take him, and let it lull him to sleep.

If this camp was where his endless journey along the road ended, on this strange, calm night in the inn, it would be a better end than most he had imagined for himself.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[closed] move, i'm gay

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