sixthiterationlogs | [closed] move, i'm gay

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[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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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.

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[closed] move, i'm gay

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