sixthiterationlogs | Let the blind lead the blind

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Let the blind lead the blind

WHO: Kylo Ren
WHERE: Just outside the Inn
WHEN: February 1st
OPEN TO: All; Threadjack style
WARNINGS: None other than that this is really long.
STATUS: Open

The fact that daily meals not only existed, but seemed to do so in spite of snow, earthquakes, and auroras in the sky, was one of a few consistently positive glimmers of hope for the village and its inhabitants. It also had the benefit of drawing a large number of those same inhabitants to one predictable location more often than not. For Ren, that was normally a reason to avoid the inn in the hours after dawn and before dusk. However, with his mind on the conversations he had had with Sansa and Veronica, and the missing beast presumably still roaming somewhere out in the canyon, Ren knew he couldn't keep approaching the problem the way he had been, previously.

Veronica's advice still lingered in his mind fresh enough after a month of thought to have him trying something new. He waited for a good number of people to enter the inn before doing so himself, and asked, with a softened tone and a calm voice, if people could spare a moment when they finished to have a discussion.

He had missed the most recent meeting, entrenched as he had been in his training. It had been another lost opportunity, and he wanted no more of those. This was as good of a chance as any, and he was taking action before action could be taken from him.

With his request submitted, he left the inn and borrowed a sturdy crate from outside one of the unused buildings. He took a seat on it, just outside the front of the inn, during the meal. Most people came and went through the doors, and it gave him a good position without worrying about the crowding of the growing village's size packed inside one space.

When enough people decided to come out and take part, he stood back up, his long hair loosely pulled back, and the scar the cut across his face and down his arm far more visible for it. He looked around at the faces gathered, some familiar, others new, and straightened his back, standing taller and more assured. He needed people to trust him, or at least trust that what he had to say might be important. But he could not be harsh, he could not demand. He had to coax reason out, and the only way to do so was to offer his ideas as ideas, and nothing more.

"A lot has happened in this canyon. Some of you have been here for far more of it than I have. There have been hazards, storms, unusual discoveries, and violent creatures. People come and go, almost always without the slightest inclination as to how or why. I myself have gone and returned, and I remember nothing of it." He paused there, one hand holding onto the metal staff he had been using so long now it had become an extension of him. He rested it on the ground like a cane now, using it to keep himself grounded.

"This canyon is unpredictable. The dangers and threats that may face us in the future can not be anticipated wholly, and there is no way of knowing who among us will still be around to see them. But one thing is clear. I do not believe our captors have ever intended anything positive of this place. They observe, and they prevent our escape. They take our strength, our possessions, our memories," He hesitates a moment, his grip tightening on the staff, his voice sharper for a moment before settling back to an even tone. "And they toy with us. We have no idea who they are, what their true intentions may be, or how they came to bring us here, only that for now we are trapped here, together."

He looks over the group that has gathered, a frown crossing his face, his brows furrowed a moment before smoothing over. He has to choose his words carefully, and for the sometimes reckless young man, it isn't easy not to dive straight in.

"I think it's time we discuss whether or not this place needs more than the loose assortment of tasks and common, repeated actions it has as it currently stands. I believe we need a leadership in place. A council. With how unpredictable this place has proven to be, no one person can or should be trusted with that task but more dangers will come, we will face more disasters, more attacks that we can not see coming. We can not assume that we will always have the luxury of waiting until after the fact to react."

He breathes, slow and deep, and tries to find the words again, searching for the right phrasing, the right voice.

"I think a council is something we should consider. A group of people to share the burden of making tough calls or assigning tasks when things go wrong, or when something needs to get done. It will not work, however, if disagreement runs rampant underneath it. That's why I came here. At the very least, it should be discussed. If the majority is against it, I will drop the matter, but if we do not at least have this conversation, I do not think this village will last many disasters before the fragile organization the structure of it is currently built on collapses and falls apart."

Having said his piece, Ren stepped aside, and offered the area he had been speaking from to anyone who might choose to use it.

[This is a meeting post open to threadjacking, interruptions, opinions, and the like. If your character has anything to say, let them do so. I'll drop a secondary comment below for Ren specifically, otherwise go wild and respond to anyone you like or start your own thing. It's intended to be an IC discoure over whether or not the village needs some form of leadership, but any actual organizing of a leadership is not intended or planned to be formed from this meeting.]

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Casey was on the roof, whittling a piece of wood into the form of a cat, sprawled on its back with its paws outstretched as if to catch dust in a ray of sunlight. He had been watching the meeting from the safety of a higher vantage, leery of being anywhere near such proceedings. He had seen camps go wrong far too many a time in attempts to change or develop a different form of organization of leadership, and it manifests as an uncomfortable dread slowly crawling up his spine, regardless of the tone of the meeting. He only half catches words when volumes are raised, but he knows he's better off not knowing.

The moment he sees Kira slip away, however, he thinks he can guess where his roommate is headed. He brushes wood dust and shavings off his knees and pockets the half-finished figurine and his tools before carefully lowering himself to drop into the room.

He closes the window, shutting the voices out, and moves over to the bed to lay down beside Kira without a word initially, resting his face behind his arms and staring at the headboard in silence, uncertain of whether Kira will ask him to stay or leave, and ready to do either.

The bed dips only so much, for its lack of quality and their combined weight; Casey brings some of the cold in with him, his clothes a bit damp, his skin as cold as Kira's for the wind, the smell of snow and pine on him. But they would warm up faster if they stayed where they were, side pressed to side, and the dread in Casey's gut is little disturbance compared to the meeting.

Trust us, he'd heard insisted more than once. From people he trusted and people he didn't. From people who wanted to be heard but not listen, and he doesn't know what it all amounts to. If he trusted them implicitly, he wouldn't have had anything to say.

Casey makes himself easy to trust. He seems to require it of himself, lest any wave he make lead to injury or abandonment. It reminds Kira of Credence, but isn't really the same. Isn't as severe, maybe. Like a pair of carvings in different states, the shape of a thing rendered in different levels of detail. "Did you enjoy the show," he asks, unmoving, just his free arm shifting to lay over his own waist and make room for the body beside his.

"Not really." His reply is soft and honest, his eyes drifting over toward Kira and his head turning to rest his cheek on his arm. He didn't trust people easily, or often. Trust was a dangerous road, but a necessity now and then. Kira, though. Kira he trusted enough not to have issue sleeping in his room without a weapon. He trusted a few people in the camp, more than he usually did, but he had been there longer than any other since his much much younger years. When he wasn't alone.

"It sounded like things got hot a time or two." It's a question and an observation in one, and he watches Kira in the isolation and relative quiet, before shifting enough to kick his shoes off. He's not going out to do chores in the atmosphere he had observed.

It's reassuring to feel him settle in, to know he's deciding to stay. It isn't a permanent kind of settling, the kind Kira worries about: too attached, clingy, or complacent. If he asked, Casey would leave. If he looked for a way out, he's relatively sure Casey would lend aid.

Maybe he shouldn't ask that of him, considering what he came from. But if Casey could go back with someone, if he could land in a place better than the canyon and the ash choked place he called home, Kira would try. If all he can do until the warmer weather is teach him to read and write, he'll do that too.

He knows people help each other, here. He just doesn't always know who to ask, or how long it lasts. "It did," he agrees, sighing and sliding the arm down, crossing them on his chest. "But there were personal feelings going on. We lost some people, they vanished, and that always hurts someone."

Even if he had to wonder: why not me. Who no one would miss and who so desperately wanted to get back, to know what happened.

Vanished just registers to him as left or died, and he closes his eyes, listening to the sound of Kira beside him and the silence that replaced the rise and fall of voices, tense and urgent, that had had him out of sorts on the roof. His hand slid into his pocket, his fingers brushing against metal and wood warmed by his body heat.

He doesn't say he was worried. For himself, for the state of the camp, for Kira while he was standing among them. He just thinks over the words, trying to remember anything he could from the words that had risen enough to be heard.

"If things get worse-" He trails off. What. He'll leave? Ask Kira to come with him? This camp was Kira's. And if the people in it were not just speaking in the words of frightened survivors not wanting to look beyond the walls of the canyon, there was no easy way out. He had lost the road. Even if he made it back, the memory of the dream would linger. Could he go back to walking the ash covered wasteland alone after having seen the sky? After breathing the air without a mask, and tasting the clarity of it and the water?

A sharp burn of salty tears pricks at the corner of his eyes.

He couldn't keep lying to himself. He wasn't staying 'just a little longer'. Inside the canyon, he was no longer the waste waif and wanderer he had made himself into. He waited, and waited, and found more and more reasons to stay, to help, to throw himself into fixing the camp and help keep the dream alive. He swallowed thickly and stared at the ceiling, slowly pushing his fears and uncertainties down and burying them.

"It sounded like things had calmed back down."

"There's mostly good people, here," he assures him, not even processing the shift in Casey's mood, the feel of him shrinking next to him, without his body moving at all, before he acts on it. Moves to fill the space, shifting against Casey's side and looping an arm up, curling around his head to drape a hand into his hair and idly brush it up from his face. His nails lightly scratch it back, thick texture that, without the build up of ash, had already gone so long unwashed it didn't produce much oil.

The ash probably only helped with that. Kira focuses on the physical feel of it, on the weight of Casey's head against his arm, to keep the sadness and mild panic from tugging him deeper down. "It's alright," he says idly, eyes shut just to rest them, not engaging it more than he has to. "Nobody's mad at each other down there, and there's people like Mark and Kate to sort it. Nobody's been violent to me since I got here," he adds, ignoring the fact of Ren himself: they'd patched it up, and there was a knife with the cards in his pocket, a strange token of the man's actual concern for him.

"If things get worse, we'll figure it out. As a group, or just you and me if we have to." It feels an empty promise to make, with how little he can do about a future he can't see, with how little he managed to do about a future he could--but if it lets Casey pull back for a moment, what harm can it do?

Casey relaxes into the words. It doesn't matter how empty they are, there's an escape on offer, and a thread of something with it that makes him miss a warm body curled into his side and his fingers tucked into soft fur. They'll sort it is something he's heard before, and he's never much liked what followed, but he ignores the spike of fear it brings and focuses on the nails against his skin.

Contact isn't a threat when its softly physical, and it feels too easy to relax into. The burn is still there, the whisper of Dog's judgment pressing at his mind. Why hadn't he left? Why did he keep staying? Was it because he didn't want to find Dog? Had he given up on John's teaching and words?

The village was a strange thing that existed in a dream and was filled with a kindness he didn't know how to understand. But John had taught him to be kind to the world that was kind to him, and none had been kinder than Kira. Kind in the way he offered food and a place to sleep. Kind in the way he taught Casey to read and write letters. Far kinder than anyone in the way he didn't press into memories and emotions and try to pull more from Casey than he knew how to offer or respond to.

"It's not so bad." Not being part of a camp. He's done it most of his life and survived and he's sure the two of them could as well. "Less to worry about." Less to care about, too.

"Fewer resources though," he warns--too idle and warm to argue, too uninvested in anything that would have the pair of them at odds. If Casey wanted to leave, to see the edges of the place, to hover outside the village and watch instead of participating, Kira would follow just to ask the cards each day: is it near, where is food, should we go back.

He should have gone after him. Even before the radio silence. He should have walked in Ty's footprints and pulled him away from the fall that would kill him slow, burning from fever and already asleep to the world.

His fingers have gone still in Casey's hair, and he starts again, scratching back and forth in a gentle rhythm. "I told you when you arrived, about when I was sick. That was from living away from everyone. It was easier until I needed help."

"Living with people can get you sick, too." It's not an argument. He's seen that to be the case, and it feels less like a danger than just a death sentence that strikes at random. But then there's people that could be doctors in this camp, or at the least they seem more willing to help than any he's been in before. So the urge to cut and run is not as strong as it would have been otherwise.

Casey closes his eyes and tries to force relaxation to come. He corks the bottle of paranoia and learned fears for a while, and shrugs off thoughts about whether or not the camp would hold. From the start he had called it a dream, and there's still a part of him that thinks the moment he leaves he ruins the dream and reality will crash down and around him and drown him in the cold and the ash all over again. Even as the thought returns, though, Casey lets it slip away.

Power could go to people's heads so easily. Organization caused disagreements and unrest as much as it tried to prevent them. Watching people bicker over what to do had unsettled him and kicked up that desire to run, but then there was Kira in the room. Kira with his hand in Casey's hair, and his clear exhaustion still funneling to try and still Casey. And all Casey could do was let himself be stilled for another moment. To relax into it and wonder what side of things Kira had been on down there and what he thought of it all.

As much as he knew now that Kira wasn't the leader of the camp, Casey still gravitated to Kira as if he was.

"They wouldn't know what to do if you left." His tone is light, as if he's trying to build a joke with it. But the words felt heavy with truth on his tongue. Kira was part of the camp. He wasn't like Casey. He wasn't a scavenger slipping through with the placating motions of working for his food. He made things run and work like they belonged to him.

He laughs, fingers curling in Casey's hair, the lightest tug as he turns his head just to muffle it in his shoulder. It wakes him up a bit, leaves him bright-eyed looking up at him and still smiling. "I don't know enough of anything to be that important. Plenty of people cook, plenty of people drag the new people indoors."

As much as he tried not to be useless, he knows there's a bias behind Casey's words. "There are plenty who don't even listen when I talk, I don't know why you still do."

Except he did, hand in his hair and a set of dice in his pocket. Kira doesn't have the energy to win them all over with affection. There were people he couldn't even find the energy to be decent to on a regular basis. Curling on his side, he adjusts to the head on his arm, muffles a yawn into that same shoulder.

"You make more sense than most of them." It's honest, whether it's true or not. Casey did think Kira had a sane mind, even if he disagreed with some of the thoughts that came from it. He respected the things Kira said, and the man himself, more than anyone else at the camp. That was at least in part due to the frequency of their contact with one another, but it made it no less true.

He rolled slightly onto his side as well and turned his head, watching Kira through half closed eyes. Perhaps it was affection, or a taming the way Kira had tamed the cat. It didn't matter to Casey why he trusted Kira. He did. That was the extent of what it mattered to him.

He ended up mirroring the yawn and tucking his face half against the crook of his arm.

"People rarely even listen to themselves, anyway."

Physical proximity, at least with him, seemed to matter very little to Casey. Bodies took up space, touched, and it didn't have to mean anything. Kira could scratch his head, shove him toward the bathroom when he tried to get into the bed dirt and sweat streaked from a day's work; Casey could roll into him and tuck in against his arm, and it meant--

Trust, but only that. It was just a place to put his head. Kira occupied the space closest to him and that was a version of being close to him.

There was a line between them, that kept it being anything else, and they were both maintaining it. It was one of the steadiest things here--the sun rose and set, and they had quiet conversations from inches away, and no one pushed it any further. It reminded him of the long years when Ty was just a friend, and that had never been a bad thing. Even now, the time after that cut short, he doesn't really regret it.

"You're no exception," he teased quietly, moving his hand to Casey's back, steadying him where he's decided to lay. Casey's version of close was very close, for how he talked of it.

There's a familiar exhale from Casey at the teasing comment. Amusement faint enough that someone else could easily miss it for nothing more than a breath escaping. The physical proximity to Kira was more welcome than he would verbalize. It was nice to feel the contact, to have the warmth of someone trustworthy close without feeling a need to tense or slip away.

Kira didn't press, and that was important to Casey. He let the wanderer rest without actually trying to stop him, and he didn't dig into Casey's mind with questions he either couldn't answer or didn't want to. He didn't bombard him with unneeded details about lives and worlds Casey wasn't a part of.

He was safe, warm, and just jagged enough at the edges to have a bite and a grip to his kindness. Enough to dig in and not make Casey's head spin with a dizzying uncertainty and discomfort at the too much of it all.

"Why would I listen to the ravings of a mad man." He offers back, his eyes closed, but the faintest tease of a grin tugging just slightly at tired, lazy lips.

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Let the blind lead the blind

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