sixthiterationlogs | What goes on in that place in the dark? [OTA]

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What goes on in that place in the dark? [OTA]

WHO: Veronica Sawyer
WHERE: Town Hall
WHEN: 24 February, evening
OPEN TO: ALL
WARNINGS: Mild self-harm, mention of death
STATUS: Closed to new threads

Dear Diary,

Well, I'm still alive, although I don't know if that was intentional.

Yesterday when I was cutting through the park, I was struck by lightning. Not directly; that's why I'm still here. If you think you know what that feels like, trust me that you don't. I wish I didn't.

I should probably be a big bundle of gratefulness that I survived, but I can't get around why.

It felt personal when Ren died, like he might have been on the right (wrong) track. He was always pushing so hard, all the damned time. Even when I told him to relax.

I don't know if this was a warning. Could it really be coincidence? Lots of people were struck recently, but only one died. Only one got a message etched on his roof. Did I just get the celestial equivalent of a smack with a rolled up newspaper?

Staring down at what she's written, Veronica fights the urge to tear out the entire page. You don't even have to read the content to see the abrupt slide from rational to ridiculous: The tidy block letters she'd adopted to save paper had been abandoned for her own massive scrawl weeks ago, looped across precious pages with all the eye-rolling angst of a truly mournful teenager.

The main room of the town hall is large, and every movement she makes seems to echo. It's cold -- Nobody lights the furnaces in the buildings that aren't being used -- and she'll have to leave for somewhere warmer soon, but the thought of the inn with its brightness and bustle of people is still too overwhelming to consider.

The sweater she has on over her clothes is black, large enough to nearly be a dress and perpetually slipped off one shoulder. She sets her journal aside and pushes up one saggy sleeve to reveal a strip of linen bandage wrapped loosely from elbow to wrist. Gently, she unwinds it and considers the livid, fractured pattern beneath. It seethes against her skin, tender and accusatory, and without thinking she presses hard against a shiny red line with her finger, pain flaring up bright and hot until she cries out and drops her hand with soft hiccough of sound.

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She's not in her bed. Cougar's bringing by some soup that he's made of the herbs and broth that he'd managed to put together, but there's an empty space in Veronica's bed that shouldn't be so empty. Lucky for him, he's the best tracker amidst the Losers and it's not like this place is that hard to find someone. He follows footprints and anticipates her turns until he ends up at the Town Hall, finding her inside pushing at her wound. Fury in his eyes, he shoves his knife back into the holster at his ankle, heading straight over to her to pick her up and haul her over his shoulder like kindling without a word, because if he did say something, it would be an angry, unintelligible run of Spanish.

"Bed," is what he says sharply, giving her use of her feet before they leave the Town Hall, his jaw set with hard determination. He knows enough to know that she needs rest and going out in this weather is far from restful.

Veronica is keenly aware of the fact that struggling will get her absolutely nowhere, but the moment her feet touch the ground again, she gives Cougar a solid, petulant shove, her eyes blazing with the injustice of being manhandled. She's not his kid, she's not even his sister.

"I'm fine," she spits, crossing her arms over her chest and refusing to wince at the rough burn of the fabric scraping over her tender skin.

She's dropped her journal, and marches back to collect it, has to get down onto her knees to locate the wayward pencil. Sitting back on her heels, she looks down at the dog-eared pages, her eyebrows pulling together.

She wishes his intentions were less pure. It would be easier to stay angry.

"I just wanted to be alone for a little while."

"Be alone in a bed," is his angry reply, seeing as she's not going to heal properly unless she gets to rest. Instead, she's walking around in too-cold weather and straining herself. It's not like he can talk, seeing as he's done the same after multiple injuries, but he also knows that the entire team had forcibly shoved him back into a bed. It's just his turn to be on the other side of this.

His arms are crossed as he looks at her darkly from under the brim of his hat, not pleased with the implication that to be alone, she has to come all this way. "You're healing," is what he says angrily, "you will only get worse, if you do this. I don't want to see you hurt."

Edited 2017-02-27 15:29 (UTC)

The impulse to snap back is still assuredly there, but so is the knowledge that this is the bed which she made for herself. The decision to move in with Cougar had been entirely her own, and for all that she had talked about potentially moving out, of finding her own place to give herself as well as the boys privacy, she's still there. And part of the reason for that is simply because it's nice to be taken care of.

It's just really fucking inconvenient right now.

"I'm fine," she replies, and pushes herself to her feet with a sigh, journal and pencil in hand. There's not much use to actively fighting this, so when she walks past him and outside, she automatically turns toward home.

She's not and he knows it, but he doesn't know if pushing will accomplish anything but her pushing him away. He knows that he looks to Veronica as a surrogate sister for the ones that have been out of his life for so long, but also, she's part of his team. Without Clay and Aisha and Pooch, there's the feel of something missing. "Conejito, you're not," he says, knowing she might take offense to the nickname, but given both her size and speed, he thinks it's a very apt one.

"Let me at least get you something to eat, while you rest."

Knowing that she's little doesn't do much to make being called a bunny palatable, but Veronica satisfies herself with merely tossing Cougar a quick, unimpressed glance in reply. He isn't leaving her alone, but he's softened enough that she can meet him nearly halfway without it chafing much of her pride.

"Just not invalid food," she replies, imagining a bowl of plain broth -- No hearty chunks of carrots or noodles here. "There's nothing wrong with my stomach."

"No, not invalid. I killed some meat in the woods," he says, though he's not sure what the name of the animal is in English, so it's meat. "We can sear it, put some dark greens. Give you protein," he says, wishing that he had some of his Mama's food that he could ply her with, rich food soaked with flavour that would make you forget how you feel. "Do you want a study?" he asks. "We can make Jake's room one, if you want more space."

He had been a moody teenager himself, once, running out on his parents and he knows he has no space to speak, but now that he's on the other side of this coin, he's beginning to understand the headaches he'd put his poor parents through.

"I don't need a study," Veronica replies, and instantly winces at her spoiled, peevish tone. She sounds more like Heather than she really wants to examine.

"Thank you for offering," she tries again, her tone more measured this time, fingers sliding her hair behind her ear. "But I don't need more space in the house. I don't know what I need. I mean, I've had three friends die in a year, they don't exactly give out a handbook for dealing with that."

He concedes with a nod of his head, because he knows what that's like. Sometimes, he thinks what they really need is to lock the door and talk, because there's that little piece of information that he's been keeping from her about Roque, something that he thinks that she, of all people, might understand. "Maybe rest," he allows. "Maybe talk. Right now, bed," he says, but it's not stern so much as worried.

"I will leave you alone, but you promise to sleep, at least eight, ten hours."

"I'm not going to sleep if I'm not tired," Veronica answers, although she is tired right now, has been tired for weeks. Where's the break point between concern for her being in bed too much because she's depressed, and thinking she's in bed too little because she's injured? How does Cougar even make that call?

"But fine," she concedes, some little balm in having made her point even if Cougar really couldn't give two shits. "I could probably use a nap."

"Then rest your body so it will heal," he counters, because wandering around at all hours will only strain it more. He's glad to hear her give in, just a little, and knows he's a hypocrite because he would protest much worse if he were in her shoes, but he's not. He's in his own very comfortable boots.

"It might not be better when you wake up or even in a week, but it will hurt less, if only just a little," he says in Spanish, knowing that much from experience.

She wants to say she knows, to remind him this isn't exactly her first rodeo, even opens to her mouth to that end. After a moment's hesitation, she closes it again with a sigh; being an asshole really isn't going to make any of this easier on either of them, and none of what's happened is Cougar's fault.

"I'll be fine," she repeats, and tries a wry smile that doesn't reach her eyes. "I'm resilient."

For all Cassian had explored most places at least once already, he periodically returns to try again. If the geography of the natural landscape can alter… well, who knows. Perhaps it's the opposite: to confirm object permanence. If this were a delusion brought on by nervous breakdown or hostile brainwash, or the dream of last misfirings of dying neurons seeming to last forever as his body atomized on Scarif, there would be tells, other inconsistencies. So in every place, he's looked for some strange detail that would be entirely out of character for his own brain to invent, and memorized it; and systematically comes back to check them.

Before Jyn's arrival, it had been to see if this was a situation that could be broken out of.

Now that she's here… it's to try and make sure, to whatever degree of agency (nil) he has, it stays.

He's not quite through a doorway when he hears the gasp of pain. He pauses a moment, caught between wondering if he shouldn't intrude and the more powerful instinct to make sure everyone's all right.

The second wins—with a bit of compromise. He looks through the door but doesn't immediately walk through it.

The young woman he sees doesn't appear to be in immediate danger. …From outside herself.

From the inside… he's seen such eyes on refugees and veterans…

The second instinct wins entirely.

To catch her attention before trying to invade her space further—and not impose his interpretation on the scenario before trying to understand it better—Cassian starts simple: "Hello…"

Though on impulse, he also brings the half of himself through the doorway that brings his still-bandaged hand into view. (Linen wrapped, just like hers.)

This is not the first time it's occurred to Veronica that there isn't anyplace in this entire damned village where it's possible for a person to be truly alone. Even the woods are questionable -- She's gone out in them and just stood there enough times, waiting for Frank to get over himself and climb down from whatever tree he'd been in.

She doesn't blame this guy -- His name is something with a C, she thinks. Obviously he has good intentions. But she really isn't sure she can be polite if he thinks he's going to save her from herself.

"Hey," she says, and pulls down the sleeve of the sweater, ignoring the burn of the fabric across exposed wounds. She collects her journal, but otherwise makes no move to leave, instead sitting back with a weary sigh.

"I'm fine, if you're worried."

He's looking at her with a bit too much focus. Rather rude for a stranger. Watching her movements, her microreactions to them, her tone… it helps of course what she isn't trying to hide.

Whatever Cassian sees seems to make him come to a conclusion…

He shrugs. Somehow cavalier and agreeable. "Would my worrying help?" He comes into the room, nodding to a cabinet past her to indicate his trajectory. "I'll be out of your way in a bit."

—Though he's obviously not that unconcerned, because he can't help nudging again. As he passes, he holds up his own bandage to indicate hers. "Dr Williams?"

"Helen," she answers, although she knows Rory well enough by reputation. "Yesterday," she preemptively adds, sensing easily enough that this guy is trying to establish a connection between them so he might help her, regardless of what he might say. Good intentions aren't that hard to get a bead on.

"And yes, I am aware that I should be in bed." In bed, out of the cold, being hovered over, like a girl doesn't have a right to have an emotional breakdown alone and in the cold.

"I said nothing," said Cassian peaceably, spreading his hands. "I should have claimed a cabin right after arriving instead of camping in the snow for a month. One of the other strangers here telling me so wouldn't have made me."

He glanced at her, possibly could see how little use she had for indirectness, and… didn't take a seat near her, but rested his hand on a surface, as a compromise. Here but won't imposedly settle in. "Still… even as a stranger… I think I've had an injury like yours before." (Recognizing the glimpse of it and/or the way she's reacting to it with clothing and body language. Self-infliction has certain tells.) "And it makes it difficult to want to leave you entirely alone. Even," said with a firm tone of I'll respect— "if you don't want to talk about it."

"You didn't have to say anything," Veronica replies with an arch of her eyebrows and a tilt of her head. He didn't just come in here for whatever he was after and leave, so obviously he feels some need to be invested here, however marginally.

And when he continues, he proves her spot-on, and she has to wonder why he couldn't just admit what he was up to in the first place.

"I don't," she says, of wanting to talk about it. It isn't something she particularly knows how to articulate to friends, much less a stranger. She's watching him just as steadily as he has been her, and the idea that he may be forming assumptions about her or why she's here or what she's doing really chafes.

"For the record, I didn't say I was fine because I had some teenage urge to be an asshole. I really am fine. I have a support system that is... honestly, it's ridiculous. No one is letting me slip through the cracks, I promise."

That is, actually, why she's here.

He gave a slight smile and a salute-like nod. "All right." Putting both hands back at his sides, he gave another nod of valediction and turned away to leave her alone.

Sensing people in a space is like feeling the temperature of the air, or the movement of it against his skin: it's easy to ignore. Manhattan was too densely populated to ever be alone or unaware of other people, and he thought nothing of another presence in the building when he arrived. It seemed familiar enough, solitary enough, not to draw attention from his task.

The cleaning party hadn't given him much time to explore alone, and he's come back to check the smaller rooms again. They'd probably been explored for supplies and answers since the first party arrived, but--when he walks into the kitchen these days, every intention of helping with the meal, there's a hideous static under his skin. His brain washes over with the snow of a television with no signal, and he keeps walking until he's out the kitchen door and wandering.

At that point, he has two choices: follow his whispering instincts, or go back to the grave.

He doesn't know what he's meant to do or find in the dusted and re-draped store room of the Town Hall, but he spares his attention to each of its corners, noting the narrow wooden bench left along a bare wall, or the flutter of the curtain around a window that isn't sealed for the wind. The glass is cold under his idling finger, and breathing on it reveals only the smudges of hands testing and opening the pane: no secret messages or symbols left by denizens past.

The cry drawing him out of his own head comes with a phantom pain in his arm, secondary enough to panic--the volume on that static sound turned up to a roar of white noise--that he knows it isn't from his own old wound. Shaking his hand at the wrist, he approaches the door with some caution--peering around the frame to find the source of the sound and find that she's still alone.

"Are you okay," he asks, just to draw her attention as he moves slowly into the main room. The source of her pain is clear and fresh enough, stark against her skin, stark in its own right against the dark bulk of her sweater. He's seen her plenty of times in the kitchen, and he guesses they've both left it to Sam and Kate today. Still approaching slowly, he takes an arc that draws him to the walls of the room, so that he's following the line of it to her without blocking any kind of exit. "It's Veronica, right?"

She really should be back home and in bed. Sooner or later, Cougar's going to realize she's gone and come looking. But being fluttered and fussed over has even less appeal now than before, and when she looks up and points her dark-eyed scrutiny at this new addition, it's not so much the being interrupted she's concerned with as whether or not he's one more person who might try to gallantly save her from herself. She isn't dying or wanting to die; she's just doing a shit job of figuring herself out at the moment.

"Yeah," she confirms with a slow nod, not bothering to wonder how he knows her name. It's a small village. "You're Kira." It's only the people from the last few weeks she's gotten behind on.

"Unless the secret to this place is that we're all clones who had to Clockwork Orange our old memories, that's me." His brows lift, but his eyes don't roll, still focused on the wound on her arm. He tested his own knuckles too many times in the days after burning them to think anything of it--she might have pressed it to the corner of her journal, or pushed too hard against the floor, to make it flare like that.

Lifting his gaze from her arm, skipping over the open page and taking in the wide, cold room, he stuffs his cold hands into his pockets and leans on the wall. "Semblance of privacy over self-preservation," he asks, the faintest steam of breath lifting from his mouth. "I could see if anyone left anything for the furnace."

Veronica shakes her head. "It's not worth it. By the time it actually got warm in here, it would be way past time for me to leave. My roommates can be a little overprotective and this just happened yesterday." She holds up her arm in evidence, as if it hadn't already been obvious.

"Thanks for the offer, though," she adds after a tick, not feeling particularly grateful for anything at the moment but appreciating the thought in a distant, objective sort of way. But then, she'll probably feel like a bitch later regardless.

"Did you get hit at all?" she asks, a deliberate sidestepping of the elephant in the room. Somehow, she doubts this guy is looking to get into the complexities of knowing Kylo Ren any more than than she is right now.

He shrugs: "There's also a bench we could set on fire, but I don't think Mark would appreciate a scorched floor after everything." He's had his fill of picking through smoldering buildings anyway--his coping mechanisms haven't taken the plunge into arson just yet.

Something about the question ties weights to his fingertips, makes him flex the knuckles under the scarred tissue of his hand. A question can just be a question, he thinks. As much as lightning can just be lightning, carving through them. "I don't know if I should say no or not yet," he admits. "I'm not even sure I care, as long as I don't have to bury anyone else.

"Sorry," he adds, lifting the hand to rub a weary itch from his eyebrow. "Just had some friends hit, I guess I'm tired of being the overprotective roommate."

"It's okay," Veronica replies with a drop of her gaze to her lap. "It's not like it was your fault. Sorry I didn't help." The truth is that it hadn't even occurred to her to need to participate in anything so practical as burying a body. She'd been too wrapped up in herself to worry about who got stuck doing the honors when, to her knowledge, they don't even have a proper shovel in the whole town.

"Objectively, I can appreciate an overprotective roommate, but I'd be lying if I said it doesn't get annoying." Cougar cares, Jake cares. Hell, Frank isn't a roommate, but he cares in that same possessive, self-righteous way. But knowing they care and knowing she isn't particularly well-built for a place like this doesn't help much when it starts to chafe.

"The shovel he left me for the job is about two and a half feet long," he manages, remembering the bite of it against his fingers, the uselessness of Casey's gloves, and leaning into the softer bite of everyday mutual bitching before the thought forks into something uglier. Something to dump on someone he's spoken to more than pass the flour in the months he's been here.

"Point being, I don't blame anyone for not subjecting themselves to it."

Following her gaze down, there's the thick pad of paper, there's the wall he's leaning on, that he could be sliding down, sitting beside her against. He doesn't need foresight to imagine the pile of his limbs settling, the asking about her roommates, the anecdote about Casey trying to herd him around when Casey just learned how to spell his own name. Eventually they might talk about Ren, without really talking about Ren. Eventually he'd ask about what she's writing, the way no one ever wants to be asked, and she'd either tell him or walk away.

His breath steams the air on a sigh: if she really knew Ren, enough to think she needed to move some earth for him, maybe she'd been pulled in by the same things. "Do you ever just want to say fuck it and go see what all those places on the map are for yourself? Do you ever get tired of waiting for beefy survivalists with weirdly good teeth to stop babysitting us, and go climb a wall?"

A laugh bubbles abruptly from Veronica's throat, and she immediately tips her head forward, covering her eyes with shame, and yet not doing much to curb the honestly much-needed moment of levity.

"He did have good teeth, didn't he?" And a great smile, when he managed to show it, and a lot of other things she swallows quickly down to avoid spoiling the moment.

"I tried once, when I first showed up," she continues when she finally leans back again. "I was in the first wave. A ton of us came out of the fountain on the same day, one after the other. We didn't know then that getting out was harder than it looked. I broke a bunch of my nails off."

She turns her hand up now, fingers curled in against the palm, nails long grown back, and then slides a look up to Kira.

"But I would be lying if I said I didn't wonder sometimes if we weren't drugged to not really try very hard."

It's a joke, it isn't--if she was ever the type to worry about a few broken nails, she isn't now, sitting out in the cold with lightning scars down her arm and a dead friend. He favors her with half a smile, his own teeth starting to show. Some of it's just her, herself, and some of it is slotting that into his idea of Ren, and what Ren responded to in people.

"I can't say I know everything Kate puts in that bread," he offers, but she has a point. There had been more than one time someone had explained a danger to him, then shrugged off its existence with no idea how to handle it, or no will to try until the snow cleared. Now that it had, lightning kept them at bay. Soon it will rain, then be too hot--any number of excuses to spend another day inside, reading Casey the same three books until he didn't need any help.

"Everyone handles the stress differently," he adds, some well of forgiveness springing eternal from him. "But I'm not worried about my nails if you aren't."

For a long moment Veronica just sits there, looking back to her hands and the filed arcs of her fingernails -- Not the meticulous manicure she'd arrived with, but far from ragged. She still cares how she looks most days. Or did, until recently.

She just lets it settle, the sheer idea of it: Of flouting everything Cougar and Frank have tried to tell her, of just going out there and trying to get out simply because she'd used up all the fucks she had to give. It's reckless and selfish; she isn't so distraught that she doesn't recognize that. But she really isn't sure she cares.

"Let's go," she finally, abruptly replies, and pushes herself to her feet. "Before someone tries to stop us."

Frank likes that it's so empty. There's a certain level of privacy to be found in the knowledge that every movement anybody makes, unless they've got a hell of a lot of training, is going to carry. No surprises. He can just sit and listen, be nothing more than senses and instinct instead of the restless creature in his head. When he'd felt the need for high ground again, this place had been first on his list.

So he didn't miss her approach, or that it was her specifically settling in on the floor boards (who else carts a pen and paper around?). But she hadn't come to see him for weeks, and even if he thinks he might have figured out why, she isn't looking for him now either. That's a choice she's making, and he respects it enough to let her have her distance — though not, apparently, enough to forgo creeping over to the top of the nearest stairwell to keep an ear on her.

It's that soft sound that changes his mind. He lets a floorboard creak as gets to his feet, as a courtesy, but as soon as he gets far enough down the stairs to get a good look at her, he's not thinking about masking his footsteps anymore. His gaze burns on the discarded bandage, at the angry red lines down her forearm.

"How bad?" he asks, his throat suddenly gone dry.

He always seems to enter this way: Slipping in under the radar; quiet, sneaking like he isn't certain whether he belongs there. Sometimes she wants to shake him for it, wants to ask what the hell else she has to do, what she has to prove so that he'll stop acting like an interloper.

Just now, though, she wants to shake him for the question, wants to ask which wound he means.

The lightning? Kylo Ren? The fact that he himself has been peering in proverbial windows and keeping his distance for weeks when she needed him most?

She frowns, fingers wrapped tightly around her slender wrist like she's looking for some point of contact, an anchor.

"It's not great," she finally allows, but doesn't look up.

Edited 2017-02-28 03:09 (UTC)

Not great. He gets that from her body language as much as her words, and his brows pinch, but he nods anyway. He wants to ask where and how, but working himself up into trying to punch the sky isn't going to do either of them much good, at least not until he can get his hands on the people controlling it. He swallows that impulse with a roll of his jaw.

He's not blind to certain things, though - the way she's gripping her wrist, the fact that bandage didn't come off on its own - even if he's been blind to an awful lot lately. If anything, that fact worries him more. (What else has he missed?)

"Let me," he suggests after a beat, with a nod to her bandage. It's gentle enough to leave room for argument if she has a mind to, but he's crossing the space and kneeling his hulking form down next to her all the same.

There's only the briefest tick of hesitation before she lifts her arm out, palm up, the spiderweb of livid red tracks on her pale skin obvious even in the thinning light, wrist to elbow and then disappearing beneath the bunched fabric of the sweater.

Words seem utterly futile, too many of them or too little in turn, her emotions vacillating rapid-fire between anger and sadness. It doesn't really matter in the end anyhow, the brush of his fingers like a trigger, something with her subsiding, giving permission, eyes wrapped suddenly in saline. She leans into him, silent as one tear and then another slips free, and then whispers against his shoulder.

"Where have you been?"

His hands are calloused but warm as he cups her elbow from underneath, careful where he presses his thumb to anchor the bandage. A thrum of tension in his shoulders answers where she leans, just for a second, some baseline vigilance giving a last gasp before he settles — but he does settle, letting the air rush out of him all at once, shifting to give her a place to lean into. Closer, when she turns her face into him. For all that he's a concrete block of a man, there's still some room for softness.

"Same place I always am," he says, "Around."

Not here. He doesn't sound proud of it.

"You stopped coming out." A question, not a judgment.

"I didn't—" she begins and then stops, struggling with what she wants to say, or if she wants to say anything at all. What's happened, it's so much bigger than Ren dying or herself being struck by lightning.

She shakes her head instead, pulling in a slow breath through her nose, and leans back enough to watch as he wraps her arm back up, for whatever good that will do.

"I can't always be the one coming to you," she finally settles on. It isn't entirely fair; this isn't really about him. At least not entirely. But he's here and it's convenient, even if it just makes her feel sour instead of vindicated.

His eyebrow rises just a tick, because yeah, he can guess this isn't all about him, but the part that is about him isn't what he expected, either. She's always doing that, throwing just a little him off balance. Asking things of him that used to be normal, before normal got turned on its head. It's not like he didn't know she needed somebody. He can read body language across the village about as well as across a room. He just didn't think she needed him.

"Yeah." He nods, dropping his eyes with an apologetic grimace. "Gotta work on that."

"You wanna be mad at me, or them?" Like either one would be fine.

Neither of them could probably blame her if she lashed out, whichever way it went, but Veronica actually takes a moment to genuinely consider her answer. What does she want from a situation that's predicated on taking from her instead.

Maybe it's not really worth it to be angry anymore. She isn't sure she has the energy. If that's supposed to be the endgame for these people, the ones keeping them here, then well played.

She sighs, a drawn-out, resigned sound, and finally looks at Frank, ducking her head to catch his eye.

"I just want you here. Right now, that's... That's it. That's all." She presses her lips together, watching him, her eyes tired but unwavering. "Can you do that?"

Something about that catches him a little under the ribs — something, like he doesn't know damn well what it is, what patterns he's repeating without even noticing he's doing it. He's been a shit father, and he's being a shit friend, and one of those things he could still fix if he tried. His teeth catch the inside of his lower lip between them for a second, but he meets her eyes too, and nods.

"You want me around, you've got me," he says, a little wry; he's no treasure, but he's not going anywhere. At least not right now. He tucks the end of the bandage beneath the last wrap-around. "Guess there's no accounting for taste."

"Guess not," Veronica confirms. A month ago, this might have been accompanied by a smile, even a faint one, but tonight she simply feels worn, scraped out physically and emotionally, and she can barely spare the energy for her own feelings, much less Frank's.

But she's glad he's here, that he's staying even if he's late.

It occurs to her not for the first time that it could have been him as easily as anyone, that there's a difference between mourning what was yet to come with someone like Ren and mourning opportunities already missed with someone there all along.

"I love you, you know," she says, just to put it out there, to have something concrete if only so he can't talk himself out of caring. It's said; no take-backs.

Well. Here he was worrying about the fact he can't even get a smile out of her, not even at his own expense, but that train of thought crashes and burns when she drops that bombshell. He wants to tell her, You shouldn't, but they've had that conversation half a dozen times now; he knows she doesn't care about should and shouldn't. She says she loves him, and he can't stop her.

He doesn't have to ask himself if he feels the same way. He knows. He feels more for her than he has for anybody since the park. But knowing it and saying it are two different things. Maybe that's what she needs right now, to hear it out loud, to be sure, but the words die in his throat, and now isn't the time to be dragging all his shit out into the light to explain to her why.

"C'mere," he manages instead, reaching one big arm out around her shoulder to pull her in, burying warm breath and bushy beard in her hair. He can't say it, but he can try to show it, even if right now that just means holding her close. He just has to hope she'll get it.

But this, he guesses, isn't all about him either.

"Did you love him?" he asks eventually, and his tone is gentle. even if the question isn't. "Your friend?"

So he knows then. She guesses it should have been a given, but it was difficult to know for sure when he's spent so much time recently wrapped up in his own misery.

"No," she says, no hesitation to the answer or how she leans into him, a skinny arm spanning the width of his back, fingers curling into the wool of his coat. There is, perhaps a little surprisingly, no twinge of guilt to her answer. Any different one, Ren himself would have found absurd. There hadn't been time for that. They'd barely gotten past animosity.

"I thought I was going to die yesterday," she admits, cheek against his chest, staring out into the darkening room. "I don't know why I didn't. I think maybe they killed him because he asked too many questions."

There's a funny little twitch to his fingertips when she says that, I thought I was going to die yesterday. She didn't. He couldn't have done a damn thing about it if she had. She'd just be gone, her and her notebooks and her theories and her tough questions — everything she ever was or was going to grow up to be, gone. But she isn't yet. He holds her just a little tighter anyway.

"Or maybe for asking the right ones," he agrees, mulling over the possibility. There's gotta be some kind of thought process behind the things they do, even if it isn't easy to map out. "He was making a lot of noise lately — about forming a government or something?"

"Yeah," Veronica replies with a slow sigh, the word feeling heavy in her mouth. She doesn't really want to talk about this, doesn't really want to talk about anything, but there it is, out there and hovering, demanding attention.

"He wanted a council. He wanted to prepare for... I don't know. Something bad." Because it was always something bad, wasn't it? But who can prepare for lightning out of the clear blue sky?

"He had been in the military, too."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

What goes on in that place in the dark? [OTA]

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