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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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."

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

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