Nera 1: We have to go home to get home
In the months before Pass is expected to begin, J'lor gathers up other exiles surviving on the members of the Western Isles chain and collects them on the island the Instigators have chosen as their tiny stronghold. The influx of hardened criminals will change the community's personality in ways the bluerider has not quite thought out.
But that does not mean no one is thinking.
The Alley (Derek's Cave)
Actually a cave; how it came to be called 'the alley' is already lost to only ten turns of time. Here a roughly made table and chairs and a firepit look out from the small cave's mouth over the ocean crashing against jagged rocks below; this is the island's less pleasant shoreside, and it takes a little work to get up into this cave. Just as well - few are invited here to table with Derek, to discuss with he and his top thugs the matters he deems private.
In the back of the cave Derek's personal effects, including a poor bed strewn with a ragtag fur stitched together from rabbit pelts, dominate a small private space. It would appear the man lives simply.
For better or worse, the decision has been made; criminal exiles have been located and retrieved from nearby islands, and many have spent this day settling into the main camp. Tension and curiosity have warred all the long day, and it's late when Nera comes scrambing up the approach to Derek's cave, not bothering to hide the sounds that warn of her coming.
He has already had some of them here. She might know from no more than a glance - a dry pale stain, burnt sunset brown, flickers red in the firelight on the floor. The fire itself dances in innocence of what it lights, the natural pit it resides in filled with sand and ash and glowing coal beneath the crackling soft tropical wood that feeds the flame. But if the glance were not enough there's the man himself to confirm it, seated in the cave's deepest reach on the little heap of scrap-stuffed leaf-tarp and fur that serves as his bed. He's got a long leaf in one hand, or rather half of a long leaf; it's been torn lengthwise and the other half is already wrapped around his hand, around the thumbjoint. He's about to double the wrap with the rest of the greenery, but those scrambling steps hit his eardrums like a hard rain and he glances up, stretching fingers and popping knuckles.
Nera appears after a few moments, lifting one hand to tuck her hair away behind her ears; she pauses to survey the scene before her for a moment, lips pressing together. Her nostrils flare as she inhales sharply, then, uninvited, she's walking forward, pushing up her rolled-up shirt sleeves as she passes by the fire so she can crouch before him, dropping to her haunches in an easy movement. "Show me." Her tone is half reproof, half exasperation.
He watches her come in, unmoving himself, as though she bears a little watching. But when she drops into the crouch he comes back to life, bending his head and turning over his hand so she can inspect the work he's done so far. "Not much to see." Derek drops the second leaf onto the fur beside his hip and unwinds the first one enough to display a little red, a little purple, and a little swelling. "Bent it out of joint. It's back in now." He begins to retighten the greenery around the joint, glancing up at her. "He'll thank me someday. It's us, you know. Us that keeps him safe at night so he can dream." He shakes his head once, mouth squirming against something that wants to be a smile but that, repressed, just makes the bent corners of his moustache twitch.
Her lips press together again, and she folds her arms over her ribcage, maintaining her balance with the ease of long practice. "Derek." Again, the reproof and the exasperation. She watches the remaking of his bandage, then abruptly shifts, coming to her feet so that she can turn away towards the fire. "I suppose it is," she agrees, non-committal. She stoops, a few steps later, to claim a piece of wood and feed the fire, addressing the flames rather than the man behind her. "And now you care what he dreams?"
"What." Derek tightens the makeshift bandage. He will not oblige upon resources better used on lesser men; he appeals, if anything, for her indifference. The objection, like hers, is rhetorical. Reclaiming the second part of the leaf he starts to wind it crossways around the other, to strengthen the joint while it heals. "Nera," he says after that, looking up sharply, perhaps a little hurt. He snorts and looks back down and pulls hard on the end of the leaf, wincing. "Always have. Well, not because of him. Because of us. All of us that ever got by on scraps. In his dream there might be more than scraps, so it's a good enough dream." Another pull, a wince, a little noise in his throat. "Just that someone got to keep dreamers safe at night."
She's lit by the fire, the thin material of her shirt showing her silhouette, all straight up and down lines. Her hair's been blown by the wind as she walked up, and now her halo is illuminated. She sniffs, dropping to her crouch once more so that she can use another piece of firework to poke at the coals. "Well, then." It's the same tone she uses on the younger members of their community, when they're spinning tales; brusque, faintly cynical. "Our dreamers are very lucky to have a protector." A particularly vicious jab at a crumbling piece of wood, just then.
Derek draws in a thick breath through his nose and is stock-still for a moment, but resists looking up until he's tucked the end of the leaf under and finished his triage. "Nera," again, a grumble this time, protesting. He gets to his feet in a single motion, hands slipping down his hips to his pockets. One thumb catches there to idle; the other barely remembers not to, and this time he bites back the wince with words. "It's preposterous to think he's going to keep those sods in line. He himself won't even say he has a plan." The breath that went in comes out in a sigh, weary. J'lor has always made him weary. He approaches the fire, watching her hands glowing against the flame they torture. "I ain't any more interested in seeing them run wild all over us than you must be. So someone has to teach them how it is here. Don't tell me I hear you complaining?" From her hands to her face his eyes crawl, grim and grey.
The flames leap, then the log that she's prodding collapses with a crack, sending up sparks. She huffs her breath out, and turns her face up to him, cheeks reddening with the close proximity to the heat. Blue eyes meet grey, and for a few moments she holds his gaze steadily, head tilted back so she can look up at him. Then her eyes flicker back down to the flames, and there's another needless jab for a new log. "No. Of course not." It's a quiet capitulation, but not a happy one.
His mouth twitches; his moustache twitches. And when she looks away from him he raises a hand - the better one - to smooth down the hair over his lip, lest stray sparks light cinders there. "Well, it's not like we'll ever go home if we're all killed for what little garbage we've got to loot," Derek retorts, unhappy in his own bitter way.
A particularly savage jab seems to relieve the last of Nera's feeling, for she withdraws her stick, bangs it twice on the ground to rid it of embers, then sets it back down on his firewood pile, bracing her hands on her knees to come to her feet. "Nobody's going home," she replies, more weary than anything else; both hands come up to scrub at her face, leaving soot smudges on one cheek. "You keep us safe here, and we trust in you to do it." Her words are gentler there, just for a moment. "But neither you nor anyone else can pave us a way home."
He watches her too keenly, and the wounded hand fakes a gesture emphasized by a flash of moving green, raising as if he might stop her smudging herself, then falling, forbidden. "I try," Derek allows, of safety. He looks at her a moment longer, black brows crouching low to cast shadows over his eyes, then turns bodily away, staring into the back of the cave. "We won't go home because we aren't trying to go home," he remarks, his voice suddenly sandy soft. It is wholly at odds with the way the fingers of the one hand massage and worry at the thumb-joint of the other, with the way his face steels against the pain, but these things are somewhat hidden by his body. "Not really. There's no point spreading ideas and whispering in ears because we can't be heard from here."
He shakes his head, dropping his hands, bending his neck. A little rueful spit in these words: "We have to -go- back, to get back. It wouldn't be subtle. It wouldn't be nice."
She laughs at that, bolder than usual tonight. "We have to go back, Derek? How do you propose we do that? Will I summon our wing of riders?" With a sniff, she turns away towards the entrance of his little sanctuary, hands thrust deep into her pockets. "I didn't realise you were still numbered amongst our dreamers. I lost mine a way back."
"I don't dream," Derek says, in the silence after her bitterness, three tough chewy syllables against the rush and sigh of the sea outside in the night. They're out of place, vulnerable and irritable, irrelevant, unbidden. He turns around and respeaks them the way they should have been. "I ain't dreaming. It's simple fact." Slowly he starts out toward her, bare feet silent, though the cave is narrow enough to tell the tale of his approach in the way it reflects his voice - and he does go on talking. "He's been waiting for them to realize they were wrong and welcome us home. But that's not going to happen and you know it. We all know it. It won't happen because they. weren't. wrong." He stops two paces back from her to let that sink in, staring at the halo of her hair, firelit against the dark backdrop of the cavemouth.
"Not by their standard," he says then, a little softer. "And the standard won't change without us there to change it. So yeah: we have to go home to get home. Black or white. Ain't nobody on this island, rider or not, going to be able to deny that forever."
"Black or white," she echoes quietly. "I'll tell you what's black and white, Derek. We're here. We have no way home. I have a camp full of criminals to get back and supervise, with I can't imagine what on their grubby minds." She sniffs once more, shoving her sleeves up past her elbows. "Dream your dreams of home. I call this place home, for I'll know no other." Already she's turning away, to begin another circumnavigation of the fire, towards the entrance. "Go to sleep. Dreams come easier, that way."
He's had his moment. Derek is not the island's best motivational speaker and failure, though no friend, is not the least of his evening companions. He bears it in silence as she starts out away from him and his little domain, his refuge and boxing-ring and home. He turns so he can the better watch her escape him, and makes no move to hold her back. But he does say this, when she's about to cross his threshhold. "You deserve better." Sandy, soft, and vital, like he means it. Whatever its meaning is.
The fire she's jabbed and pierced 'til the flames lick wild will light the cave well into the gray of dawn. Occasionally his shadow will stand against the light, a silhouette in the entryway between inside and out. He paces, and thinks, and stirs the embers. Derek does not sleep.
Hopefully this is the first in a series. Thank you, Nera, for a great scene... and for being you.
But that does not mean no one is thinking.
The Alley (Derek's Cave)
Actually a cave; how it came to be called 'the alley' is already lost to only ten turns of time. Here a roughly made table and chairs and a firepit look out from the small cave's mouth over the ocean crashing against jagged rocks below; this is the island's less pleasant shoreside, and it takes a little work to get up into this cave. Just as well - few are invited here to table with Derek, to discuss with he and his top thugs the matters he deems private.
In the back of the cave Derek's personal effects, including a poor bed strewn with a ragtag fur stitched together from rabbit pelts, dominate a small private space. It would appear the man lives simply.
For better or worse, the decision has been made; criminal exiles have been located and retrieved from nearby islands, and many have spent this day settling into the main camp. Tension and curiosity have warred all the long day, and it's late when Nera comes scrambing up the approach to Derek's cave, not bothering to hide the sounds that warn of her coming.
He has already had some of them here. She might know from no more than a glance - a dry pale stain, burnt sunset brown, flickers red in the firelight on the floor. The fire itself dances in innocence of what it lights, the natural pit it resides in filled with sand and ash and glowing coal beneath the crackling soft tropical wood that feeds the flame. But if the glance were not enough there's the man himself to confirm it, seated in the cave's deepest reach on the little heap of scrap-stuffed leaf-tarp and fur that serves as his bed. He's got a long leaf in one hand, or rather half of a long leaf; it's been torn lengthwise and the other half is already wrapped around his hand, around the thumbjoint. He's about to double the wrap with the rest of the greenery, but those scrambling steps hit his eardrums like a hard rain and he glances up, stretching fingers and popping knuckles.
Nera appears after a few moments, lifting one hand to tuck her hair away behind her ears; she pauses to survey the scene before her for a moment, lips pressing together. Her nostrils flare as she inhales sharply, then, uninvited, she's walking forward, pushing up her rolled-up shirt sleeves as she passes by the fire so she can crouch before him, dropping to her haunches in an easy movement. "Show me." Her tone is half reproof, half exasperation.
He watches her come in, unmoving himself, as though she bears a little watching. But when she drops into the crouch he comes back to life, bending his head and turning over his hand so she can inspect the work he's done so far. "Not much to see." Derek drops the second leaf onto the fur beside his hip and unwinds the first one enough to display a little red, a little purple, and a little swelling. "Bent it out of joint. It's back in now." He begins to retighten the greenery around the joint, glancing up at her. "He'll thank me someday. It's us, you know. Us that keeps him safe at night so he can dream." He shakes his head once, mouth squirming against something that wants to be a smile but that, repressed, just makes the bent corners of his moustache twitch.
Her lips press together again, and she folds her arms over her ribcage, maintaining her balance with the ease of long practice. "Derek." Again, the reproof and the exasperation. She watches the remaking of his bandage, then abruptly shifts, coming to her feet so that she can turn away towards the fire. "I suppose it is," she agrees, non-committal. She stoops, a few steps later, to claim a piece of wood and feed the fire, addressing the flames rather than the man behind her. "And now you care what he dreams?"
"What." Derek tightens the makeshift bandage. He will not oblige upon resources better used on lesser men; he appeals, if anything, for her indifference. The objection, like hers, is rhetorical. Reclaiming the second part of the leaf he starts to wind it crossways around the other, to strengthen the joint while it heals. "Nera," he says after that, looking up sharply, perhaps a little hurt. He snorts and looks back down and pulls hard on the end of the leaf, wincing. "Always have. Well, not because of him. Because of us. All of us that ever got by on scraps. In his dream there might be more than scraps, so it's a good enough dream." Another pull, a wince, a little noise in his throat. "Just that someone got to keep dreamers safe at night."
She's lit by the fire, the thin material of her shirt showing her silhouette, all straight up and down lines. Her hair's been blown by the wind as she walked up, and now her halo is illuminated. She sniffs, dropping to her crouch once more so that she can use another piece of firework to poke at the coals. "Well, then." It's the same tone she uses on the younger members of their community, when they're spinning tales; brusque, faintly cynical. "Our dreamers are very lucky to have a protector." A particularly vicious jab at a crumbling piece of wood, just then.
Derek draws in a thick breath through his nose and is stock-still for a moment, but resists looking up until he's tucked the end of the leaf under and finished his triage. "Nera," again, a grumble this time, protesting. He gets to his feet in a single motion, hands slipping down his hips to his pockets. One thumb catches there to idle; the other barely remembers not to, and this time he bites back the wince with words. "It's preposterous to think he's going to keep those sods in line. He himself won't even say he has a plan." The breath that went in comes out in a sigh, weary. J'lor has always made him weary. He approaches the fire, watching her hands glowing against the flame they torture. "I ain't any more interested in seeing them run wild all over us than you must be. So someone has to teach them how it is here. Don't tell me I hear you complaining?" From her hands to her face his eyes crawl, grim and grey.
The flames leap, then the log that she's prodding collapses with a crack, sending up sparks. She huffs her breath out, and turns her face up to him, cheeks reddening with the close proximity to the heat. Blue eyes meet grey, and for a few moments she holds his gaze steadily, head tilted back so she can look up at him. Then her eyes flicker back down to the flames, and there's another needless jab for a new log. "No. Of course not." It's a quiet capitulation, but not a happy one.
His mouth twitches; his moustache twitches. And when she looks away from him he raises a hand - the better one - to smooth down the hair over his lip, lest stray sparks light cinders there. "Well, it's not like we'll ever go home if we're all killed for what little garbage we've got to loot," Derek retorts, unhappy in his own bitter way.
A particularly savage jab seems to relieve the last of Nera's feeling, for she withdraws her stick, bangs it twice on the ground to rid it of embers, then sets it back down on his firewood pile, bracing her hands on her knees to come to her feet. "Nobody's going home," she replies, more weary than anything else; both hands come up to scrub at her face, leaving soot smudges on one cheek. "You keep us safe here, and we trust in you to do it." Her words are gentler there, just for a moment. "But neither you nor anyone else can pave us a way home."
He watches her too keenly, and the wounded hand fakes a gesture emphasized by a flash of moving green, raising as if he might stop her smudging herself, then falling, forbidden. "I try," Derek allows, of safety. He looks at her a moment longer, black brows crouching low to cast shadows over his eyes, then turns bodily away, staring into the back of the cave. "We won't go home because we aren't trying to go home," he remarks, his voice suddenly sandy soft. It is wholly at odds with the way the fingers of the one hand massage and worry at the thumb-joint of the other, with the way his face steels against the pain, but these things are somewhat hidden by his body. "Not really. There's no point spreading ideas and whispering in ears because we can't be heard from here."
He shakes his head, dropping his hands, bending his neck. A little rueful spit in these words: "We have to -go- back, to get back. It wouldn't be subtle. It wouldn't be nice."
She laughs at that, bolder than usual tonight. "We have to go back, Derek? How do you propose we do that? Will I summon our wing of riders?" With a sniff, she turns away towards the entrance of his little sanctuary, hands thrust deep into her pockets. "I didn't realise you were still numbered amongst our dreamers. I lost mine a way back."
"I don't dream," Derek says, in the silence after her bitterness, three tough chewy syllables against the rush and sigh of the sea outside in the night. They're out of place, vulnerable and irritable, irrelevant, unbidden. He turns around and respeaks them the way they should have been. "I ain't dreaming. It's simple fact." Slowly he starts out toward her, bare feet silent, though the cave is narrow enough to tell the tale of his approach in the way it reflects his voice - and he does go on talking. "He's been waiting for them to realize they were wrong and welcome us home. But that's not going to happen and you know it. We all know it. It won't happen because they. weren't. wrong." He stops two paces back from her to let that sink in, staring at the halo of her hair, firelit against the dark backdrop of the cavemouth.
"Not by their standard," he says then, a little softer. "And the standard won't change without us there to change it. So yeah: we have to go home to get home. Black or white. Ain't nobody on this island, rider or not, going to be able to deny that forever."
"Black or white," she echoes quietly. "I'll tell you what's black and white, Derek. We're here. We have no way home. I have a camp full of criminals to get back and supervise, with I can't imagine what on their grubby minds." She sniffs once more, shoving her sleeves up past her elbows. "Dream your dreams of home. I call this place home, for I'll know no other." Already she's turning away, to begin another circumnavigation of the fire, towards the entrance. "Go to sleep. Dreams come easier, that way."
He's had his moment. Derek is not the island's best motivational speaker and failure, though no friend, is not the least of his evening companions. He bears it in silence as she starts out away from him and his little domain, his refuge and boxing-ring and home. He turns so he can the better watch her escape him, and makes no move to hold her back. But he does say this, when she's about to cross his threshhold. "You deserve better." Sandy, soft, and vital, like he means it. Whatever its meaning is.
The fire she's jabbed and pierced 'til the flames lick wild will light the cave well into the gray of dawn. Occasionally his shadow will stand against the light, a silhouette in the entryway between inside and out. He paces, and thinks, and stirs the embers. Derek does not sleep.
Hopefully this is the first in a series. Thank you, Nera, for a great scene... and for being you.