[open] Time it is past and I roam free

[lumenrelegandus]

Who: lumenrelegandus and anyone
When: Early in the week
Where: The dojo, the streets, the path toward the Ruins and/or Hunting Grounds.
Format: Prose
What: As if any loss weren't bad on its own, sometimes it opens up past ones.
Warnings: I'm being bad for posting a new log without doing any tags for ongoing threads! I have company for a few days and am semi-

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[impossibly]

River had been sitting on the stone for some time, waiting. A place where paths could meet, she had felt it humming like a leyline under her bare soles until she followed it to where she was needed.

Elsewhere in the city unreadable women whose swords hit too close to home were drawing blood. River could taste it in the air, drenching the landscape like a bloody sunset. But the squabbles of monsters was nothing more than a bruise compared to the rawness she could feel Remus scraping over her as he came down the path.

There was a debt owed (My turn) from all the times at the dojo he had patiently, painstakingly, pieced together her jigsaw all of sky, picking up pieces the exact same shade of blue and fumbling them to where they belonged. The cracks are still there, aching, glaring when held up against - she'd thrown her Forge again, first arcana, fourth month, worst invasion. But then she'd watched it again, compulsively, biting her lip so hard that it bled.

It has healed by now, if she hasn't quite, and her small smile upon seeing him does not pain her. Even surrounded by ghosts and anger, as tangled as Mal, he is a joy unspoken. But it is a sad smile, because he might not understand why she's here.

"Two paths diverged in a forest," she quotes, getting gracefully to her feet, honoring him once again with a little bow. Then she pushes aside tradition and the empty spaces it grows between people, and reaches out for touch, comes close to take his hand and anchor him, twines their fingers to remind him that he is not the only sailor still stranded.

[lumenrelegandus]

He had a fantastic idea of coming on her dancing in the wild, long hair mingling with the branching shadows, feet not caring they were bare, She lightly fled on dancing feet And left him lonely still to roam In the silent forest listening. They were all of other worlds, here, but River was straight from some other galaxy.

"Yet knowing how way leads on to way," he murmured back, not knowing if it was strictly the same quote as hers, "I doubted if I should ever come back."

He looked down at their joined hands. He thought of sitting, seeing if she sat beside him; or of kneeling before her, for absolution; but felt just enough energy at the touch to keep flying walking. So he squeezed her fingers in invitation to go forward, without releasing hands, together.

"We shouldn't be here, you know," he said, making no move to lead them elsewhere.

[impossibly]

River goes with him, or leads him, or falls into step: whichever, they are moving, slowly, like learning to walk, toe touching the ground before her heel like she's testing the way ahead, ankles with a ballerina's curve. They seem to be leaving the hewn path completely. She will walk the circumference of the city, never delving further into danger or back to civilization, hovering at a mid-point, splicing the two-fold path, the middle way.

"I learn by going where I have to go," River says, now quoting something else entirely. "This shaking keeps me steady. I should know."

It is obvious the way that Remus trembles on unsteady foundations, but she wants it in words, solid, definable, even if they are to be words she cannot truly understand. "I am exactly where I should be," she tells him. "Are you?"

[lumenrelegandus]

He has never once lied to her. It's the rawness of this honesty that's new.

"I've rarely felt I belonged anywhere. I get along better here than many places I've been… but to what purpose?"

An adolescent feeling, he thinks, but unshakable.

"I believe that one thing happens after another because of a culmination of factors that are largely uncontrollable, unforeseeable, and unseen. We must act with purpose in the hopes of influencing causality with the nuance of our intentions, but it doesn't mean there is a larger plan.

"Except that we were brought here. Brought. Even if on a whim, there is agency in that.

"And we are sent away."

He dug a few fingers into his hair, and removed them again to look out.

"I accepted an unhelmed reality, where the highest powers do what they will because they have absolutely no interest-or even awareness-of those below. There is no reason to suspect that forces on such wholly different levels of scale should have anything resembling the same ways of thinking.

"There's a directness here, where superior powers play with smaller ones with no greater caring but with the semblance of localised awareness and intent. It's at every level of sentience in this place.

"The last time I encountered that, I went to war against it."

Sounding exhausted, "But I don't want war."

He stops against a likely place to lean and looks at the sky before coming back to her. "I wonder if any of that makes sense."

Without cruelty, the layers of saying that to her aren't lost on him.

[impossibly]

There are three things River enjoys in her companions: people whose heads are interesting, people whose words are interesting, and people who make her feel normal. Lupin is a little of all three, even in soliloquy. She follows along, tries to keep each word alone and without association, finds that makes them meaningless sounds, restacks them to find there is more and less to them, more or less.

"What about purpose?"

River doesn't enjoy people playing games where she can't see them either, which is why she doesn't want to buy what religion is selling. Yet the way everything unfolds here-

"If it's not the law of large numbers then it's ineffability." If it takes people for a reason, could they place their own judgement values and fight for those without looking microscopic? "Fighting it could just be like a white rat in a maze. Sometimes that's what they want you to do. Doing nothing could be the anarchy. But I don't think that would be allowed. Something bad will happen sooner or later." They watch us, she wants to say. They know all of our names. Casually, she takes in the world through he peripheral vision, reaching out, shivering a little.

[lumenrelegandus]

He nodded, almost as if (if only) sensing more of what she meant around what she actually said. Knowing she was right and he agreed, but sometimes he needed reminding. With a side thought that in switching roles she was succeeding admirably. -Then she said something that made his eyes lock on hers.

"They?"

Though the Twins flashed instantly in his mind, a deeper, more resounding thought reverberated beyond rationality: Veneficus

[impossibly]

Despite the circumstances, despite everything, she couldn't help but laugh a little bit. She was a creature built for learning: of course spending so much of her life in the care of others had taught her how to care herself. She's playful when she swings their hands and glances coyly up at him.

"Plural, non-gendered, non-specific. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio."

[lumenrelegandus]

His creaking joints and too-tense muscles loosen, unlocked at the childlike gesture. He joins in the swinging. Manages a smile and responds with what may be their shared motto: "Qui docet discit."

[impossibly]

"Qui docet discit," she repeats back, and if he's sad, if he's so sad, at least he's easy now, less evocative of a countdown or something balled and tense. Of course her mentor is all about flux, patterns where she has none, cyclical. But not predictable - never that.