Further proving that I am incapable of writing short things...
*flings a drabble at Halo and heads for the hills!*
She is barefoot in unfamiliar pajamas. She holds her hands out before her as she walks and watches the rain pool in her palms. This is weather like none she has experienced before. Rain at the headquarters building is gray and hard, and she has never been at the Guardianship during a storm; she imagines that they are fierce and flashy, the kind of hydraulic pounding that makes you grateful to be indoors. This rain is soft and warm. It smooths out sharp edges into rounded contours. It makes everything fuzzy and indistinct, even sound. The air fills with a soft, staticky crackle as raindrops explode, like a bad radio connection. The wet hem of her nightshirt smacks her legs just above the knee as she walks. It is not uncomfortable.
She is positive she’s never seen this courtyard before. There’s grass underfoot, for one thing, and this is not the Guardianship. The building behind her is smooth and featureless, a tower of synthetic metal. This is Siun, perhaps somewhere in the wealthy district, where people can afford lawns and the occasional potted plant.
The farther she wanders, with the grass squelching pleasantly between her toes, the more convinced she becomes that this is no place she has ever been. The courtyard has become a garden, grown over with wild flowerbeds and fruit-laden vines. She does not know how she knows that fruit should grow on a vine; she’s never picked any for herself, or seen any ripening with her own eyes. But this is not the most unusual thing she has found herself knowing.
If it is a dream, it’s the most convincing one she’s ever been in. She spins experimentally, pirouetting on the ball of her left foot. The sodden nightshirt traps her right leg as she lifts it, throwing her balance all to hell. The grass is too slippery to offer traction, and she goes down in a dripping tangle. Her hair drags into her face, a heavy smack of cobwebs and snow. She lies there for a moment, half on her back with her vision almost totally obscured and her pajama shirt bunched up under her arms, and blinks at the lint gray sky.
“Weird.”
“What is?”
She rolls onto her stomach and twists her neck around to look for the speaker. Behind a swell of vines is a pebbly bench that she is dead certain wasn’t there a moment ago. One of the trees leans protectively over it, shielding the occupant from all but the occasional spatter of rain. There’s another girl sitting there, holding something round and furry in her lap. Her hair is brown, cut in a straight fringe across her shoulders and forehead. She wears a loose robe over a pale blue dress. It looks like something from Inya’s movies.
She squirms to her knees and studies this person who most definitely was not sitting there two minutes ago. She is very aware of her muddy feet and nightshirt, of the spaghetti-noodle tangle of her hair. She is aware of these things, but not necessarily concerned about them.
“I don’t think any of this is real,” she says decisively.
“Is that so?” the other girl tilts her head toward the thing in her lap, which trills back to her. “You think so?”
“I’ve never jumped worlds in my sleep before,” she replies, peeling grass off her elbows, “And I don’t know this place.”
“Yes you do.”
“I don’t know you, either,” she frowns. The rainwater trickles down the crinkle between her eyebrows.
“What do you Know?” There is an emphasis to the word that she cannot ignore. She frowns harder, screwing her eyes shut and clenching her hands in the hem of her shirt.
“I know you aren’t real. I know I wasn’t here yesterday. I was...” Her hands come over all warm, and she looks down at the puddling red in her lap. She can’t feel the grass prickling her legs anymore. “I was...”
“Nephele,” the other’s voice is sharp, commanding. “It’s all right. That isn’t here. You can forget about that for now.”
“I’m very sure I’m not here,” she whispers, turning her hands over to inspect them for any traces of the vanished red.
“That’s just fine. We’re only going to talk,” she pats the bench beside her, and Nephele climbs to her feet to join her beneath the shelter of the tree. The air is chilly without the constant warm wash of the rain. Bumps stir under her skin. She can feel them on her legs. This is an enormous relief.
“What’s your name?” she asks as she shifts around on the hard stone of the bench. It digs painfully into her tailbone.
“I gave it up,” the girl’s eyes are brown. She could lean back against the tree and disappear into it if she wanted to.
“You can’t do that.”
“You can if you haven’t needed one for a long time.”
“How long’s that?”
“Long enough for Siun to stop looking like this,” rings flash on her fingers as the brown girl gestures to the garden. Nephele realizes at this time that she has not been breathing throughout this entire not-dream sequence. She notices when she nearly chokes on a gasp.
“It was beautiful once, wasn’t it?” the girl continues, perhaps a little wistfully. “This was my garden. We used to sit on this bench and talk until the sun came up. Or maybe we wouldn’t talk, maybe we’d just listen to the city outside. In those days, when we needed more room we’d expand out, not up.”
“I...wouldn’t know about that,” if this were real, Nephele would be upset with her voice for shaking so.
“Really?” she pokes at what Neph assumes to be the furry thing’s stomach. It squeaks happily and flails stubby limbs. “You’ve peeked both forward and backward before. Is this so far back?”
“You seem to know an awful lot about me,” Nephele drags her hair forward over her right shoulder, leaning into the weight of it as she wrings out the rain. “I’ve already told you, I’ve never seen this before.”
“Then there’s still time for you,” the other girl says gravely. Nephele almost laughs at her face, somber as an android. Brown eyes drill into hers, and the gurgle dies a quick death in her throat
“Stop being so cryptic” She says instead. She slides two fingers through the fall of her hair, dividing it into thirds. She braids without thinking, seeking comfort in the familiar twist of fingers and locks. “It’s annoying. You’re really going to have to explain better.”
The static pattering of the rain fills a thoughtful silence. The girl produces a bit of string from one of her sleeves and ties off the end of Nephele’s braid. “There used to be people like you,” she says, flicking the braid back over Neph’s shoulder, “We called them Criers. They predicted things.”
“Steve always said I wasn’t clairvoyant or precognitive,” Nephele protested, blinking past her dripping bangs, “He said I was just very intuitive about personal things.”
“The Criers weren’t much different,” the thing in the girls lap rolls to its feet and shakes itself off. It trundles up her wide sleeve and disappears. “Their job was to tell you how you died, and what thing of value you’d leave behind for the future. You can’t get much more personal than that.”
Nephele’s heart skips a beat. She stares, aghast, caught somewhere between horror and pity. “You knew how you were going to die?”
“We all did, before the war,” the brown girl is grave and a little sad. Nephele takes her hand without meaning to. “It’s much easier to go into a fight if you know for sure that you’ll survive to die later. Or even if you know that it’s the end for you,” she smiles, self-mocking, “They never told us we’d lose. It took me a very long time to understand that, in their eyes, we hadn’t. Enough of us survived that you exist, you and all the rest. I think now that they were taking an extremely long view of the situation.”
“What are you?” She won’t even try to deny the tremor in her voice anymore. The desire to run back inside the metal walls drags her under like a wave, choking down all other impulses. She understands the metal, inorganic smoothness and symmetry, not the wild crush of wet grass under her feet and a hundred thousand years of obligation settling on her shoulders like a sack of sand. She can do nothing but stare helplessly at the girl, at the wistful, freckled smile.
“I’m the imprint of a girl who died for you,” the hand she holds is warmer than her own, the heartbeat strong in the tips of the dry little fingers, certainly not the grasp of a dead woman. It traps her here, in this garden, as effectively as any negation field. “Or maybe I’m several people. Impressing a memory of a place like this in the ether is a very difficult thing. I never could have managed something like that when I was alive.”
“Why?” she wants to yank her hand away, but somehow that is completely out of the question. “What for?”
“To warn you,” the girl leans in close. Their noses almost touch. Nephele can see freckles on her eyelids. She can’t feel the girl’s breath on her face, and somehow nothing is more terrifying than that. “Stop trying to Know. Don’t invoke it anymore. You might not like what you see.”
“I’m not a Crier!” she breathes desperately, “I’ve never seen anybody die!”
“Not yet,” intensity burns in those brown eyes, eons of purpose finally brought to bear. “But everything a person does, every little bit you pick up by accident, it’s all buildup for the impression they’re going to leave on the world when they move on. Everything you’ve ever known without knowing is just progression towards the inevitable. And, one day, that’s going to be all you see.”
“I can’t help it!” with an enormous burst of willpower, Nephele wrenches away, tumbling right off the bench. “I’ve never been able to tell it to stop!”
The girl remains seated, her hands folded impassively in her lap. “I understand. It’s a talent like any other, and it can’t be turned off. You will see things, but you must not summon the knowing anymore. You have other gifts, more important ones that you’re going to be in need of in the future. Develop them. There are other ways to gather information Nephele. The most well-informed people in the world aren’t mages.”
“But...but we need every edge we can-” she protests feebly.
“Nephele,” the memory, the imprint, whatever she is, leans forward, her brown hair cascading over the collar of her robe, and takes her face between her hands. “Do you want to know how he dies?”
She stares, sickened, and her breath catches in a terrified sob. She has never been any good at concealing her emotions, but the intensity of this sharp fear and denial is blindsiding. Something in her chest hitches on her ribcage and stays stuck here. She presses a hand to it, watches the dead girl’s face waver through a hot screen of sudden tears. The indistinct mouth smiles a sympathetic smile, and the memory presses a kiss to her forehead..
“Knowing your own death isn’t so terrible,” she says softly, “It's almost a relief, really. It’s watching the clock tick down over the person you love that’s the worst. That would break you, and it’s very important that you remain intact. Do you understand?” Nephele nods numbly, hunching up over the pain in her chest and the ghost of a wound in her stomach. In all her life she has never been more frightened, and it has not been that easy a life.
“Don’t worry,” the girl’s arms are around her neck now, her voice murmuring into Nephele’s ear, still without the faintest ghost of a breath. “You won’t have to think about it. Your mind is very good at putting these unpleasant things aside. It’s why you’ve managed to persevere this long. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“I...I would r...I’d really like to g-to go now,” she manages to choke. The dead girl nods and helps her to her feet. The furry thing up her sleeve squeaks as they walk back to the metal building, each leaning heavily on the other. They stop when the grass gives way to stone beneath their feet, and Nephele scrubs at her eyes to get a last good look at her.
“I’m sorry you had to die for this,” she offers, cringing at the inadequacy of simple words.
“There are worse things,” the brown girl beams, throwing her garden a backward glance. “I’m actually happy that my impression was something important. That’s the most any of us can hope for, in the end.”
Nephele can think of nothing to say to that. She squeezes those warm hands and smiles in a lopsided sort of way before stepping back inside with a certain amount of relief.
She comes awake with a gag, aware of something foreign down her throat. It vanishes with a thought, flung out and away, but just that simple movement sends her head reeling and screeching. She doesn’t think she’s ever felt more awful. Nephele dares a squint, only to find herself blinking blearily at a ceiling she doesn’t know. The pajamas, however, are vaguely familiar.
Something clatters frantically off to her right, sending little lances of shattered sound through her eyes and ears and into her brain. It hurts an awful lot. A vague blur moves between her and the light, a shadow more familiar than her own reflection. She blinks a few more times to bring it into focus.
“Ca...” no, “Sinclair?” She has never had difficulty telling the two of them apart. Cade focuses more out of the organic eye, Sinclair the cybernetic. She’s always wondered how nobody else seems to notice. But it’s unusual for him to be steering their shared body. Usually it means something’s shocked Cade into hiding. And she doesn’t like the way he’s hovering, either.
“Hey...” he says, everything about him tentative and scared. She smiles to put him at ease.
“Where are we?”
He smiles back, a sudden spreading of relief all over his face. “The Guardianship.”
“Oh. Why?” Her hand gropes feebly for her stomach, and she is relieved to find it whole beneath the blankets. Sinclair shifts anxiously, as though he wants to reach for her but is too afraid. She solves the problem for him by taking his hand and making a futile effort to sit up. He responds as she knew he would, climbing up to her side and holding her to him.
“Things have been busy,” she knows evasion when she hears it, but he heads her off by pulling the blankets up more tightly around her shoulders and asking “How do you feel?”
Nephele frowns and looks down at her hands.
“See-through,” she decides at last. Things are not adding up in her head. A simple gut wound should not have left her feeling this terrible. It’s highly unusual for Sinclair to be the one sitting up for her, which wasn’t to imply that she wasn’t happy to see him or that he loved her less, just that Cade was awfully pushy. And there was no reason for her to be in the Guardianship. She is certain that something significant has happened, but she doesn’t know what.
For a moment, a brief one, she considers peeking. But the pain of a simple teleport was bad enough. And anyway, Sinclair will tell her once she can reassure him that she’s just fine. She has a lot of questions, but they can wait.
It really isn’t that important.
She is barefoot in unfamiliar pajamas. She holds her hands out before her as she walks and watches the rain pool in her palms. This is weather like none she has experienced before. Rain at the headquarters building is gray and hard, and she has never been at the Guardianship during a storm; she imagines that they are fierce and flashy, the kind of hydraulic pounding that makes you grateful to be indoors. This rain is soft and warm. It smooths out sharp edges into rounded contours. It makes everything fuzzy and indistinct, even sound. The air fills with a soft, staticky crackle as raindrops explode, like a bad radio connection. The wet hem of her nightshirt smacks her legs just above the knee as she walks. It is not uncomfortable.
She is positive she’s never seen this courtyard before. There’s grass underfoot, for one thing, and this is not the Guardianship. The building behind her is smooth and featureless, a tower of synthetic metal. This is Siun, perhaps somewhere in the wealthy district, where people can afford lawns and the occasional potted plant.
The farther she wanders, with the grass squelching pleasantly between her toes, the more convinced she becomes that this is no place she has ever been. The courtyard has become a garden, grown over with wild flowerbeds and fruit-laden vines. She does not know how she knows that fruit should grow on a vine; she’s never picked any for herself, or seen any ripening with her own eyes. But this is not the most unusual thing she has found herself knowing.
If it is a dream, it’s the most convincing one she’s ever been in. She spins experimentally, pirouetting on the ball of her left foot. The sodden nightshirt traps her right leg as she lifts it, throwing her balance all to hell. The grass is too slippery to offer traction, and she goes down in a dripping tangle. Her hair drags into her face, a heavy smack of cobwebs and snow. She lies there for a moment, half on her back with her vision almost totally obscured and her pajama shirt bunched up under her arms, and blinks at the lint gray sky.
“Weird.”
“What is?”
She rolls onto her stomach and twists her neck around to look for the speaker. Behind a swell of vines is a pebbly bench that she is dead certain wasn’t there a moment ago. One of the trees leans protectively over it, shielding the occupant from all but the occasional spatter of rain. There’s another girl sitting there, holding something round and furry in her lap. Her hair is brown, cut in a straight fringe across her shoulders and forehead. She wears a loose robe over a pale blue dress. It looks like something from Inya’s movies.
She squirms to her knees and studies this person who most definitely was not sitting there two minutes ago. She is very aware of her muddy feet and nightshirt, of the spaghetti-noodle tangle of her hair. She is aware of these things, but not necessarily concerned about them.
“I don’t think any of this is real,” she says decisively.
“Is that so?” the other girl tilts her head toward the thing in her lap, which trills back to her. “You think so?”
“I’ve never jumped worlds in my sleep before,” she replies, peeling grass off her elbows, “And I don’t know this place.”
“Yes you do.”
“I don’t know you, either,” she frowns. The rainwater trickles down the crinkle between her eyebrows.
“What do you Know?” There is an emphasis to the word that she cannot ignore. She frowns harder, screwing her eyes shut and clenching her hands in the hem of her shirt.
“I know you aren’t real. I know I wasn’t here yesterday. I was...” Her hands come over all warm, and she looks down at the puddling red in her lap. She can’t feel the grass prickling her legs anymore. “I was...”
“Nephele,” the other’s voice is sharp, commanding. “It’s all right. That isn’t here. You can forget about that for now.”
“I’m very sure I’m not here,” she whispers, turning her hands over to inspect them for any traces of the vanished red.
“That’s just fine. We’re only going to talk,” she pats the bench beside her, and Nephele climbs to her feet to join her beneath the shelter of the tree. The air is chilly without the constant warm wash of the rain. Bumps stir under her skin. She can feel them on her legs. This is an enormous relief.
“What’s your name?” she asks as she shifts around on the hard stone of the bench. It digs painfully into her tailbone.
“I gave it up,” the girl’s eyes are brown. She could lean back against the tree and disappear into it if she wanted to.
“You can’t do that.”
“You can if you haven’t needed one for a long time.”
“How long’s that?”
“Long enough for Siun to stop looking like this,” rings flash on her fingers as the brown girl gestures to the garden. Nephele realizes at this time that she has not been breathing throughout this entire not-dream sequence. She notices when she nearly chokes on a gasp.
“It was beautiful once, wasn’t it?” the girl continues, perhaps a little wistfully. “This was my garden. We used to sit on this bench and talk until the sun came up. Or maybe we wouldn’t talk, maybe we’d just listen to the city outside. In those days, when we needed more room we’d expand out, not up.”
“I...wouldn’t know about that,” if this were real, Nephele would be upset with her voice for shaking so.
“Really?” she pokes at what Neph assumes to be the furry thing’s stomach. It squeaks happily and flails stubby limbs. “You’ve peeked both forward and backward before. Is this so far back?”
“You seem to know an awful lot about me,” Nephele drags her hair forward over her right shoulder, leaning into the weight of it as she wrings out the rain. “I’ve already told you, I’ve never seen this before.”
“Then there’s still time for you,” the other girl says gravely. Nephele almost laughs at her face, somber as an android. Brown eyes drill into hers, and the gurgle dies a quick death in her throat
“Stop being so cryptic” She says instead. She slides two fingers through the fall of her hair, dividing it into thirds. She braids without thinking, seeking comfort in the familiar twist of fingers and locks. “It’s annoying. You’re really going to have to explain better.”
The static pattering of the rain fills a thoughtful silence. The girl produces a bit of string from one of her sleeves and ties off the end of Nephele’s braid. “There used to be people like you,” she says, flicking the braid back over Neph’s shoulder, “We called them Criers. They predicted things.”
“Steve always said I wasn’t clairvoyant or precognitive,” Nephele protested, blinking past her dripping bangs, “He said I was just very intuitive about personal things.”
“The Criers weren’t much different,” the thing in the girls lap rolls to its feet and shakes itself off. It trundles up her wide sleeve and disappears. “Their job was to tell you how you died, and what thing of value you’d leave behind for the future. You can’t get much more personal than that.”
Nephele’s heart skips a beat. She stares, aghast, caught somewhere between horror and pity. “You knew how you were going to die?”
“We all did, before the war,” the brown girl is grave and a little sad. Nephele takes her hand without meaning to. “It’s much easier to go into a fight if you know for sure that you’ll survive to die later. Or even if you know that it’s the end for you,” she smiles, self-mocking, “They never told us we’d lose. It took me a very long time to understand that, in their eyes, we hadn’t. Enough of us survived that you exist, you and all the rest. I think now that they were taking an extremely long view of the situation.”
“What are you?” She won’t even try to deny the tremor in her voice anymore. The desire to run back inside the metal walls drags her under like a wave, choking down all other impulses. She understands the metal, inorganic smoothness and symmetry, not the wild crush of wet grass under her feet and a hundred thousand years of obligation settling on her shoulders like a sack of sand. She can do nothing but stare helplessly at the girl, at the wistful, freckled smile.
“I’m the imprint of a girl who died for you,” the hand she holds is warmer than her own, the heartbeat strong in the tips of the dry little fingers, certainly not the grasp of a dead woman. It traps her here, in this garden, as effectively as any negation field. “Or maybe I’m several people. Impressing a memory of a place like this in the ether is a very difficult thing. I never could have managed something like that when I was alive.”
“Why?” she wants to yank her hand away, but somehow that is completely out of the question. “What for?”
“To warn you,” the girl leans in close. Their noses almost touch. Nephele can see freckles on her eyelids. She can’t feel the girl’s breath on her face, and somehow nothing is more terrifying than that. “Stop trying to Know. Don’t invoke it anymore. You might not like what you see.”
“I’m not a Crier!” she breathes desperately, “I’ve never seen anybody die!”
“Not yet,” intensity burns in those brown eyes, eons of purpose finally brought to bear. “But everything a person does, every little bit you pick up by accident, it’s all buildup for the impression they’re going to leave on the world when they move on. Everything you’ve ever known without knowing is just progression towards the inevitable. And, one day, that’s going to be all you see.”
“I can’t help it!” with an enormous burst of willpower, Nephele wrenches away, tumbling right off the bench. “I’ve never been able to tell it to stop!”
The girl remains seated, her hands folded impassively in her lap. “I understand. It’s a talent like any other, and it can’t be turned off. You will see things, but you must not summon the knowing anymore. You have other gifts, more important ones that you’re going to be in need of in the future. Develop them. There are other ways to gather information Nephele. The most well-informed people in the world aren’t mages.”
“But...but we need every edge we can-” she protests feebly.
“Nephele,” the memory, the imprint, whatever she is, leans forward, her brown hair cascading over the collar of her robe, and takes her face between her hands. “Do you want to know how he dies?”
She stares, sickened, and her breath catches in a terrified sob. She has never been any good at concealing her emotions, but the intensity of this sharp fear and denial is blindsiding. Something in her chest hitches on her ribcage and stays stuck here. She presses a hand to it, watches the dead girl’s face waver through a hot screen of sudden tears. The indistinct mouth smiles a sympathetic smile, and the memory presses a kiss to her forehead..
“Knowing your own death isn’t so terrible,” she says softly, “It's almost a relief, really. It’s watching the clock tick down over the person you love that’s the worst. That would break you, and it’s very important that you remain intact. Do you understand?” Nephele nods numbly, hunching up over the pain in her chest and the ghost of a wound in her stomach. In all her life she has never been more frightened, and it has not been that easy a life.
“Don’t worry,” the girl’s arms are around her neck now, her voice murmuring into Nephele’s ear, still without the faintest ghost of a breath. “You won’t have to think about it. Your mind is very good at putting these unpleasant things aside. It’s why you’ve managed to persevere this long. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“I...I would r...I’d really like to g-to go now,” she manages to choke. The dead girl nods and helps her to her feet. The furry thing up her sleeve squeaks as they walk back to the metal building, each leaning heavily on the other. They stop when the grass gives way to stone beneath their feet, and Nephele scrubs at her eyes to get a last good look at her.
“I’m sorry you had to die for this,” she offers, cringing at the inadequacy of simple words.
“There are worse things,” the brown girl beams, throwing her garden a backward glance. “I’m actually happy that my impression was something important. That’s the most any of us can hope for, in the end.”
Nephele can think of nothing to say to that. She squeezes those warm hands and smiles in a lopsided sort of way before stepping back inside with a certain amount of relief.
She comes awake with a gag, aware of something foreign down her throat. It vanishes with a thought, flung out and away, but just that simple movement sends her head reeling and screeching. She doesn’t think she’s ever felt more awful. Nephele dares a squint, only to find herself blinking blearily at a ceiling she doesn’t know. The pajamas, however, are vaguely familiar.
Something clatters frantically off to her right, sending little lances of shattered sound through her eyes and ears and into her brain. It hurts an awful lot. A vague blur moves between her and the light, a shadow more familiar than her own reflection. She blinks a few more times to bring it into focus.
“Ca...” no, “Sinclair?” She has never had difficulty telling the two of them apart. Cade focuses more out of the organic eye, Sinclair the cybernetic. She’s always wondered how nobody else seems to notice. But it’s unusual for him to be steering their shared body. Usually it means something’s shocked Cade into hiding. And she doesn’t like the way he’s hovering, either.
“Hey...” he says, everything about him tentative and scared. She smiles to put him at ease.
“Where are we?”
He smiles back, a sudden spreading of relief all over his face. “The Guardianship.”
“Oh. Why?” Her hand gropes feebly for her stomach, and she is relieved to find it whole beneath the blankets. Sinclair shifts anxiously, as though he wants to reach for her but is too afraid. She solves the problem for him by taking his hand and making a futile effort to sit up. He responds as she knew he would, climbing up to her side and holding her to him.
“Things have been busy,” she knows evasion when she hears it, but he heads her off by pulling the blankets up more tightly around her shoulders and asking “How do you feel?”
Nephele frowns and looks down at her hands.
“See-through,” she decides at last. Things are not adding up in her head. A simple gut wound should not have left her feeling this terrible. It’s highly unusual for Sinclair to be the one sitting up for her, which wasn’t to imply that she wasn’t happy to see him or that he loved her less, just that Cade was awfully pushy. And there was no reason for her to be in the Guardianship. She is certain that something significant has happened, but she doesn’t know what.
For a moment, a brief one, she considers peeking. But the pain of a simple teleport was bad enough. And anyway, Sinclair will tell her once she can reassure him that she’s just fine. She has a lot of questions, but they can wait.
It really isn’t that important.