I had to be... I have to be..

[endlessdel]

Delirium closed her eyes and inhaled.

Well, I mean... what I mean is, what are you?She remembered... she remembered hiding under blue-green table cloths so dark that they were almost black but were soft and safe. Her secret place to hide under when all the stars looked at her with burning eyes and saw her, saw things she didn't want them to see.

Comments

[purplensparkly]

It wasn't really, really hot anymore, so Trance didn't really have a problem when she saw Del sitting on the beach. She was curious, though, when she just saw her staring out into space. Curious and maybe a bit worried. Maybe she was worrying too much, but Del was dear to her. She'd lost her sister and her brother and now Luce was missing and she couldn't find him. Del wasn't quite family, not the way that the others were, but she was close enough. After all, she always had taken care of the people who really mattered to her. Just like she had whenever Harper got into trouble.

"Hey there," she said, undoing the wrap she'd used as a skirt and spreading it out on the sand so she could sit on it. "How's the water today?"

[endlessdel]

"The same as it always is...wet." Del said with a vague smile on her face. It wasn't a happy smile or a sad one, it was an old one and it made her feel almost normal. Even when everything was going wrong, when Macha and Flora were being raised without their mother and when she had to be different. "Lucy's in the sky with diamonds. Have you noticed?"

Noticed that he was gone? That she was different? She wasn't sure what the question was.

[purplensparkly]

Trance wrapped her arms around her legs and nodded. "Yeah, I noticed. I beginning to think I'm just destined to be alone. No Spike, no brother." She smiled a little. "I have you, though, so that's good." She still wasn't counting about the people back home, but she didn't have them, either. She didn't really want them if it meant it was going to mess up things back home.

She tucked a lock of hair behind Del's hair. "How's my…" She hesitated, about to say Delirium. Instead, she just said, "How's my girl?"

[endlessdel]

"Yes, I'm always here." Del said with a small smile. She always was with herself, with Delirium, even when she was buried under layers of guilt and pain and dark memories and blood and hurt. She was always there just like Daniel would always have Morpheus. "I have a photograph of the- of the twins. Would you like to see it? They're so beautiful, my little joys."

[9mmshotglass]

She padded, barefoot, tall (as tall as Julian) across the sand and down the beach, determined to ignore the fact that the world looked seriously different from this high up and that she was a baritone...or that she'd had to shave hair off her face. In the end, she'd shoved on Austin's sunglasses and grabbed a pale green tee out of the Clothes Box, stalwartly refusing to address the issue of what was in her pants, and went out. Didn't matter where. Out was out.

Not that she didn't like that part of her anatomy in some fashion or another, but still.

That contemplation wasn't going so well, so she'd gone for a walk and the walk had lead her here. Lanky, that's what she was. Lanky and seriously packing muscle. Her face might be different, her voice was not the same, but her eyes were and it was those Dani Reese eyes that took in Del on a beach looking...different. It wasn't the pregnancy, it was something else, something more base

[endlessdel]

Dancing men came to me from a far world, bringing tribute, of birds and flowers and fine gems. They were grateful for...for what?

There was no tribute in his hands, no swaying steps to his feet but still she sat and still they came to her. With sweet words on their lips no less. Del tilted her head to look at the man, raising her hand in approximation of his height over hers and looked curiously, sanely, at the man until she smiled delightfully at him-no at her.

"Thank you, you look very tall. Changed," Del said smiling thoughtfully at Dani. "I've always been scared of it, always but it seems so silly now. Change is as inevitable as the sun rising and setting. If we're not changing then we must be dying on some level- we should embrace change, embrace life."

She sounded like Charlie. "I'm not Charlie. Or maybe I am? Maybe we're all Charlie Crews."

[9mmshotglass]

"Not sure I want to be Charlie Crews," she said wryly. "But I'm still changing anyway. New places to start, new views on life. Just changing. Things can't stay the same because if they did it'd get...boring. This?" She gestured and made a particularly irritated face. "Too much change. I had to figure out how to pee...and aim. And..." That drew another annoyed expression. "I'm still not sure I'm even half way comfortable, but I guess the thing about change is that eventually it's not change and weird becomes normal."

She paused.

"It's pretty weird to be this tall and this male, Del."

[endlessdel]

"At least it doesn't hurt, at least it's not tearing you into a million pieces and always demanding your attention." Del said with a half smile. She had enjoyed being a man, gender wasn't important when you were the personification of an idea. Dani's thinking too much, thinking too much about everything when she should be feeling. "Have you had oral sex yet? Now that is delightful; wet and hot and tight, just the right amount of pressure to pull you over and so intense. So different. You need to stop thinking so much about it and just enjoy it."

Del placed her hands over Dani's, tracing the creases around her finger joints before she threaded her own fingers through Dani's. "It's just a body. It's not important, what's important is that you're still you inside there."

Well, I mean... what I mean is, what are you?.

[spd_green]

After the baseball game, a swim in the ocean sounded like a good idea. It was a short swim though, because Bridge didn't like moving only a certain distance in the ocean nearly as much as a liked moving a greater distance on the sand. He found Del before long and wandered over to say hello.

"Hey," he said with a little wave, realizing that her eyes had been closed. "Oh, were you sleeping? Or meditating? I don't want to bother you."

[endlessdel]

"Meditating and you're not bothering me, nothing really bothers me not even Asher's sister. I was just...trying to attain a deeper sense of relaxation but I can do that just as well with my eyes open as with them closed." Del said smiling thoughtfully, delightfully up at Bridge. "Did you bring me tribute or did you just come to talk to me?"

[spd_green]

Bridge grinned back, pleased that he was welcome. "Just to talk. I can go find some tribute too, if you'd like, but it might take me a while to find something good and you might be gone by the time I get back. So I'll just sit?" he asked, looking for permission.

[endlessdel]

"No, I never needed tribute but people thought I did and brought it to me anyway. And I always preferred words to jewels, words are warm and alive but jewels are cold and hard." Del said thinking about it before nodding at his question. She didn't know you should ask permission for things like that, she'd have to remember it instead of just inserting herself into places, conversations, beds. "Words taste nicer too. I bet you taste nicer then diamonds, more salty."

[thegreat_ashby]

Lew was always a lot better at remembering faces than he was at remembering names, so it came to no surprise to him when he recognized the figure lying on the beach, but no name immediately sprang to mind to accompany it. At least he wasn't bound to get bitched out about it. He hadn't even slept with the woman, so he wasn't obligated to remember anything.

"Waiting for floating cities to come and take you away, not-Tori?" He asked, coming to a stop beside her and staring off at the horizon line. Part of him was still waiting for the Coast Guard to show.

[endlessdel]

"Hello Lew Ashby," Del said greeting the man who looked like Asher. Well looked like him if you squinted, covered your eyes with your hands and spun around whilst trying to discern a likeness for someone. "No. Most of the floating cities are dead now or abandoned and the few that survived wouldn't dare attempt to rescue a member of the Endless. No, I was... thinking."

[sgmitchell]

Oh, the boots today. Being a woman, he could deal with. The ridiculous outfits, he could deal with. The boots? Those were just damn painful. The sooner he got back to his own boots, and away from leather for a bit, the better.

The sooner he got off the beach, probably the less likely he'd kill himself, too. That particular interest was interrupted by the presence of a familiar red haired woman on the beach. He hadn't ever spoken to her at length, but he recognized her from mealtime.

He might've walked right on by and left her to her meditating--the whole meditation scene made him uneasy--but she opened her eyes in his general direction just as he'd arrived, so it seemed only right to say something. Even if she probably wouldn't recognize him to remember rudeness later.

"...Relaxing ocean view."

[endlessdel]

"I don't know why humans find views of the oceans relaxing," Delirium said quietly to the woman-no man. Del wasn't particularly relaxed from looking at it. She'd only come down to the beach because it was quieter then everywhere else and generally lacked an Asher looming over her like a rather large and ineffectual guard dog. "You come to breakfast on Thursdays and you're not usually like that. Don't worry I'm not usually like this either. Well I'm normally this gender but not like this. You like...pie? Not the mathematical number, the food based pie."

[sgmitchell]

The way she said 'humans' set him on edge, and he couldn't say why. Maybe it was the way Austin had said it as if he could still become liquid metal if he really wanted to, or any of the other non-humans he'd known with similar attitudes, or maybe it was the nostalgia at all the worlds he used to visit. Would still visit.

Maybe he was just thinking too hard on a general discomfort of talking to the woman he didn't know.

By the end of her line of speech, however, he found himself...not so much relaxed, as casual. He offered a small smile and a nod. "Yep, that's me."

He was fairly certain she was the first one to figure that out without the help of Austen wandering around yowling at them.

[endlessdel]

"I like the mathmatical number, did you know that in some worlds if you tried to balance out pi and make it exactly three it would cause the destruction of the universe? It's a fun number," Del said simply as if she was talking about the sky being blue or the water being wet. Del inhaled sharply, making a small noise of protest as the twins well one of them kicked. "Human children are very uncomfortable, would you like to feel? I hear it is something that humans like to do often, I don't know why."