When it's good, it's too good to last

Heart is buried six feet in the ground, gonna need a shovel now

Some small amount of tension releases its hold on her. Not enough to show, or fully be felt even, not really, but of the dozens of cords that've tighetened against her, the lessning of one isn't nothing. "Mm," she murmurs wordlessly in response, glad that at least she'd had a nose for something being right after all. Vesper had never fully acknowledged that point when she'd brought it up, and after the mind fuck of Thal's lips, it left her less sure about what's a want and what's something to obey. She can't quite shake the feeling that something at that shitty party hadn't been a want. She didn't like it, and she didn't much take Vesper to be the sort to appreciate commands he couldn't shake either.

The jarring aspect reads the same as he'd told her though, and she looses a small sigh to hear it repeated. "So even if it's nothing terrible, being channeled is...not a good time for you, I'm guessing? Sounds disorienting as hell." She'd known that much, or could guess as much; she's never really bothered to ask about it until know. If anything, she'd been impressed with how apt Vesper had been with both scenarios she'd called upon him, but it'd been unwanted work for him, and threat of death is a different request than desperate need. "Guess that's where I really fucked it all, then."

Feeling a splinter widen then, a different cord bearing down further, she lets that train of thought disperse into those tears and Sunjata's cataloguing of degrees of bad. He's right, she supposes, wondering is far worse, and she's still wondering about a lot even of she knows some of it. Like wondering how, even if she did fuck it up, he just left the way he did? Wondering how it seems to mean so little, in the end. How it only took six seconds to build her up and ruin him. How it's all destroyed, instead of just a little crooked.

She closes her eyes against those echoes. Steadily, she reopens them around the blur of water, blinking away the salt and forcing herself to watch the wall. She notices the new details that appear, book titles that weren't there, clarity magnifying in small wisps and movements of the mind's image. Sitting up a little so she can really see the room, she breathes in, not quite a gasp, but the sound of an idea forming. "Does that normally happen?" she asks him, a touch of excitement in her voice as she slides back down into the pillow of his thigh. "The longer you're in here, does it normally make the memory come back, clearer?" She has not used the magic rooms this place boasts often, and when she has it's usually been scenery that's dull enough to not notice parts that are missing. If she could use this to help her puzzle piece some of this shit together though, replay moments into something crisper, maybe even drag Thorn here and ask him for an outside opinion...well some of the memories anyway, she wouldn't subject him to all of them. Maybe she could find something here.

Her glance locks onto his with a lightness that she knows wouldn't be here without him. Hardly seems the right word for how heavy she still feels, but she'd still be a bawling mess without the pattern of his voice and the warm extension of his company. "Good thing misery likes company, then." She exhales something just shy of a snort. After a certain point you just have to embrace the fact it's all shit right now and find some humor amid the awful. Certainly helps to have someone sitting in the storm with you.

A yawn breaks across her features as she resettles after her rebuff, only hesitating to cast him a lingering, knowing look that says she isn't buying his halo and angel wing act for a second. "Sorry to steal you away for this," she murmurs around another yawn. "I owe you." Quite literally, actually. Sunjata's time isn't generally a handout when he's here.

Colt

Maybe one day I'll get back the rhythm in my chest

now take what i offer, straight up the nose, down the throat

it's a bearable bruise on your conscious

“I mean, I’m happy to help when I’m called, but yeah. There’s times where you’re showering and you’re like ‘wow this would be really awkward if someone channeled me right now’.” Which isn’t really a fear the Flood should have, given his status as the sex demigod, but here he is – subconscious worries and all that. After all, he was mostly called for his magic regarding water and less so of his sexual capabilities.

Glancing over at her when she says that’s where she really fucked it all, though, brows pinching. “Why’s that?” He’s nosy, but he thinks that he can get away with it in the quiet confines they’ve gotten in the memory of the Flood’s in his youth. One that warps and changes just a little bit as the memories flood back in and it has him glancing back down at her as she settles against his thigh.

Looking up to see what she’s talking about, he snorts a little to see the book titles appear. “Yeah, it does for me. Pretty much dying a bunch of times gives you shitty memory, but the longer I’m in one the more I can remember. It’s less like looking at the whole when you can just focus on the parts with the others actively there.” He shrugs, unsure why it relates, lest she want to try to use it to pinpoint where she’d fucked up.

In which case, he doesn’t think he should be around to witness it. Unless she wanted an outside perspective. He’d let her decide.

Nodding to the mention of misery liking company, though, that’s something he can certainly get behind. He feels her yawn and it’s one of those ones that sticks with him, too, contagious as they are. He stifles his own yawn, humming a little soft exhale. “It’s all good Colt. I don’t mind, really.” And he doesn’t. He’s still her friend, after all.

but don't it feel good? don't you feel calmer?

i am the way and the life in the best looking truth

Heart is buried six feet in the ground, gonna need a shovel now

It's difficult to truly put yourself in someone else's shoes when you're not the same size. Maybe you can get in them, if they're bigger, but they won't wear the same. You can try, if they're smaller, but it's not the same. It maybe should have been more obvious to her, given that she's the one doing the calling, but she's never given it much thought as to what being called is like. As Sunjata explains though, it's clear it's not so pleasant as a knock on your front door, giving you time to call out an I'm coming! and let yourself wrap up whatever task before hurrying to the handle. It's an instant, displacing tug, and without warning. "The shower?!" she says with a touch of surprise, one that lingers and settles into a wider gasp of concern. "Imagine you're taking a shit, that's way worse!" Well, now she's half a mind to never summon anyone ever again, which was already going to be the case for Vesper, but she didn't need to make Sunjata's nightmares come to fruition either.

His question doesn't earn an immediate answer. In part because she's still trying to edge around all the thorns of her thoughts on this matter without drawing more blood than she needs to. Even when she settles though, she doesn't speak to it, though her jaw works over the words like a sour candy that can't stay against one cheek too long. Despite the current state of her and how openly broken she's already been, there's something really vulnerable about explaining all this in actuality to Sunjata. Friendships have certain roles, and while no friend can entirely be everything for someone, this would be a new assignment to Sunjata's typical role. She breathes in, chest stretching with the depth, and on the blow of her exhale she decides.

"I was seeing—we were—I had a—Vesper." She struggles to label what it had been, and in an exasperation to spit it out just throws out his name like that should be explanation enough. The sound of it is like ice crystals building up in her blood, and for a moment she freezes as the crisp and painful crawl of it spreads through her. Her pulse thumps like a warren of rabbits unleashed in her chest, feet stamping out her ribs with each heartbeat. After a moment, sighing through her nose with a slowness to keep her body from shifting too much, she recovers enough to continue. "He's been at the Grounds all season, so I..." She runs a hand through her hair again, composure threatening to leave her as she hovers too long and too loud over this particular pain point. A shame of truth, not in her actions, but in her feelings, which feel so blatantly wasted now. "I—I missed him. A lot. I was frustrated more and more, so I tried to...y'know, take care of myself, make a little happiness where I could." Color finds a seat up her neck, less from embarassment than the recollection of a moment that's still weirdly adored and loathed now. "I couldn't, finish, though. So I channeled him."

She doesn't say anything for a minute, then just sniffles and runs her palm over her eyes. "Anyway, he helped me. It cost everything though, because when I went up to see him it—" She heaves a shuddering breath and can't say any more about it, not right now, grief thickening in her throat as fresh tears well up and over again. The rest becomes a distant sort of din, to swept up in a fresh undertow of loss. One of her hands grips around his leg, clinging like he's the only buoy out here in this turbulent sea right now.

Colt

Maybe one day I'll get back the rhythm in my chest

now take what i offer, straight up the nose, down the throat

it's a bearable bruise on your conscious

Maybe it was worse, though Sunjata can’t imagine getting called during that and it leaves him no worse nor no better at thinking about just when people called him. But it’s a conversation that takes a hold while he asks her why she thinks she’d fucked up that way. He isn’t trying to pry, obviously, but if he can help then maybe that’s a small amount of solace.

She surprises him when she answers, though, the explanation fumbling from her lips as he nods – putting a face to the name that she mentions. Safrin’s kid, the one with Jack at the Ark when he’d helped them clean it up. He doesn’t interject while she formulates her thoughts – knowing full well that he’d often been on the receiving end of not being able to say a complete thought before someone decided to try and offer their advice. He knows how shitty that feels, especially when you’re already down from the emotions of what happened.

So he’s silent, letting her explain. And when she reaches the climax of the story, Sunjata’s thankful she isn’t looking at him with the way his face twitches into a slight wince. “Oh.” He says unhelpfully – because any time he’d been channeled had been to fight something or other. Not for… recreation, he supposes.

She grips onto his thigh and turns into it, tears dampening his pants as Sunjata’s hand starts to smooth out along her side, trying to offer some warmth and comfort to her in the process of formulating his thoughts. “It ruined everything?” He asks quietly, trying to think about whether or not it was salvageable for her. And honestly, he doesn’t know them that well – least of all Safrin’s kid. But if he’s anything like the goddess that had birthed him, well, there were ways to try and fix what happened.

“I’m no expert, obviously, but I don’t think things are ever fully impossible. It might just take time for you guys to come back together if that’s what you want, but.. I mean, I fucked up once and ruined things between Ru and me and even fucked up my marriage with Nate at the time with it. But… they came back eventually. I didn’t think they would at the time and it wrecked me, but… they did come back.” And he’d been widowed in the war and Ru had forgiven him afterward eventually, even if she wasn’t here right now. He knows she’s forgiven him for those mistakes.

but don't it feel good? don't you feel calmer?

i am the way and the life in the best looking truth

Heart is buried six feet in the ground, gonna need a shovel now

The tears have brought a swelling to her head that throbs in tune with her heartbeat. It's pressure that builds behind her eyes, and she keeps her lids closed for a good part of the while now as she tries to ride through the awful sensation that seems to have crawled from her gut, to her chest, and now has taken residence in her head. Her throat runs drier, and all the busy lines of failure and confusion seem to blur into something even less manageable now. Nothing feels clear anymore, everything ballooning with grief until the shape is unrecognizable.

She doesn't need to answer his question, the answer is plain enough in her tears. Thankfully, he seems to agree, because he presses on, though she guesses the words he meant as something soothing, land like their own cuts with all the rest. No, she thinks, the sight of him walking away feeling so damn final, she doesn't think there's any hope of him coming back. She knows what Sunjata's trying to say, and she doesn't know the details of his falling out with Ru and Nate either, but she can't imagine it'd been so heartless, so sure, if they found their way back. Maybe before they'd actually loved each other first, too, and not whatever the hell and she Vesper had been doing. Climbing and falling and getting hurt, is all, it seems.

For a moment she doesn't stir or speak, just tries to ease into the constant feeling of shit that existing currently is. She tries to keep still, as if motion might shift something else and send it loose, painful or too bright to look at right. "It's impossible to go back in time," she tells him, stubborn and bitter. No, she's not eating up his version of hope in the slightest. "That's all that'd help now," she says on a sigh. "Can't undo the channel that upset him, can't undo the way he reacted to it." Whether Sunjata is right or wrong, none of it can reach her where she's at currently, and she fully believes what she says. Those moments left a crease on something that'd once been flush, and even if you unbend it now, the little line is always there, marring what'd once been.

Maybe part of her problem is trying to keep something too smooth, thinking maybe it's possible to protect something enough that all the roughness of the world can't get to it. She once believed she'd had that, just didn't realize all the lines that kept wrinkling it in the dark, impossible to see until the lights turned back on. Made sense maybe she could pretend there's something unblemished with a man that bids shadows, but turns out this time, even in the dark all the creases made themselves known.

"Only thing I'm aiming to fix now is never doing this again," she asserts, folding in the softer pieces behind the shell of this destruction.

Colt

Maybe one day I'll get back the rhythm in my chest

now take what i offer, straight up the nose, down the throat

it's a bearable bruise on your conscious

“Yeah, I know the feeling.” Sunjata sighs, frowning a little as he realizes that he too could have solved so much in his past if he’d just been able to undo it and go back in time. Maybe he would’ve forced Nate to stay in the Refuge with him so he wouldn’t have to succumb to the final strike of war. Maybe he would’ve been able to be stronger and tell Safrin that he’d take his chances with the war anyway. He wouldn’t have Kamaria now, but at least it’s the only good reason to look up at the stars these days – choosing the cloudy skies over clear night skies.

He might have been able to prevent so many things that it seems almost like a cop out to be able to do it differently – and perhaps that’s why they still can’t. That’s why he’s still stuck in this machine of whether or not he was doing enough or learned enough or was enough in general. It was his status quo, it was what he did. “Well, I wish you luck with it. Life’s kind of a bitch in that way, though.” The more you say you’ll never do something, the more likely it is to occur - at least in his experience. The whole “ill never love again” only to find himself stuck in the same heartbreak circle again and again.

He squeezes her shoulder lightly and settles into the couch a little more comfortably, fully intending on keeping his place here and letting her sleep. As such, the conversation ebbs and flows until exhaustion finally gets the best of Colt and Sunjata’s there to be a watchful eye over her until he falls asleep too.

- FIN

but don't it feel good? don't you feel calmer?

i am the way and the life in the best looking truth