The next morning, Eileen wakes to the sizzle of eggs and bacon on the stove. The front door and one of the back windows is open, setting up a crossflow that serves as natural ventilation for the tiny cabin. The air off the lake is still cool, and will remain so until well into the afternoon.
Dane's moved the table away from the wall for breakfast. He's set the two adult-sized chairs across from each other, facing not across the length of the table but across the width. Their bananas are waiting there, and two frosty glasses of milk. The main course is still on the griddle, though. He doesn't seem to have noticed Eileen is awake now. It's understandable: the bacon sizzles loudly, and he's rather wrapped up in what he's doing.
Sunlight streams in through the east-facing window; leaves a slanted oblong on the floor. It makes the fur rug blindingly white; makes the interior of the cabin unapologetically cheerful. Granted, in the light of day Eileen can see some cobwebs up in the rafters, but even that doesn't detract from the lightness and brightness of the place.
eileenIt gets cold at night. However, Eileen is like a small blast furnace under the covers. She moves around a little in her sleep, rolling onto her side and wiggling back against Thomas, hugging her pillow and tucking up her knees a little bit, her ankles flopped over each other. This is how she wakes, though, a little sweaty from sleep.
Her senses wake her more than any internal clock. Light filling the cabin, pouring into it like molten gold into a bowl. The sound of sizzling, and metal on metal, and wood crackling in a fire, and the breeze rustling trees outside. Birdsong. She smells food. Bacon grease. Coffee in the stovetop percolator. She feels the breeze through the windows and door, cooling her forehead.
Eileen also senses that her panties are still on. So that was a dream.
She smiles, hugging her pillow and watching Dane lazily for a little while. She doesn't draw his attention to the fact that she's awake. In fact, when he looks over, she has her eyes closed, her mouth a little slack, her breathing steady.
DaneDane is no master chef, but he can handle the basics well enough. There's an innate familiarity in the way he cracks eggs, flips bacon, pats the yolks to check the doneness. When he glances over his shoulder at her she looks asleep, so he can't ask her whether she likes her eggs sunny side up or well done or what. He ends up going for soft-fried: the yolk just solidified, but not hard yet.
When he woke this morning he was a good deal closer to Eileen than he was when he slept. She'd scooted over in the night, or he had - he's still not quite sure which - and her back was to his chest. His arm was over her side. They were spooning, albeit loosely, and he was at once mortified and delighted.
He crept out of bed soon after, though. She stirred a little as his warmth left her. He tucked her in carefully, tenderly, and then put his pants on and his jacket. The sun had only just cleared the horizon, and the ground was aglitter with dew when he stepped outside.
It's an hour or so later now. And he's taking the pan off the fire, bringing it over to set directly on the table. And now, finally unable to keep from waking her any longer, Dane comes over to the bed and gives Eileen's shoulder a gentle shake.
"Do you want to get up?" he asks. "I made breakfast."
eileenIt doesn't bother Eileen that Dane held her -- a little, sort of, and not really on purpose -- while they slept. Together. She turned over and somewhere in there he moved closer and maybe she rolled onto his arm or he just happened to lay it over her middle anyway, but that's how he woke up, and she's vaguely aware of it because she stirred in the middle of the night to the sensation and then settled back down again, slept again. The memory comes to her slowly and dimly even now.
But he got up with the sun, and let her sleep in a bit. She can't help but smell breakfast, and she can't help but sense the change in the air and the quiet sound of footsteps as he comes back over toward the bed. He touches her shoulder and she
rolls onto her back, grabbing his forearm, keeps on rolling to haul him over. She cackles, pinning his arm under her ribcage, now flopped onto her opposite side. "I gotchoo. I gotcher arm." Then, sing-song: "And I'm not giving it ba-ack."
DaneToo dignified to yelp, Dane nevertheless goes oof! as he's dragged down. Flopped over her now, his arm trapped, his torso at right angles to hers, he smirks at her.
"You tricked me," he accuses. "You pretended to be asleep, only to ambush me. The thanks I get for cooking you breakfast!"
eileenThere is a closeness, there. And he's not so blind or daft to think that Eileen doesn't come by this easily, that with everyone else she's detached and can't find her tenderness. He knows. He saw her with Charlie. She's not a withholding sort of a person. She's not someone who struggles to make friends or connect with others. It happens all the time. It's a part of her.
And yet it's hard not to feel... special. Even if everyone feels that way with Eileen, it might just be because it's true. He is special, just like Charlie is special and Roman is special and just as Ashley was special. It happens quickly with Eileen, a headlong tumbling into all her sweetness, but that sweetness has depth. It's as thick and bright as honey, strong enough to cut bitterness, strong enough to buoy, but oh,
how she melts.
There's more to it than that, with Dane. There is something else there that isn't mentor or friend or partner, but he's not sure he can handle that and she knows, because he says it one way or another, how grateful he is to be allowed this kind of closeness, this much affection and forgiveness and -- let's just say it -- intimacy, at a pace that doesn't make him panic.
He's too dignified to yelp. She hugs his arm, holding him in place with her whole body wrapped around it, while he accuses her -- rightly -- of luring him into an ambush, and Eileen just... snuggles his arm. She smiles, her eyes closed now, then tips her head forward and rubs her brow against his forearm. Nuzzles him. Then lets him go, as easy a release as a flower opening, and rolls onto her back. Smiles at him.
For a golden moment.
Then she pops up, kissing his cheek, and swinging her legs out of bed, sliding her feet to the floor. "I have to pee."
DaneIt's true. When she looks at him, touches his hair, smiles at him, hugs his arm ridiculously like that, he feels special. He suspects Charlie felt special, too; loved and comforted, when he hadn't felt loved or comforted or special for a very long time. Then again, Dane could say the same.
She lets him go. It's gentle, it's easy, and even in that he feels...
loved. Comforted. Special. He smiles down at her. She kisses his cheek; she feels him lean into it for just an instant before she's popping off the bed. He gets up a beat after her.
"I'll plate breakfast out," he says. "There's hot water in the kettle if you want to wash up."
eileen"Yes yes yes," Eileen is saying, to the washing-up idea, as she darts in panties and t-shirt and bare feet out the door and onto the grass, as unconcerned about this as she seems to be about most things. It's cool outside but warming up, and her tshirt is no more thick or long or baggy than it was when she wore it in the car yesterday. She's a bright thing, a fey thing, hopping across the green for a moment.
When she comes back in she goes straight for the water kettle, pouring it in the washbasin and adding some cooler water to even it out. She stands over by the water pump itself and strips down -- at this point it's clear to her that either Dane will look away if he's going to be his regular prim self or else he doesn't care any more than she does -- to her birthday suit, humming as she gives herself a quick sponge bath with her washcloth. She has a tiny bar of soap from her bag that smells like lavender that she also uses, and by the end of her little regime she's Clean Enough and her breakfast is only starting to cool.
Eileen, perhaps thankfully, gets dressed before coming to eat. 'Dressed' in the sense that she puts on a bikini of red and white stripes, the bottom half held together by metal rings at her hips and the top half held together by another metal ring between the cups but strapless. She wiggles into a pair of short denim cutoffs over that and then flops into the chair across from Dane, shaking her unbrushed hair back. It rarely looks composed, at least not the times he's seen her, so the fact that it's still tousled and wild and unruly from sleep means little.
"Ooh, coffee," she says, seeing the steaming cup of black sitting beside her plate of bacon and eggs, picking up her fork. "Dear Thomas, thank you for this bountiful breakfast and may it nourish my body, Amen."
DaneThomas is, in fact, his prim self when Eileen disrobes again. This is turning into a habit, he muses, his back turned, his eyes and hands suddenly very busy with arranging the silverware just so. As lavender starts to fill the tiny cabin, and as cold water splashes onto the rough stone tiles lining the 'sink', he can't help but ask:
"Aren't you freezing? We can absolutely run you a bath if you need one."
But no, no, she's not freezing. Or even if she is, she doesn't seem to mind. Later on she wears only swimwear and cutoffs, and when she tosses that unruly mane of hair back he swears he can smell lavender wafting at him over the odd, tall little counter-table.
Quirking a smile as she thanks him, "Careful. You might feed my ego."
eileen"That'll take forever," Eileen says, of the bath idea. She is chilled, but the fact that washbasin water is hot helps. She knows any minute now they're going to go outside and it'll be sunny and they'll be on the little lake and he'll be catching dinner and she'll be worshipping Sol and it'll be awesome but also very warm. So he keeps his back turned, arranging silverware, certainly not imagining her naked behind him or anything like that, and a few minutes later she's joining him at the table to eat.
She drinks the coffee eagerly. It isn't exactly gourmet, but he made it and poured it for her, so she drinks it anyway and that makes it better, because it means something. In a way that's just as good as good coffee, really.
Her legs swing under the table as she digs into her eggs. He tells her to be careful of his ego and her eyebrows perk at him. "But you made a big breakfast all by yourself and let me sleep. Why shouldn't I thank you? That was awesome."
Dane"It's not the thanks. It's the prayer." He smiles again, then, picking up his fork. "Don't worry; I was mostly joking. Let's eat."
It's a simple breakfast, but hearty. The bacon is crisped at the edges. The eggs are light and fluffy. The toast is ... toasted. One can imagine him making this breakfast for a five-year-old before bundling her off to kindergarten. Or, later, for himself - on those days he bothers, anyway.
It seems to gratify him on some level to see her enjoying her breakfast. He sips his coffee, he eats his eggs, sometimes making a miniature sandwich with eggs and bacon wrapped in toast. He finishes a little before her, leaning back in his chair - but not very far, because the high center of gravity would topple him to the floor much easier than a normal chair - and looking out the windows.
"If you want to go for a swim," he says, "the water's pretty clear, especially in the center of the lake. There are two other cottages on the far shore, but by and large this lake is out of the way. No one motorboats here, and no one dumps anything here."
eileenThe way she looks at him then, a wry little smile on her face and a curious-playful glint in her eye, is not paired with anything she says. She just nomfs a bite of egg and smiles at him. They both make sandwiches with their food occasionally. Eileen likes to put a little bit of butter on her toast. One can imagine Dane making a breakfast like this for a five year old, but Eileen doesn't. She doesn't know how long he was married or how old his and his wife's daughter was, except that she was very young still. A small chair. A little bed.
A gaping hole.
Eileen lets her legs swing while she eats, catching up slowly to Dane as he finishes. "I was going to ask about that," she says. "Swimming, that is. I mean, I don't want to scare the fish away."
Dane"How about this," Dane suggests, "after I catch enough fish for dinner, you can splash around as much as you want. Before that, maybe you could just tan in the canoe. Or on the shore."
eileenEileen is smiling. Then she sits up in her chair and crawls onto the table, on her hands and knees, angled here and there to not disturb their plates or their coffee, and smiles again right up close to his face.
"You should swim with me, then," she says, with no real explanation as to why she crawled onto the table in order to tell him this.
DaneDane isn't quite sure what to do as Eileen starts climbing over the table. He watches her, bemused, his hands flat on the tabletop and his fingertips relaxed.
"All right," he agrees, "and perhaps after our swim we can go for a hike. There are some trails around the lake. Nothing too strenuous ... Eileen.
"May I ask why you're on the table?"
eileenDane is a planner. He planned out their first mission together on the way there. He sort-of made plans that they'd keep working together, since it went well. He plans the rest of their day, too: fishing, sunning. Maybe a swim. Maybe a hike.
And yet, Dane is also... agile. Things change, so he changes. And he's chaotic and forgetful, too. No food or bug spray came with him when he packed his duffel bag and got in the car with Eileen. She climbs on the table and he just accepts it.
She smiles at him, more broadly than just a moment ago. "I'm glad you asked, Thomas," she says, like a presenter. She leans forward a bit, taking a bit of bacon from his plate and holding it up to his mouth. "To be closer to you," she explains, and this time her voice isn't like a presenter at all, or a spokesmodel, or anything like that. She just says it simply, easily, humming a little to herself in the aftermath.
DaneDane rears back a little bit from the proffered bacon, looking to see what it is. Then, careful not to nip her or - worse - suck on her fingertips, he clips the tidbit between his teeth, takes it. He wants to stay on the safe side of a line that grows a little blurrier by the moment. He sits back; he rubs his face for a moment, and then he stands.
"We should go," he says, and if she feels like he might be fleeing a bit ... that's probably because he is. "Fish are most active in the early morning, and it's nearly ten."
eileenThis time Eileen isn't hurt. She looks a little confused when he rears back, then amused when she realizes that he just wants to see what it is she's offering to feed him. And it isn't that she was going for some lingering-stare finger-sucking moment that would end in him hauling her off the table and onto his lap for some of that back-breaking torrid sex he was afraid she might have been asking for all those weeks ago, but that doesn't meant she would have refused if, y'know, something along those lines had happened. On the one hand they do need to catch some fish because their meal plans depend on it but on the other hand she has long since learned that there are times when sex can prove an adequate substitute for food and sleep.
Dane doesn't lick her fingers or hold her wrist to keep her still while he eats the bacon she's offered, but it's still kind of sexy seeing him take it in his teeth the way he does. She smiles a little to herself, lazily, and then he does that thing he does when he's fighting off an erection. Well: that's how it works in her mind, at least. Dane rubs his face when he's trying very hard not to be turned on. That he pushes his chair back and stands up and says it's time to go definitely gives her the impression that he's bolting.
That's when the confusion comes back a little. She tips her head, still on her knees on top of the table, wondering what happened between draping his arm over her in bed and being skittish. Ah. Oh. He didn't mean to because he was asleep. Comprehension dawns and darkens her eyes a little, makes a little furrow between her eyebrows.
Ah. Well. It smooths. It's understandable. It's a little sad and sexually, at least, it's mind-numbingly frustrating, but she understands. Eileen sits back, crossing her legs and picking up her plate to finish. "Wow. I thought it was later, actually. I feel like I slept forever."
She finishes quickly while Dane is getting fishing gear together, then hops off the table. "Let's go see if that canoe still keeps the water out."
Dane"We were in bed by ten," he reminds her, "so we did, in fact, sleep forever."
Out here, it doesn't seem so important to leave the front door open or shut. Dane left it open all morning. All they have to worry about are summer insects, and at this time of day there are no mosquitos. There is a large green fly, which he shoos out ahead of himself as they head into the bright sunshine. He's found his fishing tackle somewhere - likely under the bed, in those storage drawers - and the little tacklebox is in his hand as they head out.
The cabin faces east, and it faces the long side of the lake. The opposite shore is only four or five football fields away; large enough to be good exercise if they tried to row across, and large enough that the other two cabins -- Eileen can see them, if she really looks for them -- are far away enough not to intrude on one another's privacy. Not so large that the opposite shore is out of sight, though, or even out of reach.
This country is not so limitlessly flat as the lower midwest. There are some low, rolling hills both on their side of the shore and the opposite. They don't get in the way of the sunlight, though, which glitters blindingly off the lake. Dane sets his tackle on the shore and unwinds that old, sunbaked canoe from its post. It's been out for several winters and summers on end, exposed the whole time. Dane's heart aches a little for the little boat; it really wasn't meant for this sort of abuse. He'd be surprised if it didn't have any cracks, happy if it floated at all --
and it does. It floats, though it leaks a little. That's all right. He drags it back on shore, goes inside, digs around until he finds some sealant; seals it. While the sealant dries he dusts the seats off, cleans the oars. Then they drag the little canoe back into the lake. Dane watches for a while. Then, satisfied with its watertightness, he holds it while Eileen climbs in.
His lower legs are dripping when he gets in himself. He's wearing shorts, which is surely an unexpected sight. His calves are rather pale. He's rather pale himself, normally, but he's still tanned from that mishap a few weeks ago. He gives Eileen one oar and holds the other himself. She sits at the bow, he at the stern. They're off! He follows her lead, occasionally paddling off-stroke to correct their course.
eileenEileen takes little with her: a hair tie, a towel, her flip flops, a bottle of water. She puts a thin layer of sunblock on, at least enough to not burn outright, and slips her sunglasses onto her face. She helps quite a bit once she's finished eating breakfast, actually, pushing and pulling the canoe onto the water to see if it floats. She climbs in to see if her weight will instantly sink it, then hops out and helps him find the various leaks to put sealant on. He wants to push it out, so she laughs and lets him take the brunt of the work. When he climbs in, dripping wet, she grins and hands him an oar, turning around on her seat.
"Dark behind it rose the forest," she says, as she first dips her oar in the water and drags it back, "rose the black and gloomy pine-trees. Something something something, bright before it beat the water, beat the clear and sunny water, beat the shining big sea water."
The oar dips back up out of the water, dripping, and she switches, sitting straight-backed and tall. She turns and glances back at him. "I'm sorry about last night," she says. "I was a little tired and feeling so... intimate with you. It was childish to recoil from the fact that we see the world so very differently."
DaneShe quotes something. He thinks it's a quote, anyway. He doesn't know it, and he can't think of anything appropriate to quote back, so he simply paddles quietly. Neither of them are hurrying. The little craft drifts easily, smoothly over the calm water. She turns to talk to him; he looks at her over her mostly bare shoulder.
And smiles. "You're a lot of things," he says, "but you're hardly childish, Eileen. It was late. I didn't think we were verging on an argument, but... I don't blame you for wanting to simply have a quiet night."
Their oars dip. They pull. Their oars rise, dripping and flashing.
"Do you want to talk about it now?" he asks quietly. It's a genuine question, not a suggestion in disguise.
eileenThe water has a slow, viscous quality today, though it glitters where the sunlight bounces off of it. Eileen looks out at the other cabins, at the trees rimming the lake, the not-so-distant hills. She lets the breeze cool her shoulders, move her hair across her arms, and feels herself already slipping into that almost trance-like state of pure sensation.
"Sometimes I am," she says, of being childish. It's not an apology or a word of shame; she's just being honest. The honest truth is also: everyone is sometimes. So is Dane.
There is a long pause from her after he's done talking. After he asks her if she wants to talk about it now.
"I think I wanted to start a fight with you, a little. Push you," she says, which may or may not be an affirmative to the 'do you want to talk' question, "even though I promised not to."
Eileen glances down, looks at the bed of the canoe, looks at the water. She wants to let the oars slip, let them fall away into the water, tumble slowly to the floor of the lake. She wants to lay out in the canoe and doze against Dane's thigh, not lascivious or pressuring, but deeply intimate all the same. She wants him to hold her on purpose tonight, and she sighs softly at all these thoughts.
"I want... very much to be close to you. And that's okay, and... I wouldn't initiate that closeness with you if I thought you really wanted me to be more distant. I think you'd tell me." She glances back at him there, as though to confirm it. "I wonder sometimes if you're unnerved, though, because you don't know what all being close to me would entail. Or do to us."
DaneDane is frowning a little when she looks over her shoulder. A little after, she can hear the soft, rhythmic splash of his oar out of, over, and into water come to a stop. The canoe drifts a little, listing to the side under her paddling. Then perhaps she stops as well, and they come to a slow, revolving stop.
"It's partly that," he admits, "but simply not knowing what a relationship with you would be like - or even if there would be a relationship - is only a small part of my hesitation. On some level I'm ... not ready for another relationship, Eileen. I might never be again. Even when a wound heals, there's still a scar."
He grimaces a little. Such vague talk; it makes him a little disgusted at himself. He looks out over the water, so bright and smooth. It's such a beautiful day to be feeling this way, he thinks, and looks back at her.
"There's also the matter of my wife. My daughter died. My wife didn't. I don't know what became of her; I do know she hated me when she left, and she hated everything the Traditions stood for. I don't know ... where she is, or when she'll come back, or what she'll do then.
"With all that staring me in the face, the last thing I should do is pretend none of that exists. The last thing I should do is embark on some ... giddy romance as though I weren't carrying all the baggage in the world."
eileenEileen -- so attuned to her senses, so obsessed with touch and music and taste and enjoyment -- does hear Dane stop paddling. She feels them moving, turning a little, and she draws her oar in, turning on her seat to face him now. The sun shines off her shoulders, glints on the rings at her hips and between her breasts. She can see, through her sunglasses, when his frown smooths...and when it returns. When he grimaces. Perhaps she can even understand why.
He looks out over the water and she looks at him. He talks about his wife again. That's when she realizes: he's never said ex-wife. He's never called her by her name. He always says 'wife'. Something in her sinks, heavy as a stone in water and just as painfully slow, just as inevitable. Sometimes she hates gravity.
So that's around when Eileen looks down at her flip-flopped feet. She has her arms folded on her legs, elbows closer to her hips and wrists against her knees. She does feel a little sad. Mostly, though, she feels thoughtful. When he's done, she's quiet. They revolve in the water, not quite at the center but far enough out that they can't see the bottom anymore.
She lifts her head again. "I didn't understand," she says softly. "When you said she left, I... didn't know you really meant that she just... left. So you're still married to her."
That's not really a question. Eileen knows there are also laws governing this sort of thing, divorces when one partner just up and vanishes that the other partner can apply for and have passed on their own. She can't assume now that Dane did any of that. So they're still married. And on some level, it's because he wants to be.
Or at least: that's what she's guessing. What she's hearing. When she'll come back. When. He did say 'when'.
Eileen licks her lips, slow and thoughtful. Presses them together. The first thing to come to her mind, she doesn't say, because she isn't sure of it yet, and she won't be ruled by it, and she does live by the Code even if many cultists abandon it. She exhales, and the saddest quirky-smile he's ever seen on her face tilts at the corners. "Is that how I make you feel?" she says, only half -- no, more like a quarter or one-twelfth -- teasing. "Giddy and romantic?"
Dane"No..."
Dane trails off there. He looks over the water again, his oar balanced over his knees, dripping from the blade, flashing in the sun. Waterbirds soar overhead, but he doesn't look at them. His tacklebox sits on the bottom of the canoe between them, as yet unopened.
"You make me feel hopeful," he says. "And young. And foolish. And like maybe there's a chance of winning a war for and against a reality that really doesn't want us to be here. And maybe if we did win, then everything would be forgiven, healed, and set right again.
"It's not what you think, Eileen. It's not some ... silly love-obsession-thing where I'm still in love with my absentee wife. It's that I'm ... wounded and scarred, and one of those wounds opens up again every time I remember my daughter is dead and one of those scars is walking around blaming me for our daughter being dead. I'm not someone, something, that should be inflicted on anyone. Least of all you."
eileenThey really need to fish. It's almost eleven now, and getting so warm that the fish are going to get lazy and slow and ignore every fly Dane tries to lure them with if they don't stop talking about Feelings and Emotions and Angst and get some dinner on the hook. And yet: at this point, if they don't say these things, if they let it fester under the surface, it will be just another wound that never closes. She looks at the water, soft and lapping and glittering, and wants Dane to fish, but she also doesn't want to throw his words under the wagon wheels and pretend they don't matter. That they're mud, squelching into just so much more mud.
From the way he describes it, she makes him feel the way he did before things all went to shit. Back when everyone really believed that man, global ascension, man, it could like TOTALLY HAPPEN. Man. And they could do it. They could make the world safe for their kind -- not to mention the fae, the Garou, even the pale ones and even the violent ones, they could make people aware that there was so, so much more to life than what they wanted to believe. The knowledge is there that a vast swath of the human population might go mad from such a thing, but the belief that it's better than blindness, darkness, and ignorance is there.
It's there in Eileen. She isn't traipsing along into a new war with her eyes closed, thinking everything will be sunshine and rainbows and kittens and unicorns when they overturn reality. She knows the truth is brutal. She knows that the truth is also malleable. They can make it what they want. And she knows what a chaotic existence that will be, and
what a peaceful one, and
what a terrifying one, and
what a beautiful one.
So really, in the end: not so different from what reality and existence are now. Not really. Not in the end.
She watches him as he speaks. He's right: it isn't what she thinks. He isn't obsessed with his wife, longing for her return, waiting for her. All the same, though. He hasn't let go. And maybe he can't. Maybe that's what he's trying to tell her, too, and really... Eileen's the last person who can judge anyone for what they try to hold onto. Or hold onto without trying, holding on because they're on a hook, wiggling and wiggling or even just giving up and accepting it, but it's a hook and it hurts and sometimes that's just how things are. Sometimes you get sharp metal stuck in you.
She looks pained, the way he talks about himself. And she's quiet for awhile afterward, frowning, looking at her palms.
Eileen sighs. It's a lovely, aching, almost musical sound. When she looks over at him again, she reaches up and takes her sunglasses off. It makes her squint. Makes her look a little vulnerable, doing that, but also oddly strong. She takes the sunlight in and it burns, it burns, it sparks off the water and sets her vision on fire and a part of her likes that a little bit, likes that it hurts to be in the middle of all that brightness.
"I'm pretty sure some of what you said when you came up to my place that first night is exactly what I'm trying not to do, right now. Like how people get close to you and then they care about you," the 'god forbid' tone of her voice is hard to ignore but also isn't malicious, isn't mocking, is strangely understanding, "and then try to fix you."
That part quiet. Another sort of sigh, those words. Because she knows. By god, she knows: you can't fix people. You can't heal them. You just... can't. No mind magic, no life magic, no spirit transfer, nothing is really going to make that stuff better with a wave of a wand or an Enochian chant or a rain dance or even enough drugs and she knows of some AWESOME drugs. Especially if they don't want to be fixed, or aren't ready to be fixed, or don't believe they can be fixed.
Reality is created by belief.
"I'm not going to ask you stuff about what happened because I don't need to know right now. You'll tell me if or when you want to, or need to, yourself. Or I'll ask when I really need to know, if that's ever. I'm not a shrink or whatever." She pauses there, her upper teeth set briefly in her lower lip, then licks them both.
"I don't think you're a thing that's inflicted," Eileen finally tells him, and her voice is quiet in a way that makes sense by candlelight or firelight, indoors, nighttime. It feels so strange to hear that tone out here. She looks at him, achingly, willing him to at least believe that much. "And I'm not saying that just because I like you or I'm totally falling for you or because I am fine with eating no fish at all, all weekend, because it'd be okay with me to just end up fucking the whole time we're here, and that's all true and everything but it's not... my motive."
She fiddles with her sunglasses, twisting them open and closed in her hands. "I used to help kill people that were too wounded and scarred to be allowed to keep going on, inflicting themselves on the world."
Let that sink in for just a second. This is the girl who cries if someone gets slapped in front of her. If they seem sick. Who fretted so much over Dane's paradox-burn that it's entirely possible he stayed away from her for a few weeks just so she wouldn't have a miniature breakdown every time she brushed against him accidentally.
"I also don't mean that I have like... perfect judgement, or whatever. I just don't want you thinking that my whole brain is just chasing butterflies all the time and I'm just dancing along like life isn't a mine field. Or that I don't have wounds, or scars, or that I'm somehow pristine or innocent and you'll ruin me if you go through my life a little and your baggage leaves a furrow."
She drops her sunglasses unceremoniously and rubs her face. "And I'm not all 'oh I'm so emotionally strong nothing can hurt me' and I'm not just 'oh if I get sick of your crap I'll LET YOU KNOW, BUDDY' or stuff like that." Her arms drop, hands hanging limp. "Just don't... not explore this with me because you're afraid of it hurting me or messing me up or something. And if that's not what it is, and it's more about you not wanting to get hurt yourself and stuff, then... well... well then it's not fair of you to do stuff like tell me that if anyone could be with you right now it'd be me, or inviting me up for a weekend at your cabin by a lake, or kissing me while looking at the stars, okay? Because that's like, beyond mixed signals, Thomas."
She quiets. She looks miserable, suddenly. "I'm sorry."
And hugs her knees. "I want to be patient and understanding, it's just hard when I don't understand."
Dane listens to everything she says. He looks at her almost the entire time. She can look at him, too: see that some of the things she says make him ache. Others surprise him, or even shock him a little bit. And still others make him a little uncomfortable.
It's when she calls him out on his mixed signals, though, that he grimaces and looks away. It's when she apologizes that he looks back, quickly, startled, then ashamed.
"No," he says. "No, you shouldn't apologize. I'm the one who owes you an apology. You're right, Eileen. That was ... poorly done of me. Perhaps this entire trip was utterly irresponsible and heedless."
A small hesitation. Then:
"It's not that I think you're some innocent girl who needs to be protected. But I do think I'm a danger to those around me. And even if I'm not, then my ... history certainly is. I brought you here because I wanted to help you understand. Or perhaps simply because I wanted to feel understood for once, and to try and heal this place in my mind. And you've said that that's not selfish, but in truth I think it is.
"Should I take you back to Chicago?"
eileenAwkward, uncomfortable, uncertain, pained, panged, aching, sad, guilty, confused --
Eileen realizes she's running through a list of adjectives that try and fail to be perfectly synonymous with the vibe between the two of them right now, and she stops. She is looking at him but her mind is wandering as it so often does. She tries to be a good listener, she wants to be a good listener, and when she really focuses and puts her mind to it she honestly, truly, totally can be a good listener. It's just that her brain does other things at the same time. When she amplifies it with magic she can be a freakish multitasker, but then she feels discombobulated, split into pieces, and it makes her worry she's going to end up with multiple personalities but it really helped in college and she wrote some incredible papers and it's not really cheating if you just do your best and her best includes being Awake.
She reaches up and rubs the back of her neck. The vibe in the canoe really is sort of weird and awful, or else she wouldn't be going on sixteen tangents trying to escape it right now. All she wants to do is cross over and get between Dane's knees and hold him. Probably kiss. Soft, slow, wet but not drenching kisses. Enough to stir, not enough to inflame. Not to solve anything. Not to heal anyone. Not to even... go anywhere. She can't think past that. Time, or at least the parts of it she can touch, ends there. Or stops. Or just evaporates.
Yeah. That's it. Lifts like a curtain, so the real play can begin.
It's been awhile since he's asked her if he should take her back, and outwardly, all Dane can see is that furrow between her eyebrows, the hand rubbing the back of her neck, the downturn in her mouth that makes her lips sort of pouty in a strangely intellectual way that looks positively enigmatic.
She puts her sunglasses back on. It isn't symbolic of anything, taking them off or on. Well, maybe taking them off was. Vulnerability, openness, honesty, guards down, all that. Putting them back on is just because the sun combined with the water is killing her eyes. Does he know that her eyes are light-sensitive? She blames how light they are, there's like, barely any color in them. This may or may not be scientific reasoning.
"I want to be here with you," she tells him, honestly. "Just like I want to understand you, and ... be close to you. But it's getting hard to be around you and not --"
Well, she doesn't need to finish that sentence, does she?
Eileen is watching him. "I heard a story about a magical lock and key," she tells him, her voice blending a bit with the sound of the water against the sides of the canoe, that languid lapping whenever the wind skims along the surface. "The lock, and the box it was a part of, was made of volcanic stone, but it had never quite cooled down from being lava. It was always hot -- too hot to even hold onto.
"The key," she goes on, her voice steady and smooth, lively and sleepy at turns, a voice made for storytelling, "was enchanted. It was made of ice, always cold to the touch, cold and hard even in summer sunlight." Her head tips slowly to the side. "The only thing that could cool the lockbox was the key, and the only heat that could melt the key was the lock. But because the lock would melt the key and the key would break the enchantment on the lock, the box could never be closed and locked again. Once opened, it would be open forever."
Eileen turns around, arranging her towel along the seats of the canoe to make herself a little more comfortable. "And since no one knows what's inside the lockbox, they're afraid to use the key."
She lays out, arranging herself as best she can, unfurling herself to the sun like a flower, worshipping the sky above them.
"I think we should stay," she says, and the storytelling trance dissipates from her tone. "Even if it isn't perfectly peaceful." Her shoulders shift, get more comfortable. "Neither one of us was really made for peace, I think."
DaneDane watches, bemused, as Eileen tells him a story. As with so many of their kind, Dane's power lies beneath his skin. It's in his mind. It's in his will. It is his will, and to the naked eye he seems --
well. A little sad. A little hunched, sitting on the canoe's rear bench with his paddle across his knees, his shoulders drawn in a little. His shorts are canvas, very sportman-ish, and consequently a little out of place on him. His shirt is short-sleeved, but it's still a buttondown. He doesn't look like a destroyer of worlds. He doesn't really look like someone who would enjoy roughing it in a pseudo-19th century cabin, either.
Or someone who had and lost a daughter. Or someone who looks at Eileen sometimes and thinks she is so wise, so warm; thinks if only I'd just gone back inside that night; I wonder what would have happened?
Dane smiles, wry, as her story concludes. She is preparing to sun herself. She is sunning herself. He lays his paddle down on the bottom of the canoe, careful not to drip on her, and reaches behind his bench for his tacklebox.
"The only other legendary box I've heard of contained all the sorrows of mankind," he reminds her, "and I'm pretty sure Pandora regretted opening it."
He starts to put together his fishing pole. The canoe rocks a little on the water, but it's a clear, calm day; not much wind to stir the lake. Now that they're no longer paddling, it's quiet out here. Nothing but the distant wind in the trees. The cry of waterfowl. Water against the hull.
"Though," he adds, quieter, "I suppose your counterargument would be that all that remained in the end was hope."
eileenEileen smiles at the sky. "Nah," she says. "My counter argument would be that most legendary boxes are metaphors, even the ones that actually exist."
She stretches out a little bit more, giving a deep sigh. The sun saturates her through her skin and she floats on it, the sigh becoming a quiet murmur of relaxation.
"Sometimes it doesn't matter what's in the box," she adds, but then: "I want to listen to you fish."
DaneHe quirks at her, but his hands don't stop what they're doing. He's familiar at this. Practiced. His fingers move, his wrists and his arms - and twist here, a push there - the pole comes together. Then the line unwound and strung delicately, swiftly through a series of ever-shrinking loops, until at the end it hangs free from the tip of the pole. Then the bobber, the sinker, and finally: the delicate, deadly little hook that will bring prey gasping and thrashing from the depths to die.
Fishing, as tranquil and meditative as it is, is a brutal art. The Akashics might understand.
"There's not much to listen to," he says. "The occasionally whiz-plop. And then a lot of silence. Maybe one or two bouts of splashing, if we're lucky."
The pole is ready. Dane cocks his arm back, unlocks the reel, and - with a slow, smooth motion of his arm - sends the hook whizzing out over the lake. The plop when it drops into the water is almost inaudible. He sets the butt of the pole carefully down, then, propping it against the side of the canoe. And then it's time to wait.
"Can I ask you something?" he asks a moment or two later. And then - oddly naked, and with no sense whatsoever of trawling for compliments: "Why do you want me? What do you see happening between us?"
eileenAll she can do is smile. "But Thomas... the whiz-plop and the silence are what I want to listen to. They're nice." Her smile is almost affectionate, at that.
And the truth is, the sound even of his shirt rustling as he moves, then the whiz, the almost inaudible plop, the thumping and arranging as he props the pole in place -- she does feel affectionate toward these noises. She isn't using magic right now. She can't see the sounds like colors in the air or bolts of light or pictograms or equations streaming through her mind, though she could if she wanted to.
That kind of sensory magic isn't why she loves the sounds, though. Loving the sounds is why she learned all this magic.
They rock a bit in the water, moved by the water and the water moved by the air and its own primal, deep, unseen motivations, and Eileen enjoys the warmth as the day climbs towards its zenith. A few moments pass in silence, drowsy and almost comfortable again -- which isn't hard to get to with Eileen, not really, simply because of who she is -- and Dane asks her what he does. Openly, nakedly, easily but not uninvestedly. At first it might seem like she hasn't heard him, or is ignoring him, or is asleep, because it takes a long time to hear anything back from her.
To be fair, Eileen is only in her mid-twenties. Her brain is gelling, though it probably got there a bit sooner than most because she can see the whole of the universe. But she's still only in her mid-twenties. She doesn't seem like she's had any deep, life-changing relationships. She's certainly never borne and then lost a child. She works at the Art Institute, surrounded constantly by light, color, motion, order and disorder, beauty and discomfort, people from Chicago and all over, baristas and suits. Right now she's floating on a canoe in the middle of a near-private lake on a summery day, sunning herself in a bikini while a good-looking man catches food for their dinner. It's hard to imagine her ever having seen enough hardship to understand how it feels, to even realize that certain levels of suffering even exist,
except,
what she said earlier.
So to be fair: she is young. And the temptation is there to see this as an opportunity. To think to herself that maybe if her reason for wanting him is convincing enough, if her vision for their future is nonthreatening enough, then Dane will put his mouth and his hands on her skin and fulfill this craving of hers that, she admits, is becoming a wee bit all-consuming for her.
But Eileen doesn't really see it that way. She doesn't think about how best to manipulate her words, or modulate her answer, to get what she wants out of this exchange. What he really wants. What he's looking for. How best she can dismantle herself and put her pieces back together in a way that might lure him in, make him let his guard down, make him stop being stupid and give into himself, because really, that's what it's really about, seriously, she's not some Venus flytrap, is she? No, she's not. If anything she's a forget-me-not.
She peers under the rims of her sunglasses, then lifts them a bit, propping herself up on her elbows. She doesn't look mad. She doesn't look surprised or annoyed. If anything, she looks a little sad. Mostly thoughtful.
"I want you because I want you," she says gently, a few seconds later. "At first it was just... well, you were there. One minute it was one thing and then we were having coffee and the air was different and we wanted each other and you were running away from it, so... I wanted you to know it wasn't one-sided. I wanted you to know that you were... invited."
Slowly, she sits up, a surprising strength in her core that lifts her. Her shades drop back down to the bridge of her nose, but slide a bit. She doesn't adjust them.
"I want to be close to you. And at first I wasn't sure if you could even... would even... be close to me like that if we had sex. If you'd let yourself. I've thought a couple times that maybe you want to be close but you can't be that close yet, that open, and maybe for you, or with me, or something, you wouldn't be able to help it and then it would be terrifying to be so unlocked, and... that's why I keep trying to back off and give you time and let you be...
"Safe," she says. Her shoulders rise and fall; she shakes her head a bit. "It doesn't really matter. You were asking why and what. It's hard to answer 'why'. I don't have a list. I just do. It feels right. It feels like it's good. You know how some places give you a weird vibe and some give you a good vibe and some people are the same and... well, some possibilities give me those vibes. Even if a place and a person don't, the possibilities might. And so sometimes I do things people think are crazy or dangerous or horrible and it's because I know somewhere down that path might be something that's just golden and if I'm not crazy and dangerous and brave I'll never, ever feel that with something sane and plain and easy."
She takes a breath. "I'm not talking about you, by the way. People that give me bad vibes, I mean. Charlie kinda did. He still kinda does. But look how that turned out."
Eileen glances out at the water, following the barely visible, glistening thread of the fishing line to the bobber in the distance. She watches it, stares at it, as though willing a fish to bite.
"I see you on top of me... behind me. I'm not on my knees, though. Arched up, like... a cobra. And your hand's in my hair, sort of holding it near the scalp, not really violent but --"
Dane"Stop."
He cuts in before she gets very far into that visual of hers. Before she talks about kissing or not. Before she talks about how it's slow and hard and ritualistic; not loving, but so attuned. Before she talks about sharing a heartbeat, joining on that level that only animals and Ecstatics are familiar with.
Before all that. But after she says you on top, behind me. After she says his hand is in her hair, and after, damningly after, it's become readily apparent to him what she's really talking about.
Stop, he says, and he's turned his face physically from her like he can't even bear to look at her right now. His profile is tense, his hands are tense. He's a study in tension, rigid and drawn and crackling. The world around him is a contrast; he burns against it, like a splash of fire-red and fire-orange against blue, green, gray, brown.
What she said - what little he let her say - burns in his mind, too. He's a little shocked by it. It's not what he imagines, usually, when he imagines sex. Maybe he's old-fashioned. Maybe he's just not very inventive. Sex for him doesn't involve very many positions. It doesn't involve very much roughness. It doesn't involve his hand in anyone's hair,
but that's the image that lingers with him, not because he wants to pull her hair or hurt her or anything like that but because her hair is such a magnificent, extraordinary thing: so thick, so lustrous, tumbling this way and riffling that. He closes his eyes for a moment.
"That's not what I meant," he says a little later. And a little angrily: "You know that's not what I meant."
eileenThe first time Dane got angry at her, or irritated, or annoyed, or whatever word you want to give to it, she backpedaled immediately. She apologized, rather profusely. Then they went and saved Charlie's life.
That isn't what happens now. He tells her to stop, his voice sharp as a knife but firm as a blunt object, and Eileen stops. She closes her mouth and she is still looking out at the bobber and she just looks... sad. Not suddenly, babblingly apologetic, not ashamed, not soothing. She just looks sad, and she doesn't look at him either.
Tension, however, is a physical, tangible thing, no matter what the laws of physic say. The laws of physics were made up by the joint consensus of humanity, guided by a few ivory-tower magi so long ago no one quite remembers it perfectly. They nudged humanity into these rules. Those rules became law. These laws became reality, and Eileen is outside that.
Tension, emotional and potent and painful and exhilirating all at once, is something she can sense in her skin, even if she can't see it in his eyes.
It'd be fine if he said nothing. He doesn't, though. He tells her it isn't what he meant, then a little angrily: she knows that. A tiny frown furrows Eileen's brow. She turns to look at him.
"It's just a fantasy, Thomas," she says, and it's a bit on the defensive side, a bit like she's trying to reassure him. She shakes her head. "And okay, the blunt, short answer: I like you, but I don't know. I want you because I do. I don't know what might happen between us. I'm sorry I don't have an answer that's easier for you to hear."
Dane"I know it's a fantasy," Dane replies, quieter now. He reaches out, restless; fiddles with the pole and the line. Settles back again. "But I'm ... unaccustomed to your sort of frankness. Sometimes you just say things, Eileen, that would shock me even if I weren't attracted to you."
He sounds ridiculous, he thinks. Like some prim, starch-collared Victorian, flushing at the sight of a lady's ankles. He does it again: he rubs a hand over his face, and then he looks at her.
"But I am attracted to you. So as you might imagine, it's quite a bit worse than shocking. I just ... Eileen, you promised you wouldn't push. And putting those ... thoughts, those images in my mind, are certainly a form of pushing."
eileenThey've gone over this -- sort of. Only not really. And this is when he sees her angry. Like, really angry. Because she yells, and Eileen doesn't screw up her face and yell, usually, it's strange to see it, it's surreal because of how obvious her actual feelings are, hurt and frustration and, well,
a very real pang of rejection. "I told you I'd back off until you showed me you wanted something else!" she shoots back, only it's not really 'back' because he wasn't shooting to begin with. "Then you brought me up here and you kissed me. Then we settle that and we were all fine and you open it up again to ask me why I want you and what I see happening, and now I don't know what the hell you want because you don't, either!"
She's just short of standing up in the canoe, which could only end badly. She doesn't. But hearing herself shout those last few words at him, shouting in what is obviously the product of sometimes Being Cool, Man when things aren't actually Cool, Man, Eileen pulls her head back, taking in a breath that shudders a little as she inhales it.
She doesn't even dare start apologizing for yelling at him. She just closes her mouth.
DaneEileen
yells.
And if her talking about sex in such explicit detail was shocking, then this is flatly astounding. Dane stares. A bird in a tree -- all the way over by the shoreline, which is a good few hundred feet away -- flaps noisily and startledly away. If there was some nice, plump fish underwater, some trout that might have been their dinner eyeing the morsel on the hook -- well, he's gone long before Eileen
is finished
and takes that breath that shakes a little. Dane isn't sure if that's anger or a sort of shock of her own. He doesn't imagine she gets that angry very often; she doesn't seem the type. She wasn't even angry when Charlie threw a goddamn tantrum when they came in to help him.
A silence stretches, awkward. Dane reaches out and fiddles with the pole again, rolling in a bit of the slack that the line had developed.
"I don't know what I want," he says after a while. "So, you're right about that."
eileenIt isn't Dane's quiet response, fiddling with the fishing pole, that makes Eileen look so miserable. He could be yelling at her right now and she'd probably still be sinking inside. She looks like she took that breath and just held it, tense as a post, waiting for his reaction. He says he's so dangerous, but she isn't afraid that he's going to hurt her. She's never afraid that he's going to hurt her.
They do trust each other. Some.
"I'm sorry I raised my voice," she says, so quietly, as though to compensate for her explosion a moment ago. She's tugging at the loose threads at the bottoms of her cutoffs, anxiously. "I..."
Eileen takes a breath, exhales slowly. "Right or not, I care about you. And I respect you. And you're my friend. So... I'm sorry I shouted at you." She frowns, thinking a little while, then looks at him. "Maybe we should take a break. Just... be alone today, each of us, for awhile. There's just too much in the air right now, it's hard to breathe."
DaneNow it's Dane's turn to look a little miserable. Not so long ago she was saying she wanted to listen to him fish. What a silly little thing, he thought; and yet at the same time he wanted it too. He wanted her to lie there on the gently slope-hulled bottom of the canoe, swaying with the current, listening to the lap of water and the occasional hiss of his fishing line. He wanted that sort of peace. And quiet. And acceptance.
A strange word to think of, that. Acceptance. But it's what comes to mind; it's what lingers there, even after he nods.
"All right," he says. "Let's go back to shore. I suppose I'll fish. I'll leave you my car keys, in case you want to go into town."
eileenEileen shakes her head. "No, I'll swim." Simple as that. She's wearing her suit. Her towel is lying on the shore, waiting for her. She quickly shucks her cutoffs, explaining: "It'll help. Like... meditating. Or going to a gun range. I'm not saying that ever really helped me, but I could see the appeal and I know a lot of people who are pretty seriously down with putting a few rounds in the ground occasionally to help themselves think."
She looks over at him, taking off her sunglasses. "I'll stay around here. My phone isn't really getting reception out here, but I never get lost and I'll try to make sure I'm back before it gets dark so you don't worry."
Of course she never gets lost. She knows exactly where and when she is, always. All she has to do is tune out and turn on.
The way she's looking at him is a little longing and a little sad, both. She wants somehow to let him know everything is going to be all right. That she never stays mad for more than a few seconds. That despite it all she still really does want to be here, and be with him, even if she doesn't know what that means and even if it kinda hurts and confuses her and makes her angry. But then, Eileen doesn't like most running-away drugs. She's the type who is always running-towards.
"It'll be okay, Thomas," she says quietly. "I promise."
The canoe doesn't really tip much to the side when she puts her hand on the edge and drops herself over; she isn't that heavy. But she does drop herself into the water neatly, toes pointed downward, hair soon streaming upward. There's a splash, a bit, not enough to wash over Thomas. She comes back up a moment later, hair plastered to her face and neck and streaming out around her, floating on the water. She smiles. It aches, but it's there, and it somehow is reassuring: everything will be okay. She promises.
"I think I'll take some LSD. Maybe E, so it doesn't last as long. I never liked doing LSD by myself anyway. It's just that it's so good for working things out, you know?"
DaneIt is necessary, and it does ache, when she tells him it'll be okay. He needed to hear that, somehow, even though it doesn't make him feel much better. He still sits a little straighter, involuntarily, and hold his breath just a little when she flips neatly over the edge.
When she surfaces his spine relaxes again. He's frowning as she smiles. And then she tells him her plans, and he goes on frowning at her, and at the end she says you know? and he just shakes his head.
"No," he says, "I don't."
It's okay, though. He looks at the sun's position, then back at her. "I'll be back when I have some fish," he says. "Maybe mid-afternoon. I'll see you then?"
eileenTreading water, she looks up at him, her legs vanished somewhere in the center of the lake, making her look even more like a mermaid come to make friends with him. She looks comfortable in the water, which somehow isn't surprising. It's freezing cold, though, and she doesn't pretend it isn't. She's shivering within moments. This will not be a leisurely swim for several hours; she's going to get to shore quickly and curl up in her towel in the sun for awhile.
She smiles, though. "It isn't for everybody." A brief, sad expression. "It might be a bad trip for you. I don't want that."
Not that she's offering to share, not that she expects him to partake of anything psychoactive with her. She's pretty sure he wouldn't even be down with a little ganja, which only makes feeding it to him in edibles incredibly tempting and yet very very wrong and she's not going to do that, come on, he's her friend.
She loves him, a little.
Eileen flicks some water at him from her fingertips. "Catch us a good dinner, you manly outdoorsmanly manly man-man," she says, and turns in the water, sweeping her arms through it, propelling herself forward.
DaneIn truth, that little, possibly-nameless lake that Dane canoes and fishes on is so small that Eileen can easily keep sight of him all afternoon if she wishes. He takes his time. He doesn't seem to be dawdling needlessly, doesn't seem to be out there just to avoid coming back -- but he takes his time. He casts. He waits. He lays down at one point, watching the sky. He catches one fish around eleven, another around two. A last one late in the afternoon, four or four thirty, and that's the last. He picks up the oar, after that, and paddles himself back in long, alternating strokes, jumping out of the canoe when he's a few yards offshore to pull the little vessel ashore.
He has the fish in a bucket, his pole and tacklebox in his other hand. He looks a little more tanned than he was this morning, and a little more burnt. Whether or not Eileen is in the tiny cabin, he nudges his way in with his foot, setting the bucket of live fish in the sink, rinses the fishing pole, and then dismantles it over the kitchen table.
When she comes back, or if she's there -- he's quiet a while. Then he speaks without much lead-in, and quietly:
"I think perhaps... it's best if we stop discussing and examining all the minutiae of our relationship. I realize I'm the main driving force behind that, so you shouldn't take this as a complaint on your behavior. At all. Because it's not. It's just that -- the more we discuss it, the more I think about it, and the more I think about it, the more I feel I have to justify everything I do to myself, and to you. That drains the emotion from what we have. It ... paralyzes me. Because I don't know what I want, and I certainly don't know why or if I should want."
He sets the pieces of the pole in the box, then puts his hands on the table. Looks at Eileen.
"What I'm saying is: I'd like for us to just be. And to just see where it goes. And I'll try not to overthink every step, nor stop myself because I think I should stop. I'll try to simply ... do what feels right.
"Is that fair?"
eileenThat lake is so small that Dane can see her when she reaches shore, walking up out of the water, her hair a saturated, dark curtain down her back. She stands on the short and wrings it out to her side. He can see her, if he looks, when she walks with her towel around her waist into the cabin, and when she comes out again, her hair in a wet braid and wearing ...well. Her bikini, still. At least she has a pair of shoes on, maybe. But that's the last he sees of her for a long time.
She wasn't kidding about the drugs, though.
If you ask Eileen, or many Cultists, the talk around psychoactive drugs is mostly positive and not very wary. If you follow a few simple common-sense rules it's the same as any other altering substance, but you wouldn't know that from the way the world treats it. They talk about therapeutic uses and about Buddhist monks, about euphoria and inner peace. Their common sense rules go back to dose-set-setting, a rhythmic and almost poetic triad of words that blur together and roll off the tongue, which only makes the Cultists like them more.
Eileen in particular knows what she's bringing to the table when she interacts with a drug. She knows what's inside of her. She knows that the drug, like an angel, is going to meet her exactly where she is, and if she isn't honest with herself about where she is, she's in for a very bad trip indeed.
When she swallows the little orange pill with the lotus flower imprinted onto it, it is as sacred as taking communion. It isn't always. Today it is. She closes her eyes and lays out in the sunlight between some trees. It's not the same as taking it in a club or in an orgy. It's always different. Every moment is different. The passage of time does not frighten her. She listens to things. She turns on, and magic flows out from and around her, becomes an aura that is so bright and so colorful that one would think fairies might flock to her, but she's alone in the woods and yet
never less alone.
It's hours upon hours later when she comes wandering back to the cabin. She's drowsy, and thirsty, a little dizzy, and yet not depressed, not sore, not sick to her stomach. She's in the afterglow, and looking forward to seeing Thomas again. It's still hours before sunset, too. She sees the canoe on shore and smiles. Her hair is down now, dry now, wavy now. She's carrying an empty water bottle. She's lightly tanned, a warm golden color, but the tops of her shoulders and the top of her nose and cheeks are a bit red. When she comes in she leaves the door open behind her, because it's warm outside and the breeze will keep the cabin from smelling like fishwater all night.
She smiles when she sees Dane. "Thomas," she says, and comes to him, wraps her arms around him, eyes closed and smiling. It's not a brief hug, nor is it a lingering one. It's a good, firm hug, and then she lets him go, dropping her sun-dry body to the bed and digging around in her backpack for real clothes: panties, the cutoffs she had on in the canoe earlier, a t-shirt. Dane sits with his back to her and she changes, and as she's coming to the kitchen to get more water -- apparently at peace with the silence -- he begins to speak.
Unstartled, she looks over at him. Lets him know with her eyes for a moment that she's listening, but goes on getting more water. She's very thirsty, though her appetite hasn't come back yet. She comes slowly to sit across from him, and he says what's on his mind.
She nods, at the end. "I'd like that."
And that's all. Which, for Eileen, is almost as surprising as her outburst earlier on the lake. She holds her water in a clay mug like it's coffee, and she sits slumped in her chair, knees against the edge of the table, feet on the edge of her chair. Peace, now. Acceptance that, for awhile, was so hard for her to hold onto. She doesn't even ask him waht feels right at the moment. He'll do it, or say it, even if it's nothing. She realizes, a moment later:
"I will, too."
Then, setting her legs down and leaning forward, she squeezes one of his hands in hers. And leans back again, curls up again, sipping her water.
DaneIn a way, they've both meditated. They've both communed with their own gods, in their own ways. When they come back together she looks calm, drowsy, warm, languid. He looks thoughtful, pensive ... but calmer, too, in some undefined way. More settled.
So, Eileen was right about this, too: they needed time apart. And things are all right, in the end. And she meets him over that table. He says his piece: all the things that came together in his thinker's mind over the course of the afternoon. She
simply nods. Agrees. And a little later, makes a realization of her own.
Dane smiles at her over the table. It crinkles the edges of his eyes a bit. His hand turns over under hers. He returns the little squeeze. Then he exhales.
"Do you want to build a little bonfire tonight? We can just sear the fish over and open fire and eat it with a little salt, pepper and lemon."
eileenThis, too, Eileen has an easy and brief answer to: she gives a single sweep of her head, up and then down, quite firm. "Yes."
She smiles. "Did we bring cocoa? I feel like we did. If not I'll just... melt chocolate and add milk. I'll make rice for dinner. And we can eat some raw veggies. And make s'mores and cocoa for dessert."
It gets less brief after her initial agreement. But she smiles, slowing down, laughing quietly to herself just because she can tell her appetite is coming back. "We could start now. It's still a couple of hours til it's dark, but we should have a fire and watch the sunset."
Dane"You got a few packets of instant cocoa at the store yesterday," Dane reminds her. Their hands are still joined; it's with a little bit of regret that he pulls back, straightening. "I think we put them on the shelf. Do you know how to build a fire? I still need to clean the fish."
It's a little absurd, he reflects: he doesn't want her to have to watch that. Not that messy, brutal business of bashing heads, slicing bowels. Fishing is secretly quite savage. It's not the first time he's thought that today. It's perhaps not the first time he's wanted to protect Eileen from something, either, even though he knows, even though she's told him,
she hasn't survived the ascension war totally untouched. No one has.
eileen"I did?" she says, brightening, and her hand moves in his, like an extension of laughter that never quite makes it out of her lips. She smiles at him, even as he lets go her hand. She likes the way he is always straightening up, squaring his shoulders, clearing his throat, things like that. Running his hand down his face. "Oh, do I know how to build a fire," she says, scoffing. "You take one of those log-things, and you put wood all around it, and then -- we don't have any of those log things though, do we?"
Eileen screws up her face. "I guess I'll clean the fish. I hope I can get at least some kind of network up here, though, cuz I'll have to Google it. I bet there's a ton of YouTube videos about it."
Undeterred by her uselessness in the wild, Eileen finishes her entire mug of water in one great chug, putting it down on the table when she's done. "Where's the knife?"
DanePredictably, Dane balks. "It's messy," he hedges. "And it takes practice. It's not even the cleaning that's the worst part. There's also the killing. You must hit them hard and fast, or they'll suffer a long death. You should build the fire instead; it's easier."
eileenThere's a soft look in Eileen's eyes there, at Dane's balking. The way he describes it. She leans over again and puts her hand on top of his, just looking at him,
willing him to hear every word he just said to her,
in another context. In another part of her life. And strangely enough there's a small smile on her face, gentle for him, and yet appreciative, too. He thinks about her aversion to suffering, and many wouldn't, not when it's Just A Fish.
"It's okay," she says. "We'll do both together."
DaneDane hesitates a moment. Then - without quite caving in or giving up - he agrees. "All right. I'll teach you, then."
Which is what he does. And it's a tiny ritual, as much as her taking that pill had been; as much as his fishing was; as much as so many tiny, insignificant little things are rituals in their world. They wash their hands first, taking turns on the pump and under the faucet. Then they take the bucket of fish out onto the porch. There are three -- two yellow perch and a pike, dappled and sinuous in the water. Dane has brought a pair of knives out: a heavy cleaver and a long, thin, curved slicer. He also has an icepick with him, and a broad, flat board.
"The easier way," he explains as they crouch over the filleting board, "is to hit the top of the head between the eye and the gill. You want to use the back of the cleaver, and you'll want to hit hard. The first time you do it you may accidentally smash the skull and make a mess, but that's better than having to hit it over and over. The other way, which is more difficult, is to drive a pick into the head -- about where you'd hit the the cleaver -- and destroy the brain with a rapid sweep. It's not easy, but it's a cleaner kill. I'll show you both, and then you can try whichever you prefer."
And so he does: hands sure, mouth set, holding the wriggling, flashing fish in his hands and making them go still. He leaves the last of the three for her, setting both tools down beside the filleting board, passing her the bucket as he picks up the cleaning knife.
Whatever Eileen chooses to do, Dane goes on as methodically and businesslike as before. He shows her where to slice, what to remove; tosses the guts and air bladder and all the rest of the mess back into the bucket. He'll throw it back into the lake, he says, for the other fish. Circle of life and all that. He lets her gut the second and the third fish, and when they're done he goes inside to get a baking pan, which he fills with ice and water. They set the cleaned fish in the pan, cover it, and wash their hands.
Then it's the most primitive ritual of all mankind: the building of the fire. They find a spot on the shore, away from the grass and close to the lake, where they pile a circle of rocks to contain the flame. Then Dane shows her how to stack the logs so that they can breathe, and where to set the kindling. A few matches touched to rolled-up scraps of paper serve as their firestarter, and as the smoke starts to curl into flame Dane finds a fallen branch to use as a poker, which he hands to Eileen once the fire is good and started.
"The smoke'll keep the mosquitos away," he says. "I think there might be a couple lawn chairs in the cabin, under the bed. Let's bring them out, maybe have a beer."
eileenThere are things Eileen has done in her life that no twenty-something she knows has ever experienced or dreamt of experiencing. She has done things that many war veterans don't want to imagine. She knows how to build a fire with a starter log and nothing else, but she's very good at roasting marshmallows. She has no idea how to kill, gut, and clean a fish that's been caught for dinner. So she smiles when Dane says he'll teach her.
It is a ritual. A deeper one, it seems, from the way Eileen approaches it. She washes her hands carefully, with motions that seem almost surgical. She is solemn when they come to the porch, out in the sunlight as though what they're about to do isn't very dark, in its way. But the meal will be delicious, and if she intends to eat, she must not shy from the killing. If she wants to live, she must not shy from death. She knows this. She has known this since she was too young to be thinking of such things.
The first fish is still alive when Dane pulls it from the bucket. Eileen is kneeling next to him, hands on her knees, well out of the way when he raises the cleaver and kills it. Then she shows her where to place the pick, the hard, sharp stroke to kill it.
But when he looks at her after, there are already tears in her eyes, welling up thick and wet against the gray. She apologizes, wiping at her eyes with the heels of her hands, trying to remember that this is a good thing, this isn't inherently bad or wrong, but she doesn't say any of that aloud. She just says she's sorry, and she calms down soon enough, insisting that she'll do the next one, which she does,
with a shockingly quick and clean blow through the brain, but as soon as the fish flops for the last time and is not a living thing anymore but a slab of meat to be eaten, Eileen bursts into renewed tears, her hand still on its side, setting the pick down.
He'll notice that her hands don't shake, though. Not so much as a tremor. This has nothing to do with fear. Strangely, even the tears seem cathartic, seem wholesome and ...safe, somehow. She cries a little longer, this time, and accepts comfort if it's offered, but she does calm down on her own. Sniffs away moisture. Wipes her eyes on her upper arms, this time. Blinks away the rest of the tears and does not insist, or argue, or any of that, when Dane takes the cleaver and the ice pick and does the other two. She does not cover her eyes. She lets loose only a few tears, because these deaths aren't as protracted, but when they're all finished, she exhales a long breath and looks at them for a moment, in silence.
And that ritual is done.
There's none of that when they clean the fish, though. That's just meat. That's just cooking. This, Eileen does easily, handling a knife on the fish and making gagging faces as they pull organs out. "That's cannibalism," she says archly, as though annoyed with the fish that are going to eat the guts of their friends. She is quite eager to wash up after that, making ick noises as she gets 'fish slime' off her fingers.
Building a fire is more joyous. She likes the forming of the circle, the hauling of the wood, the arranging of the pieces, the delicacy of the kindling. She reads bits from the old newspapers before they tear them, roll them up, burn them. She gives a woop and jumps up as the fire takes to the wood finally, dancing away from it, fists in the air, her shirt pulling up over her newly-tanned abdomen.
"I should have brought a bandana," she says, and instead starts re-braiding her impossible hair, loose over her shoulder. Dane tries to hand her the poker and she darts away, laughing, as though he's chasing her with it, which he isn't and wouldn't. She grins, though, and the sun hasn't even set yet but is golden in the sky still, shining off her legs. She goes with him to get the lawn chairs out, and they're covered in dust so they wipe them off with cloths and pull beers from the ice box. Eileen's stomach growls after that first drink of beer, and she remembers how long it's been since breakfast.
Occasionally she sticks her legs out to warm her bare feet to the edges of the fire's heat, and she smiles. "Let's play Two Truths and a Lie."
DaneThere's something as quietly miraculous about this. As much as those stars Dane kindled out of the air, this is a sort of magic. Blood-magic, perhaps. One thing dies. Another comes to life.
Dane doesn't say any of that out loud, though. He thinks -- well, he thinks too much, really; but still: he thinks of all people, Eileen would be one who would understand, who wouldn't mind. Still, it's a little embarrassing to voice, and so he doesn't.
He does comfort her when she cries, though. Or he tries too, putting his arm around her, hugging her against his side until she calms. It doesn't take very long. She's not hysterical. Her hands were steady and quick; she didn't make true butchery out of slaughter, which he respects. Afterward the mood is a little lighter, and she makes ick noises, and he laughs under his breath.
"That's nature," he counters. "Besides, there are other kinds of fish in the lake. It doesn't necessarily have to be cannibalism."
It's not yet dark, nor even dusk, when the fire is lit. It flickers, nearly invisible in the sunlight, visible largely by its effects - wood turning black, curling to smoke. One thing dies and another lives. They can feel its warmth, which is almost too much right now with the sun still bright on their bodies. They'll be glad for it later, though, when the sun is gone and the night has come, and the chill returns to these northern waters.
Eileen's stomach growls. Dane gets up without commentary and goes to get the chilled fish, along with the grille from the stove, which he now props over the open fire. While he sets up cooking, Eileen proposes a game. He considers a moment, and then he sits back, letting the grille heat up before putting the fish on.
"All right," he agrees. "What were the rules again? And, you start."
eileen"Fish are fish!" she argues, as they're washing. "Eating bits of bladder. I don't eat bladders. And that's why people have computers and fish don't." Which is a bit of a leap, but it makes at least some sense. She's so light, now, though so filled with pain as they killed. It's hard to explain. He doesn't ask her to. She doesn't try. It's clear she sees it as something of a weakness, though, something of a problem -- though why, it's not as easy to see. It doesn't seem that she thinks she should be immune to death, immune to suffering. But it's debilitating to her. She isn't really okay until it's over.
And she also sticks out her tongue at him as they're drying their hands. "And I know nature is messy. I'm a woman. Menstruation! Childbirth! Ick, ack, ugh!" She flaps her hands, then claps them together. "Fish guts are still gross."
Which he can't argue with. He can try, but it'll be futile.
Outside, awhile later, a fire starting to crackle and the sun starting to set, lazing in their chairs with beer, Dane moves from his chair as soon as her stomach growls and starts to cook. She blinks, but smiles as she watches him set up the grill. "Thank you," she murmurs, too. As for the rules: "Oh, there aren't really any. We have to each say three things about ourselves: two true, one a lie, and the other has to guess which one is the lie." He tells her to start and she laughs, leans forward.
Thinks. Hard. Like a sculpture, or like a Pooh Bear.
"The smell of cinnamon gum makes me want to throw up," she begins. "My favorite color is yellow. Red wine gives me migraines."
Dane"I know yellow is the truth," he says. "And... I'm going to guess red wine is the lie."
eileenEileen laughs. "You're wrong," she says. "I don't have a favorite color. I do, but... it changes. I just like color. It means different things depending on what it's for. I like how it is in my apartment, though. The yellow there makes it... warm and bright and comforting and... makes it feel like spring and summer even when it's cold and wet and dark outside." She's smiling. So much, so broadly. "Your turn."
Dane"You tricked me." he accuses. "You knew the yellow in your apartment would throw me."
Dane takes a drink of his beer, thinking. Brooding, she might think, but ... no, he doesn't think she'd really think that. He looks out over the lake for a moment. The sun actually sets behind them here, but the view is still nice: the opposing treeline painted warm colors by the shifting light.
"I once won a hot dog eating contest," he says. "My parents are members of the same country club as the Kennedys. I have a model airplane collection."
eileenEileen grins. "Well, then I'm gonna win, I guess," she says, and he's not imagining that note of challenge in her voice. It's an invitation to play. To chase. If she were a dog she'd be playbowing, forelegs extended and tail up, eager to burst forward with all that energy he knows she has.
He broods. And thinks. Drinks his beer. And gives her the most ridiculous opening statement. She lights up, and stares at him, then claps lightly. "Yooou...are lying about the model airplanes."
Dane"Probably," he agrees, and brings the beer up for another sip.
And he's sipping again while she mulls over what he says -- sipping when she picks model airplanes, which makes his grin suddenly behind the lip of the bottle. He glances at her, "Yes. And for the record, the hot dogs happened when I was twelve.
"Now you."
eileenShe sticks her fists in the air. She's already winning. "You know how I know?" she tells him, too eager. "You're not the type to have a bunch of stuff lying around. Collections, I mean. I'd be really really surprised if you had an airplane collection. Or any kind of collection, really. At least of anything kinda useless."
Eileen curls up in her chair, thinking a bit before she comes up with her next set. Then, brightening: "I won a handwriting award in fourth grade, I have made and enjoyed an ostrich-egg omellete, annnd I didn't give up my pacifier for good until the day I started kindergarten."
DaneDane takes a little longer to answer this time, eyeing her as he considers her two truths and a lie. After quite some time he hazards a guess, "The handwriting. That's the lie. Am I right?"
eileen"I had horrible handwriting," she admits, shaking her head almost morosely. "I actually had to stay after school once because my teacher was so fed up and she couldn't read anything I'd turned in. Then I basically got detention and had to re-do every assignment in perfect handwriting before I could turn it back in again. It was horrible. I had the worst hand cramps, but my parents -- my parents, who you'd think would DEFEND me -- were totally stern about it and made me do it anyway and what's weird is that I had really good handwriting after that because I practiced so much but sometimes if I'm really crabby I make illegible scrawls just to be defiant."
Dane"Hah!" It's one of the more unrestrained sounds she's heard him make. "I was between that and the pacifier. I was quite sure the ostrich egg omelette was true, if only because you would have loved to experience something like that at least once. The pacifier, I wasn't certain about. You don't seem the type to rely on much. But then, you were five. And the handwriting... I'm sorry, Eileen, but you simply don't strike me as the type to have perfect handwriting. At least," he allows, "not by nature."
A moment's thought, hrrming. Then:
"I went skydiving for my twenty-first birthday. I've never built a sandcastle in my life. I lived in Paris for a few years as a teenager."
eileenShe grins as he starts to get into it, explains his choices, thinks, tells her things, more than just the statements and whether they're true or false. She hunches up her shoulders, grinning. "My best friend and I had this thing about weird foods. We totally bonded over it. And... yeah. The pacifier was like, this thing I would hide and take out when I was upset or couldn't sleep, so it wasn't like I used it often by then, but it was still this big deal and my dad took a picture of me throwing it in the garbage on my way out the door, wearing my little backpack and everything."
Her eyes widen a bit at his choices. "Oh, you're getting serious now," she tells him, then has to think for awhile. "I think... that... the skydiving is a lie."
Dane"Damn it. How did you know?"
eileenThis time she outright squeals with delight. "I almost didn't. But...well. If your parents share a country club with the Kennedy family, it's likely that you had the opportunity to study or travel abroad. I'm a bit surprised by the sandcastle thing, because I could sort of see you being the crazy, energetic, let's-do-something-suicidal type at age 21, but not... really. You're not really frivolous."
She pauses a moment, tipping her head. "Maybe that's why I guessed you'd never built a sandcastle, which is why we are totally going back to one of those beaches and doing so later this summer."
Dane"Well; it wasn't so much an opportunity as it was my parents deciding to separate. My mother took my brother and I and moved to Paris. It was interesting. I liked it well enough. Three years later my parents reunited and we went back in time for me to go to high school, and James to go to junior high.
"As for my birthday, I think all I did was get quite drunk. And I've tried building a sandcastle before. It's not as easy as it looks. Mine fell apart. But then I didn't have one of those little plastic buckets children use.
"So: hit me with the next one."
eileenEileen's eyebrows go up a bit when he says his parents separated but reunited. That's rare, especially these days. He tried and failed to build a sandcastle: that's a little heartbreaking. She thinks for a moment, though, letting it pass, then says: "I have two older brothers, my parents are divorced, and I'm originally from San Francisco."
Dane"I don't think you have brothers," Dane decides. The pause, this time, is not terribly long.
eileenEileen winces for him. "Ooh," she says. "I have two." She grins. "Care to guess again, for partial credit?"
DaneDane makes a disgruntled noise, sitting up to poke at the fire and check on the fish. "No," he says, "it'll be even more embarrassing if I'm wrong again."
eileenShe smiles, and laughs lightly, so she just tells him: "My parents are still married. And still live in San Francisco. My oldest brother is Noah, and he lives in New York. Our other brother, Charlie, lives with our parents." She pauses a moment there. "His IQ is like... forty-something. He didn't get enough oxygen when he was being born. Which is why when mom had me, she was like, gung-ho about getting a C-section."
There's another pause. "He really loves blowing bubbles like you would not believe, though." Eileen reaches over with her foot and nudges his calf with her toe. "Your turn."
eileen[I rename oddar-brudder to something else when I think of it!]
DaneEileen can see a certain awareness flicker in Dane's eyes at the name, Charlie. Again, when she says he's impaired, he was suffocated during birth, damaged. He wonders, momentarily, if that was why. It's only a moment. Then he sets it aside. He knows it's not.
"I Awakened in the middle of a physics experiment," he says. "The first rote I learned to cast was to conjure fire. I make a mean canard à l'orange."
DaneEileen can see a certain change in Dane's eyes when she tells him about her brother, the middle one, the one whose brain was starved at oxygen during birth. It's something like sympathy, though not pity. It's only momentarily, anyway -- it goes away as he's nudged, as he thinks of another lie. And two truths.
"I Awakened in the middle of a physics experiment," he says. "The first rote I learned to cast was to conjure fire. I make a mean canard à l'orange."
eileenTalking about her brother doesn't bother Eileen much. It's always awkward, though. People always seem to think they need to say something, like they might say something to make it better somehow, or like they assume it's so horrible it needs to be made better. Sometimes it explains a bit: no wonder her parents let her get away with a pacifier for so long, when she really really needed it at least. They were so happy to have a girl, so grateful that she was healthy and fit and bright after the trauma that came in the wake of their second son's birth. They couldn't explain to her, for such a long time, what was different or why, and so sometimes, yes,
they let her go to bed with her binky in her mouth, sucking steadily away to soothe herself to sleep. It was easier than fighting with her when they were so exhausted from struggling with her brother.
Dane, at least, doesn't try to figure out something he should say. He doesn't express a bunch of sympathy or ask her weird questions about her retarded brother. He takes his turn, and she smiles. "Well, the second one is obviously a lie."
DaneDane slaps his own knee in exasperation. "Are you reading my mind!"
eileenShe laughs aloud. "No, I just know how magic works, silly. Maybe the first spell you cast was conjuring fire. I heard of an orphan whose first use of magic involved not only slowing her fall from a cliff but unconsciously healing about eighty broken bones so she didn't die as soon as she hit the rocks below, but that's not the same as a rote or a spell. Lots of people have great and powerful bursts right at the start, but when you have to turn around and start buckling down, there's no way someone tries to teach you that right off the bat.
"Also!" Eileen goes on, "you didn't specify what kind of conjuring you meant, and also you used the word 'conjure', which really isn't a very 'Thomas' word to begin with. Creating fire from nothing is way too advanced for an apprentice, and creating fire from readily available fuel and other forces is totally different. So what kind of experiment were you doing?"
DaneDane thumps back in his chair, smiling wryly at Eileen. "You know those air-tracks with the gliders? They work a little like air hockey. A monorail with little holes in it that continuously blow air out, and a little glider that sits on the track and slides back and forth. It's a way to simulate zero friction at a relatively low cost. Very popular in high school and college physics laboratories.
"We were in the middle of a lab session. Deriving the kinematic equations. Acceleration, deceleration ... a lot of sliding that glider back and forth and making measurements of distance, time, etcetera. After a while I stopped paying attention to the numbers. I was just watching the glider. The movement; kinetic energy in an almost-pure form, unfettered by weight or friction or gravity. And suddenly it was like I could see it, see something that no one else could see, that invisible logic that made all those silly little equations work. And once I saw it, it was so easy, as natural as breathing, to manipulate it.
"The next thing I knew the glider was stopped dead on the track. One second it was coursing along, hardly losing speed at all on circuit after circuit. The next: nothing. Zero motion. My lab group thought maybe the air pumps had broken, or a seal was leaking, or something. I knew it wasn't any of that, though. I knew I had done that, somehow, which frightened me. Quite a bit, actually. So I ran out of class, and all the way home strange things were just happening around me. Trees I'd look at would split in half, or suddenly grow three feet. The sidewalk rippled like water sometimes. I was afraid to look up at the sky because I was pretty sure it had turned some strange color. People were staring at me. I thought maybe I'd gone insane, but ... once I got home and got some sleep it seemed to just pass. Weeks went by without incident. Then one day a representative of the local Hermetics came to find me and the rest, as they say, is history.
"Not so exciting as falling off a cliff," he finishes, reaching forward to turn the fish, "but there you have it."
eileenEileen listens intently, curled up in her lawn chair and holding her beer lazily between her fingers, arm hanging off the rest beside her. She smiles and nods when he asks her if she knows about those air gliders in physics labs. She doesn't interrupt, even to tell him that one of her favorite things to do when she turns on Forces sight is to observe gravity, which is why she managed to get a key made to the roof of her building so she can drop things off of it and probably the best thing in the world is a water balloon and has he ever seen those videos of guys doing stuff in slow motion because they are straight-up cray-cray.
She doesn't interrupt. And after a little while, she actually isn't even thinking of things to not say. It's easy to just listen to Dane. He talks about what he could see, and describes it very thinly, but she knows. She can see it, too. She has seen it. She's felt it. That is why all magic begins with the senses, with sight. That is why it is called an Awakening: the opening of the eyes. The coming of consciousness. To be blind, and then to see. To realize what things are, first, before you reach out to manipulate them.
But she knows that, too. Oh, she does. That craving. That need, almost, to reach out and manipulate. Stop the glider. Speed it along. Break something. Create something. They all begin as such children, so eager to impact their surroundings once they realize that they can.
At the end of the story she's smiling that small, soft, enigmatic smile of hers. "I don't know. Splitting trees down the middle sounds pretty exciting to me, even if you weren't meaning to." She takes a drink of her beer and thinks a moment, then: "I started out majoring in poli-sci. I don't have a driver's license. And I used to be a cheerleader."
DaneDane is more careful this time. He's one for three. That's abysmal. And it's not a competition, it's only a game, but -- he wants to know her. He wants to understand her. Of course, he's learning her right now, literally as they speak: learning her in so gentle, so unremarked a way that he barely even recognizes it.
"I can't imagine you ever majoring in poli-sci," he finally decides, "but I can see you cheerleading. And I'm fairly sure no state would ever give you a license."
eileenEileen laughs, in that delighted way that tells him that he is still losing. Horribly. "Oh, you're so bad at this game," she says, and nearly tips her lawn chair over by leaning over and kissing his arm, right on his t-shirt, because it's the easiest thing to reach. She plops back down and drinks her beer.
"I actually was not a cheerleader. I was very bookish and nerdy and rode my bike every day, but otherwise I wasn't athletic at all. But no, I totally don't have a license because there's no point, and I actually did start out as a political science major."
She sips again, shrugging. "At the time I was a consor to the Euthanatoi. I was interested in it -- politics, like money, are just a mundane sort of magic -- and I knew it could be helpful in ferreting out corruption in government, but... things changed. And I'm glad they did. Art is... so much more interesting to me."
Dane"This game is clearly loaded in your favor," Dane mock-grumbles. "You're an excellent judge of character, and you seem to have undergone a personality transplant on multiple occasions.
"One more round," he bargains, "and then we eat fish. Okay?"
eileen"Aww," she says, and nudges him with her toes. Physical contact. She's always doing that. Giving him a small kiss, or holding or squeezing his hand, or nudging him with her feet or crawling across the table to give him food or falling asleep beside him or sighing softly, thankfully in her sleep when he turns over and drapes his arm over her. Grabbing his arm and hugging it while he tries to get her to 'wake up'. She's so... touchy-touchy. Grabby hands. Sensation.
"You just don't know me that well yet," she tells him, smiling. "And... well, yeah. I am an excellent judge of character. So it must mean something good that I like you so much!" She perks at this realization, and grins. "One more turn for you. Then we eat fish."
DaneDane isn't really used to this much random physical contact. One imagines he was never really the touchy-touchy type, not even before whatever cataclysm ended his life as it was. He's a bit physically uncomfortable with it, stiffening involuntarily every time she touches him unexpectedly, hugs him, glomps him, kisses his arm --
and yet, at the same time, hungry for it. Starved for that kind of affection; that simple human contact. Every stiffening is always followed, as in this case, with a sort of softening. A seeking. Sometimes he leans into it. Sometimes he breathes a little differently. This time he only looks at her; smiles.
"Two more rounds, then," he allows. "Then we eat fish.
"I won a poetry prize once," he says. "I can write in mirror-script with my left hand. And I play the cello."
eileenEileen stares at him. She knows now that he's competitive. Quietly, gently, but it's there, and it excites her a little and endears her more. He's really fucking with her now. She bites her lower lip, watching him, and
she knows he's uncomfortable a little, too, but she can't help it, she would be sitting on his lap and curled up against his chest right now if she had her way, she'd be nuzzling him under his ear, not to turn him on but just to be close, to curl up like animals, to be warm and near and and and.
He doesn't ever tell her to stop, though, or anything like that. It's like getting a shot, almost, the way he reacts when she touches on him: he flinches, and then he feels better.
She huffs a laugh. "Um...the poetry prize is the lie?"
Dane"How are you doing this?!"
eileenThis time she's not sure. Maybe he doesn't play cello, although now he's confirmed that he does AND he's able to mirror-write with his left hand and it's so neat and she just wants to tackle him but she doesn't, she just giggles and kicks her legs, drinks her beer. "I solemnly swear I am not using magic but you would be able to tell if I were anyway so you don't need the solemn part. I'm not very solemn anyway."
Setting her empty bottle down, she looks over at him. "I want you to show me the other two sometime though."
Her feet come down, bare and soft, brushing over some grass. It feels good. "I have a PC but an iPhone, because all the fighting makes me sad and I want to be fair. I'm scared of heights, and my favorite Rolling Stones song is 'Sympathy for the Devil'."
DaneDane squints one eye at Eileen this time, as though this might help him pick the right answer. After quite a while he says, slowly:
"I can't imagine you being afraid of much. Which means you probably are, in fact, afraid of heights. You're from California and so are your parents, so I can believe the Rolling Stones one. And you're definitely not one for conflict, but I don't think you're that anti-conflict. So... I'm going with the iPhone/PC one. That's the lie."
eileenEileen just shakes her head. "Man. I even tried to make that one easy."
Dane"Damn it. I just assumed if you made it that easy you were laying a trap. I suppose you're not really the type for traps, either. All right." He sits up, scrubs his hands over his face for a second. "Let's see.
"Aside from France and the States, I've never been to a foreign country. I have an irrational fear of chickens. And ... "
he seems about to say something else. He stops. An odd, quirky little smile crosses his face. He says:
"Last night, I put my arm around you because I wanted to. Not because I was asleep and I didn't know what I was doing."
eileen"Aw," she says at first. "I'm not." He knows she's not -- the type to lay a trap for him, that is, wait for him to fall into her words and then spring it snap, shut, clenching into him. Even in a game. She doesn't like to cheat.
He keeps making his hard, though, and she keeps managing to figure him out. The real point of the game is to learn more about each other, though, not to prove what a good guesser either one of them is. She knows how he Awakened, now. She knows that he plays the cello and comes from wealth and status and influence. She knows it's very likely he speaks French. She knows, too, that
he'd never knowingly, willfully hurt her. She just knows that. So she smiles when he does, and says: "You are absolutely scared of chickens, so I guess you've never been anywhere but the States and France."
Eileen doesn't even mention the third as an option for the Lie.
DaneStrange, but as subtly competitive as Dane was getting, there's a moment when he wants to agree with Eileen, just so she'll be right again. He doesn't want to hurt her. He wants to protect her in this small, ridiculous way,
and when he recognizes the absurdity he stops, shaking his head. "I've actually fairly well-traveled. Antarctica is the only continent I haven't set foot on yet. And I'm not frightened of chickens. My daughter was, though." The revelations are getting a little more painful, even though it makes him laugh, just a little, to remember. "She said they had T-rex eyes. Which isn't entirely incorrect; they are descended from dinosaurs."
eileenThis is a sort of pain that Eileen can almost see beauty in, comfort in. Healing in. She can't see that he wanted to protect her even from getting one single question wrong, and neither one of them is mentioning his admission, his confession, from just a second ago: he held her because he wanted her to. It wasn't really an accident.
Her head leans against the back of her chair. "Chickens are kind of freaky," she says, agreeing with Dane's daughter. And then, because it feels strange to say it like that even in her own head, she asks quietly: "What's her name?"
DaneA tiny little silence - hesitation and ache both. Then, simply, "Molly. For Marie." A small pause, and then he takes a breath; moves along. "Go ahead. Give me another one."
eileenA soft smile at that. A lovely name, and nickname. She doesn't say so, though -- at least not out loud. She has enough faith in Dane to know he can read it, though. She may or may not be giving him too much credit. She doesn't think she is. But then, Eileen tends to err on the optimistic side.
But she shakes her head. "Nah. We've both done five. I'll just tell you: my greatest regret about my apartment is that it doesn't have a tub, I've never read the Lord of the Rings, and no, I actually don't like roller derby and it's not the one place where I don't mind seeing people getting hurt. I went once and had a panic attack."
Eileen gets up, stretching gently. The sun is dipping lower in the sky, not yet setting but warming the dome of heaven above them, turning it colors. She arches her back and she stretches her arms up, she makes herself a crescent, then she sweeps that long, thick braid of hers back off her shoulder and walks over to him, getting down on her knees and crossing her arms on top of his knees, looking up at him. Her chin rests on her folded arms.
"And my heart was pounding when you came to bed last night," she tells him quietly. "It felt right when you put your arm around me." Another truth, because none of these are lies now, spoken not in a whisper but in a voice like a poem: "You make me feel like I'm levitating."
She's not sure he can answer any of that, much less all of it. So she absolves him of the need to speak, and kisses his knee, and pulls back, getting to her feet again. "I'll go get the rice."
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