2017-05-14: The Past Never Dies
- Log: The Past Never Dies
- Cast: Noah Hawthorne, Cassidy Cain
- Where: Baskar Encampment, Outskirts of Adlehyde
- Date: May 14, 2017
- Summary: With trouble having chased her out of Port Timney, and knowing that there's bound to be more of it, Cassidy Cain lingers in the outskirts of Aldehyde to send a few messages through a trusted courier, and comes across a badly injured Noah Hawthorne, fresh out of his very bad day in Lahan.
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
It's deep in the cradle of the evening, and the sky is heavy with close-hanging stars. Port Timney is quieter now than it was two nights ago, the bulk of followers attendant to the Shepherd (and tourists curious about the spectacle of his presence) having departed for investigations into the foul emanations of Malevolence wreathing the blasted city of Lahan. Before Noah followed them, its peace seemed surreal after so much chaos; by now, it must be practically serene. Workers on the docks conduct business unhindered, open-air bars nearby sleepy with late-night regulars and quiet conversation. Courting couples at restaurant tables have long since finished eating and linger, reflecting candlelight and sultry interest at one another across the span of small tables through the conduits of lasting eye contact and fingertips that lightly brush and play over their opposites as employees give them dirty looks and check clocks, eager to go home. Light breezes sweep through plazas that only two days ago were thronged with life, now empty and echoing, bits of litter still gusting through them as mementos of a better time.
This is the peace toward which Noah Hawthorne thinks he's riding, though the hush that has descended on him has less to do with the hour or the populace of the city than the way he left most of his blood behind in Lahan, and has been draining of the remainder at a slower but still dreadfully steady pace ever since.
He looks not unlike he's just had an intimate encounter with a blender -- which is not far off from the truth. Countless smaller cuts are nicked across his limbs, one perforation on the outside of his thigh where he was run through, but the worst by far is in his right side below the ribs: a large vertical cut front and back where a massive weapon drove through him, widened by futile efforts on the part of his assailant to yank it free and his own weight as he dangled there. His shirt is a black smear from chest height down, front and back, and across the course of his ride has dried enough to turn sticky, clinging uncomfortably, still gleaming in the moonlight where the wound resides and continues to ooze.
There is blood in the mane of his horse, and drizzled down the white stretch of its left shoulder. It's pooled in the saddle, in his shoes.
The alchemical agent he used on the killing field is wearing off, the temporary boon to his health fading. By the time the destrier is close enough to the city that the lights swim out of the darkness for him, his eyes want to unfocus and his head is spinning. Enough that he doesn't notice the horse has brought him all the way back to the endless, sleepless bustle of Adlehyde rather than Port Timney, retracing their journey of over a week ago. Returning to the last place it had a decent meal, as horses do, without any heed paid to his rider's condition.
That Noah is still upright in the saddle by that time is a miracle owed to a decade of horsemanship, a stubborn disposition, and a suite of survival skills. Entering Adlehyde without his wits about him, though, seems likely to have him hauled from it, thrown to the ground, robbed, and his horse stolen, and he's in no condition to predict that, let alone guard himself against it.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
Business has taken her to the very outskirts of the city; that encounter with Kid Bartlett had only given her plenty of impetus to return to Adlehyde posthaste, in order to send a few messages through a trusted courier she knows there. Needless, really; the Mercy Killers are not unknown elements to her, she knows Kid will be back, and with a considerable number of dangerous people with him.
It is from this office that she steps out of, the evening breeze rustling through her hair as she stops at the building's porch, snagging a cigarette between her teeth from the pack that materializes between her fingers like magic, her silver lighter with its ouroboros decal on her other set as a light is struck and the flare of red-gold embers illuminate her face for a second or two, bringing those pale features in sharp relief before the shadows claim them again. Smoke curls up from the end, reaching for the heavens as Cassidy takes a deep drag of it, letting its poison fill her lungs and the rest of it to escape the slight part of her mouth.
There is a folded pamphlet in her hand - the headline was interesting enough that the blonde had the foresight to snatch a copy before the rest have been claimed, true to form in a town that has been decidedly seized by Old Stuff Fever - the Exhibit's constant delays have been legion, but if the print is to be believed, most of those problems have been resolved. It means, somewhere in the ever-churning wheels and cogs of her perpetually active brain, that she is running out of time to learn what she needs to in order to keep her head above water - if she and Jude are right in their theories, anyway, with respect as to when this supposed cataclysm is going to hit the city. Privately, she wonders whether Noah has seen it yet; they parted ways in Port Timney after the incident with his cuneiform bone, and she hasn't seen him since.
"Nae time like the present," the woman murmurs, a boot sliding out of the porch and taking a step into the street, just as the plodding sound of a horse's hooves reaches her ears.
Her hand is on the revolver at the small of her back, handily disguised by a graceful pivot to face the direction from which it comes from.
There are rumors about her; that Luck has a strange kind of stranglehold over her and, indirectly, those who insist on being around her orbit - strange coincidences, convenient twists of serendipity, little things that enable her to do the impossible no matter how insurmountable the odds. She has very little patience for superstition, but in moments like these, certainly, she can almost believe it when dark clouds above her head part at this very minute, silver moonfire spearing down from the gap to banish the encroaching darkness momentarily, slanting over the hunched figure of precisely the person she intends to find...
...half-dead on a saddle.
Emerald eyes and their bits of gilded accompaniment widen slightly; dark-honey brows furrow as brisk, long-legged strides take her on an intercepting path towards the by-now familiar, impressive destrier, reaching out with agile, decisive fingers to snare the strip of rein closest to the bridle. While the rest of her expression is easy, her gaze tics over him quickly and makes a very quick, thorough accounting of his injuries.
"You look like shite, luv," she tells him in lieu of a proper greeting. "All this incidental tae your hobby, too?"
She knows from a very recent visit that the town's doctor will be asleep, and the last time she had paid a house call, his wife had made things relatively difficult. Tsking quietly between her teeth, she glances down the road, and then towards the outskirts of the city, picking out a few pinpoints of light in the darkness. She knows that specific encampment very well; it was where she had brought Jude when it had been time to save his life. But she would need a horse to get him there, and at the present moment, she is sorely lacking in four-legged friends.
(The temptation is there to count Morgan among that number, but something tells her that he'd take umbrage to that...not like that has ever stopped her before.)
Exhaling, she attempts to nudge one of Noah's feet off the stirrup, so she can hook her own through it. "C'mon luv. In this circumstance, you're going the wrong way." And with those words, she swings a leg over on the other side of the horse, settling on the saddle in front of him. Clucking her tongue against her teeth, she tugs on the reins and steers the destrier towards those pinpoints of light.
~ * ~
It takes at least three of the Baskar medicine men to lug Noah Hawthorne into the smoke tent. The oldest one of these has elected to supervise the proceedings, though he turns a quizzical eye towards Cassidy as she stands just outside of it, hands on her hips.
"(I didn't expect to see you back here so soon)," he says in his gutteral tongue.
Cassidy lifts her shoulders in a shrug. "(Hate to inconvenience your cadre, Matohska. I wouldn't have if it wasn't urgent.)"
Matohska nods, holding out a leathery palm in which she deposits a small bag of gella. The item disappears within his robes. "(We will take good care of him. He'll have to inhale the grass, but once he's sufficiently anesthesized, we can get to work.)"
"(Yeah, I know. I'll be here, as always.)"
With a dip of his head, the shaman turns to head into the tent, to start on the necessary preparations.
The blonde conwoman exhales, turning her eyes skyward, tracing over the starry spray dotting the darkness.
"Seriously, it's always something," she mutters.
What the hell happened?
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
The sudden stop in the horse's plodding gait rouses him from his lightheaded trance, but he visibly struggles to focus on her, eyes tightened, lids flickering. It's her brogue that identifies her to him, and he scrapes at the inside of his skull to convene what wits he has left in his present state so that he can answer her in a manner more befitting of his usual character.
There's even a flicker of a smile, and somehow, impossibly, it manages to take up position in his eyes, his blood-smeared, perspiration-slicked face wry in spite of everything. "My risk-reward calculations might have been a little-- " He grimaces. His voice is rough, slurs a little around the edges. Someone less familiar with his accent might miss it, but she's had enough time with him by now to tell. "-- a little off, tonight. Yours too, huh? I didn't think you'd want to stick around Timney after we ran into--"
He can't remember. The word he wants, the memory that requires the word, both suddenly slip through his mental fingers like a tooth knocked from a mouth. So: he can't remember the name or situation associated with the Kid, and he still believes he's in Port Timney.
Taking him somewhere to get help is probably a very good idea.
He doesn't protest when she pushes his boot free of the stirrup, though there's a moment when it seems like he might slide out of the saddle. It's the blood in the saddle that saves him: tacky, providing a grip between cloth and leather, thighs that usually see to the business of keeping him mounted too painful to tense to any degree. Once she's seated in front of him he lapses into silence, and he stays that way until he's hauled bodily from the horse, his immediate instinct to resist. Would have done, if tensing his abdomen hadn't suddenly threatened to liquefy his brain and flush his consciousness into a black void. They carry him off with his teeth gritted.
It takes...a while...for them to sufficiently sedate him. Smoke hazes the interior of the tent to an alarming degree, wisps of the stuff curling upward and out of the peak, thick as cream, and even then it's barely enough: Noah is a big, powerfully built man, in the prime of his youth and probably in the best physical condition of his life (barring all of these extra holes, of course), and he's also spent the last ten years roaming Filgaia and sampling all that it has to offer. Vistas and caves, yes. Books, scrolls. Food. Women. Drink.
Drugs, too. Of course. Often in combination with one or several of the aforementioned other things.
All he can do is lay there and occasionally cough, the latter of which causes fresh streamers of blood to rill thinly from the ugliest wound in his middle.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
The copious amounts of smoke leaving the tent in thick, yellow-tinged plumes has the waiting Cassidy's eyebrows lifting higher, and higher, and higher as she watches the medicine men go in and out of the tent, bringing jars, then boxes, then crates of grass - and of colors that rival a rainbow's spectrum - into the conical construct until none finally leave. Privately, she wonders whether it's because they really needed that much to keep Noah sedated, or because there was so much in there that the medicine men have gotten high themselves and passed out on the spot. Curiosity almost has her peeling away at the flap to peer at what's within, but this is a Baskar encampment, not a city - the rules and culture are different, and while she is blatantly irreverent everywhere else, here, she is courteous and respectful, though the reasons for that are ultimately stories for another time.
Within the tent, Matohska and his apprentices get to work. With the grass finally claiming Noah's senses in a way they need it to, they start on the necessary rituals to stitch him back together - a ritual rooted on a combination of offerings to their Guardians, magic and old-fashioned physiological knowhow. It ends after a few long hours of knitting his wounds closed and disinfecting those that stay. The shaman does good work, there's very little of the latter by the time he's done, but that does leave Noah stripped to the waist, with bandages criss-crossed over his abdomen and the sites that hold his most serious injuries. His smaller nicks and cuts have closed completely, however, not leaving even so much as a scar.
The resulting light-show, through all of that, must look incredible in senses pumped full of powerful organic hallucinogenics.
He is moved when the shaman finally finishes, the tent flap open to air out the thick blanket of smoke trapped inside it, moved to another where an elderly Baskar woman is waiting, three men arranging the relic hunter on a cot. She seems to be the encampment's alchemist; his hazy senses would pick her out, swathed with her colorful shawl, seated by a low table and working a mortar and pestle over a combination of seeds and paste within the heavy stone crucible.
It isn't long after this that the blonde finally retuns to Noah's vicinity, exchanging a few quiet words with the woman, the local dialect drifting in and out of his ears. The older woman hands over a cup full of the resulting concoction, which Cassidy thanks her for with a dip of her head.
Moving towards where Noah lies, she hooks her boot into a low stool, dragging it towards the side of the cot. Taking a seat, she holds the cup out for the addled relic-hunter to take.
"Nae going tae lie, luv," she says. "This probably counts for one of the nastiest brews on this planet, but it's effective. Helps if you dinnae smell it. C'mon now, down the hatch."
Once taken, it goes down foul, bitter, and slow, like warm molasses without the cloyingly sweet, caramel aftertaste. It sticks to his ribs and hits his stomach like a sinking brick - but a soothing warmth will start to spread through his innards almost immediately afterwards.
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
At some point the camp ceases to exist for Noah completely.
The faces hovering over him lose all sense the way words stop having meaning if they're repeated often enough, suddenly strange, alien. The lines and contours shift along pathways defined not by sight but by memory, old faces that open different sorts of wounds, from which bleed faint regret and wistful affection, shot through with a bright spike of rejection: his rejection, of them.
Lights flicker and mists swirl. Concourses of silver and ivory expand for him before folding in on themselves, swirled into a vortex of spinning blades, then the soft trickling of water into a basin, the bottom of which recedes into the distance, draining everything. The tent ceiling soars skyward into high vaulted atriums of glass then collapses into rough canvas that gains weight and becomes stone tumbling earthward, destined to crush him--
The hallucinations go on for a very, very long time, dragging him bodily through scores of memories best left buried. He sweats with the purgatives, is insensate to the manipulation of his limbs, the removal of his clothes (and subsequent returning of his sliced but serviceable pants). He hears snatches of a dialect he understands but cannot in the grips of the drug parse, any more than he could speak any other language for as long as the height of that heigh lasts.
As it wanes so does his desire to remain conscious; what increments of drug slide out of him are replaced with drowsiness, his body taxed by all of its exertions and the manipulations of its condition. Drowsing is how she finds him when she arrives, the worst of the sweat and blood washed away by fastidious Baskar hands. He stirs when she speaks, heavy lids lifting. His pupils are blown-wide portals of darkness ringed in vibrant green and rich golden brown, thin bands that struggle to push back against the pitch in the middle. They find her eventually, and the fingers that reach out to take the cup from her have a tremble brought on by blood loss, though he reaches for it unerringly and once he's sure he has a sufficient grasp on it lifts his head enough to throw the grotesque concoction back all in one go, fighting the viscous consistency every step of the way: eyes squeezed shut and features tight.
His head drops back to the stuffed prop beneath it, too stiff to properly call it a 'pillow' -- at least if someone were asking him for his opinion on the matter, which they are not -- and his eyes stay clenched shut as he holds the cup out blindly for her to take back. The first breath he takes afterward brings all of the god-awful taste with it, and it does nothing for his expression.
God, it would have been better to let me die, he wants to say, and does not. Even in this backwash of delirium he understands what was done for him.
"No Baskar in Timney," he says finally, as the clench of his eyes slowly eases. He leaves them closed. "Where?" Every hefted breath draws shadow into the shallow, creased depression of his sternum, the hollow of his throat. Flecks of misted blood still cling to the sinew and muscle of throat and shoulders, small tokens of a vicious fight.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
Deft fingers pluck the bowl away from him once extended in her direction, situating it on the low table next to the cot.
The encampment reminds her of another one, though to say that she remembers it well would be an exaggeration. Much like Jude's or Noah's own experiences, her own significant stay in one of these tents was fraught with memories of twisted silhouettes and the ghosts they carry, smells and colors that make no sense, and the dull ache of physical pains that would have been excrutiating were it not for the administered treatments. To see him still alive despite everything he has endured, or at least enough that he's able to live through Matohska's exhaustive and exhausting rituals, loosens bands of ice constricted tightly around her lungs in a way that she hadn't realized until presently, when he demonstrates enough mental acuity to be able to inquire what he does.
"That's because you're nae in Timney, luv," she tells him oh-so-helpfully, a wry smile tugging on the corners of her mouth. A cool hand reaches to rest over his forehead to test his temperature, in the event that he had suddenly developed sepsis or worse in the last few hours, not that she was seriously expecting it - she has never once had reason to doubt the shaman's work. But old habits - remembered despite close to a decade of trying to bury them - remain, the touch instinctive before she could arrest her thoughts to pull it back. The fact that she is still this comfortable with the gestures that are expected when situated by someone's sickbed lends a decidedly uncomfortable tug somewhere in her stomach, and her palm lifts after that brief and mindless test. She turns her attention, instead, to pouring a glass of water from the pitcher waiting for the patient.
It's crisp and cool - ice left to melt while the patient flits in and out of consciousness. She fits it around his fingers.
"Then again, considering the state you were in, it's nae as if I can expect you tae be able tae tell east from west, or the back end from the front end of your poor horse, which probably needs tae be hosed off after you've basted him with your own blood. You're about a click away from Adlehyde's borders, and luckily or unluckily for you, I had business around here. Was just thinking of looking you up, in fact, but I dinnae know when you were getting back from Port Timney." And, understandably, she had to leave the port city relatively quickly considering who was waiting for her there.
Her cigarette pack appears again, drawing another stick out with her teeth. The lighter manifests again, its silver plate reflecting the warm golden glow of the single lamp burning on a standing pedestal close to the cot. It isn't long until she's inhaling deep from it again; no judgment from the Baskar woman, who stands up and quietly shuffles out of the tent, presumably to allow for a private conversation. Emerald eyes watch her as she leaves, before fixing on Noah again.
"So what happened?" she wonders, hooking a long leg over the opposite knee. "Dinnae tell me you decided tae return tae the Grotto by yourself this time."
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
He's warmer than most would be, but not in a humid, feverish way -- just the metabolic fire of a body having passed through an outrageously accelerated healing process, all of its systems overclocked. Better that than a chill, one supposes, given how much blood he lost; the tawny, golden cast of his skin is blanched, desaturated.
Not Port Timney, she says, and he's opening his mouth to ask her again -- where? -- when his fingers transmit the icy shock of cold, sweating glass, and his thirst is suddenly so deep and so powerful that all thoughts of conversation are pushed aside. He grasps it with far more interest and purpose than he did the bowl with its foul contents, and makes an effort to prop himself up with one elbow, having only partial success: his middle, whatever wound remains beneath that bandage still painful. It's enough, anyway, that he's able to drain the contents of the glass with an outsized greed and not lose any more than the droplets that fall from its wet circumference. Relief floats to the surface, loosening some of the hard angles of his face again.
"Adlehyde," he repeats. The word is muted with his exhaustion -- more from the pain and healing process than anything required of him during the actual fight -- but it still manages to contain a subtle note of surprise and rueful humor. "Shan..." Two low notes of amusement sound in the cage of his chest, never making it any further north than that, though even with his eyes closed, somehow they have the trick of smiling when he's entertained -- something in the set of his brows and lashes, maybe. "That idiot."
Luckily or unluckily for you--
One of his eyes opens just barely, aimed in her direction. "You do keep turning up, don't you." Not a question. Observation. At least there doesn't seem to be any paranoia in it, though he'd probably be well-justified if there were.
On to questions then, and inevitably his thoughts rove backward to flash over distinct moments from earlier in the evening, captured stillframes. Some of those thoughts cause goosebumps to erupt over his arms, shoulders, and chest, a momentary shadow flicked between brows that don't quite fully knit. Silent a moment, he finally rolls his head to the side and opens his other eye, watching her with a glassy, dilated gaze. It's just as well they've been left in quiet, because his voice lacks much volume, a fireside murmur for confidences that stems from his weariness. "I followed the Shepherd to Lahan. He was going to purify it...somehow. Things got out of hand quickly. The whole place is..." Already distant eyes go more absent still, remembering. "Those stones we saw in the Hollows. You remember. But...more. Everywhere. Everything."
Two heartbeats later his eyes focus on her again and this time he makes a forceful effort to see her, to bring some semblance of alertness into his own countenance, aided by a thin but very real thread of relish. "I saw it, Cassie. The -- did you hear about the lecture in the Inn? The Malevolence. It came and went at first. The world was grass one minute and an enormous black and white checked floor the next, the castle walls changed, they were coated in...icing. Strawberries." He attempts to shoot her a stern look. "I'm not still high, I did see that." Pause. "But only for a second. It disappeared after that, like a mirage."
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
Shan must be the name of the horse; she doesn't mean to, but the ability to soak up minute details like a sponge has been so deeply ingrained in her that she can't help it, and before she knows it, that bit of knowledge clings to the back of her brain like a barnacle, unable to be dislodged. She has been around the surface long enough that she knows people would kill for this part of her, how effortlessly she does it, but the fact that it is still there despite that decisive attempt to throw her old life into a pyre of her own making curdles the blood in her veins. Her hand moves again, torso twisting on her seat so she could pluck the pitcher off the table and pour him another glass of water.
You do keep turning up, don't you?
She chooses to focus on that instead; that same, easy smile curls up on the corners of her mouth yet again, slender shoulder rising and falling in a gesture so subtle, he couldn't be blamed if he thought he imagined it. "Some say I have a knack for turning up in either the most opportune or the most inopportune moments. Equal odds, really, but that's nae important. What's important is that you do what you can in the next few hours tae recover because I'm going tae need your expertise soon enough, related tae what we talked about outside of the Hollow."
Cassidy shifts, lifting slightly so she could access the back pockets of her leather pants, drawing out a folded square of parchment and unfolding it once it's in her fingers. And while she does this, she listens quietly to the unfolding tale; the fact that Noah states he followed Sorey to Lahan has her lifting her brows, inclining her head slightly at him. She had attended the very same lecture he references, though she doesn't recall seeing him there, so what would have been an unfamiliar concept - Purification, and that the Shepherd can do this - is not so much anymore because she bothered to attend, evidence enough that while Filgaia's more mystical secrets are of no interest to her, her survival very much is and she can't help but inwardly pat herself on the back for doing what's necessary to ensure it.
But to hear that Lahan is blanketed by the same ill feeling that inundated the both of them in the Grotto has her lips twitching downward faintly, brows knitted in the middle.
"Well," she begins, after she absorbs the news that Lahan was covered by it when they arrived. "That sounds bad. Did the Shepherd manage tae do his job?" The kid looked young, no more than seventeen or eighteen years of age, but she has long since learned that youth is never an accurate gauge for how capable an individual is. She remembers her own past, and most recently, Errol's ultimately successful attempt to track her down despite miles of desert. The thought of those sightless dead eyes underneath the smoking barrel of Noah's revolver culls a dull cramp within the cage of her bones.
His description about the mirage only makes that faint look of consternation all the more overt. "Huh," is all she says, infuriatingly impassive, no matter that he could see thoughts turn over within the green of her eyes. After a moment, she exhales. "Well, it may have been bad, but you lived through it. Must mean you're destined tae fight another day, luv. Rumors have it that Lahan's been bad news for a few weeks now, so it's nae surprising it's become the epicenter of some kind of strange magical disaster."
She hands the piece of parchment over to Noah. "I'll leave that with you, but safe tae say that I believe it's relevant tae our current interests.
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
Shan.
It means 'Mountain,' for anyone with a working knowledge of the tongue the word comes from. A fitting name, even if it isn't particularly inventive.
She asks if the Shepherd fulfilled his function, and Noah's brow creases in earnest, stays that way when he brings the refilled glass to his lips again. He drains only half, minding the warning rumbles in a stomach still trying to process the immense amount of hallucinogens he inhaled not long ago. He wants the rest -- desperately, and he looks down into the transparent ring at the surface of the liquid, but after a long and longing moment errs on the side of caution, holding it out for her to take so that he can subside back onto the cot with a full-body exhale. His left hand travels over the side of his ribs, gingerly feeling its way down over bandages with oh-so-careful pressure, trying to get a sense of his own condition. He does this while he speaks. "I don't know. We fought a...skeleton, I suppose, though it wasn't one skeleton, it was a huge one, made of many. It had armor that looked cobbled together from pieces of broken Gears. Lahan was completely destroyed at some point -- it's a midden. Battlefield. There are...figures. Pieces of them, half-preserved by whatever killed the town. This thing was made up of lost souls, skeletons, debris. Malevolence. It did the worst of what you saw when you brought me here, though there was someone else there. Something? Some...entity, in a suit of white armor. I couldn't tell the gender, if it had one. It stabbed me with a thrown sword for no goddamn reason, but left partway through the fight with the revenant." He pauses to collect his thoughts, still adrift in hazy swirls of mental fog, and in that silence his eyes tighten as his fingertips find one edge of the remaining wound, far smaller than it used to be. The wince yields to a subtle shift, something wickedly satisfied flitting through hazel eyes and twitching the corner of his mouth. "I filled it with bullets before it left."
It's short-lived, that contentment. She pulls his attention back toward her and the paper she holds out. When he takes it and holds it up, however, the folly of that gesture is immediately apparent: to him, the words are crawing all over the page, spidering lines seething like half-finished insects. He lays the sheet down on his abdomen and lifts both hands, rubbing his face. "How about a summary?"
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
The tale he spins for her as to what happened in Lahan has Cassidy's frown growing even more prominent, until resignation simmers in the undercurrents of her baffled expression. While she has absolutely no doubt that the dead can destroy a person or a place, she didn't think she'd see a day where that would be the case literally. And while Noah may have inhaled enough hallucinogens to kill a horse just a few moments before, his experiences in Lahan were untainted by the medicinal smoke; she has absolutely no reason to doubt him in this instance, if not just for the fact that he has absolutely no reason to. Still, it keeps her quiet, save for another shift on her seat, a quiet exhale and a roll of her head back to look up at the apex of the tent above them.
"Wonder if Hell decided tae stop being fookin idle and tried tae rise intae the land of the living," she mutters. "And after all I'm hearing, still nae have any idea if it's connected tae what I'm s'posed tae be keeping an eye out on." A growing frustration gnaws in the pit of her stomach - she shouldn't be involved in things like this. This is as far from her wheelhouse as anything possibly can be. What the hell can a con and a thief do about all of that? She doesn't even have the benefit of sorcery to make sense of all of it, being as incapable of it as anyone could ever be, save for the caprice of her twisted Luck.
She takes the glass he hands her, taking a drink. Leaning forward, she rolls it between her palms, droplets of condensation rolling over her skin and giving her some respite from the humidity in the tent, kept warm by lamps and whatever incantations have been inscribed in its perimeter for the patient's comfort - the desert chill can be deadly, after all.
His words about getting stabbed for no reason has her smile curving upwards, a faint shadow of its usual ease. "Well, would nae say for nae reason. You were obviously in the way, meddling the way you are. How dare you. But at least it's got something tae remember you by."
She drains the rest of the water and sets it aside, letting it rest near the pitcher with a quiet clack. His request has her smirking faintly. "Ay, well, let me do all the work, why dinnae you? Leading your sorry arse all the way here, paying the shaman with my own bloody gella, staying by your bed like some devoted admirer. You're lucky you're easy on the eyes, luv, and that I'm a generous soul that's just all too unwilling tae leave the world an uglier place than I found it without your fine arse stomping all over it."
There's absolutely no way she's serious - her tone makes that clear, before she retakes the parchment with a deft pluck of her fingers. "But fine. Let me regale you with the tale of Professor Emma Hatfield, who I'm sure you've probably heard of, considering she seems tae be one of the more established personages in one of your fields of interest." He did mention that ARMs were something of a specialty of his. "And the Lolithia, an ancient golem - whatever the bloody hell that is - from its tomb."
She proceeds to do just that, though she needs the paper to be able to do this. Her exasperation is apparent, though that is not surprising to him, and while her interests are undoubtedly many, archaeology was never one of these. When she gets to the end, she folds the paper and tucks it back into his fingers, for him to peruse once he is able to do so.
"She's also looking for a date for the Exhibition, so the article doubles as both a grant proposal and a classified ad," she says, though he can practically taste that bit of mischief in the air. "Like interests and what I just said about your overall attractiveness, I have half a mind tae pimp you out if not just tae get her talking about this thing she found."
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
Her smirking, arch remarks get a twitch of the lips out of him as his lashes lower to sit heavy over eyes still misty with scraps of intoxicating smoke and the physical trials of a long, painful day. No verbal response, though, where on any other evening he'd be cat-in-the-creamery happy to joust with her over even the slightest of barbed sentences.
Instead he's quiet and his expression is unfocused while she reads the gist of the notice, impatience coloring every brogue-twisted syllable that comes out of her mouth. Given the way his features soften again, minute evidence of tension letting go, it might be easy to believe that he's succumbed to the groggy need for rest that's haunted him since she first stepped into the tent.
Not yet, though.
"Hnh. I couldn't stand to see you jealous, but if that's what it takes to get the information we need..." A weak attempt at best, but half-serious, at least: he'd absolutely take up with the woman temporarily if he thought it would yield any significant information. It wouldn't be the first time, after all.
His fingers close reflexively on the paper as it slides back beneath his hand, eyes opening, field of view muzzy. Sharpening that view requires real effort on his part, so for the moment he lets himself lay there with his gaze cast down toward the end of the cot but up on an angle that shows him a thin seam of night sky through the tent flaps, the interior walls warm fields of buttery, blurry light. "Your problem," he says, leading off into some other direction with a reflective tone, "Is that you think about the past as being over...but it's not. History isn't just a static collection of names and dates. It's an expression of a...totality of experiences, the pulse of sentient life. You and I..." He gestures between them with one hand, the movement slow, "Deal in people as much as anything. The past is people, Cassie. It's not a sequence of a events, it's...stories. Human stories. And those don't die, even though they should, sometimes. That's why they say the past comes back to haunt us -- it doesn't. It just never dies in the first place."
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
"Ay, that I am." A weak attempt at best, yes, but Cassidy answers it anyway with that blade-sharp smile, putting the lamps in the tent to shame. "Seething with jealousy. Practically writhing with it. I'm sure I will nae be able tae help myself once face tae face with the undoubtedly fetching Professor Hatfield, having tae smile through my teeth as I watch you shatter my heart intae wee little pieces, while I inwardly sigh..." And she executes one so unfailingly delicate and laden with longing that it is distressingly convincing. "...forlornly, lamenting tae myself 'why, oh why, cannae that be me'? It'd be excrutiating. Absolutely torturous. So much so that I'm liable tae tear my hair out in frustration and have you branded as the worst rake in existence, but this is clearly for the good of the whole of Adlehyde, therefore this great sacrifice must be made."
But he seems to be willing to place himself as a willing tribute on the altar of curiosity, and to possibly avert an inevitable disaster, that she is clearly satisfied with the answer he gives. Reaching for her pack of cigarettes again, she manages to pluck one from the wrinkled carton when his following words give her pause. Her expression betrays very little, but as always with the most telling things about her, these small pauses are brief and ultimately deceptive. Soon, the toxic stick slips between her lips, the silver lighter spun between her knuckles to light up the very end.
"Mm," is the noncommittal response, tilting her head back, lips parting just enough for the smoke to drift from between the seam - she never blows the smoke, simply letting it escape her mouth from the artful vent she creates between pliant, pale-pink cushions. Lashes lid over her eyes.
"Dinnae think stories can haunt you if you've forgotten them, or if you dinnae hear about them in the first place. If you never rediscover them in some way, and I think this world is vast enough that's possible, would nae that mean they're as dead as dead can be?"
After a pause, she waves a hand to the side, slowly standing up from her seat and planting a hand on her hip. Looking down at him with unreadable eyes, that, too, vanishes when the easy glint returns. "You oughtae get some sleep," she tells him, turning on her heel to start heading for the entrance of the tent. "You've had a rough day, by all accounting."
<Pose Tracker> Noah Hawthorne has posed.
If she needed any evidence of how rough the last few hours have been for Noah Hawthorne, she'd find it in his threadbare response to all of that theatrical mooning. There are so many things he could say, so many things he could do, so many expressions he could wear, challenges he could issue. Bets he could make -- those particularly; moments like this are rife with potential for creating a little bit of harmless mischief whilst simultaneously indulging his need to flirt with just about everything and everyone he finds interesting enough to merit the trouble.
None of that happens. He utters a kind of 'hnnh' sound, token suggestion of good humor and manufactured satisfaction with her mooning, even falsified the way that it is, but it seems more for her benefit than for his.
All of his remaining energy he siphons instead into this other piece of himself, no less congruent to the foundations of who and what he is than the incorrigible rake, though the resonances between them seem impossible -- wide polarities on the spectrum of personality types.
He could go on at great length about this -- disturbing her for reasons he cannot fathom, with thoughts crystallized for him by reasons she cannot fathom, either, but it's easier to answer her question with one of his own. More concise.
"If you close your eyes, does that mean a thing isn't there anymore?"
He hears her rise, hazy eyes following her silhouette as it rises and is cast in shadow by the lantern hanging from the top of the tent, behind her. You should sleep, she says, and he lets his eyes close. "Mmhm." Agreement. He wants that, yes. It could be that he didn't notice her pause, the hitch in her expression, the change in the mood in the tent or the suddenness with which she's decided to depart. He's been drugged, after all, and he has had a rough day -- by all accounting. Could be.
...But across the vast oceans of difference in each of them, the shapes of their distinct continents are not so unalike. You and I, he'd said, deal in people as much as anything.
"Thanks, Cassie," he murmurs, words that melt around the edges enough to imply he's halfway to sleep already. "I'll see you soon."