2021-02-05: Old, Unhappy, Far Off Things

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  • Log: Old, Unhappy, Far Off Things
  • Cast: Citan Uzuki, Billy Lee Black (as Jessie Black)
  • Where: The Thames - Upper Deck
  • Date: February 5, 2021
  • Summary: Late at night, Jessie and Citan catch up over a few drinks, with Jessie addressing the many complications surrounding his son.

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    There is not, technically speaking, a point in the day where the bars are all closed aboard the Thames -- in a city like this, where many people work at different and strange hours, it behooves most businesses to operate in shifts. Similarly, most bars, while they're open, don't really have 'dead hours' for the same reason. It's perfectly acceptable to go drink at ten AM! ...Just as long as you're not operating heavy machinery afterwards. Even here there are standards, as applicable to safety.

    Nevertheless, there are low volume hours for the bars aboard the Thames, depending on where you go and when, and this is the place in which Jessie has managed to 'corner' Citan Uzuki. The fact that it's about four in the morning at this point may speak somewhat to its nature.

    "Yes... I met him in Spira," he says, of Jessie's son. "He was assisting in one of the refugee camps. ...You remember what I had said of the situation there." Citan shakes his head. "To think that regardless of where one goes..."

    He trails off, glancing down at his drink, but does not lift it to his lips. The doctor has in fact been nursing this one for nearly an hour and it's still halfway full.

<Pose Tracker> Billy Lee Black has posed.

Jessie, for his part, is nursing number four. That leathery, dark skin of his blends in well with the quiet mood of a place like this.

"Heh," he grunts, to Citan's musing. "Hopin' there's a drop of peace on this rock? You just haven't kicked it hard enough." ... He chuckles to himself. "Guess it wasn't this rock, though, huh? People the same everywhere." He leans back in his seat, rolling his neck until it cracks to one side. "Hell. Depressing, that's what that is. Glad you could take care of him, at least."

His eyes focus in on a point a million miles away, staring sightlessly through the wall. "Ain't much I can do for him by now. Stone's in there too good."

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    "Peace... hm..." Citan muses, dark eyes for the moment on the liquid in his glass.

    Lahan had been peaceful, a place where for a time it had been easy to almost pretend that the rest of the world hadn't existed. But...

    Perhaps Jessie isn't the only one in a somewhat morose mood.

    "Yes, it certainly seems that way... I have yet to travel to the rest of Lunar, but from what I have heard, there is much strife in those lands as well." He manages a somewhat tired smile. "What a world that we live in, yes?" Two worlds, to be exact.

    "Yes... Though it seems that he had already become acquaintances with Fei." He pauses, glancing over at Jessie. "The young man with whom I am traveling," he explains, for further context. Then he blinks. "...Stone? Do you mean, 'the Bishop Stone'?"

<Pose Tracker> Billy Lee Black has posed.

Jessie grunts a chuckle, raising his glass in fake toast. "A blessing from our dear ol' emperor," he grunts, bitterly.

"Ah, sure am." He sets the glass down, tugs unhappily on the bandana at his throat. "Legend of a man, our bishop. Rightwise, holy." Again, a bitter grunt. "Hear the boy tell it he must piss holy water."

He cocks a glance at Citan. "Swept in while I was off with the Shevat resistance. Should never have left 'em."

He slugs back a mouthful of swill and slaps it down on the table. "S' how'd you end up babysitting some bumpkin, anyway?"

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    That smile of Citan's is no less tired when he, too, raises his glass, though he says not a word and similarly does not take a drink but sets it back down softly.

    Faintly, Citan grimaces to hear the elder Black speak so but refrains from commenting. "...I see. Yes... Billy had spoken of him... and he told me of Racquel." He pauses, gaze averted. "I am sorry to hear it, Jesiah."

    It's on that particularly morose note that the doctor finally does take a drink, only to rather hurriedly set it back down when Jessie speaks of something that is, perhaps, somewhat nearer to Uzuki's heart. "--You were with the Shevat resistance, Jesiah? I had not heard of this," Citan remarks, one eyebrow arched.

    But the conversation angles back towards him and Fei--

    "That is... a rather long story, to use the cliche," Citan says hesitantly, glancing over at his former senior classmate. "I suppose the simple matter of the story would be... we had been living in the same village. ...Have you heard anything of what became of a village in Ignas named 'Lahan', Jesiah?"

    This may be his way of testing the waters to see how far the tale has spread.

<Pose Tracker> Billy Lee Black has posed.

Jessie, at least momentarily, deflects: "Hah. You think I aged this poorly on my own?"

Having prompted Citan to open up, he pursues this. "Few reports. Vanished in a blast of light. Could've been a Kislev weapon, maybe Aveh, one of 'em trying to clap back at Adlehyde's show o' force...Too far inland for a Wels that powerful...wild Reaver, maybe, but they're not so common out in Ignas. Demon invasion happened not long after, that was an option..."

He turns a sideways look on Citan. "But when a lot of people die, I find betting on Gebler is safe."

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    He lets Jessie speculate for a few moments--

    Before his former senior lands on the right answer. Ever so slightly, Citan nods. "Indeed... Gebler was involved. The transport of an 'experimental weapon', it would have appeared. The weapon, a Gear..." he glances away again, as it attempting to settle on the right way to phrase what he's about to say, "...was the cause for the disaster."

    The silence may be palpable around this corner of the bar before he speaks again, saying at last the thing he has apparently been attempting to skirt around:

    "...And Fei was also involved."

    Better that Jessie hear it from him than learn otherwise, perhaps. It may not be a matter that can remain under wraps indefinitely, even if they all behave prudently.

    "After that, we left the region. Of course Gebler would have investigated the cause, and I thought it best that they failed to find him. We have been traveling since."

<Pose Tracker> Billy Lee Black has posed.

"Hah," Jessie says, rolling his shoulders back against his chair, setti nghis eyes on the spinning ceiling fan. "Always careful with your words, eh? They do love to leave their toys lying around, don't they." Because Jessie shot his tact behind a barn six years ago, he then proceeds to gruffly summarize, "So the kid blew everything he ever loved straight to Hell and now he's wand'rin' the world with a Solarian and," he glances to Citan with a wry curl on his lips, "whatever you're goin' by these days. S'pose I can understand that." He taps the table. Well, one good turn.

"Few years after we came to the surface, I left Raquel with the kids - we had Prim by then - and went lookin' for the Shevat resistance. Blew more than my share of Gebler home to mama, but I didn't find them for a while. By the time I did..."

Grimace. "By the time I did, Raquel was gone. Wels, the boy says. But I wonder."

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    He grimaces, if faintly. "It is... something rather like that."

    He doesn't speak of where Elly falls into this, though perhaps Jessie might be able to guess.

    Jessie shoots him a look. It's a glance that Citan meets, his own expression by contrast a neutral, a difficult-to-read calm.

    But the remark on what it is that Citan calls himself these days goes unanswered.

    "I had wondered to where you three had headed, when you left Solaris," he says, which is a tactful way of phrasing 'left with no forwarding address' from him, perhaps -- not that vanishing from Solaris with any hint of where he had gone would have done Jessie any favors. "So that is what you had been doing... and you have not spoken of this to Billy." It's a statement, rather than a question.

    Wels. That was the story Billy had told him, too. But...

    "..."

    His hands close around his glass and he gazes for the moment into its amber depths.

    "You think it may have been instead... the work of a human," he murmurs, his voice low.

<Pose Tracker> Billy Lee Black has posed.

"...when I left," Jessie says - for all he acts like a reprobate, in this, at least, he feels he should explain himself, "the boy was too young to understand. Too young to trust with it. By the time I was back, the Ethos'd already got to him." His eyes grow distant, and he actually drinks from that mug of his. "Hell of a thing. Not being able to trust your own kin."

He turns his eyes back to Citan. "There were Wels. That I know. But the way the boy says it, this Bishop Stone jumped in just in time to save them, but too late for Raquel. In our cabin, out in the woods."

His eyes glide shut, his jaw tightening. "Coincidence ain't a god I believe in, Hyuuga."

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    Citan, for his part, doesn't say a word. His expression remains impassive as Jessie explains; his gaze, watchful, thoughtful, rests on his old classmate.

    Has he ever said anything to his own child? Midori wasn't even five years of age when he left her with her mother. By now she'll be eight, going on nine. If she's in the place he suspects she's in, then she will have already received quite an education besides.

    (He has no idea now, or ever, that his daughter had already learned all she needed to know by the time he'd left the ruins of Lahan behind.)

    Billy had told him this much. Jessie reframes it and adds one more piece of information.

    A cabin. In the woods.

    "I... see," Citan says quietly at last, gazing down at the counter, where his hands have tightened around his glass. "Bishop Stone... the name seems familiar..."

<Pose Tracker> Billy Lee Black has posed.

On an island specifically chosen for its isolation.

"He's Solarian," Jessie says. "Damn sure of that. Not..." He grimaces, sucking his teeth. "Not sure of anything else. But he sure wasted no time convincing my boy that I'm worth less than dirt."

Jessie folds his hands, eyes narrowing seriously. "Is it a grudge against me, or are they just after Billy...he's my son, so his Ether Response is nuts. But if they were after him for that, they wouldn't bother with the mind games. Something's not adding up. Whole thing feels...messy. It's not clean enough for Etrenank."

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    There are strange, strange coincidences in the world -- Citan of course knows many of them. But there are coincidences that happen on their own... and there are 'coincidences' that someone helped engineer.

    He should know. He's arranged several 'coincidences' himself.

    "I see... yes, that does make sense," Citan murmurs, on Stone being almost certainly 'from Solaris'. He glances sidelong at Jessie. "So you think that...? Except, if that was their aim..."

    He falls silent, gazing up towards the ceiling. No, it doesn't add up. As far as he's aware, there haven't been any new orders to... and it's all very...

    Messy. Yes, that's a good word for it.

    "You feel that someone is playing a game," he says, as if to further probe the matter. Setting son against father... it has the air of something personal.

    Perhaps it's no wonder it's something about which he knows nothing.

    "Will you wait to see their next move, Jesiah?" Citan wonders, continuing the metaphor. "Or will you choose instead to overturn the board?"

<Pose Tracker> Billy Lee Black has posed.

"With my family's lives," Jessie says, quietly, and there's an abyssal cold in the words.

He leans back in his chair, his jaw set, One fist clenches. "Already tried to pay 'Stone' a visit. He's locked up tight. Security in the cathedral's no joke. Overturning the board..."

"...there'll only be one person who can do that," he says, staring over Citan's head.

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    There isn't much that Citan can say to that, his gaze turning away from Jessie and down towards his glass. It's true that it's a game. It's true that up for 'grabs' are the lives of his entire family. It's just also true that the end goal is veiled.

    How did that saying go? If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory you will suffer a defeat, wasn't it...

    His attention returns to Jessie.

    "I had... thought that you might have already tried," he says carefully. It is after all the approach his former senior prefers. But one person can only do so much. No matter how powerful someone is, there is a limit to what can be done. "So... the only choice that remains is to wait," he says.

    'There'll only be one person who can do that'.

    "...Yes?" Citan prompts.

<Pose Tracker> Billy Lee Black has posed.

Jessie grunts, running his thumb unhappily along his jaw. Busying his hands. "The boy. Billy," he says. "He's in it neck deep anyway. If he could see a little clearer, he'd flip the whole thing apart."

Then he scoffs, and draws in a breath. "Not 'a little' clearer though, is it? As ya say, Hyuuga. Only thing I can do is watch...and be ready to take my shot when it comes."

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    Of course.

    It would be his son.

    "Yes... with his position..." As an Etone within the church, he would be well-primed to put an end to this.

    "But at present... he is not..."

    The fly in the ointment, as it were.

    His father puts it more clearly than Citan himself does. Nodding the once, he regards Jessie for a moment. "Eventually, 'they' will make their move. I am certain of it... whatever they are planning, I do not think they will wait much longer," he says, reaching up to fidget with his glasses. "You have felt it as well, have you not? There is an uneasiness in Aquvy. If they are here, they will not be immune to it. Perhaps, they might even rush..."

    So he says, speaking of one man and one man alone.

<Pose Tracker> Billy Lee Black has posed.

"No," Jessie confirms.

"He isn't."

Jessie flops back into his chair, then further, tipping it back.

"Let 'em," he grunts.

"I've had a long time to put their names on my bullets."

<Pose Tracker> Citan Uzuki has posed.

    To this, Citan has no immediate response, instead turning his head to regard Jessie for a seemingly long moment.

    "...Of that, I do not doubt," is what he says in the end, before finally picking his glass up off the counter and taking a drink from it.