2024-06-21: Lonely Hearts Club
- Log: 2024-06-21 Lonely Hearts Club
- Cast: Loren Voss, Lan Lilac
- Where: Gunsmoke Desert
- Date: June 21, 2024
- Summary: After meeting with Eleanor to discuss Leah Sadalbari's plan for them and Gwen, Lan and Loren finally talk about what happened when she was captured by Solaris.
=============================<* Gunsmoke Desert *>============================== The Gunsmoke Desert occupies the northwestern portion of Ignas. This desert is different from Aveh's. Instead of rolling dunes of sand, it has dry and cracked ground, and the mountains that rim it also intrude into the interior, forming stunning rock formations that can look as beautiful as they look impossible. The settlements here are hard-pressed to survive, consisting of countless small towns. The lucky few are connected by railways to the Seed Cities scattered about the Gunsmoke. Many are lost to the sands, which cover them and a tremendous concentration of ruins from Filgaia's past. This makes these badlands the heart of Drifter activity in Ignas. BGM: Wild ARMs 3 - Migratory Birds ~ Scoundrels - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAZwGaRyWL4
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
It hadn't been the first time that Eleanor had managed to bridge the impasse that so often arises around Loren and Lan (mostly because of Loren, honestly). After all was said and done and she'd laid out her own contingency plans for the two of them (plus Gwen), it had been suggested that they go and get a bite to eat. There had been general agreement on that front.
...Though, in the end, Loren hadn't eaten much more than about half his meal. Lan would know that it's probably not because he doesn't have a taste for the food. Either someone had spilled to him the source of meat out here (doubtful, or one would wonder why he'd have ordered something with meat) or he's uncharacteristically just not that hungry.
Eleanor had departed after. It wasn't so much to take her leave from them permanently, but something else she needed to attend to. Logically that suggested either some matter related to ARMS or, perhaps, Energy Nede, the ongoing war, or maybe just a message from her wife.
Loren, released from Eleanor's supervision, had headed for the long series of stairs leading higher up the face of the rock. Perhaps he needs to get some air.
The thing is, though...
...the rock is...
...a lot higher than it looks from down here on the ground.
Finally making his way up to the top of the rock, Loren takes a few tottering steps, then drops to his knees, then drops sideways to flop over onto his back, utterly defeated by the climb.
He rolls his head backwards. From up here, one can see the edge of evening, advancing as the afternoon gives way to night.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
(Oh, so he'll eat thoma and worm but not her homestyle mesquite roasted desert grubs? Picky!)
Lan had taken him to a saloon nestled into the lee of the towering boulders that shelter the town named after the biggest of them. Jeneora Rock's homes and businesses are connected by a series of catwalks made of metal scrap and rarer wood planks, because when the people who started this outpost ran out of shade on the ground they just started building up. The soles of her sandals had clanked softly on the metal as they climbed another flight of stairs. Lan had told him that the woman who owned it was named Rosa, and that Lan couldn't really remember how long it'd been since she was last here but that Rosa was expecting a baby back then.
In the end, Lan did the math and remarked that it must have been a few years - so when she swung the hanging double doors open and saw a brown-haired woman with a gently-rounded stomach underneath her ankle-length skirts, Lan just kind of froze right there in the doorway.
(A few seconds later, a young boy of about five or six had run out of a back room, his cheeks covered in freckles just like his mother's, and Lan's brain had caught up with the timeline again.) When he'd left after their meal, Lan had been getting reacquainted with the two of them.
Up here, at the top of Jeneora Rock, the desertscape stretches for iles in every direction. It's a harsh land... it's still hot, although the heat has mercifully faded from 'broiling' to merely 'baking' as the sun kisses the horizon. He's alone with his thoughts and his exhaustion for a few minutes, the echoing sounds of town life bouncing strangely between the rocks on the way up to him.
They don't disguise the sound of footsteps steadily climbing the stairs towards him, leather soles on the boards unhurried. Just when he's managed to get comfortable, Lan Lilac joins him. "Heeeeeeeeeey," she greets him, her usual cheer subdued - whether by the emotional wringer she'd just been through, or the worm steak in her belly, or the climb.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
(Did he assume, somehow, that worm was not being literal? It's an open question!)
(Thoma meat, at least, is probably acceptable to his palate, though.)
He had simply walked out into the later afternoon/early night liminal period after their dinner while she was still mid-conversation with that woman. Rosa. It had not been particularly hard for Lan to figure out where he had gone.
Even Loren wouldn't have walked right out into the desert without being prepared for the night... right?
The creak of the metal and the footsteps heading upwards across the rock would have given his path away. There's no immediate way down again except the route he'd taken up.
It's warm here on the rock. A few hours ago and it would have been boiling, but the slow advance of night and the retreat of the sun have stolen away the fury the stone had possessed. It's warm, almost uncomfortably so, but he won't burn like this. He should still get up. He should find somewhere else to stand, or sit, or something.
His gaze remains fixed on the horizon and darkness's advance. Someone else is climbing the stairs, not long in his wake. He thinks he knows who it is. It can't be anyone else. He--
He closes his eyes tightly, not wanting even that thought to complete its cycle.
She greets him. He knew it was her. He doesn't answer at first, apparently playing at being dead here atop the rock. Then, slowly, he begins to pull himself upright, first on his hands and forearms, then onto his haunches. He's opened his eyes again.
"...Hey," he says to her, folding his arms atop his knees.
"...It's pretty warm up here."
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
There's nowhere else he would have gone. She's known him long enough to know the kinds of places Loren prefers to go when he's uncomfortable or overwhelmed; and the town in the shade of the rock doesn't have many of those. The quarters are too close down below, with even the most secluded nook still mere yarz away from discovery by another.
It's of no consequence anyway. Once she's climbed past the town, once she can see all the way to the horizon again, Lan can sense him. The twisted Ether in him calls to the black ink in her, the same way the black ink in her calls to the crow's mercy in Gwen.
He's still laid out flat on the stone, sweat in his hair, waiting for the buzzards and the worms to come for him. But Lan was here first, and it wouldn't be the first time she's fought back death for him on top of the world. He sits up, and she sits down, stretching her bare legs out in front of her. The long cloak is tucked in with her things at the inn, and Lan is free to enjoy the desert air on her dark skin once more.
"Yeah. This is the closest to the sun, so it's the hottest part of town." (Well, she isn't really wrong, per se, but she sure as hell isn't right either!) Lan leans back on her hands, close enough to reach over and touch if she wanted to. She won't hurt him like this. (She hadn't hurt him at all.)
"...Hey," she says, turning her head to gaze at him with her pale, pale eyes. "Are you okay? You..." She trails off for a moment, like she's once again looking for the words she wants. "...You uh... you're sure it wasn't me?" Lan ends up seeking reassurance, even though she wanted to give it.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
There tends not to be a lot of solitude in the places of the surface world. Sometimes everything is crammed in together, as tight as tinned fish. Sometimes it just seems like there is no such thing as a 'private space'. In Etrenank, he'd had nearly his entire home alone to him, sometimes -- to just him and Mirza, a lot of the time. It was possible to spend days at home without seeing another person.
He can feel her presence as she draws close, he realizes, in much the same way he'd once felt Gwen's and now again can feel Gwen's (if in a different way). It's disconcerting: as if the corruption calls out for itself, scattered across many hosts. Do they want to unite? Is that the aim? For all of it to gather together in some form or fashion?
And then she's here again at his side, and then he doesn't know at all what he thinks about it. About the corruption. About what could happen next, or what has happened, or--
And he looks at her, at first uncomprehending and then with the expression of someone put upon. He sighs. That's not how it works. "That's..." he starts, only to trail off. He glances down at the stone and lets the flesh of his palm rest against the baking rock (the rock, the real reason it gets so hot up here) for a moment.
He moves his hand after that strange moment comes to its end; he shakes his head. "...never mind," he says at last.
It's warm up here. A trickle of sweat trails down the side of his face. He doesn't want to be up here but there's nowhere else for him to be.
She speaks again and when he turns his face towards hers, Loren finds he can't look away. Is he okay? He finds himself struck mute by the very question. How can he--
But she mercifully asks him another question. Is he sure it wasn't her?
"...Yeah. I'm... very sure," he says at last.
He knows what he did.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
It had been a unique kind of hell, there in Etrenank. She didn't realize yet, why it had been strange to talk to Mirza for long. And aside from occasional visits from Leah, or the confused, aloof distance of Loren's father, there had been nobody. But it had been Loren's home, and there was nowhere else Lan could go. She had waited, and waited. Alone.
For a moment his expression turns to something familiar, something normal. It's a bit comforting to see. Lan feels herself smile a little in response to it, even if he doesn't have the energy to bicker with her.
"It's just," she continues after a silent moment, "You didn't seem sure. Because you took a little bit to tell us." Even just a few extra moments of thinking she was spreading it were too many. Maybe he was sparing her feelings. Maybe he was lying. Maybe--
Lan bites that thought off with a minute shake of her head. No. No, that is not a thing worth thinking about. She needs to focus. "I really thought I had done this to you. Because of the vault of lights and, and everything after, with Rahab. I didn't do it to you but I... the ink kickstarted it. It was too much. And I thought that I was cursed and I already can't go back to my village, so if I couldn't be around my friends either I didn't know what I was going to do," Lan admits.
She leans forward, clasping her hands together on top of her thighs, fingers tightening against one another. "So I... I'm worried about it, and you, but at least there's that one good part."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
There had been a time when silence wasn't quite so normal in the Voss household, but that had been a long, long time ago. Loren has had more than enough time to acclimate to it, even crave the isolation in his more stressful moments. Of course, even on a Solarian base, there was rarely the isolation he wanted for long.
Maybe it's the heat. Maybe it's the meal he'd eaten. Maybe it's his exhaustion from the climb (as an officer with a desk job, these days, he's only occasionally put to the task physically anymore and rarely like that). Maybe it's his malaise, growing stronger by the day. But even when the bait is set before him, he can barely feel the strength to snatch it up.
...Is that how it had seemed?
"No--" he blurts out, with a suddenness that seems to take even him aback. He pauses, then shakes his head. "No, I..."
Is that what she'd thought?
He hunches his shoulders, bringing them tight up by his ears. "That's not... why."
She continues on, explaining how worried she'd been, how she'd thought she might be cursed, how she didn't know what she should do. He doesn't move. He stays rigid right where he sits, just like that. It feels like ice water has been poured over him, and he can feel his skin prickle in spite of the heat.
And he can feel its presence, rising like a tide in his heart. It's hard to breathe.
He can still, when he turns his head just so, hear the song. It rests somewhere in this desert. It's for him to find, if only he will seek it out.
He's not here. He's not sitting on this rock. He can't feel it. He's not here. Where is he? The world is a smear, blue and brown and blue and--
His stomach drops. Is he flying? Or falling? He feels sick.
Her words sound like they're coming from a million miles away. She's been talking. He hasn't said anything.
But there's one good part.
Slowly, he blinks, feeling lightheaded. One hand finds the too-much warmth of the rock and all at once he unfolds from the tight posture he'd held before, splaying his legs out before him.
"...What?" he asks of her as his fingertips seek the heat and solidity of the rock and the rest of reality, and it might just sound like an honest prompt for her to go on rather than reveal that he wasn't here mentally just moments before.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
That's not why, he tells her. Like it hurts to say, like the words are dragged from him. He doesn't explain though, and Lan goes on.
Suddenly, he sprawls his legs out on the warmth of the rock, no longer curled up on himself like a shrimp. It quiets her for a moment, and she watches his hand flatten against the warmth of the stone.
He looks lost.
"...It messes you up, doesn't it." Even if it's been years since the Stranger first came to her, she remembers the dreams. The nightmares and the illusions. Lan watches Loren waver.
She looks at his hand. If she truly isn't cursed, then...
She'll be careful. It won't be like last time.
Her hand reaches out for his.
Inside of her the ink stirs sleepily. But by now Lan has had years of practice at denying it, at drawing out the time she has to fight before the Stranger's gift begins to warp her perceptions. So she conentrates, and she breathes slowly through her nose, and Lan sits there quietly, holding Loren's hand for as long as he'll let her.
"The first word was 'dream'," Lan half-sings. It's that ancient lullaby she favors, the one she sang for him a scant number of times before. "From the middle of sleep, which secretly accompanies the darkness in my heart."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
He doesn't explain, not really. Even admitting that much feels too much like ripping a bandage off halfway: the sensation of it, however getting through it might suit him in the long run, is too much in the moment.
But that's exactly the problem, isn't it? It's exactly how he'd ended up in this state. At the end of the day, however he looks at it, he's still a coward.
And it's a simple step from there to fall inwards and feel the corrupted Ether's embrace as even his senses are turned against him. Lan, who has a lot more practice with this than him -- and who knows well his own quirks and foibles -- makes the educated guess.
Loren swallows, his mouth and throat dry as he looks at her, and he nods.
Her hand finds his as he's still settling himself slowly back into reality. Her fingers are warm against his, or at least, that's how it feels to him. It feels cold here on the top of the world (it's not cold, not the way it feels to him) but the rock is warm and her hand is warm, and though his own fingers twitch and test her grasp initially, soon they curl around hers. And she begins to halfway sing.
He can feel it. He can feel the pressure and the heat of her hand, and he can feel the cool ebb of that Ether flowing just beneath her skin, pulsing in counterpoint to the darkness rising his own heart. But she's barring the gate, he realizes, and if she's doing that much for him, then...
Loren tries to mirror her: tuning out the words but mimicking the way she's breathing slowly. Focus-- she must be focusing. He has to keep this under wraps, or he'll end up...
Well, Leah will see otherwise, and that's a cold comfort all its own.
Still, it's a cyclical breath, one moment moving into the next without cease. Each exhalation sounds -- feels -- a little like the crash of a wave against the shore. How strange is that? A sound he'd never heard until he'd descended to Filgaia's surface, where there is rain, and seas, and...
"...I'm sorry," he says to her, after moment has turned to moment just long enough. There's a lot he's sorry for.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
"We can fly, we have wings," Lan murmur-sings, eyes lidded. She holds the gate between them closed, although even she can't truly bar the door by herself forever. Their respective wrongnesses brush up against it, try to peer through the cracks. "We can touch floating dreams."
His fingers curl around hers, hers keep steady contact against his. Lan is not uncomfortable holding someone's hand. Even his. Even after. "Call me from so far," her voice rises a little, the high notes requiring a bit more effort before her voice drifts back to earth. "Through the wind, in the light..."
Lan holds the door, and holds Loren's hand, and holds the final note a little longer than is really called for.
She becomes aware of his breathing. Even, steady, in and out and in and out and in. Ceaseless and calm. She thinks about a time that seems long ago now, on a beach. She'd sung this for him then too, hadn't she? And the waves had come in and gone out, come in and gone out. For a while things are calm and quiet, the only sounds their breaths and the far-off echoes of town life below. He's sorry, he says.
Lan realizes she let her eyes slip closed at some point, and opens them so she can tilt her head towards him and ask, "Why? What for?"
She's not asking him to list his sins so that they can be expunged, or so he can be forgiven. She just wants to know what's on his mind.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
It's dangerous, like this. He's holding his own as best he can, but she's still doing the bulk of the work -- he's not as experienced with it, for one thing, and for another, his present state of mind makes what control he does have woefully fragile. And she can't hold the line for both of them, inevitably.
But, right now, in this moment...
He's closed his eyes, shutting out the fading light of the day as her song comes to its end. The air is still warm. The rock beneath, warmer still. Her hand is warm. She's still alive, and so is he.
He opens his eyes, letting the early evening light back in once more and glances back up at the endless sky.
What is he sorry for?
The words come out of Loren in a sort of jumble as he tries to put thoughts into words. "You were... the plan was to use you against them," he starts, then adds, as if it helps, "the Metal Demons." Hyadeans. "As a Shaman. You were... they were going to sacrifice you for an edge in that battle." His fingers encircling hers twitch, as if uncertain whether to hold on or let go.
"I was a coward," he says to the sky and to her, not daring to glance her way. "I am a coward," he corrects. "I would have let it happen."
Even now? Would he still let it happen like that, even now? But what's the difference, really, between what he did then and what he's doing now?
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
Eventually her strength will give out, or her control will slip, or something else could happen. The ink in her will become the ink in him will become the ink in her. Lan's breaths are steady. Her hand doesn't move against his.
But he can learn to do it too, just as Lan had learned. And he'll have her to teach him, if Loren wants that. Like Lan had had her mother and aunts and uncles to teach her to focus her mind and move her body and open her heart. They can do it, together.
She expects him to say something about the Stranger, or how Loren brought another problem to them, or that he can't abandon his parents even though he knows what he's being coerced into for them is wrong.
She didn't think he was still nursing a hurt this old. Lan turns her face fully towards him, pale eyes wide. "...I thought it might have been something like that." Her eyes are sad.
"Not when I was still sleepwalking, of course. But after. When I kept thinking about it and thinking about it. And I wasn't really sure how far they would have taken it." But Solaris had done worse to Lydia and to Azoth. Arguably, they're doing worse to Loren right now - they had at least forced Lan into a good dream, one where she was the heroine. She would have probably gone to her death convinced it was the right thing to do, despite any regrets. She might not have become a restless spirit, as long as she'd never learned what she died for. (Look, Lan is a shaman, she has to think about this kind of stuff.)
So he only confirmed it. Lan knew, for a long time now. So why are her eyes burning? Why does her chest hurt? Is it for herself? Or for Loren, who would have had to live with what he'd done?
Lan's fingers tighten around his. Her mouth tightens in a close-lipped grimace, and that's it - tears well up and spill, hot and fast, down her cheeks.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Would it be so bad, if that were to happen? The thought itself nearly takes his breath away, a slight staccato that she might (hopefully) miss as she sings. His hand tenses against hers: it's not the first time. If he were to become lost in his own dark sea and vanish, wouldn't that be...
He stops it there. Some things don't bear bringing to their conclusion, and some things don't bear dwelling upon. Right? He'll learn, he'll learn, oh, he'll learn.
There are a lot of things he regrets. There are a lot of things that should not have happened -- to her, to both of them, all sorts of things he could have arrested, or prevented, or just not have done. There's a lot of apologies he owes. But this one nearly tops the list.
He'd still believed back then that it was for the greater good. The people of the surface were worse than animals: they were poor stewards and did not deserve what they had. Only Solaris had the wisdom to lead. But... still.
She had been nice to him, and she was going to die just for having been in the wrong place at the wrong time. For having been nice to him. For being convenient. And he couldn't bring himself to lift a finger to do anything about it. He can lie to himself all he likes about how there wasn't anything he could have done, about how she would have been found if he'd set her free, about all he'd have achieved would have been more pain for his parents. And in that, how is it any different than now?
"They would have. That's what the plan had been." He'd known about it: his role, perhaps as punishment for his blunder in Lan finding her way onto the Tzadkiel in the first place, was to supervise her until the final mission.
"I think... Leah did something to change it," he starts to say, and then he finally looks over at her and realizes that she's started to cry. Anything else he could have said dies in his throat.
Not all that long ago, he'd gone so far as to give her an awkward kind-of hug when she'd needed one. Here, floored, his expression ashen, he wavers. Her fingers, her hand, she's holding his hand as if her life depended on it -- or is that just him imagining things?
Once he'd held her, sort of, kind of. The thought of doing that now nearly roots him to the spot as she cries in the manner of someone trying very much not to cry. She won't let go of his hand and so Loren brings his other hand to hers: slowly, carefully, a stone statue animated and moving the only thing that he feels like he can move.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
There's no shame in crying when you need to. She's told him that more than once, because Lan firmly believes it. But shame isn't part of what she's feeling now! There's just old, half-healed sadness with the scab torn off, all that pain and scar tissue exposed to the desert air once more. "I thought," she begins, "I thought I'd cried all this out already!" But Lan's mouth still wobbles. Tears keep rolling down her face, even so.
Maybe it was always going to hurt, to have it acknowledged. To be told her suspicions were correct. That she was never anything but a silver bullet, and Gebler the gun.
Stubbornly, her grip on the gate doesn't yield. The ink bubbles in her veins, but Lan holds fast. Grief doesn't dissolve responsibility, after all. And Lan has a responsibility to Loren, and to the people down below, and to herself.
Lan won't be taken by surprise again.
And she still hasn't let go of his hand.
His other hand covers theirs. Lan sniffles and turns more toward him to clasp both of his hands in both of hers. "They..." she trails off, and lets her head fall forward as she brings their hands up to rest her forehead against them. "You were there. You knew. You knew what they were going to do to me and you-- how were you supposed to live with that, afterwards? For the rest of your life, knowing what they'd done?" Would he have mourned her? Would he have found a way to tell her mother, as a last courtesy for a friend? "How were you supposed to live, Loren?!"
Her grief, old and well-trodden as it is, spills across her heart again. But Lan is older now, and maybe a little wiser, and it no longer threatens to swallow her whole. "How is anybody supposed to live, after that...?"
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Her hand in his hands, his hands in hers--
She doesn't let go. She never has, not in a way that mattered.
She hadn't been a friend back then -- not the way he sees such things. But she'd still been kind to him in spite of how he'd treated her. She'd been nothing but kind to him, unrelentingly so. Even back then, he probably would have carried that with him for the rest of his life.
And probably, it wouldn't have been all that long. Probably, he would have bled out alone atop the Photosphere, staring up at a blue sky.
The thought of his own death lost its bite a long time ago, though. Instead, what just about destroys him is her own grief over that evaded reality. Even now, when it's her life and what happened to her while he watched on and pretended not to see, she's still thinking about...
He hasn't said anything as she bares that part of her heart to him, as she rips away the bandage that's hidden the wound and reveals it was never as fully healed as believed. All Loren can still do is watch on -- how much longer can he pretend he can't see what's in front of him? "I," he croaks, unable/unwilling to answer her.
I don't know. Maybe they don't.
And shouldn't he be feeling something right now? Shouldn't he cry out himself? Shouldn't he be angry about this? Shouldn't there be -- something? Instead, it feels like he's been hollowed out by her grief, the core of himself excised by some master surgeon. It feels like all he can do is sit here and look at her, a stone parody of himself.
The only thing that remains is that question, the one that has plagued him on dark, sleepless nights for years.
"Hey," he says at last, and his voice sounds strange even to him, "Why... were you kind to me?" When we met, he means. Those first few times, he means.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
Lan has thought and thought about what happened to her. She turned it over and around and upside down and poured her heart out to Gwen and some of the Black Wolves. Sifted through the pieces of her broken heart and sorted the important bits out of the wreckage. But she hadn't given much thought to what Loren's place in it would have been. It had been a thought too repellant to bear scrutiny. Because Lan knows what kind of person Loren is. What kind he had been.
She lets go with one hand, to wipe at her face. But she doesn't let go, not completely. Of his hands, or him. "...How were you supposed to live with yourself?"
She doesn't understand it. She does, but she doesn't. Lan has never been in a situation like Loren's. Lan wasn't beaten down by her peers for something beyond her control. Lan was loved by her village and treated with care. Even after stealing the Medium, even though she was scolded harshly by her mother and the elders, she was still welcome in Little Firelight.
She knows Loren feels trapped, but that doesn't let her understand what it's like...
But what he asks takes her by surprise, and Lan wipes her eyes again, looking at him with her eyebrows furrowed and a downturn to her mouth. "Why was I... why wouldn't I be? We're supposed to be kind and help each other. Life is hard. We're not supposed to make it harder." That's the surface answer, isn't it? The truth of it. But when she thinks back, she maybe understands what he means.
"And because..." she continues, slower. "Because you seemed like you needed it. You were all snippy and mean." And people learn that. They learn to be that way, just how Hicalu had learned to be terrified of everything. "But you were interesting, too. You knew a lot of things that I didn't. And it was fun to talk to you and teach you things you didn't know."
And then the Tzadkiel had happened. Myyah Hawwa had happened, to Lan. She lowers their hands to rest on her knee. "And I was lonely. I missed my village. And later on, nobody else in our unit treated me like a real person except Leah and I didn't understand why. You were rude but you still listened to me."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Why is she crying? Why is she crying, and for him of all people? Of course Loren knows that it's just her nature: he might as well ask the tides to cease, or for the stars to disappear. But all the same it makes something in his gut twist to see it.
Once again, she asks of him that simple question, and once again, he doesn't give her an answer in response. What would he even say? How would she feel if he told her the answer that popped into his mind? He remains silent instead, unable to look away from her while wishing he could look away.
So he asks her the other thing that has been on his mind, plaguing him for years: why? Most people he interacts with seem like they can't get away from him fast enough. And while he's made a few friends in those many years since graduating from Jugend and beginning his work as an officer, the overall trend has been constant enough. People don't like him, and they tend not to stick around.
But it was different with Lan. She hadn't given up: quite the opposite, even when he'd wanted her to leave him alone a little bit, at the start. And then she'd somehow become a constant fixture. And then--
He looks blank at the surface answer, at her first answer. It's as if he doesn't really believe what it is that she has to say to him. Maybe that's how she was brought up, but that doesn't mean anything in the world outside Little Firelight. In the heavens or on the earth, people are cruel to each other even if it only makes existance harder. Perhaps it's just human nature.
But before he can open his mouth, Lan continues.
"Because I... that doesn't make sense," Loren tells her, shaking his head.
But he was interesting, she says, and she had fun teaching him about things he didn't know while learning the things she didn't know, and that takes him visibly aback. No one has said he's 'fun to be around' in a very long time! But it was also because of the after. Because she was lonely, because no one else treated her like a person or even listened to her except him (even if he was rude).
"I... that wasn't... it was just because!" he blurts out, trying to right himself. "I just told you, didn't I? It's because it was my fault that you... and I didn't even have the courage to let you go!" He clutches at her one hand tightly with his two, his eyes widening as he stares at her in search of some alternate truth.
Unfortunately, in this case, there is only one truth to be found.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
Why wouldn't she cry for him, of all people?
"What doesn't make sense? Didn't you need someone to be kind to you?" Wouldn't anybody need that, want that, wish for that? Isn't that basic human nature?
He argues with her again. He protests. Lan sits there with a patience that rivals stone. "I just..." she begins, mouth opening and closing on words that don't suit what she feels, until she gets her thoughts and heart into order. "It wasn't your fault that I got nosy! It wasn't your fault that Myyah Hawwa did-- did that to me!" Her hands twitch around his, like she's fighting the urge to fidget or self-soothe. "And, and it's not like I didn't lie to you too! I wasn't-- I woke up and I was afraid and I hated you, a little!"
Her shoulders hunch around her ears, Lan's gaze fixed on their hands. She's afraid to let go. "I woke up... uh... I think in the plant jail. The atrium. We were talking and... everything tilted a little. And it all fell away and I was alone, and I'd been alone except for you and Leah for months and I didn't know how to leave!" So Lan had pretended to be asleep still. She'd looked at him with disdain and then pity and then understanding.
And then the call had come for her, the ink stirring in her mind.
"I don't know... if I ever would have been brave enough to leave on my own. Until the-- hey," Lan interrupts herself, like she's remembered something important. "The Carros. You've still got them, right?" Her grip tightens a little and she lifts her head to stare at him. It's important!! "The... a, anyway I don't know-- if you had let me go before then wouldn't I have just come back? I don't-- I'm not saying what you did or didn't do was right. But I... I don't know!" Lan admits, finally. "I don't know. But you needed someone, and I... I think I needed to be needed."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Of course he'd wanted that. He's only human in the end, and deep down in his heart, he wants the same thing as any other person.
But the look on his face might tell the rest of the story for him: he hadn't expected to get it from anyone. He doesn't answer her. There's no good way to answer that question of hers without sounding even more pathetic than she might already assume.
"...We're not supposed to get close to people from the surface," is what he says ultimately instead when she protests his own argument against the foundation of their friendship. "I should have known better, even if we were in dire straits on Lunar," he continues, finally closing his eyes and tilting his faces away. She won't let go. He can't let go. "And--"
She'd woken up and hated him. He doesn't open his eyes or even turn his face back towards her: he instead maintains for a long moment his own silence. Below, someone shouts to a neighbor, a counterpoint to their argument. And Loren still doesn't say a thing.
Well... good. You should have the thought blooms hot and red in his heart, its flames crossing that great black sea. But even if it might serve to push her away, he can't bear to say that out loud.
But it hadn't lasted for her, had it.
She continues on against his silence, talking for the first time to him about what happened to her, about what she'd done to cope against the realization of her circumstance once she had awoken, and it's nearly in the middle of that when she asks Loren something important that catches him entirely off-guard and prompts him to open his eyes and look back at her.
"The-- what? Those dolls?" He seems entirely taken aback and blinks in astonishment. "Well-- yes, but, why are you asking about..."
But this is Lan, after all. Should he be so surprised?
But that's not the heart of it just yet. She says to him something important, something that seems to grab at the crux of their connection and drag it kicking and screaming into the light. At first, Loren widens his eyes as if in shock, but then his shoulders sag in defeat. It is true, after all. In the end, they're both lonely enough and needy enough for this friendship to work. In spite of everything.
His grip on her hand slackens, but does not pull away: there would be no way for him to escape her now. "...Yeah," he says instead, exhaustion overtaking him. "It's something like that."
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
It's easier to think that this friendship is just about Loren's loneliness. About her ideals. About being kind to someone that needs kindness. But no Lan is an island, and Loren isn't the only one who needs support.
He seems surprised by her concern for the welfare of carnival prizes, and Lan tilts her head a fraction of an inch, still looking at him. "Because! Because I... that day at the fair was really fun. I felt like a person again, even if I... I was still all jumbled up inside. We had a good time with Gwen. And, and I dunno, they were proof that we'd gone out and done something normal, and that I wasn't just your 'pet Lamb'," and things could get better!"
Lan still doesn't quite look like she's said everything she wants to say, though. "...And besides, they're so cute. And they light up, and that's so amazing?" She'd been fascinated by touch-activated lamps, too. He can't still be surprised by now. "They were just special to me. And I know I wasn't really able to think straight when I broke out, but I had wanted to ask you to take care of them."
She had barged into his room that night, when she could sense something just beyond the horizon. Not five minutes later, she had burst back out into the hallway, bleeding and running. Finally, finally, she was free - of Assyria base, at least. Lan looks down at their clasped hands and rechecks the barrier between their souls. "I stayed so long after waking up because everybody knew about Little Firelight. I thought that if I left, someone might... I dunno, use my family against me. But then I had to go and I couldn't risk going back afterwards. You knew something was wrong with me, and they might have sent me back to Myyah Hawwa."
So she ran, and she ran, and she's still running. Lan squeezes his hands one more time, gently, and cups hers around them. No longer holding on like she might fall apart without that touchpoint. Just... there. "It must've upset you, huh. Sorry about that. Sorry about... well, I probably upset and embarrassed you a lot." Lan looks off to the distant desert. "I heard about people calling me your pet, y'know. And they'd laugh. But you never laughed at me."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
If that's all it was, then it should have given way under the strain long ago. If that's all it was, Lan could have certainly fulfilled the need through other better-natured people. But while it's one facet that underpins the whole, it's not the whole.
The day they'd won them had been a fun day, she says. Thinking back, he can only but think about how frustrating and embarrassing the whole business was. And then he'd gone and won a stuffie, and he's way, way, way too old for stuffies (or at least he certainly was then and definitely is now). "That was normal?" he asks, seemingly incredulous. He blanches -- somehow -- when she refers to herself as 'his pet Lamb', but it seems like it's as water off a duck's back for her.
And yet, in spite of himself and in spite of everything that had happened, he still has both of them. They're in a box under his bed, but he's still kept them as he's moved from assignment to assignment, even if he can't bear to take either one out lest someone discover his dark and terrible secret.
"...Yeah," he says, glancing away as if embarrassed. "I thought that's what that meant. Um, if you want them back...?"
Because he's definitely not going to keep his if he doesn't have to. Maybe her brother would like it better. Maybe it would be more suited for someone who would actually care about it. Or, for that matter, someone with a relationship with Lan that isn't so...
Eventually, he'll have to let go: even Lan can't hold the gate forever, and he's barely able to shoulder his part of this burden. His grip loosens much as hers does. He'll have to let go and draw away and, eventually, stand up and walk away again. It's what's best. It's the only thing that he can do.
"I don't know," he says, and then corrects himself, "I don't know what would have happened. I still don't know if anything has happened. Or if they will try anything. With Little Firelight, I mean." He looks back at her again. "The Leah I used to know... I don't think she would have."
But it's a different story with the Leah of today, of course.
"...Do you want to do it?" he asks her. "I don't think I can talk her out of it. I don't think I have a choice. And I know. Eleanor gave us those teleportation gems. But..." There might be a way for her and Gwen to escape it, if they wanted to.
With care, he tries to part his hands from hers, hesitating only when she apologizes for... embarrassing him a lot. Loren just looks at her for a long, long moment, that stare of his becoming increasingly disbelieving by the second.
It culminates in the most withering, weary look he can manage under the circumstances. ...Yeah, that's because they were laughing at me, he sighs internally. But at least in this, he's more like the Loren she's used to.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
"I mean... yeah? It was a carnival. You play games and win prizes." Lan suddenly has A Thought. "...Except the punching robot. That part was very, very un-normal."
She's had plenty of time to stew over being called a pet, and it wouldn't be fair to be angry at Loren for the things someone else said. He was hurt by it too, although differently than Lan. She knows they weren't just laughing at her. "I do want mine back someday! You've had them all this time..." She seems interested in getting hers back, but does that mean she expects Loren to keep his?! (Yes. Yes it does.)
"Mmm. I send letters home and we try to keep in touch via the Memory Cubes, but that still means someone has to make the trip to Baskar Colony or Little Twister to use theirs. If we could just get one back home it would be easier." But if Memory Cubes were that easy to get, everybody would have one in their pocket. "But that means nothing has happened as of about two weeks ago." No news is good news and all...
He looks back at her and finds a Lan that is a bit cheered after her crying jag a few minutes ago. There are still damp tracks on her face, but her eyes are clearer. "I don't like the sound of an experiment, but I really don't like you being the only one being experimented on. Gwen will agree, I know it. If you have to do it, we should be there with you. Even if I want to believe that there's enough of the old Leah left to not let her try anything funny with you..." Lan grimaces a bit. "I'd feel better about it if we were all together. And maybe the experiment will do something good and we can get rid of everything somehow!" She knows she's grasping at straws. But Lan is tired of enduring, with no hope in sight. Even if it's a long shot, she wants to try.
It's a sadness and a relief when he carefully lets go of her hands. Even if she wasn't straining to keep the barrier up yet, she can relax a little more. "...What?" she has the unmitigated gall to ask about his incredulous expression.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
'Carnival games' are -- or rather were -- pretty unusual to someone like Loren, to be fair. But...
"Well, good. I'd hate to think that was normal," Loren says on the matter of the robot that had definitely knocked him into next week.
She does want it back, she says, regarding her caro plush. If she meant that she just wanted hers, though, and not for him to gift both hers and his, well she's about to be sorely mistaken. He's just had the green light to divest himself of a minor (but still significant) concern regarding his on-base possessions (and the ever-fraught nature of transferring his things through security every time he moves location). Loren doesn't say a word and instead, just nods thoughtfully. The tricky part will be of course getting the stuffies off base without getting caught. And the odds are pretty good that someone will interrupt it if he tries it alone...
But it is at least a problem he doesn't have to solve immediately.
So she's been in communication with her village by mail, even if she hasn't gone back. "Oh... that's good." No one had said anything to him about it getting razed, but he wouldn't put it past certain elements to obscure that piece of intelligence... if it had happened, at least, and if it has, it's at least not happened since about two weeks ago.
And as far as he can tell, nothing's shifted since then.
He finds himself bristling when Lan says that she doesn't want him to do it alone. Does she think that little of him, that he can't withstand whatever it is that Leah wants to try? And yet, whatever it is, it sounds like it might not be sufficient with just him on the stand. It sounds like she needs all of them. And even if she'd said her plan wasn't to eliminate them all...
There are the gems, and perhaps he'll have to trust in Eleanor's magic if everything goes awry.
"...Okay," he says to Lan. "Then I'll see what Gwen thinks. And then..." Maybe it'll work. Maybe they'll be rid of the curse.
Loren doesn't think it will be that easy.
His hands slip from hers after that moment of hesitation. At her question, Loren shakes his head. "...Forget it. It doesn't matter anymore."
He rises to his feet in the moments after, finally wiping away the trails of sweat at his brow and temples. "The view up here is really something," he says at last, turning to look around him. It's still warm up here, yet night's chill is a few hours away. He can see its advance on the horizon.
"...We should go back down soon, though. Eleanor will wonder where we went."
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
Lan will be disappointed to find out that Loren is less enthused about having matching stuffies with his besties than she is.
And it probably won't be as easy as Lan hopes, and maybe it'll even be awful, a new kind of psychological torture to endure for no real reward. But that's why she doesn't want Loren to endure it alone! "If you're sure," she says, watching him stand.
The view is amazing. The rock formations beneath their feet and in the distance. The painted colors of the endless sky. Lan gazes out after him at the horizon. "Worth climbing all the way up, huh? ...But yeah, we should at least let her know where we are. Too bad after climbing all the way up, we have to climb back down too! They get real mad if you cheat and use magic."
Loren knows her well enough by now to know when Lan is going to share a story, and she doesn't disappoint. "So the first time I came here, I climbed to the top and the people below started fussing at me but I couldn't hear what they were saying..."