2023-02-21: Where I Belong
- Log: Where I Belong
- Cast: Ruth Pauling, Rixia
- Where: Klein Manor
- Date: February 21, 2023
- Summary: Ruth and Rixia have a quiet moment among the pigeons...
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
SOME INDETERMINATE TIME AFTER RIXIA'S ARRIVAL
Things are calming down at Klein Manor for the most part, and Ruth has started to drift off accordingly. For the early times in which Rixia situates herself there, Ruth feels out of place among the company of the well-to-do Klein people. She's dressed a lot more like a Drifter, if not a pauper outright, and has spent most of her time beyond that one shared meal sitting around outside like she were a garden decoration rather than a part of the guard detail.
Her true nature remained concealed the entire time, and though she is a friend to the Klein family... a handful find her presence unnerving. Some of it is from those who know her history. The rest... there's a certain kind of vibe check that she's not passing, but nonetheless, the next few days are peaceful and safe (enough).
Currently... it's nearing noon, and Ruth isn't that far out from the Manor. The skies are clear and crisp, and she's sitting at a bench watching some birds go about and be birds that are acclimated to city life. (The pigeons here are not quite as hardcore apathetic as those in Meria Boule, though. Those pigeons... are the champions.)
Her hood's up, her gaze is down, and she's gone so still that there's at least two pigeons perching on her and checking her out. She does not seem to mind, or perhaps even notice. She has to sit at an awkward angle so that the rifle at her back has space to exist off the side of said bench, but... she's there, if Rixia wanted to catch up with her before she left for Guild Galad to check up on Ida.
<Pose Tracker> Rixia has posed.
Rixia is... also out of place, having found that the paradox that the riches and luxury that she's coveted when down in the dirt caked with grime and blood is that she doesn't belong there. And even when she tries, she finds herself... bored. She started trying to show off some cocktail recipes to some of the servants, but eventually she finds herself passing the time taking part-time jobs at Klein City's dive bars.
She's just waking up now after a late shift; she's been given a nice dress to wear, which makes her look a bit more fitting to the place, but... it doesn't really feel like hers. Then again, she won't ever complain about being given nice clothes. "Hey... Miss Ruth, right?"
She waves and walks a bit closer, but stops as she squats next to the pigeons and takes some seed out of her bag and tosses some to them.
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
'Hey... Miss Ruth, right?'
Ruth's head tilts up, which disturbs the two pigeons exploring her and they just take off. The rest do, as a precaution. Some fly right past Rixia! (They'll come back for the tossed seed soon enough, though.)
"Hello, Rixia." Ruth's voice is measured, even tired, but not cold and unwelcoming. Her right hand goes over her heart, fingers curling inward as the daylight glints off the Granasian rosary that hasn't quite lost all its luster from wear yet.
"It's kind of you to share with them," Ruth says of those pigeons that have temporarily fled. (Extremely temporary, like some of them might be coming back half-way through this sentence.)
<Pose Tracker> Rixia has posed.
"You think so?" Rixia idly muses. She watches them peck at the seeds, and then fly off; she doesn't demand that they stay or anything. "I like pigeons. A lot of people think they're nuisances, but... I like them. They're always trying their best to live, no matter where they are..."
She bobs her head for a moment, then looks towards Ruth as she clutches her hand over her rosary. She gets up gently and says, "Thanks for the other day. ... I think I feel a little bit more... I'm not sure okay is the word, but I'm less upset, I guess."
She gestures gently and says, "Can I sit with you?"
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
Ruth cracks a little smile at Rixia's view of them. As Rixia relates her feelings as to what she said the other day, she speaks as such: "Some days, you can only feel. Not feel good, or bad, just... feel, at all." It sounds sad, but the smile's still there...
'Can I sit with you?'
Ruth looks up at the query. Her eyes don't quite meet Rixia's, but there's just enough of a pause between query and response that it hits the milestone of 'small quantifiable amount of awkward.'
"If you need to, I don't mind." Her posture straightens just enough to give Rixia more space in which to let herself sit and relax on the bench, while those pigeons sticking around for seed are... sticking around for seed, being window dressing, as Ruth parts her hand away from her heart and gestures at large to the bench.
<Pose Tracker> Rixia has posed.
"... I don't need to, I guess, but I want to," Rixia is truthful about herself, shifting slightly so that she can scoot onto the bench and keep watching pigeons. "Feeling. I think it's healthier to feel, but I often forget that. Sometimes I just want to drink it all away... sometimes I just want to not feel. Run away from my feelings. That's super unhealthy, though, but I just can't help it."
She smiles quietly and says, "I'm going to have to go back at some point, I know that. I can't just keep running away. This has been nice, though... I don't mean just the manor, but... being able to tell someone a bit further away about what I've been struggling with."
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
"Hm." Ruth muses in humming as Rixia admits she simply wants to. Her hands rest at her lap, her right over her left as she gently squeezes her left hand underneath that cover. The pigeons are none the wiser, because they're pigeons and they're stuffing their beaks full of food.
"I hardly drink, myself." Ruth says to Rixia's desires to drink away her feelings. "...Brings out the beast in me when I have too much." It almost sounds like a joke - almost. Still, she lets Rixia have the floor aside from this aside.
"It says a lot you'd run from that world to come here, instead." Ruth's head tilts down again, smile softening to something more neutral. "There was a time, for a few years, I had a place I kept to myself. I wasn't... happy, there, but it was... familiar." She trails off. An undercurrent of discomfort, of carefully chosen words.
"What you've been through is hard. What you've been through hurts." Her right hand goes up to her left shoulder, as if on reflex for a twinge of pain that shoots up there. "No one lives as a soldier free of scars."
<Pose Tracker> Rixia has posed.
"... people keep warning me that. I started drinking when I was like 14, since I stayed around so many saloons and bars," Rixia admits. "And I know, it happened. Part of why I ran away was because I drank a bit too hard. I know it's not a solution. It's just more running away."
She pays attention to how Ruth speaks of how there was a place she kept to herself. She wasn't happy there, but... it was familiar.
"... I think I get it." Does she? "Well, I think I get it. I mean, I didn't have a lot of opportunities in my life up until recently. I was living really poorly. You kinda learn to... make your own comfort spaces out of what you have, even if it doesn't make you happy."
She softly looks to Ruth placing her hand there. "A soldier...? I didn't even think about that when I joined the Guard. They offered me bread and clean water and new, comfortable clothes and shoes. ... I guess that's true of a lot of people, though. Conscripts and everything."
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
Ruth keeps a poker face on the young drinking age. It's a story she's heard - and seen - often enough.
"It was... something like that," she concedes to Rixia's idea about what it all means, with a bit of a smile there in being somewhat on the level without saying the whole thing.
"Where I came from, down in Zoara... there was a time where the 'haves' had so much, the 'have-nots' became driven to take by force." Ruth lowers her arm from her shoulder, back to her lap. "The 'haves'... they did pay well. Enough that an able man of good circumstances could make enough to support their family... put their younger siblings through schooling in the 'better' cities."
There is a smile. It is not a gentle one. Bitter, on the cusp of something much less approachable, that eventually... relaxes, if not quite recede.
"Who are the Guard fighting now?"
<Pose Tracker> Rixia has posed.
Ruth's tale about the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' resonates with Rixia. "... mm. So I mean, I'm... from this landmass called Glenwood. And in Glenwood, if there's a constant as far as I'm aware, there's these two nations that just love to be at war with each other, Rolance and Hyland. I'm just one of the many war orphans that their wars produced. My village was some nowhere that no one remembered, and I don't even know who walked all over it in their conquest. They redraw the lines so many times... and every time, they do it in blood..."
She leans back and sighs. "I remember telling people, as a kid, that the difference between the two was just what colour of banner they wore. The rest didn't matter. They took from me, all the same. Why does anything else matter? I don't even know what they're fighting over. It's so over my head, but I'm the one who had to taste the blood and dirt and grime on the ground..."
She admits, "If I didn't meet dad and force my way to staying with him, I might've become a bandit too. Lots of kids got inducted into bandit gangs, because they were hungry. A lot of them got put to the sword."
Who is the Guard fighting now?
"... ... I don't know," Rixia admits. "Hiro's group, I guess. They call them the Vile Fiends... they think someone who Hiro's protecting is a Lord of Calamity, but... ... to be honest, after all I've seen, I know the way in which labels are just convenient things to put on people who're inconvenient for them..."
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
In turn, Rixia's experience about the two nations at constant war who seem to just leave ruin in their wake... is a near-miss with home. She struggles to avoid thinking about what would happen if Rixia were instead a native of Zoara who had to relate a parent's tales of the same things. Ruth lowers her hands away from where she herself has to look at them, centering herself on the sorrow and frustration that Rixia is volunteering - entrusting, to someone she met not long ago.
"You spoke of fighting the Lord of Calamity," she says, from that day she came to Klein Manor. "How many were hurt... scarred. And some bore loss to see to their defeat." The former elf speaks, sitting up and lifting her gaze up into the air. "That even gratitude for the sacrifice felt hollow... for how shallow it must have been."
Ruth's hand is back over her heart again, eyes lidded (from whatever vantage point Rixia has to look Ruth in them, as she's notoriously dodgy about prolonged eye contact).
"Someone asked me this a long time ago when I felt lost, Rixia, and... I've taken it to heart since." She turns her head in Rixia's direction, now, and Rixia will get a much clearer look at it - the sorrow behind Ruth's eyes, at times seeming at odds with the rest of her.
"What is it you feel you deserve in your life?"
<Pose Tracker> Rixia has posed.
Rixia does pause, because she can somewhat sense the air and read the inbetween between what is spoken and not spoken; she wonders if she's pushing it a bit too close, with how Ruth also seems to be someone with a lot of experience with hurt around this. But Ruth asks her a question, one borne from when she felt lost...
What is it that she deserves in her life?
The foxgirl doesn't answer immediately. "... you know ... when my dad left me three years ago for his--" don't say real don't say real "--other family in Spira, I fell into this spiral of thinking I didn't deserve a dad because I insisted I come with him. That I didn't deserve comfort, and a family, and people to love and nurture me... I think I still feel that way when I'm in a dark place, sometimes. I know the ways in which it controls me, gets me acting desperately for approval and validation from someone."
She makes a face, though -- then looks towards Ruth's eyes, and the sorrow in them.
"... I wanna say we deserve love and validation and the comfort that our loved ones don't provide that love to us conditionally, but ... I'm still struggling a little to get there. ... it's tough... whenever something threatens to take that away from me, it's hard to ignore the whispers that it's because I didn't deserve it."
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
The pigeons that were feasting look up, see the look in Ruth's eyes, and just take off then and there. An ominous sign, and yet...
For the strange quality in her eyes, there's nothing (further?) untoward about Ruth's manner. She listens to Rixia patiently, without interrupting. Without scoffing. She listens to hear what it is that's driving her, with the only tell being a slight twitch in her left hand at mentioning the concept of not deserving a dad. When Rixia meets her eyes about what she wants to say - that desire, her admission of being in that dark place and feeling those whispers that are hard to ignore.
Ruth's eyes close once Rixia's done speaking, and she looks down.
"My own family disowned me long ago. To them... I was not the blessing I should have been." A smile, as she looks away. A smile that does not belong to that statement. "I didn't seek forgiveness or validation from them, in the end." She takes in a breath that, visually, doesn't ever really seem to leave her unless she's exhaling out the nose so quietly to not even be picked up by Rixia's ears.
She thinks further of the discussions Seraph Yvain and herself have had, about why he placed so much trust and faith in her despite her very nature being an existential threat to himself - and how close she might have come to accidentally sending him over the brink when they first met.
"What Lunar is going through is cruel." Ruth remarks. "At times... it feels only one's ability to be cruel in turn is the only way." She looks up to the sky. "The heavens weep, and all we have to offer is our shoulders to cry on."
It's a clear day, though, so that sort of undermines the sentiment. Just a bit.
"...In the end, there's some things not even time will heal."
<Pose Tracker> Rixia has posed.
"... being... disowned," Rixia murmurs, feeling the energy leave her limbs. She doesn't try to say 'I know what that feels like'. She tries to search for it in her own words, not being the blessing she should've been...
"I'm not... going to pretend I know what that's like, but... when my dad left me, like I said... when I knew it was because he had family he left behind in Spira... I know in some part it's because he didn't want to drag me into a war the Guard was having. I know dad well enough that it's his own awkward way of not wanting to bring me into danger, but... it still hurt a lot. I keep comparing myself to these imagined Ronso children, thinking, if I had a horn like them, if I was more like a lion... maybe if I was a lion..."
She pauses, then slumps. "But... ... thank you, Miss Ruth. It's not... easy to say that, I know. Thank you for trusting me with that... if I may say that. It means a lot, to be able to say these things to someone. ... I know I'm going to go back to Lunar. But even if something happens, even if our paths don't cross again, I want to thank you for trusting me with these things... and in turn, that I can entrust some of my feelings with you."
There's an awkward little smile. "It takes more than time to heal some wounds. Time is... unfair, in a lot of ways. It'll push you forward when you're not ready, never waiting for you. But... you've got some people looking after you too, right? Miss Eleanor..." She doesn't want to presume too much on the other relationships. "... just like I've got some people looking after me too. And I can't just abandon them, cause they're hurting too. Even if it's just each other's shoulders to cry on... that's better than nothing."
<Pose Tracker> Ruth Pauling has posed.
Ruth, in turn, listens to those woes... and she's never imagined hearing a Beastfolk wishing they were another kind of Beastfolk, but that's from the Filgaian perspective. She listens to Rixia talk out and through her feelings, where some days before she struggled to even allow herself to cry.
How she tries - and succeeds - to resolve the contradictions in her feelings.
And then, Ruth is thanked, and her head turns a bit at that, even with the admission that it's not easy to say that. That she's going back to the world she wanted to get away from so much that she was willing to chance any number of dangers walking from Damzen to here, that Rixia can put up that awkward and genuine smile, and... her own thoughts about time, and the people looking out for her.
"You're a strong one," Ruth remarks, quiet, ad the admission there's other people looking after her that she can't abandon after all that's happened.
"Miss Eleanor... and others, yes," she answers at last, about the mutual shoulder crying, as she lowers her head and once again looks to her rosary. "I'm... glad you have people like that." Lunar is a cruel place, but in many ways, far kinder than the part of Filgaia she lived and - in a bloody way - helped reshape to a degree only a few other soldiers of the time could boast.
"Rixia... the life I've led was not kind," Ruth says. "Enough so... I don't deserve kindness or shelter. Or..." Orw hat? She doesn't finish that. Ruth's body language seems to seize up, for a few key moments, but... she holds 'it.' She knows why she holds 'it.'
"So I've chosen to be worthy of their fear, their pain, their anguish." A little smile. "Even if all I've done, all I've mastered just... brings only more of that," she brings that hand to her heart, "and I hold onto the feeling in my heart."
It's ominous!
"But... thank you for trusting me with yours." The former elf returns the sentiment. "I don't feel Lunar will escape a revolution. I've... seen the neglect. The abandonment. What I saw, it can't continue."
Also ominous.
"I can only pray you'll find your way through that."