6830/After the Astral Plane
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| After the Astral Plane | |
|---|---|
| Date of Scene: | 07 July 2021 |
| Location: | Loft Apt - Hope House |
| Synopsis: | Clarice helps Nicolai recover from a bad trip - and they discuss the nature of guilt. |
| Cast of Characters: | Clarice Ferguson, Nicolai Codona
|
- Clarice Ferguson has posed:
The pair appear on the king sized bed - and Clarice releases her hold on the man long enough to pull back the sheets. His shoes are tugged off, but everything else is left on as gets her own shoes off, and pulls the blankets up over both of them. The added body heat will warm things up fast. Every movement is simple, and no-nonsense - though there's some concern showing through her otherwise tightly controlled features. She presses herself against Nicolai's side as she adds, "This is just to warm you up." There's a brief pause. "I could see about some hot tea as well, I guess, if that'd help."
Then - after a momentary pause her voice asks a bit more gently, "You're okay, right? We don't know what that stuff was..." She could guess, though.
- Nicolai Codona has posed:
He doesn't protest Clarice's closeness, not at all. It doesn't seem weird or awkward to him in the least... he's European, this is tame, even for friends.
For a long time, he just lays there shivering, but as soon as the cold is chased away and he's back up to a relatively sane body temperature, he finally pushes himself up to sit. It doesn't take all that long and he really really seems fine in that regard after.
"I guess, I dunno. I'm not sure what happened. I... just couldn't control it. How the hell did *you* end up there with that... what's her name?" Now that he's back here, he has to think a second to remember what he knew there... "Lydia? How did you get there?"
- Clarice Ferguson has posed:
"I don't know," Clarice answers. She lets him pull away, and slides out from under the covers, keeping them tucked around her.
That was an uncomfortable length of physical proximity for her - and she sits on the edge of the bed, her back slightly angled towards him. "The guy sprayed you with something. You went down. I teleported over to catch you, Lydia came to check on you, and we both- we were just //there//" she says simply, her voice quiet.
"What the hell happened there, Nicolai? Those people, that river, the boat..." Her grip tightens on the blankets beneath her.
The man in the boat...
- Nicolai Codona has posed:
"I'm not even sure I can explain it all in a way that you'll understand, Clarice," Nicolai says while he's getting up from the bed to wander into the living area. Why? Well, to retrieve his acoustic, music... he needs his fix. He comes back and settles down on the side of the bed to strum out a few idle notes.
"I've been... this has been my world. That has been my world, or half of it, for as far as I can remember. I'm not sure there's a way to make other people understand what... Sometimes, when the living pass through, the things they see... the things that happen, are of their own making..."
- Clarice Ferguson has posed:
"...were any of them real?" Clarice asks quietly - uncertainly. She could still see them all - all of those people. The people she'd failed. The people she'd killed. A few tears streak down her cheeks silently as her hands still grip to the blankets beneath her. "They weren't... spirits, or souls, or whatever? They're just... figments? It was just my guilt?" she asks.
- Nicolai Codona has posed:
"They could have been... would have been. If... some of them were, but I think mainly that one you chose to get on the boat wasn't. It's what you expected to see, so it manifested." Nicolai's idle strumming turns more into sounding like an actual song. It's soothing, soft, like a lullabye.
"I'm not sure what would have happened if he'd gotten away with that girl. I'm... You might have been stuck, unable to leave until she was saved."
- Clarice Ferguson has posed:
"...woman," Clarice supplies quietly. "That woman. Fatimata Inyene. She was a mutant rights activist. I murdered her." She feels sick to her stomach, staring fixedly at the floor in front of her. She couldn't erase the woman's face from her mind. "I murdered a lot of people, though."
- Nicolai Codona has posed:
"Far as I can tell, you were just a gun and someone else pulled the trigger," Nicolai replies quietly, his voice is really barely audible over the music he's pulling from the guitar. "But even misplaced guilt is a powerful thing, it's not something you just get rid of, sometimes you never get rid of it."
His strumming gets louder for a few moments, then softer again... "I know it's nowhere near the same thing, but I was supposed to be home the night Cristian died. But I'd met a guy... anyway..." If it wasn't obvious from the start that Nicolai was at LEAST not gender particular... it should maybe have been. "... I feel like I coulda saved him if I'd just been home for dinner like we'd planned."
- Clarice Ferguson has posed:
"I wasn't a person then," Clarice responds quietly. Was she agreeing with him? Hell - was the whole 'not a person' thing even remotely true, or was that something she'd simply convinced herself of? Who knows. "I've give anything to undo any of it."
She lapses into another brief silence before adding, "Maybe you'd've saved him. Maybe you'd be gone, too. We can't ever know."
- Nicolai Codona has posed:
"Well, sometimes I... feel like I think it would have been better dying trying to save him than feeling like his death was somehow partly my fault, but then I remember that it wasn't. That what we can't control is never our fault. We can't change it, so there's no point in letting it the dark shit stick around too long."
He finally settles on a song to play instead of just idle, song-like notes of his own making. 'Here Comes the Sun'. Seems appropriate. He doesn't launch into the vocals yet though.
- Clarice Ferguson has posed:
"I try not to dwell in it," Clarice admits quietly. "I try to build the future I want, instead. I try to make up for it." But she has her moments, clearly. And the dreams are never far. She lifts one hand wiping it across her eyes, but otherwise remaining still on the edge of the bed before she adds, "If you're sure you're alright now, should head home."
- Nicolai Codona has posed:
"I'm fine, but if you want to stay you can. I'll take the couch, it's typically where I fall asleep anyway, in front of the television." Nicolai stops strumming the guitar and sets it aside.
"But Clarice, you should stop doing things to atone..." His forehead creases, he's trying to figure out... how to express what he means by that. "If you stop doing things to try to make yourself feel better and *just* focus on the doing them for other people, because you want to help them *just* to help them? You'll find the 'making up for it' happens faster. ...because you're no longer chasing the impossible." - atonement for sins not deserved.
- Clarice Ferguson has posed:
"No!" Clarice replies immediately, when Nicolai suggests she stays the night. "...no," she adds in a less forceful tone. "I'd rather sleep at home." She knows when she's in for a rough night, and there's some things she's just not willing to do in front of witnesses.
"And it's not like I sit there every day, dwelling on- dwelling on everything that happened. That... everything is an act of atonement. I don't... stew like that. But it doesn't change what it is. They taught me these things, to use me to tear mutant kind down. And I mean to choke 'em with it. I'll do more good with this training than- than they ever could have imagined."
- Nicolai Codona has posed:
"Okay." Nicolai holds up his hands a little defensively. "Go home then..." Whoa... he just offered! He pushes himself to his feet and goes about gathering clothes out of the dresser in the corner of the room. "I'm gonna take a hot shower. Remember, you're always welcome here. ...and I'm sorry you got... sucked up in that tonight." He's *still* not sure how that happened, but he aims to find out by finding out what the hell they walloped him with.
- Clarice Ferguson has posed:
"Yeah, you said," Clarice replies. She was still sitting awkwardly on the edge of the bed - but she pushes herself up now, rubbing at her eyes one more time. "I'm glad you're alright, though." She looks towards Nicolai now - for the first time since she'd crawled out from those covers, flashing him a tight, awkward smile. She was a mess sometimes - and this just happened to be one of those times.
"...be careful out there. You may have painted a target on your back."
She'll wait a moment to allow him to respond - then blink away, back to the asteroid in her typical purple flash of energy.
- Nicolai Codona has posed:
"Then I'm doing something right," Nicolai calls out as he's as he's heading to the bathroom. It's not that he *isn't* worried about his own safety, it's not that at all. He's scared truth be told, but he's not one to let his fear get in the way of doing the right thing.
