alex, plural. (jewplicate) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2013-03-25 22:31:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! log, alex katz, sadie thompson |
WHO: Sadie Thompson [USA] and Alex Katz [USA].
WHAT: Two depressed and angry young persons have a chance encounter.
WHEN: Backdated to the evening of Friday, March 1st.
WHERE: The memorial wall.
WARNINGS: Language, Holocaust references, angry and depressed youths.
STATUS: Complete.
Night at IVI seemed to fall swiftly, though Sadie couldn't really say why that was. Perhaps because the expanse of desert afforded very few twilight shadows, or the early calls of night birds and crickets that gently ushered in the dusk. It was day, the sun set spectacularly, and then it was dark. Some evenings Sadie could appreciate the brilliance of the constellations above them, but tonight was not one of those times. Tonight, she avoided looking at the stars, because it would only serve as a reminder: the same stars were not shining above Maine. Only Orion was familiar to her, and he was upside-down. It might have been an appropriate metaphor for her life, if Sadie bothered to look up at the sky, and if she were the sort to apply metaphors to her life. Upside-down, backwards, topsy-turvy, wrong. Enely's post had made her thoughtful, and as was so often the danger of thinking too much and too hard at IVI, those thoughts had transformed into guilt and anger. Guilt for wondering if going home and raising a child and finding a shitty job to pay the bills was what she really wanted. Anger at the authorities that had taken away her crappy choices to begin with, for restricting her freedom and expanding her worldview. The two intertwined, as always, inextricable from each other. It was impossible to say if Sadie was angrier at the IVF or herself. She had neither the words nor inclination to express this to Julieta or Libby, and Rashida was out now, drinking in the dark and the power it gave her. Sadie wanted no awkward comfort or soothing words, she wanted to make noise and break things. So she left the dorms and stalked westward, intending to rip up the earth and throw rocks at the fence and exhaust herself with her power until she didn't have the energy to feel so angry anymore. Her path, perhaps subconsciously, took her past the memorial wall, and there beneath the tree planted for the fallen students she saw someone kneeling, placing rocks. Sadie stopped and watched. It was a Jewish tradition. Rather than flowers, they left stones at gravesites. Alex had never been the type of person who went in for religion or tradition, either one. But he had always liked this particular one. Flowers died; stones had a weight to them, a permanence. He knew that nothing was permanent, that over decades the stones would erode into sand and dust that would blow away in the wind, scatter over the Outback, but for human purposes it was close enough. The action was meaningless. He knew that too. She was dead. It wouldn't bring her back. She wouldn't notice or care; she was dead. He knew, but he did it anyway. He did it at night, because he did not want to be seen. He did not want to have to explain himself. It was private. It was quiet; he did not utter a word. The cairn was small, still. He had come only a few times, when the need had overwhelmed reluctance to face it, driven by grief or guilt or a simple longing to connect, in some small way, with the dead. He picked stones carefully, large but not too large, able to fit in his closed hand. An interesting shape or color, striations, breccias with chunks of minerals embedded in the matrix. This one was unusually heavy, rounded and oblong, sandstone with two sharply demarcated bands near the top. He set it up atop the others, sat with his hands on his knees, resting back on his haunches. He looked up at her name, carved into the wall. Her image seemed to hover in the back of his mind, and he thought of her hand in his. He sat there, silent, until he decided that it had been enough, with no real feel for how long it had actually been. He stood, wobbling slightly on stiff knees, and turned, and froze, when he saw Sadie. "Hi," she said when he turned, her arms crossing instinctively. Unlike her run-in with Valya - had it already been almost two months ago? - if Sadie felt guilty and awkward for intruding upon Alex's grief, it was buried under her current turmoil. Instead she tried to catch and hold his gaze, fellow to fellow, bound to this stark wall in one way or another. See, she wanted to say, here I am: a kindred spirit. I'm angry, too. I'm hurting, too. "I was wondering about the stones." She paused for a beat, and then shrugged. Of course the geokinetic would wonder. "They're good." 'Nice' wasn't right, and 'appropriate' felt appropriative. The monosyllable she'd let slip through didn't exactly express what she meant, or represent the height of eloquence, but she meant it: they were good, they were right, even if she didn't understand it. Alex had had years of practice avoiding gazes. Eye contact unnerved him. It always had. He couldn't say why. Even with the other Alexes, he looked at his hands, or his shoes, or some point on the wall instead of looking them in the face. And they did the same, of course. Two identical young men, unable to look at each other. So it was to his shoes, rather than to Sadie, that he mumbled, "Hi." He turned back around, and shoved his hands in his pockets. He looked at the small pile of stones because it was something to do, because it was something to look at, because he felt less uncomfortable. "It's a Jewish thing," he offered, with some hesitation. Then, "I like it." "I didn't know that. I like it too." Beyond the stories of the Old Testament, Judaism was still foreign to Sadie, even now after almost 9 months surrounded by people of other cultures and religions. She knew the basics, of course, but these little things, these traditions and customs she knew nothing of. And yet, the stones struck a familiar chord with her, somewhere deep in her being - as a human, even, and not just a Vol with an affinity for the things that came from the earth. Sadie closed the distance between herself and the wall, reaching a hand up to touch one of the names, fit her fingers inside the indentation of a letter. Would she have to carve more here? Would it be soon? Her gaze, though, rested on the stones and she gave another nod of approval. "Better than flowers, anyway." Her eyes flicked to the blossoms planted by her teammate. "No offense to Teresa or anything." "Flowers die," Alex said flatly. There had been enough death, hadn't there? Why compound death with more death? It was too much, he decided, and the anger started to bubble up inside him, the anger that sat easier in his stomach than the hopeless, blind despair that gnawed at its lining for most of the day. He knew, in some manner he couldn't voice, or wouldn't, that it was just another way of not dealing, of substitution without elimination. It was pointless, and it could have no outlet anyway, here and now, so he pushed it down, swallowed spit as if it were a physical manifestation of that anger. He allowed himself to look up, to unfurl out of himself a bit. He watched her trace the letters. He realized he knew virtually nothing about this girl - that she was the younger sister of one of IVI's biggest douchenozzles, that she was a teen mom and it had apparently been something of a scandal when that information came out, and that she had carved this memorial. "Why did you do it?" he asked, seeming to startle himself with the abruptness of the question. I didn't want them to forget. That's what she'd said to Valya, to answer the same question, unasked at the time. Those words softened her real intention, skirted around her own anger out of respect for the older Zhiglov brother, newly bereft at the time. As Sadie looked at Alex now, she recognized the anger and despair (how could she not?) and knew she did not have to bite back her own pointless, endless rage. "To hold them fucking accountable," she said, smacking her knuckles against the brick to emphasize them. "To make sure they don't forget, that they completely fucking failed in their supposed mission to keep us safe..." That the lives cut short were lives disrupted, uprooted, spent in depression or barely above it, trying to forge new relationships or find the silver lining to being trapped under a force field in a desert thousands of miles away from their homes. Sadie crossed her arms and scowled, glaring down at the stones Alex had placed. "Not that it makes a fucking difference." "They don't care." He did not sound angry about that. He had never expected them to. From the day the International Vol Institution had been announced he had been sure that the motivations behind it had nothing to do with protection or trust-building or anything of the sort. He stopped himself short of saying that they were glad six vols had died. For one thing, he wasn't entirely sure he believed it - he was pretty certain they weren't terribly broken up about it, but glad? For another, he knew next to nothing about Sadie Thompson, and one of the things he did know was that her brother was about as far up the ass of the IVF as it was possible to crawl. "Why you?" he asked. He had no right, and he thought that if their places had been reversed he would have stalked off without answering. But he knew who he had lost; he took a step forward, reached up and pressed his palm to the A in Marine, chiseled into the wall. Lottie had lost her boyfriend. His roommate Valya had lost his brother. Who had Sadie lost? And that was the question that Valya hadn't asked, the one Sadie had dreaded at the time - what gave her the right to carve their names up on the wall, to throw these people in the face of the Dean and the team leaders, and remind her classmates every day of what they'd lost? Sadie pressed her lips in a line, watching Alex, close to her now, his hand on Marine's name. "I didn't think about it at the time," she said after a long moment. "I just wanted to do something." Her eyes traveled up to Erik's name, to Alyosha's and Mal's, but she stopped short of explaining who they were to her, because really - she wasn't Lottie. She wasn't Valya, she wasn't Harlow or Omar. "It felt right. Better than uselessly tearing up the earth and throwing rocks at the force field," Though she still did a lot of that, given no other recourse. "They fucking paid attention for once," and here she smiled, viciously bitter. "Maybe if I carved my son's name all over campus, they'd actually let me go home?" It was a humorless joke, and she let her hand drop from the wall, though her eyes didn't leave the brick. "Ha, ha." Alex wasn't sure how much attention they had paid. What had been accomplished? There had been services - services he had not managed to make it all the way through - but nothing had changed. They were expected to move on, which of course Alex had found impossible. He said nothing for a time, until finally he figured, what did it matter? "I don't think any of us are leaving here again," he admitted. He wasn't sure he'd told anyone that before. "They'll find excuses to keep us penned in. First they'll pretend it's for our safety. Shit, they're probably right, even." He laughed, all bitterness, and brought his free hand up, tracing the carved letters of Marine's name with a long, bony forefinger, his other palm pressed into a facade still warm to the touch after baking in the Australian sun all day. He thought, fleetingly, of the warmth another human body radiated. "They'll stop pretending soon enough. Once we do enough damage. Once they pass off enough murders on us, enough Olympics attacks, enough subway bombings. Once they make it look like we're out of control, like we need to be put down. It's for their safety, not ours." He closed his eyes, let his forehead rest on the wall, supported by his hands. "They don't even need to justify themselves with Aryan mysticism or eugenics or any of the other fallacious bullshit the Nazis used to pass off genocide as anything but." He laughed again. "Too Jewish?" Sadie was watching Alex now, storm clouds moving over her face as he gave voice to all her worst fears. The worst fears of all of them, really, even those who firmly believed it would never happen. She used to try and be among them, she tried to believe her brother: that this was temporary, that of course they would go home sooner rather than later, that of course they would be allowed to return to their lives. Now, Sadie had just one belief that she clung to, one flickering, faltering belief that she stoked with that omnipresent anger whenever things looked too bleak and impossible. Like today. Like right now. "They can try," she said, quiet and fierce, fists balling at her side. "They aren't the ones with powers." Maybe they weren't ready yet, maybe they weren't powerful enough yet, maybe they didn't have a plan yet - yet. "And I won't - I won't - let them point to these names and say we're better off here, because we're not. I'm not. I never will be. Fuck that, fuck them." He turned, and looked at her, and slid down the wall, pulling his legs into his chest. He resisted the urge to laugh, to tell her "good luck with that, kid". Instead he spoke quietly, resting his chin on his knees, eyes now on the dusty ground, not on her. "We have the powers. They have the power." The distinction, he thought, was clear. They were all little more than children, and there were a bare handful of them compared to the rest of the population. "Maybe we could take over IVI. Okay, I don't believe that, but say we could. Then what? There's a forcefield. We're trapped here." A pause, as he shifted around dirt with the toe of his dirty Chuck Taylors. "So they mass outside, come in and slaughter us. Or pump in some kind of gas, or pump out the air. Or nuke us. Or shit, just starve us out. Like a siege." It's an interesting thought, medieval warfare made modern, thick stone walls replaced by invisible, impenetrable ones. "So say we figure out how to get the forcefield down. Then what? We scramble? We're in the middle of the desert with nowhere to go. They'd catch most of us before we got anywhere near civilization and the ones who did get away probably wouldn't be able to get off the continent. And they'd have to live knowing people were looking for them, and they'd be locked up again if they were found. If not killed." The conclusion, to him, was obvious. "We're fucked." Sadie was silent for a long time after this, first staring down at Alex, then looking away to the horizon, beyond which the force field loomed. The anger was ebbing out of her, but she desperately didn't want it to. It wasn't that she didn't think Alex was wrong, it was more that she just couldn't let herself believe that. She didn't want to end up like him, a living ghost, drowning in her own despair. So she clung to her anger, she fought to keep that rage alive, and when finally - fingers clutching at her elbows in a white-knuckle grip - she found the will to keep that flame steady, it was with all that fury and fear that she hissed, "No. You're fucked, if you believe that. Me, I have someone to get home to. They won't stop me, they won't keep me here." With that, she pivoted and began to walk away, but stopped and looked over her shoulder. "I don't think she would let them, either." It was cruel, and she knew it, but from what little she knew of Marine - Marine, who saved her brother and everyone else from the nightmares of George Cooper, whose name she carved and traced over again and again - she thought it must be true. The Young Vols she fostered would never give up so easily. And besides which, Sadie's newly-stoked anger needed to lash out at someone, and Alex was there, reminding her what she was most afraid of. She walked away. He smiled. He couldn't help it. He knew what she was doing. He recognized himself in her. It was a bitter recognition, and the knowing didn't stop the visceral emotion. Her words were meant to harm, and they did, and he responded in kind. He laughed at her back, and called after her. "Keep that chin up, kid." He sat there until all light had drained from the sky. The stars here were unfamiliar, flipped from the northern starscape he was used to, thousands more of them visible than at home. It had been a wonder when they'd first arrived; tonight he did not look up. He thought of only one thing. |