Cavan Darling (darling_boy) wrote in lost_world, @ 2015-06-30 08:43:00 |
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Entry tags: | annabelle curry, cavan darling |
Not so old friends come back (Cavannabelle log, tbc)
Annabelle was not here. Even though the Doctor had told him as much, and as much as Cavan trusted the Doctor despite his oddities, maybe even because of them, he'd still gone looking. Not willing to really accept it until he saw for himself. And why did he care so much that she wasn't around? Cavan had no way of explaining it to himself. He'd never experienced anything like this before. The emotion was entirely new to him.
While he'd searched, he'd tried to determine the answer, time and time again he'd come up empty handed.
But it was true, she was nowhere.
It felt a little bit like mourning, what he did next. Something else that was wholly new for the boy. He hadn't even mourned when his father had died. Missing and mourning. What had this girl done to him?
The week following, he was more than a little bit withdrawn. He didn't go into social areas where he might be forced to speak to other people. Cavan kept to himself, taking food to his room, spending time sitting on the beach and watching the waves, but doing it on the opposite side of the island from where the people usually went. The resort staff had managed to find him some books, but they were all bodice ripping smut.
And he read them anyway.
He had tried, and failed, to procure alcohol from the bar. It seemed like the right thing to do, to sit on the beach and get drunk and mourn the loss of Annabelle. Of course, part of that couldn't be done without the booze.
Holding one of the trashy romance novels, Cavan got himself a slushy fruit concoction from the restaurant that had within it an island of plastic complete with tree, monkey, and umbrella. The glass it came in was more of a bowl. It was perfect for his plans of reading out by the water. Tucked under an arm was a bag filled with sunscreen and snacks. He knew there would be a giant umbrella and fluffy towel waiting for him because there always was.
Mouth trying to reach the straw, Cavan turned to make his way outside.
Annabelle had always liked the beach.
New Orleans had no such thing. You had to drive out to Mississippi, or
further to some southern points in Alabama, or further to Florida to
get a beach. She'd gotten to do that more than a few times--her
Mayfair cousins certainly enabled any and every opportunity for her to
spend more time with them in the hopes that they'd rub off on her more
or convince her father that they should have more influence on her
life.
She'd found herself in a room, with a note, and once she read that
note she panicked more than a little. A ripple of energy went through
the hotel room and hit the walls, vibrating through them. There was
nothing for her power to touch, and briefly, Annabelle was very
thankful that she was not pyrokinetic.
There wasn't much in the room for her, other than some clothes (a
little bit more revealing than she would have liked, but it did seem
like there was a resort outside, so...) and some art supplies. Her
ring was on her finger.
Sitting here wasn't going to do any good.
So Annabelle changed. She'd been given a two-piece bathing suit where
the bottom was a pair of boy-shorts. It had a gray backround and a
flower pattern on it that reminded her of Magnolias, and she had to
wonder if that was an accident. There was also a big hat, like the
ones her aunts would wear, with a big wide brim, a proper Southern sun
hat, a black pair of sunglasses, and a wrap that matched the bathing
suit that seemed to be designed to go around her waist. Finally, there
was a pair of sandals that were her size.
She found her key card for the door and held the hat as she went out
of her room.
Everything was without incident until she got to the water. She took
one of the towels provided and was laying out on it. There was another
one nearby with no one on it, and she wondered who it was for. Both
were situated sort of under a big, wide umbrella.
If she closed her eyes, she didn't feel so much like she was going to
cry. Or electrocute someone.
---
Making his way carefully down to the water, Cavan sipped on the fruity drink, wondering if Marcel would finally convince the Countess to spend an evening with him at Wickery Estate. And he promptly hated himself for it.
The big umbrella obscured most of the view, and the shadow of it distorted the rest. He didn't notice there was anyone in his spot until he'd dropped the book and the bag and was getting ready to sit down. He noticed the leg first, frowning he moved to see the rest, ready to make a stink about propriety and not invading other people's spaces. He wanted to be alone when he read about Countess Fortenberry, Goddamn it.
But the curve of the cheek and tangle of hair made Cavan look closer.
"Annabelle?" He breathed the word out.
---
Annabelle was just about unconscious, in that territory just before
naps happened, where the light behind her eyelids was starting to dim
from warm pink slowly to black. It was nice to just be here in the
sun, without Lasher, even if it meant being back in a prison without
bars.
She hadn't seen Lasher since she'd been 'back,' but Annabelle wasn't
counting her chickens. It hadn't been all that long, and he was
probably not very happy about being back here, either. She imagined a
lot of disembodied pacing and hair-tearing.
This is when she heard her name.
Annabelle opened one eye behind her glasses to see who was talking,
then sat up and grinned. "Cavan, hey!"
She looked over his outfit, and everything he held.
"What're you reading?"
---
"Um." Cavan was shaken by seeing her. He'd expected to never see her again, had been mourning the loss. He felt like he was seeing a ghost. The words tripped out of his mouth when they finally came. "The Countess And The Scoundrel?"
Telling Annabelle what he was reading wasn't on the list of things he wanted to do in life, but he was so shocked he couldn't stop himself from doing it.
He sat down, forgetting the drink, the book, the snacks.
"How long... when did you show up?" That was an intelligent question, right?
---
She just blinked at him over the book title. There was nothing that
needed to be said that her expression did not say.
Annabelle considered.
"I don't know. I think today? I got a note. It was on the bedside
table in my room..."
She turned her head in the direction of her hotel. Annabelle
swallowed. "The note wasn't really that specific."
Truthfully she was trying not to think about it that hard. If she did,
bad things might happen. And now that Cavan was here, that could mean
really very bad things.
"Did everyone get those?"
---
He sighed heavily, wanting to defend himself, the book, everything about what was going on. It wasn't his fault that the resort had nothing else to read. And it had been either The Countess And The Scoundrel or one entitled Miss Mary Meet's Sweet Shop which had been far less promising. In which apparently Mary Meet owned a sweet shop and fell in love with the mysterious bank foreclosure officer.
Instead, all that came out was a rather pained and shame-filled "Shut up" on the breath of the sigh. His eyes cut to the book and he thought about pushing it into the sand to show his distaste of it, but he knew that he wanted to finish it to see how everything turned out. Cavan had a problem with abandoning books in the middle, unless they were truly horribly written. Unfortunately the adventures of Marcel and Countess Fortenberry were cheesy, ridiculous, absurd, and unrealistic, but they were actually fairly well penned.
"Almost everyone got notes." He nodded. She'd just gotten here today. Well. Okay then. Cavan didn't know what to do with that information right now. "The people who are brand new to the group didn't. I guess they just got to figure shit out on their own. There's nothing really to be specific about. It's an island resort. Don't go beyond the wall. Pretty much all there is to it."
---
Annabelle grinned when he told her to shut up. She said the word
'busted' under her breath.
But as Cavan went on, her grin faded. "What did the one you got say?"
Her eyebrow arched. There were brand new people? Something inside her
twisted. She was worried all over again. New people meant new
opportunities to be startled or pissed, and it meant more chance to
accidentally hurt or kill someone. She needed help. She needed the
Doctor, or Sam, or....
Annabelle swallowed.
"Have you.... who else is missing? Is the Doctor still here? Or that guy Sam?"
Her gaze went to the wall immediately when he said they couldn't go
beyond it. That was when she knew Lasher was back. All the hair on the
back of her neck stood up and Annabelle made a fist with her left
hand.
Beyond the wall. Go beyond the wall.
---
Busted. Damned right he was busted. Caught red handed. Horrible. The whole saving grace of reading the book had been that nobody would ever know. That he'd been so incredibly antisocial in the past week that not even the Doctor would see him with it.
"It just said that we'd been in stasis, and whatever grogginess we felt was because of that, and they'd had to do some restructuring of our peer group." He was paraphrasing, of course. He blended his next statement in with that second question she'd asked. "The Doctor is here. I don't know about Sam. We explored some, but I didn't really have the heart..."
Cavan wasn't sure what she would think or feel if he finished that sentiment. He hadn't had the heart to do much more poking around on the island once he'd learned about her being missing.
"Anyway. The Doctor told me that I'd been gone longer. Since some time before all you guys. I'm sorry if you thought that I like, abandoned you, or something." Shut up, Cavan. Shut up. He noted her tense up. "You okay?"
---
Annabelle didn't like the sound of that stasis thing. Her note had
said something about that too, but hearing it aloud somehow made it
worse.
When Cavan said he didn't have the heart, she looked at him, sort of
waiting a few seconds for the end of the sentence. "The heart for
what?"
Her hand was still in a fist. And Lasher was still talking. He was
saying he was going to go over to the other side of the wall, that
there must be something over there that 'they' didn't want Annabelle
to see, that eventually she would cave and go over there, that she was
weak-willed...
He just kept going. It was all emotionless chatter because Lasher had
no way of conveying emotion.
Abandoned.
She came back to the conversation for that, tuned out the chatter.
Annabelle shook her head. "No. I mean, I just thought you were gone.
It wasn't just you it was other people, too and... I don't know where
I thought everybody went. Someplace else? Someplace else they put
you."
Was she alright?
Annabelle shook her head very slightly. "I'm... no. But it's ok."
---
Stupid mouth. Stupid mouth saying things he didn't want to expound upon. Cavan looked away, not wanting to see the look on her face when he said the words he was going to say. He couldn't bare to see pity there, or laughter. He couldn't bare to see that look that girls gave the pathetic guy when admissions were made.
"I didn't have the heart to look for anyone else once I found out you were gone. I didn't care." His fingers found and fiddled with the edges of the book, one corner fanned through again and again. And he couldn't bring himself to look at her, despite the rest of the conversation.
"I guess I was just in stasis longer. I wasn't really anywhere else. I remember being on the ship, and then I was here." He shrugged, glanced up and then looked down again. "Do you need to find the Doctor? Can he help?"
Cavan knew he wasn't a doctor in the normal sense, but it had seemed to him like the guy knew about and was able to help control whatever was going on with Annabelle. Cavan knew some of it, but not all.
---
Annabelle wasn't very good with guys.
She wasn't antisocial, but dating with her particular abilities was
incredibly difficult and more than a little dangerous. She wasn't sure
Cavan meant anything romantic by what he said, but she was not sure he
didn't, either. But Cavan was looking away, and Annabelle was pretty
sure people did that when making eye contact was too hard. She was in
new territory now and there was not a single thing her power could do
to help her.
Her mouth opened, and just sort of hung there, open. Merrick would've
said something about letting flies in, for sure, if she were still
alive. For a second, Annabelle missed her cousin. She would've been
helpful right now, with her vampire telepathy and even just her
general life experience. Goddamnit.
Annabelle didn't see herself as anything special. What there was that
was special about her was dangerous and she wished it wasn't there,
just like she wished Lasher wasn't there--and he was having a GREAT
time with what Cavan had said.
Laughter. He must not know that anyone who loves the women in your
family dies.
Annabelle imagined Lasher as a person standing in front of her, and
took a few seconds to imagine his head exploding.
"But... why would you... you missed me?"
She blushed. And it didn't go away.
As for the rest....
"I don't know if he can, but I need to find somebody who can. Sam was
helping. Dean's brother? I'm trying to figure out how to control
my..."
She didn't say the word 'power.' And her face took on a colder cast,
much like Rowan's. "So I can be a weapon."
---
The silence cut into him. His mind went all kinds of places with it. She was trying to think of a nice way to tell him to fuck off. She was doing her best to not giggle. The fact that he wouldn't look at her made it worse, he didn't see her blush. That might have given him more to go off of. Or maybe he might have just thought it was a blush of horror.
"Yeah. I mean. I guess." Admitting he missed her was adding poo onto the pile, so he tried to sound flippant about it. He realized after it was out of his mouth that he just sounded mopey. Man. What she must think of him at this point. Cavan didn't even know what to think of himself. None of this was familiar territory. Even the whole having friends thing was new. And here he had a small group of them. The Doctor, Dean, Annabelle...
Trying to grasp on the topic change, Cavan said "Dean's here, I'm pretty sure." Or maybe the Doctor had been saying something about the last planet. His head was all over the place. Maybe he'd just given her false hope.
The word weapon got him to glance up. His lip curled up in confusion, and his brow furrowed. "What? Weapon?"
---
Annabelle smiled at him.
She wasn't sure how she felt about Cavan, but he was nice and he was
cute and him saying he missed her was really nice to hear. It made her
stomach do a good fluttering thing.
Weapon?
Annabelle bit her lip and nodded. "We need one, don't we? To get out
of here?" Her eyebrow rose, and a little bit more of Rowan crept into
her face. Lasher was away, he was over the wall and he was chattering
and saying 'laughter' over and over. That wasn't good but she could
ignore him for now.
"I need to learn how to control my......" She blushed. "Self. So I
don't hurt anybody unless I want to."
---
Cavan's eyes narrowed briefly, unsure that he had really heard what he'd heard. There seemed to be some difference in the way that Annabelle had said weapon the first time, and when she'd said it the second. But he'd leave it for now.
"I think it's really overly hopeful to think that we're going to get out of the grip of the aliens. Have you seen the kind of people they're able to control? Angels? Gods? We're here until they don't want us anymore."
It was a gloomy outlook, he could admit, but he didn't feel like harboring the hope. It was too destructive, that particular hope.
"Controlling your abilities is probably best for everybody." He nodded. "Especially you. You need to feel like you can be around others without worrying all the time."
---
Overly hopeful.
Annabelle didn't know about that. It was egotistical, for sure. If the
Doctor hadn't gotten everyone out, she should be realizing that she
couldn't do much here, either. But it didn't feel that way for her. It
felt like she didn't know what she was capable of and that meant she
didn't know she couldn't do it.
She didn't say anything, but she didn't agree with Cavan, at all.
"I don't want to hurt anybody." And that was true. "Especially people
who've been trying to help me, or y'know. Missed me."
She raised an eyebrow at him and there was a fast, close-lipped smile.
Beyond the wall, Lasher continued whatever it was he was doing. It
sounded like he was having a great time.
"What do you think is behind the wall?"
---
Cavan looked back at the book cover when she brought up again that he'd missed her. Was she making fun of him? Did she mean that genuinely? He was going to have to talk to somebody about all of this, and he had a feeling that the unlucky person was going to be Dean. Only in part because he could gleefully imagine just how uncomfortable it would make the older man.
He looked up at the wall, staring at it for a moment as if he could see through it and give her the right answer. Finally he shrugged.
"Bad things." He mused. "Worse than what we've seen so far. We've never been to a place that had a wall to keep us out. In. Whatever. I mean, there were those islands but it wasn't like they put the man eating fish there to keep us apart. They were just there. This? This has to be nasty."
---
"Why put us here, then, though?"
Her eyebrows drew together in a furrowed line. "I mean, they have to
know someone's going to go over there. It's probably already
happened." She wasn't talking about Lasher, either. Annabelle thought
about the vampires at home, the ones she'd never specifically seen but
knew were there. You could feel them, around corners, especially in
the Quarter. There was some unspoken thing about the Quarter belonging
to Lestat.
She had never felt threatened, but partially that was because she was
a Mayfair and partially that was because she was a witch. Both of
those things earned her respect from anything walking around her city,
and that meant she got left alone. It was possible for Annabelle to be
mugged or shot, but nothing supernatural was going to be stupid enough
to touch her.
She realized then that Lasher taunted her about being over there
because he knew she wanted to see what was on the other side.
---
"They like to see what we can deal with." Cavan's shrug was one shouldered, almost casual. "Since the first planet, it's been all about what we see, what we do, how we handle it all. We thought that the first place we were in was normal, just a city on Earth. But it turns out that everyone there had two pupils. Not so bad, right? Well, the next place was this Easter Halloween place and we couldn't go out at night because of all the vicious animals."
Another shrug.
"I don't think the aliens ever believed the wall would stop anybody. The resort staff might have. But not them."