S. L. Rose (rosesisred) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2015-09-29 06:25:00 |
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Entry tags: | # 2018 [09] september, karen sharpe, samantha rose |
Who: Sam and Karen
When: Recently, pre-Cal detention
What: Trade-off of bad days
Theirs was a presence more felt than seen. Something about the nature of a uniform made the eyes naturally avert, as armed men and women strode down cluttered corridors, stood sentinel at the ends of halls; an ever-present reminder of the capitol's considerable reach. The hour turned, duties exchanged between the ranks, and Karen found herself at last at the end of her own patrol shift. Just another resources agent to pass silent along the halls, a fixture of life hardly demanding a lingering turn of the head.
Freedom given and now spat back out into the world, no longer a still phantom stationed silently near a wall, Karen nevertheless took her time in leaving. Long before the city's current state (its death and harrowing rebirth, humanity stubbornly rising from its own ruin), she had found some connection to halls as these. Memories lingered. Part of herself perhaps was rooted here, as there must have also been a part of her rooted in the government building across the city.
At present, home had stranger meanings, a complex set of new parameters. Who understood plainly now where they belonged? Certainly the soldiers, one would’ve thought, whose profession it was not to delve deeply into questions of the profound (theirs is not to question why).
Karen wandered by herself through the hospital, a rare occasion to be unattached to her partner. A brief time allowed, perhaps, for activities such as private thinking and reflection. Residents seemed not to pay her terribly much consideration as she passed, looking about idly for any familiar faces. Eventually she sat in a repurposed former lobby, one positioned to face the evening sky, as the setting sun bled slowly over a parched and crumbling landscape.
Her jacket dangled off the side of the chair, her posture loose as she rested her chin on one palm; she heard people moving through the room but did not immediately turn her head.
Home was a goddamn construct. Always had been, always would be. Sammy understood the soldiers built their own, a carapace carried around on their shoulders like sweat-stained comfort in comrade-in-arms. There wasn’t none of that for folks who didn’t forge their own certainty in their own strength, for folks who weren’t certain of nothing except the rivlets they were held together by, cracking under strain. Sam, she wasn’t in uniform. If they’d had a damn one in the place she’d have resisted but the scrubs - papery thin cotton by now, the kind that could be bleached and scrubbed until they were the color of sand and old bone - they were reserved for the folks doctoring to other folks, instead of the floors.
She wore denim, instead. Cracked at the knees, bleach-stained, and her hands were raw. Dry cracked around the nails and Sam couldn’t remember manicures real well; she remembered the scent, and the roll of someone else’s fingertips across a palm. She could paint her own nails any color a scout picked up, but the skin was broken now. Thickened. Wasn’t fooling no one by painting the nails red, least of all herself.
She was done, real done. Sweaty-haired, piled heavy above the back of her neck; gold-shot copper and stuck in feathers to her face, and a look nobody saw Sammy Rose show if there were folks around. It looked like maybe she’d been shaken out some, fabric stripped of its clever folds and pleating until it was just what it was, lacking artifice.
Recognized the woman propped into a chair, watching the world bleed itself out of light. Sam’s face shifted, tired under all that rosy light, but something flared in the eyes, drew itself around her like a blanket -- or an armory.
“You’re sacked out,” Sam said, with definitive lack of question in the rounded, syrup-sweet syllables. Without asking nothing, she slid down the wall and sat, someplace near enough Karen’s feet, faded denim and sprawled knees and her head tilted back against crumbling plaster.
“Was it that bad?” Aimed in Karen’s direction.
“Not nearly,” Karen spoke, slowly sitting up proper now that she had an audience. “Least when your worst opponent of the day is monotony.” Bluff or bravado, the simple forced act of stillness nevertheless had clearly done her in; without inertia, she had fallen into the dreary mire of her own thoughts -- and what opponent was exhausting if not the self?
Shoulders set, she sought to shrug her weariness aside. Karen’s gaze rested on the woman in front of her, brow knit briefly as she pushed her way back to the present. The sun sank lower into the horizon, as if it too had been overcome by the day, and its last volley of light shone off the younger woman’s bundle of hair in a mess of red and gold.
“And what for you then?” The question tossed back gently. “Ain’t seen you for a bit, have I? Hospital must be keeping you busy as ever.”
Monotony wasn’t nothing found easy in the hospital. A whole long period where folks didn’t come in injured, or hurt, or otherwise ripped in two by the sadnesses of losing folks or losing the life they’d believed in too long to go on letting go easy: that was impossible and the dream to be chased down to its tail-end. Karen wore exhaustion same way Cal did, heavy over the eyebrows, like a bad mood but same way, she shrugged it off like it was nobody’s business but hers. Soldier, maybe, that part, down to the bone. It looked easy, the way the other woman did it.
“Hospital don’t stop, sugar.” She ran her hands through her own hair, snagged rough cuticle and a broken nail on a strand and cussed under her breath, soft as exhaled breath. The hospital was about the only place Sam felt useful and useless, equal measure, split down the middle fifty-fifty. It took something out of her, beat it, maybe squeezed it some until there was nothing much left but the parts there were had contributed.
“I just had a real long day is all.” And the shrugging it off, it was effortful, end of the day without a shower and a clean-up job that helped pretend that the day was just a bad dream. “Y’all tell me how the world outside is now”
“Dried up and turned belly over,” Karen said, offering up her usual straight-faced manner of humor. “Dogs out making a real mess of everything, but ain’t none of that new.” A contrast to Cal in certain ways -- unlike the man’s affable nature and boundless energy, emotions worn on the sleeve, she took her time in coming out of that battle-hardened shell.
But Sam was no stranger to her and neither were these busy hospital corridors. Weapons had been traded out and there was no battle to be waged nor bullets to be dodged, or so it presently seemed. She leaned on one arm, noticed the stringent odor of cleaning product, thought of all those who had passed her along the halls with their arms full, their eyes forward and their minds set on some unknown list of tasks. A institution reborn and reconstructed, and all of it remaining under the protection of the government (a weary day, but not time ill-spent).
“You been holed up here too long? What about that bar said to have cropped across the city?” She shook her head and sun-bleached hair scattered across her face. “God Bless America and her unflinching capitalist spirit.”
Dogs doing what they did didn’t make Sam flinch any. They were folks, dealing their own way with how the world had shaken out. She didn’t blame them none, except when the way they dealt rubbed up against the way other folks dealt, or when it meant death and the rubbed-raw look Cal wore when he was real close to his bones. When it caused trouble, and Cal and Karen went to war, the kind all over dust and bullets and the air choked with red dirt, then she minded some. But Sammy wasn’t fighting any battles.
She didn’t pry none at that shiny-shellac shell, didn’t ask for no more than Karen wanted to give over. Sammy liked Karen plenty, but she thought of travel-stains and bullet-wounds and Sam didn’t want to know a scrap more of blood and death and the scent of sorrow than she had to.
“That bar?” Sam lifted her chin; soft, but the whole of the girl was soft, made for perfume and silk instead of hardy cotton and blood-stains. Her smile lit like the sunset. “God Bless America and her love of alcoholic beverages, sugar. I want to go,” she said, without elaborating on why not. Sammy missed bars; laughter sodden with liquor, and the warmth of unreeling companionship. Except walking on into the bar that had grown overnight was walking on into the pried-open scab of what she’d lost. Sam had fitted into bars. She didn’t want to know if she fit no more.
“Y’all have been?”
“Not yet,” Karen admitted, noticing the way the other woman had lit up at the prospect. She gave a lazy shrug of her shoulders and felt a sliver of the day’s exhaustion ease away; it was enough. “But I’ve been fixing to when I got the time. Cal might know a thing or two more than me, you might do well asking him when he ain’t busy roping cattle.”
A low sound escaped her throat that nearly bordered on a laugh; never was she to envy her partner of certain appointed tasks. But the mention of him brought other memories along with, a nest of worries that waited for her, no doubt upon her eventual return to the capitol. So many scrapes, so many near-misses of late. Too much did they welcome danger into their lives and too little did they give time really living; or maybe, she thought, that might just be her alone.
Kay shook her head. No time for that now, she reminded herself, allowing that golden glow of sunset to lighten her spirit, that curious smile to ease what burdens rested on her shoulders. Those tiny moments that one once took so easily for granted and now seemed to number too few indeed. “Worse things than what you or I been up to, that I do reckon.”
Not yet, Karen said like the days were soft as butter and yielding, instead of crusted over, scabbed with loss. Not yet, and Sam liked that plenty in a woman that wasn’t her. Karen didn’t lust over opportunity and grab it real tight just to know she had it. Karen didn’t need to, there wasn’t nothing but air in the space in between her breast bones, there was heart. Sam didn’t know a thing on what that felt like, but she admired it.
“Cal’s more an in man, than an out man,” Sam said, without a scrap of shame. “Least he is with me, sugar.” They didn’t do out so much. Somehow they’d gotten themselves to the point of scraping one another raw when it wasn’t convenient out in front of other folks, tattered skin and broken nails and pretending was pretending and mighty fine right up until someone pointed out the exposed. Cal didn’t want to go drinking with Sam, he had friends for that.
Karen looked something like worry pressing fingers to her temples in the next moment, and Sam offered in spite of herself. “We could go. Place like that, prob’ly could use womenfolk, and y’all can hold your liquor, right?”
“We could, I suspect,” she said, a response that was slow and thoughtful, the feeling behind the gesture kept just out of sight. No dynamite burst of enthusiasm nor quick roll to her feet -- but even as the shadows of the room grew longer, the light from the room draining as the day worked to escape them, a decision was being settled upon.
It started with an inhalation of breath, pushing up from solid lungs as Karen shifted up from her borrowed chair; down through once-weary limbs as she reclaimed her jacket; her other hand reached out, a polite gesture for the other woman to take it. Karen looked down to Sam. Certainly there was a resolution made beyond that guarded gaze, and though the day had nearly ended, she was not yet ready it seemed to see herself disappear along with it.
“Come on with me then,” she said. “I imagine you’re right, and a little celebration is long past due.” Somewhere down the hall footsteps echoed, another changing of the guard, burdens lifting from one hand to another. Fluorescent lights buzzed, snapping on in succession to fend off the impending night; as strange and tiring as it was most days, life continued on around them.
That wasn’t a rush of enthusiasm, sparkling as champagne, but Karen wasn’t much of a champagne woman, Sam figured. Karen went deeper than that, less effervescence and more the solid, slow burn of something that took time to steep together. She watched the other woman roll to her feet, the movement effortful after a day doing something a whole lot more troubling than scrubbing bloodstains out of cotton, so folks who got themselves hurt didn’t believe themselves to be the end of a very long string of other folks.
“Well, y’all gilt-edge the invitation like that,” Sam’s voice was rich with laughter, honeyed good graces and something lighter about it at the possibility of a door opening up wide on the hospital. It stank, of antiseptic and these days, of fear. She didn’t have no notion of the changing of the guard, the hospital was just a whole lot of waiting out the end of the world. Sam peeled herself upward, a short, sticky-sweaty package and bright red hair, and fell into step with Karen until the florescent, squeaky-clean interior faded toward the entrance and the dying light beyond.
“Y’all look like you could use it bad. What went down?” It sounded throwaway, real light, but Sam only ever asked the big questions when they didn’t sound much like big questions at all.
“A bad run, more friends lost real recent,” she said, the words pushed out as she nudged open the hospital door with her shoulder, leading the way to the parking lot outside. Kay looked across the pavement, out toward other men and women loitering around a mix of vehicles, arrivals and similar departures. Her face was one of conflict. “Don’t like where it’s all headed,” she continued after a hesitation, the sliver-scratch of a confession so rare as to appear nearly as a wounding (here, the weak point, the chink in that old armor). “Not all so much for myself, you understand.”
And what was to understand? In this life there were few luxuries one might generously allow themselves. Human connections seemed the riskiest of all, a thin, taut string connecting survivors that so easily might snap with a sharp tug. Sorrows relived, again and again; gentleness, a sentiment that so often haunted them as a thing of the past.
Karen stopped near her truck, keys taken from her pocket and dangling in one hand. In the rearview mirror came her expression as it shifted, to worry, to doubt, and back to resolution, all lined by a bruising city skyline, the hospital now at their backs. She opened up the door and turned. “I got enough stories to share tonight, if you’re looking to swap a few,” she offered, her eyes back on Sam. The faint glow of the man-made outside lights did little to mimic the sunset. Even so, the faint smile returned.
There wasn’t a whole lot of light to see by, when the sun went down. Sammy figured that was poetic, kinda. The sun had gone down two years ago, and no one had figured out how to yank it up. Karen wasn’t Cal: the itch to talk it over until it was chewed through (until the nightmares of the week - her brother, bloodied, broken, a chunk of flesh torn out of his side, ended in a tangle of sweat and bedclothes and the new nightmare began the week after) wasn’t gonna kill nothing off. Karen wasn’t looking for nothing from her, and Sammy wasn’t looking for nothing in return.
She grinned back at that little smile that floated surface. Maybe it was a military thing, those expressions that looked like they could drop beneath the waves as quick as they came up top. Sam wasn’t military, she smiled like she was coaxing out smiles from other folks.
“Y’all got a deal.”