inconsistent kinds of worlds
Characters: Wren and Leandro Setting: the kitchen
Leandro let Wren lean on his side as he carefully navigated the way back across the courtyard. He had his arm tight against her back and under her shoulders, leaning a little in her direction too for balance. The whole situation made him feel surprisingly numb. He could think of nothing else yet but getting Wren to safety while his pulse settled and the shock of what had happened sank in. His eyes were straight ahead as they hobbled, but he decided to try to talk to her a little. Maybe that would be reassuring.
"We're going to go to the kitchen and get some ice for your face. Jason said you don't have a concussion so you'll be okay if you lie down. How's that sound?"
"Okay." Wren answered automatically, voice a little mumbled. Leandro could have told her he was going to take her to the moon and she probably would have said the same thing. She was in shock, mentally having taken a step way, way back. But she trusted him, so he could take her wherever, and she wouldn't fight him even a little bit.
Leandro got them the rest of the way through the courtyard and into the kitchen, where he searched around for someplace to put Wren. He didn't want her just standing there in case some delayed reaction from shock or anxiety saw her falling to the floor. He'd seen guys get hurt and lose blood, and not faint till hours or days later. Nobody wanted to admit it happened, but it did sometimes. The brain was a mysterious thing.
With one toe stuck out he pulled out the familiar stool and got it up close to the cabinets, where Wren could rest her back. "Let's sit right here," he suggested to her, angling himself so that she could slip from his arm and onto the stool. He was tiring, his face tight, but he shored up the last of what he had to get her down properly. Once that was done, he discreetly shook out his arm and went to the fridge, poking around in the freezer section. He put a generous handful of ice into a plastic bag and brought that back to squat in front of Wren with it. "Ready?"
Wren sat on the stool, back leaning against the cabinets. She stared at nothing, still sort of trying to pick her thoughts up and put them back together. Her eyes cleared a little when he came into her field of vision, and she nodded. "Okay." she said, repeating herself, but she knew what was coming. Her cheek felt like it was swelling a lot, and it was a little bit interfering with her vision on that side. She just hoped it didn't swell her eye shut.
Wren was starting to look a little... lopsided, Leandro observed. Her face was blowing up in a pretty harsh way. That other girl must have hit her with some tremendous force. He scowled at that, even as he lifted the bag and applied it to Wren's face, just under her eye. "Just try not to move..." he murmured, though he knew that'd be hard. That probably hurt, with the combination of the damage and the cold.
As he sat there with the ice, he tried to mull through some of what had happened. He was angry of course, but it was stunted somewhat by the fact that the person who had attacked Wren was a woman. It left him at a loss, a blind spot. He didn't know how to retaliate. Nobody should have been hitting women in the first place. Through grit teeth, he simply started for now on, "I'm sorry," reticent otherwise.
"It wasn't your fault." she said, reaching up to put her hand partially over his and the ice, to help hold it there. "It's not the worst that's ever happened to me." she added, clearing a little more with the cold. She would be okay. She'd been hit several times in the face there, but she'd be okay. She hadn't been stabbed. That was the good part. She looked down at Leandro, not saying anything for a long moment. When she did speak, her voice was a little distant. "Are you angry with me?"
Leandro was silent for a moment at that. He was still, knees on the floor, just feeling the warmth of her hand permeating through the chill of the ice. The flesh around his eyes tensed, and then he turned his chin down.
"No," he said at last. "I'd never disagree with you enough to ever want this. It's not your fault either. You... I don't understand what you did, but I trust that you did what you thought was right. Out of anyone here, I think you're the only person I can really say that about."
She looked down at him and appreciated that. "I'm glad you aren't mad at me. I was going to message you later. Explain." she said, drawing in a breath and letting it out slowly. "I didn't want things to get violent. Things...they happen so fast, Leandro. And there's no one here to protect us. No one to stop anything. If anything happens, then..." she felt tears well in her eyes, and tried really hard to stop that in it's tracks.
She changed tracks, though didn’t quite properly warn him about it. “He said he saw my door open. Said that he was ‘concerned for my safety’. And I don’t believe him. I wish I did, but I don’t.”
Leandro clenched his fingers around the ice, holding it steady but casting his eyes down and squaring his jaw. He may not have been angry enough to deny Wren compassion, but he was still deeply conflicted. It churned uneasily in his mind.
"Look... I won't lie to you. I don't like what you did." His dark eyes drew back up again, but he held back his temper to reflect only gravity. "I think you dived into actions the rest of us might not have been prepared for. I mean yeah... there were a lot of people ready to completely wuss out, and I have my own issues with them. But there were also some of us, Charlie included, who were looking for some higher standards here. It wasn't right of the staff to just ask us to lock people up without telling us why or anything. That's just dysfunctional. We can't act like that outside. We'd be fucking monsters. No different from the other shitheels that have been stepping on us already."
There was a slight flare-up in him, a breath rising high in his throat and a roll of his jaw, but he put his free hand over Wren's arm to prove it wasn't necessarily her making him lose his cool. "Wren, there's nobody to protect you anywhere. The cops are a joke, the system is a joke. If you want justice in your life you have to make it happen yourself. I define that by not rolling over to anybody's scare tactics. Sometimes that means fighting for what you believe."
He paused then, trailing off with a sigh. His head shook slowly. "I know. He did the same to someone else. I don't know what his deal is, and I don't know if he's violent or not. Maybe he's just weird. But that's the problem. We don't know what he really did or meant to do. And now he's in the stocks for an entire day. I just don't know. But look, we can take care of some things in your room. Remember how I have those things on my door and all of that? I can do that to your room too, things that will let you know if anyone is ever in your room again, if you want me to."
Wren drew from the context of Leandro's statement that she could be considered a 'fucking monster' from his criteria. She listened to what he had to say, however. She was silent, her mind turning everything over. "Do you want to know what I think?" she asked. He'd explained his position, of course, but she wasn't entirely positive he wanted hers. He seemed extremely set in his own opinion, and in her experience, when people got like that, it didn't matter to them what you had to say. So, she decided to ask, before she responded.
For a moment, Leandro didn't answer. It sounded like Wren was about to disagree, and he wasn't sure whether or not he wanted to hear it. He didn't like having his mind changed about her, to see her differently. He had enjoyed what they'd been thus far, but of course she was an individual with her own opinions. It was bound to happen. It was just a matter of time.
He took his time lifting the ice a little and looking underneath it to gauge the condition of the skin, and then move it to a slightly different spot. "You can talk to me," he said at last.
She gave a sad approximation of a smile. "That isn't a yes." she noted. "But here's what I think. I think that you see the world as a harsh place, because it's been harsh to you. I think I don't know about a lot of things you do. But I do know one thing. I know about living in an isolated, entirely cut off group away from society. I know more about that than probably anyone here." she said, looking at the floor.
"I think your views are valid, and have merit, and I don't disagree with them. But I don't think it's the whole picture, either. People...they might think I'd have trouble seeing the bigger picture, think I'm stupid, because I'm not very worldly. But I'll tell you what I saw."
She drew in a breath, and let it out slowly. "I saw a group of people, dividing. I saw one side filling, and another. I saw strife, all over a situation that was presented, and immediately, everyone was putting in their own two cents, for their own reasons. And I believe in people's ability to do that. I agree with it. But I know groups. And groups can get very violent, very quickly, and what you said is wrong. Maybe the 'cops' are a 'joke' out there. But it was the guards at the prison I was first placed in that saved my life. So you can't tell me that no one will ever protect anyone. I'd be dead. The only reason I am not, is because I got jumped, and it was intervened upon quickly. And a guard held her hands down on my wounds, to try and stop the bleeding, while others subdued my attacker. And we do not have them here. I know. Look at my face. And this is all just punches and scratches, this isn't something sharp, shoved in between your ribs. No one intervened very quickly. No one's watching for it, no one's prepared to deal with it if it happens."
She looked to his eyes. "I saw a group that was about to start tearing itself apart, and if it didn't today, then it will soon enough. And I know just how fast things get violent. So I asked Ryan what he meant to do, and he said he would take the punishment laid out for him, before people busted down his door and forced it. So, I facilitated that for him. I helped him make his own decision. And people need to respect that, too. If you think I actually wanted to do that, I didn't. But it isn't about me. It's about not giving a group of already volatile people a reason to strike that first match. If it means people need to be angry with me or hate me, or think I’m stupid, I’m far more okay with that than I would be with anyone getting hurt when they didn’t have to."
For a long time, Leandro didn't respond at all. His face was like wax, stiff and as if it was not completely alive. On the other side of it, his landscape felt molten, a flash fire lapping away the layers of his facade. Though Wren may have looked into his eyes and his eyes may have looked back, their dark depths were like shadows obscuring a room with the lights off. He moved on autopilot, finishing moving the ice around her face and then placing the bag on the counter in exchange for a piece of paper towel that he wet briefly in the sink with brisk, efficient movements. His focus seemed to be on blotting the dried blood off of Wren's arms.
He wasn't sure why he couldn't accept that Wren didn't want violence to break out. It was a fine, normal impulse. The part of him roiling beneath the ice, though... it begged for it. It liked seeing the blood and the anger, rising alive whenever the first drops were drawn. Conflict was a higher power in itself, revenge its reward. There was only so long an animal could be kicked down before it started to bite, and Leandro had already proven to society that he was capable of doing so. Maybe not to physical human beings, but to their establishments and their structures. He'd burned things because it felt good, and the impulse was rising again. The longer they talked about this, the more he wanted it. The more it consumed him to think of punishing the staff, of thwarting them and flaunting in their faces that he could fight them and survive. Or maybe die trying. He could even accept that, as long as he went down on his own terms.
Leandro realized that at this point his hands were shaking. He was running out of steel for calm conversation, but Wren wasn't the one he wanted revenge on. At last, he could do no more and just held the towel as still as he could, worrying that his pulse could be felt all the way through his fingers.
"Then you're lucky," he said quickly, lips curling over the words. "Someone came for you once, but you've seen now that that's not always the case. The real world doesn't have guards. People get violent. People fight. But you know what? It's not my problem to keep people from fighting. I can't control everyone. Neither can you. But I can be prepared to defend myself and what matters to me. If I don't, nobody will. You're talking about some kind of community, but you know what I see? We're alone. Everyone is alone. Some people give a damn and most people don't. People will try to take what you have. People will look out for themselves first and foremost. You can cry about it but you can't change it." He shook his head slowly. "I'm just a masochist. I'm stuck giving a damn and being willing to fight for it too. Just, my standards are different. If blood has to be shed today for true freedom or integrity tomorrow, not some fake go along to get along shit, then let them come. I'll take on anybody."
Instinctively, his chin lifted and he snarled toothily at where he thought the nearest camera was. Some had accused him of being sweet recently, but even the fairy tale Beast was both prince and monster for a reason.
She could see the tension in him. It was clear as day to her. Wren was a very intuitive person on her worst day, and even if she'd just been in a fight, she was feeling sharp in that moment. And that was when she recognized that Leandro was going to ruin things. He was going to do something, anything, that would make him feel better, and she knew what made him feel better. Burning things to the ground did. He'd already told her as much, when they'd been discussing things over the computers. He was angry, and he was very clearly unable to accept a point of view that didn't align with his own. It made her heart ache, because of everyone in the facility, she felt closest to him. She still wasn't even sure what to think about Chester, beyond everything was apparently a lie. So for the moment, he didn't count in the slightest.
But Leandro did.
"I don't understand how you can be angry with me, because I made a move others 'may not have been prepared for', but you're willing to sign everyone here up for some violent blood bath because you've decided it should be that way." she told him. "If you really believe in a principal, then it needs to not be every man for himself, Leandro. You have to believe in what's right for everyone. Not just you. Because as much as you may believe everyone is alone, you aren't. None of us are. Even if that's how you would like it to be. None of this has to be as you've presented it. I think you just don't want to see anything different." She said, voice still light, but there was a deep seeded sadness that washed beneath her tone, knowing he wasn't going to hear anything she'd just said to him any better than her previous words. But she believed in herself as well, and even if it was upsetting...she wasn’t going to smile and nod, and agree with him just because it would make it easier. She was a soft spoken person, but she had heart, and a backbone, and she used it, even if it was in an unobtrusive manner.
"I didn't sign anyone up for anything," Leandro spat back. He couldn't take kneeling anymore, so he dropped the towel to the floor and stood up as if he'd been innervated with springs. He had to pace away, at least a few steps, crinkle his hands into his fists and feel his own strength well up into his palms. He had the control right now. He was on top. He was alright. He was alright. He was alright.
Finally he managed to turn back to Wren, a net tossed over his fire for now. He wasn't screaming at her – really, he couldn't – but he was just as determined as she was. "It's not you. It's not me. Did you see me attacking anyone? Did I slam anyone to the ground? Don't talk to me like I punched you myself when I went out there at my own personal risk to drag you out of it. And here I stand, cleaning your wounds anyway, as you tell me this. That I'm not thinking of what's best for everyone. You might have thought about their safety in the moment, but when I offer up my own body for fodder for this shit, you know why? Because I'm thinking about the future. About how we're going to be treated later on, after the fucking staff," He shot another glare over his shoulder. "Gets it into their heads that we'll be complacent to this. That it's okay to treat us without care for our rights. You know what happens when people get that idea? They take advantage. Yeah I'm pissed, because I've been taken advantage of for as long as I can remember. I get sick of it. And there are very few things that make me not want to confront someone who tells me that I should shut up and let that go just because it's uncomfortable."
It only occurred after he said it that it really sounded like he was talking about Wren, even though he hadn't meant it that way. There was a visible flinch, but in the end he let it stand. If they were going to divide, they were going to do it for the truth. He didn't want to spend time with her either feeling like he hadn't said what he meant.
She picked the ice back up and put it back to her cheek, liking the numbing of the area better than the pain that was setting in again already. She watched him as he moved, still seeing all the tension for what it was. People didn't pace when they were settled. "I didn't say that. And I'm not talking about them. Honestly? I didn't do what I did for them. It didn't matter to me, what they wanted, what mattered to me was not giving people an excuse to tear each other apart. And because Ryan had made his own decision, and if that was what he decided, then that was what was going to happen. You still have to remember it was his choice. If we ignore everything else, it still came down to the fact that he decided to do this himself. Caroline...she did to, even if it took convincing, because the last thing I wanted was for us to believe it was okay to break down someone's door because we've been told to do something."
She was silent for a long moment. "I haven't now, and would never tell you to 'shut up'. I've listened to every word you had to say. I'll always listen to what you have to say. I haven’t even told you you’re wrong with the majority of what you’ve said. But I don't have to agree with everything you say, and I'm allowed to have my views too. If you hate being told to shut up and not be heard, please don't treat me like my views aren't important either. Or that they're invalid because they aren't the same as yours. If you do, then you're not the person I believed you to be, and...." that was the first little crack in her there. She looked away from him, not quite finishing the thought.
Leandro stopped where he was on the floor and just hung his head for a second. His face disappeared behind the curtain of his hair, and then all of a sudden picked back up again. He barked out a stern, humorless laugh broken by the thick grating in his chest. It sounded and felt disgusting to him, bringing up a thick clot of mucous tinged with something metallic. Probably stress from earlier. Inflexible scar tissue had a delightful way of ripping. He went to the sink and spat it out. It looked clear, but it tasted bad. He'd need to rest after too long, himself, but now he was en pointe on a thought.
"I think that disappoints me most out of everything you've said today. If you really believed that either of them deserved punishment and you were bringing everyone the proof, then I could respect that. But for you to say that you were only avoiding conflict? That's just awful. I thought better of you, too." He looked down at Wren with drawn eyes. "I'm upset with you because I think what you did was motivated by fear, not that you have some different opinion from mine. The crowd might have looked like a lot of chaos but we had people going, we had people thinking for a minute. And then it was all gone. I had faith for like... half a second," Here he lifted his hand and cracked his thumb and first finger open just a touch to show how much faith that was. "That maybe there were a couple of people here who didn't have their heads up their asses. But in the end it went out the window with all the facts remaining. We don't have proof of what they did, no victims actually stepped forward – except in private to me after it's all over, apparently, so it doesn't even exist to anyone else - nobody had the chance to decide if they deserved what they got, nobody put forward any other ideas, and we're still puppets. What do we have to be proud of, huh? Oh, we're alive. That's such an honor. We're going to be living like animals if it keeps going this way, policing each other and dragging them to the stocks or the noose or whatever else the staff decides is the flavor of the day at the first sign of trouble just to save our own asses. I guess you don't agree, but I'd rather die like a man than fall to that."
It hurt more hearing that than any of the physical blows Kasper had given. She felt cold then, and it was probably the ice, but it didn't feel like that to Wren. "I think there are more shades in the world than black and white, which is how I think you see it. And there's a difference between believing in trying to protect the group and being motivated by fear. But I don't expect that you believe me." she said, voice wavery. She cleared her own throat, and stood.
"I apologize for making you lose hope, lose faith. No one should have to deal with that. So, I am very sorry. I will be requesting to move to the other block. I assume this will mean you won't have to deal with me much in the future." She wiped at her eyes, and turned. "I am sorry for distress I have caused, and I wish you the best."
Leandro's head started to shake again, slowly and evenly and repeatedly. His mouth formed into a bitter shape and his arms tucked around himself as if to stave away his own sting from the outside. "It can't be done," he said quietly, simply. "You can't protect people from themselves. They'll always win."
If it seemed a multifaceted statement, it was probably because it was. It was dark, worn, and resigned. Something beneath it, the softer influence, wanted to make him reach out to comfort Wren again, to make it okay for her and tell her she didn't have to be sorry or cry. She didn't have to go away. But the demon still hung from his arms like lead and wouldn't let him move. It said he should have expected it; it was bound to happen, as all good things were meant to die. Often long before their time. That's how he had managed to survive all the years, it said to him. He had never been good enough to die.
With this thought he stood there. He couldn't be the first to leave. No matter what he thought of himself or anyone else, he wouldn't abandon someone. If Wren was going to do it she'd have to do it for herself. He would wait until she did, and then call it over, hold the funeral in his mind, say a prayer, and bury it under the frigid dirt.
"That doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Isn't that what you're really about? Not giving up?" she posed, though she didn't expect an answer. He wouldn't rail against all of the injustice in the world like he did if he really believed things couldn't be done. It didn't make sense. It didn't add up.
But nothing felt like it did in that moment. Wren felt very broken. She turned towards the door, though looked back at him before she left. "I appreciate every moment you've been in my life, even if it was brief. I am sorry you see me as some...monster. I will miss you." she told him, but she couldn't see a resolution if he really believed all of that about her. And he clearly did. So, with that final sentiment she turned to leave, not wanting to force her company on him.