Ryan Armsford (blindsides) wrote in thefield, @ 2009-05-21 15:08:00 |
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Current mood: | cold |
Entry tags: | delilah, ryan, z - 1st tribe - day 20 |
Stumbling
Who: Ryan and Delilah
When: at dusk
Where: temporary camp, on the way east
Ryan was just as concerned as everyone else about what might happen when the Laughers found them. He was beginning to wonder if this had been a good idea. While he knew they needed to go someplace where they could find food, he wished they'd been able to get to a place where they could climb up into the trees. He was sure Kenneth had all the confidence in the world in his gun and in the fire they'd built to keep the beasts away, but Ryan wasn't feeling all that sure right now.
A lot of his problem was the fact that he was sunburned and shivery from the daylong walk in the hot sun and also that he hated night in a strange place. He could see next to nothing except the vague orange of the fire a few feet away and the shifting shadows of people walking around. He'd be fine once they'd reached their new camp and he got used to the layout so he could get around by himself, but right now he wasn't feeling thrilled with life. He'd sat down next to the cart containing all their bedding, trying to stay out of the way. If nothing else, it was nice to rest after a walk like that, he told himself, trying to look on the positive side of things.
Delilah was nervous. And she was fairly certain, despite her exhaustion from the entire day, that she was not going to get any sleep tonight. The memory of all the noise from the night before had worked its way into her bones and set up shop, staving off anything resembling peace once the dark started to fall. That didn't, however, keep her close in to the group. Rook wasn't with them, something that had kind of been on her mind all day, as he was the first face she'd seen when she'd arrived. Someone had said that some others had gone ahead of them, and that struck her as an awful idea.
Somehow feeling like she was intruding around the fire, and just needing a moment to herself, Delilah walked a bit away from the fire. She intended to skirt around one of the carts and step out of the circle for just a moment, and instead very nearly tripped over someone who was sitting there. "Oh!" she said, looking down apologetically. "I'm so sorry, I didn't see you."
"I know the feeling," Ryan said wryly. He knew someone new had appeared in the field the other morning, but he hadn't had occasion to speak to her yet, and he hadn't gotten close enough to be able to see her clearly. "It's okay," he added. "I was tryin' to stay out of the way." He pulled his knees up to his chest, gazing up at her with a calm and yet somehow blank expression in the dim light of dusk; he could see her form but nothing else from this angle. "I'm Ryan," he introduced himself, "and I'll go on and tell you that I can't see you until you get closer. I have this... eye thing." He never minded telling new people about it. It was simply a fact of his life by now.
Delilah blinked at this information, as it was a bit unexpected, though she had no idea why. With such a variety of people, there were bound to be things wrong with them. It just seemed ... well, okay, she didn't know what-all 'eye thing' encompassed, but what cruel fate would send a blind man here. "Oh I'm so sorry," she said again, automatically, and came closer to kneel down in front of him. Maybe it would help? "I'm Delilah, it's a pleasure to meet you. ... what sort of eye thing? If you don't mind my asking." She hoped not, she was curious about everyone around her. It was just hard to know what manners were appropriate in this situation.
"Hey, Delilah." Ryan smiled at her as she got down on his eye level; despite the fact that it was dark all around them, she was close enough that he could see her now. He almost wanted to sing a few bars of that Plain White Ts song to her but yeah, she might not know it and that would prove to her that he was a dork. It was possible that he was extremely overtired, or he wouldn't have even considered it. "Nah, I don't mind. I had retinoblastoma when I was a kid, and I lost a lot of my vision while they were treatin' it. I do a lot better in the daytime." As long as he was close enough to whatever he was looking at, but he saw no need to belabor the point.
She twisted her lips to one side for a second, looking sympathetic. One of the people she taught part-time was blind. The way she picked up on the nuances of the language was incredible. But that was beside the point. Delilah settled down, sitting on her knees and looked at him. "How long have you been here?" she asked after a beat, which was a question she had a feeling she was going to be directing at everyone she got the chance to talk to. She hadn't been told yet how far back this went, and really ... wanted to know how people were dealing with it. If they were at all.
"Near as I can figure, I've been here about two weeks," Ryan told her. "There were a few people who were here before me, but not many." He thought that Helena had been the first, or maybe Rowan, then the big blond guy, Cross. Then several of them had awakened in the field at approximately the same time. "For the first few hours, I thought I'd gone nuts, then..." He shrugged a shoulder. "Where you from?" he asked. He thought she had a nice voice, not ordinary. He thought he could catch a faint accent, but it wasn't as definable as his own Southern one.
"Two weeks," she breathed, with something like awe. She couldn't even fathom it. And he'd gotten over that in a few hours? She still really hadn't, in the deep recesses of her mind. But then again, if she was insane, anything anybody said didn't really matter. Acting purely on instinct, Delilah reached out and put her hand over his, just for a moment, in a small gesture of comfort even if he didn't seem to need it. "I'm from New York City," she said. "Ukraine originally, but I had been in the states ... almost ten years. You sound from the South." She smiled faintly.
"It still feels a little like being on vacation," Ryan said. "Nobody'd pick a vacation like this except extreme survival-type nuts, but you know, you sleep in trees, meet new people, and kinda feel like you're goin' home in another week or so. Except we're not." He smiled at her when she touched his hand, thinking that she seemed very sweet. "New York," he mused. "Always wanted to see what it was like there, if it was anything like what you see on TV." He rested his chin on his bent knees, trying to stave off the sunburn-induced chills that were wanting to take hold. "Yeah, it's hard to miss," he agreed when she said he sounded Southern. "I grew up in Louisiana, been livin' in New Orleans for the past several years."
A little corner of Delilah's brain balked at his statement that they weren't going home. But she didn't think too deeply on it, she couldn't. Not yet. "Oh, what happened in New Orleans was horrible," she said, her own accent dancing over the name of the city. "How is the rebuilding going? I've always wanted to visit, but the chance hasn't come up yet." She paused, then chuckled a little at the parallel in what they'd said. "We should trade cities for a time, if we get home, no? New York is ... there's anything you could ever want there, if you know where to look. So it depends on what you want."
"It's still a great place to visit," Ryan said, loving to talk about his adopted hometown as much as any native New Orleanian did, "even though it won't ever be quite the same again. It's been over three years, and some areas of the city still haven't recovered." He smiled ruefully, not having any way really to describe the ghosts of the devastation that still existed, moving shoulder to shoulder with the living. "Like New York, I guess, when 9/11 happened." How weird was it that they were discussing life in their respective towns just as if they weren't sitting in the middle of nowhere waiting for carnivorous animals to possibly attack them? "I'd just like to see it," he said to her whimsical idea that they should trade cities. "I feel like I've never really been anywhere."
"If you've been somewhere, you've been to at least one anywhere," she said in a soft, musing way. She hadn't been in the city very long when 9/11 had happened, and she would remember the day down to her bones. Odessa and the surrounding towns and villages still held the scars of their short fight for independence, she was no stranger to the echoes of war, however brief. But the United States hadn't ever been attacked in such a way, and the city was still recovering, almost a decade later. "But I agree, you should see it. The ladies would adore your accent," she told him with a little grin. "Just order your food quickly in counter-type restaurants, they get impatient."
Ryan chuckled when she said he'd need to order food quickly. "We Southerners don't do nothin' quickly," he said, exaggerating the accent for her benefit. "I've heard all my life about loud, pushy, impatient Northerners. Just never got far enough North to meet any." New Orleans was an amalgam of all sorts of people, but he knew it wasn't anything like a big, cosmopolitan city like New York would be. It was easy to fall into this line of conversation, to pretend that him seeing New York one day was possible. "People in New Orleans would love your accent, too," he told her.
She gave a delighted-but-soft laugh at his drawl. Really, she'd always found accents that were different than her own utterly compelling, and the Deep South one fell straight into the Sexy category too. Not that it was an active thought, it was just there. "Yes, you think so? A lot of people seem to find me difficult to understand. Either that or they think I am Russian, and want to call me 'comrade' all the time," she said with a wan smile. She really didn't expect Americans to be able to differentiate between Ukraine and Russian, so she held it in good humor. Most of her countrymen wouldn't. "Northerners are not so bad," she added with a shrug. "There are assholes in every region. They are just ... in a hurry, a lot of the time. In the city, anyway."
"I think it's lovely," Ryan told her, all gallantry-- or as much so as he could be with his scruffy, needing a shave, sunburned face and eyes that were glazed with tiredness. "I don't have trouble understandin' you at all." Some of that could be because he listened, paid close attention to anyone to whom he was speaking. He could see how people like Arlo or possibly Angelica might not take the time to really listen to what she was saying. He smiled a little when she said there were assholes in every region. "Just like here, I guess. Small as this group is, you've still got 'em."
"Mmmm," Delilah said with a smile, in lilting agreement. She'd already encountered one, hadn't she? "I would ask you to fill me in on all of the alien-world gossip, but I've always thought it more fun to find out on my own. Such as, I believe when I first arrived, I stepped on the toes of ... Payne?" Such a strange name, for a female. Especially a Russian female, though she supposed it could be a pseudonym. Who was bound to their real identity here? ... and there she was again, thinking of it like a real place, like something her head hadn't just been pulled too taut or something.
"Yeah, it's better to let people form their own opinions, I think," Ryan agreed. Delilah might find someone he couldn't stand to be quite pleasant. Everyone was different in what personality traits they could tolerate. His eyebrows lifted slightly when she said she'd stepped on Payne's toes. "What happened, if you don't mind me askin'?" He couldn't see Delilah trying to one-up Payne as a huntswoman, particularly not when she'd first gotten there, so it must have to do with Clay, he thought. He knew the two of them were hooking up.
"She is apparently a bit ... possessive, shall we say? Of Rook. Whom I quite literally ran into upon my first arrival," she said, with a tiny hint of amusement in her voice. She could somewhat understand such behavior in people, even if she herself didn't subscribe to such notions of owning another human beings. "Shame, he seemed like a perfectly sweet person. I was a bit beside myself, however, and didn't smooth things over much." Really, it was a state that she continued to be in, it was just easier to keep under wraps now.
"Rook, huh?" Ryan said. "Interesting." There were definitely things he missed because he did not see well, and apparently the fact that Payne had claimed Rook as well as Clay was one of them. "He's alright," he added despite the fact that he still bore the ghosts of bruises from his and Rook's fistfight. He believed there'd been extenuating circumstances. He smiled at her. "Wakin' up and finding yourself here leaves most people beside themselves." Just because he'd become relatively used to it didn't mean he believed this was how things should be.
She more or less bit her tongue on whether that was interesting or not, and reminded herself not to be unkind. If she'd attached herself to someone in this place, she would likely want to hang on to them too. Delilah shifted her legs so they were a bit more comfortable, tugging her rapidly-stretching t-shirt down over her thighs a bit more. It was cooling down, and her sunburn didn't feel very good. "I can imagine," she murmured, tilting her head at Ryan just a bit. "How are you holding up?" It was a direct question, but that was how she did things, most of the time.
Ryan had pretty much ceased to notice that he was shivering. He was a fair-skinned blond, and the sun today had not been kind to him at all. He watched the dim outline that was her, his gaze a little bit distant as he thought about her question. "From today, or in general?" he asked, but then went on to answer her before she could reply. "Most of the time, I'm okay. What good would it do not to be, right? There's a girl here who goes around cringin' every time you look at her, like she expects you to hit her." He was thinking of Olivia, the walking wounded. "Then there's a guy who swears at an' insults everybody... I guess that's his way of coping." Arlo. "I want to be okay, so I usually am." It made sense to him.
Delilah nodded, thinking that answer made enough sense. It was the wondrous power of the mind, to say 'we're coping with this' and have it be true. It had to be true. "Then it sounds as though you're better off than some," she commented, though he of course was aware of that. She didn't go on to comment on how she was holding up, because she really wasn't sure she had a definitive answer. Or even a not-definitive one. She was just existing, taking it all in, trying not to be completely overwhelmed while her brain worked on auto-pilot. Idly, she picked at some grass by her knee, not sure where to go from there. Which was a rarity for her.
Ryan was silent for a couple of minutes, feeling the cool night air on his flushed skin and listening to the faint sounds of people talking. "I know it's weird," he said finally. "It's even weirder not knowin' what might happen next. Like, we could wake up tomorrow in our beds at home, ya know?" He didn't much think that was going to happen, but who knew in this metaphysical nightmare they found themselves in? "You doin' okay so far?" he asked. He wasn't sure what kind of answer to expect. She seemed calm, but that didn't mean she was.
She couldn't help but feel the rush of ohgod that would be wonderful at the very suggestion of just waking up in her bed tomorrow. That sounded completely glorious, in fact. Something she would absolutely love if it happened. But Delilah didn't give voice to it, as he surely felt the same way, and didn't need it rubbed in. He'd been there longer than she had, after all. "I'm ... not sure," she answered eventually, with a soft kind of laugh. "I really honestly don't know. I swing between calm and rational and being convinced that I've lost my mind completely, and back again."
"That's totally understandable," Ryan said. "I think it makes more sense really than the people who just shrug and go, 'oh well'." He never got the notion that Rowan, for instance, minded being here whatsoever, pregnancy and all. If he had the choice? Sure, he'd go back home to a world that made sense, a world where he knew what to expect most of the time. Yeah, he'd miss Thorne and a couple of the others, but that didn't mean he'd choose to stay here if given the option. He rested one cheek on his bent knees, his face turned in her direction. "I know I can't see worth a shit, but if I can do anything for you, let me know, okay?" he offered.
Delilah looked at him for a heartbeat, then let out a sound that was kin to a laugh. "Oh you're just a doll," she said, and moved forward on her knees to hug him around the shoulders. In a way that wouldn't smother his reclined position, but still. She couldn't help herself. The posture, the accent, the offer, it was too sweet not to hug. "Thank you so much, Ryan, I truly appreciate it. The same goes for you too, okay? I know I'm lost and don't know what I'm doing at all, but if you need anything I can provide, all you have to do is ask." Delilah let him go and sat back, feeling a lot warmer inside. She just loved sincere people.
Ryan blushed a little, but he didn't mind at all when she called him a doll and hugged him. He certainly wasn't one to refuse attention from a pretty lady. "Thanks," he said, grinning at her when she sat back. "We'll all stick together, and things'll be okay." That might've sounded more than a little bit naive and idealistic, but there had to be some light in this great darkness. The more friends, the better.