Wit Acuity Intellect Perception Speed Curiousity
AIR
Jeremy wasn't tremendously surprised when Sasha pushed past him, and offered the woman no resistance, moving limply out of the way as she walked in as if she owned the place and demanded the presence of their host. The woman in green was there, in the front room; she responded to Sasha flatly as Jeremy followed Serena and Adele in. The former made a beeline for Kolby. The latter hovered like a wind-borne snowflake, inquiring as to what she could do to help. Voices raised, confusion. There was a stranger in the house, whose aura was reminiscent of Lana's but deeper, xylophones to her glockenspiels, or massive tolling cathedral bells. Serena glared at him. If she had been a cat, she would have her fur puffed, her ears back, and her teeth bared. All the same, there simply wasn't enough energy in the room for damaging violence. Jeremy sincerely doubted any conflict would go beyond raised voices.
Then Sam burst in, finally. Jeremy had unconsciously oriented himself in the fire wielder's direction, so that when he sprinted through the door, their eyes met instantly. There was nothing but concern in Samiel's dark gaze. Somehow, Jeremy had feared condemnation, but of course that was absurd. He couldn't possibly know what had transpired. Until he did, Jeremy felt no shame taking advantage of that lack of judgment. He took Sam by the shoulders and sagged against the other man's chest, so beaten and weary that for the moment the simple comfort of human contact was almost overwhelming. “You're alright, thank goodness you had me worried.” The quick, unpunctuated rush of Samiel's speech, his odd diction, was reassuringly familiar.
“That may be an exaggeration,” Jeremy replied, just as quietly. He wanted to explain everything that had happened, wanted to confess, even wanted, in some part, to be hated as he deserved. But Sam turned to chastise the earth wielder, and Jeremy let go of him, and when he turned back, it was with a smile and a comment about needing a shower which was so practical, so banal, Jeremy was completely derailed. At this distance, he really saw the fire wielder for the first time since entering the house. Sam still looked tired, but he was freshly washed, even his clothes mostly clean. He hadn't worked his hair into its customary pointy style. It was silky brown nearly to his shoulders, less forced, more natural. An odd change. Even when Samiel had been convalescing from his dueling injuries, he had kept up his scenester appearance.
So. All right. Shower. Sam nodded towards a small room, then made his way over to the couch and sank into it. Jeremy looked around. There was hostility and distrust here, but it was obvious the earth woman and Adele wanted no conflict, and everyone else was surely too drained. Pheonix was weak from her stay in the facility they had freed her from, Tabor had fought both those imprisoning her and the rogue air wielder. If anyone else caused trouble, the entire group would turn against them. All of that aside, what could Jeremy do if a fight broke out?
Exactly. So he threaded his way through the room, into the bathroom, and locked the door.
Feeling more or less safe for the first time in days, he deliberately deadened his sense of the auras in the house. This seemed to be more of a mental trick than a magical one; he had learned it during his brief stay in Valhalla, a way of focusing his attention inward so that everything fell blessedly silent. To his annoyance, he could not do anything similar with his connection to Sam, at least not with this technique. He would just have to suffer through being constantly aware of where the fire user was. At least there wasn't any other information forcing itself on him. It was hardly any trouble at all to ignore that bit of knowledge as he stripped off his filthy clothes, wincing when the rags of his shirt stuck to the dried blood from one of the larger scratches on his side. That must have been from a splintered branch. He'd have to make certain to clean it thoroughly.
He wasn't the first to use this bathroom. There was some dirt in the bottom of the tub, and he had to turn the knob as far as it would go before the water was hot enough for him. It scalded his skin, made his myriad cuts burn like lines of fire, and hurt like hell on the blistering skin of his palms, but it also felt so good he was almost ashamed. He let the dirt and grime and blood, his own and that of others, run down the drain with the water, and tried to straighten out his thoughts.
Death was the problem. Three deaths in particular.
Killing the nameless girl in the water village had been the first problem, the first time he had questioned his identity. He was inherently not a killer, because violence was often the easiest solution and rarely the best. That death had occurred in the heat of battle, though. He could justify it to himself, in time. It was kill or be killed, and he simply had to avoid ever being locked into a situation like that in the future. There was no question of which of them deserved to live, because there had not been time to gather data or pass judgment. He did not want to be the agent of death again, but it had been unavoidable, and he could have been the one killed as easily as she.
Lana's death, on the other hand, was aggressively personal. All the logic in the world could not convince him, in his heart, that he could not have prevented it. Of all of the group he traveled with, he was beginning to trust Tabor and Pheonix, or at least to know what they would do under given circumstances, and Serena was not as bad as he had feared, but Lana and Samiel were the only of his forced companions that he actually liked. He wanted to grieve for Lana, to properly mourn her passing. There would be tears shed by him, if not by any of the others. At least here they were immediately washed from his face by the water drumming on him. He doubted he could stay locked in the bathroom for so long he no longer felt shaky and prone to weeping, though. Tabor would snicker, Phee would despise him, but he did not much care.
More frightening, though, was the anger Lana's death had inspired in him, the vitriolic hatred towards a world that would kill someone like that, without cause. He wished pain upon her killer, upon Ward for letting her die, upon himself for his own inadequacy. And therein lay the true pain of the final death, that of the mad air wielder. Jeremy had not fired the gun himself, but he would have in a heartbeat. Because the man had killed Lana. Because he had threatened Sam.
There was a mess of hair and skin products in the shower stall. Jeremy squinted at labels until he found a shampoo, and rubbed it into his hair, finger-combing out the worst of the snarls. Dirt ran out with the first rinse. By the second, the normal ash blonde shade of his hair had been nearly restored, a few shades darker than Adele's, but more grey than yellow in most lights. Samiel was another problem. The mad air wielder, targeting the fire users of the group, had made Jeremy acutely aware of just how attached he had become to his mad genius. It was probably a case of Sam being the first intelligent person he had met since leaving St. Francis, exacerbated by Samiel's unwarranted kindness towards him, the danger they had gone through, the combination of vulnerability and strength Sam represented. It was altogether the perfect recipe to elicit a near-obsessive affection from Jeremy, especially with him still rebounding hard from Melissa. Although she had dumped him nearly a year ago, Jeremy still missed his first love keenly, still sometimes felt her absence like an ache. That would taint anything he felt towards Sam, of course. As clever as the fire wielder was, compared to Melissa's witty banter, her brilliant enthusiasm, he was bound to be found wanting. Pursuing any relationship besides friendship with him would surely end badly for both him and Jeremy.
Besides, there's that heterosexual prejudice out here... So easy to forget, that the customs of Jeremy's home were not the customs of the rest of the world, even in things as seemingly unrelated to the collegiate lifestyle as romance. It was probably better this way. Sam was unlikely to even suspect Jeremy of... Of what? I'm not in love.
He found a cake of soap, and attacked his injuries with it viciously, distracting himself with the cleansing pain. The long scratch along his side was the worst of his wounds. Scrubbing away the scabbed blood made him bite his lip at the stinging of it, but he didn't want to leave splinters in the wound. There were several minor scratches, mostly on his arms and face. A year or two ago, any one of those would have been call for putting a halt to everything for peroxide and a plaster. Now he dismissed them, letting the blood run to cleanse them. The scratch on his side might bleed enough to be worth bandaging, if he could find some gauze, but compared to the injuries the others had taken, it seemed unimportant.
Eventually, the water turned cold, and he stepped out, helping himself to a towel hung by the door. By the dampness of it, one of the others had already used it. He left spots of crimson on the pale fabric, but by the time he had tousled his hair nearly dry, only the largest of his scrapes was still bleeding.
He decided on dry pants rather than clean ones. His jeans had somehow not taken as much of a beating as the rest of him. He did clean his undergarments in the tub, and the shirt he had been wearing, although the latter was so torn he almost didn't bother to put it back on. The damn thing was more hole than fabric. Then he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror, the steam from his shower rapidly evaporating from the silvered glass. Pale skin, now that the dirt was off, marked up by cuts like the random lines of a red pen, and mottled with the black and blue and green of bruises. He had the slackly slender build of someone who hadn't endured much physical hardship, so consumed by intellectual pursuits that exercise and food were equally inconvenient, which made his injuries seem even more out of place. He didn't have Tabor's confidence, to display his body, his meager battle scars. His face was scratched and bruised as well, and dark circles emphasized the gold of his eyes. He turned away from the glass, not wanting to see any more, and pulled the sky blue garment over his head, hesitating only slightly to be sure his arm went through the sleeve, and not one of the larger holes. Stubble on his chin, too short and pale to be detected by sight, caught on the fabric.
Needle. Thread. A razor. That didn't seem like too much to ask for. He would request it in a moment. He wasn't quite ready to lift his barriers and go back out there, yet.
