Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was a sleepy Sunday when Laney felt the mental pull of Ida's message, fingers rubbed against the grain of fur in her mind. She attended it with idle nerves, picking at a frayed sock even as she transformed. Her mind supplied options, hushed and hasty: someone is hurt, someone has died, someone hates you. Someone knows where you are and how small and pointless your life is. Someone knows. She sifted uneasily and pulled the message free from the air, studying the little transcription to paper that her ring had automatically provided.

Hvergelmir let out an unsteady breath and let herself half-relax. A birthday greeting from Ida; no one was dead or dying, nothing to worry about. She'd be fine. She shifted back to Laney's frayed socks and borrowed pajamas, staring at the attached photo of the dawn cityscape for a while, turning it over in shaking hands. There was Ida, up and about, doing her rounds, and here was Laney, awash in endless hours headed nowhere, trying to sink deeper into the couch cushions. The guilt was overwhelming.

Orah had a family who supported her, a college program, a life dream. People like Laney -- she knew what she was -- they were anchors that other people dragged along until they were too tired to bear a second person's weight anymore, then collapsed holding. Good people, people like Orah or Xanthus or Herger or Finn, or, or Tara, they didn't give up on carrying people's problems no matter how much they weighed them down. They just let their own lives collapse under them. They gave even when they had nothing left to give.

Thank you!!!!! Coffee later? she wrote back miserably, wondering how many hours she could buy herself before she had to muster a convincing smile. 4 pm across from DC Memorial Hospital?

Hugs,
Hvergelmir Knight of the Cosmos

She sent the message off, stamped with her signet ring, then sat forward to put her head in her hands. Till 4 pm to figure out how to avoid explaining about her parents. Her pride -- a brittle, musty thing she hadn't realized she possessed -- rankled. It was one thing for Tara and Kent to know, because that was Tara, and who'd seen Laney at her worst if not Tara? This was another thing entirely.

Sitting in the coffeeshop, poring over a school textbook, Orah looked like a simple and appealing vision: sure of herself, sure of her goals, sure of her place in the world. Ida, she knew, was less secure -- always wondering am I good enough? no matter how much she accomplished. A few years from now, all this studying -- all the hard work Orah put in -- would hold Ida in good stead as she rose to the rank of princess. Hvergelmir, meanwhile, would gain nothing, failing in her hopes and dreams of ending this war peacefully or reaching anyone through her work. Laney would be no use to her knight self, or anyone else at all.

Orah's life was so full of promise. She looked bright and sunny and weightless in a pale grey dress: a vision of spring. Laney was sloppy in her borrowed clothes: a worn pair of jeans, an orange t-shirt advertising some jerk chicken place that had gone out of business two years ago. Laney pushed back her hair, threw on a smile, and slid into the seat across from Orah, pressing her fingers over the page the other girl was reading. "Your brow's furrowing," she observed warmly. "Don't read it like you're mad at it."

Orah, as she often did, had a healing presence. It reminded her of Kairatos -- not in the sense that it was at all similar, but in a way that felt like the same experience in different aspects, for different needs. If being around Xanthus made her feel brave, like plugging into a battery, being around Orah made Laney feel soothed -- like sinking into a hot bath. She had a way of being, an almost nurturing nature that came through in the way Orah looked at people, looked after them. Maybe, Laney thought, that was what Alois had been seeking in her, the hole he'd described finding in her where he could hide a piece of himself.

Not a hole, Alois, she thought. What you see as gaps in people are their open arms, ready to help you carry. She wondered if he'd died, as Kairatos had suspected he might, after the abbreviated account he'd given of the odd Tartaros experience. She hadn't seen or heard from him since then. It was a chilling thought, bleeding out alone, for a boy who'd wasted his whole short life never knowing how to be anything but. Laney hoped not. There were so many dead already.

She wondered, though, how Orah would ever fill the hole he'd created in her heart. It was easy to forget, but she was still so young -- too young to have a heart so badly broken. Who was the person that soothed Orah's sorrows and calmed her heavy heart?

"Thanks," Laney said when Orah returned, accepting the coffee. "You didn't have to." She considered the book for a while. I want to be that person for you. I want to be someone who makes your life feel easier. I've never been that person for anyone before. Other things -- but never someone who made other people's lives easier by her presence. "You know," she said, smiling, "I can help you study, if you want. I know lots of mnemonic tricks that make remembering things easier."

"There's no trick to getting over the gore thing," she responded, the wisdom of it sitting sad in her heart. "You're going to find that, when you have to -- when someone's bleeding and their life's all in your hands, and they need you to be one hundred percent with them, the revulsion's not there. That's how it is for you in the future, and it's how you'll get there again. You'll see -- when you need it to, that feeling just climbs into the backseat."

It had for her: seeing Camelot on the ground, bleeding from a spearhead in his back and a bear trap biting into his leg, she'd somehow managed -- not because she was good at it, or because it didn't affect her, but because -- in that moment -- she had to. There was no alternative.

"For now, though," Laney said, feeling a little guilty for letting things get heavier than they needed to be, "let's focus on learning veins and arteries, right? And -- did you get me a -- a present?"

She stared at the gift in delighted disbelief, reaching out to admiringly twirl one of the ribbons around her fingertip, as though to say: is this really for me?

Laney fidgeted in her seat, a little uncomfortable with the attention. She could feel her cheeks pinking.

"If it's going to melt," Laney said, a quizzical look on her face, "I'd have a tough time returning it! I hope it's not an ice sculpture," she joked. It came out awkwardly. She could tell.

With great care, she reached into the gift bag and pulled out the first thing she found. A little white confectionery box which, on investigation, contained chocolate-dipped strawberries. "Oh!" she said, delighted. "I love sweets!" She beamed up at Orah, thrilled and somehow a little relieved -- and only belatedly remembered there had been more in the bag.

The rest she retrieved with gentle care, unwrapping it from tissue and holding each item up for inspection.

It was . . . pajamas? They looked soft and cozy, with a couple pairs of socks to keep her always-chilly feet warm, too. Laney smiled and folded the bundle of clothes to her chest. "They're beautiful," she said keenly. "Thank you -- this is so kind, I'm really grateful. I love all of it, I -- "

Laney looked back at Orah, who had her whole life together, who was young and brave and caring -- and suddenly something about all of it, about the pajamas and the strawberries and the socks, the coffee, the birthday message . . . it was all just too much. She let the clothes fall into a pile in her lap, put her face in her hands, and began abruptly sobbing.

Laney let herself be comforted -- but she found that, try as she might, she couldn't meet Orah's eyes. Her own were swimming with tears, and the world was blurry, but she could only look down in her lap, where the fallen pajamas lay crumpled. "I can't do this," she said, barely intelligibly. "I can't, I can't, I -- "

She fell forward into Orah's arms with an ugly wail. There she stayed, crying and clinging. Then, finally, with her fingers knotted in Orah's clothes, her voice scratchy and quiet into the other girl's shoulder, she confessed, "My parents tried to send me to a cult deprogrammer when I got out of the hospital. I'm living on my best friend's couch -- I don't have anything."

"It's not their fault," Laney said automatically, coughing on the words from how dry her throat felt. "It's not their fault, you can't blame them. They don't understand -- they're just . . . it's what anyone would think. They were trying to help."

It was true, and the hardest part: Laney's parents had been in the right, trying to help a child that was clearly on the path to getting herself killed. They'd been trying to do right by her in the only way they knew how. Maybe it wasn't warm and fuzzy, but that had never been her parents -- they weren't the huggy type. But Laney couldn't say they hadn't done their best, as far as they knew how to.

There was a reason she'd tried to help Gemma with her emancipation from her family -- a reason she'd understood her not wanting to go to Boston. Her mother hadn't been capable of looking after her, but Gemma had always insisted she'd done her best. That was what had struck a chord with Laney, that feeling: other people won't understand my family because it isn't like their family. Other people won't know why it matters to me. Other people won't value it.

They were her family. They deserved better than Laney blaming them for a problem she'd caused, secrets she'd kept.

"You don't understand," Laney whined, squeezing Orah tightly. "I don't have anything to fill it up with. You've got your whole life ahead of you, you know exactly what you're doing with it -- I don't have a job, I don't have any money, I don't have a driver's license . . . I never even finished high school. I don't even have anywhere to start. I'm twenty-two years old and I don't have anything to show for myself."