[Knight] Hvergelmir Knight of the Cosmos || Laney Sutton

[Shazari]

Solo - Warp - 687 words

She woke screaming.

Even her parents -- normally largely absent, normally piping up only to express hollow concern when she came home with cuts or bruises she refused to explain -- came running to find her sprawled out on the couch, fingers pulling large gaps in the weave of the afghan, eyes wild. She woke, not just screaming, but in a horror of clawing herself up out of something that didn't want to let her go, a sleep so deep she thought she'd only felt it once before. Laney hadn't let herself sleep this deeply in years. It felt like death, and she was afraid she'd never wake again, if she did. That's what it had been like, this time, too.

She'd dreamed of dying. There had been a long, hollow blackness, and horrible sorrow and friends she loved dying by iron and by fire, and then, finally -- when she'd lingered long enough to know there was nothing beyond that, nothing more than steeping blackness that turned like tea the longer she drifted in it -- her mind had finally started to surface.

She came up tearing at her blankets, clawing at her face. Her mouth felt odd. For several minutes, she listened to her mother on the phone trying to get in touch with Carmine and her father trying oddly to dab at her face with a hot washcloth or something, and relearned the feeling of her tongue on the back of her teeth, the way her jaw moved properly without half of its ligaments reattached and its skin not taut with scar tissue.

This wasn't right. Her parents weren't supposed to be here anymore; or, no, she wasn't supposed to be here anymore. After the attack, they'd tried to turn her in and she'd never come back since. After the attack, which...

No. That wasn't real. That was a dream, not a memory. A dream, which...

Her head hurt. Her mother was trying to put her on the phone with Carmine. The last thing she wanted to do right now was figure out what half-lies she could tell to her therapist to satisfy him without actually providing any information. She wasn't even sure what to tell herself.

"Don't," she said, lightly pushing away her mother with the phone. "I'm okay," she said, fending off her father with the washcloth. "I had a bad dream, it's fine. I'm sorry I was loud."

She wondered why, this time, her parents (usually so eager to accept any out from having to care for her when she was in distress) didn't accept it. Why her mother started talking about her 'odd hours' again and treatment facilities and how she'd been 'even more remote' since 'that friend of hers' had gone missing and the police had come by with questions.

Tara. Her mother didn't even bother to remember Tara's name -- and now Laney was having trouble separating dreams from reality and her parents had finally found their excuse to start suggesting some sort of inpatient... something.

"I'll think about it," she told them, which was a miserable lie, but she had to get away. She had to clear her head, to get away from memories of a person she hadn't yet become, someone she was apparently supposed to be.

She left them a note on her desk when she went. There was too much in her head, all of a sudden, and the thought of her parents felt... terrifying -- but they were still her parents, they were always still her parents, and no memories or premonitions really changed that on a dime.

Laney would come back once she'd figured everything out. She just needed... time.

Staying overnight at Becky Simms' place, she wrote, which was the name of a nonexistent person. Her parents would probably give up once they couldn't look up a local Becky Simms in the white pages.

She gathered up her things -- food for a few meals, iPod, fresh skeins of thread that she'd been spinning recently -- and let the old harmonies of space carry her home to the place where the stars offered her the best of their privacy.  

[Shazari]

Solo - Tapestry - 1,105 words

Weaving was incredibly easy to mess up. This was especially true if you'd never used a loom before.

Hvergelmir had memories of it, from her past existence. She could remember sitting there in her weaving studio, drawing together complex, colorful tapestries with carefully planned alignments of thread; but trying to do it in practice, in this lifetime, was agonizingly slow and difficult to master. A few times she'd been sure she'd broken the entire loom somehow.

After a few hours, she'd crawled onto one of the big chaise lounges and slept.

* * * *

Her dreams were wild hazes of images, spinning on a turntable. She woke sweating in a heap on the floor.

* * * *

When she was a little girl, Laney's parents had once taken her to the zoo. All excited, she'd found the penguins and the lions and the polar bears on the map; then, she'd asked where the unicorns were. "Oh, sweetheart," her mother had said, "you know, there aren't really any unicorns. They're just make-believe."

Laney had cried for ten minutes, and they'd had to take her home because that was causing a scene. They'd never gone to the zoo again as a family.

She could feel them pulling away.

Angry with her. She was inconvenient.

* * * *

"Look!" Laney tugged at her father's sleeve. "Dad, look! Look, Dad, I did it!"

Cupped in her other hand was a small paper crane. It was dented and more than a little sad looking, with the telltale crease marks of a page that had been folded and refolded by amateur hands, but she had finished it. So maybe it hadn't been a professional paper crane like real origami people made, but the red-crowned crane was a symbol of luck, and that was good for people who were going on long plane flights, right?

"Laney, I can't right now, kiddo, I have to pack," he said. "Go show your mom."

"But I wanted you to see!"

He glanced over, barely spotting the little papercraft in her hand. "That's great, honey," he said dismissively, folding an undershirt.

Laney stood there for a while, waiting for him to say more. When he did, it was to ask her to go bring him his toiletry bag from under the bathroom sink. She did that.

"Thanks, sweetheart," he said, brushing a hand over her head. "You're such a good helper. Will you go get Dad his charger for his Palm Pilot? That's my girl."

She would've gotten him the whole world. If he'd asked.

Laney made two hundred and seven more paper cranes that summer. She never did make it to a thousand.

They didn't matter.

* * * *

Fast-forward a few years. She asked to go to a summer theater camp for her birthday one year. No luck -- they sent her to a beginner's music camp instead.

She learned how to play the trumpet badly.

Her parents decided not to buy her a trumpet.

* * * *

The next year, they sent her to a keyboarding day camp.

She learned to type close to a hundred words per minute. The camp gave her a certificate saying so.

Her parents put it on the fridge for almost a week.

* * * *

Laney started competing in spelling bees when she was still pretty small. She was good with words and with memorizing things, and she studied for hours on end. She read books and magazine articles on how to improve her memory and took vitamin supplements, and she won some trophies.

She liked it. She won a scholarship to a private school, and her parents were proud of her for it. They told her so one night at dinner, at least -- and what clubs she should join to pad out her college applications when she went to school for International Business like her father.

It seemed like happiness, a little; she wondered if this was what other family dinners were like. And she could learn to like International Business. It was a lot of language skills, she guessed, and she had a good foundation for languages thanks to all her spelling bees.

They were happy with her, then, even if they never came to any of her bees to see her compete. Spelling bees were boring anyway, she guessed, and they were busy people.

* * * *

None of that mattered. None of it was important. Her parents weren't bad people.

They had a plan for her life, and that just meant they were invested in her welfare. That just meant they cared.

It had to.

* * * *

Some time a few years after age twenty-one, Laney had gone missing for about two months. She'd come home different, when she did; her face was stretched and pulled in strange lines by black sutures and newly-forming scar tissue; her cheek sank a little on one side where they hadn't fitted a bridge to replace some of the teeth that had been knocked out yet; and she no longer had a tongue with which to beg her parents' love.

She told them what she was. Showed them what she was.

They told her she was a criminal. They told her she had to turn herself in, that she never should've gotten herself involved in something like this when she couldn't even remember how to use the coffee maker correctly. They told her they'd call the family lawyer -- to go with her to the police station.

What were you thinking?, they said. No wonder this happened to you.

* * * *

Eventually she finished her weaving. She set the cloth to dye.

When she went home -- the next day, as she'd said in her note that she would -- Laney stayed in that evening and worked through a thousand-piece puzzle depicting Big Ben. The next morning she struggled through a particularly uncomfortable counseling session with Carmine. She came home and did some chores around the house. Laundry, vacuuming, dusting -- her parents never left too many dishes lying around, but there were two coffee mugs in the sink from that morning, so she did those, too.

She spent the rest of the week that way. No patrols, no meeting up with friends to compare notes -- and less chance of running into anyone to see if they'd had the strange, prophetic dreams, either. Laney left the house only three times -- Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, to keep her regular appointments at her bench in the park.

It was a relief when no one came.  

[Shazari]

That Doesn't Mean We Let the Roses Go - 829 words (backdated to Sunday, February 8th)

Laney would remember, later, that it had been a very small intervention. It was only her mother and her father — and the ‘exit counselor,’ as they kept calling him. And a few ‘security’ people outside. And a van.

Forcible deprogramming, she knew, was illegal on adults. They’d had no right to try to take her, no authority of custody, so they shouldn’t have been able to; shouldn’t, except that Laney’s parents had apparently claimed she was seventeen. They’d nearly strong-armed her into a car and driven her away, in fact, when she’d tried to leave: even despite her insistences that she was twenty-one years of age and they had no right to detain her against her will — but she’d run.

In retrospect, Laney guessed she should’ve noticed the signs.

They’d been nice to her in the hospital, her parents had, but stiff. At the time, she hadn’t noticed, because her parents were always stiff, but looking back it had been worse than usual. Her father had initially said he’d wanted to talk to Xanthus, which she’d tried to convince him out of; but she didn’t, at first, think she’d been successful in talking him out of it. Later, when she found out he hadn’t gone through with it, she’d been pleasantly surprised and relieved. She hadn’t expected her pleas to find much ground with him. It didn’t occur to her, then, that he might’ve had some other reason he’d refrained.

Maybe the most obvious sign, though — other than the gentle way they’d talked to her with the kid gloves on after the first week, like she was made of spun sugar and might shatter — was that, even after they’d brought her home from the hospital and she’d been required to have another week of bed rest, her parents still wouldn’t give her back her cell phone or her laptop. Not even her Kindle.

Laney, they told her, needed to focus on resting for a while. They said the doctors thought her condition was very delicate, because of her previous coma. They didn’t want to take tOo many risks just because she seemed to be healing ahead of schedule. She could read some of the books on her bookshelves, watch some movies. Mother would make her some hot cocoa.

Her parents took time off of work.

Her mother made her hot chocolate.

What a grand old idiot Laney had been, not to suspect anything.

On the day she was supposed to be officially done her bed rest — the day she’d thought she was getting her phone back, and the first day she’d gotten dressed in clothes that weren’t pajamas — she’d woken, showered, and gotten dressed only to find that, by the time she’d gotten back into her bedroom, all the shoes had been removed from the floor of her closet.

She’d gone downstairs, confused and in her Clifford the Big Red Dog socks, and her parents had been there in the sitting room, but not alone: a stranger was with them. The man with the tortoise-shell glasses. He explained, after some introductions, that he was an exit counselor. That Laney’s parents were concerned that she was in danger. That everyone here cared about her.

All two of them. It was the tiniest intervention she’d ever heard of. They hadn’t tried to call any of Laney’s friends (she guessed they didn’t know any). They hadn’t even called Bethany. They hadn’t even called Carmine.

(But Carmine, she realized, would never have approved — he knew she wasn’t seventeen, he knew it was illegal for them to try to take her away. Of course they couldn’t call him.)

Laney listened to her parents and the exit counselor for a long time. Maybe two, three hours, she was pretty sure. It was awkward and it stung — she wasn’t in a cult, but she couldn’t explain to them the truth of what she was actually doing, especially not with a stranger present — but she stuck it out. They’d gone to a lot of trouble, after all. Her parents had taken time off of work. They said they really cared about her. They were worried. She stayed. She owed them that much.

It was when the exit counselor explained that she was going to be going away to a “recovery facility” with them that Laney balked. That was when it started to sink in that there was no viable solution to all this, nothing she could say to satisfy her parents and the exit counselor, nothing that would justify the thousands of dollars they said they’d spent on making this happen.

“You can’t,” she explained, stepping backwards. “I’m a legal adult. I’m sorry. You can’t.”

“You’re seventeen. Your parents love you very much, Elaine.”

There were two lies in what he’d said. But in retrospect, maybe there were three.

It didn’t matter. When the exit counselor took a step toward her, Laney ran.  

[Shazari]

Solo - Say Hello Wave Goodbye- 1,711 words

The well was quiet today. Its pale waters burbled softly, reflecting back the endless stars overhead in only slightly shifting configurations. Hvergelmir pulled free a few freshly dyed ribbons from where she’d weighted them down with rocks by the steps, then set them aside to dry until her next return. She slipped off her shoes and put her feet in the well, letting the water soak her tired legs and bleed some energy back into her limbs.

The meeting had mostly gone well. Without Babylon there to lighten the mood and frame things in a way that people were comfortable with, Hvergelmir wasn’t too surprised that no one seemed terribly excited about it . . . but she tried to remember the new faces in the audience, the people who’d had questions. Hopefully it had helped at least some of them, even if it was a little stiff and blandly academic-sounding.

Hvergelmir never felt sure of how to talk to people in large groups. She always retreated into something distant and formal.

That wasn’t the problem, though. It wasn’t what was weighing on her shoulders, making her feel so tired that she just wanted to go home and sleep for a week.

An image rose in her mind of a familiar red bull pauldron. Kairatos, hunched over on himself in his seat, a dark-haired Cosmos knight sitting next to him. Holding his hand. Leaning against him shoulder to shoulder. Bringing him out of his gloom, chatting away like they were friends of long standing, thick as thieves. Like it was her place, and she belonged there, and the pair of them both knew it. Wearing his necklace.

It had been all Hvergelmir could do to keep her concentration, keep the meeting moving. To take her immediate reactions and set them aside until everything was over and everyone had gone home.

That had been her once, standing by his side while Castor waxed mad, trying to soothe his wild feelings, offering support. It was her place, once.

Not anymore. Not since New Year’s. Or not since the meeting on the moon. It was hard to say which.

Maybe after New Year’s, he no longer felt any sympathy toward anyone in the Negaverse. What he’d gone through — maybe it was too much for anyone to go through, and still forgive. Maybe he’d feel more at home with Castor, these days, than not. He’d barely spoken to her in the year and a half since then; Hvergelmir had no idea what Kairatos thought about anything, anymore.

Or maybe it was what had happened on the moon. Their argument. She should’ve known better — no one liked to be disagreed with or criticized. Everything she’d ever learned in her interactions with people had taught her that. The people that befriended her, the ones that grew to like her, did so because she made their lives easier. They liked her when she didn’t complain. They liked her when she didn’t ask anything of them. They liked her when she kept her opinions to herself, left her feelings out of it, and only offered comfort.

She should’ve known better. Nephthys, her mind taunted her, would’ve known better.

Hvergelmir slipped her feet out of the well and stood, unsettled by that train of thought. Nephthys hadn’t trusted people, hadn’t let them close to her — commitment had terrified her — and Laney wasn’t Nephthys, she wasn’t —

She rubbed her hands over her face.

Bare feet carried her away from the well, back toward the templed. In through the front entrance and the tattered curtain, past the kitchen. Up the stairs, out onto the great crystalline balcony that made up her weaving room. Hvergelmir crossed to the towering standing loom, a soft padded bench positioned in front of it, with a single object placed carefully on it.

She took up the object reverently between both hands, slipped it over her arm.

She’d been wrong to voice her criticism — but was it more than that? Had she been wrong in the criticism at all? Good people had died at Mistral. At New Year’s. In the Rift. All of them, senselessly, horribly dead, and Kairatos had raged at the Code for it, for the loss of their precious lives. She’d been horrified that so many of them had gone down into the Rift without so much as a single plan between them, horrified that they’d all chosen passion over sense and wisdom . . . but she’d found Kairatos’s anger misplaced, and had questioned him for it. Was she wrong, not to nurture outrage for all those who’d lost their lives? Was she failing to honor their memories?

Hvergelmir looked down at the golden bracer she’d slipped over her arm, its fit too big for her narrow wrist. “Should I be angry?” she asked, studying its burnished surface. “Is that what you would’ve wanted?”

Her heart pounded. Her vision swam. She sat down on the bench and put her head between her hands.

“I don’t know what to do anymore, Reagan.”

* * * *

She paced the temple a while longer, walking the echoes of old pathways in the dead garden, between spaces where flowers and vegetables had once grown. Eikthyrnir accompanied her for a while, strolling the perimeter of the island where it dropped off into nothingness, pausing here and there to gaze out on the stars. They were near the stables when the vision came to her, a long and quiet recollection that she hadn’t asked for and didn’t want.

The woman in grey wouldn’t look at Nephthys. Oh, she could feel the weight of her stare, every so often, when her head was turned — but the moment Nephthys looked back, the other woman was always suddenly engrossed in something very lively and engaging. It was obvious what she was doing. Nephthys knew enough about human behavior to be able to tell when someone was trying to look like they weren’t deliberately avoiding her.

Her stomach churned. It wasn’t the first time she’d gone to visit someone she cared about, only to learn that they no longer had a place in their lives for Nephthys’s company.

She’d danced this dance before. She knew the steps — she knew what they always wanted from her. One last kindness: to graciously bow out without making a scene. Nephthys always obliged.

It was just that sometimes it was someone she loved. Sometimes it hurt so much.

It took about half an hour of furtive glances, of the woman in grey trying to muster the courage to approach Nephthys and begin the awkward conversation, before Nephthys found that her heart couldn’t take watching the woman’s torment any longer and she made her way through the gathering over to where the woman in grey stood.

“Allynore,” she greeted, her voice vivid and easy. “How lovely to see you. I’m afraid I can’t stay very long,” Nephthys lied, “I just didn’t want to leave without saying hello and asking after your health.”

Allynore looked at her with a conflicted expression that was half relief and half dread — and all beauty, in Nephthys’s eyes, even so. She longed to raise her thumb and gently smooth out that furrowed brow, to gather up Allynore’s square shoulders in her arms and tell her there was nothing to be frightened of, and tease her about the cut of her jacket. None of those things were hers to do anymore. All she could offer now was a benevolent smile.

“We should — we should talk,” Allynore said, leading Nephthys away from the crowd.

Now they’d come to it.

“I’m glad you came, actually,” Allynore opened. Nephthys didn’t question this lie. “I wanted to let you know that I’ve moved on with my life. I’m in a really different place now —”

She said some other things that Nephthys couldn’t seem to pay attention to. Nephthys stared at her while she spoke, keeping the polite smile fixed on her face. So very like her long-winded Nora: she always had to say her piece. She never knew quite when to quit in a conversation.

“Anyway, it’s not as though we had anything,” Allynore inadvertently twisted an unseen knife. “You’ve still got a hundred lovers in different ports, I’m sure. A wilder life than me, settling down with my one girl. You should — you should send me letters, really, tell me all about your escapades. We can’t all be like you, Neph. That was a different time in my life; I can’t do your whole thing anymore. It’s just — some of us have to grow up some time, you see? Some of us want something real. Just one person. Real love.”

Nephthys let her talk. She loved her too much, in that moment, to interrupt.

When she was done — when there were no pieces of Nephthys’s heart large enough left on the ground to be stamped on — Nephthys picked up Allynore’s hand, brushed her lips across the knuckles, and smiled with all the warmth she’d learned from a lifetime’s work at diplomacy. “I’ve treasured every memory,” she said with careful simplicity. “You were kind to worry about me, silly thing — you know my bed’s never cold long.”

There wasn’t much left to say after that. It was just the usual awkward pleasantries — Allynore felt obligated to ask after Nephthys’s life, Nephthys answered her politely, they bandied around some small topics that neither of them cared about: then, finally, Nephthys claimed there was a ship at the pier waiting for her that she couldn’t miss, and Allynore let her go with all the relief of someone having tied up a lingering loose end.

It wasn’t difficult to find a ship that would take her on board, really. She had her choice of destinations, all of them far, far from here, and from Allynore’s big, brown eyes. Nephthys chose a comfortable starliner headed toward Tantalus, in the end — it was as good a place as any. She had friends there.

Hvergelmir turned away from the vision, suddenly cold despite the eternally mild temperature on the island.

She couldn’t think about this. It was too much. She needed to get away.