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 Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2011 1:07 pm
The minutes were ticking by so slowly that it was agonizing. There had been no danger when Alkaid and Hematite had parted ways, but in the aftermath of the night she felt more nervous than she would have normally and knew that she would not be calm again until he was home. Her mind was whirling with a thousand 'what if's and she quickly decided that she needed something to distract her and make the time pass.
She powered down, found a blanket, and curled up on the couch with their TV blaring some terrible reality show. She tried to watch it, but her attention was in and out - she recalled less than half of what was flashing in front of her eyes. In the darkness it was easy to get lost in her thoughts, even as flashes of color and light tried to capture her attention again and again.
Hematite was out taking care of their mistake, her mistake. If she had been a little faster, a little better, a little stronger..
She shut her eyes against the assault of the TV screen and lay her head down on the couch arm. Her arms curled in the thin blanket she had wrapped around herself and pulled it up closer to her chin. It was a childish notion, using a blanket to stave off the monsters, but Kaia's monsters were so much more terrifying - they always had been. She couldn't remember being a child, when the only thing to fear was her own imagination.
Time passed faster then as the TV lulled her into a false security and she began to drift in and out of consciousness. Her body was forcing her to sleep out of self preservation - not only had she sapped a great deal of her energy, but the stress was threatening to suffocate her. She had no idea how long she was actually out, but eventually her mind crashed back into reality and she awoke with a start.
She sat up, panicked with her hands curled into the blanket like it was a lifeline. Her bright eyes glanced around the apartment quickly until she realized where she was and what was happening - there was no Nemesis, no corpse, no danger here. She relaxed back into the couch cushions and rubbed the back of one hand against her forehead.
She didn't think she was actually going to sleep comfortably for a while, especially not until her roommate got home.
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Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2011 1:32 pm
Hematite appeared in the shadows of the apartment with the faintest displacement of air, far less energetic after two teleports. The military uniform dissolved into a t-shirt and jeans, and a pair of sneakers that he kicked off in the direction of the door. He squinted into the room. All he saw was Kaia's prone but wide-eyed form on the couch, bathed in shifting colors of light. So she hadn't given up and gone to bed yet.
He didn't sit down on the other side of the couch so much as practically fall into it. On the TV he could just barely make out the forms of loud, rich nobodies whose lives involved a lot less dead bodies and short-skirted enemies than his or Kaia's. He closed his eyes to the bright light.
"I think Point Break was on when we left," he suggested, as though he hadn't just returned from explaining a dead soldier to one of the General-Queens. The gravity of the situation was pretty heavy on him too now, but there was no reason to fluster Kaia because of it.
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Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2011 1:57 pm
A deep wave of relief washed over Kaia not for the first time that night as Hematite reappeared in the darkness of their apartment. She kept her eyes on him as he powered down, kicked off his shoes, and finally just collapsed into the comfort of the couch. He was okay, that was one less thing to worry about, but there were still a dozen others weighing heavily on her mind.
At his mention of TV, she shifted and dug around beneath her blanket and the throw pills she had piled up at her end to find the remote. Her hand brushed it in the crack of the couch and she dug it out, then reached over to drop it in his lap. She honestly didn't care what was on the television, he was usually the pickier one.
"How did.." she started and trailed off, pursing her lips for a second and glancing at the TV as a distraction as she tried to get her thoughts in some kind of order. She didn't want to ask some meaningless, stupid question. Did it matter how it had all gone, or what he'd done? Not really, the outcome was the same.
"That shouldn't have happened." It was a statement, but one of those that seemed to have a second half pending, despite the fact that it took her a little while longer to decide just how she wanted to say it. "Why has no one set up some kind of.. contact system for this? Even the humans have done that."
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Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2011 2:23 pm
The Negaverse had been cold as ******** as usual, leaving his exposed face and hands feeling like he'd been smothering them in ice the whole time he'd been gone. Kaia on the other hand was warm, and for one instant as she pulled back her arm brushed his. There was a brief window of time when he could have done something more than take the offered remote, something comforting - but nothing came to mind before she had settled back against the opposite arm of the couch. Brooding it was, then.
He tried to channel surf, but everything looked and sounded the same to him at this time of night. The flipping images came to rest on a sitcom rerun and the faint laugh track that accompanied it. It would drown out the yelling that was still ringing in his ears.
"Because who's going to be the one answering those kind of calls twenty four-seven? Tanzanite's arm?" There was a pause, and then to be safe he added, "That was not a serious suggestion."
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Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2011 3:12 pm
The chill of his skin was something she could at least notice even despite her somewhat lacking attention span. With a frown, she concentrated on unwinding herself from the blanket she had twisted around her body to form a cocoon. Once it was unraveled she shifted it so the length would stretch across the couch, then simply leaned up to toss it over him without even asking if he was cold. She had lived there for a few weeks, she knew it was cold, and she wasn't in the mood to deal with his stubbornness.
She relaxed back into the cushions with her legs drawn up on the couch between them, taking advantage of the blanket that was stretching over the space of 'no man's land' in the middle of the couch.
"Don't be silly," she sighed at him, "I'm pretty sure arm doesn't have a complete vocal range." Not to mention Tanzanite didn't have the time to just respond to everything willy nilly, even if.. the consequences could be disastrous when no one did. She frowned and rolled her head to the side to look at the TV for a moment, trying to distract herself with whatever mindless comedy he'd picked.
Then, abruptly, she looked back at him and sat up all at once. For a moment she looked like she was fighting to say a thousand thing at once, eventually just reaching out to grip his arm and give it a little shake. "We can do it. We have those.." she waved her free hand at him with a frown on her face, "crystal things." Truthfully, they were harder for her to get used to than the cellphones had been.
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Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2011 3:45 pm
He held his arms up instinctively as she tossed the blanket over him. How did she know -- he hardly needed to ask, didn't he? It was like she was psychic, whatever the word was for that weird psychic girl intuition was. Regardless of how she'd figured him out, he did glance over at her appreciatively and warmed his hands up underneath the blanket.
"The fact you know enough about that thing to make an educated guess is bad enough," he joked back.
What Kaia was proposing was new and different, and Khaldun was normally the sort of traditionalist who was too afraid of change to accept the benefits. If they'd just kind of fended for themselves for years in a ridiculous show of survival, it was probably good enough. But Kaia's argument had the dead body of a guy who could very easily have been himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. That was worth taking into consideration. But...
"Answer everyone's 911 calls?" He scratched his head. "I... guess we could, yeah."
Then the devil's advocate crept in. "But what if we get, like, three calls all at the same time? Like something big and stupid happens. Like that crazy ambush you survived a while back. We're going to leave someone hanging."
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Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2011 4:13 pm
As he countered her suggestion she sighed and dropped the hand that was gripping his arm, leaning back into the cushions again and thinking through the next hurdle in their path.
She brought her hands up and rubbed them over her face tiredly. If she hadn't just teleported, or been punched in the kidney, she would have been infinitely less tired and much more capable of thinking about this. Then again, she wouldn't be able to sleep until she'd gotten through some of the ideas that were beating around in her head.
"Even if we can't answer them all we can still answer one, right? That's more than anyone is doing right now." She dropped her hands and crossed her arms over her middle, staring up at the ceiling for a long moment. Then inspiration struck again. "You guys make teams, right? I've never really been recruited to one, but I know Zinkenite has one."
She sat up again and dropped her hands to her lap, over the blanket. She watched him in a way that seemed like his face was just a focus for her attention, until her attention resurfaced from thought.
"The Negaverse can't possibly need everyone gathering energy all the time, right? We could recruit people to be an emergency response or something."
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Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2011 4:31 pm
"Yeah but that was like... someone just told us who was on a team and we did regular stuff... as a team. It's really dumb. Everyone just hates each other by the end of it and next thing you know you all break up like a band whose drummer can't keep a beat." He kept talking even as Kaia seemed to tune him out in favor of deeper thinking. "We'd be better off letting people at least opt out if they're going to be assholes about it otherwise. Have people volunteer to do double-duty, with us and with whatever the hell else they're doing, or something."
He had to admit he liked the way she thought, though.
"Yeah! Better to spare a few people like us to come save them when they're in trouble," he chimed in. Frankly he was just sold on the idea of not having to go out and gather energy every night. This was a what-if worth encouraging. "Less casualties, more energy in the long run. It makes sense to me."
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Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2011 4:44 pm
She had to admit, his advice was a little more helpful than she thought he usually was with this sort of thing. Even if he had ulterior motives, they seemed like they worked for the purpose of what she wanted to do.
She sat there a few more moments before she was scrambling, throwing the blankets off of her and onto him as she shot up and headed for the bedroom without another word. There was a few moments worth of rustling before she came back with a notebook and pen in hand and flopped down next to him on the couch.
"I think I can work this out," she chewed on the end of her pen a little as she stared at the few lines she had already written. With a purpose in mind and something to plan, all the worry had faded and been replaced by focus. She scribbled down something else, zoning in and out as she tried to think of the logistics of the barely formed idea. It could work, it had to!
"Hey," she finished writing a line and glanced up at him, sucked out of her focus for a moment by the fact that she still had a teenage boy living with her. "Do you want to order some pizza or something?"
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Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2011 5:07 pm
No response.
The daring if unsuccessful rescue attempt they'd made that night and the two teleports that followed had completely sapped Khaldun of energy. He watched Kaia for a while, waiting for her next big epiphany. But before long he grew unfocused, and rested his head against the back of the couch. By the time Kaia remembered he was there, he'd fallen asleep right where he was sitting.
Not tonight, apparently.
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Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2011 6:42 pm
Kaia briefly considered waking him up to ask him again. If he got too hungry, he'd wake up grumpy and moody and she didn't want to deal with that. Still, he'd worked really hard and she supposed he deserved at least a nap.
She stood up and set her notebook on the table, then leaned down to tuck the blanket up around him as best she could. She gave him one last smile before she picked up her notebook, pulled the chain on the overhead light, and disappeared into the bedroom.
She shut the door behind her with a soft click, then stretched out on the bed to finish her plan.
They could do this.
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