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 Posted: Thu Mar 30, 2017 12:44 pm
Admittedly, Isaiah dragged his feet on the prospect of contacting Gwen for more than a week. During that time, the hours flew with business arrangements for Scylla, the restructure of his business in preparation for future changes, an issued statement to those of Order who would listen, and various dates of seeking out others who saw to his rescue from the battle. Gwen was one of the last he contacted, and he detested his own cowardice in putting off such a prospect.
But the pair stood on highly precarious grounds, even after the Negaverse tried to take him.
Ice allowed himself only so much time to prepare - too much, he knew, and he would back out yet again on a needed conversation. As consolation to himself, he made no reservations at any one restaurant for their discussion. He wanted somewhere more private, where few seldom found reason to tread. He wanted a meal that complimented discussion well, as only light fare could compliment such a heavy topic. And, he wanted an outdoor area with easy means to escape - and a temperature that would allow them to sit for a time without freezing to death or drowning in spring rains. Luckily, the forecast for the eve predicted tolerable circumstances.
A garden salad with bloody mary dressing and a southwestern crab mix was boxed as Gwen's meal, and a box of vegetable-laden tofu skewers provided enough food for him. Both styrofoam boxes were nestled into a plastic bag and tied around his wrist for easy transit. Again, he left himself no time to second-guess Gwen's choice in palatable foods and picked what he could off the menu. If she wanted to complain at him about his choice in free food, then that already set the conclusion to their discussion.
Isaiah's text alerted Gwen to the location - Shore's Bridge, a decadent beauty that crowned over the dry riverbed that divided part of the city. Here, wind groaned through rusted loops that held the bridge aloft, and numerous holes punched through the guard rail over the ages left desperate reminders of youth squandered on the rocks below. The site was not all wanton destruction, however - the narrow conduit soon opened out into a great lake, where neon and sodium lights lilted on the still surface - but local knowledge pinned the place as one of the jumper bridges. As Isaiah sat down against one of its supports, he noted a scratched tally that belied the number of deaths. At least those who chose to come would do so under te guise of their own problems, and find little interest in disturbing them.
With a knit blanket rolled out, Isaiah chewed the plastic bag from his wrist and distributed the boxes to form a makeshift setting for two. The great steel bars composing the bridge shielded them from the wind, and a heavy barrier to his right blocked off all sense of traffic. If nothing else, he chose a private place.
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Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 1:47 pm
Gwen had managed to rush home after work to change out of her well beaten polo and black pants. Distracted as she had been all day, it wasn’t unsurprising when her boss let her out a bit early, claiming that Gwen looked ready to fall asleep on her feet and that she should take the time to get rest. The suggestion was a nice fantasy but wasn’t going to happen. She’d been anxious all day with her mind able to come up with a multitude of horrible prospects for her date with Isaiah. She wanted to see him badly and see how he was doing, but feared that something may be up. After all, why choose the location he did? Why wait so long to contact her since that night?
Despite the constant buzz of anxiety, she made her way to the designated meet-up point. She’d chosen a spring green tee with a lace yoke neckline and sleeves, a black over sweater which she utilized as her coat (thanking mother nature for the warmer weather), and a pair of tight skinny jeans with a pair of tan booties to finish of the look. It wasn’t overtly dressed up but showed she put effort into what she chose with the intent of showing off some of her assets through the lace neckline. She was using her attire to try and feel confident. To feel like she was in charge of herself and her emotions and that she could deal with whatever happened.
It, unfortunately, wasn’t helping much.
Parking her car a block away to give her time to collect herself, Gwen found that the walk was too terribly short to deal with the mass of thoughts floating around in her head. She navigated past the broken guardrail and out to the area that could be deemed beautiful to anyone who hadn’t heard about the reputation of the structure. Still, Gwen was trying to focus on the beauty in front of her and not the heartbreak that happened in relation to the bridges out-of-the way location.
Heels sounded hollow on the wood, but Gwen barely noticed as her eyes shift to Isaiah and the small picnic he had put together there. Immediately her heart warmed and a smile broke the tired and worn look that seemed to be her constant. Perhaps her worries had been for nothing? The little show, that Gwen assumed was one of affection, helped to release some of the fluttering butterflies from her stomach.
“Hey, there.” She said as she walked up to him. In the private atmosphere of Isaiah’s chosen location, Gwen felt free to walk up and give the man a kiss on his cheek, a hand resting on his good shoulder as she pulled back to look him over. “How are you feeling?” The ginger would be lying if she said she knew anything about the effects of a starseed pull. The most she knew was how painful it was for anyone to hold onto it, a lesson learned in that battle courtesy of one of the lieutenants. She couldn’t imagine what it had felt like, or if there were any longer repercussions, to a full starseed pull. Plus, he had been so close to death…
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Posted: Sun Apr 16, 2017 9:08 am
Isaiah saw Gwen's approach from some distance away, and he felt bitter anticipation welling up in his gut. He sighed to himself; Isaiah grew terribly tired of his own impatience and of the murky confusion between him and Gwen. The incident with the Negaverse set the lot of their affairs into perspective, and Isaiah understood then that he needed to address these issues before an unhealthy lack of boundaries tangled them together. Still, the prospect of yet another fight left him cold about addressing their differences any further.
When Gwen arrived, Isaiah received the kiss in kind and placed a hand at the small of her back during the process. She felt warm, likely from the long trip up the bridge to their meeting spot. "I'm fine," he answered back somewhat unconvincingly. "Well, more or less. The Negaverse playing grab-a** with me wasn't quite what I'd term a delightful encounter. Please, sit." He gestured as best he could to the swath of blanket opposite him, where the takeout box sat waiting for her perusal. He seated himself shortly thereafter, hoping that Gwen would follow the convention herself. If she sat, then she needed to spare extra energy and seconds to lift herself from the premise before she went storming off into the night. An extra expense even that small might dissuade her from doing so.
"My starseed bounced back pretty quickly. It stopped hurting around the night that I gave that speech with Scylla. And, well, everything else is just bumps and bruises." Isaiah wedged his drink between his knees and unscrewed the cap carefully. The drink popped with carbonation, and Isaiah retired the cap to take a drink. "I'm still stuck with some strange signature-sensing anomalies, I have a shorter temper than you right now, and Tastykake is still trying to dig up all of my potted plants. So, in a lot of ways, nothing has changed.
"But my perspective has, both as a knight and a person. That's the reason I called you here. Well, aside from thanking you personally for helping me out of that jam. As a person, I want to reinforce our boundaries with one another." He paused, then sighed. "Gwen, I know you have a lot of trouble with my tendencies toward other people. I see it just about every time we're out together, and I can't imagine it's comfortable to feel threatened by anyone who gives me a lingering glance. I don't think our relationship is doing you much good on your journey of learning about yourself and growing into the person you want to be. And for me, the problems in my own life have mounted to the point where I need to focus on my own life and how I'm going to piece it back together with this new perspective. So, we need to call it quits. You need to see other people and find someone who works better for what you need out of a partner." He left no room edgewise before he continued into his next topic, banking that holding such responses in might dissuade some of Gwen's anger.
"As a knight, I would like to patrol with you more. I think we could get a lot more done as a pair and as a faction if we teamed up and addressed the Negaverse threat with… Ah, what's the word they use? Extreme prejudice. Yes, that's it. And on top of that, we could both stand to make an example for other knights by adding to the wiki database that Mistral made for us so long ago. Wikipedia didn't really garner much use until it featured quite a few articles, and I expect a knight database will go much the same way. Coordination isn't going to kill us." Though I know I'm not the first to suggest as much, and there were likely several before me who were better at it. Look where we are now - still in the same place, fighting the same battles. What a waste.
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Posted: Sun Apr 16, 2017 8:56 pm
An eyebrow quirked high at his ‘I’m fine’ line, but thankfully Isaiah continued on with his explanation. Perhaps he knew that she’d not accept such an explanation but it certainly didn’t help ease the worry that was so plainly etched on her face. His offer for her to sit would have gone brushed off if it wasn’t for the fact that Isaiah himself had moved to make himself comfortable on the well laid blanket. The boxed dinner was a welcomed sight considering that Gwen had almost 0 time to eat that day except for a rushed lunch at work. There had been no time between leaving work and rushing here to even contemplate snacking on anything and that was assuming her knotted up stomach would have allowed her to. So, she followed suit and made herself comfortable on the blanket, but didn’t reach for the dinner so carefully purchased and presented.
And then he mentioned Scylla and Gwen felt her stomach return to its previous state. Welp. So much for feeling any better.
“Shorter temper than me?” She commented, the first thing she’d said since asking how he was doing. “That’s an accomplishment.” She tried to tease, but the joke fell flat even to her own ears. “Well, I am glad you’ve managed to recover from it. I was worried. I won’t lie and say that seeing you like that wasn’t terrifying to say the least.” She watched as he utilized his knees to stabilize his drink to manipulate the cap off. It was that instant that Gwen really saw how well Isaiah had come to adapt to his lack of limb. Something so small as opening a drink had become second nature to him. He hadn’t even thought twice about how he was going to open it. So much had happened between Halloween and now and Gwen was seeing how little she had a hand in it all. How little she knew what Isaiah had gone through and how he learned to cope.
Pulled from her reverie as he began talking again, Gwen’s brows furrowed at the mention of boundaries and as he continued on she felt the need to defend herself. It wasn’t the fact that he was seeing other people. It was the fact he hadn’t told her. She knew they were opening the relationship. Sure it wasn’t easy to deal with. It was completely unnatural for her, but at the same time she had been willing to try and she thought it would include more conversation between them. She had thought he would have told her that he was seeing someone or interested in them. She thought...well...she thought she’d also be included but, that wasn’t what had happened. She opened her mouth to give her protest, argue her points when he dropped it.
She sat there, legs tucked underneath her, and hand son her lap stock still She didn’t know what to do. Or what to say. His conviction was so evident on his face. He was convinced that what he was doing here was for the best. That they were both going to be better off. Nails dug into her skin but she barely noticed the half moon marks she was embedding into herself. Her eyes were focused on Isaiah and the shock, pain, and hurt were all there. All of the emotions were showcased in her blue eyes.
And as Isaiah continued on, Gwen did the only thing she could. The only thing she’d learn to do to protect herself for so many years. She shut down. She pushed all of her hurt, frustration, pent up anger, everything. Even her desire to scream and yell at Isaiah for making this decision his own, as opposed to talking to her, was pushed down and away. It was instinct at this point. Do whatever it took to make Matthew...make Isaiah happy.
“Right.” She said finally, her voice cracking with the effort as she finally unfurled her interlocked hands, the marks of her nails evident on pale skin. “Right.” She said again with a bit more conviction in her voice as she nodded her head, a hand reaching up to push red hair from her face as she looked down at her hands which now plucked at the hem of her shirt before turning her gaze back to him. “It’s probably for the best. I mean, we’ve hardly talked since Halloween and it’s been bothering me like you said.” She said flippantly. “Maybe we are just better off working together as Knights.” The words were said as she worked to convince herself that this was right. “We could do a lot of good work together for Order and against the negaverse. I mean, there’s more than enough hate between us for them, right?” She laughed faintly at her joke, eyes and head dropping again, to veil her face in a curtain of red.
Heaving a deep sigh she worked to stop the onslaught of tears that wanted to come before finally lifting her head again, pushing the hair away. “Anyway, yea. Let’s, uh, let’s do that. Work together and all.” She didn’t know what to say at that point. What else was there to say on her part besides scream and rage at him which would only do to push him away more. She wasn’t ready to do that. Gwen wasn’t ready to completely cut herself off.
“So uh, what did you bring for dinner, hm? I haven’t had a chance to eat like, at all today so I can’t explain to you how thrilled I am that you brought dinner.” She offered a smile.
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Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2017 6:05 pm
As Isaiah watched her eyes well up, he loosed a long sigh. Gwen was shutting down, obviously enough, and her flippant remarks only fueled his simmering, ubiquitous anger. Gwen could be pissed, or upset, or fly off the handle in any number of ways and such reactions were valid, he told himself, but he seldom wanted to deal with them himself. So often now, her emotions felt like a liability placed upon him - a requirement that he must deal with her emotions as well as his own. And that incessant burden grew great enough now that he needed to dig himself out from beneath its hold. As Gwen's emotional manipulation ensued, however, he realized that he tried to carve his way through concrete with a plastic spoon.
Isaiah muttered his disappointment to himself. "Or this can go as badly as possible. That's fine, too." Most serious conversations with Gwen trended in this fashion.The thought that he had to deal with yet another unproductive fight brought him back to days spent with Sid, where they at least held many deeply beautiful spells of knowing one another to contrast against their stark fights. And they had drugs to blame - they had a monster that wasn't themselves. Here, he and Gwen found none of those same sanctions. They found no artificial highs upon which they could base their emotions for one another, and similarly, nothing more than themselves to hate when their intricate dance fell out of sync.
And when it did, often enough, Isaiah had to play the enemy.
"You're being a brat." Isaiah rubbed at his face, both seething and stumped at how he could possibly remedy this shithole of a situation. "You're being a brat," he repeated. "I'm sorry that you felt the need to invite all these emotions into a conversation that we should've held months ago, but the fact of the matter is, this isn't working. It's not working for me, it's not working for you, and frankly, I'm tired of having to carry around the baggage for it. I wanted this to just… Go smoothly, we'd stay friends, you could do your own thing, I could do mine, and we could start recovering from the ******** up s**t that keeps happening in our lives.
"For ******** sake, I lost an arm. I lost all of my teeth. They took my signet ring from me by cutting my finger off. I haven't been able to deal with all of that, not with you and everything else that's going on and my business partner and I just want a ******** break. I'm sick to death of playing the villain, Gwen! I am! So when you find it within yourself to have a spot of compassion and gather your head for a decent conversation, please let me know because I'll be praying for that ******** day to arrive." As he finished, he became acutely aware of a trembling in his body, where anger shook him vehemently.
And yet the guilt circled on itself. "That's not… How this was supposed to go." He laughed mirthlessly as his throat tried to close. Tears welled, but he knew well enough to breathe out and dispell them. A hand placed on the nearby barrier helped him to stand. "Alright then." He slapped his palm to the concrete, ready to leave.
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Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2017 6:56 pm
“Excuse me?” Gewn’s eyes fixated on Isaiah as he called her a brat. The hell were they, 10years old? Childish name slinging was the route he wanted to go now? How kind of him. On top of that the entire blame felt like it was being thrust upon her. Like it was entirely her fault that she had feelings about him, and about the situation they were in. What the ******** was she suppose to do? Did he expect her not to have any sort of emotional attachment? Her sorrow at the loss of something she had clung to with such a fierce need was beginning to be taken over an anger that she had been trying to repress for so long. It welled up like a fresh spring, a little at a time, only a few of the bubbles reaching the surface for the time being as she worked to push it down. To keep herself for snapping entirely at him. “Isaiah, I don’t know if you noticed, but we were together for...well...I won’t say a year but pretty ******** close. I am not some random girl you picked up at a bar last week, ********, and had her get attached.
“Whether the relationship was working or not, it doesn’t dismiss the fact that I cared for you, worried about you, wanted to do the best I could for you...loved you.” She said quietly, her body tense, shoulders high as she held the tension there. “Did you really think I didn’t care what they did to you?! ******** Isaiah, I TRIED to help! I am sorry that I am a human being who makes mistakes and couldn’t find that one bit of help you wanted but you damn well didn’t help either! You shut down on me. Pushed me away when I tried to help in anyway I knew how. I grew afraid to say or do anything that would make matters worse between us.” Her eyes, once welled with tears had shed them, but Gwen seemed to not notice the wet marks running down her face as she finally let loose her own frustrations.
“You moved out. I gave you space! I assumed that was what you wanted...needed. As much as it hurt I did it and now it sounds like that had been a mistake as well. Apparently I was a bother even when I wasn’t near you.” She spread her arms looking at the little picnic put together. “Then you come here, set this up to break up with me and then getangry that I am upset about it?” She shook her head, pieces of red hair clung to her cheeks where the tears had run down, but again she took no notice. Her entire focus was on Isaiah. Only Isaiah. “I won’t sit here and say I didn’t make mistakes. I know I did, but you damn well made them too and don’t try and place all this blame on me.”
In a fluid movement she rose to her feet, running a hand through her hair in the process as it fell in front of her face for a split moment. By now she was fuming. A torrent of emotions. “I don’t know how much more compassion I could possibly give you. I gave you everything I had. Everything. But you either failed to see it or ignored it. I am not sure. And don’t you forget that I tried to give you everything you wanted when you made it clear that s**t wasn’t working out. I took the challenge you presented to me even after you had already gone ahead and cheated on me. Hurting or not, you damn well knew what you were doing then and still ******** did it when all it would have taken was a conversation. But what did I do? I forgave you.” She half laughed, mostly at herself. “Maybe I am the idiot in this whole thing. I don’t know.”
“I was going to just....make it through this. Not make this a ‘who wronged who’ thing, but apparently I couldn’t even do that without being the selfish uncompassionate one. So, fine. You got what you wanted, again.” She spread her arms. “I’ll just go and you can enjoy your dinner yourself in solitude without having to worry about whatever I may say or do since that’s such a hinderance to you.”
She raised her hands to her hips, resting them there as she turned her head up to the sky, eyes closed. “Maybe we can still be friends.” She said softly. “But I need to time to mend and you do to.” The anger that had been so apparent in her eyes and mannerisms had faded about as quickly as it came. Gwen was now tired, drained and just wanting to crawl into bed to weep her pain away. She turned her attention back to the man she had...still did love. “We’re apparently both ******** ups whether you want to believe it or not, I don’t care. That’s how I am looking at this.”
She moved to walk past him. Car keys jingling in her hand as tears welled again at anger at herself for snapping, at Isaiah for putting this whole ******** thing together, and at the both of them together for ruining each other in different ways. "If you absolutely need me, you know how to reach me." She said as she slipped past him, doing her best not to have to brush her body against his as he stood in her way off of the bridge.
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Posted: Thu Apr 20, 2017 7:22 pm
Yes, of course. Of course this is how it would go. What a fool I was to expect anything different. He understood, to a point, how Gwen felt. He could say nothing toward the aspect of cheating, for he never endured a closed relationship with any modicum of satisfaction (as was obvious, he supposed, in their frequent meltdowns). He did recognize, however, that he asked a lot of another person who needed to depend on him for emotional support. But if he had none to offer in his current state, then was it not his right to exercise those boundaries?
Did she really intend to keep him at all costs? Were he another man, perhaps he would find great romanticism in that. Instead, Isaiah felt revolted at the prospect of being trapped to Gwen's side ad infinitum, as jealousy rendered her ugly over the years. She shared not in the interest of others, preferring to stick with traditional gender roles and traditional relationships, and he supposed there remained some credence in those wants, some genuine importance, but that entire realm of cishet breeder culture existed far beyond his understanding. He knew nothing of what it meant to sleep with but one person for years on end. He knew nothing of raising kids. He knew nothing of white collar nine-to-five jobs where he was expected to come home to a cooked dinner.
These were, he estimated, wants that Gwen might have. Regardless, these were wants that Isaiah definitively did not have, and a latent fear arose that staying with Gwen would drag him down to that special kind of hell. So when she snapped at him, pinned him to the role of devil, then flounced with her righteous indignation, Isaiah made no attempts to stop her. He had but one arm and passed on his right side, so even if he wanted to, the option was barred to him. He did not watch her leave, for even the sight of her a** would not allay his anger.
"Thanks for telling me what I need," Isaiah said to the stars. He looked out toward the mouth of the river then, between the great steel teeth of the bridge that rose to meet the sky. A suicide bridge for a date night. Jada's right, I really am s**t at picking appropriate venues.
But this one… Oh, the temptation is real. He laughed to himself, exhausted, as he trusted his weight to one of the towering supports. It would be easy, he supposed. Delightfully, deliriously so. He could fly as he fell, his ribs would break, and he would drown in blood or water. It wouldn't matter which. In death, there existed no need to make amends with other people, or manage a shop that grew to be too much for him, or worry about the repercussions of his actions. He wouldn't need to care for Scholomance anymore, or fight down his incessant anger, or continue facing the Negaverse. A slip, a fall, and that's all.
Ice did not cease his low laughter as he existed the bridge opposite to Gwen's departure. Reaching out, he traced the great steel framework with his three fingers as he passed. He felt alive then, acutely so, and the wind that passed along the riverbend raised gooseflesh on his skin. He heard the roiling river as it rushed beneath him, ever in a rush to meet the sea. "s**t," he finished at last, a curse spat at the sky.
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