middleofsomewhere | So Familiar a Gleam: Conclusion

Entry tags:

So Familiar a Gleam: Conclusion

Time to leave!

There is not much of the city left, but the park is holding together as those anchoring help those who are not voidtreckers through back to where they belong. Monsters continue to attack and a little further out there is a battle of hearts and minds being fought with the mass of colours and chaos.

Eventually, after the bulk of citizens had been evacuated everyone with SCA's on would hear Jin-Roh's voice after a few frantic beeps, as Chiff aligned everyone's SCA's. "We are almost done here, if you are with anyone not tethered to a voidcraft get them to the evacuation point, as quickly as possible."

Anan pulls out of the anchoring point to call out to any defenders in the park. "Come on! Anyone who isn't a voidtrecker! It's time to go."

Luckily those off fighting the entity headed the message and made their way to the park as Jin Roh spoke again.

"Everyone else get ready. When we call it you need to leave. If you don't have your SCA on then get to someone who does."

As the last people rushed to the park Anan calls out again, through her SCA and outloud to the park. "You need to unanchor, before you can evacuate. Everyone be ready."

She goes in again though, because there are some last people, those from the large battle, getting through as another message was called.

"Almost there. Be ready. On my command..."

Anan unanchored again. "Quick everyone unanchor."

"NOW" Jin Roh's voice came through strong on their SCA's. Hopefully those with SCA's would grab those without.

There is some outside help as well, the train pulls anyone who is unconscious or still under the entity's control, forcibly evacuating them. This includes Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji and Zagreus.

Luggage Carriage

There has been a mass evacuation before and that was crazy enough but since then the population of the train has almost doubled and now it is an extremely tight squeeze as everyone crashes into the luggage carriage at the same time.

The train jerks and rolls as they enter into the void at breakneck speed and again as they seem to slow, rather than speeding off though the void.

There's a crackling from their SCA's. "Voidtreckers? Voidtreckers come in!" Anan's voice. "Please tell me you made it..."

There's only a few moments of signal and soon they are flying though the void again, away from the strange non-world, the entity sealed for now. To new adventures, but first hopefully some time to recover from all that has happened.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Jingyi assumes he's more overwhelming than anything else, with a proven track record for being loud and opinionated enough to talk over others without always knowing. He also doesn't think he's that wise, maybe in another ten years, but he tries. Tries.

So the stretch of silence is something that he doesn't know how to suss out, other than waiting it out and being, again, some kind of anchor. (Hah...) Reminding himself not to be an ass, but knowing he probably will be anyway, because the only person he can mostly accurately read onboard is Sizhui—Lan or Wen. Even then, it's a strange tossup: both of them are younger than he expects, and neither of them share his world.

So he can at least be sturdy, curl his arm and tail a little more closely, and let himself sit as he is, there. When there is some vocal response, he blinks, still staring down at his mostly emptied bowl. Energy is very hard to drum up, but he'll do what he can.

"Tired doesn't last forever," he says, breathing in long and deep, then out on the same count. Centring himself, because he can glean a little more out of his spiritual energy if he's circling his qi. "I don't mind. No empty offers." Only nearing empty bowls, but that's solvable in an easy way.

Yet ah, what does that include? He ponders, finding it hard to think through the haze to how one best goes about constructing. "The kind I know... memorial tablets, or stones. Incense for burning. Leave offerings. Eat them later, after dues paid. Yours?"

How do you mourn your dead?

"Um.."

Inigo shifts, clearly kind of uncomfortable. He realises said reaction is showing, and that means he can't just weasel himself out of this one with a lie, even though he doesn't like talking about the truth all that much. The more he keeps to himself, the better it is. But considering this unfortunate topic, he supposes he has to admit at least a little.

"My world has a.. complicated relationship with the dead."

Quite possibly the vaguest and most omnious statement ever, but look. He's trying, okay? Just keep him sandwiched here like this, at least that gives him some comfort while talking.

"So I don't think we can take much from there. Instead, I.. I guess anything that might remember them would be good."

He doesn't move his head, though he does his eyes, sliding them from sightlessly regarding his bowl, to regarding Inigo from a rather acute angle. Mostly it means switching which set of legs he's looking at, since he doesn't shift himself.

He's not great at biting his tongue most the time anyway, but tired, even his scant politeness shield has flipped off for the distant mountains. Inigo isn't comfortable with this subject, and in fairness, mortality isn't usually what people go to bed singing over and wake up refreshed by it's brief finality in the face of the world that endures beyond. Not when people here are alive when dead, existing on capricious whim, tethered and yet dangling over the edge of a chasm at the same time.

"Is yours?" A complicated relationship with death, like Xue Yang, dead and gone but alive, here. He's bothered that it's Xue Yang, and not... better, less psychotic people who aren't known for capriciously murdering entire minor clans. That's the thing, right? No pattern to who comes, at what point in existence. No pattern to when they leave, or what they leave for.

The young voice of the child telling him he's scared. He's scared, does he have to go, he died there, is it so bad? If he lets the river take him, if he lets go? The reassurances offered, that this is a world where you may be remembered, where you're anchored, where your soul can find another life and another, that he isn't finished, he's not diminished, he'll grow. Hollow comfort to a crying child, hollow comfort when he did step through the blinding, warming light of the other side.

Jingyi blinks away those recollections, tail curling tighter. Sometimes saving people did not save a life at all.

"We'll remember them." Not the names they never had, but the fallen, the faces of anger and fear and despair and the hope those souls were not destroyed. Does the train need something like that, too? For the crew before, for... other things he's only vaguely aware of? Diagad. A whole universe, gone. So many, many names. "Memorial tablet, with the wood. Easier to carve... do we even have spare stone?" Disjointed again, mind slipping between both possibilities.

The other's initial question it met with nothing but a small affirmative hum. Sorry to ruin your curiosity, Jingyi, but Inigo is mostly holding it back right now because it's not a conversation to be had in this situation. Not when it's a small miracle that Jingyi hasn't fallen asleep here yet, just like this, all huddled up with someone while sitting on the floor, surrounded by practically empty bowls of rice.

Not to mention that Inigo has a hard enough time talking about his past that it's an easy excuse to hide behind. It's easier to think of doing some form of kindness for someone else than for himself.

"I think the only stone we have are in the rock garden," he then speaks up. Still kind of muffled, considering how comfortable he is against the other's shoulder, but audible enough between the two of them. "Then again, I don't think anyone is going to throw a fit if we take one of those."

Please, let him fall asleep. He's tired enough it means immediately starting to drool, and that's what everyone needs in their life: times where they get drooled on by exhausted friends.

As it is he just offers another squeeze of his arm, closing his eyes in a doomed to fail attempt to remember what the garden stones look like. He remembers the lotuses more, which is funny, when none grow in Gusu. They're pretty, though, and that's reason enough.

"Wanna move it out of the rock garden, or set off a section?" If they already exist, they're easier to use, and he can figure out using qi to carve stone after smoothing out one surface for the writing. Though unless the train offers up its standard language, the one he suspects it has, it'll have to be his best, poetic approximation in his own language.

He could ask Hanguang-jun, or Zewju-jun, or Wei Wuxian. He ends up asking Inigo first, since he's here, and they're in this memorial business now. May it not be booming. "What should it say? In memory of... all those who came before, and the ones who died far away from home?" His brain stalls out on wording, on how to include any other lost and dead, on how one does when operating on scales that approach war crimes, to a scale so immense his mind cannot wrap around it. Easier, simpler, to think in other ways. Then, out of the haze, a partly recalled poem. Two, which he thinks he knows, and blends together in paired lines. "What is past I cannot reach again, and what is to come I cannot keep. The candle has a heart—it too hates parting. In our place, it sheds a tear at dawn."

His expression, were it seen, is rather blank. Mostly he's wondering when he last read either poem, or if Sizhui would remember the rest of either. Hanguang-jun, he thinks, would.

"Probably easier to keep it there," Inigo replies.

Because Jingyi is way too tired to move a rock, for one, and.. well, even once he recovers, or even if Inigo would just carry it by himself, what's the point? It's not like there's really a better place for it other than right there, especially since there's already statues and the like around. It wouldn't be out of place, and no one should mess with it there either.

And while the guy's other question is a little harder, especially with Inigo's mind filled with the bad sides of the mission and his stomach full of rice, there's already those lines.

Before he can even speak up.

Inigo shifts a little, pulling his head off the other's shoulder purely so he can ask: "Wait, are you some sort of poet?" No judgement, bro! Just surprise about this hobby! Especially since Jingyi is so.. so grumbly that Inigo didn't quite see it coming.

Who knows, maybe the engine room could use decoration. Jingyi hasn't though that far, muddling through snippets of educational memories and the sudden, intense recollection of a handful of sect precepts he avoids speaking out loud because thinking about them (no running, no undue emotion, no this or that or anything) is even more exhausting than having them memorised in the first place.

In turn, he's more surprised that Inigo is surprised. "They're not my lines," he says, "Just stuff I remember." From a childhood of education, where books had been preserved when so much of the clan grounds had burned. "Hanguang-jun's husband is big into quoting poetry. He turned it into riddles... I stubborned my way through figuring out 'cause then we'd sneak down to Caiyi Town and eat grilled meat on sticks."

It hadn't hurt his schooling with Lan Qiren either, outside of the fact there was eventually a new rule inscribed on the special stone for Lan Qiren's Slow Mental Unravelling and Acceptance of His Nephew's Chosen Husband, which read like: One will not engage in poetry competitions with Wei Wuxian for prizes.

Ugh, whatever.

Inigo's shoulders sag a little at the answer. Even though it's surprising, he thinks Yingji having been into poetry would have been kind of nice. When Inigo has a dorky creative hobby he's shy about sharing with others, it always feels a bit safer to be in fellow creative company.

But then again, at least Jingyi is a pretty great person in general, so there's at least still that.

"I think it's better than anything I could come up with," he shyly admits. Especially since the words are so poignant. Inigo would never be able to think of anything like that. "Maybe we should just go with that. We don't want them to have to endure having something dumb on their memorial."

He's not sure what the, is it disappointment? Is about, per say, but the sagging touch to his shoulders and all he can really think is to just... try to plonk Inigo down again, so whatever poetry shook up doesn't need to add to what's swirling around in his head.

"Mm, yeah, it's nice... I dunno. I tried leaving pretty rocks for my parents before I knew better." Even got lectured for it, but in a way that turned from proper form to a kind note, from Zewu-jun, that while it might not have been appropriate, they doubtlessly were thankful for a sign of their son's filial piety. "Being remembered is important, even if it's not always with the prettiest words."

Memorial tablets and clan histories crafted and left on walls and in books. At least he's branch. Less trouble, that way.

"Though if the carving needs time, I could do calligraphy first? If we have... ink... a brush... red paper..................." He trails off with a sigh. "Or just ask Takato if we can borrow his crayons."

Jingyi, who hasn't discovered the art supplies, such as whatever they are, only knows what he's been shown, and that is: crayons.

For my parents?

Look at Jingyi over here, casually sharing some really sad facts. Because there's an implication there. One Inigo isn't sure he isn't reading too much into, but he feels like it's there all the same. He knows better than to ask about it though. Especially when Jingyi - despite everything - seems so strong all the time.

Even right now, when he's tired. Because he still has the energy to sigh and lightly grumble.

"I don't know if there's ink," because please, Inigo isn't involved enough with the Art Kids to know what they have, "but there was a lot of paint at an art day a group of kids held before. I bet there's some left, if you wanted to use that. Maybe they'll have brushes too?"

.. even if Inigo doesn't really know the difference between a regular paintbrush and a calligraphy one, considering calligrapy sure wasn't as much of a thing in his world anymore once the world went to hell in a handbasket.

Facts aren't worth avoiding, though he wouldn't generally bring it up. It felt relevant to the conversation, about what it is the dead might appreciate from the living, and who in his generation wasn't likely to have lost one parent? Both? Some were more directly adopted into other branches, some were adopted in, but most were communally raised, not lacking for instructive attention, just, perhaps, touches of home.

However, there's another... thing. Jingyi frowns, puzzling over that word, paint. "They'd want silk for that, wouldn't they? If they're painting?" He's imagining inks, not the acrylics or oils of the worlds, no concept of which brushes would be involved in what he assumes is an adjacent artform to what he learned to use. "Doesn't matter, this is getting tiring."

The thinking. He's getting tired of the thinking without having the awareness already of what's on hand. Not a problem he'd often faced at home, only when on Night Hunt traveling through the realms, and even then, the Lans haven't been destitute for a while. Towns have goods, they have funds. It's an equivalent exchange.

Which... right, right. The train and its stupid bribery system. "If nothing else," he says, closer to drawling, pulling thoughts like seeds out of the thick syrup in his head, "Can order something. But, a rock. Big stone. Can do the poetry, can order the incense. A burner? Ugh, what else?"

He finally sets his bowl to the side on the floor, mostly to lift his hand and rub at his forehead. Think, Jingyi, think! These are things he should have memorised.

Behold: the clash between western and eastern cultures. Their minds are very much imagining something entirely different when it comes to these topics. And it's hard to tell if Inigo realises that - not really, probably - or if he's just worried about the other overextending himself when he already seems so tired - much more likely - but he shakes his head regardless.

"Hey, it's fine."

With the two of them having been untangled a bit now, Inigo reaches out, putting a gentle and - he hopes - comforting hand on the other's shoulder.

"We can always do it later, once you feel better. Don't worry about it right now." Because Jingyi looks like his head might just explode if he spends too much thought on this right now.. "Should I help you get back to your room?"

The hand on his shoulder seems to pull him out of the way-too draining mire of his own thoughts, smoothing out the slight furrow of his brow. It still takes him a moment to process what Inigo's saying, but aside from blinking at him a few times, he gets there before it's too awkwardly long.

"I'm kinda big," he says, finally uncurling enough of his tail to wave it around like someone suffering a complete lack of enthusiasm might wave around a small flag. "I mean, I weigh more than I look." Not a problem for cultivators, they all had boosted strength, and the Lans tended to do enough corporeal endurance punishment that Jingyi, the one often breaking rules, was thankful for when it came to anchoring. He carried enough of the unconscious across that even his arms felt a sort of warm burning from it, this morning.

He smiles, though it looks more like a lopsided grimace, flicking his fingers toward his bowl. "Plus, dishes. Can rest after, figure out what we'll need, have it ready for... ah. Platform?"

It's not far off again, if he remembers what day the ICP said it was.

"Oh, what's that?" Inigo says, a grin appearing on his face that's slowly spreading. He's always like this - not necessarily in the face of challenge, but more in the face of people being too energyless or down about things. It's a natural urge to make things lighter, happier for other people, as much as he can. "Are you saying I'm not a man, huh? That I'm not a manly man who could carry you? Or.. do dishes?"

A very manly man activity.

Inigo waves a hand, as if to wave off any concern the other may have. "Just leave the bowls, I'll go back and clean them once I've gotten you to your room. You can rely on good old Inigo for everything today, your highness!"

"What in the world does that have to do with being a man?" He mutters, giving Ingio a suspicious, tired squint. One that turns curious, enough that his tail manages one shiver of a twitch, thumping down hard against the ground.

"Can you really deadlift me?"

This, huh, this he's got to see. Dishes, dishes he could do too, he trusts most people can, but he's pretty confident that he's heavy. It's the tail.

No one expects the weight of his tail.

Also, two beats later: "Your highness?" That merits a snort, because monarchies were so removed from the united four clans, he's only read about them in stories. It's not hard to figure it's a tease, but it's funny, one that's a bit more like accusing him of being, ah, demanding. Bratty? What are highnesses like? "Please."

Edited 2021-07-28 06:42 (UTC)

Inigo lets out an overconfident sort of sound.

"Of course!"

This is going to end in disaster. Sure, it's not like Inigo is super weak. He's a swordfighter, after all, and considering he's used to those big medieval swords, he can at least carry some weight. And while maybe he could carry girls, or kids.. Carrying a guy his size is going to be harder. Especially with added dragon bits.

But he can't give up now, right? He'll look like a loser! Time to just go with it..!

"I'm almost getting the impression you think very, very little of me, you know." But it's said in a joking way - don't worry, he's not actually upset.

They are absolutely going to end up in a collapsed, tangled pile of limbs on the floor, and Jingyi knows he's going to laugh when it happens. It's not going to hurt, he takes worse falls in practise any day. He's pretty sure Inigo has too.

"If I thought that little of you, I'd already be standing." A tired smirk, and then he's simply offering Inigo his hands.

Get wrecked.

It's time.

Inigo walks over, taking those hands. (Maybe, just maybe, savoring the feeling of holding hands with Jingyi for a moment! Nothing wrong with appreciating holding the hands of your pal, after all!) Then he starts trying to pull him up, but he's very quickly starting to realise this is going to be near impossible. There's Jingyi's regular expected human weight, but then there's suddenly something extra, and it's just..

It's impossible. Not that it means Inigo doesn't keep pulling for a moment more, but it does mean that the mental vision Jingyi has already received here is coming true. With a startled yelp, Inigo just collapses right on top of the guy, leaving them a double boys heap on the floor.

A bowl is accidentally sent sailing across the floor because of the impact too, coming to a halt on the other side of the room.

".. Ohh.. I think I broke my back.."

Don't mind him just lying here on top of you, dude. He can't quite move just yet.

He's tired enough that when Inigo goes flying into him and they both topple over, he's only barely able to yank himself out of boneless mess to actually still boneless mess, but capable of not smacking his head into the floor, he wheezes. Any amount of weight hitting his chest like that's bound to force air out, but it doesn't hurt. The reason why he can't catch his breath is his sudden bout of laughter.

He can't help it. He's so tired, a great number of things can strike him as hilariously funny, and for now, this gets to be one of them. Only here he is with Inigo still defeated and on top of him and that's even funnier, and he might be clutching onto Inigo as he's laughing, shaking and wheezing with amusement, to the point he cannot form sentences and he might be tearing up and eventually, breathing's going to be equally hilarious.

"You... you! You fell! Fell very... very im... impressively!"

Turns out it's difficult to speak when you're exhaustion laughing so hard you just about cry.

Edited (p h o n e) 2021-07-28 18:47 (UTC)

At first he wonders if maybe Jingyi is choking right under him. It'd make sense, considering the way his body starts to weirdly shake - and, therefore, shakes Inigo's body right alongside his own - and those odd sounds coming from him.

But then the sounds get louder, and it's very obvious exactly what they are. He's laughing. He's laughing.

"I broke my back and you're laughing!" Inigo says, managing to somehow sound indignant and flustered all at once. He's probably wheezing mid-sentence, because his fallen body is being jostled all around here by the other's grip on it. "I-- By Naga, I can't believe you're laughing about this of all things..!"

Was the trick to making Jingyi laugh all this time just pulling something like this? The sort of thing that'd make a toddler laugh? Please.

Having a two year old's sense of humour when he's this exhausted might be stretching it. Or, no, exactly right, and he does try to stop, but it's just so ridiculous.

"Your back's not broken," he says once he's not turning into an asthmatic wreck, gasping for air--welcome along for the ride, Inigo. "Just your pride. I told you, I'm heavy."

This is why it's better to be on top than squashed below. He lets go and sort of dead fishes under Inigo, breathing slowly regulating, and wipes the back of his wrist unsteadily across his eyes. Oh, he can't even remember when he last laughed like that, the near hysterical self fueling kind instead of excitement over interesting things or new foods. He's even more tired than he realised, he's moving to the kitchen, the train can transport him home later--if he curls up as a dragon, couldn't he sleep under a sink?

Then, with a slow, blighted blink, he vocalises his belated realisation.

"Inigo, I can just shift. You can carry tiny dragon me," he says, ignoring the fact Inigo has decided his back is broken now.

"I don't know if I can ever walk again!"

Sorry, Jingyi. You came to the circus, so now you have to expect the clowns.

And by 'clowns' I mean the fact that Inigo is still just on top of the other, like some sort of paperweight, and still whining about his supposedly broken back. Which, you know, looks fine. And considering he isn't screaming like he's dying, he's probably just entirely fine. He's only got a case of the Whinitis.

"My career is--" He pauses, as if he's now - yes, only now - realising the other said something. It finally makes him move, scrambling off the other so he instead ends up kneeling on the floor right next to where Jingyi is still strewn about. ".. Wait, why didn't you suggest that earlier?!"

Jingyi makes a slew of small sounds as his friend scrambles off him, most of them some variety of grunt. There's no good answer, and he could white lie, if his sudden spike of energy from hysterical laughter wasn't already tapering off entirely. He turns his head, peering sideways up at the younger man.

So, more honesty. More very silly honesty.

"I forgot. 'N it's tiring." He uses energy to shift, it's not a free process. Did he even register the clowning theatrics, we've yet to know. He closes his eyes, and his whole form... silvers, his features lose sharpness, he becomes a very localised silver sun that's hard to look at not for the light, but for something uncomfortably fluid about it. It's a matter of two, maybe three heartbeats, and the mass of him reduces, his cargo pants and hoodie collapsing in a gentle billowing exhalation around the smaller body no longer capable of filling both.

Then he wiggles, his head looking back up out of the hood, fur positively ruffled every which way. He's still on his back, so the wiggling continues while he continues to work himself free through the neck hole, his ribbon slipping down to partly cover his eyes as he goes.

... He gives up once his forelegs are free, tucking his paws up against his chest, talons curling in to the centre of them. He stares. Stares at Inigo.

And instead of asking for help, points out, "Told you your back's fine."

Said, and I cannot understate, in the absolute driest way possible: "This is all temporary, born out of my willpower to save you. The moment I bring you back to your room, I will fade into dust for all eternity."

He can keep up the dramatics forever, dude! Don't you dare question it!

But he can be dramatic and helpful at the same time. The two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, which is why Inigo is already reaching out to try and help free the little dragon from the robes before Jingyi only manages to entangle himself further up into them. Though Inigo doesn't fully gather the dragon into his arms right away, instead putting it down on the ground next to the robes for a moment as he starts to gather the robes, throwing them over one of his arms.

Because Inigo is so not going to dump him back into his room naked, no matter how comfortable Jingyi apparently is with showing off his body to the entire world.

"Wait a moment, once I have all of this, I'll pick you up too."

Edited 2021-07-29 19:19 (UTC)

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

1/2

no subject