peripheries | IC Contact

[What keeps Renfri coming back to the beach in the days and weeks after the Leviathan incident finally draws to a close is ultimately a single word rendered in text: Yes. Not the sort of thing that would seem to have the power to preoccupy a person's thoughts — or at least, not unless you happened to know the question it was answering.

Did you see me die?

Yes.

It's a strange thing to be so hung up on, when she's already died once. When she talks about it in casual conversation because it's a thing that's already said and done, the very reason she's even in Trench to begin with. It's not even the first time she's escaped a moment where she was supposed to die and didn't; she's been doing that, after all, since she was fourteen.

But there's something about this that won't go away, because it's not that someone intended for her to die, it's not that she was supposed to die, it's that but for things unfolding the way they did, she would've been just as dead as the others who were taken in the chaos that gripped this beach just a few short weeks before. She would've been among them because it was a vision that would've come true, but for the influence of someone standing just a little to the left of it.

She would have died here, and she didn't, and she keeps coming back to thoughts of when she'd been running from the beast and it'd cornered her, when it'd had every chance to finish her off, and yet for just one instant —

Did you see me die?

Yes.

There are no answers to be found on this beach, she knows, but that's not enough to keep her from coming back again and again, anyway.]

[There's another lone figure on the beach. It sits atop a bit of rubble, bits of unturned stone and what used to be pieces of the mess hall and tent. The pile is so precariously put together that it seems unlikely the person was able to climb up there and yet there they are, surveying the grave of the camp and the ocean that held the beast that destroyed it.

The sea calls to Kaworu Nagisa and it has for a long time, before he was even aware that he could hear its siren song. Then it consumed his body and now it has laid stake to a piece of his mind. There's always the soft sound of churning water that gets louder when he sleeps, always a gentle tug on his steps, turning his feet towards the Further Shores. He shouldn't heed the call: it lead to his death the last time after all. Yet here he is, giving in yet again.

He hears a sound, somehow, despite the rush of the tide, and glances down to find a familiar face. And it's strangely comforting, even if he doesn't have a name to put to it.]

Ah. It's you.

[There he is, the boy from the Oracular Spectacular. It's uncanny how many people she's met in various stages of "about to throw up on someone", lately; hopefully he's over that by now.

There's an odd psychology inherent to positioning, even in simple and offhand ways. It comes with connotations and implications, and right now he's perched atop an impossible thing and she's down at the foot of it, peering up like some supplicant just arrived at an oracle's mountain.]

You too.

[He stares out at the ocean with the same look on his face that she knows she always wears when she does it, herself. She wonders if he looks for the same things she does, when he does.]

What are you doing up there?

[Well, there was more vomiting the past few days, but he's past that now. Lucky for her.

He glances around at his perch, a thin piece of wood that probably probably collapse if he were any larger. The advantage of being a small bird when you settle some place fragile. Then his eyes move back to the ocean, both to answer her question and because he can't resist turning his gaze back there.]

...Trying to fill some sort of longing, I suppose. Answers to questions that I don't think can be answered.

You and me both.

[Shame there aren't enough perches for everyone; they could be birds of a feather. A little spiteful toward her own compulsion, she keeps her eyes on him instead of indulging the urge to turn and face the water instead.]

It was before all that mess, last I saw you. Back before that thing turned up.

[There's a question implied: how did that play out for you. She leaves it implicit, unwilling to outright ask.]

Yes.

[His voice is soft. He's learned if he keeps his tone soft, it can be harder to read. However, this time, it gives everything away. Whatever happened to him, it wasn't good, and considering the body count, it's easy to guess what happened.]

Did it happen? ...What happened to you in the vision?

...No. It changed, just enough.

[How funny, in a way that isn't funny at all, that he died and she didn't and they both seem to be possessed of the exact same angst about the whole business regardless. She digs the toes of her boots into the sand, mostly for something to do with them, pushing it into little trails and craters as she thinks of worms.]

I was supposed to die. I don't know how — except by that thing, I imagine.

[Almost absently, she rubs at her arm, which used to twinge with bruises every time she moved it, but those have faded now.]

I almost did. But.

I see.

[The technicalities she explain seem to wash over him. She didn't die. As those three words pass through his brain, a strange weakness washes over him. Like he'd been carrying something heavy and finally could sit and recover.

It's relief, he realizes. He's relieved she did not die. Even though he only met her once, the idea of her dying was something that felt painful to conceive of. She'd been kind to him, in her own way, and so in his mind, she deserved some sort kindness in return.

Kaworu reaches up to scratch idly at the corners of one of his eyes and feels wetness slide between his flesh and nail.]

I'm... [He seems unsure of the next word. Like it may not be the right one.] glad you didn't die.

[It's funny how he sounds like her. Funny how it feels to hear the same words she's said herself but in someone else's voice, offered up to her instead of handed out to someone else. I'm glad is so commonplace, so ill-fitted, that it's almost stupid, and yet there's really no better way of putting it, is there?

She chews the edge of her lip. There's a weight she's been carrying on her chest, too, and for all that she's done well to keep it under wraps, it keeps coiling tighter and tighter like an overwound spring. But maybe like this, it's fine. Neither one of them is finding any answers out here; maybe that makes it a good place to ask the questions she's been afraid to voice.]

I think it didn't want to. The beast.

[Even just that much of a confession feels like an absolution.]

I mean...I don't mean that. It did. It was killing all of us, I don't mean that I was anything special, or —

[I'd think, maybe I was special, and even the things that everyone else feared, I wouldn't, because they would like me. Just me and no one else, she'd said once, when she and Paul were playing at whims and fancies. And Paul had said — ]

I mean — it was as though, just for a second...

[Maybe I could have been one of your monster friends, Paul had said.]

...It was like it knew me. Like one bit of it knew me. And it stopped.

[He watches her, curiously, as she works through her thoughts. He tries to imagine the beast with any control in the face of that insatiable desire to consume in attempt to fill a void of those it lost across infinite instances in time and space.

And as he opens his mouth to explain to her that could not be possible that it was against the very nature of the beast, he touches on a memory. Feather light, so thin that it's almost as though he can't reach for it to examine it. A voice, her voice, ringing out above the surface and in that moment it reached his ears through roaring waves of the mess of corruption and deep sea that was the Leviathan. A reminder that he was himself, and he was not this beast. They had not, and would not become one.

He stares at her, so intently and without blinking that it's probably a little unnerving.]

I heard your voice. After... it... After I became part of the beast. I heard it.

You — became part of it?

[That's the problem with madness and chaos on the level of what hit the beach that day; it's impossible to see everything, or even most things, or even really anything except what's immediately in front of you or what you're looking for. But that — well. Now she's got more detailed information than just he died, doesn't she.

And then, gradually, it comes back to her. The day they met, when he was ill. When he wasn't scrying like anyone else was. He was talking to the monster, from far away. And then it came, and he...became part of it.]

You...you heard me, and...?

That's right. It was able to submerge the conscious parts of my soul within its own and gain control.

[There's an involuntary shudder that he tries to suppress. It comes out as a little tremble. Then, he leaps off his perch, landing impossible soft on the ground. His gaze never leaves her. Like if he looks away, she might not actually be there.]

I said I'd keep you safe. I wanted to.

Then that was you.

[He's not the only one not daring to look away; her eyes, with hints of the white showing around each of them, track him from perch to descent until he's landed in front of her, waiting to be regarded — or maybe scrutinized.]

You made it...spare me. Just long enough.

[And she almost says why, because it's the next most natural question, but I wanted to really sort of covers that, or at least as much of an answer as she knows she's likely to get out of Kaworu regardless.]

Do you think it was worth it?

[He cocks his head, still not breaking the gaze that connects them. It's odd to hear that question. A question he knows he would ask. He cannot simply accept an action on its face. He has to understand if the choice was made with full awareness of the consequences or the implications. Too often, humans forgo asking these questions because they fear the answer.

But she didn't fear it.

So all he can do is nod.]

Yes. It was.

You and a lot of people.

[More than she's usually willing to admit. It's one of the things she usually conspicuously omits when she presents her own biased perspective on the witcher who killed her: that he tried to save her too, more than once, because he thought she was worth saving.

The more and more than those people add up, the harder it is to assume that they're all wrong.]

...So. Does that mean I should thank you, or...?

[Oddly, of all the people she knows, Kaworu is probably the only one who'll instantly grasp that it's not the insult a more socially well-adjusted person might think that sounds like. Neither one of them knows the courtesies for this sort of thing, probably. It's a genuine, honest question.]

No. I don't think so. I did it because I wanted to save you but I had no way of knowing if I could. I'm... glad that it worked.

[He understands. He would ask the same question. He gives her a small half-smile, something that borders on the edge of trying to be reassuring.]

IC Contact

post-leviathan, as promised

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and now that i am back from vacation, sorry about the delay!

no worries! welcome back!

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