[ week five ➝ chane ]

[sweats]

[ Hello, Chane. It's Tuesday, it's the afternoon, and Will arrives and falls in step with Chane wherever she's heading off to. Winston follows nearby, giving a soft woof and looking quite happy.

He gives her a smile, soft and kind and tips his head to her. ]

I'm curious. What year is it where you come from?

Comments

to make you hurt the way you are hurting me!!

[tightly]

[ 2020, he says, and it feels so alien to her. An impossible year, one that she'll later come to intrinsically define by the crisp, exacting technology on the train -- but we're not there yet, so it's an irrelevant comparison at present.

2020, he says, and it's a time made for others. Her children's children, perhaps, if she and Claire decide to create. And Will, who might walk the same ground as them, pass a son or daughter in a crowd and never realise. He won't, but he could.

An eighty year difference, he's so sure about. She'll be elsewhere by then.

( -- a different train, perhaps.)

She hadn't needed this place to tell her that the boundaries of life and death were malleable, edged with otherworldly possibilities and governed by vast hands. She had known that since she was a child, from the day her father told her about the immortality elixir and then expressly forbid her from ever drinking it herself. It was Huey's design that she should live and die in a sheer minute of his life, and he would finally finalize the theory of her existence. Chane had only obeyed, of course. And she hopes she was a good experiment, validating his hypotheses and maybe gaining him some acclaim.

That doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. She's helpless to do anything but obey her father. To do otherwise is as physically impossible as touching her nose to her tongue, or flying, or breathing in a vacuum. That doesn't mean she's any less curious, begrudging a command with one hand while accepting it with the other. Her curiosity has always been accompanied by prickles and open cuts.

Plainly, selfishly, she doesn't want it to be the way Will says it is.

Chane struggles to keep a firm lid on that instinctual bout of unhappiness, knowing it affects him. Interestingly, there's an accompanying feeling of failure - almost as if she knows a way to circumvent his unwelcome prophecy, but won't. ]

well that's just unfair tbh

[sweats]

[ It's true -- it is interesting because there's a pause in Will's thoughts as he feels Chane's on the edges, feels the slow slide of her emotions as they shift from the usual chill of her mind into something more bleaker, more unhappy. His lips tug in a frown as he looks over to her, watching the side of her face for a moment as he considers.

There is surprise in him then, his own complete surprise, because he never quite expected that sort of response from a gap like this. With others he'd grown fond of -- Percy, for instance -- there was the solid assurance of their relationship existing in an ephemeral state. It's the same with Chane but still, her sadness strikes a chord in him.

(And the failure too. He couldn't possibly guess what that's from.)

He ends up stopping in their walk, not quite sure what he wants to do next but still finds himself reaching out to catch her wrist. From there, it's an easy tug to pull her in close, wrap his arm around her shoulder and hold her in a warm hug. She can probably feel Winston's tail brushing against her legs in turn as he sniffs her slightly before settling at their side again. ]

There is something comforting about the weight of a good memory. You may forget the details but the feeling it gives you isn't something that can be taken from you. Not really. It's always there, underneath everything. It makes all of this a little better, doesn't it?

[tightly]

[ His arm comes around her and frames her so solidly, she's initially caught off guard. It's not often that Chane feels as small as she is, with silence and surety to prop her up like a wall. Embraces are the one consistent exception: when someone folds themselves around her, her response is to shrink into them. Perhaps not an immediate response, no -- but it happens regardless of whether or not it's urgent or delayed. As Will holds her, she finds herself slowly sagging, letting him bear some of her weight. Some, not all.

As he holds her, his voice is close enough to leave faint vibrations across her scalp. It's an odd sensation, one she isn't sure she likes yet. His words leave her equally unsure, neither convinced nor unconvinced, but listening intently because... well, that's all she can do.

It must be so easy for him to be friends with her, when he can say whatever he wants and she lacks the ability to disagree, to contest.

Despite all of this, unkind thoughts and indecisiveness, there's a clear indication of acceptance. With no other reason other than she wants to, Chane lingers in the moment, burying her face against his chest. ]