apassingafternoon | hail of arrows

hail of arrows

To graduate from utter silence to the constant roar of Gilead was something else. Though she had been here for over a week now, and would stay for much longer, Kaine was not used to the constant noise. Even at night it felt as if she could hear every shuffle of bodies in sheets and night clothes, every fuck whether positive or not, and all those conversations that were never suited for daylight. It all made sleeping outside difficult, but even lying beside Nariko didn't make it any easier to deal with the walls all around her. They were suffocating. At night and in the day, they threatened to drive Kaine out of her mind.

So she took to wandering around because there wasn't fuck else to do around here, not for her.

Which might have explained catching sight of him towards an edge, around a corner. The specifics weren't relevant, that Kaine saw Bert and spun on her worn down heel and followed him was relevant. It should have also been worrying for her, this unnatural and constant fascination that was tempered by the occasional bout of good sense felt odd. It was a ... Not a problem, but not exactly good. Crushes on men that you hardly knew, that hid the way Cuthbert did, that never let her finish talking the way Cuthbert did couldn't end well.

She followed anyway, and not with any real ounce of subtlety or control. Eventually one of them would have to say something and in her own way she knew he might take that responsibility first. So she followed, and even if Kaine happened to be wrong he was pretty interesting to stare at anyway. Maybe it was the hair.

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She looked briefly to the direction she should have gone in and pouted briefly, but then settled her eyes back on him. "So, what I heard is that you'd sooner be terrified of anything romantic because you're pretending its not in you. And on top of that you're using death as an excuse, as if I'll live any longer hanging around Nariko, let alone the rest of you idiots. What you are really saying here is that you're scared, and you would rather control it and be scared by yourself than be scared with someone else and let them help you." She quieted for just a second, as if rethinking something. "It would have been easier if you just thought I was ugly. You can't choose who you're attracted to, but you can choose to let yourself have something that might be good, for however long it's there."

She looked in the right direction and shrugged, shook her head. "Are you coming? I've never seen anyone but Nariko shoot."

"What I'm saying," Cuthbert retorted rather grumpily, "is that you have terrible taste in men, and I refuse to be a part of your frankly insane life choices. I have my own frankly insane life choices to make." Tossing his hair back overdramatically, he turned on his heel and started to stalk towards the practice fields. "Don't start telling me what I feel. I get enough of that bullshit from Alain."

Which wasn't to say that she was wrong. Only that he wished she was. If that wasn't obvious enough from his manner, it could only get more obvious from the way his smile was fading into something much less easy and cheerful. It wasn't quite one of his dark moods, but it certainly wasn't his usual happy-go-lucky approach, either.

She had never seen a man do that so well and in any other situation it would have been utterly hilarious. But she did answer her own question: It was definitely the hair. Kaine didn't follow immediately, she lingered in place and then quietly trotted after. She didn't keep her silence to make him feel better or even to let him sink back into his pleasant space. Kaine didn't give a single fuck about any of that because that issue, his desire to remain as far away from anything good, predated her.

"In any case," She was quiet for that span of time because despite all of that factual talk hearing him confirm her words had hurt. True, she had only wanted him to kiss her again and nothing more than that, but it still poked at her insides, seemed to pull at her organs. "I wanted to apologize for before. When I said that Roland was throwing a fit. It upset you, right?"

Cuthbert shook his head, heading down the hill towards the targets. "I was already upset. What it did was piss me off." He turned to look at her, pushing back his hair with one hand. "You seemed to think he was angry because he was jealous, and over something stupid and petty like her lover showing up. Ever since you came here, you've acted as if he's some imposter for claiming her, and then you turned around and shamed him for being angry, as if he hadn't had every right to be on edge."

He let out a deep breath. He hadn't meant to spew that much of his irritation out, but sometimes it was hard to stop. "He's my dinh. More than that, he's my friend. I don't always agree with the things he does, but I'd follow him past the gates of Hell, and if he won't get angry when people insult him, well, I'll do it for him." Shaking his head, he smiled crookedly, shrugging one shoulder. "I guess maybe it did upset me, a bit. Anyway, apology accepted."

"He is an impostor for claiming her, because he doesn't love her. And I know that it's something they both chose in their own right, that she didn't have to say yes and neither did he, and that something like this can happen at all has nothing to do with either of them. But she's my friend, she's someone I thought I was in love with, and I have to sit and watch him hurt her every single day, and I can't do anything to fix it. You can stand there and say 'well that's just how Roland is, because of what he's gone through' but it's difficult to accept something like that when your friend is being attacked, isn't it? No one else will pay attention to what's hurting her so I have to."

Not for the first time it occurred to her that she and Bert had matching positions. They were protecting people who viciously tried to shake off the idea that they needed protecting at all. It didn't make anything better, of course, in fact it might only mean there was always a wedge between herself and the man that had, for whatever reason, currently stolen her attention.

"I don't hate Roland as a person. I hate that he doesn't seem to want to try and understand what she needs, which has nothing to do with being in love with someone or not." But it did have to deal with being close, and that seemed to be Roland's obstacle. "... But you forgave it before I could say the rest of that, so the timing is sort of off."

Cuthbert was quiet for a moment, walking on in silence. It wasn't until he'd reached the firing range that he stopped and turned to look at her. He wasn't smiling now. "Didn't," he corrected her. "He didn't love her. Which was probably easier on both of them. Not to mention on my nerves."

Which was the closest he was likely to come to admitting just how jealous he was. This was worse than Susan, in a way. Loving Susan, in the end, had been Roland's choice to make. Now Cuthbert was finding himself jealous of Nariko's closeness to Roland, without even the salve of knowing that Roland himself was happy with it. Jealous and protective. It wasn't a good mix.

Sighing, he took out his slingshot and one of the steel balls he kept in a pouch at his belt, loading the sling and narrowing his eyes at the target. "It's not because of what he's been through. Not entirely. He's also just an ass." The steel shot whistled through the air, striking neatly in the centre of the target, and Cuthbert loaded another. "Besides. He is trying. He's trying very hard. It just so happens he has all the sensitivity of a stone wall."

Edited 2015-02-19 01:11 (UTC)

He was kidding, right? And yet she knew he was at such a point that there was no such thing as messing around. Not about this. He was implying that Roland was already in love with her and though she wanted to refute this, nothing came out. He knew, and she wouldn't refute that. As a result they were both a little quiet all of the sudden. It didn't make any sense to her. The man loved her but he wasn't even staying with her most nights. Didn't couples at least share a bed? Had Kaine been lead astray with that idea?

"Everyone's an ass. I'm an ass, Nariko's an overly sensitive bitch sometimes, you're emotionally closed off on purpose. I can get over things like that." But it was much harder for her to understand the intricacy that Bert felt, that Nariko constantly talked about. It was like listening to people talk about in not just another language but a dead dialect of it.

"You told me to not tell you how you're feeling, but my general assumption here is that you're about as alright with all of it as I am. And I don't mean in the sense of whether they love each other or not." She meant the jealousy of it. Feeling as if you were losing someone vital to your being to a villain. Except that person wasn't a villain at all.

Cuthbert shrugged, sending the second shot to join the first in the middle of the target. "I don't own him. It's none of my business what he wants to do with his own marriage, so long as it doesn't end up with us all in jail this time." A ghost of his usual cocky smile crossed his face as he fired off a third shot. "Not that I'm against free bed and board, but I could've done without that deputy's terrible singing. Half an hour of that and I was starting to look forwards to being hanged."

After one more shot, he lowered his slingshot, sighing, and turned to face her. "It doesn't matter if I'm alright with it, or if you are. It's done. Ro' would call it ka, I call it bullshit, but either way, there's nothing we can do to change it. And if I can hold off disliking Nariko for what she's doing to him, you can hold off making sharp comments about Ro'."

"Or you could tell me what it is that she's doing wrong or, better yet, speak to her yourself and then some part of it might be fixed. Especially since she likes you quite a bit, Bert. She'd probably cry at hearing that you even vaguely disliked her." Which made her laugh, though it might have been a cruel gesture. "But I won't be so harsh, that's why I apologized. The sooner everyone can try to," What was the word? "Agree with one another, the happier we're likely to be." She paused again and laughed again. "Sometimes I say things in a way that's much to harsh, so if I do it again I hope you'll tell me, and then we can make it better, too."

It was that simple for her. Kaine knew that she could be difficult, blunt, and even crass in her own way, and while some of that was her responsibility she would right as soon as possible. Which was partly why she was here with Bert to begin with.

"Why were you ever in jail? Aren't gunslingers law keepers or something?" A slight diversion in topics might not be a bad idea but at least it was a very genuine question.

"Aye. And therefore, not the most popular with lawbreakers." He seemed to relax more than a little at her laugh, some of that darkness receding from his expression. "Here's a fun fact: the only thing Farson's men like less than gunslingers is fourteen-year-old gunslingers who show them up in a fight. Another fun fact: angry mobs are remarkably gullible."

Maybe it was crazy for him to be joking over this. God knew that joking didn't make it any less raw; Roland hadn't been the only one changed by their experience in Hambry, or the only one who grieved what had happened there. In all the war since then, Cuthbert couldn't think of a hollower victory than the one they'd won in Mejis. But Kaine didn't have to know that.

"Long story short, we got framed for murder and conspiracy. And then we blew ten kinds of shit out of the assholes who did it, which, I have to tell you, was extraordinarily satisfying. But it did instill in me a certain horror of what happens when Roland falls for people."

She raised an interested brow at that, not only because some of the lightness seemed to come back to him, but because it was genuinely interesting. No, it didn't sound like the sort of thing to joke about but Kaine did understand why some people needed to process things that way. Her grandmother had been that way. Hm.

"How thoroughly would I have to beg to hear the harrowing and endearing highlights of that tale?" What she really wanted was to hear the whole deal, but that might be too much for him. In the meantime she plopped herself on the ground, thankful for the good weather and the hard ground underneath her, her legs crossed. "I would trade it for a story if that interests you, as nothing about my personal life is very worthwhile."

Coming from an entirely different world, ending up in this one, managing to survive ... Not at all worth talking about.

"It's Roland's story, really. Most of them are." Cuthbert shrugged, tucking his slingshot back into his belt. "He's the one with the great and noble destiny. The rest of us just tag along to provide moral support and sharp one-liners." He rolled his eyes, smiling, but there was a real bitterness in there. It wasn't easy, especially for someone as proud as Cuthbert, to know that you would always be a footnote in someone else's history. Even after the years he'd had to get used to it, it wasn't easy. It was just that the alternative was striking out alone, and for how much he loved Roland, that just wasn't possible.

Flopping down next to her, he draped his arms loosely over his knees and shrugged. "Story for a story sounds fair, though. Although I'm warning you, prepare to be horribly disappointed by a tale that mostly consists of Roland being an ass and me and Alain rolling our eyes into the distance."

"A story belongs to who the perceived hero is. And you don't get to choose my perception anymore than I tell you how to feel." Much like everything else that Kaine said it was without inherent malice or too much feeling, it was a gently spoken fact because that's what she believed it to be. The winners wrote history, but that didn't mean there weren't other sides and avenues to events.

"Besides, it seems that I like your one-liners, and you have very nice eyes." ... Wait, that might not have come out the way she wanted to. It sounded more like a come on than an assurance that he was more important than he seemed to think himself.

Well, damn.

Cuthbert blinked at her, snorting laughter. "And my opinion of your taste in men has changed not one jot," he commented wryly, and stuck his tongue out. "But thankee, nonetheless. Though while I won't deny that I am very pretty, nice eyes aren't generally considered a foundation block of heroism."

He laughed, lying back in the grass. For all that he'd come out here intending to shoot, he had to admit that this had its benefits, too. The fact that he didn't feel like his emotions were quite so raw and open was a big part of it.

"All right. Harrowing and endearing highlights. Where to start?" Cracking his knuckles dramatically, he squinted up at her. "Well, I guess the beginning's usually a good bet. And this one really is Roland's story, so I'll cut it short; he let himself be baited into taking his test of manhood when he was fourteen. Al and I told Ro' he was going to die, but you've probably figured out by now that trying to tell Ro' some things is like trying to knock down a brick wall with your head." He pulled a face, lacing his hands behind his head. "So he made the challenge, and by some miracle he didn't die or get sent west. Only that left us all with the tricky problem of the person who wanted him to lose, and that, my dear sai Kaine, is how we all ended up getting packed off to Mejis to count cattle."

That part, frankly, was the easy part to tell tongue-in-cheek. Parts of what had happened in Hambry - like their confrontation with the Big Coffin Hunters, or Mayor Thorin in general - were easy to put a light spin on. At other parts, notably most of those involving Susan, he got rather more morose. A few things - not least the whole existence of Maerlyn's Grapefruit - he excised as completely as he could.

After explaining how Susan had helped them escape from the jail, he sat up abruptly, hands still behind his head. "And then there was a rather bracing battle where we drove an entire army into the thinny, and then we went home. And they all lived happily ever after, the end." Because even Bert had limits in what he could talk cheerfully about, and the memory of everything after the battle was enough to make him shiver. Besides, Susan's death and Roland's grief belonged to them. They weren't his to share. That memory of brittle, greasy char and the hollowness in Roland's eyes was one that would stay between him and Alain, and that only because they couldn't be rid of it.

For a moment, that shadow passed across his face, and he looked rather lost. Then he pulled a face, scraping his fingers through his hair. "Okay. Your turn."

She might have mentioned that her ability to go on functioning didn't rely on his opinion of her taste, but everything else was far more important than useless quips. He laid down and she stayed right where she was, listening from beginning to end without any interruption. In fact her expression hardly shifted even during some of the parts where a greater reaction would have made sense. Kaine listened as much as she watched the way that he told her this very long, thorough tale.

"Mm …" She did owe him something, didn't she? Except the last thing on her mind was returning the favor. "It's normal for friends to comfort each other, isn't it?" She wasn't asking it in a way that required him to explain, it was for confirmation and nothing else.

"Depends on the friends. Roland and I, for example, are awful at it." He said it lightly, but met her eyes thoughtfully for a moment, then shrugged. "I guess it is, though."

"Alright."

That was about all she needed to go ahead and hug him. It was kind of a tricky thing since he was on the ground, so she ended up on top of him in a strangely not-friend-like way. But that's why the qualifier was there: This was a friend action, not anything else, so obviously neither of them would think it was anything else. She laid right down and wrapped her arms around him and squeezed, her head tucked a little awkwardly on his chest. If it was any comfort she didn't force the contact outside of the acceptable almost-minute.

"You're an idiot," But that might not have been what he was expecting to hear when she sat up. "If my taste in men is shit then your constant downplaying of your own actions and of how much you're needed is just as bad." And then she gave him his space once more, straightening out her top. There. She was comforting. "Keep doing this shit and I'll kick you in the shins, Bert. There isn't just one kind of hero in every world that happens to exist. There are a bunch of different kinds, and you are certainly one of them. And don't argue with me, either. I gave you a hug." So he couldn't argue you with her.

He laughed, a little shakily, and shook his head. "Do you know how many arguments I could have avoided if I knew that was a loophole?" he joked, sitting up. "Anyway, Rebecca's girls have left me in a position where my shins can't take much more abuse, so I guess I have to cede. I'm a dashing, smart, extremely attractive hero, and I can't possibly blame you for wanting to get into my pants." He considered for a moment, then leant in, kissing her high on the cheekbone. A chaste kiss, but a kiss nonetheless. "Thankee," he said, sincerely, then looked rather sheepish over his own sincerity. "All right, now it's definitely your turn."

Despite her lack of experience even she couldn't help thinking that a little battle might have been won there. Not the entire war, far from that, but it was something. And occasionally all anyone needed was a little something to help them get ready for everything. But apparently her own rules didn't exactly apply because while it was very obviously a chaste kiss, just as her hug had been without ulterior motive or thought, she still blushed and looked off to another side.

"You're welcome." At least they could agree that it was her turn, and she tried to think of something to tell him but nothing really stood out for her. "... My life has been really boring."

Horrifyingly so. "There was that one time I caught a drunkard who dressed himself up in a weird outfit and constantly made speeches?"

"Many different kinds of heroes, indeed," Cuthbert said with mock-sincerity, and laughed. "I don't believe for a moment that your life's been that dull. Not travelling with Nariko, anyroad, not from what I've seen of her." Shifting his weight, so he was kneeling rather than sitting, he regarded her thoughtfully for a moment.

At last, he looked up at the sky. It was coming on to evening; they'd been outside longer than he'd realised. Not that he was complaining. For all their to-and-fro, and for all that revisited pain, this was the most peaceful afternoon he'd had in ages.

"Tell me about where you're from," he said suddenly, after a minute or so. "I don't even know where that is, but I'm guessing from how you talk it's nowhere I've been. So. Start there?"

"Not a bad point, I guess. But I'm really not kidding, everything before her was just ..." She shrugged, "The way it happened to be. I don't know if she already told you but I'm really not from around here." But just in case it wasn't clear enough: "Your entire world isn't mine. In-World or Mid-World or whatever World, it's not mine. I ended up here by accident and Nariko's helped me not die. She was also the very first friend that I made."

She unfolded her legs and laid them straight, grinning. "Sixteen years and no friends. How sad is that?" Her shoulders lifted and fell back down. "It was always just grandma and I, y'know? People don't take kindly to a kid that can tell whose going to die or turn into crazy, terrifying ghosts that kill people. We lived in the house my great-grandpa built, where my parents lived until they were killed, it's actually not that bad a place, nice land, kind off of in a corner, it's just far away from everything else."

Her eyes closed and for the first time in weeks she appeared to well and truly relax. "We don't really have roads or big civilizations, but we have plumbing and that's pretty damn great! Also, hot water whenever we want within reason. My grandma sold jewelry - people weren't as scared of her as they were me - and I took orders for furniture. I guess that makes me a carpenter. Everything is quiet, people keep to themselves for the most part. Everyone began to open up a little when Nariko came around, I guess it helped them realize that I didn't really enjoy what I could see. If I ever go back maybe it won't be so bad."

But that was if she ever went back at all. "Oh, we have these things called paninis - they're like flat, ah, I think you call them popkins? Sort of like that. Flat popkins, and they're amazing. I can make this one with cheese and herbs and chicken, it's the best thing in the world with some tea."

He smiled sidelong. "Besides the people, sounds like a great place. Peace, quiet, and chicken popkins." Laughing, he folded his hands together, resting his chin on them. "Roland mentioned a little of this, after Nariko told him. But only a little. I don't think he's sure how much of it is his to tell. Do you mind me asking how you got from there to here?" He wrinkled his nose a little, shrugging. "Only the closest I've come to other worlds was the thinny in Mejis, and that thing set my teeth on edge from a hundred paces."

For a split second she almost told him that the people weren't really so bad. They had been cruel to her, of course, but they were perfectly giving and sweet to just about everyone else. But then there was Nariko's voice in the back of her head you don't need to defend them, and she kept herself quiet. They didn't deserve her kindness even if they had changed after Nariko's arrival, one day Kaine would be able to give that but not now.

"If nothing else it's good to know that we're all very good about keeping privacy," And though she wasn't smiling her voice sounded warm, even grateful.

"It's pretty much all her fault. Maybe a year after my grandma died we suddenly had the Spectres to deal with. It was easy to liken them angry ghosts, so that's what people considered them, but ghosts don't bleed and they don't try to speak. It didn't matter how many I cleared out from my land or near the city, a whole new horde would come back the next night. I wanted to fight smart, not hard, but no one would talk to me. I found Nariko floating in the gorge, about to fall over the edge. I saved her, and then she told me this unbelievable story about horses and Baronies, stuff I've only ever read in books."

"Eventually we got over the cultural exchange and made a deal. Nariko wanted to get back home but I needed someone to speak to our city's 'dinh', you could say. Even though she was foreign it was easier for her to go and ask questions, people always showed up out of nowhere in my world, and they always seemed to come from different places. Some were actually dead but they never quite looked it, hence my utter lack of popularity." Because a little girl asking why a rotting corpse was running around, when said corpse looked and acted perfectly healthy just couldn't go over well.

Cuthbert raised one eyebrow, considering this for a moment. "Should I be saving my questions for the end," he asked primly, "or is now a good time to mention that I understood maybe half of that? You have the advantage of me, seeing as I've never even read of your place in books."

Some of it, he could piece together, from her tone if nothing else. But he was curious by nature, and there was a lot that he was already wondering about. What Spectres were, for instance, or how Nariko had got there. Most of all, how it felt to know something like that. He was used to dealing death, and had grown perfectly able to face his own short life expectancy with good cheer, but that didn't mean he was comfortable with the idea of death itself; what she was describing sounded nightmarish to say the least.

But he shook his head, pulling a face. "Never mind. I'm a terrible listener. Go on, so you needed her to talk to this dinh...?"

She laughed a bit, and shook her head. She thought questions might be easier to ask in the middle since they were from entirely different places, since Kaine could never seem to learn how to change her speech or her mannerisms just right. It left room for that lost in translation effect, but if he wanted her to go on then she would.

"Right. Nariko went to speak with our 'dinh', and was told a legend. That our world had been made by a God, one that lived among us for a long time, long before even my great-grandparents, but that God died. Because that God was dead Spectres were invading our world essentially because there was no great force to keep the out. Like many stories, it was all very weird and jumbled." At least that was how it appeared to Kaine at the time and even now. Too easy, too idealistic, and her instincts had been correct as ever. "Anyway, our 'dinh', Matilda, gave us a map. If we went by that story we'd have to bring back some weird God on our Earth and then everything would be fine. None of us really believed that but, hey, we could get to where that person was supposed to live easily enough, and it wasn't as if there was anything else to go on. For good measure Nariko asked everyone around town, even went as far as Commerce - the city with the ocean - but everyone agreed on this story."

"So we had to get these four keys from monsters. The thing about my world is that it's filled with a bunch of things you might call strange, domesticated yaks, dogs and cats that can move themselves from one place to the next in an instant, and then especially large beasts that tend to guard certain areas. For each key there was a beast to kill, and a sort of," She waved her hands vaguely. "Temple-like area to go into where the key was. After we had all four it was easy to go on our merry way, to the final leg of a shit show that had already been pretty weird, especially when you remember that Claude had been following us the whole time. Mostly being an antagonizing little shit that wouldn't make any sense. He kept trying to get us to turn around but there's no stopping Nariko, and I was still pretty damn tired of fighting Spectres."

Here, Kaine paused, and though she tried to refrain from slipping into a heavy voice, it seemed inevitable. "So we get to this … Castle-like place, made entirely of glass, about the strangest thing I've ever fucking seen. That God, the Shadowlord is what Matilda really called her, wasn't dead at all, in fact she was up and moving around just fine. There we met Claude for a final time and since she was mute, he spoke for her. Most of that legend was pretty true, but the God never died, not physically, she just kind of lost her mind, might as well have been a moving shell of a thing. I didn't even think she understood what was going on. Apparently when she was normal - so back when I was about thirteen - she kept order just by being around, sort of like a grounding force for the entire world. But when she broke everything else did too. Spectres are people who couldn't withstand the force of her song, a kind of magic that's exuded off of her body or, more literally, as an actual sound. Imagine that hearing that noise from a thinny would turn you into a monster that didn't know if it was alive or dead, that could barely speak any language, and only wanted its suffering to end. That's a Spectre. That was what Claude allowed to happen. Some people could ignore that song and would be fine, but many more wouldn't. Because our world tended to pull in people from all over the place it was no wonder that they'd show up there, have no idea what was going on, and then turn into monsters. It was no wonder we kept ending up outnumbered."

"Anyway, what I haven't brought up is that this crazy God chick? Looked an awful lot like Nariko. I mean, maybe twenty years older and with different hair but, seriously, it was like staring into a mirror. We figured if we offed her everything would go back to normal, but Nariko couldn't do it, so I ended up saving her ass. Some other crazy shit happened, suddenly Claude and I were both here. I stayed with Nariko, and we thought Claude was dead but," Again, she waved a hand. "Of course he wasn't. Would have been too easy."

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