🎵whistle while you work🎶(closed)

[load_aim_shoot]

Who: A. Rama Raju, Lanfear, William Gibson, Renny Oldoak
What: wilderness chore bonding time!
When: I'm thinking some time after the ghostly housefire, but it's loose
Where: the forest around Milton

Content Warnings: talk about food/eating/not eating, possible talk of fire stuff. will add as stuff comes up

Comments

[solitarysoul]

"I don't know. I haven't asked about it. But I'm pretty sure other people have these...powers too."

[load_aim_shoot]

"Pretty sure?" Raju's frown as he looks over this time is disapproving. But Levi is only a boy, he reminds himself as he looks up at the rafters, paces, rubs his hands over and around one another. Old enough to drink back in... wherever it is he'd come from, and Raju himself had started a man's work, learning, working, training, younger than that. But that doesn't mean he isn't young. He can't be expected to approach any of this in a scientific way. If that's what Raju needs, he should be doing it himself.

"I need to find out more," he decides. Light at the end of the tunnel, if Levi allows him to reach it. All of this dealt with... later. Where no one will see the impossible thing that might be inside him, and later. "There's no point in trying to come to conclusions from a single case. I have to ask more people before we do anything here."

[solitarysoul]

Levi rolls his eyes, "I haven't exactly been polling people on if they can do something new or not. But I've heard people talking."

He sighs a bit at Raju's mention of 'a single case' but doesn't push it. Finding out you can do magic when you were certain it couldn't be a thing had to be hard. Karin had never really accepted what was happening in Prehevil, after all. And he was at least as stubborn as her.

[load_aim_shoot]

Raju nods, keeps nodding absently, gaze absent. His eye catches a spot on the floor, soot in the shape of a footprint. His shoe now is just a few inches misaligned from it, stepping over the same spot. He takes a slow breath, staring down at it. In the fireplace the fire grows in a sudden movement that makes Raju twitch, a jerking whole body twitch, and then he forces himself still. At attention, back straight, arms straight down at his sides, fingers curling and then curling further to keep themselves still, pressing hard against his palms.

"Well..." Raju looks over at Levi again, tries for a polite, friendly smile. It starts out as a sorry thing, twitching out over his face instead of growing naturally, but after a moment he settles it onto his face. "Let me know if you find anything out. I, ah—"

He glances over toward the fire. It's dangerous like this, isn't it? Something is dangerous. He can't understand it yet. And without being able to understand, inside like this, in a building made of wood, where people feel safe, and sleep—

"I'm going to take a walk." His smile grows a determined little inch. People take walks. There doesn't need to be anything strange about that. He hadn't even taken the blanket off before it— well. To all appearances, he could have come in intending to go right back out again anyway. It's alright. It's fine.

"Good luck with your..." His eyes move to Levi, then over to Levi's bottle. The polite smile stays. "...relaxing. I'll see you back here later, I'm sure."

[solitarysoul]

"Yeah...you too."

Levi sighs and leans back against the wall. He peers at his bottle, debating if he should finish it off or not.

[load_aim_shoot]

And with that Raju goes back out into the snow, hunching his shoulders, pulling his mittens on, scowling at nothing as he pulls the door of the Community Hall closed. The cold is bitter on his face, bitter and hateful. And a relief. And he doesn't know where he's going.

He'll figure it out. He'll figure all of it out, eventually.

He will.

What a damned awful day.