singillatim | prelude

prelude

January 1st 2015

Do you remember yesterday? What is tomorrow?
How will you face this quiet apocalypse?
— Raphael van Lierop.

As the old year falls and the new year begins, the skies fill with light. An Aurora comes on the last day of December, and with it the usual signs of it: the ethereal noise, the cracks and pops in the air, the stuttering of electrics as they struggle to power on and then blare and flicker. It is, as Interlopers have come to know, business as usual — in terms of the Auroras within this world. However, something a little different happens this time.

Interlopers will fall asleep all over the town of Milton. Even the ones who fight sleep and try to stay up into the small hours of the night will find themselves drifting off for a short while — as if their eyes just feel too heavy to keep open, and their minds slip into a deep kind of quiet darkness without their realising. And at first, there is nothing — nothing but the quiet dark. Something peaceful, almost.

A dream comes.

The first thing you notice is blood in your mouth, the cold in your bones, the deafening din in your ears — as if you are caught in static and the sound of howling winds through pine trees. You are afraid. At first, you do not know why. You find yourself on your knees in the snow. The skies are filled with green light, the air is thick with smoke. And then the realisation comes:

This is the ending of all things.

You look up, to the sight before you: a huge, shapeless shadow. Towering above you, over you. A head peers down at you: a cluster of three wolf skulls, eye-sockets glowing green and terrible, and their three open maws, dripping with more green. The sound it makes is unnatural, you cannot put it into words. The darkness draws in, you are so cold, so tired.

This is the ending of all things.

It is so hungry. You are so tired. The world falls away, you cannot see the stars, the dark hiding them from view. Were they even there to begin with? Or did they go out? You have forgotten. And you know, you know—

This is the ending of all things.

The skies glimmer, licks of strange, colourful wisps curl above — a voice screams out your name, from the static and winds. Through the noise. A woman’s voice. You have heard this voice before, in the lights and noise. Do you see? What could be? What you could become?

Can you hold on? Please. A hand grips your shoulder, but as you turn — the dream ends.

For some, they snap into waking with a shout or cry. Some will shudder awake to find tears in their eyes. All over Milton, the Interlopers wake: shaken, unsure, afraid. They will awaken to the dark: the Aurora is gone — slowly fading from the night skies into an otherwise calm and clear night.

It is a new year.

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"My name," he says softly, simply, still watching the other man's face. "And then... I'm not sure. I can't remember the difference between what she said and what I just knew."

Raju takes a breath, holds it for a moment to feel the pressure in his chest, and then lets the air out all at once, dropping to sit beside him. "The same dream," he murmurs. His eyes dart back and forth over nothing, remembering. The other man remembers more than he's saying — there was that pause before the answer — and Raju wouldn't be surprised if whatever it is he isn't saying matches up with Raju's notes, too. The end of Raju's pen finds itself tapping fast against his journal's cover.

"Do you? Know the difference, I mean. I remember what I felt. What I felt in my body. I felt the snow, I heard the wind. The rest is..." The rest of it is only him, a feeling that he knows already which doesn't merit even the attention of dismissing it. But not every one of those thoughts came from him, did they. Did they? Raju's jaw tightens, the frustration of not being able to see what might be important when it was shown so directly to him making it into his voice. "...harder. I'm only sure I heard my name, out loud."

Yes, his name. Their names. She screamed it from some void, over the howl of the wind and hisses from machines. Did she scream the name of every single one of them? Did she say the same thing to them all?

Crozier watches the tapping of his pen, feels the attempt to connect meaning to the symbolism. He's a fixer, a doer, this man. He's the kind of person who will get it done no matter the cost.

The realization comes along quickly -- he worries for this man. There's a lack of control here that can drive a person mad, too many pieces of a giant, seemingly unyielding puzzle. He wants to understand and to perhaps fix it, but Crozier knows that sometimes all one can do is try to carry on and just hope for better. If he keeps pushing himself…therein lies the worry.

"She was pleading," he tells him quietly. "What for I'm not certain. But I knew the cold and the ache in my bones, and the blood in my teeth and on my tongue. I could taste copper and feel exhaustion in my joints. It felt like sickness. I felt...no, I knew it was the ending of all things. "

Edited 2024-01-04 04:07 (UTC)

"All things," Raju repeats to himself, the pen pausing its tapping. With the... the feeling still pulling at him underneath the cold and the unearthly noise and the fear it'd been easy to remember only the promise of an end, and so in the blurry confusion of a remembered dream to dismiss the whole of it. But hearing someone else saying it out loud—

"All things," he says again, looking down and leaning forward as he flips the journal open onto his knees and begins to write in urgent, curling strokes under the notes he's already taken. "I remember. I remember the stars going out. Or... maybe they were hidden behind that creature. I'm not sure. The creature is the key, though. Don't you think? Those three skulls and that light; if we can unravel that first, the rest of it should fall into place."

"It's no coincidence we saw the same creature." Creatures? What unknown things could have been hidden in the lights and behind the dark. Crozier exhales softly and leans forward, watching Raju with a concerned furrowing of his brow.

"I think the voice at the end," he says softly. "The woman's voice...there was warmth. If this world wants us dead, the aurora and the weather and the creatures and all else, then perhaps the one that called our names wants us to live."

Even with all the need pushing him to question, to figure out, to take the useless leftover things the dream had left in his mind and push it into the kind of urgency that can actually be of use, Raju finds a moment to smile at the idea. He looks up from his journal with an amused expression, humour curling at the corners of his lips. It is funny, isn't it, even if only a little bit? The idea of these... these bizarre mysteries and the kinds of creatures no one has ever seen crawling through these frozen forests ready to kill, that's one thing. But the idea of some kinder force waiting behind the rest, wanting to save those who can't save themselves, that idea is something else. Stranger, somehow.

"Maybe she's the cavalry, ready to sweep us away? Wouldn't that be something." But it's too important to think over all this for the humour in the bizarre idea to stay. Even as he finishes speaking Raju's frowning down at his notes again, eyes dating over them to try and spot anything new.

"It depends on how literally we're to take all this," he says, thumb moving slowly up and down over his pen, voice troubled. "Do you really think there's a woman, or... something else, someone else, trying to help us? And there's really a thing out there, that creature, needing to be fought? I would have said it was a... a vision, metaphor, even after waking here, but that doesn't happen either. Not like this, to every one of us at once."

"If she is the cavalry she's come too late," he mutters, rubbing his face slowly.

"I think there's no reason not to take it literally." He gestures towards the air in front of him, squinting slightly. "If a three-headed wolf stalked out from the tree line right now how surprised would you be?"

There's a whistle of the wind just then, rattling the community center roof just a moment. Odd, how the wind feels alive in this place.

Raju's gaze moves from the other man's gesture to the roof, and he listens to the piercing sound of the wind. That, at least, is something that makes sense; the noises that the wind can make, the way it moans sometimes with what sounds almost like a voice, it's familiar. The way it sounds eerie but doesn't have to be, not if you use your good sense, that's familiar. Or it would be, in a place where the meaning of every little detail wasn't constantly in question.

His gaze stays on the ceiling until the whistling around the roof has passed. Then he looks back at the other man again, huffing a breath out through his nose, grimacing a little. If the creature came at them he would have to react to what he sees, what he hears. Surprise might not be the right response in a place like this, and he hates that enough already, but— "That doesn't mean we should stop looking for an explanation," Raju says stubbornly, looks down over his notes, looks up an instant later again.

"Why too late?" he asks as it occurs to him. "Not that we should sit and wait for rescue, but so long as we're still alive, we can get back. Go home. We only have to find a way."

But would everyone want to go back if given the opportunity? Would all the dead want to return to a world where they're rotting in the ground?

"Why not prevent us from arriving in the first place? And what of the people that came before? But perhaps you're right, there's always hope when there's still life." And he doesn't disagree about looking for explanations. It does seem like this place is one big puzzle laid out for them to solve.

The fierce wind reminds him of the bundle at his feet. Crozier pulls at the leather string and pulls out a pair of caribou-fur gloves, lovingly stitched together with sinew. He presents them to Raju with an encouraging nod.

Raju looks curious as what seems to be a bundle of fur is pulled out of the bag, confused when it's held out his way. He leaves his pen on the still open journal to take it, and his eyes widen.

"Gloves," he realises, turning them around in his hands, parting the fur of one to study the stitching, glancing inside and then turning one around in his hands again. "Like yours."

He looks up and then down again, eyes drawn to them. He goes outside still, of course, though it's so cold on some days he has to come back inside every twenty minutes or so until he can move before going out again, though the warmest day here is the coldest one at home, and the colder ones here are cold enough that it hurts, hurts outside his skin and inside his throat and his chest and his— and his hands, which makes it impossible to do anything when it gets that way even for a while after he comes inside, joints stiff and touch clumsy, which is even worse than the damned cold.

They look warm. They look just as warm in his hands as the one he'd seen on the other man when Raju had first seen him wearing it. He remembers how he'd wanted, for only a moment before he'd put the feeling away.

"These are from... where you came from?" he asks, tearing his gaze away again. "Made by the people who saved you? You must not have many." It isn't a protest. Raju isn't interested in insulting this man that way and, importantly, he's too damned cold, too cold all of the time, to volunteer to give them back. But if the other man were to reconsider, or say he had only meant to show them off after all, then Raju would give...

Well. He would try.

He’d seen him admiring them, known a hungry look in a man’s eyes when he’s wanting. This place is harsh and unforgiving, but Crozier’s realized a long time ago that he needn’t be.

“Not exactly,” he tells him, continuing to push them into his hands. “I’d asked…the ridiculous boar, I’d asked for fur.” It’s the first time he’s acknowledged the wintertime gift-giver, the encounter itself still feeling like a fever-dream.

“So many of you lack what I’ve been lucky to own. I wanted to be certain everyone kept their fingers.”

And Raju had looked freezing, bitterly and painfully so. He worries that soon Goodsir will be overrun with people needing their blackened feet seen to.

A frown flickers over Raju's face. The animal. The one a few have talked about, with the gifts. Easy, unlike so much else about this place, to dismiss as the kind of story that flowers in desperate minds and grows as it spreads— but the frown doesn't last long. The gloves themselves, at least, are real, present in an immediate, important way that one more inexplicable story in a sea of others can't be, their fur soft under his hands. He rubs a thumb slowly over it. However this man had come by the material, he did come by it, and then he...

"Fur. So you made these."

Raju looks down again helplessly, the fascination on his face taking on a different tone, a hint of something else, more serious. Odd, to realise he's holding something like that in his hand. Not acquired some place else but made, made to help, and put into his hand with real hope that it would. The last time someone had...

Before he left, he realises. Years ago. There had been a couple gifts. Painstakingly made, well meaning, the kinds of clothes they hadn't realised he couldn't wear, not if he intended to blend in. Parts of the people who'd done their best to help raise him, to help him remember home. He can't remember what happened to them now. He hasn't thought about them in a very long time.

And this now, soft and heavy in his hand. The stitches aren't so neat as Raju's when he repairs his own clothes, unevenly spaced over the leather, awkward and painful to look at. He realises that his eyes are stinging.

"All this with one hand?" Raju asks, voice more relaxed than it had been a moment before, determinedly relaxed, and he doesn't look up too far when he nods toward where the other man's hand isn't, in hopes he'll look there too and not at the way Raju's eyes must be shining. "It must have taken a while."

Crozier tries not to read into Raju's initial facial expressions, but he worries slightly that he may have somehow insulted him or wounded his pride. He averts his gaze for a moment, determined not to look too hard at Raju's face and his own handiwork.

The stitching is rough. Uneven, different sized, the fur not-quite lined up in any ascetically pleasing way. He'd tried his best, but the best with one-hand and by lamplight wasn't ever going to be immaculate.

"It wasn't too terrible," he answers him. There's an attempt watch his expression again to see where they'd landed on the gift, but he catches the way his eyes look overbright and quickly averts his gaze to give the man some privacy. "Threading the sinew was the worst part."

Crozier clears his throat softly. "The Netsilik women would laugh me off the island if they saw these, but they'll work. I'm sure of it."

Raju is silent for a moment, looking down at the gloves. He takes a breath, almost steady, then lets it out, steadier. "They will." There's no hint of doubt or question in his voice. He's never needed to wear anything like this, doesn't know what kind of construction it takes to keep out this kind of relentless cold, hasn't tested them at all. But if the construction is lacking, Raju can patch up any holes. That isn't the point.

The moment of danger is over, mostly, eyes not stinging so much as they were, so he can afford to let go of some of the reflexive control over his voice. "Thank you." He lets it come out quietly, and a little rough. Not too terrible work is still work, and sounds polite besides; the man deserves a little gratitude, even if only a second of it makes it out of Raju's mouth.

He looks up now that it's safer to, gives an amused huff of air and an embarrassed little smile, clasps the other man loosely on the arm for a second before he drops his hand, and his eyes drift back down to his lap. "Is sinew what this is?" he asks quietly, half to distract from himself and half because he does want to know, running his thumb with slow care over the stitching again. "You'll have to show me how to make it into thread. I'll run out of my own soon."

"The thread, yes, sinew. It helps repel the water."

He's felt, as terrifying as it's been, that the only way they'll all live through this ordeal is to band together. He can't bring himself to operate in any sort of capacity with them all, as much as he might even enjoy that, but he can still care for them from afar.

"I could show you, yes." He may even enjoy having the company, to say nothing of how reassured he'd feel knowing others could stitch their own mittens and hats and whatnot. "Happily so."

"I'd like that," Raju says, something rough sneaking its way into his voice again. It's strange. He barely knows this man. But the way being outside instead of cooped in here should be a relief, the way he needs it to be one, and the way the cold hurts, the way his hands hurt with it because he won't keep them tucked against himself, where he can't do anything with them at all— and then this. And the image of this man hunched over wherever it is he stays, keeping the fabric in place however he can, maybe pinched between his knees, while he painstakingly sews it into something more with his one remaining hand. And then handing all that effort to Raju.

He doesn't know why he's reacting this way. It's only a pair of gloves. It's bigger than it is. That, on top of the frantic need he'd felt on waking, to turn the— to turn that into anything but what it was, you are so tired, to push hard enough for answers that the parts of him that can't be go away.

This, on top of all of that. That frantic need isn't gone, but it's a little softer, now.

"And another favour, if you don't mind," he says, looking up, wondering when his gaze had moved to the gloves again. He smiles, a small, genuine thing. "Your name?"

It hasn’t occurred to him yet that he might find redemption in this place, a balm for stubborn wounds that refuse to close, and yet when he sees him looking over the simple there is a small spark of something akin to healing. Caring for others —- helping them through with what little he can supply in terms of knowledge and resources, it drives him to continue getting up the morning.

“A small favor,” he replies with a smile, holding out his right hand to him. “Francis Crozier.”

Raju's smile grows as he takes the hand to shake. "A pleasure." Plenty of strange things happen in this place, large and small; it's strange to say the nicety and mean it. "Francis."

It's a statement, and a question. He doesn't seem the type to insist on the formality of his family name, or the respect of his rank, not here and now, but it will be good to be sure. "I'm certain that these will work," Raju says, nodding down at the gloves. "But I'll be sure to let you know."

Then, a little helplessly, though Raju's already said it: "Thank you."

"Pleasure's all mine, Raju," he replies, eyes crinkling in mirth. "Forgive me for my ill manners. Too much time in the wilderness."

He's become a little boorish in his old age.

"Next time I come to the community center I'll check on the mittens, mn? See how they're holding up?" Not the flimsiest of excuses for basic human contact, but definitely an excuse nonetheless.

"Any time," Raju says warmly and means that nicety, too. An excuse to spend time with this or that person has only ever been about good strategy, before; being in the right place in the right way, to charm the right people. Except with Akhtar, who'd never seemed to need excuses at all; he was very honest that way, once he knew that he was welcome.

Nevermind that. There's no sense in thinking about what's left behind. There's a man in front of him here and now who's been steady and kind, and Raju sees the excuse for what it is, and in this place, it warms him. "Come by on a morning, we can go out and test them on something."

Not a morning after a horrific shared dream, he naturally assumes. It'll be good to be social and for it to not feel forced for a change -- it might even stop the men from unnecessarily worrying about him. He knows the reason why Jopson and Little tend to hover.

"I'll take you out to check the rabbit traps. It'd be nice to have two more hands available for resetting them." He chuckles a little self-deprecatingly, glancing about the room as the others quietly stirred around them.

"Have you spoken to anyone else yet about the dream?"

Raju raises his eyebrows, thinking more about hunting — he'll need to learn, won't he, in a place like this, where the allowances of civilization are far away — and not expecting a question about the dream again. "Not in any detail," he says, curiously. "I only confirmed our dreams were the exact same when I spoke with you about it. Why do you ask?"

"I doubt it was just the two of us, significant as we are," he says, not able to withhold the tiniest bit of snark. "I wonder if the others can fill in our gaps in memory."

His lips twitch into a smile, enough to acknowledge the joke, then his expression moves into something thoughtful and unhappy. Delving into that dream again. But he nods. "It's important to be sure. Especially about something like this."

And he has his notes. He was thorough. He won't have to think back too much, only convince others to instead. That much, Raju can do.

"Back to it then, hm?" His smile is tight, one of his hands clenching the glove under it. But the other man — Francis — isn't wrong. It's the right time for it. "Best to do it now, before anyone has time to forget."

As much as he's beginning to truly appreciate Raju's company, he has others he'd like to look to, particularly his former steward. Thomas Jopson tends to have a keen eye for detail, he may remember far more from the seemingly prophetic dream.

He's slow to stand, cold still in the joints, and raises his hand in a very quiet, but still friendly, wave of his hand. "We'll compare notes later, mn?"

“Of course.” Raju nods, raises his hand back, and watches Francis as he walks away. Strange, he thinks, and doesn’t think too deeply on what he means. He looks down at the mittens again instead, running his fingers one more time over the fur. He wants to put them on. But like many things, it isn’t time for that yet. He’ll have to sew a pocket, later, into that blanket to keep them in; for now, he tucks them into his trouser pockets, gathers up his pen and his journal, and stands up to get to work.

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prelude

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