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thejusticelounge2014-03-25 10:39 am
bossymarmalade) wrote in thejusticelounge2014-03-25 10:39 am
corax et caduceus
Kyle stretches and yawns in his closet, staring up at the ceiling. It hadn’t been….a bad night all things considering. He knew he shouldn’t be getting USED to any of this, or settling down or anything, always alert, Rayner, goddammit - but at the same time, he felt better, more sane than he had in the past few days. Lying here in the closet of his best friends’ bedroom. Kyle sits up and that’s when the hangover headache hits him,hard. “Owwwwwwowwwwwww,” he moans loudly.
Mar’i waits until everyone else in the Bungalow has already left, then slowly raises up on the bed. She looks out the window for a moment, then towards the closet where Kyle’s still sequestering himself after he makes a loud groan. Wordlessly, she crosses the room, slides the door open, and sits down beside him, closing it behind her. She says nothing, but her hand finds his in the darkness and she pulls her knees up to her body.
Kyle sits there quietly, after the first sheet of light blinds him and then darkness closes in again….except now there is a Mar’i here with him. It’s a little embarrassing. The closet is a tight space and it isn’t as if he’s been the cleanest person since he got back. Ay dios, now you’re thinking the closet is your bachelor pad?! Get it freaking together Rayner. When her hand finds his, Kyle holds on to it tight, sudden, all thoughts of ‘dude-smells irritating ladies’ dissipating. His ring isn’t on his hand, but he presses their hands together as if trying to dig the phantom jewelry into her skin. “Mar’i,” he says, softly.
Mar’i sits there for a long time, silently, clutching his hand. Her fingers are trembling, and she’s got her chin buried in her kneecaps, but she’s focused instead on the slits of light visible from the top of the closet door. “We’re gonna go to Raven Terminal together today. I’ll stay with you there, like I promised.” She hasn’t even noticed his ring is missing, but the Lantern-shaped bruise on her palm matches up with where it should be.
Kyle his legs move, heels scuffing and skidding against the hardwood floor, an instinctive movement as if he wants to run. But he stays put, moving only enough to shift so he can look at her. She’s folded herself like a sleeping bird; but nothing about her tense frame is about slumber. “What’s the Raven Terminal? Why am I going —” he stops, edits himself, “Why are we going there?
Mar’i sighs a little and closes her eyes. “It’s the medical bunker we found. The one with all the medicine that saved Bruce. They took him there yesterday in the Westfalia. They want to take you there in it too, but I…” she pauses, like something’s stuck in her throat, “let’s just walk there together. It’s not far. I want to walk.”
"Mmmokay." Kyle sees no reason to be uncooperative right now, as he prompts for her to stand up. He isn’t sure why she’s so…something about it. After all — “Bruce is still there right? Maybe he’s awake and I can talk to him - Mar’i! We can both talk! I mean, we can ALL talk, the three of us!” He suddenly jolts, excited at this prospect of the three of them together, able to talk to each other.
Mar’i lets Kyle help her up—the closet is way too cramped to stand up without mutual assistance, and slides the door back open. There’s an empty knapsack on the floor beside the nightstand and she moves over to it, pulling it up onto the bed. “Give me all the clothes you want to take with you. And give me my stuff, too. Don’t forget the hat.”
Kyle pauses, but only after he hands her her hat. “Why’re we taking clothes there? Are - are we staying there? Is everyone in the camp moving?”
Mar’i pulls the hat tight over her head, letting it shield her eyes from him as it flops around in her movements. She packs their clothes quickly, orderly, and checks the room again to make sure she hasn’t missed anything. “Because we’re going to stay there. All the time. Until the moment Bruce gets well enough to walk again, and then we’re going to undo what we did and go back home. No one else is coming, so you won’t have to worry about them all being fake,” she explains.
Kyle drops the ugly pair of boat shoes he’s holding onto the bed. “What? What?! Mar’i, do you remember what happened? You remember it now —” Kyle ducks under her as she steadfastly packs, holding her shoulders and straightening them both almost roughly, so he can look at her, see her /face/ — “You remember the HSR! And the face of your father…”
Mar’i ‘s face instantly curdles into anger and confusion. “NO! I still don’t fucking remember what the fuck happened, okay?! I’m not GOING to remember! I know—” her voice cracks a little, “I know we did something, and I know now it had to do with me and my universe, because you keep mentioning it, that had to be it, but I DON’T REMEMBER.” She jerks hard against his hands, trying to break his grip. “I don’t care about remembering, I don’t WANT to remember! I just want to get everyone home and I want to get out of this godforsaken camp and I—” she pauses, eyes going hard, as she forcefully shoves his shoes into the bag. “I just want this all to be over so I can go back to my life, because this isn’t my life and this isn’t any fucking fun.”
Kyle lets her go, dropping his hands to the side, but windmilliing them back up just as fast. “You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t know that?! While you’ve been here, Mar’i, trying to make family and gardens and, and - and archery, this freaking place has been GROWING. It’s growing inside your mind and it almost started growing inside mine. All I wanna DO is make this right, I don’t want this to be my grave, or yours, or Bruce’s! The only way we can get out is to get you - BOTH of you remembering, because…” Kyle leans against the window, suddenly lightheaded from his hangover and temper. “…because some of my memory is spotty too. And it’s fading fast and…god…Mar’i I’m terrified. I’m scared as hell and I got nothing, no way to overcome it.” He looks down at his ringless hand. “Fucking useless. All I have is you and Bruce.” He adds silently and Zee…but that seems fucked up in both this world and the real one. He discards the thought before he ends up using it as a liferaft.
Mar’i looks at though Kyle has slapped her because within a few words he’s hit the nail on the head without realizing it. She pulls the knapsack shut, her fingers trembling even harder. “I know that. I know I’ve been playing a stupid game that I don’t even understand the rules to. I’ve created something from nothing, and I’m a fool for it and I know that.” Her eyes drift to the bed. “That’s why we’re leaving and we’re going to set things right.”
Kyle drags his eyes from his ringless finger, to her back as she is turned away from him. She’s about as tall as him, like a model…but with a little more ass. Kyle chokes on a ridiculously amount of laughter that bubbles into his throat. He grabs two water bottles that are sitting empty on the nightstand, heading to the washroom to fill them up. He returns, finding a long tie-dye scarf and, after some struggle, creating some sort of makeshift shoulder sling to put the water as well as anything else he could grab. Kyle finds a used baseball cap, logo’d with a Midland Co. brand, affixing it atop his black hair. “Then let’s get going. The forest, Mar’i. It moves.”
Mar’i nods silently, her hands finding the small notepad in the nightstand beside the bed. She stares at it and its accompanying stubby wooden pencil for a long time, trying to think of what to say. How to say it. Sorry I made you take care of me? Sorry I forced my way into your life? No, none of these things were okay to say, none of these burdens were his to bear. She had already wasted too much of his time, all of their time, playing house. Her hand trembled slightly as she wrote ‘Taking Kyle to Raven. Be safe.’ and folded the note up. She left it on the nightstand, heaved the bag over her shoulder, and nodded at Kyle. “Okay, let’s go.” She doesn’t even register his comment about the forest.
Kyle dully watches as Mar’i writes something, for them. These people or things, or whatever they are, Kyle isn’t even sure anymore. And he doesn’t care, he doesn’t. He doesn’t care about any of them because they’re not real. He can’t care for them when he needs to keep Bruce and Mar’i alive and well enough, when they all need to just get OUT. Once she gives him the nod, he exits, swiftly. And outside in the bright sun, Kyle turns and looks at her. “I’m following you, nena.”
Mar’i pulls her hat down a little farther as she pushes forward through the camp. She grabs one of the handmade eskrima sticks leaning against a wall, twirling it momentarily in her hand like a baton. The woods come closer and closer, and she doesn’t divert her eyes from the path. Her hiking boots make a thin clapping sound against the pressed dirt. “I want to tell me everything you know about this place. I have to know everything if I’m going to get us home.”
Kyle watches with a detached sort of interest at the way she twirls the wooden escrima stick. Like she’s a cop, it’s what he immediately thinks. Wooden escrima sticks. The rest of the Things had done so much here, gone so far out of their way to make life seem normal and real in this ridiculously wrong and unreal hell. “I don’t know much about here. I ran away, four…five… days ago, I ran over there.” Kyle points, then squints and scratches the back of his head, slowing his pace a bit. “No…no I ran into the forest over /there/ and there was a cave. I ran in the cave because there was…something in there.” Kyle shudders, then jogs to match with her pace. “I remember hearing you calling for me, and other voices too, but. I kept running. I wish I’d taken you, Mar’i. I’m so sorry I left you. And Bruce. I was so damn angry and scared, without my powers…” He pauses in his disjointed tale, reaching out to brush his fingers against her arm, by way of apology.
Mar’i listens to him as they make their way into the forest, staying as close to the middle of the path as possible. Her mind is half-hazy, thinking about what’s going on and what’s she done and how badly she’s fucked things up, but her eyes are peeled towards the treelines, on the lookout for movement. “I wish you had, too,” she finally answers, looking off towards where the shale ridge was rising in the distance. “I wish I hadn’t ever…” her lips pause but her feet keep moving, and if she’s crying she makes no sobs nor attempts to wipe her tears. “I just wish I hadn’t been so stupid.” Thokos’ voice booms in her head, and she can almost feel his boot in her throat. Stupid little girl. Can’t control your emotions. Attach onto anything that looks at you too nicely. Stupid stupid stupid.
Kyle doesn’t hear the slight, tight tremble in her voice, as he weaves this way and that behind her. He isn’t paying attention to the direction; instead, he’s scooping up mushrooms from trees and from the ground, tucking them into his sling. He also plucks fruit that he doesn’t recognize, figuring Mar’i can look at them, tell him if they are edible. “You’re not stupid, I believed it too. For a while, I believed it too, I thought were our friends and…and our loved ones.” Kyle does look up at her again, at her back. Her long heavy braids beats against her skin as she walks. “You’re all, like. You’re sunburned,” he observes stupidly.
Mar’i looks back at Kyle for a moment, tear-marks down her cheeks. He doesn’t understand. He’s still on that impostor kick, and if she thought it would help her feel better she’d get on it too. But then that makes the last five days null and void. She doesn’t want these feelings, but she doesn’t want them to go away, either. “Without my powers I don’t absorb solar energy anymore,” she answers, words cool at first for all the emotions swirling on her face. She turns back to the road, leading them up the beginning of the ridge. “I’ve never been…” she pauses, thinks about it, “I’ve never been this cold before, even as a child. I could absorb energy a little even then.” She adjusts her hat, now talking mostly to herself. “I guess that’s probably why, too. Just the warmth. Not feeling cold at night.”
Kyle stares dumbly at her tears, not expecting to see them at all, and he’s not really sure what they mean. So he listens to her explanation warmth and cold and repeats her words. “Not feeling cold at night.” He drinks from one of the water bottles, thirstily. “The closet was really warm,” he adds, for lack of anything else to say, and then launches back into his tale. “Anyway I ran into the cave, I kept running. I was so tired and I wanted to die, I remember that feeling. I…I’ve gone a long time without really understanding what that meant. Wanting to die and knowing it could happen…and…anyway there was a drop. It was pitch black so I didn’t even realize I was falling, but I dunno. It felt like I was in there for days, running, crawling in the dark. Hearing things, and…whatever. Point being, I ended up at the lake. And I realized—” Kyle stops, looking down from where they were. They’ve reached over the shale ridge and are looking down into the crater valley, and he points at the bunker. “Is that it? Is that where Bruce is?!”
Mar’i blinks as she processes his words. “You’ve been to the lake? And then what? What did you realize?” She turns her head to where he’s pointing, the indent of the bunker into the hill visible now. “Yeah,” she nods. “They brought him here yesterday and I overheard someone saying this morning outside the window that he was awake. He’s probably still pretty sick, but at least he’s…” she turns and looks over her shoulder as they reach the peak of the shale ridge. She can see Cachement from this height, although the sleepy camp cannot see her. “At least he’s safe.”
"AH!" It’s finally time. "We can go home! We can go —" Kyle grabs hold of her hand, this time running in the lead and pulling her along. "I hope he’s awake, and then I’ll tell you both and then we can get out of us and leave all of this behind." He can’t wait to leave this nightmare behind.
Mar’i tries to keep up with Kyle’s enthusiastic pulling, which is made harder by the shale they’re running on and her still-bruised legs. “Kyleeee,” she groans, limping as she follows. “Slow down!”
He complies almost immediately, looking down at her legs. “What happened?” he asks, only now actually noticing. “You should’ve used plants to fix yourself, Mar’i…ay. There are so many plants here.” Kyle can afford to smile, genuinely now, he is so convinced now that everything will be fixed soon. His own cognitive dissonance doesn’t make any connection between his own suspicion of the Cache branded items running concurrent with his complacent acceptance of the surrounding nature.
Mar’i helps him push open the bunker doors to the Raven Terminal, and together they enter the strong-smelling main entrance. “I’m going to take a nap,” she murmurs, already looking for a suitable place to bunk. She’s just woken up, and the walk isn’t that long, but emotionally she’s drained. She finds an empty patient bed in the nearby area that seems to be some sort of outpatient room, and curls up on it, dragging the privacy curtain around so she’s alone. “Wake me up in a bit,” she says to Kyle as he disappears behind the curtain. Then, she rolls over on her side, absolutely freezing, her body tightening into a fetal position. She can get her knees all the way up to her face, and she repeats her earlier moment in the closet by doing so, burying her eyes away from the light. Then, her tears start afresh, and her shoulders shake until she finally falls asleep.
"Yeah okay," Kyle says, making sure she is in her bed and he feels better when she draws the curtain drawn. She’s safe in there, he figures. It’s just her here, then Bruce and him. He leaves quickly, thinking maybe she needs to…cry, or something. Kyle doesn’t know how to help her, except to try and get her home. So he leaves, heading back out into the terminal to explore the area and finally, finally check on Bruce.
Mar’i waits until everyone else in the Bungalow has already left, then slowly raises up on the bed. She looks out the window for a moment, then towards the closet where Kyle’s still sequestering himself after he makes a loud groan. Wordlessly, she crosses the room, slides the door open, and sits down beside him, closing it behind her. She says nothing, but her hand finds his in the darkness and she pulls her knees up to her body.
Kyle sits there quietly, after the first sheet of light blinds him and then darkness closes in again….except now there is a Mar’i here with him. It’s a little embarrassing. The closet is a tight space and it isn’t as if he’s been the cleanest person since he got back. Ay dios, now you’re thinking the closet is your bachelor pad?! Get it freaking together Rayner. When her hand finds his, Kyle holds on to it tight, sudden, all thoughts of ‘dude-smells irritating ladies’ dissipating. His ring isn’t on his hand, but he presses their hands together as if trying to dig the phantom jewelry into her skin. “Mar’i,” he says, softly.
Mar’i sits there for a long time, silently, clutching his hand. Her fingers are trembling, and she’s got her chin buried in her kneecaps, but she’s focused instead on the slits of light visible from the top of the closet door. “We’re gonna go to Raven Terminal together today. I’ll stay with you there, like I promised.” She hasn’t even noticed his ring is missing, but the Lantern-shaped bruise on her palm matches up with where it should be.
Kyle his legs move, heels scuffing and skidding against the hardwood floor, an instinctive movement as if he wants to run. But he stays put, moving only enough to shift so he can look at her. She’s folded herself like a sleeping bird; but nothing about her tense frame is about slumber. “What’s the Raven Terminal? Why am I going —” he stops, edits himself, “Why are we going there?
Mar’i sighs a little and closes her eyes. “It’s the medical bunker we found. The one with all the medicine that saved Bruce. They took him there yesterday in the Westfalia. They want to take you there in it too, but I…” she pauses, like something’s stuck in her throat, “let’s just walk there together. It’s not far. I want to walk.”
"Mmmokay." Kyle sees no reason to be uncooperative right now, as he prompts for her to stand up. He isn’t sure why she’s so…something about it. After all — “Bruce is still there right? Maybe he’s awake and I can talk to him - Mar’i! We can both talk! I mean, we can ALL talk, the three of us!” He suddenly jolts, excited at this prospect of the three of them together, able to talk to each other.
Mar’i lets Kyle help her up—the closet is way too cramped to stand up without mutual assistance, and slides the door back open. There’s an empty knapsack on the floor beside the nightstand and she moves over to it, pulling it up onto the bed. “Give me all the clothes you want to take with you. And give me my stuff, too. Don’t forget the hat.”
Kyle pauses, but only after he hands her her hat. “Why’re we taking clothes there? Are - are we staying there? Is everyone in the camp moving?”
Mar’i pulls the hat tight over her head, letting it shield her eyes from him as it flops around in her movements. She packs their clothes quickly, orderly, and checks the room again to make sure she hasn’t missed anything. “Because we’re going to stay there. All the time. Until the moment Bruce gets well enough to walk again, and then we’re going to undo what we did and go back home. No one else is coming, so you won’t have to worry about them all being fake,” she explains.
Kyle drops the ugly pair of boat shoes he’s holding onto the bed. “What? What?! Mar’i, do you remember what happened? You remember it now —” Kyle ducks under her as she steadfastly packs, holding her shoulders and straightening them both almost roughly, so he can look at her, see her /face/ — “You remember the HSR! And the face of your father…”
Mar’i ‘s face instantly curdles into anger and confusion. “NO! I still don’t fucking remember what the fuck happened, okay?! I’m not GOING to remember! I know—” her voice cracks a little, “I know we did something, and I know now it had to do with me and my universe, because you keep mentioning it, that had to be it, but I DON’T REMEMBER.” She jerks hard against his hands, trying to break his grip. “I don’t care about remembering, I don’t WANT to remember! I just want to get everyone home and I want to get out of this godforsaken camp and I—” she pauses, eyes going hard, as she forcefully shoves his shoes into the bag. “I just want this all to be over so I can go back to my life, because this isn’t my life and this isn’t any fucking fun.”
Kyle lets her go, dropping his hands to the side, but windmilliing them back up just as fast. “You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t know that?! While you’ve been here, Mar’i, trying to make family and gardens and, and - and archery, this freaking place has been GROWING. It’s growing inside your mind and it almost started growing inside mine. All I wanna DO is make this right, I don’t want this to be my grave, or yours, or Bruce’s! The only way we can get out is to get you - BOTH of you remembering, because…” Kyle leans against the window, suddenly lightheaded from his hangover and temper. “…because some of my memory is spotty too. And it’s fading fast and…god…Mar’i I’m terrified. I’m scared as hell and I got nothing, no way to overcome it.” He looks down at his ringless hand. “Fucking useless. All I have is you and Bruce.” He adds silently and Zee…but that seems fucked up in both this world and the real one. He discards the thought before he ends up using it as a liferaft.
Mar’i looks at though Kyle has slapped her because within a few words he’s hit the nail on the head without realizing it. She pulls the knapsack shut, her fingers trembling even harder. “I know that. I know I’ve been playing a stupid game that I don’t even understand the rules to. I’ve created something from nothing, and I’m a fool for it and I know that.” Her eyes drift to the bed. “That’s why we’re leaving and we’re going to set things right.”
Kyle drags his eyes from his ringless finger, to her back as she is turned away from him. She’s about as tall as him, like a model…but with a little more ass. Kyle chokes on a ridiculously amount of laughter that bubbles into his throat. He grabs two water bottles that are sitting empty on the nightstand, heading to the washroom to fill them up. He returns, finding a long tie-dye scarf and, after some struggle, creating some sort of makeshift shoulder sling to put the water as well as anything else he could grab. Kyle finds a used baseball cap, logo’d with a Midland Co. brand, affixing it atop his black hair. “Then let’s get going. The forest, Mar’i. It moves.”
Mar’i nods silently, her hands finding the small notepad in the nightstand beside the bed. She stares at it and its accompanying stubby wooden pencil for a long time, trying to think of what to say. How to say it. Sorry I made you take care of me? Sorry I forced my way into your life? No, none of these things were okay to say, none of these burdens were his to bear. She had already wasted too much of his time, all of their time, playing house. Her hand trembled slightly as she wrote ‘Taking Kyle to Raven. Be safe.’ and folded the note up. She left it on the nightstand, heaved the bag over her shoulder, and nodded at Kyle. “Okay, let’s go.” She doesn’t even register his comment about the forest.
Kyle dully watches as Mar’i writes something, for them. These people or things, or whatever they are, Kyle isn’t even sure anymore. And he doesn’t care, he doesn’t. He doesn’t care about any of them because they’re not real. He can’t care for them when he needs to keep Bruce and Mar’i alive and well enough, when they all need to just get OUT. Once she gives him the nod, he exits, swiftly. And outside in the bright sun, Kyle turns and looks at her. “I’m following you, nena.”
Mar’i pulls her hat down a little farther as she pushes forward through the camp. She grabs one of the handmade eskrima sticks leaning against a wall, twirling it momentarily in her hand like a baton. The woods come closer and closer, and she doesn’t divert her eyes from the path. Her hiking boots make a thin clapping sound against the pressed dirt. “I want to tell me everything you know about this place. I have to know everything if I’m going to get us home.”
Kyle watches with a detached sort of interest at the way she twirls the wooden escrima stick. Like she’s a cop, it’s what he immediately thinks. Wooden escrima sticks. The rest of the Things had done so much here, gone so far out of their way to make life seem normal and real in this ridiculously wrong and unreal hell. “I don’t know much about here. I ran away, four…five… days ago, I ran over there.” Kyle points, then squints and scratches the back of his head, slowing his pace a bit. “No…no I ran into the forest over /there/ and there was a cave. I ran in the cave because there was…something in there.” Kyle shudders, then jogs to match with her pace. “I remember hearing you calling for me, and other voices too, but. I kept running. I wish I’d taken you, Mar’i. I’m so sorry I left you. And Bruce. I was so damn angry and scared, without my powers…” He pauses in his disjointed tale, reaching out to brush his fingers against her arm, by way of apology.
Mar’i listens to him as they make their way into the forest, staying as close to the middle of the path as possible. Her mind is half-hazy, thinking about what’s going on and what’s she done and how badly she’s fucked things up, but her eyes are peeled towards the treelines, on the lookout for movement. “I wish you had, too,” she finally answers, looking off towards where the shale ridge was rising in the distance. “I wish I hadn’t ever…” her lips pause but her feet keep moving, and if she’s crying she makes no sobs nor attempts to wipe her tears. “I just wish I hadn’t been so stupid.” Thokos’ voice booms in her head, and she can almost feel his boot in her throat. Stupid little girl. Can’t control your emotions. Attach onto anything that looks at you too nicely. Stupid stupid stupid.
Kyle doesn’t hear the slight, tight tremble in her voice, as he weaves this way and that behind her. He isn’t paying attention to the direction; instead, he’s scooping up mushrooms from trees and from the ground, tucking them into his sling. He also plucks fruit that he doesn’t recognize, figuring Mar’i can look at them, tell him if they are edible. “You’re not stupid, I believed it too. For a while, I believed it too, I thought were our friends and…and our loved ones.” Kyle does look up at her again, at her back. Her long heavy braids beats against her skin as she walks. “You’re all, like. You’re sunburned,” he observes stupidly.
Mar’i looks back at Kyle for a moment, tear-marks down her cheeks. He doesn’t understand. He’s still on that impostor kick, and if she thought it would help her feel better she’d get on it too. But then that makes the last five days null and void. She doesn’t want these feelings, but she doesn’t want them to go away, either. “Without my powers I don’t absorb solar energy anymore,” she answers, words cool at first for all the emotions swirling on her face. She turns back to the road, leading them up the beginning of the ridge. “I’ve never been…” she pauses, thinks about it, “I’ve never been this cold before, even as a child. I could absorb energy a little even then.” She adjusts her hat, now talking mostly to herself. “I guess that’s probably why, too. Just the warmth. Not feeling cold at night.”
Kyle stares dumbly at her tears, not expecting to see them at all, and he’s not really sure what they mean. So he listens to her explanation warmth and cold and repeats her words. “Not feeling cold at night.” He drinks from one of the water bottles, thirstily. “The closet was really warm,” he adds, for lack of anything else to say, and then launches back into his tale. “Anyway I ran into the cave, I kept running. I was so tired and I wanted to die, I remember that feeling. I…I’ve gone a long time without really understanding what that meant. Wanting to die and knowing it could happen…and…anyway there was a drop. It was pitch black so I didn’t even realize I was falling, but I dunno. It felt like I was in there for days, running, crawling in the dark. Hearing things, and…whatever. Point being, I ended up at the lake. And I realized—” Kyle stops, looking down from where they were. They’ve reached over the shale ridge and are looking down into the crater valley, and he points at the bunker. “Is that it? Is that where Bruce is?!”
Mar’i blinks as she processes his words. “You’ve been to the lake? And then what? What did you realize?” She turns her head to where he’s pointing, the indent of the bunker into the hill visible now. “Yeah,” she nods. “They brought him here yesterday and I overheard someone saying this morning outside the window that he was awake. He’s probably still pretty sick, but at least he’s…” she turns and looks over her shoulder as they reach the peak of the shale ridge. She can see Cachement from this height, although the sleepy camp cannot see her. “At least he’s safe.”
"AH!" It’s finally time. "We can go home! We can go —" Kyle grabs hold of her hand, this time running in the lead and pulling her along. "I hope he’s awake, and then I’ll tell you both and then we can get out of us and leave all of this behind." He can’t wait to leave this nightmare behind.
Mar’i tries to keep up with Kyle’s enthusiastic pulling, which is made harder by the shale they’re running on and her still-bruised legs. “Kyleeee,” she groans, limping as she follows. “Slow down!”
He complies almost immediately, looking down at her legs. “What happened?” he asks, only now actually noticing. “You should’ve used plants to fix yourself, Mar’i…ay. There are so many plants here.” Kyle can afford to smile, genuinely now, he is so convinced now that everything will be fixed soon. His own cognitive dissonance doesn’t make any connection between his own suspicion of the Cache branded items running concurrent with his complacent acceptance of the surrounding nature.
Mar’i helps him push open the bunker doors to the Raven Terminal, and together they enter the strong-smelling main entrance. “I’m going to take a nap,” she murmurs, already looking for a suitable place to bunk. She’s just woken up, and the walk isn’t that long, but emotionally she’s drained. She finds an empty patient bed in the nearby area that seems to be some sort of outpatient room, and curls up on it, dragging the privacy curtain around so she’s alone. “Wake me up in a bit,” she says to Kyle as he disappears behind the curtain. Then, she rolls over on her side, absolutely freezing, her body tightening into a fetal position. She can get her knees all the way up to her face, and she repeats her earlier moment in the closet by doing so, burying her eyes away from the light. Then, her tears start afresh, and her shoulders shake until she finally falls asleep.
"Yeah okay," Kyle says, making sure she is in her bed and he feels better when she draws the curtain drawn. She’s safe in there, he figures. It’s just her here, then Bruce and him. He leaves quickly, thinking maybe she needs to…cry, or something. Kyle doesn’t know how to help her, except to try and get her home. So he leaves, heading back out into the terminal to explore the area and finally, finally check on Bruce.