[IC Inbox -- Snowblind]

[heavensreader]

Is it worki - oh. Ahem. This is Kesara Freamon. Please leave your message here and I will call back on you as soon as I can.







Wait, is it still - argh, how do I ma-

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[heavensreader]

[He's delaying something, he isn't saying something, and Kesara wants to kill him. Does he think she's stupid? There was a trap - a grand discovery, otherwise, two more keys, but - there is a but - something important -

She rears back, eyes wide, nostrils flaring, heart feeling like he'd drenched it in a bucket of seawater.] Someone died. Who died?!

[rattlingthestars]

[ He winces visibly this time. ]

Kain and Zack. It took both of them at once.

[ He'll explain, if she wants, tell her the whole awful story - but he's giving her a moment to let it sink in before he puts anything else on top of it. ]

[heavensreader]

What?

[She does need a moment. She needs rather more than a moment. And she doesn't take it. He'd just said something, but it was something ridiculous that made no sense.] Wha - what did you say? Kain, he - what?

[She doesn't understand why her mouth refuses to form more sensible thoughts. It's like she's facing a wall - a sheer glass wall - she keeps walking into it, but nothing new seems to happen, she can't make it make sense and yet it's still there.] He can't - Kain's dead? But he was - but he was fine, and - we just talked the other day -

[rattlingthestars]

It... he wasn't sick or anything, it wasn't a fever. [ Jim had talked to him two seconds before. A blink and the world had changed, the steadiness Jim had managed to find in Norfinbury blown away. ] He would've told you if he saw it coming, I think.

There was a trap - [ He said that already; stupid. ] - and he and Zack wanted to go first to make sure it was safe.

[heavensreader]

But they're soldiers, they're both soldiers, they're supposed to know better, they're meant to know how... [And she's meant to be good with words, with thinking. She can't talk sense and she can't understand - ]

And you and Zell are fine? You're both just fine?

[She doesn't mean for it to sound accusatory. Does she? Everything's whirling in her head.]

[rattlingthestars]

There wasn't any warning - it was just like that. [ He snaps his fingers, but even that's not as quick as the bomb had gone off. ] They couldn't have done anything different, there wasn't any way we could've known.

[ He sounds like he's trying to convince her and himself at the same time, voice high and pleading. ]

Zell and me. We were waiting outside the room. Got caught with a few pieces of glass but nothing... we're okay. [ He doesn't know if that will make it better or worse for her, that they're alive when Kunsel and Zack aren't. It doesn't sound like she wants the answer to be yes, but maybe that's just the guilt that's already been running around his mind since it started working again. ]

[heavensreader]

[She catches on that even through the shock, maybe because of the shock. She wants to scream at him. How could you not do anything! He was my teacher! How could you be alive, you useless, you stupid - ! If I were there - ]

If I were there -! [Her own voice is a small, strangled little cry, like a mouse. It would've been different. Kain wouldn't have died. She wouldn't have let him.

It's too late now. She bunches her fists in her hair, shaking all over, her words swallowed in a wounded animal sound.]

[rattlingthestars]

I know!

[ Even Jim's not sure if it's reflexively agreeing with her, trying to sooth with her, or some kind of genuine agreement. He sucks in a breath through his teeth as he struggles for calm over the storm of you could have done better, Kesara would have done better, if someone else were here-. ]

I know.

[heavensreader]

Then why - !

[What a foolish, childish, pointless question. Where is the why? He was there and she was not. She might have done something - or she might have not - he might have tried to do something - it didn't work. It's over and done and she is wrestling with maybes and shades...]

His body, do you have his body? Did they take it?

[rattlingthestars]

We left him. When he finally died.

[ He doesn't try to answer her question, because he can't, or lie to her, because he knows he screwed up. Once he was thinking again, he realized they should've buried them, but - it had been getting late. They'd taken the key that Kunsel and Zack had died for and run for the next building. They couldn't stay, not with Zell seeing their friends' corpses as clones of Riley Sung, not with Jim falling apart. ]

Last night. They've already taken it.

[heavensreader]

[That, at least, she might have been able to rage at - there is a kick of it in her stomach when she hears his answer, and she is so very close to letting it erupt. Useless, useless, leaving them lying there, in the cold...

... dead men aren't cold. She realises that in a queer detached way that stops all her feelings in their tracks, and for the first time leaves any room for his. She wonders, dazed, if Jim thought the same thing. Don't leave them in the cold. It makes bile rise in her throat, with such force and suddenness that she is almost sick.

Say something, say something. Anything.]

They - the admin - if she's going to fix it, she'd need -

[She can't do it. It's impossible to believe that the admin could fix anything here.]

[rattlingthestars]

She'll need their - she'd need them. I know.

[ At least, he hopes that's how it works. That they may be something wholly new when they return - well, he's heard the idea, and he doesn't care for it much. ]

Still seemed... [ Jim visibly bites off his words, cheeks puffing out and sucking in. Wrong to leave them there, no funeral, no proper burial. ] ...Wish we could've stayed. But I'm not letting this be for nothing.

[heavensreader]

Don't stay.

[She says it with the sudden force that shows she is letting the words run free ahead of her, before something else can overcome them. It is wrong. No burial, no mark - an unmarked grave is the worst thing, the unfairest thing, to an explorer.

But it isn't worse than unrealised ambition, aborted discovery. And she must think of it in these terms - ambition, discovery, exploration and its demands, otherwise she will never make sense of it and it will be too much, too much.]

You have to keep moving. That's what you have to do. If you find what they wanted to find, it - [it doesn't make it better nothing makes it better] - it'll be the best monument they'll have.

[rattlingthestars]

We took the key.

[ Jim's thinking isn't that far off from her's. If this is the last thing the two of them do in Norfinbury - the last thing the two of them do at all - then he and Zell are going to make it count. ]

We're going back to the toy store to try it. Whatever they died for... someone was working hard to protect it. It's important, it wasn't for nothing.

[ They didn't freeze to death, or get caught by a random monster. They died doing something that mattered. ]

[heavensreader]

[Kesara knows these words. Weren't for nothing. She thinks they ought to comfort her rather more than they do. Now she's resolved to help Jim see that comfort, though, so she decides not to think of that. If that is the best story, then that is what she'll tell.]

That's just what Kain would've said - I know it. You know it even better than me. Even if one man dies, the Game continues, it's won as long as the work is done. You're brave and Zell is brave. You'll finish the work.

[rattlingthestars]

I know.

[ This isn't exactly how he expected this conversation to go. Jim's had more time to deal with it, he thought he'd have to find something comforting to say to her. The surprise doesn't register over the strength of his other emotions but later he'll appreciate it. ]

Thanks, Kesara.