Wee small hours

River
[How did I do at my interview? Dex+perf]

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 5, 9, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 8 ) [Doubling Tens]

Farrah
The two of them keep weird hours. It's a sign that things are starting to return to normal that they barely see each other. Farrah managed to pick up her studies as if she had been at UC Denver this entire time and River found a gig dancing and if Farrah isn't at the library until ass o'clock in the morning then she's sleeping.

Or trying to sleep.

They only spent about a week in a crappy motel before landing this place on South Irving. They're on the first floor which means they have the kids underneath them blaring music that comes up through the floor at all hours of the night and they have the Elephant Man upstairs.

Farrah has a Forces Ward going pretty much constantly. Every time she has to renew it she remembers Mike teaching her how to do it in public discreet for the sake of remaining discreet and she feels a stab of guilt every time. She keeps busy enough that she doesn't dwell on what happened but she has to sleep sometime. And her brain is more of an asshole than she is.

It's about four o'clock in the morning. River has just stepped through the apartment door. Farrah keeps the bedroom door open when she's here by herself. They only have the one bedroom anyway. River closes the door behind her and that's when Farrah jerks awake. Gives a short yet distressed cry as she does so.

Sounds like she was about to scream Mike's name but it caught in her throat.

River
River got hired on the spot at Diamond Cabaret. Was told that she was going to be allowed to negotiate for when she was going to work, what days she wanted off. The manager didn't bother to check her references, though he did lowball her in terms of what she was going to be able to get as an hourly rate. People always do, but she got a much more generous offer for scheduling than she was expecting. We digress.

She slipped in the front door, back in the shorts and oversized men's shirt that she had been wearing earlier. She had her audition clothes underneath, which was not a euphamism for underwear, she was actually wearing hotpants and a sports bra. (Something the manager hadn't been fond of, but soon realized he could deal with. Too mesmerized by what she was actually capable of doing to really care about what her body looked like without clothing on.)

She comes in, clicks the door behind her quietly and pads into the bedroom. She leaves her shoes at the door, always does. River leaves a trail of shoes no matter where she goes, and soon enough the young woman shuts the door, enough to jolt her friend awake. THe cry makes her stomach turn and her breath stops. Heart in her throat.

"Shhhh," she says, comes to her side of the bed and kneels down, "it's okay, it's okay..."

She makes eye contact. River always makes eye contact if someone will let her.

Farrah
Little else in her life has enjoyed as much importance as has keeping the impact of what she did from River.

In the days leading up to their decision to give their acarya a Good Death Farrah became thoughtful and withdrawn. Centered. It is no small task to take down an Adept of Entropy when said Adept is both perceptive and quick-witted. Ambushes didn't happen to him. He would see them coming and cut them off. So Farrah knew before she cleaned and oiled her .45 for the last time that if she fucked this up they were in trouble.

She had put it off as long as she could. As if she had made a mistake. But Mike disappeared for over a week after he took River for her shooting lesson. Farrah spied on him. And then another crime scene appeared in Phoenix.

Between his return to San Diego and his death Mike had seemed like Mike. He had that same curious light in his eyes that he always had. That same light of an impending smile that he always had. But Farrah had made up her mind. She kept her mind from him. And then she sprayed his into the wall behind him.

She is disoriented for several seconds but then River's footsteps pad towards the bed and she's there in front of her and Farrah breathes ragged. Drenched in cold sweat.

"Jesus," she says. Her eyes glisten in the darkness but then she blinks and they clear. Eye contact doesn't mean honesty but Farrah sucks at lying. "What time is it?"

River
She reaches forward to pet back some of Farrah's curls, her fingertips are cool; the air outside is getting cooler. They are in the full swing of autumn and River feels it more than anything else.

To say River knew the full impact of what they had done wqas a lie; she had no idea the depth of how much this had unsettled Farrah. How hard this could be because she could not live in the other woman's memory, could not walk her path but, instead, could only hypothesize. Could only take the data she was given and regard it as truth because Farrah didn't lie to River (yes, she did. Everyone lies to each other, some are just better at it than others).

"It's around four? Maybe four fifteen?"

She purses her lips. There's silence that feels uncomfortable for River.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Farrah
Farrah likes to think the shit she's lived through and the shit she's done and the shit she's seen in her life has tempered her to the point where she doesn't have emotions. That is an immature way of viewing the world and the people in the world. She knows she has had it easy compared to other people. She grew up in a loving household where her parents accepted her alternative lifestyle choices and yeah okay she caught flak in school because she only fooled around with other girls but it wasn't like she got beat up or raped or anything serious because of it. When she ran away she ran away because she felt like she was supposed to be somewhere else.

This isn't a story River doesn't know already. Mike met Farrah when he walked in on her at a rest stop bathroom. The lock was broken. She had been seventeen years old standing in cut-off shorts and a bra scrubbing her armpits. He had been twenty-three years old and dressed in clothing stained in blood and gravedirt after walking away from his acarya for the last time. It wasn't the most glamorous way to meet another person. They locked eyes in the mirror and stared at each other for a moment before he blushed and slammed out of the bathroom again.

He dropped her off at a hostel in downtown San Diego. They ran into each other at a corner store later. He took her home. They fucked because it felt like the right thing to do at the time. Their souls had been calling to each other. I know you. I know you too.

That feels a long time ago.

River asks a question and it hits something in her friend. Farrah sniffs and the inhalation is congested and she makes a noise deep in her throat that sounds as if it is going to be protest but tears leak out of her eyes. Thick cold tears.

"No," she says in a voice she doesn't recognize. That makes her want to cry more. Fuck.

River
River looks up. She doesn't think the ceiling has answers but she needs to look somewhere to recenter what she was thinking. Doesn't know what she would have done if Farrah had said yes to her (listen, silly, she would have listened.) So, River sits there, lets her thumb drag across Farrah's cheek and take in whatever streams were being carved there.

She gets up at some point, takes a few steps and crawls into her side of the bed, which becomes the middle, which becomes Farrah's side of the bed. She tucks an arm over the young woman, presses her body against hers so she could feel her breathing and just take in the fact that her friend was hurting.

"... do you want me to make pancakes?"

Farrah
Like anything else in life one has to practice functioning while crying in order to function while crying. Farrah only knows how to cry while shut in a room by herself so that other people don't know she has working lacrimal glands.

Even when she was his student Farrah did not cry in front of Mike. He subjected her to trying and terrifying ordeals both before and after her diksha but Farrah did not cry in front of him. She cried plenty but she cried in private. She has never cried in front of River. River has always been the one who broke down at the sight of blood and let herself feel the weight of moral conundrums.

When River strokes her cheek Farrah breaks down crying. It is not a long jag and it's obvious she is pulling herself together even as she cries. By the time River has climbed into bed with her and pressed herself to her back Farrah has stopped. She grabs up her hands in her own and holds them tight against her breastbone and shakes her head when River asks what River asks. Her curls are soft and free against River's face. They do not coax down easy.

"Do you ever think we should've tried to fix him?"

Mike had stared shark-eyed at River in the moments before Farrah shot him. Laughed a burning cold laugh at her attempts to plead with him. It was not a Good Death because the man they were sending into the next life wasn't in the room with them.

River
River has never felt any shame in crying. She's felt shame while crying, as though the shame had caused it, but River was not ashamed of the mere act of crying. She'd always been like that- hadn't been afraid of death but had always been afraid of causing something pain. She, as a result, could work while she was distraught because she spent so much time trying to process the weight of the world around her as it crashed into her at inoperative times.

So she stays there. Inhales the smell of her hair and stays with the young woman while she's crying. Her breathing stays steady even if part of her hurts. She stay close, pulls in even closer because she doesn't want Farrah to think that she had gone anywhere, that she would ever go anywhere because they were meant to be- fate ordained it so. Just the four of them.. except there had only been three... and now, as far as River knew, there were just two of them.

What did fate have for them now?

"I do," River says, after awhile. She thinks about it a lot, tiptoes around it delicately while people ask her why she moved here. Looks for the exits and tries not to cry when people express their sympathy.

"But... I don't think... right now... that we could have fixed him. We did the best we could do with what we had," she says. Remembers how his laughter was so cold, how his eyes didn't have the same feeling they had before. River  wanted to think the change was sudden, that it wasn't all a lie- that the kind man she'd become friends with had actually been her friend.

"And I'm just... I'm sorry I couldn't have made this easier."

Farrah
"Fuck easier."

She's crying again. She doesn't want to be crying again. She hates crying. It's a sign of weakness. No one gave her this impression but her peers and the media and yet she never once in her life saw Mike cry. Neither has River. Mike never put himself into situations that would cause him sadness.

Call it hubris. Mike could have lost one of his two -- three -- students more than once. But Mike eats ribs with a knife and a fork. He drives a stick shift. He has never once operated a food processor or a blender. He is a young soul inhabiting a precise man.

Was. Was a young soul inhabiting a precise man. He's dead now. They rolled him up in a tarp and buried him out in Harbison Canyon.

"I'm fine, Riv."

She tightens her grip on her friend's hands. She won't ask for anything. She wants to go back to sleep and she doesn't want to be alone and she doesn't want to live in a world where she is the reason Michael MacCarrick is dead.

Her alarm is going off in two hours. Farrah and her brain are officially fighting.



River
She squeezes her a little, just enough to let her fiend stay aware of her prsence but Farrah is crying so River closes her eyes. Suddenly her breathing is not so steady. She's never seen Farrah cry, but she finally knows what it would take to get her there. She knows what it will take to push her friend over the edge.

The only sound is breathing, is crying. River is thinking before she says, quietly.

"I'll take care of you," she tells Farrah. Even though no one needs to take care of Farrah. She's said the same thing to Mike, and perhaps she rationalizes in those quiet moments that this is what she had done. They had killed him but he got to try again now. If River knew what caused it all, if she truly understood she never would have done what they did.