The Way Things Are

River
There was a guy half a block away that owned a food truck. It sold Cajun food.

It didn't quite make sense tyo most people as to why there was a man selling cajun/creole food from a truck in Federal when there were any number of pho places or taquerias that had other authentic cuisine to sample from, but the fact of the matter was this: Denver had no good cajun food, save for the food that came off of this little old man's truck. And it was run by a little old man, just a little over five feet tall, shriveled into something like a sun-kissed raisin, with the biggest, brightest smile full of dentures that one could really have. He ran the truck all by his lonesome; you didn't ask him where he got the alligator and you sure as shit didn't ask him what the spices were that went into it.

No, this was not gluten free. No, this was not a low carb food. No, you did not want to know where the ingredients came from, you just wanted to shut up and eat what the guy was offering and call it a day. Like the old grandfatherly type that was nice enough but didn't take any lip.

He'd told River she was too skinny. It was the first thing he'd said when she'd ofered a lite portion (which he was having none of) gave her a full lunch sized portion and only charged her for half because she needed to put some meat on her bones. Wasn't gonna take no lip, miss, you hear?

He got a laugh out of her, too, but it was small. The old man (whose nametag and side of the truck labeled him as Joel) laughed in return, produced food promptly, and River went to go sit at a park table near a playground half a block away. They'd agreed to meet there, and for now she was content to look at her food and... try to convince herself that food was important. She was going to eat, because she'd told Joel she was going to eat. Then again, she'd said a lot of things that she hadn't made good on, part of that was why she was sitting in a fucking park with cajun food in front of her.

She hasn't gone to sleep yet. Made work the evening before and there is still glitter clinging stubbornly in her hair and her clothes are comfortable. She's wearing a hoodie that belongs on someone the size of a line backer. Her purse is sitting next to her. River takes a bite of food, a woman in grayscale flecked with gold. Shrugs, takes another bite because her body is screaming at her that food is important and this food is delicious. She looks left, then right, and then goes double time on what's in front of her. May as well get eating out of the way before she loses her apetite.

Michael
Though she is somewhere off-screen reading a book and eating her po' boy a certain Egyptian-American Euthanatos has received two calls concerning the same event from two different people today. The first one came from her former acarya who disappeared sometime last week and resurfaced after a two-day radio silence to inform her that he had blacked out and come to in Newark, New Jersey, and that he would be back when he figured out why a woman named Alice had sent him there.

Alice has been dead longer than Prohibition. They did not know this then. And the next Ihsan heard he was back in town and just so she was aware he intended to meet with River to discuss the state of the life-oath she and Farrah Esmail violated not even two months ago.

Then River asked if she wanted to go to the park she was meeting up with Mike and would really appreciate it if someone she trusted would be there to help with the body if their meeting produced one. She agreed. They went together. The hope is that they will leave together. They are both essentially living in a bathroom in a two-room suite at the Hotel Monaco.

Ihsan is having the best day ever.

---

River can feel Michael before she sees him.

The night he came over to help with the soup that had been made of Farrah's body must feel as though it happened to someone else. Their hotel room is saturated with his resonance but River has not seen him since that night. It isn't that he's avoiding her. It's that he rises early in the morning and goes to bed late at night and there are times when he does not go to bed at all. He lives off of coffee and magick and his own unflagging good cheer.

Must have left that good cheer in the car. When he comes over the horizon he feels like a storm cloud. He's wearing a dark blue suit and a patterned tie and has his hands in the pockets of the blazer. The wind tries to tug at his hair and has small success. He is pale in the way that he is always pale and not in the way that suggests an overload of entropy.

He is grim in a way that she has never seen him grim. Not when he was truly him. When he was overtaken by that nameless past life his eyes got a black and manic cast to them. Like the fight and the eventual peace come over someone as they're drowning. This is the grimness of a teacher approaching a student who has transgressed.

Without speaking Michael takes a seat across from her and folds his hands on the tabletop.

River
They keep completely opposite schedules. In truth, they almost always kept opposite schedules- River saw more of Mike when she was getting off work than any other time and they were no longer on the kinds of terms that warranted spending time together in the wee small hours when her night was ending. She's waiting at the table, puts her fork down and pushes food tot he side because she's gotten all she's going to be able to get down into her stomach and the way her body tenses she feels like she's going to see it again within the next five minutes.

There is something to be said about River, and that was that she had never seemed to shy away from what was coming. She wears dread openly, yes, but she wasn't dreading this. All warmth and radiance, yes, but there is something about River Vasquez that doesn't waver. That stands where it was meant to stand and holds its ground as though she were unafraid, as though she was the unconquerable sun save for one simple fact- she was not so strong as to be the sun. Radiant, yes. Warm, certainly, but such things are brightness and warmth are currently overshadowed by the distinct impression that she is precisely where she was intended to be.

Unmoving. Unwavering. Resigned.

She looks at him and he sits down. Thinks about the things she could say- she wants to say she's sorry. It's written on her face, in her shoulders, in her eyes, even in the way that she breathes. She wants to say that she's sorry, but there she is- resolute. River doesn't say that she's sorry about that's not what this is about. Mike's not stupid, and being sorry doesn't change the fact that actions were taken that were not acceptable.

"Have you eaten?" she asks. It's not something casual, though it is a carry over that she doesn't entirely realize. Adam was a compulsive feeder. Never lost his appetite until there wasn't enough of him left to really feed. River doesn't think about this, just seems concerned that Mike is taking care of himself.

Michael
After what happened to Alice they are right to worry. More than any of them Farrah could remember the details of their past lives and even she couldn't tease out the rotten tooth that had them locked into this battle with the Artist.

The question after his well-being does not chip away at the rock settled into Michael's features. If he survives past his third decade that boyishness in his features will not go anywhere. It will only throw more light onto the fact that he is a handsome and charismatic individual who prefers to delight in life than anguish over it.

Right now he is reading her. River does not know what it is to be read like this. She may think she does because she is a stripper and strippers are looked at like almost anything other than autonomous creatures.

Michael has come into River's place of business before. He did not understand what she did or why she did it and maybe he had wanted to talk her out of it. After he had seen what he came to see he told her that he respected her decision and would not pressure her to make a different one. She also never saw him in there again. He had unnerved a couple of her regulars. No one wants to sit next to a Boy Scout when they're trying to watch a pair of bare tits in peace.

But River has never been read like this before. This is the way Michael looks at someone when he's trying to decide if their time would be better served in the Shadowlands.

"Before you ask me any more questions concerning my physical status," he says and he's looking her dead in the eye as he does so, "I feel it necessary to remind you that the life-oath typically ends when one attempts to kill the other."

River
She's never been shy about making eye contact with him. Or anyone, for that matter. So she looks him in the eyes and doesn't seem intent on hiding anything because... was there a point? She looked back at him and didn't see anything other than stone and it felt strange to be on the receiving end of someone who is clever ad perceptive and has, when in his right mind, been the type whose decisions she didn't typically find herself questioning.

River knits her fingers together in front of her, doesn't look away and instead just inhales deep. Takes this as an exercise in being aware of inevitability. Keeps her hands clasped in front of her so maybe, maybe he won't notice that her hands are shaking.

He's seen her at work, possibly not recently. Probably not recently, probably doesn't know that she took an involuntary vacation for three days because someone decided that his hands needed to be places that they didn't need to be and instead of politely reminding him that he didn't get to put his fucking hands under her g-string she hit him hard enough that it gave the guy a bloody nose. Told the man to get out with the kind of fury that one wouldn't think could come from a woman of River's size. He's lucky she didn't break his nose and call it a day. Her boss decided it was better that she take a few days off, gave her a talking to about letting the bouncers do their job.

She's been erratic recently. Told her boss that a family member died so she gets a wide berth. Cleaned up her things like she might not bother to show up at some point. In truth, she was expecting this. But she hadn't ever been shy about making eye contact and she might be scared out of her mind but she's there and resigned.

"Right," she says, like she'd needed to be reminded that she doesn't get to ask those kinds of questions. Exhales slow and it's a forced calm, "um... so... what can I do to help inform your decision on what happens next?"

Michael
If anyone was going to kill Farrah it should have been him. And Farrah did not deserve to die as she did.

The room where Farrah died had not been a proper bedroom long enough to absorb the characteristics of the bodies that slept in it but it had been theirs. It was a safe space for them. Though Farrah joked plenty about the folks River would bring home and told her to put a scrunchie on the door knob like they were still in college she knew that River would never violate the sanctity of their lives like that. That was the one place in the house that they both expected to be able to go when they were vulnerable and have that vulnerability respected.

If Farrah had kept her goddamn bone flute in the kitchen with the rest of her instruments she might still be alive right now. But she kept it in the bedside table next to her Tarot cards and her phone charger and her vibrator. It was useless to her in the moment that she needed it.

When Michael and Ihsan arrived at the apartment the night Farrah died he had not meant to pull River away and shield her eyes from the sight so soon as he realized she was at his side staring at it like the burden of explanation was on her. It was as much a muscle memory as was River's calling him in a time of crisis. Michael had been the one to clean up Farrah's body. Once he'd made his call to Grace to tell her to tell everyone else he had told Ihsan to take River back to the apartment.

He has not been erratic recently. So far as he is concerned he lost Farrah the night she shot him in the face and buried him out in the desert. But her punishment for that ought to have been dying knowing why she was dying and to try again in the next life with her soul cleansed.

Michael has always had a terrible poker face. He does not have time to mourn his former student. He is breathing slow and even the sort of breathing you have to really stare at a person to notice but River can see the slight tell of tension in his jaws. This isn't in the manual.

"I've already decided what happens next," he says. This is where he would thaw a bit if he took this less seriously but all Michael has ever really had is the Chakravanti. She knows the barrenness of his past. Before he took on students Michael was lost. Hard to say what he is not but he is an acarya to the tradition. People rely on him. The closest River gets to seeing him thaw is his holding both thumbs aloft a moment as if to signal a light change and then returning them to their prior place in the stitching. "In light of recent events, I will tell you that I understand, to an extent, why you and Farrah did what you did. But that does not excuse it, and because your part in the..."

What the heck do you even call what happened, anyway?

"... misunderstanding did not, to the best of my knowledge, amount to anything other than accessory, I do not intend to end your life." A small sigh. "What were you hoping to say to... 'help inform my decision'?"

River
[this is me holding it together.]

Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (1, 1, 5, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )

River
It's in those moments at the table while she's trying to piece through what she would have hoped to say to him that she realizes she doesn't haveanything anymore. She realizes that her family is in Chula Vista, that she'll never invite them out here to visit her nor will she ever venture back to San Diego to check back with them in more than the occasional phone call and holiday wish. She realizes that all she has left of Farrah lives in a shoebox and on her instagram account. Is made up of messages and hash tags and voicemails that River can't bring herself to delete yet even though the box is getting full.

She worries about losing her phone, or breaking it and having to get a new number because it means she won't get to hear her friend's voice anymore. She'll go like all things do, inevitably fading to what she remembered instead of an actuality. River still has moments that something happens and her first instinct is to call Farrah, and sometimes she does just to let the phone ring. So she can leave a message, pretend like she's talking to her. Pretend like Farrah is going to call her back or give her shit about it later but it never. happens.

It's in those moments across from him at the table that she realizes with some degree of finality how real it is that Mike is gone to her. More real than when he was buried under a foot and a half of dirt in the place where River had sat and tolds his unconscious form that she would protect him. He's there alive and breathing and vital and more dead to her then when he'd just been a mistake she was mourning. It feels like grief, but she knows that loss can kill you in ways you'd never anticipated.

But there she is, sitting still as can be, watching him and waiting for what she sees as an inevitability. He asks what she was hoping to say, and this was when she looked down, this was when she, for the first time in incarnations, couldn't handle looking at him.

"I don't know," she says, "I thought... maybe there was something you didn't already know, something that you would have wanted clarification on... I..."

She inhales sharp, clenches her clasped hands together. Tries to hold it together because he's not someone she can cry in front of anymore. She wants to say she's sorry. It's obvious. It may as well be written across every ounce of her being but she doesn't. Until, of course, she does pony up with something.

"We drove out to the desert once where Farrah and I buried you... and you went away, and didn't come back for almost an hour and a half and... I went out and found you and you were cold and I was so worried... and I remember covering you up, and saying that I would protect you... and I didn't," she inhales sharply, "and I told Farrah when we got here that I would protect her and I didn't. And... I'm starting to realize that I'm not good for my word, so if I have to swear something to you now I have no guarantee that it won't be worthless."

A second, she looks back at him. Whatever decorum she's holding onto right now is held so tightly she may have crushed it, "that... wasn't for you, though..."

Michael
This isn't any easier for Michael than it is for River. He's just older than she is. He's lost more than she has. He's killed more people than she has. He remembers more than she does. That he can sit there dry-eyed and unmoving and witness her suffering and the almost breakdown and not move to try and comfort her as they both know he would have done at any other point in their history just means that he's teaching her yet another lesson.

He is a teacher not just to her and to Farrah and to Ihsan but to anyone in their community who comes along in need of guidance. And they are a community. They are a marginalized and oppressed minority who needs each other even if they can't agree on a single thing ever and would rather kill themselves than admit this.

When River looks down it causes a visceral hurt in Michael's core that she does not see. The audience can see it though. He tenses his jaw harder than he had been before and he tightens his hands' grip on each other and he takes a steeling breath to remind himself that he is a pillar of their community and he is the example to which fledgling teachers set themselves and he can discipline a wayward former student of his without caving. It does not matter that he understands and that he wishes things had not gone the way they had. Things had gone the way they had. He can blame himself or he can accept what is out of his control and proceed forward without further suffering.

She knows better than to say she's sorry. It will sound like mewling to him. River is neither helpless nor weak. She did not mewl at him the night she swam herself a mile out from shore to safety and accepted his offer of a towel and a warm place to stay. She had better not start now.

Though he knew where exactly they had buried him he did not know why. Nor did he know that the place had some significance for River. He could have known if he had dug deeper but he had not. They never talked about the night of his last Seeking.

He swallows hard when she speaks of protecting Farrah versus protecting him. She may not notice this. It's subtle. His Adam's apple moves but it's subtle anyway.

Farrah's magick was subtle. That was Michael's teaching but not his doing.

"You understand that your word will mean nothing to me, for a time, and whoever else learns of this will know that your word means nothing."

He neither quantifies nor qualifies the time. All he does is give her a tell. He isn't going to kill her today. This is what happens when you violate a life-oath.

River
She inhales long and slow and she is resolute. The sun does not waver, the sun does not flinch at what happens under its light and if she is going to be that star then she is going to have to learn to be unwavering. She's going to have to emulate the way her magic feels- bright but like a promise that can be unbroken. Warm but unwavering, like truth. Like inevitability. She's going to have to learn what it really means to give your word.

She thought she knew, but here we are.

She exhales, sets her shoulders back and looks at him and it's a reminder. They have business, thsi is business, this is the part where they lay out how their relationship is going to work from here on out. He says that her word will mean nothing to him, nor will it mean anything to anyone else who learns about this.

"That makes sense," she says, and there isn't an ounce of self pity. She's holding on to the protocol, because no matter how badly this hurts this is how things work now. River could mourn later, but she knows that you have to push forward to survive things like this. That you have to accept what is the new normal to move on, lest she face terrible consequences.

"Do I have to tell people, or is this something that stays in the realm of if it comes up?"

Michael
[manip + subt: i really just want to see what happens when he actually tries to have a poker face]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) [Doubling Tens]

River
[would she even be able to counter that shit?]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 1, 1, 4, 6) ( success x 1 )

Michael
Even when their relationship was at its most egalitarian Michael held to a certain standard of behavior.

He took on a karmic debt each time he took on a student. For Farrah it meant that he was pulling her off an aimless path and setting her on one that had more than academic meaning. It meant that they could resolve a physical complication carried over from a past life. It meant that he would have a grounding point for the place he was meant to be next. For River it meant that he had to slough off his own selfishness to help another person survive. It meant he had to learn to be vulnerable and tough at once. It meant that by the time he met Ihsan he was not so much an enigma as he was a pillar. He knew what his purpose was in life and he knew that he could fulfill that purpose.

Farrah's atman is in the slipstream now. Without the proper application of knowledge and Will none of them know where she will end up. She may inherit Farrah's debt. Michael hopes it will not. But River cannot see that. River cannot see anything in Michael where before she could have seen his true feelings. The shape of him underneath that suit and his own natural magnetism. He drew people to him. He was a light.

Right now he is a mountain. A sheer rock-face she has no hope of climbing. If he pities her and wants to go to her River has no way of knowing. All she sees is the acarya that the rest of the Chakravanti sees. One who would kill a former student if it meant restoration of balance.

Killing River would restore nothing. She needs to live. That is all she sees in his eyes when she looks at him.

"Your only obligation is to do better. So long as you do not repeat the mistakes you made before coming here, you may rehabilitate your reputation among the Chakravanti. But if you transgress again..."

He draws a heavy breath. She sees the heavy breath but not the thoughts or feelings that fuel it. When he lets her see him again it's only in his sentence structure. Michael only eschews contractions when he's not giving his words his utmost attention. And he means what he says even if it sounds as if he isn't thinking when he says it.

"Don't transgress again."

River
[per+alert: do you look like you're taking care of yourself?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )

River
"Okay."

It's all she says. She doesn't have room to argue the point, wouldn't dream of it otherwise.

This is the way things are now. It's an abrupt change, a harsh change, something that leaves her out in the middle of the world and she feels like she's drowning but she knows that she has a purpose, and she knows that she has to make good on that purpose, that she hadn't felt like she needed to be doing anything other than what fate had made it clear that she needed to do. Things changed, yes, and she would have to change with them.

Her only obligation is to do better. They both know she can do better.

"Okay," she says again. Like that makes it real, like that makes it final. She's going to do better, things are going to be different. and as much as she may not want them to change, they have to. She'd made it abundantly clear that she was willing to contribute to a world-shattering change, but now she actually has to live with its consequences.

But she gets to live with them honestly. River likes that a little better.