Monday, July 28, 2014

Stuck in a tree

Elijah

Elijah Poriot didn't climb trees often, or at all really, but when he called he had a proposition for Dan.

You see, he had enjoyed hiking. You see, he had enjoyed the out of doors, and being a child who had been so lovingly, achingly deprived of trees he had one simple request.

Hey, Dan, you wanna climb a tree with me?

"Do you wanna build a snooooowmaaaaaaaan," Elijah crooned.

That's how this problem started, really, because it was too hot and Elijah Poirot, darling Elijah Poirot, was not actually qualified to climb trees. How someone is qualified to climb trees is beyond all reason and comprehension, but Elijah Poirot was not qualified to climb trees for one simple reason: going down. He had no problems going down all sorts of things. Hills, stairs, people- these were all acceptable places to go down on but a tree was something different. There wasn't a gradual Oh yes! when you went down. THere was usually just a crash, thud and then nothing.

But he had decided, since Dan said something about rock climbing, that tree climbing was obviously the appropriate middle ground for this.

Elijah

Five minutes later, Dan gets another text.

Dan, I made a terrible mistake. Trees are dangerous. SOS

---

Elijah peered awkwardly out of the branches, perhaps a tad too high or drunk or whatever to really justify being in a tree right now.

"Weeeeell fuck."

Dan

Dan is just old enough that he does not necessarily live by or with or for his phone. It's a tool, not an appendage, and he doesn't feel lost or strangely at sea when it isn't right in his hand, and he doesn't feel unmoored when he puts it down in the kitchen and forgets about it until tea-time, but to be fair he keeps it reasonably close, especially when SerafĂ­ne is outside of view and/or shouting distance, as she has been for some weeks.

Still, he gets Elijah's texts at the same time. Picks up the phone from wherever he laid it in the music room and scrolls through and glances at the first with a hushed sort of smirking laugh, then reads the second one and,

well,

shakes his head and rubs his beard and slides the headphones off his head, ruffling his close-cropped blond hair with one hand as he hits save with the other and then returns to the phone

Where are you?

- is what Elijah gets back, across the ether.

Elijah

Where was he?

Hmmn. That was an interesting question. And an entirely appropriate question if eh was going to invite Dan to come visit him in sprucely solitary confinement. He had to think of what kind of tree he was in, what was where, how he was going to describe this and it was all incredibly complicated. One has to wonder sometimes if Jenn feels like Dan feels some days.

Admittedly, Jenn was about the same age as Elijah, he may have even been little older, but she kept enough of an eye on him that the age difference has negligible at best. In that hazy, not-on-the-groundly state, Elijah had time to stop and reflect and think. Yes, think, because when his mind wasn't trying to revolt against him thinking was a wonderful past time.

Where was he?

Washington Park, Elijah replied. Soon enough Elijah was sending his GPS coordinates, because he had no idea what he was doing in a tree, but he did know how to use his phone.

Dan

K. comes the reply. See you in 15.

--

Dan is tempted - tempted, mind you - to tell Elijah that he should magick himself out of the tree. Dan tells him no such thing. Also, he refrains from telling Elijah not to fall out of the tree, and keeps any other advice he might have to himself. There's no stay put and no don't worry, none of that. Elijah's an adult, even if he is barely an adult by human standards and barely Awake by the standards of the Traditions. He is still both things: Awake and adult and, well, Dan understands and respects both.

-

So. Fifteen minutes or so pass before Elijah gets another text -

Closer to Smith or Grasmere Lake?

Then -

NM. Got it.

A handful of minutes later, the tall, tattooed, bearded blond man is strolling up the nearest jogging path, looking up more than down.

Elijah

There is a tree, a very tall tree. A very tall tree that has yet to have the weight and strength that it should because of its nature. A tree with leaves as big as dinner plates and like some strange arboreal creature, there was the younger man sitting as high as a house in more than one sense of the word. He doesn't seem so much afraid as he seems… inconvenienced. Being in the tree seems to have given him time to think, yes, but it has also given him time to contemplate.

Contemplation was different than thinking, you see, because contemplation was somewhat more spiritual in nature and at that juncture, at the moment when he could have sworn that the leaves were talking to him and there was music in the subtle creak of the branches and there was a second where it was all making sense and it was all beautiful and he looked down at his phone and very, very carefully, he leaned forward and-

Oh, look, there was Dan!

"So I was thinking," he starts, "about distance… and how, if we're all connected, is distance really that much of a factor in stopping people from doing what it is they need to do?"

Dan

"Some of that might depend on your definition of need," Dan responds, peering up at Elijah stuck-in-the-tree, shading his eyes a bit against the sun with the flat of his left hand. The right is tucked quite neatly into the right front pocket of his skinny jeans. Dan is squinting a bit, his mouth closed, one of his rather quiet smirks adorning his long face.

"Why?" He asks, as he starts examining the tree for options beyond the obvious, the suggestive span of THIS ROUTE DOWN. On ski slopes sometimes it is called the easiest way down.

So. Easiest way down?

"Is there something that you need to do, someplace far away?"

Then, a second later.

"And, do you think you can get down? Or do I need to call the fire department."

Elijah

Does he need to call the fire department?

"I'm not a cat," he lamented.

Elijah contemplates this for a moment, really thinks and puts his hands on a branch. Dan had told him down was easier than up, and the young man- clearly just a tad altered in that tree, peered out over a branch and tentatively reached for something that wasn't quite there, only to realize he was grasping at the air. Elijah made a little sound of displeasure.

There was a way down, he wasn't that high up and he could jump with minimal injury, though there were an abundance f branches, just not all of them looked like they could easily support Elijah's weight. The fact that he had gotten into the tree at all and hadn't gone toppling out of it yet was rather impressive.

Did he need to do something far away? "Not yet… I was just thinking about it… every time I try something, I touch it, literally touch it, taste it feel it and it's all right there, but there's a whole world out there, and it's astounding to think that there are parts of it I won't be able to see… and I wondered why I would have to actually be there in order to experience them. I could take a trip halfway across the galaxy if I got good enough and never leave my couch… not that I much care for the idea of having my brain floating off into the cold black void of space, but y'know."

He'd done that before, but it wasn't space he was drifting off through. nothing so grand and magnificent in its coldness.

Dan

If you go up there has to be a way back down. Isn't that some sort of principle of the universe. Doesn't that go right alongside the conservation of matter and the fact that an unlabeled tuna fish sandwich left in the company fridge will stay in place until the day you were planning to eat it and then disappear unaccountably into someone else's stomach.

"Believe it or not," Dan informs Elijah, "cats are more likely to be able to get out a tree when they want to than people." He unearths his hands from the pockets of his jeans and circles beneath Elijah's perch, studying the branches and identifying the sturdiest one with the best connection to the main trunk - as best he can - from down below. Identifies it with a flick of his left hand. "That one - " A huff of a breath. Then, " - no, the other that one." And so on, until Elijah gets it right.

--

"If everything's connected - " this is not precisely idle, just considered, contemplative. The consor allows the thoughts to linger and then bifurcate. "What makes you think that your brain would be floating off in the cold black void of space. Doesn't that just mean that distance, like separation, is just another fucking myth that we share. Couldn't it really mean that everywhere and everywhen is contained in the exact same point of singularity that you occupy at any given moment.

"So there's no fucking void. Just the realization that there never was any distance between you at all."

Elijah

[can I climb trees? Dex+athletics (seriously, how did you get up here?)]

Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (6, 6) ( success x 2 )

Elijah

Eventually, he does seem to figure out how to get himself onto a low enough branch that the prospect of jumping down or getting down seemed like a less than unpleasant factor. The lower branches, unsurprisingly, were better at holding weight. They were better at supporting one hundred forty pounds of teenaged magus. From there, he was content to just sit there.

he smiled, perhaps serene, and perhaps pleased. Dan was a familiar face, and a face that he didn't mind seeing from the new angle.

"If everywhere and every when is connected… Doesn't it reduce everything to here and now. Everywhere is here, every time is now?"

Elijah leaned forward, and ungracefully hopped himself out of the tree. He even landed on his feet, too... perhaps it wasn't so ungraceful afterall.

Dan

"Depends on what you believe, doesn't it?"

Elijah makes his way down. Dan does not put out both arms to brace him or make a gesture like he might consider catching the younger man. He might've done that if Sera were involved: told her, perhaps, simply to let go and trust that she'd be caught. Or perhaps he would've coaxed her down from the treetops until she was within arm's reach, and then held out his arms to pluck her thoughtfully out of the tree.

With Elijah, well. Dan gives him a quiet smirk of approval when Elijah finds that branch - lower than the rest, solid right? - on which he can park himself. Steps back out of the way, stowing his phone in the front pocket of his jeans.

"I mean, you can say reduce and if you think that that makes the world smaller, more mean, grimier and all the rest, then it fucking will be. Or, you can say reduce and if you think that means something beautiful and essentialist about the space we occupy - something oblong and perfect and contained, like an egg, everything necessary for life wrapped up in one smoothly fertilized shell, then that's what it means.

"Or you could say that it instead multiplies the here and now into the infinite."

When you make the world conform to your will, words matter, right?

Then: "Look at that. You made it out without assistance from the fire department. No broken bones or anything."

Elijah

"I think of it more… like when you're cooking. When you cook something down to the point where what you have is the core, concentrated, flavor. When you boil off all the unnecessary stuff and you have that essence of what it all is," he replied. feeling the ground beneath him and hearing the tree creak beside him and he wanted, more at that moment, to feel that free falling moment, the milliseconds that could pull out into something longer and more full so it felt like the time that he went skydiving right after he'd turned eighteen. So he could feel that moment of soaring free fall tick by before his feet hit the ground. Even if it was short, because it didn't have to be short.

It could be as long as he damned well pleased so long as he could will it to be so.

"Words always matter."

Like an absolute truth.

"… wanna find another tree?"

Dan

Dan is standing not precisely beneath the spread of the tree's branches, but a few steps away now. They're on the grass made sparse by drought and the heat of the summer, looking out over the guttering glimmer of one of Washington Park's captive, well-groomed lakes, and Dan has both the lake in view and the young mage in view and he is listening and he is captured in an aspect of listening, you understand. There is a way in which he stands and a way in which he cants his head both toward / away from Elijah Poirot, a way he nods slowly while Elijah explains What It All Means to Him, at least Right Now, if not both Yesterday and Tomorrow, and within that aspect of listening a kind of deep and quiet respect for both Elijah's beliefs specifically, and the idea of belief as a Thing Itself.

So many goddamned threads.

"That's where we're different, I suppose." Dan murmured, thoughtfully, blue eyes flickering upward to catch the edge of Elijah's profile in the evening light. He is both quiet and quietly serious. "I don't think any of it is superfluous. Hell, I don't feel like that either."

Then again: look who's awake, and look who is here, still, sleeping with his eyes wide open.

A short bark of laughter follows.

"Depends on what sort of tree you're looking for. And what you intend to do with it."

Elijah

In all truth, if Elijah had never died there is a good chance he would have never awakened. That his life would have never been seen as anything potentially remarkable, and he never would have been standing here in Denver talking with people whose minds and capacities for thought were extraordinary. People who dreamed. People who were still asleep but understood the world so much better than he did.

"What if it's not superfluous? What if I'm wrong? I just… if the world is infinite and here and now can be anywhere and and when and I'm John Wilkes Boothe and Lincoln and… how do you not just sit back in horror of it all? How do you not sit back in wonder? If there are layers and layers and one truth at the center, one universal experience… it feels like it comes to the same place. How can something be everything?" his voice is small at that moment, seeking genuine and open for Dan's opinion because Elijah looks at him like Dan knows.

Look which of them is awake. Look at which of them is aware. The answers are different.

And Elijah grins, "well Dan, fuck if I know what to do with a tree, we've already proven that."

Dan

"Whoa," Dan to Elijah, and Dan's grinning now. This open expression framed by his blond beard, the genuine good humor crinkling the corners of his blue eyes and the whoa comes out of his mouth on another breath that feels like this exhaled cloud of laughter but returns itself to itself in something else: like-minded and like-made, but not precisely aligned.

And Dan slings an arm, companionable, around Elijah's shoulders, claps him on the right shoulder.

"Technically," Dan informs Elijah, "when you're a willworker, I don't think you can be wrong. Or at least, when you decide you were wrong you start looking for the next frame of meaning. Right? You get to frame it all your way, and I get to frame it mine.

"How can something be everything? That's the mystery, isn't it? How the fuck can anything exist? How could the universe have a goddamned beginning, right? What came before all this shit? How can something begin without something preceding it? Mystery. You have to allow space for it, because without it you start looking for answers everywhere and a helluva lot of those answers are absolute bullshit.

"But I don't think you're in danger of that.

"And, there's a helluva lot you can do with a tree. Ever read that children's book - the Giving Tree?"

Elijah

"Actually? No. I've never read the Giving Tree."

Dan

"You should," Dan says with a sideglance. "Read it sometime."

Elijah

"Is this going to help me with my something can be everything problem or my tree problem?"

Dan

"Both, I think."

Then, wry:

"Well, I don't actually think that either one is a problem. Do you?"

Elijah

"Not a problem... more of a jumping off point," he replied. "You rescued me, I owe you a beer, c'mon."

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