Elijah
There is a moment of dawning horror that comes when Elijah realizes that his friends are going to burn two people alive in their home and act like this was not a big deal. Or, perhaps, it was a big deal. Perhaps they realizes precisely how important and how horrifying this is, but...
There's always a but. So, it was an evening full of distraction. Which, strangely enough, involved wanting to hang out with Samir. And pretend like nothing was weird. Nope, none of this is anything other than normal. Nothing about this is a complete nightmare that he's trying very hard not to think about. Nope. Tonight was fine.
To his credit, he hasn't started drinking yet, but he's got a backpack full of books and tequila and things that are built for forgetting. He's accustomed to doing this kind of thing. He's been hanging out in the floor, has already made his way through a book about the printing press and how fascinating that was.
The horror's part of the wonder.
Just keep telling yourself that.
"So, uh..." awkward smalltalk time, "what do you do here?"
In the sparse apartment that smells cleaner than any hospital he'd ever been to.
Samir
Elijah is not the first person to step foot inside Sam's apartment since he moved in. The landlord let himself in a few times before Sam managed to ward the place against either detection or intrusion. And Grace slept here last night while he stayed awake and watched the inside of the safehouse from his computer monitor.
Three computer monitors share two desks. None of the windows open. All of the blinds are drawn tight and the air conditioner drips into an old coffee can. A cactus lives on a bookcase made out of cinder blocks and two-by-fours. A television sits on a middle shelf but it is unplugged and turned around to face the wall. That's what it gets for telling him to kill himself. Asshole TV.
While the Hermetic apprentice studies the Mercurial Elite sits in his wheelie chair and alternates between typing away in the monitor responsible for his Tor connection and the monitor responsible for the same Civilization V game he's been running since his last Seeking and the monitor responsible for keeping an eye on Kalen.
Gandhi is an even bigger asshole than his TV.
Unless Elijah indicates that he would love some lighting all he has is the glow from the LED monitors.
So, uh...
Though Sam's eyebrows rise he doesn't turn around until the question hits him.
"What?"
Elijah
He leans over, pretty sure that if he touches anything it would break immediately. So, he's nervous, appalled, and awkward. This is just like the time that he and his mother visited his grandmother in Quebec. He remembers the house being strangely earthy and his mother looking like she wanted to go home immediately. There wasn't some mythic fairytale forest at the back of this propertty. No, there was a Chinese laundry service.
Well, laundry is kind of mysterious and terrifying. Maybe it's similar.
His eyes flicker to the screen, brows raise up and he starts the arduous climb to his feet. It's a slow thing, it's a purposeful thing, it's a lazy thing because he's still trying to make sense of what is going on in front of him and-
"Hey, is that Civ?" he starts to meander over once he's finally gotten on his feet, "do you have another chair? I wanna watch."
Samir
"Ah..."
Sam looks around as if he might have misplaced a second chair. He has an air mattress that is fully decked out to look like a proper bed with the exception that it's on the floor rather than up on a frame and box spring. That is it. It would appear as though he takes his meals standing up in the kitchen or sitting at his computer.
No second chair exists. He sighs and looks over at the closet.
"Hang on."
[lololol conjuring up a fucking chair. matter/prime 2. base diff 5 (SANCTUM FTW) -1 quint.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (7, 9) ( success x 2 )
Samir
[extending +1]
Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (5, 6) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Elijah
Samir opens the closet, and there is a chair.
There is a fucking nice chair. His brows raised, his expression impressed and he started to head over to the closet to acquire said chair so Samir didn't have to, you know, move the chair. Not that he would really have to of course- it has the kind of wheels on it that make the thing move like an Olympic figure skater.
He blinks.
Blinks again.
"... do you wanna trade chairs? I feel really bad now, this is a really nice chair."
Clearly, he is on the edge of a breakdown. He's being entirely too timid about a fucking chair.
Samir
As of right now Sam is not distracted by what is going on on his middle monitor. He has a Bluetooth headset plugged into his right ear and he does keep looking back at the text scrolling alongside the video feed but he is not attending to it active and alert. His guest wanted a chair and it only requires a series of keystrokes in a terminal window on the same monitor for him to pull a new chair out of thin air.
When he gets up it looks as if he just happened to have one in storage. Elijah knows better. He's seen what the VA is capable of doing across distance and using bottles of cleaner and bottles of drugs.
One brow quirks when Elijah asks if he wants to trade.
"... it's a chair," he says. "Are you...?"
Fuck. He doesn't want to ask. He knows what Elijah's problem is. That's the danger of paying attention though.
[perc + empathy: i hate myself.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 2, 5, 5, 7) ( success x 1 ) [Doubling Tens]
Elijah
[Willpower: IT IS ALL ABOUT THE CHAIR!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )
Samir
[REROLL THAT'S BULLSHIT]
Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 8 ) [Doubling Tens]
Elijah
[Manip+sub: I'm fine!]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 7, 7) ( success x 3 )
Elijah
He needs to find some way where his conscience can justify setting what he presumes to be human beings on fire in their own homes (which he also presumes to be a pretty gruesome and horrible death). What he saw of their foes was this- reprehensible people doing something that is reprehensible. The deed must be done, they can't continue to exist on this mortal plane and let reincarnation sort everything out. This is understandable and reasonable.
Burning to death is a horrible way to die. It's why he'd gone overkill on his particular rote dealing with the human amalgamation they'd dealt with. He didn't want it to suffer, he wanted it to end. Quick, painless, final. The act is done before you even begin to fathom what happened.
This, what Grace and Kalen are going to do (what Samir is assisting in and observing), is not quick. It is not painless. It is not merciful. It is torture- in the best of scenarios they would be smothered to death by the smoke and debris. Their lungs would burn and they would die struggling for air. Drown in smoke.
What he needs is to find something that makes it okay, that lets him come to terms with the fact that good people he knows and cares about are going to torture living beings (reprehensible monsters, he knows), until they are no longer alive.
He doesn't know if sex will make things better. He doesn't want to touch people, as strange as it seems. He wants to sit in a shower and boil until he feels clean. He wants anything that will make him forty thousand miles from here. He wouldn't mind having sex, but he makes no promises that he might not start crying or dissociating.
Sex might be nice. Sitting with a person who gets it might be nice, too.
Barring any of that, he'd settle for heroin and laying in the bathtub.
Samir
For those of you playing along at home: Samir Lakhani is not a bad-looking male specimen. Quite the opposite. He has two eyes and he owns mirrors in which he does not look because he spends an inordinate amount of time in a world where he cannot trust his own perception. But on the occasions he has looked in a mirror he has seen the face the rest of the world sees. He knows he looks good.
So when he stands still despite the distraction of keeping an eye on his friends - their, both of them, he and Elijah are remote while another of Samir's kind shields herself from invasion and Elijah's former mentor walks up to a building filled with slumbering evil things without heartbeats - he also locks his eyes warm and brown onto Elijah's cool blue ones and what he sees in them makes him feel for him.
Samir hates feeling for other people. He feels for the cashiers and the taxi drivers and the homeless he passes every day. He feels and he knows what it is they need in order to make it through the day and if it weren't for his own mental illness he could bleed himself dry to give it to them.
A sigh quiet and calm leaves his lungs. He is beginning to give a shit about Elijah. This is not a burden for him. It could be a distraction but Samir is capable of multitasking. It could be a distraction but Samir could pull anything Elijah needed out of thin air.
So he grabs hold of the wheelie chair and pulls it out of the closet. Knocks his own shittier one out of the way and positions it in front of his computer setup. Starts to type a command onto the keyboard.
"... hang on."
[matter 2: transmutating the really nice wheelie chair into a loveseat or something so elijah can play civ 5 while he does his shit. -1 practiced rote -1 unique focus.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (1, 8) ( success x 1 )
Elijah
[Per+empathy- how close CAN I get to you before this is uncomfortable?
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )
Elijah
And, within a moment, he is done sitting in a chair and then it's a loveseat. A really comfy loveseat, come to think of it. He doesn't quite sink in, being damned near six feet tall. He doesn't often get to fall into couches unless they are particularly magnificent or they're spectacularly shitty. This is not the Taj Mahal of sofas, but it's certainly not comfortable.
Elijah scoots over, eyes flicker back to the screen and he looks a little distant. A little absent, but then there's Civ. His lips upturn.
"Man, why is Suleiman all up in your ass," he reaches forward to take control of Civ. Picks it up like it's not a big deal. He might not be fantastic with computers, but he sure as shit knows how to play video games. This was a nice distraction. Civ was not going to make Elijah start irrationally crying for reasons he believes are entirely natural.
"What're they doing now?"
He really doesn't want to know, but he really does.
Samir
So he drags Elijah and the wheelie chair from the closet to the computer. The wheelie chair morphs from a super awesome wheelie chair into a comfortable loveseat. When Sam sits down next to him he has to grab his wireless keyboard and balance it on his knees. He has one keyboard per monitor. Samir Lakhani is a busy man.
When the Hermetic apprentice asks about Suleiman he slides the appropriate keyboard in front of his guest and settles back on the couch.
"... I, ah... I have two gold mines. And all the coastal tiles on this portion of the map. And he's super fucking pissed."
Tap tap tap. Tap tap. If Elijah looks over at the middle monitor he may not be able to make much sense out of what he's seeing. That doesn't matter. It isn't as if he's a Sleeper.
What're they doing now.
"We're waiting on Kalen." A beat. Shit. He's read too much on Ginger. He knows Kalen and Elijah are close. He stifles a sigh and points at the monitor responsible for Civ. "If you want to start a new game that's cool. You're probably gonna get fucked in about seven turns."
Elijah
"Are you presuming I suck at Civ, or do you have the difficulty jacked all to Hell?" he's in the process of starting up a new game, saves where Samir is right now because it sin't fair to jack up someone's game irreparably and then run away. He has no idea that this game has had the longevity of most people's college boyfriends. This is a pretty long standing game, it looked developed.
His eyes flicker tot he screen, and he stays there for a minute. He isn't paying attention to the game, he's paying attention to the trainwreck and-
nope. Back to Civ. Back to the new game because why the Hell not?
He taps idly on the space bar. Doesn't push it down but he does tap. Doesn't know he's doing it, but probably realizes it's kind of annoying. Tap... tap... tap tap... taptaptap... taptaptaptaptap. Fibonacci numbers, exhales slow and long. This is just a part of awakened life, they're going to do atrocious things. Inhales. Exhales.
Tap.Tap.Tap.Tap.Tap.Tap.Tap.Tap.
Samir
They're waiting on Kalen and then Sam says:
"Yes, there are."
Elijah can't hear what precipitated that answer. He asks if he's presuming he sucks at Civ. That is the least of Sam's concerns right now but a razor-quick flick of an almost-grin tugs at the corner of his mouth anyway.
"... yeah, I've got it on fucking Deity Mode. Go ahead."
Elijah has no way of knowing the other young man forgot to turn off his mic before he answered his question or that Kalen and Grace both heard him as he said this. Or that Sam is too distracted by his newfound friend's at-bay nervous breakdown to care.
He isn't paying attention to the game. He may not make anything of it when Sam says into his mic:
"Right behind you, yo."
A few seconds later it becomes apparent that Sam is Working and Elijah is losing himself to a sort of number-based self-soothing with which the reality hacker is beyond intimate. Fibonacci and he go way back. He begins to type on his keyboard and the glow from the middle monitor becomes a bit sharper. Penetrating. It could get into Elijah's skin if that's what he wanted. Sam knows he needs that sort of distraction. Now is a bad time.
"... you okay?" Sam asks as his resonance begins to take over everything else at the desk.
Elijah
He's halfway to twenty oneby the time Samir asks if he's okay. To be fair, he eventually leaves the keyboard alone and turns his attentions toward tapping on the table so it's somehow less obnoxious. Seventeen in and he stops, purses his lips. Wants to lie, it's written across his features and his shoulders and it's on his countenance.
"I'll get there?" he says, "but right now, no. No, I am not okay."
Tap.Tap.Tap.Tap. Twenty one.
Lays his palm flat on the table and stays there and he doesn't lean in, stays still for a long moment which feels wrong on so many levels. He does lean a little against Samir, that sort of guarantee that this is a person and not something he's making up. Elijah runs his hands through his hair, both of them, exhales hard again because he's trying to remember that he needs to breathe.
"... is it fucked up that I want to see what happened? So... like... context?"
Samir
No one can see how Sam stares straight ahead and convinces himself that he can tolerate the pressure and presence of another living breathing filth-beast against his arm. Even after that other living breathing filth-beast rests its head against his shoulder. He stares straight ahead and by this point he has passed the event horizon of what will agitate him to the point where he needs to stand up and clean the ever-loving fuck out of his apartment.
This apartment reeks of bleach and vinegar and verbena. It is not physically possible for the place to get any cleaner without obliterating all organic life within the four walls.
So Elijah is not okay right now and Sam accepts that because half the time he isn't okay either. It's a wonder he's okay right now. He was okay when they started. Some small feat of will. He is okay because he has to be.
Hands go through Elijah's hair and Sam clenches his teeth and inhales deep to let it go again like to remind Elijah hey buddy this is an important part of your metabolic function. He could speak if he had to but he focuses on the middle monitor. On the Code rushing by and morphing reality in the small window in the lower left corner of the monitor.
"No," Sam says. Not fucked up. "Kalen is going to start a fire and Grace and I are making sure it doesn't spread. Look."
Look. Like Elijah can make sense of the Code rushing by.
Elijah
He looks at the corner of the screen, the part that is going to give him some kind of view into what, precisely, is going on. See? They're doing things to make sure this doesn't hurt anyone else, just the people inside of that house. It somehow seems a little less like mass murder when they're trying very actively to just murder a finite number of people and not an abundance of them.
He just kind of awkwardly stays hung out on Samir's shoulder like a tired toddler who doesn't quite want to take a nap just yet. There isn't any shame in feeling the frailties of being human. There's no shame in being afraid, in being appalled (tells himself again that the horror of this all is not separate from the wonder. They are one in the same. In their own rights, there is something to be said sbout the artistry of what is happening here. Beautiful disaster.)
Drowning on land, he thinks. Tells himself. Like drowning on land, drowning's peaceful at the end. He knows this, once you stop fighting and accept it- the sinking is almost pleasant. Maybe it's like that, once the terror of everything passes, it will go easily. Maybe he underestimates Kalen, hopes the place goes up in an absurdly quick inferno, like spontaneous house combustion. Like the people would be ash before they realized what happened to them.
"What language are you coding in?" he asks, like he would know what that meant.
Samir
"... what?"
Like asking what language he's speaking when they're both speaking the same language. That wasn't a question he was expecting or prepared to answer. Not when a good part of his attention is on keeping a budding fire contained within a two-story building where four sentient creatures are currently taking a dirt nap.
And yet Sam has within him a teacher's spirit. He does like other people. Likes them from a distance but distance doesn't mean shit to a Virtual Adept.
"Oh." He gestures to the middle monitor with the hand not attached to the shoulder Elijah is leaning on. "I, ah... I knew a guy, once. He called it Reality Code. It's just... you know how DNA is? Makes a double helix and somehow that makes atoms and atoms make cells and cells make... whatever cells make? Tissue? Yeah. That's reality. And the Reality Code. Super small command chains you can change and make a, ah... an office chair into a sofa. Or whatever." A beat. He actually looks over at Elijah. "Since we hemmed the fire in, both of us, it'll... ah... consume faster. They're asleep, they won't suffer. It's almost over. Look."
Elijah still can't make sense of the Code. Can't even make sense of the cadence of it. He has to take Sam's word.
Elijah
[WP: don't equate creating a sofa to Downs Syndrome]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 5, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )
Elijah
He leans forward a little, actually gets himself off of Samir's shoulder in order to actually look at the screen and see what was going on. He looks at the code, peers like he genuinely wants to udnerstand but just can't. There was a time that maybe that was something that he could have factored into his world view but that time has long since passed.
"So it works... like... you're manipulating reality on a cellular level, a couple genes makes a big fuckin' impact," looks back to see if he understood what was going on there.
But, the heart of the matter was actually addressed, and soon enough his eyes go back to the screen, like it's a train wreck. Still looks like he might get sick. Still looks like he doesn't quite know what to do with himself. Still looks about like the bus dropped him off somewhere completely wrong and he has no idea how to get home but knows if he doesn't get home by five thirty his ass is getting beaten.
It's almost over, Samir tells him.
Silence.
"I seriously don't know if I want to blow you or drink a bottle of tequila and let today be yesterday when I come back around."
Samir
A couple genes makes a big fuckin' impact.
The Mercurial Elite nods his head but does not take his eyes off the screen in order to check on his charge. For now Elijah is okay even if he is Not Okay. For now Sam is focused on Kalen and Kalen's escape even if they all know Kalen is going to make it back to his vehicle without drawing attention to himself.
What Elijah overhears as Sam talks into the headset involves firetruck response times and whether or not 'man' is alright. Silence as he listens. Silence as the other two resolve their ends of the bargain and the three dissolve into their own ones again.
He knows it's over when Sam removes the earpiece from his head and sets it down on the desktop. Runs a hand over his own restrained hair and turns to look at Elijah. He heard him when Elijah said he didn't know whether to blow him or consume a bottle of tequila. Whatever he and Grace did drained him quite a bit but not as much as fighting back Quiet drained him. He is lucid when he speaks.
"... do you want me to make a bottle of tequila, or...?"
Elijah
"I'd kinda like to be cool on my liver, but if you're not cool with it, I'll totally just drink. Besides, you did a lot of hardcore, terrifying and upsetting shit, I kinda figure you deserve a blowjob or something."
Samir
The way they're angled on the loveseat Elijah and Sam can look sidelong at each other. Elijah may very well look straight ahead but Sam is aware of the weight of what Elijah says. He had the weight of the kid's former mentor's words in his ear. Weight he ought to have known a Hermetic to be capable of but had not experienced in a long time.
So Elijah indicates the binary of his options and then gives a strong preference for one over the other. It is not the option Sam would have preferred but to be quite honest Sam would have preferred not to have had another sentient being cross his threshold to begin with. They're already way beyond his comfort zone. His comfort zone is in another fucking galaxy.
There's that word 'deserve' again. Sam sighs quick and almost quiet and runs the hand closer to Elijah over his own hair again.
"... do you wanna smoke a joint first, or..."
Elijah
[1-5 good, 6-10 not good]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (6) ( success x 1 )
Elijah
Does he want to smoke a joint first? He doesn't really have tot hink about this, he laughs because... well... why not? They could smoke a joint, then could do whatever. He does have a preference, but his eyes drift back to the screen again. Where there had been a fire, where there had been a disaster. He exhales again.
Thinks about taking smoke into his lungs. Thinks about drowning on land.
Gets up and heads to the bathroom. Quickly.
He doesn't so much shut the door as he does pull it tight and lean against it. Doesn't even turn the light on, just retreats and retreats quickly because he needs to be somewhere that isn't here. Needs to think about something that isn't dying or whatever happened. He doesn't know they weren't people. Doesn't know what they were dealing with, doesn't know huge chunks of the details there, but that was all something that he presumed he could fill in if he wanted.
And right now, he wants to throw up, so he's knelt over the toilet in the dark. Just waits there.
Samir
Were not for the fact that Sam knows what it is to feel crazy on an ordinary day he might have looked up sharp from his monitors and followed Elijah to the bathroom. He knows what it is to feel like that and he knows what it is to lose control over his body when control is all he feels he has to hold onto. Before they went out in search of the fiends responsible for the monster in the park he had cracked a quip about vomiting. Sam is used to feeling crazy.
Watching others struggle with their own sanity isn't anything he's used to. He was the crazy one in his previous cabal. He was the one who would bolt out of a room without apparent provocation. The others all had their own flaws sure and they had their own mental cracks. Elijah has his own too.
Sam can respect that.
So the kid goes from talking blowjobs and tequila to leaping up and shutting himself in the bathroom. So Sam gives him until the slamming of the door to turn and watch the the door. To listen and make sure Elijah isn't in there retching or trying to hang himself with the shower curtain.
Elijah has about sixty seconds before Sam feels concern enough to get up and knock on the door. Sixty seconds is more than most people would give him.
The reality hacker exits out of the new game he started and pulls up the old one. Fuck Suleiman.
Elijah
There's a sort of catharsis that you have when you are doubled over a toilet breathing some sort of chlorinated air. There is a feeling where you sense the cold ceramic close to your skin but not quite and the tingle in your arms when you're leaning too hard on them and he's counting through his head item after item after item. Trying to think of some distraction, trying to think of something that will put this in perspective because he doesn't want to run off and dive into a goddamn bottle or do any number of things-
But he needs a break. He needs a push. Even Sherlock-fucking-Holmes had his vices and they sure as shit weren't all violins and fireside chats.
Breathes in again and the air is cold. Exhales and can feel the ripples on the water- thinks and wonders if it's Emmanuel or Raphael. Confuses fire and water, and knows which scares him more. No longer thinking of drowning when he stands up, turns on the water in the sink that's damned near too hot to put his hands in it, but he splashes his face anyway.
There's a knock on the door- "I'll be out in a figurative minute."
Washes his face. Washes his hands. Steals some of Samir's mouthwash and washes the taste of whatever the fuck out of his mouth. He comes back out and he's decidedly less panicked.
"Let's get stoned. And if it's weird, you can totally call me Renee."
Samir
Within a matter of seconds Sam's expression goes from confused to concerned to committed to not asking. If it's weird he can call the kid Renee. Sam does not speak French. He speaks Spanish and Arabic and is starting to get a grasp on Mandarin Chinese. He isn't a slouch. He just relies on his current location to dictate his linguistic needs.
One day he will be able to execute a program that will allow him to understand everything regardless of tongue. Today is not that day.
Today is however a day that he happens to have a joint rolled and stored in the top drawer of his desk. He doesn't have to conjure up the paper or the stash. He levels his gaze at his guest. No seduction or suggestion in it. Sex is not an escape for Sam. He is an attractive man and he is nice to Elijah and he is interested in what he has to say. Likes sitting and talking to him. Recognizes that he needs time and space to get his shit together. That his shit is not together right now.
So he removes the joint and a lighter from the drawer and stands to drag the loveseat back three paces from the computer desks. Give them some space. No point opening a window to air the place out when he can make the smoke and the smell disappear with a few keystrokes.
"I'm not gonna call you Renee," Sam says.
Elijah
"Cool," he says, plops down on the couch but doesn't actually invade Samir's space for some strange reason - strange because he had just espoused an interest in going down on the dude but not in getting into his space because... well, because. He rode a fine line between needing the comfort of another human being who knew what the fuck was going on and needing nobody to ever touch him ever again and to keep their goddamned hands to themselves.
Except, of course, he realizes that Samir is about to move the couch and the time mage has impeccably horrible timing and he rolls off and gets to his feet. Lets Sam do the moving because he is still getting his bearings from rolling off the couch.
"My middle name's Renee, by the way, it was supposed to be René, but my mom was doped all to Hell and the nurse didn't speak French," Elijah clarifies.
Samir
Elijah is not smooth. His rolling has Sam stopping what he's doing to ensure the other man isn't going to break his nose on the beat-to-shit hardwood floor. They settle after a moment. Moving the couch doesn't take much effort. Sam isn't going to sit down until his guest does.
"That's alright." This to the matter of Elijah's middle name. "My grandparents are from Gujarat. My middle name would've been my father's name, but my mother doesn't know who my father is, so... I don't have one."
He holds out the joint and the lighter. Guest gets first toke.
Elijah
[Gujarat? int+academics]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 8, 8) ( success x 2 )
Elijah
Truth be told, Elijah has no idea that his father is not his father. He has no idea that his mother had an affair with some slender blond thing that worked on a construction site and came home when her husband wouldn't. He had no idea about it, because it hadn't mattered to Charles Poirot. It didn't matter to him that his wife had cheated and strayed, Elijah was his son because fatherhood wasn't the same as being a sperm donor.
Elijah takes a seat on the couch, though, doesn't put his feet on it because it would be rude. Samir conjured a couch out of thin air for him. He would much rather be respectful of his space and just hang out. Takes the joint between his fingers, takes a long, steady hit and holds it like he's done this before- probably within the week, all things said. He's a young, attractive, cisgendered white male who came from an upper middle class family. He's set to do any number of things to press against the seams lest he have to think too hard about the privilege he's oblivious to.
And let's not mince words, he's privileged. Even in awakened society, he's privileged. Not everyone has someone to sit up with them when the more well-versed mages in town commit atrocities and you need a break to process.
Hands the joint over. Starts to think that, maybe, he doesn't want to have sex. Maybe he just wants to talk, feels pretty damn lucky for a second. Then two. Then three and five eightthirteentwentyonethirtyfour.
"Where's Gujarat? North or west part of India?"
Samir
As it happens Elijah is in the company of a person who can tell what other people need even if those needs don't coincide with needs he himself could claim to have or harbor. Their kind gravitate towards egocentric and antisocial tendencies but they are both young and they have not yet convinced themselves of their own godlike potential.
One of them is revered by the online community. He could have called up any number of faceless nameless persons to help him in his quest tonight but his quest tonight was not one he undertook on his own. Sam was not the only person who suffered an injustice in the park that night. When Elijah said he wanted adventure the reality hacker sighed and called him out on his bullshit but he did not tell him to go it on his own.
Grace and Kalen are eating udon and contemplating the weight of interring undead creatures to ash when they know at least one of their kind to be Not That Bad.
The word 'vampire' is not in Sam's vocabulary as anything other than a mythology to which some of his kind make reference. It may be a euphemism. So far as he can tell he and Grace helped Kalen torch some Fallen tonight. Doesn't make it easier to stomach. He sat up all night and watched them torture and kill several young people.
"It's, ah..." Sam drags hard on the joint the way smokers drag on cigarettes. It shuts down the part of his brain that won't shut up. He holds the smoke heavy and hot in his lungs and lets it out slow so he won't cough. Hands it back and finishes his thought once the burning in his bronchioles dissipates: "West. West India. Shares a border with Pakistan. They moved to Vancouver when my mom was a baby."
Elijah
"I've never been to Vancouver. I've been to Quebec, though- my mom's from there... are you from Canada or was there another big countrywide shift in the cards for you guys?"
Takes the joint back if it's passed, will take another hit until they are out. He's engaged, and there's something to be said about Elijah- he liked people. He really did like people, liked what they were capable of. Liked the things that made them who they were. Liked their drie and wants and needs and the little idiocyncratic pieces of bullshit that made human beings fantastic because they were.
He adjusts on the couch, takes a second to look at the other young man. The one who also did not think of himself as some godchild. No, they were just people. Two dudes sitting on a couch smokingpot.
Elijah adjusts.
"Dude, your couch is pokey as shit."
Which will be something he revisits as they get progressively more and more stoned. They'll talk, maybe Elijah will tell him stories or spout off poetry or ask him more about the code of Reality, even though he doesn't quite understand what it means because it's important to try and understand people. There's rules, there's protocols. There's shit you have to do when you're coding, that much he knew.
He might talk about poems, might tell Samir ghost stories that don't actually have scary points, they're just literal ghost stories. He's met and heard a lot of ghosts, some of them were interesting people. Probably keeps from talking about the dead, though. Probably just talks books or something and the marvels of how Samir can fucking will furniture into existence.
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