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Covered in snow, Halifax wasn't really anything to look at. In fact, it may have made the place look a bit uglier. Of course, that may have been in part to the fact that Corona didn't really care much for winter at all. The biting winds, the temperatures that dipped horrendously low, the mountains of snow that piled up and bogged them down… aside from the fact that on rare occasions it actually made things look nice and pretty, it was an annoying season to deal with.
For the most part though, Halifax was always well travelled. There were already well worn paths into the streets that went every which way. Some prints by the quadruped, some by the bipedalled; the latter was more common. She had come there to get away because she hadn't been out of Inferni for quite some time. Reading, distracting herself, generally fixing what had been turned topsy-turvy in the old mansion there, whatever worked.
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As November drew to an end, Ahren became increasingly detached from the real world. Poe vanished from his world, smiling as she did so. He did not hate her for this, but he knew what it meant. The guitar she had left with him was strapped on his back. Though he was not brilliant with it, he was competent—enough to give them one song before the world ended. It was peculiar to him, in some way, that he had traded the crossbow for an instrument he barely knew how to play.
Coughing and drawing his hand to his mouth, he stepped around a puddle of slush. What caught his attention quite suddenly was the color on his hand. Frowning and rubbing this off, he turned his eyes down and idly toyed with his tongue ring. His mouth still tasted like blood.
A scent caught his attention and the blonde looked up. On the intersection ahead a familiar figure crossed, and he trailed after it until they were within speaking distance. “You’re a bit far from the Waste,” he offered with a smile, joking with her as he seemed to do with everyone he met.
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It wasn't every day that Corona heard someone coming up behind her. The last time someone had, it had been in that dingy hospital where she had been mistaken for the very man who she spied out by glancing over her shoulders to make sure it wasn't a repeat offence. Corona didn't quite make out the guitar strapped to his back at first, though as she slowed down to even out their paces, she noticed it. Smiling faintly, she only shrugged in response to his words.
“I guess so,” she said lamely, “there wasn't much to do around there today. So here I am.” Once again, he seemed well. Definitely better than the last time she had seen him, anyway. “Nice guitar you've got there, though. I didn't know you knew how to play it too,” but maybe it wasn't so different than the violin. Which naturally played away to memories she hadn't thought about for a long time, and that lead her to silently wonder if he still played it too.
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“I didn’t,” he offered, half-glancing over his shoulder. “You tend to pick things up along the way though, da?” A laugh broke from his throat, though he didn’t know why he was laughing. Shrugging slightly, he lifted both palms. The right, still bearing an ages-old scar, moved and touched his temple smartly, while the left gestured to nowhere in particular. “Poe gave it to me in exchange for a viola.” That was half true, at least.
Brushing the back of his hand against his side again, worried she might spot the discolored smudge and recognize it for what it was, he kept talking. “I’m not that good. Can’t play it so long with my arms the way they are.” He couldn’t do much for very long with his arms as bad as they were. It was getting worse with the cold. “You headed anywhere in particular?”
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Her smile broadened at his laugh and she drew her attention away from him and towards the wasting artitecture of the city around them. “I suppose that's true. We've all picked up things along the way.” She hadn't seen Poe for a while, but she didn't mind it either. Poe was a free spirit, much in the sense that the travelling coyotes that had founded Esper Hollow had been. She came and she went as they had. While his comment about his arms absently made her think about the now healed gash that he been on hers, she couldn't really imagine the pain he had to deal with.
“Maybe once spring comes, you'll be able to master it. Then you can be a wandering minstrel and confuse your enemies with song,” she spoke thoughtfully, if not a bit humorously. Being blind in one eye may have fucked up depth perception, but if push came to shove, Corona didn't doubt how much damage a guitar to the head would do. “But no, I'm not really going anywhere in particular. Just wandering around. Trying not to get bludgeoned by anyone while I'm here this time.” Though if that one broad from before came around… she'd be confused this time for sure…
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He was smiling up until she mentioned spring, and then for one brief moment, his face dropped as suddenly as a cloud passing the sun. It was gone as suddenly as it had come, and he hoped she did not catch the slip. A wiry and peculiar smirk crossed his face, and he bared his teeth in something more snarl then grin. Ahren laughed, hair tumbling into his face. “I think they’re all ready plenty confused, pilgrim,” he offered, only then comprehending what she had said after the fact.
Cocking his head and focusing his good eye on her, the blonde frowned slightly. “Bludgeoned? You taking after that brother of yours?” His tone indicated he was talking about Gabriel. Of all his children, it was Gabriel who seemed to bear new scars each time they met.
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weird post is weird. i blame the fact that i'm watching a show about a paraplegic giving birth, haha. D:
[html] let the dogs bite at your ankles
She didn't catch it. Even if she had, she probably wouldn't have pretended to see it. As far as she was concerned, the world was fine. Everything was fine. Things were being even instead of odd. Corona did not want to see it any other way. “No, just getting your leftovers, it seems,” she jested, then meeting his expression with a smile. “Some broad mistook me for you the last time I was here. She had two different coloured eyes. Can't really remember what her name was though, it was a while ago. I was too busy trying to make sure nobody died.” Rhiannon-something, but she couldn't remember if that was her first or her last name.
“She said that you'd tried to kill her or something though,” she said without really thinking about it. “She seemed kind of crazy to me. I knocked her out and tied her up, which is how I found out why she attacked me,” and that point, her tone dropped along with her gaze, “so I asked her how much she valued her life.” But just as that little stumble came and went, she bounced back to a neutral place. “It was kind of weird.”
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He listened. If there was something Ahren had learned to do in the madness, it was listen. People always talked. People usually lied. But in each syllable, in each breath, there was a revealing truth. The blonde, with that peculiar black streak in his bangs, kept smiling as she explained the situation. Someone he had tried to kill with mismatched eyes. One corner of his mouth twitched, revealing off-white teeth, and his eyes were full of mirthless laughter. “Yeah, I know who you mean,” he said, and then hooked one arm around her shoulder. “She and I had…well, some words, a few I would say, and one thing just led to another.” A shrug and a roll of a wrist and then he was smiling all the while, eyes bright and just slightly mad.
“Come on, I’ll get you a drink.” Without waiting for a response, he half-led her down the street, turning sharply at another intersection and landing them right in the middle of an old Irish-styled pub. Yellowed and crumbling photographs lined the walls, offset by dozens of other odds and ends. Ahren wasted no time shrugging the guitar off and sliding behind the bar and perusing the bottles that had not been broken or opened. “It’s impressive,” he offered absentmindedly. “, that humans went to such lengths to drink poison.”
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Yeah, just some words. Corona hadn't quite been there before, but she knew just what some words could do. Sometimes they were rage-inducing, sometime they sparked paranoia and dread. Sometimes they were the best things ever uttered. She didn't say anything, only shook her head passively and followed him towards the dingy bar. Halifax had a lot of them, but she had never really dabbled in them. Drinking didn't really impress her any, but she wasn't about to turn him down either.
Paying momentary attention to the old photographs, Corona could only imagine what kind of real creatures the humans had been as he fiddled around. The faint clinking of glasses and bottles didn't make the silence awkward in the slightest and she turned eventually from the pictures and placards on the wall to the dark-stained wood of the bar counter. Slipping quietly between two of the stools, she leaned over to watch him peruse. “And yet here we are, imitating them,” she mused softly. “We drink their drinks, study their philosophies, learn their medicine and read about their histories.”
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He drew two bottles, and put them on the counter. The whiskey and wine had kept their color despite the years of neglect. After searching for a wine opener, he managed to find one in the miscellaneous supplies behind the counter and handed it to his daughter. Coughing and shaking his hair out of his face, he twisted the top off the whiskey and took a healthy swig. The taste was familiar and welcomed, and it warmed him from the throat to the belly. Ahren grimaced and coughed again, and then took another drink to settle his throat, however slight it was.
“I think it’s because they fascinate us,” he said, realizing suddenly he hadn’t eaten in days. “Monkeys with no teeth and no claws managed to build all of this—“ a gesture to the building around them, to outside. “—and then destroy themselves.” The blonde shook his head again, and took another swig. “It’s a funny world we live in.”
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“They are fascinating,” Corona remarked as she briefly looked over the label on the wine bottle before opening it. “But sometimes I wonder if history will repeat itself. Or if we'll follow in their footsteps.” She doubted such a thing would happen in their time, but it was always a possibility. They could master firearms beyond what they had. Make their own. Figure out electricity and use that to their advantage. It had always been a game of survival and as it were, the world that they were living in was still behind the times. Most of them will ran around without clothes, most of them still fought with tooth and claw.
“This place isn't so funny though, at least not to me,” she continued on after she had taken a drink. She didn't consider its taste, though it was enjoyable. “Overseas… France, that was a funny place. Everyone prattling about in their clothes and speaking in tongues. You know, I read in one of those books that man wrote that our ancestors weren't actually all that intelligent. We were supposed to be simple, yet have some sort of complex hierarchy like the rest of the world. Yet we evolved, somehow.” That to say whether or not their so-called evolution was that at all, or jus a by-product of nature playing its own little game.
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He felt the alcohol going to his head, though it would take far more to get him completely smashed. The alcoholic he was, and had been, had created a tolerance. He knew this, and he knew better then to do what he was doing, but addicts are fragile. Lazily, he focused his attention on her, and shrugged again. “I don’t think its evolution,” he offered, electing to take a seat atop the bar instead of the stool. “Mutation, maybe. Something went wrong with our brains and we wound up like this.”
Laughing lightly and shaking his head again, his addicts hands found the tobacco in his pouch and produced the case he had stolen and taken to using. “I do think we’re following them,” he said between his teeth, lighting a cigarette. “In some way,” he exhaled. “Stealing what they had, making it ours. I don’t know. Maybe we’re just looking for ways to destroy ourselves.”
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Mutation was a likely theory as well, she knew. If the humans died out for whatever reason, then they had probably gotten a surge of everything. Land, prey, access to things they shouldn't have been in. All it took were a male and a female with the right genes and then it all went down the drain. Adam and Eve, whatever or whoever they were. Creation and evolution had never meant much to her. She sighed contentedly, leaning against the counter quietly as he spoke. Her expression did little to change, expect for the end.
“But why would we want to destroy ourselves? We're at the top of the food chain now, we've got every reason not to destroy ourselves.” Although if they certainly headed down the same path as the humans, tit for tat, then perhaps they would destroy themselves. But she didn't believe it would get that way, not any time soon. “I doubt we'd be able to destroy ourselves in the way that they did themselves. We were here before they were, as far as I'm concerned.” To that, she could drink. They were far more adaptable than man and from the sound of things, far more flexible and compatible with things.
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Why? Ahren had never been able to answer that question. Wise men and philosophers had never been able to answer that question. The hybrid dying out in the forest had never been able to answer that either. The voice in his head offered nothing but silence; nothing except for the same thing it had told him when he had seen his son. A mouthful of whiskey silenced it, and he seconded the notion with a drag from the tobacco.
Perhaps it was reason she was arguing, perhaps some sense of the truth of instinct and survival. It was a mutation that drove people to self-destruction. Something drove them—that was for damned sure. “I don’t know. My father destroyed himself. Something else went wrong in the brain, maybe. Something didn’t connect, or connected wrong.” He shrugged, and swallowed another mouthful. Perhaps, in some small way, he was destroying himself as well.
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Maybe she had lucked out on most of the crazy that seemed to flood everyone's gene pools. Maybe it was because she had always put distance between things or just accepted it as normalcy. Psychology was interesting enough on its own, but she had never dabbled in it too deeply. She didn't want to be able to play connect the dots so easily when someone started acting foolish. They were all mad as a March hare, that's probably what the answer could be. “Misery said that it was the cancer that killed him,” she replied, “but if he had cancer, then it was probably from his own choices.”
She had never known much of anything about her grandfather. She didn't always quite know or understand her father either. Or her mother. Or her siblings and possibly herself from time to time. “But I guess I can't really say because I never knew him,” she said offhandedly, shrugging. “People behave strangely when they're going to die. Or they want to die.” There was always something a little bit off, something that never presented until the very last moment and by then, they'd just given up. Thrown it all away.
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He drank, though not for his father. He drank because that was something he found release it, as temporary as it was. Ahren had forgotten the face of his father. Mab had told him that, before he had gone, in some arcane reference he did not understand. The whiskey tumbled through his mouth and into his belly, and it settled there uneasily, heavily. It was going to his head, crossing that line that allowed him to put down that ever present guard, if only for a time. “Cancer, yeah. He was crazy. Completely fucking crazy,” Ahren drawled on, his accent changing as he continued, pausing only to take a long drag on the cigarette.
“He kidnapped me from my mother. I don’t know why. He hated me. Used to get real fucking high and smack me around. Y’know,” he continued, taking another drag. “I went colorblind ‘cause of him, I think. One day I could see color, and the next there wasn’t anything. Except red. I can see red.” He focused his eyes on the wine, cigarette burning in his hand. “Did Misery tell you how he kicked my ass out of Chimera?”
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She took another drink and was generally a slower drinker than he was. She wanted clarity though, just to hear what was coming out of his mouth. And what did come out of his mouth was nothing that she had heard before. Snippet and pieces of a past that had made him into who he was. More odds and ends that she would remember for reasons that she did not understand why. But to see the colour red was an interesting thing to be left with and that alone was probably enough to drive a man mad. To know the world one way and to live it in another was something that she hoped not to find out, at least visually.
“She never spoke about him much. I think the only time she ever really mentioned him was when we fought when I was kid,” she answered, almost like a drone. Without thought, though she was thinking about that time. Things could have been a lot worse. At least she had never had the sense knocked out of her by anyone in her immediate family. “Is that how you ended up in Inferni? You met her that way, didn't you?” Funny, how a chain of events lead to things. Throw out a boy, make him be a man too soon. Take a few links out of his life and see how short it becomes.
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Ahren’s eyes remained unfocused, and it took him a minute to register her words. The mechanical motion of the cigarette rising and falling, as his lungs followed suit, was so engrained in his system it was unavoidable. “No,” he said, furrowing his brows together. “I met her before that.” A vague warmth cut across his chest, reminding him of scars buried beneath the fur, beneath the thing he had become. He finished the cigarette, stamped it out in a nearby ashtray, and toyed idly with his necklace. “I went to my mother’s church. Then Inferni.”
He coughed again, then took a drink. Once again, he drew a cigarette, lit it, and continued. “I had to burn down Damian’s cabin. Kidorah didn’t trust me. So I did that. I think that helped break him, in some way.” Shrugging again, he dropped his head into his right hand and shut his eyes. “The last time I saw him was when he chased me out. They didn’t even tell me he was dead for weeks.” There was not regret in his tone, but he had never understood why it had taken so long for someone to let him know.
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She thought idly of the church he had mentioned. She couldn't remember whether or not she had ever gone in it or not, but she had remembered it to be a place that he had often went. He had always been coming and going, even then. It still interested her, even though it was really a sad sort of story. She didn't offer anything at first, only stared blankly at her bottle of wine for a moment to mull things over. She couldn't quite imagine how he must have felt, if he had felt anything at all towards it at that point in time.
“Did it upset you when you found out? Or were you happy about it?” Even if he had been a horrible father, he was still his father. He had played some role, some sort of pushing hand that set him off down the road. She let it sink for a moment, and then delved down another topical road that was looming in the distance. The parts that she remembered clearly and easily. “I know Segodi made you leave Inferni after Baneesh died… but how'd you end up back in Chimera?” He hadn't been there too long, if she remembered, when she had come there as well.
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He coughed again, heavily, and then leaned over the back of the bar to spit. It was marred red, something he recognized as a problem, though chose to ignore. “Ach, I don’t know,” he said, sitting back up and arching his back. It popped, and quieted as he settled back. “Not like we could have reconciled, or anything.” Another drag on the cigarette, another shot of whiskey. If Corona had ever doubted her father was an addict, these terrible signs were all too present on this gray, blustery day.
“Mab,” he answered flatly. “Mab found me in the city and told me I had to go back. Said she couldn’t find a better man.” Even today, he remembered her face that day. Remembered her one bad eye that had since healed, the way she had looked so relieved when she gave him that damned necklace, and how her eyes were pressing him with a secret warning. Chimera was a monster. Chimera will try to destroy you. “Pack didn’t think so. Aiji was there, and I came out with what I had done. You wanna see people’s true colors, you don’t keep anything in the dark. S’how my arms got all fucked up, anyway.” Another drink, another drag.
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