Come Sail Away IC Inbox

[crushed_pearls]

Erin's voice mail message is in a weary voice: "Erin Peters. If you called in the middle of the night and I didn't answer, I'm dying. If I pick up and someone on your end isn't dying, they will be shortly. Text otherwise."

Comments

march at some point.

[decrypter]

Has the ship's magic gone haywire, to your knowledge, because reality seems to be slipping in its moorings. The world isn't quite as contained in itself as you'd like to think a world is.

What do you even call this, logically?

[crushed_pearls]

Fell in a hole into a past that is not your own did we?

[decrypter]

I think you would say that random holes in the ship being around and not somehow marked is a form of discrimination. How do you think I ended up dying when we are not in a dangerous sort of situation?

[crushed_pearls]

Yeah pretty sure it violates the Americans With Disabilities Act and also standards set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. That said I would prefer not to do this over text so how do you feel about sushi no one goes to the sushi place except Johnny and Siffleur and that weird fish kid I could do sushi.

[decrypter]

I like sushi. I'll be down there in a little while to give us both time to get there safely.

[crushed_pearls]

Glorious.

Erin proceeds immediately. It will give her time to stack up Several Plates Of Sushi so Helena doesn't need to keep getting up from the table and also because Erin is having a bit of a time and would like to eat about it.

[decrypter]

When Helena arrives, Erin will see the new way of walking she's adopted - smaller steps, a touch more cautious than she was before, before she enters. Thankfully, with how few people come, it's easy to find Erin and coax herself into a chair.

"Please tell me you understand the nature of the magic going haywire around us."

Because that's what this is, right.

[crushed_pearls]

"Not entirely. I've got some observed facts, and some baseless speculation." Erin pushes a plate closer to Helena and keeps eating hr own sushi between thoughts. "Fact one: the rifts are present inside the past as well, and can be used as an exit at any time. Fact two: time does not pass the same between the past you enter and the ship, with time on the ship advancing a few seconds at most that I've seen." She pauses. "...Keeping in mind that I spent two years with Ruby inside one."

The admission is in a very small voice.

[decrypter]

There's a long silence after that, and Erin can see Helena's thoughts going across her face. Confusion, contemplation, but not disbelief, before finally:

"...two whole years? Why?"

[crushed_pearls]

"...Everyone keeps asking me that." Erin props her cheek on her palm. "Hell, even Ruby asked me that and I thought she'd get it. She was...little. Real little. Her sister was barely bigger and practically raising her. Useless fucking dad too busy being depressed that he married a warrior who went out the way warriors go. Stupid. No one who raises a sword dies in their fucking bed. So, I stayed. Gave them someone in their house who could let them not be okay. Learned to cook blind. Loved 'em. I mean, I already loved Ruby but...you know...and then when Ruby went off to school to learn combat I got kicked out."

"...It was a pretty good life, allowing for how sorely I missed everyone here."

[decrypter]

"Oh, Erin."

Her voice is soft, but there's no judgement in it. Just a sympathy there that there really wasn't another option that wasn't leaving Ruby to the whims of fate.

Quietly, she puts her hand on the table, palm up. It's an offer of a touch, but not one to be imposed.

[crushed_pearls]

Erin takes that offer, feeling absurdly grateful for it. Her cheeks burn, not that Helena can see it. "...Anyway. Fact. Three, right? Three: you can physically manipulate the environment of the past, but you can't seem to take it with you. I definitely had some of Ruby's things from her house and they are. Very not here now. And, fact four, the person whose past it was seems to remember both your visit and what I'll call the 'original' timeline, as if both happened. Which brings me to my baseless speculation." Erin squeezes Helena's hand softly. "Visitors have full continuity of memory; hosts have duplicate memories. I think they're dreams, in the sense that a square is a rectangle...fuck wait you don't do shapes...they're dreams the way a haiku is a poem but not a limerick. If you follow?"

[decrypter]

"...Dreams seems like a good way to put it. A dream that echoes over your memory, one of the ones that lingers there."

She leaves one hand in Erin's, using the other to pick up a glass of water to drink.

"Except it doesn't always happen immediately. Sometimes it...takes a bit for the dream to come through."

[crushed_pearls]

"...Think there might be some you're waiting to receive, Helena?"

[decrypter]

"...I don't know. I have things in my head that should be impossible, more dreams than I know what to do with. I have Darcy killing one of those hunters I spoke to you of, I have Max being chased down by a different one, and neither of them should be there. I have people visiting me at my home, meeting my father, I have..."

It's a stronger feeling through the Glamour, something warm, something that makes Helena pause and just consider the weight of it again.

"Years."

[crushed_pearls]

"Sounds like you picked up something you want to keep." Erin quirks a little smile, hums a little hum. "...Does it matter if they really happened, do you think? Or does it matter more who was there, and what they did and said?"

[decrypter]

Putting down her water, her eyes close, debating on if she will or won't tell. But...

"Promise this stays between us?"

A much lighter request for a promise than the heart wrenched one that had come to her before.

[crushed_pearls]

"Until, or unless, you release me from my vow," Erin agrees readily. "...Also the sushi really fucking hits after two years in a forest let me tell you."

[decrypter]

"...Security walked into one of the rifts and found me. And spent a couple of years there, until it followed me to the gates of hell and died for that."

It's very, very softly said.

"I have a very confusing set of memories now, along with all the others, to handle."

[crushed_pearls]

"...Security did come back, right?" Sorry Helena she really needs to make absolutely sure about this one.

[decrypter]

"Yes. I was there when it woke back up here."

If it hadn't...she doesn't want to think about it.

"It's doing fine, now."

[crushed_pearls]

There is an extended and audible sigh of relief. "...With so much to keep straight, when you usually have such an orderly mind...it's gotta be rough. Especially to realize that people close to you saw you before you became the you that you are right now. God...if anyone met thirteen year old me..."

She says, unaware that the narrator is working on that right now.

[decrypter]

"...years, Erin. I know you saw it from one end, and I'm seeing it from the other. What am I supposed to say to that?"

It's a great weight to process.

[crushed_pearls]

"I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say to it either," Erin admits. "Part of me wants to suggest writing it down in case you forget later, but...years."

[decrypter]

"I already did that when I was up the entire night waiting for it to come back, when I realized it was dead and it was my fault for bringing it there. I have pages and pages of a life I'm not sure I even lived, but that I remember like ghosts that left impressions in wax. It makes me realize how much changed. What could have changed. What, perhaps, should have, regardless."

A beat.

"I have to apologize to anyone that got dragged into one of those hunting grounds, though."