Logs:At a Crossroads
| At a Crossroads | |
|---|---|
| Dramatis Personae | |
| In Absentia | 2023-08-01 "What do you want to come out the other side?" |
| Location
<NYC> Le Carrefour, Le Bonne Entente - Astoria, Queens | |
Above the bustle of the clerestory restaurant, tucked at the base of the bell tower, this indoor garden and library is out of the way and easily overlooked, sure to become a favored "hidden gem" of travel guides. Low bookshelves full of mythology, fairy tales, and folklore ring the central elevator shaft and the stairway spiraling around it like an easily navigable labyrinth. Beyond these are plants in a variety of tastefully whimsical containers, each with its own engraved plaque giving the common name, the scientific name, and their significance to various traditional stories and practices. The walls have been done away with so that the room extends beyond the doric columns into a surreal rooftop garden enclosed with glass stretching between the tower's massive buttresses. The arrangement of plantlife becomes less formal as one moves out into the four arms of the conservatory, visible containers giving way to beds and terraces and eventually landscapes carefully cultivated to look wild. There is plentiful seating scattered along the paths and just off of them, from proper benches to picturesque logs to surprisingly comfortable boulders. By day, myriad butterflies dance amongst the enchanted vegetation, and likewise moths by night. A shallow stream weaves throughout, feeding ponds that host plants of their own alongside fish, frogs, and turtles. Wandering the outer edges of the conservatory, one could almost feel lost in a mystical forest but for the stunning views of the cityscape beyond the glass. It's late, and technically, the conservatory is closed. Not that anyone seems to be keeping especial watch; the doors are open, occasional soft lights glowing along the paths or in the treetops. Aside from the quiet burble from the stream, it's quiet in here right now, the room's lone current occupant making very little sound. Wendy has tucked herself down by the side of one path, sitting cross-legged beneath a tree and studying a thick tangle of passionflower vine thoughtfully. Polaris's approach might not be all that noticeable to anyone else until her soft footfalls came into earshot, but as empty as the conservatory is, something probably tipped Wendy off well before that. It is probably little surprise that she finds her way unerring to Wendy, as well. She's dressed as if for work in black jeans and a black babydoll shirt with two horseshoe magnets overlapping to form a heart, stompy black boots and her usual array of metal accessories. Her hair is newly clipped into a bob, medium length in front and notably shorter in back, a style she hasn't worn since before Prometheus. She gives a small, awkward wave as she coasts to a stop on the path beside Wendy. "What's that?" She indicates the vine, sinking down to one knee to peer at it herself. "A shelter for fairies," Wendy replies, without looking up. She reaches a hand out, fingers very gently nudging some of the vines slightly to one side; behind there is a tiny and finely crafted house tucked into the growth. A zebra longwing is halfway through the process of emerging from a chrysalis that hangs from the roof of the little sculpture. "There's a lot hiding in here." Her eyes cut to the side, then back to the butterfly. "Your hair got gay again." "Whaaaaat!" Polaris's exclamation is hushed as she stoops lower to peer at the butterfly-in-progress. "I was gonna say just from walking in I absolutely get why you love this place, but. Well, there's always a lot I don't get, too." She drops down to sit on the mossy ground, one leg pulled up to her chest, her arm curled around that knee. "My hair's always been gay," she objects mildly. "It just got really tangled last week and I got fed up. It's nice and cool, though..." She combs her fingers through her hair and it falls easily back into place. "...and gay. So um. How've you been?" "Anahita curates this place. -- No matter how much I watch it, I don't get how a goo knows to become a butterfly." Wendy rests her elbows on her knees now and her chin on her loose-knit fingers. "Gayer." It's a mild concession, followed by a quizzical tilt of her head. Eyes a little wider, innocently: "What's tangled?" "Yeah, I heard she was groundskeeping here, but I didn't imagine this kind of grounds." Polaris looks around at the veritable indoor forest, up at the treetops and the starry sky beyond the glass, then back down at the tiny house. "I bet she'd tell you some wild-ass bullshit about the mystery of metamorphosis if you asked." Her wide hazel eyes flick back up to level a flat look at Wendy. "'Tangled' is like when you're at the beach all day and don't rinse the salt out of your hair, then you run your fingers through it and it catches. For like, a second." She riffles her own hair again, no catching. "Except it stays that way until you comb it out with a ton of conditioner. Or chop it off. You know I fully thought you were serious the first time you ever asked me that" "We didn't go to the beach much when I was little. Maybe I was serious." Wendy tips her head up to follow Polaris's gaze. "I didn't imagine most of this when I heard Lucien was building a hotel. Maybe I should have. It's a good place to metamorphosize." "It's a lot more impressive that you didn't imagine it." Polaris sets her chin down on her knee. "Maybe he should have named it La Chrysa...lide." She pronounces her otherwise decent guess at the French word as though it were Spanish. "What are you metamorphosizing into?" Wendy purses her lips, eyes still fixed upward now on the leaves overhead. "Do you think a caterpillar knows what it's going to be when it melts itself into goop?" Her brows knit uncertainly, and her shoulders have gone slightly hunched when she drops her chin back to her knuckles. "I feel like a lot of us are in the goo stage right now. I don't know what comes out the other side." The furrow of her brows might suggest that Polaris is giving the question serious consideration, though to Wendy's eyes she's contemplating something a lot more distressing than insectoid existentialism. "I don't think caterpillars know a lot beyond like, which leaf to cronch." She hunches in on herself, too, just a little. "Lucky for them, I guess. Metamorphosis is kinda terrifying." Her wire rings slither from her fingers and flow together and re-form into butterfly with intricate filigree wings, which flutters through the air between them. "What do you want to come out the other side?" Wendy lifts a hand, catching the butterfly on a forefinger. "Well, I don't think I'd wear wings very well." She blinks hard, staring at the little wire sculpture. "I don't know. I thought this would feel like --" She shakes her head slowly, toes curling down hard against the bed of her sandals. "I don't know what I thought," comes out softer, just above a whisper. Her eyes are still fixed on the filigree wings. "...Are they going to wake up." Polaris takes a deep breath, holds it, and lets it back out. "Yeah, I don't know what I thought, either. It just doesn't really feel like we won." The wirework butterfly's wings quiver as her shoulders pull in tighter. "I don't know. Charles--Xavier has been trying since the raid." Reluctantly, her voice carefully even, "They might not." "I'm sorry." Wendy's fingers curl in against her palm, tight; it dislodges the footing of the butterfly as she drops her hand. "I never..." She's fidgeting idly with the hem of her skirt as she watches the real butterfly clinging to the shreds of its pupa, crumpled wings just starting to expand. "It's messed up. If neither of them --" She pauses, frowns uncertainly, amends: "-- none of them. Were here to see..." When she breaks off it's with an incongruous laugh, small and half-seeming to startle herself. "Oh. Jax did have a sword, in the end. Didn't even have to use the lasers." The steel butterfly hovers uncannily in the air for a moment before Polaris resumes animating it as though the flap of its wings were actually necessary to keep it aloft. "He did," she says, kind of faintly. "Someone had to be the one-man cavalry. I helped make that sword." The butterfly's wirework frame flows and reshapes itself into a sword that hovers above the palm of Polaris's hand. "Well. Decorate it. There are a lot people who should gotten to see it..." She frowns and looks past her floating artwork to Wendy, suddenly alert and uncertain as to why. "None of them?" "It's a beautiful sword." Wendy turns her head, looking over towards Polaris with a faintly quizzical look. "Dawson. Hive. DJ. Whoever they've all --" She turns a hand up, holding her palm below the hovering butterfly without quite catching it again. "Become. They gave so much to this fight." Polaris sits up. "Become?" she echoes. The butterfly stops mid-air, eerily still for an instant. Then flaps once more and settles gracefully in Wendy's palm. "I think Dawson had faith we would win, eventually, but he gave...everything." "While I was watching your training, I thought..." Beneath the butterfly, her hand is trembling faintly. "When DJ first got here I didn't even want to be in the same room as him. It was hard and it was weird and I -- but he's changed. I couldn't see it when it was just Hive, he'd always been Dawson in some way I didn't get, but --" Her brows are knitting, and she studies Polaris thoughtfully for a moment. "-- Don't you see it? You've spent much more time with them. I know DJ's always looked like Dawson, but he never used to be him. Not like he is now." The butterfly goes limp in Wendy's hand. "What?" Polaris's eyes are so wide they look almost luminous in the fey light. "Of course he's changed. He's been in a whole different world, and he's been Hive..." She trails off and her eyes lose focus with the intensity of her concentration. "But they were alike in so many ways to begin with..." She does not specify she means DJ and Dawson, but perhaps realizes that would be obvious to Wendy in any case. "I just thought." No trailing off this time, she just sucks in a sharp breath. All she can manage after is a quiet, "Oh God." "Did you not know, I'm sorry, I --" Wendy lowers her hand, setting the inert butterfly gently on a knee. Her eyes have gone a little wider, too. "... does he not know." Polaris hunches her shoulders in tight, and her voice is still very small when she replies, at a delay, "I think they would have told me if they knew. It can be hard to see...changes. From the inside." The butterfly's intricate wings melt and distort into a swallow-tailed shape, their wirework markings reminiscent now of too many eyes. "And you see a lot that other people can't, period." The butterfly flaps its new wings once, slow and experimental. "Are we going to lose him again?" Wendy fixes her eyes on the butterfly, her shoulders hunched, and does not answer. Polaris levers herself off the ground just long enough to re-settle at Wendy's side. "I was about to say it'd be really fucking unfair for him to die twice for this victory, but he'd died a dozen times for it before we ever met him." The shift of her arm is tentative, an invitation to an embrace that she suspects she should have thought through more. "I'm sorry," she whispers, and even she doesn't quite know why. Wendy's shift is just as reflexive -- beginning to lean in towards Polaris's offered embrace, but, then, settling back where she had been. Her knees pull up to her chest, her arms wrapping around them. She doesn't bother to blink away the tears that are forming, gathering bright and wet and taking their time to fall. "About what part of it." Polaris drops her arm, but does not move away again. She starts to mirror Wendy's posture but stops, remaining at least marginally more upright, a solid presence even if her breath flutters with the effort not to cry. She has to think hard before she concludes, "Pushing you away." The butterfly drifts back to perch on her loosely curled fingers. "You didn't push me away," doesn't come as argument but just a quiet and rueful addition; Wendy has accepted this apology, this explanation, with a small heavy nod. "You just stopped doing anything to keep me close. In some ways, that's..." She lets out a heavy breath, her eyes fluttering shut. "I know it comes easier for me. Seeing people. But I never used to feel invisible with you." Polaris buries her face in the crook of her elbow, but replies, only slightly muffled, "It's not like I thought this consciously, but. Maybe I felt like I didn't need to see you. Like you were always there, always would be there. Which was pretty fucking unfair, too." She draws a shaky breath. "It might be too late for me to see Dawson--or whatever they are, or were. Not too late to see you, though." Wendy's breath comes out in a slow hard hff, her face also tipping down against her arms. The hff is followed, zero bits more intelligibly, by a quiet hnngh. When she lifts her head again she fixes her eyes for a moment on the longwing, its wings unfurled, now, and, even if it isn't quite ready for flight, looking filled-out and bright. "Okay." Just that, quiet and simple. She pushes herself slowly to her feet, offering Polaris a hand up as well. "Let's get a..." She trails off, her mouth briefly twisting before she finishes, "Cocoa." Polaris peers at Wendy over her forearm with a jumbled mess of worry and hope, then follows her gaze to the butterfly--the actual organic one. On the back of her hand, the steel butterfly unravels into long strands of wire that slither over and between her fingers, molding themselves with the ease of long practice into fanciful abstract spirals again--with a subtle eye motif here and a suggestion of a wing there. When Wendy rises, she accepts the hand up. "Fuck that noise, let's get--okay, maybe not shit-faced, but..." Her smile is thin and pained but not completely devoid of humor. "...if God has a problem with us getting a drink, They can meet me out back." | |
