Logs:Your way was through the sea, your path, through the mighty waters; yet your footprints were unseen.

Your way was through the sea, your path, through the mighty waters; yet your footprints were unseen.
Dramatis Personae Destiny, Leo	2024-03-02 "What do you think of yourself as?"
Location <BOM> Jenner Infirmary - ???
There's a long way yet to go before this place feels at all homey, really, but at least it's clean, now. Food stocked in the kitchen, working power, working plumbing. Here in the infirmary the stores have been fleshed out since their tight-packed Emergency Travel Kits. The bulk boxes of supplies that recently fell off the back of Several Trucks are still being unpacked and catalogued. Leo is crouched at the moment beside a large box of many variously sized syringes, making note in small neat all caps on a clipboard before he starts lining them neatly up in one of the many cabinets. Destiny has gained a reputation among her Brothers for moving gracefully and quietly, to a degree that is sometimes unsettling or at least startling in a haunted place like this. She's living up to it now, though luckily the door's hinges are squeaky enough to alert Leo it's being opened. She's in a blue mandarin collar shirt and pleated, voluminous wide-leg trousers that swish around her ankles like a skirt. She carries a white cane in one hand, just as a walking stick and not a navigational aid, and cradles a glass mason jar against her side with the other. Stopping just inside the door, Destiny tilts her head slightly one way, then the other, then faces Leo. "Do you think of yourself as a healer?" The question sounds mild and curious, not at all like a challenge. And also, not a very normal way to start a conversation with a virtual stranger. Leo looks startled as he glances up, but then, he often seems startled. His brows knit slowly, and he's looking from Destiny to the mason jar and then back down to the box in front of him. After a small pause, he resumes carefully tucking the boxes of syringes away. His brows stay deeply furrowed. "Do you need a healer?" Destiny hums thoughtfully. "No," she concludes, "not yet." She taps the end of her stick on the floor sharply, then walks over to the counter beside the disused computer workstation and sets the jar down. "I made ginger syrup. It is good medicine, but I am no healer." The cant of her head this time seems more like a gesture and less like listening. "I don't know if there is a place for it here. I thought I should ask one." "I'm only -- doing inventory." Leo glances to the jar again. "There's a lot of good medicine in the kitchen, I think. At least, it's often my first stop. If I'm not feeling good." He rocks back on his heels, closing the cabinet door. "What do you think of yourself as?" "That is very true." Destiny smiles gently. "I will put this in the kitchen. It works on pancakes as well as upset stomachs. She considers the question momentarily, her fingers tracing idly over the three bands of masking tape neatly circling the jar. "Destiny," she says finally, her smile pulling sharper and more mischievous. "I am a seer, a meddler, a warrior, a wife, and a mother. But I think of myself as Destiny. It is easier to keep track, that way. What do you think of yourself as?" Leo's brows hike upward, but a tentative smile is echoing Destiny's. "Is it? All by itself that seems like. A lot to keep track of." He is adding a label to this cabinet door, printed clear and neat. Then pushing slowly to his feet, setting the clipboard on the counter. "Did the seeing come first, or the meddling?" His eyes lower at her question, and his laugh is a kind of tentative one, too. "Oh -- oh. I'm -- still doing inventory." "Inventory is vital work." Destiny sounds absolutely sincere about this. "Though not often work for which I am best suited. Would you mind labeling this for those who can read what you write?" She does not hand Leo the jar, merely sets it down closer to him. "I am not so very sure, now. The future comes easily to me, perhaps too easily, but the past..." The slight sidelong tip of her head has the same effect of a very shallow, one-sided shrug. "...has passed. Like most, I contain multitudes, but they, too, see their own possibilities..." She sweeps her hand forward, her eye changing to focus much farther ahead than the wall behind Leo. "...and on and on. I find do it easier to keep track of Destiny than Destiny, the Seer. But your way has advantages, too." Leo slides the jar closer. His lips twitch, a faint amusement in his voice as he starts to write its label. "Oh! Yes. Most people do." His brows are creasing as he attaches syrup, ginger to the side of the jar. He taps the butt end of his sharpie lightly against the lid, shaking his head slowly. "Has it? Pass...ed. I mean. We still. It still." He's very much looking at the wall, now, at a faded splotch of stain darker on the dingy yellowing paint. "I mean. What is the future without it?" "Thank you." Destiny gives a shallow but gracious bow. "Maybe that is a matter of terminology. I do also think of the past as a sort of mythology for explaining -- or obfuscating -- the present. In that sense it is here, just another part of the present. The past may change, but it can produce no new possibilities." She tilts her head the other direction. "When I try to see the past as a sequence of events it...looks wrong. Flat. Unreal." "Hmm." It's a quiet sort of hum, a little pensive, a little unconvinced. Leo sets the jar back down closer to Destiny, tapping lightly at the side of the jar once he does. "Maybe," he echoes diffidently, "that is a matter of terminology." He's picking up the box he'd emptied of syringes, carefully slicing at the tape so he can flatten it down. "As a sequence of events..." He trails off, starting to fidget with the edge of the cardboard box and then putting it aside before he can bend it too much out of shape. "History books flatten the past. I think. It is only real through us. But so is the future, isn't it?" "I am not a big reader in any case, though it is easier now than when I was young." Destiny reaches unerringly for the jar, after Leo has tapped it, though she just scoops it against her side, does not yet pick it back up. "Oh yes, it is. At least, it is no more real or unreal. It is my perception that differs, and perception is a powerful thing." She rotates her cane, slow and meditative. "Some say time is a river. I think of it more like an ocean, as such things go. I see all the places that winds, currents, and our own maneuvering can take us in vibrant dynamic color, but of where we have been, only the faint glowing wake." Her smile is small and rueful. "I suppose that is a kind of blindness, too." "Hmm." Less skeptical, this time; there's a new warmth in Leo's voice, a quiet passion that oddly does not jar at all with his assertion: "The ocean is terrifying. So many potential deaths, no matter how experienced the sailor." When he says it, it sounds like praise. So does: "I think it's a kind of insanity, probably. To know it and to sail anyway." Destiny's eyes don't light up, exactly, but they seem to focus on Leo for the first time since she walked into the room. "Probably," she echoes brightly. "It has been too long since we've gone to sea together, but we are avid sailors, Mystique and I. You as well." Perhaps it is a trick of the light, but she looks for all the world like she's studying him. "I think you understand how the same storm that might founder you can also drive you far, if you know how to run before it." She scoops her jar back up. "We should talk sailing sometime, when you are done inventorying." Leo's brows lift quick and startled at this revelation, though he at least keeps the surprise out of his voice. "Oh! Yes, we -- well." His fingers are drumming quick and light against the countertop. "Setting this place in order -- might take a while. The ocean is not going anywhere, though."