Logs:Room for Amazing

Room for Amazing
Dramatis Personae DJ, Polaris	2022-08-25 "I'm glad to be here making the world better with you."
Location <GA> Forest Defender Camp - South River Forest, Atlanta
The barricades blocking access to the forest have grown in both number and sophistication over the months. Most prominent is an overturned, graffiti-covered truck that had been sent to haul away the other barricades until the defenders managed to disable it and chase away the crew accompanying it. Nearby is the colorful little village housing said defenders, the tents lighting up one by one as dusk deepens. The tree-sits, ranging from makeshift portaledges to actual tree houses, are still visible against the twilit sky. Dinner is in progress at the mess pavilion, and as usual there's conversation and substances to share around the communal fire pit. Polaris is perched atop the truck, wearing a magenta shirt adorned with a molotov cocktail filled with stars and galaxies, gray convertible cargo pants, and heavy black combat boots. The steel link cuffs around her wrists are as usual the most obvious of her ferrous accessories, most of the others being crafted from intricate woven wire. Her hair has grown quite long and she's unraveling the braid that has confined it all day, but not paying a whole lot of attention to the work of her fingers as she gazes off at the distant Appalachian Mountains, still backlit by the setting sun. Here among the motley crew of aging hippies and bandana-masked punks, earnest young activists with fire in their voices, weathered grandmothers with fire in their eyes, DJ, in his sturdy boots and jeans and short-sleeved plaid button-up, has been blending in perhaps more than he ever has yet managed to back in New York. Around the firepit conversation flows in easy time with the intoxicants; DJ has been partaking heavily of the former and not at all of the latter. There's a flush in his cheeks all the same and a brightness in his eyes when he flutters over, settling quiet and light down on the truck beside Polaris. He has a pair of bowls held somewhat precariously in one hand, a hefty serving of chili and rice in both. He settles on the truck with one leg crooked upward and one hanging down over the side, setting one bowl beside himself and offering the other to Polaris as his eyes follow hers out toward the mountains. Though her eyes are not fast enough to track his movement, Polaris is smiling when DJ arrives. "Thank you." She shakes her hair out in glossy green waves over her shoulders and accepts the bowl. "Me and Wendy spent the first few years of our uh...career up in those mountains." The spoon in her bowl starts slowly mixing the chili with the rice on its own. "Did a lot of stuff like this, actually." She waves her free hand vaguely at their environs. "Except with shitty gear and shittier boundaries." Her smile softens when she glances over at DJ. "Are you gonna miss all this?" "Spent the last few years of mine up in them, too." DJ's eyes are lingering on the mountains wreathed in sunset glow, his arm curling up around his shin. His teeth have caught at the inside of his cheek when he looks back around the camp -- the smoke curling up from the fire pit, supporters sending meals up to the platforms in the trees, the cross-marked medic tent where he's been spending so much time -- and his breath comes back out in a slow shiver. There's a small crooked smile on his face when he hitches a shoulder, turning his attention away from the bustle and to the slow motion of Polaris's spoon. "I mean, there's gonna be plenty of work to do wherever we go." "It's so beautiful up there," Polaris says dreamily. "I love cities, but they're noisy. It's a relief when the loudest thing I can feel is Earth." She gives DJ a searching look. "I mean. Yeah, definitely! It's just--I guess it feels like this is more your speed." She bumps his shoulder gently with her own, then finally starts in on her food. Thoughtfully, "Though hiding from a genocidal government is probably a more intense rural experience than like. Blockades and encampments. Was your mutant haven anything like this?" "Nah. You'd be surprised at how often hiding from a genocidal government was peaceful." DJ's leg slips down to join the other dangling off the side of the truck. "Our mutant haven was --. We were out on Jackson's farm, you know? I don't know if you've met his -- well." He bows his head, eye scrunching up as his hand lifts to scrub fingers in a path against the side of his head. "... don't know if his folks here are much like they were at home, but they worked hard to give us all a nice place. Them and Polaris the girls and Hive and Wendy and Lily and Joshua and Spence and a rotating cast of refugees and livestock. Wasn't like this. It was farm chores and shabbat dinners and family home evenings and..." He blinks, looking abruptly away out toward the mountains again. His jaw tightens, grinding only a brief moment before relaxing into a small smile. "What does the earth feel like out here?" Polaris raises her eyebrows. "Dystopian YA lied to me. Again." She tenses subtly, her shoulders drawing in ever so slightly. "That sounds really nice, actually. Aside from the whole--genocide. Thing. Anyway that tracks because the Hollands on this side are pretty frakking amazing. They're godparents to all the labrats, pretty much." Her gaze drifts along the dark ridgeline. "My lab didn't do decompression on the farm, but Dawson brought me to visit a couple times. I'm glad they had your backs. I imagine you must have been away a lot? Despite being well-staffed in the badass teleporting freedom fighters department." At the question she tilts her head slightly, closes her eyes, and goes still. Not eerie or preternatural, just comfortably still. "There's a big field line, right over there..." She stretches her hand out to the north and sweeps an arc across the darkening sky. "It feels...powerful and steady. Like standing knee deep in the shallows of a huge river, and being psionically linked to the water." Her nose crinkles as she squeezes her eyes shut harder. "If I really concentrate, I can feel some of the smaller fields that touch it--even if they're way out of my range." She opens her eyes, brows lifting again. "Huh. I've gotten better at that, too." "You could write your own," DJ suggests lightly. "Too much dystopia focuses on fighting, not nearly enough on intentional communities." His fingers pluck at his jeans, his eyes lowering and his voice softer. "That -- does sound like them." He lies back, hand tucked behind his head and his eyes tracing the path Polaris's hand describes against the sky. There's a faint brush against her mind, soft and sighing like wind rustling through a swaying curtain of leaves. DJ has gone still, too, his breathing slower and his gaze now fixed rapt on Polaris's face rather than the evening sky or mountains beyond. "I think you're stronger than you really know." Polaris presses back into the psionic touch with a soft physical sigh. Her grief and anxiety are distant whispers beneath the nostalgic comfort of the encampment, the argent desire--for DJ or Hive or both--to which she's grown accustomed, and her bright wonder at the glimmering curve of geomagnetic field lines. "I hope you're right. Sometimes I feel like I can move the world, other times it's like I'm tiny and insignificant..." She drops her hand to the steel chasis of the truck, alive to her senses even though the machine is dead, and looks down at DJ. "...and sometimes it's both, you know?" It isn't a rhetorical or perfunctory 'you know'. "Yeah." DJ's voice is soft, and echoed by a quiet sense of affirmation rippling up against Polaris's thoughts. "I think it's always both. I think we need to be able to hold both at once. We can change the world -- build Zion here -- we have to try. But we can't be so arrogant to think that it's our world to control." His eyes drift back upward, picking out the first faint stars appearing against the darkening sky. "I'm glad to be here making the world better with you." Polaris bites her lower lip. "It is tempting to think like that sometimes, and I can't always blame it on the crazy. But I don't know how anyone can look at the universe--I mean really look at it, and not get at least a little perspective back." Her gaze turns up again, but only momentarily before snapping back to DJ. She isn't startled, exactly, but perhaps did not expect to hear it put quite that way. "Me too." She sets her bowl aside and flops down next to DJ, eyes tracking the filigree of smaller geomagnetic field lines criss-crossing the sky, even though she cannot see them. "And I know it's complicated, but I also want find--make a home for you." This is quiet, by her standards, and she glances aside at him, her eyes wide and sincere. "With you. Wherever we go." "Lotta people don't really look at it, do they?" DJ falls quiet after this. His eyes are fixed steadily up, his breathing slower. The soft shiver-sigh of his minds is a quiet thing, faint and wistful. For a stretch he is quiet, before a lopsided smile breaks across his face. "I'm sure the future's got a lot of places to go." He sits up, his untouched food forgotten on the roof of the truck as he looks back in the direction of the mountains silhouetted dark now against the sky. His head tips in their direction. "This evening, though, you want to go out there? The mountains are gorgeous on nights like these." "I think a lotta people don't know how to look." Polaris's mind drifts wordlessly between the majesty of the sky above and the brief tightness in her chest when she looks away from DJ--for once not bothering to analyze it too deeply, just letting it pass instead. When he sits up she rolls onto her side. But then her eyes go wide once more with a thrill of delight and she shoves herself abruptly upright. "Oh gosh yes please that would be amazing!" "Not that I'd encourage anyone to live through torture or genocide, but I do think it gives you a leg up on stepping out of yourself every once in a while." The dry amusement that curls through DJ's tone is not entirely his, but then again, it is. As is the quick brightening of his smile, eyes lighting with an uncomplicated joy. He reaches for Polaris's hand as he rises from his perch, a psionic flicker of anticipation presaging the whirlwind melting of the world to come. "It feels good to have some room for amazing."