Logs:Who Says You Can't Go Home

Who Says You Can't Go Home
Dramatis Personae Lael, Naomi
In Absentia Jax, Harm	2023-08-22 But they's not family.
Location <XS> Lake - XS Grounds
August is drawing towards its end but it's still summer yet -- still hot, still humid, the sun still bright and gleaming where it glitters off the lake. Here on the side of the pier Naomi is drinking in the sun, locs splayed out around her head on the beach towel she's tossed across the wooden boards. She's in high-waisted jean cutoffs and a dark blue crop top with a lightning bolt across the front, scales gleaming across her forehead and the tops of her shoulders, sandals kicked off towards the edge of the pier. From her phone, tucked into a plastic cup to form a tinny speaker, Chris McCarrell laments the end of adventure -- Where do you go when it's over? What do you do when you've come to the last day of summer? Naomi, apparently, tries a million new things -- in the totebag slumped beside her, beside sunscreen and a rolled up swimsuit, a notebook of music composition paper remains blank, a granny square half complete with crochet hook stabbed through the yarn, The Hidden Oracle dog-earred only a few pages in. Right now, all of those are abandoned in favor of just listening, breathing slow, her eyes closed under her sunglasses. The soft slap of water against paddle and grows louder as a canoe plies its way towards the pier, and by the now much more polished brush of his mind Naomi knows before even looking up that it carries her brother. Dressed somewhat less fashionable cut-off jeans and a light blue Chimaera Arts tee shirt graced with said art space's namesake, Lael is letting the craft coast now, paddle dipped into the water as a rudder to guide it alongside his sister. He has his tackle box, a small cooler, a bucket of ice, and a couple of fishing rods stowed in the bottom of the boat. "Get in, loser," he says, deadpan, "we going fishin'." Naomi sits up almost as soon as that first brush has run up against her mind. By the time her brother pulls up to the pier, balling up the towel with her shoes and phone and bag to toss into the canoe. "Who you callin' a loser?" she asks, her mind brightly amused even as her tone slips indignant, as she drops down into the boat. It rocks unsteadily as she settles onto the seat. "What we after?" What fish, she means, mostly, though she wonders if her brother is looking for some psionic quiet -- the new kids are loud enough out loud, and probably their minds are worse. "Lake trout, if they bitin'." Lael counterbalances the rocking of the boat while his sister situates herself. "Whatever else we can get that's big enough. Ain't had no fried fish in a minute." He picks his paddle back up and offers Naomi the other one. << Sure wouldn't mind some quiet, neither. >> He pushes off from the pier and patiently waits from them to drift clear before he starts paddling. << At least they got some respect for us, even if it ain't for the right reasons. >> Naomi takes up paddling on the other side, a thin and frictionless stream of thought set aside to just watching and matching Lael's rhythm. It drifts to other fishing excursions, to lazy afternoons on the banks of the Chattahoochee, a deep ache for home that settles heavy in her gut. On another line, Naomi is considering << (right reasons) >>, trying to remember how other students here used to look at the pair of them, trying to pinpoint what's changed in their expressions and tones. She can see it clearest in the new students, the ones who showed up while they were away -- something like awe in Samantha's face in the girl's bathroom (right before her toothbrush turns, predictably, into sand), something like a need to impress in the gleam of Caden's crystals springing up around a cafeteria table. << Is it respect? >> Though her thoughts still rise and fall freely, Naomi's thoughtspeech comes more easily than it did before jail, more clear above the rest of her brain noise after hours in secret conversation at monster-table and in testing rooms with her brother. Under the question, she's comparing their classmates to the bog inmates, the kind of berth they gave Lael inside (the kind of berth they mostly gave Naomi) and struggling to name the difference. << Lots o' types of fear all looks the same to me. >> Lael's locs weave slowly from side to side in time to his gentle disagreement. That he's learned more control over his hair and more comfort with how it moves outside his control might not be so very obvious to anyone other than Naomi, but perhaps the fact he's let it grow out past mid-back length might suggest something along those lines to those who knew him before. << It was fear, at Lassiter, mostly. With the new kids that weren't in Prometheus, it's more a mix bag. Morbid curiosity, sympathy(pity)(solidarity?)... >> His smile is just a little sharp. << ...some fear, too. >> He's not sure if any of it's actually respect, either, but he likes it better. But aloud he says, "You wanna go home?" << Some different kinda fear, >> is Naomi's assessment, though she doesn't spend much time elaborating on what the difference is in their classmate's eyes, before jail and after. The question out loud arrests these thoughts, and though she doesn't freeze Naomi is definitely addressing her answer to the ends of Lael's hair and not his face. "Nah," says Naomi. << (Yes) >> thinks Naomi, that hollow ache overwhelming her for one terrible second. The Helen that rises up in her memory is too rosy, the faux-German rooftops and rolling Appalachian mountains only calling forward happy childhood memories, the thousand cuts that town put their family (put Lael) through struggling to burst through the heavy blanket of nostalgia. "... Maybe. Just for a lil bit," she clarifies in a rush, "not to stay. Ma said --" Naomi bites her lip, focusing on the pain of it, trying not to let her feelings and opinions wash through just yet, "-- you could come home too, if you wanted." Lael tries to stop his face from reacting, but it twitches through several iterations of bitterness, sadness, and amusement. "Well," he says mildly, at last, "bless her heart." That's all he says, for the space of several measured strokes of his paddle. "I'll go with you. If they get too weird about I can always go up Nana's old shack, throw some pottery, maybe go huntin'." He sounds very casual about all of this. "I'll mind my manners with them, but I'm done putting up. They waitin' for me to apologize they gon' be waiting a long time." Naomi bites down harder, on the inside of her cheek this time, focusing on that small sharp pain through Lael's silence. All too quickly it dulls, all too quickly her homesickness breaks into her surface thoughts, bright and relieved when Lael speaks again and swiftly followed by a twisting-crashing guilt. "You ain't gotta," she hedges – too little, too late, she thinks. "I'on wanna –" << remind you why you left (them)(there)(me) >> << be stared at (like they looking for me under the scales) >> << worry (you) (our folks) (about you) >> << be there (alone)(again) >> She shakes her head vigorously, her next stroke splashing up more water than is necessary. "They waiting," Naomi confirms what the siblings both already know, "and they should keep waiting 'till they figure out its them who owes you." << (could make 'em apologize) >> is fleeting, there and gone again but not before it dredges up memory-explanations of how. "Nae, my whole life is a reminder why I left." In Lael's mind this manifests as an exhausting montage of fear, disgust, and pity pouring into him from their parents no less than from teachers, schoolmates, and passing strangers. "I been knew how they felt about me long before the telepathy, but hearing it... An it ain't like I thought folks out here--" "Out here" encompasses a firm sense of the whole world beyond Helen, Georgia, and it's only in this contrast that his bright fierce love and profound grief for home shines through. "--was gon' be any better 'bout how I look. But they's not family." He sets his jaw and leans into the next few strokes of his paddle, though not as sloppily as his sister. The canoe accelerates smoothly toward the far side of the lake. << The fact there's bog folks tryin' harder than our own kin to see us? That hurts. >> A flash of Jax leaning in to point out a particular deft stroke on Lael's canvas, doggedly pushing through his discomfort with the locs straining reflexively toward him. Another of Harm tucked beside Naomi, their cheek pressed gentle against the tender new scales on her shoulder, gazing up with adoration undimmed by fear. << You can make 'em say the words, but you can't change their minds. >> An uncomfortable realization whispers, << (I can,) >> but he pushes it firmly aside. "I do miss home, and I do want to give them a chance, and it ain't good for you to be alone with them, neither." Naomi's paddle drags in the water for a moment too long – when it's time for the next downstroke, Naomi just pulls it in to rest across her legs. The litany of overheard revulsion, that bright grief, the human faces that Lael presents all lap up like waves against her own memories, mostly matching in their hurt and anger at their parents, at humans, at this school that is becoming home but isn't home enough. Mostly. That brief flash of her significant other melts into her own memories of Harm's face resting against her shoulder, her sore skin soothing under Harm's gentle touch. Melts again into lunch conversation that is so painfully awkward: << "It's so wonderful when we are called to connect with our primal nature through rhythm and melody," >> says Harm's mother in Naomi's memory, gaze lingering too long on her scales on primal while her husband ponders how gangster scales might help in a music career. These moments shift again into a profound sense of parental love – in Mr. Sun's furrowed-brow concern for Harm's future, in Ms. Wong's patient corrections of her husband's pronoun use, in the less-than-subtle shift of plates around the table towards both Harm and girlfriend alike. It's that kind of love Naomi is aching for, at once aware that she has had so much more of it than her brother but also feeling its absence these last three years so keenly. On a quiet thread of thought – not earnest, not serious – she's wondering how hard would it be, for them combined, to make their parents be the ones they both needed. "If you sure," she says. Her mind doesn't betray her verbal nonchalance in words, but in melting, relieved and grateful, against the touch of his. Lael doesn't roll his eyes outwardly at the memory of Harm's parents, but the shake of his head and his chuckle give a vague sense of eyerolling all the same. "I guess it could be worse -- at least they know from weird." He dips his paddle into the water and gently turns the canoe, letting it glide into a quiet cove before he arrests their forward momentum. Sheltered from the wind by a wooded stretch of headland, the canoe only rocks gently with the wavelets that find their way in from the open water. With the mansion, its manicured lawns, and the atheletic fields out of sight, it's almost possible to imagine they're in the wilderness. Lael opens his tackle box and just stares down at his paraphernalia for a moment, eyes steady and unblinking. "I'm sure." << And they do love you. >> There's a weary sorrow in this thought--perhaps too weary for someone so young--but no bitterness. << Maybe tryna see past your scales will help them see me, too. >> This doesn't really sound hopeful, but not altogether hopeless, either. << If they come around, even if it's for the wrong reasons? I'll learn to forgive. >> He reaches down and starts poking through his collection of sinkers and lures, and though he's not looking at his sister now she can feel his solace in the familiar not-pressure of her mind against his. "Now, let's catch us some trout."