kenoscomm | communion | stargazer-focused but ota

Cooking classes. [ Matt seems to find the idea amusing, as well as promising--he takes the point that you don't have to be an expert to get paid for your efforts. Still, he can't help a bit of self-effacing whimsy. ] Maybe I can astound the locals with tales of two-minute noodles.

[ He manages not to stare at Gloria, which is frankly a monumental achievement. She's so pretty. He just smiles as she and Liem greet each other, his gaze catching on the edge of one of her leaves. ]

Oh, ah, yeah, [ he answers, glancing back to Liem. A lopsided smile. ] You aren't the only one here I used to know, apparently. People've been really nice to me, even after they realize I don't recognize any of them.

[ Some people have also been Silco, but, you know. ]

Oh? [Liem’s tone is a little wry.] I’m happy to hear it. I can think of a couple Zenites in particular from Horos who couldn’t in any honesty be described as nice.

[If Matt hasn’t run into Silco or Gen yet, though, that’s probably for the best. He doesn’t need to deal with mean Zenite (pocket size) and mean Zenite (full size) when he’s only just arrived.

The route he takes them on through the Community Centre is brisk, allowing for glimpses of different facilities and in-session classes as they tour the layout of the building, but no real opportunity to stop for more than a few moments. He didn’t bring Matt here to try to sign him up for something here and now; just to familiarize him with the space, for if he wants to come back later.]

Did you have any questions about that…? It must be strange, meeting complete strangers who feel like they already know you.

[ That tone gets Matt laughing in surprise. ]

One of those wouldn't be Mr. Silco, would it?

[ Educated guess, but he has to imagine there's only so many mean Zenites who also came here from a place called Horos. And he has no idea about Gen yet, so that narrows it down.

Matt trips along happily enough with Liem, taking inventory of the classrooms and what he can glean of the various activities transpiring within. He appreciates dedication to learning, to improving oneself--even beyond his bias as an academic. Something about it feels hopeful. Future-focused.

At Liem's invitation, Matt's gaze slides to him. He tries to assess what he might be thinking behind the dark glasses, but it feels like divining from cast stones. More projection than exegesis. Still, the line of his mouth appears gentle enough. ]

I'm sure I have more questions about this whole thing than I realize, [ Matt says. ] But for now, I guess ...

Are you okay? Or, um, are we? [ He tries to keep his tone light. No big deal. ] I've already apologized for some things the other me did, I have no problem doing it again.

Ah, so you have met him.

[Liem’s lips twitch a little in response to Matt’s laughing reply. Yes, who could he mean other than Zenith’s number one hater? Aside from its number two hater, that is. (This is a slightly uncharitable way to describe Gen, even in thought, but in fairness he has been very difficult to Liem specifically.)

The hint of a smile fades from his mouth, however, when Matt asks his question. Above the dark lenses of his glasses, his brows first lift, then furrow slightly.]

We’re fine, Matthew.

[Perhaps he’d feel more complicated about this if he could recall the evening Matt invited him to that seedy club, got him drunk, and asked Liem to drink his blood… but he doesn’t. All he recalls is how hopeless Matt had seemed the very first time he’d met him, and how he only seemed to get worse the longer they remained in Horos.]

I’m only… a little concerned, perhaps. [He turns them past the building’s public pool, heading up a corridor that loops back towards the main exit.] The version of you that ended up in Horos wasn’t doing well. That’s not an indictment; neither was I. [Liem grimaces slightly, mouth thinning.] It was a bad place. But… in some ways, I don’t know that this one is much better.

[For you, is what he means.]

[ Whatever Matt was bracing himself for, it wasn't that. He was thinking he must have done something wrong, or weird--had an unrequited crush, maybe? Said something stupid or offensive? His eyebrows climb, a look of pure surprise on his face. ]

You're worried about me.

[ There's a sliver of a teasing tone in there. The self-deprecation Matt can sometimes wield when discussing something serious, a sort of compromise between his reserved WASPy upbringing and his own personal desire for the truth. Still, he can't help thinking of what Sebastian said before, about how the version of him he knew before was missing a hand. He thinks of Amos saying, shit, I missed you, brother.

Maybe there's a good reason for someone to be worried about him. It's not like he's finding this an easy place to navigate. ]

[The gentle expression on Liem’s face says that Matt’s understanding is right on the money. He is worried, even if he’s trying not to make a fuss about it. Although he has the feeling Matt wouldn’t appreciate too much concern, maybe finding it patronizing, it seems negligent to simply avoid the subject altogether.]

I am. I don’t want to see you suffer the way the other version of you did.

[Their circuit of the Community Centre concludes, and he pushes open the door so they can emerge back into the brilliant sunshine. Even draped in shadow and cloaked beneath hat and fabric, after a year of living here, Liem still can’t help but find the double suns excessive.]

So… If you need help with something, I hope you won’t hesitate to seek it. If not from me, then from someone.

[He glances at Matt.]

But of course, you can seek it from me.

[ The word suffer slides into Matt's ear and right down to the pit of his stomach. Has he ever suffered? Apart from the way in which everyone does, the way a certain amount of pain seems to be the inheritance of an embodied, limited life? Bad things have happened to him, for sure. And the prospect of being his world's maybe-sole survivor in the face of apocalypse feels ripe for misery, even if his sharpest anguish hasn't landed yet.

Matt's clearest feeling after hearing all this, honestly, is sadness for Liem. It sounds like whatever happened to other-him, it was hard for Liem to witness. Painful. And Matt's not sure what to do with that. He can't remember the last time somebody said they were worried for him. ]

Well ... you're already helping me, [ he points out, likewise gentle. Or perhaps careful. Like he's trying to keep a ball in the air. ] Showing me the sights, helping me brainstorm income streams.

[ A pause, and Matt adds, ] I know I don't, uh, look like much. But I've been taking care of myself for a little while now. I promise I'm tougher than I look.

[Liem suspects that, regardless of Matt’s gentle reassurance, the other man doesn’t really understand where his concern is coming from, or what he’s worried about. He doesn’t know how to tell Matt that regardless of how terrible Horos was and how punishing the Regent’s hold over their people felt, a lot of the suffering he saw Matt go through seemed like it was made worse by his need to deal with it by himself. By his need to be tough, strong enough to confront his own struggles without making them someone else’s.

He knows that need intimately, after all. But he’s also familiar enough with the feeling to know that pushing isn’t likely to get him anywhere.]

I believe you.

[He pauses in the courtyard outside the Community Centre, considering while he looks at the other man. There are other things he feels vaguely like he should say to him, but he doesn’t know how to bring any of them up; so he doesn’t. Instead he asks,] Would you prefer to keep exploring, or find somewhere to sit for a while?

[ Matt wants to see every inch of this city, honestly. But he feels like he can do that on his own time. He knows his attention would be split if he tried to get the lay of the land and talk to Liem at the same time, which feels unfair to both Liem and Springstar. ]

Someplace to sit sounds nice, [ he decides. A small smile. ] I haven't even asked you my standard Shard-Bearer questions yet, so on my end, there's lots to talk about.

[ Suffer is still jangling around at the bottom of his brain, busily writing Greek tragedies, but Matt tries to push those thoughts away. At least until he can shape them into something productive, or at least probative. Also, does Liem believe him? Matt finds himself missing the way social interactions seem to work around other people marked by the Stargazer Aspect. The way inarticulate emotions will bubble to the surface and render themselves legible. ]

We’ll sit, then.

[Not here; even though there are benches outside the Community Centre, Liem would need to be literally on his last legs before he’d settle for resting outside in Springstar’s double sun. Instead, he leads them through the plaza and towards a cafe, so they might head inside and into the shade.]

What are your standard shard-bearer questions?

[Liem’s tone is conversational. If he’d known Matt had a standard array of questions to offer first-thing, he might have saved the community centre tour for after. Still, they’re here now, heading for quiet and dark and coffee: three things Liem has come to appreciate highly. There’s plenty of time yet for questions now that they’re heading off the street.]

[ Matt doesn't register any surprise that they're eschewing the sunshine. The sunlight is a lot more direct here than he's used to, and plenty of people back home wouldn't want to be out in it for all kinds of reasons. Photosensitivity, vampirism, worries about sunburn or skin cancer. Plus, he's secretly rooting for someplace to grab coffee, even though there was no need to keep that a secret and he could've just asked. ]

Well ... only one of the questions is standard, [ he admits. ] It's important, though. I've been asking everyone why they chose the way they did.

Ah.

[That would be one of the most pressing, he supposes. It wasn’t really one that he had occasion to ask, since he arrived with the very first group of this current generation. There were no senior shard-bearers to help him along: only his peers, working through their own decisions in their various ways, and the leaders of each faction, who had been a little less busy in those first weeks, it seemed.]

Well… I wasn’t eager to choose either side, at first; that’s why I took a rather long time to decide. [He glances at Matt again, his look considering.] How much did the others tell you, about the place we knew you from before?

[ Matt returns Liem's gaze, trying unsuccessfully to disguise his curiosity (and a hint of fretfulness). ]

Not much, [ he says. ] That it's the same mission here as before, [ Amos ] that my performance was less than stellar. [ Silco. ] A bit of catching me up on the interpersonal side of things, how we knew each other and what we shared. [ Sebastian.

There's also the part where he lost a hand, but that seems super grim. Matt decides to at least wait until they're sitting down before he mentions that bit. ]

Edited 2024-02-06 16:49 (UTC)

[Liem isn’t exactly surprised to hear that the things Matt has learned about his time in Horos have been less than comprehensive. How would one even go about digging into all that, especially on a first meeting? But some of it is relevant to Matt’s question, so Liem can’t exactly leave it alone.

He does, however, give it just a moment, nodding and then holding the door to a cozy little coffee shop so Matt can precede him inside. They may as well get caffeine before diving into the kinds of topics that talking about Horos eventually necessitates.

Once they’ve ordered drinks and grabbed a table, he continues.]

It was quite similar, yes. You could liken the group we were a part of to Zenith, broadly speaking. But that place was different in a few significant ways, one of them being that “Zenith’s” dictator there ruled basically the entire civilized region. Another was that new shard-bearers were not given a choice of whether or not they wanted to harmonize to that side.

[ Liem is now Matt's favorite person in all of Kenos for showing him a coffee shop with chill vibes. It's stiff competition for the top spot, because Matt's met a lot of super interesting people thus far. Maybe favorite is a ranking, though, like how all dads get a #1 DAD mug.

He'd intuited that this part of the conversation wasn't going to be pleasant. But now, hearing the word "dictator," he's very glad to have a comforting beverage in hand. ]

Jesus, [ he says. ] "Not given a choice"? Like ... how, exactly?

[ He's imagining spells or spiritual possession, maybe one of those MK Ultra scenarios where supersoldiers are drafted and molded by the government. But he supposes someone could hold a gun to his head and say "harmonize to Zenith." Would it work without his fundamental cooperation, though? ]

[Liem doesn’t know who Jesus is, but he assumes this is a swear, and Matt is correct to do so. His mouth thins as he pauses, since he doesn’t want to freak Matt out, but also, Matt already went through all of this in person in another universe, so he should be able to handle it secondhand.]

Newcomers were brought to a secure location and confined there until they harmonized. They were fed a… [—he falters a little, here—] what I can only describe as “concentrated despair,” in order to reinforce the belief that their worlds were gone, and couldn’t be brought back.

[He takes a deep breath.]

For me, that was some months before we were brought here. We were all purged upon arrival, but after that… I wasn’t eager to sign up for either side, regardless of how different they might seem.

[ The language Liem uses is somewhat distancing. You could almost think he's describing something he witnessed, rather than something that happened to him. But Matt doesn't blame him. A soft horror suffuses his face, draining it of color.

His brain is quick to spin up questions and rejoinders. The semantic distinction between saving and reviving. The fact that some of the people who joined the Zenith side under extreme duress seem to have chosen it again, with less duress this time. Though that's not a mystery to him, is it? A stranger with a birds-eye view into his past might see how he and Vincent met, then Matt's choice to date him--clear-eyed, no teeth at his throat in that instant--and find it puzzling. A sign of Matt's stupidity, or naivete. He knows these things can be more complicated than they appear from the outside. ]

I can understand that. [ Quiet. ] If something was working on you before, I'd find it hard to trust that it wasn't happening again.

[ Which does make him wonder about Cyrus and Yima. He trusted so immediately that they were honest, if not necessarily perfect. ]

[Liem nods slightly, though he doesn’t know that it was necessarily distrust about the influences involved that was keeping him from pledging to either side. A large part of it was just the choice in general; he hadn’t felt like he could possibly know what was truly right, so how could he choose for either side? Especially because this time, the choice really was only his.]

It was challenging—and I didn’t know how I could discern how true either side’s position really was: Whether our worlds really were gone for good. Whether going back was truly possible.

[He folds his fingers around the plain black coffee he ordered, pensive.]

But I made promises in the world I came from, to my country and to my god—so I thought that until such a time as I found evidence against the possibility of returning home, I should give my services in support of Meridian’s cause. And here I am.

[ Matt definitely has questions about this quasi-involuntary servitude they evidently shared, things like are Amos and Silco okay and did I ever mention a guy named Vincent. But he's not sure how useful those questions are just now, and he doesn't want to poke at something so painful.

For the moment, he nods, faintly surprised that Liem wasn't sure what to believe but tucking it away for later. The mention of god and country draws a softer expression, a mingling of wistfulness and recognition. ]

A lot of people on the Meridian side seem to have that, [ he says. ] Some really concrete obligation back home. You're the first I've heard of that has one to a god, though. [ Rather than, you know ... being a god. ] I respect that. If I had a situation like that, I'm sure I'd choose the same way.

[Amos and Silco are definitely not okay, but that’s a matter for some other conversation, probably, unless Matt really wants to bring it up. Suffice to say that most of the people over in Zenith are probably not normal, but especially not the ones who came over from Horos.]

Did you not have a community where you lived, Matthew?

[The way he says it, it’s clear he doesn’t just mean a neighbourhood, or a place where Matt happened to live. He means a community that he could be a part of, that accepted him and valued his presence. Some place it would be hard to leave behind, to divest himself of.]

Ah, well-- [ Matt looks sheepish. ] I mean, I had a cohort in my program. And some of my self-perpetuating wards were showing great early results, so I was doing a lot of work on the ground where I lived, and I know a few other practitioners. It's just, the way I see it ...

I'm sure I must've told you all about this before. [ NOPE. Matt, oblivious to his failure to communicate across multiple timelines, traces the handle of his mug with a fingertip as he considers his words. ] I only learned I could use magic as a teenager, and it was ... like a light coming on for the first time. I felt so connected to everything, and everyone. I have people I've loved, and places I love, but what I feel the most strongly is like.

[ He looks up at Liem, with a crooked smile like he fully expects to be laughed out of this cafe. ]

I think there's an energy that binds us all together. Something that gave us our shape, and our desires, and it's--way, way too big to understand fully. But it's good.

[Liem remembers Matt telling him that he was lonely, and that before learning magic he’d been lost, without direction. These things do not give him confidence when he considers the situation Matt is in now. He does not trust Matt to do what is best for himself, when he is so keen to look to the world around him for a sense of purpose.]

So—your community is wherever you are, you mean. In Kenos, in your original home, or somewhere new.

[He seems a little melancholy as he says this. Even in Horos, after attuning to Kenoma’s influence, Liem had yearned desperately for the land he’d left behind. He cannot imagine ever belonging somewhere new. He hadn’t even belonged in Taldor, really—he just belonged to Abadar, and he’d been content with the knowledge that one day, when he reached Abadar’s realm in the afterlife, he’d have a place he was truly supposed to be.]

I don’t understand, though. How can you feel that way, connected to the existence you came from, and have doubts about whether it should be saved?

[Knowing him as he does, having suffered alongside him in Horos, Liem has to assume that Matt wouldn’t have come down so firmly on Kenoma’s side if he’d been able to decide for himself—but at his own level of harmonization, he can tell from looking at Matt’s shard that he also hasn’t opted to lean towards Meridian, either.]

Sort of, [ Matt agrees, though only hesitantly. ] Maybe everywhere is my community. And places that aren't even places, in the way we're used to experiencing a sense of place.

[ "Place" doesn't taste like a real word anymore, but at least Liem isn't laughing. Even if Matt's answer doesn't seem to have satisfied him.

Though Matt doesn't blame him, really: First of all, Matt has never successfully explained his view of the cosmos to another person and has long since stopped trying. Not even at 3 am when everyone's really fucked up. And second, Liem's question is one Matt's been asking himself. He puffs out a breath. Glances down into his mug for a moment, gathering his thoughts. ]

I guess, because ...

So we know we're not the first creatures to ever live on our planet. There were others before that went extinct. And that event was supposed to be really sudden--we don't know a whole lot about it, but we know that much. And before that, we don't know how the universe originated. There might've been another universe that collapsed and created our current one, there might be infinite universes that are always moving away from each other ...

I guess I'm trying to say that I don't know if it's right to bring my world back, when cataclysmic events are part of nature. My world got its start in the first place because something else made space for it. I've never done, like, necromancy or anything, but the stories about bringing things back that are gone are pretty gnarly.

[Matt’s response draws a frown from Liem—it can’t not, when he says things like I don’t know if it’s right. It inspires the same reaction as if he’d questioned whether someone should try to resuscitate a drowned person, just because they were past the point of struggling. Death is a part of life, so why try to help those on the brink of it, right?

He knows that isn’t fair, and isn’t what Matt means. He’d just hoped things would be more different with a version of him who hadn’t been steeped in Kenoma’s dogma.]

You said something similar to me in that other place, when I first arrived. [When Matt first found him, naked and still half in shock in the Champion Shrine.] Not about necromancy—you compared reality’s destruction to a forest fire that lets new life grow from the ashes.

[He hadn’t agreed with him then, either… but ultimately, he hadn’t had anywhere else to go but with him.]

What if it isn’t like that, though? What if something ripped it apart and ate the pieces, and is coming for what’s left? No bed of fertile ash: just a hungry darkness. Is that “right”?

Oh. [ Intrigued, but cautious. Matt's sensitive to rejection on points like this, and interprets anything that isn't overt assurance as faint damnation. ] Well ... I believe in that too. That at least on my world, destruction can be the necessary force that creates something new, after.

But you're right. [ About that characterization of the darkness. ] It's a lot of unknowns. And to that point, what if it's a hungry darkness looking for worlds to eat, and resetting everything just like it was in the moment before that happened--what if it puts us all in the same situation again? [ He laughs, sheepish and a little overwhelmed. ] One version of me already met you. So who's to say we haven't done this a hundred times, and haven't figured out how to break the cycle yet?

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cw: some discussion of abusive relationships

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