Noli equi dentes inspicere donati.

[baedalites]

Who: EVERYONE.
What: Swap meet.
Where: The Apache and surrounding environs.
When: Sukkardi the 14th of Haneden
Notes:

• Swap Meet Spreadsheet: Pre-chosen swaps are green. Assigned are blue. There were a few characters that were selected more than once, so objects were assigned on a first-come first-serve basis. If you have any issues or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact the mod team.
• For objects that might not be immediately apparent as belonging to their owners, there may be a picture or name attached, or players are welcome to have their characters ~just know~ it's for them. Drr drr drr, bb.
• Party post nights are a great time to come join the chatroom.
• The topic threads are just suggestions; if you've got somewhere else that your characters simply must be, make your own thread.

Warnings: None yet. Please put warnings up on individual threads.

The Apache is much the same as it always is: dimly lit, with the jukebox playing in the background, and the bartender serving whatever's on tap.

Comments

[diogenesis]

As Ilde approaches, her intention to join him clear, Mycroft finds himself preparing to put on his most effective Social Niceties mask and override the strong feeling of annoyance and discomfort that has always accompanied someone-who-is-not-Sherlock invading his personal space without invitation. To his surprise, however, the feeling never comes. Ilde takes a seat by his side as though they'd arranged to meet here, not speaking a word even in greeting. It's calming, this level of presumption—no one but his brother has ever treated him this way, and so it's at once inescapably odd and utterly familiar.

Mycroft realizes Ilde is one of three people in Baedal who could have pulled this off without being related to him, and he wonders if that means these people have become his friends.

He looks at her, eyes flicking over the details of her person in what outwardly seems like a quick, casual glance. Of most immediate note is the lolly, of course—wrapping indicates cherry flavor—and Mycroft wouldn't think that entirely odd of Ilde were it not also for the change in her scent (perfume remains the same, but smell of cigarette smoke has lightened considerably) and the lack of a drink in her hand. He raises one eyebrow, waits a moment as though he's calculating the net gains and losses to his pride if he proceeds, then reaches out and takes the candy, tucking it inside his jacket. He's certainly not indulging in public.

[rhinemaid]

He may not, but Ilde will - hers is blueberry and indicates it probably best he save his for later, because her tongue is slowly turning blue and she's charmed enough by that to let it show through, pressed occasionally to the back of her (edges unseen) teeth as she settles placidly into people-watching at his side, neither asking much of him nor offering up much herself. At least not much that she's aware of, when his observational skills surpass what she's observed of them.

The only outward sign of her restlessness is the fact her nailpolish can't seem to decide what colour it is-- but it cycles lazily through shades of purple, green, blue, yellow, pearl with differing tints, french tips, a crisp clear manicure, her fingertips and thumb resting against the camcorder in her lap.

Eventually: “Have you found yours yet?” Or has it found him, since-- he's here.

[diogenesis]

The kaleidoscopic nail polish is, to Mycroft, only slightly more subtle than a large flashing neon sign over Ilde's head reading I'M RATHER PREOCCUPIED. He's noticed the camcorder (she has nothing with her in which to properly carry the device—it's obviously her gift); her thoughts are partly there, yes, but there's something else underneath that's bigger. The gift is recent—not even in her hands for more than an hour—but the change in her scent would take at least a few days, and the lollies speak for themselves.

For now, he keeps these thoughts private.

"No," he says, letting her see exactly how enthused he is about that fact, "but I see you've found yours."

Despite the high level of noise in the bar, Mycroft whispers the words; he doesn't need to put on a show for Ilde, and he certainly doesn't need to add to the ruckus. He'd sign, but he's fallen into the habit of taking his cues from Ilde regarding her preferred communication method of the moment.

[rhinemaid]

“It found me.” Or, more accurately, Tatiana found her, recognized her as the girl in the recording and made sure she got it back safely; she's grateful, but it's an abstract gratitude this evening when there are so many things going on in her head behind her eyes, behind the false-front illusion. After a moment, she opens it again so Mycroft can see some--

“And this,” Emery is saying, in Italian, “is my princess-- no, precious, really, you'll love this when you're older--” as he tucks a squirming, reluctant Ilde under his arm on the steps, changing his martini glass from this hand to the other so the camera can better appreciate both father and daughter together. “As I was saying. This is my very sweetest baby, Ilde Decima Featherstonehaugh, who is very patient with me for saddling her with that mess of a name. Presently she thinks she's very embarrassed by her daddy, but I assure you that's merely adolescence talking; in actual fact she's appreciating my paternal ingenuity. So this is a record of our holiday, which we are enjoying in our beautiful home--”

After that she'd said are we enjoying it, really in an adolescent deadpan, and had her hair tousled over her face for her trouble, but she shuts it off again too quickly. Emery had been handsome, charming, peculiarly brittle; they had been alike, and he had been right.

[diogenesis]

Mycroft takes in the younger Ilde, the effusive silver-haired man at her side, and the stunning manor that serves as the video's setting. The entire production says a lot about Ilde, leading Mycroft to contemplate the importance of specific context.

Particularly interesting are her and her father's appearances. Compared to the way Ilde looks now (blatantly unreal), both her younger self and Mr. Featherstonehaugh seem solid and true. There is still something otherworldly about them, something indefinable, but it's not illusory. Even though they're on a video, Mycroft somehow knows he's seeing what they really look like.

She was part human then, he remembers (and with the memory of that conversation come flashes of other things—but not now, not here, it's already so loud). He wonders which existence she would choose, were she able. She had spoken of her humanity as something that had been taken away—as though she'd been a glass of humanity half-full and not a glass of fae half-empty—and so Mycroft has his theories.

“It was a beautiful home,” is all Mycroft says in the end, though he says it with sincerity.

As he does so, he lets something come through in his expression that speaks to the presence of deeper thought, to the fact that he's seen more than what's on the surface here. It's such a personal thing for him to have seen, for her to have willingly showed him, and yet she's not truly aware of how revealing it was to do so. The least he can do (the very least) is show her this tiny piece of what lies underneath.

[rhinemaid]

There is a conversation to be had, about Ilde and humanity - a conversation that she'll likely skirt repeatedly in the coming months - but it isn't going to be had now, when she's thinking of Tuscany and the last days she spent there with her father, after this holiday, a flying visit between school and Boston, packing her things while he followed her, reminding her she didn't have to do this. Picking at the glasses he didn't need, programming half a dozen different contact numbers into her cellphone so he was sure she had them; reading the emails Edmund Seward had sent over and over and over, not looking for reassurance but for something wrong, something he could use as a reason to forbid this, a better reason than because I said so when his daughter had mastered the art of out-talking him when she was nine years old.

(In Hasi's world she must have never gone; she wonders if he found something.)

“He bought it when I was about five,” she says, looking out through her memories at Mycroft with a smile that looks easier than it probably rightly is. “Tuscany; we used to go into Florence a lot.” She doesn't get to speak Italian here, often, but it is the language in which she's most comfortable, the one she associates with the place she's most comfortable thinking of as 'home'. Ilde has never been 'from' anywhere, not exactly, but when she's homesick she's thinking of Italy. So there's that.

[diogenesis]

“Yes,” he says agreeably, as though he already knows what she's telling him—and in a way he does, having heard Italy in her accent upon first meeting her and having deduced the location of the manor from the video. Mycroft realizes his mistake just as the word leaves his mouth, but in the end, he decides to let it be, unadulterated by any makeshift addendum he might have procured. Ilde can draw her own conclusions.

The pause after this single syllable is a touch awkward, but it segues into something comfortable for both of them: Italian. Among the earlier languages Mycroft learned, Italian slips on for him like an old glove; he even raises his voice up from a whisper to a murmur because the sound of it is too good to waste, even if only he can hear it.

“It's a beautiful country. I've been there a number of times, myself.”

[rhinemaid]

Ilde brightens in an almost embarrassingly uncomplicated way, because she prefers this and she so rarely gets it any more. When she speaks Italian, it sounds more natural than the very-neat way she speaks English; the difference between learning a language by lessons and learning a language by living in it. She's more at home almost instantly-- “It's fine as long as you ignore all the people,” she says, which is how you know it's home.

[diogenesis]

Mycroft has never seen Ilde so pleased. He's surprised, but that seems more to do with his own reaction to her smile than to the fact that she's smiled at all. Her obvious happiness inspires, in turn, something similar in him—not nearly as close to the surface, and not what he would call happiness, but perhaps a small flicker of satisfaction, or even contentment—and it warms him for a time.

The smile also makes her look much younger, and subsequently makes Mycroft feel quite old, and he briefly wonders if their—friendship? acquaintanceship? odd understanding of one another?—is completely proper. He knows Lyla is even younger than Ilde, but he is always aware of that. Ilde, though...

Her demeanor at once has the impetuousness of youth and the trained falseness of age. Who is she to him, really, that making her smile could inspire something so close to pride?

“I think as much can be said of many places,” he replies with a small, wry smile before taking a drink of his scotch.

[rhinemaid]

Ilde, though, is someone who responds in very particular ways to different sorts of people; it's easy for her to fall into the role she plays beside Mycroft, the bright precocious participant whose age becomes indistinct in conversation, but it's a role and one that's only part of her various assorted truths. (She understands the concept of truth in falsehoods because she is that.)

“Most places,” she concedes, because she's never been the most pollyanna girl in the world and frankly, she doesn't like most people. She's good at tolerating them, but she's not as much of a social creature as she sometimes pretends; it's just interesting that in Baedal there are more of the sort of people she genuinely does like than she's accustomed to there being around her. It isn't part of her theory about why they're brought here, but it is interesting.

[diogenesis]

“Unfortunate but true,” Mycroft laments with dry good humor. “In London, at least, the people seem content to ignore you back.”

This is Mycroft's version of city pride.

[rhinemaid]

“I have a lot of family there, but I never really saw the appeal. Guildhall, obviously.” But her plan had never involved living in London, no; her uncle wouldn't mind letting her stay with him while she studied, and then after that...somewhere. Home to Florence, maybe. She could always just ask Jae what it is that she's up to in his version of events--

--but she'd rather not.

[diogenesis]

Mycroft nods. It's easy for him to picture Ilde as a young student attending the renowned performing arts school, breezing through classes on account of her exceptional talent.

He realizes this is a largely uninformed vision; there's no way for him to know what Ilde's relationship with the educational system was like when she was at home. The fact that she acts as a teacher in Baedal suggests that she feels a certain degree of comfort with the subject of education, but there's no way to know for sure. Mycroft knows that most people assume he'd had an easy time of it as well, and they couldn't be farther from the truth.

“I'm afraid I took the predictable route and went to Oxford,” he says, more sure than not that Ilde will have already guessed that or Cambridge. He thinks of a few things he could say to her about Oxford, about uni in general, but in the end, he leaves it at that.