multiversallogs | open → you can leave me; i cannot leave myself.

Who: Ilde Decima & OPEN.
What: Ilde has errands.
Where: Various places!
When: Coardi, various times!
Notes: Obligatory polyvore. I am not posting thread starters because I am lazy, but you can take your pick from the mentioned locations in the post. Have lunch with her! Catch her on her way out of the hospital! I HEARD YOU LIKE MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS? Etc. She mostly avoids the trains but is not opposed to sharing cabs! Feel free to drop me a line if you want to work out something in particular.
Warnings: Generalized 'Ilde is in this log' warnings; I'll edit if anything specific crops up.

Coardi this week means no work means 'everything else Ilde has to get done this week', which is how she thinks of it and a slight exaggeration of the truth; some things are easier to do if you tear them off quickly like bandaids or wax strips or bad news, so her appointments at the Glory Shada are in the morning. That way, she reasons, she can't spend the rest of the day dreading it - it'll be done, she can get it out of the way, and then she's got a dozen other things to do that can occupy the space it was taking up in her head. Quitting smoking is making her insane, she's pretty sure; she's irritable and her hands never have enough to do and there is all this time she doesn't remember having that now she has to fill up with other things. Other things that aren't putting out Ivan's cigarettes in his thigh or something similarly irrational and unhelpful. Not drinking is easier, although it complicates her social life in unforeseen ways - it isn't that she isn't willing to go out, or even that it's difficult to turn down a drink and order something nonalcoholic, it's that she likes people en masse so much less when she's sober.

On the upside, it's a problem that can be solved by not being around people, which is increasingly less difficult as they keep disappearing on her. Katherine, now Cindy; she keeps herself sane through the clinic appointment imagining Cindy's running commentary on the medical staff, which is easier than wondering what Cindy would make of what she's actually doing.

(She thinks maybe she'd like it, but she isn't sure, and anyway, it's not anybody's business at all for months yet.)

The lunch crowd at Umibōzu isn't too much on a Coardi; she lingers longer than she'd planned to before her afternoon's activities take her back further into the city proper. She makes stops at her bank, a music shop and a beauty salon; there's an architect in Brock Marsh who can give her a quote and some advice on the kind of renovations that they're thinking about for the basement (the short version of that encounter is 'Jesus, my bank balance', but they have time, which is in and of itself a strange and untrustworthy feeling). By the time she's just at the edge of the river, carrying her heels in one hand, the only things she has left to do are an evening viewing of a piano she might buy and the groceries, which she can do last and then pack into the cab going home and maybe con the driver into helping her carry them in. With a little time to kill, then, it's all right that it's beginning to get dark. She's more comfortable that way.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"You are delightful," he said, after a moment. "It's as far as you're comfortable with. It's going to take some... care, but I should be able to manage." If Mitchell could.

“I am delightful.” Thank you for noticing, Ivan. “I was thinking that we could experiment a bit, and see what works.”

"That sounds promising." He resisted the urge to pursue experimenting right that moment, since they were managing to have a conversation. "I really do badly want to keep you, you know."

“I've wondered, lately.” --since they were being truthful with each other. She didn't look at him as she said it, resting her cheek on the side of the sofa and watching his hands on her feet instead.

"You've been out, and busy, and I've not been quite sure when and if to expect you. And when you come, until now, it's been unclear to me what we can and cannot talk about." It hasn't been simple.

“I wasn't sure how much you were interested in hearing about.” Not accusatory; matter of fact, and something they've already clarified now. It still feels tentative and awkward, but less so than it did an hour ago and she feels slightly more optimistic about the prospect of it not continuing to feel tentative and awkward. Sooner or later they have to adjust.

"It's not a situation I've dealt with before." There weren't many of those left, prior to Baedal. Ivan, while adaptable, was no longer used to having to improvise.

“Being surrounded by humans will do that.” Ilde has a hard time picturing him in any comparable sort of situation - she's not always entirely sure how they ended up here at all. It's not exactly what she had in mind when they met, for more than a few different reasons.

"Not only humans," he points out, but mainly just to be argumentative. "It is the oddest sort of afterlife I've ever heard of."

“Vampires don't get pregnant.” Typically, neither do people who've died - but Ilde isn't dead, she's just someone who happens to have died at one point. The details of how that works are something that escape her, which is a little troubling; she can't imagine it works outside the confines of this city.

After a moment, “Well, you were probably never heavenbound.”

"I still don't talk with humans very much, you know, was more my point." A few, but she, Njoki and Deacon were probably the three people he saw most now that Daniil had gone, and none of them precisely qualified.

“My point wasn't that you talk to humans--” which is not, no, what he's particularly known for doing or indeed what most vampires are particularly known for doing, “--but that you didn't, exactly, seem to have an endless array of variation besides them. You only mention vampires and werewolves. Half of those don't get pregnant and the other half push that button in your head marked 'inescapably a twat'.”

"Ghosts," he says, after a moment, "though they don't get pregnant either, so I suppose you're still right." Which should generally please her.

After a moment, he says, "If heaven exists at all, I think vampirism generally takes it off the table."

'Being right', as a rule, is something that Ilde takes more satisfaction in than seems strictly necessary. She'd always have been like this ('such a clever girl'), but it's likely something that her experiences have exacerbated; a part of her identity that she still feels in control of.

“That seems likely.” --given what vampirism tends to consist of.

"To be completely honest, I didn't expect anything after my second death at all," he says, quieter.

“I asked you about it once.” She remembers; what was dying like, what was being dead like. It feels almost comical in retrospect, only months after that that she made those intimate discoveries for herself. She thinks, fleetingly, of what she'd been thinking of when she knew she was going to die - that she should've been better, should've been able to fight beside Sonja and not end up trapped somewhere she couldn't be rescued from. That she didn't want to never see Ivan again, even if she'd thought for weeks by then it was a foregone conclusion.

At the very end, that she was sorry she'd ever written her father and given him hope.

"Oblivion seemed the logical thing to anticipate. I know people who still die human generally get something else, but." He shrugged. Vampires, to his knowledge and experience, didn't get doors.

He ran his thumb over her wrist. "I'm glad I got you back." He hadn't expected that either.

open → you can leave me; i cannot leave myself.

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