multiversallogs | baby i have been here before

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baby i have been here before

Who: Jae & Ilde.
What: Jae returns from confronting Hilmi, and has to deal with some things he didn't expect to.
Where: His apartment in Creekside.
When: Immediately following this log.
Notes: THE PARADE OF EMOTIONAL HORRORS CONTINUES.
Warnings: Discussions of rape, suicide, death, Apocalypse-verse flavored tragedy, torture, mental health issues (post-traumatic stress). LOTS OF SADNESS.

For a while, he's fine.

For a while, he isn't himself.

Indulging in this much magic is like no drug Jae's ever been on, and the adrenaline is tailored - precise, clean, detached. He hasn't accomplished what he set out to do, but he's taught someone a lesson (just like the deserved to be-), and they deeply fucking needed it. Now he knows what that thing is; he's felt its power and its magic and he can find out how to stop it. That's just how it's going to be.

Jae makes it all the way to Megan's neighborhood before his head finally comes back down to earth.

He stops short, not quite on her street yet - he looks down at his hands. There's blood on them, smeared awkwardly and mostly dried, and he's suddenly cognizant of the tightness on his face and the too-sharp stiff feeling of air hitting split skin on his face. Oh god. Oh god oh god-

What the fuck is he doing? Walking to Megan's house like he's done some great thing, where did Hilmi even go? What has he done - marching through the district, blood-covered, bruised, head held high and gaze frosted over, like some good little soldier, his school teachers would be so proud -

His school teachers. In Osaka, in the programs. He remembers it. He knows they'd be proud because he remembers this, too, every second ticking by of that magic that feels like black alien grease in his head and in his throat, that he's never, never used before - before -

He didn't remember it last time. Last time, at the facility. He used the same magic, tonight, that he used then.

And he remembers everything.

Jae throws up in a public trash can. Someone passing by takes pity on him and helps get him shuffled into a cab - one of the enchanted ones, and the little driver, delicate and glowing just faintly, asks him if he's all right and calls him sweetheart and he can't say anything besides hollowly telling her his address; he doesn't want to talk to her, even look at her, because no one should be taking pity on him or being kind to him, not after he did that. His head swims, he pays her - too much, and he ignores her to flee into his building, staggering up the stairs (doors slamming in his wake, he doesn't hear it at all) instead of waiting for the lift. His hands shake unlocking his apartment door, he locks it behind him, and it's not until he's in the bathroom doorway, staring in at the bright white tile, eyes shot, face bruised, split, bleeding, keys still in one hand, that he remembers someone else is supposed to be there.

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Someone else is there; Ilde had found the key in the river and walked to his apartment, sopping wet and naked underneath the illusions that prevented anyone from thinking too hard about stopping her. (Someone dropped their grocery bag when she went by, and she remembers thinking abstractly that yes, there are some people in Baedal who can see through her glamours. It doesn't matter.) She made it all the way inside so the key is by the door and Ilde is in the bathtub, with feet instead of a tail and warm water instead of cold and her arms hugging her knees to her chest.

"Oh," she says, like he said something.

Jae isn't surprised or upset she's there - he did tell her she was welcome, he figured she'd find his key and be here. He just... forgot, because he was too busy clawing his way home through the panic whiting out all his thoughts.

He stares at her for a while.

"Hilmi carried you out of the church. He doesn't know what happened after that. He thinks he could be dead."

'We're not that lucky' isn't even funny in her head, it just feels like the beginning of a dull headache and she presses her hands to her face for a moment, palm pressed close and fingers splayed. There's something-- 'dehumanizing' feels like the wrong word but it's the closest one she has, thinking of her body, hands touching something empty that she left behind, without her permission or her participation--

It's not about Hilmi, in that moment; there are few people who could have been in that position and not stirred this sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. She can't think about it.

"He'd know." If he were dead. He'd know. "You're bleeding," she says, in lieu of elaboration, numbly.

Edited 2012-01-15 15:09 (UTC)

Jae just blinks at her for a moment - not in confusion, just blankness, because not blinking would be painful; his eyes feel too hot and sore, like he might cry, or like he already has, but no tears came and none are coming, he's just got that exhausted, ragged over-stimulated sickness clinging to him. Hilmi would know if he was dead. Okay.

(What is he now?)

"Yeah."

He knows he's bleeding, and for another heartbeat he stays where he is, staring at nothing, and - he seems to catch up to himself and he moves. The pace is all right but his timing's off, and he drops his keys without seeming to notice as he tugs open the (pink) medicine cabinet and looks for... something. He picks random things, and then he turns away from the mirror without looking at it. Maybe he was going to walk all the way to his bedroom, but he doesn't, and instead ends up sinking down unsteadily against the small step around the bath tub, it's little tile dais; he grabs one side of the dark pink mold to balance himself and it doesn't really work because he thunks down and ends up with one elbow in Ilde's bath water, soaking his shirt, with his random first-aid supplies still held in his hand.

Quiet, Ilde takes them from him, shifting so she's resting against the side of the tub and picking through what he's got (discarding a couple of things as not actually useful without checking him for having picked them up - it's that kind of moment, it's not his fault) to just do it herself, because for the time being she's the more deliberate of the two.

Which is a bit troubling, of itself. She wonders, but doesn't yet ask.

It's a superficial cut; it looks worse than it is (than it should be). What's more worrying is Jae's shell-shocked silence, the way he's clearly fucked up but not emoting it at all. He's just blank. It's probably more familiar than if he was crying.

Getting the blood off his face feels better.

When he breaks the silence, he still sounds distant - but like he's trying not to be, lost somewhere, the rip tide of confusion and guilt already starting to shift him.

"I meant to do what I did," he starts, and turns his head - just so, not looking at Ilde yet, but towards her. "I can't - deny it, now. But I shouldn't have."

The question is like a natural consequence-- "What did you do?" and she sounds like she isn't sure how she's meant to be asking it. Worried, yes, but that's today all over; she doesn't know Megan, doesn't know who else to call for her besides Jae and there's not much they can do yet except keep looking for something actually useful. Erik is looking. Jae is-- Ilde isn't sure, and she promised to call Erik when he got back but not immediately, she figures, it can wait a minute.

"I went to ask Hilmi to fix her."

It seemed so perfectly logical. He doesn't think he has the energy to even run through his decision pattern at the time - it feels foolish, stupid, childish; who knew someone could really be that heartless. Ilde, probably. What a world, that she gets to be right about something like that.

Jae finally looks up and meets her eyes and there's finally something in him, and it's - sadness, and regret. He's enormously ashamed with himself, but he's too fucking tired from how much magic he overloaded on to drive it to hysterical self-pity.

"I wanted him to feel what he does to people. I made him feel it."

(That magic back in the arrival room - forcing people away, screaming at people to leave him alone, to not see him, to not hurt him - she's got an idea, he's sure.)

"Good," she says, and she doesn't have to think about it. Hilmi reminds Ilde of home in all the worst ways, growing up in Florence before the storm came, and while it's true that she never tried to have that conversation because she knows she's not equipped it's equally true that it has never occurred to her that he might even understand what she could try to say. Why would he, when he's never had to?

The world goes to hell and the enclave sleeps segregated because of what happens in a world like that and all Hilmi thinks is about how unfair it is that he has to sleep further out because there should be some place in their hellhole of a world where the enclave's women can feel safe. Sonja carved that space out and that's the only way Ilde's ever seen it done. Men don't understand, but it doesn't matter because they'll do what Sonja says or-- you know. Or else.

(Jae is slightly revelatory, in that way.)

Ilde's reaction doesn't surprise him - her callousness (if it's that at all) doesn't make him recoil, but he doesn't take any comfort in validation, either. It is what it is; whether or not he's proud of it, something had to be done, and this was it. They'll all see the aftermath later -

- if there is any (and that discomforts him, deeply).

"I don't use magic very much," he tells her, and it feels like confession. Between Megan and Ilde and him having the gall to do something like threaten to call Hellsing, Jae feels like a traitor all of a sudden, admitting his aversion. "Not like that. Because I can't remember how, it was-"

His expression twists, like he's in pain, and he breaks away from her gaze again.

Her hand is still near him and she lays it against his jaw, below the bruising and split skin at his cheekbone; cool though the water is warm, smooth like the pearl she isn't and gleams like. She's a lot of things at the moment, but callous isn't one of them - other times, yes, catlike as faerie tend to be, pretty monsters curious and cruel - and she understands just enough.

(Which is everything, for the two of them; they have faded polaroid snapshots where other people have conversations.)

It's the back of her knuckles, and a sigh, and her cheek against the rim of the tub. It's very quiet.

When she touches him he smiles in that way where it's smile or break, and he reaches up to push his hair back and he stops, realizing there's still dried blood on his hand; he lowers it back down, resting on the outside rim of the bath so there's nothing else in the water with her. (It's already a lost cause with the other one - his elbow's still in the tub, leaning against it with his arm in the basin.)

"I remember everything today," he says, staring at his hand. "I don't remember anything from that night. Just that when we were on the boat, Chaerin finally told me, after the babies were asleep, that I was beautiful. That the ones who survived didn't have minds anymore."

He sounds bleak. He puts his other hand in the water anyway.

"I don't know where Hilmi is."

Edited 2012-01-15 16:36 (UTC)

The first thing she thinks on the subject of Hilmi's whereabouts has less to do with any concern for him than it does concern for Megan - what if they need something from him for the antidote? She has no idea how it's made or what goes into that, for all she knows they will need him, what are they supposed to do if he's fallen in a ditch somewhere? (She'd come within inches of suggesting to Erik that if they needed a sample of him for whoever he found to create something that she was sure that could be arranged, she knows all these tall gentlemen who keep offering to do things for her--)

"I think you must have been beautiful," she says, finally, quietly. She thinks of Ellen.

It's things like that which make Jae's actions reckless - he's smart, and he's experienced in the ways of the world, but he was too emotionally overwhelmed to think about potential repercussions. He doesn't have the calculated foresight, or the ability to give himself appropriate distance. It could have gone much, much worse than it did, and though Jae - perhaps worryingly - doesn't feel bad for what he's done to Hilmi, he feels guilty for perpetuating anger and harm, and he knows as certain as the stillness of the tile under him that if he ends up arrested by some kind of magical police force, he'll just go quietly.

"I never wanted to be seen that way."

Beautiful because of hurting others. He accepted it, because it was Chaerin, because they had to have that iron-clad coldness to hang onto in those weeks, but it always made him feel queasy.

Forced to feel empathy is not something Ilde can be readily convinced is anything Hilmi doesn't deserve; maybe he'll understand, later, or maybe it'll have been a wasted effort, but it's nothing he gets an apology for later and Ilde has trouble seeing it as something done to hurt him. Jae made him feel the way he makes others feel, and if that's pain then Hilmi did it to himself, made those choices on his own. That's how she feels about it, but she's also not the one who actually did it to him and she rests her folded hands on Jae's shoulder, close and quiet with steam rising from the bath behind her.

"You're still beautiful," she says, because it's more complicated to her than about hurting and she isn't very good at knowing what to say, so sometimes it's just the first thing to cross her mind.

The smile he gives her is fleeting; he chooses to take her intent as comfort and thus be comforted by it, even if he really, truly doesn't care about anything like beauty right now. He feels anything but - not because he's roughed up and cut and miserable, but because he touched parts of himself tonight that make him feel the lowest of all things.

"Did you know," and of course she doesn't, wouldn't, but he's edging into that place where he's barely not in space, "That I knew about Baedal before I came here?"

"No," she says, like she expects him to elaborate on it; the word is a question that she doesn't quite ask, resting her chin on the edge of the tub. Of course she wouldn't know, but now she's curious -- she's always curious, there's almost nothing that pushes her so far she can't be stirred back with something that glints just the right way to catch her eye.

"The City of Baedal." It's a murmur, almost. "An old name for Shinshi, The City of Spirits. Where all the kings lived and taught all the people of Korea how to live up away from the dirt; it was a great metropolis, on Baekdu Mountain, before Gojoseon, when our history begins."

It's an old story. Most people forget, because even if some Koreans still keep Confucianism, almost none of them still keep the old, old ways.

But Baekdu Mountain is in Ryanggang. North Korea. Zainichi Koreans know the Spirit City.

"It's a glacier, in a crater that keeps a volcano that sleeps for one hundred years at a time. It's where life began in Han-guk. The mountain is sacred. Even if no one's ever found the city."

"Spirits," she repeats, remembering; telling Ivan she thinks it's about souls and not live bodies, the stab of fear that there'd be no coming back from the consumption of hers. (Souls who do things, who push--)

He recites the formal name and title in Korean, and he sounds better for it. (In his head, in his heart, it's his real first language. His Japanese is surely rusty by now, but it's been years since he's even thought in it, much less spoken it.)

"Maybe we're in a volcano."

(They aren't.)

"That's how the dead come to be here and so do the living," she says, quietly; it's been on her mind for months, the theories she concocts about how Baedal works and why. Ivan was the first person she really tried to discuss it with, but she returns to it again and again on her own, and under the present circumstances...

"It doesn't matter. It's souls."

She's almost certain.

He's quiet for a while. He could follow her train of thought, yes, and he does - absently, distantly, through a fog in his head. Souls, alive and dead. Maybe he counts as dead, now. Maybe they're going through everything in his apartment, boxing it away; he has no emergency contact. No family. A missing person's shit being sold at a police auction-

Jae puts his head down on the rim of the bath.

"You should all be Korean, then."

His hands are still in the water, starting to feel strange. The moisture is starting to seep through his sleeve to the rest of him.

"I can't go see Megan like this. I really fucked it up."

The angles that they rest at here, Ilde gazes at him like it isn't at all odd, sitting here and having this conversation with not quite enough words. (As many words as they need.)

"I don't know where she lives," she says, quietly. "Should Erik go check on her--?"

There is not really any argument that Jae isn't going to do it.

"Does she know Erik?"

Jae isn't sure a guy she doesn't know should go show up at her door, demanding her current status - hell, any guy, maybe he should... do something. Doesn't Hasibe know her? They're co-workers, right? (Fuck, does Megan even still have her job?)

"I don't know-- I don't know her, really, I copied her eyes once--"

Ilde has no idea where she works, who she knows, what would be the appropriate response right now; the only part of this that she knows anything about is Hilmi and she doesn't know enough to offer anything useful. It's frustrating.

Weakly, Jae thinks maybe he doesn't want to know what copied her eyes meant, and then he thinks that if he's thinking that, surely he's feeling better - and then he just feels hollow again. Maybe not.

"I don't think a guy she doesn't know should go."

So he'll go in the morning. He's in no state, right now. And he doesn't have anything to help her with, anyway. (Because Hilmi didn't. Because Hilmi is a fucking waste.) Maybe by then, somebody will call Ilde back.

"Okay." Erik can go find Hilmi, then, maybe. They still might need him, though Ilde thinks she'd prefer it if they didn't. At least she doesn't have to see him, either way. Megan doesn't have to see him, that's important. More important.

"Okay," she repeats, nudging her cheek against his shoulder.

Jae closes his eyes. She's comforting; there's something about her that makes the static in his head (that feels like a color, that smells like midnight) ease a little. Maybe it isn't her, maybe it's just being with someone else.

He wonders if he'll go to prison if he's killed Hilmi.

In the dark behind his closed eyes, for a moment he feels like he's not in his body anymore - like he's laying down, held down, in the dark-

Jae doesn't startle, but he opens his eyes again.

Sleeping is going to suck, tonight.

"I'll stay," she decides, quietly, and it doesn't seem abrupt; one moment flows neatly and smoothly into the next and Ilde is staying because it feels like where she should be at the moment and she follows instinct like it's all there is, sometimes. Right now.

He says, "Okay", and it sounds like Thank you, and for a long time, he doesn't move.

When his arm starts to ache from the position he's in, Jae finally sits up - his neck hurts, from being curled over, but he doesn't pay it any mind, it just blends in with everything else. His shirt's half soaked by now, and he slowly pulls himself to his feet. In his bedroom (which is attached to the bathroom; there's three doors in the master bathroom, one that leads into it from the main room, one that leads into where the toilet and shower are, and one that goes into the bedroom. It's a little crazy-), he pulls off his shirt lets it drop to the floor, and pulls on another one, long-sleeved and soft-knit, and doesn't bother changing anything else or even drying properly first.

He re-appears in the bathroom, standing by the doorway again, holding a black hooded sweater. It's the really soft one.

Ilde pulls herself up out of the bath when he returns, picking up a towel and stepping down the dais with the very deliberate steps of somebody who needs badly to be in control and isn't, maybe, her glamours resettling on her skin as the water drips off it. (He's probably seen her tattoo before, in London; high hemlines and high heels, she's still that person, sharper and darker.)

"I should've got actual clothes," she observes, but she takes the sweater and it's not like it won't cover most of her, given how much smaller she is than he is. "I think I gave someone a turn."

For all his other tendencies, you'd think Jae might turn red at a girl he's fully platonic with getting naked out of his own bath tub, but Ilde's body isn't the first he's seen; if he looks at anything, it's how she does her glamour. (She's much better at it than he is.)

"They must have been a prude." Lightly, just barely. There are odder things in Baedal than nudity. "I have.. I mean, whatever else you'd like to put on."

That one's just really comfortable, and he didn't want to assume she'd really want to, you know, wear his knickers. (Some of them are cute, though.)

"This is okay," she says, finding her hands in the cuffs and smiling up at him, small and nearly tremulous. "This is-- fine, clothes are just..." A vague gesture. Habitual, obligatory, or play. Sometimes all at once, but right now it's just nice to have something soft to tuck herself up with.

"It's fine."

To Jae, clothes are rather important (like her deliberate steps, he's got - the only things he has, putting himself together this way), but he's either in too open of a mood or too exhausted of one to do anything besides passively understand her implication. Clothes in the water must be a pain in the ass, anyway.

"You're welcome to whatever," he says, and it doesn't sound like a brush-off, it sounds like he's telling her she's got carte blance in his apartment (which she does). But his eyes are rimmed in red, worn out and frayed down to the bone, so that's the last she's going to get out of him for now. The bed in his bedroom is kingsized on an antique white frame, white sheets; he lays down, still fully clothed, on the far side of it (so Ilde's near the door if she decides to sit down).

He'll be out pretty quick. (Troubled, fraught, but out.)

The importance of clothing is something that Ilde is just used to experiencing differently than people around her, but Jae probably would understand why she's so choosy and impractical; if she has to do this, then she has to do it her way and make it hers, uncompromised. It's like the glamours, and making sure that what people see is what she chooses for them to see. What they know is what she chooses to tell them--

--which Jae does understand, she already knows that, so she's both genuinely touched by Jae's offer and has every intention of taking him up on it at least as far as looking around. Because, from their admittedly short acquaintance, she's comfortable taking him at his word.

But she has to call Erik, eventually, and after she's decided that no, she's fine in the sweater, she pulls the door to behind her (not closed, not all the way) and curls into the corner of the chaise to get a hold of him. She doesn't have much to say - if anything - but it's one more task to tick off her list before she runs out.

After that, maybe she'll just sleep, too.

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baby i have been here before

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