wonder if he'll ever know

[cestrumnocturnum]

Who: Benji Ryans (and later, Wolfgang Einhorn)
What: Just a little law and order.
Where: The Spatters
When: All of 31st.
Note: During the raid, there is a halt on all communications going in and out of the Spatters -- no media is leaked, and the reception for CiD is just flat out poor. In the aftermath, there's a blackout of information.
Warnings: References to police brutality.

The book lies neglected on the kitchen table as they share coffee instead and talk lightly. Benji will have to coax her-- Sepa, the mother of one who has lived here for almost five years-- into returning to it, thinking ahead already to what better literature might make this more enjoyable than tiresome.

With her attention out the window, Sepa speaks of her home world, of the volcanic earth and the hot springs and the devastating winters, of the epic on-foot journeys and the enormity and scale of their governance. How small and petty and cluttered Baedal seems to her and how the fog at least reminds her of home. Second eyelids blink horizontal in a gesture that has begun to read to Benji as uncertainty. In the corner of the kitchen, her daughter, Kidirin, is drawing. She's being raised Baedal, Sepa had said, when she'd told Benji she'd given birth to her in the Glory Shada. The little girl's skin is the same pale green as her mother's, but more human features show in the shape of her tiny jaw, the tiny nails on her fingers.

Setting down her coffee, reluctant to end the conversation but feeling guilty should she not try to do her job, Benji reaches back for the book. But before she can say anything, Sepa hisses and points out the window--

"Look."

~

The fog was rolling in thick today, disguising some of the activity beginning to brew in the Spatters. There was no calming down Sepa, who kept slipping into her native language but was more than able to express her urgency that she couldn't remain in the building. Benji could only take her word for it, only urged her into a coat and helped her dress Kidirin. She told Sepa she should leave her CiD before remembering that Sepa had gotten rid of it a long time ago. They'd left out the back and ducked through a gap in the fence.

Benji hugs a corner as she observes the street. Heavy barricades erected to cut off the street, the roaming shadows of the Militia men and women patrolling it, conversing with one another. Veiled in the creeping mist, they seemed to be almost the only tangible things in a ghost-like world of uncertain definition. She sinks back as a group of them move down the street, on foot and horse both.

The sound that follows, less than a minute later, is one she has heard before -- the breaking of a door beneath handheld battering ram, and it takes three blows. Something breaks. Tension and anger. The arrest of one turns into the arrest of several when someone is dragged from their home and those that love them and those that don't even know them rise to their defence.

Benji has zero compulsion to get arrested, especially not when she can feel Sepa anxiously watching her back. She stops recording on her CiD -- because that's what they do, isn't it? -- and turns back to her.

~

They wait it out, for a while, with a few others who discover the cover they've found behind a building, and Benji gladly keeps Kidirin in her lap as Sepa accepts a cigarette. One of them reports a story of a criminal -- maybe, maybe not -- who'd breached the barricade on horseback. It sounds heroic, and someone asks what happened to him.

Shot in the back, of course. Someone else confirms they heard gunfire.

Soon, they disperse as quickly as a flock of birds at first word that a line is closing in on them. Benji stays with Sepa and her child, unsure who is protecting who, before realising that no one is.

~

Underground, with old world cobblestone that is slippery underfoot. Sepa has to use her powers to break down the barred off way someone had installed some more recent time ago, and it's too dark to see. Benji uses her CiD as a light, and they feel their way with their hands. It's meant to come out somewhere in Ketch Heath, making it a lengthy journey for being underground, but Benji would settle for emerging somewhere beyond the guard set up, sealing off four winding blocks of Spatters.

She keeps expecting the click and whirr of camera bots, the green-turned-red eyes of a hunter in pursuit, the choking yellow smog. But soon, Benji finds the metal rungs of a ladder, the faint light of an opening. Sepa climbs first with her child riding her back, arms around her neck, and confirms safety. Benji comes up just for the fresh air and to see the sun's position in the sky, to share a quick and awkward embrace.

And as agreed, at least by her, she goes back down, and makes her way back through the tunnel. It will be a journey she repeats until the barricades are taken down.

They aren't until sunset.

Comments

[cestrumnocturnum]

"I arrived-- after the monster siege, in Ged," Benji says, after having to think a moment about which one is Ruudary. And also how long she's been here. Months. Her expression remains bleak, which always makes her look more severe, a little older, drained.

She wants to ask where they go, after they're arrested, but feels somewhat-- unqualified to be asking that, and also there are a lot of questions to be asked. Ones she hasn't been asking. "Maybe I haven't, mm. I don't think I've said anything about it very much, about when I was taken. To here. I don't really like thinking about it, but I did, all today, because it's really nice here usually. I mean, I don't like to go on about it, people generally don't like that they're here, and I miss-- my family, too, and everyone."

Hnn. Sip of wine. But she isn't finished. "But it was nice thinking that it's a place that can't be at war with anything from the outside, or-- just. No more supply runs. No one can leave so no one has to be smuggled out of the state, out of the country. You can have almost anything you want for yourself, and go anywhere, and there's magic." Which she still finds kind of enchanting, the idea of it, even if she knows that it can be just as brutal and gritty and exhausting as she's seen superpowers to be. Sometimes it's full of ghosts and throws tables at people, but it's still magic.

And yet-- "Today wasn't forgiveable. How they treated them, how they treated anyone. Just because it's the Spatters, and no one cares. It's so dangerous, it becomes so dangerous, especially when they make you think that fighting it makes it worse." She glances at Wolfgang, briefly self-conscious, down again at her glass.

[gramarye]

"They bring you in with nothing, you miss your family and hate being here, but you have to take care of yourself or you starve. You have to make a life here, and you get attach to it because you make it out of nothing, it's yours. A good accomplishment. And it's nice, everyone here who isn't somewhere they like people not human, they're treated better. Then they give you little things, reminders of home, make you grateful to them for those kindnesses. They, um -" He can't think of the word he wants in English, gestures broadly and uselessly. Sleepy and anxious and agitated, he speaks quicker and his grammar suffers for it. "Give you Stockholm syndrome. So when the Militia, they do these violent things, you don't want to watch it too hard, because if you get involved, they destroy everything you work for. And you can't ask most people to give up everything they have for probably nothing. And you can't just go somewhere else."

He pauses. "I don't think this is an accident, I think they design it this way, so most people never see this, they never think about it too much. It's fucked." He laughs but it's joylessly bitter. "I think sometimes I'm crazy, no one seems to see. It's like this everywhere. Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Baedal, it's all the same."

[cestrumnocturnum]

"They," Benji repeats, following a quiet mm that is lost in her wine as she drinks deeply. Wolfgang's words sink in and remain unsettled, aggravating, and they are words shaped from the experience of living here and living elsewhere. It rings familiar -- there is much here that is unique to here in a way she never had before.

A hand comes up, rubbing uneasily at her jaw, tucking hair behind her ear. "You aren't crazy," she says, after a moment, a glance to him along with a minor smile, back down at her drink.

"Where I'm from, they put depressants in the negation medications and made it compulsory if you were over tier two. Or tried to. The hunters-- you saw them, when we dreamed-- they were installed with a... it's a compass, for people like us." It's easy and thoughtless, how she includes Wolfgang, how her perception of Evolved has expanded to xenians, magic-users. "They just kept making so many laws and the laws weren't there to protect anyone.

"I didn't have to, um. Do any of that, I wasn't even legal. It started a long time ago, maybe-- 2010, earlier, a few decades, and we lived off grid. When I came here, it was when we were meant to be going back. In time." Now who sounds crazy? "To, mm, to try and stop it from getting that bad, somehow. It was easier to be," gesture with glass to indicate Baedal broadly, "wooed, I suppose."

[gramarye]

"That's horrible." But not surprising, not really. It's better than what the Technocracy would do if they were in power - eradicate everyone but the baselines, anchoring the world into a static reality that they would control - but then again, they also don't have HIT Marks and cyborgs running around in the street in broad daylight, either. One of them was enough, those teeth. It stands out, his normal dreams are all the same.

He brushes his hair out of his face, it's all tangled on one side where he was laying on it, then picks at a loose thread on the arm of the couch. "I don't understand what that's like, not really, only... abstract, sort of. So I try not to judge people who get complacent, I think, maybe it's the first time they're able to go outside without being afraid. I just." Tugging on that pendant again, barely restraining himself from gnawing on it and getting teeth marks in the setting - "Just tired of seeing kids get shot, and everyone looking the other way."

[cestrumnocturnum]

"Yes," is quiet, kind of over Wolfgang's words, not interrupting or bringing anything new to the table, just-- yes, Baedal can be beautiful sometimes, sometimes its easy to be part of the problem. Evil is apathy, that was one of the things they'd tell each other. Benji shuts her eyes for a second, feeling the weight of the day and the wine in her mouth.

Opens her eyes again so that she doesn't take a miscalculated sip, taking a measured one instead. "Thank you," she says, after a second, even if she knows it might be confusing to hear. For what? "Just for. Talking, but understanding too. It's been a day.

"I only wish I knew what to do, you know. It was easier in New York, in its way. You help people leave the state, or leave the country." That you can't do that here goes without saying, glancing to Wolfgang again, hand twitching like she'd like to right one of his pale locks gone awry, but refraining -- also there is more than just one, so. "It's like you can't just... help people, when they're trapped. I mean. You can, for a day."

But not for as long as they're here.

[gramarye]

Wolfgang opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again - fidgets, shifting back and forth, then gives up and starts gnawing on his thumbnail, the tip of his finger.

"There are people here who are," he says finally. "Helping. Or they're trying to. Here, in Badside, um. And others. I could take you."

Of course there are. Of course he knows where they are. For someone who spends over half his day asleep, who gets anxious when the doorbell rings and has to psyche himself up for hours just to make a phone call, he sure does manage to get into a lot of trouble.

Not that there's some grand anti-police conspiracy underground, it is, for the most part, concerned citizens trying to enact social change through protest, copwatch programs, disseminating information - small grassroots actions. They don't even have that much momentum. But it's there, and these things start somewhere. And there are factions of them talking about going beyond peaceful protest and civil disobedience. They are starting to arm themselves.

[cestrumnocturnum]

There are ways things start, too. The Ferry began with one woman with a capacity to gain information, and some kids with pamphlets. A long time ago, granted, before she born.

Benji looks to Wolfgang, a bit too tired to be surprised. She's not even sure she would be. She finishes her drink, anyway, and sets it down, hands folding and allowing for a fleeting smile, a nod. "I'd like that." In as much as this isn't enjoyable, but there are different ways to want things.

[gramarye]

"All right." He is too something to smile. Tired, sad, anxious, pick one. So that's that - he feels a general reluctance to invite other people into something so dangerous, like anyone would, but Benji is an adult and he knows how patronizing it is when others don't allow you to make your own decisions, and anyway he would be mildly disappointed to have heard no, anyway, despite how he tries not to judge people for it.

"Word will probably get out. About this. They can black out the CiDs, but they can't stop people from talking." He rubs at his face like scratching the sleep out of his eyes. "I guess we'll hear in a few hours." In the morning, but he can't tell if it is or isn't yet.

[cestrumnocturnum]

"I don't picture a lot of people going home right away," Benji says, agreeing, palms sliding together in a slow fidget, before she studies her palms, the faint healing patterns of shallow injury from a while ago and the dirt collected in the lines. Which somehow inspires tiredness, but that's likely the wine. And everything else. "There are other places to lay low, I think, she-- um, the lady I was with. She said she was making for the woodland areas if she could get that far. I might go see."

A shrug, and Benji goes to stand, taking empty glass with her. "After I sleep for a month, of course."

[gramarye]

"Okay. I'll be here." Since he's up, he'll stay up, probably at least for another couple of hours. And checking his CiD over and over, seeing if anyone else has heard of this, if anything's starting to happen - he sort of doubts it, but...

"Let me know if you need anything."