multiversallogs | then the riddle gets solved and you push me up to this

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then the riddle gets solved and you push me up to this

Who: ~~Bruce~~ Tom & Seoraj.
What: Camping, completely free of ulterior ~~alibi~~ motive.
Where: North of Flag Hill.
When: Beginning roughly on the 30th.
Warnings: Weirdness, violence, sexuality.

They leave early, because that's the tradition of camping - before dawn, as they have to make it up to the northern edge of the city proper first ("'Morning-") - the provisional shops built into the cliff face that hosts the treacherous ways up into the forests are helpful, the proprietors less so; that they generally profit off fools isn't anything they keep quiet. Bruce isn't bothered. Cold morning air and physical exertion with dirt under his hands makes some far-off part of him feel at peace.

It's just starting to become properly bright out when they reach the summit that'll lead them into the woods, and he takes a moment to stop and look out over the view of the city. Up here it's quiet, but not silent - it's not an absence of sound, but an absence of people, and looking down on Baedal from the vantage point of the highest natural point in the only landscape they have available makes it feel like another world.

Remarkable.

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"Right."

This man.

That's all he has to say on the subject, even in his head. The ambiguity conveniently covers nearly everything he might otherwise remark on, without wasting any of the time he could be spending keeping a sharp eye out for their less visually talented friends from earlier. Or anything else, given where they are and what they're doing and the fact they seem to be working on a 'good news, bad news' existence today.

He doesn't see any of them; he still isn't comforted.

Investigating the cliff face, even with the motivation of fading light, is not a job Bruce can do in a few minutes - he can hurry his ass up, yes, but it's still careful work. Especially in the dark. Forty-five minutes into it, Seoraj will receive a text that says Fine still. You? and Bruce has to wonder what, exactly, powers the cohort network; reception is only partially obscured so far out.

It's an hour and a half before he resurfaces, appearing back over the edge with almost alarming speed - jeez he's good at that - and whether or not he's roughed up is hard to tell, because he's half-soaked.

"Hi." ... Yes, hello. His voice is hushed, a good habit. "There are a lot of caves half a click down that are shallow enough to get light with dawn. They're uninhabited. Though there's a stream that runs through the cliff deeper in." Which is good for many reasons of practicality and hygiene alike.

The concern of what might come along through that stream - Seoraj suspects he's beginning to get paranoid about every possible bad ending, but on the other hand that seems eminently sensible about now - is one that occurs to him promptly, but weighed against the upsides of having it there, worth taking the risk. Mind, he's not sure anyone else should ever take their word on risk assessment, collectively.

(He flatters himself that he's better at it when he's not following Bruce out of some morbid desire to see what happens next.)

“How far down're we going?” Not tonight, he presumes; they'll camp, it's about that time. But it might be worth getting a more detailed version of the plan, given what's happened already and the version he remembers getting before they left the city--

"Pretty far," which sounds a lot like I don't actually know, though at least Bruce has the decency to sound passingly sheepish - it's hard to tell if it's genuine, given his... given himself, but it's true they don't have a map or detailed instructions. That much, Seoraj knew before they set out. "Hopefully we'll end up going in a direction no one's living in."

Yeah, that's likely.

Bruce explains where they'll need to go, exactly how far down everything is - Seoraj will have to shimmy down first, so Bruce can pull the rope down with him as he goes after. It'll probably take them fifteen minutes to get down to the cliff shelf they can use to camp in, so all in all, not bad.

And then he waits; sitting back, looking up.

Even though the sky is only a deep blue, not quite pitch-black with total sundown, the sky is shining with unfamiliar stars, not even grazed with anything close to light pollution.

“There's where we all see the same thing,” Seoraj says, reflectively, beside him. “That's nobody's sky.”

Something about it is oddly satisfying to him; he looks up at those strange stars and what he feels is something unifying, an experience shared no matter what internal context they bring with them from their own worlds. Those stars are different for everybody in their cohort, and he likes that.

In the cohort, anyway. There are all kinds of books and maps about astrology, astronomy, guesses and lore - "Until someone builds a space ship."

(Shut up, Bruce.)

The flippant tone of his voice is an obvious put-on; he doesn't have anything helpful or poignant to say, but it doesn't seem right to not say anything. It makes a strange sort of sense that this man communicates better when he's in situations that are closer to high-octane, as if that's how he's built, and at all other times he's merely coasting, waiting to be used properly.

He glances at Seoraj. "Better get a move on. Can you get down there in your skirt?"

“Figured I was going first so you wouldn't get distracted,” Seoraj returns, so very mild in a way that comes all the way back around to insouciant. These manly thighs are Integra Hellsing approved, Bruce, don't even play.

"Well I'd hate to have something happen to you if you went over unsupervised," he says. "Then what would I do?"

Shoo, Seoraj. This is supposed to be a serious mission, fraught with peril.

By the time Seoraj is lowering himself down into the ravine - it's slow, careful going, because he can do this but he's not extremely well-practised and he's aiming for that happy medium between 'not so fast I cock it up' and 'not so slow I cock it up either' - he's still chuckling, under his breath, which is better than going down thinking really hard about things that want to eat him and psyching himself out.

So there's that.

Bruce is calm, at least, sharp-eyed - once he directs Seoraj in a quiet but clear voice to navigate a certain way - though part of him is, privately, wondering just how he's going to deal with the consequences of this banter. It's not that he's nervous, but it's ... well, different, and Bruce doesn't like not having a plan.

Now, though, he has other priorities. And when Seoraj is safely into the cave ledge, Bruce begins his descent, pinning and pulling his way down, though honestly relying more on his own ability to climb over the rocks. It would be safer, yes, to leave the rope anchored at the top, but then they'd be leaving a flag to anyone watching. When they leave he'll do things the hard way. That's fine.

When Bruce drops down into the cave without incident, he has the decency to look a bit worn-out, at least.

“You'd be bloody irritating if I were of a competitive mind,” Seoraj remarks, quiet, from where he's been getting the layout of the cave they're in while Bruce was coming down to join him.

Bruce just smiles at him, lopsided and only barely not fleeting. He tidies up the ropes and pegs and pulls out a small cylinder to use as a light, a tiny thing that casts a surprisingly warm glow once he clicks it on. (Even without advanced science, Bruce has still managed to find an innumerable amount of gadgets. It's a gift.)

"It's been quiet?"

“Quiet enough.” No movement, nothing unexpected; it doesn't relax him, not when they've got a suggestion of what they can expect going deeper, but maybe they'll keep on having a quiet night before they continue in the morning.

That's good.

Bruce creeps around a bit at the back of the cave - it's got a narrow passageway back into the deeper catacombs and the water inlet, which he points out; once they're settled in he kicks up some gravel along the passageway floor, listening carefully. ... Because of course he thinks he can hear something disturbing gravel against stone in his sleep. Maybe he can.

"So," oh no he's going to try and converse like a normal person. "Most of that was .. unexpected."

Of course he thinks he can do that. (Hear gravel in his sleep...converse like a normal person.) Seoraj is less inclined to question what Bruce can do, any more, and much more interested in watching to see what actually happens.

Although--

“I'm still holding you to it,” in his very mild way. The Vault show, he means.

A beat-

"I meant the dragon." Bruce you asshole.

"I suppose the rest bears addressing."

(It feels strange to cop to that attraction, even indirectly, but good, too.)

“I was expecting the dragon,” Seoraj observes, wry, his arms resting over his knees where he's sitting, close to but not against the cave wall; might get cold, sitting right up against it. Might not have expected the exact details, but 'this is going to get really insane' has been more or less his stance on the whole thing from the beginning. Call it a hunch.

--which is a pretty good way of stepping around that which he did not expect, actually, because it's interesting and he's...interested, that's clear, but it's out of his field of experience in ways that dragons turned out to be not quite.

He knows what he's doing, with a woman. Meg, for instance; if nothing else, can't say he doesn't know where everything goes. Doesn't end up feeling like he's starting all over again from before his voice finished breaking, which was not what he thinks of as one of the more dignified periods of his life, such as those have been.

"Which surprised you?" Quietly, though they've got to keep their voices down out here. He sits finally, and it should be a little gratifying to the other man, noncompetitive as he might be, that one of Bruce's knees pops as he does.

It's either that he reciprocates (and hell, said anything about it) or the existence of it between them at all - Bruce, for his all meager and not exclusively pleasant experience, isn't sure how well Seoraj reads him. He isn't sure if there was anything to read, either, having gone around this in some very complex circles in his head for a good while.

(It's a little gratifying.)

He laughs, quietly, dropping his head for a moment and smoothing his hand over his hair, down the back of his neck underneath it. (There's a lot of hair.) The last of that sound comes out as a rueful breath and he says, “No shortage of pretty women 'round here.” ...Baedal, not, uh, this cave. He's not been watching for someone like Bruce (Tom, still, as far as he knows); it snuck up on him, unexpectedly, and the whole thing (that there is a whole thing) is what surprises him, catches him off-guard and makes him pause.

Mind, he's still smiling.

Bruce - Tom, he's been going by Tom for so many years now, it doesn't even seem strange anymore - smiles; it's a little wry in a self-depreciating way, and a lot knowing. One extremely surreal night mediated by Vanessza and a date that ended in near-disaster doesn't give him much of an edge on the situation. That Seoraj is smiling and that he isn't like -

- well. He isn't like any of the examples Bruce could cite in a conversation like this. That difference and its contribution to how keen he's become is something Bruce is cognizant of, though he chooses even now not to focus on it.

"It's not my usual fare, either."

With them more or less settled, Bruce clicks off the light. It'll pitch them into darkness for a bit, but the stars as bright enough that after a few minutes, he knows his eyes will adjust.

The extent of Seoraj's familiarity with the notion, prior to Baedal, consisted of vague rumours that invariably concerned foreigners; he hasn't had much occasion to give it more thought, before, but at least in his case that mostly means a lack of inconvenient preconceived ideas. Large parts of his life have been 'find something interesting, make up the rest as he goes along', so why should this be different--?

What makes him uneasy has nothing to do with Bruce - Tom - but the locale. It's never been consciously deliberate but it's also never been coincidence that the women he gets deeply involved with have tended to be foreign women, women in cities he was passing through, relationships that had an inevitable and consistent endgame. Sooner or later he had to go, and though some endings were less amicable than others, ultimately they all ended the same way, without necessarily much input of his.

It's not something he's particularly inclined to examine, though, and there's another long, hard day ahead of them tomorrow; there's only a quiet chuckle in the darkness, and then sleep, and in the morning the change between them is just awareness, for now, so they can go on.

Sleep is uncomfortable on the rock, but they're covered and relatively protected, and it's flat and free of bugs. Could be worse. Bruce wakes long before the light's made it's way down into the ravine, and moves silently as he scopes out any changes. Nothing's come to bother them during the night - or at least, nothing that wasn't floating through the air undetected.

If Seoraj isn't up by the time the sunlight begins to turn the black pit slightly greyer, he's getting a poking.

Seoraj is awake before dawn by habitual reflex - he just usually is, Bruce surely remembers interrupting him in his morning routine over some horse shenanigans - though not quite so quickly as his companion, here. It's hard to say whether he's temperamentally a morning person or not, but the knack for falling asleep anywhere and shaking it off in moments is a survival skill that he mastered a long time ago, and he's easy on his feet in good time.

“Not missing anything?” A little wryly; from their camp ... toes ... seriously, Bruce, what madness have you got him into. (The best kind; Baedalian domesticity has had him bored a while.)

"Doesn't look like it." He's already eaten a terrible-tasting ration bar (finding things sealed to the point of being undetectable by animal senses is difficult in Gotham, forget Baedal) and is ready to get back to work, as it were. He's got an idea about where they're going, and it's going to suck, but it's also the best idea about where they're going he's had since they set out. (Comforting.) He relays this to Seoraj, quiet enough not to disrupt the ambiance of whatever's deep inside the rock, lurking, but leaves out phrases like 'it's going to suck.'

(It can probably be inferred.)

Rock climbing through a cave system is claustrophobic, dark, uncertain work, but Bruce is sure-handed and has such a calmness to him that it seems like nothing could possibly go wrong without his permission. More than once, they have to sit still and quiet as something creeps past them towards one of the cliff-side fissures, apparently off to bask in the warm light. Pockets of air seem thicker, in places, too humid, but cold.

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then the riddle gets solved and you push me up to this

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