river_meimei | (no subject)

(no subject)

[Immediately after this:]

Duo is hurrying down the hallway towards room 121, pulling River along with him with one hand closed gently around her arm. She's starting to stumble a little, but keeping pace. He gets to watch where they're going for the both of them, though; her gaze darts around, never quite settling, and her jaw is clenched as tight as her shoulders and the tendons on the backs of her hands.

Her white face is tight with fury, but there are tears on her cheeks now.

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He's keeping up a stream of babble that is attempting to be reassuring as well. "Okay, okay, here we are. C'mon, let's get inside and close the door at least, huh? Man oh man, your brother is going to kill me." All right, that last part might not be so much with the reassuring. At least now they're in the room.

"Wrong."

Her head snaps sideways; her eyes, tear-bright and full of furious intensity still, fix on Duo.

"He's wrong. Breaks the bounds, doesn't fit."

"No kidding. I'm not keen on any gods, but his dad must have been a real nasty one. But he's gone, and we're here. It's pretty safe, I got some wards up on it ages ago, they should still work okay, though. Sit down at least."

He herds her toward the bed and hovers nearby.

"Never is."

River lets herself be herded. When she drops onto the bed it's in one abrupt motion, as if gravity suddenly took over; she turns her head to stare at (or through) the wall, face tight and tears still slowly leaking.

Ahhh, no crying girls! That is not a thing allowed to happen in his presence! He shoves a handkerchief (bright green) into her hand. "I figured getting away was the best thing, but you've gotta work with me here, kid. What can I do?"

"We all do." River's voice is low, tear-clogged. She takes the handkerchief automatically, though she doesn't put it to use except to clutch it in one fist, her fingers tightening and loosening in arrhythmic agitation.

"Stand true."

"Who we are. He breaks the world, all the straws in the quantum underpinning, but, but he won't. He won't."

"I..." He breaks off there. He's reasonably sure the guy wasn't trying to be malevolent. Solving math problems isn't very evil. But logic probably isn't going to help at this point.

"We're okay. Quantums and all. 'Least, I am. You're gonna have to tell me if you are." Duo quits twitching uselessly and sits down next to her.

River's silent for a long minute.

(But you have scarred me with your knives and burned me with your fires borne of your false magic)

And then -- she's still silent, but her head moves a little in an unclear and fretful gesture, and then her shoulders slump as if all the fight's gone out of her between one breath and the next. Her eyes close, and open again to stare unseeing at the blanket.

"That's not exactly encouraging." Duo bites his lip and carefully reaches out to touch her shoulder. He's got the pose of someone expecting to get smacked a good one. No sudden moves, though! He can always put ice on it later.

River doesn't move, nor even tense up; if anything, her posture sags a fraction more.

"He's wrong," she mutters.

"Hurts the air. And, and I can hear it."

"Okay, we can work with that. He didn't say too much, but it wasn't what he said, was it?" Since she didn't punch him in the face, he tries an arm around her shoulder.

"Feel free not to answer, but this is your other thing, isn't it?"

River's gaze slides to him sidelong, after a moment.

Her head moves slightly in an equivocal gesture: maybe affirmation, or maybe a question, or maybe something between the two.

"I wouldn't want to read anyone's mind, here." That's a half question too, testing out a theory or two. "I like being the center of my universe just fine, thanks. I can only take so many points of view."

River is silent for a long, long moment, looking down at nothing.

And then: "It's very noisy." There's a ghost of a smile with that, but the humor is bleak; if this sounds like an admission of sorts, that's because it is.

"That must suck," Duo offers.

River shrugs a little, against his arm.

She's had five free years to get used to it; eight years, since the first treatments began.

"Is it quieter up here, away from people?"

Pause.

"...when I'm not talking, anyway?" Should he leave her alone?

River's chin lifts in the start of a nod, and pauses. She nods again, more surely.

"Should I shut up and leave you be?"

River is silent for a moment, head bowed.

Then she shakes her head, a little -- the motion small, but faintly frustrated. "Not the point. It's qualitative."

"You're okay."

"If you say so." He is touched, actually!

"You wanna stay up here for a while, then?"

"What we do," River whispers to the far wall. "Khef and ka. Hold it together." Tears glitter in her eyes, and smear messily across her cheeks, but she's not quite crying any more. "It's the job." She swallows.

And nods, just a little.

"I get ya," he says. "Sometimes it's a lousy job. Go on, use that. I didn't give it to you so you could leak all over yourself."

He digs around on the shelf under the bedside table for a moment before coming up with a sharpie and a pad of paper. "Why don't you show me what you were working on before we got interrupted?"

Distraction is a go.

"It's not relevant." Whether this means the lousiness or the handkerchief is unclear.

Or the sharpie, for that matter.

"You were the one who was getting all fired up about theory, earlier. C'mon, what if I forgot how to calculate my next trajectory? At least I could follow along in the notes."

Duo gets a Look. It is a Look that says, you are being ridiculous on purpose now, and you know it, doofus.

But, hey, she's looking at him instead of the middle distance!

Of course he is, this is his clever strategy. See? It worked.

"Yeeees?" He waggles the marker at her.

"Won't forget."

If he does, he has bigger problems than needing to follow River's notes. (Especially since half of them are in chalk on the bar floor, unless they're already getting cleaned up by sleep-deprived Oompa Loompas.)

That's not precisely a refusal, though.

"Well okay, no. Probably not." She's got him there. "But it was a purely hypothetical situation. See? Theory came in useful after all. You were right."

He gets the face again! This time it has shades of I am not a moron either.

But she also reaches for the pen, reluctantly.

"Your subtlety is flawed," she informs him.

"I try and worry about subtle on occasions where it'll actually help," Duo tells her."Unless you'd rather play tic-tac-toe, show me what you got."

This will keep them busy for a while. He'll sneak back down and see if the bar has emptied out any later.

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