route_1065 | He Ain't Heavy

Entry tags:

He Ain't Heavy

Who: Parker (

nostabbing) and Ishimaru (

ardent)
Where: Goldenrod City
When: Thursday, January 23
Summary: A couple of not-siblings take advantage of the warm weather to appreciate the out-of-doors. The fact that one of them is virtually comatose is largely irrelevant. Also basically this.
Rating: PG? I'll update the rating if it changes.
Log:

[It's a nice day outside.

It's been a nice day a lot, recently — there've been some mildly cloudy days and maybe the occasional rain shower, but by and large it's been sunny summer afternoons here in the middle of January, and even though Parker's still kind of convinced that the world is ending a little bit as evidenced by it, she has more important things to concern herself with for the duration. Namely, the fact that she's taken it upon herself to spearhead the Keep Ishimaru Doing Stuff So Maybe He'll Start Getting Better effort, which up until this point has largely been founded on such endeavors as putting food into him, walking him around places, and occasionally fleeing from bees.

Today, fortunately, they've largely managed to evade hostile insect encounters, keeping instead to the sparsely-populated streets of the city and wandering around on the sidewalks that will take them past comforting, familiar buildings populated with normal people and normal things. Sometimes they stop and look at the beginning blooms of utterly confused flowers; sometimes they pause to listen to street musicians with their Kricketunes put on a show. Most of the time they make sure to eat something, and Parker always makes extra sure those snacks never involve butter, pancakes, or anything obviously resembling the two.

She's still not sure about that one, but Hagakure said so and Hagakure's a bro, so that's what she's going with.

Today, the snack of choice is street crepes; she'd planned on maneuvering him toward the local donut shop for some delicious fresh crullers, but then the cart and its batter-swirling magic had caught her eye, and she'd been just fascinated enough by the whole business to sort of haul Ishimaru along as she drew near for a closer look.

Street crepes. No butter, no pancakes, and no meat. Also yummy. It's too bad she can't steal one (or seven), but paying isn't so bad when it's for Ishimaru, anyway.]

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[At first she isn't quite sure whether he means that for the vendor or for her, mostly because saying thank-you is presumably the socially correct thing to do here, and he could've communicated it to her noiselessly if he'd really wanted to, so the extra effort is a little perplexing. But there's something about the way he tries that changes her mind on that, solidifies that it really is meant for her. Maybe it's that he keeps going after that odd noise wrangles itself out of his mouth; maybe it's that even as his gaze shifts around, every so often it's like he's trying to hold it on her.

She forks over the money and doesn't even wince, and then watches as the circles of batter gradually crisp up and get transferred to the cutting board where they're laden with all the fillings. Apparently Vendor Guy's delicate culinary sensibilities have been offended by the thought of just painting one of these things in nothing but chocolate, but at least he manages to make it look artful before wrapping both orders up in paper and handing them over to her.]

Oh, these look great.

[She takes them one at a time, first dragging up Ishimaru's free hand to stick the strawberry one into it, then retrieving her own — so she never has to let go of his other hand while she gets things sorted out.]

You want to go sit down somewhere and appreciate stuff while we eat?

[He nods again at that, though his attention is rather clearly fixated on the crepe than her, as though he's trying to work out what he thinks of it; he's getting better at eating on command, even though he still has to figure out how he feels about whatever's in front of him before he attempts - he's never said anything about how sick it tends to make him feel when he eats anything nowadays, but if it gets bad enough then maybe he will, who knows.

He decides eventually that he feels pretty okay about the crepe. It looks good, anyway, which is more than can be said about most things that are put in front of him; whether this will just turn to ash on him when he eats it has yet to be seen, though, and he's not going to get his hopes up too far.

He isn't sure where they're going to go in terms of appreciating things, but he finds it doesn't matter. He knows she won't lead him anywhere he truly doesn't want to go, and more importantly she can tell when he truly doesn't want to go anywhere; as long as it doesn't end in bees again, he supposes it'll be fine.

Not that he really minds the bees normally, but those were quite a lot of bees.]

[She nudges him with her shoulder as she starts to lead him further down the street; there are benches interspersed every so often along the sidewalks, usually near lamp posts and decorative plant...things, and maybe they'll stop at one of them if one feels right, or maybe they'll keep going until they find a park, or maybe they'll make a detour and go all the way down to the pier and look at the ocean over the boardwalk's railing.

There's a lot they can do on a day like today, and there's really no pressure to do much of anything — save perhaps eating their crepes quickly enough that the ice cream doesn't melt and spill all over.]

Hey, so...

[Nudge, nudge.]

Maybe one of these days you can give the Eevees some orders. You know, when we take them out. I don't think they listen to me as good as they do to you.

[...what is small talk at least there is no mention of ritual suicide thank god]

[He's content to follow, at any rate; the nudging is good because it gets his attention, lets him know there's something he should be paying attention to that isn't just the crepe and the way the ice cream shifts a little in the heat of the day, and even if he's not sure what to do with the words he finds himself grateful for them because at the very least they give him something to think about.

The horde has been spending a lot of time lost lately, he thinks, but surely they listen to his sister; maybe no one has told them that they should.]

...Okay.

[He doesn't remember deciding to answer, but apparently he did somewhere along the line because he has, and he busies himself with eating some of that ice cream before it starts getting into any sort of major slippage; the chocolate over the strawberries tastes good, even if he's never liked sweet things (because it was so, so much easier if he didn't).

The ice cream doesn't taste too bad either, today. That's often a bit more dubious but for now it's all right.]

They...seem worried. A lot.

[...]

...the Eevees.

[Just for the sake of clarification.]

Edited 2014-01-24 08:07 (UTC)

[He's eating, and that's good. If nothing else, Parker's going to take that as a success, because even if it's largely devoid of basically any nutritional value (and wouldn't Alice White know? No, no, that was Peggy, she was Alice's friend the nutritionist), it's still calories and as long as he's not getting sick from it, that's a triumph. And it's not just about the food, either; it's about the process, the sort of...wrapping your head around the idea that deliver-food-to-mouth is a thing that you do, so it's a habit you don't lose, because she knows from personal experience that it is one that can slip away if you're not careful about it.

Luckily, chocolate is delicious. Getting chocolate was a good idea, and she's glad he agreed.

The dial on the safe keeps spinning back the way it came, and now again, there's been a click of the tumblers. He's talking more. This is good. Maybe Ishimaru is in the mood to come out of himself for a little while today; some days he isn't. But if he is today, then that's another reason to call it a good day.]

Do you ever step on them when they follow you around?

[Given how they...do that.]

I think they're kinda like me. Just...trying to make sure you know someone's there. Y'know.

[That makes sense, doesn't it. Hm.]

Well...it's hard to not know they're there. They swarm.

[Really, even Keisuke tends to get in on the swarming at this point. Sayuri doesn't, though, because she's entirely too much of a princess; she's a Kirigiri animal if Ishimaru's ever seen one.]

...I try not to step on them, though...I usually don't.

[Some of them just get indignant; the little ones are kind of like what Ishimaru's heard of little dogs. They'll follow you around forever, but the second you step on them they look like you've betrayed their trust in some fundamental way and now they aren't angry, they're just really sad.

...And then they're back to following again once you've given them enough pettings.

He's quiet for a moment, though, thinking about what's been said. Trying to connect things, to put them together in ways that make sense.]

Do you have one of them for yourself...? Like we do.

[...Well, that's admittedly not quite it, but it's close enough; the rest of his friends have one, after all, so clearly Parker should as well.]

[Something about that last bit hits her strangely, makes her pause and stare at the chocolate ribbons crisscrossing the melting ice cream in her crepe as she tries to figure out what it is. She's just sort of gotten used to the idea that the Eevees go with Ishimaru and his classmates; ever since they'd all woken up from that weird dream thing, it'd been like that. Eeveemaru and Naevee and Hagakurevee and the one that looked like Creepy Eyes and all of them. It just...it was like their beaded phone charms, sort of. One for every classmate, and a little different on each one so you could tell them all apart.

After awhile, it ends up coming to her that it's the "like we do" that's poking at her, somehow. Maybe it's just that there's still some lingering frustration that Ishimaru was someplace bad and nobody could get in to help him. Maybe it's that what she'd told Hagakure — nobody's going to hurt you again — can really only extend to here, where she can reach them. Ishimaru and his classmates are from somewhere else; they're different.

It's like when Eliot says "there's something wrong with you". He doesn't mean anything bad by it, but there's still that reminder somehow, of that unspoken you're different.]

I have a Jolteon, but he's not really mine. I mean, not like Eeveemaru is for you or anything. He used to belong to this guy and now he's just kind of...mine, I guess.

[She kind of shrugs a bit, then takes a bite of her crepe big enough to delay the follow-up by a few seconds.]

I don't think I get one, do I?

[He goes quiet for so long that some might assume that he's not going to answer; he isn't bothered by the question, though. Just not really sure why it's a question in the first place.

It takes him a moment to process it, that's all, to focus on it solidly enough to answer, and the only way he can think to answer is with another question.]

Why wouldn't you?

I dunno. I never went to high school.

[Which would probably be a non sequitur to anybody not currently in the conversation, but because she very much doesn't want to dwell on the topic of school, she's fairly quick to forge on through the natural progression from there.]

I went to a reunion once, though. Just a little bit before I got here. This weird guy got picked on in high school so he started helping out the Iranians and hid a secret password inside a Roman room.

[...]

I wore a badger suit.

[Ishimaru is content to just listen for the time being, focusing on the chocolate and strawberries and ice cream, and he's managing to eat it at a decent enough pace to keep it from just sort of melting everywhere; that last bit does get his attention, however, a bit more quickly than most things do nowadays.

It's a good day, really.]

...Why?

We did a Nate thing. Since we couldn't figure out how to get the weird guy's password, we got him to change it instead.

[...Wait, hang on, that's sort of the middle of the thing, isn't it? Because there's also the thing with the brainwashing thing that Sophie does, and Eliot pouring the tea, so.]

Sophie does this thing. Neuro-lin...guistic programming. It's weird, she like...says stuff and then taps you, and then it kind of gets in your head and then you do it? So we did that, on the guy. We knew from his old passwords the kind of stuff he'd pick for one, and then we kind of put the one we wanted in his head so that when he got all paranoid and tried to change it, he'd change it to the one we already knew, and then we just used that.

...Nate's kind of scary like that. With the plans.

[Wait, and now she's missed the original point. Right.]

I guess his school mascot...thing was a badger? And he graduated in '85. So we got him to change the password to "badger85". That's why I was the badger.

[Again, he takes that all in without moving to interrupt or interject; it's a bit...strange, to discuss things like this so openly, but at the same time it's sort of nice, in a way. He nods after all of that is out there; perhaps it's fortunate that his mind is perfectly willing to gloss over the details and implications and just dismiss it as a story to be told and not Something That Happened To Someone.]

Why didn't you go to high school?

[The question is sudden and more than a bit of a non sequitur in its own right; just the same, it's been something he's wondered for a while, and now that they're talking about this sort of thing, he doesn't see why not.]

Oh.

[Surprisingly, that one doesn't hit her sideways the way the earlier mention of high school did; there's less emotional attachment to the institution itself (for her, anyway) because it's all invested in the people who've been there instead.]

I guess 'cause no one ever made me? I went to elementary school and stuff because my foster parents had to make me. I guess if I'd been living with Archie and his real family I would've had to go, but I was pretty much on my own with the storage lockers and stuff by then. And Archie never made me because he was teaching me thief stuff instead.

...Maybe they would have wanted you at Hope's Peak. For the thief things. Before everything happened - they would have liked you.

[Somehow it wouldn't surprise him. Stranger things have gotten in, after all.]

I don't...remember what high school was like. I think it was good, though. We have pictures, from the year we were in high school together.

Don't you have to be the best to do that? To go there, I mean.

[...Hmmm.]

I think we all could've gone. My team, I mean. The first time we all worked together, we were all picked because we were the best. All except Nate; they picked him because he was honest. That's why we all trusted him, too.

[It prompts a rare variety of smile out of her, though — the kind that she's not expecting, where it's just kind of on her face before she quite realizes it — the suggestion that they would've liked her. That's...kind of weird. Kind of nice, too. Not really something people tend to tell her that much.]

Maybe you were the king. I didn't know they even had kings and queens in high school but I guess they have the kind people vote for. At dances...or something.

[He stares at her for a moment, trying to decide what he thinks of all that, before he shakes his head.]

If we did that...voting, I mean, for that sort of thing...it would probably be Naegi-kun. And maybe Maizono-kun for queen.

[He hesitates for a moment before he continues.]

Has anyone told you anything about Maizono-kun...?

[Naegi-kun...is Makoto, she reminds herself, and once she does, things start to make a fair amount more sense. Probably he'd get picked for the same reason Sophie got picked; he's either a really good grifter (which is why everybody likes him), or he's just such a decent, honest person in general that he might as well be a really good grifter, because everybody likes him anyway.

It's still weird, though, because she's pretty sure monarchies aren't supposed to be popularity contests. Or even, y'know...democracies. But whatever.]

I don't think so. I don't remember meeting anybody named that, anyway. Is she one of the ones who isn't here yet?

[...welcome to high school, Parker, where the rules are made up and our royalty doesn't matter.

He has to think for a moment before he says anything further; he's not entirely sure what he wants to tell her about Maizono, he just knows that he does.]

...She's an idol - a...pop singer, I guess? She's really well-known for it.

She hasn't come here yet, though.

Oh. So not like a...

[She kind of motions with her crepe hand, sketching out something in the air that's roughly a foot tall about about the size of a small statue.

Because, y'know. Idols.]

I guess if she's your classmate she must be the best idol, then. That's kinda neat.

[But then she kind of cocks her head and looks him over a minute, trying to put her finger on something that's nagging at her.]

But you...don't like her too much?

[...Out of all the things he's considered with regards to Maizono in the past, whether he likes her or not has never been one of them.]

...I don't know.

[...]

She...did things...during the incident. Things that weren't very good. But we...

[Mnngh.]

...we all did things then. So I don't know. She's...not bad. I think.

[Her hand tightens very slightly around his, almost subconsciously, like she's afraid the agitation of talking too much about school will snuff out his motivation to talk at all, like he'll slip back into his shell if she doesn't keep him tethered outside of it.]

You can tell me about her. If you want.

[Maybe there's something about Maizono that's important. Something she needs to know.]

...Kuwata-kun...he'll take it badly. If she comes here.

[He thinks for a moment about it.]

Maybe Naegi-kun, too. But...he'll be more okay, I think. We've talked about it. He doesn't hate her.

[...]

She's very pretty, though...and she's nice to people. I thought she was all right. We didn't talk very much.

[...oh, right.]

...She died, though. She was stabbed, so knives will probably a bad thing around her.

[She'll be bad around knives, because she was stabbed.

...

...so the mark must've killed Mondo with butter.

That's just wrong. Just plain wrong. Who thinks of something like that.]

It's gonna be kind of hard to get rid of all the knives. Maybe we can just not let her in the kitchen.

[She gives him another of those little nudges.]

If you want to let her in the house, I mean.

[He glances at her at that nudging; he doesn't seem bothered, at least. Still sort of off, but that's to be expected by this point, and at least it's no worse than usual.]

...Of course I do. Why wouldn't I?

[That earns him a shrug.]

I dunno. I guess just...like, if it were gonna make it really hard on everybody else to move her in, then we'd figure something else out. You know, if Kuwata's going to hate her and Makoto might hate her but maybe not and then she's gonna be weird about the whole kitchen anyway...maybe it's better to just figure out something else instead? Or something.

[It's a little delayed, but she gets a shrug of her own.]

A lot of people hate Celes-kun.

But we're still nice to her.

[...]

Because she's ours. Right?

...Right.

[ :|a ]

Are we also nice to them because nobody else would be?

Sometimes.

[He settles into another one of those weird, silent periods once that's out there; a bit too long to be a proper pause, but not so long that he's obviously retreated back into his head.]

...I want them to be okay.

They deserve it, too.

[Her head tips down a bit, and her mouth is working back and forth again, the way it sometimes does when it's like she's not quite sure what to do with it. She knows what she wants to say; it's just a matter of not being sure if she can get the sentiment to come out right in whatever choice of words she utilizes, and it's the kind of thing where there's a fair amount of pressure not to screw it up.]

I want you to be okay.

[That's the easy part to get out.]

...You're going to. Right?

[And that's the rest of it.]

[His own gaze darts down at that, his eyes eventually sliding closed; he doesn't know what to say. He can't promise her that he will be - both because he doesn't know how true it is, and because no one from that school can really say they will, can they? They'll be okay in some ways, but in others they definitely won't be, and even if he knows that's just how things are there's not much to be done about it.

But he'd also told himself that he would be nothing like his grandfather, and his grandfather had never been okay again, had he? Not after the...everything.

It's something to think about; he's not sure he can right now. Another of those quiet noises leaves him without him really realizing it or deciding to do anything at all; his eyes are still closed.]

...I want to be. Eventually.

Sometimes things take a long time.

[They've stopped by now, on Parker's part without realizing it, and she takes the opportunity to look carefully at his face while his eyes are closed. It's not that she's looking for something, precisely, but she could draw his face on a glance if she tried, and yet that's still not the same thing as really taking a minute to just...see him. Who he is. What he looks like.

It's easy to forget he's really just a little kid. Almost as easy as forgetting that he's really not that much younger than her, either.]

They said I was broken. Pretty much everybody, the therapists and the judges and everybody. Even Nate...said that.

Maybe you can still be okay, even if you're not...you know. The way people think you're supposed to be.

[He opens his eyes to look at her at that - actually look at her, without his gaze immediately darting away or shifting around or being completely unable to focus, and even if he still looks a little dead behind the eyes at the very least he seems to actually be seeing what he's looking at for the first time in quite a while.]

...Have you ever heard of kintsukuroi...?

[He doesn't think she has; it takes him a moment to find words, to express what he means to say, and in that brief moment he almost second-guesses himself.

Almost.]

It's a Japanese art...mending things like pottery and ceramics. The repairs are done with gold lacquer, not clear...the idea is that even if something has suffered damage, it has a history and it's more beautiful as a result.

...I don't...know if we're broken or not. But it...maybe it's like that. Not how we're supposed to be, maybe, but...better for it anyway.

I think I stole a vase like that once. I thought it was just supposed to be like that, with the gold lines running through it.

[It never occurred to her that the gold might've been for the sake of repair, either; when people try to repair priceless things that get broken, they don't come out beautiful. The thought that people in Ishimaru's country figured out how to do it, and not just figured it out but actually made the ceramic more beautiful because of it...

...

That's pretty profound. And not just because it involves her favorite expensive metal.]

...I'll hold the pieces for you. While you put the gold in. Okay?

...Okay.

[And for the first time since he woke up, it feels like it might be.]

Thank you, by the way. For...everything.

[And that earns him another of her smiles, accompanied by a squeeze of the hand.]

Even the bees?

[He doesn't return the smile, though he rarely does that anyway; the hand-squeezing is another story.]

...We should probably avoid doing that to the bees again...

We should probably avoid doing that to the us again, too.

[Just sayin'.]

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He Ain't Heavy

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