deercountry | i know that the sun is here with me

So Cabo is a place measured in travel and money. Cabo is somewhere his mother couldn't get to on her own, with the tandem understanding it is not somewhere she can return from on her own either. So she's stranded, somewhere Cabo-adjacent, reliant on a man Robby doesn't know to send her back safely. Paul doesn't allow a wince of sympathy to tighten the corners of his eyes, and so he doesn't have to look away from Robby and the feelings bleeding off of him like watercolour.

"Something like that," Paul concedes, with a disaffected half-shrug, one shoulder rising higher than the other before both fall, "I was a Disciple once. One of those people who cluster in the Pale Sanctuary - not the one that tends to Beasts, but the one that looks to the Pthumerians - and throw bones to tell the weather. One of the things you learn is that the Pthumerians are better with intent than comprehension. We're as strange to them as they are to us, most of the time."

"Which is a roundabout way of saying they don't know any better than this." The shrug repeated, even less emphatic than last time, and Paul steps away from the couch and folds his hands behind his back. "You don't have to do anything. We could sit here and say nothing, and the stag will still come to take us back eventually. I only thought it might be a bit awkward to pretend I couldn't see you."

He's not just rambling. He's deliberately filling up space, like chaff tossed into the wind to disrupt the tracking patterns of seeker drones - or a squid squirting ink, more topically.

"I keep feeling like I'm putting you at a disadvantage," he says, examining a faint marking on the wall that's become particularly interesting in the last five seconds, "There's informational asymmetry between us. I'm sorry about that."

"It's not like we had a choice," he answers evenly. Him, either of them; Robby isn't going to target Paul for what neither of them chose, even if they decided on messing with Winter Mournings. Robby doesn't go as far as questioning Paul's reasoning, if he knew any better, but Robby knows that he wants to trash the thing as soon as possible. Stick with the pine cone wreaths, glue it together by hand.

Decisions and choices to be made later. For now, there's what to do here, in the now; a memory they're trapped in, frozen in time. The hollow thought of karate hanging in the air, the undercurrent of anger freshly made from disappointment that threatens to poke out from somewhere like a live wire. It sticks in Robby's stomach, in the hold of his shoulders as he moves over to where the couch in, the early morning peeping through the cracks of blinds. If he has to move around Paul, he does, without looking at the other, regarding first the living space itself.

It's not because it's easier, but because he wants to. Because it is a memory, of a time and place that can't be returned to, though Robby's never been in a state of mind to ever contemplate fantasies. There was a better time once in the past, maybe, but this wasn't it.

But the couch does feel as worn as he remembers it (hah, of course it does). And that's a more interesting thought than any line of conversation between them, such as: So, how's my dad doing.

"Do you really want to share anything about yourself?" He says instead, after the minutes of silence Paul likely felt. "It doesn't make a difference. I know about you, you know about me -- so what? I have to take care of my own problems. I'll figure it out."

That's just what he does. This is how this goes.

Paul moves himself out of Robby's path as unobtrusively as he can, which is a surprising amount despite the blunt intrusiveness of his presence in general. It's the set of his shoulders and the downcast deference of his eyelashes that help make him smaller, that might as well flash not here to cause more problems in bright halogen lights.

He's a guest, even if he's an uninvited one. It comes with certain reciprocal obligations of behavior. When Robby sits, Paul makes his way to the other side of the couch and takes up the other soft chair after carefully moving the throw pillow resting on it to its arm. It's even softer than it looks, and he feels like he's sinking into it as time ticks by soundlessly.

"No. I don't really want to." He picks up the pillow again, turning it over in his hands, inspecting its stitching. "Every time I tell people something about myself, they end up getting ideas about it."

Often, they start to feel sorry for him. Paul still doesn't always understand why, and he's almost given up on trying to explain.

"I don't doubt that you figure it out. You struck me as the type who does the first time I met you." He looks up, his expression neutral, leaning slightly towards tiredness. "That's life. You adapt to survive it, or you don't."

Moving now, Robby watches Paul, to see what he'll do in this uninvited space, more of a peculiarity than being stuck in a memory, a moment. No one comes here except the men that his mom brings home, no one but the two that he labelled as friends, but more of co-workers for the same gain. Friends have been a given up concept with Robby's interest in school, friendly acquaintance about where the people he sometimes sees and like at the skate park.

He thinks he hates the fact that Paul can see everything about the way he lives as much as a piece of his life played out, like they're both similar concepts. And aren't they? The way that he hasn't cleared the place up, the blankets scrunched up on the couch beside him. He can see how cheap that pillow is, its age and his and his mom's worth.

This is why he doesn't like the guests they don't have, looking away from it and Paul's gaze; his body hunched, foot tapping on the ground.

"I didn't survive," he admits -- more because he can't stand the quiet of the room, the annoyance that won't leave his gut. Tinges the edges of it with humour, the irony of Paul's belief. "I got lucky. Good guys don't make rent after they piss off their contacts."

Good guys who gave up their old ways to be better, the person they wanted to be.

He flops back on the couch, staring up at the ceiling.

Edited 2022-12-10 22:01 (UTC)

"Mm."

Paul sets the pillow down on his lap, leaning forward over it after Robby flops back. He can tell a great deal from their surroundings, exactly as Robby is concerned about. A look at someone's home is nearly as intimate as a look inside a private journal, if you know what to look for, and Paul spent most of his life being trained to know what to look for.

Dust dances in the thin rays of light infiltrating the room. The touches of decor that attempt to brighten the space are like the lingering scent of his mother's floral perfumes, like her overly bright reassurances that everything was going to be all right in the midst of things being very patently not all right. It's none of Paul's affair, but he can see it anyway - how this room swallows possibilities like a sand trap.

It's like he can watch it swallowing Robby now, how it's dragged him back to this time in more ways than one. Paul doesn't know what he can do about that, but it's not in his nature to sit there and do nothing, and so:

"How did you get lucky?"

What happens after this?

"Why do you want to know?"

Robby thinks he knows why, and none of it is genuine. Why should it be? It's easy to find polite curiosity in the place where real concern is scarce; even friends won't go out of their way for you, and he and Paul are anything but close. They're joined by a laughable situation that's oh so familiar for this time. It fits so well.

Maybe it's why he turns his head to Paul, watches him with the question, and with the follow-up:

"Do you feel like you have to 'cause you're stuck in my memory, or because you're chummy again with my dad?"

He taunts for a reaction, because why not? To see if Paul will take the bait or offer him silence. Cobra Kai teaches its students to strike first, no mercy, and Robby knows what their tactics can taste like. Why not find out with this one, too? What he'll give to him in turn.

This is, of course, a test.

There's something that's almost a relief about that. It flickers across Paul's expression and into the paradoxical relaxation of his shoulders. He knows what to do with a challenge - you meet it.

"Both of those options seem like oversimplifications," he says, knowing full well that's part of the point, "But more the first than the second, if those are my choices."

Now that Robby is looking at him again, Paul holds his gaze, openly observing him for his reaction in kind. His curiosity is cautious, but not quite wary. There's a quality of measuring up in it not unlike how he met Robby on the sparring platform before it all went so profoundly sideways.

"Do you actually want to know why, or does it not matter?" Like Robby's question, he asks as much to see how Robby takes it as to hear his answer.

This Robby doesn't meet him with as well as a look detached as he had on the sparring deck; he doesn't hide his suspicion as well, the distrust, because he doesn't want to. This is his space, after all, where he's allowed to judge anyone as he pleases, where he was just left by the person he loves the most. He blinks at the initial response, but in no particular manner; he's more interested in watching Paul in turn, than being affected by what's said.

He's being met, and he refuses to back down from what he's started. And most of all, he wants to know what will happen, despite the itches in him that tell him he knows how this will go, how he might want them to go. Ready, waiting, for a world to show its true colours.

"Surprise me," he offers, if with a tone that expects otherwise.

Surprise me, as if either of them actually think that's an option. But then again, for all Paul knows, he might. He tends to surprise people when he least expects to, and meet their expectations when he imagines otherwise.

"I want to understand you better." Paul tilts his head, like another angle will help him see more clearly. "That part, I'm sure you put together. But the reason why...I don't know if this is true on Earth, but where I was raised, if you respect someone, you attempt to see them clearly."

He frowns lightly, then rubs his thumb between his eyebrows, a habit he picked up lately and hasn't yet put down. What he said is true, but insufficient.

"I want to get to know you." The same meaning, but different tone. More casual, more equal. "Because we're in your memory, because your father is my teacher. Because people I care about like you, and want to keep spending time with you. Because if things go well, you and I are going to keep meeting each other, and however you feel about me, I want to stop tripping over things I don't understand. If I'm going to irritate you, I'd generally prefer to do it on purpose."

It's true, that neither know what to expect from the other: because what Paul takes to be the obvious is far from that, to Robby. 'I want to understand you better.' If Robby had thought that for a moment as true, he wouldn't have asked the question that led them here in the first place. It wouldn't be the reason that Paul's remark following it that Robby's brows lower an inch as he continues to watch him.

Why he might even seem confused, or unsure, the further that Paul explains his motives. Maybe this is the kind of peculiarity of being in Trench, or one specific to Paul. He doesn't know really who the guy could mean beyond Johnny in terms of people I care about like you, and Robby wouldn't fit his dad under that, with his dad already named. There's no one else to bother with any of this.

But really, the bigger problem of them all is that Robby's never had to navigate around diplomacy, of being respectful, or wanting to be. Never in a way where one exposes their hand, and there's nothing begrudging or severe to it. There's little to be gained from where Robby sits, even in keeping things well for the people around them. It's not enough to care.

There's really no reason for Paul to care.

It's easier to be ready for what you're used to (a fight, indifference) than not, and Robby sits quiet in the entire answer that Paul gives him. The one awkward now in his own memory, this picture of his old home. Suspicion receding in place for that awkwardness, and, the words not feeling right from his mouth:

"...Mister LaRusso came and took me to his place after I let it slip to his daughter things weren't good at home. I didn't expect them to do anything."

It wasn't why he told her. It's not what he expects.

He doesn't even know what to expect here, now.

Truth is like a knife. It's a maxim Paul is sure is bandied around in any culture aware of both knives and honesty, which is every human one Paul has ever heard of. Everyone knows that the truth cuts and pierces, that it can sever and wound.

What Paul is learning is that the truth is a knife, and a knife is a tool as much as it is a weapon. Truth is an oyster-shucking knife sinking into the hinge of a shell and levering it open, or a paring knife no longer than a little finger spiralling delicate curls of fruit peel into a bowl. You can drain a wound with a knife. You can graft a plant with it. It all depends on how you choose to wield it.

"People are funny like that." Paul says, looking down at faint, neat scars that are nearly invisible over the joints of his hand by now, a year out. "Your teacher...Mister LaRusso. That seems to be the kind of thing he does. You did get lucky."

Say the wrong thing at the right time to the right person, and watch the trajectory of your future bend. Paul thinks he understands that. Another gap fills in. He doesn't think about the truth Daniel asked him not to tell Robby about, but it's there all the same, a shadow at the back of his mind. Did he already look at Robby and think he'd fit under his roof before now, or was it seeing him underneath it that made him want to keep him there?

"I've been lucky like that." Eyes back up, still watchful, but barely guarded. "It's a funny kind of luck, too. You need it, you'd rather not have had to need it. Something like that."

People are funny like that. People are confusing like that, but that isn't the sincere emotion it stirs. The reflection of his teacher only further makes it difficult for Robby to meet Paul's eye, or to want to, when just a minute ago he had been keeping it purposely on him. Because Mister LaRusso came here for him when he had no reason to; because Mister LaRusso came for him, even after he'd hurt him once.

There was a lot about people Robby never really knew he could experience for himself before he got to know the man who was only supposed to be payback, a personal grudge. So it's hard to find fault in the compliment of a lifesaver painted as observation, and settles Robby's mood to something more mild. Perhaps more willing, or open, as he looks back at Paul again. Tentative as before, but he asks, not exactly a test this time:

"What happened?"

This time, there's no clear gauging of a reaction. No expectation, but an engagement in what Paul wanted, and not. He didn't want to share anything, and Robby hasn't forgotten that -- but you won't get far in understanding one another without a more levelled exchange.

A question Paul anticipated, this time. Anticipation isn't synonymous with preparation, however, and the light tightening of his jaw is almost like the involuntary and incorrect kind of bracing for a hit that has to be untaught.

A fundamental problem: he's gotten lucky like that too many times, in too ways complicated ways. It's difficult to narrow it down to something appropriate and intelligible. It's difficult to know how to tell the kind of stories he'd rather swallow.

But that's one of his other fundamental problems, and the only remedy is the attempt, over and over, to make his path through the words.

"This summer, I made a mistake in who I chose to trust." The pillow makes a good anchor for his hands, but he only lets himself hold it, not clutch. "I turned away from the people who warned me about him. I helped him do something terrible. I hurt people. Badly. And then I got hurt."

The stilled softness of his voice is not calm. It's an abstracted observational distance, the feelings that pair with these facts held away from them so that they don't crack through his composure. His discipline is visible, the effort of it expressed primarily in the slight unfocusing of his eyes.

"The people I didn't listen to, the ones that I hurt, they came back for me. They took me away from where I was and brought me somewhere safe." Like Daniel took Robby somewhere safe, a point Paul doesn't need to belabour aloud. "I've been trying to have been worth it since."

It's strange, this place Robby's mind is stuck in. Because what Paul says is familiar, but not because he knows the event Paul is talking about. It's a bare minimum to not give names or faces, except Paul's own. It could be anyone's story, many people's stories, when framed as it is.

But it's Paul's too, by the way he attempts to detach himself from it in a manner that makes it obviously personal. He can understand that, and takes no particular judgment to it. Gaze aside, thinking; admitting, even if it doesn't entirely register:

"I'm going to do that too." But the weight isn't there, and -- was that the right phrasing? He's conflicted, because there's thought more than a heavier emotion, the point of even admitting to it. "--Do you feel like people forgive too easy?"

It's not the former he cares to connect with. But the latter, with Paul's choice of words -- does he?

Logically, they both likely know luck isn't something earned or deserved. Luck is intrinsically neither, because if it was, it wouldn't be luck. Even if you imagine luck as possibility emerging from conditions that permit it, you must acknowledge that luck cannot be guaranteed however you arrange the world to invoke it. The word for luck you can summon is magic, and maybe that's the transmutation Paul wants to work backward through time. Post hoc worthiness, built of penitent rituals and internal alchemy, until the old self falls away and a new, better one steps out of his skin.

Or something like that. Paul breathes out through his mouth, in through his nose, a tidal ebb and rise. He comes back into the room from wherever he was suspending himself above it, and his shoulders sink down from the tense height they'd crept up to.

"Sometimes." He releases the pillow and leans back, head tilting back against the chair. "Some things people forgive too easily - other things, people don't forgive easily enough, and it depends on who's doing the forgiving, and who's being forgiven. But that's not the thing that bothers me the most. Maybe it should be, but..."

"Some people let themselves be forgiven too easily." He shrugs, contemplating a faint water stain. "They treat it as an end, not a start."

And some people don't let themselves be forgiven at all, but that's another sort of problem.

Robby wonders if the generalising is on purpose, but it leads close enough to an actual answer he was looking for. If Paul's someone who judges by standards he expects himself to follow, and he seems sort of the kind of guy. Even if he barely knows him, and knows he barely knows him. A handful of meetings and talks that barely scrape two hours, maybe, and their first meeting, does it count?

Do any of them count as anything more than some elaborate dance-around of each other, where maybe they scratch some surface, but it's so bizarre. This is bizarre. He can still feel his heart emptily reminding him he has karate practice later today, softened by the further thought of what's to come.

Mister LaRusso's face on the other side of his door.

Robby looks along the back of the couch, a gaze that takes him over to Paul. "It doesn't sound like you're gonna have that problem," he says, his tone neutral, no particular judgment in it. There's maybe something to be said about how one chooses someone's forgiveness as easily as they can luck, but what point does it serve, anyway?

Forgiveness is personal to everyone involved.

If Paul had another set of cultural contexts, he might be able to put this situation into more intelligible terms for himself, but most of what he knows about blended families historically ends in bloodshed and betrayal. There's no room for interlopers in a bloodline, and for Paul, this hesitant mutual feeling out is not only uncharted territory, but an entirely new environment.

It's ironic that this would be less awkward if they were trying to kill each other.

"I don't?" He asks, rhetorically, then blows out a lungful of air before he folds back over his lap, elbows propped on his knees. He gives Robby another long, evaluative look, skimming over his composed surface.

"Or maybe that's all just the things I tell myself," he says, touching his fingertips together, "Sometimes I think I might not even know what forgiveness is. Not the way that other people talk about it. But what do you do about that?"

He opens his hands, palms up: nothing, lightly self-derisive, a papering over of the furtive fear he attempts to keep concealed and let come too close to the surface the last time they spoke. The endless self-reflective insecurity of what if there's something wrong with me that gnaws out the hollow of doubt that's much more the barrier to letting himself be forgiven than any noble moral pretension.

"What about you? Do you think people forgive too easily?"

Robby doesn't meet the question, or the look after it, with a particular dramatic change of heart. Eyes resting back on Paul, the question of what Paul truly is or isn't only receiving a slight tilt of his head, eyebrows raised, a shrug in the motion of a head and eyes.

It's Paul's self-judgment, in the end, an 'answer' only given to fill the pause. Otherwise, Robby is quiet, even as the question is turned back onto him. What does he think? When the word forgiveness has never come up for him, though it's been asked for in apologies and mistakes admitted to.

There's an easy example he could use. A man that stands between them, figuratively; and even then, not in this room, this memory. Instead there's another mentioned, the one that actually occupies Robby's thoughts: a betrayal that he took a part of, controlled thoroughly, and didn't see it for what it was until everything had broken.

"It's never been my problem who people forgive," he answers almost flippantly, but keeping casual; an answer that both this Robby can give. "But when you start thinking about it for yourself? I don't know if it exists. There's just accepting what you did, wondering if things can get better, or if it's all going to wrong again. You don't get to choose."

--but the latter that's spoken is a different Robby, an older one, sitting in the other's place. When it happens, the shift and change, can't quite be pinpointed; maybe he's been sitting there for a while, was the one all along.

No, that isn't true. But Robby doesn't react, his arms folded across his stomach, expression firmer, holding back while his gaze downward speaks for the thought he's giving to this. Raising it back onto Paul, an easily more contained look.

"Forgiveness doesn't really matter, right? It's what you do next. You make yourself better and hope it's working so you're not that guy anymore."

The one who got you where you were in the first place.

Johnny's the cobra in the room, so to speak. The shadow of a man Paul is doing his best to talk around, because when he tells people it's not his place to interfere, it's exactly what Robby says last. It's what you do next. It's making yourself better, and for Paul, that means that he should stop plunging his hands up to the elbows into other people's problems they don't need him to solve.

All the problem he can try to solve here is a simple, if not straightforward, one: building a rapport, piecing together a pidgin tongue between them they can communicate through. This is progress. Paul nods, maybe a little too readily - but he'd already resolved to put his cards on the table, hadn't he?

"That's the only way it makes sense to me," he agrees, barely blinking at the transition from one Robby to the next (it's only natural, in a memory blurred with a dream), "You don't get to choose the world you're in, or the circumstances you're given, or what the people around you do. Only your own actions are yours, and how you choose to live with them."

No wanting in the world will make someone change from the outside if they choose not to. Sometimes Paul is embarrassed by how hard it was for him to learn that, and how easily he stumbles back into the false-logic of fervent desire.

"Good guys might not always be able to make rent." He smiles slightly, like they're in on something together. "But I still think it's worth it."

But it's worth it, huh. His heart is undecided, less for the moral good, and how well it works out. How well all of his choices have worked out, but he's also working on that, too.

He chose to be the good guy - or the guy who didn't risk getting caught doing bad. Robby looks at Paul on that end, not with confidence, but with acceptances as he concedes (with the argument in himself), "--The LaRusso's had a nice house."

A fact, brushing over the difficulties of that nice house, the doors he doesn't want to touch, much less open. At least he doesn't need to linger on it, as instead, he's focused on Paul; his eyes assessing him under a soft scrutiny than anything sharper, thinking, evaluating. This is the first time they've spoken to each other since their phone call, is what he's able to recognise now. Or more important: this is the first time he's had to confront Paul's existence since the accidental apologies put online.

That is, the real him. Not the him that's a name and somewhere to direct his feelings towards, without ever thinking about the individual himself. Paul the person has never mattered; just Paul the favourite, who was Miguel before him.

--it would've been different, had they met sooner. Even now in his chest something stirs, signalled in the way that Robby's gaze drops, his jaw tightening before a breath. But he can dismiss it here, now, doing as he did with a slightly younger frame as he tilts his head back, sees a ceiling that doesn't look quite right. Faded.

Everything is faded, scent and presence. This memory was a long time gone.

"Could be worse," Robby speaks out loud. "Could be getting chased by a monster, thrown naked in the woods, getting tortured."

It could've chosen a better spot, Robby thinks. Which leads to another thought, Robby tilting his head with a knitted brow.

"--Think we can leave here and head to the skate park?"

Very, very important question and realisation. Shit--what if they could?

Like most estimations of a moral philosophy, there's as much (or more) aspiration than truth to what Paul says. It's what he wants to be true, the pivot on which he's hanging the new calibrations of his moral compass, but there's nothing objective to measure it by except - The LaRusso's had a nice house.

Maybe he's reading too far into it. Paul still finds he usually is. But he lightens at that like sunlight behind a cloud, the diffuse relief of hearing anything that almost sounds like what you feel when you haven't found the words for it yourself. It's nice to imagine he might not be the only one who isn't being completely selfless about their self-improvement.

He rubs his thumb across his knuckles as Robby speculates that at least it's not worse, which is the kind of comforting thought Paul has gotten used to getting behind in lieu of anything more robust. The absence of nudity is particularly appreciable, once it's been brought up. So, it could be worse, and there's that, which is something.

And apparently it could be better. Paul has only the sketchiest understanding of what a skate park is, but those combination of words seems promising.

"We can go anywhere you can remember." Paul keeps his eagerness largely in check, but this is a service he's been itching for a chance to provide; let it never be said he missed an opportunity to experiment with blood magic. "Do you want to? I have time."

Is time still moving? is not a thought Robby expected to have right about now, but neither did he expect to be stuck inside his own--memories? Or whatever; and especially not with Paul. But here they are, and his concern for time is easily brushed aside with Paul's assurance of his own being available.

"What do I have to do? Think about it?" He asks it with humour, and if it's as easy and that, he can think about it without difficulty. A place more familiar to him than any dojo, a second home, the place he went to all the time - young and older - to get away for fun or to blow off steam. It's extensive bowl, pipes and ramps; the rails and the noise of wheels amongst chatter under the California sun.

Should he close his eyes? He's kind of already waiting to do that, like it's the obvious next thing he should be doing here. Come on, he's watched movies. Or maybe he has to take this bundling thoughts and walk out the door with them. That also sounds very magic-typical.

Lead the way, in whatever fashion you will, Paul.

Paul has yet to determine what the relation of time in memories is to time outside of them in the heart of winter. Sometimes, it's one to one. Other times, it contracts or elongates, and there are too many variables to control for to do anything but make an observational study of the data for later. There will always be next year, and the year after that, and as many years as Paul can wring out of this place.

In the present moment, however long it is, Paul rolls out of the chair and to his feet like he's been waiting for a tether to be cut. He hasn't - he's the one who ties the tether, the one who anchors himself - but it's good to move after being so still in a conversation like that one. He smiles with a new cocky tilt to it as he stretches his arms overhead and nods, first to Robby and then to the door.

"That's right. Think about the skate park, and I'll paint." Robby's intuitions are correct. Doorways are the most straightforward route, and most readily available. He walks over to the one Robby's mother disappeared through and nicks his thumb with a quiet hum against the sting, then sketches out a rapid, confidently applied sigil in blood that starts to glow silver as the shape comes together.

"There." Paul steps back and to the side, and in a fit of uncommon whimsy, half-bows to gesture to the doorway in invitation for Robby, as formal as the finest of butlers. "Lead the way."

Robby watches Paul in his move from the chair to the door, not privy to the bite he takes due to the angle, but he still sees its results in the ritual. It's one of those aspects of Trench one becomes familiar with, but Robby isn't yet used to every aspect of it; so it's a curiosity as much as an oddity, one of those things he can't connect himself with. Every blood type is different, but being a warmblood will feel even more disconnected.

Well, he gets to reap the benefits of others' works the same as anyone else. Paul's bow earns him a raise of Robby's brows, then a twitch of his lips as it settles into humour; moving on into acceptance as he too approaches the door waiting for him, his own, in a way that gives him one last pang of something bittersweet for what used to be, and the nerves of anticipation.

Thoughts on the skatepark, he reminds himself wordlessly, and opens up the way.

And they're there, in all magical glory. A handle no longer in Robby's hand, and neither is it extended out in front of him. His clothing is casual, covered, black jeans and a long-sleeved band shirt, his fringe free than pulled back. It is as he knows it: the day sunny but with a bit of a wind, the sound of clacking boards, talking that usually means shouting between one another over the noise of other activity. The distance sound of cars, and then: the environment itself.

All of it may be unusual to Paul, to say the least, and then there's the park itself: grey stone slab covering a wide area just for this single purpose, with most of the space flat and left empty. There's a set of stairs to one side with a railing in its centre, the ground otherwise a gentle slope that doesn't require those stairs in the first place. Wooden structures are littered with their own slopes, and there's a wall covered in murals where many of the pipes lead up to, can bring a rider to its top.

If there's other people or not depends on how well the reality of a memory can be bent. Robby knows faces, but he knows bodies more, the general energy of the skatepark on most days. Anything would be impressive to the guy, no matter any oddities to its delivery, and he would be taking it in, brushing his hair back uselessly after a breeze does it first.

He'll drop the board in his hand eventually, test it under his foot, and then seem to remember Paul to look for him, and ask: "You got one?"

This wasn't at all what Paul was half-expecting. The first thing he notices is the sunshine, which has a magical quality that he knows he didn't give it, more luminous and golden than any sun he's ever seen. He blinks against its brilliance with a strange sense of primeval deja vu, some deeply human thing in him wanting to stretch out and bask in it.

The rest of the scene is arresting in a different way. The mixture of blunt concrete and the imprint of youthful innovation over it capture his interest at once, and his eyes rove over the scene with unfiltered interest. The bodies Robby remembers better than the faces roll through the scene with a soft clatter of noise, the indistinctness of their features somehow not threatening despite their blurriness. It's more of the quality of a dream that subsumes the memory.

He should be more discreet in his observation. This still isn't his memory to gawk at. But - Robby did invite him to it, didn't he? And there's nothing here Paul can see that he thinks he shouldn't. The undertone he senses within it is a good one. So it's all right.

When Robby addresses him with the question, Paul wrinkles his brow and holds out his still slightly bloody hand. A board appears in it with no special burst of glitter or slow materialization. Like the scene around them, it comes into being all at once, like it was always there. He doesn't drop his (generic, nearly featureless, not quite perfect) board, but bends to set it on the ground.

"I do now," he says, with a significant degree less confidence than he had in making the portal, and he puts his foot gingerly on it in mimicry. "Like this?"

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strongroots - 2023-01-09 16:15 (UTC) - Expand

i know that the sun is here with me | december catch-all

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cw: minor self-injury (magical ritual)

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