come_love_sleep

My computer died!
I am typing this on Taesoo's computer, which is a bit like wearing his underwear would be, I think--the familiarity doesn't bother me but it just doesn't fit right.

And now we are going out so he can buy a pillow, and we can go to a massive pillow fight at the park this evening.
Sometimes I am seven.

My life is full of new things right now.

I'm enjoying myself. While happiness generally feels precarious to me, still my life is sweet and full of fireflies and interesting food and...well. I am delighting in Taesoo's company. He reads at least half as fast as I do! Probably more like three-quarters. And he reads many of the same things, too. I'm actually a bit excited, I keep giving him things from my shelves, shared context is delicious. He's pretty much delightful, and learning him is proving fascinating. A lot of it is the whole fifth-degree black-belt thing; he moves like a light breeze, cutting through a crowd or striding through an empty space with the same ease of motion, and he dances disco-style in the kitchen while he cooks. A strange combination of goofiness and dark-eyed stillness.

We went to the Strip so that he could buy Korean food, with Leah being kind enough to drive; I haven't been seeing enough of Leah of late. She and I looked at pretty summer dresses, and I got a bag of gourmet gummi bears that are surprisingly good. In a little Asian market Taesoo started grinning, and nodded sidelong at the shopkeeper, murmuring 'she was born in the same part of Korea as I was,' though when he checked out and spoke with her for a minute I couldn't hear the accent he was referring to, as Korean still sounds like a dream-language to my ears. I suppose this will come in time.

I'm reading a lot, studying not nearly enough. At last it feels like summer, all my restless waiting having held it off until now. There are strawberries in the fridge waiting to become a pie, and last night I made lasagna for the first time in...it must be nearly a year. Lasagna is a food I make for loved ones, not on my own. It's nice to have an excuse for it.

I take photos, but mostly they turn out like ( this: )Scarred knuckles, narrow wrists, wolf-pelt hair, and no sense at all of who you are looking at.

This is turning out to be a very scattered thing, and I find that I am sleepy. So perhaps I will nap (he's filling out job applications online, and the sound is like rain, he types in the same odd fashion I do, a flurry of fingers and then silence, a rush of falling clicks and then a pause.)

Sleep, with the fan pointed at my legs...life is good.

This waking up screaming thing is a lot more rude when someone else is in the bed.

Stayed up until six AM watching Top wo Nerae! 2, slept until one. Got up at two. Ate apple pie for breakfast (I do a fantastic apple pie, my pie crust is legendary and I use three kinds of apples and very little cinnamon or sugar), then had a shower where my back was scrubbed by another person (when is the last time that that happened? Dave. July. A year ago now) and then, instead of going to the grocery store and getting Nishiki rice, I gave a foot rub and discussed how wonderful skin is. This of course resulted in one climbing back into bed.
(I love my bed. A deep, not-too-firm, not-too-soft futon, Queen sized, a light comforter, the window above barely covered with a reed curtain, just outside the window a very green back garden)
It's ten minutes to seven, and I am only now awake again.

The question in my mind is--why is it that an activity I have been well-known to partake of on my own, in an empty house (anime until stupid o'clock, waking late, leftover pie for breakfast, excellent shower, nap) becomes so much more delicious when experienced with company?

I still have a massive entry to finish about New York. Not the tournament, but everything else, Chinatown and the Empire State building and the subway, being surrounded by people with faces like mine in the opposite direction from white...many interesting things. Much interesting food, as well.

And now we will get up and get rice.

I promised I'd write, and now that it comes down to it, I find that it is hard.

The kendo tournament was in a much smaller space than I was expecting. I also recognized almost no one at all; this was not a bad thing, but considering that every joint practice and tournament I have ever been to, I've seen some familiar faces, it was certainly a little strange.

There were a couple of massive teams, and some very small ones, but ours was one of the smallest. Some of the dojos sent eight teams worth of fighters! That's forty people. I can't imagine regularly practicing with forty people.

I spent a good deal of time watching a bunch of fighters from a kumdo dojang who had come to participate. Kumdo is not kendo, even if it is the Korean analogue; there are differences, and I was looking for them. I think I am not well-trained enough to truly see, though. I did notice that they seemed to favour many quicker strikes over one perfect one.

I must admit that I got a bit of a swordsman-crush on a fellow named Jinwoo Jang--I think it was him! I am looking back through the booklet now and might be wrong, but it sounds right--who was very beautiful to watch. His movements were not flowing, not liquid, they were sharp and almost abrupt but somehow he was always precisely where he needed to be right in the instant he needed to be there. And he had a very good sense of the space; bowing out after a win, he took his steps back, bowed to his opponent, then pivoted on one heel and bowed also to the guy coming in to take his space for another bout. Very classy.

It's hard to write about my bouts! Hm. Okay. I entered the tournament feeling loose in my shoulders, easy, comfortable. I was not keyed up. I was not anxious. If I am being entirely honest, I went to sleep the night before thinking "Tomorrow I will bring a medal home for Sensei." It wasn't ego, my kendo isn't that good, it was just--a decision I made.

I looked my first opponent up in the booklet, and it said she was ikkyu, a step down from her first black belt, a couple of kyu past me in rank. There was a half-second frission of unease at that, and then it was just like well, Rob is ikkyu, and I fight him all the time. The unease dissolved.
Got in, started the match, and pretty much immediately took men. When I get into it, there is nothing but the bout, and sometimes it is hard to remember what happened, afterwards, but I won by men also. Two points.
Shook hands with her and she was beautiful, a very lovely, sincere smile.
My second bout, a little bit later, was more fierce. I took her men, and when she was expecting me to try for her men, I took her kote. She was grinning after that bout, I think she enjoyed it, which always makes me happy.
Afterwards, I went up to the table for that court. "So--ah--when is my next fight, then?"
And the man sitting there blinked at me. "Not for hours. You're in the finals now."
O_O
"Ah? Oh. So." and I turned, walked back around the court to my team. Steve Perry, from Ohio, a very sweet fellow who had come to be part of our team for the tourney, smiled broadly. "Finals, huh? Cool!" I was more than a bit disbelieving--usually the women's bracket is not separated into kyu and dan, and usually it's considerably longer to whittle everything down, so I had expected four or five fights before I got a chance at the finals.
Eric came walking up as I finished flipping through the tournament booklet, thinking perhaps there was a mistake. He said "So! I missed your bout. How'd you do?" I tilted my head and said "I won. In the finals now." and his eyes widened a fraction, and his mouth opened just enough for a small breath. He was easily as surprised as I was.

And then came waiting. Every other tournament I have ever been in so far--I say every other like there's been many, ha--I have fought and eventually lost and then spent the rest of the day watching my teammates and beautiful people on other teams. But to be in the final? That meant that I couldn't let myself get into that sort of pleasurable drowsiness that comes on me, where I am enjoying but not sharp. I do not think I did so well at that.

Team bouts, I got knocked out immediately. I gave the woman fighting me a good go; she was nidan, though I didn't know that going into it, and it made me feel a bit better about losing to her.
She also gave me one of the most magnificent bruises I've ever gotten from kendo; as long as my hand, nowhere thinner than an inch and in one place two inches wide, and some of the skin is rubbed open as well; she went for my men but was unbalanced, and stabbed me in the arm instead, and her momentum dragged the tip of her shinai down and into my bicep for several inches. Hurt a lot even then, and usually I do not notice pain at all during actual shiai.
(Evidence of this is that I have a very deep bruise just above my left elbow, and no memory whatsoever of receiving it. Hurts! Is surprisingly ugly, going black now. There''s a hard knot in the centre of it, it must have been delivered with some force. But I have no idea when.)

I lost to a men, and we bowed out and shook hands, and she was radiant. Kendo just makes people beautiful. "That was good, that was good!" she kept saying. "Thank you!"

And then there was more time to wait. My wisdom teeth were singing, and I was worn out and tired, but still very happy to be there. I practiced for a bit with Eric, sat outside in the sunlight and had an interesting discussion with a massively muscled bicyclist, ate a banana. Texted Gin over and over. Talked to Taesoo on the phone just a little. Went back in, and had my final fight. It was against Adriana Ariga, Ariga-Sensei's daughter, and she owned me, but it was enjoyable and I think I figured something out about a personal flaw in my kendo, right in the last second.

It's really hard to sum up a tournament. There are so many little things that add up into so many big things. I need to work on, as Eric put it, 'maintaining intensity.' I'd never had to worry about it before, but I intend to have to worry about it many times in the future. Getting knocked out in the morning makes for an easy ride, but won't likely improve my kendo. And--I've come to the realisation that I really like fighting in tournaments. A lot. It used to scare me, the very thought of it unsettled me, but now I have a strange sort of hunger for it. Pitting myself against strangers is just fun! Throwing myself out there against an unknown opponent, a three-minute test where I don't know all the variables. Exciting. And I always learn something about myself, and I learn about how to do better. It's intense and just enjoyable.
I don't mind losing. But I really want to win. I don't like losing, to be sure! But if my opponent is much more on than me at that moment, if I simply am not giving it my all, then maybe I would feel bad if I won. I like earning my wins, I think.
Though--there's something deeply satisfying about knowing something like "She thinks I am going to take her men. All I have to do is reach out, and--"
and taking kote.

Anyway. I am not summing this up very well, perhaps...as I said, there is always so much. But I learned something, and I know how it feels now to really *want* to win, to make that decision and follow through with it. It's a different feeling, and I like it a lot.

( I did well. )
Thank you thank you thank you for your well-wishes. :)

Wish me luck!

Tomorrow morning I leave for New York.
Tonight I could go to one last practice, if I cared to. I am having trouble deciding which would make me more uncomfortable; missing practice immediately before a tournament, or getting to the tournament with damp kote. Emi-senpai gave me a tenegui that does not suck, so I can get my hair as sweaty as I care to and not worry about needing to run a load of laundry with my tenugui in it; I can wash my gi when I get home and tumble it cold all night if necessary, I can take an hour and iron the pleats knife-straight in my hakama before practice or before sleep, it doesn't much matter which.
But urrgh, wet kote. Nothing like sticking your hands into clammy leather.
(I think I complain so much to shame myself into going.)

Regardless, though--I am looking forward to this. I have never been to New York, and this will only be my third tournament as a participant, and I am feeling much better about my kendo than I was for the first two.
Plus, wahey, road trip.

Life is complicated,, increasingly complicated, right now. Things which seemed more certain are precarious, and it's taking its toll on the space around my eyes. I should not be awake--I did not sleep until after four, and I've been up since nine, same as yesterday.

So, distractions!
I am reminded that I never showed photos from the Tekkoshocon demo (did I? Maybe I did?). Have some random ones, and a few photos from my last two tournies, too.
( Read more... )

So I was lying in the park, in the breeze, my laptop lying open beyond my head so I could hear if Taesoo came online, Yukio Mishima book in my hands, when a shadow fell before me. "Hare Krishna." said a male voice. I twisted on the cloth I'd thrown out on the grass, squinting up into the sun to say hello and no thank you I don't want a vegetarian cookbook, but before I really even get a chance to get a good look at him--Caucasian, early sixties, smiling, swathed in some pale fabric--he interrupted himself. The words about the books he was holding stuttered out, replaced by "Where are you from?"
sigh
"Here, sir." The 'sir' is reflexive. I very often use it when I want to say 'you asshole,' or when I am trying to distance myself from the person I am speaking to.
The corners of his lips twisted. "But what nationality?"
"American, sir."
"But--but what ethnicity? You're Native American?"
"No, sir." And then he finished offering me the book, and I declined, and he moved on.

I was cranky. I have long since tired of being asked that question. But he saw the narrowness of my eyes and walked away, so at least--I thought--he was more alert than some who have pestered me about it. And then, not ten minutes later, as I was starting to be less irritated, he came back. "Look, can you just tell me--what nationality are you? Where is your family from? Because I have traveled all over the world and--"
And I got pissed. He'd read my body language correctly before, and left me alone, so why did he come back?
"I am many things, sir. And I would like to tell you that I find that to be an offensive question."
"Normal people don't! I've been all over, asked a lot of folks, and they just tell me. I've traveled the whole world and--"
"Many multiethnic people that I know consider it to be an offensive question, sir."
"It's not offensive!"
"Look. I am a person before I am a Rottweiler, okay?"
And he grinned at me. "Oh, that's cute. That's nice."

I drew myself up, and one of the women with his group, a sweeet-faced young thing, came up behind him smiling nervously. "Oh, don't mind him." she said. "Don't mind him. It's not offensive." And he walked away, without apologizing.

I am sick of being told what does and what does not offend me.
I am sick of being asked what I am. I'm a human being, and I chose to be so. I'm an adult, an atheist, a skilled copyeditor, a relatively amateur martial artist. But as for the rest of it? I just--I can tell you what I am not but it is not anybody else's right to ask or tell me what I am.
I am not one of those flip-books where you section out the animals to make something monstrous. I am not a 'mixed-breed,' a 'mixed-blood,' or an 'exotic.' I am not a puzzle to be figured out! I am not here so that you can page through my blueprints--oh, look, Filipina jawline, oh, look, Italian hips. Yes, my eyes are massive and dark and bafflingly, slightly Asian. Yes, my wrists are thin and my waist is narrow but my hips curve out. My skin color could be filtered from anything but white, it's true, but I have an Irish chin. And? It is not your innate privilege to take me down to my composite pieces like a Lego set!
I'm not your fucking game! Don't look at the bits, look at me, or better yet don't. If you think that it's acceptable to ask who my ancestors were before you even ask my name, like you would with a dog, like you would with a horse, you should just walk the fuck away.
'Cause one of these days, somebody's gonna ask me that question while I'm holding a shovel, and I don't know if I can be trusted in that situation.

Things which please me this week:

I was at the grocery store, looking at yogurt, when three children--siblings, I think, the oldest of them perhaps seven years old--came racing up, grinning, and decided they would pick out my yogurt for me. "Do you like Key Lime? No? Okay, how about Blackberry? No? Which do you want?" Upon my deciding, as usual, that I wanted Strawberry-Banana, one of them reached out and grabbed one, placed it into my hand with a great deal of pomp, and then they all went racing to the other side of the store at breakneck speed.

Last night, Titus-Sensei brought in a carefully-folded square of fabric cut from an old hakama, for Emi-senpai to use to mend her kote. As he handed it over, he smiled in that quiet way he has, and said "This is like--as if I am giving you a piece of my medicine. Use it wisely."

Gin texted me me the other night to tell me he could see fireflies.

My roommate came home at midnight, soaked to the skin and grinning as she shivered--she'd been at a party at a bar where they turned the sprinklers on and left them on all night, simulating rain inside the building.

Taesoo will be here in nine days. He'll be waiting for me at my apartment when I get home from New York.

I leave for my tourney in seven days, and for once I am not feeling as though I have been slacking off in my preparations. I have been practicing hard, and I am feeling pretty good; not as though I've made any great leaps, no major room for braggadocio here, but I can feel the ground under my feet.

That was a hell of a storm last night. I particularly was interested by the bit where the neighbour's trees started dropping limbs, and we got hail the size of robin's eggs.
And the bit where the newscasters were like "If you are listening to this broadcast, please, take shelter."
Tornados, huh? Clouds that come down out of the sky and eat your house?
What the hell?

Flash floods, those make sense. And fire--whoo, boy, does fire make sense. You don't grow up in the desert and not have a really healthy respect for fire. When it rains, you get to the high ground and when there's fire, you go into the wind, not away from it. But. Uh. What do you do about clouds that want to eat your house?

I don't know what to say.

We live in a world full of people. I forget that sometimes.

Mmmn, oooh, wisdom teeth.

I'm lying in bed in my silly/wonderful pink fluffy bathrobe, the fan going, the curtains lowered. It's languid and if it weren't for the constant ohgod pain it'd be lovely.

Still haven't put my eyes in for the day, wearing my clunky glasses. Of course, I have only been awake for a little while.

Had two dreams that I can remember; first involved someone setting off a bomb in a football stadium, and I woke up with the words "there are pieces!" on my lips, images of torn up footballers vivid in my brain; and then against my better judgment I fell asleep again, and dreamed a beautiful thing.

It's mostly gone now, but some of the things I do remember--I was a servant, I think, to some terrible desert lord. I was new-come to the stone city I served in. I had a friend outside the walls, a long-haired young man who I think perhaps was a herdsman; and I had a friend inside the walls, son of the lord.
His mother was dead. And reviled as some sort of witch.
The desert lord was feared, a shape-changing sorcerer who often looked like a kind of raven/griffin thing, heavy with jewels and casually vicious.

I was conscious, at the same time, of an analogue to this world--somewhere more technologically advanced--that I might be returning to.

The friend outside turned out to be conversant with spirits (in particular, it seems, those who had cared for the maligned lady), and he turned them on the griffin-lord, who fled, or was killed, and with the lack of him the city transformed. I remember wandering through the terraced palace with the young lord, marveling over how the walls had abruptly been covered in murals of green-growing things, and of women who were also flowers, depending on how you looked at them. The one that sticks in my head most clearly is a painting taller than I, of women flying in a great candle-lit marble and rosewood ballroom, their skirts flowing around them. The angle at which you see them is below; their ruffled underskirts, and golden shoes, and brightly coloured outer dresses conspire with the point of view to make them into flowers with slim, stem-bodies and arms thrown out like leaves, hair whirled out like roots.
I would very much like to paint this picture. It has been a long time since I have had a clean canvas, though.


I think the dreams were inspired by the following; the first by a discussion I had with Alex last night about John Dee, the sinking of the Spanish Armada, and how magic would be more elegant a weapon of war than an A-bomb; I don't much see the need for elegance in war as it is entirely horrible and making it more beautiful does not lessen this, but I do see the need for a lack of waste and civilian casualties. War is a gobbler and a messy eater.
(And there is something to be said about the idea that if John Dee was this tremendously powerful fellow, who destroyed that many men on his own, it was a hell of an act; most men in war will never have that power. But the weaker side can still possess bombs, which would, one supposed, assist in keeping powerful men in check?)

The second dream--when I woke from the flying-body-parts dream I needed to get my brain onto a different track. So I picked something random to read, followed some links. I ended up reading about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, built for a heartsick queen, and about various 'confounding of tongues' myths, and about an Eridu king, so plainly there's some relation to that. It's not often that I can point to the genesis of my dreams, so this is kind of neat.

And now...time for day clothes, contact lenses, to draw a comb through this tangled hair and to run to work to get my paycheck. Mortal cares, and all of that.
I'll respond to everybody's comments on the last one when I get back, my apologies for being so lazy about it...but if I don't get out of the house now I never may. The thunderstorms are magnificent of late but I do not appreciate wet socks.

I can write about the thing I have been not writing about! I have been not writing about it the way that, starting a fire on a windy day, when the first flames start finally to lick at the tinder, one holds one's breath and crouches very still.


At the end of June, Taesoo is coming out to Pittsburgh to live, and to study at my dojo.


Shin Taesoo is my friend. What else he is, I don't know yet; I do know that I care very much for him and he for me. Taesoo is Korean-American, a chef, a martial artist with many years of study behind him (though not so much in kumdo, Korea's analogue of kendo, but rather in Taekwondo). He speaks English, a good deal of Korean and some Japanese; he's quite a bit taller than me, slender and muscled and has that way of being very, very still that is common to hardworking martial artists. His eyes are a (synaesthesia demands I say 'creamy' but maybe 'smooth' makes more sense) very dark brown, much darker than mine. His skin is paler, and he has hair like a wolf's pelt, black and thick and a bit coarse. He has high, sharp cheekbones in a broad face, and a well-defined jaw; a bit unusual-looking but quite lovely. His hands are long, his fingernails neat and short, his wrists narrow but his arms well-muscled.
(I asked him, once, what part of his body he likes best; "My nose, I think." he said. "Because it has never been broken. It's still straight." I think this covers a lot of "Who is Taesoo?" ground in a very short space.)

Taesoo knows a lot that I do not know, about cooking and martial arts and some rough stuff; about language, and doubtless about many subjects that we have not discussed. And I know much he does not know, about other things. But walking into my room for the first time, the first thing he really did was look at my bookshelves; and he grinned at me and said "You have a copy of The Last Unicorn? You rock." He'd read it already, and he was the first guy I had ever been interested in for whom this was true; most guys write it off as dumb girl fantasy without ever cracking the cover and seeing what an elegant thing it is. He also reads Pratchett, and I sent my copy of Kage Baker's Anvil of the World with him when he went home.
(Does anything say so clearly that I hold him in my affections? I gave him my books.)

What else can I say? He's been through darkness and he is much like me, capable of true anger, and he is surprisingly kind. He says he doesn't like kids, but if he's smoking and there's a kid in front of him on the sidewalk, he'll stamp out the cigarette or cross the street to prevent them being affected by a moment of his smoke; he seems to be endlessly patient with the very few people to be in his inner circle, and patient enough with those outside it. He asks me every day if I have eaten well, and he says laughingly that he's going to make me fat when he gets here; like me, he makes food to say I love you; you matter and like me he spends maybe a little more time worrying about others than he should.

Meeting him at all was pretty much accidental, online, and the whole situation thus far (like very nearly every other relationship I've ever been in) is cobbled together from happenstance, coincidence, and lightning from an empty sky. I can say that talking to him is...like talking to myself? Were I just a bit more dark, still? And the two year age-difference might account for that, actually. I can say that being around him feels peaceful and good.

I can say that--considering it's been a year and a half since I went on a date, really--I'm...a little wary. He is not moving out here with nothing in his eyes but me, everything has sort of lined up; housing, job, and his dislike of Boston have all conspired to make Pittsburgh seem a shiny place (which, let's be honest, it is). But while I am not the only reason, I am certainly the catalyst for the move. He is moving here to be around me. That's kind of...humbling? To choose me as the direction he'd walk in, when his time in Boston was done...
Scary, maybe? Is that the word?

Being around Taesoo makes me quietly and fiercely--and sometimes, loud and laughingly--happy. He understands when my eyes get dark and my hands get still and I'm not here anymore but seeing something horrible. And it does not scare him; and he does not need to coddle me. He simply understands it.
But I have not yet gotten that much of a chance to be around him at all. For all our hundreds of hours of talking on AIM and Skype and on the phone, I have spent three days only in his presence; three very good days, but I am not fool enough to judge the shape of a relationship by so little. So as I said--I do not yet know what he is to me. But I care.
And I am going to get a chance to find out.

Crossposted to fanfic100! Maybe I should get a fanfic journal?

Title: Poetry
Fandom: Hellsing
Characters: Walter C. Dornez, Seras Victoria
Prompt: 065, Passing.
Word Count:3038
Rating: PG 13 at worst
Summary: Seras hardly knows what to do with herself on a night when she doesn't have to go out hunting--but Walter knows how to relax.
Author's Notes: My first fic here! I hope you like it. :)

( Seras paced. )

I might be able, soon, to talk about what it is that I've been keeping so quiet about the last couple of months. I hope so! Were I less superstitious or more certain I'd be talking already.

I spent today cleaning, sleeping, and studying Japanese. There's been a subtle click in my brain, and little things begin to make more sense.
I will spend tomorrow sleeping and studying.
My sexy pink-haired roommate installed a screen door on the back porch! It's fantastic. The noise of it slamming shut is very soothing.

What else? Things are going on. Mostly good. Been under an intense amount of stress, but, well--when am I
not, and all. Taking time to meditate, and taking my vitamins, helps a lot.

I guess my sister must be writing about me again, since people off of her f'list are looking at me. Hi, people off of my sister's f'list.
(That's a pair of words that lose their meaning very easily on repetition. Ssisster'ss F'lisst. It sounds like those wasp-women from Tanith Lee's 'Night's Sorceries.')
("It iss CHILD!")

Tonight Natalie made venison burgers for dinner. My friend Aaron came over by surprise, bearing five Dresden Files books that it has not yet been my pleasure to read, and he stayed over for dinner, and we talked about movies and comics.

Watched some Top wo Nerae! 2. I had forgot how much I delight in the protagonist's voice. High and sweet and candy-flavoured. I downloaded it so I could work back through and maybe make an AMV; am downloading Paradise Kiss and Gankutsuou for the same reasons.

Edited more for Narumoto-Sensei. Have been editing for him quite a bit; woke the other day to thirteen passages in my inbox, some of them a couple of pages long (but most of them quite short). Gave me a bit of a start of dismay, quickly dealt with. It's not enough; for all the hard work he does with me, it's not enough. I'm glad to have the chance to repay him in some small fashion.

Wow, I am tired. Evidence of this is my increasingly simple sentences. Time to make my way to sleep, I think. And tomorrow, more kanji and grammar and endless head-paining study of a language that fits into my brain all as angles.

I keep dreaming about the desert.
Not the desert I grew up in. Deep, midnight, silvery sand dunes, peaked by wind and constantly shifting.
I wonder if this means that I am done dreaming of the sea.

I am typing this from the front steps of the library that I work at, or rather from the low marble wall that encloses a statue in front of those steps. It is lovely out today but I can't quite seem to get comfortable--
--ahah, free bench and table, woohoo!--

--I am typing this from one of the fairly-comfortable picnic-style bench-table conglomerates at the very edge of the yard that houses my library. The breeze is up today, and in a few hours I have kendo; I am sitting here ostensibly to study but no study is happening. Instead I have been chewing gum, reading webcomics, and looking at helicopters as they flitter over. All in all, satisfying. Feeling a vague sort of peace, though it is not contentment because there are things that I wish were happening which aren't, and people I wish were here who are far off. But things are basically okay.

(*moves to an even better, shadier bench-table*)


So--yeah. Life.

The dead-looking, wrist-wide treelets emerging from the base of the prolific apple tree in my back yard, which I had taken to be a pair of suckers off of it, burst into blossom. They are not, in fact, suckers off of the apple tree, they are woodbine, or European honeysuckle, and now my bedroom smells of honeysuckle every time I open my windows. It is glorious.
(these are the honeysuckle that I grew up with; these are the honeysuckle that one of my senpai smells partly of, to my oddly-perceiving brain; and in researching what they are actually called, I found that traditionally they are symbolic of love that does not damage, that holds but does not strangle, and does not injure on the release of it, because a honeysuckle vine does not damage tree or building that it climbs. This pleases me.)

In the tree across from me, fifteen feet off and twelve feet up, there's a knothole; and from the knothole there are emerging cranky paper-accordion cries. It's a starling's nest. These are *not* the starlings that I was raised with, which are small and black and star-shaped; these are larger, and while the males are black widh deep, deep blue heads, the females are a gorgeous brown-to-purple-to-green, and in the summer their feathers take on creamy flecks; they have their stars on, Julian told me.

Today I am going to be hanging out with Leah; she will come to practice with me, and then home with me to hang out and watch bizarre Japanese TV dramas and maybe make brownies or something. We can be twelve.

(I am much looking forward to practice tonight. Kata practice after normal practice, now, on Thursdays; and oh, I do love kata. Like the best kind of dance.)

I suppose I am just re-arranging my life at the moment. Makes me a bit dozy.
But! Leah will be here any moment--I'd best go.


ETA:
And then my computer refused to post this, and then Leah showed up, and we walked to the dojo and I had practice, and I got to see my beautiful, beautiful senpai, and then Leah and I came back to my apartment, and as soon as I was in the door I smelled something gorgeous--my roommate had put a vase of lilacs on the kitchen table, and it was just...so good.
Leah and I made dinner, watched the first few episodes of Hana Kimi, had some popsicles (thank you, Taesoo! I had never imagined a honeydew-flavoured popsicle, it was delicious!)and now she is sleeping and I am listening to a winebeetle buzzing against my wall as it considers whether or not my laptop monitor is the Moon. Sleep, I think, would be best.




--G

*deeply tired*
Stayed up until stupid o'clock last night, feeling ill. Chatted on AIM a good bit, which was nice; it's good to have conversational company at least when the world is insane.

Work today is work, much as the usual. Everyone is here, though, for the first time in many weeks, so at least no one is bogged down with too much to shelve.


Missing my friend from Boston. Missing Katie a lot today, bizarrely...haven't seen her in five years! But ah, well, this happens.
At any rate, time to shelve. More later.

--G

"Do your people ever write songs about anything besides love and death?"
--Willy Silver to Eddi McCandry


I'm very, very tired.
At the beginning of the week I lost two friends to stupid, pointless deaths. Thank you very much but no I do not want to talk about it. Probably ever.

I cleaned my house from top to bottom; I made banana bread for my kendo team; I walked a lot and thought a lot more.

On Friday, my friend Taesoo came to visit me from Boston. We have spent the weekend doing nothing in particular, wandering around the city eating gelato, laughing quietly at loud delighted drunks; and I've had Kate Bush stuck in my head since I walked him to the Greyhound station and saw him off.
("It's in the trees--it's coming!")

But damn, dozens and dozens of hours of online conversation, and when I finally get to meet him it's--my friend Taesoo, not a moment of awkwardness, saw him across the bus terminal and it was just oh, hello!
So my life is more complicated than it shortly ago was.

Waiting is hard. Love and death are hard. And I have a fever now, so I suppose that I shall go to sleep, which should in theory be very easy.

here is an interpretation of a poem that I simply can't stand behind--but I don't know whether or not my interpretation of it is right.

The poem itself is here. And every interpretation of it that I can find is all about temptation; that if God is hid it's because one is being tempted, and that in passing separate ways the two of them avoided the dire temptations of the flesh. Everyone seems to think that this is a poem about sex.
I can't agree.
I can see where the idea comes from; being caught in the teeth of something that denies Reason could certainly be explained by repressed desire shattering Victorian restraint. But it just doesn't taste right.
And mostly for the last stanza:

Let her go and find a mate,
As I will find a bride,
Knowing naught of Limbo Gate
Or Who are penned inside.
There is knowledge God forbid
More than one should own.

I have a friend who was raised in a similar situation to myself. He calls himself a stray, and says the same of me; he recognizes things in me that unsettle other people as simply being things he carries, too. It's...restful.
He says "What I want more than anything is a world where people like you and me don't exist." It will never happen, but it's a pretty dream.

It's soothing that he understands me, horrible as it might be that he's had to climb through the same shadowlands. But for me, in the past, loving people who had no comprehension of real evil was kind of like allowing myself into a world I'd been denied. It doesn't last, of course, because one never gets entirely clean of this. We turn to people who don't understand because it means that we can forget, but eventually we remember, and those people, lacking all context, are generally helpless in the face of it. It is perhaps cruel, even if no cruelty is intended. There's part of me that never has managed to crawl out from under the bed, face pressed to the floorboards and bags and bags of dirty laundry pulled in after her so that she's invisible as a little mouse. But mostly she's quiet, and for that I am lucky.
There are those of us who, upon remembering, wear the darkness like a cloak; to stand next to someone who has seen them in it, traps them there. To see the reflection of it in someone else's eyes blinds them.
Many kinds of darkness you can't climb out of alone. But too often, having reached the lip of the well with another's help, neither of you can be around the other anymore; not without holding each other in the dark.

I've thought that--the sun marks you, but dark things do much the same. You carry it around under your skin, and it's visible to people who can see in the dark. And if they can see it, you have to see it too. Some disfigurements are imperceptible to the blind, and though it doesn't make them vanish, it makes them...smaller, somehow.

I can't see this as a poem about temptation. What do you think?

Just home from tournament. Sensei sent out this email, which sums up one angle of the weekend quite neatly:

"Please join me in congratulating the members of the University of Pittsburgh Kendo Dojo on the following achievements during the 21st Annual Cleveland Kendo Tournament and promotion test:

Eric Gildea - 1 and 2 Dan Division - 2nd place
Mifune Yutaka - 3 Dan and up Division - 2nd place
Keiichiro Narumoto - 3 Dan and up Division - 1st place
Team A (Gildea, Jeong, Narumoto, Yutaka, Schleyer) - Team competition - 3rd place

Vincent Lee - 4 kyu
Emi Iwatani - 2 Dan

I consider this an outstanding accomplishment for our dojo. Omedeto!"

You guys. You guys. Seriously.
*can't stop smiling*
If I could sum up this weekend...I mean, I *can't,* but if I could, there would be a lot of happy adverbs.

I personally had three bouts and lost all of them; but oh. The woman who beat me in women's went on to win the tourney for that bracket; the man who beat me in my last bout was so...it was just so good, we both couldn't stop grinning, when we shook hands he looked like he wanted to hug me.
(Expect essay forthcoming on kendo as an act of love.)

And if I hadn't known already, I would be quite, quite in love with my team. Such good people.
Still reeling. *massive grin* I mean--you guys...

This is not a game. Here and now you are alive.

Guess it's been a bit since I updated with anything of meaning, huh?
My fingertips are lavender and magenta and the precise same blue as my hair has been, dark and promising. And so is a shirt which heretofore had been white but rather terribly stained; I've tried over and over for six months to clean it, and finally counted myself the loser in that battle. So now it's purple and magenta and dark blue, and dripping dry on the back porch. I stepped out in my bathrobe, and the porch creaked under my bare feet, and it was raining; my breath steamed though it's not that cold, and when I looked out at the apple tree it had exploded into leaves, though this morning they were only tight nubbins of greeny-gold. Some of them are as long as my thumb, now.

I broke my shinai in practice last night, so I've spent some time this evening putting staves from one and leather from another together. Seems it'll work, though the length is a little different than I am now accustomed to, which might make Thursday's practice problematic. Better that I get it all worked out then, though.

Anyone who has read this journal for sufficient years may have noticed that I get quiet when something serious is going on. The fact that the last several posts have been about dreams or kendo, but nothing about life might be a good indicator; so I'll come out and say yes, something is going on.
Not bad. Complicated.
I never want to talk about anything while I'm still uncertain of it. So I won't. But I will say, to any who may have wondered, that life is well, and I am working hard.

I've also been made challenge-mod for psohdrabble ! What fun!


And may I say that this melody, at four minutes and forty seconds or so, when all the musical uncertainty comes back to one main path, does delicious things to my brain? Just--good.

http://www.youtube.com/user/PittsburghKendoDojo has a bunch of stuff, and the most recent ones are from the demonstration.
Yes, I am in there.
Yes, I am really quite awful. And no, I have no excuses for it. But it was a fun demonstration to be part of, regardless. :)

Had the kendo demonstration at Tekkoshocon!

First, lemme say how impressed I was with Tekko in general this year. Excellent, excellent venue. Good use of space, too, it didn't seem lonely despite the size. The Dealer's Room was fantastic, the Artist's Alley wasn't painfully cramped like last year, the AMV and video rooms were spacious and quiet. The staff of the hotel weren't visibly terrified. I loved being in Downtown instead of fricking Greentree, everything was close and I could have walked home after the dance if I had wanted to.

(My ear is still ringing, just a little; I enjoyed dancing, and the DJ did not suck which has generally been Tekko's tradition as far as dancing. When I got home I set my laptop to a white-noise website so that I could sleep through the ninnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng that wouldn't end.)

The demonstration went well. My own kendo was very, very bad; the carpeted floor threw me off more than I expected it to, not that that is any sort of excuse at all. Narumoto-Sensei and Eric had the crowd in their palms, all those faces looking up in awe and delight, and the atmosphere was really great. Lots of laughter, lots of awe, no uncomfortable otaku-moments (not *really* uncomfortable, anyway) and people paid fascinated attention. It was a fine experience, and I hope that they ask us back.

Today I am stiff in many muscles and aching in that fashion that demands I go and do something to stop the soreness--the same thing I did yesterday, ideally. Dancing won't happen, but suburi at least can.
'Cause if I don't do that, I am going back to bed!

Got through kendo practice last night without needing to take a break, which was unexpected considering I've got the use of about 75% of my lungs in a good breath. Still coughing up nastiness, but much less than before.

Today I went to the park, in the sun, with my Japanese dictionary and some manga and my laptop, and sat and translated, and half-dozed in the sunlight, and got noticeably more tan. I expect to do the same thing tomorrow, if it is not raining.
(it is very likely to be raining.)

And tonight I got to have a not-quite-long-enough but still-plenty-long conversation with a friend I had been somewhat worried for. That was soothing and enjoyable.

Basically--feeling much better, and almost all is well. :)

Forty-one and a half hours of conscious time and counting.
Daaaaaaaamn.

Had two or three hours of sleep early in the evening, and then woke and did not sleep again. It's almost eight in the morning now, still twilight-dark with the rain is coming down but the thunder has ceased--the world smells like rain, sweet and hollow and clean. I am doing laundry, since I can not sleep; shortly I will make breakfast, and shortly after that I will go to work.

Spent my sleepless night updating my music collection, mostly. Adding things to my iPod, removing things--its battery life is short and it's only a 30-gig, but I'm very glad to have it, it makes work go much more swiftly. And today I shall have much good music, and little bad.

It's been a long time, I guess, since I really wrote about what I have been reading. I still read almost as much as ever--at work yesterday I read The Nation, which is the first book to make my eyes well up in ages. It was very good. I wish--I kind of wish--that I lived in that world, or had access to it. Maybe part of it is the whole little-brown-island-person history in my blood, but to be from that island...it was the last chapter that really did it for me, I think. Pressing a telescope into a newborn's hand, so that they can see...

Anyway.

Today is probably going to be one of those get-through-it kind of days. I am having trouble figuring out if the light in my room is *actually* pulsing or if it's just my tired eyes--but given the rain, I will assume that it's not me.


Amplificathon starts tomorrow! I will be podficcing a lot more this time, with any luck. I am also getting better at it, which is gratifying.

I've been learning kanji, and practicing my katakana and hiragana, and it's changing the way that my handwriting looks in English. This is probably for the best, my English handwriting is erratic to say the least, changing wildly depending on mood and circumstance and what I'm writing about.

Wow, I am way tired all of a sudden. I could sleep two hours--wonder if I will try for that?

Today was interesting! Full of unexpected meetings, sunlight, and chocolate.
It was Leah's birthday, so we met up and wandered around, and I got her a Leah-sized strange chocolate cake, and myself a brownie, and we ate them on church steps.

Inexplicably tired, considering I've not been up ten hours yet. Probably just the falling edge of this damned illness. I do feel much, much better now, though.

I now have a little whiteboard for the practicing of kanji. Very cool. it's about two feet by three, a little less, and it's hanging on my wall but lifts off easily.

I dreamed in Japanese last night. Dreamed--sweet things, barely remembered; being stretched out on a park lawn between two blankets, between two people, softly holding eachother out of exhaustion and trust. Dreamed that the sun rose and we all woke, having slept through the night and surprised that no policeman had come to roust us out, to see the boyfriend of the girl arriving with fruit for breakfast. She introduced him to some bees--we were surrounded by them, the clover was full of them--so that later on, if he tried to find us, the bees would know him and not sting him. There was a bee in particular that we were fond of, for some reason, though she looked like every other bee and was not particularly different from them.
Dreamed that I kissed the boy with us on the side of the head, and his hair was soft against my lips. I loved him, and I loved the girl, and I was happy to be around them; I was very glad to see her boyfriend, since she was so much happier to know that he was safe.
The dream felt like it was about things being built, and things ending. it was sweet and wistful and good.

I really meant to study more Japanese today. If it is almost the fourth month, that means I have eight months until the JLPT. Not enough time! I have not been studying earnestly enough. My speed at reading kana is much faster than it was two weeks ago, though, which means I can do a lot more work in Japanese itself, and not romaji. This helps.

Guess I will go and study now. And clean my room, before I sleep--my blankets and sheets are clean of cat hair, but my room is a bit of a mess from the combination of creative effort and illness. Haven't done much this week at all but tried to recover.
(Missed kendo all week. Maow. But better that than bring the illness into the dojo and infect everybody.)

Should study--feeling a real urge to draw instead. Hmmm...

A month ago, looking at kendo photos online:
Him: You're allegedly the person on the right?
me: yeah
i think it's me
Him: Your feet are very elegant-looking here

Dan, when I was twenty years old: "If you were asking, if I had to choose something about you that wasn't nice, it would be your feet, they're sorta rough, you know?"

Aunt Amber, when I was thirteen years old: "If you only took care of them, you'd have gorgeous feet."

When I was twenty-four years old:
Jonathan kissed the inside of my right knee, brushed it with cold fingertips to tilt my leg. He trailed light, light kisses down my calf, pausing at the hollow of my ankle to roll his pale eyes back up to me and grin. He cradled my heel in his thin palm, turned my foot toward his lips--
"--don't!" I said.
He looked back at me in surprise, thumb grazing the top of my foot. "Why?" he asked, half laughing.
"Kendo tonight. Haven't showered yet."
He actually looked at my foot then, which had been briefly and inefficiently scrubbed down at the dojo after practice. "Ah. I didn't even think about it," and there's that grin again, "your feet are always immaculate."

When I was twenty-one years old:
Tom's hands on my foot, kneading to the point that it's almost painful but stopping far enough off that it's just entirely delicious. At the end of this foot-rub I'll be able to wash my hair with my right hand for the first time in over a year; bless his skill at reflexology. But I am a bit...just a bit...anxious that he's even looking at them.

When I am twenty-two years old:
Crossing into the kitchen when I lived at Nils' place, barefoot on the bananaflesh coloured linoleum, moving quickly and heavily, and then the sudden sickening sensation of a piece of Pyrex driving itself into the ball of my foot, lancing through muscle so deeply that the wound suckers shut over it and I have to hold the hole open with a pair of tweezers and dig around with another pair to fetch the chunk back out again...I will find a blood droplet the size of my thumb three weeks later, missed by the cleaning rag.


I have a love-hate relationship with my feet.
Not with anyone else's; I love giving foot-massages, callus doesn't bother me, as long as they're clean it's cool. I like the muscles, the delicate webbing between toes, I like how people may look similar but feet are always different. But my feet?
They were too big for my age when I was twelve. They haven't, it must be admitted, grown much since then; by thirteen I was a size 8 1/2W, and that's where they sit. But at thirteen, they were *massive* and I haven't outgrown the idea that this is true.

Every single pair of shoes that I have ever bought myself has been purchased for what they are, sure; but also with an eye toward making my feet seem smaller. If it has a minimizing effect, visually, there's a good chance I'll quite like it.
(However, I will only buy shoes that I can run in. This has lead to me learning how to run in high high heels. It's not comfy, but I can do it.)

All of this adds up to me not really liking to shoe shop. The last time I bought a pair of shoes, Jonathan helped me pick them out--it's been a year and a half, almost. Side-zippered boots to the low calf, black, shiny, bound 'round with a single strap...I loved them.
To death.
I glued them back together twice. The zipper on the left one would, since two days ago, only come down halfway. There were holes in both soles, also covered in glue. They were beaten up and cracked and had begun to not fit snugly anymore.

They're in a trashcan at the Waterfront, now. And in my possession, the first pair of Skechers I have ever worn. Thin-soled, I don't expect them to last, but they fit like a kiss, black with black embroidery, whisper-thin scars of silver on their sides. I always hated tennies for their heaviness, the way they made me clomp, saggy-toed rubber-edged clumsy-makers. But these...

It's funny why we hate what we hate about ourselves, isn't it? I can do so much with my feet. I have prehensile toes, I use my feet almost as much as I use my hands to pick things up; if it's light, I'm much more likely to grab something with a foot than to bend and fetch it. I can deliver a good hard kick, I can climb trees, I can--sort of--fumokomi.
So why is it that I am 26 years old and still bound up in the anxiety of someone literally half my age over something so stupid? I have good feet! They're not ugly even if they're scarred and callused, those calluses make it so that I don't bleed on the dojo floor.

But still, at kendo, I find myself hiding them. Every time I go.
And still, around people I like, I'd rather wear socks than bare them. And this is me, who delights in the feel of a hardwood floor, of thick carpet, of grass or sandstone or tarmac!
This is me, who has laughed at gunfire and kidnap attempts! I hide my feet out of...shame? Social embarrassment?
Enough of that, I think.
Enough of worrying over it. They're good feet; I am not a delicate maiden and never shall be, but I am capable of beauty and if my feet are my worst aspect I am a lucky child indeed. Shame over something like this is useless, and as of this moment I am done with it.

I've been eating right and exercising, but I still get so sick I'm laid flat. Maybe I am getting better, but I'm still not better enough for kendo--and I really should go to kendo, and I want to practice but am definitely too weak and ill; I need to talk about the Tekkoshocon demonstration with Eric, but I don't want anyone to get this. T_T Decisions, decisions.

The sky looks very bright and blue from my window. I'm half-sitting on my futon, still not dressed for the day(but I didn't sleep until five in the morning, this is all right), eating some of a breakfast experiment that I made last night (brown sugar, finely-chopped baby carrots, grated apple, cinnamon put into a basic muffin mix, came out as a soft, sweet bread), and coughing ceaselessly. My face feels tired. My hair needs washing (all of me wants a scrub, I miss being around someone who could sponge down a tired and feverish Genevra, condition her hair, towel her off, lotion her back...), and so do the dishes, so I will probably hie myself to the kitchen sink in a minute.

Finished Ayakashi last night, or rather the part of it that had the Medicine Seller from Mononoke in it. If you've not seen these things, I highly recommend them.

(Goes off, does dishes, has shower, back to futon.)


Anyway. Time to see if I'm capable of moving outside the house today.

Massive fever. Have to work anyway.
Woke from a dream about a good female friend being turned into a dragon against her will. She was weeping on the phone as the last of her humanity mutated away, because the dragons would never respect the thing she was going to be, when sometimes they do respect humans, and if she'd managed to remain as she was she could have earned their ears...now she was just going to be a weaselly little thing.

Dreamed I was racing through a giant crumbling fortress, with European-style dragons outside looking for me, though they were far too big to get inside. I couldn't see more than their finned heads and long, long necks.

Woke two hours before the alarm--can't get back to sleep. My skin is hot and dry as a dragon's.

Last couple of days have been a complicated little web of nonsense, for the most part. Wish my pocket hadn't been picked, so that I wouldn't have to walk several miles a day--I got so used to the bus!--but at least the weather is fine.
Well, fine-ish. Still in the forties, early fifties, but that's gorgeous compared to how it has been.

Made dinner at Christian's today, sticky rice and broccoli and chicken and fried egg, that was nice. Been chatting a lot through Gmail with Dave, on his breaks inbetween classes In The Future; he's twelve hours ahead of us. I tend to be going to bed just as he's getting back to his apartment, since I've been going to bed very late indeed, so it's nice to be maintaining the friendship with little nudges here and there.

Have been studying kanji at every opportunity. It's fun, actually, if hard, and I'm learning quite a bit.

What else? Want to make chocolate chip cookies; have no white sugar or chocolate chips. This is surely for the best. Have been eating a lot of oranges, and I feel fantastic...eating well in general is so good for one, isn't it?
Suppose I'll sleep, instead.

The end of the war dream. Previous parts: One Two Three

In my dream, Dave's rattling breaths are slower now. Less choking and desperate; he's unconscious, and I'm praying. The amulet between my breasts is burning cold with proximity to his injury; help is coming, help has to be coming. I've got my back to the tree and I'm doing everything I can to see everything there is to see, a knife's edge away from panic.

Help comes from two directions at once--Julian and Katie, on the back of a horse, Katie sliding off before Julian can halt it, and Mallory with the cart from the battlefield. Tears are rolling freely down my face now, and Julian hugs me, and pushes me against Katie, who holds me until the sobs stop, less than a minute. Mallory is hard in trance, the glow of her pushed deep into Dave, and she looks almost empty of it while he burns. Rob walks over from the cart, confers a moment quietly with Julian, and I pull away from Katie.

From the battlefield, I hear the golden trumpet call of dragon-Christian's cry; I'd blocked out the noise in my worry, it seems, because all of it comes rushing back like a kick to the chest, and with it the smells--mud, blood, trampled grass, fire and ozone and something spicy and spiky and tangled to smell. Mallory, behind me, says "All right. I've got to get him back to the camp, but for now he's stable."

Stable. Oh, god. My knees shake. Stable.
His face is not so grey, now, and the arrow is lying on the ground. I bring my hands up to my face, to wipe my eyes, to stifle a noise, and see that my the skin under my fingernails is lined with blood (and for a moment, they're the hands of a girl ten days shy of her tenth birthday, soft and bitten-nailed, but that fades swiftly).
Mallory wavers, a bit, and my arm is about her waist before I know I've moved; Kate and Julian lift Dave carefully to the back of the cart. I look out at the battlefield, back at Dave, uncertain.
We need every body that we can have out fighting.
Am I capable of fighting?
Stable. and nothing I could do either way. I straighten, swallow. "Julian." I say, and he comes up to me, green-hazel eyes quiet. "Can you stay with him, unless Alex needs you?"
"Of course."

I walk to the cart. I don't dare climb into it--I won't be able to convince myself to climb out again--but I lean over, stroke Dave's sleeping head. A couple of long strands of hair, loosed during the fight, catch on my fingers when I pull my hand away, and I look at the way they go translucent in the late-afternoon light. I reach up to my braid, and I wrap the hairs through my hairband. Not alone. Not doing this alone. Dave does not stir, and I can't find my tongue to say anything as the cart pulls away. I watch it until I have to turn, glance flicking from Dave to the eyes of my compatriots, who are very still. And when I turn away, it's like a deep breath. Dave will be protected; time to work some more.


And then I am fighting. My arms are burning, my shoulders are one massive ache, my throat is raw with screaming, it's all mechanical now, swordwork, hacking and slicing, trying to avoid friends. Not that that's hard; the enemy is everywhere, still. I know that we're getting the better side of the battle, but from the inside it's still the hardest thing I have had to do in my life.
I can feel Dave, when I reach for him, half-conscious on a cot in the centre of the camp, safe. I keep doing so, like tonguing the space where a tooth used to be, making sure, over and over again.

The fight is--I am only really aware of little scattered bits and pieces. Feeling my knee pop when I sink in soft turf. My feet are wet, leather boots soaked through at the toes. I see Gareth sometimes, laughing, cutting through the air, moving too fast for sense; I see Christian's shadow, though I dare not look up and take my attention from the field. Once, I stumble around what is left of the massive black thing that dragon-Christian had been fighting, bled out and empty on the ground, its cloud of glamour gone. I don't like looking at it, the cloud was less uncomfortable to see than this strange angular thing, all limbs and elbows.

For a moment I smell cloves, and I'm grinning then, aware I'm close to Harold on the battlefield. The way he moves stands out, very Earth in with all these things that move like wind or water. He flashes me a smile, takes a breath to say something but a pair of fighters tumble between he and I and he must expend it fighting. He's fighting barehanded, no weapons at all--whether he's lost them or simply didn't start with them, I don't know, but he looks fresh to the field. He's also plainly not alone, but working with a group, like Christian. He cocks his head, and vanishes again into a knot of trouble. I don't worry about him for a second. Bodies fly.

A shadow flutters over me. Not Christian; his shadow does not feel like ice, doesn't put the taste of novocaine in my mouth. I look up and instantly understand, in the way of dreams, that the wooden-hulled airship passing over us (so like the one that Eric flew, perhaps one of our own) will not only pass unharmed into the camp, but that it is full of enemies.
They're after our camp. And our small group of children, our healers, our mages who are working from within the camp...any camp followers we have, anyone we need protected.
Dave laid wards over the far camp, before. The most of our helpless are there--refugees who could not fight, families, the wounded from previous battles, the people gone fey-mad when the world flipflopped.
The near camp is only loosely warded now, and mostly empty; the ship will pass right over it, unchallenged (Christian-dragon is coiled around the Cathedral of Learning, half a mile away, and fighting something that flies like a kite, sinuous as a ribbon) and we'll lose them...

The talisman between my breasts goes icy cold, and then quickly comes back to skin heat, and I stagger; someone has just sipped from my energy like a toddler on a straw. There are only a few people who could without trouble, who are keyed to the wards that I wear constantly. That wasn't Alex, drawing off of me, it was Dave; he's conscious again.
(What is Dave for, as a mage? Alex is the heavy hitter, though there are others of his calibre in our ranks. Dave isn't one of theirs, his work is more suggestive, more about turning the eye away, making you think you wanted to do one thing and forget entirely about another...)
The airship turns, elegant, toward the near camp.

I reach to see what's going on. Gareth is there then, aren't I lucky to be so well-looked-after, and Harold; one or another of them grabs me by my shoulders as my eyes roll back. Harold, probably, the hand feels wide around the ball of my shoulder, but the nonsensical thought slips from me...

Dave is awake. He is bandaged, half-sitting, and he has his sword beside him on the cot and a gun in his hand; he is listening. Waiting.
Only one airship for this nasty little mission; they could hardly spare another. And he's convinced it that the near camp is the far camp, or that the near camp is what they wanted all along, or that the near camp is a great big shiny swimming pool for all I know; our dependents are safe. But the worst part of our wounded...
Dave looks up like he knows I can see him--he must, and for a moment I'm looking out through his face, feeling the pain in his chest, the unpleasant thickness to his breathing. "Sorry, love." he murmurs, brushing the hair back from his face, and I feel the unsettling sensation of his hand on his own cheek as if it were my own. "Didn't mean to borrow quite so much from you. I have to stay conscious, but I don't want you hurt either."
and he dashes his hand out in a sharp, abortive gesture, and my eyes snap open again on the battlefield, a mile away.

"Fuck."
Gareth seems to know already, and Harold doesn't need to know; my expression is enough to tell him that it's bad news. "Dave's getting them to attack near camp, instead of far--it's gonna be bad." Gareth is gone already, moving like a breeze, tapping comrades on the shoulder as he moves, but I can't run nearly so swift as that. And we can't lose too many of us from the battlefield, not even for the sake of our wounded...
I'm running anyway. A tactic like that is meant to drag us off the field, I have to find a superior and--as soon as the thought is whole in my head, I see the General who had debriefed me earlier, Gareth at his side like my fear embodied, speaking quickly. The General nods, gestures, and Gareth is in front of me.
He moves so fast it makes me feel sick; he is not even slightly attempting to hide himself now, to look at all human. I don't care. "Seven of us, for all of them." he says. "but your folk have always liked that number, haven't they? Run now."
And I'm running. What's the better part of a mile? a few thousand feet, no distance at all, even to a body so tired, not when the fear of her family's death is on her. Gareth is with me--far ahead of me now--and Harold, and three of Christian's group, and someone I don't know, a man with almond eyes and black hair and a narrow frame. None of us say anything as we come on the camp, listening. There's the sound of gunfire, not a repeater but someone steadily squeezing off round after round, and from another direction other unsettling noises, something like a scream. Gareth goes one way, the slim young man and one other of Christian's group go another, and Harold and I race to the healers' tents, to where I know Dave is.
The fifty-foot tent serving as a triage unit sits closed, a burn scar just beside the doorway having taken out the ties that held it open. I listen for a moment and hear nothing; gingerly, I open it just a fraction. It's dim inside, the broad tent poles casting shadows in the dust. There's a corpse at my feet, something with fine cheekbones and wide, sightless pink eyes, and another not too far from it that looks similar, elvish and fair and shot through the head. Across the tent, sagging under a tent pole, another. I glance from bed to bed, wondering where any of our wounded are, where anyone living is. behind me, Harold says, in a tone of surprise, "Damn! Where'd they all go?"
Leaning on the pole in the center of the tent, Dave coughs, winces. "Just me." he says, and I race forward. "You shouldn't even be standing...! Where is everybody?" My fingers graze the same place on his cheek that his own fingers had, and I stop, swallow. "Are you all right?"
He smiles broadly, snaps his teeth. "Of course. And everybody else--well, there weren't a lot of us right here, Mal's group had moved most of us to far camp just in case, and..." he gestures behind him, and a long row of beds is suddenly just there, a dozen people where before I'd seen only tentwall. "The healers can see them, but nobody else." One of them, a man with his head and both hands bandaged, half-smiles. "Works like--a charm." he says, and Dave shakes his head. "They stuck me in with this lot to punish me, I'm sure of it." he says. "They've been doing that all afternoo--"

His head and mine both turn at once, at the sound of gunfire. "Though Razz is here. She went out through the front, didn't you pass her?"
"Razz?"
"Hot chick with really great hair?"
The one of Christian's folk who had almost drowned, inside the glastig-woman. "Oh! No, I didn't see her." he straightens, I steady my rifle, and we head outside toward the sounds of battle.

This is a dream. It does not always precisely flow. I'm facing Alex, and his eyes are closed as he mutters something very quickly, and his face is streaming sweat. In front of Alex are a half dozen of the enemy, dressed in brightly coloured leather patchwork, and between them and Alex is Julian, and my mother's .45. Katie is behind Alex, facing the other way.
Julian's eyes show recognition and relief, and one of the half-dozen turn, but we're moving too swiftly; I grab him, open his throat deep with a throwing knife, drop him before he can gasp. Dave, behind me, shoots the one on the far left with more of the acid fire (please, don't let them notice how much dimmer it is than it was) and Harold comes out of nowhere, moving too fast for me to see precisely what he does though I hear the sound of breaking bones. One of the creatures falls on its ass, scooting back toward Alex to get away from us, struggling to get to its feet again, and snarling, Julian shoots it through the back of the skull, kicks it away from Alex's circle so that the blood creeping out of it doesn't spoil things. Alex's nose twitches, a ghost of a smile crosses his lips, but he doesn't pause in whatever sort of spellmaking he's doing, doesn't even open his eyes.

There's a laugh behind us, and Gareth comes up, his compatriot--Razz--leaning heavily on him, looking pale but satisfied. "That was swift enough." he says. "There were fifteen or twenty of them toward the back, looking for--well, anyone, probably, but Rasa and I have dealt with them." The woman smiles, nods.
Katie's looking at Gareth like she's just seen a tombstone guardian come to life, and he winks at her. She shivers, turns to face me. "Glad you're okay." she says.

And then Alex laughs, a sound as startling and welcome as the first thunder in a summer rainstorm. He rises to his feet, unsteady on sleeping legs, and kicks open his circle.
And there's a feeling like the first rain on a hot day, something whips toward me from the battlefield, invigorating, delightful. I look at Alex, confused. He shrugs, grins, leans on Julian, and Julian silently dares me to ask any question at all. I smile and shake my head. I don't need to know.
When we leave the camp, we can hear that the sounds of battle have changed. Our enemy is running, and quickly; I don't know what Alex did, what was the product of all that work, but I do know that our people have fought tirelessly.

On the middle of the field, the General is facing a line of bound prisoners, men and women on their knees, perhaps a dozen of them with their hands tied behind their backs and their mouths gagged, eyes blazing in colours not found in a human face. The first of them, dressed all in grey, coral-white hair falling across dazzling green eyes, tosses his head and manages to look royal despite the fact that his knees are picking up grass stains. To his left, a woman who looks much like him, dressed in creamy lavender (surely that gown is unsuitable for battle?), her bare feet folded under her, glances up and sees us, and goes a still as a dead thing.
Gareth--white haired, dressed in pale clothing, tall and undeniably not human--starts to whistle.

After that, it's mostly bits and pieces again. The air tastes like rain, and the smoke of the battlefield is rising toward cloud-towers that make the sky no less bright. Our people are helping eachother from the battleground, Mallory's work and that of her folk just beginning; I know I'll be up all night changing dressings but for a moment I just take a breath. There's the sound of banners above me and I look up, see dragon-Christian kiting through the air, examining the battleground from a height, before cuttting into a dive. He falls toward the ground, and there's a dark dazzle before his feet even hit; and then, through the smoke, Christian comes walking, looking a bit tired and entirely too pleased with himself. He waves at me unconcernedly, and I wave back. I should get to far camp, to the wounded, I should make sure that Dave lies down and gets checked up on again, it would be stupid to lose my partner to sepsis. I should find Harold, and get him to come along; I know he's a healer, though he was worth more to us just then as a fighter.

Christian is looking up at the sky, down at the ground, out at the land, as he walks through the aftermath of carnage. He carries a long, Chinese sword--rectangular, flexible. Occasionally he looks down at a body measuringly, and then thrusts the blade into a throat, or through a ribcage. He's humming. He seems a bit distracted, pleased to look at the towering, harmless summer clouds; this is just another job, and he's doing it, but he's not precisely enjoying it. When he finds an enemy who is alive but unconscious, or wounded but not on the verge of death, he raises a hand, calls someone over, and moves on. Triage, merciless triage.

The sun is bright, almost painfully so, and the smells of battle are deadened by the smells of grass and the coming rain. I watch Christian for a moment more, considering--I could help, there's so many things right now that I could do--and then I turn back, facing the Cathedral, feeling once again that absurd gratitude; I am alive, my nakama are alive, the enemy is captured or turned back or( the sound of the sword cutting in and out, one swift movement, and Christian's voice raises in whatever it is that he is singing)dead, for a moment I can breathe. For a moment I can just count cloverleaves.
And then I wake up.

I woke up clearly hearing this music, though my room is empty of aught but birdsong. It was restful and pleasing.


(I woke from a dream with Draco Malfoy and Catherine Deneuve, set in some odd version of the Squirrel Hill Library, the point of which seemed to be that one's circumstances have a lot to do with who one becomes. Draco Malfoy was a lot less bitter with Catherine Deneuve as an adopted mother.)

But! Neat Works In Progress meme from rainjoyous.

Post a single sentence from each WIP you have (or as many as you want to pick). No context, no explanations (sayeth Laura, and agreed with by Gen, bollocks to that, most fun bit). No more than one sentence!

First; a line apiece from a bunch of unfinished spoken word pieces and shreds of poetry:


I wonder--where is the point that emphasis begins to mean nothing?

To stay in love with you I need you to be less afraid of *silence,* because while thunderclouds start in the quiet, so do forests, and to stay in love with you I need more than the cultured little knot-garden of affection that seems to be all you'll plant for me.

and I don't remember being jealous of you, my little fairy-baby

There are some choices that make us not human anymore, for a minute, a year

(I wonder if I/will have those hands, when someday/I've earned my black belt)

The day I left my mother's house, my hands were painted with maps, and arrows were stitched onto the soles of my sandals

And then, some stuff from stories:

It's the drizzly, I-can-do-this-all-day sort of winter rain that makes the entire world seem as though it's dead or dying--there are no birds today.

When I woke up today, I was already at work.
I am not sure if this is a horror story or not, because it's strange and slow and sad.

English magic is strong, but it is hardly the only flavour of the Art that exists, and betimes a man likes the taste of something unfamiliar.
(That's from the Sedna story that I still can't make work.)

She's not overlarge, a sweet, young thing, golden of wood and barely stained, unencrusted by barnacles, her sails a deep rose in hue. Every inch of her is bright against water or sky.
(My Canterbury-by-Sea collection. It's coming along okay-ish.)

Still, she did have to go out among the wolves to get the things she needed to keep her hair so red.
There was something alien behind Grandma's face today.
Two separate attempts at a very particular sort of Red Riding Hood tale.


And then, some fanfic

First, a handful from different approaches to a Walter/Seras Hellsing fic that I'm beating around, or a couple of them, really:
Alucard was full of a fizzing energy, a sharp-toothed delight, that Walter found questionable in the best of times; laid against Seras' evident fear, it was disgusting.

The vampire--Master, came the knowledge again, bright and joyful and fierce, and the desire to do right by him--who had killed and then unkilled her seemed much less interested in her now that the tall blonde woman was around. He dumped Seras unceremoniously on the back seat of an expensive car, and Seras drifted out of consciousness until the door opened again.

Behind the dark-haired man, the front doors opened, closed. His lips thinned, though no irritation marked his brow. "Welcome to Hellsing."

It didn't matter where she'd been, how long she'd been gone from the pillow, but every time she laid her head down to rest through the day, there was the faintest breath of lavender from the linens.


And then some other stuff;

'I always wondered," Simon said, "If your ears were more sensitive than mine, since there's more there to play with."
From my as-yet-untitled Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann Viral/Timeskip!Simon that just WON'T LEAVE ME ALONE

And in his arms, she went to light and mist, and the wall went to snow, and Katara wept, scrabbling for the Avatar
The best Avatar fic I feel I've ever written, hands-down. Unfinished. Sigh.

"My son was older than you when he died, Toph." Iroh said. *cough* ahem. Yeah, exactly what it looks like. But I swear to god she isn't twelve in it.

Thoughtful today.

I learned to read when I was three-and-a-half years old. By five, I was reading adult novels, Heinlein and Asimov and McCaffrey, though I did not have the context to understand them. The first time I read The Last Unicorn, I was five or six; this probably goes a very long way toward explaining who I am.
My mother told me once that I learned to read out of frustration; there was this entire universe and I could not touch it. Could not understand it. There were stories there, and I could not touch them; there was magic there that I could swim in, but I couldn't get through the wall of text to find it.
I think sometimes that all I am is a quest for understanding. If I could find the words, and be understood, then I would not ever be left alone again.
(This is, of course, not true.)

Much of the time I think that my desire for, my love of language is just because--there are stories I still can not understand. If a printed page is a garden, the words are the garden gate; strong structures that can still keep me out. Once I get through the gate, it's green spaces and orchids and trees to climb,and in English words are filigree holding something beautiful. But in other languages, wrought iron and alabaster, interesting to look at but impassable.

I love words in any language. 珍しい, for instance, めずらしい, mezurashii, the word for unusual or rare in Japanese. Petrichor, the smell of the desert after rain. Fuego, fire. Pomme de terre, 'apple of the earth,' potato. 萤火虫, yíng huǒ chóng, 'luminous fire insect,' firefly. Beautiful.

But the more I learn, the more I want to know.

It feels like--somewhere, there's the Story. The one that makes everything make sense, opens up the world like an orange and lays it all out to be seen and tasted and understood, and loved. For some people, this has to be religion, but religion was never wide enough for this, for me. Sometimes I read a sentence here or there, I hear someone talking in passing on the street, and the words just ring in me, and I know; that was part of the Story, just then. A little piece of the truth.
But there are so many words that I don't know, in so many, many tongues. I was a teenager when I realised that this thing I am hunting can not be entirely found where I am from; that if I want more of it, I have to give more to myself, because English can't hold it all. And even if I regain fluency in Spanish, and gain it in Japanese, in Mandarin, in Tagalog and Italian and Greek, I will never find it all.
I'm Pellinore, and the story is my Glatisant, as much metaphor as beast, and I shall probably hunt it until I die.
The thought of that actually makes me very happy.

Lately, when it rains, I have been hearing this odd noise. Every minute or so, quite regular, a plonk sound, round and hollow on the back of my tongue, a beautiful tone. Sounds almost exactly like a kakei, one of those bamboo devices that fills with water and then tips from the weight and empties, striking itself on the ground as it goes. I have mostly heard this noise at night, or when too busy to investigate; and anyway I live in an apartment in a row house, there are often strange noises on my quiet, complicated little street. My apartment is a fine one, one of two in this building, on the second floor, and it comes attached to a small hill garden overlooking a strange little walled courtyard; the courtyard belongs to the domeciles of the downstairs neighbour and his neighbours, and it is usually full of sparrows and strange, orange little singing birds with long curvy beaks. The courtyard has a thin path between our building and the house next to us--two feet wide, perhaps less--and some days I take that shadowy walk from the street to creaking, rickety, greening wooden stairs, up to my garden and my back porch and the door that lets in next to my bedroom. I like the shape of things here.
Anyway. Today it was raining, gentle springlike rain, and warm, and I came home to that sound. I opened the back door and stepped barefoot out to the porch, trying to lift up the bedraggled Tibetan prayer flags left by a previous roommate, looking at last autumn's apples still piled on the ground, and there was the sound again. Close, and melodic. A drop of rainwater as big as my thumb fell from the roof above me, darted past my face, and again, that hollow, clean, satisfying sound.
So I leaned out against the mossy wooden railing of my porch, looked down, and watched another drop ring on a Budweiser can that had been bent in an angle against itself, sitting on the brick at the foot of my stairs. Plonk.
Moments of kensho.

Association Meme: Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.
Mine are from rainjoyous:

1) Kendo, obviously and first off, seems such a passion for you now =)
Kendo makes me a better person. Since I really decided that this was something I was Going To Do, it's been like--there is a foot of steady earth under me. Everything else might be turmoil and mudslide and pandaemonium, but under my feet, a step forward and a step back, there is firm soil.
It helps that I have a massive amount of respect for my Sensei and my senpai. Very good people.
As I write this, I'm nursing a blistered hand and a split-callused foot; kendo probably never stops hurting, I guess, though callus builds and blisters are few and far between these days. Some weeks, if Eric-senpai has been teaching, I spend every step well-aware of what I've been doing, stiff-muscled and wincing every time the shape of the terrain shifts. I get massive bruises from missed dou strikes--across the thigh, big as my hand, or under my armpit in the soft flesh next to my breast, livid blue and purple and gold.
Last night I tore the callus on my foot, for the first time in some months, on my *very last strike;* I felt it go and cursed, but I was happy to have gotten through all my strikes so it was okay. And watching Rob cutting graceful through a crowd, or the way that Eric sits, I can't complain; this makes my body better, too.

2) Long hair. I know you've cut it since but in my mind it's always there from long ago pictures, this insane long mermaid-hair.
Hair is just about the first thing that I notice on a person. As a child, I always wished that my hair was black like my mother's; the deep brown-with-red-highlights thing just didn't do it for me, if I couldn't be as white as my peers would like me to be, I wanted to be more visibly other. And I always loved the idea of Snow White's mother, with her own dark hair.
(now, paradoxically, as my adult growth ends and my hair is suddenly coming in black, I find that it doesn't matter much at all...)
All of my siblings had long hair, even the boys; my sisters' hair, like mine, was inching down toward the knees, and my brothers' hair brushed their shoulders. I didn't cut it because I didn't ever want to; I was the girl with long hair, it was a big part of me.
Mom once cut her hair to spite my father, because she was angry he'd shaved his beard, when she didn't much care for his face without it; it never grew so long again. Julian remains convinced that the spite permanently altered the way that her body works.
Every boyfriend I've ever had, save one, has a lock of my hair in a braid--when I left England after my first visit, I took a section as long as my forearm and as wide as my thumb and made it into a token for Dan, after he asked me, gingerly 'can I have some of your hair? To keep?' My hair is long enough now that I could begin to do that sort of thing again.
I tend to be a bit superstitious about hair, where I leave it, who I leave it with.
I found one of Jonathan's long, pink hairs on my blanket the other day. I wash my sheets and blankets once a week; it's been a year since we dated, and he has never been in my apartment. Some things *stick.*
My sister Heather used to braid my hair together with hers. Hers was knife-straight while mine fell in big loose curls, and hers was the colour of deep creek water, silvery-dark where mine tended toward copper-dark, and I liked the sight of them both looping and crossing each other, knowing the difference would be invisible from across the room but seeing it clearly so close-to.

3) Cooking - I know you love it as much as I do.
Cooking for someone is how I say I love you. It's inappropriate, perhaps, to forever be going up to my senpai and saying "Do you have any idea how bright you are in my vision? so I don't. I make cookies instead.
I have been cooking since I was seven years old, when Mom went off to work and I had to take care of the kids. Cooking is all about strength and home; if the people I'm close to don't know how, I teach them. If they do, I learn from them. If I am trying to show someone new that hello, I am quite considering making you family, I go to their house and make a meal; or I have them over to mine, though those meals are always had with big groups of people and generally serve a slightly different purpose.


4) Words. You have - a very particular way with them. I don't know anyone who captures the poetry of the day to day like you.
I *love* words. Actively. I love finding new ones, I love putting old ones together differently, and not just in English. I think that a lot of it probably is because of the synaesthesia; while sentences do not precisely have a *taste,* they do...balance. A good sentence falls whole into place and is finished, rather than having jaggy stick-out edges, and the whole of the piece gets brighter. If something's off, it's like having a dim patch in the work, and I have to go and hammer until it's glowing like the rest of it.
My favourite authors are also really particular with their words--Robin McKinley, Tanith Lee(her Tales of the Flat Earth series altered a lot of the darker parts of who I am), Peter S. Beagle.

5) A certain . . . *tries to think how to word this* I think of myself as something animal quite often, but definitely some sort of herbivore. You I sense the predator in. A lynx, a wolf, a vixen. Teeth and fur, anyway.
I always say that I am from a family of wolves, and it's true--we fight like wolves, we groom like wolves, we protect kin like wolves. But since leaving the pack, I am considerably more like a fox creature, small and big-eyed and travelling alone but not averse to company. Tricky and amused, a fox in the Japanese fashion.


( albums that changed my life meme )

...was this weekend. Well, the first in which I participated; I attended the Cleveland tourney last Spring, but mostly took photos and played gopher.

I am still digesting the weekend, I think. I had a promotion test, and passed; it was my first, and I am now ranked sankyu. I fought five bouts, and won two of them; my first in individuals and my first in women's, losing the second in both and my first in teams. I saw a lot of beautiful kendo, and learned some things (why, for instance, the knees are apart in seiza if you're male, and being a martial artist I count as male--were I sitting seiza like a good Japanese woman I'd have my knees together) and made few enough mistakes that I am...not satisfied, but not horrified either.

Biggest mistake was allowing someone else's confusion to confuse me, when instead I should have been hitting her. I knew what Narumoto-Sensei meant as he was the judge! She didn't, and it made me unsure. I should have taken her men, instead. Next time I will take advantage of everything that is handed to me!

This one went much more swiftly than the Cleveland tourney, probably because I was participating.

I also am...more aware, though I was quite aware already, that my senpai are golden souls and well worthy of my respect and affection. Good people, and I would throw myself between any of them and a velociraptor. Something like this...it's not something you get twice. I will love it as long as I may.

I was told that I did very well in my promotion test; participating in it was strange, everything got very quiet in the foot of space around me, and still. I felt very present, I guess, though maybe that is not the word. There was just the right thing to do, and I tried to do it. And in the first bout that I won, it was just like I could see. My opponent was not at my level(which is not high! I am a chopping block, a wood-post dummy, for now, so please do not think that I am bragging), and I could see what was going to happen next, where an opening was going to be. That was kind of unreal.
I think that the next time I face her will be interesting. Her face, at the end of it, was quite determined. I will have to keep practicing hard.

Anyway. I don't know that I can explain things without gushing. I loved it, I loved very nearly every minute of it. I got my ass handed to me in practice by an eight-year-old, who the next day I found playing a loud, screaming, giggly sort of tag in the locker rooms("Tasukete! Tasukete!" "Help me, help me!") and I got to see truly beautiful kendo. And beautiful kendoka, it must be admitted, I had some fun watching the way that people move through a crowd, the facial expressions of tired or excited or tense martial artists, the way that people hold their hands when they're not holding a sword. One of the most superficially fantastic things about kendo is that I get to be surrounded by gorgeous people.

I had some very good discussions about purpose and practice with Eric-senpai, and I watched my teammates and Sensei being beautiful and fine; I met interesting new people, one of whom reads what I read and studies the same Japanese program that I do; and I came to a couple of quietly startling realisations about myself that ought to make the next little while interesting indeed.

And then when I got home from Detroit, I had the best night's rest I have had in months.

There is not so smooth a seam between as between the previous two. Rather than telling me exactly what my duty is or how I get to it, I fall to sleep and straight into the war, no kindness to it.


The first thing that I know is that it is very loud. There’s a thick-throat-taste and smell of sweet dry dead flowers, and tin--the smell of blood. And thinking about my friends and kin, I can see them--whether it’s the talisman between my breasts or just the fact that it’s a dream, I can’t say. But I reach out and know where they are, and what they’re doing.

Alex is back at the camp, kneeling in a double circle drawn in chalk and salt and something like a flaky red herb, eyes closed, sweat running down into the creases around his eyes, and Julian is sat behind him outside of it, looking concerned but at the same time still somehow confident--he trusts Alex to know his own limits, and to be able to surpass them if he really has to. Alex speaks words I can’t really hear, quick and rhythmic and purposeful, voice rising and falling in a language I don’t understand. The air around him seems strangely clear, crystalline.

Julian’s eyes are calm and very, very green, swampwater that hides silver fish. He does not fidget, merely watches his lover, unusually still for him (and quiet; not singing) but not tense. Just watchful. His shotgun is close by, though.

Dave and I went out to the field together; he is magician and warrior, I’m just warrior but a bit more skilled than him at that, and I’m attached to him as his partner. Dave is throwing fire from his hands, acid-bright, his face pulled into a cold angel mask, something like a smile but more vicious than smiles should be. He is laughing, and dodging blades without ever yet having drawn his own; he is getting the best of the battle in the small knot of turmoil where he is sitting, though I do not know how long this will last. He moves quickly, but he’s not trained in any martial art but that of his sword; and I know somehow that his magic is nothing like Alex’s. I’ve got his back as I can, but the flow of battle often separates us.

Eric is cutting his way through the crowd like a knife through water, no visible sign of tenseness, just the endless rhythm of find an enemy, dispatch it, find another enemy. His face is sharp, and he's hurling imprecations, mocking.

Mallory is not back at the camp, as I had assumed she would be. She’s working field triage, fighting her way to the injured and trying to get them home by way of horse-cart. Her cart is already almost full--four or five people with grievous wounds--when she’s spotted by something considerably meaner than her, six-limbed and dark-furred and intelligent, and hungry. It knocks her down with one of its spindly front limbs, and thankfully also knocks her away--maybe it just wants to play with its food, but it hits her out of its own grabbing range. The thing goes down, pierced through by rifle shot, and a hundred feet away Rob gestures for Mallory to get up and get moving. “Come on, come on, come on!” He’s holding position, perfectly still in all the teeming madness, eyes so harsh and pale that I can’t help remembering a wingshot raven I saw up close as a child, whose blue-white gaze was so bright that when it blinked it was like a strobe. Mallory hauls another injured man into the cart and takes off, trusting she’ll have cover, trusting Rob will be there--I don’t know if, in my dream, they ever met, but there is kinship in this sort of battle, and they each both just are trusting that the other will be able to do what will have to be done.

Christian moves like a dancer, as though the fighting is just the natural flow of things, and all these fighters are his partners in it. Seize, break arm, break leg, break neck; dodge knife, shatter hand, jam knife up under ribcage and twist. Watching him, it's like this is right even for the horror of it, because his place in it is just so sure. His face is twisted as he fights; he is perhaps enjoying this, and he moves like he’s done it all his life. His band keeps close to him; they work as a unit.

His second, Gareth, is like a wind, lighting from knot of fighters to knot of fighters, moving with dreamlike and unbelievable grace, so cleanly that he looks slow. He is as serene as a Madonna, his mouth slightly parted, his eyes half-closed. Something about the complete picture is horrifying, and knots my stomach. He’s so placid it’s almost obscene.

One of the black things moves through the crowd like a scythe, and everywhere it turns, people fall in waves. It’s impossible to see it clearly, a massive cloud of dark sparkles that the eye slides off of, from which occasionally emerges a long and crooked limb, a barracuda jaw. It is laughing, if that can be said of something that is not actually making a sound; the air does not vibrate, but our heads pound and we shake. I fall to my knees as if suffering an earthquake, trying to keep an eye on my surroundings as my knees fail me and every joint in my body screams under the wrongness of the thing’s presence.

From the corner of my eye there’s movement, and despite the overwhelming nausea and the way the world rocks, I spin, sword out. It’s Gareth; he holds out a slender hand to placate me. “Hang on.” he says, and reaches out and drags one long finger from my cheekbone to my throat, sending a thrill down my skin. When the delicious shiver leaves me, so does the horror, and the world rights itself. “You’re in the way.” he says, and slides one arm around my waist, dragging me to my tiptoes.
“What?”
“Come along.” He is not grinning at all now, and he’s moving very swiftly, I must weigh nothing to him. “No sense playing squish.” he says. I lift my toes from the turf and we practically fly across the ground. He’s singing, a bit--something jaunty and jovial about a picnic. On the chorus (“and will you let me bind them in your hair?”) he looks down at me with a wink. I’m baffled.

I see that Christian’s entire group, who had kept eachother in shouting range, is fanning out in a broadening circle around their leader, and in the middle of the spot they’ve cleared, Christian is standing perfectly straight, eyes closed, hands coming together in almost a meditative grip--and then he’s gone, there’s nothing but empty grass, trampled and wet from last night’s rain.
And then there’s something there that fills the entire empty space and more, sinuous and gold and grinning with a mouthful of incredibly sharp teeth. It snaps out with one long be-taloned limb and knocks a dozen of the enemy back, and when it opens its mouth the sound that comes out is recognizably like human laughter, though it’s deep as church bells. But in my head, though it’s got a spicier edge to it, like carnations, still the air is full of the scent of vetiver and mallow, Christian’s smell, and I can’t help laughing in bright disbelief.

Christian-dragon kicks off of the ground, glittering like a sunset, the turf shredding under his feet as he takes into the air.
He’s huge. The size of several hills rolled together. Somehow he’s still well capable of being careful, since he’s not injured a single one of his own (though it must be imagined that they are at least a bit accustomed to this, and I remember Gareth laughing when I asked what Christian was). He’s not hurt any of mine, either. His outstretched wings make a sound like banners. The enemy is falling back, quailing at the terrible battle-joy in his eyes, at the sound of his cavernous voice, but I know that it can’t be enough. The great black sparkling thing rears up with a scream, and the smaller things at the foot of it scatter as Christian answers the call with a challenge of his own, a golden note that makes my teeth ring.
The concussion of their meeting stirs the air with a massive shock. Little shreds of black glittery cloud rip free and fall to the ground, crawly rags that disintegrate in the sunlight. Christian sinks his talons deep into the cloud, grasping what growls at its center, and shakes; his long neck darts out and he sinks all his sharp teeth into the mass of it, snapping his head back and forth like a pit bull.

My attention is slammed back to the ground by a giggle, and I face three somethings like the creatures that followed me up the tower, tall and loose-limbed and casual, expressions just a bit mad. One licks its red lips with a tongue like a cat’s and flexes its fingers, and I draw my sword--my bullets have been spent. The thing giggles again and feints to the left before sweeping at me from the right, retractable claws snapping out from its fingertips. I cut its hand off and it screeches in shock; the screech ends when I kill it.
I turn to face the other two, but the cream-haired gentleman has already dispatched them, one’s belly is open to the breeze and one has a gaping hole where his throat used to be. Gareth drops a half-bow and races away from me, laughing, on to the next fight, and I turn to see what next must be done.

A glimmer draws my attention, and I see a girl made all of water sweeping across the field, her dress a wave that bears her six feet above the ground, its liquid rolling over the severe-haired one of Christian’s team and gathering her into itself. Trapped in it, Christian’s fighter chokes, and her black hair fans out around her as she struggles to get to the edge of it. The water woman looks down at herself--she’s ten feet tall now, sucking water up from the damp ground, and where she passes the earth is left dry. Christian’s fighter is trapped below the water-woman’s sternum, kicking and punching in an effort to break the surface, but somehow entirely incapable, her blows rebounding. The woman runs a hand down her own breast, across her ribs and down to her hip, smiling at the face that stares up at her in horror from inside her own body, amused by the clenched fist that slams around under her collarbone. She puts her hand against where the fist strikes, like a child playing outside a window. She makes a satisfied noise, a kid with an ice-cream-cone, and the woman inside of her slows in her struggle, her motions becoming vague, her lips turning blue, her body sinking down beneath the line of the water-woman’s ribs. I’m racing across the field toward them when an arrow, silver-headed and yew-shafted, smeared with some sort of ointment, finds the place where the water-woman’s heart should be. She gasps and collapses, body writhing around the shaft in an effort to be rid of it, and I cut her throat. Her blood is clear and cold as snowmelt and comes quick as the liquid from a water balloon, splashing me. She gurgles as she dies, and in the instant before she deliquesces her eyes are filled with censure--but she would have killed me if she could, and I have never done aught to her or hers but in self-defense. The black-haired woman falls to the ground as the water-woman bursts, and I drop to my knees, feeling for a pulse. It’s there, but sparrow-faint and she’s not breathing; I yank her up into a Heimlich, force ice water out of her, screaming for a medic. Mallory’s there before I can finish the cry, blue-garbed and her hands almost made of silver fire; she pushes the fire out of herself and into the woman’s chest, and the woman’s face flushes with colour, and she gags, vomits more freezing water. Mallory grabs me by the shoulder and shakes me once. “Cover us.” she says, and pulls the woman up, drags her to the cart. I see that Rob’s sitting on the end of it now, guarding the people prone within; I cover Mallory without incident until she gets to it, and then I move on. Our forces are pushing forward, but it’s so terribly slow.

Behind me, I hear Dave shouting. His dark hair is falling loose of its tail, and his angel’s expression is considerably more ruffled now; he’s lost his knife somewhere, and has drawn his sword. He’s quick, but losing ground against something with skin like willow charcoal and whiteless eyes like drops of dark blood, and a long, pointy pink tongue.
Dave strikes it, but his blade rebounds as though the thing were made of coal, and he staggers back a step. And the opening between him and the thing is wide enough for a black-fletched arrow to dart through and sink itself in Dave’s chest.
His eyes widen, and he gasps; I can’t seem to cross ground swiftly enough, and Dave reaches out with his acid fire, and the black thing sizzles and screams, falling away from Dave in absolute agony. I’ve got a throwing knife out and away before Dave hits his knees, and the small green nasty with a bow, unnoticed until too late, is down with my blade through his throat; but it doesn’t matter. Dave pitches forward, twisting at the last instant so that he lands on his side rather than the arrow.

By the time I reach him, his mouth is pink with foamy blood, and his chest is making a hideous noise with every struggling breath. I dig through my pockets to find a plastic film to put over the hole, around the arrow-shaft (please gods let it not be poisoned) and Dave snickers. “Well, this is fucking stupid.” And his eyes roll back, and he goes entirely deadweight in my arms.

I’m not a magician, and I’m not a healer, and I feel utterly useless here, watching his skin going grey and seeing the pulse leaping in his throat. In the back of my head I can see, through the sibling-line between us, Alex’s eyes going wide in anger and fear for Dave; he shouts something, and Julian and Kate are moving, but the camp is far away, I’m not sure what help they can give me. Dave is heavy, but I’m strong enough; stupider to leave him than to move him, so I grab him in a fireman’s carry and drag him over by a tree, were we’ll have at least a little bit of cover. His hair drifting soft over my throat makes tears spring to my eyes, and I bite my lip until it bleeds to keep from screaming--must be quiet, must be calm, panic and rage will avail me nothing. I lay him down at the foot of the tree, and I draw another knife into my hand, ready to throw, and I pray.


And then I wake up.

Have been having a massive epic dream, of late. FB people, if you're tagged--you're here. Or some fascimile of you, obviously, I don't know how you'd really act in case of faery war.


This is part two of a dream that began some long time ago; I have already had part three, but must pack stuff for hauling my ass to the kendo tournament, and have already spent too much time typing this.
And no, this isn't exaggerated; this is what the dream was. Quite intensely detailed. Lots of details I'm not putting in, actually--embroidery on clothing, dust in the air, the taste of floured apples...)


(part one is here)


In my dream, I vault the side of Eric's airship and am racing toward our army, somewhere near Schenley Park. The army has an audible noise to it, a humming of many feet and bucklers and voices all at once, tense but not yet on the attack. Our encampment is massive, though, and full of many activities at once; getting through it is not swift.
I'm looking for a warlord. Eric grabs the ball of my shoulder, gets my attention; nods. "You did good. Survive this, too." And then he's off into the crowd, to see to his men. I watch him go for a moment, feeling something sharp in my throat. My siblings are all gone, thousands of miles away, and I have no blood-family here; and while I'm glad of that, it's uncomfortable to watch him walk off. I won't be able to see him safe, though he's a better fighter than I am by far, and that knowledge is just more anxiety on top of what I already carry.

I'm walking from cluster of tents to cluster of tents, all of them tall pale canvas, following the pull under my breastbone that tells me where the person I'm seeking is. A neat bit of spellwork. The camp has changed shape since last I was here, and the big Generals' tent is not quite where it had been; but I find it, and jangle the bell at the door. "Littlejohn, is that you?"
"Sir." I answer, and the flap flips open. "Good, good. I heard Gildea had brought you back in. Not too much trouble?"
Inside the tent everything is dim, though it's not too stuffy at least. The General addressing me is tall, slim, honey-hair pulled back in a tight tail. He's got a .45 at his hip, and a dagger on the other side, and his shoulders are not the sort of broad that you get from weightlifting, but the kind that comes of use. "They were waiting for me, I think." I said. "or maybe just looting, not that I know what would be in a college building that they might want."
The General's face fills with tired good humor. "Who knows? Notebook paper? Ramen noodles? Chocolate bars?"
"Some of their number have a serious weakness for refined sugars, sir." someone says, in the back of the tent. "Or perhaps they were simply bored." The General shrugs. "At any rate. What do you have to tell me?"
"Ah--" there's a peculiar sort of click in my brain, a relaxing of my muscles, and I start to talk. I tell everything I've seen; the golden-light off of the water that's flooded Downtown, the massing army headed our direction, my estimates of numbers and power, the casual way that my enemies pursued me and how easily Eric and I dispatched them. Things I did not consciously remember seeing tumble out my mouth, and I feel the leather thong around my neck with dispassionate clarity, glad of the token at the end of it that fills itself with this knowledge that otherwise I might not be able to bring home. The General says nothing, merely laces his hands together behind his back, eyes half-closed. At the end of it my tongue tangles, and I fall silent, abruptly drained. I let out a deep sigh, clear my throat, and the General faces me again. "Thank you." he says. "Go and get what rest you can, not that I imagine there will be too much time. There should be room for an hour or two, perhaps."
"Yes, sir." I say, barely noticing him in my haste to leave the tent, trying to narrow my focus again back to something human.
(He chews his cuticles, I note despite myself. The woman behind him, another of the Generals, has lines of exhaustion around her eyes, and something fuzzy caught in the hair by one ear. The rug is dusty. Oh, I am tired.)
I step out of the tent, and the cool air revives me somewhat. Home, I prod, and the gem hanging over my heart gives a weak flutter in my skull. Left it is, then. I walk slowly, not having the energy for more.

To my right, there's a small group clad mostly in black and shoaizome blue. Christian is at the head of it, looking almost relaxed, arms folded, faint smile on his face. Behind him, his men and women are talking in low voices, somebody is poking at a campfire. There's a man clad in a creamy grey, clothing that seems to me to be a bit unfit for the battlefield, sharpening a long knife. His hair is the color of cream, and probably longer than he is tall; it's been loosely pulled up in itself several times, and it tumbles in an artless fashion that would probably take hours of work to achieve on a human head.
He's plainly not human, though. Human people do not come that beautiful, human skin that delicate would have no place under sunlight. He's also grinning incessantly, baring perfect white teeth. He smiles at me, nods, and Christian looks up. "Wait a moment?" he asks.

In the confines of this dream, I know Christian, but I think that I do not know him well. His small group--there are no more than seven of them, I think, a woman with dark skin and hair cut severely to her chin, a man all in brown with a humble face, others moving in and out of the tent behind them--glances up to me for a moment, sees in the set of his shoulders that all's well, and goes back to what they are doing. Only the grinning pale beautiful one keeps sitting in his camp stool, toying with his whetstone, eyeing me through heavy lids. "This one has been hunting today," he says, and something about the his tone on the word 'hunting' makes the muscles in my back tense. His expression hasn't changed, but something about him is all bloodlust, or maybe sex, and it takes a conscious effort to stand still.
Christian smiles then, not at my reaction but at his subordinate. "Enough, Gareth." the pale man laughs, a musical noise, and his attention falls back to his knife.
I wonder who they are, this group, and how they got caught up in this battle. They're plainly not part of the regular army, and just as plainly they've been working together for longer than this season. Christian takes a breath, releases it. "You're head of the scouts, right?" he asks. "I have seen you." I nod. "Yes, sir."
"Is there anything you could give me to make the day easier?" I think a moment. "What are you?"
His eyes gleam a moment, and he smiles broadly. "Excuse me?"
I sigh, cursing magically-increased exhaustion. "Sorry. What sort of fighters? Not mounted, plainly. "
"No." he bites the smile back. "Not mounted. Combination of--close-to, and air."

Behind him, the white-haired man hoots. "Air!" he says. Christian doesn't have to turn around, the set of his shoulders shuts the man up. "Forgive my second," he says. "He's excitable." I shrug, not really minding. "Well. Air is useful--they don't seem to have anybody but ground fighters, though some of them..."
Massive tentacular horrors knuckling in behind the glittering throng, something huge and made of shadows that I can't look directly at, gods-be-damned mages clouding everything I've been spouting numbers, estimates, positions again, and Christian looks a bit keelhauled. "Sorry." I say "Useful skill, but when I'm this tired..." He looks sympathetic, and I shrug. "I can't be sure. There's some big guns out there. Their frontguard is quicker than ours, I think, so a lot of it is going to just depend on brute force. Our sparkly boys are gonna do a good deal of long-distance damage, we still have one or two of the missile-launchers, but not a whole lot of ammo. Any of you guys riflemen?"
The woman with the severe hair gestures from the campfire, but the rest of them don't look up. "Right. Well. Okay. I'd recommend, honestly, that you attach yourselves to one of the battalions armed with guns, and see if you can't provide assistance there." Christian nods.
"But I'm no strategist." I continue. "And even if I was...tanks aren't gonna win this, we need something else."
That smile again, flashing and gone. "I see. Thank you."
I'm just so god-damned tired, I can't even muster an elegant reply. "Sure thing." I say. "You need me, ask for the Fifth, I'm attached to one of their magicusers when I'm not out on Survey."
And I walk on.

I pass by a bunch of people in a dark and elegant blue--healers. Mallory is there, and her hands are full of silver fire until I shake my head--I must be dangerously tired, if I can't turn off the sight that has her look that way to me, her skin seeming to glow from inside and her hair full of dark lights. Usually I'm better shielded than that. Two hours of sleep might not be enough. I pause, but she doesn't look up, bustling from table to table, poking at bundles of something or another, and I don't want to get in the way of vital work, so I walk on. I'm closer to my own tent now, to the people I'll be working with.

The air feels as it does after a rain, almost cold despite the sun, and for an instant I'm overcome by the smells of green-growing things, and the crystalline quality of the air is electric. I close my eyes, try to filter it out, and the greeness goes away, muted and replaced by the scents of orange blossoms and biker leather--I grin despite myself, knowing another of the people who in waking life are my senpai is there without having to look. There's a fluttering relief in my chest--dream-me hadn't seen this one in a while.
I turn, opening my eyes, and Rob waves a hand, straightens from the broad tentpole he's leaning on. He's wearing something slim of some pale-dyed, moon-gold tone (a shade I've never seen him in, in real life--this dream is full of colour), sleeves cuffed and rolled above his elbows, dark trousers to ankle boots, nothing loose to catch if he should have to move swiftly. "Good to see you made it back in." I say, since he's something like what I am, some sort of scout, though not under me. He shrugs, half-smiling, and the motion is easy; he's well-rested. "Any news?"
A cloud darts between us and the sun, and I try to pass off the shiver as just having to do with that. "Yeah. They're really close--it's going to be today."
Rob's face goes still. "Okay." I'm afraid that if I start to talk, I'll just spout it all over again, and the expression on his face says he knows better than to ask specific questions that might trigger it, not before I've slept. "No guarantees that the camp will be safe." I say. "So if there's anything in there that you have to save, send it back with the camp followers--the General's putting out a call that they're to go another ten miles or so back." Rob grins, then, shakes his head. "Just stuff." he says. I let myself yawn this time, try and draw in a bit of energy from the grass beneath me and the sky over me. "I won't keep you." he says. I feel a ridiculous gratitude, bow, and make my way across the grass to my own little encampment, smelling roasting apples on the cookfire already.

I am within twenty feet of my encampment when I feel a tingle over my skin, and hear "Gen!" from the circle of tents. "Alex." I say, quietly, knowing he'll hear--he's triple-warded our campsite, ever just a bit paranoid. He is wearing black, a brown-black, trousers tucked into high sturdy boots, simple shirt. His fiercely curling hair is long, pulled back uselessly, and his hands are covered in soot.
(I decide not to ask.)
"Everything okay?" he asks. I snicker at the oddness of that question in the middle of what is shortly to be a battlefield, but I knew what he means. "Worked a treat." I say, hand hovering over the talisman. He smiles briefly, and Julian comes up behind him, in celadon and tan, buttery-soft trousers and loose shirt. "Dinner's going to be a bit." he says, and even exhausted I can see the pleasure in Alex's eyes at the sound of his voice. I feel such an absurd gratitude, to have my family here with me, my un-brother and the complex thing that Julian is. "I need to sleep." I say, the words slurring a bit. Alex steps back, and I push into my tent and collapse onto my bedroll.

It's occupied. Warmth fills my chest, and I slide over, pull Dave's arm about my waist. "You just get in?" I ask. He mumbles into my hair. "Hour or so ago. Have the second camp set up, was setting wards for 'em all night. Glad you're safe." his fingers curl around me, one hand laces itself through my loosened hair and tightens. I arch my back, feel the puff of his breath on the back of my neck. Everything is good. I kick my boots off, loosen my collar, sleep.

(I wake, almost, to the sound of my roommate's cat yowling at my door, wind outside, a car passing on the bridge above my house. I do not open my eyes. I don't want to wake yet, there is something I am supposed to do...I fall back into the deeper parts of sleep.)

I wake in the tent an indeterminate amount of time later. The sun against the tentwall has moved, but I couldn't even tell you in what direction...Dave is up, quietly settling into his boots, and pulling his dark hair back. I sit up, blink, trying to get the I-can-see spell to settle right in my head. More useful than contact lenses, less likely to fall out in a brisk breeze, but sometimes it's slow to recognize that I am awake.
"Morning, love." Dave says.
"Morning?"
"Well, no. About mid-afternoon." he smiles, teeth sharp. "Sleep well?"
I can't remember. "Solidly, I guess." He snaps his jaw, and I shake my head, absurdly pleased by this everyday thing in the midst of all this strangeness. He's tucking his shirt--blood red, china red, beautiful peacock of a boy--into his black trews, reaching for slim silver knives and belting them on. He has a sword of some European tradition, narrow and basket-hilted, and that goes on too--knowing I'm watching him, he cocks a hip and poses. "come on, is there ever a moment you're not vain?" I ask, an old argument. He laughs, and from outside the tent I hear "if you are awake enough to bitch, you're awake enough to eat!"

Katie?
Katie is here?

Dave's face is blank with surprise; he must not have known. I rip the tent open, throw myself out it, and Katie is standing there, so tall, and pale, and smiling, her hair redder than it used to be, and long, and I've pulled her into a painful hug before she has time to say hello.
"What are you doing here? You're supposed to be in Sacramento! Before the phones went down, your mother said..."
Her face goes tight with pain for a moment, and I trail off. "Kate...are your sisters okay?"
She takes a quavery breath, sighs. Shrugs with only one shoulder, a sharp motion. "I didn't make it out before the Veil fell." she says. "Got stuck without combustion engines about four hundred miles from here. Got a ride with some crofters, then some guys with, like, scales..." she looks me in the eyes then, and she's still my Kate, regardless of whatever else might have happened since I saw her last. "The girls got out. Everyone but Tiff, at least, I'm not sure about her but I have no way to find out for certain. Anyway. Came here!"
I'm shaking my head. Alex is behind her, holding something that smells delicious. "Always said, could find you anywhere." I say. "Glad to see it works both ways."

Kate is the only one of us dressed in machine-woven cloth, and it's ragged and torn. The stuff just doesn't hold up, here, for whatever reason--when the vines came, when the Veil fell, a lot of things started to behave erratically. "I should have a shirt you can wear." I say. "And Dave's about your height, you can cinch some of his pants until we can get you a needle and thread..." I trail off. This is stupid. I've got a meal between me and death if I'm unlucky, or worse, a meal between me and watching Dave die, or Eric, or Rob--and I'm offering her a sewing kit? Mama bear, always.
Kate just smiles, and hugs me again, and Alex hands dinner around.

I can't stop watching her, this piece of everything that I walked away from to save my sanity--I wonder about my own sisters, my brothers, if they're faring well. If stuff in that part of the world can even detect stuff here. There was a little while, when the world started going thin and strange in places, we had a little warning, and a lot of people left, but--well, this is me. Why would I walk away from this?
If I had known it would come to war, maybe I would have done. Maybe.
And Kate would have been trapped here without me. And I would never have seen Dave again, or Julian, or Alex. I question every choice before I've made it, but it's unhealthy to question overmuch once nothing can be done.
Alex is sitting back in Julian's embrace, looking as relaxed as he always does before he has to do something that might kill him. Dave is pacing a bit, reciting something under his breath the way he does sometimes when he's trying to think of something else, Katie is looking tired and happy.
Ah. "Kate...do you have any weapons? Or know how to use them, for that matter?"
She shakes her head. "No gun. Got stolen." her eyes go dark. "Not bad with a handgun, but that's about all."
Damn. But before I can worry, Alex raises his head. "Stay with me." he says. "I'll be working from here. Julian's support team. You can help him, or you can go over and work with the healers, they always need another set of hands." Alex has to work from here, or it's better if he does--he's been in this encampment for weeks, it knows his tread, and the triple wards have a lot of him in it. He can't work from a place of power, but this is close.

Dave is behind me now (the cat, the cat is yowling at the door, shut up, I want to stay with my friends in this green place with the rain-taste on the air, shut up), his hands on my shoulders, and there's a sudden whistle in the air. Fireworks. We turn, and I'm not hungry anymore. Tall screaming fireworks, from the main encampment--two green, one gold.
Time to work, boys and girls.

And then I wake up.

Dreamed I flayed a friend alive so I could eat his life.
Dreamed Eric from kendo was giving me a serious dressing down, quite furious, about how I wasn't mature enough and didn't stick to things (this must be because I have been too sick for kendo).
Dreamed my house burned, and I stood outside it with a handful of books and no shoes on.
Dreamed I was dead, and what was left of me stayed at the library, waiting for another friend to come and talk. that wasn't a bad dream, exactly, because I knew that I would be useful; I knew everything in every book in the library, and in every book that had ever been in the library, regardless of whether or not it was gone.
Dreamed that I was stuffing .45 rounds into my pockets, and I couldn't find my keys.
Dreamed I was wandering through my house naked but for a towel around my dripping (waist-length) hair, and I walked into the living room and my Sensei were there, and two of the senpai; I had to write something on a whiteboard, and my towel wouldn't stay up under my shoulders, but I didn't honestly mind too much, no shame in me for it, I was just worried that I'd be somehow offending their sensibilities.
Dreamed that it was summer, and I was in some grand resort that I didn't belong at, to be married to someone rich I didn't much like.
Dreamed it was nighttime, and I was at the top of a massive camphor tree, knees locked around it, hair down, sap sticky on my legs and on my hands from climbing, and I was playing a flute. That at least was a lovely dream.


When I dream like this, is it any wonder that I do not rest?

I never sat and watched a football game before Sunday. Not a fan, you see. But Sunday I was with fans, and I kind of figured--between the team of the place where I grew up, and the team of the place where I live now? Surely worth watching for the novelty of the thing.

I hung out at the Ruskin dorms with friend Christian and a lot of screaming college students, and one or two hollering grad students. Chips and dip and Black and Gold cupcakes--it was surreal. So far removed from my usual crowd. I didn't understand a lot of what I was looking at, of course, but delight and frustration are easy enough to comprehend, so I watched their faces and hands as often as the screen.

The Steelers won--and then within a minute of the win, somebody pulled a fire alarm in the dorm hallway, and I pulled on my shoes and jacket and coat, and we went out into the bustling, scream-filled night. Christian's dorm is in the lovely Ruskin Hall, very close indeed to the Cathedral of Learning, but by the time we got out there--less than two blocks!--the streets were already packed with hollering people. There was a line of motorcycle policemen blocking traffic off of Bigelow, which is good, considering that no car could possibly have made it through the several hundred people gathered there.

The steps of the Cathedral were also covered in cops, who kept people from getting into the building. very sensible. Someone in the crowd lit off a series of fireworks, and people pulled back a bit as whistling fire sailed into the trees, too low. One of the trees began to smoke; someone thought it a good idea to climb into a smaller tree and break off pieces of branch to use as torches. Fire broke out in various places in the crowd; someone lit a garbage can, a round bulletin board, there were more fireworks.

I was glad to be with Christian, who is as open-eyed as I tend to be. He shouted and laughed too, but he never stopped paying attention to the tenor of the mob.

Police helicopters began to arrive. Whenever a spotlight touched someone in the crowd, they would shout in abject delight, and the people near them would push into it, as if it were a light on stage, waving up at the copter and whistling shrilly.

Someone climbed a streetlamp, and began doing chin-ups from where he hung off of it, thirty feet above the tarmac. There was the plain scent of weed, which I have no problem with--better far a mob on marijuana than beer.

I wanted to talk to the cops, to thank them for their hard work, but I was hardly going to interrupt them where they stood, marble-faced and flickery-eyed.

I felt very set-apart and alien even as I was amused; too busy paying attention to potential danger to lose myself in the mob, the way I might at a club. I am fine with this--even dancing I always have one eye watching behind me, and in a situation like the Cathedral lawn that night, better to have a spider's set of eyes looking in all directions.

There were so many people that it was not very cold at all--but despite the lights and streetlamps and fireworks and fire, it was still pretty dark. We called another friend, and she came to meet us. The cops started their motorcycles--so many cycles at once made a terrific noise, I could feel it vibrating in my throat, tickling my palms. And at the same time, there's a sound rather like ripping paper, and the night gets quite a bit brighter; Christian's head snapped up at the same time mine whipped around to see, and without really thinking about it the both of us were like "Time to go!" a fire engine arrived, the cops began to move, and we weren't going to stay there any longer. The cops take down Fifth, wrong way on a one-way street, and we move across the Cathedral lawn, which is at this point a sheet of solid ice. People were sliding like hockey pucks, ricocheting off of eachother and the foliage, though far fewer people than were in the streets. I did not slip--Christian slid once, caught himself without seeming to notice, and we went back to the dorm to find the friends we'd lost in the crowd. Another couple of dozen cops pass us, lights off of the motorcycles all in silent chorus, beautiful and fey. After them comes a fleet of cars, normal traffic or rather civilians; hardly normal, as the unbroken horns and wild shouts that come along with them would attest. Lots of Terrible Towels being shaken out windows, lots of plain and extreme delight on faces as they zoom by. We run across the street and get safely home, passing tipped-over newspaper boxes, empty wine-bottles, surrounded by the calls of sirens.

I thought at that point that my observations of the evening were finished--but hanging out at Christian's, the room was filled with that same honey light, and we looked at the window to see cinders drizzling down. Somebody upstairs had lit the contents of a wastebasket, or something similar, afire--and was dumping it out the window, large dangerous flower-petals sailing merrily out to the snow.
Really it was quite lovely.

And then, we went all the way to the airport to fetch a friend home; and then I slept, curled up tight on Christian's tiny but still soft couch, laughter from outside punctuating strange dreams.

Title: Space
Rating: Very low PG, I suppose
Pairings/Characters: A couple of dozen OCs with no names or descriptions
Warnings: Mentions of violent death
Word Count: 1422



( We are the ones who know them in the dark. )

(Or; tag me for this again and I dance in your entrails like a five-year-old with party streamers)

1. I have a serious thing for tritones. You don't even know. Maybe it's the synaesthesia, but diablos in musica can get me moving faster than pretty much anything else in the world, it's like being in a crowd of excited people, like having the air whistling past under my toes.

2.I almost always fall for younger guys. No clue why. Maybe a dominance issue? Except they are usually very forceful guys, so maybe not.

3. I know what living human innards look like.

4. Robin McKinley saved my life. In particular the book whose opening line is "She could not remember a time when she did not know the story" and whose closing line is "and the not-quite-mortal part of her did sleep, that she might love her country and her husband."

5. I often find comforting things which by all rights should terrify me.

6. I have laughed myself awake.

7. I can be tickled to orgasm.

8. I am not afraid of spiders, snakes, bees, wasps, dogs, small spaces, heights, children or confrontation.

9. I will listen to the same song thirty or forty times in a row.
(lately: The Commander Thinks Aloud, Subtleskeptics' cover of ANYTHING. Currently, their cover of 'Kids.')

10. I think I weigh ten pounds too much. This is very, very new.

11. I can not do a handstand. This will, however, shortly be remedied.

12. I like futons a lot more than beds, on pretty much every level.

13. I bake because it's a bit rude to go around telling people you love them all the time, when they're not related to or in love with you.

14. I love--love!--to dance.

15. I have moved so far off from being the person who automatically drops that she's eldest of a brood, that some of my friends didn't know I had siblings until really recently.
(friends: I have a shit-ton of younger sibs. In order of appearance--brother, sister, sister, brother, sister.)

16. I could eat rice at every meal. Some weeks, I do.

17. Things that really irritate me; people chewing with their mouths open, people telling me "oh, but you look so white!" after I give them the answer to "What ARE you, anyway?", the fact that all my Prisma pencils seem to be fractured on the inside.

18. Things that really please me: fireflies. Cold whole milk. The way that the people I'm close to smell, honeysuckle and orange blossom and limes and pine trees and vetiver and cloves. Looking out the window at the snow; occasionally, crunching around in it. The view off of almost any bridge in this city. Standing upright. Baths so hot that the flesh under my fingernails aches. White rice.

19. I am considering getting a tattoo. Something vulpine.

20. I never thought I would live to see 26 years of age. I am, however, terribly happy that I did.

21. I still go as much as four months between periods, inexplicably.

22. The first time I piloted a plane, I was nine years old. The first time I fired a gun, I was four, shortly after I learned to read. The first time I kissed a boy, I was sixteen; the first time I had sex was three years later. It seems that I do everything out of order.
I am fine with this.

23. I am ready for more.

24. The smell of Mars Black acrylic makes me really queasy; the smell of any other acrylic makes me giddy.

25. I still do not believe in snow.

In my dream, I have a tube of seed-beads in one hand and a grey felt hat in the other. The hat is something like a fedora, one button, the stitching inside the band ever so slightly crooked, though machine-tight; I think it's a beautiful hat.

I have some archival glue, so I run a thin drizzle of it around the underside of the brim, and cover it in seed-beads. It''s gonna look gorgeous, all speckled with bright little spots of various colours. I decide to fill the inside with them, too, so I can feel them against my skull like little teeth when I wear the thing. I just about have the distribution just right when I look up, and Rob, from kendo, is sitting there with no facial expression whatsoever.

I feel a sudden rush of guilt, but keep at what I'm doing, turning it this way and that so that the beads catch the light and glint against the grey.
"Let me see that a minute." Rob reaches out, and I don't look up at his face, just allow the hat to be lifted from my glue-gummed fingers.
"This--this is my hat." Flatly. Not exactly accusing me. "Genevra, I know this hat. I made this hat."
"Oh! I'm so, so sorry! I'll--err. Just."
I feel really guilty now. Dream-me is fully aware that she snuck over to Rob's house, and took the hat she saw lying around somewhere, thinking it lovely. Not out of any malice, just a childish desire to have. And now I've covered it in seed beads! Rob is just looking at me now, irritation evident on his even features, and I'm not able to meet his glance. "I. Uh. I don't know how I got it. I'll just--clean these off--shall I."

And I take it back from him, start pulling the beads off of the still-damp glue. "You do that." he says, very shortly, and I start just throwing the beads behind me, not caring where they land, my little bright lights going everywhere in my absolute discomfort over this bad thing I did. I can feel the glue under my short fingernails, the rub of the felt against my fingertips, and when I wake up I can still feel it.

Title: Pivot
Rating: PG
Pairings/Characters: Azula, Ozai
Warnings: Implied torture
Word Count: 1245


( PIVOT )

I am soooo sleep-depped. But not much more to go!
Tonight I'll sleep like a dead thing, and wake refreshed at a human time for work tomorrow.

New reaction with my synaesthesia; the feel/sound of freshly-smoothed ice under a sharp skate is very very like having a hard-candy on my tongue, sweet and solid and satisfying. Also a little like swinging a quarterstaff.

Last night, Titus-Sensei recommended that I test for rank at the tournament. Even *typing* that gives me my physical anxiety reaction, a thrill up the backs of my legs and a momentary stiffness in my palms.

I really wanna do a Hellsing AMV to Kate Bush's "Lily." the singer would of course be Integra, starting off young, and I figure Gabriel would be represented by Alucard, Raphael by Seras, Michael by support staff and Uriel by Walter.
("Uriel" being to her left hand, of course, which tragically fits manga-Walter rather too well, and the character of Uriel in mythology guarded the gates of Eden, was 'pitiless as any demon,' a rescuer and an Angel of Repentance. It pleases me. So I'm a foolish little girl, fine.)
(Gabriel is the strongest; Raphael the guardian of young people, lovers, travelers, guardian against nightmares; Michael is the field-commander of the army of God, according to Wikipedia.)

Yeah, too tired now to really think. Lots on my mind! Family and friends, worry for some of those who are dear, work. Maybe I'll run myself a nice boiling hot bath, soak away the aches brought on by walking a few miles yesterday and then kendo and then walking a little ways and then ice-skating and then not sleeping.
It's good, though.

I'm buzzy-happy today. Good couple of days.

Yesterday, I helped Narumoto-Sensei with some writing (for which we went to lunch, and then hung out at my house while I made cookies and he roundly cursed the English language), and then went to kendo. After kendo, I walked to my friend Christian's place--Christian is the indirect cause of my meeting Harold, and I might have referred to him once or twice here as Prince Zuko, 'cause the first time I saw him, he was teaching a martial arts class and watching that's all I could think of. At Christian's I had dinner, interesting cake, and excellent conversation and watched The Punisher; ended up crashing out on a blow-up mattress in his living room because holiday buses are notoriously unreliable. Didn't sleep until way late, though, as we stayed up talking until what in Arizona, in summer, would have been past sunrise.

Woke up slowly and leisurely, too cold but aware of having had the next part in a serial dream I've been having, and had some cookies for breakfast, watching Christian's roommate John work on a bit of comedy, and Christian work on kata, for performances they have in a class today. Both were enjoyable to behold.
And then, the Inauguration! I do not often feel pride in my nation, but today there's at least hope.

And then I get home, and jojo_kun has posted the fanart I won in the meme, Walter/Seras fluffy pornish goodness!
I feel good today!

...which was unsettling. You can't get to my back porch without vaulting a ten-foot fence or sneaking through a strange windy courtyard and then coming up a flight of stairs. Whoever it was, I guess I scared him off--but the very fact that he tried the door, with me sitting right there, less than five feet away and fully visible in the window, is not nice.

My fingernails are stained grey from messing with my Rapidographs, but now four of my Rapidographs work again. This time tomorrow, all of them will.

(I used the cleaned ones to ink a bit of Hellsing fanart. Geek? Yes. But next I will use them to ink the stuff from the drawble meme. And I'm happy with my Prisma-coloured Walter! I may put him on my door, like a fourteen-year-old girl.)

And now, back to shelving in the Kids section. Dear dear dear.



(Today, the Forces of Evil are powerful, down here in Shelving and Stack Services, so it's just as well that I get upstairs for a bit. Maybe get something to drink, hide in Eleventh. ;P)

(not really, all-seeing bots that scan my every word and report to my boss! I will be doing cleanup in Children's, honest!)