[Post Canon Update Open Log] Wasteland, Baby!

[lofi_charm]

Wasteland, Baby!

The Day That We Watched The Death of the Sun [ Blackwood Brews ]

It's a rainy morning when Blackwood Brews reopens, brass keys jangling loudly as Martin pulls them from his pocket. It's strange to be back here. There's this constant feeling that there's another shoe waiting to drop. A phantom Sword of Damocles. Pumpkin Hollow is far from perfect, certainly, but it's that familiar imperfect, predictable and comparatively easy. But after everything that he and Jon endured for... however long, Martin's already forgotten what Jon said it was aside from it feeling far too short... Some of those worlds within the world, they felt so... real. Dreamlike and permanent, like they'd been there forever. The sick village comes to mind. Not to mention that dreadful house.

The scent of tea leaves snaps Martin from his introspection. There's a bit of dust. He should get that cleaned up before Jon gets here with the pastry order from Max.

Water boils as rain falls outside. Dishes are washed, tea sets prepared. The dark wood and bookshelf-lined walls of the shop feel cozy under the rainy sky.

Martin almost doesn't notice as someone finally enters once the shop is open.

He startles lightly, snapped out of his stupor as the bell on the door rings. "Oh--- Hello there! Welcome in! Have a seat wherever you like. Can I get anything started for you?"

The Cloud & The Cold & Those Jeans You Have On [ Morning Fog ]

Sometimes, in the very, very early morning, the fog will be much thicker than usual as it rolls in off the shoreline.

A figure stands on the beach, in the very thick of it, silhouette almost obscured despite its size. A Thermos-like flask in hand, Martin gazes out at the sea.

He came here to be alone. Mornings on the shore are quiet if you stand far away enough from the marina. Between the distance and the effects of his Lonely fog, the far-off shouting of the crew of the Mipha's Grace as they load up their ship for the day sounds almost unreachably distant, like the echo of another world. A world of people and gatherings, so otherworldly to Martin's solitude.

During their apocalyptic hike and their stay at the safehouse, Jon and Martin were separated meaningfully... maybe twice? In all that time that felt like years, just a few brief moments apart. And Martin loves Jon more than anything or anyone, but a thing like him... Well, he's always needed a healthy dose of solitude to think straight, and he won't find that at the cottage or at the tea shop.

But maybe occasionally it won't hurt to be interrupted, to be kept from sinking too deep. Either by a friend or a fellow seeker of a moment's peace in a loud and busy world.

You Gaze Unafraid as They Sob from the City Ruins
[Closed to Jon]

As things slowly start easing back to normal, Martin and Jon spend fewer and fewer days laid up in bed, dead to the world. But every so often, they take a day to themselves to just be.

Martin has been almost ghost-like, his own struggles to reconnect with this world drawing the Lonely to him in noticeable but largely innocuous ways. (Aside from a bit of fog in the house, but what can you do.) Jon is woken on a lazy morning not by hands and a lover's voice, but the phantom of a kiss to the forehead, the cloying smell of bacon being cooked, and the sound of the ocean through a window that was not open the night before. Traces of Martin's presence.

Jon will find the other man out on the patio, breakfast laid out on their garden table overlooking the bluffs. "Morning," Martin murmurs, smiling with a warmth reserved only for Jon these days. "Hope I didn't wake you too early."

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Comments

[hadnoright]

Daisy listens quietly, as she can be surprisingly good at doing. Melanie and Georgie being somehow unaffected makes some amount of sense—guess the eye thing paid off, good for her.

She almost wishes the rest of it came as more of a shock than it does. The moment she heard the tapes, she thought that was it for the world—why would there be any undoing it? Why would the Fears leave any way for the world to escape their clutches? That there might have been a way to end it at all is more surprising than the fact the others took to fighting over whether or how to do it. That Jon decided he couldn't stand for it and tried to do his own thing... well, it wouldn't be the first time he acted alone because he knew he'd be stopped otherwise.

She's only alive because of that habit.

"So you are." Of course they are. Together. Matched set. Makes sense. That hesitant and I catches her ear, but she won't ask. Some things are personal. "Gotta be honest. Think if I was there I would've agreed with Jon. Not sure I'd've wanted to see what the world turned into after that kind of— collective trauma. Or what'd happen to those of us connected to the Fears."

Being cut off from the Hunt the first time saved her soul, but it also felt like it broke her in ways she could never have truly recovered from, back home. It's being in these other universes that's let her reclaim her existence. Throwing the entire world into a post-Fear society sounds all well and good until you think too hard about the side effects. Let alone subjecting another world to everything that had happened to theirs.

But then again...

"Though, probably only if I didn't remember here or the ship. Seen plenty of signs the Fears exist elsewhere anyway. Doubt letting them go changed much in the end."

She sighs. Drinks.

"...sorry, though. Can't have been easy. Any of it."

[lofi_charm]

"I-- don't want to go 'round about it again," Martin mutters.

There were perfectly legitimate reasons why they'd chosen what they had. Because the lives of all those people were worth trying to save. Because there was no guarantee that any other world would have an apocalypse. Because even in their own world, the amount of people who ever experienced the Fears was small enough that you had to be in special circumstances to have heard of them at all.

"The most important part was that we agreed. Jon was the only one not on the same page, and---- and it backfired, for him to go against the group. But it's done now, and--- according to Mortanne, it was all meant to happen. To bring us back here, stronger, so that we could help. This is our home now, for good, and we agreed to go back, end that story, and then come home."

Unable to look at Daisy for the moment, Martin glares into his teacup. "...I wondered if us just... dying early would have saved anyone. Mortanne told me no. That the Web, and Elias--- Magnus. Would just try again. Or the universe would just pause eternally in our absence. Hard to believe we were that vital."

[hadnoright]

Daisy raises a single hand in silent acknowledgement, not enough investment in the debate to turn it into a whole thing. Hard to fully imagine herself there with them, having that argument, without knowing every step of the way that led them there. Hard to even know for sure her opinion would stay the same.

(In the end, she wasn't ever meant to make it that far in the first place. She believes that wholeheartedly.)

"Mm. I can believe it. Or— I can believe either answer. The way things went. Magnus' and the Web's plans. It made you important. Made all your choices tangle you up in the fate of the world. Maybe if Jon had said no in the coma, Magnus would've just started over. But he'd've had a harder time, I think. Would've had to clean the board. He'd invested too much in the pieces he had."

Who was left, that would make for a good replacement Archivist? His only surviving backups were Martin, Melanie and Basira who all already distrusted his every word.

"So. Maybe that was the way it was always 'meant' to go." She snorts, lets her head sag against her own shoulder. "So far as anything's 'meant' to be anything. Dunno. Can't imagine my part in it ending any other way."

A breath. "This is home, now. For me too."

[lofi_charm]

"Yeah," Martin summarizes, letting it out as more of a sigh than a word. "No turning back now, regardless. Just... gonna try to make a life. Jon will be happy. Th-that you're planning to stay, I mean. You two have a complicated history, but at the end of it all... he loves you. And I think he'll be relieved to have you as part of the life we're building."

A pause. A moment to worry with the cup he's dusting.

"...Mortanne says something terrible's coming. That's why she offered us the opportunity to go back, finish the story. She didn't say what, but we should be ready."

[hadnoright]

Daisy's face does that— thing, it does, where she's clearly having some sort of strong emotional response that her natural deadpan and general lack of external displays of feeling does not at all know how to translate.

(She's still yet to say the 'love' word aloud to anyone—at least, not if it's aimed at the person she's talking to. Don't look at her. She's fine.)

"When I see that scrawny idiot," she says, "he's not gonna know what's hit him."

This would sound like a threat if it were in almost any other context. It might still sort of sound like it in this one, but it's not, promise.

A claw taps against her cup. "Sounds about right. All of this stuff lately. Feels like it's building to something. Getting out of here isn't gonna be as simple as killing a few more demons. No way."