strangetrip | [GP/EP] Check-in Day

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[GP/EP] Check-in Day

The woodwinds in her collection were for noodling mostly, and the violin was for memory of her family, but when Curnen really wanted to play she turned again and again to her guitar. This would probably always be her best instrument. It was the first of the month, she’d been here over a year, and it was probably a check-in day. So she sat on the lawn with her instrument in her lap, sending out a subtle magic to call anyone stranded in their little world this way.

At one point, though, she set aside the guitar and turned her face to the sky. For just a few minutes she required a different kind of magic.

It had been a week now since Scanlan had vanished in the battle. And Pike, too, though Curnen honestly couldn’t have cared less about her going away if she tried. Still. The two of them were family to people very dear to her, people who missed them. And Scanlan had been her friend. You marked something like that with a song.

Of all the money that e'er I had
I spent it in good company
And all the harm that e'er I've done
Alas, it was to none but me
And all I've done for want of wit
To memory now I can't recall
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be with you all

It was a traditional Irish goodbye, a farewell to friends said with love, drinking, well wishes, and the hope of meeting again. She couldn’t think of a better one for the occasion. And as she sang she twined her magic into her voice in a new way, sending the song to any ears that needed it, ears of those who knew and missed the departed. Not all of them might understand it, not all of them knew what she was, but she didn’t particularly care about that right now. The song was more important than the hiding.

Once the last note had dissipated she picked up her guitar again and resumed her work. If there were anybody out there, they had to know where to go.

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"Beta--Beta, I have told you not to do that."

Sighing, Allison leaned back against the kitchen counter, so she didn't have to lean on her fucking crutches, and shook her head as the little silky terrier and sleek black tomcat with pigmented corneas switched breakfast plates on her. It was a not uncommon occurrence, but considering that Beta was on a weight control dog food and Todd was taking glucosamine with his breakfast, it was a problem at least for the time being.

No matter--she'd give Todd treats later, and the glucosamine in Todd's food would be good for Beta's joints.

Letting the pair finish each other's food, Allison grabbed her crutches and started hobbling towards the bathroom, cursing the stupid cast that encased her foot for the millionth time. She hated not being able to hit the street, she hated the stupid plastic fucking bag she had to wear over the goddamn thing, she hated...

...crossing the threshold into the hallway of her apartment, Allison found herself outside.

The situation wasn't unfamiliar to her--once upon a time, it had been a train and not some dusty road, with a monstrous pink building looming in the distance, and a song on the air that stirred strange feelings, had her turning on her crutches to better face the distant structure, to start hobbling forward a few steps to go towards it.

The problem now was that she had a sinking feeling that came with knowing. That she wasn't where she was supposed to be, that she had no recourse, no escape...

That, for the second time in two years, she'd been taken from her home.

So she started hobbling along the crappy dirt road on crutches, with one bare foot and her cast getting filthier by the second--gathering dirt the way rage gathered in her chest, hot and cold at once, burning instead of hurting.

She didn't care about her cast, didn't care what she would look like as she approached what looked like a hotel in cutoffs and a sports bra, or the questions that she might raise with the scars littering her noticeably muscular bare arms and tattooed torso--among those being a couple of bullet grazes and plenty of old knife wounds. And that didn't even include the aged green and yellow bruise still marring her shoulder from the last bullet her body armor deflected, nor did it include the sheath clipped to the inside of her cutoffs, the handles of her ring daggers pressing a comforting weight into the small of her back.

Allison didn't care about a goddamn thing as she struggled up to the door--not the music that propelled her along the road, not the dust, not anything.

She only cared that she was further from home than she had ever been--not just Beacon Hills, but Darrow. Darrow was home now, with her cozy apartment and her pets and her blood soaked second life. She had friends like Tris, family like the Inseparables and Newt. Darrow was where she didn't have to struggle to belong.

She'd been taken from Darrow, and it hurt. It hurt like hell...but she'd endured far too much pain in her life to be able to survive more of it, more loss and grief and regret.

So no, she wasn't scared or aching for home.

As she furiously hobbled up towards the hotel, Allison Argent was seriously pissed off.

The anger and indignation were so thick in the air that Snow could almost smell them on the wind before she caught sight of anybody approaching the inn. And when she did look, she realized in some ways she could be looking at herself. Well. Except for the part where this was a white girl. But the part where she was torn up and torn away from everything and mad as hell, yeah, that Snow recognized. The part where they were of an age and covered in tokens from myriad fights--though Snow's own bruising and scars were hidden under overlarge clothing--yeah, that too.

There was a time not so long ago where she wouldn't have been even slightly that aware of what she could look like from the outside.

Now this was normally where Snow would make herself scarce and get herself back down to the stable. She didn't like dealing with new arrivals. Too often they needed her to be able to step carefully, something that reminded her either so much of displeasing her stepmother or so much of her inability to talk to people that she absolutely fucking hated it.

But somebody who was ready to punch her out just for being there? That was easy to understand. She could work with that.

She smoothed her hands over her two braids and headed down the path to meet the new girl. Snow wore a gun openly on her hip, but she made no move to draw or even touch it. It was only that she'd never had any success hiding Rose Red, and around here there was no point in hiding it, so she'd stopped bothering.

The figure that started towards her up ahead raised Allison's hackles on principle: unknown, visibly armed, sure and measured stride of someone who knew how to use the gun at her hip.

...a really pretty gun, as the girl drew closer. It tempered a little of the anger--it gave her something else to focus on that wasn't how badly she wanted to bleed someone, it was a touch of the familiar and the safe and the sane.

"I really hope you're not planning on using that gun!" she called out as the girl approached. "'Cause it's gonna be really hard to ask to see it if I'm busy not getting shot!"

When Snow came to a stop it was several paces away. Enough to give the girl space and some reassurance that Snow wasn't about to grab her or take a swing.

The challenge puzzled her, though. Because surely this was a girl who knew that if Snow was going to shoot her, she'd have done it already before drawing any attention to herself and with surprise on her side. She shook her head. "I'm not going to use it. Can I help?"

"Sure: got a magic carpet I can use to fly back to my old pocket dimension?" Allison deadpanned with a definite sharp edge in her tone as she continued forward to close some of that distance the girl left between them--a peace offering, a reassurance.

She was a far cry from the kid that had drawn her daggers and walked through a train station, armed and terrified she was hallucinating again, and it made her feel suddenly older, tired.

Sighing, she shook her head and, when she was close enough, propped one crutch against her side so she could offer her hand to the other girl.

"Sorry--I'm not in the best mood." she explained. "I'm Allison." Glancing down at the other girl's hip, her smile softened into something a little more sincere. "And that really is a very pretty gun."

Why was she apologizing? Of course she was angry. Even ignoring the cast and the crutches, they always arrived in some combination of angry, confused, or afraid. Frankly the ones who kept their cool--or were excited, because some people were just that fucking dumb--were the ones Snow was leery of. The only people who didn't react badly to suddenly and inexplicably being somewhere they shouldn't were... unsettling.

Even more noteworthy, though, was the fact that she knew what was happening. And most of all, not many people actually complimented Snow's gun.

Snow took the offered hand. "I call her Rose Red," she said. It felt natural to introduce it first. "I'm Snow White. Did you come from Gotham?" Though she supposed when she'd left it, Gotham hadn't exactly been a pocket dimension anymore.

The idea that this girl--Snow--had named her gun was fun. It made its own sense, too, she always felt like her bow was an extension of herself...she just never gave it enough personality to name it. It was more some unnamed limb or digit that extended from her hands and her fingertips. It was the same way with her knives.

Yeah, Allison definitely liked this girl.

"Well, it's a pleasure to meet you both--or will be, if you ever feel like swapping friends." she offered, then in the interests of safety leveraged her crutches so she could turn to the side before she reached back to unclip her sheath from the back of her cutoffs in order to show Snow her ring daggers.

Weapons were useful, interesting--the thought of never seeing her uncles and friends ever again after losing the boy she loved? Useless. Weapons were better.

"And I'm from a city called Darrow--not Gotham." she added, sliding her daggers out just enough to give Snow a good look at the gleaming blades. "My boyfriend was from Gotham--is from Gotham."

It only felt like a death in the family, but Jason had just gone home. That was all...taken from Allison and sent where she couldn't follow.

"But before Darrow, I was from Beacon Hills." she went on, making herself look up from her daggers to meet Snow's eye again. "Home is home, but Darrow had better places for target practice, you know?"

Snow had never particularly been a girl for knives; the only time she'd ever carried one had been when she'd stripped all the weapons off that Pinkerton her stepmother had sent to cut out her heart. It had been a badge of victory to carry the weapon meant to dress her like a deer. But somewhere in two world hops she'd lost that blade. She hadn't missed it all that much.

Neither had she ever put Rose Red into another person's hands for more than a minute. Percy had held it longest, and that mostly so he could provide her with bullets.

Though all the same, the idea of a mutual introduction rather than just handing over her gun, that made the idea bearable. Even intriguing.

Another time, maybe. She nodded.

"I was in Montana. Then Gotham. Now here. This is the Madonna Inn. Though..." Not quite used to this and never very good at talking to people, she paused in hesitation for just a moment. "From the sound of it, you've done this before, too." She supposed that made it easier. When she'd first arrived, she hadn't been able to make herself tell Sam or Dean or Steph about the reality she'd recognized immediately, not for days.

"I have--and trust me, I'm doing much better this time than last time." she sighed, sheathing her daggers again and gesturing with the sheathed blades. "Short version? I thought I was hallucinating and nearly jumped a couple people."

She fell silent as she clipped her sheath against the small of her back again, frowning curiously.

"But...so this is just...here? Darrow was a whole city." She gestured towards the distant building, shifting on her crutches to squint at it. "Is this it?" The girl was outside, so they could leave the building...

"How much play?" she asked, still staring at the building before she looked to Snow again. "Darrow had some rural areas around the city. Countryside--you could travel some, but any road you took out of town eventually led you back to the city. I'm assuming something similar has to happen here."

Snow nodded her understanding. She'd almost shot Roy.

Gotham before she'd arrived had been inside a very tight bubble, which had then widened. Most of her time there they'd had a world, but an unfamiliar one full of danger. "Four hours," she said. "However far you can get in four hours. You don't hit a wall or anything, just... world curves in on itself and you're walking or running or whatever back here."

"Just like Darrow, then." she murmured half to herself, still half talking to Snow. She let that settle into her head, then refocused on her new friend--definitely new friend with her attitude and her gun. Too new to trust, but that would change.

Sometimes she wished it wouldn't...but she wasn't keyed that way any more than Jason was.

"I never tested it, so I don't know the time, but that's what happened in Darrow, too." she explained, shifting on her crutches to relieve some of the weight on her good foot. "Least there's nothing keeping me from running if I need to. I'm used to...space."

The wilds of the dark and the streets, where she could fly and fight, where she could put on her mask and show the world the face that felt more like her own than the one Snow was looking at right at that moment.

In that moment, she realized the Alpha couldn't live in this place, and the notion immediately started an uncomfortable, heavy itch between her shoulders that she wouldn't be able to scratch as long as she was trapped here.

While she didn't know what or where Darrow was, that didn't particularly matter. It was another pocket universe. What else did she actually need to know?

"Right now, though, should probably talk to the innkeeper about getting your room. There'll be a reservation waiting for you. Creepy as shit, but that's just Darryl."

"Reservation. Right." Allison sighed, shifting on her crutches and rolling her head restlessly to stretch her neck. "Of course there's a creepy innkeeper, too--but it beats the hell out of the cult of Tiffany Charlotte."

Realizing that she was talking mostly to herself, she shot Snow a rueful smile.

"You, uh--you don't wanna know. Anyway, right, get my room from Creepy Darryl." She paused, then looked from the building to Snow again.

"Anything else I should know about this place? If there is, walk with me. Might as well get check in over with."

Snow's brow furrowed faintly for just a second at the unfamiliar name, but supposing that it wasn't exactly important for her to know she let it go and the pinprick frown smoothed away.

Instead she nodded and started back to the main building, matching her pace to Allison's. "So it's safe here. There's people who don't look human, and sometimes weird shit happens, but for the most part, nothing and nobody's gonna hurt you unless you start up a feud with somebody else here." She glanced at the cast before turning her eyes back to the pink building. "We got some healers and doctors around here, also."

Re: Allison & Snow

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Since it was rare enough to see Snow choose to greet one of the newcomers, Kash didn't interrupt. Even though the girl was bruised and battered and hobbling around on some kind of half-cast and a pair of crutches that always looked like torture devices to him. She needed healing, but by the looks of things most of the healing she needed would be too late in coming anyway and a half an hour or however long it took Snow to do whatever Snow felt needed to be done wouldn't hurt anything.

So Kash kept an eye on the girls -- almost mirror images in the anger vibrating under their skins -- and let the little mare he had at the end of a lead line keep on with her grazing. She'd been spooked since the undead invasion, and even though he'd healed her, she'd been off her feed. He and Snow'd discovered she'd eat all right if there was a human there she trusted, so he was taking a break from the clinic and waiting on Z to wait on Snow, the new girl, and this pretty lady instead.

Eventually the girl was hobbling around on her own again. Kash put himself near her path but not on it. And called out, "Snow tell you to come find a healer?" At just under six feet, he wasn't a big man, but a girl who wore her scars like badges of honor, would read war and battle in his mismatched eyes and in his stance. The first forty-some of a hundred slash scars up one arm would draw the eyes.

She was aware of the man off to the side, but not focusing on him, a skill she'd honed with Jason's help. It was only when he spoke that she stopped limping along and focused on him. What she saw...surprised her, because it was hugely comforting. To put it plainly, the guy looked like he'd seen some shit, and reminded her a little of her father and the men she'd commanded so briefly with the way he planted his feet and the square of his shoulders.

Plus, apparently, he knew Snow, so he had to be good people.

"Mentioned it a little, yeah!" she called out, shifting her path to hobble towards him. "But doctors are the ones that put this stupid thing on my foot, so I didn't think it was worth rehashing the issue. At least until the cast comes off, and since I just got it? That's gonna be a while."

When she reached the man, she shifted to prop one crutch against her side and extended her hand.

"Allison Argent."

"Kash," he replied and shook her hand with his firm, callused mitt. His gaze took in her bruises, compared them against her apparent general health, and he came up with, "Less than a week since you got the cast, unless I'm reading it wrong," as his hand dropped away.

"If I'm right, it won't have healed enough to prevent me from getting you out of the cast and off the crutches. You'll have to be careful and not stress it until the fresh bone catches up."

He watched her face for the inevitable uncertainty or disbelief; if she came from a world where magical healing existed, she would accept the cast as inevitable, no matter how long she'd been without magic. Instead of wasting his breath to explain, he'd gotten in the habit of waiting for them to ask.

Edited 2018-09-18 02:39 (UTC)

Allison's eyes widened in confusion for a moment, not understanding...but slowly, what she knew of reality and fiction began to fill in the holes for her, bringing with it at least a possibility of what he was offering.

"You think you can heal me." she surmised. "With magic...what's the catch?"

"I know I can heal you with magic," Kash corrected, a small tight smile on his lips. "And there's no catch. I just can't heal anything that is already healing. So I can only heal the bone that's still broken."

She only looked mildly skeptical, which was pretty good for someone walking in off the 'street' as it were.

"And no one has to die to accomplish it?"

Coming from her world--where a Druid tried to sacrifice her parents for magic--it was a valid question.

Kash gave her a Look, somewhere between offended and amused. "I'm a Life cleric. It's my job to keep people from dying before their time." Except the evil ones who were trying to kill the people he was protecting, which seemed entirely self-evident.

"Hey, I had to ask." Allison half laughed, and would have raised a hand if she wasn't still leaning on her crutches. "The last person I met who could do really hardcore magic was making human sacrifices to consolidate her power."

She paused, losing her smile as she stared down at her cast for a long moment. It was fucking insane, but the cast, the broken toe itself, was a piece of her old life in Darrow. Just getting rid of it...

Nope. She wasn't going to get sentimental over a broken fucking toe. As she made the decision, she propped a crutch under her arm and reached up to touch the silver fleur de lis that hung around her neck.

Reminding herself that Porthos would never speak to her again if she had a chance to fix her foot and didn't, she looked up at Kash again with a nod.

"If you can help me get out of this...I'd appreciate it. Thank you."

"Smart," Kash said approvingly but wasn't a dick about it because she was new for one thing and Snow liked her for another.

"The part that's going to suck is we've got to get the cast off first." Technically, he could heal it with the cast on, but Kash wanted to see the injury and make sure there was no infection he'd be sealing into healed bone. Maybe those who pulled their power from Life gods didn't feel the need to be so careful, but he was trained as a healer before he got his magic, and Vesh was anything but.

"Come on. You can lean on me to get to the clinic."

Allison nodded, accepting the help with less difficulty than she might have otherwise. He was brusque, businesslike, he wasn't trying to protect or take care of her but he was still being kind. He was doing his job.

It was the kind of efficiency laced with gentleness that she'd always admired in Jason, and in Tris.

"You gonna use magic for that, too?" she asked as she moved to collect her crutches in one hand, reaching out to lean on him with her free arm. The question was more genuine curiosity than anything, perhaps something to add to a new volume of the bestiary. She no longer had it with her, but it had shown up in Darrow. Who was to say it wouldn't appear here at some point?

New world, new supernatural threats...just because she couldn't be the Alpha here, just because she was an Omega now didn't mean she still couldn't do her best to be ready--to learn.

"Nope. Gonna use a bone saw. And the vibrations are gonna make that hurt like a bitch," Kash explained in his usual gruff tone. He liked her, though. She asked good questions.

They had a pretty decent distance to walk to get to the clinic from here, so he figured it wouldn't hurt to give her something else to think about. "There's probably a spell that could take it off, but cleric spells aren't that subtle. They're more about brute force healing, turning back undead, buffing friends, and put down enemies and making them stay down."

He paused as they crossed over a large, flat bit of rock to get back to the parking lot on the way to the conference center, giving her a chance to catch up and balance again. "If you want a spell that can cut like a knife, you're looking at wizards, usually, or warlocks with enchanted blades. Speaking of both, if you see women who look like demons, red and pregnant or albino with a gold bow on her tail? They're not. Demons. They are spellcasters, and my family. Don't tangle with them or more than your foot's going to need healing."

Lots of words on his lips today. Must be practicing at being a father.

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[GP/EP] Check-in Day

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Allison & Snow

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