Participants:
| Scene Title | Double Blind |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | A chance encounter between two women of differing beliefs might have unknown, long-term effects. |
| Date | January 2, 2020 |
This was supposed to be a productive day. A day of resolution after an incredibly stressful revelation.
"Can it still be called a revelation if you still don't understand anything at all?" Finch mutters these words to herself as she walks - nay - stomps by her lonesome past darkened, abandoned storefronts and sticker-covered traffic signs. The fact that she may or may not be lost occurs to her with a huff, and her pace slows as she casts a look around her - at other people walking the same, wide street, as though she might just find a familiar face among them.
… But this isn't like where she used to live. These are strangers with places to be, and none of those places is here. So she turns her face, instead, to the brightest thing in sight. Standing in her yellow puffer jacket, she stares into the dirt-framed window of a small bakery, a young couple inside just leaving one of the two small tables near the veritable treasure trove of well-lit baked goods surrounding the counter.
The jingle of a bell upon their exit snaps her out of her own thoughts, and she brings her hands up to her pockets only to have them come back out woefully empty and immediately clenched into fists.
It's time for some harsh freakin' words. The harshest. So harsh she might need to say them a little more quietly than she otherwise would, in case someone overhears.
"This sucks."
Words that stop a passerby in their tracks. Hard-soled shoes still in their click on concrete, and Sahara Jackson pauses, looking up from her thoughts. She'd been distracted, dark ruminations stealing her attention, but Finch's frustration— small as she might try to keep it!— draws her attention.
This looks like a girl in need of help.
The blonde woman steps forward again, flats clicking while slacks swish. She wears a long winter coat that goes to her knees, wool facade over a thermal lining, with a hood that pools back behind her neck, little wisps of fur tossing in the breeze. Her smile is warm like honey as she steps closer to Finch, enough to keep a polite distance but still break through that city bubble of space between strangers, speaking to her with all that small-town closeness:
"Sugar, you doing all right?"
Like topping on a cake, her voice is both light and heavy both. Sahara looks to the bakery front and then back to Finch, a little divot between eyebrows occurring as she tries to divine what's got the girl's goat in such a fashion. She doesn't seem overly worried, looking back to her with a renewed, comforting smile. Whatever it is, it'll be all right. Surely. A purse hangs from a long black strap off her shoulder.
Finch's eyebrows pop up with the addition of another voice, her gaze sweeping over to Sahara with an immediate added alertness.
"Oh! Um." She thinks for a second, then immediately decides, "I'm not, but I will be. This day's just wrong. Do you feel that too? Like the year started off…" Mrghl. She wraps her arms around herself in lieu of being able to find the right words. Familiarity may not have been found, but it's in her voice nonetheless, called for or not. The offered smile is mirrored, even if it's a poor excuse for genuine. Her jaw rolls forward. "Or maybe it's the city. Do you think it's the city?"
Oh, and this one even talks back! Usually they don't, but it doesn't stop Sahara from displaying common decency anyway. She tilts her head sympathetically while she listens to Finch describe the issue.
"Hm…." she supposes, a touch of exaggeration in it. It's kindly, showing her interest rather than making mock of the younger woman's issue. "It might be the city," Sahara concedes ruefully. "It was really a hard transition for me after I moved here. Are you new? It definitely might be the city."
She bows her head, giving Finch a knowing look. "It can be a huge change if you're not prepared for it. And even if you are!"
"I wasn't really. Prepared." Finch muses of changes, attention wandering while some extra energy born of frustration has her breathe all the way in and sighing the air back out.
"I'm sorry, Miss," She starts suddenly, letting her arms drop back down and shooting a look of concern to Sahara. "You're just here and I'm opening my heart to you and letting all the monsters tumble out like you have a barn to keep them in." This, of course, comes with her hands mimicking a spew forth from her chest. Bleeaargh monsters everywhere whoops.
Sahara smiles kindly, shaking her head. She doesn't seem like she's particularly bothered. Indeed, Finch's troubles are distracting her quickly from whatever had been weighing her down when she first looked up. "I'm Sahara."
She glances back to the bakery they're outside, nodding her head that way. "I was thinking about slipping in for something—" a patent lie, as she hadn't been, but told smooth as silk and with convincing charm, "would you like to join me? My treat. Nothing like a quick cup of cocoa and a croissant to power up against the stress monsters."
It's not that there's no doubt in Finch's eyes, nor that she's completely naive. But today? Today has been a special sort of awful. And this proves that there's still nice people in the world. Because the alternative is an unacceptable reality.
"That's so nice of you," Finch states, matter-of-factly rather than by way of compliment. "And I will," in fact, she's already half turned in order to keep talking to Sahara while she bouncehops sideways toward the door, eyebrows still crumpling toward each other as she wrangles her own brain and thoughts into a better direction than they had been going. "if you're sure about having the time. Have you eaten here before? It looks so nice. Oh! I'm Finch."
The door is pulled open by Sahara's hand, and she nods Finch in ahead of her. "I'm sure," she reassures. "I just got done with everything I needed to do for the day. I could use the break myself."
Inside, the warm smell of an afternoon batch of something delicious wafts forward from the ovens. Sahara's fluffy and doting nature amplifies at the scent of it, rejuvenated once they step out of the cold. Everything that the winter day might have distracted her with is now firmly put aside. She begins to unzip her jacket, intending on claiming that empty table they'd seen from outside.
"What about this new year has got you so down, Finch?" Sahara asks, going through the motions of calling dibs on her chair by placing her coat on it before nearing the counter. "Let's see if we can't turn it around, maybe. Get things back on track." Her voice is honeyed, her smile just as bright. "Sometimes you just have to talk it through to realise there's a solution there you just weren't seeing before."
Finch is immediately sidetracked. Though a cant of her head implies her attention is at least still partially on Sahara, the girl's got her hands hovering near the baked goods behind glass almost the moment she steps in and indiscriminately throws out a, "Hi!"
"I'm not really down," she lies, "I just- also don't wanna be, y'know?" Though still frustrated, the new environment is enough to lift her tone a little. She looms near a batch of fresh out of the oven chocolate croissants, brow furrowing. "Being here's been really confusing. I met some new people today that- I thought we were meeting up for something really important but it was, like, a lot. And the friend I was there with, she suddenly had a bird, and there was a gunshot and shouting and punching, and everything just kinda… fell apart, so I left. Things here just don't make sense."
One of her hands balls up into a fist, knuckles pressed into the cold glass as she looks over her shoulder to search Sahara's face, concern in her voice. "Is it like this where you came from too?"
Important meeting? Sahara can't help but perk up a little at that. Finch had also been to an important meeting today? But it's some kind of different meeting, because of course it is.
There had been guns at her own, but no gunshots. Certainly no birds.
But the southern woman's interest doubles down as she approaches Finch's side. If Sahara had physical wings to draw the girl under and shelter her from the outside world, she'd almost certainly be doing that right now. "It isn't like that, where I come from. No— where I'm from, things are decidedly more normal."
Her gaze softens in concern, mouth pursing for a moment in hesitation. "Finch, were these friends of yours, by any chance…" the pause is natural, not lingering, even as she goes down through an entire mental rolodex of things that they could be called.
"Evolved?"
"I don't think they use that word much," Finch answers in a pensive near-mumble, perking up a little once Sahara nears. "'Slice', yeah, they like that one. I think I do too. Sounds cool. Like 'SLC-E'? I didn't really get that one right away - anyway this was a big room, though!"
She pushes her shoulders back and does an indoors-friendly version of throwing her arms wide to gesture exactly how big this room was without necessarily managing to accurately show any such thing at all. Her heart's in it, at least. "And I never met anyone else there before except one person. Oh, except maybe in a dream. That was the whole reason I was there, and I thought everyone else was too, and then just…" Just. Iunno.
Her attention is drawn to a woman adjusting her apron and approaching the two of them from the other side of the counter. Finch's bright smile jumps right back into action. "Chocolate croissant please! Thank you!"
"I'll take one, too," Sahara says with a smile at the bakery worker. "And a…" she looks to the instant coffee machine behind the counter. "Vanilla cappuccino, please." Her fingers drum along the side of her purse while she waits for their order, giving it a moment before she snaps the side of it free to pull out a clutch presumably either showing cash or credit cards within.
She picks on indicators in what Finch says, such as they, and her potential ambivalence. Potential, because Finch didn't yet understand that feeling as confused and out of place as she did was wrong.
What a wonderful thing that she'd run into Sahara.
"Finch," she begins, landing firmly on the side of supporting and soothing rather than pitying with her words. "That doesn't sound normal. At all. Sweetie, that sounds … wrong, actually." Sahara turns to the girl by her side with a small arch of her brow, a touch of concern to it. "And just where are your friends now, anyway? You seemed so upset outside."
"Did they abandon you?" It sounds like a question, but it's not. Not in Sahara's mind.
"Hot cocoa for me, please," Finch calls over her shoulder as she slips away, taking off her jacket and bundling it up in her lap as she takes a seat across from the claimed chair.
"She's probably just at home?" She answers unhurriedly once she's settled in, looking around at the interior of the shop and taking a deep breath. If there's concern there, it's not deep-seated. "Hopefully. Or just with- oh no." Her gaze whips back to Sahara, eyes suddenly wide. "What if I abandoned her? I sorta stormed off. Right onto a stage like a crazy person. Maybe she's upset right now too but in a different bakery. And with a phone."
Which - an experimental squish of her jacket confirms - Finch is sorely without.
Sahara isn’t worried the slightest bit at all about Finch’s friend as she takes her seat, expression placid compared to the open concern she’d been showing for little Finch directly.
"You didn't know anyone there. And she did, didn't she? You were the outsider, and they abandoned you instead of welcoming you in." She begins to shake her head. "I'm so sorry you went through that hurtful experience, dear, it sounds like you were treated so poorly by your slice friends."
It's now that something like a frown comes over Sahara, like it's wholly foreign to her. "But that's just what happens with them, isn't it? They'll tell you you're welcome along for the ride, that you're just as valued as they are, but they…" Sahara tsks at it. "They just don't, in the end. You're not the same as them." She sounds particularly sad in her knowing interpretation of the events that unfolded. How dare they treat Finch like that.
"There's so many of them here in New York," she commiserates.
The pensive ponderings do not leave Finch, showing in how her fingers continue to dig into her jacket, pulling idly at a label wedged between seams. Her attention drifts wistfully off over to the window, listening even if her thoughts have her scanning the street outside.
New York's normal certainly is different. There's no denying that. But other things…
She bites the inside of her cheek, before looking back to Sahara with her head tilted curiously. "Where else would they be? It's kinda hard living most places."
That's more compassionate a question than Sahara is usually challenged into answering when it involves the SLC-E, so it takes her a moment to respond. “That’s a pretty big question,” she acknowledges. “One that takes a lot of bravery to ask, I think. Getting the country to agree on a solution might take years, but living apart might not be that bad.” She lifts her shoulders in a shrug.
“For my part, I’d rather focus on helping our own,” Sahara confides. She pauses for just a moment to look up at the bakery employee with a smile as she brings over a tray with their drinks and croissants on it. She bids the woman a polite thank you before turning back to Finch. “Making sure we feel supported, looked after… not abandoned.”
Finch does not seem to notice the employee. She sits, jacket in her lap, hands on her jacket, eyes on Sahara, trying to piece something together.
"… Oh."
The noise leaves her without thought, and it's only then that she notices the food and drinks. "Oh!" She bristles, shoulders popping up and hands clawing suddenly into fistfuls of fabric as her eyes scan Sahara anew.
"Wow. Okay." The words leave her calmly, albeit through a pinched throat, voice small. She relaxes one of her hands to retrieve her drink and brings it up to her face, suddenly several measures more attentive. Curiosity and something else she hasn't quite identified yet drawing the words forth when she asks, "So… how is support not happening right now?"
Sahara's smile returns in a small flicker. Internally, she fights with both being pleased at the way things are going just as much as feeling suddenly out of her league. She's used to the quiet hemming and side-eyes and you knows and brow raises of her belief system. It's another thing to talk about this in a way that's ever more open… yet without skipping straight to derogatives. Arguing why the Evolved were a problem was something sly, cunning politicians did— something that radio personalities wittily snuck into their programs. They said it without saying it.
Now it was her turn, and she was neither of those things. But she does her best.
"I mean, take a look around, Finch," she says a little more quietly. "The system isn't being built to protect people like you and me. No; it's the Expressives who deserve all the protection, isn't it?" Her tone says it isn't. There's a twist to her honey, a subtle but lingering sting to it. "People will wring their hands and say 'we should have known better; done more' whenever a tragedy happens because of people like them, like it was an accident nobody could have foreseen. Except we know just how dangerous they can be, don't we?"
Hadn't Finch seen that herself, after all? Sahara seems to think so.
"Nobody holds them accountable for the danger they bring. It's people like you and I who suffer from the nightmares that causes, and there's nobody to care and do anything about it but people like us."
She seems saddened that it just is this way, but neither does she seem inclined to change it in a way that paints the SLC-E in a positive light. Indeed: "It's up to us to look out for each other. You know what they say." Sahara remarks with a return of warmth to her smile. She reaches for the paper cup of her cappuccino.
"I actually don't," Finch admits readily, having forgotten her previous plight in the face of this new situation she finds herself in. She still looks tense, but her stare into Sahara's face has no give to it. For all the youthfulness still clinging to her, all the wide-eyed wonder at a still new world, she's looking mighty sure of something. "But I know what you're saying," she continues, sitting up a little, "and it sounds like you're feeling left out. Like you feel you were forgotten. But did you really lose anything?"
She doesn't leave room for an answer - she might have entered this conversation a little naively but gears are switched easily enough to imply that she though she is relatively new to these issues, she has not been blind to them. And she is not unprepared. "Maybe the word 'deserve' only sounds like a bad thing when you say it because you're comparing yourself to your sibling when your parents are just trying to keep you both alive in the backseat."
And, as if it's a point that needs to be made, she lifts her cocoa to say over the top of it, very seriously and while maintaining eye contact, "There's only one back seat."
Sahara's brow lifts, pausing mid sip of her own drink. For a moment, it seems like Finch's point might've struck a chord, caused her to see things differently. But then she lets out a chuckle, trying to make it sound kindly, but failing.
"Plenty of people have lost things because of them, Finch," she says softly, but with conviction. "They've lost jobs, homes, and a good number of people lost their lives. Nobody will get them the justice they deserve, but we can all look out for each other better to prevent tragedies." Sahara shakes her head, stressing, "And believe me, I'm very glad what you went through today didn't go worse— didn't become another tragedy."
"But more than that, people have lost their peace of mind. Folks are afraid, and they deserve not to be." She tilts her head at Finch, asking curiously, "How about you? After what you went through, how do you feel?"
"Scared!" Finch replies without pause, forgetting herself and her inside voice both, before setting her half empty cocoa down on the table with a papery thunk. "I'm scared, and I'm angry, and I'm confused! But lotsa people lose things, on both sides, and when people lose things, you help 'em." She is adamant about this, drawing in deep breaths and pushing her heels into the floor.
"And when they hurt people, you help 'em too." Both hands flat against the table, she adds, "Or at least you try. Right?"
Sahara smiles again, but it's smaller this time. "That's what Jesus would want us to do," she agrees. "To never err in compassion and to uplift others no matter how misguided they are." She starts to shred off a small piece of her croissant, supposing, "But the reality is, when you're attacked, sometimes you have to attack back. I don't personally believe in that," This is a most assured clarification, imparted with a meaningful glance, "but I can see why people think like that, after all they've lost."
Her smile warms. "I like to think I'm just like you, Finch. Helping anybody who needs it." Sahara gestures to the girl across the table. "My work is helping ease people's pain. I do physical and massage therapy."
"That's wonderful," Finch replies as though automatically, in a holdover sullen tone despite showing otherwise no signs of insincerity.
This a departure from what they were talking about, but a look downward implies that maybe she'd had enough of the previous subject, anyway. Still a bit riled up, she grabs her own croissant and just chomps a bite out of it, holding a hand underneath to catch the crumbs before they might spill onto her jacket.
"I try," she starts past her bite, "but I 'nno how many people I actually help." The words leave her with concern painting her features. "Sounds nice to literally do helping for a living."
Sahara nods in sympathy while she takes a moment to enjoy the treat. The extra seconds put additional distance between them and that more stressful topic, though. "It's why I moved up here. All the rebuilding— there's plenty more people to help than there are down in Alabama." She hms as though that's still a pleasant thought, even as she goes on with, "It can be hard, still. You can do your best to help people, but people can continue to make the same bad decisions… you just do your best anyway, and feel good about what you do. You can't be a miracle worker and you can't feel awful when people say awful things to you because you're not."
"Lots of deep breaths at the end of my day keeps me sane. I know I help. But sometimes, I'm the only one who sees it." She starts to smile again. "Biggest example is when I teach yoga classes. Most people don't know how they look at first, but I help guide them on their way to better posture, stronger poses. It's therapeutic, a bit."
Her attention flits back to Finch and Sahara's smile strengthens. "You'll find your niche. Passionate girl like you? I think you will. Might need someone to help set you on the path, but you'll get there."
Finally, after another eager bite of croissant, Finch's own smile returns. It's a reflective thing that lacks a great deal of the warmth she showed before, but it's there. Brushing flakes from her hand and onto the tray, she looks back up to Sahara again.
"I will. I still have a lot to learn, but I kinda can't wait to? I'm been really lucky. Things have been hard but-" Her expression screws up with a bit of errant tension before it and the rest of her visibly relaxes. "I've been really lucky. I, um."
Having started a sentence and stopped, she reaches for her cocoa again as the related thoughts settle into something a little more complete. "I want to thank you."
Sahara’s surprise is evident, but brief. She’d been focused on the perceived crack in Finch’s armor of positivity, wondering if a well-placed chisel into it would be enough to start to change the way she was seeing everything— make her see things right, possibly. It’s not like she wanted to knock the young woman’s rose-colored lenses right off her face, but at the same time…
“I’m just glad I was able to help you some,” she shares warmly. “You seemed upset.”
"I was. And I still am." Finch admits, suddenly pushing her chair back as she gulps down the rest of her cocoa down in record speed. Her movements are still a little too brusque for her to seem totally relaxed, but something a little more driven finds its way into her smile when she sets her cup back down. "But I think maybe that's okay."
Maybe her armor's too impenetrable, or her naivety too overbearing. Maybe she's disengaging because this might be a dangerous topic to broach for someone like her.
Or.
"You said you teach yoga? That's where you do, like, the poses and get all thoughtful about yourself and the world, right?" She flips her jacket over, finds where to shove her arm into it, and uses the hand that POPs out of the end of her sleeve to grab her croissant from the table. "Can I join you some time? I'd like to maybe talk some more."
How positively delightful! "Yes, of course," Sahara enthuses, reaching aside to her purse to snap the side open and pull out a metal container with business cards. "Here, let me get you the information." There's definitely more than one type of business card in there. At least three, and a fourth small stack of cards she's received in return. She snakes two types out and snaps the case shut again primly. "This one's for the studio, and the second has my information on it."
It's a simple thing with her first and last name, her personal number listed. It also advertises her as a sales representative for an essential oils company. Sahara's bubbly as she presses both cards down for Finch to take.
"If you need someone to talk to, you can call me any time. I know how hard it is to pick up and start new, it'd not be a bother at all. Everyone needs a support network!" She's smiling again.
Finch is already standing by the time she pulls the cards towards her, delighted at their sight in all the ways someone who has never held a business card might be. "Oh gosh of course. I'm really glad you've been able to-" What's an essential oil? Her eyebrows arch quizzically as she reads the top card she's currently holding, before she quickly flashes a bright smile back at Sahara again. "Able to do so much! Man that's nice."
Slipping the cards into a pocket, she waves goodbye with her croissant in hand, and starts half walking half sideways skipping toward the exit. "I gotta go! I wanna go find my friend before she worries too much, but I have a phone and I can call you when I find it!"
All things considered, that's a pretty good way for things to have gone! Maybe Sahara didn't stick the landing, exactly, but neither did she run Finch off by coming off too strong. So really, this is great!
"Take care, Finch!" she bids the younger woman cheerfully, looking like she'll comfortably take her time with her treat. Maybe she'll go back to thinking about what she was before their chance encounter.
She's got a fresh perspective now to reapproach the topic, after all.