Participants:
| Scene Title | Honesty, Opinions |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Magnes finds Sable hard at work, and the two share about personal matters. |
| Date | May 22, 2010 |
Out front, in the snow.
Look for Sable in the Lighthouse, and you won't find her. Truth be told, she's been remarkably evasive these past few days. Evasive, reticent, rarely found around large groups - absent. This is unusual, because even when she's in a bad mood and doesn't want to be around others, her ill temper is usually /audible/. Of all her strange behaviors, quietness is easily the strangest.
But today she is not sulking around the interior of the building. In fact, she's not even sulking. She's just out front of the Lighthouse, armed with a snow shovel and a vengeance, not clearing anything, but rather moving great heaping piles of snow from the drifts that make the driveway into a valley. These piles are borne to a spot by the corner of the building, where they form a rough pentagon around a patch of snow that bears the marks of Sable's not-so-sizeable feet.
It's still cold as the ninth circle out there, but a combination of thorough insulation and fairly intense physical labor have Sable puffing great plumes of white as she goes about her steady but ambiguous task. Eyes, locked behind lizard-eye goggles, have a set, ferocious look as she trucks more and more snow to its new site.
Originally leaving the house to test his ability to flight without freezing to death, Magnes is dressed in all white snow clothes with mirror snow goggles and a red scarf around his neck. He follows the shovel trail, then stands behind Sable, head tilted. "What are you doing, Sable?"
Sable spins, her grip on the shovel slipping, the snow she was carrying tumbling to the ground. She gives a grunt, and sinks the shovel, blade first, into the snow like one might a spear. With a roll of her shoulders, she tugs her facemask open enough that she can talk unmuffled. "Sun's back. Snow ain't gonna last forever. Gotta strike while the iron's- uh…" in retrospect, that idiom doesn't seem quite appropriate, "Well, y'know what I mean. Nice scarf."
"Thanks." Magnes suddenly points up, which causes the snow in a ten foot radius of them to fly into the air, ice cracking apart from under them as well. He makes sure she doesn't fall, of course. "You alright? I heard some things happened…"
Sable stares up at the snow Magnes has so effortlessly pulled from the ground. She gives a huff. "Jesus. Don't I feel like an asshole f'r usin' a shovel." Her head turns back to Magnes at his implication. "Y'believe everythin' your hear from anyone y'hear it from?" she says, "Who'd know?"
"I don't really know what happened, I just heard something about you having a fight." Magnes moves to place a hand on her head, shaking his. "If I believed everything I heard, I wouldn't be here asking you, would I?"
"First I'm askin' who it is you heard it from," Sable says, her voice back in a more conversational register, not without contention, but without caginess. She gathers up the snow she dropped and carries it over to her project-in-the-making.
"Not one person in particular, I just hear people talk. That's why I'm not even sure what happened." Magnes crosses his arms, staring down at her. "So why don't you tell me what happened? I don't wanna go and ask someone else, you're my friend, so I wanna hear from you."
Sable gives a snort. "People? Jesus. Well, when y'next hear people talkin', set 'em straight," she turns, fixing Magnes with a look from behind her goggles, "As far as either party is concerned, ain't nothin' that happened, unnerstand? All that shit? Idle fuckin' rumors. Don't let any more of that… whatever, libel 'r slander or whatall else… don't let it spread further, y'hear?" She turns over the shovel, emptying it onto one of the five lines. "Knowin' now, that it was agreed that nothin' happened," she shrugs, "Mayhaps somethin' did. Unofficial, like."
"You can talk to me, y'know. I talk to you about plenty of my problems." Magnes rubs his arms, looking around them. "It's kind of cold, so we should probably talk about your problems before we freeze to death."
"Ain't gonna freeze if you don't laze the fuck around. Get yer hands dirty. We're gonna build a fort that'll last 'til next snowfall!" Sable says, lifting her shovel over her head like a statue of a general triumphant, "Comon', I'll tell you about what didn't happen while we get what we need for the walls." She starts trudging back to the drift, preferring, it would seem, to haul from a quarry of sorts, than to just take the snow immediately around them. "So, I was just goin' about my business, feelin' decent, maybe with a bit of an edge, but a good sort of edge. And then, outta nowhere, I just feel fuckin' terrible. And not sad 'r nothin'. Lethal. Like I wanna kick a fucker in the head 'til their momma won't recognize 'em no more."
"There's a lot of crazy going on in the Lighthouse." Magnes notes, following her and motioning his hand to clear a path as they walk, like some sort of Snow Moses. "Elaine got very depressed suddenly out of no where, and Aaron is hallucinating. Either women are all crazy and Aaron has a vagina, or we're all getting cabin fever."
Sable takes another big shovelful, giving a grunt of thanks for the parting of the White Sea, before heading back towards the fort. "That's a damned shame. Your pretty little bird shouldn't have to go through that shit. All the same, can't help but feel a touch relieved. I'd rather there be some expla-fuckin'-nation for what happened t'me. Cuz… well," she tosses the snow onto the pile, then turns, taking a seat on her currently slipshod creation, "As bad luck fuckin' had it, right after I started feelin' so dark, I may just have bumped into Tasha." He can't see it, but her eyes are cutting over to one side. Despite her prostration and the forgiveness Tasha offered, she still feels pretty bad about what happened, "May have sorta… caused her harm. With words and with blows."
"It's not your fault, something is obviously going on." Magnes crouches slightly, then crosses his legs, floating low enough to get eye level with her. "You're my friend, Sable, I know you're not like that. You may be a bit rough around the edges, but you're not a bad person." He pauses, looks up for a moment, then back down to her. "Um, what's your last name?"
"Well, thanks fer the vote of confidence," Sable says - she sounds glum, but in truth it's just because she's reluctant to let Magnes make her feel better when she's not as of yet sure she deserves to. "Make sure Saint Peter gets yer endorsement. I'm gonna need it." She gets up, arching her back until it pops. Hauling snow is brutal on her back muscles, after all. The question about her name catches her off guard. She eyes Magnes though, again, he can't see the particulars of the look behind her eye protection. Still, he's been around her long enough that he can likely less just by her posture the kind of expression she's giving him. "Why? Whatsit matter? Just my mum's last name. Or whatever fuckin' name she gave the people at the hospital or whatever."
"It's important to me. Even if it means nothing to you, a name is important, it's a part of you that I wanna know." Magnes crosses his arms as he carries a large heap of snow behind him, smiling in amusement. "It's a Southern belle name, isn't it?"
Magnes' guess has a useful effect. Sable has no time to be further cagey or evasive, because she's too busy laughing. She wraps her arms about herself, the shovel's haft hanging in the crook of her elbow. "Oooh, sure, sure. Yeah. M'real name's Scarlett O'Hara. Y'got me. Good fuckin' guess." The laughter dwindles into snickers, and she brushes a finger under one lens of her goggles, a pantomime of wiping away a tear of mirth. "Jesus, boy, if I was a bastard of high society, or what's fuckin' left of it down South, think I'd have been tossed into foster care? Naw." She shakes her head, "If you fuckin' insist, fine. It's Diego. Honestly, I wonder why you didn't guess before. Thought my perfectly bronzed skin and big Telemundo tits gave it away," this last, of course, being the height of sarcasm, "But explains a lot, don't it? Fiery Latin temper." She snickers again.
"Diego? Huh, that's strange." Magnes raises an eyebrow, mostly because… well, she's not any of those things she just mentioned, which would normally be associated with the name. He starts to shape the ice into a roughly two foot long, one foot wide block, making and stacking them in a circle. He's taking a different, more stable approach to fort building than when they were training the other day. "Hey, um, can I have an honest opinion? Do you think I'm kind of a jerk for not committing to Elaine?"
"Only tellin' you because you're my comrade in arms, arright?" Sable says, "Don't tell no one. Ain't nothin' my parents gave me I care t' keep, 'cept life, and even that shit's negotiable when I hit twenty seven." She begins to shape the snow as well, though with less speed and skill. There's a gap of silence after Magnes' question, and for a moment it seems like maybe she wasn't listening. But, in fact, she is just thinking. She answers his question with questions of her own. "D'you love her, and does she know y'ain't committed?"
"She knows I can't commit to her, even if I want to, because I love Claire, and I can't really help it. I don't even know what love means, it's just the word I think of when I think of Claire, and yet I'm so hurt by her I'd rather be with Elaine, who makes me happy and really likes me." Magnes forms a series of blocks until he's built a makeshift chair, then sits across from Sable and starts making one for her as well, that can sit in front of his and face him. "I don't understand why I love someone who keeps hurting me, but not the person who's making me happy and, well, I'm sleeping with."
Sable seems pleased as punch when she discerns Magnes is building chairs. "Fuckin' right on. Thrones in Castle Crimson." This, apparently, is the name of her proposed fortress. She waits while Magnes makes her a throne to match. "So what you're sayin' is that if, say, Claire asked to have you back, you'd drop everythin' to be with her?" she tilts her head, "I mean, not that you'd know 'nless it happened, right? But you figure maybe that's what you'd do? Even if it hurt ol' Elaine?"
Magnes finishes her snow thrown, motioning for her to take a seat. "You're lucky structural physics was practically early high school stuff with me. I may suck at physics in general, but I can do snow chairs." He snickers, then goes back to thinking about the subject at hand. "I'm not sure… I mean, I love Claire, but I don't wanna hurt Elaine, and I know I'm gonna hurt Elaine, I don't know how, but I know. I'm weak, really weak, I'd probably drop everything for Abby, let alone the girl I'm in love with. But I've never been faced with that… well I was faced with it once. I left a sociopath to date Claire."
Sable lounges in her chair, adopting an indolent, regal posture. Her brow arches, though again, he can't see it. But it comes through in her tone. "What it sounds like, man, is that you want whatcha can't have. Which is, like, always how it goes fer pretty much everyone. And I dunno that there's a lot you c'n do about it, 'cept hope you come around to a more sensible goddamn way of thinkin'. Then again, ain't nothing sensible about love, so…" she shrugs, "Pretty much you're fucked. But to answer your fuckin' question - well, actually. Does Elaine know about Claire and Abby and shit? Because if you haven't told her, if she don't know, yeah, that sort of makes you a son of a bitch. And if she asks you to put that shit aside and /try/ and fuckin' love her instead - I figure the decent thing is to give it your best goddamn shot."
"I told her everything upfront, and she says it's alright, but… I feel like it's not." If she looks around, she can see that Magnes has gradually been building walls with his mind, mostly as a control exorcise, but their fort is coming along. "It's like… I feel like a jerk, even though she's giving me the freedom I feel so bad about. She can understand the things I say, she's cute, has that Scottish accent, smart… so why is it so hard to commit?"
Sable gives a snort, "Cuz it's easy," she says, "Man, unnerstand, it may not feel like it, but you're lucky. Some folks think love is easy, or, like, it's easy and they just make it hard on 'emselves. They fall in love quick with whoever they're with, they fuckin' mistake the first thrill for the real thing. But they never really get it. Love isn't somethin' you find. It's somethin' you make, somethin' that /becomes/ real because you fuckin /will/ it to be. When you say 'I love you', it's an active goddamn statement. It's not 'oh, I've figured out I loved you', it's 'I /will/ and /right now/ love you'. You… you don't take the easy path. That's closer to the true way, man. You're lucky, though it don't seem like it."
"Yeah, I guess this is better than thinking I'm in love…" Magnes gets their walls, which are gradually forming a dome, little higher than the thrones. "Elaine says she's happy to take it slow, but we all live together, so… I want you to tell me if I'm ever a jerk, alright?"
Sable grins crookedly, "I'll keep an eye out for signs of prickishness, no problem," she says, "Just, y'know… if things don't work out between you two, lemme know," her grin spreads, "I wouldn't mind givin' her a shot." It's… not totally clear if she's just being her lewd self, or if she actually /means/ this.
Magnes grins himself, offering Sable a quick nod, then continues to mentally stack the fort. "Come on, let's finish this thing, then maybe we can show the kids."