Participants:
| Scene Title | Leaving Breadcrumbs |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Tamara calls on her birthday, to leave a trail of breadcrumbs. But is it one to be followed? |
| Date | March 4, 2009 |
The Lighthouse, Girl's Dorm
With the sparse number of residents in the Lighthouse, privacy is thankfully easy to afford. It's something that — after the last day's events — Colette could use a little of.
Legs crossed and back pressed up against the wall beside a narrow window overlooking the ocean, the young woman rests with her back straight and hands settled on her knees. With eyes closed, she breathes in and out slowly, brow tense, head ever so slightly tilted to one side, as if to regard something in her peripheral vision more clearly.
But with eyes closed, Colette isn't regarding anything with vision, she's feeling, sensing, and appreciating the texture of the colors and ambient light around her. It took a stranger to help her come to realize even more potential within herself, and shutting out the rest of the world, Colette can feel with some inexplicable additional sense the waves of visible light washing over and reflecting off of her body. She can feel the texture they make in the air, feel with her eyes, see with her hands, smell with her ears and hear with her skin.
It's a remarkable juxtaposing of senses, and being able to feel the light, to be able to tell by touch that her comforters are blue, be able to tell that the wall behind her is eggshell white, just by contact is remarkable. In a short time, Tavisha has taught her so much about herself, and on the same token, she has taught him things about himself he hadn't yet wanted to realize.
It's moments like these where she is alone, when anything truly seems possible, when the world around her might not be such a suffocating and hopeless place to live in. For now, she's pushed away thoughts of guilt, lonliness and uncertainty to instead stop trying to learn how to understand everyone around her, and instead learn how to understand herself.
Distractions, of course, come at the most unexpected times.
Unexpected, Tamara often is; inopportune, however, she rarely is. The seeress waited until her feelings coalesced, the correspondence of attention and intuition that held back this second call until dusk just began to gather. In New York, that is. Where the nineteen-year-old is, sunset remains two hours away. The numbers she dials are known rather than understood, symbols that might as well be arcane for all they signify.
They mean speaking to Colette once more.
Final number pressed, Tamara holds the little gadget to her ear, listening to digitized ring and the soft rustling of breeze through evergreens with equal aplomb, her lips slowly curving into a playful smile.
The muffled ringing of a phone causes Colette to jump out of her skin, coupled with the vibration in her back pocket. She yelps, practically falling out of her faux-zen state and right off of her bed, only managing to save herself a lump on the forehead by catching herself on the nightstand. The girl hisses out a breath, rising up off of her behind to tug her cell phone out of her back pocket with two fingers. Her brows furrow, looking down at the unfamiliar number.
She hesitates, tenses, and considers not even answering.
Then again, who else would have this number except someone she knows?
Her lips crease, breathing in a deep breath before pushing out a heavy sigh. She's expecting someone entirely different when she flips open the phone, "What?" She blurts out, leaning back against the wall with a huffed breath to blow an errant lock of hair from her eyes.
The smile broadens into a grin, and though the expression cannot be seen, it can be heard. Partly from the undercurrent of laughter in the words Tamara speaks. "That's not a very nice way to say hello, kitty." There's entirely too much amusement in that familiar, long-absent voice for the statement to count as a reprimand.
"Ta— " You can push away thoughts, you can push away memories, and to an extent you can push away feelings. But no matter how hard you try to forget something that truly matters, no amount of distance can ever truly dull the feeling. "T— Tamara…" Colette settles down slowly to the bed, fingers of her free hand winding tight into the soft fabric of the blanket beneath her. She swallows, tightly, and the sinking feeling in her chest wrenches in such a fashion that the glassy look her eyes take on is unavoidable.
Clutching the phone in both hands now, she leans forward and exasperatedly splutters words into the receiver, "T-Tamara! W-where are you I— " miss you so much? She could say that, but she can't. "I— are you— I'm— " too many words come all at once, none of them managing to wedge through the conversational door at the same time. She shudders, curling her knees up as she holds the phone gentle, fingers trembling.
"Where are you?"
The question is a predictable one, even for someone not touched by insight. Equally predictable is the soft huff with which Tamara replies to it. "Too far," the older teen answers. "The shadows kept moving. The horizon's not that far, though. Couldn't go past that. Don't worry, though. It was faster going home." There's a pause; Colette can see in her mind's eye the birdlike tilt of Tamara's head, the habitual mannerism which precedes a query of her own. "Where are you?" But is she asking because she doesn't know, or only to turn the question back on its original speaker?
Having the question thrown back at her, Colette hunches forward and swallows a shuddering breath back behind trembling lips. Lie? What good would it do; and furthermore thee idea of wanting to lie to someone this important to her makes Colette queasy. "I— " But on the same token, Tamara knows exactly where Colette is. The answer is hesitated on, "I'm where… I think I need to be," she responds with a hesitant, if not entirely honest smile to no one but herself. She doesn't fool herself.
"I— miss you, I miss you so much." Her eyes wrench shut, hands cradling that phone next to the young woman's ear shake. "I'm— I'm so— Oh God I missed you, I— When're you coming home?" The same question could be asked of Colette, and bitingly, she assumes her own answer is the same as Tamara's — when it's time.
Quiet ensues for a few brief moments, the girl on the other end of the line turning over the words and examining them from all angles. "Not so much farther," Tamara replies in the end, skipping over the subject of where I need to be. She leaves Colette to draw her own conclusions, neither approving nor disapproving; it could mean she's right. It could just mean she has to make her own mistakes.
"I can't count them. The river doesn't leave breadcrumbs. And… it's kinda fuzzy. But I know it wasn't far." Another pause, with the weight of consideration; the sense of a slight frown. "Don't get so far away you leave everyone behind," Tamara says quietly, not so much of an instruction as it is a hope. "Others were missed, too."
A hesitant, weak laugh slips out from Colette's lips as she leans forward, keeping that phone cradled to her ear as her lips creep up in the ghost of a smile before she speaks, "I— I'm— " How does she explain herself? It's not an easy question, and it doesn't have a simple answer. Swallowing tightly, Colette laughs softly again, a sound more trying to hide the beginning of a sob than anything meeting true laughter. "I'm not… going to leave anyone— behind." She's not even sure of her own words, it's more of a statement of intention rather than an affirmation. She doesn't want to leave anyone behind, but somehow she feels it might just happen regardless. It's hard to tell what the future could possibly hold.
"I— I have your scarf." She mumbles, searching for something to say that isn't I'm sorry, the guilt of knowing that Tamara's seen how she ran from Judah crushing a weight down on her shoulders. "I— never let it out of my sight," she tenses, leaning towards the phone with a tremble of her jaw matching the shuddering of the rest of her body. "I— want to see you. Where— where are you?"
Where is an easy question to ask — but when the person it is asked of is Tamara, there are no simple answers. Colette knows this. "You had to believe anyway," the older teen informs her. Her tone is gentle, a wistful inflection to the words. "Close isn't that close, and the shadows aren't done." Tamara smiles, brief silence accompanying a shift in her gaze, the slight darkening of blue eyes. "You have the time; use it."
Use it. Those words sink into Colette's bones like the damp chill outside sinks into the brick and mortar of the Lighthouse's walls. She breathes in slowly, eyes falling shut again, trying to close out everything except the comforting sound of Tamara's voice on the other end. "You'll… be coming back, right?" Her hands curl around the phone just a bit more, squeezing it as if threatening the plastic rectangle would influence Tamara's words.
"I— " She clears her throat when the rest of her sentence comes out as nothing short of a choked, emotional tangle. "I just— want to make sure— " that this isn't the last time she'll ever hear from her? It's a horrible thing to think. "I still owe you— I— you're going to make s-sure that— " her words hitch in her throat, "You'll be back." It's more of a self-affirmation that a completion of her previous train of thought, as if realizing just who it is she's talking to.
"You didn't owe me," Tamara corrects softly. Not in her reckoning; but what she remembers and what Colette remembers lie in opposite directions on the flow of time. The seer, too, closes her eyes; seeing, still, all the many things that may yet come to pass. Some more desirable than others. "The mirror came back," Tamara replies. She can promise that much. One way or another, there will be a returning. A beat of silence ensues, before the girl speaks again. "Nothing ever really stops; there were flowers. Flowers bring rain. Rain is fun to play in but not for sitting out." It's an explanation of sorts, if not the clearest. "Be careful, kitty — and don't forget."
Click.
The silence on the other end of the phone, the audible click of the receiver hanging up, it all sends a shiver through Colette. The girl's jaw trembles, unable to be kept still as she leans forward, resting her brow against her knees as her feet press down against that now crumpled fabric of her comforter. When she finally, shakily, brings the phone away from her ear to flip the phone closed, all she can do is smile. It's a smile that, despite the fact that she's crying, is an honest one.
She'll be back, and Colette would wait forever if she had to for that.
For her.
 March 4th: Walking on One Shoe |
 March 4th: If I Could Turn Back Time |