Lowered Expectations

Participants:

delia_icon.gif huruma3_icon.gif

Scene Title Lowered Expectations
Synopsis Huruma travels to the Ryans household to talk to Benjamin, she finds Delia instead
Date August 15, 2010

Ryans Home — The Garden


If you've ever seen a Gallagher show, you know the sound a melon makes when it's being hit with a bat. Combine that with the sound of an annoying little Yorkshire terrier barking its itty bitty head off, and the frequent yells of a young woman for it to shut up and there you have the Ryans backyard on a Sunday evening.

In a small attempt at rebuilding the bridge between her and her father, Delia made supper from one of Mary's old recipes. Four hours later, it's still sitting on the table gathering flies while the redhead is angrily taking a bat to every fruit and vegetable in her father's precious garden. She's angry. Very much so.

"This is for…" squish "the award I won in grade nine.." squish "This is for…" squish "the ball games you never made it to…" squish

It goes on and on, every slight on the young woman's life is exacted in revenge in the form of fruit and vegetable puree.

Huruma knows a sound quite like this one she hears filtering from behind the house; it isn't the sound of melons that she is reminded of, to say the very least. This is only the second time she has dared drop by unannounced. The first was to simply bother Benjamin. This time is her seeking him out to inquire about the evens of the last visit. Unfortunately, she cannot feel him inside the house, nor behind it-

-but sure enough, someone is home. The dark woman saunters in silence along the side of the house, white eyes peering up over her shoulder when she senses a prying gaze from the neighbor house. The same one that had been watching her the last time, has been watching Delia from behind the curtain in the upstairs. Huruma ignores her, in favor of budging open the gate with all the grace of a ghost in a hall; it is quite possible that Delia may not see her for a few moments, standing back, and out of view of the redhead along the back of the house. Not for ill-begotten reasons, of course. Just that it is so much more interesting when she doesn't think she is being observed from behind.

With Delia facing opposite a slinkily dressed and sour-looking Huruma, it seems the neighbor lady's show is either going to get better or worse.

"This is for never coming home!!" Delia shouts as she throws a small watermelon up in the air and swings the bat around to connect to it with a satisfying smack. The red juicy meat of the melon explodes into the air, covering the young woman and quite a few pains of the greenhouse with the dripping substance.

Unlike the well dressed Huruma, Delia has taken a page from her father's book of fashion. She's wearing a pair of faded old jeans, a t-shirt, and graying tennis shoes that are soaked with the guts of the now perished inhabitants of the garden. The redhead hasn't seen Huruma, the creak of the gate was masked by the yapping mutt from next door and her own screams of fury.

After getting covered in melon pulp, she stops for a moment, her ribs expanding and contracting as she takes labored breaths to calm herself. The dog is still scolding her for ruining the garden, loudly. Turning her head to face it, she bellows loudly and throws the wet bat at the fence. "SHUT UP!!"

"What did those creatures ever do t'you?" Huruma's voice is like a smoldering coal in Delia's cold, distressed anger; she speaks only loud enough to be heard, only loud enough to totally spook Delia out of her pants, so to speak. Her long arms have crossed, eyelids hanging low as she watches the girl before her, standing in a battlefield all of her own.

"…Pity. They were quite delicious."

Delia whirls around in a panic as she hears Huruma's voice, familiar but foreign all at the same time. It takes her a moment to register who it is exactly and when she does, she staggers backward in fear, slipping on the rind of one of the extinguished squash. Her feet come up into the air and the young woman is thrown onto her back.

Huuuhhhh the air rushes out of her when she lands, winded, and she is left struggling to force more oxygen into her lungs.

Huruma crunches through the garden debris, heels digging into toiled dirt as she floats into Delia's vision up above. The sky frames her, blue on brown. She looks down at the redhead for what seems like an eternity, arms hooked in front of her abdomen, lips pursed in something vaguely displeased.

"Now, either you want a friend t'roll around in melon massacre with- or-" Huruma's foot squashes toe down on an unbroken rind. "You are just needing t'cool down."

"He didn't come home…" Delia wheezes, as though those few words are explanation enough for the temper tantrum that's occured in the garden. Slowly, she struggles to get up. Not once but twice she slips and lands on her back again before she's finally on her feet in front of the ebony woman.

"I tried, I tried to do something nice." Her grumbled complaints are nearly drowned out by the yap yap yap of the dog from next door. "MISSUS WILSON!! WILL YOU SHUT THAT DOG UP?!" The silent answer is the waver of a curtain from an upstairs window next door.

Huruma allows Delia to pull herself up, only offering a hand once she is standing, if she needs to steady herself. Getting up is have the battle. The dark woman watches her, examining, observing, down to the intricacies of her finer moods. Delia is young. Younger emotions tend to be far more raw. More primal. It does not actually have to do with her hair color.

"Did he know?" About that something? Huruma asks this only for Delia's ears, her smoothness undeterred by the vegetable on her boots. "I take it that …you and he are at odds."

"Who knows, I left a few messages with a woman at his office…" Delia begins. She stops and shrugs her shoulders as she kicks a bit of underfoot rind out and across the yard. Has she the inclination when she was picking out careers, kicker for the Giants or the Jets would have been a good choice. The rind flies up in the air and lands with a soft plop, right in the gutter.

"I don't know, he probably just doesn't give a shit." Her muted grumbling borders on a pout, something quite unattractive on a grown woman. Another kick of rind has it landing against the glass of the greenhouse. Then another… and another…

"He does. I know him that well, at least…" Huruma offers this, eyes following the arcs of melon over the yard. "He gives many shits, t'be quite frank." About his family, and about his garden, for instance. Ben will be quite saddened at the loss of his plants by course of Delia's mix of missing logic and inner turmoil.

"You should no'be so hard on him." But, to her credit, Huruma does not say why.

"You know, I keep telling Lulu the same thing. Don't be so hard on him, take it easy…" Delia blinks a few times, redistributing the tears in her eyes into a lovely sheen that makes them sparkle in the dying light of day. She inhales sharply with a long sniffle as she plods away from the woman to collect the bat that she'd heaved toward the fence moments ago. "I know he gives a shit about his job. That he didn't want to quit when Mom died but it was that or foster care for us."

But he did quit. Delia seems to be picking and choosing what aspects of her father to dislike and which to simply ignore. "Sometimes I really wish that he was there for us more than just when we're in trouble."

"Your father is a soldier-" Huruma mutters, watching the redhead walk. "-and I know personally how difficult it is t'stop being one." She tries to be as gentle and as vague as possible. She does not know how much Benjamin has told his girls. "Even soldiers cannot be there at all times. But certainly, they try, they still leave parts of themselves at home."

"Parts that they love, as many men might have to."

Delia turns and regards Huruma with eyebrows lofted high on her brow. "Seriously? He's not a soldier. Soldiers are in the army. He hunts people for a living, I know, he told me." Her voice is sullen and her posture very tense. Letting loose a heavy sigh, she swings the bat up over her shoulder and balances it against her neck. "He hunted you."

Blue eyes stare across the span of the yard into white ones, almost daring the other woman to deny it. She doesn't say anything further to justify herself or her actions.

"He hunted me because it was his duty." Huruma's eyes narrow across the yard, pupils flickering dangerously back at Delia. She may be daring something out of Huruma, but this is someone that you do not want to start posturing with. "There are many types of soldiers, Delia. But they all band for a cause, whatever it may be. Make no mistake, your father is a soldier." Why, just ask him to disassemble and reassemble a firearm as fast as he can. Guaranteed that it would blow her mind.

"He was in th'Navy, was he not? I expect his life'as been formed around that. So even when he is hunting dangerous criminals-" Which is quite telling of why he hunted Huruma- "He is thinking like a soldier. I can always see it in his eyes." Her hand moves up, palm and fingers gesturing over her face.

Lowering her head in defeat, Delia shrugs a consent to Huruma's explanation and scans the yard, eying the damage she's caused. "I hope he doesn't think like a soldier when it's my turn," she utters somewhat cryptically. She's still not convinced that the mandatory registration isn't just the begining of something much larger and much more horrible. Thinking like her old self, the one that hasn't taken evo test after evo test after evo test to make sure, it's with a sigh of relief that she thinks of a world without evolved people. Knowing what she is, there's dread looming over the horizon, the world is ending and the sky is falling.

Huruma was confided in enough that she can recognize signals such as these ones. This must mean that he was right, after all.

"He won't. Provided that you do only good with what God has given you." It is a strange echo, her words; they nearly mirror the ones that Amato had given her. To these, Huruma tacks on an example. "Much like how I did not. Not at first. Not completely, for a long time. Then again, y'could simply call me chaotic." Her teeth flash long enough to give a small smile.

"I know someone like you. She chose well when she was young, and- has led a long, helathy life." It's not over for Delia either.

"What if— " Delia stops and lets loose a long sigh. Shaking her head, she swings the bat down from her shoulder and waves it by her side. "Nevermind. It's probably just all a part of me going insane because I'm a freak." For some odd reason, it makes her feel better saying it that way. A freak. If Lulu ever found out, she'd never hear the end of it. One reason why Delia has chosen to remain so quiet about it.

"Did she have to register or get put on a list?"

"No. But she's had t'run from and come t'blows with far worse things, I assure you. Per'aps one day you will meet her." Huruma cants her head to the side, voice practically crooning past a faint smile on her lips. "M'family history is quite full of fighters- just like yours."

"You may be a freak, but th'day b'damned if you are not of talents. And, luck."

"Luck? How do I have luck? I could have a normal life where everything is just peachy. Not this…" She waves her hand around as she furrows her eyebrows into something of a glare. Delia sags visibly, her shoulders droop down as she deflates, the air coming out of her in a very long sigh. "I just want to be normal. I don't want to worry about being hunted down by my dad or… someone he works with."

"So don't. Worked f'me. Dealt with it as it came. Be good, do good. What is normal, anyway? Boring." Huruma's opinion, that is. "Even a normal life is never peachy. Be extraordinary." She smiles again, flicking a look towards the back of the house. "If it turns out you are hunted, fight back as you need to. Or have friends that can." Meaning herself, in the current state of affairs.

"I cannot change your displeasure, but I can tell you how pleasurable it might be. Guidance is free."

Delia's face twists into a grimace. "I can't fight back. I can't do anything. All I can do is…" Hokuto called it art. Her father called it dreamwalking. She calls it.. "… nothing. I can do nothing. I'm going to test positive, be registered, get hunted… " She's not going to be dissuaded from that fact, it doesn't seem, no matter how many people try to sway her.

Slowly, her blue eyes rise to meet those white ones again and she searches the dark woman's face. "I'm sorry, Huruma. I'm sorry for everything… I'm just. I don't want to be different, I want to be a doctor."

"So, do it. Nothing about this will stop you." Huruma tilts her brows up when the girl looks to her. "I don'care what you think, but m'grandmother would have hit you by now, I think." Just a passing thought. Maybe she shouldn't meet Etana after all. "You shall figure things out, I expect that much. For better or for worse."


Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License