Participants:
| Scene Title | Veiled Intentions |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Two people speak but their lips don't match their words when Glory and Eve converse at sunset. |
| Date | July 4, 2021 |
The hum of engines fills the rest stop parking lot. Pine trees abound here, overgrown and penning in the cracked asphalt. The rest station itself looks dilapidated but still somewhat intact, marred by graffiti. With the convoy stopping as the sun gets low in the west, passengers disembark to stretch their legs for the first time in hours.
Glory, duffel bag slung over her shoulder, has already put some good distance between herself and Frizzell. She’s found a concrete barricade facing the highway, settling down on it like a bench. She drops her bag between her feet in the grass and watches the sun glimmering in the west, rick and deep red as it tracks toward the horizon. Hunching forward, Glory pulls a crumpled and old photograph from her pocket, one scorched by fire. She looks down at it, smiling distantly.
Then, looking back up to the sun, the smile fades.
Rest Area Westbound · I-76
Rootstown
Ohio
July 4th
6:25 pm
Above Glory but just a ways back, Eve bops up and down while in her mist-like form. Scarlet particles dance around themselves as the wild woman stretches herself and then contracts, gaining ground so to speak on this very interesting woman. The thing about speaking cryptically back at Eve like she happened back on Frizzel, is she might take it as a secret message or even worse a challenge.
Boomer was too busy slowly becoming her soon to be daughter in law and Eve wasn't sure how to explain to Monica or Queen Lowe or even Silas what she felt when she looked at the dark haired woman who hadn't lifted the corners of her mouth in Eve's sights until this very moment.
The cloud is now peering from above, through muddled vision at the photograph Glory carries. It might be rude to follow someone like this but she did ask Eve a question.
And the older woman had maybe come to an answer.
It’s a photograph of a man, probably in his thirties. Broad shouldered, short-cropped dark hair, very tan, square jaw. Handsome in a way professional sports players can be. He’s dressed in sweats, there’s a gym behind him. There’s a little bit of an arm around his waist, but that side of the photograph is entirely burned away. Eve doesn’t recognize him.
A brother? A lover or friend? A father? An Uncle?
Eve asks herself all those questions and takes in the slow way Glory's smile fades away. There's a piece of her that wants to rattle that silence and shake out just what makes this woman so interesting but instead she waits and watches, curious as a cat. Eve just wasn't sure if she was observing a predator or prey.
If nothing else, Glory seemed troubled. Her whole world has flooded, Eve thinks. Of course she's troubled.
Crying has a way of assuaging suspicions. People have used it to try and defuse situations or avert responsibility throughout history. But in the lack of knowing observation, Glory’s tears are anything but that of a crocodile’s. They are genuine, grief-filled things. She is careful with the photograph, burned as it is, and delicately tucks it back into her jacket before hunching forward to sob for a few minutes.
Once she’s finished, Glory wipes at her eyes with the heels of her palms and rakes her hair back from her face. She looks at the low-set sun, heavy on the horizon, and swallows back that hurt deeper down. Eve knows this behavior, pushing through the grief to carry on. It must be fresh.
The woman in hiding watches the woman grieving with growing compassion, Eve feels for her and is reminded of her own grief for the people she has lost. For her mother, even if a version of Valerie Mas had been returned to her. For Cameron. There had been enough of that now, Eve decides as she angles her form towards the ground behind Glory.
Slowly crimson tendrils of energy wrap themselves around each other until the pale woman is breathing heavily, hands on her knees. It always took a lot out of her to stay in that form for too long but it had its perks.
Eve makes sure her footfalls are loud to give Glory enough of a heads up and to protect her feelings if she would like to hide them. "You know I thought about it,"
Throwing a hand out to catch on the debris Glory is currently sitting behind. Eve lays on the slab and lets out a deep sigh, trying to get comfortable on the concrete while looking up at the sky, "The question you asked."
Are you?
She had said.
Eve didn't know if she was.
Glory startles a little, angling a furtive glance at Eve. She draws one knee up to her chest, silent in the late evening sun. There’s still a hint of glassiness to her eyes, still a hint of pink emotion. She pushes through it.
“You did?” Glory asks. It isn’t so much a genuine question as an indication of incredulity. She regards eye with partly-lidded eyes, searching her with the wariness one might a strangely friendly, feral cat.
"I once thought I knew what I was doing. My visions offered me a… security blanket, no fuzz." Maybe all fuzz. Eve stops and let's her words drift off in the light breeze, lacing her pale fingers around a fresh joint and matches. It takes a couple tries but she eventually gets it lit and takes a deep puff. Holding it in and standing, the bottom of her legs and feet dissolve into red mist, giving off the illusion that she is hovering in the air.
The older woman moves forward looking up at the sky as smoke wafts up and behind them. Her crimson eyes go far and she tilts her head, tapping the ash that begins to form on the end of her joint. The flakes trickle down in the air, falling on her booted feet. A hot ember burns brightly on the black surface before snuffing itself out. "I'm not even a seer anymore. Not like I was! And I was happy to be free of the echoes after awhile, knowing the future isn't all it's cracked up to be, trust me."
Eve turns and looks over Glory offering the joint with a sad smile, "Now? I don't know what I'm doing, I just know I'm trying to save the people that I love." She stops again and thinks, licking her lips and frowning, "Even if it means dying for them."
“Sounds like a shit way to help anyone,” Glory says, resting her chin on her knee. She glances over at Eve, brows furrowed. “You can’t help anyone if you’re dead. One and done never solves anything.”
Glory looks back out to the abandoned freeway, watching the way the wind blows the tall grass that grows up between cracks in the asphalt. “What’s it like, being a seer?” She asks, keeping her eyes focused ahead. “I’ve never known any. This is… the most people I’ve ever been around who have powers like that.”
Eve doesn't correct anything that Glory is saying at first, she already knows the price at the end. "Heh well that sort of logic doesn't really apply to me silly." Puffing hard on the joint and snickering softly, "You could put a bullet in my brainpan and come to this spot the next day and I'd be right here to meet ya! You could boil me alive in a steam room and I'd just… come back! I don't stay dead dearie."
She thinks, allowing the smoke to pour out from her nostrils, crimson mists swirling around her bottom half. "I think I've died five times now. I'm starting to forget the number," a slight shrug, "but never the bodies!"
Thinking back to when she was a true seer makes Eve sad and she frowns, light dimming in her eyes significantly. "Being a seer was like viewing the world through… an infinite spyglass. The slightest turn showed a whole new view. It started in dreams and it was always so metaphorical. My brain couldn't comprehend." So much confusion in the first days, so many symbols misread. She was still reading too hard into her visions at times. A blessing and curse.
"I would plunge my face into the River of time and see the most horrific things. Then I would help my friends stop them." It sounds so simple and maybe it really was back then. Eve didn't really think too hard in those days, "I grew to let my visions dictate every part of my life, when I died and lost my original gift.. I was sad but grateful. I needed a break from them. I needed to live without looking forward and knowing what was next." This wasn't what she wanted anymore.
And just like that Glory is revealed to Eve.
"Oh my precious girl," sucking her teeth in and shaking her head, "Where I'm from we are many, we are everywhere and something just happened that created even more and changed some of us on even more incredible levels." Eve could talk about her people the Expressives forever and if Glory doesn't seem like a lost and orphaned Expressive in this moment…
"No one in your family has the Gift?"
“My family is dead,” is Glory’s terse, hushed response.
Unfolding her leg, Glory sits forward as if she were about to stand up and walk away, but something makes her stay. She closes her eyes, exhales a deep sigh, and instead sits further forward and rakes her hands through her hair.
“My… mom had a power. I think. She died when I was really little.” Glory folds her hands at the back of her neck. “My dad did too. No hiding from him.” She says with the faintest ghost of a laugh, until she remembers his face. Then the hint of a smile on her lips fade away entirely.
"Both the parents who raised me are dead too." Eve isn't as sad as she was in the past. She knows they are in a better place but she wishes they had a better relationship before it all happened. Glory's story is much more tragic seeing how she lost them at such a young age. "Knowing loss at such a young age can create a shell meant to keep all the venom in the world out. I'm sorry you had to go through that." Eve feels for a fellow orphan.
"My dad was a mechanic, he was a hard ass but we had fun." Her own smile dims as she thinks about her father's infidelity and her mother's lies. "My mom had me with some older guy though, I think I saw him in a dream on my way to this world." It's just about all she's thought about but there's nothing she can do about George Porter from here. "What did your parents do?"
The older woman has settled against the concrete again. Content to smoke and not play around with her ability and legs. Her hands still move every other second. Eve had never learned how to truly stay still for long.
Lowering her hands into her lap, Glory shakes her head. “I… I don’t know what my mom did,” she says in such a way as if she’d never even thought to ask. It hurts her in a new, unexpected way. Which, perhaps, is why she shares so much about her father without really thinking about it. “My dad worked security,” she says softly. “He was always big and strong, looking out for people. He—got really sick and didn’t get better. I lost him when I was thirteen.”
Glory slowly stands, scrunching up her face in regret about sharing so much. But it’s easy to talk to Eve. “Sorry I—I think I just need some space right now. This is all kind of a lot and I—I haven’t talked about them in a long time.” She sighs softly. “It sucks.”
"No child should know the pain of losing a parent so soon." Sighing and moving her head from side to side in disappointment in the Fates. This is what it had to offer the innocent? Sometimes she wished to take a mallet right to the Nexus of it all, it wasn't fair for people like Glory and Eve. "No need to say sorry dearie. Loss is one of the most powerful emotions even if one of the saddest." The darker haired woman gives the younger a sad look, she understands this pain so well.
"Go on now, get your space. Have a cry. Never be ashamed of feeling, always feel no matter the cost because what you lose by trying to feel nothing is more grave than anything that can be imagined." Eve places a hand on Glory's shoulder and squeezes it one finger at a time then tapping her. "Thank you for trusting me with your pain." Slowly Eve begins to disperse into that red cloud and she hovers near Glory for a moment, lips pushing out from the mists, "Find me when you want to speak more of what haunts you." The mist drifts off into the sky and Eve bops away to give the girl her space, to allow her the freedom to scream at the world if she wants too.
Space, as in hiding behind a nearby piece of concrete to watch Glory's next movements once she's hovered out of sight. Glory intrigues her but mostly Eve is worried for this orphan in pain, she fears what she might do alone. Best to keep an eye from a distance and consider her own losses and how they have shaped who she is today.
Eve is a whirlwind of platitudes and suggestions, coming in like a hurricane and vanishing just as quickly. It leaves Glory unsure of herself, standing with her arms wrapped around her midsection, staring at the space Eve once occupied. She reaches down to her hip, to an empty sheathe for a knife once held there, thumb tracing the opening. Still gone.
Still gone.