The Chant of the Sibyl
Nov. 21st, 2007 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crowsIvan Roque stared out across the dark land where it bled into the darker sky, which was starless and glowering. Everything was quiet in the compound.
“How many days?” She'd been able to sneak up on Ivan since highschool, so focussed did he get on the machinations of his inner mind when he thought he was alone. The man stirred slightly, lifting himself away from the casement that he'd leaned against, though he didn't turn to look at her.
“1,647. And counting.” He sighed, shaking a bowed head as he extended an arm toward her. The smaller woman tucked herself easily into his side for a brief squeeze. “It gets stranger every day, doesn't it? This thing...” A long exhallation sighed out through his nose. He looked tired.
“Yes.” Isolde replied, stepping forward to splay her hand agaist the cool panes of the window. “Every day.”
Silence swung heavily in the room, neither of the doctors looking at one another.
“We did the best we could, Ivan.” Isolde was the one to break it, not turning to see her old friend's face.
“I still... I just still wonder about that so much. I feel like there's a lot I don't know the truth about, even now.” His voice was as haggered as the land they looked across, mapping seperate routes over the shadowy terrain.
“Well, Ivan... Everyday we're a little bit closer.” In conversation, Isolde didn't like to dwell on the tragedy. Everybody had lost somebody... that's how it worked when that kind of a slice was taken out of the human population on the earth. Regardless of her reticense, however, Isolde was one of the most resilient – intellectually – despite her intimacy with the real facts of the cataclysm, which both of them silently believed was still far worse at its glarled roots than anybody who was left in the aftermath understood. She was the picture of dilligence, going to work every day scrutinizing each lead on any new information – whether it appeared to be related to the spread of the initial infection – that came up, just as they had been doing before the plague exploded across the globe. Some days it was the only thing that kept Ivan going... he'd been ready to give up more than once, resulting in several late nights of her coaxing him minute by minute. I need you. I can't do this without you.
“I guess so.” He said after a long time, drumming his fingers on the sill beside her.
“I came with some news, actually, Ivan.” She said after.
It was unlike Isolde to stall, and this finally brought Ivan around to scrutinize her. She looked as tired as he felt, but that was nothing new. “What do you mean? What eid you find?”
“We're getting a little closer to Adrian.”
Stooping slightly, Ivan set his elbows on the windowsill and sunk his head into his hands. “Is this even what we want, Isolde? Do you think it will really help us, with anything?”
Beside him, she was nodding, eyes fixed on the darkness outside the window. “I'm beginning to think so, more than I was. Wait until you meet the guy I've got downstairs.”
Ivan saught her face with his eyes, looking up from where he leaned as his rambling thoughts were finally and fully derailed.
“What? Who?” He straightened suddenly, feeling a bolt of tension lance painfully through his achey muscles. “What did Adrian do to him?”
Isolde's face went tired, openly, and she shook her head before reaching out to catch Ivan's shoulders with her small hands. “Calm down. Adrian didn't do anything to him.”
“Oh...” Ivan gritted his jaw, rocking his weight back down onto his heels. He felt a little embarassed by the outburst; it had been uncensored, a product of what he was begrudgingly coming to accept was a simple matter of projection. He blamed Adrian James for more – likely a lot more – of the situation at large than he really deserved. It was easier, turning that face he'd never seen into the face of a demon. Isolde tried to reason often with himm, and after four years it was finally starting to shine through and he was beginning to understand that he had to let it go. Not to mention how badly it alienated poor Jadany, but he'd learned quickly – even before everything went to hell – to keep his mouth shut around Jadany.
“He was never with Adrian and his people. But he has seen them. He's been vagrant for years, this is the first time he's spent any real time in a permanent settlement... maybe since the beginning.”
Ivan's mouth worked, pursed over to one side of his face as his emotions waffled from misplaced anger to protectiveness. He opened his mouth to speak, but Isolde stopped him with a laugh and raised a finger between them.
“Oh, for heaven's sake Ivan, before you even ask me... yes, he's in quarantine and decontamination right now, right this minute, being picked over by the kind folks down there who don't want plague in our facilities any more than you or I do. We all understand the risks, doctor Roque. Just remember, some of those people still have family to protect.” She raised an eyebrow at him, smiling in a faintly chastising manner before gesturing out across the darkened landscape. “It isn't over yet.”
Sulking, Ivan slouched again, and on second thought turned his back against the wall to slide down and sit beneath the casement. “What, you mean the worst of it?”
Isolde tousled his hair affectionately, her eyes bolted on the distance that panned, featureless and grim, to the horizon. “No. The world.”
“Seems pretty over to me. Certainly isn't going to recover in my lifetime.” The man grumbled, leaning his head against her knee. “I'm sorry Isolde, I don't mean to be like that. I'm just so tired today, I'm getting tired of the feeling that every new stone we manage to turn over opens up ten more questions. All the answers are so insignificant, compared to what I realize we don't know. Every single god damn day.”
Isolde sighed through her nose. He didn't look up at her, but he could feel in the subtle sway of her muscles that she was shaking her head.
“It's not the significance of the answers that we need to be concerned with, Ivan. It's the number of them, the whole they add up to.”
“But we've been trying to add them up to something for... sixteen hundred some odd days, Isolde, and coming up pretty empty handed.”
“Ivan Roque.” Her voice, which came only after a while of calculating silence, was laden with a heavy, artificial calm.
“...what is it?”
“You and I are trying to move mountains. In so many ways, are endeavor is friendless and poorly equipped... I can't even count the tools that I took for granted in our former life, our former work. This is a whole new world now. You can't even compare it to what we did before. We've gone from being doctors to being... warriors, or something. Something entirely different than what we were.”
Ivan was only slightly heartened by her soliloquoy, but sat up all the same. One thing that she did speak to, that she was entirely right about, that his mind and heart would never let him forget (this is what had made him good at what he did before, and what kept him alive when everything came down, and what was going to keep him going until he walked right into his grave) that there was a job to be done. He and Isolde had been some of the only people qualified for work of this weight before more than half of the human race had been annihilated by the deadly disease... he certainly knew there was no one else to step up and carry the banner, now.
“Alright, Isolde. Let's go get to know your latest student.”
She lowered a hand to help tug him to his feet, but grabbed his arm when he made for the door. “His name's Niklaus. He didn't give me a surname.” There was a small hesitation in her voice; Isolde was making some hasty, but careful, decisions about what she was going to tell her partner and what she was going to let him find out for himself. “But he won't be out of detox for a little while yet.” She paused, and patted his shoulder. “Since you're up, though, maybe you should go see Jada. She was asking how you were the other day, and it would be good for you to get out of here for a while.” Walking away from him, Isolde waved a hand dismissively about the small room that had been given to him for work, while Isolde spent most of her time downstairs in the infirmiry.
Ivan slumped slightly. It wasn't easy to reconcile the way he felt about Jadany. She deserved his ire even less than Adrian did, but Ivan would never stop seeing Adrian James as a monster. The woman who so clearly loved him and, it seemed to Ivan, would turn her back on them at a moment's notice to go back to that way of life struck him as little more than an accessory to his madness. Either way, Jadany Arkenstone had been a key to many of the answers they had found, however insignificant they may have yet seemed.
“Alright, I'll go check on her.”
Jadany had taken an equally aggressive stance alongside Ivan and Isolde in terms of appreciating and using the fact that she was still capable, still functional; indeed, still alive at all. Their outpourings were all different... and unlike the other two of their unlikely trio, Jadany didn't possess world-class microbiological education, but – and Isolde made a specific point to Ivan about it, regularly – she was far from useless. She'd found her place among the orphaned and otherwise aggrieved children of the plague and associated warfare, a caretaker and compatriot, a teacher.
In the semi-permanent settlement that had sprung up in the relative safety of their little oasis, there were about a dozen kids between the ages of 4 and 11 or so. The small pack of rangy teenagers where treated more or less as adults, a position that they adjusted to fairly quickly once things got settled down. They pulled their weight somberly, never speaking of the dead families, schoolmates, girlfriends... and spent their free time in lockstep, a secret society braced only on themselves for support.
Jadany had all the younger ones, surrogate mother and govereness in as many capabilities as the young woman could manage. They found out early on that this group would not likely grow in numbers, unless they were to go out and find other kids in places that could shelter them. There were occasionally strays, out in from the wasted land, but they were rare and always adults. The state of the outside world was not friendly enough to allow an unescorted child to survive... Ivan and Isolde figured that anyone caught out in that holocaust of elements and disease, that did not get bunkered or find shelter otherwise, was probably dead before the first year was over and done with. Very quickly, the focus of energy went from finding survivors to keeping the people that one had alive. Every heartbeat was precious, as Isolde always said.
Ivan found Jadany surrounded by a tidy circle of rag-tag, cross-legged children. They were all thin and pale, and in a weird way ornamental to Jadany's bird-like fragility; a quality of hers that had pre-existed the onslaught of the plague, and only grown more pronounced as the years of deprivation wore onward. She was reading slowly from a tattered storybok, turning each page gingerly when the passages finished and turning the next so that the group could see the associated pictures. Ivan hovered on the outskirts of their tiny pow-wow, studying the faces of the kids as they watched her. Every one was so intense, focussing on her careful diction and even tone. It made him despair a little; Jadany, who looked at any moment like she might just blow away with the slightest puff of a draft, was all they had.
He noticed after a few minutes that some of the older children had little slates that they were writing on, copying down the words section by section as they read, practicing. No schools, no study programs, nothing to even teach these children to read with the exception of Jada. Ivan felt his moody heart soften a little. He saw her infrequently... their first impressions of one another had been quite negative, and the stigma of those times – before the cataclysm, though they were, and now so long ago – had never really faded, from either of them. He'd been surprised when Isolde had said that Jadany had inquired after his wellbeing... that she'd noticed what a recluse he'd been for the last week. And here she was, pouring every waking moment into trying to preserve literacy in the derelict next-generation of a shattered human race. Isolde was right. Everything was different, now.
By this point, some of the kids had began to take notice of him, being slowly distracted from their story circle by the presence of a relative stranger. In the settlement, all faces were familiar, it was a small community... a lot of people were still in some phase of denial about having lost everything, however, withdrawn into their own psyche and clinging to whatever private hopes kept them alive day to day. Ivan, and a couple of other self-proclaimed researchers who had landed in this little pit, were largely aloof... it was easier than having to stare that demon in the mouth and, frankly, there was a lot of work to do and limited resources to do it with. He and Isolde were studying every microbe they were able to get their hands on, isolating the different types of infection that had torn apart their species from the inside out. Ivan had, two years ago, come up with the idea that – once communication lines were established between themselves and other, similar areas where human life persisted – that people at large should scout for samples of contaminated soil and plant matter, anything they could get their hands on, so that they could be analyzed. That way, they could map the route of the contagions... he envisioned all the facts beginning to come together like one beautiful puzzle that would eventually show a clear path to some kind of clean, promised land. Some things degraded much faster than others, becoming dead and inert – harmless. Other things lasted a long time, a black mark on his map, an area that wouldn't be safe for generations. Timelining all of the different contaminants was the way that the human race would be able to take back their ravaged planet, but it was slow going. Painfully slow going.
When Jadany realized that her kids were being taken from listening to her, she pulled herself out of her focus and looked around from her place on the floor, finally setting her eyes on Ivan who, embarassed at being percieved to be staring, cleared his throat and waved.
“Um, yes doctor Roque? Did you need something?” Her voice was so small, she could have almost been one of them.
Ivan shook his head. “I was just hoping I could listen in for a while.” One of the older girls – perhaps eight – shuffled aside and told the little boy she'd been sitting near to make room. Totally of their own accord, they'd come to make a place for Ivan in their circle. The girl grinned – she was missing a front tooth, the adult replacement beginning to show brightly through the gum – sunnily up to the tall man who folded his legs somewhat awkwardly and sat down. His heart swelled painfully... these, he figured, were the kind of private hopes people were clinging to, to wake up in the morning and keep moving.
Jadany finished that storybook and another – both ritualistically familiar to the children, for lack of anything else to read in the compound other than compiled medical research and haphazard attempts at settlement-wide record keeping. Then, the older children paired off with the younger children to help with some handwriting excersizes, Ivan filling in with the odd-man-out, as there were only eleven children, so that Jadany could oversee the little class as a whole.
Then, the slight woman sent them off to bed. They all slept in one room, on cots comandeered from an old hospital, lined up neatly. Once they were safely shut in, Jadany turned to a slightly sheepish looking Ivan, hands burried deep in his pockets.
“Thank you, for that, doctor Roque.” She nodded his way, stooping to pick up the two books and folding them against her chest.
“Really, Jada, call me Ivan. It's been beyond long enough.” He cleared his throat and tried to smile. She was a little more successful, wide doe's eyes large and dark in her face.
“It makes a lot of difference to them, Ivan. The more people they get to see, or play with. Makes them stronger. Gives them a better chance to survive.”
“They're all orphans?” He already knew the answer to that question, even as she nodded, her eyes closed a moment.
“Every one. Healthy, though... as much as someone can be these days.” Jadany was a lucky case... she was one of the early infections, and Adrian had burned it out of her with opiates and strycchnaine, chemicals that reacted with the strange contagion in ways that Ivan and Isolde still didn't understand. The damage that had been done to her body – both by the microbe, and the poisons – was irreparable. She would never be strong again, never look full or real like a girl of her age should. A part of Jada had died, and what was left was ghostlike and fragile. Her smile was kind, though, and she worked tirelessly for the young and the sick. Though there were few of the former, they were hugely important... and there were loads of the latter.
Ivan nodded after a few moments and then, kicking at the floor a little nervously, spoke what he'd come to say. “Jada, I'm sorry that... we've never gotten along better. I've really been less than a gentleman at times.” It wasn't that he went out of his way to make her life difficult... Ivan openly supported her in a variety of endeavors, and was silent at worst about the many things he knew they didn't agree on. However, due to basic prejudice he'd always held her at arms length, determined not to allow her to become a friend or confidant, and that simply wasn't very fair. Opportunities for warmth, for friendship, were as rare and precious here as any life was, to the world.
She smiled, nodding a little. “It's alright. I understand why, finally.”
“Certainly doesn't make it acceptable. If in this age we can't overcome our differences then what are we but insects waiting for our extermination to be complete?” It was a somewhat morebid thing to say – and came out of his mouth entirely more macabre than he intended, but Jadany just laughed a little and shook her head.
“I forgive you, if that's what you're asking.”
Ivan laughed, a little embarassed, and then shrugged her in the direction of the exit.
“Isolde's picked up someone she wants me to meet, someone from out in the wastes. Want to come?”
“Very much so.” Jadany nodded, catching up to his shoulder with a hasty step. Smiling for the company and trying to relax a little – maybe this first impression would be better than the one with Jadany – Ivan lead them out into the hall that would funnel them toward the quarantine/decontam area.
“Do you remember what you did before?” Isolde pressed, her hands folded tight atop an open notebook with nothing yet written on the page.
“No, not much of anything from before. Nothing concrete.” Niklaus pushed the corners of his mouth down thoughtfully, never looking at her. His fierce eyes – a pale, icy blue – constantly scanned the area behind her, panning over and over the open commons that they sat at the edge of. He straddled a chair with his back against the wall, powerful arms crossed just above the wrist and hands hanging. He sat very still, minus the constant movement of those eyes, waiting for a death that could come at any moment.
This man was the strangest thing they had yet pulled in from that wild land that the familiar world had become, overgrown and changing at a rapid rate. People talked a lot about repairing the world, restoring it to what it had been, but Isolde knew in her heart nothing was ever going to be like it was before. Not in her generation, and not in any that would follow it – assuming the human race was able to cajole it's survival from the universe. From the simplest to the most grand of things, what facets of society had been able to remain alive, and what different faces of nature, were forever changed. In the four years since the earth was razed by disease and despair, she'd seen a great many things as a biproduct of all that destruction. People sick with every kind of unimaginable ailment, as well as any reflection of madness that one cared to put a name or face to. But Niklaus... he was neither ill, nor mad, nor was he recovered... at least, not like Jada was, scarred forever by the sickness in a way that you could almost see, but not quite put your finger on.
That was not to say that Niklaus had not been changed. That was what was fascinating about him.
“I don't know why you're asking me these questions, miss.” Niklaus smiled a broad, eerie smile, from which his teeth flashed whitely. One was chipped.
Isolde put her notebook down on her lap, eyeing him levelly. Niklaus made her a little nervous, but it was equally exciting, being in the presence of living, breathing proof and evidence of a wealth of information that she didn't have yet. “Pardon? We conduct the interview to determine... well, we'd like to know more about you, what you're coming from and if there's any way we can help you.”
He laughed a little. “Miss, I've lived a long time out there, as well as a man alone with only his own skin can live. Asking me where I've been isn't going to help you find what you're looking for.”
Isolde stared thoughtfully at him until a few moments later when his eyes slipped from her face upward. A hand landed on her shoulder, and a quick glance to the side revealed Jadany and Ivan standing quietly. Resettling her gaze on Niklaus, Isolde stated quietly, “We're looking for a great many things.”
Niklaus, this is Ivan Roque and Jadany Arkenstone. My dearest friends and assistants.”
In a single, powerful motion, Niklaus stood. Between the two small girls, and Ivan's average height and build, Niklaus was a giant. He was easily six and a half feet tall, broad shoulders bound in spare, heavy muscles. His hair was long and pure white, framing the hard angles of a pale, high-cheek boned face. He extended a hand first to Ivan, enveloping the doctor's hand in a firm, steady grip before offering it to the slightly more timid Jadany. Ivan cleared his throat.
“A pleasure, Niklaus. Welcome.”
“Though they've had the opportunity infrequently, most people have called me Witch.”
Ivan pursed his lips a little. There was very little about the big man that was not alarming, he had decided already, and this was no exception.
“Why's that?” He found himself asking, but Niklaus – Witch – waved the question off with the flick of a hand.
“It's warm here. That is good.” That disconcerting smile spread across his features again, eyes sweeping the room behind them with an appreciative nod. His gaze found it's way quickly back to Isolde. “May I stay?”
The question was so blunt, so simply asked as to cast a strange and childlike shadow lancing through his features.
Recognizing that powerful Niklaus saw her as some kind of figure of authority here, Isolde smiled and nodded. “I hope you will, Niklaus. We don't have a lot to offer, but together we have more than one may does alone, out there.”
He nodded his grinning agreement, like some kind of snowy barbarian playing the part of a gentleman.
After a short time, conversation somehow bending like refracted light around anything that was a straight answer, the girls left Ivan and Niklaus to go check on the infirmary patients and find some bedclothes and a cot for their latest lost lamb. The two men sat across from one another, the silence filling up around them like floodwater. Isolde had been the primary driver of conversation... Witch was particularly attentive to her, and Ivan hadn't decided whether he believed it was beccause she was pretty, or because he saw her as the pack leader, or what. Either way, no matter how off-putting the starkly pale man was, he oddly seemed anything but threatening. He was grateful for what they offered him, understood what shelter and companionship meant. Ivan got the feeling that he had been very lonely for a long time, and that – whether or not he claimed to not remember anything from before – the presences of all these people probably rubbed down into an old wound of loss.
“How long has it been.” His deep voice echoed out after a little while, carrying with it a quality not unlike someone who is speaking from the back of a cave or the bottom of a deep well.
"Beg pardon?” Ivan, shaken from his reverie, replied.
“How long. Since the end of the world.” Niklaus wasn't looking at the other man, his eyes settled interminably forward, staring through the far wall of the room and beyond it.
“The war ended four and a half years ago, round abouts.” Ivan tried to feign nonchallance by not delivering the number of days. Isolde and he counted them back and forth... days since the last leader from the old world had finally dropped dead of the plague and the machines of warfare finally ground to a squealing, thunderous halt. By that point, the plague was beginning to burn itself out too... not because of some breakthrough on the part of people like them, but simply for the fact that it was running out of fuel to feed itself. No pathogen can spread beyond the edges of the population that it consumes, and the frontiers of human society had grown very narrow, and very broken. What irony was this, of mankind, that when faced by something that could truly threaten the state and future of the human race, they turn to murdering one another. That had always made Ivan laugh, in a way.
Niklaus was nodding slowly. “Longer than I thought.” The words were carefully neutral, frank, but the veneer concealed something deeper and more painful. It confirmed Ivan's suspicions of Niklaus's isolation for the majority of that time.
“And you survived? Just, out there, without any help or backup...?” Being incredulous, by this point, was not something Ivan was going to have an easy time suppressing.
“Something like that.” A small laugh, then, deep in his cavernous chest. “I stopped in on a few groups of people, what's left... nothing for a while though. I've been alone for a while. This is the first settlement I've seen that seems... like it might stick around, and not just be blown down by the next passing wind.” He turned an appreciative smile up to Ivan,
“Heh, thanks... we do the best we can here. Everybody works very hard.” The general thoroughfare that passed through this commons area had died down for this later part of the evening, but Ivan found himself searching after the people he saw passing by. He associated people as much to the work that they had done, and continued to do, as he did with their names. Carol Ramsey, she'd been a housewife before, and had organized a small brigade of people to keep the facilities as sanitary as possible, especially insofar as the storage and preparation of food were concerned. It sounded frumpy and prudish, but she went about it with a sharp eye and sharper reason, pointing out to anyone who might have made a jab how nobody could afford the risk of food borne illness or the waste of rations to spoilage or cross-contamination. Ivan appreciated her stern, grounded reason, but could see also – even just now, from her walk and introverted expression – that she was a woman crushed. Her children had been everything to her, as he'd overheard her talk about them. They were school-age, before, performing well and heading toward bright futures. Then there was an older man by the name of Henry Traves who was one of a few people that lent previous and more recently-acquired mechanical skills to the construction and maintenance of the settlement's slowly expanding campus. Everything was cramped, attached... it was hard to make a floorplan or blueprint when ay to day you didn't know what kind of space you were going to need or, more pressingly, how much of what resources you were going to have available to you. Some rooms connected where as other's didn't, the hallways radiated outward like a maze.
“They must.” When people stopped talking, everything seemed very quiet in the compound... it was very easy – and something that more than just Ivan had pointed out – to get lost in one's own thoughts rather instantly were there to be a lapse in conversation. Ivan found himself frequently startled, as in this case, by a voice that seemed - for a second – to come out of nowhere. “What do you do?”
As he shook himself out of it, Ivan looked up to meet Niklaus's curious eyes. “Oh, I'm a doctor.”
“Ah, like your friend.” Folding his thick arms across a thicker chest, Witch settled his shoulder against the wall and crossed his ankles. “You two must really run the show down here.”
“Mm, not really run the show... but, people have certainly given us a good ammount of authority, that is true.” Ivan reflected, pressing his lips afterward in thought. He'd never really looked at it that way before... their little society had grown very organically, rather than with the compulsive need that humans sometimes showed to force establishment or go through the motions of convening some kind of mocked-up traditional style government. It was irony that, in this hell for mankind, people demonstrated their better sides much more capably. The world functioned very well when people came together without instruction, and everybody felt a responsibility to just... do what they could. And when they took that as good enough, from the rest of the people around them. The sad thing was, Ivan knew – cynically – that it couldn't last.
“I want to help.” Niklaus said. Once again, Ivan found himself locked uncomfortably in the bigger man's stare. “You and Isolde, can teach me, right? To care for the infirm?”
Ivan blinked quickly, as if he'd been nearly-missed by a blow to the face. “Well, I suppose so, yes... I certainly don't see why not.”
“I know you don't have enough doctors.” Niklaus didn't let Ivan go, pulling up off the wall slightly to lean forward.
“There aren't enough doctors in the whole world, for there to ever be enough in any one place with what's happened to us.” Ivan's voice had gone suddenly hoarse in his throat, but he shook it off, breaking away from Witch and turning to pace a few steps across the floor. “We need to know as much about you as possible, Witch. You have to tell us everything.”
“You're also looking for that man.” Without turning back, Ivan could feel that white grin angled at his back. He couldn't say what it was about Niklaus that made him so uncomfortable, but te tension that rippled across his back was palpable.
“What man.” Ivan stated flatly without turning around, setting his eyes on the far wall.
“The man that leads the people. Adrian. James I think? That sounds right.” There was a pause, stirred only by the contended rumble of a sigh in his deep chest. “You and he are not so different, really? Leading people, by means of faith... stabilizing survivors.”
It snapped against his consciousness. “Adrian James is a monster! He infected his so-called followers, he's been poisoning them with opium to test their so called faith.” Ivan had whirled on Niklaus, looking up at the larger man with a pointed finger. “Isolde and I help people, we've been helping people since day one, not forcing them full of drugs that will damage them forever!”
Witch was un-phased, grinning his free grin and shaking his head just so slightly. Ivan was opening his mouth to speak when Niklaus's cold eyes shifted over his shoulder. The smaller man turned again, flushed and about to demand what the problem was from whatever innocent onlooker had stumbled upon his outburst, only to be greeted with Isolde's cool expression. Her face was drawn, thinly veiled unhappiness ticking just beneath her skin. Beside her, Jadany stood on, a shoulder beneath one of Isolde's light hands. She wasn't looking at either of them.
Ivan's heart – and his anger – withered beneath his breast. He ran his fingers into his hair, feeling the instant regret welling. He wasn't sure if he felt more anger toward himself, or Witch, or Adrian. After a moment of throbbing silence, Niklaus brushed by his shoulder, but then paused, thrusting a finger beneath Ivan's chin. The two men locked eyes.
“He is just as much the face of the New World as you are. And as I am.” That wolf's smile split his face, blue eyes glittering. That face – Niklaus's face – the face of the new world? Ivan nodded slowly, and the pale man pulled away, clapping his shoulder.
“You're part of his crew?” Ivan was struggling to keep his voice calm, searching Niklaus's eyes. “Or you were?”
Niklaus laughed lightly, shaking his head. “No. But you, and he, are the only people that I've seen in my ... years ... of wandering, that are actually doing anything to put the world back together. If you two find one another, you might just have a chance at success.”
“Jadany, take Niklaus down to where we found a place for his cot, will you?” Isolde's voice was like... a river of calm carving Ivan's thoughts. She had been his tranquilizer since day one, and a dogged smile found his features as Niklaus fell into step following, and dwarfing, Jadany as she lead him away. There was a tense moment of irritation flickering across her face, but it untied quickly and her hand replaced Witch's on his shoulder.
“He knows so much more than he's told us, Isolde.”
“You try my patience, Ivan.” She said affectionately, rubbing his shoulder. “He's only been here a few hours. And from what I understand it this man's been outside of society for more than four years. Considering that, he's a prince.”
“Unless he's lying about everything.” Ivan sulked, looking hopefully to the door.
“I thought we were trying to implement a sense of hope and positivity?” Isolde's hand dropped to her side. “Come on. I took some blood, I want you to look at it. After supper we'll talk to him more about Adrian. Look at it this way: if this Witch can lead us to him, there are a lot of answers we've been after that we'll finally have a shot at getting. Remember, we only have a guess as to what he was treating people with the illness with early on, even though most of the infection in Europe originated with him. He's also our first and only really good shot at potentially finding a source for the pathogen.”
Ivan rolled his shoulders, trying to shake out of the sulk. “I think I'm just tired. I'll meet you back up in my room with your samples.”
“Okay.” Isolde pursed her lips slightly, and as Ivan turned to go he saw her shaking her head. She was worried about him... more significantly than she was willing to voice. As he retired himself to the makeshift laboratory, where all those questions came into even sharper relief, he wondered if she wasn't correct to be.
“How many days?” She'd been able to sneak up on Ivan since highschool, so focussed did he get on the machinations of his inner mind when he thought he was alone. The man stirred slightly, lifting himself away from the casement that he'd leaned against, though he didn't turn to look at her.
“1,647. And counting.” He sighed, shaking a bowed head as he extended an arm toward her. The smaller woman tucked herself easily into his side for a brief squeeze. “It gets stranger every day, doesn't it? This thing...” A long exhallation sighed out through his nose. He looked tired.
“Yes.” Isolde replied, stepping forward to splay her hand agaist the cool panes of the window. “Every day.”
Silence swung heavily in the room, neither of the doctors looking at one another.
“We did the best we could, Ivan.” Isolde was the one to break it, not turning to see her old friend's face.
“I still... I just still wonder about that so much. I feel like there's a lot I don't know the truth about, even now.” His voice was as haggered as the land they looked across, mapping seperate routes over the shadowy terrain.
“Well, Ivan... Everyday we're a little bit closer.” In conversation, Isolde didn't like to dwell on the tragedy. Everybody had lost somebody... that's how it worked when that kind of a slice was taken out of the human population on the earth. Regardless of her reticense, however, Isolde was one of the most resilient – intellectually – despite her intimacy with the real facts of the cataclysm, which both of them silently believed was still far worse at its glarled roots than anybody who was left in the aftermath understood. She was the picture of dilligence, going to work every day scrutinizing each lead on any new information – whether it appeared to be related to the spread of the initial infection – that came up, just as they had been doing before the plague exploded across the globe. Some days it was the only thing that kept Ivan going... he'd been ready to give up more than once, resulting in several late nights of her coaxing him minute by minute. I need you. I can't do this without you.
“I guess so.” He said after a long time, drumming his fingers on the sill beside her.
“I came with some news, actually, Ivan.” She said after.
It was unlike Isolde to stall, and this finally brought Ivan around to scrutinize her. She looked as tired as he felt, but that was nothing new. “What do you mean? What eid you find?”
“We're getting a little closer to Adrian.”
Stooping slightly, Ivan set his elbows on the windowsill and sunk his head into his hands. “Is this even what we want, Isolde? Do you think it will really help us, with anything?”
Beside him, she was nodding, eyes fixed on the darkness outside the window. “I'm beginning to think so, more than I was. Wait until you meet the guy I've got downstairs.”
Ivan saught her face with his eyes, looking up from where he leaned as his rambling thoughts were finally and fully derailed.
“What? Who?” He straightened suddenly, feeling a bolt of tension lance painfully through his achey muscles. “What did Adrian do to him?”
Isolde's face went tired, openly, and she shook her head before reaching out to catch Ivan's shoulders with her small hands. “Calm down. Adrian didn't do anything to him.”
“Oh...” Ivan gritted his jaw, rocking his weight back down onto his heels. He felt a little embarassed by the outburst; it had been uncensored, a product of what he was begrudgingly coming to accept was a simple matter of projection. He blamed Adrian James for more – likely a lot more – of the situation at large than he really deserved. It was easier, turning that face he'd never seen into the face of a demon. Isolde tried to reason often with himm, and after four years it was finally starting to shine through and he was beginning to understand that he had to let it go. Not to mention how badly it alienated poor Jadany, but he'd learned quickly – even before everything went to hell – to keep his mouth shut around Jadany.
“He was never with Adrian and his people. But he has seen them. He's been vagrant for years, this is the first time he's spent any real time in a permanent settlement... maybe since the beginning.”
Ivan's mouth worked, pursed over to one side of his face as his emotions waffled from misplaced anger to protectiveness. He opened his mouth to speak, but Isolde stopped him with a laugh and raised a finger between them.
“Oh, for heaven's sake Ivan, before you even ask me... yes, he's in quarantine and decontamination right now, right this minute, being picked over by the kind folks down there who don't want plague in our facilities any more than you or I do. We all understand the risks, doctor Roque. Just remember, some of those people still have family to protect.” She raised an eyebrow at him, smiling in a faintly chastising manner before gesturing out across the darkened landscape. “It isn't over yet.”
Sulking, Ivan slouched again, and on second thought turned his back against the wall to slide down and sit beneath the casement. “What, you mean the worst of it?”
Isolde tousled his hair affectionately, her eyes bolted on the distance that panned, featureless and grim, to the horizon. “No. The world.”
“Seems pretty over to me. Certainly isn't going to recover in my lifetime.” The man grumbled, leaning his head against her knee. “I'm sorry Isolde, I don't mean to be like that. I'm just so tired today, I'm getting tired of the feeling that every new stone we manage to turn over opens up ten more questions. All the answers are so insignificant, compared to what I realize we don't know. Every single god damn day.”
Isolde sighed through her nose. He didn't look up at her, but he could feel in the subtle sway of her muscles that she was shaking her head.
“It's not the significance of the answers that we need to be concerned with, Ivan. It's the number of them, the whole they add up to.”
“But we've been trying to add them up to something for... sixteen hundred some odd days, Isolde, and coming up pretty empty handed.”
“Ivan Roque.” Her voice, which came only after a while of calculating silence, was laden with a heavy, artificial calm.
“...what is it?”
“You and I are trying to move mountains. In so many ways, are endeavor is friendless and poorly equipped... I can't even count the tools that I took for granted in our former life, our former work. This is a whole new world now. You can't even compare it to what we did before. We've gone from being doctors to being... warriors, or something. Something entirely different than what we were.”
Ivan was only slightly heartened by her soliloquoy, but sat up all the same. One thing that she did speak to, that she was entirely right about, that his mind and heart would never let him forget (this is what had made him good at what he did before, and what kept him alive when everything came down, and what was going to keep him going until he walked right into his grave) that there was a job to be done. He and Isolde had been some of the only people qualified for work of this weight before more than half of the human race had been annihilated by the deadly disease... he certainly knew there was no one else to step up and carry the banner, now.
“Alright, Isolde. Let's go get to know your latest student.”
She lowered a hand to help tug him to his feet, but grabbed his arm when he made for the door. “His name's Niklaus. He didn't give me a surname.” There was a small hesitation in her voice; Isolde was making some hasty, but careful, decisions about what she was going to tell her partner and what she was going to let him find out for himself. “But he won't be out of detox for a little while yet.” She paused, and patted his shoulder. “Since you're up, though, maybe you should go see Jada. She was asking how you were the other day, and it would be good for you to get out of here for a while.” Walking away from him, Isolde waved a hand dismissively about the small room that had been given to him for work, while Isolde spent most of her time downstairs in the infirmiry.
Ivan slumped slightly. It wasn't easy to reconcile the way he felt about Jadany. She deserved his ire even less than Adrian did, but Ivan would never stop seeing Adrian James as a monster. The woman who so clearly loved him and, it seemed to Ivan, would turn her back on them at a moment's notice to go back to that way of life struck him as little more than an accessory to his madness. Either way, Jadany Arkenstone had been a key to many of the answers they had found, however insignificant they may have yet seemed.
“Alright, I'll go check on her.”
Jadany had taken an equally aggressive stance alongside Ivan and Isolde in terms of appreciating and using the fact that she was still capable, still functional; indeed, still alive at all. Their outpourings were all different... and unlike the other two of their unlikely trio, Jadany didn't possess world-class microbiological education, but – and Isolde made a specific point to Ivan about it, regularly – she was far from useless. She'd found her place among the orphaned and otherwise aggrieved children of the plague and associated warfare, a caretaker and compatriot, a teacher.
In the semi-permanent settlement that had sprung up in the relative safety of their little oasis, there were about a dozen kids between the ages of 4 and 11 or so. The small pack of rangy teenagers where treated more or less as adults, a position that they adjusted to fairly quickly once things got settled down. They pulled their weight somberly, never speaking of the dead families, schoolmates, girlfriends... and spent their free time in lockstep, a secret society braced only on themselves for support.
Jadany had all the younger ones, surrogate mother and govereness in as many capabilities as the young woman could manage. They found out early on that this group would not likely grow in numbers, unless they were to go out and find other kids in places that could shelter them. There were occasionally strays, out in from the wasted land, but they were rare and always adults. The state of the outside world was not friendly enough to allow an unescorted child to survive... Ivan and Isolde figured that anyone caught out in that holocaust of elements and disease, that did not get bunkered or find shelter otherwise, was probably dead before the first year was over and done with. Very quickly, the focus of energy went from finding survivors to keeping the people that one had alive. Every heartbeat was precious, as Isolde always said.
Ivan found Jadany surrounded by a tidy circle of rag-tag, cross-legged children. They were all thin and pale, and in a weird way ornamental to Jadany's bird-like fragility; a quality of hers that had pre-existed the onslaught of the plague, and only grown more pronounced as the years of deprivation wore onward. She was reading slowly from a tattered storybok, turning each page gingerly when the passages finished and turning the next so that the group could see the associated pictures. Ivan hovered on the outskirts of their tiny pow-wow, studying the faces of the kids as they watched her. Every one was so intense, focussing on her careful diction and even tone. It made him despair a little; Jadany, who looked at any moment like she might just blow away with the slightest puff of a draft, was all they had.
He noticed after a few minutes that some of the older children had little slates that they were writing on, copying down the words section by section as they read, practicing. No schools, no study programs, nothing to even teach these children to read with the exception of Jada. Ivan felt his moody heart soften a little. He saw her infrequently... their first impressions of one another had been quite negative, and the stigma of those times – before the cataclysm, though they were, and now so long ago – had never really faded, from either of them. He'd been surprised when Isolde had said that Jadany had inquired after his wellbeing... that she'd noticed what a recluse he'd been for the last week. And here she was, pouring every waking moment into trying to preserve literacy in the derelict next-generation of a shattered human race. Isolde was right. Everything was different, now.
By this point, some of the kids had began to take notice of him, being slowly distracted from their story circle by the presence of a relative stranger. In the settlement, all faces were familiar, it was a small community... a lot of people were still in some phase of denial about having lost everything, however, withdrawn into their own psyche and clinging to whatever private hopes kept them alive day to day. Ivan, and a couple of other self-proclaimed researchers who had landed in this little pit, were largely aloof... it was easier than having to stare that demon in the mouth and, frankly, there was a lot of work to do and limited resources to do it with. He and Isolde were studying every microbe they were able to get their hands on, isolating the different types of infection that had torn apart their species from the inside out. Ivan had, two years ago, come up with the idea that – once communication lines were established between themselves and other, similar areas where human life persisted – that people at large should scout for samples of contaminated soil and plant matter, anything they could get their hands on, so that they could be analyzed. That way, they could map the route of the contagions... he envisioned all the facts beginning to come together like one beautiful puzzle that would eventually show a clear path to some kind of clean, promised land. Some things degraded much faster than others, becoming dead and inert – harmless. Other things lasted a long time, a black mark on his map, an area that wouldn't be safe for generations. Timelining all of the different contaminants was the way that the human race would be able to take back their ravaged planet, but it was slow going. Painfully slow going.
When Jadany realized that her kids were being taken from listening to her, she pulled herself out of her focus and looked around from her place on the floor, finally setting her eyes on Ivan who, embarassed at being percieved to be staring, cleared his throat and waved.
“Um, yes doctor Roque? Did you need something?” Her voice was so small, she could have almost been one of them.
Ivan shook his head. “I was just hoping I could listen in for a while.” One of the older girls – perhaps eight – shuffled aside and told the little boy she'd been sitting near to make room. Totally of their own accord, they'd come to make a place for Ivan in their circle. The girl grinned – she was missing a front tooth, the adult replacement beginning to show brightly through the gum – sunnily up to the tall man who folded his legs somewhat awkwardly and sat down. His heart swelled painfully... these, he figured, were the kind of private hopes people were clinging to, to wake up in the morning and keep moving.
Jadany finished that storybook and another – both ritualistically familiar to the children, for lack of anything else to read in the compound other than compiled medical research and haphazard attempts at settlement-wide record keeping. Then, the older children paired off with the younger children to help with some handwriting excersizes, Ivan filling in with the odd-man-out, as there were only eleven children, so that Jadany could oversee the little class as a whole.
Then, the slight woman sent them off to bed. They all slept in one room, on cots comandeered from an old hospital, lined up neatly. Once they were safely shut in, Jadany turned to a slightly sheepish looking Ivan, hands burried deep in his pockets.
“Thank you, for that, doctor Roque.” She nodded his way, stooping to pick up the two books and folding them against her chest.
“Really, Jada, call me Ivan. It's been beyond long enough.” He cleared his throat and tried to smile. She was a little more successful, wide doe's eyes large and dark in her face.
“It makes a lot of difference to them, Ivan. The more people they get to see, or play with. Makes them stronger. Gives them a better chance to survive.”
“They're all orphans?” He already knew the answer to that question, even as she nodded, her eyes closed a moment.
“Every one. Healthy, though... as much as someone can be these days.” Jadany was a lucky case... she was one of the early infections, and Adrian had burned it out of her with opiates and strycchnaine, chemicals that reacted with the strange contagion in ways that Ivan and Isolde still didn't understand. The damage that had been done to her body – both by the microbe, and the poisons – was irreparable. She would never be strong again, never look full or real like a girl of her age should. A part of Jada had died, and what was left was ghostlike and fragile. Her smile was kind, though, and she worked tirelessly for the young and the sick. Though there were few of the former, they were hugely important... and there were loads of the latter.
Ivan nodded after a few moments and then, kicking at the floor a little nervously, spoke what he'd come to say. “Jada, I'm sorry that... we've never gotten along better. I've really been less than a gentleman at times.” It wasn't that he went out of his way to make her life difficult... Ivan openly supported her in a variety of endeavors, and was silent at worst about the many things he knew they didn't agree on. However, due to basic prejudice he'd always held her at arms length, determined not to allow her to become a friend or confidant, and that simply wasn't very fair. Opportunities for warmth, for friendship, were as rare and precious here as any life was, to the world.
She smiled, nodding a little. “It's alright. I understand why, finally.”
“Certainly doesn't make it acceptable. If in this age we can't overcome our differences then what are we but insects waiting for our extermination to be complete?” It was a somewhat morebid thing to say – and came out of his mouth entirely more macabre than he intended, but Jadany just laughed a little and shook her head.
“I forgive you, if that's what you're asking.”
Ivan laughed, a little embarassed, and then shrugged her in the direction of the exit.
“Isolde's picked up someone she wants me to meet, someone from out in the wastes. Want to come?”
“Very much so.” Jadany nodded, catching up to his shoulder with a hasty step. Smiling for the company and trying to relax a little – maybe this first impression would be better than the one with Jadany – Ivan lead them out into the hall that would funnel them toward the quarantine/decontam area.
“Do you remember what you did before?” Isolde pressed, her hands folded tight atop an open notebook with nothing yet written on the page.
“No, not much of anything from before. Nothing concrete.” Niklaus pushed the corners of his mouth down thoughtfully, never looking at her. His fierce eyes – a pale, icy blue – constantly scanned the area behind her, panning over and over the open commons that they sat at the edge of. He straddled a chair with his back against the wall, powerful arms crossed just above the wrist and hands hanging. He sat very still, minus the constant movement of those eyes, waiting for a death that could come at any moment.
This man was the strangest thing they had yet pulled in from that wild land that the familiar world had become, overgrown and changing at a rapid rate. People talked a lot about repairing the world, restoring it to what it had been, but Isolde knew in her heart nothing was ever going to be like it was before. Not in her generation, and not in any that would follow it – assuming the human race was able to cajole it's survival from the universe. From the simplest to the most grand of things, what facets of society had been able to remain alive, and what different faces of nature, were forever changed. In the four years since the earth was razed by disease and despair, she'd seen a great many things as a biproduct of all that destruction. People sick with every kind of unimaginable ailment, as well as any reflection of madness that one cared to put a name or face to. But Niklaus... he was neither ill, nor mad, nor was he recovered... at least, not like Jada was, scarred forever by the sickness in a way that you could almost see, but not quite put your finger on.
That was not to say that Niklaus had not been changed. That was what was fascinating about him.
“I don't know why you're asking me these questions, miss.” Niklaus smiled a broad, eerie smile, from which his teeth flashed whitely. One was chipped.
Isolde put her notebook down on her lap, eyeing him levelly. Niklaus made her a little nervous, but it was equally exciting, being in the presence of living, breathing proof and evidence of a wealth of information that she didn't have yet. “Pardon? We conduct the interview to determine... well, we'd like to know more about you, what you're coming from and if there's any way we can help you.”
He laughed a little. “Miss, I've lived a long time out there, as well as a man alone with only his own skin can live. Asking me where I've been isn't going to help you find what you're looking for.”
Isolde stared thoughtfully at him until a few moments later when his eyes slipped from her face upward. A hand landed on her shoulder, and a quick glance to the side revealed Jadany and Ivan standing quietly. Resettling her gaze on Niklaus, Isolde stated quietly, “We're looking for a great many things.”
Niklaus, this is Ivan Roque and Jadany Arkenstone. My dearest friends and assistants.”
In a single, powerful motion, Niklaus stood. Between the two small girls, and Ivan's average height and build, Niklaus was a giant. He was easily six and a half feet tall, broad shoulders bound in spare, heavy muscles. His hair was long and pure white, framing the hard angles of a pale, high-cheek boned face. He extended a hand first to Ivan, enveloping the doctor's hand in a firm, steady grip before offering it to the slightly more timid Jadany. Ivan cleared his throat.
“A pleasure, Niklaus. Welcome.”
“Though they've had the opportunity infrequently, most people have called me Witch.”
Ivan pursed his lips a little. There was very little about the big man that was not alarming, he had decided already, and this was no exception.
“Why's that?” He found himself asking, but Niklaus – Witch – waved the question off with the flick of a hand.
“It's warm here. That is good.” That disconcerting smile spread across his features again, eyes sweeping the room behind them with an appreciative nod. His gaze found it's way quickly back to Isolde. “May I stay?”
The question was so blunt, so simply asked as to cast a strange and childlike shadow lancing through his features.
Recognizing that powerful Niklaus saw her as some kind of figure of authority here, Isolde smiled and nodded. “I hope you will, Niklaus. We don't have a lot to offer, but together we have more than one may does alone, out there.”
He nodded his grinning agreement, like some kind of snowy barbarian playing the part of a gentleman.
After a short time, conversation somehow bending like refracted light around anything that was a straight answer, the girls left Ivan and Niklaus to go check on the infirmary patients and find some bedclothes and a cot for their latest lost lamb. The two men sat across from one another, the silence filling up around them like floodwater. Isolde had been the primary driver of conversation... Witch was particularly attentive to her, and Ivan hadn't decided whether he believed it was beccause she was pretty, or because he saw her as the pack leader, or what. Either way, no matter how off-putting the starkly pale man was, he oddly seemed anything but threatening. He was grateful for what they offered him, understood what shelter and companionship meant. Ivan got the feeling that he had been very lonely for a long time, and that – whether or not he claimed to not remember anything from before – the presences of all these people probably rubbed down into an old wound of loss.
“How long has it been.” His deep voice echoed out after a little while, carrying with it a quality not unlike someone who is speaking from the back of a cave or the bottom of a deep well.
"Beg pardon?” Ivan, shaken from his reverie, replied.
“How long. Since the end of the world.” Niklaus wasn't looking at the other man, his eyes settled interminably forward, staring through the far wall of the room and beyond it.
“The war ended four and a half years ago, round abouts.” Ivan tried to feign nonchallance by not delivering the number of days. Isolde and he counted them back and forth... days since the last leader from the old world had finally dropped dead of the plague and the machines of warfare finally ground to a squealing, thunderous halt. By that point, the plague was beginning to burn itself out too... not because of some breakthrough on the part of people like them, but simply for the fact that it was running out of fuel to feed itself. No pathogen can spread beyond the edges of the population that it consumes, and the frontiers of human society had grown very narrow, and very broken. What irony was this, of mankind, that when faced by something that could truly threaten the state and future of the human race, they turn to murdering one another. That had always made Ivan laugh, in a way.
Niklaus was nodding slowly. “Longer than I thought.” The words were carefully neutral, frank, but the veneer concealed something deeper and more painful. It confirmed Ivan's suspicions of Niklaus's isolation for the majority of that time.
“And you survived? Just, out there, without any help or backup...?” Being incredulous, by this point, was not something Ivan was going to have an easy time suppressing.
“Something like that.” A small laugh, then, deep in his cavernous chest. “I stopped in on a few groups of people, what's left... nothing for a while though. I've been alone for a while. This is the first settlement I've seen that seems... like it might stick around, and not just be blown down by the next passing wind.” He turned an appreciative smile up to Ivan,
“Heh, thanks... we do the best we can here. Everybody works very hard.” The general thoroughfare that passed through this commons area had died down for this later part of the evening, but Ivan found himself searching after the people he saw passing by. He associated people as much to the work that they had done, and continued to do, as he did with their names. Carol Ramsey, she'd been a housewife before, and had organized a small brigade of people to keep the facilities as sanitary as possible, especially insofar as the storage and preparation of food were concerned. It sounded frumpy and prudish, but she went about it with a sharp eye and sharper reason, pointing out to anyone who might have made a jab how nobody could afford the risk of food borne illness or the waste of rations to spoilage or cross-contamination. Ivan appreciated her stern, grounded reason, but could see also – even just now, from her walk and introverted expression – that she was a woman crushed. Her children had been everything to her, as he'd overheard her talk about them. They were school-age, before, performing well and heading toward bright futures. Then there was an older man by the name of Henry Traves who was one of a few people that lent previous and more recently-acquired mechanical skills to the construction and maintenance of the settlement's slowly expanding campus. Everything was cramped, attached... it was hard to make a floorplan or blueprint when ay to day you didn't know what kind of space you were going to need or, more pressingly, how much of what resources you were going to have available to you. Some rooms connected where as other's didn't, the hallways radiated outward like a maze.
“They must.” When people stopped talking, everything seemed very quiet in the compound... it was very easy – and something that more than just Ivan had pointed out – to get lost in one's own thoughts rather instantly were there to be a lapse in conversation. Ivan found himself frequently startled, as in this case, by a voice that seemed - for a second – to come out of nowhere. “What do you do?”
As he shook himself out of it, Ivan looked up to meet Niklaus's curious eyes. “Oh, I'm a doctor.”
“Ah, like your friend.” Folding his thick arms across a thicker chest, Witch settled his shoulder against the wall and crossed his ankles. “You two must really run the show down here.”
“Mm, not really run the show... but, people have certainly given us a good ammount of authority, that is true.” Ivan reflected, pressing his lips afterward in thought. He'd never really looked at it that way before... their little society had grown very organically, rather than with the compulsive need that humans sometimes showed to force establishment or go through the motions of convening some kind of mocked-up traditional style government. It was irony that, in this hell for mankind, people demonstrated their better sides much more capably. The world functioned very well when people came together without instruction, and everybody felt a responsibility to just... do what they could. And when they took that as good enough, from the rest of the people around them. The sad thing was, Ivan knew – cynically – that it couldn't last.
“I want to help.” Niklaus said. Once again, Ivan found himself locked uncomfortably in the bigger man's stare. “You and Isolde, can teach me, right? To care for the infirm?”
Ivan blinked quickly, as if he'd been nearly-missed by a blow to the face. “Well, I suppose so, yes... I certainly don't see why not.”
“I know you don't have enough doctors.” Niklaus didn't let Ivan go, pulling up off the wall slightly to lean forward.
“There aren't enough doctors in the whole world, for there to ever be enough in any one place with what's happened to us.” Ivan's voice had gone suddenly hoarse in his throat, but he shook it off, breaking away from Witch and turning to pace a few steps across the floor. “We need to know as much about you as possible, Witch. You have to tell us everything.”
“You're also looking for that man.” Without turning back, Ivan could feel that white grin angled at his back. He couldn't say what it was about Niklaus that made him so uncomfortable, but te tension that rippled across his back was palpable.
“What man.” Ivan stated flatly without turning around, setting his eyes on the far wall.
“The man that leads the people. Adrian. James I think? That sounds right.” There was a pause, stirred only by the contended rumble of a sigh in his deep chest. “You and he are not so different, really? Leading people, by means of faith... stabilizing survivors.”
It snapped against his consciousness. “Adrian James is a monster! He infected his so-called followers, he's been poisoning them with opium to test their so called faith.” Ivan had whirled on Niklaus, looking up at the larger man with a pointed finger. “Isolde and I help people, we've been helping people since day one, not forcing them full of drugs that will damage them forever!”
Witch was un-phased, grinning his free grin and shaking his head just so slightly. Ivan was opening his mouth to speak when Niklaus's cold eyes shifted over his shoulder. The smaller man turned again, flushed and about to demand what the problem was from whatever innocent onlooker had stumbled upon his outburst, only to be greeted with Isolde's cool expression. Her face was drawn, thinly veiled unhappiness ticking just beneath her skin. Beside her, Jadany stood on, a shoulder beneath one of Isolde's light hands. She wasn't looking at either of them.
Ivan's heart – and his anger – withered beneath his breast. He ran his fingers into his hair, feeling the instant regret welling. He wasn't sure if he felt more anger toward himself, or Witch, or Adrian. After a moment of throbbing silence, Niklaus brushed by his shoulder, but then paused, thrusting a finger beneath Ivan's chin. The two men locked eyes.
“He is just as much the face of the New World as you are. And as I am.” That wolf's smile split his face, blue eyes glittering. That face – Niklaus's face – the face of the new world? Ivan nodded slowly, and the pale man pulled away, clapping his shoulder.
“You're part of his crew?” Ivan was struggling to keep his voice calm, searching Niklaus's eyes. “Or you were?”
Niklaus laughed lightly, shaking his head. “No. But you, and he, are the only people that I've seen in my ... years ... of wandering, that are actually doing anything to put the world back together. If you two find one another, you might just have a chance at success.”
“Jadany, take Niklaus down to where we found a place for his cot, will you?” Isolde's voice was like... a river of calm carving Ivan's thoughts. She had been his tranquilizer since day one, and a dogged smile found his features as Niklaus fell into step following, and dwarfing, Jadany as she lead him away. There was a tense moment of irritation flickering across her face, but it untied quickly and her hand replaced Witch's on his shoulder.
“He knows so much more than he's told us, Isolde.”
“You try my patience, Ivan.” She said affectionately, rubbing his shoulder. “He's only been here a few hours. And from what I understand it this man's been outside of society for more than four years. Considering that, he's a prince.”
“Unless he's lying about everything.” Ivan sulked, looking hopefully to the door.
“I thought we were trying to implement a sense of hope and positivity?” Isolde's hand dropped to her side. “Come on. I took some blood, I want you to look at it. After supper we'll talk to him more about Adrian. Look at it this way: if this Witch can lead us to him, there are a lot of answers we've been after that we'll finally have a shot at getting. Remember, we only have a guess as to what he was treating people with the illness with early on, even though most of the infection in Europe originated with him. He's also our first and only really good shot at potentially finding a source for the pathogen.”
Ivan rolled his shoulders, trying to shake out of the sulk. “I think I'm just tired. I'll meet you back up in my room with your samples.”
“Okay.” Isolde pursed her lips slightly, and as Ivan turned to go he saw her shaking her head. She was worried about him... more significantly than she was willing to voice. As he retired himself to the makeshift laboratory, where all those questions came into even sharper relief, he wondered if she wasn't correct to be.
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Date: 2011-11-06 07:15 am (UTC)purses hermes birkin 40cm
Date: 2011-12-04 10:28 pm (UTC)