incognoscibilis | And time goes quicker between the two of us [Blue Sargent 3/25/16]

"The cow's still awake," she says, coming up the stairs. Which is, likely, not the normal reaction to hearing one's name. Nor is it as sudden a revelation as it sounds. She's been sitting thinking, and thinking turned into a sort of weird vigil, and anyway none of this is normal.

"I mean, doing normal cow things. So--" she rounds the corner, feeling helpless with just this information. "He, they, wherever they are--"

Blue stops, seeing the bowl full of dark liquid. It wipes her mind of suggestions or what ifs, sends a shiver through her. "Oh," she says instead of anything else, and looks up at Adam. "When did...that happen?"

"Just now. I...I haven't started," Adam said, suddenly feeling like he'd been caught doing something he shouldn't. Precisely because scrying like this was a terrible idea. There was no Calla this time, no third factor to ground while Blue amplified, but he trusted her to pull the plug and draw him back if he needed to.

"I tried going to the police and they just didn't even care. Gansey, Ronan, Noah. They're all gone and the police just don't give a damn!"

He was desperate. They both were.

"Better not have," she says, the snappy comeback instinct more than anything. Blue looks at the bowl, and she can't help but be afraid she won't be enough, or that it heralds something terrible -- her mind flashes back to Persephone between the mirrors, only it's Gansey she's clutching at, this time --

But there's nothing to do. Sitting around isn't an option.

"Of course they don't," she says, bitter. "We're immigrants." She laughs humorlessly. She's never felt so different in this place. "Someone yelled that at me on the way home the other day and it took me a good minute to realize it wasn't," she gestures to her face, her skin. In Henrietta, only the most overtly racist section of the population had ever said anything straight to her face, but it didn't take much to understand.

"I don't think anyone's going to do anything." But they can. Blue clenches her hands against her hoodie and looks at the set up, stepping closer to Adam. Okay.

"If you lose yourself in there, I'm going to actually kill you."

Adam gestured for Blue to sit down opposite him. "Did you give them a piece of your mind?" he asked, trying to eke a little smile out of her before they had to see to the difficult work of being a witch and a magician. "I can still remember that idiot at the convenience store. I thought you were gonna eviscerate him while he laughed." If he didn't hate conflict, he would have almost delighted in it.

Blue Sargent was as refined with her words and her principles as Robert Parrish was blunt with his fists.

Picking up a lighter from the floor behind him, Adam lit one candle. "Cabeswater wants its Greywaren safe. It knows that stealing me out of my body won't make that happen." It didn't mean that something else might have an agenda opposite Cabeswater's but he thought that, at least, he could rely on the forest not to do him harm.

He held out both hands. "I'm trusting you."

Edited 2016-03-25 05:54 (UTC)

That does get a little smile out of her. "God, I wish. They were in a car." She sits down opposite, eyes narrowing and smile going smirky in a combination of annoyance and triumph. "What a piece of misogynist trash. It was a waste of words, but it felt good."

"Is that what it knew the last two times?" she snarks. He's right at least that if Cabeswater has any say in it, Ronan will be okay. She reminds herself of that moment in the cave, Ronan yelling at Cabeswater that he wouldn't be safe if Gansey died. It'll keep them both safe, if it can. It's a horrible, selfish thing to need, but she does right now. Her vivid, reaching imagination is proving extremely good at all sorts of possibilities for every one of their missing friends.

"You're right," she says, because Adam should know she's with him, and she takes a long breath, centering herself as much as she's able to sitting in front of something that could kill someone she loves. "We don't have any other options, anyway. I'm just so sick of not seeing meaning I'm the one who watches, you know?"

She pulls her switchblade from her pocket and sets it down in front of her. In case. Neatly across from the bowl, it seems appropriate. It pulls her into readiness and she tries to focus on the part of her she can shut off sometimes, to try to urge it on, tries to shut out the panic that something terrible will happen. Is happening.

His trust means a lot, especially right now; it tugs at her. There's not even anything good to say back to it -- not the right time to joke, and not enough of it to be truly honest. Blue just reaches her hands out to him, giving his a squeeze and a little nod. "Let's do this."

"Damn doppler effect," Adam surmised. They were lucky they'd been in a car but if Blue's legs had been long enough, she'd probably have run alongside the car and given them what was coming anyway.

Her question about Cabeswater was valid and Adam shrugged, uncertain. "It doesn't...we can't apply our morality to it," he admitted. "But it likes to keep its tools polished and shiny." It was a crude metaphor, but he thought Blue could understand.

The sight of the switchblade was oddly reassuring, as if that was the final component they'd needed to complete their circle. An unlit candle. A lit candle. An unopened switchblade. And them. Now all of the ingredients were present, right down to the organic pomegranate juice (he didn't know if Cabeswater had a preference, but if they were trying to find Gansey, he figured organic was best).

Squeezing Blue's hands, Adam took a steadying breath and looked into the bowl, letting his eyes go unfocused as he reached into the liminal part of his brain where Cabeswater lived. He envisioned the root system of hundreds of trees, all of them touching and connecting, and bid the forest to give Adam sight along the lines.

"BiGOtttss," she jokes, imitating the doppler effect of them driving past her, and smiles a little. It feels wrong, like she shouldn't be able to smile, like she's doing someone a disservice. In truth it's a little more that all her emotions feel closer to the surface and her body's what's trying to push them all down. Like the numbness and practicality is all she's got between life and an avalanche of everything. If Adam drew a real laugh from her right now she might just have to keep laughing until she was done.

It's not invalid, and she nods. It's still sort of crazily fucked up to think of Adam as a tool of anything, but she can at least try to trust that.

She takes a deep breath, quelling the unsettling feeling it gives her to watch his eyes go unfocused; she pushes it out of her head and trades it for practicality. Blue pushes a little at that part of her that amplifies, tries to send it through her to Adam. Brighten the light, clear the signal. Without Calla or even Noah here to anchor, it feels a little more tenuous, but she isn't able to hold back on it: he needs this. She needs him to see; he needs her to be able to. Gansey and Ronan and Noah need them to do this right.

She watches the rise and fall of his chest, his eyes, both reassuring herself and alert for a change. Her heart's hammering in her chest.

He huffed out a breath. It wasn't quite a laugh–Adam was too tense for that–but it was close enough to relieve a little of the tension. Blue Sargent armored herself in strangeness, in careful irreverence, the way that Adam Parrish confined himself to his own mind, made himself unknowable.

Careful not to show his fear, Adam squeezed Blue's hands and then inhaled deeply. Then he exhaled. He told himself to calm his breath, his thoughts, to let all of it sink into some other place until he was in that empty Cabeswater place. He was aware, but only distantly, of the hands in his. Gansey. Noah. Ronan.

He knew. Adam didn't know if he thought or spoke the realization. He didn't even know who knew, just that he did and it made his chest ache. He knew. And it was significant.

But what he or anyone else knew did not help him locate Gansey. Or remember who Gansey was. Cabeswater had such a hard time telling people apart that didn't belong to it.

Blue's never sure what she's supposed to be doing except helping, here, and as far as she can ever tell with these things she's helping sort of by existing, which means she just has to wait. The anxiousness and impetus to be quiet makes her want to talk, move, do something. She pushes past it resolutely, taking a breath and focusing on staying still.

(Blue's shitty at meditation.)

She thinks of Dorian and Harry in the other city, the lake back home -- the last few times she's used her power to any extent beyond just being, and tries to spin it out. Thinks of Ronan, sitting on the edge of the water with no light and watching her, the same Ronan as theirs bringing cows from Cabeswater and different. Gansey looking at the cave in awe, or brushing his nose against hers or taking her hand on any given day coming home from the library. Noah, faded or reliving death or just an ordinary boy laughing and curled up on the couch.

Like if she imagines them fully it'll help Adam instead of making her sad.

She's also got to do Calla's job, here, too, though. Or Noah's. Whoever's the one responsible for not being her or Adam. The one holding the line while Adam rappels down into whatever cave Cabeswater has made for him this time.

It helps a little to think of it that way.

"He knows," Adam says, a voice that is and is not Adam's, and she startles a little. There's no getting used to someone speaking through one of your friends. It's always dangerously close to when she has to bring him back; but it's important, too.

Who knows?

Carefully, she feeds out a little line.

No. He knew. He knew on the roadside. Past tense, because he was gone now. Gone beyond Cabeswater's reach, which troubled the forest. It liked to keep its things all in once place. It was so much tidier. But one of them was Gone. The others were somewhere else, somewhere the forest could touch but not dissemble.

Trapped.

Trapped and gone were very different things.

Raising his head, Adam and the thing he'd let see through him–Adam and Cabeswater–looked at Blue, eyes bottomless.

Four little Raven boys, nothing left to see One took his leave back home and then there were three.

He's moving his lips, but nothing like words she can understand are coming out, his eyes open but moving like he's dreaming.

Adam, Cabeswater. whatever it is says something clearly, but Blue can't understand. Capti is what comes out of his mouth, and dammit, she doesn't speak Latin. "Captive?" she repeats, trying to make sense of it. It's simultaneously terrifying and better than some alternatives she can think of.

Adam tips his head up and his eyes are hollow. Black, fixed on her. She can feel fear shoot through her like ice, bile rise in her throat. His - their tone is almost playful, sing-song like a child's game, a little mocking.

No. No -- Blue is anguished at it; she can't breathe. Her mind is running over with questions. Who's captive? Who's the One? "Where are they?" she demands. Her hands are trembling in Adam's. "Stop playing games and tell us where they are! You want the Greywaren back or not?"

She should pull him back. She needs to pull it together and pull him back before there are two. "Adam..."

Four little Raven boys, noticed by the Horn. Three got caught and then there was one. The ghost. The dreamer. The thief. The one that left. Its hands and eyes. Cabeswater couldn't find them. It troubled the forest greatly and it didn't have the words in any language to describe who had done the taking. It could feed Adam an image, one he grasped at, but that was all.

An elegant creature, with the graceful limbs of a deer but scaled like a dragon, its tail like some kind of feathered dinosaur. And atop its head, gleaming like a crown, a pair of elegant horns. It had a name and he had to find it, but Cabeswater had no word for it.

What walks like a deer, has armor like a dragon, and horns of gold?

Adam says four little raven boys again, and then he trails off, the blackness of his eyes going unfocused, swaying. "Adam," she repeats, sharper. "Adam." A tug on the line, or the equivalent of it.

But no tug answers. No response to her withdrawal. He's still, staring, and she lets out a stressed little exhale, pulling her hands away from his and pulling her knees up, trying to shut down on herself, to pull whatever makes her so powerful to psychics back into herself. Like shutting down on Noah. Fuck you, Adam Parrish, she thinks, fuck you and your fucking forest, don't you leave me alone here.

"Wake up," she says, and without anything left to do, smacks him across the face, feeling horrible and sick for it.

Nothing.

"You don't get to die on me, okay," she says out loud, grabbing her switchblade and with it is the terrible knowledge that she could be entirely alone. She can't get it open, fumbling. She is alone, here in this stupid warehouse, by herself and there's nothing she can do to help anyone.

Screw that. "You can't." She takes a deep breath and slashes down across his arm.

What walks like a deer, has armor like a dragon, and horns of gold?

"What walks like a deer, has armor like a dragon, and horns of gold?" It was in English this time but Adam's eyes were still wide, dilated black, and unfocused. Cabeswater pressed the image on him again and again with a desperate lack of Latin word for it. Fingers shaking he reached blindly forward, Adam's grasp faltered when his arm met the knife and Adam jolted back into himself. Like falling off a building in a dream and waking up right before the impact.

Chest heaving, he looked at Blue. "Cards," he rasped out. "I need the ca–"

Adam paused and touched his face, realizing that the left side of it was smarting. "Did you slap me?"

He jerks forward with a gasp, like waking from a dream , and Blue grabs for Adam. He's saying something about cards but nothing seems to be processing quite.

Then he puts his hand to his cheek. "I'm sorry," she says, eyes wide with guilt. "I. Yeah. I know I fucked up, I'm sorry. You weren't breathing...I panicked." Blue abruptly hates this, hates her own lack of collectedness. Hates that she can be relied on to hurt Adam, one way or another.

"Cards," she says after a minute, trying to be steel, and moves the deck to him.

"Shit, Blue, no. I..." He leaned forward until their foreheads touched, a gesture that they made platonic. Stubbornly so. There was a difference in what Blue did and in what he'd consented to, as compared to other times he was physically struck. He knew that Blue wouldn't have done it if she didn't have another option.

"I just kind of always figured you'd slap me across the face a lot sooner." It wasn't quite funny because the gesture was still loaded with associations but at the same time if he couldn't be the one to laugh at it, then who could?

"Cabeswater has an understanding of what's taken them..." Adam said. His arm shook and he paused, arm hovering over the cards. "Maybe I should get the first aid kit."

She leans into the touch gratefully and takes a breath, knees bumping his. It's good to be able to do this like friends without the weirdness between them: she's not sure how she'd have survived the last eight months without that. "I'm just. Really glad I got you back." She's a little terrified every time they do this, but this time seems worse. Maybe because of the last time, and Persephone, but also because she's so scared for the others. It had seemed a little inevitable that something would go wrong. That she'd do something wrong, that maybe there wasn't preventing anything.

She snorts a wry little exhale of a laugh. "Just don't get forward, young man." Blue sits back, saying, "I haven't slapped Ronan yet, and he's still making fun of me for Valentine's Day. You're good."

She frowns at his arm, forgotten momentarily. "I'll get the first aid kit, you stay still. And lift that up," she adds, as she pulls her feet under her. "Above your heart." She pulls takes off and returns a few moments later with the kit and some frozen peas. "Here." She wrinkles her nose and wipes the blood away with an alcohol wipe before putting down some gauze and rummaging for the tape. "Put some pressure on that."

And despite it all, he was able to let out a little smile too. "Remind me, later, to tell you how bad my Valentine's Day went," he said, smiling thinly. It would make for an excellent story that would be better enjoyed once things stopped going so completely wrong.

He did as he was told and raised his arm over his hand, tugging over the cards while he mulled over what Cabeswater had tried to tell him. "It kept showing me this image, this animal," he said. "And asking me a riddle. Not 'cause it was trying to be obtuse but because it didn't have a word for it. It was like...I don't know. If you mixed a unicorn and a dragon?"

Hell, Adam wasn't sure he had a word for that either.

When Blue was finished doctoring him up, Adam pushed Persephone's deck to her. "Can you shuffle it? I've got a feeling you should."

"Oh no," Blue says with a wincing smile, thinking about the chocolates and the myriad possibilities. "I'm afraid to ask. Which doesn't mean I don't want you to tell me," she hastens.

"What walks like a deer, has armor like a dragon, and horns of gold," she says. "You said it, while you were out. Something did, anyway." She frowns, sitting back down. Riddles aren't always literal, so she'd been trying to think of things that aren't animals -- armor, horns, it could be some sort of military vehicle, but the walking like a deer had been confusing. But it sounds like it is one, anyway.

She takes a breath and takes Persephone's cards carefully in her hands. "Okay." They're worn at the edges and like every other deck of cards, Blue can feel absolutely no tingles or warmth or rightness from them, but maybe the nothing she feels is a little more like Persephone, a little. She splits the deck in half and folds them into a fall, shuffles them in her hands another time, the deadpan dealer of fates, and spreads them down across the floor for Adam.

He nodded, chewing absentmindedly on his knuckle and watching the shift and cascade of cards. "It said it in riddles because it doesn't know how to communicate otherwise, but because it also just doesn't have a word for it." The creature had looked so beyond any mythology that either of them might know that Adam was stumped for even a guess.

"It was definitely an animal," he said, trying to think it out, wishing he could draw. "Like something off a Chinese scroll." At least, he guessed it would be on a scroll. Most of the Chinese art he'd seen was on the borders of a take out menu.

Breathing out, Adam bent over and studied the fanned out cards. One card for each of them. His hand hovered and selected four cards, which Adam put facedown on the space between them, naming whose card was which. "Ronan. Noah. Gansey," he said. Then, thinking better of it, he also took out a fourth. "Kavinsky."

Blue frowns, trying to think about those characteristics. Deer. Dragon. Horns. Horns. Something about that feels like she should get it. "If Cabeswater doesn't know what it is," she says, frowning, "I don't know if I'll know." She knows a lot of pretty esoteric deities and fantasy creatures, between her family and her own reading. But they're mostly goddesses -- big surprise -- or sort of archetypal. She wants to draw, even though she's pretty sure that she's really only good for three-dimensional art: cutting, sewing, making things out of other things.

It's easier to concentrate on the cards. She frowns a little at Kavinsky, but more than any real animosity she can summon it just stirs confusion. "Is he gone too?" She's the last one to follow Kavinsky's movements with any real attention. But it's hard not to feel, in the wake of that possibility, that someone's hunting them.

"It looked Asian," Adam said, a little helpless. "So it's not a creature that the forest knows from its own world. Language. Whatever."

Sighing, he noticed a card that had pulled loose when he drew Gansey's card. Taking it as a message, he laid it crosswise on top of the card he'd already drawn. "Cabeswater said that there were four Raven boys noticed...noticed by the Horn. Like it's a capital noun. It called one of them a thief, so..."

Gesturing, he indicated Kavinsky's card and then began to turn them over. "The Tower," he said, reading Ronan's. "The Hanged Man." Noah. Stomach feeling unsettled, he skipped Gansey's cards and turned over Kavinsky's. "The Fool."

Destruction. Trapped between here and there. On a journey.

"The Horn. I know that," she says, and closes her eyes for a minute. Where had she heard that before?

The extra card for Gansey is unsettling, and she tries to pay attention to what Adam's saying. "Whatever this Asian dragon deer this is really likes Aglionby," she says dryly, not without a glance of concern at Adam. It's not Henrietta that it's finding. She's from Henrietta. Adam's from Henrietta. They'd have been taken first if being born on the ley line was a big deal. They're looking for people with power.

Powers: Tris hadn't seemed to think she and Adam were safe. That stirs something she's supposed to think about, but Blue's struck by the cards, wrapped up in looking at them. Not for the first time, she wishes she could read more accurately. The basic things she's picked up speak of change. Disruption, sacrifice.

She looks up at Adam, anxious.

More than ever, he wished they were all here and safe. Gansey's near-encyclopedic knowledge of mythology and language would have found the answer to the question in seconds. But that was just the problem, wasn't it? Gansey wasn't there.

Heart heavy, thudding in his chest, Adam turned over the first of Gansey's cards. The Knight of Swords. His stomach dropped out and he had to clench a fist for a second to suppress his shaking fingers. Only when it was under control did he turn the card over.

There, as reliably as the rising and setting of the sun was Gansey's card. Death stared up at him and Adam knew. Whether it was Cabeswater or the cards or just his gut feeling, Adam knew.

Blue tucks her feet under her and leans forward to look at the cards as Adam reaches for them over. Her heartbeat feels loud in her chest, echoing itself heavily in her wrists and throat, like it might choke her. Please, she thinks, please...?. Ever since she found out they're looking for power, the fact that Gansey's missing and that Adam isn't has seemed wrong. Not that she wants Adam gone, it's just. It feels wrong.

The Knight of Swords. Travel. Abrupt change. A hint of violence or chaos. Sometimes a young man, impulsivity, so maybe -- maybe it just means Gansey? But when Adam turns over the next card she sits up.

Death.

"Death doesn't mean death," she finds herself explaining, half-begging, as though Adam were some new visitor to the house and she were responsible for the cards. "It just means the...end of something..." Her lips feel dry, and she can feel panic tugging at her, tears burning behind her eyes. Her hands are pressed fists against her knees.

[so so SO late - respond if you want, cool if you need to fade!]

"It doesn't," he said, but they both knew the real meaning of that card when it came to Gansey. Death was Gansey's card, in all of its implications and meanings. Transformation, rebirth, and the very real ending of a life. Gansey, whose life was defined by his death. Gansey, whose death had been predicted on the ley line and recorded in Blue Sargent's own hand.

He tried to think of words that might soften the reality, the implication, but there were none. So he didn't say anything at all, merely looked at the Knight of Swords and knew.

Four little Raven Boys, nothing left to see. One took his leave back home and then there were three.

Blue looks at it. She feels a little like she's been pulled from time, like her thoughts exist outside her body, even her breath and her heartbeat not grounding. She picks it up. Death.

This is all wrong. There's supposed to be rain, Glendower, a kiss. Or maybe there was never that, some spirit in the clothes it thinks it should be wearing. Maybe it's already happened, somewhere else, back in Henrietta where the year's turned over. She's stolen the last couple of months, hasn't she? She'd thought, maybe -- if they could just see things through April, they'd know for certain that spirit didn't mean anything, not here --

One took his leave back home, she hears in the creepy sing-song that had spoken through Adam.

Did he have anything to go back to?

"I should wash this before the pomegranate stains," she says, sensibly, distantly, picking up the scrying bowl as if she could opt out of its prophesies. Her steps to the kitchen feel like someone else's.

She empties it into the sink, a wash of deep red, fingers pink with it, and everything comes slamming down back into her body in a rush of dizzy grief and horror. Blue wants to hurl the bowl away, wants to scream like some angry creature, but with Adam sitting right there, she won't do it. Instead she just stops trying, drops to a sit onto the kitchen floor, knees pulled up.

He stood, followed Blue because he knew he shouldn't be left alone with his thoughts, his blood, his cards. Because Blue shouldn't be alone in their barely used kitchen. He wanted to reach out, to hold her, to offer to hold her, but suddenly he was back to that sticky summer day in his apartment, where trying to hold her, to kiss her, ended in sadness.

Instead, he stared out the factory windows and tried to think about the rest. "What now." It was a question, a statement, meant to remind them that there were others. That they had to compartmentalize.

That Gansey was gone.

He let his knees buckle from under him and sat there next to her, head down.

Adam sits down heavily next to her, and Blue looks over. He's known Gansey longer than she has; he deserves to feel worse and she hates that he might. Hell, he's the reason she knows Gansey at all, really, aside from his ghost. If Adam hadn't wanted to talk to her that day: if, if, if, a series of chains of events that she can't, ultimately, even imagine at this point. She wants to offer some kind of comfort, but something anxious twists in her stomach even as close as they are now. Besides: she can't even make herself feel better.

Impulsively, she bridges the gap between them to press her side against his, a lean for both their benefit, and sits there for a long moment, her head resting against his shoulder. Some reminder of solidity to both of them.

"That's all there is," she says, quietly and mostly to herself. She can feel herself shivering and locks down the urge to cry, the sick feeling. She has to pull herself together. The others need them.

She takes a sharp, shaky breath. "We find Ronan and Noah. We have to."

When she leaned against him, Adam could have that moment to breathe. He wrapped an arm around her and pulled her closer, as if they could compress their loss, grief, fear all into one single package and put it beneath the stairs. Pain didn't work like that. Pain lingered and left marks, visible and not, and all they could do was live with it.

"We find Ronan and Noah," he agreed. That was what came next. That was the goal to rally around instead of looking at the void that was left in Richard Campbell Gansey III's wake.

"Better call your friend."

And time goes quicker between the two of us [Blue Sargent 3/25/16]

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