[Jarod Nightingale] It was getting colder, but not cold enough that sitting by the lake would prove uncomfortable. The breeze coming in off the water was brisk, but the ambient temperature hung at just about 60 degrees. The silvery glow of the half-moon was mostly obscured by the reflection of multi-colored city-lights on the water, but in its own peculiar way, this place felt relaxing at night, when it was free of picnicking tourists and noisy families, and the drone of cars in the background had dulled to a gentle murmur.
Half an hour ago, Jarod had put a ten-year-old girl (almost eleven, she frequently reminded him) to bed. Now he was sitting in the grass by the lake, alone and gazing out across the water. The lapping waves were hypnotic. Not the ocean, true, but a lake this size had a tide nonetheless. It was a contemplative evening, and he wasn't particularly looking for company. That didn't mean he'd turn it away if it came walking by.
[Ashley McGowen] It's almost cold enough to need a jacket. Ashley isn't sure where September went.
The lake is moon-touched, limned along the crests of the waves and choppy where it breaks on the rocks at the shore. It doesn't smell like brine, and there's none of the reek of fisheries upshore threaded into the breeze (blessing), but Ashley's glad that she's managed to stay by a body of water. It was one of the things that made Chicago feel a little more like home, when she moved here.
So naturally she makes her way out here a lot, when it's dark and when the families have cleared away. She took the dog out for a while, but she returned him to the apartment after a few miles and then decided she wasn't quite ready to go in yet. She spends a lot of time outside. She wanders.
She also is not particularly looking for company; she wouldn't be out here if she wasn't. Just distraction. She's wandering up close to the shore, close to the boulders that line it, a small silhouette breaking the pattern of the waves. Not hopping or walking along them: that would be asking for a broken neck, without depth perception. And it's the snap of winter that brings her head up, swinging in Jarod's direction.
[Jarod Nightingale] [Awareness? Yes?]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 3, 6, 8, 8 (Success x 2 at target 6)
[Jarod Nightingale] Ashley was a hard person to miss, if you were aware enough to pick up on her resonance. Physically, she was small and unobtrusive, but her character was anything but subtle. It pushed out into the world with a force of Will that none of the other magi in the city could match. So when the Hermetic approached this particular little bit of lakefront property, Jarod knew, without even looking, who it was that had intruded upon his meditations.
And, in fairly typical Jarod fashion, he didn't greet her, either visually or verbally. Instead, he lay back until his head nestled in the cool grass, and looked up at the dark sky. It was hard to see the stars, here. The city-light (and the smog) muted them.
One of his legs stretched out on the ground (unlike Ashley, he was reasonably tall, and had the long legs to go with it), while the other remained bent at the knee. There was a thin leather jacket over his (black) button-down shirt, and this protected the expensive fabric from the grass and dirt. It hung open though, and the wind brushed past and bit through to his skin. That wasn't entirely unwelcome.
At some point he closed his eyes. But he was listening for the sound of footsteps.
[Ashley McGowen] Jarod doesn't greet her, or even look in her direction; a while ago Ashley would have assumed that he just didn't see her. Except that it's rare for a person to miss her anymore. People tell her that they feel her approaching all the way down the street, and Sleepers look at her uneasily when they pass her on the street or in a restaurant. She just feels weird, to most of them, no matter how small and nonthreatening she might look.
So at first she assumes he's ignoring her. Their parting last night wasn't the friendliest, after all. Except that this isn't the sort of thing that makes Ashley McGowen decide to leave someone alone. On the contrary. It makes her want to approach more, to rub someone's nose in that avoidance and force confrontation.
Then she thinks: maybe he's just waiting, and so some of the readiness to fight fades in the face of that thought. It still lurks there. She can't entirely help that.
Ashley is not barefoot. She does whenever she's at the Court, in the woods, but not here on the lakeshore: a fish hook through her big toe when she was seven and her mother's lectures about tetanus and lockjaw kicked that habit for good. So her footsteps aren't as whisper soft as they might have been were she not wearing shoes; as it is, they're still very quiet. Jarod only hears them after she's gotten relatively close.
The Hermetic stops at his side and looks down at him for a moment, her eyebrow just slightly raised. Then she drops into a sitting position in the grass next to him, crosslegged, in jeans and a formfitting black shirt. She's rolled the sleeves up to the elbows in spite of the breeze.
[Jarod Nightingale] When he lay still like that, with his eyes closed and the soft play of light and shadow touching his skin, there was a kind of statuesque perfection to his appearance. It was easy enough to see why he'd fallen into modeling. And, for a moment there, it was hard to tell whether or not he was awake or asleep. Except that his breathing was too shallow, and he'd been sitting up moments ago, and let's face it... Jarod was exactly the kind of person who would lie there and pretend not to notice someone (whatever his reasons ultimately were.)
So of course, Ashley wouldn't be surprised when he finally spoke. (Without opening his eyes.) "I just can't seem to get away from you, lately." And those words could have been harsh, but they weren't. There was also a faint tug at the corner of his mouth. A repressed smirk, maybe.
[Ashley McGowen] Ashley doesn't try to guess at Jarod's reasons, after a moment or two. His behaviors contradict more than Kage's do, and most of the time it leaves her utterly confused. A touch frustrated: she likes to know where she stands with people.
She doesn't look at him overlong. She draws her legs up and rests her elbows on her knees, one hand clasping the wrist of the other while her forearms dangle, and looks back out at the waves. There aren't any stars to watch here. It's the position of someone settling in, not preparing to leave, in spite of the fact that she asks,
"Do you want me to go?" There's no sign of oh-please-don't-tell-me-to, insecurity or desperation. It's just direct. A touch pointed.
[Jarod Nightingale] "Whether you stay or go is up to you. If I didn't want to be around you, I'd have already left."
His eyes finally opened, and they slid over to contemplate Ashley's seated figure. In this light, they were dark. Inscrutable. Then he reached over with one hand and tapped the side of Ashley's knee softly with the back of his knuckles.
"Taking a break from pub-crawling tonight?"
He seemed to have forgotten the way their last encounter had ended. Or at least, he was acting as if he had. Perhaps that was a product of the lake and the wind and the grass tickling the skin on his feet. The afternoon hadn't gone particularly well, and neither had the night before, but right now, in this moment, he was calm.
[Ashley McGowen] There is no vocal response to what he says, whether she stays or goes. This is much the way Ashley feels herself, when it comes to dealing with others; if she doesn't want to be around them, she lets them know. She isn't used to other people being that straightforward.
Ashley isn't looking at him; her eyes are still watching the waves. They're small and choppy, one devouring the others as it comes up behind them and building into something more at points. Until they reach the shore and break. Repeat. There's a rhythm to the ocean. Her face is all contrast, in this light, something delicate and almost fey, pale beneath the shadow of her eyebrows and her hair.
Her eyes are drawn toward him when he reaches over and taps her knee. Night's drained the color out of them. "I thought my liver needed a break," she says. "And I teach on Wednesday afternoons." Her tone is flippant, a touch amused.
"Besides, some people are starting to figure out it's a place I go sometimes, and I've been in the mood to shirk my responsibilities."
[Jarod Nightingale] "Shirking responsibilities is a highly enjoyable experience. I recommend ample doses of it." After a pause of consideration, he added (amending), "especially when shirking them with pleasant company." And he smiled when he said that. The expression was a little cocky and a little too self-aware, but if Ashley hadn't figured out by now that he was a bit of an arrogant son of a bitch, then she hadn't been paying attention. At any rate, he was pleasant company. When he wanted to be. As was she. (When she wanted to be.)
(And when they didn't, neither of them were particularly pleasant at all.)
"I should warn you, though. I'm not really in a talking kind of mood."
Water and moonlight had that affect on him. So did having a string of unpleasant encounters. (Everyone dealt with stress in their own way.) There wasn't really an insinuation behind those words. For once (as he had a moment ago when he'd told her that if he didn't want to see her, he'd leave) he was just being straightforward. He could be that, now and then.
[Ashley McGowen] Jarod amends his statement, calls himself pleasant company, and the Hermetic smirks and rolls her eyes but doesn't disagree. She wouldn't be here, after all, if she didn't think so. Ashley likes most people (and wouldn't they be surprised to know) but she certainly has preferences.
Unfortunately she is in a talking sort of mood; she often is when she's around other people at all. Even when she's not, Ashley absorbs herself in words; this is how she's had to learn to communicate. It's how she connects to the world with music gone. It's hard for her to reconcile another way (and when she does, she does it instinctively.)
Moreover, there were specific points of discussion; Kae, after all, had been very vocal. Had lectured a lot. But there's no rush. Not really.
She doesn't press the point, though. Just shrugs a shoulder and says, "Then we won't talk." She doesn't close her eyes or lie back in the grass, but she does unfurl a little, lean back on one arm with the blades brushing up between her fingers. And she watches the waves and listens to the surf.
[Jarod Nightingale] There was always business to attend to, with Ashley. Even when she wanted to escape it. That was the drawback of ambition. But it was also a part of her character, and it was likely that, given the chance to sit around and do nothing of consequence for days at a time, she wouldn't know what to do with herself.
Still, she played along amiably enough, tonight. Then we won't talk, she said. And for awhile, they didn't.
Ashley unfurled, and Jarod remained lying back on the ground, one knee bent and one hand resting on his stomach. The other hand was in the grass, and his fingertips traced the individual blades slowly, almost reverently, then dug gently into the cold, sandy earth. (Connection.)
Finally, though, he pulled himself into a sitting position, draping an arm over his knee, and looked at Ashley.
"I didn't say I wasn't in a listening mood."
[Ashley McGowen] Ashley doesn't seem uncomfortable while that silence stretches. She spent her teenage years in Boston, after all, with her father. There plenty of evenings she can remember from high school when they would communicate to each other through glances and gestures and might speak less than ten words to each other throughout the day. She does know how to watch, and how to listen, they're just skills that don't get exercised that much when she's in the company of someone else, these days.
Perhaps she would speak of something else other than business, were it someone other than Jarod that she'd come across. It's hard to say. But more than likely not; truthfully, she's never really learned how to get to know people other than through business. It's easier to call them when there's something to trade than to just say that she wanted company.
It's also much easier to find topics of conversation. No, she has no claim to social graces.
She looks over at Jarod when he speaks, and a corner of her mouth curves up, amused. She says, "I swear people do that just to watch me flounder for topics," because sometimes she is more self-aware than she seems. Then there's a moment's quiet. She says, "I did meet a Traditionmate of yours a couple of weeks ago, though. At the Court. Have you been there?"
[Jarod Nightingale] Ashley mentioned floundering (a hint at her awareness of Jarod's propensity to manipulate - or maybe just awareness of her own social awkwardness), and Jarod laughed gently. "I just didn't want you to feel uncomfortable." (Ironically.)
He shook his head when Ashley mentioned a place called the Court. Not only had he not been there, but he'd never heard it mentioned. At least, not by that name. Emily had mentioned going to the woods with Kage - that the Orphan had shared some things with her there. That was the extent of his knowledge, which may or may not surprise Ashley. Both he and Emily had a bad habit of keeping things to themselves, as if the details of their lives were precious commodities that, once shared, could be lost or damaged.
And the Court... was not his place. Tekakwitha was over an hour away, by car. Given the option, there were other wild places not so very much further away that resonated with him more personally. Places that none of the other Chicago mages were likely to go. (Places that were his.)
"Who was it?" he asked, in regards to the other Verbena. Certainly he wasn't familiar with all of them, but members of their tradition tended to wander in and out of notice, so one never really knew who might show up at a given time and place.
[Ashley McGowen] Jarod shakes his head, which does surprise Ashley a little - if only because the place is so well known to Emily, and for a while she had thought that perhaps Jarod had gone there with Emily first and Kage had been then to follow. Then again, it wasn't Emily that first brought Ashley to the place. It was Kage, and they'd gone swimming and she'd gotten a lecture about listening too much to Hannibal. As much as Kage lectures about anything.
"Kae Ohmer, she said," Ashley says, and some might find it odd that she tags that last bit on, the addendum. But she's aware of how much some magi change their names when they go to new places; she herself has a craft name. An odd one, one that sounds decidedly less mystical and full of portent than the ones her Traditionmates generally choose, but one all the same.
"She lectured me a lot about the seasons and stuff that sounded kind of...you know," a wry smile, "cycles and portents and charting days and stars and I got lectured on bending like a new leaf instead of cracking like a brittle one." Her tone is dry but not mocking; there's an irony, she thinks, in having gone to them seeking to forget how to think and to have been spoken to about lessons as detailed (but different) as many of her Hermetic ones.
"And I think she got enough about what I've done in Chicago to write my biography," is the next addition, delivered with a twist of her mouth. She does lean back in the grass then, half-lying, raised on her elbows so that she can still see the waves. It's a bit less vulnerable, this position, than just lying flat on her back.
[Jarod Nightingale] Names tended to have as much or as little meaning as one chose to apply to them. Not unlike religion. Many magi chose to change their names after Awakening, or to take on more than one (the social and the personal). Jarod still used the name that was listed on his birth certificate, in part because it held relatively little meaning to him. Jarod was Jewish in origin, but he wasn't Jewish. From what he'd been told, the name had come from a friend of his father's who'd died in the Vietnam war. Ian (his middle name - though nobody knew this, largely because no one had ever asked) didn't reference anything at all. One or both of his parents had probably just liked the sound of it. Nightingale was British, because his father's family had come from England, but the current generation was a nearly perfect embodiment of the American Ideology. The word itself meant a kind of bird: one that was plain to look at, but capable of a beautiful song. There were... multiple layers of irony in that.
It was a name. He was used to it, so it suited well enough. There was another that was used, on occasion. Something Rada had given him. It wasn't so much a name as it was a description, and though there was some personal history there, it was not necessarily a true name either.
In any case, Kae Ohmer (true or not) was not a name he'd heard before. He contemplated this, but didn't respond, which probably meant that he had nothing to say (that he did not know her). That changed when Ashley mentioned cycles and portents. He was all too familiar with these things, of course. They'd been drilled into his own head as well, once upon a time. Somehow, it amused him to think of Ashley having to sit through it, and he snorted quietly with repressed laughter.
"A pagan religion is still a religion, with all the ritual that goes along with it. Not everyone thinks of it that way, though."
[Ashley McGowen] Ashley didn't spend much time with members of other Traditions before she came to Chicago. She's not used to thinking of them as needing a complex base of knowledge and memorization, except perhaps the Sons of Ether and the Akashic Brotherhood; one thing she has quickly learned is that for the most part, individual approach counts for a lot, and there is a lot more other Traditions learn than basic philosophy.
"I guess," she says, and her smile is a little self-conscious. She's becoming aware of just how little she knows, of just how much stereotyping goes on within the Order of Hermes - then again, other Traditions are often guilty of the same. "I should've figured. I mean, I know the Tradition has its roots in druidism. I'd just expected the rituals to be more visceral, I guess." Something closer to blood and sacrifice, something closer to the Nordic rituals she's studied: then again, this is what appeals to her, and she isn't always aware of the strength of the influence of her Avatar. (One would think a woman who hung nine days from an ash tree, who had an eye and an ear plucked away by Knowledge and Memory before the slow fog of unconsciousness was lifted in a hospital bed, would give it more thought.)
"I mean, some of it made sense. My Jhor was lifted in June. I've just known people who got into this thing of thinking that everything occurs in cycles and they were so fatalistic." She's thinking of her Euthanatos allies. She's also offering all of this hesitantly, because she doesn't know Jarod that well, really, and because Ashley isn't the sort who usually offers personal information without being asked. It feels strange to her.
[Jarod Nightingale] Jarod could be both an easy and a difficult person to talk to. Easy, because he listened well, and carefully. He never tried to dominate conversations. Difficult, because he seldom offered anything personal in return, which made knowing him an increasingly one-sided relationship. That didn't mean he never made concessions, though. Emily could speak to the fact that he did, on occasion, offer personal details of his own accord. They were just sporadic, and tended to happen mostly when he was feeling relaxed.
Ashley had a similar hesitance, with that regard. Jarod glanced at her, and pondered.
"There are a number of smaller traditions within the Tradition as a whole. As I've said, people approach things differently. Life itself is visceral, though. All the ritual in the world won't contain that." This was probably the closest that Jarod had ever come to talking about his own magic. It wasn't much, but it was something. "If you were hoping to be able to bathe in menstrual blood and carve runes into your flesh, don't worry. Those things do happen."
[Ashley McGowen] Jarod talks about bathing in menstrual blood and carving runes on her flesh, and there's a surprised laugh from Ashley: she hadn't expected to hear it from Jarod, and because the thought of smearing herself in blood is a bit beyond her yet. Hermetic magic, after all, is quite sterile. Runes and philosophy and magical theory.
There was a time during her apprenticeship when it made sense for magic to work with blood; her Awakening itself was heavily based around the concept of sacrifice. She'd never read much mythology when she was younger. For a long time she didn't know why, didn't think about it. Hermetics, of course, tend to view it as primal (they refer to Verbena and Dreamspeakers, disparagingly, as Primals) and barbaric. Those tendencies were quickly curbed.
"I don't really know what I was expecting," she says, honestly. "I mean, I've never been really into nature or anything, and she seemed to be." There's a pause, and then the wry admission of, "I guess I was hoping for something I would think about less."
Ambiguous, and it could be condescending, could insinuate that they are savage and incapable of enlightened thought. That being one of them would be easy. It isn't, though.
[Jarod Nightingale] Jarod's aloof manner maintained through the majority of Ashley's comments, so it was difficult to tell whether he agreed or disagreed, or even thought much about any of it at all. That said, there was one point during the conversation where her words seemed to elicit a more (for lack of a better term) visceral response. That was when she said: I've never been really into nature.
At this, his expression changed, and his lips curled into something resembling disgust.
"We create these separations, and they're all completely fabricated. As if living in houses and using tools makes us any less a part of nature. Nature is in our blood. The rest is just lies we tell ourselves to make us feel safe. Think about that the next time you want to fuck, eat or breath."
He stood up, brushing dirt particles and bits of loose grass from his jeans, and straightened his shirt and jacket. "The things your blood tell you - those are the only things that are real."
It seemed a foregone conclusion that he was going to walk off at this point, and, not surprisingly... that was exactly what he did.
[Ashley McGowen] Evidently, he disagrees; Jarod corrects that assumption of hers, makes an unusual offering of his own beliefs. And ordinarily this is the point where Ashley might argue back, but she doesn't for two reasons. One is that she doesn't really disagree, now that this point has been made; interprets it in a different way, perhaps, but doesn't disagree. It's difficult for her to unlearn certain aspects of her Hermetic training, the conditioning that doesn't necessarily contribute to what she is trying to learn now.
The other is that Jarod is getting up to leave, making another of his abrupt exits. That flicker of irritation was too blatant for even Ashley to miss it. Regardless, her eyes are attentive while he speaks, as he brushes his jeans and shirt free of blades of grass. Hungry and thoughtful.
"I'll think about it," she says, and this isn't something she says idly.
He walks off, and Ashley lets slip a sigh, her head falling back as though a string has been cut, as though she'd look up to the sky and ask for patience only her eyes are closed. "I didn't mean to piss you off," she says, but she doesn't make any effort to stop him.
Her eyes linger a moment and then focus back out toward the lake once more, where the waves crash like a slowing heartbeat.
