[Jarod] Sometimes bad habits were hard to break.
But in order to break them, first the people in question would have to decide that it was, indeed, a bad habit. Ashley probably spent more time considering these things than Jarod did. She wondered if this was healthy behavior. She wondered if she ought to feel guilty. (Perhaps this in itself was a form of guilt.) The Adept had book-ended a trip to visit the ashes of a departed lover by sleeping with another one, and there were a lot of people who might view that as amoral or insulting to the memory of the woman who was no longer there. Truthfully, Ashley hadn't been given enough time to really know the Akashic, so attempting to determine what Daiyu herself may have thought of this situation was sketchy at best. Given what she had known, however, it would not be unreasonable to assume that she wouldn't have minded, or that she might have wanted Ashley to find some measure of peace, even if it wasn't lasting. One had to take what joy they could from the world.
But that's assuming that Ashley was, indeed, happy with what she was doing. Not everyone had sex just because they enjoyed it, and there was a strong element of self-distraction about this exchange... for both of them. Between the two of them, though, it was Jarod who could have been more likely accused of having a dangerous relationship with sex. Often he'd tread very neatly along the thin line that separated healthy and unhealthy sexual behavior. Once upon a time, he hadn't been able to see that line at all. But there was something transformative about the process of reclaiming a part of oneself that had once been forcefully taken. Not just reclaiming, but embracing - championing - making it an irrevocable part of himself. Making it... his. Jarod had done that with sex a long time ago, and he did not (would not) allow guilt to ever enter the equation again.
And when he was with someone, during whatever time they had to be together, he didn't think about anyone or anything beyond the immediacy of the moment. That was part of the appeal of sex. It was a rush of water that drowned out every single other thought in his mind, and the world suddenly became beautifully, perfectly, sharply in-focus. Afterward, though... those thoughts gradually began to resurface. (Perhaps that was why he never stayed for very long.)
Back at the pub, Jarod had vocalized certain desires... and to his credit, he'd made good on them. He usually did. Sex was not the kind of activity that had a set end-point, for him. Entire evenings could disappear rather easily this way, but eventually, as the night hours stretched into morning, a warm, dizzy calm settled in, and the two of them found themselves just lying in bed together, breathing quietly, with no particularly urgent desire to move. Jarod usually got up to take a shower right about now, but tonight he let himself remain where he was for awhile. Anxiety tended to make his natural fastidiousness into something close to a compulsion, so this may have been a sign that he felt more relaxed with her than he had at the beginning of their friendship, but for a person to come to that conclusion, they'd first have to know that he hadn't been relaxed to begin with. (And of all the things that Jarod was good at hiding [even from himself], that was probably near the top of the list.)
He was lying on his back with his head turned to the side, gazing at the hollow at the base of Ashley's throat, where her pulse jumped delicately beneath the skin. One of his hands rested against her side, occasionally brushing the skin there gently. Somehow his thoughts had traveled back to the thing he'd wanted to say to her earlier, when Thomas had interrupted them. There was a long bout of silence before he said, quietly...
"I knew her, once. Li. ...Daiyu."
[Ashley] From what Ashley knows of Daiyu, she doesn't think she would have minded this, but really, there's no way to know. Guilt is very much a part of the grieving process; the bereaved often feel as though they should be miserable, because to be otherwise sometimes feels as though it's detracting from the significance of their relationship with the deceased. It feels as though the other person is being forgotten. What she's done before and after the trip feels disrespectful.
There's fear, too. But whatever is there, it fell to the back of her mind, because she too doesn't think of much beyond the moment whenever she's with someone. Ashley is a creature of Hunger, and there has always been a certain singlemindedness that accompanies that drive when she allows it to take over. Right now, yes - she is actually happy with what she's doing. There's a kind of joy that follows her around sometimes, quiet and understated and private though it is, buried beneath everything she's taught herself to be.
Ashley has never been the sort to get up, shower and leave. Perhaps it bothered her for a little while that Jarod was, but she assumed it was part of a casual encounter; she has no other experience with them, and it confused things less, so it was probably for the better. Still, she likes the contact now, though she hasn't pushed it too far; she has a hand covering his and the other arm folded behind her head. Her eyes are closed.
Or were, until he speaks, and then they open and she turns her head to look at him. Her eyes look a touch searching when they meet his, but they don't linger long. There's a pause, and they wander off again and she has to swallow, much as she did earlier tonight, before speaking. "When?" Her voice manages to be firm, however faint.
[Jarod] There was a part of him that had half-expected a scene similar to the one they'd shared a few weeks ago, when he'd asked Ashley about her library. Anger wouldn't have been a surprising reaction, and Ashley's moods tended to flare up rather suddenly, once provoked. Perhaps she'd interpret this as another form of manipulation and secrecy - that he'd waited this long to tell her something he could have told her months ago; that he'd allowed her to talk about Daiyu on a handful of occasions without ever mentioning the fact that he knew her. Initially, his reasons had probably been exactly as selfish as one might expect, but later when he'd realized the degree to which Daiyu's life and death had affected the Adept, he'd kept quiet for other reasons entirely. This was Ashley's grief. He wasn't going to try and claim a piece of it from her.
But he was telling her now. For whatever reason. And for whatever reason... she didn't get angry. She just asked him: when?
"A long time ago. Ten, eleven years. After high school I went to live in China. Eventually I ended up in Beijing. I studied with the Akashics for awhile. That's where I met her. I wasn't sure, at first, that it was the same person... but then I saw a picture of her at Emily's place."
His voice trailed off for awhile.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you earlier. I didn't think you'd want to talk about it, at least... not with me."
[Ashley] The picture Jarod saw, the one with a lot of smiling faces sporting the same stark, bold Enochian rune, is the only one Ashley has. There's a copy of it in her study; Jarod might have seen it if he'd glanced in its direction the time she briefly showed him her arcane library.
For whatever reason, she doesn't seem angry right now. Perhaps those instincts had risen briefly, when she'd wondered why he didn't bring it up before now - but really, any anger doesn't matter. He's telling her now, and if he'd spoken of it to her much earlier, he's right: she probably wouldn't have wanted to talk about it with him. There were a lot of people who asked Ashley about Daiyu after she died, encouraged her to talk about it and told her that she didn't have to be strong. The only people she talked about it at length with were Kage and Israel. Wharil, who felt even more guilty than she did about the Akashic's death, held her once while she cried. The rest were met with blunt refusal and, if they persisted, anger. Threats.
The warmth of her small hand departs from the top of his and she brings both arms up to fold over her chest, her hands to grip either shoulder. A self-embrace, almost, except Ashley doesn't exude the kind of vulnerability that such a gesture would suggest. She tips her head back, looking at the headboard, the ceiling. "It's okay," she says quietly, when he apologizes.
He might think that's all she's going to say, but after a moment's silence she speaks again. "I only knew her for three months." Beat. "I saw her die." Maybe she mentions that because she thinks that if he knew her, he might want that story, he might want to know.
[Jarod] Ashley had known Daiyu for three months. He'd known her for almost a year. Given only that fact, one would assume that Jarod could claim a greater understanding of the Akashic, but a decade was a long time for a person to change, even under normal circumstances. Factor in the necessary enlightenment and increased self-awareness that came with Awakened life, and one could be almost certain of significant personal evolution. In truth, he couldn't have claimed to have known her very well at all.
But he remembered her, even after ten or eleven years. She'd made an impression. She hadn't been just an occasional acquaintance.
He kept his eyes on Ashley for awhile, then rolled his head so that his gaze joined hers in facing the ceiling. His hand slid away, but not far. It came to rest on the mattress a few inches away. His other hand drifted up, meanwhile, and settled splayed across his chest. The leg closest to Ashley bent a little at the knee, foot flat against the bed. He hadn't bothered to claim any of the blankets, still warm enough from what they'd been doing all night. There was a light flush to his skin still, a faded glow that touched his lips and spread across his chest. Sweat had dampened pieces of his hair along the line of his face and neck. He looked beautiful like that, but in a different way than he might when spotted on the street. This was more... real. Human.
She looked beautiful too, but this wasn't really the moment to mention it.
"...What happened?" he asked quietly.
[Ashley] Ashley had suspected he would ask this question, but that doesn't make her any more ready for it. She's recounted the details a handful of times, to a handful of people, but most haven't asked. Words passed from mouth to mouth among the chantry members for a while: the chantry was attacked, Li Daiyu was killed, the Society of the Nameless Crow lost a member, Ashley McGowen wept while the others cleaned up. Mercifully, she hasn't had need to tell anyone.
"After I became an Adept, I went home to Boston for a couple of weeks to study the Ars Mentis with an associate of mine," she says. "And when I got back things were kind of a mess. There was a barabbi Adept who was hiding a Labyrinth here and he started working. I guess a bunch of initiates were investigating it and didn't escalate it until there was already a lot of trouble, and by the time the information got to either me or her, there was a ton of it and it was badly organized. But we were going to do something."
For quite some time, Ashley felt a lot of resentment about how things were handled, somewhere amid the rest of her anger. She still feels it, a little, even though she's finally started to make peace. It comes through more in her diction than her tone, but it's there. "They attacked the chantry before we had a chance to act." And here is where Ashley bites the inside of her cheek, where her breathing roughens a little, because this is where it's personal - where it's a memory and not a story. "And she and I, uh, we had lunch and were on our way there and then I started to feel that they were breaking down my wards..."
She stops, but it's not for long. "Emily and this Euthanatos kid were there too. The Nephandi that were there had broken the Wills of some officers and one had a shotgun. It almost killed her charging in, and I didn't get the Nephandi down fast enough and they just...all the heat went out of her. I think they meant it for me, but..."
Her voice isn't shaky. It is, in fact, very carefully measured, balanced even, and her gaze hasn't moved. "I took them down after that, but she was already dying. All I did was watch."
[Jarod] Daiyu had died the way that all Vajrapani died - fighting. He'd known this even without having to be told. There'd been small snippets of information from Emily and Molly. Ashley herself had mentioned it before in a few, brief words. But he'd never had the heart to ask any more, until now. Hers was just one more face banished to the mists of memory. Better to forget, perhaps. Better not to think on it. She wasn't the first of his friends to die, and she wouldn't be the last.
He knew what impermanence meant. He knew it very, very well - had known it since he was the same age as his daughter was now, when the suffocating, nauseating reality of it had exploded into his life like a bullet fired from a gun. But there was also the unendurable reality of things that did not end, and this he learned later, as years passed and memories lingered like ghosts.
There was a small flicker of muscle movement around one of his eyes when Ashley mentioned Emily's involvement in the fight.
On another day, perhaps, he wouldn't have attempted to touch her. But touching was so familiar a thing in this moment that he almost did it without thinking. Almost. When the silence settled in again, he rolled onto his side and looked at Ashley, and his arm shifted to reach out toward her, but it stopped briefly - hesitated. Not out of nervousness or uncertainty but because he didn't want the touch to jar her. Neither of them had the benefit of clothing to wear as armor. There was vulnerability there. When his hand did touch her, it came to rest slowly on her stomach, then slid around to tuck in at her opposite side and pull her gently against him, offering warmth without smothering.
He didn't try to console her. He didn't say anything at all.
[Ashley] Ashley hasn't seen many friends die, yet. She's known people who did, and sometimes she was sad for them, but this, after her mother, was the first person she actually cared about. Dylan will always stick with her too, but that was different, it was shared suffering; her mother was the absence of a loss, but Daiyu was the first person who was actually a presence. Like Jarod, Ashley isn't a stranger to impermanence; she expects to lose things that she takes joy from, doesn't believe that those things are things one can hold onto. So also like him, she knows this is not the last.
Her own strength of Will, though, can always be relied on. She's just as certain that she'll get through it and come out on top when it happens. There's no fear there: just grim, sad certainty. Beauty is fragile.
When he touches her and pulls her in against him, there's a long moment where she doesn't move, where she closes her eyes and remains there with her arms folded over her chest. But after a moment she turns her head to tuck her face in against his neck and shoulder, and an arm goes around him when the rest of her follows. It's a gradual thing when she lets go, a conscious choice.
Her breath against his skin isn't steady, but there aren't any tears. Her voice is thick when she speaks again. "I keep thinking that..." Pause. Her throat clicks a little when she swallows. "That someone I knew for a couple of months shouldn't have done this to me. I thought I'd be over it. But I don't want to forget, either."
[Jarod] "I think sometimes, people come into your life at precisely the right moment, and in precisely the right way... to change a small piece of you completely. Maybe it's better not to forget. It doesn't make you weak... to see things clearly."
Ashley didn't cry, and he wouldn't ask her to. Neither would he recoil from the small slips of emotion that she did show. For all the show they both made of dancing around each other most days (like a couple of caged predators too wary to trust the other not to attack the moment they let their guard down,) Jarod could display moments of quiet, genuine empathy. It was subtler, perhaps, than that of a person who was more used to expressing warmth and affection, but that didn't make it less meaningful. When Ashley tucked her face against his neck, he tightened his arm around her and bent his head so that she'd feel his breath in her hair. He kissed the top of her head, then lifted his mouth away again as he began speaking.
"Insoluble riverrain conscience echo of the future
I keep vigil for you here by the reeds of Elkhorn Slough
and the born mouth of the Salinas River going green
where the white egret fishes the fragile margins
Hermetic guide in resistance I've found you and lost you
several times in my life. You were never just
the poet appalled and transfixed by war you were the maker
of terrible delicate decisions and that did not smudge
your sense of limits. You saw the squirrels crashing
from the tops of burning pines when the canister exploded
and worse and worse and you were in charge of every risk
the incendiary motives of others were in your charge
and the need for a courage wrapped in absolute tact
and you decided and lived like that and you
held poetry at your lips a piece of wild thyme ripped
from a burning meadow a mimosa twig
from still unravaged country. You kept your senses
about you like that and like this I keep vigil for you."
The words weren't his, but they were. And he could have been speaking to Daiyu or Ashley or a woman he'd kept hidden for years in his memory. Or he could have been giving Ashley's own thoughts a voice. It didn't matter. Words were only symbols of truth, anyway.
[Ashley] Ashley is not as cerebral as most people assume she is, even after they get to know her better. She never has been; she's found the words to articulate her Will and her beliefs such that it's misleading sometimes, though. For example: it does not make her weak to see things clearly. This is something that, on some level, she knows because she has learned, because she has started to adapt, but on the other hand every instinct she has is screaming that she should be too strong to allow other people to affect her at all; she shapes herself, others do not.
This fuels her Will and always has. It's also purely primal in its origin. When she was advising Ashley on how to overcome her Jhor, Israel suggested that she would need to overcome instinct. This was odd advice to offer a Hermetic, but it was true.
So is what Jarod says. Ashley nods, quiet, a small gesture just to let him know she's heard, that the words are appreciated. Her fingers curl against his back without digging in and then relax, and after a second she lets them brush over his skin a few times. Intending to offer something as much as to take it, perhaps, because he cared about her too, presumably, if he's remembered her all this time.
But that movement stills again as he begins to recite the poem. She doesn't quite know the entirety of what it means to him, just that it's something. Ashley has trained empathy into herself, when she has it: she understands others by applying her own experience and feelings to them, and right now she knows there is something shared, an echo of whatever Hunger there is in her.
She doesn't sob, when her composure finally melts away. This, much like anything else from her that's at its most genuine, is quiet. When he finishes she reaches her other hand up between them and bows her head away from his neck for a moment to rub at her eyes. She doesn't console him either.
[Jarod] His emotions tonight were a little less raw than Ashley's own. He didn't cry, but there had been enough quiet sadness in his voice to indicate that the moment was shared between them. For a long time they both let the silence settle in and linger. Jarod's arm released its hold on her for a moment so that he could brush away a little of the wetness on her cheek with his thumb.
"We were just kids, back then. But we learned from each other. She made me feel... more grounded. I... well. I guess I wasn't all that different, back then." He smiled sadly. "She broke my nose. I deserved it."
He let out his breath in a long sigh. There might have been more, but it was late, and he was suddenly very, very tired.
"...Do you mind if I stay?" he asked quietly (almost a whisper.)
[Ashley] Her emotions now are not nearly so raw as they were even at this time last month. Two months ago. It's going to take her a long time to have entirely made peace, to look back on the summer with a kind of quiet sadness, a regret, rather than the deep pangs of emotion that have gotten farther and farther between. But she's started to, and eventually it will happen, and for better or worse the loss of one person has helped her strengthen her bonds with several others in a way she might not have otherwise.
Still, he mentions that Daiyu broke his nose, and Ashley laughs. It's something he can feel against his chest, a silent tremor, a burst of mirth that doesn't last very long at all - because really, it's only funny because she knew a more settled Daiyu. But the idea of her breaking someone's nose in her youth for some transgression isn't very difficult for Ashley to wrap her head around. "I didn't get a chance to see her do any nose breaking."
What gets to Ashley, most of the time, is the could-have-beens. Life is full of them. (It's also full of things that have become. She'll think of that later, when she remembers to remember.)
Her head lifts a little at his question, a glance up, but after a second her head settles against his collarbone again. She might have asked him herself, if weariness hadn't struck him first, but in a way she's glad she's not the one who had to make the request. "I want you to stay," she says, and then the hand on his back leaves him a moment to reach past him for blankets, which she pulls over them both.
Morning might cast a different light on all of this, after the harsh winter sun has crept through the blinds and spilled over them. Maybe his anxiety will return, or maybe she'll draw back into herself and he'll wake up to find himself alone and her already about her business. But probably not.
