missing exits, missing people, recognizing geometric shapes [open to multiple]

[driftseeker]

Echoes of Raleigh, listen to me sing a horrifying chorus as her brother is ripped from the Conn-Pod, torn away with his life skewered on teeth larger than anything, his mind a shrieking turmoil of fear and agony and despair -

Mako wakes with a sharp intake of breath.

She doesn't have a brother.

She sits up in the bed in the apartment Gabe was kind enough to offer her, green like he said it would be to match the curtains framing the window, where the watery predawn light filters in to fall in puddled disarray over the rumpled sheets.

She braces hands to her temples.

She doesn't have a brother. She doesn't have a brother.

Mako jerks the covers back and pads to the kitchen, rattling around in a frantic attempt to fall into some morning routine. It is not until the loud groan of the coffeemaker pierces her ears that she realizes she does not start the morning with coffee. She starts with tea, Darjeeling black, and Raleigh would drum his fingers against the countertop impatiently, absently, as he waited for the grind of the beans to halt and the rhythmic drip of the machine to begin.

Coffeemaker abandoned, Mako flees into the outside world with its rush of cars and dizzying lights. She does not have much by the way of clothing, just essentials, simple and utilitarian.

She reads the name of the place at which she finds herself. Wilmot's.

She needs a drink.

No she doesn't. Raleigh needs one.

Mako has to sit down and order, and then she puts her head in her hands.

Comments

[bibliophale]

Aziraphale is having an early start.

Melanie is looking after Lilly today, because he needs a break. Childish of him, he supposes, but he simply cannot relate to the girl and her strange, animal nature. Melanie seems to connect with her readily, and Lilly with Melanie, which is of course lovely. But he is not cut out for this.

He misses Crowley. But they've more or less ceased contact in recent times. Necessity, or perhaps forced indifference. Something of that nature. In between those lines.

A young woman steps in and he glances her way - a rifty, naturally, most of the people who come here are - but not someone he'd expect to see here at this hour. He's not sure what metric he's going by, but regardless, she has his attention as she sits down, clips out an order, and holds her head.

She looks very unhappy.

He wonders if she's new.

"Excuse me," he says gently. "Are you all right?"

[driftseeker]

Mako startles. She had not been aware that she was even being watched as she entered and sat, though she remembers enough about this place to know the nature of the clientele. Johnny had helped her obtain a general understanding of the city, including places like this - places for rifties and cosmic refugees.

She looks at the other man uncertainly, not sure what she should draw from his decidedly frumpy sense of fashion, his earnest-seeming nature.

Raleigh wants her to be on her guard. Fortunately, in the interest of avoiding further cognitive dissonance, Mako agrees.

"Slow morning," she says by way of explanation, which is not really an explanation at all. She tries to muster a smile, and comes out with nothing but for a tired twitch of her mouth.

[bibliophale]

"Mmn." He lifts his glass to his lips and draws a slow sip. "Well, you've come to the right place for that."

He sets his glass back down and offers her a hand. "I'm Aziraphale," he says. "I came through the rift - goodness, it'll be three months tomorrow." He shakes his head slightly, as if to dislodge that realization. "You?"

[driftseeker]

"Mako," she says, the word made hesitant by the stopping of her tongue before she could say Raleigh instead. "It has been almost a week."

She has never heard a name like his before, leading her to ponder its origin. Working among the employees of the Shatterdome, she had come to pick up a passing feel for international anthroponymy, but his name strikes her as vaguely latinated. She is not wholly sure what to make of that.

She is not wholly sure what to make of anything he is saying, rather. Three months is a stretch of time that seems utterly overwhelming to her. To be confined to this single city for three months, with no promise of when or if one will return home, if at all -

Her drink arrives. She knocks half of it back in one gulp, shutting her eyes against the pleasant burn of alcohol sliding down her throat.

This is not right.

This is not her.

She runs her thumb absently around the rim of the glass in neural indecision.

"I am not very used to this," she admits to her drink quietly.

[bibliophale]

Goodness, she's going for it. He hesitates before sliding a couple stools over until there is only one spot between them. Easier to converse quietly this way. "It'll be all right," he says dotingly. "We look after each other. You'll get used to it."

He smiles, he hopes encouragingly. "Was your world anything like this one?"

[driftseeker]

Get used to it. She's not sure she ever will get used to it, here. Until recently, she defined her life by a single goal, and focused on little else beyond it. Upon achieving it, she now lacks all but the last remaining tie to the world she recognizes, lurking in the form of Raleigh's insistent, low voice in the section of her skull she has no idea how to partition away.

Mako makes a small, scratchy noise in the back of her throat that could be misconstrued as a bitter laugh.

"It was very different," she says quietly. "Years ahead."

Twelve years and a world's destruction ahead.

[bibliophale]

"Well, you're not alone there," says Aziraphale easily, swirling his wine before taking another sip. "I'm a few years behind, myself. There are those who came from Earths very, very different from this one, or not from Earth at all. The Rift takes all sorts." Not very comforting, he supposes.

"Do you have a place to stay?" he asks. "I'm the caretaker of one of the apartment buildings, if you need accommodations."

[driftseeker]

"I am staying somewhere," she says softly. The idea of sipping at her drink, now that the rest of her brain has caught up with the rush of alcohol she just injected unceremoniously into her bloodstream, suddenly seems incredibly unappealing. She slides her hands from the table surface, folding them in her lap in a too-hasty gesture not unlike one that would indicate deferring to an authority. It is automatic, and it feels too timid and restrained, but it feels, distantly, correct. Nothing Raleighish about it.

It would be far, far too easy to adopt his square-shouldered slouch over the table, posture faintly redolent of an unconcerned sprawl, legs hooked beneath the seat, head to one side, eyes dark and watchful as his fingernails tap a seemingly careless tattoo against the rim of his glass with its steadily dwindling contents.

"Thank you." She flashes Aziraphale a brief expression of gratitude, too strained, too shy, before her eyes again become distant and downcast.

She has no idea what to say, and is fast coming to the realization that this other man has no intention of leaving, engaged as he is in their stilted, almost one-sided conversation.

The trickling silence between them stretches to a point of social tension, and, trying desperately to mask her panic and think of something to say, Mako seizes the first handful of raw, guarded, tensionless instinct she can find and pulls.

Immediately her hands slide back to the table surface, propping her chin on the ridge of her knuckles in a closed fist, looking at Aziraphale with none of her demure reticence, none of her painfully soft-spoken laconicism, her stare even and flat and composed.

"Anything I should know about this place?" she asks, the words tinged with a subtle American accent.

[bibliophale]

Aziraphale is barely cognizant of her apparent restlessness, her constant motion, the way she shifts unevenly between postures radially different from what another. All he retains from it is a vague sense that something is wrong, that there is something boiling beneath a surface he's not altogether aware of. He glances at her and lets his focus rest, curious, trying to suss out what he's picking up.

"Well, it's fairly ordinary," he says. "Apart from us. There are several persons you'd do well to avoid. And there's... the network. You have a phone?"

He hesitates. "Or did you mean about the pub?"

[driftseeker]

"Either one," she says idly, slipping the slim black rectangle of her phone from her pocket and setting it against the table with a soft click. Raleigh looks at the man obliquely, chary but calm and outwardly earnest. If Aziraphale is eager to inform her about the apparent dangers, there are plenty of advantages in listening. He seems well-meaning enough, and she is inclined to trust his disposition, at least as far as fair warning is concerned.

She tips her glass at an angle against the table, watching the pale liquid slosh faintly against the vitreous edges. One thumbnail bites into the table's surface, digging absently into the sun-warmed wood. "Who should I be looking out for?"

[bibliophale]

"Well - may I?" He reaches out to her phone, scrolling through her contacts. Not very many yet, though she has been added to the rift's network. "It looks as though you haven't had phone contact with any of the more unsavory types," he says encouragingly. "I see you have Gabriel here, he's - a good person to know." He tips his head, vaguely uncomfortable with just talking about Gabriel like this. "There's, um, the small matter of his brother. Do you know what Gabriel is? That is, did he tell you?"

Not a very stealthy way to go about it, but it's not exactly a secret, he supposes.

[driftseeker]

She twitches a shoulder in a slight, noncommittal shrug as he goes ahead and picks through the faint digital signature of her new life, and takes the opportunity to drain the remainder of her drink in a burning, pungent rush.

"An archangel," she says, lifting one eyebrow. "Yes. I'm staying in his building."

She hesitates and, with a minor decline in the social confidence she's recently begun to exude, frowns, a small crease of concentration appearing on her forehead. She feels a little more herself.

She is herself. That is what she has always been.

"I did not know he had a brother," she admits.

[bibliophale]

"Oh!" Well, then. Aziraphale has no idea what makes Gabriel choose some over others to live in his personal building - at least he assumes that's the one she means, especially since the unpleasant 'boytoy' of his is also listed among her meager contacts - but it's just as well she has a place to stay. None of his business, at any rate. "Well. Good."

He clears his throat and slides her phone gingerly back over.

"His brother - well, he has several, but there's only one here - and it's, well, the Devil." He tilts his head, running his finger idly around the rim of his glass. "He tends to leave most humans alone, but I think it's rather important to know. If you do ever encounter him - he looks human, like Gabriel and myself, but he'll very likely tell you who he is - it's best to just stay out of his way. However you can."

He finishes off his glass. "I'm an angel too," he says belatedly. "There are rather a lot of us, relatively speaking."

[driftseeker]

She tilts her head to one side, contemplating him carefully. She has a vague familiarity with the Devil as a concept, but she had long since assumed that, were 'hell' an actual real place that people actually really went, she had already glimpsed it in the form of a gash in the fabric of the world at the bottom of the sea.

Hell was never red, to her. It was never made from fire. It was blue and bioluminescent, water rushing from the crackling seam between worlds.

"Angels seem to look very human, here," she says, inflecting the words politely but with a fair amount of skepticism to be expected from one who has just been informed that their impromptu conversation partner is, in fact, a celestial entity.

[bibliophale]

"Well, we tend to do that," he says. "Our true forms are - too complex for this plane. They would rend humans apart." He sets his glass down on the bar and fills it up on his own, glancing at her with a little smile. "It's usually better to blend in. Here, things are... different. So many of us running around, it's not much good to keep ourselves secret."

He studies her for a moment. "Are you sure you're all right?"

[driftseeker]

Rend humans apart is a rather good reason to not constantly put oneself on display. Mako lifts her eyebrows subtly, reasonably certain - only reasonably - that this instinct was born from the part of her brain that was hers and has always been hers, and not with a certain person with whom her mind has recently come deeply, intimately familiar.

She can no longer tell the difference between the genesis of each thought, from what part of her fractured mind it arrived.

"I am still getting used to it," she says. It sounds like an admission of guilt, and she thinks, maybe, hopefully, probably, that part came from her. "I do not think Manhattan existed where I came from, anymore."

[bibliophale]

"Oh," he blurts. "Oh dear." Anymore doesn't sound particularly promising. Could she be from a world that saw some sort of partial apocalypse - like or unlike the one he and Crowley [debatably] thwarted?

"I'm sorry," he says, not sure why, not sure what else to say. Tentatively he asks, "What... happened to it?"

[driftseeker]

Mako simply shrugs and orders another drink.

"A war," she says softly. "It ended just before I arrived here."

She ended it. She and Raleigh and Hermann and Newt and Chuck and Pentecost, at a cost she was prepared to devote an unhealthy amount of mental energy convincing herself it was worth it, except that she never got that chance.

She had not wanted to lose Raleigh too, she had told him. She had not wanted to lose anyone.

She sobers slightly, figuratively, and removes herself further from the literal concept as her second drink arrives and she sips it.

"It will not happen here," she says, though it sounds more an assurance to herself than to him. "It would have happened already."