station72 | when were you happy? (open)

Entry tags:

when were you happy? (open)

CHARACTERS: Beth and YOU
WHERE: here there and everywhere
WHEN: any day and every day
SUMMARY: open prompts for downtime. if you'd like something specific hit me up at

pineappamatic!
WARNINGS: N/A! will update as necessary

i. hello, it's me

[Beth doesn't like the sensation of the mental link, like a lot of people. She feels like it's been enough time that she should be used to it by now, but she isn't. She doesn't mind people seeing into her head, though, as much as she feels like she's infringing on others' boundaries, or inflicting the tangled mess of her mind on them.

So, she's making a point to meet and get to know everyone. Really get to know them, the old fashioned way. Where people reveal information about themselves as they feel comfortable.

It's kind of a tall order, but she's trying.

It could be anywhere: in the rec wing or the nesting deck or just in a hallway. The ice doesn't need to be broken first, either; if Beth makes eye contact with a stranger long enough, she'll muster up the courage to break it herself, stepping forward enough to catch their eye.]

Hi. [Her voice is soft but her eyes are steady. She holds her hand out to shake.] I'm Beth. I don't think we've met before.

ii. push it

[On occasion, Beth can be found in the training wing. There isn't a set pattern to when she shows up; it's more that there are good days and bad days, and on her bad days she feels a need to be productive. She needs to be better. Stronger. She can't get complacent or comfortable. This place isn't any safer than where she came from, it's just a different kind of danger.

The thing is, though, she's small. And she's never had any sort of proper training regimen; most of what she knows is a combination of physical feats made in fight-or-flight situations and what people could teach her in the scant moments of spare time they could find back at the prison.

But she can start by lifting some weights.]

'Scuse me. [She points at a set of hand weights that they may or may not be standing in front of.] Can I get at those?

iv. choose your own adventure

[Hit me with a prompt of your own, or let me know if you'd like to plot out something else!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ Practice, really. He's spent a lot of time focusing on it, and compared to someone like Prince he's got a long way to go - but he's okay with where he's at, when it means he can hold a conversation like this with someone without either of them having to worry about giving off or getting more than they plan.

He gives a little chuckle at that, making a face at the difficult of keeping track of days on the station. ]

On Concordia it wasn't so hard, because they had real days and kept their own time, but up here... it's weird as hell without the sun, you know?

Yes.

[That's a little more... emphatic than she usually is. But look, she's a farm girl. The sun is a big deal.]

I mean, I know what you mean. I got pretty good at trackin' the time and the days back home, but without the sun it's like we don't even have them. [beat] I mean, I guess we don't. But it makes plannin' your day and stuff even harder than it is already.

[ His expression lights up a little at the empathetic-ness, that she gets it. He's a city boy at heart, sure, but after all his time in the military and up in the sky, nothing's the same without the sun. ]

Yeah, I get you. Might as well not even have days, especially when it comes to trying to keep a sleeping schedule. [ Something she'd said in the middle of that catches his attention, though, and he looks curiously at her. ] You had to track the days back home, too?

[Oh. What's a not-awkward way to explain that civilization has collapsed and calendars aren't usually at the top of a list of priorities when you're evacuating your childhood home from a hoard of flesh-eating monsters?]

Um, yeah. Sometimes. We... used to move around a lot, and it can be easy to let days blur together if you don't pay attention to them, you know? I always wanted to keep track. So we would know when important days were comin'.

[ ...all right, that makes him even more curious. We used to move around a lot automatically makes him think military brat or on the run but admittedly, he's more than a little biased there. Still, he understands what she means, and he quirks a little smile. ]

Feel free to tell me if I'm being too nosy, yeah? I know it's hard enough keeping things to ourselves with this going on. [ He taps the side of his head. ]

[She balks a little. She's being rude.]

Oh, no, it's not— it's not you. It's just... I'm not so good at keepin' everything in, yet.

[And she doesn't really like bombarding people with the sights and sounds and smells of what's left of the world she knows, if she can help it. She tries to block it out by thinking of something positive while she talks, the farm and the horses and freshly cut grass.]

The world... ended, I guess. That's what people say. [A beat, then quieter:] I never really liked thinkin' about it like that. But everything's shut down. It's not like you can get on a computer and look up what day it is, anymore.

[ Sam’s tempted to interject there, to offer to help her with her shields if she wants. He still remembers what it was like when he first got to the station, and even now that his control is actually pretty decent, he knows he’s got a way to go.

He doesn’t want to interrupt, though, and it’s a good thing - because damn, that’s a little different than he’d been expecting. Makes him think of something like the worlds that Angel and Ilde had showed him. ]

Little more extreme than anything I’d been thinking, damn. I can’t imagine what that’s like. But I can get not liking to think about it like that. Makes it seem like everything you’re doing now’s an afterthought, like it don’t mean anything because the way people knew it before’s ended.

Right.

[That's it exactly, nail hit square on the head. She can't think of her life now like an afterthought, like a string of days until it's over. If she does, it leads to— a dark place she doesn't want to go back to. It needs to have meaning, and she'll get it wherever she can find it.

The same old saying of her father's steals through her head: if you don't have hope, what's the point of living?]

The world's still there, you know? Folks still care about each other. They still hurt. They're still happy. [Sometimes.] It's— harder, now. But that doesn't make it meaningless.

Yeah, yeah I feel you. It's the difference between just surviving and really living. You gotta find happiness where you can.

[ Sam'd learned that a long time ago, and it's one of his most strongly held beliefs. That slips through his shields, a little, part intentionally and part because damn it's such a relief to meet someone who shares it. ]

Been trying to convince a lot of people here of that.

[She smiles, but it's a little heavy, a little sad. She'd had some trouble convincing people at home of it, too.]

Yeah. I've... kinda gotten the impression a lot of folks here are— frustrated. [That's a gentle term. She looks at her hands.] I can't really blame them. It's hard to hold on to the idea that you can still be happy, after you've had everything taken away like that. I get it.

[ Frustration, yeah that's one word for it. He quirks a little smile back at her. ]

And there're a lot of them who've been going so long that they ain't even sure what makes them happy any more. [ Both back home and here, really, maybe that says something about the people that Sam hangs out with. ] I don't blame 'em, either. Took me awhile before I could get over feeling like I wasn't doing right by what I lost if I could be happy without it.

Everybody needs to go through that, I think. It wouldn't count for much if it was easy to just let everything go.

[So he shouldn't feel bad about it, she means. She was ready to let go of everything she loved because she was too afraid, once, so... Anybody can at least do better than her.]

It'd be easier if we could do it for somebody else, maybe. Figure out what makes them happy. Or help, or— anything. But it doesn't work like that, most of the time.

[ It wouldn't count for much if it was easy to just let everything go.

Despite how good his shields are, that resonates so strong with Sam that the feeling bleeds out across his side of the mental link. He knows both sides of it, struggling to let something go and being ready to let everything go because of it, but he lets that go before it gets any farther.

And ducks his head a little, throwing her a sheepish smile. He hadn't quite meant to get into things that deep. ]

That used to be what I did, back home. I took the coping skills I learned and taught them to other people, tried to help them see that there was another way. Help them relearn what makes them happy.

Think you're probably better than me at it, then.

[It's a joke, a thin attempt to lighten the mood a bit. She hadn't meant to crack the wall of his mind like that, even if what she got was a feeling of commiseration. It stills feel a little bit too much like trespassing.]

That sounds nice, though. Helping people like that. Was it your job?

[ He gives a low chuckle, going along with the attempt. He doesn't actually mind, too much, he just doesn't like making people feel things they might not want to. ]

Yeah, it was. I was a soldier, then after I got out I worked for a while at the VA. Which... probably doesn't mean much if you don't have those back where you're from.

We had them. Before, anyway. [Before everything went to shit.] For veterans, right? After they come back from war?

[Her knowledge of it is pretty basic. She was 16 when the world went under, and before that her life was mostly just the farm and school and her friends.]

That sounds like it'd be a hard job. [Being a soldier, being in a war, and then trying to help people like you— it sounds like another level of struggle to her, even if the odds are high that she has her own struggles like it.] But important, too.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

when were you happy? (open)

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject