mental link;

[shri]

[ Knock-knock -

- or something like the creak of city gates of her wanting to reach out to anyone else in the hive that will respond. ]

( These ability we have aside from communication. I require a trainer for my own.

And a decent explanation of what they are and their pitfalls. I am not familiar with this kind of... magic. )

[ Yeah she can't think of another word for it. ]

Comments

[shri]

(when did the world change enough to care about whether the soldier was a child or not? When did she stop eating her young? )

[ryohji]

( She never did stop. What changed are her table manners. ) [ he will take her metaphor as far as it will go. depersonal, like her, and the way she was learned to spear her young so cleanly when it was once a blood and tendrils show. clean enough to lead one to think it's the machine doing the killing. ] ( More utensils at her disposal, so she doesn't have to use her bare hands. No one likes a messy eater. )

[shri]

[ the first burns low, crackled in dull embers, somewhere two rooms away, she heard the laugh of women, nothing less than lyrical for the memory she settles against the edges of. ]

(I will do what I can for Shinji, however he allows me too now. )

[a pause, and a flicker of shadow shapes on the wall, the dancing shades of many armed Gods. ]

(another question, if I may? )

[ryohji]

( I appreciate it. )

[ because he, he can't do much of anything for the boy. by virtue of his complicity. ]

( I'm used to asking the questions, not having to answer them. That's alright, if you make it a good one. )

[shri]

[ it ought to be hard to cut out her heart, in many regards, but like any ruler that has done it for a great length she does it with ease now. A quartered of part of herself, compartmentalised, but old enough now that she no longer pretends it does not matter to her - only that she frames it that does not matter to anyone else. But he - he has proven his own truth, that he will not say it in grandness or misery, simply as it is and she must know what the fight in front of her is. For she will never belong to this nest, she knows always whom to who she belongs.

The fate of her home is no one else's burden but herself. After all, it was she who had failed to save them. ]

(In your future, does my homeland... Hindustan, India, whatever name it is called... Does she... ) [ she dreads the answer the answer she had been hovering on when she realised how far she sat out of time, out of place. ] (... does she have peace now, in your time, from the English? Did they drive them out? )

[ryohji]

[ as if retiring a toy box for the night, his mind takes a new, sedate edge. in a war of truth-telling, kaji isn't one to be thwarted by sugercoat or soft blows. her question neither surprises nor disappoints. the question is fair. what must follow by logical conclusion is a fair answer. ]

( India achieves independence from the British in 1947. ) [ some shy of one hundred years after lakshmi's time. he continues unhampered. ] ( During that time, a Muslim-based coalition cedes from the country and forms Pakistan, against colonial wishes. )

[ another man would've stopped there, spared her the excess barrage of over-elaboration. he had answered her question exactly, provided dates where generalities would have felt unsatisfactory. but he had spent his life on the receiving end of difficult questions, and what'd he'd wanted more than anything was someone who would go above any beyond what was asked of them; in one single bound answer the questions that followed the first, so and and so forth... ]

( But that's something for the history textbooks, now. Fifty years later, a group of researchers ) [ end of the world cultists and one beguiled scientist. in this case, teasing the minute details would only serve to distract rather than emphasize. ] ( uncover a large creature hiding under the snowbanks of Antartica. This is Adam, the progenitor of all life on Earth. Contact with Adam and the researchers trigger what's known as Second Impact. The following explosion sets off tsunamis that destroy much of India's geography and its people. Then, a war breaks out between India and Pakistan over the remaining refugees. I was a teenager, then. The countries have never recovered. )

[ no truth without hope, no matter how small. what follows is small like a dot on the horizon, but visible all the meanwhile: ] ( But, the India I knew never contained vampires. )

[shri]

[ There is frankly -- too much, so little there. He talks of things he cannot understand but no more than she could understand things of his home. Of those that as he says names, situations, she puts faces too. They are not just the British, they are red coats splitting apart to monstrous forms like skin peeling back to show what they truly were. They are not Muslim-coalition, they are her Afghans, who have no reason to fight for a Hindu Queen, but died, bloody and proud and ten to one, the best men on the field. Pakistan - what should Pakistan be but more her own home land, cut in half?

That all of it, all of it should come to nothing, when it all burns.

The hot, wet feeling over the link is unmistakeable. Her home, her home, her home. Her rivers where she had washed her feet as a child, the temples she had gone to pray over her growing belly, the men and women who had presided over her wedding, who had gripped her hand when she thought she might fall at her husband's funerals. The walls of Gwalior, high and wide, the temples of Varansai, laid down in Krishna's legacy - of her home, her home, her home. ]

( Thank you. )

[ She thinks he will understand, when she cuts the link without any other comment. After all, what was there to even say? ]