I'm just a stranger in a strange land

[atouchofka]

Who| Alain and OPEN
What| Alain arrives, in a rather desperate state
Where| D7 suite and around the Tribute Centre
When| Just before the Binding plot (slightly backdated)
Warnings/Notes| TBD

One moment, he was riding hell for leather in the gathering darkness, hunched low in his saddle, a bullet-graze in his thigh and his heart in his mouth. The next, he woke up in a strange room, alone, with the pulsing pain gone from his leg and the horse vanished out from under him. His heart, though, was still pounding, and although he put up no fight when he was led to the suite, he wasted no time in leaving it again. His gun was gone. That was bad. Worse, more frightening, was that the two guards who had taken him here had given him no echo of the Touch. They were cold and dead as automata, without any sense of personality. And all that might have frightened him, but for the fact that there was a more pressing issue at hand.

He had to get out. He had to get back. Blood pounding in his ears, he cast around for a weapon, and, finding none, decided not to linger and search - a gunslinger is his own weapon, Cort's voice echoed in his memory. Instead, swallowing, he set out into the strange new land, walking fast, taking in all that he could around him. The place was foreign, reminded him of nothing more than the old broken-down machines of his world, but shiny and new. And confining. Too confining. He had to get back.

In short order, he was thoroughly lost, fighting down uncharacteristic panic. He tried to reach out with the Touch, but found nothing, not even the sense of the Touch itself. That was horrifying, but he had no time to be horrified. Is this the Clearing? he thought at one point, desperately. Am I dead? But if he was dead, then who would bring the message through? If he was dead, then the gunslingers were dead, too, and Gilead's last hope with them. He couldn't be dead. It was unthinkable.

Unconsciously massaging his forehead, where a sharp knot of pain was gathering, he took a deep breath and cast around for someone to ask. The next person he saw, he approached, ignoring that dull sense of emptiness where the Touch ought to have sensed their mind. "Cry pardon..." he began, and cleared his throat.

Comments

[ka_sera_sera]

Roland is no stranger to this feeling, this feeling of unreality, displacement. As if his body is frozen, while his mind tries to figure out when he is. He's not at the end, almost certainly, in his time of endless waiting in Panem, because this is a figure from the life before that. One of them. He tries to match the sight to a memory, so as to know where and when he is now - the sight of that familiar face in profile, the expression, the clothes...

The clothes of the person that familiar figure is speaking to. A fashion Roland's only ever seen in one place. Panem. He must be in Panem, then, in its Capitol. Which means-

He's struck with a memory, then, one from his first day in this Capitol. Cuthbert's face, too young and very dear. Roland remembers how little any explanation had mattered, whether he was dead or somewhere else - somewhen else - altogether. It hadn't mattered. It'd happened then, he'd met one of his old, old friends again. It can happen now.

A noise makes its way out of his throat, wordless and pleading. He must have raised his arm, too, or perhaps moved, and at exactly the wrong time because there's a loud, sharp clatter to one side of him - a capitolite bearing a tray, one that's spilled its contents all over the floor. He glances at it very briefly, then looks back to the only sight of actual importance in this room. "A-alain," he manages hoarsely, and as he speaks it strikes him how old he sounds, in comparison to that young, strong 'cry pardon' he'd heard from his old friend just a moment ago. It seems impossible that they should meet this way, that Alain might turn to him and seem whole, healthy, that he might see Roland as he is now, so long after their time as tet has ended. Surely Alain must have heard him. The moment of waiting stretches out into what would feel like eternity, if Roland didn't know the taste of that particular feeling too well already.

[atouchofka]

Alain hears. Turns. For a moment, his mind, like Roland's, slows to a crawl, though for a slightly different reason. Without a sense of mind, he thinks, for a moment, that he's looking at Steven, or even at the Eld himself. That instinct, that gnawing suspicion that he was dead, only grows at the thought, and he swallows, hard.

"...Cry pardon," he says again, to the person he had hailed, but a little more querulously, distantly. "I have to..."

And he edges away, his eyes fixed on the son of the Eld, making a vague, apologetic gesture of his hand to the person he was talking to. On closer inspection, he can see that it isn't Steven, at least. The lines of his face are wrong, and Steven had never had those fingers missing, let alone those complex mechanisms in their place. As for the Eld, maybe, but even without the Touch, there's something nagging at the edge of his mind, a knowing that he knows better than to discredit.

Still, his voice is disbelieving, even hearing that voice, familiar for all its age-cracked degeneration. It can't be. All else might be, but this cannot.

"Roland? Ro'?"

[ka_sera_sera]

It's the nickname that does it. Shakes him at least a little out from that sense of unreality. If he could bear it he'd fall to his knees. Instead Roland propels himself forward, getting every inch of distance out of his legs to take him as close to that painfully familiar form as quickly as possible. "Oh," he says, the word a slow release of emotion, still realizing it.

He leans forward, presses his forehead to the forehead before him and cups the face, all unaware that the machines set at the end of his right hand are pressing their cold, rubber-covered grip against that young cheek a little more firmly than Roland intends them to. "Oh, old friend. I ought know better, now, but tell me. Tell me it's you. Tell me that you're here." He searches those eyes, looking alert, eager. As if, without the other gunslinger to lean against, he might just fall right over.

[atouchofka]

"It's me," Alain confirms, his own voice cracking a little. Just for the moment, his fear and desperation as regards the message fades into the background; raising one hand, he touches Roland's face cautiously, fingertips tracing the unfamiliar lines of age, old scars of time that hasn't happened yet. And then there are those fingers, those cold inhuman fingers pressing into his skin. "Gods be good, Ro', what have you done to yourself?"

He laughs a little, because it's that or give into the tears that are already threatening. "I can't look away for five minutes, can I?" he says hoarsely, because with Roland's clear age and the way he's looking at Alain, it's impossible to think that they're still travelling together in Roland's when. But that doesn't matter. He always knew he wasn't going to grow old. Just so long as...

His eyes snap back into focus. "The message. Ro', the message. Tell me I got it through."

[ka_sera_sera]

Roland stays still, treasuring the feeling of those fingers moving over his face. Around them, capitolites are taking pictures. Inside of five minutes those pictures will be available to the whole city, and inside of an hour at least one fan will be industriously pounding out a speculative story about just who Alain might be, this new young thing in Roland's life who he loves so well.

Roland cares nothing for that. Would not be surprised, were he told, but does not care. He opens his mouth after hearing that laugh, ready to inform Alain that it has been a great deal longer than five minutes, but then-

Roland pales a little. His eyes go wide, his mouth pinched. "You've carried many a message in your time," he manages, his voice still not entirely smooth. "Can't recall missing a one." He hadn't, though. Not really. Alain had never been as smooth with the code of their messages as others had. What messages he'd carried had been few.

[atouchofka]

Alain is silent for a moment, watching Roland's face change, apparently oblivious to the people around them. His broad, honest brow creases, and he swallows understanding like a lead weight, heavy in his throat and his gut. He doesn't need the Touch to read Roland. He never has, not after all their time together. And though he loves Roland as only a ka-mate can, though he respects him as a friend and as a dinh, that attempt at subtlety is like a punch to the gut.

He opens his mouth to say something in the High Speech, finds his tongue wraps too tight and too close around the words, and has to swallow them back again. By the second or third time of trying, the tears are starting to show, as much out of frustration and exhaustion as out of grief. He gulps them back, looks up at Roland, and settles for the Common instead.

"...You," he begins, and bites his lip. The reproach that was building up has gone out of his voice now, worn away by that exhausted resignation. "You always played me honest before, Ro'. Don't lie to me now." But he won't push it. If Roland wants to tell him what he remembers, he will; if not, then Alain will resign himself to not knowing. It isn't not knowing that hurts, not half so much as that blatant lie.

Wiping his eyes on his sleeve, he clears his throat, refusing to acknowledge his damp eyes any more than that. "Whatever happened, I'm here now. So, uh... where am I, exactly?"

[ka_sera_sera]

Roland lets Alain pull away in wiping his eyes, but he does not entirely let go. His right hand slides from Alain's face to the back of his neck. "I've never lied to you," he says firmly, and then wonders if that's true. It feels true.

"Anything more should wait though, I think." Roland doesn't mind his own tears, fallen as he'd watched Alain struggle to speak. There was a time - maybe as late as Alain's time, but certainly earlier - when it would have injured his pride to be seen to weep. But now he lets the tear tracks sit where they are, stretched over his cheeks. It's much more interesting to keep looking into Alain's face, fill in the gaps in his memory. That little line next to Alain's mouth, he'd forgotten that. Forgotten the hint of a hard angle at the corner of his jaw. "Where did they say your room was? Do you remember?"

[whatisay]

Alain isn't the only person in the District Seven Suite nursing a pained head. Jason smells more of the herbal cigarettes he uses to control his migraines than usual, and the tightness in his temple has drawn dark lines around his eyes and brow. It's made him snippier than usual, predicting that in a few hours he'll be incapacitated. He rushes his Tributes to appointments and photoshoots and the gym without letting them stop for breakfast.

Naturally, on the day when he wants to get home as soon as possible so he can let the worst of the headache hit while he's lying in the dark with an icepack the Gamemakers have decided to dump another Tribute on him. He flicks through his notepad, unsure whether this one's got Alain as a surname or a given name. His glasses keep riding down his nose, and he shoves them back up with clumsy savagery. He strides towards Alain before Alain's even finished leaving his bedroom, evidently a native here despite the relatively-subdued nature of his suit and shoes.

"Jesus, can't you people stay put for twenty minutes?" He finds the page with Alain's information and jams his pen behind his ear, his other hand into his pocket.

"Hope you've gotten your beauty sleep, because I want you out the door in five minutes. Chop chop, food's on the table." He waves a hand down the hall, towards the kitchen, lip curling with impatience. "Go."

[atouchofka]

Alain is an easygoing man by most standards. But he's an easygoing man who's just seen his entire cadre of gunslingers killed, who was midway through riding back to tell his remaining kin how utterly fucked they are, who just woke up in a strange place with half his senses feeling jumbled or gone. His patience for such scorn and disregard is thin, at best. You can almost see his hackles rise, and his hand drifts, just for a second, towards a gun that's no longer there.

"I've got no time for what you want," he says firmly, doing his best to modulate his tone. His face is soft and rather doughy, but there's a hardness behind his eyes, if you look close enough. "I have to get back. How did I get here, and how do I leave?"

[whatisay]

Jason snorts, and anger makes his nostrils blanch a bit. He doesn't even notice Alain's hand drifting; their hard eyes meet each other, each pitiless and stubborn. Jason's throat tightens a bit, not with fear but with irritation that his order isn't being followed with the immediate compliance the old batch of Tributes used to afford him.

"If that's all you have on the agenda, you have all the time in the world, because you aren't going back anywhere." Jason holds his hand out. "Give me your wrist. I need to make sure you've been properly tagged and chipped."

[atouchofka]

"I will go back." Alain doesn't proffer his wrist, just stands right where he is and continues to stare Jason down. He's not what you'd call an intimidating figure, but despite his stocky build and immensely unremarkable looks, there's a coiled kind of strength to him. "I will go back, whether you help me or no, and if I have to fight my way out of here, then I shall. This is too important. So tell me how to leave this place, for I have seen too much blood today, and I don't want to add yours to the count."

[whatisay]

Jason, by contrast, strikes an intimidating figure not from size but because he seems hollow, wearing all that violent energy around him like a second skin, radiating it all outwards like a sustained explosion. He leans in.

"Look, I'm not the one that brought you here and if it were up to me, you'd be right back where you belong, which is back under whatever rock you crawled out from. But it isn't up to me, and until it is you're not going anywhere. Now, we have to work together, so give me your wrist before I report you for threatening a Citizen."

[atouchofka]

Alain considers arguing, considers pushing it. But two things stop him. Firstly, he doubts it would be productive. This man may be pushy and rude, but he doesn't seem to be lying. This isn't his way out.

But, more importantly, he's starting to get a grip on the man himself, and what he sees scares him. For the first time since arriving, he's glad his Touch seems to have faded; what he can see in Jason's eyes suggests that trying to touch his mind would be like sticking a hand into a hornet's nest. He recognises that look, has seen it in Farson's men and in Hambry: the look of someone who hides their anger and fear by turning it outwards, who can't be reasoned with or even really reached. If they continue arguing, it'll come to blows, to no end, for someone like that won't be moved to help him.

He looks down, ignoring the prickle of horror down his spine, and holds out his wrist.

"Who did bring me here?" he asks, unflinching even as he capitulates. "I'd petition them for my release, if only for a day, an hour even. You cannot know the importance of it."

[crabmunicator]

Cry pardon is the kind of wording just unusual enough to draw Karkat's attention, and it's probably all the clearer once he turns that he's not human. Grey skin, sclerae a bright, yolky orange to match the tips of his short horns (which unlike the accessories on many a Capitolite, are quite real), and semi-rounded tips of his fangs should do well to set him apart. On a less alien note, he's only 5'2" tall - plus the fluff of his black hair.

He's been caught somewhere in a hallway, but he's not busy enough to tell him off for the interruption.

"What is it?" he asks.

[atouchofka]

Alain takes a half-step back, his hand going instinctively to his gun - which, of course, is missing, its comfortable weight gone from his hip. He isn't entirely sure what he's looking at here, but he is sure it's not human, and not native to his world, for surely he'd have heard of something like this?

But it speaks, and in a voice that's not so far from human, and if he's honest with himself, Alain has no time for discomfort. Let alone to turn away now he's got the (thing? creature?) man's attention.

"I have to find my way out of here," he says instead, bluntly, raking one hand back through his mop of blonde hair. "I kennit, it must be difficult, but I... I have to. Now."

[crabmunicator]

Karkat plainly sounds like a teenager, voice a bit rough but perfectly intelligible, speaking English just fine like everyone else here. Not that he has the choice, as he's learned.

Of course, he's not surprised by Alain's reaction. He's not the first person around who's never seen a troll, but he does gather that he must be new, which his words make all the clearer. He frowns, because this isn't going to be a happy thing to explain.

"You can't. And I'm not saying that to stop you or anything like that, but I'm saying it's beyond your control to do. It's all up to these picky jackasses in charge who goes where when, whether it's here or home or not," he explains. "Worse, going back seems to demand the act of dying in the Arena first, and there's no guarantee you'll get to stay there. I went back that way myself, and yet here I am."

It's a lot to say at once, but he feels no need in holding back or lying about the nature of their captivity. False hope hurts worse than honesty, in the end.

[atouchofka]

Alain is quiet for a long moment, taking this in. If he were a hastier person, he might just sweep it aside as he's tempted to do, and find someone else to help him. But even with the adrenaline thundering through him, and the desperation pounding at the back of his mind, he's a more thoughtful kind than that. So he is simply quiet, wiping his hand over his mouth and searching Karkat's face for a lie. Now, more than ever, he feels the sucking absence of his Touch, which ought to fill out the picture for him; now, swallowing, he pushes back that absence and tries to focus.

"You're sure?" he says at last, quietly, meeting Karkat's eyes with a hard, searching look. "Can I petition them? I have to go back." He swallows, weighing the dangers of sharing his position against the need to make it understood. After a moment, making his decision, he says slowly, "If the message I carry does not make it to my brothers, we are all lost. The last of my kith and kin, the last forces of the White... they will all die. You are not who I must beg, I kennit, but please, if there is aught you can think of, any way I can return..." Even if it's only for long enough to pass on the message. Even if it costs him his life. He needs a way back.

[crabmunicator]

"Yes, I'm sure," he answers, and it's without the usual impatience he'd affect. This guy sounds earnest with his wants, and Karkat can't keep from sympathy for it. But for the first time, he's grateful for the time he went back, if only for the knowledge it imparted.

"Listen: if time where you're from is anything like it is for me, then what has to happen will happen regardless. But I'll put it this way. If you ever go back - and it won't be your choice when it happens - things will take off from the last time you were there," he explains, gesturing some with his hands. "You won't remember this place. Whatever you were doing then you'll go on doing, and what will happen will happen. You might come back here after; you might not. Like I said, it's not up to us."

He hopes at least for this kid's sake that doom doesn't work the same way there. Dying is never fun, but it's worse when the permanent kind hits you because of how time wasn't supposed to go.

[atouchofka]

"That..." Alain sighs deeply, looking wearier than anyone his age ought to, as if all the last twenty-five years of his life have all piled in on him at once. He drags a hand over his face, and tries to smile. "That's some comfort, I guess. Thankee."

The words that come to his mind are ka like a river, like a wind, but he keeps those words to himself. They're a comfort sometimes. Here, they only ache, because he's felt the future waiting for them back home, and it's blood and darkness. For him, or for them all? He doesn't know. He doesn't want to. But even less does he want to be caught here, like a fly in amber, in that not-knowing.

Still, it's better than that frantic desperation, than hurling himself against a brick wall trying to finish his mission, than knowing he's failed them because he can't get out of here. So he's not lying - it is a comfort. It's just a cold kind of comfort, is all.

"Thankee," he says again, awkwardly. "Uh." Belatedly realising that he hasn't introduced himself or done anything but demand, he sticks out one fleshy hand, rather abruptly. "I'm Alain, do ya fine. Alain Johns."

[conifer]

Emily attempts a smile, one that she hopes is both reassuring and apologetic, but she knows that it won't go very far to assuage the concerns he has about being brought here, and moreover what he's expected to do here. She wishes that she could feel more sympathy for the Tributes, but apart from the very youngest of them she's mostly just grateful that they've been brought here to fight so that her own people don't have to. She rises from the sofa in the common area of the suite, abandoning the pile of magazines she'd been trawling through for mention of her Tributes, gesturing for him to sit with her.

"I know it's strange, but it will be okay."

[atouchofka]

"No." He meets her eyes, holding them, trying to make her see the urgency of the situation. He does not sit. It's rude, and he doesn't like to be so brusque, but he can't stand on courtesy. Not now. "No, you don't understand. It won't, not if I can't get back. The chances are slim enough as it is. There's..." He swallows. "A message. I have to get the message through. Everything hangs in the balance. It's not the strangeness that troubles me, s-sir." And he's so intense, so thoroughly caught up in that need, that he doesn't even notice that somehow sai has become sir.

[conifer]

"In that case, there's not much I or anyone else can do to help you there." It still feels odd to her when she has to face the fact that the Tributes aren't just pulled in here from hazy, obscure places that she doesn't have to think about, but real worlds with lives and families of their own. It's a lot harder to send them off to die over and over when she has to think about that. "But there's nothing you can do, so you're better off focusing on yourself here."

[atouchofka]

"No," Alain says, but it's more a sound of stubborn disbelief than of disagreement. "There has to be. There has to be something." Hot tears are starting to sting at the backs of his eyes, and he swallows hard, shaking his head. "Thirteen men... thirteen gunslingers died so I could get this far. All the others will die too, if I can't tell them. There has to be something." He dashes at his eyes, and it's that, more than any conscious thought, that shows him he believes her. He's not going to make it in time. Farson's army will fall on the remnants of Gilead's men, unprepared and unaware, and they will all be killed, without even the chance of defending themselves. Because of him. Because he failed.

He sways a little, paling, and looks like he might be sick. "Cry pardon," he says hoarsely, not looking at her. "But there has to be."

[conifer]

She doesn't like having to be so harsh with a Tribute, especially one so new and even more so when he's stuck with her and Jason for support, but she knows there's nothing comforting she could say, either. "The people who brought you here don't care. In fact they probably waited until now to pull you in here knowing the deaths of thirteen people weigh on you so that you'd make more entertaining television for the Capitol." She purses her lips tightly, breathing out deeply through her nose, knowing that if she goes much further along that line then she's in danger of sounding as though she's arousing anti-Capitol sentiment to the security forces that she knows are always listening in. "Look, I'm sorry. But the only thing you can do is make sure you don't get killed yourself."

[atouchofka]

"Tele-fishon?" The word means nothing to him, a man who comes from a world of horses and candles and only perished remnants of technology. He blinks at it, rubbing his hand over his mouth and closing his eyes. "They won't carry it back for me, then?" he says after a moment, his voice low and broken. "I don't need to go back myself. If they would only send it, let Roland know..."

There isn't a great deal of hope in his voice, not after what she's said. But he has to try. If this was his last mission - and he's afraid, no matter what comes next, that it was; he could feel that growing sense of doom the whole time he was riding back with the message - then he has to at least complete it. He has to. Failure can't be an option. Too much depends on him.