Who

Sa'mael, Rielle

What

Sam and Rielle cross paths once again, and a familiar subject is revisited…with perhaps a flicker of hope attached.

When

It is evening of the twenty-fourth day of the fifth month of the tenth turn of the 12th pass.

Where

Loft, Southern Weyr

OOC Date 12 Mar 2017 07:00

 

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"Aye. You're a madman."


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Loft

Light and airy, this space is interesting moreso due to how accessible it is from a staircase that hugs the outer stretch of the stables: it is frequented by more than just herder apprentices, the sweet and acrid scents of runner sweat, hay and feed commingling with the earthier tones of dirt and manure. It isn't an unlikely location for a winter nap, being often warm and dry and restful.


Sa'mael has been scarce of late: not exactly shirking his duties, but not necessarily lingering around the Weyr either. So it is a rare moment that Sa'mael finds himself ensconced within the loft, a bottle in hand. The world is fuzzy, hazy around the edges as Rukbat slides behind the horizon, like melting egg. Vibrant red streams through clouds that still mist rain, and enough light is visible to bounce off the glass bottle in hand. He tips it to his lips, lays his head back and sighs. Worn around the edges: road dirt and other travel-signs roughen the image. His Jaguar jacket is dusty and askew. Longish blond hair is slicked back and more than a few days’ worth of downy blond beard covers his jaw. The scent of leather and road cling to his frame.

Rielle had learned to appreciate the relaxing atmosphere of a rainy autumn day in a place with something less than stone for a roof. The sound of the rain drumming on wood or tin and the smell of damp earth has become a comforting thing for her, and with no duties to tend to this evening and Zariel off with her father, she slips into the stables to take advantage of the weather. She aims for the loft, and all seems clear…until she halfway up and the sight of another person gives her pause. It wouldn't be the first time she's found someone else up here. Who it is finally registers and keeps her from going back down the stairs. "Sam. You're…looking a bit run ragged," she notes, quietly kneeling in the hay once she's up, teal eyes surveying the whole of him as she gauges whether or not she ought to go.

Pulled from a reverie, Sa'mael rolls the back of his skull against the loft's wall until he faces Rielle. He tips his bottle up - the dark amber liquid sloshes - "Good to see you too, Rielle." His words roll together in a singular laziness, the hellfire rage banked for now. "Feel like I been rode hard and put up wet." Sam doesn't look like he cares if she joins him - in that, he's not giving her the stink-eye or anything. He is sprawled, long-limbed, across the loft, owning every inch he touches. "Come here to hide out?" Dark humor laces, but it's barely a sussuration of movement of the darkness that lies within.

Rielle sighs a little when Sa'mael gives her a bit of flack for her first words. "It is good to see you," she murmurs, and shifts a shoulder to dislodge a small satchel she carries with her. She picks a spot across from him to stretch out herself, propping on one elbow one her side as she twitches her skirt into place over her knees. "Were you? Anything needing a look?" A roundabout way to ask if he's injured at all, from whatever he's been doing. "You could say that. Just wanted a quiet spot to write a bit and relax. I've learned this is a good one."

That's Sa'mael: made of ass and razor blades and unapologetic about it. He watches her settle over the rim of his bottle. He's not guzzling the liquid at least. "Nah. Few nicks. Nothing that's going to kill me." The despondency that once limned his demeanor seems to be gone. In truth, whatever it was has forged him anew. The rage that once cooled is white hot: an engine that powers a machine in one direction. Sa'mael's. "S'a'good place." His words slur together, though on purpose more than accident. A connoisseur of alcohol, it takes more than a quarter of gin to get him blitzed these days. His liver is probably begging him to stop, but alas. Not yet! "To hide, that is. Or just stay out of people's shit. Life treatin' you well?"

That lack of Sa'mael's former despondency is likely what allows Rielle to decide to hang about for now. At least the rage that has constantly simmered under his skin for as long as she's known him is familiar. The other stuff wasn't. Done get her skirt arranged, she lets her wrist drape over her hip and gives a little shrug of one shoulder. "Those are easier to take care of than what will kill you, at least. But it's your hide." This she knows well. She nods agreement to his further assessment of the place, the motion carrying into an answer to his last. "Life is…steady. It wasn't for a while. But I've got my priorities straight now at least, and…things are alright." Her gaze drops along him again, pensive. "Life hasn't been dull for you lately?"

"My hide isn't going to suffer a few scratches. Got plenty of those already," Sa'mael points out with the lift of his bottle to his lips. The liquor burns down his throat, giving him a jolt. "Yet you hesitate on steady and things like you're not sure the words you tell yourself are truth." It's a guess, and it's delivered in the same careless fashion he always delivers his barbs. "If life's dull, then I'm dead. If trouble isn't finding me," he bares his teeth in a manic grin, "then I'm finding trouble." In his tone is a winding darkness, a barbed thread that echoes back to the days of Candidacy and beyond, to a time trapped in a mine. "Always said, if I'm gonna go, I wanna go out in fire." He smirks, and tips the bottle towards Rielle in offering. "Not in my bed."

"I wasn't hesitating. Just making sure it was the right word," Rielle counters matter-of-factly. "And it is." The familiar grin earns a wryly arched eyebrow and a smirk to match as Rielle reaches out to accept the offered bottle. "Why find or be found by it? You are trouble," she quips in an easy, lilted drawl of her own before tipping the bottle against her lips. "Fire," she notes as a bit of the very thing crawls down the back of her throat, "takes many forms. If you're going to go, go out in the good sort, aye?"

"Nnnghh," Sa'mael's sound isn't discounting her words as falsehoods, but more a fact of acknowledgement. At her quip, he laughs - and it is a boisterous laugh that carries with it elements of good and bad, but mostly bad - and shakes his head. "Yeah. I am trouble." He isn't denying - never denies it. "Bad news," he lifts a finger and points it at his chest. "Don't make no promises I can't keep. Fire's fire. It's more probable I'll go down for a shitty ass decision than some noble cause. I ain't no one's hero." When she's done, he makes grabby hands for the bottle. Next!

Rielle actually likes Sa'mael's laugh quite a bit, more so because it seems so rare. So she grins to hear it. She acknowledges Sa'mael as trouble and has for some time, and while she's quite aware that there are real connotations to it, calling him "trouble" is almost something akin to affectionate when it comes to her rough, razor-edged bronzeriding clutchmate. He is a familiar sort of trouble. She hands the bottle back and then rolls onto her stomach, folding her arms and resting her chin upon them to look at him. "A fiery end always seems to come up when I talk to you," she notes. "Fever's fire wouldn't be a good end, though. Then you'd be in your bed and on fire when you go, which I doubt is what you'd want." Why does she point that out? Perhaps he'll get what she's on about sooner or later. "What comes before that, though? The fiery end, I mean."

Ahhh, bottle, dear friend. Sa'mael drinks a good gulp, cold-fire blue eyes watching Rielle. "Ahhh, no. I'm not going out in some stupid fever. If I'm in my bed, there's only one reason to die." A raucous tone underscores that, though he leaves it just there and offers the bottle back. "If I got my ass sick, I'd take myself on Czhaevth and I'd make myself sure I landed in the fire." He shrugs, uncommitted to the 'before'. "Who the fuck knows. I like to think I'd be on the road with shit chasing my tail. I live for the adrenaline rush." Something - something to live for. It's spoken in his features, felt in his words, shivered in the ancient bones of rage and grief. A grief that's dulled with time, but like any war wound, gives off it's phantom limb pain.

"You will if you keep that up so hard," Rielle points out with a little jerk of her chin toward the bottle. Not the first time she's said as much, but she can't help reminding him. Perhaps she should just give it up by now, but…she's simply never been able to. His reply is something she's heard in some form or other from him, too, and she sighs, resigned. "Aye. You're a madman." Not accusatory, just a statement. "I suppose it's not something I'll ever understand, but I don't have to. I'd decided I gave a damn about you without understanding back before we Impressed anyway." And apparently she's decided it's something she can just let be now.

Sa'mael pauses after another gulp and an offer of the bottle her way. "I will what?" A brief moment of curiosity as something in her statement doesn't add up to what she'd said mere moments ago. Still, her labelling him as a madman pulls the bare-toothed grin from him. The coldfire blue eyes chilling in their intensity. "That's me. A madman." As much as he throws his arms around the fires of his eventual demise, so does he embrace just about ever opportunity for getting into shit. Whether it's Threadfall and tight maneuvers that leave him seconds from certain death or other ventures, danger is a constant shadow. "You shouldn't, Rielle," he intones, though even as he says it, he knows his clutchmate won't listen. "I ain't worth no one's worry." He wiggles the bottle, causing the amber liquid to slosh around. Silent signal: want more?

Rielle does take the bottle back, though she sips rather than gulps. "Go out in 'some stupid fever'," she clarifies before taking her drink and offering it back. "That's what too much of this does. It kills your liver and the rest of your body follows. Painfully. It can't fight back. You take ill, you burn…and you're gone. It's ugly. Undignified." The weight of firsthand witness leavens her words, blue-green eyes dulling with unpleasant memories before finding his again. "That's one reason why it's useless to tell me I shouldn't give a damn about you. I don't want to see it happen to you."

When Sa'mael takes the bottle back, he eyes it. "I tried to quit once. It fucking sucked." So here he is, shoving the bottle back to his lips for a drink. At least he's cut back to a drink. "Guess I always thought I'd get killed before I died from the sauce." He takes a breath and cradles the bottle in his hands and regards her. "It's easy to pass judgment, Rielle, on someone. You ever had something in your blood and you needed it. It physically hurt when you didn't have it. And all you could think about was getting that one thing. That one fucking thing that would make all the pain go away? You ever go through that?" A question posed as a blade, a hint of that unraveling desperation echoing in the rough tone.

"I'm not judging you for it, Sam," Rielle says quietly, pressing up to a sitting position at his knee. "Before I came here, I saw it a handful of times. Never knowing reasons why unless someone cared to tell me. It was never my business. But there was always a reason. I just tried to do what I did best to help." She she draws a slow breath and releases it, bracing on one hand to her right. "I don't know it firsthand. But I've watched it. Watched people deal with it, watched how it hurts when they need it, like you said. And I've seen people die when it's addressed too late. It takes more strength than I'll ever understand to want to get past that need so that you're free…but I know that's possible, too. I've seen it." She gestures to the bottle. "Deciding to be free of it is a choice, just like it is to decide to be a slave to it. Harder. But not impossible."

Sa'mael lets that sit between them without a word given. He regards her while carefully tilting the bottle for a deliberate drink. It's not in defiance of her or her words, per se, but an a final act of choice. "I dunno I'm strong enough." A bald statement, but Sa'mael doesn't hide from the truth when it comes to himself anymore than he hides from the truths of others. "But I got something…" He seems conflicted, torn by revelation so he finally settles on. "Maybe one day I'll be strong enough, but that's not this day." Still, against his own words, he sets the bottle down and unwinds himself in fluid motion. He consumes his life with movement, heated and intense. Every tug and pull of muscle drives him forward to a new ending. A new change. "But maybe I'll leave that with you. Czhaevth's window of opportunity is dwindling and if I don't go, I'll find myself out on my ass for the night." His grin is a tear across his expression, bleak and yet almost youthful. A heavy clap of his hand on her shoulder, and he tosses at her, "You keep up that good life, Rielle. It suits ya." That's gonna end up being his farewell. Sam ain't so good with the 'good-bye'.

Rielle simply waits, not sure what to expect from Sa'mael now. She starts to give a little shake of her head at his first and halts herself, clenching her jaw subtly when she notes the conflictedness about him. Her eyes land on the bottle and remain there for a stretched moment until she looks up to see his grin. She bites her lip when his hand lands on her shoulder, brows furling slightly before she looks up and watches him descend from the loft. "Bye, Sam," she says, but she doesn't know if he hears it. After another few breaths, she picks up the bottle he left behind, turning it over in her fingers and inspecting it with a resentful gaze. "Let yourself be strong enough," she murmurs to the air, and then hurls the bottle to shatter against the far wall. Shards of glass and the spray of amber liquid disappear into the hay - a bit dangerous, but she'll tend to it before she leaves, out of courtesy. For now, she'll lay back down and write, the bite of alcohol wafting through to mingle with petrichor in subtle reminder of the conversation that's passed.

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