OPEN | the waves still crash on the bonfire ash.

[evite]

who: skye & you, hopefully.
what: getting settled? getting hype? what's soon to be the usual, probably.
when: throughout the month of may.
where: city-wide!
warnings: none yet.

✈ in memoriam.

( she doesn't want to mourn. not like this, anyway. skye has too many guilt-laden memories that hang off her ribs to let them free into this city yet; she's half-convinced she'd light too many lanterns and burn the place down. so, instead, she opts to observe. she finds a quiet place off to the side where she can draw 8-bit patterns across the lantern someone had so helpfully placed in her hands and thinks back to all the people she'd left behind.

she draws a pattern on one side, jagged lines that don't quite meet so much as attempt to cross each other out, and hides a name in the blur of ink in the middle. trip, four letters, but they're hard enough to write as it is. another side depicts the layout of the bus, a messy blue print from an untrained hand. the lines are thickest for a square off to the side; not her bedroom, but the sparring room. a place that left her mourning for something that had never been real in the first place. ward. what could have been.

at one point, someone approaches her, lighter in hand and ready to help lift the lantern up into the sky. there's a beat of hesitation before she shakes her head, fingers clutching reflexively over the paper between them. )

No, I think I'm going to keep it, actually.

( is that weird? it might be weird. )

Is that okay?

✈ in officio.

( they offer her a job. well, to be more specific, they tell her to find her own work, which seems a lot more real than anything else thus far. she's not used to having things handed to her, anyway; the idea of having to find her own work seems much more skye than playing cheerful worker drone and just going where they tell her to.

not that she really has to try, anyway. the city seems more than happy to request software codes — mostly inconsequential things, housekeeping projects that likely are a little too blase for anyone they might keep on staff full time, but skye doesn't mind. it puts money in her pocket and boredom on the back burner, the former of which she prefers and the latter of which is probably better for the city.

as a freelancer, though, skye doesn't have an office. there's no official place for someone to meet her or come calling; ultimately, it means that everywhere becomes her office. depending on the day or her mood, she calls a few places "home away from home" — the coffee shops, of course, with their comfortable seating and plentiful selection of baked goods; the local university's library, naturally, and its expansive collection of quiet working tables and reference materials; and in a twist, the local gym, where skye can scout for someone she might want to approach after hours, in the hopes of filling up all that precious free time.

she thinks may might even be proud of her for that. sparring voluntarily? who would have thought. not skye, that's for damn certain, but she's trying new things. like talking to people, for one. such as: )

Hey — ( hey you, no, that's rude. ) — listen, can you hand me that?

( "it" could be anything. a lamp, a book, a muffin someone dropped on the ground. go crazy. get weird. make things happen. )

✈ wildcard.

( y'all probably know the drill. if you want something particular, please shoot me a pm and let me know! ♥ )

Comments

[evite]

Yeah, yeah, I'm — ( not technically fine, per se, given how her arms feel like they're burning from the inside out from the exertion, but she'll get there. ) I'm good, I swear.

( but his recommendation isn't a bad one. she just needs a minute to catch her breath, rubbing her palm across her opposite arm, gentle pressure against the muscles as if to will them to come back to life. )

Must be more gravity on this moon or something. I didn't think fifty pounds would be that heavy, as totally insane as that sounds.

( there's a moment where skye considers doing the subtle, normal thing. lifting a smaller weight — maybe twenty pounds? — and just doing the reps, acting like this is a thing she totally does every day. but subtlety just ain't her bag. )

You're... uh. You're Steve Rogers. ( cool cool cool. ) Captain Rogers, I mean.

[neversurrender]

[He grins at the gravity comment and shakes his head.]

No, that's how fifty pounds feels, even back on Earth. Trust me.

[Reaching back over to the rack of weights he grabs up two that are twenty-five pounds each and offers them.]

How about you start at the half way mark and work your way up?

[It's not that he's unused to being recognized, especially back home. Hell, even here his is a name well known considering there are two other guys walking around with it. But he's also gotten used to a certain sense of anonymity in the Quarantine. And beginning recognized by his face is a phenomenon that has not happened for awhile.]

Steve is fine. [There's a bit of wariness in his tone that comes from currently being a well known person of interest back home. Outside of his circle, he's not sure how other people perceive him now in the aftermath of the Accords.]

[evite]

Thanks. For these, I mean. For handing them to me?

( was there ever a moment in skye's life where she thought she'd be on a first name basis with steve rogers? nope. definitely not. but now that it's happening, the only thing in her brain is simply low-pitched screaming, the kind of white noise that blurs out any possibility of rational speech.

so, naturally, she takes the weights. why not, right? they're heavy, but not so heavy that she can't manage a stiff curl of one arm followed by the other. it's just enough that she knows her reps are likely to be limited to a significantly lower number. )

... Steve. Okay. ( there's a hesitation in her tone that betrays just how uncertainly skye is taking this whole first name basis concept. ) I'm Skye.

( oh, what the hell. who said taking things slow was any fun? )

Sorry, I know this is, like, super weird ... but, um. Does the concept of a flying red Corvette mean anything to you?

( it's the first thing that comes to mind when she thinks of coulson that someone else might know too. )