(no subject)

[11calls]

who: Alex Reagan and hopefully you!
what: An open log. There's a couple open prompts but if they don't work just add your own! And don't worry about styles. I'll match em.
when: The month of August.
where: Anywhere you want her to be that's not the mingle, honestly!
warnings: Not that I can think of at the moment.


I.

Despite everything else in her life, Alex Reagan happened to be someone who was a person of habit, and so where she could be found just happened to be habit as well. So, all too often Alex found herself working at The Coffee Shop rather than her office with the substandard coffee and the annoying interns. She was there almost every day with at least one empty cup in front of her, one full one and some sort of pastries there for anyone who might happen to want to stop by and visit, or for anyone whom she had a lunch date with. The table itself was largely taken up with two books and a notebook, along with her phone from home. She inevitably had one of the books open, even though both of them were on the same lines of things, even if vastly different.

Alex would either be reading from a book on learning Spanish and copying what she was learning into the notebook in small and frantic writing, as if her hand couldn't keep up with her brain, because well... That's basically what happened, even in things like this. Still, she was making a real effort to do it, and the book was deeply into, as Alex was hitting the harder parts of the beginner's section and there were lists of words that went along with it.

The second book is much older and still somehow less well-loved than the first one, and Alex had found it in the back of the library shelves. Despite having taken it out days ago, she was still dealing with the beginning pages of it, and if there was something that was guaranteed that would make her grumble, it was this. But still, she was determined to try and teach herself how to read Cruciform even if it killed her, which at this point it honestly just might do. So when someone came up to her, she was all too ready to sit either of them aside, and greeting the other person with a grin, especially if it was someone who she expected.



ii

The other way in which Alex was a creature of habit came with her walking her dog in the afternoon. Alex's pitbull was large and gray and more than a little friendly, which probably made sense considering Alex Reagan was his owner. Her mornings were normally running and rowing, but afternoon walks were more slow and leisurely and normally made by herself. Well, by herself as well as her playing Pokemon Go, even if no one else was. So, yes, she's walking her dog but she's also got her device out to let her know when there just happens to be a pokemon or two in the area that she's walking in.

Normally she collects one or two, and fights at a gym or so, and then goes about her business and comes home. Not today though. Today, Alex just stopped so suddenly that Apo's leash actually snapped taunt for a moment before the gray dog came back to see her, and Alex is just staring at her phone for a second. The dumbed silence only lasts for a second or two before Alex just yells like the child who she can come times be: "Oh my god! It's a Pikachu! It's a Pikachu!" Then without a preamble other than that, Alex just takes off after it, a giant grin on her face. She's never caught one before.

Comments

[11calls]

Alex added both ice and water from the door of the fridge to her own, and just a little water to his before she joined him at the table with a smile, sliding one of the glasses across the reclaimed wood towards him. (Ruby was the one who decorated the house, because she was Strand's assistant and she was pushy in a similar way to Alex. Even if they didn't exactly share the same tastes.)

Adding the cookies, she just asked softly: "better?"

[bestsir]

He took the glass, but didn't drink right away. "Yes—thank you." He left his notebook open to where it had fallen: another sketch from memory, this time of the cairn at Victory Point.

"It is not a pretty story, what became of us," he said.

[11calls]

The drawing that he showed her was beautiful, but it was bleak, and it made Alex frown. You didn't need someone who's brain went as fast from 'everything's fine' to 'worst possible scenario is happening right in front of me' as hers did to realize that what was shown there was some kind of memorial or something. A grave, it felt very much like a grave, though what it was for wasn't something that Alex was sure of.

But then she gave him a little smile and put her hand over the top of his, giving it a gentle squeeze. "It's okay, I don't expect pretty stories here, Harry. You can tell me whatever you need too, alright?"

[bestsir]

He took a sip of his drink and sat back.

"This stone cairn," he said, indicating the sketch. "It was built by a prior expedition, and we left records of our own there. I think they may be the only records we left behind. I have learned ... that the fate of our expedition is a mystery, that artifacts and traces have been found, but little else. We wished to be remembered, I think—but not in this way."

[11calls]

The last time that Harry had been here, they'd spoken about how he didn't know what had happened to the exhibition, and if someone there might tell him. The fact that someone had told him made her heart hurt for him for a moment, but she also understood wanting to know. She would have wanted to know if it had been her.

"I'm sorry. What happened? How did it all go so wrong?"

[bestsir]

Harry takes a deep breath. "Our ships were trapped in the ice for two winters. We were supposed to be provisioned for that long, perhaps longer, but our stores of tinned food were contaminated—the tins poorly made and the food rotting and the lead solder poisoning us all. Scurvy set in as well. In the end we abandoned ship and attempted to walk to safety."

He takes a drink, and it's clear that his hands are trembling a little. "All the while there was a creature on the ice, stalking us."

[11calls]

Alex just listened, sitting forward with one hand on her drink and the other under her chin. When he was shaking, she reached out and touched his arm again in order to offer some sort of support. Telling secrets like this, they were big things and Alex knew it, which is why she was quiet until there was a space for her to ask the question.

Well, it would probably end up being more than one, but Alex was Alex so she focused on one thing: "Creature? What kind of creature was it?" Because nothing natural ever got called a creature. At least not in that scared as hell sort of way that Harry had.

[bestsir]

A spirit that dresses as an animal.
That doesn't leave this room.

"She would not say." Alex would probably be able to guess that he means the woman whose picture she saw. "Such things in her culture are sacred, so I can only guess from the what little she did tell us. It was ... it looked like a polar bear, but bigger than any bear that has ever lived, and its eyes—it had eyes like a man's." He closes his own eyes briefly, remembering the glimpses he got of it. What it did. "She called it Tuunbaq. I think it was ... bound to her father, a shaman, but when he died, she was unable to control it. She tried." Dear God, how she had tried. He passed a hand over his eyes. "But she could not."

[11calls]

Alex knew that Harry meant the woman who he called 'Lady Silence' so she just nodded, her eyes going wide and round behind her glasses. It was clear that Alex believed it, believed him and believed in this giant polar bear who had a man's eyes. And she believed that it was connected to a shaman like he did. After all There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy was a quote that Alex lived by, and she had found it more important than ever here.

"That must have been horrible. For her and you all. Did it just keep attacking you?" Alex was trying to put together the pieces of why it would be, and honestly it seemed like one of the most similar tropes that she had in her head was the whole sacred ground that needed to be protected thing. Or that they just pissed off the wrong spirit, that was there too.

[bestsir]

Harry nodded. "It was capable of misdirection, of a kind of—it would attack in ways that seemed calculated to frighten as much as simply to kill. And she could not stop it—she was as terrified of it as we were."

Another drink. "I have pondered it for a long time now. The creature was not mindless, not purposeless. I believe that our presence there was an affront to it somehow—to the order of things. We should never have gone."

[11calls]

There are certain things in Riverview that Alex tries her best not to think of, and of course the biggest one is demons. For good reason, but she's trying to avoid the subject as much as she can. When Harry's describing what the creature did, she can't help but think of it in terms that she knows, and in Alex's quite good mind's eye, the creature was more demonic than man or beast. So she just took a sip of her own scotch for a moment.

The whole thing about it being tied to the Earth and not being there also made sense to her. "Back home where I'm from, there's a lot of stories of hauntings around Native American lands where white people when and screwed something up. I can see how this would be a similar thing, trying to protect Lady Silence and her people from whatever was happening with your exposition. It must have been awful to be there but to not really have a choice in it. I'm sure that the creature didn't even understand that."

[bestsir]

There was a palpable look of relief on his face at the fact that Alex got it, and that she didn't immediately disbelieve him. From what he knew of her, he had mostly expected that she would understand, but it was good to have that expectation confirmed.

He nodded. "No one wanted to leave more than us," he said. "Perhaps if Sil—if Silence had been able to bind herself to it, she could have ... reasoned with it somehow. I don't know. Perhaps not; perhaps our presence there was such an imbalance to the order of nature there that it could do nothing else, no matter what. But even without it, I think we would have all been doomed nonetheless."

[11calls]

Alex couldn't have not believed him, she'd seen to much and knew too much about stuff like this to disbelieve him. Besides, there was the fact that at her core, Alex was a believer. Harry didn't seem like the person who would lie to her, and more than that, everything in her gut was telling her that he wasn't.

Alex Reagan could be an idiot in a lot of ways, but she always trusted her gut.

"Why would you have doomed? Just because of the natural world and how some people responded to it?" Like the people who had taken him when he didn't want to go simply because he was a doctor.

[bestsir]

"The Arctic is harsh and unforgiving—even the natives will say as much, and they have found ways to live there for centuries. We sailed there with our ships and our tinned provisions, thinking them superior, but we were wrong." He sighed heavily. "Our provisions were poisoning us—either rotting or contaminated from the lead solder, or both. There was scurvy, and starvation, and we were far from anyone who could have rescued us."

[11calls]

Alex made a face when there was the mention of scurvy and starvation, and she was pretty sure that if she was given the option over a quick death from the creature and the slower death from the other too, well she knew which one she would end up choosing. But mostly she was thankful that she didn't ever need to be in that position, and that Harry was here, and safe.

Reaching out, she gave him a squeeze once more. "I'm really glad that you're here and safe, Harry. Honestly. That sounds... horrible. All of it."

[bestsir]

He managed a weak smile. "There is more. And worse. I would not blame you if you did not wish to hear it."

[11calls]

The frown just deepened, and the hand on his gave another squeeze. "Harry, if you need to tell me something, then I'll listen. To all of it. I promise."

[bestsir]

He was quiet for a long time, not touching his drink, and not looking at Alex either.

"Perhaps you can imagine," he said. "To what desperate men will resort when they are starving and dying."

[11calls]

Alex knew what he meant, there was no mistaking the meaning for someone who had grown up on stories like the Donner party and Alive. She swallowed, and her voice was soft when she touched his arm again. "When someone's desperate and starving, they're going to do what they'd have to in order to survive, Harry. Cannibalism is a terrible, terrible thing, but so is slowly starving to death when you have no hope. Is that what you mean?"

There was no judgment in her face, just concern for him, Alex couldn't help it.

cw: The Terror spoilers, survival cannibalism, murder

[bestsir]

Harry nodded, and then, quickly—he was terribly afraid Alex might get the wrong idea:

"I told you about Hickey. He murdered the man I thought his closest friend, and ordered me to butcher the corpse. I refused—it went against everything I was, to do that—but he threatened to torture an innocent man until I complied."

[11calls]

Cannibalism when someone’s died and your only source of food is one thing. More than one thing it’s enough. But this? This makes Alex pale, she can’t help it. “Oh my gawd.” The words almost seem to run together in their haste to get out even.

“He killed his friend and then threatened torture to get you to do it to someone else? Christ he really is a monster isn’t he?” Among other things. Things that Alex wants to call him, but she doesn’t want to stop Harry from talking. There’s a niggling sense in her gut that’s telling her this isn’t even as bad as it got.

So she just asked softly, “what happened, Harry?"

cw: The Terror spoilers, survival cannibalism, murder, suicide

[bestsir]

There was a very long silence before he could bring himself to answer.

"Hickey and his men captured our captain, and I knew it was only a matter of time before he would murder Crozier as well. He would do anything to survive, that man. And I—I suppose I had succumbed to despair, by then."

He drank then, but only a little.

"I took poison, and contrived it to look like suicide so that Hickey would not know." He turned his arm up and rolled back his sleeve to expose the inner skin of his wrist and forearm, revealing a long pale scar. "I warned Crozier so that he would not fall victim as well, and I hope that he lives yet. As for the others..." He shakes his head. "I have wrestled daily with what I did since I woke here. I am not sorry for HIckey, but for the other men ... I tell myself that they were spared a longer, more wretched end." But Alex could undoubtedly tell from his face that he didn't believe that self-justification.

[11calls]

This was something that Alex wasn't prepared for, honestly, and she just frowned at the thought of him being so desperate that he would do something like that. It was a desperation that was so deep that Alex didn't understand it, couldn't understand it because she had never been in a situation like that, and hopefully never would. She wished that he had never had to deal with it.

When he was finished, Alex didn't really have any words for him, a rarity for the reporter who could talk about most anything, and had many times over both back home and since she'd been here. So, she just hugged him, because he needed it, and because more often than not, Alex thought that hugs helped.

"I think you did spare them, Harry. I think you spared them, and I don't think they'd blame you for it." Her words are soft and spoken in with the hug. "I'm so sorry that you needed to do that."

[bestsir]

Harry froze at first, wanted to pull away—not because he didn't want the comfort, but because he felt he didn't deserve it. They would have cursed his name, he thought. They'd have known he acted not out of kindness, but of despair and anger. That he was no better in that act than Dr. Stanley had been at the Carnivale.

But he was tired now from the telling, so tired, and Alex's embrace was the sort of kind human touch he hadn't had in ... he couldn't remember how long. He bowed his head; he could think of nothing else to say. "Thank you. For that."

[11calls]

"It seemed like you really needed it," the words are said simply, and she hugged him again, her hand on his back. "Seems like you've been beating yourself up for a long time, Harry." She could see it written on him now, even with the time that he'd been here an away from all of this. Not that she didn't think that he shouldn't have remorse for what he did, but because he couldn't undo it. The past was the past and no one here had the ability to undo it.

"I know it's hard, but you're here for a reason, Harry. Whatever the reason, this place decided that you deserved a second chance," the words reminded her of another conversation, one similar in scope with Peter. "You have every right to take it, you know."