milliways_bar | (no subject)

He's not the only one with star themes this evening: Sinthia is sitting cross-legged in a chair with a tin box full of galaxy-patterned marbles in front of her. Each one levitates up away from its fellows in the box, and after a moment of inspection joins the ballet-like whirl above her table, sometimes mimicking a maypole dance, sometimes the orbits of planets. Sometimes just spinning in pretty nonsense patterns.

At no point is she touching any of the glass with her fingers, though. Just staring at them intently as they move.

He sees the girl - the one who spoke with her mind - and watches as she makes the marbles move through the air.

The magic is harmless enough bug if still gives him pause.

The marbles tumble over and around each other, and Sinthia smiles quietly to herself watching them dance. She spies Elrond and everything stops for a moment, hanging still in the air as if frozen.

It takes a considerably long time for her to speak, but speak--verbally this time--she does.

"Hello."

"Hello."

He nods at the marbles. "Don't let me interrupt you."

"You're not," she replies lightly, as the marbles all gently fall to land back in the box, shepherded by unseen hands. "But I don't meet many people twice."

He steps closer.
Lightly.

"Here? Or at home?"

He would imagine many places where a girl like this would not be welcomed.

"Home. Most people I meet die."

Quickly.

She shrugs. "I don't get to talk to many of them."

He is quiet.

Then he says, "When I was a small child, there was a war. Everyone died. Except for my brother and I."

Sinthia looks at him a moment, and takes a moment before she replies.

"There's a war at home. The whole world is in it."

Edited 2019-04-04 03:27 (UTC)

He nods and doesn't offer platitudes because war is an evil thing and children knows that.

"Are there any adults where you are? That can look after you?"

She shrugs. "There are adults. I'm the only child there," Sinthia says. "But they mostly leave me alone. The Allied soldiers are all scared of me, and the HYDRA ones don't ever pay me any attention."

Soldiers.
Two different kinds by the sound of it.

He offers up another bit of his own story instead of prompting her.

"We were captured, my brother and I. One of our captors wanted to kill us but his brother stayed his hand. Because we were so small."

"I wasn't captured," she says. "The Allied soldiers were. But they came from everywhere, mostly America." Sinthia shrugs.

"It's difficult to tell unless I talk to them. Sometimes at night I can be quiet enough to talk to them. They're mostly scared, some are angry. I always hate it when they're scared of me. I don't want to hurt them." But the way she says it, that doesn't mean she doesn't end up hurting them.

He hears what she says.
And what she doesn't.

"Are you asked to?" he asks quietly. Naturally.
"Or does it just - happen?"

Some things can be difficult to cont4ol.

She looks at him squarely, face somber and sober as a church mouse. And it takes a long time for her to speak; speaking about this, acknowledging it to anyone, results in cracks that threaten to let the scared child spill through her facade of coolness, of ease in the world in which she operates.

Cracks like that would get her punished. Could very well get her killed, especially when she knows how little regard the adults around her have for life.

"Both," Sinthia whispers, barely making the sound. And her mouth forms no words past that as she explains. This is a private conversation. "My father calls them tests. Tests of my abilities and my control of them. I have to...do things to the soldiers. Move them, or manipulate them, then kill them. They always die at the end. I said I didn't want to once, and it was so much worse than I would have done it."

She tries to be quick, at least. If it can't be painless and without fright, it can be fast.

Is that how the Orcs were first made, he wonders.

Were they pressured and pushed till they told themselves they acted out of mercy?
Were they pressured and pushed till they stopped caring?

He looks at her with ancient eyes, knowing full well that there he can say. And likely nothing that will change her circumstances.

Evil will turn upon itself in the end.
But if evil is the adult that should protect one -

"War makes evil flourish, where it should not."

There is no sound out of her, though Sinthia's eyes close as if in anticipation of a blow that doesn't come. She only sighs, and her shoulders relax by fractions of inches.

The notion that she herself is evil is not new; such are the terrified and panicked thoughts of many people who've been on the receiving end of her less-than-perfect abilities. It's been repeated enough that she accepts it as factual.

"My father almost killed me as an infant," she murmurs quietly. "I wonder why he didn't."

"But your life will be your own one day, when you are grown, and you will be able to find a path yourself. Maybe that is what he wants for you?"

And, grown, she may choose if her hands shall bring pain or peace.

She breathes out, shaking her head. "No. It isn't." This she knows.

"Then you will want it," he says, just as quietly.

"Even unbearable things, things no child should see or hear or do, can be overcome. It can harden us. It can break us. But we can mend and be made whole. And we can still chose another path for ourselves."

And sometimes one cannot and Fate swallows everything. But hope shouldn't be taken from the young.

Edited 2019-04-08 04:02 (UTC)

Sinthia is quiet for a long while, digesting this before she speaks. It seems contrary to everything she knows that at any point in her life there will be another path, another kind of existence for her to adopt. Living in a warzone with no memory of anywhere or anything else will do that.

"I don't think anything can mend me," she says, slipping back into the silent thoughts that Elrond can hear as clearly as if she'd voiced them. "I'm...broken into too many pieces." It's hard to describe that, the feeling of coming apart at the seams and only barely ill-fitting back into the same body and mind.

Pieces can be mended. And peace restored. Even when it seems impossible.

There's no censure to his words. Only hope.

There is a glinting flash of life atop the water nearby as it breaks, and a streaking grey form rises through the air above it.

Elrond stops to watch the animal rise in the air. Smiling.

It looks a little like the porpoises that would follow along his Father's ship when it came back from the sea.

He walks closer.

The creature doubles back, leaping in the air again and somersaulting backwards into a dive. Moments later, he resurfaces, this time perfectly still and calm. He regards the stranger with a knowing, curious gaze.

"Well met, child of water," Elrond calls out.

At home, he would have greeted the creature as child of Ulmo, but he didn't know who riled these waters, so a more generic greeting was in order.

He doesn't necessarily expect a reply. But the son of the Mariner is polite to those who call the Sea home

"Greetings to you as well, Net Caster," Ecco replies.

He sounds a series of quiet hums and clicks, looking to get a better sense of this stranger.

"You seem...different from the other land dwellers I have met here."

Elrond walks closer to the shore.

"You have met Men, I should think. I am not a Man though I have kin who are."

He smiles.

"My name is Elrond Half-elven. "

"My name is Ecco," he says, swimming a bit closer. "I am a Singer from the Home Bay. In my waters we have seen these Men ride their floating bones on the surface and cast nets from them to catch fish.

"You are kin to their kind? As mine is to the Great Blue Singers?"

Singers? What a perfectly chosen name.

Elrond smiles.

"In ways. Both my Father's sire and my Mother's were Mortal Men. But we share many traits, like Singers and Great Blue Singers. We eat the same foods, we hunt in the same way."

"And are there still others who are alike to Men?" Ecco says. "In the ocean there are many sorts - the Spotted Singers, the Humped-Back Singers, the Pale Ones, and the Little Singers of the Harbors."

"Where I live there is. Men and Elves and Dwarves. Hobbits. And others still. But many you will meet here come from places where only Men walk the ground."

He nods.

"Where I am from, we may converse with the four-legged and the feathered and the swimmers. Not as you and I do now, but something not wholly unlike this."

"We could hear the songs of our people and their kin," Ecco says. "But we have never been able to speak with the Net Casters. Some wondered if they could truly speak as our kin could. I suppose I am the first Singer to know the answer to that question."

He breathes deeply, considering this new information. Ecco has been a curious dolphin since his days as a calf. Every day here he seems to learn something new.

"These other lands, where your kind do not live...are they separated by the waters, or are they separated as Milliways is from my home?"

"Many worlds connect here and people will travel here in various ways. I pass through openings in my dwelling and find myself."

And Elrond has been curious ever since he was a child.

"Is that how it is for you also? Are there places where openings in the rocks lead here?"

"I sang to one of the glyphs beneath the sea," Ecco says. "They are bright and clear things, like hard water. None that live in the sea know where they came from, but they are the only things apart from ourselves that will sing back. I had not known them to bring Singers to other places like this before, but that is what this glyph did."

"So you may be the first Singer that has travelled here," Elrond says with a smile.

"I very well may be," Ecco says.

"Do you know of any others of your kind who have been here?"

"I do. I have met friends here, and others I knew not who also called Arda home. And thus I've learned that time is strange here. Travellers arriving here may meet others who have arrived from yesteryear or centuries in the future. It is strange."

It's been ages, nay, decades since Clem's seen Elrond. He may or may not be surprised by her furry jacket, bright pink high heels a bright orange miniskirt.

She's been on the road 'finding herself.' By...getting high and seeing Steely Dan concerts. But he doesn't need to know that.

She clomps on over happily to greet him.

"Clementine! Well met," he says cheerfully.

He sees her clothes and the marks left by the years.

But those among the Firstborn who befriend Mortals learn not to let changes blind them to constants.

"Well-met," she echos happily, and sits right down without asking to, because of course she does. "You have to tell me everything that's been going on, it's been like years. EVERYTHING."

He laughs.

"You will find yourself do most of the talking. Scarcely a season has passed in my valley since last we spoke," he replies.

Clementine blinks. "Wow. Cosmic." She sighs. "Did you know I was in prison?"

Smooth as a baby's bottom, isn't she?