It may come as a surprise to many, particularly to those who don't get to know her very well, but Sid also craves physical contact. Every human being - nearly every living thing on the planet needs it. It creates a connection that Sid bolsters with her magic, tagging Elijah's Pattern as it were so that she can do as she says and keep an eye on him.
She touches him but even though she doesn't hold his arm gingerly or limit the contact as much as she can, she doesn't hesitate to move away when she's finished her map. A map that will soon prove completely useless, but neither of them know that yet. When Sid moves away from him there is a sense that it is not simply to get away from him, but to get herself away from him, give him distance. Sid craves contact but what she's learned over the last several months is that these people, the ones that she's met and cared for and loved, these people have been hurt because she's come in contact with them.
So she puts a space between herself and Elijah, almost more for his sake than for her own. And he repeats the name of the restaurant dubiously, which makes Sid dubious in turn. Her mouth firms into a line and she looks at him uncertainly. But her magic is wrapped all around him. She can feel the pulse of his heart thrumming in her own veins, can feel the way that their very atoms seem to be connected in this moment. If he should get lost, she will know where to find him.
Which is good, because in five minutes she's driving up Santa Fe toward Swifts and, rather than pulling up to the curb to park, she passes it with a sigh. She guides her truck around the block so that when Elijah reaches a cross street she's already there waiting for him. Rolling down her window, Sid leans her head out to call, "Elijah!"
ElijahHe hasn't had a chance to sober up yet. Nope, on the contrary, he finished his beer and very politely deposited the can in someone's recycle bin, because if he is going to be drunk in public he is going to do it while being environmentally conscious. Elijah continued along the way, blithely unaware that he was going in the wrong direction and had read his arm upside down until someone was calling his name.
Someone was calling his name.
It made him jump, pull his arms up and look around for the source. Sid can feel his heart rate spike, his adrenaline course, dopamine flow and god damn he should be a lot more drunk than he is, because she knows precisely how much he's had and how much he can take. Always pushing the limit, this one, or unaware of what that limit was.
It hit him that it was Sid yelling at him, and he stagger/sauntered down her way.
SidSid is aware of the effect the exertion of walking what was supposed to be only a block and a half but which has turned out to be slightly longer is having on Elijah. She is aware of his elevated heart rate and the moment when his BAC spikes. He is a young and healthy male, however, and so she knows he's not at a level that is dangerous. At least, not dangerous enough that he shouldn't have been trusted to walk that block and a half without issue.
That was Sid's problem. She still hopes and has trust in people's sense, reason, and ability.
He stagger-saunters over to her and when he's close enough that she needn't raise her quiet voice too much, she asks, "Do you still want waffles?" She doesn't know. Maybe he changed his mind and that's the reason he's wandered off course.
Elijah"Have you seen the new Avengers movie?"
Elijah"Have you seen the new Avengers movie?"
SidConfused, off guard, and immediately wary, "You mean the one that came out two years ago?"
Elijah"Yeah, that one," he replied. He paused, "Has it seriously been two years?"
SidSid doesn't answer that question. In fact, she doesn't immediately speak again. She looks at Elijah and then she turns away, looking down the street ahead of her, considering. After a moment she turns back.
"C'mon," she says, "get in. You need food."
ElijahHe is a force of nature, or at the very least forces those around him to exercise their better nature. He was... an interesting young man. He continued along, because she w`as right Elijah did need food. His stomach growled in agreement and he followed along in line by her like a confused duckling who hadn't figured out that he needed to be behind people instead of caddy corner to them. "Anyway, I'm always in the mood for waffles."
Elijah(on a one or a ten he falls asleep in her truck)
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (9) ( success x 1 )
Sid[do you seem sleepy? alertness?]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 5, 10, 10) ( success x 2 )
Sid[Life 3 coincidental: You seem tired and I don't know that you have nightmares and also I'll probably feel better driving around with a strange drunk boy if he's asleep, let's help you take a nap, threshold of 2 (1 to target, one to snooze briefly)]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (4, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )
Elijah[Do I sleep any better?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN7 (3, 5, 6, 9) ( success x 1 )
SidIt's a good thing that Sid has her hazards on, letting the cars behind her know to go around her while she talks to a young man. Traffic forms a steady stream of cars along one side of her truck while she climbs out the other to head him off and get him inside. Which she does, noticing the weariness of him. It's something that is separate from the drunkenness, but is in no way helped by it, surely. Taking his hand as she helps him up into the cab, she focuses a moment on the drawing she made on him.
Climbing up onto the step, Sid slides the seatbelt across him and carefully locks it into place. Stepping down, she closes the door gently before returning to the driver's side. Within seconds Elijah will feel a deep weariness bear down on him. Not enough to knock him out should he choose to fight it, but it will be a hard fight if he does.
Sid climbs up into the driver's seat, closes the door, turns off her hazards, and drives. Not to Swifts, it'll be busy tonight. Most places will be busy tonight. She goes instead down Santa Fe, past the I-25 overpass to Breakfast King. They are better used to dealing with crowds.
In the parking lot, Sid parks the truck somewhere toward the back. As she kills the engine, she undoes the Working that she put over the apprentice and waits. Either his weariness wins out, and he keeps sleeping, or he wakes.
Elijah[am I tone deaf?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )
ElijahHe takes her hand and climbs into the cab of the truck. He marvels at how her hand feels, how she is warm and the feeling of empowerment fills the air. He doesn't quite know that something might be going on, because he doesn't know something has sot[[ed happening. He still believes her first effect was in effect, and Elijah looked at her with those green eyes of his and he smiled.
He starts to nod off, but tries to snap himself back to reality, to fight it off with some kind of sound. Like a small child, he sings-
"À la claire fontaine, m'en allant promener- J'ai trouvé l'eau si belle que je m'y suis baigné," hé wasn't bad by any means, but there wasn't the sustaining poet in his tone. He was most assuredly tenor, maybe a baritone at best but that was neither here nor there. The sound was achingly sweet, a song for pining, "Il y a longtemps que je t'aime- Jamais je ne t'oublierai"
They get two minutes into driving before he can fight no longer and finally succumbs to sleep. By the time she is undoing her working, Elijah is… still surprisingly deep in sleep. Hr makes a little sound, something almost concerned, but he doesn't wake up.
ElijahAt about this time, the young man's cell phone starts going insane.
SidIf Sid spoke or even remotely understood French the song might have more meaning for her. As it is, Elijah could start singing Frère Jacques and it would still threaten to make her chest hurt. Within minutes, though, his voice trails and his head lolls and then he's out, leaving Sid in relative silence. She glances at him once and then turns her attention to the road.
In the parking lot, when she lifts the effect and finds Elijah still asleep, at first she assumes that he was tired. He was drunk and needed to sleep it off. He just needed the sleep. Which is good. For one shining second Sid starts to think that maybe she is capable of doing good after all. The only downside is that now she's stuck with a sleeping young man.
It's while she's pondering this dilemma that his phone goes off. At first, Sid ignores it. The ringtone goes and goes and stops. Then goes and goes and stops again. And again, and again.
Finally, frowning deeply, the corner of her bottom lip disappearing between her teeth, Sid undoes her seatbelt and slides across the bench seat, the better to locate the source of the ringtone. When she has it, she looks at the face of his phone, at the name on the caller ID, the picture if Elijah's put pictures with his contacts. Swiping her thumb across it to take the call, Sid sings her hair away from her ear, holds the phone up and says,
"Hello? Ah. Elijah's phone." Her quiet voice seems almost an ordinary volume in the relative silence of the cab.
Elijah"Elijah Renee Poirot if you are going to hook up with people, you need to tell me-" a tiny woman snapped on the other line, which was about when she realized that there was a voice she did not recognizing answering Elijah's phone and-
"Ohmygod, I am so, so sorry, is Elijah there? Did he lose his phone?"
There was a moment of silence, some stammering and- "oh, uh, if you have his phone and not him, Elijah's the blond guy in most of the pictures, I can come get his phone if you need. Is he with you? He isn't with you, I don't hear talking."
ElijahThere is a picture of a brown haired woman of questionable ethnic origin licking his face on the caller ID. The name next to it said - ICE Jenn
SidAt first Sid holds the phone away from her ear, letting the snap of the voice on the other end sail harmlessly past her ear canal. Then,
"No, he's here. He's," she pauses, looking at him slumped into the corner of her truck, the seatbelt all that's keeping him sitting upright and not sliding to the floor. "He's asleep.
"Actually. Are you." Jenn can't see the way that Sid frowns as she tries to put together the words to express what she wants. "Is...is there somewhere I can take him? So he can sleep not in my truck."
Elijah"Oh god, he didn't crawl into your truck bed and go to sleep, did he? He's done that before," she said with no small amount of worry.
Jenn, patient Jenn, does let her worry stew and she waits. The little bleeding heart waits patiently, tries to come up with something to say, "I could get him if you want? He could sleep in my car, I mean... you could try and take him home, he should have his house key in with his pocketwatch. Left pocket."
Wow, he does have a pocketwatch in his left pocket.
Jenn's good.
Elijah"Oh god, he didn't crawl into your truck bed and go to sleep, did he? He's done that before," she said with no small amount of worry.
Jenn, patient Jenn, does let her worry stew and she waits. The little bleeding heart waits patiently, tries to come up with something to say, "I could get him if you want? He could sleep in my car, I mean... you could try and take him home, he should have his house key in with his pocketwatch. Left pocket."
Wow, he does have a pocketwatch in his left pocket.
Jenn's good.
Sid"No," says Sid. In another life, the question of whether Elijah crawled into her truck of his own volition to pass out without her knowledge would have been met with an understanding laugh. Sid was like that, too. Once upon a lifetime ago. Now, though. Now her voice is quiet and steady and nearly void of inflection. Elijah didn't crawl into her cab and she's neither concerned about it nor upset. But the fact of the matter is, there is a boy sleeping in her truck and she would like him not to be, because she is tired herself and would like to go home and lay down. But she's not going to take Elijah home with her, and she's not going to leave him in his truck or somewhere laid out in the grass to wake whenever he wakes.
"No," she says again, to the idea of Jenn coming out to her to pick him up. She isn't much for caregiving, but it seems to her that Elijah would be better off sleeping on a couch or a bed or some other soft, comfortable thing that isn't her truck's bench.
"I can take him home. If...I mean." Sid frowns again. The trouble with being untrusting of others is the knowledge that others who don't know her won't be trusting of her, either. Not until she proves that she's trustworthy. Only how do you prove your trustworthiness over the phone to a stranger?
"If you give me his address. I can take him home, and...and I promise I'll just drop him off and go."
ElijahShe promises.
She promises that nothing will happen, that she'll just drop Elijah off and leave, nothing weird. Nothing terrible. Jenn nods absently, unaware that the woman on the other line can not see her nodding. Can not see her trying to think through what may happen and puzzling through worst case scenarios. She realizes, at that juncture, that they have nothing worth stealing. Nothing worth taking save for the sleeping cargo with her.
"I-I'll text you the address, I'll meet you there if you want, but like I said his house key is in his pocket, please be careful with him," she all but pleads. Whoever this young man is to the woman on the phone, he means the world to her.
Soon enough, there is a bing on his phone with an address.
RichardThere is a rap on the window. A very tall, very blonde man is standing outside, his forearm braced along the top of the truck, his shoulders hunched to peer in. He's wearing a faint, quizzical smile, and when Sid looks at him he waves with three fingers.
Rest of his fingers are holding a doggie bag from Breakfast King.
Sid"Okay."
That's all Sid says at first. She cannot see Jenn on the other side of the phone call, but she knows how she would be if their roles were reversed. If she called looking for- for Frank, and some other voice answered in his place. She would be frantic. She would be affecting a demeanor of calm, but she would be frantic. Desperate. And she would be so happy to find him safe and unharmed she wouldn't care if she came home to find their house cleared out completely.
"I'll put your number in my phone. Ah. I'm Sid, by the way."
She is, for those just joining us, sitting behind the wheel of her old blue-and-cream-and-rusted truck, in a parking space toward the back of the Breakfast King parking lot. There is a young blond man quietly snoozing in the passenger seat, head lolled toward the window.
Sid[don't freak out: WP]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 4, 4, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )
SidThere is a rap on the window and Sid, distracted from the presence of patterned and oceanic resonance by her own dilemma, starts. Body freezes, shoulders tighten, and her eyes narrow beneath a tense brow.
When she turns and sees Richard outside of her window some of that tension eases, but not all. One hand still holding someone else's phone to her ear, she uses the other to roll down her window. Yes, it is a manual-crank window. Sid's truck is closer to Richard's age than to the boy in the passenger seat.
When the window is half down, just enough for her to speak without having to stretch her chin upward, Sid says quietly, "Hi."
Richard"Hi."
Long, lanky Richard with his lazy, easy grin: he looks in at Sid, and then at Elijah, and then back at Sid.
"You didn't roofie my friend there, did you?" It's a joke. Mostly.
Sid"No." What she doesn't say is not exactly. There was nothing slipped into the last drink that Elijah had about a mile north of the Breakfast King, not by Sid and not by anyone else. She would know. Until about ten minutes ago Sid was aware of every process running in the boy.
There is the kind of silence coming from the phone that lets Sid know that it's ended, so she lowers it.
"He was drunk and tired and restless so I helped him fall asleep. I thought he'd wake up when we got here, but..." The phone in her hand lets out an alert - a tone or a buzz, something that sounds different than the calls Jenn made to it only a few minutes ago. Sid looks at the screen, catches the message as it flashes across the top, and lets out a small sigh. Leaning in against the side of her car, Richard can see that Elijah isn't the only one. Beneath the lights of the parking lot Sid is a sickly kind of pale. There are dark shadows beneath her eyes and, should Richard open up his senses, he'll detect recent workings.
"I'm taking him home now."
ElijahThe knock is faint, and not enough to actually wake Elijah up. The little blond man, who wasn't little by any means he was thin but he was six feet tall so he wasn't a petite creature by any means, was a heavy sleeper. The young man was probably just being he'd up by the seatbelt and the good graces of the powers that be. He did, however, look like he was sleeping, which was a familiar look for Richard because he's seen how this kid passes out and it looks just about like that.
Richard"Hm. Okay." Richard eyes Elijah for another moment. Then those remarkable eyes, ocean blue, come back to Sid. "Did you two run into trouble or something?"
Elijah[Did I sleep okay?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 3, 7) ( success x 1 )
Sid"Not today," comes the reply, and for a moment Sid wonders if they shouldn't make signs.
It has been ___ days since Denver's last crisis. Or
Denver's crisis level is- with a wheel of colors and a needle pointing out a color spectrum. But where would it go?
Sid's reddish brows tighten and she looks at Richard, her expression thoughtful. The look in her eyes is somehow older than she is. Like something ancient moves just beneath the pale surface of her skin. Something animal and wild that seems at odds to her quiet demeanor.
"If you're worried you can come with us."
ElijahCar alarms are obnoxious.
Car alarms, as a rule, are always obnoxious. There eis never a point when they are not because they are supposed to be obnoxious so they will get attention. Most people drown them out, but the sound, coupled with the rather loud cursing of the owner of the car nearby whose panic alarm wouldn't shut up, happened to be enough to rouse the young man from his slumber.
Not as well rested as he could be. He inhaled and he smelled something sickly sweet. Something that smelled faintly of decay and he had no idea no one else could smell it, that it was his imagination carrying things over.
He groaned, and suddenly was aware of precisely how much tequila he'd had in a short amount of time.
"… sonofabitch.."
RichardOn cue, Elijah stirs. Richard straightens up a little, his forearm atop the car lifting off; now just a hand on the frame.
"Nah, it's all right." He quirks a grin. "Looks like Sleeping Beauty woke up, anyway."
SidA car alarm starts blaring from the car beside them and Sid tenses again, eyes shifting to that side, watchful of the stranger cursing. That watchfulness subsides when Elijah shifts. The sigh Sid breathes is one of relief. An awake Elijah should be able to get himself from the truck into a building of some kind. Or at least he won't be dead weight for her to attempt to carry.
She starts the engine again. For as old as the vehicle is, and for as ill-kept as the exterior is, the engine sounds alright. Like it's been cared for to the best of the ability of one who can't afford for it to break down.
"Okay," she says. "Take care."
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