Some called it psychometry. A psychic ability to obtain information about an individual through an extra-sensory paranormal means by making physical contact with an object that belongs to that individual.* Sometimes also known as object reading. One of a small list of abilities that Salvador Delahada had at his disposal, the one that those in the know used him for the most.

As Skid once told him some time ago: "That's a rather chancy burden to bear, Sal." As the weeks and months went by, he was starting to fully comprehend why. Hell, he had even admitted so much to the daemon man not that long afterward.

Sometimes I'm not myself.

That confession was becoming most disturbingly true the more that time went on, the longer he carried these burdens around. There were thoughts that kept him up, kept him awake at night for many long hours. Kept him from comfortably sharing the bed with his lover, in their new house, for any length of time. That among other reasons.

The house itself was a small comfort, so small that it hardly even registered most of the time. He paced the halls and rooms of every level in no particular order. He spent most of his time in the sparring room Sin had built for him, padding barefoot over the tatami mat flooring. His own preferred surface. Sal liked the way it felt under his feet, the sturdy grip it gave his soles when practicing all that his father had ever taught him, alone or with imaginary ghosts.

There were no ghosts in this house. Everything was too new for there to be any memories coated in the floors and ceilings and walls. The air was fresh and clean, with just that hint of salt spray beginning to permeate the odors of fresh paint and drying grout. This was their house, one they could implant their own memories into. That had been the plan, its intention of being built, but Salvador just wasn't feeling it. This house didn't feel as much like home as he might have hoped.

The only ghosts that existed here were the ones he brought in with him, and those were numerous.

Skid had asked him once what sort of things he thought about. Salvador was always thinking. His mind was a constant tangle of thoughts. Some of them were his own, others were not. Some thoughts concerned the copies of memory he had taken from things over time. A little of this and a lot of that, then a pinch of something else. Everything adds up over time, and finally it was starting to wear on him. Deep in the dark of night, when he was left to his own thoughts, when Sin was sleeping, or when he wasn't home, it was all he had. Having them made him speculate that he was finally beginning to lose his mind, again.

"There's too much," he muttered to himself, pacing the length of the sparring room. There was always too much. He kept soaking in the information like a sponge, because it was asked of him, demanded of him. That was what he could do. That's how everyone used him, the tool. When being told to do so, it was fine, he could focus on that one scrap of information at a time, but when he was alone....

Nothing made sense anymore. There was no set order. He collected dust, gathered rust, and there was no longer a set order to anything anymore.


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*(Paraphrased from Wikipedia article.)

"All I can do is See. I can't do anything about what I See. It's just there. What was. What is. Never what will be, because tomorrow never comes. It's always there, out of reach, and there's no seeing it until it becomes yesterday."

"Salvador...I can't imagine that it's as lucid as a book you'd read. How could you know what I'd need, or when I needed it? I haven't talked about any of this to you."

That was after. Nothing fell in sequence anymore. Some thoughts flickered in out of the blue as a stinging reminder of things to regret. Before that, Ali had run into him at the Red Dragon. They had been talking, something the pair of them did a bit too infrequently. Before that, they had been talking. And before that, Salvador had been consumed by one of his spells.

His attention drifted, eyes tracking movements here and there. Mostly through his peripherals. But for the most part he remained distant, pensive. Ali noticed and asked, "What's wrong?"

The voice was behind him. Salvador was sitting at the bar with his elbows on the counter, facing outward, slouched a bit on that stool. "Mm?" Like he was drenched in fatigue, he turned his head toward his shoulder slowly. Pulled to the sound of Ali's voice. "Ah, it's nothing." It's never nothing.

Of course, Ali didn't believe him. He was right not to. "When something's genuinely troubling you, you're not good at hiding it, Salvador."

What had been troubling him that day? He couldn't remember. He was simply grateful that for once this memory was his own.

The corner of his mouth quirked a wan smile right when he turned his head again, forward focus once more. The expression was gone just like that, then. "I've been dreaming," he said without feeling, except perhaps that lingering fatigue, as if he still felt he were sleeping.

He felt that way rather frequently these days. It was nearly impossible not to. Especially when he was alone. That, among other reasons, was why he spent so little time at home. Because when he was home, he was almost assuredly alone.

"Will you still love her when she's whole again?" he had asked, rather suddenly. The buzz was so thick that day that he hadn't quite realized he had interrupted Ali mid-sentence, broke an entirely different topic of conversation.

Taken aback by the question, Ali was silent for a moment before quietly asking, "Will you come sit down with me?"

Laughing breathily, Salvador tilted forward, removing himself from his backward lean against the edge of the bar. He brought a hand up to his face, scrubbed his palm there and nodded, rising. "Sorry. Sometimes..." Dropping his hand, he turned, shook his head. Never mind that sometimes he thinks he's going mad. Ali didn't need to know that. Not then. Not ever.

Though who was he fooling? Clearly everyone could see it. The signs. If Ali had been able to spot that something was troubling him, then it was probably just as obvious that he was losing his mind.

They moved away from the bar, after Ali snarled at him and told him not to apologize. They moved to the couch by the hearth. Ali turned off the heat on the fire, took up most of the cushion space for himself. Salvador sat on the end and shoved his spine into the corner of the sofa.

He wondered, as he always did, where the best place to start was. His mother would have told him that the best place to start was the beginning, but he didn't know when that was anymore. So he grasped at the first recently relevant thought that struck him. "Sometimes when I dream I'm not myself," he murmured, as if reciting some long forgotten scripture.

"More and more these days actually," he amended quietly. "I don't think I've had my own dreams in months. Not since..." It wasn't easy to recall when. The first thought that came to mind was a woman's name. "Rebekah."

Ali was mostly audience, only listening, but that statement prompted a sigh from him. "Why does that not surprise me?" he muttered wearily.

A lame little smile formed for a moment, quietly amused. Then it was gone. "After her, it was always her. Then everything got tangled up. Sometimes when I dream I'm you." Rust colored eyes cut aside to assess how that might affect the bubasti.

Plainly the Bubasti had no simple response for that: surprise, perhaps; a little confusion; a dash of wariness. He didn't cover it with the glass, didn't mask it over. Instead, his head tilted, brow arching, a twisting lock of hair marking the intensity of what came through most clearly--his curiosity--along one high-boned cheek.

There again was that quiet smile, crooked and self-depricating. Salvador looked back out across the commons, letting the expression fade. "You shared your past with me, remember?" He sighed, lifting a hand to his forehead to rub out an ache. "It's only sometimes. That same section of your life over and over. I'm walking in your shoes, speaking your words, hating her like you hated her, but-- Not really hating her."

Sometimes ... even his own memories were a trigger.


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(Adaptation from live play with thanks to Ali al Amat.)

Ali?s lips lingered, there at the corner of her red rosebud mouth. It had been raining that night, and the light from the overheads in the highrise?s aboveground parking area was refracted through a million drops of water. It gave her lovely upturned face a pale serene glow as they kissed under the shelter of the overhang at the front door. She drew back to consider his face with large dark eyes, clearly weighing her chances. Thunder muttered through the canyons of the city. Faint and faraway, the dragon consul that ruled Infinity City roared a response.

He shook his head, though he couldn?t help but smile down at her. ?Not tonight. I have a full caseload waiting for me in the morning.?

When another kiss and a slow caress of his short-shorn head failed to convince him?exactly as it had not for the last three dates?she turned sulky and spiteful, and was soon sailing off for her car. That was that, he thought, and leaned back against the brick with folded arms to watch her go. Her tires screeched. Her brake lights receded into the sodden half-lit night.

Miriam. That was her name.

He?d just turned to go in when the barest suggestion of motion caught his eye. It might have been someone cocking the hammer of a pistol, or tensing an arm to throw a knife; his hand settled comfortably on the .45 in his shoulder holster, thumbing off the safety, half-drawing the gun as he turned to see?

?Rebekah, down on the sidewalk. She was soaking wet, her always tangled hair a matted soaking mess trailing down the sides of her face. The old-style leather motorcycle jacket was dripping rain from every chain. Mascara and eyeliner were running down her face in streaks. She looked like someone had stripped her down to her emotional bones, like anything greater than grief had been torn away. There was a plastic bag held loosely in one of her hands. The other was empty.

He had not seen her once in the six years since that awful night that she?d left him writhing and bleeding on the floor of the Hotel Millennium penthouse. He had the gun, the strength, the power. He knew intuitively that she could not dodge in time. He could draw and shoot. Two through the heart, two through the head. There was no doorman on duty to pay off. He could carry her to the dumpster behind the building, behead her, cut her heart out. In the morning there would be no body left.

She looked at him as if she heard his every thought. Looking at her, looking back at the memory, he had no idea where she found the courage to smile. But she did. It was a pitiful thing, a paltry mockery of an expression, but he felt his own mouth move in response. She said, ?Save me, Obi-Wan. You?re my only hope.?

?Rebekah,? he sighed. His thumb slid the safety back into place, and he reholstered the gun. ?You look like a drowned rat. Come in.?

Elsewhere... some days past...

The Bone Grove stretched out around him, though he was as unaware of it as the bones that made up the ground beneath him. Which was, in all literalness, piles of the bones of the dead. His ferrymen to this place had been none other than those that were bound to him in an eternal opposite to this place.

Shades, cast in their grays and reds, meandered throughout the bones, one stopping and checking a skeleton every so often. They dotted the landscape, endless, while the half-Daemon turned. He fell, in part, from his bed upon a massive Draconic skull. An arm and leg swished down, begging his eye to crack open. It did. And he wasn't where he'd ever been before. His head picked up, eye wide, and he turned to take in all that was the Bone Grove.

In all its morbid splendor, the Bone Grove was a wasteland. Here lay the end of all things. Everything that had once been living, abandoned, forgotten over time. Many of these artifacts were white-washed and turning yellow-gray with age. Some were still slick with offal residue and painted red. The very earth beneath the scattered skeletons was saturated thick with blood. Not a terrain that was easy to walk through for a creature with weight. The Shades moved without leaving a mark through the acre large trash heap of certain inevitability.

In the very center of the Grove was a marker, a large boulder that had once been round but was now split in half, clean and neat with a smooth surface and strange hieroglyphs written in a long forgotten language. A monument or a tombstone, perhaps even both. Red veins were spread across the back of this stone like poison ivy on a dying tree, and sprouting up behind the glyph-stone was a five feet and five inches tall sapling drenched in blood. Its limbs and trunk wound up and twisted darkly toward the sky, made from this same substance, constructed of vessels large and small, dripping periodically upon the stone and skeletons beneath its boughs. This tree, as its shape suggested it should be, pulsed with the beat of a human heart.

Thum-thump. Thum-thump. Drip-thump.

For all the density of his body, his feet spread wide and served nearly the same end as snowshoes would have, in any frozen climate. Perhaps he'd been made to walk on the backs of the dead, as well. All his senses drew him to the tree in an inexplicable fashion, bones older than the ages cracking or crumbling under his weight. He approached the glyph-stone, and stopped opposite the tree.

"Where in the Hells.." He felt a morbid sense of unfamiliar familiarity that sat in the back of his stomach telling him he didn't really want to know, at the same time he'd asked.

It was enough of a question for an answer to come drifting across the field of bones. A silver mist that clung low to the saturated earth beneath them, swirled and spiraled in and out of cavities, ribs and eye sockets. A ghostly murmur of a voice, laced with the distant echo of copper wind chimes dancing on a far away breeze.

Sanctuary, said the chill wind. Domain. Sacred Grove. There was no warmth in this place. Here was the skin-crawling cold of the grave, eternally imbued into the very atmosphere. The air was thick with the stink of the dead and decaying. The vein tree continued to pulse in time to a human heart beat. Look close enough and one could see it throbbing on every thump.

Welcome, Daemon-born... And then, there: perched atop the slick glyph-stone, at its very pinnacle, legs tucked neatly to the side and bare feet hanging down across the words, was the plain looking woman in white. "...to the end of all things."

The words running through his ears, his mind, his very being; none of them seemed to affect him as deeply as the simple physical incarnation atop the stone. A single pulse in his chest rapped against his ribs in time with the tree, all at Faye's arrival. He flinched, but did not take that pivotal step back from her. His eye was glued to hers.

"This.." He looked around, "Is where everything ends? Where you reside?" He couldn't stop looking everywhere. "What is that?" A claw lifted, slower than he thought it would, to point up and behind her, at the tree. The heart. Several of the Shades had already gathered around it and settled upon the bones to watch its eternal rhythm.

So many questions. Such a reaction. Her too dark eyes blinked slow, shimmered, here, constantly with motes of silver. Just as slowly, she turned her head to regard the mockery of a tree. There, at the corners of her imaginary mouth, a soft smile bloomed. Her answer to all his questions was not direct. There was no simple way to explain, and ever was she a cryptic creature.

"Once ... when he came to me on his own two feet, walked the long and mortal path instead of calling to me in his grief ... he said: 'This is where death waits.'" She paused but a moment. Faye is a timeless creature and her words, always, carry great weight. "I said to him: 'If death were to wait in any one place ... this would be it.'"

In the span of a blink, she was no longer sitting atop her glyph-stone. Instead she was standing beside the tree. She lifted a hand to touch its slick and oozing bark, to feel the pulse beneath her chill and ethereal palm. "This ... is his. All his anguish. All his grief. All that he has lost and all that he will some day be. I suppose ... it could be called ... Salvador's Heart Tree." She stroked the bleeding trunk as a lover might brush the cheek of her sleeping mate.

"Salvador's..?" The half-Daemon moved around the stone, desperate not to touch it for some reason he couldn't possibly fathom. He watched Faye as a surgeon might watch God hard at work. He settled into a timid position before the twisted tree, and turned towards her again. "It's so.. Big. What fuels this..?"

"He does." That answer was very simple. Her hand fell, drifted away from the tree and she took a step back. Her bare feet made no sound on the bones and refuse beneath her, for she was weightless, even in this form. Almost casually her hand reached aside to brush one of the nearby Shades. The Shade brushed took in a sharp breath, as though it had been given some precious gift, while Skid watched Faye speak and move.

"His will alone keeps this relic thriving. His very life is tied to this tree, and the life of this tree is tied to him. It grows as he grows, twelve inches every year. It sprouted not long after his metamorphosis." Tilting her head, she thought to add, in the same scientific monotone, "Shortly before his father died."

The idea of his age and the tree's height being directly related were, for a moment, slightly confusing. But nothing remained a mystery forever. "It.. Is it Salvador?" More than a mere symbiotic aspect of him, perhaps? "May I touch it?" His curiosity was going to get him in grave danger, someday. Much as it had in the past, both recent, and distant.

There were trinkets inside, little baubles that glinted in the dim light of stars and moon above. Hanging from the boughs on either side, veins coiled tight around the grips, were a pair of twin hook swords. Had anyone ever wondered from where Salvador retrieved those weapons of choice before?

Faye herself seemed to smile again, somewhat wicked, somewhat cruel, as she stepped around the first Shade and onto the next to touch its crown. He marveled at the tree while the next Shade took in a sharp gasp, eyes lingering on Faye in the afterward as the first's did. She was going to attract a following if she kept this up.

The past, the past... It was all in the past. The present had ceased to exist quite a long time ago. Back, way back, before the here and the now. He shuffled and swayed in and out of what was and currently is, never fully capable of sorting them apart at times. Like these times.

These were the times when everything seemed quite all right. He was perfectly himself, absorbed in his own thoughts, and content not to worry himself over any single silly thing. Or, well, he tried very hard not to.

It wasn't easy fighting back the tide of four times as many years as your mind was really capable of containing. Though it wasn't even that small a frame. He wasn't precisely sure how much time was locked away up there. At least two decades. She seemed so young. But that was the thing about creatures such as her. Looks were tremendously deceiving.

She came, she went, she made her mark. Tunnels swallowing up the head lights and spitting her out into a tree. Had it been a tree? Or was that memory getting itself tangled up with another? There were so many that it was nearly impossible to sort them out, and he should have given up on trying, because every time he did he forgot everything else.

There was no wondering who he was. He knew exactly who he was. He was not. She was Fionna Helston. That's who she was. Her hair fell in loose waves down her back, when she was clean enough and presentable. She was an artist, a lover, a cynic, a strategist, a widow, and a child at heart. Sometimes all of these things, and other times one at a time.

She rocked them to sleep, her little angels. Sang them sweet and soothing lullabyes to chase the demons of night away. She told them stories.

Then she fell and fell, tumbling and turning, through an abyss of time that had no ending. Glimpses of this and snippets of that reached out for her as she spiraled down. Down and down, deep into the suffocating dark. She hit bottom without a jolt but felt the world swelling in around her, strangling all that was and taking away all that would ever be.

All was gone. All was lost. There was only darkness. That smothering and unyielding darkness that embraced her without mercy. Men were laughing, somewhere, whispering their wicked plots and digging her up from her grave.

Something cold slid down across her back and--

Salvador woke, gasping. Something shattered near his ear. A moment later and he realized it was a glass, from the end table. His hand had knocked over when he stirred with a shock in his chair. The world poured in around him like the roar of ocean waves, and the mocking whispers crawled across his ear drums.

His entire body felt numb. His hand was held against his face, but it took him a moment to realize it even existed. This was his hand. This was his arm. This too was his face, and this was his body. The flood of whispers retreated back on the long sigh he exhaled.

Something warm slid down across his back, and he shivered with uncertainty.

He thrashed through the webs, desperately hanging above the ground without so much as a chance at expecting it. The longer he pushed through, the thicker he was coated, until he had to stop to try and disentangle himself. "You're Revari." He spoke towards the blob, not uncertain of her in the least. "I need to speak with you about someone, though I guess you probably already know that, don't you?" The cobwebbing was thick, difficult to manage. Could take a while.

The powder blue blob turned dark, oozed taller, and the shape skittered up the side of a slope of webbing to the left. "Daemon-born the Mother calls you," she said, and her voice sounded so much less childish. Her voice became husky and chitinous. The rustling clickity clack of hardened limbs rushed about overhead, all around, along with the snip of threads being sheared. "Of her son you speak is who."

He watched, not entirely unsurprised by the shift in form, but wary of the movements overhead and all around. The muscles running throughout his tail tightened, and stirred up the masses of cobwebbing at his feet as they fell, heaping them up away from his feet. "Yes, on both counts. Do you know why I've come then, as well?" He couldn't help but wonder. The Fae were unfamiliar territory to him, save Salvador, Faye, and Chryrie. His dealings with them in his own land had only been in the vaguest and most indirect of manners. All of these experiences were learning experiences. Each and every one. "Because that would just be grand, not having to explain it all over again."

In that moment, there might be a considerable sensation of displacement. Though the key to finding her was linked to deep within one's own mind, once finding her one stopped being there entirely. You're not in Kansas anymore, Toto. All the cobwebs were cut away, and all the trees were white skeletons surrounding him. Far above was a net of glinting gold attached to the highest branches and illuminating the dusty gray ground in an angelic glow.

Nestled in the center of that web was a large arachnid creature the same dark blue-black color as the smaller one that Skid had seen before. Though this creature looked to be equal parts spider and human, with four legs and four arms, large glassy black eyes that peered down at him as it sprawled in its nest. "The task that drives you me to seek, is not of one you need to speak," she said in that husky, gold and honey laced tone. Yes, that is to say, she knows why he has come.

Skid, after having left his mind, felt almost naked in such a place with his mask gone and his eye so nearly exposed. The metal shell would have to do. "Well, I'd love to partake in some small talk, but.. Is it possible, then?" He looked up at her, contemplated the area they were in, the possibility of making his way closer to her, too many things to contemplate. "Can it be prevented? Or at least lessened?"

Tilting her head with an audible crackle of bending carapace, the creature considered him and did not blink. Large, glassy black eyes stared, reflected his image back at him through the glinting golden web. Two arms stretched, one lifting higher than the other, reached, and grabbed a rope spun of gold. She turned, twisted, all eight limbs moving in tandem and she hardly made the net shiver at all. Did she weigh anything? She turned about, and presented her rear abdomen to him. From that angle the two white crescent moon imprints on her back were barely visible, but her spinnerets set to work weaving another rope of gold that dangled down toward him.

"Gifts of silver, gifts of gold, gifts were given new and old. Eyes to know and eyes to see, all that was but not will be. The future we can never know, for always changing is its flow," she sang in rhyme. Always rhyme. Then the rope reached his level, and it was sturdy enough for climbing, spun of the strongest golden silk. "See he does what is unseen, copied imprints from which to glean; truths to speak or never peep; his to carry, his to keep." That probably wasn't the answer Skid had been hoping for.

It wasn't, and yet he took the thread and climbed up it as though her bearing on the conversation hadn't effected him at all. "I know what it is that he does, I wanted to know if there was a way to prevent what he gains from overwhelming him. Or to scale it back to a point where it could be manageable." He made his way up, and should he reach her, he'd happily take a perch upon a branch.

The moment she felt the tremble at the edge of her net to indicate new weight had landed, she snipped the rope off at the end of her spinnerts and turned back around. Revari may be considered a beautiful creature to behold, compared to others. Her fingers and toes ended in little talons, the whole of her that same glossy blue-black shell with a woman's hourglass frame but flat chested, purely androgynous save her voice. Her head was crested with ridges to make it more triangular than round, an upside down pyramid with a curved chin instead of a point. Though her mouth had those flexible venom fangs at the corners of her shell solid lips.

There were branches at the edges of her web, and when Skid chose his seat, she turned to face him, sitting in an awkward double-bunched cross-legged way in the center of her web. "Copies are the things he makes, not the whole in which he takes," she answered. "Of my concern are things once lost, which could be found again at cost. It is Time which wears him thin, not knowing where to stop, begin. To fill a cup beyond its limit, overflows and spills what's in it."

He watched her with the reverence of one who appreciated how regal she truly appeared. That, or he had the psuedo-hots for her. Whichever it was, he seemed respectful throughout her explanation, listening with the utmost intensity. When she finished, a realization dawned upon him. "Then, would it be possible to return his lost distinction of time, the line those memories should properly follow, to him?"

Such was the curse of her geas. She who speaks in riddle and rhyme. She of the Golden Treads. Revari tilted her head with a crackle and still did not blink. She did not appear to have eyelids in which to do so anyway. The lower arm on her right and the upper arm on her left stretched outward, then came together across her flat chest.

The Dream Weaver seemed to sigh, shaking her head. "Child of contradicting caste is he; never certain surely of which side to be." The lower arm on her left side lifted palm up, fingers together like Kali on her cloud. "That which physical makes him be, is but limited humanity." Her upper right arm lifted in the same gesture, and in a moment she was a goddess. "Time flows forward, never back; never deviate from the sturdy track." Her two crossed arms pulled apart and golden threads stretched and clung to all her fingers, between her hands. "A cup has only so much space to fill, before it cracks and begins to spill."

Wednesday. Early morning.

"You hungry?"

"Uh." That sounded like an offer. "I could eat...?"

"I was going to hunt later, if you wanted to come along?" Something in the eye said 'big game'.

That piqued his interest, and he almost immediately jumped on the opportunity with a hell yes! But then he looked down at his left knee and his brows knitted with a frown. "Nn."

"I want to show you some things."

He could take a hint. "All right."

Which led them to the present, after a brief past of slipping out the back door of the Inn and hiking into the woods. Hiking, for lack of a better term, because it had been quite a long walk, especially for Salvador who was still struggling with an effed up knee. The wound was fresh, the damage only having had twenty-four hours worth of healing so far.

Skid waltzed on out the back and led the way deep into the North off the city, past the limits, into the woods, where wild things ran wild. It was good the Inn was so close to the Northeast of the city already. Let them go far without taking too much time for Sal's leg by comparison to going, say, any other direction. Along the way, though, Skid began to speak. Small talk, easing into the eventual.... "I met your Mother, the other night." This was where he gave pause, in case Sal had something to say.

Sal did not immediately have anything to say at all. On the other hand, that confession stopped him short, however far out they were from the City at this time. Woods were good. Forests had trees, and that one right there looked good for leaning on. Or more like tipping toward and slapping a hand up against the trunk to keep his weight off his leg.

Some angry old history boiled up to the surface for a moment, and he grit his teeth to keep himself from getting pissy. Last Skid had told him, the half-Daemon had only seen a woman he suspected of being his mother and then was later confirmed to indeed be her. 'Met your Mother' had an entirely different connotation which usually implied they'd had a nice little chat.

Instead of letting the first thing to come to mind slip bitterly out his mouth, he bit his tongue and waited for it to pass. Figured he could pass it off as 'ow my knee' ire, since he did grab that with his other hand. "Nnn. Did you now?"

"Yes. One night she shed a tear for me, and when I woke up I was where she goes. Shades took me there. We talked for a long time." He'd turned around to look at him, and he didn't seem the least bit perturbed or discontented with it. Although, he had some strange sort of apprehension to him. As if he weren't sure whether or not he'd be reprimanded. It was an odd thing to see, from one so usually care-free. Careless. Many things, really.

Salvador quite frankly harrumphed. Pushing off the trunk of the tree, he turned aside, crossed his arms, and dropped his shoulders back against it. All his weight remained on his right leg, locked into position to hold him up, except for the other half of his weight he put into leaning against the tree. He'd never admit it, but maybe he needed to rest a minute from all this walking. Or, maybe, he was just being stubborn and refused to go anywhere until he figured out where this whole conversation was leading. "And?" Skid had never met the man, but in that moment Salvador was very much like his father.

"I asked her about your memories. How they were getting.. Too much." Skid folded his own arms, trying to figure out how to explain it, but instead he just went on. "She.. Directed me, to Revari." He took another moment to consider how best to explain the encounter, but he just went on with it. "Who, after taking a long time to say a little bit, gave me something that I could give to you." He moved back to a large, half-buried rock jutting out of the ground and settled upon it cross-legged to concentrate terribly. His hand was closed around his pouch. "She gave me something that can help."

Though he tried to play it cool and calm, taciturn and terse, the mention of that name made a brow twitch. There was almost an exclamation point popping into existence over his head right there. "R-- Revari?" He dropped his guard, unfolding one arm to jam an elbow against the trunk behind him and lean away a little.

A look to the left and then one to the right in an uncharacterstically tense and paranoid moment. When nothing came leaping out of the trees to devour him with teddy bears and giggles, he relaxed some and focused back on Skid. He had missed some of what the half-Daemon had just said, but the movement to sit and the final statement caught his attention. "You-- She-- What?"

"Yes, the Spider." He spoke that with a strange little degree of fondness. As one would speak of meeting a stranger that gave them a thousand dollars just for putting up with their inability to speak in anything but rhyme. "I asked her if there was a way to give you order for the memories you carry. She said no, that your 'cup' was running over. But she told me that there was something you could do to siphon them off. She gave me this egg thing, said you had to eat it and then 'dream away the stinging wound'. Sounds like some kind of task, to me. Then, you'd regurgitate the egg, and I'd bring it back to her." Simply, easily, and as though he hadn't gone through anything whatsoever to come across this. Conversing with Fae was apparently his forte.

Fondness!? That made Salvador look at Skid as if he had suddenly turned into a normal human being instead of the half-Daemon monstrosity of awesomeness that he really was; in other words an alien. His mouth even gaped open and he stared. He blinked. Then he kept on gawking, as if what he really wanted to say was: 'Skid you're mad.' But all that came out was this incoherent choking gurgle of a noise at first. Wait a minute. Backtrack. "You ... talked ... to--" He checked himself that time, sent another paranoid glance left and right before looking back at Skid. "R?o? The Spider? The ... Dream Weaver? And she gave you an egg?" This was crazy talk!

Salvador should, after all this time, realize what fondness directly translated to under ninety-nine percent of circumstances in Skid's regard. Oftentimes-baffling-to-others attraction. "One and one and one make three." She said it often enough. He figured if Salvador knew what he was talking about, he'd know that, too.

Oh did he ever. Salvador sucked in a whispering, startled breath and his eyes widened significantly. That was a phrase that haunted his dreams. When they were his own dreams. And since last night-- "In the end the lost find me," he murmured the recitation. With a bit of a glaze over his eyes, not looking at anything right in front of him, he sank back against the tree. Like something as simple as a little rhyme had thoroughly defeated him.

Skid's head tilted, curiously, though the egg was instinctually returned to his pouch. "Sal?" He chanced rising, and taking a step closer to the half-Fae.

There was no finer, no more vulnerable state that Salvador could be caught in. He was oblivious to the half-Daemon's approach. Curling up into himself, he blindly smacked his forehead against his upraised knee and hissed against his thigh.

Salvador... Salvador... Salvador... A thousand moaning whispers called his name.

"Stop it," he whispered desperately.

A flash of images blinded his eyes. Emaciated, bleeding bodies reaching out toward him. One of them looked, and sounded, horrifically like Sin. How could you do this to me?

Skid kneeled down an arm's length from him, concern etched into the mask. "Sal." His voice came through stronger this time. "Salvador." An anchor, if it could pull him away.

"I didn't," he was saying. The voice may have sounded like his own, but the words certainly were not. The big tip off being the guilt-laden tone that was near to trembling and tear-filled. "I didn't mean to. I--"

Salvador. The name was like a lance plunging through a churn and splattering butter all over the walls. Salvador lifted up his head like emerging from a deep dive in the sea and sucked down that desperately, much needed, gasp of air. Of course, this meant the back of his head also thumped solidly on the trunk of the tree behind him. That too was a decent enough jolt. His head bounced back forward, bowed, with a hiss and a hand lifted to hold against that bruised part of his skull. "Ow," he groaned.

"What the Hell was that?" Skid asked. He moved forwards, stopping just short of touching the Spaniard himself. "Memories?"

"Nn," he said. At least he was hearing Skid more clearly now. The whispers faded. The buzz died down. There was just this throbbing sting at the back of his skull now, which was all kinds of not really all that awesome. "Some of them," he confessed quietly. "All of them? I don't know. They all--" He lifted his hand off the back of his head to make a vaguely circular gesture. "Get tangled up. Talking all at once." He slipped that arm under his forehead, braced against his knee. "Then I don't know where I am anymore. Who I am. Who's talking? What's going on? I don't even know--" He lifted his head. "If I'm awake or not." A little higher so he could look at Skid. "Was I?"

"The cup can only hold so much.." He'd frowned intensely, a nightmarish thing to behold, while he looked down upon Salvador. "You were holding your head and.. Whimpering." As if it were an alien term. "Always telling yourself to shut up, then said something." Oh, the discontent. How it washed across him.

Well, there was something extraordinarly disconcerting about that slice of information. Whimpering? Salvador? Really? He frowned and looked back down, realizing that his left leg was spasming a little. He slapped a hand down on the thigh to push it straight again with a grunt.

"The cup can only hold so much," he repeated bitterly. Touching a hand to the back of his head, he leaned back to trap it against the trunk of the tree and closed his eyes with a heavy sigh. "This egg's supposed to fix all that, huh?"

"Supposed to." A simple echo, assurance, idea, point of view. All of it, really. Skid's hand moved to the pouch again. "Though you should probably be somewhere safe when you do it."

"Safe," he agreed quietly, by simply repeating another word. Salvador was in no real position to nod, or just couldn't work up the energy to do so. He sighed heavily. "Skid... The last time I saw R-- Her." Never say their names. Saying their names is akin to summoning them. It gets their attention, and he didn't want that. "The last time I saw her," he went on, with a brief pause to let his eyes open and look Skid dead in the one. "I was dead."

There he'd been sitting, holding up his shirt in expectation of the delivery of an importantly fragile package that he wasn't quite ready to touch. That slipped right out of his hands. His own rusty eyes widened significantly, and his mouth dropped open. He may have also forgotten how to breathe for about fifty seconds there before his lungs kicked him in the ribs to remind him they needed to function. That's when he sucked back a sharp breath and started moving again.

Awestruck more than terrified, but he had to admit, silently to himself, that Skid was a terribly fearsome creature. His heart was hammering against his spine trying to make a hasty retreat. "Mi dios." Those were the first two words he managed to whisper out. "Eres insano magn?fico." Sorry, what? Was he supposed to be doing something other than staring in a mixture of abject terror and libido enhanced admiration?

For a singular moment, Skid's lips turned up in a smile. His teeth seemed to show only in those most expressive of things outside of speech, like smiles. "Thank you." He let him take it in, while a hand rose to the side of his face to cup it, carefully. "What I do will be unlike your Seeing. You'll feel me in your mind, be aware of my actions. Your attention will be brought where mine goes. Are you prepared?"

"Uh." Questions. He was being asked things. Skid was smiling all freaky like and that was hot. Salvador was forced to blink and look away, hold up a hand. Then just a finger. Wait a second. He needed about sixty of them to process completely what the half-Daemon was telling him and try to bludgeon to death all those thoughts he probably didn't want him to get an immediate glimpse of. Blank. Go blank. Pull in that deep breath, and then he nodded. "Okay."

"Very well." Skid moved to crouch before Salvador, and take his face in both hands. "Do not blink." A light began to build behind his left eye until a plasmic sort of bridge extended, held aloft by smaller, more animate lengths of the light, which all eventually found their ways to his right eye. The smaller ones connected first, and shuddered against the onslaught of unintentional magics that surged against them.

They reordered themselves time and again, shuddering and finding their own unique working arrangements, until at long last the bridge connected, and time itself crawled to a stop.

Not blinking was incredibly difficult to do the moment he felt the jolt. To Salvador, it was a stinging ache that flared up immediately in his retinas, the feeling. Billions upon billions of preprogrammed cells fought the onslaught, and he had to concentrate tremendously to force them to stand down.

There was no blood connection, no way for that menace to get through, unless of course he dug his claws into Skid's hide, which seemed to be the intention when he slapped his hands up to catch the half-Daemon by the wrists. He grit his teeth and argued with his more internal primal urges to kill and destroy the sensed 'intruder.' Don't blink, he told him. Don't blink, don't blink. Well, doing that made his eyes water and his vision go blurry, which was just as well because the surge of static filtered through to drown out just about everything else.

Once the connection was made, he choked on his own breath and ran the risk of blinking. Hopefully the half-Daemon was onto that and kept them up with his own thumbs, since he had a hold of either side of the fae child's face.

Memories flooded, and before reliving and taking them was even considered, the vaguest feel dictated which he would dare chance, and which he even feared to know the true depths of. Those proper owners, some known and more simply felt as not Salvador were pushed aside. Those that were indeed the half-Fae's were duplicated, stripped, and carried back across and into Skid's mind where they entered the ocean with the others that had come before them.

Here was the interesting part, now. Skid had a more intimate understanding, suddenly, of precisely what Revari meant when she whispered him that rhyme of how long Salvador has been alive. The memories that were not his own far outnumbered the ones that were. Of the vast majority were those belonging to Fionna Helston, from even long before her mind had been split into fifths. Way, way, way back into the history of her very blood. Before she was even made a vampire, a prize of house Helston. There was quite a lot of her to trudge through before even coming across an oasis that belonged to Salvador alone.

The vast majority of those memories, hers, after so little as a shock of contact, were passed through as quickly as possible. When he met those belonging to Salvador he actually tapped within and pored over them, collecting every abstract detail and moment of his life, all that he had; and placed it within the repository of his mind.

Quite a great many of those involved Sinjin. Kinship, torment, desire, love, hatred, pain, real physical pain as well as heart ache, worry, doubt, admiration... All the colors of the emotional rainbow, both pretty and ugly and the vanilla in between. Five very short years of a personal history in which the sinner had been a part of all but one.

As he drew to the close of memories as recent as this very conversation, to the moment of contact, he finally drew back. The energy pulled away, and in a slow and inevitable fashion the tendrils and bridge had withdrawn into his eye again. He released Salvador, and muttered something as the shell reclaimed his eye and sealed shut once more, seamless. He moved back far enough to fall flat onto his ass, and did so. "It's done."

On the disconnect, he immediately let go of Skid's wrists. That was the weirdest most horrifically intimate experience of his entire life. Nobody had ever really looked into his own mind before. The whole thing left Salvador shuddering like he had just plowed through a lake filled with worms instead of water. Just being aware of Skid having been in there was about a thousand kinds of awkward on top of the aftershock. Shaking hands found their own way blindly to his head, eyes having closed immediately after it was done. He kind of wanted to claw his own brain out right now for reasons he couldn't fully comprehend.

"Just tell me when you want the egg." Skid spoke easily, although he didn't sound as if he'd been so much as phased by the information. Of course, the dissemination of that information from his own mind and into the abyss that held all he ever gathered from such encounters ensured that, unlike Salvador, Skid didn't have to bunch his mind in with.

"Nnn." Restrained impulse to punch Skid in the face, check. "Don't ever do that again," he groaned. Dropping his hands away from his head, he shook his head vigorously to jostle the ringing about and hopefully fling it out his ears. Swayed a little before his equilibrium caught up with him afterward. And hey, then his hand found his shirt again. Oh right. Egg.

He tugged his shirt up and fumbled with spreading it out again. "I'll take it now. Unless you plan on holding onto it until I plan on actually using it?" Which might be wise, because Sal could be considering taking a hammer to it or tossing it out to sea instead.

"Only when and if you need it. Ever." Skid simply rubbed at his right eye the whole while. When Sal continued talking about it beyond the rustle of shirt, he spoke. "That's when I plan on giving it to you. So when that time comes, let me know." A beat, and.. "Sorry for the discomfort."

Well isn't that just fantastic then. He took off his shirt for no good reason. "Nngh. Fine." So he shoved it into one of his random pockets to be dealt with later. Summer was warm even at night, and if he didn't need to wear a shirt so be it. Let all those erratic vein traced tattoos stand out.

"I'll call you when I'm ready." He has that coin, after all. Slouching back against the tree, he closed his eyes with a sigh and said nothing about the discomfort. He was just going to pretend he hadn't heard any apology on the matter.

"Excellent." Well, this left them in quite the comfortable silence. Or uncomfortable, depending on how you looked at it.


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(The previous four posts and this one are a collaborative adaptation with tremendous thanks to Necromesh!)

"Salvador... what did you do?"

He cut a somewhat sheepish look up to Fio. "I showed him what you'd seen. What you knew. What I've got from you and what I got on my own."

The priest listened carefully. "You gave him visions?"

"No." He looked back to Amisoz. "I gave him ... memories."

She was horrified and unbelieving, like all the air had been sucked out of the room.

"You have her memories?" The priest looked between Fio and Sal now.

To that he only nodded a slow affirmative.

Amisoz's words were slow as he tried to digest everything. "And you can do this at will?"

"I can-- Yes." Explanations were his weakest link. "I can ... copy them. From things. People. Places." He turned an uncomfortable look around the room after telling him this. Speaking quietly about it.

She stared with a furious sort of numbness at her cup while the conversation flowed around her. Salvador was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. He knew he should have turned around and left when he had the chance.

"Can you show me what you showed him?"

The frown she shoots at both of them is unmistakable.

Salvador drew back his chin, eyes widening some as he looked aside at Amisoz. Man just spouted off crazy talk! After knowing what he'd done unintentionally to Pietr? He wanted to see-- "I ... don't want to--" Kill you too. Blow your brain up. Whatever. "No."

But then his eyes caught on the mirror behind the bar. "Nn. Well. Maybe I could, but it wouldn't be the same. You'd only be seeing and hearing. Not feeling it all. You might not even believe me. He didn't."

He also caught that frown. "Plus." He tilted his head some toward Fio. "They're hers." Yeah, sure. He realizes that now! Oops.

"You gave..." Ali was speechless.

Amisoz looked between them all and set his glass down. His voice took on an excited edge. "But don't you see? This could help find him!"

"Can you understand that it needs to be her choice?" Ali shot back at the priest.

By this time his baby zebra, the girl with indefeatable good cheer, had bounded into the room and happily announced "Fio!" To which the woman beside him said, "Taneth--" She choked out the name miserably. She stood abruptly, upending her coffee, and went for the ladies room.


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(Live play transcription with thanks to Ali al-Amat, Fio Helston, Fre Amisoz, and Taneth Mercer.)

Friday. August 28, 2009. Afternoon.

Rain pitter-pattered against the porch roof and Sinjin lingered beneath it, half-sprawled in the swing and watching the weather he loved best. He nudged the swing into motion, observed the shuffle of the afternoon crowd try to dodge the rain from cab cars to shopfronts, watched the young Spaniard stalking through the ill weather without a second thought.

He took those stairs up in rushed long-legged stride, and by the time he got on the porch he was nice and soaking wet. Apparently he had taken a long walk today, through the chill rain, and didn't at all seem perturbed by it, which was a little unusual. However, once he was up and out of the drizzle, he shook himself vigorously, like a dog, and said, "Ugh."

Sinjin blinked sleepily at his lover, a grin slowly forming. "You're wet," he told him informatively.

"No sh*t," he griped, like it wasn't at all obvious. After the vigorous shaking, he tossed a few extra drops off his fingers by a series of wrist flicks. Then there was the standard rake of fingers through and tossle of his hair. Followed then by worming out of his jacket, turning, and giving that a shake out off the stairs to send more droplets flying. After which, he tossed his coat at Sin, simply because he had decided to play the role of Mr. Obvious.

Sin grunted, pushing the coat off of himself and to one side, reaching for a minute touch of the boy's side when he was close enough; it was a constant habit since he was released from the chains, and it hadn't faded yet

Salvador stepped sideways and into that touch more for the sinner's sake than his own. At least that part of his shirt was dry, having been under his coat. The front had one of those patches of wet that looked like he'd run a marathon and sweat up a storm, but it was only rain. He slapped at Sin's leg to make him scoot over and make more room on the swing so he could join him on the seat.

The touch only lasted a moment and retreated soon after as he slid over, letting Salvador take up space on the swing beside him. "How's the leg?"

"Better. Much better," he confessed. Salvador dropped down on the empty space and tossed his arms up over the back, one behind the sinner's shoulders. Once seated, he even bent his left leg three or four times, up and down, at the knee, to show that he wasn't wincing or in any pain whatsoever. Though he could have been hiding it very, very well.

Sin observed the movement with an approving nod before he settled in against the younger Spaniard's side, chin tucked against his shoulder. "Good." He closed his eyes for the time being, content with the boy and the sound of rain. "What's been going on lately? I feel like I'm out of the loop."

He let his arm slide down loosely around Sin's shoulders with a soft and secretive little smile, that one he reserved just for him. "You and me both, amante. First time I've been out of the house since-- Sh*t. Saturday?" Yeah. He nodded curtly to confirm that with himself. Of course, he hadn't been home that night. Had he told Sin why yet?

No, he hadn't. Sinjin Fai, out of the loop! "Mm. Same. Well, and work. Marcus quit." Sin frowned. "I've been trying to find someone to.. replace him." Which wasn't easy. Marcus was ridiculously good at his job.

"Mm. Probably for the best." Salvador wasn't going to miss Marcus. He had zero respect for the man, especially now. "What was it, exactly, that he did anyhow?" Concentrate on that topic for now, and given a few minutes he might back track to the Saturday story.

"Everything. He handled the finances, the accounts, acted as liasons between myself and other businesses and did the same for Bastian." Sin scrubbed his face with a frown. "I feel badly for him, Salvador. I really do. But I'm not sure this is something I can fix."

"You shouldn't feel bad for him. On his own, he didn't give a sh*t about you, mi alma. In the end, he only came because his ghost made him. Nothing I or anyone else said mattered to him. He didn't care about you, so you shouldn't care about him." Salvador frowned bitterly. "You should thank Missie, though. She got through to the ghost, at least."

"Honestly? If I were him, I wouldn't have wanted to do it either." He opened his eyes, watching the rain again. "He's a tool. It was just another situation where people were using him as a tool." Sound familiar?

A little too familiar. In fact, it deepened his frown, and Salvador pulled back his arm so he could roll up off the swing. "What good is a tool if it isn't being used," he muttered sourly. Grabbing up his coat, he tossed it over the rail when he was standing and let it collect more rain water.

"Because sometimes people forget that the skills people have are still attached to someone -- and it's the someone who ultimately gives any abilities worth," he murmured, watching the boy with a frown. "Why do you think I was so upset with Ali, Salvador? Do you think I don't notice?"

Salvador tilted his chin toward his shoulder, not quite looking back at the sinner. He stood there, a couple of short paces away from the swing, with his back to Sin, and said nothing. It was all in the body language and the silence, though. If he said anything right now it would only be the wrong thing and start an argument, like always, so he said nothing.

He knew the boy -- sometimes better than he know himself -- and wasn't fooled. "Speak your mind, Salvador," he murmured, watching with half-lidded eyes.

"He doesn't like you," he muttered, tipping his chin back to look forward again. "He doesn't like me. I don't even know why he was working for Ambrosio in the first place, Sin, but--" His chin tipped down marginally, enough to let him look at the porch floor in front of him. "No. I don't think this is something you can help him with. If I lost--" All those abilities that make him equally a tool, he could have said, but no. "If it happened to me, I think I'd need to figure it out on my own too."

"No," Sin agreed, "I can't help him. But on the same hand -- I know what it feels like to be a tool and feel utterly alone." That, if anything, is what the last few months had taught him. He frowned quietly, looking past Salvador and out into the streets.

Salvador tipped his chin to look the other way, then turned aside and stepped up to the rail, where his coat was. He put his hands on that and let the rain splash on his knuckles. "The Marcus we both knew is dead, Sin. And you weren't alone. No more than I am. If you want to do something for him, that's what you can do. Let him figure out who he is now. Then, when he's figured it out, remind him that he's not alone, and never was."

Sin's lips thinned, but he said nothing, rolling over the boy's words in his mind. He wasn't wrong, and his own helplessness in the situation bothered him.

Sighing, the boy bowed his head and closed his eyes. "I know you notice," he said quietly, backtracking to that statement. "I wish you didn't, because I know it hurts you to see-- To see me suffering." That took a lot of strength to admit, so much strength that his knuckles turned white from gripping the rail through his coat.

"You don't deserve it. You're more than the sum of your abilities, Salvador. You know better than that. But you give and you give--" Sin cut himself short, exhaling quietly as he rose from the swing. "I worry for you." His arms slid around Salvador from behind, soothing and quiet, lips to the nape of his neck and nose to his hairline.

A shivering sigh slipped out, and some of his tension sloughed off when he felt the sinner's lips there against the nape of his neck. "It's what I can do," he said hushly. "It's all I can do. The only thing I have left to give. I don't know how else to help, Sin. They don't listen to me. They don't talk to me. They're no better than-- Morgan. Or Seamus. They think they know me, but they don't. I thought I got away from all that bullsh*t. But no." He lifted his head, pushing out another grumble of a sigh. "No. I'm done with them. As soon as I'm done with the book, I'm giving it to her and using that egg Skid has for me. Then you won't have to worry anymore."

"Do what you wish. I don't care how much I have to worry. But make sure you're doing what you want, love," he murmured in the shell of his ear, delivering a kiss there soon after.

"What I want," he repeated, dull and quiet. Drawing in a breath, he turned between the sinner's arms so he could face him, but kept his hands braced back on the rail. "That's just it, mi alma. I don't know what I want. I don't know what's mine. I need to get rid of it. It's driving me f*cking crazy." He lifted one hand to touch fingers over one brow and thumb to jaw, eyes closing again. "Maybe I'll know when she's gone."

"It's time to get rid of her." He watched the boy twist, still kept his arms wrapped around him. "Enough memories that haven't been your own."

"S?, s??." On that he could whole-heartedly agree, along with a nod for each syllable. Exhaling, he dropped his hand to Sin's arm and bent forward to drop his forehead on the sinner's shoulder.

Sin lifted his hand, sliding his fingers through Salvador's hair with a soothing croon of a noise. Quiet, for now, since what was there left to be said? Except for one thing, anyway: "Te amo, amante. Siempre."

That brought out the quiet smile, though shadowed by his own hair and Sin's shoulder. Salvador took his hands off the rail and wound them around the sinner's waist. "Te amo, mi alma. Siempre."


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(Taken from live play with thanks to Sinjin Fai.)