2025-03-30: Testing the Waters
- Log: 2025-03-31: Testing the Waters
- Cast: Flay Allster, Lacus Clyne
- Where: Archangel Hot Springs
- OOC - IC Date: March 30, 0100 (2025)
- Summary: Amidst some downtime aboard the Archangel, Flay and Lacus have the same idea to unwind in the mini hot springs area. They decide to see where they stand.
<Pose Tracker> Flay Allster has posed.
It's been an unpredictable couple of months for anyone who's been paying attention to the state of the world - a world that has shifted from a constant cycle of conflict, towards an uncertain, unsteady calm that could be shattered at any moment. So although Terminal still has more than enough work on its hands between the situations in Orb and the Frontier Fleet, they're problems that are difficult to act on in the way they had before... which only follows that there's been more downtime lately.
Though the Archangel is stationed underwater near Orb today in the event things spill over again, there's not much they can do except to react to those events. Maybe it's convenient then, that most of the ship's upgrades since the Bloody Valentine War went to quality of life and comforts. Flay, personally, totally thought she was having her leg pulled when she was told about the hot spring they had put in - but sure enough, it's real!
It's not like she actually lives on the ship anymore, but Flay figured if she's going to be helping them out... she might as well take advantage of what it's offering. So, spa day it is. It's not the best or most spacious bath she's ever taken, but considering her position, she doesn't really have room to complain about that out loud. It's actually pretty nice to get to unwind for once - especially after just making such a life-changing decision.
The atmosphere is fairly quiet - and Flay's the only one currently occupying the girls' side. For now.
<Pose Tracker> Lacus Clyne has posed.
Flay gets about five minutes to herself in the Archangel's mini-hot spring. However -- she's not the only one who enjoys that particular creature comfort by a long shot...
Things have been gnawing at Lacus ever since the last time the Archangel saw battle. Her convictions feel a little muddled -- more than a little, really. She's been trying to shake it, going around in a circle in her head, but the questions she has just don't have answers...
... so it seems like it's hot spring day. She steps into the girls' side -- and realizes she's not alone. "Oh," she says, and it's hard for her to hide that her feelings are a little mixed upon seeing that she'll be bathing with Flay and not alone.
Still, she lowers herself into the spring slowly and deliberately. "Hello," she says, with a small nod to Flay. "Things have changed a lot recently, haven't they?" One wonders if she means the world as a whole, or for Flay in specific -- though those two things seem intertwined.
She stretches out a bit, trying to get comfortable -- and figure out where she stands with Flay.
<Pose Tracker> Flay Allster has posed.
Even if the Archangel has a fairly small crew by now, it's probably a little presumptuous to have assumed this would be a solo bath. Still, when Flay sees Lacus, her own "Oh," is almost exactly in tune with hers. It's not as if she's been intentionally avoiding Lacus up until now - she meant it when she apologized to her the last time she met. But some things aren't as easily and quickly bridged as that.
Reaching over for her towel, her first impulse is to get up and passively aggressively ask if she should be leaving now. Flay reconsiders when she sees Lacus make those careful steps forward to greet her.
This whole time, Lacus has been making an effort. No matter what Flay could say about Lacus, she's always been the one to reach out a hand to her, no matter how much it's been slapped aside. It would be too easy for that to continue, but maybe it doesn't have to be that way. "...Ms. Clyne. There's some room right across from me." She says, instead, lowering herself back deeper in the water as she considers the prompt.
"You're right. So much has changed.." She agrees, though avoids eye contact as she does. "And honestly, I don't think things could've stayed the way they were." Her thoughts inevitably shift to Break the World and the nuclear counterattack - how could things be the same after that? "For a long time, I couldn't see where the world was heading... and maybe I still can't. But I felt like I had to do something."
She finally looks over to Lacus, and asks a question of her own. "I wonder.. do you think it's for the better?" It's an open question whether she means the change within the world or within herself.
<Pose Tracker> Lacus Clyne has posed.
Lacus gradually gets settled in; Flay inviting her to settle in seems to do a little to get her more comfortable, though there's some distinctly mixed feelings there that she'll probably have to sort out on their own time.
... The water's really nice, though, and that does a fair bit to get her to open up. There's something about the atmosphere of a hot spring that makes it hard to be too standoffish.
It's hard to think that it's been just six-ish months since the world almost saw another of those tragedies that show up in the history books with 'billions' underneath. Everything feels totally different, and yet still the same -- or maybe that's just a sign that Lacus is more selfish, more self-involved, than she'd care to admit. "It sounds like you've found a path forward that you're happier with," she muses, fairly neutrally. That that path is alongside her is good, ideologically...
... but also more than she'd care to admit, Lacus isn't exclusively ideologically driven.
She looks down into the water for a few moments, then takes a breath and does her best to get back into her usual role. "Things seem better than they were at their darkest point," she allows, evidently not interested in collapsing the ambiguity waveform much if at all. "I'm... concerned about the idol the Gaia Sabers are using." ... They have to talk about something.
Beneath the water, Lacus gives her palms a quick squeeze together, testing if she's still in practice for a certain trick...
<Pose Tracker> Flay Allster has posed.
Maybe it's a good thing they both decided to relax a little... if their spa day turned into an awkward staring contest, maybe Flay really would have considered leaving early. Having any kind of conversation is better than that... even if thinking about the state of the world merits a bit of a sigh from Flay. It helps, at least, that the water is so nice and fresh today.
"If it's a path forward at all, I think I can be happy with that." Flay replies to Lacus's assessment - perhaps in doing so, admitting that she'd been fighting with her mind stuck in the past before. "It seems like Kira's been smiling a little more than the last time we spoke, too..." She adds, as if it were just an unrelated piece of small talk. But the question remains unasked - is Lacus happy?
In the space where that question might have been asked, there's instead a brief lapse of silence, before Lacus offers an answer to her previous question. "...If they weren't, I guess we wouldn't be sharing a conversation like this in a hot spring." Flay agrees, still keeping up a level of ambiguity. When Lacus changes the topic, Flay finds she's eager to jump on it... because it's something that had been worrying her, too.
"...Lilium Valerie," She nods. "She wasn't always aiming to become an idol, you know. Before all that, she was just a regular pilot." One that she'd personally fought with - even rescued her ejected pod after battle before. She hesitates - and then continues. "For a while, they did these routine 'checkups' with the female officers... it was strange, but I didn't think much of it. Then they announced the 'Boosted Songstress' project. And she was never the same since. She sounded happier... but I wonder if she can be honest about it." She frowns, absently swirling the water with her fingers.
"Either way... it seems like they want to give you some competition." Flay concludes - she's not going to say it's partially Lacus's fault, but it doesn't take a genius to understand why Lacus might be personally worried about the Gaia Sabers using an idol to influence others.
<Pose Tracker> Lacus Clyne has posed.
The question remains unasked -- and so, it remains unanswered. Lacus certainly isn't in a position where she wants to volunteer unsolicited information about her private life, not least because -- well, it's her private life.
Lacus takes a deep, slow breath, thinking about Kira for a moment. "... I've noticed that as well," is all she offers about Kira's happiness. There's a faint smile on her face, though, at the thought.
Flay offers an insider's perspective on Lilium, and Lacus raises an eyebrow. This is a side of things that she hadn't yet had time to read up on in intimate detail, despite how much it's bothering her. "... At the moment, that competition is an empty field," Lacus admits. She hasn't really felt like taking the stage was where her destiny lay since the end of the First Bloody Valentine Conflict. Idols are meant to be pure, after all -- and the world weighs too heavy on Lacus Clyne for her to feel comfortable claiming that.
Lacus catches something in Flay's explanation, though. "... It seems like you're wondering if that could have been you, instead," Lacus observes. "And it's impossible to say that it couldn't have happened..."
A silence settles in. It's awkward --
-- until Lacus uses her superior Coordinator dexterity to watergun Flay with her fingers, squeezing water through her palms. "But it didn't," she says, with a faint smile crossing her face. "The world in which that happened does not exist," she adds, a little more seriously. "What do you plan to do in this world, then?"
<Pose Tracker> Flay Allster has posed.
Instead of saying anything, Flay simply offers a small smile of her own in response. Kira's happiness doesn't need to be a knife to drive in the throat of another person anymore. After all, she's certain that Lacus is one of the reasons Kira has to smile.
"It seems like she's been pretty successful so far... her first live was a breakout hit." Flay adds. "And I doubt they're going to let that success go to waste." And with that, Flay tries to parse Lacus's reaction to her explanation about Lilium... it wasn't really what she was expecting to hear. "Really? You're still just going to stay out of the spotlight?" Lacus always struck her as deceptively decisive, so it's strange to see this side of her, to say the least.
Still, it seems like Lacus caught onto something. Had that worry been stuck in the back of her mind this whole time? "...Maybe a little," Flay answers, before that silence strikes. "Wait, how did you-" She tries to ask, but before she can even fully process the question of how Lacus was able to perfectly clock the source of one of her anxieties...
...She's being watergunned in the face. She reaches to block it with her hands, but Lacus is much too fast, and now her tied-up hair is soaked. "H-hey! What was that for?" She demands, and then quickly after, bursts into a short fit of laughter. "Ahahah... geez, I wasn't expecting that from you at all." She concedes, and then considers her point. "But you're right.. it's not what came to be." And when she thinks about the follow-up question, she thinks she has her answer.
"I became a pilot for a reason, so I'll fight, if I need to," Flay starts. "But if there's really a path where fighting isn't the only way... then I want to find it." Making her apologies is one thing, but she has to show she's serious about it. "Especially if it means he won't have to fight anymore. I'm sure you want the same thing, right?"
<Pose Tracker> Lacus Clyne has posed.
That certainty is wholly unique to Flay.
Flay's surprise grounds Lacus a bit. "The idol world moves very fast," she points out. "Redebuts aren't unheard of, but they are uncommon... when an idol has that sort of momentum, redebuting in opposition is very difficult." It's not that Lacus is one to shy away from difficult things -- but she's confident it's not the best use of her time or abilities, at the moment.
Perhaps that was Lacus's plan all along -- to bring up the anxiety and then immediately force Flay to put it aside and live in the moment. Perhaps Lacus is just a little shit. It's hard to know. She giggles back, a bit; her eyes shut for a few seconds, and she breathes a contented sigh.
When Flay says that she wants to fight so Kira doesn't have to fight anymore, though -- that catches Lacus off guard. She isn't sure what to make of it; she can certainly respect Flay's ambition, but... even if the circumstances of his birth shouldn't matter, it is a simple fact that Kira's abilities outstrip Flay's. She tries to find the words to question this, and for once she's a little tonguetied... but that question hangs over her.
"... That's true," she has no choice but to agree. "Do you think that will change everything that's happened?" ... It comes out a little sharper than she means it to.
<Pose Tracker> Flay Allster has posed.
"I guess so... but once you get popular enough, people will never forget you, right?" Flay raises, even though she knows Lacus is the expert in the field and not her. "I mean, even Sheryl Nome managed to re-debut, and everyone thought she was done for." The circumstances around that are weird enough... but it seems Lacus has made up her mind.
If Flay had to guess, Lacus's water gun scheme was a mix of both - but it's weird to think having water splashed in her face actually helped her relax. Now that she's in the clear again, she takes the moment to wring all the water out of her hair all while tying it back up.
She can understand Lacus's surprise about her motivations - maybe it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to anyone but herself. She's also well aware of the skill gap separating them, she'd experienced it first hand during the battle in Orb, after all. But perhaps it's better than sending someone else out to die for her... and that means Lacus's question stings in a way she wasn't fully prepared for.
"...No," she answers, after a moment. "It won't." She looks down into the ripples of the water. "But that's exactly why it's so important to me."
<Pose Tracker> Lacus Clyne has posed.
Lacus blinks as Sheryl's brought up. ... It's something she hadn't connected -- even if Sheryl's circumstances were different, that's something that definitely undermines her own thoughts. She doesn't have any words for it yet, though -- no off-the-cuff answer to that clear counterargument.
"... That's true," she has to concede -- and it gives her something to think about.
She sees she's gotten under Flay's skin a bit, with her comment -- and that, too, gives her something to chew on. It doesn't change things, and yet that's why it's important... Lacus wonders whether this is a sign of resolve or fear. She can't find an answer.
So instead -- she lets herself sink a little deeper into the water, affirming, "It sounds like you've made many important decisions, then," as she does.
She can't find anything else to say. Every topic feels too heavy, and she's gotten most of her playfulness out in one spurt. "...The hot springs are nice," she murmurs.
<Pose Tracker> Flay Allster has posed.
Resolve or fear... it's a good question Lacus asks herself. After all, sometimes the most fierce resolve can emerge from the deepest terror. "I think there'll probably be many more important decisions ahead of us, too." She adds, to Lacus's affirmation, with a slight verbal nudge. She can't be the only one taking steps forward.
And with that, the conversation finally hits its snag. While it was certainly worth having... it was definitely more confronting on both ends than she'd expected from a hot spring day. "They are," She starts, looking between Lacus and her towel. "So much that I totally lost track of time... I'd better start getting changed." She says, sensing the tension. "...But thanks for keeping me company." Leaving Lacus with a ghost of a smile, she wraps her towel around her chest and walks over to the changing room.