2023-01-18: Bringing Flowers
- Log: Bringing Flowers
- Cast: Yuliana Kafim, Ujico Issa
- Where: The Silent Castle, Kaffeklubben Island
- Date: 2022-01-18
- Summary: Ujico visits Yuliana as she recovers from her recent disagreement with reality. She brings her flowers -- some assembly required -- and her concern, as Yuliana speaks of all the wounds upon her. Though she struggles with herself a little in doing so, Yuliana shares with Ujico her motivation for fighting with Celestial Being... and her hopes that they'll accept her now, too. Ujico struggles with how to help someone whose past is so bloodied, but Yuliana doesn't discard the efforts of her comrade, at least.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Polar night is darkness unending, this close to the North Pole. Under twilight was the Silent Castle raised; in abyss does it flourish. The ice floes, outside, are ancient and groaning, still too cold to destroy completely.
The gates are closed, but an attendant comes to hear the visitor, who comes. The queens of the castle are consulted; she is offered hospitality, as she waits.
Finally Ujico is escorted, by a manservant with dull green eyes, to a grand and comfortable sitting room. The grand stone of the walls has been decorated with cloth hangings. A fireplace has been lit, warming the room with pleasant flames crackling behind the rail; the couches are plush, upholstered in fine velvet, and there are tables beside them to place trays of snacks.
Yuliana Kafim, the gentler lady of the house, is already seated on one of those comfortable seats -- and if she sinks into it more than is strictly proper, well, she has been recovering from a terrible ordeal. Her dress is thick and warm for the climate, emerald with deep purple trim. There are no bandages visible on her, now, but she still has a certain pallor.
"Be welcome," she smiles, gesturing broadly to a generous choice of chairs. "My Viridesca regrets she's not able to see you at present... you can imagine my state's left her rather occupied. Ah, but I'm quite fit to be up, of course." Her dearest wife will have certainly signed off on Yuliana moving about the castle, which is to say, she has permission to be out of bed.
(Not that either of them would frame it that way. It's a matter of suggestion and implication and avoiding distress. They simply care about each other so much...)
"I was... surprised," Yuliana -- Verdiska, as Celestial Being knows her -- says, picking out her words a shade delicately, "to hear we had a visitor... can I ask why you've come, dear?" There's an empty, yawning abyss where her heart should be; Yuliana offers no empathic information at all. (Luckily, the other chairs are outside of Ujico's grasp, so she oughtn't fall into that darkness.) Even so, her confusion over Ujico's social visit doesn't sound feigned.
Even if they're allies, and she can't precisely eat her... it's too strange, in Yuliana's mind, that her prey would be concerned for her welfare.
<Pose Tracker> Ujico Issa has posed.
It takes a long time to get to places on Earth. Especially the North Pole.
Space travel is much faster in comparison, even if the distances are farther. But then, in space you don't have to deal with things like wind resistance and weather.
You also don't experience things like 'the ocean' or 'glaciers'. So there's a tradeoff.
She's shown into the castle. While she waits, she uses one of the bathrooms to scrub her face and hands and comb her hair. Being a guest means adhering to cultural standards, and both of the Kafims have always put care into their appearances.
Ujico notices things like that, about humans.
To integrate better with the castle and its inhabitants, she's wearing a black velvet dress with a square neckline and no sleeves. It ends at mid-thigh and zips the entire way up the front. In deference to the chill, there's a long-sleeved purple turtleneck and some tights layered under the dress. She would have tried something more Gothic, but it's hard to travel in lace without ripping anything. Gothpunk will have to do.
When Yuliana comes out to receive her, Ujico doesn't feel quite the kind of relief she thought she would. 'Verdiska' is still pale and weak-looking. But then, anybody who was opened up like on that video... shouldn't they be dead? So really, any amount of 'alive' is better than that. "I heard about JOSH-A."
It might have been a stupid thing, to come here, if Yuliana is in the business of dancing while the sky disgorges kaiju. Ujico knew that when she was buying her ticket. "I heard you got hurt, and you're supposed to bring people flowers if they're not well." The box that Ujico hands over, getting up from her armchair and shuffling towards Yuliana, is not a bouquet. ...Well, not yet anyway. It's a model kit that builds a Bird-of-Paradise in a vase. "I didn't think real ones would survive the trip. And if you're stuck at home recovering, it's good to keep your mind busy."
She... looks serious.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
About 'humans'... huh.
It's horrifically cold outside -- but lovely and warm in here. Elisa has always taken such cares to make sure that Yuliana's environment is safe and comfortable for her.
Black is a good colour, for this place. There's a lot of black, here -- black and green. They definitely have favourite colours. The same, favourite colours.
Yuliana reaches out, with the long fingers of a pianist or an artist or an assassin, to pluck the package from Ujico's hands. She may feel it, as she steps in, and Yuliana leans forward -- the way the world quiets, around her.
... or she may not. It may be more obvious from Yuliana's end, that vague lack to her edges.
She settles back, and examines the box. And...
"Hahaha...!"
Yuliana laughs, honestly surprised -- and a shade delighted. It's not a cruel sound, this time. "Wonderful!" She exclaims, as she places the box safely to one side. "You know, I have always been the type to build with my hands -- ah, it's a clever little gift you've brought to me." She weighs the scales, for a moment, and grants: "Thank you, dear."
A hand still laying on the box, Yuliana casts her gaze, down, beside it.
"You know, the funny thing... no one's ever thought to bring me flowers about it, before."
Though someone did once offer her cake after her decimation.
Anyway.
<Pose Tracker> Ujico Issa has posed.
Well, there are only seven or so to choose from. What are the odds?
Perhaps that's what brings Ujico around. Maybe she's one of the people for whom the world has too many sharp edges, and she doesn't know why. Or maybe she's completely unaware of her own potential, or maybe she's got a better poker face than anyone could give her credit for.
...Probably not.
Ujico has been more careful about gifts, since Liu Mei's birthday party. But in the end... flowers seemed like the only appropriate thing. And if Yuliana disliked it, Ujico would have at least tried.
"You're welcome," she replies, and returns to her chair. It's plush and velvety; Uji strokes the velvet of the arm slowly. "I like to build things too, sometimes. ...Has it happened before?" Ujico asks. "I saw a short clip. You started bleeding." From everywhere. More wounds than she thought a human could survive. Even over a lifetime... it's so many.
Maybe she doesn't want to know. Maybe it will hurt to find out. But Yuliana was hurt, already. Ujico was hurt, already.
Outwardly, she sits with one hand in her lap, the other stroking the chair-arm, pink hair loose down her back for once. "How many times should someone have brought you flowers?" Ujico asks, green eyes grave.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Yuliana blinks, in mild surprise, looking over to Ujico. "Hm? Oh, no... nothing like that." That, she emphasises, with care; Yuliana can't say she's never been injured so grievously, but never with such an... eldritch undertone.
She glances down, again, to the box, and she's silent for a moment.
"... countless times," she volunteers, finally, quietly.
"I have made it through things others would surely die just watching. Few are thankful to see me alive, at the end of it. Either they expect survival of me... or they wished I'd succumb."
<Pose Tracker> Ujico Issa has posed.
Ujico is quiet for a while, still idly rubbing her fingertips against the velvet. Waiting for Yuliana to speak.
She doesn't have words for a situation like this. She has no script to follow, nothing that would be appropriate to say. Maybe it doesn't exist at all. So Ujico is quiet longer. "...I'm sorry," she says eventually, because that is the closest thing she knows to the comfort she would like to give. "I wish it wasn't like that."
"Sometimes humans are really cruel. People." It's a miserable thing, to be surrounded by hate and indifference. She looks down at her knees for a moment, considering. Feeling. Remembering the taste of hate, of wanting to smash everything. It aches dully, as it always does. It's natural. It's normal.
Her books said so.
She remembers, then. "But not Elisa, right?" It's a hopeful thing, that single sentence. She sits up a little straighter. "You looked really happy at the wedding. --Until that Lilith Someoneorother showed up anyway."
A bride can be forgiven for saying terrible things if her wedding was interrupted, Ujico thinks.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
"Unfortunately, that's just the way of it. I'm a soldier." Yuliana says, fingers coming to rest on her arm. It's covered by her sleeves, but... well, Ujico saw those innumerable lines of blood. "Or... that was my official occupation, anyway," she allows, with a light scowl.
It's hard to call herself a soldier of the REA at all, these days. Not after...
Warmth enters her expression, again, as she smiles to Ujico. "My darling Elisa has always cared for my wellbeing," she says, with clear affection. (And she drops the titles, in the process. Ujico was at the wedding; she knows who they are.) "She gets so upset, when I am hurt... and she has always acted to try and protect me from harm."
Yuliana's hand lifts, to rest by her heart, just underneath the draped scarf about her neck. (There's no crystal beneath it, right now. Their process was interrupted. It will take a little while to begin anew.) "She's always been there for me... ever since we grew close... I love her so. There are none more fortunate than I. She really... cares about me... oh, she worked herself ragged, keeping me in one piece..." Tears spring to her eyes, as her other hand lifts, to clasp over her first. Elisa was so worried...
<Pose Tracker> Ujico Issa has posed.
Ah, she was right. Elisa was the right person to mention, to make Yuliana happy again. Ujico brightens a bit, though it's only a small echo of Yuliana's own glow.
"It's important to have bonds like that. I'm so glad you found each other." And she is. It's good to see other people fulfilled; it's good that the happiness in the world increased. "I think... that when someone cares and is cared for in return, they can become the best version of themself. Because if we're sad or angry but we have someone to think of, it gives us a reason to keep trying." It doesn't have to be a lover. It can be anyone.
Ujico hadn't known that Elisa was a doctor or anything. Maybe Yuliana means it in a more roundabout fashion. "She must be good for you, to care so much."
What is it like to love someone that way? Surely it will happen to Ujico too, sooner or later? She leans forward a little, her hand finally leaving the arm of the chair to rest with its twin in her lap. "What will you do now? You'll stay with Celestial Being, right? --If you want to," she amends, because Yuliana is almost died, Yuliana is still healing. And Ujico doesn't like the idea of pressuring someone into anything, if they might have the chance to... do anything else, really.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
"When I'm with my dearest Elisa... I am always becoming the best version of myself." And the way Yuliana says it, it sounds so assuring.
It must be a good thing.
She's quiet, for a moment. Finally, she dips her head. "Yes... it's surely because of Elisa that I never give up. But it's also because she cared for me so much... that she stepped in when I kept trying, even as everything began to unravel. She wouldn't let me sacrifice myself on the altar of this world's salvation... someone like me, from the Republic, it's difficult for me to fathom." Yuliana sighs, her fingers curling around each other. "Since... my country cares so much for progress, and little of the costs involved."
Yuliana's hands drop to her lap, though they stay laced together, there.
"I would... like, to stay with our mutual friends," she starts, a touch delicately. "Though I... do not know if they will understand. But... I cannot return to the REA, as I am now. Attacking that Federation operation, as a Federation officer... no amount of lies and circumstance can salvage my position." She pauses; she shakes her head. "No... I do not wish it to be salvaged."
Her fingers tighten, about each other.
"They... hurt me, Ujico," and perhaps she can communicate the gravity of the situation by using her name, when they so rarely do. "Quite terribly... and thoroughly. It is... difficult for me to speak on, but... I cannot return." Even saying that much, her expression is drawn taut.
She looks down, to the side. "... it... upset me, that I would be so unmoored in this world by my failure. While it persists in this wretched state... there must still be ways to improve it from within. So... I hope Celestial Being will accept me, I suppose. To achieve equality in this world..."
<Pose Tracker> Ujico Issa has posed.
The altar of this world's salvation...
It must be a metaphor, Ujico decides. And she has already asked Yuliana too many painful questions today. It's not good to make an injured person upset. Television and her father said so.
"Progress at the cost of people..." Perhaps it makes her a hypocrite, to call it anathema and then get in her mobile suit, which is made to build a new world on the backs of murdered soldiers and destroyed facilities. She doesn't let it bother her much.
Yuliana is getting upset again, even if Ujico didn't ask her anything. "If they hurt you, they don't deserve you. So don't go back, since you don't want to - you can be free, if you want to. 'Once you've lost everything, you're free to do anything.'" She read it once, and it had stuck with her. Of course, the narrator hadn't lost everything - he had thrown it away, which Ujico thinks is very different. She fidgets a bit, a hand coming back to the chair's arm to touch the fabric again.
"I can't speak for the others. But if you want to make a new world out of the old one, I think you would fit in with the rest of us just fine."
Because who hasn't wanted to be free of everything that constrained them? Who hasn't wanted, at one time or another, to burn the world down and piss on the ashes?
But it got better. Ujico is getting better, all the time. She's sure Yuliana can, too.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Yuliana certainly isn't talking like someone who wanted to destroy the world. Change it, certainly. Change it... dramatically, and violently, and suddenly. But is that not the way of Celestial Being, who have declared war on war itself?
"I wanted to make the world better," Yuliana defends herself, quietly. "To help my country, and the Earth." Not the 'Earth Sphere'. Perhaps she's just speaking loosely. "That's why I agreed to the experiments... that's why."
There were consent release forms, you know. She knew she might die. She thought that meant she knew what was being asked of her.
"I don't wish to be a disloyal person... but what I did for them, what they did to me... I wanted to live a normal life, but I simply declined to see the leash about my neck." There's something else, that usually hangs there. Surely that's not a symbol of control, just the same.
"Equality... cannot exist in a world plagued by war, Ujico. I've seen it... tragedy after tragedy makes monsters out of neighbours, and the weak are ravished by the strong. The sick don't receive medicine. The invalid find their handrails and ramps destroyed by shrapnel, trapped inside their homes. The old are left to languish, and many find their end with such an ignoble fate as tripping and falling, particularly those alone. Women are treated poorly, and children are kidnapped to fight as their parents die before them. Under capitalism, the poor often cannot even afford to eat... that's why someone like me has elected to aid you. We share common purpose, seeing the suffering of normal people."
Yuliana sighs, a hand lifting to rub at her elbow. "Though... someone like me, who has destabilised many nations... I wonder if anyone would accept me saying it. I could defend myself by saying I thought the REA's peace would best support humanity... or I could say I had little choice, given the character of the demands placed on me..." Her shoulders lift and fall in a vast shrug, as she takes a deep, shuddering breath.
"... but I suppose the truth is," she allows, reluctantly, "I knew what I did betrayed my hopes and desires, but I found enough pleasure in my work to ignore that knowledge and go on. How unfortunate..."
<Pose Tracker> Ujico Issa has posed.
Ujico has read about it, in history books and novels and biographies. Has seen it on television and in movies and documentaries. But Yuliana has experienced it, knows it in ways that Ujico can only see the shadows of. But even the shadows on the wall of the cave had moved her to action, to step out into the danger of the real world.
Sometimes she wonders if she has the right. Sometimes she wonders who will do it if she does not.
Can Ujico, by acting, prevent suffering? Can anybody?
She listens to Yuliana, and feels sorrow, and worry, and tries to turn them into resolve.
"I think that what we were isn't as important as who we try to become. What we did isn't as important as what we're doing, and will do." Yuliana's past is deep and bloody; perhaps knowing all of it would go beyond some kind of trauma event horizon for a simple alien girl. Everyone in Celestial Being has a reason to be there. Ujico knows very little about most of them. The Gundam Meisters in particular are tight-lipped, which makes her think...
"I think that because you know the bad parts of humanity, because you've experienced it... because you want to fix everything, and make a better world, that's enough." She doesn't know what to say. She doesn't know who to be. There is no Ujico that could possibly comfort Yuliana.
Wanting to prevent suffering, wanting to make something better... isn't that enough?
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
"Perhaps... you're right. Perhaps it's high time I wielded myself, rather than being the REA's weapon. No... perhaps I already wished to do so," she shakes her head, correcting history, mildly. "Since I put myself in such a precarious position to advise our mutual friends of Colonel Garland's movements..."
Yuliana had been fighting them, in her position as a Captain, when the Colonel clashed against them. But the manufactured weapon, Yuliana, was always positioned to betray Garland. There were reports of his movements, from a mysterious source... reports which no one received, in his most recent flagrant actions.
"You are... strange for your kind, Ujico," Yuliana says, and doesn't quite explain what kind she means. "But it does seem you've come here in the spirit of kindness... it's odd, to me, but... well," she allows this much, "we are comrades, I suppose."
... so she's not entirely out of the mindset of the REA. But then, she was born and raised under socialism.
Well, perhaps she can accept this much, even from someone like her. She's not... the worst of them. Not the worst.
"But you have come all this way," she says, spreading her hands. "Come -- let me feed you, at least. I should like to offer you that much, since you thought to bring me flowers."
She'll be putting those together very soon. It's like engineering... but tiny! Delightful!