Another night, another coffee, but this time in the back room of the Jewish bookstore, and Gisa asks, after the pleasantries: How are you? There's an emphasis on the sentence, her fingers moving casually -- with the grace of prayer -- so much more easily than she moves when most other people are around. Don't tell anyone: she's actually quite graceful. That sentence means: But how are you really, buggo?
Rorschach was curled up, in a knot, on the chair and there was a creased across the bug's brow and he shrugged. Another sip of coffee bided his time before he finally put it down and cracked a wry grin <<That's the funny part of that question. one answers honestly one loses all credibility beyond the demarcation of truth. Trust reaches apogee and then inevitably? Crumbles because teh truth is known or because it is unspoken. Are we so quick to end this with truth?>> It amused him and perhaps there was more to it than that behind the hlaf-stoned languid grin. <<It's not you. It's me. And that too is the pblem and the answer I think. But it's been... hard.>>
Goylomim have difficulty understanding emotions on the best of days, and this isn't the best of days. It hasn't been the best of months. Still, she's a creature of Hope, and so she presses on. Gisa takes another swallow of her coffee, her cup clinking against her lip, and turns her hand up on the table. "I am only a Reb, not a Rabbi. But you can speak to me if you wish to speak, and I will hold your confidence like a priest. I promise not to answer your questions with riddles or parables unless you ask me to do so, though." Because rabbis do do that. Often. "You will not lose credibility with me for telling me the truth." That much is true, she's sure.
Rorschach looked to her and took a deep breath. It was the theme of the evening so what the hell. Unlike Doc Holliday his hypocracy had some bounds. He signed to herarching an eyebrow and weighing her words carefully before playing out his gambit wagering trust against his paranoia. <<WHatever else you find out know I do trust you. You have like all my fuckin respect, G>> He pressed his fingers together and then to his forehead figuring out where to start << I'm sick. It's not the radiation.>> He tried to explain it somehow and words weren't his friend right now. That that he was sort of buried at the far end of the wyrd scale? This was not hard to imagine being a thing.
"I am what I am, Rorschach," Gisa answers aloud, rolling her shoulders in that gentle, tectonic way that she has, and then she signs back almost gently, Sick how? She knows, from the look on her face, the gentle shift of her eyebrows, the way she cants her face just so. She knows because she's seen people like him many times in the past nearly-ninety years. Talk to me, and I will try to help. Both her hands, palms-up on the table in offering.
Rorschach looked to her and there was... trust? The bug's jaw set and he signed slowly, not for her ability but for his ineptitude to communicate a world of feelings so coherrently to be received in the manner intended.Boy was that a tall order. He signed finally <<My.. head. From before the durance. Think that sort of runs in my family. I have a condition. Warps reality on me. Makes it hard sometimes to filter out all... teh things. Can't describe it without sounding crazy, but... maybe I am. Maybe it's just what it is and we call a spade a spade... I like calling them large trowels myself>> He shrugged and squirreled up a thoughtful look before noting <<Been getting bad again. Affected by the skein, or maybe I'm the one affecting it. I dunno. Makes it hard to hold onto... truth I guess you could call it. That's the funny thing. Everyday, dyin without dyin>>
Like schizophrenia, or like autism? Gisa isn't a doctor, but she knows enough about 'how the brain goes wrong' after being around Lost for ninety years. Do you mean that you cannot filter out sounds or sensations, and that they overwhelm you, or do you mean that you see, or feel, or hear, things that are not there? Or both? She presses her hands together when she's done signing, a sign that she isn't doing anything but listening, not waiting for her next turn to speak. Have you spoken with a Blackbird at all? That is, after all, their job.
Rorschach looked actually impressed byt he astuteness and signed honestly <> He looked into his coffee sitting on teh table in front of him very, very still. He didn't ask for pity or consession. It wasn't what he wanted to put thing on other people, but he owed their friendship honesty at the least. <<Occasionally I see things. I hear things all teh fucking time. Sort of why I had to teach myself to grab my blade last. That's... not the sort of thing one wants to make a mistake with. Funny thing?>> The humor of it caught up with thim and he hung his head and laughed soundlessly. There was a warm grin on his face that died in his eyes, <<The person I loved for 7 years that I chased across to save... might never have even existed. I'm doin research and if I spent... all that time there trying to save them.. and they ain't real? What was I fucking doing?>> It was a sick sick humor of irony all in all. RUnning at the thing you are trying to avoid in order to avoid it.
She thinks about that for a long time, because clearly Gisa doesn't take his question as a rhetorical one: he asked her a question and she's going to try to answer it. If they weren't real, then what was he doing? The shin on her forehead shimmers, the flames in her eyepits spark and she goes otherwise almost entirely still for a good long time. Finally, her hands move again, and she answers him: You were saving yourself.
Rorschach considered the answerpressing his lips back together and signed to her <<Then I failed. Maybe not at other things though. Just been thinking since that one lady's poem. All that's going to be left someday is sand, secrets, and roaches. ANd you know what that secret is? There's a person trapped inside that bug. And that perdson forgot. Ain't really talked abou t it much. But it's weird. I can't fucking die. But someday I won't be. I'll be like one of them robo-bugs they glue a computer chip to. I'll turn right and left. I'll go. Butwill I be able to think? More? What will I do to others? I mean if my mind doesn't claim me the wyrd will. I don't want... to be not me. It's hard and it's messy and it sucks. it's a thing I can't change. I dunno. Someday though the bill comes due. Just trying to make sure I'm the only one paying it.>>
"Did it? You got here. You seem to have a shadow attached to you who seems very possessive of you. That does not come easy, I am sure." What the roach says is listened to extremely carefully by Gisa, and then she nods her head at the end. "I think about the very last one, very often. I want to be sure that no one pays my bill but me. But is that possible? If I died tomorrow, my oaths would break, and those who hold an oath with me would feel it, would know I had died. Is that not a bill?"
And then she stretches her hands out palm-up to him and looks directly at the roach, whether or not he looks directly at her. "You cannot do this alone, Rorschach. Listen." She doesn't perform, per se, but her voice is so passionate, in her strictly-cadenced accent, that there's something there. She means what she says.
"Standing on the parted shores of history
we still believe what we were taught
before ever we stood at Sinai's foot;
that wherever we go, it is eternally Egypt,
that there is a better place, a promised land;
that the winding way to that promise
passes through the wilderness.
That there is no way to get from here to there
except by joining hands, marching
together."
Rorschach furrowed his brow and rest into the side of the chir, mouth buried in his hand. There was emotion there. A lot of it. The antithesis of a golem there was little to no way the bug had to hide his thoughts and feelings as they were worn out in the open. What followed was slow and his antennae were hanging low as his fingers knit language back together like a sweater. <<Usually impossible. I am trying to be what she deserves. Sometimes against my nature, but I'm glad. keeps me 'present' here. I just don't want to be not here. Even before I left it was hard to do. Now I'm just afraid of the plaes I'll go. It's a time game.>> he sighed and sipped his coffee taking a deep breath keeping his emotions together with a thoughtful sniff. He wasn't breaking down but contemplative and emotionally tired. If there was any thing that a Golem could pick up at 80 paces it was that he was exhausted and still trudging forward. <<Trying to teach Dielle. So that those bills get paid. That's a debt no one wants to accumulate. She'll be able to take care of people. Get the toold to find herself. Just because I'm doomed? Others don't have to be. I don't want them to be. I'm not Dusk. I don't want to fight them. I want the people here to be awake and live. I want them to have what I can't. Some days it's just... hard. But it's how it is. Can't play to my endgame, but I can play for someone's I suppose.>> Funny enough could have easily been dusk or winter... yet he didn't. Also odd but still natural things. He signed to Gisa watching the tiny facets of her face change as they talked << I want to know you will be okay. I believe you will. You see things from outside the forest. You still see the things others turn from"
She listens, and nods along, those tiny changes in her face as she listens to him. "I remember having a lover. It does keep you present. Rooted in the world. Sometimes from the pain of it." There's a story there, but if there is, it's not one that Gisa is going to be sharing tonight. You must be a level six friend to unlock Gisa's tragic backstory, especially where romance is concerned, apparently. She picks up her coffee, takes a large swallow of it, settles back thoughtfully, watching his fingers as they fly, the shift of his shoulders as he signs. He is all on the surface, she is a million emotions roiling under the surface, the fire in her heart as opposed to the buggy twitching on the surface. "We will hold hands and march together, and then I will be okay, Rorschach," she answers him. "That is how. We are always going forth from Egypt together."
She leans back, slouching in her chair, and her fiery eyes pin the roach down. "I'm going to die eventually. And that's going to be okay. Death is the ultimate act of hope. As long as I die well, I promise you, I am okay. I have handed you my hope that you will go on, and I have gone to drink wine with Elijah."
Rorschach slouched into his chair with his coffee. It was a rough day and he couldn't word well. He watched the edge of teh coffee table and reached over with a hand to rest on hers. One thing at a time.
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