IC contact for lastvoyages

[tucky]

[If I don't have an active post up, feel free to use this post to have your character call, videochat, text, or knock on Tiffany's door.]

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[fuckaround_findout]

She blames all of this, wholeheartedly, on Astraea.

"There was a man with a hedgehog in the dining hall. He said he'd had her all his life, but he didn't have her last time we spoke. Before last week, I didn't have Astraea, but I knew she was mine. If we're both right, if you feel different but you don't feel different, what does it matter? It is what it is."

[tucky]

"Sweeney," she says. "And Barróg."

Not necessarily important to the topic at hand, but important to her all the same.

"Do you miss having her outside of you?"

It's the exact sort of question that she knows Callisto likes to shut down, and she wouldn't be surprised if that happened here, but she asks it all the same.

[fuckaround_findout]

Callisto waves dismissively; yes, them. She wouldn't have been able to tell anyone their names but she recognizes hearing them.

"No," she says instead. "It's not where she belonged." Wasn't where she was safe.

[tucky]

Tiffany pauses for a moment.

"A long time ago, you told me that you talk to yourself. Is she ever the part that you talk to?"

[fuckaround_findout]

"We talked," she can allow.

"She remembered... Things."

[tucky]

She hadn't meant during the flood, really, but that's okay; she'll accept this direction.

"What things?"

[fuckaround_findout]

"Tartarus. The labyrinth." She picks the waffle crust up again, acts as if it is suddenly of vastly important interest.

"Deiyasca."

[tucky]

"She wasn't-- angry with you, was she?"

For leaving the Amazons, for not being able to accept their path.

[fuckaround_findout]

"You saw her," Callisto points out, uncomfortable.

"Anger she has, but for me, mostly she cried about it. About missing them."

[tucky]

"You doing okay?" she asks, raising an eyebrow. "I know that probably wasn't-- easy for you."

[fuckaround_findout]

She smiles, quick and sharp, although she doesn't look up from her plate.

"Far too late for that, isn't it?" she asks, low.

[tucky]

"Is it too late? Do you think I only gave a shit about her, and not really about you?"

She's covered this with Astraea, of course, but never with Callisto herself - and though she's sort of dreading the answer, she asks all the same.

[fuckaround_findout]

This does get her attention, does make her look up with a subtle pull of her eyebrows.

"To be okay," she clarifies. "For anything easy. I don't doubt... You."

[tucky]

"Oh, well-- I shouldn't have asked it like that."

She tries not to, for exactly this reason. More open-ended questions are better.

"How are you doing?"

[fuckaround_findout]

Callisto waves it off with a hand, and pops the last bit of waffle into her mouth.

"I never stopped missing them. It's not any different now."

[tucky]

"I meant in general, too. With her being gone, and with her having been here. What were you thinking about, before I sat down here?"

[fuckaround_findout]

"How much quieter it is now." Astraea had almost never stopped vocalizing in one way or another, except when Callisto commanded her to silence.

It's the easiest of the questions to answer. Callisto holds her hand out flat, palm down between them, and shows how steady her fingers are.

"I always thought as long as I could hold a sword, the rest doesn't matter."

[tucky]

Tiffany slouches, resting her chin on the table, even with Callisto's hand.

"And now?"

[fuckaround_findout]

"Now I can always hold a sword -" Her hand doesn't so much as waver in the air, doesn't tremble, doesn't raise or lower. "- but nothing is better."

[tucky]

"You've taken my hand a couple times," she says, speaking of the empty pit metaphor that they've leaned on in the past. "But we haven't figured out how to get you pulled that far up yet. But I'm wondering--"

The briefest of hesitations, because she's asked this before and gotten a dismissal - but part of wardening Callisto has been figuring out what things are worth asking over and over and over again, and she hasn't yet given up on this question.

"What does better look like, and feel like? In general or in specific."

[fuckaround_findout]

In the hesitation, when she knows what's coming like she would a blow in a battle, she curls her fingers closed and pulls her hand back to her side of the table.

What does better look like?

"I don't know," she admits, more sullen than she usually bothers with being. "Other than feeling nothing at all, but that's not an option. So I don't know."

[tucky]

"People?" she suggests quietly, pressing her palm to the table right where Callisto's had been. "Not just people. Community. Maybe other immortals, unless you decided to stop being immortal. And a purpose that's about you, and doesn't rip you up."

[fuckaround_findout]

Her gaze sharpens, narrows for a moment over her immortality, like a starving creature seeing movement towards its scraps of meat, but Tiffany doesn't go that far. She could, but she doesn't.

The rest just makes her feel tired.

"A new community to watch burn? To be beaten and worse by? To be exiled from?" she asks, doubtfully.

[tucky]

"Or to become a part of. Bad shit doesn't have to be inevitable, or-- or like, all there is."

This is not said in the easy, breezy casual way of someone who's never grappled with questions like this. It's said with a stubbornness that's almost grim.

[fuckaround_findout]

Callisto is watching her, calmly. Much moreso than she would be anyone else trying to tell her any of this, than she has in the past even here. It is not that easy, they both know. Not for Callisto.

When she spreads her hands in a futile gesture, when she asks, "How?" it isn't truculence. It isn't a challenge. It's resignation, and skepticism.