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WT
Retired Staff

2,134 POSTS
Pronouns: they
last seen Sept 10, 2021 1:50:54 GMT -5

time, gender, furbies, and other things that don't exist

for good news [Lyndis] Jun 23, 2018 6:10:29 GMT -5

Post by WT on Jun 23, 2018 6:10:29 GMT -5

"Dy! Hey, Dy! Jemidi, wait up!"

People chat with Dy readily enough at work, but mostly stopped trying to invite him anywhere after the first several months of stuttered, obvious excuses, so it takes him a moment to register that someone is chasing him. When the words do catch up with his ear, his shoulders fall involuntarily. All he wants right now—all he ever wants at the end of the day—is to go home and curl up to rest his eyes, and the walk between this sidewalk and his bed already feels infinite.

He pulls together a smile anyway as Halide catches up with him, because she's nice, and probably just as tired as he is. No need to make her deal with a surly coworker after a long shift. "Hey, sorry. What is it?"

Halide returns the smile easily. "So Lin and I were talking at lunch, and he said you make your clothes?"

Dy tilts his head a little, confused. "Mostly, yeah. I made these." He gestures vaguely up and down the pants and pink plaid shirt he's wearing, as though Halide were somehow in danger of thinking he meant her clothes, then feels a little silly about it.

If she notices, she mercifully doesn't mention it. "Rad. I know you do repairs or whatever for him sometimes, how would you feel about making a dress?"

Dy blinks at her. Not that he was expecting anything in particular, but he definitely wasn't expecting that. People other than Lin do still come to him for alterations or repairs sometimes, but it's been a long time since he sought out anything more complicated, mostly because he just doesn't have the time these days. Or energy. Mostly energy.

It's faintly surprising, too, that Lin would think to mention him to anyone, in the way that it's always jarring to remember that he leaves a lasting impression on anyone.

Taking the surprise for reluctance, Halide hurries to say, "I mean, as a commission, obviously. I'll pay for materials and time. It's for my daughter's birthday, I've been putting aside money for it for a while."

Dy's fingers are already screaming, but if he hadn't lost the internal argument already, he does as soon as she says it's a gift. The money would be nice, too. "What do you have in mind?"

"If you're free tomorrow, you could come to mine for dinner, talk to Elif about what she wants." Halide hesitates for the first time, perhaps remembering who she's talking to. "Or... some other time? Whatever you're comfortable with."

Tomorrow is another long shift, and Dy spares a preemptive wistful thought for home, but the earlier he gets started on this the better. Sitting down will get him off his feet just as well at Halide's house as at his own, anyway. "Tomorrow is alright."

He's expecting the surprise, but isn't entirely sure what to do with the grin that follows. "I'll let the family know."

---

Walking into his favorite craft shop for the first time in weeks feels a little bit like coming home. He doesn't know the clerk who greets him, but they trade warm smiles, and the rows of buttons and patches and thread are as comforting as any familiar face.

Not making a beeline for the clearance bin is a novelty. Halide doesn't make any more than Dy, but she and her husband really did budget for this; Elif turns nineteen this year, and the commission is both birthday and graduation gift rolled into one—and, Dy suspects, though no one said it in so many words, a tacit celebration of surviving past eighteen. Dy is a bit giddy with the luxury of having expanded options, especially since Elif herself turned out to have more ideas about color and fabric than about style. They'll narrow things down, but for now Dy is gleefully going to town with sketches. Meanwhile, with the advance materials payment and Elif's measurements in hand, he has both a decent idea of how much fabric the base will take and the ability to buy enough to allow room for mistakes.

He goes through all the greens, both for the sake of knowing he made the best choice and because it's fun, but ultimately comes back to one of the very first bolts: a lightweight leaf green fabric with a subtly lighter swirl. It's a bright, cheerful summer pattern that shouldn't be too stifling in the long sleeves Elif wants, and if he overestimates the yardage, the color will be good for making some stray decorations.

As he bundles the fabric into his arms, flailing a little to catch the open end that didn't wrap fully around the bolt, something moves into the corner of his vision. "Oh, thanks," he says before the clerk can offer to take the fabric for cutting, "but I—"

—want to keep looking for now dies in his throat, because when he finishes rewrapping the loose end and looks up, the woman with greying hair in front of him is decidedly not the clerk. He jumps a little ducks his head, shifting the fabric in his arms. "Excuse me, I—wrong person, sorry, I'll leave you be."

Title song is The Mountain Goats' "Romans 10:9."

Last Edit: Aug 6, 2018 0:04:59 GMT -5 by WT

'the way we lived' in stylized text, with 'character directory' as a subtitle underneath

banner by Dars! <3

Lyn𝛿is
Capitol Resident

1,582 POSTS

Pronouns: ; DROP TABLE Gender;--
last seen Aug 25, 2023 23:48:21 GMT -5

does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker? ✯

for good news [Lyndis] Jul 24, 2018 1:35:19 GMT -5

Post by Lyn𝛿is on Jul 24, 2018 1:35:19 GMT -5

[googlefont="Homemade Apple:400"]

Sarika Saraswami

{collide with faces veiled in paper
reading line by line the pain there
but for the grace of code and capital
we’d cry out side by side}

Hedy asked me this morning, when we were exercising with the other ladies in our building, if I ever felt lonely without children who called me, or grandchildren to climb up onto my shoulders. I do not think she means ill by the question - for the others, perhaps, watching Cauchy and Ramanujan clawing at my legs or purring in my lap may seem like a pale imitation of what they have.

But I do not find myself feeling unfulfilled. These roots run shallow but wide; I may not have anyone in the district sharing half the base pairs that run through my cells, but I've always thought it more important to pass down knowledge.

There's a tree tracing academic lineage that spans one of the walls of the research institute, one great family tree linking advisors to students that goes back far beyond the Dark Days, far beyond what they'd allow us to keep of any other kind of history. They told us a researcher to his apprentices was like a father to his sons (a mother to her daughters, too, we'd scoff amongst ourselves). And I have advised many students, as well; I can see the legacy of paths branching from my node, and the handful of theorems that bear my name.

I'd like to believe there's more to me than those theorems, though. That I've left pieces of myself to all of the district, to everyone I've talked to - a boy on a bench, a girl at a fruit stand - and they can all be my children.

That thought - that pieces of myself would float on the wind like seeds, spreading influence farther than I could see - used to terrify me, when I was young. I remember in grade school Marisol once said she admired me for being smart, and I'd spent time worrying - whether she only thought that because I was older than her, if I'd fail the next quiz and let everyone down, if I wasn't actually smart but instead only good at memorizing things -

And I'd never told her how much I admired her; she was only six and I was eight, but when that boy had called my hair nasty and said I ought to straighten it, she'd punched him clear across the face.

Perhaps this is how old age becomes a second childhood, for the older I get the farther back my thoughts wander - back before my years of research, or even before District Three. One thing triggers another, and vertex by vertex my mind travels its well-worn paths, reaching quickly to distant memories like a expander graph.

It's a combination, this time, of the other ladies talking about legacies, and Helena asking if I'd watch over little Grace for a few days, or at least the days when her sister can't. And Grace would always beg me to teach her how to make those string-bracelets, so it'd be a nice surprise to have the hanks of colored cotton for her tomorrow.

I haven't made them since I was a child not even Grace's age, but I remember. And that first one still rests as a bookmark in my journal, the one where Rotem taught Marisol and I how to knot three colors together and we'd crafted three identical bracelets, one for each of us.

That was the summer we were inseparable, the summer before everything fell apart - and just yesterday, Helena told me she's scared things will fall apart in Three, when we ran into each other in the stairwell -

And no one knows whether the district will be better or worse off for it. It is in these times - the Capitol will point at who I look like to the world, and say that if the ones taking to the streets would try and live up to that instead, then none of the problems they were complaining about would exist.

They never saw the days I could barely get out of bed, or the times I'd vomit from the anxiety of keeping up that image of a perfect assistant researcher.

I hope no one else has to go through what I did, yet if I were offered to trade it for a life of happiness and ease -

well, it would be tempting. But, as I shall tell Grace, as Rotem once said to me by way of farewell before I left Eight - most importantly, Sarika, don't let them erase who you are. Don't let them turn off the part of you that questions the world.

"Excuse me, I -"

And the exact shade of green of the third strand in that bracelet flails in front of me, a subtle light swirl the color of cornhusks ready to be processed and turned into fiber.

"- wrong person, sorry, I'll leave you be."

"Oh, no worries at all. That's a beautiful fabric, actually, really brings back memories - it was my childhood best friend's favorite color, you know. Do you know what you'll be making from it yet?"

lyrics: in the 99

WT

Last Edit: Jul 24, 2018 1:37:07 GMT -5 by Lyn𝛿is

"Yeah… You have to be careful when placing labels on good and evil, Celice. Never waste your anger on individuals. Always focus it on the evil within all of us."
- Lewyn, Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War

WT
Retired Staff

2,134 POSTS
Pronouns: they
last seen Sept 10, 2021 1:50:54 GMT -5

time, gender, furbies, and other things that don't exist

for good news [Lyndis] Aug 6, 2018 23:21:29 GMT -5

Post by WT on Aug 6, 2018 23:21:29 GMT -5

At most, Dy expects only a glancing exchange. Apology for the interruption received, the stranger might turn up her nose or smile reassuringly, but either way they'll spend only a moment longer in one another's shopping trips than Dy is used to spending in any stranger's life. When she says "No worries at all," he offers a small, grateful nod and takes that as the end of it.

Instead, inexplicably, she keeps talking.

He takes this in stride as best he can, locking his knees to resist shuffling as he tries to figure out what this stranger is looking for out of this encounter. Agreement about the color? A chance to talk about her friend? Maybe not that last; if she likes the color, she probably means it brings back good memories, but she said was. Is it gauche to ask about someone who's at least out of the picture, perhaps dead? On the rare occasion that they're relevant, Dy dodges those questions; just last night, when Halide's husband tried to open small talk by asking about his family, he managed vague half-answers until finding an opening to ask about Elif's classes instead. Then again, in this case, she's the one who brought up her own friend. Maybe that's different.

He almost wishes she had scolded him after all, so that he could apologize again and extract himself. Not that he actually hates that this is happening—for all that she's caught him wrong-footed, this person is calm, even kind—or for that matter wants to have distressed anyone. But at least then he would know what to do, instead of standing here feeling lost and inelegant with his own silence ringing in his ears underneath the stranger's words.

In the end she saves him, whether taking mercy on his confusion or simply coincidentally, with a direct question about the fabric. Dy loosens his stance and nods brightly. Sewing, he can talk about. "Sort of? A coworker commissioned me for a dress, but I'm still working on the pattern. This looked like a good summer color, I'm glad you like it." He hesitates by fidgeting with the bolt a little, shifting one shoulder to find a more comfortable grip. "Your friend, too."