lostcarnival | ⇨ THE EPILOGUE

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⇨ THE EPILOGUE

Who: Everyone!
When: Day 61
Where: The Carnival
What: After all the rescues team return, it will be matter of tending to the wounded and getting the hell out of dodge. The Ringmaster can handle the fleeing part, but someone will need to look after those in the medical tent. Or, maybe, you just want to show up and ask what the hell happened.
Warnings: Some messed up consequences of faerie fuckery.

IN REPAIR↴

As the minutes tick past, all four rescue groups will eventually return. Everyone in the carnival is encouraged to help out, ensuring that the rescues and victims both are taken care of after the fact. You can tag in here as rescuers taking care of business around the carnival, victims recovering, or other workers checking in to see what's going on. This log is for general aftermath threads, made by anyone.

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Steven is still breathing just fine, thankfully. He's just passed out for the exact reasons Herbert guessed, and he's already dimly stirring as Jasper is directed towards the cot.

Jasper responds with an uneasy grunt and carries Steven back to his cot as instructed. She's pretty careful about putting him back down, almost uncharacteristically so.

"Is this -- I mean, is he... He's not dead, right."

"No. He's unconscious." She is an alien, though, made of light, so he tries, "Not unlike your destabilisation, I assume. To some extent." Already, Herbert's getting fidgety. He glances over at his chemistry set, back at Steven, and then up at Jasper again. "Call me over again if Steven needs me, my work is time sensitive." The crystal can't possibly be good for him, after all. A solution needs to be found.

Pointing at Jasper and giving her a serious look, he turns and walks away.

"What," says Jasper, but Herbert is already leaving??

She looks down at Steven with a perplexed frown on her face, and then straightens up and folds her arms. Fine, she supposes she can... keep an eye on him, or whatever.

It takes about five minutes for Steven to really start waking up. There are a few airy sighs as he comes to, his mutilated wings twitching and his tail curling close to his body.

Eventually, he opens his eyes, staring into space and not totally registering who is there with him.

"Did I fall asleep?" he mumbles.

Jasper grunts.

"You were unconscious," she says. "From... healing me."

A pause.

"... Thank you."

She says it very curtly and then looks away, as if the other goings-on in the medical tent are of great interest to her.

Steven half waking mind doesn't totally process how unusual it is for Jasper to thank him, even if she did it in the tersest way possible. Thanking someone for healing you is normal right? He thinks?

"Oh... right," he says slowly, vague memories of that happening coming back to him. Her nose isn't broken, so that's good. He did the thing successfully.

"How did your nose get broken?"

She looks back at him, slightly confused by the question, like she isn't sure why he'd ask.

"Fighting the Lady of the Lake," she says gruffly. "One of the fae."

Steven stays laying on his side, still pretty winded from using his healing powers. Since Jasper seems to be going along with it, he decides to just keep talking to her.

"Oh... I don't think I've seen her before," he says. He'd thought he'd seen most of the fae that had been chasing them, but he guesses not. Steven still isn't super caught up with the events that went on while he was imprisoned.

"They can be really awful," he says, which is obvious, but he's tired, okay. "I don't understand it."

Jasper looks at him for a moment without replying. She doesn't particularly want to talk to him, but she's been told to stay here. After a beat she concedes, "I thought they were going to take us for some kind of purpose. But this one just wanted someone to hurt for no reason. Like it was a game." She doesn't sound rattled or upset, exactly, just disgusted; disapproving. "You've been here longer than I have. Is the Ringmaster like that too?"

He has to consider it, but not because he really thinks the Ringmaster is anything like them. He just needs to figure out how to articulate the difference, even as he's cringing from the idea of what Jasper must have been through.

"No... she messes up sometimes, but I really don't think she means to hurt anyone. And when she does, it doesn't really make her happy."

Frowning, Jasper mulls this over; then she nods, slowly.

"Good."

She wouldn't want to be working for someone that unapologetically wasteful. Her opinion of the Ringmaster is kind of dubious, because let's be real, a lot of the time she does seem like a pretty frivolous person -- the kind Yellow Diamond would disapprove of -- but that's something, at least.

Steven wasn't really sure what Jasper's take away from that would be, so when she answers, he ends up laying there beside her for a while without saying anything more. Finally, he makes a decision, though.

"Is... what happened with the fae making things hard for you right now?" He really doesn't know a lot about what went on with Jasper, but he kind of wants to.

She blinks, and frowns.

"You healed my gem," she points out, genuinely puzzled by this question. Her extremities are in the right places now and she's not going to die, so clearly she's fine?

"Yeah, but..." He was honestly expecting she'd say something like that, so it doesn't really throw him off. "Do you ever feel like... you're so mad about something that happened, or that thinking about it bugs you? And so... it makes it harder to do things, because you keep getting distracted with thinking about it, and whenever you remember it you feel like you did when it happened all over again?"

"That's kind of what I mean," he clarifies, frowning.

Jasper's brow furrows further. Is this... some kind of trick? Of course she feels like that, pretty much all the time, but she's fairly sure that's normal? Sure, she's never heard anyone say anything about it before, but...

"Everyone feels like that," she says dismissively. "It doesn't stop me from getting anything done."

"That okay," he says, glancing away. "I just... know I feel more like that after something like this happens. Kind of like I do right now." He blinks away a few tears. "I've been trying not to let it get in my way, but... it's hard."

She's right that everyone feels like that sometimes, but it shouldn't have to last like this.

That's...

She looks down at her folded arms. When they were still on the wrong way because of her broken gem, it had been very difficult not to keep thinking about whether shattering would feel the way drowning had -- if she'd lose control of her body completely as her gem came closer to breaking in two, helpless in the face of that immense pressure from inside and outside all at once --

Her big blunt fingers are digging in too hard at the tense muscles of her arms, and the sensation brings her back to herself, abrupt and staring. She jerks her head round to look almost accusingly at Steven, lowering her hands to clench at her sides.

"Why are you telling me this. Why are you telling me your weaknesses."

"I dunno," he says, still not looking at her. It feels unwise, when all she seems to do at that is get angry. But, yet...

"I guess it's all I can think about right now."

Jasper looks away, feeling unmoored and perplexed. She wants to accuse him of trying to manipulate her, but even she's not so boneheaded that she can't see that isn't remotely what this is.

She unfolds her fists, and then closes them again.

"I don't understand you," she mutters.

Steven didn't think she would. Still, his exhaustion and emotional angst has him in a weirdly whimsical mood.

"I could try to explain?" he says.

Jasper eyes him suspiciously.

"... Fine," she says. It's not like she has anything to do except watch him.

"We're not fighting here," he says. "We're just... both people, and... we're both dealing with the same things. I don't care about any of that other stuff. Doesn't all of this feel different to you?"

He curls his fist closed, watching as the facets reflect light.

"I didn't even want to fight you before. And now... I know you think I'm someone else, but I'm not, and I can't be whatever you think I am, either. Even if I wanted to."

"I know we're not fighting. And I know you're not..." Jasper's eyes narrow. "Exactly the same. As Rose Quartz."

She'd realised that when they had been fighting, back in Wismuth. Facing Steven in one-on-one combat, even with the power of the Void at his disposal, had been nothing like fighting a Quartz veteran of a thousand years of war. And, although she hardly tries to spend time near Steven, having accepted that, it's been a lot easier since to notice other ways the assumption that they're one and the same just doesn't line up.

"... But that doesn't mean I'm not your enemy. Maybe we're on the same side right now, but do you think that means I'm going to side with you against Homeworld when this is over?"

"I don't know... if I'm ever going to get to go home again."

It's not something he's said to any of his friends, because he knows they'd be duty bound to prove him wrong. It's just, after this... he's starting to feel as if being faeblooded may follow him for the rest of his life. It isn't just a carnival change which will go away with time. It's part of him, now, and it's forever.

"I just... don't want this to be all there was."

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