indispensible | twelve. spam & voice. the sound when we come running. ( backdated post-port. )

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twelve. spam & voice. the sound when we come running. ( backdated post-port. )

voice } helena ( backdated )

Did you die? Did you kill anyone? [These seem like the two most likely options.]

voice } lydia ( backdated )

You got separated. You should learn self-defense. [This vaguely reproachful, which is a coded way of saying god that sucked, are you okay.]

voice } elsa ( present dated )

[She waits to get in touch with Elsa, who seems as easily overwhelmed as Vin was herself, not very long ago. Still, the desire to check in nags at her, and eventually she gives in.]

I'm worried about you. [It's simultaneously frank, honest, and very forward, but it seems like the right thing to say all the same.]

spam } stark ( backdated )

[She has been texting him incessantly and, of course, he hasn't been responding. She doesn't know why she's surprised. But she knows where to find him, at least. In the bar or in his cabin.]

[The bar's almost empty and he's not in there, so she slips up to his room and opens the door before he can voice an objection. Her look is steely; she knows he's done something or he wouldn't be avoiding her, but she doesn't know what.]

Why are you hiding?

open spam } present dated

[Today Vin is in the art room - or rather, the annex off of the art room that holds the piano. She is sitting at it, but not playing it, because she doesn't know how to. Instead, she is considering it, leafing through the music that she found in its bench, and arranging it in various patterns across the keyboard in an effort to make sense of it.]

[So far she hasn't had any luck, but she seems absorbed in her work. It's like learning a foreign language with no guide whatsoever. She can't help but imagine Sazed would be fascinated.]

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[Ben can hear the individual thumps of the hammers hitting the strings as well as the notes they produce, the rods working the hammers, the keys pressing into their beds; he wonders if everyone can, or just the two of them, just those with heightened hearing. It soothes him as much as the end product, the heartbeat of the instrument, the internal workings that produce the external results. He understands each and every movement of it, what to do and what it will do, and there are never any surprises.

He doesn't interrupt, thumbnail pressing into the edge of the cover of his sketchbook, not until she looks at him expectantly. He doesn't smile, but his eyes meet hers squarely.]

That is a story. You are telling one right now.

---Oh.

[She looks at him with wide eyes, an expression that might be comical or an exaggeration on someone else, but with her is completely genuine. She didn't realize. She puts herself in a different category from other people - not because she thinks she's better, but because she has always, always been outside the norm. She never thought her story counted as a story.]

[For a long time, she didn't think she counted as a person. What is a Mistborn if not some outside thing? What is a skaa if not something lesser? What is a woman? What is a knife? She knows what she is now, most of the time, but she wonders, too, are the answers to these questions stories? Where do stories begin and end?]

[She wishes for Sazed - wishes, too, suddenly and with a pang, that Ben and Sazed could talk. They would both learn more from each other than she could ever expect to teach.]

I didn't know my story counted . . . as a story, Ben, [is all she says out loud, stilling her fingers on the keys, clasping her fingers into fists. She looks small and weak, sitting here. No one would know to look at her what she is capable of.]

[She looks at him in surprise; he meets her wide-eyed shock with steady, quiet calm. He is certain of this. Everyone tells their own stories, but Ben knows he made a religion out of the habit. He made a coping mechanism out of the habit. He survived, lived, breathed on it, for a given quantity of each.

Whatever is good in him, is because he breathed life into a story, and it breathed life back into him.

Ben's gaze drops down to the keyboard again, and he lifts one hand to run his fingertips over the ivory, but he doesn't press any of them. His voice is quiet, with softer edges than he is given to; she knows what she is. Ben has told himself a dozen stories about her in the space between their conversations.]

Had I been raised by anyone but Manticore, I suspect I would have had what is referred to as an active imagination. It was caged by Manticore, though, and they would have channeled it into something else if they'd even known of its existence. I kept it to myself though, shared it only with my unit. I kept it as safe from them as I could.

Because I understood next to nothing about how the world worked, I had to make it all up. I couldn't ask anyone questions so I listened to the conversations others had around me, and I filled in the blanks any way that I could. I still do, sometimes, though I suppose I have learned too thoroughly the habit of keeping them to myself.

They all count. Some stories are better than others. Some are truer than others. But each and every thing we tell ourselves - the story you told yourself earlier, that you should avoid playing because it makes the piano sound as though it is dying, that you should avoid playing because you might ruin the music - all count in one way or another.

[She listens to him, her brow furrowed in careful thought. She doesn't understand 'Manticore,' but then, she doesn't really need to. She understands 'caged'. That's the important thing. She understands being locked inside of yourself, by someone else or by your own mind or both.]

[Her fingers drift across the keyboard as his does, and play no music. She thinks about stories instead of telling them, because some things (although, in her opinion, not many) require forethought.]

Sometimes I think I might be afraid of stories. People used to tell stories about me. About people that I - loved. They were lies.

Do the stories that are lies count, too?

They all count.

[His immediate reply is just that: immediate. He believes this the way he believes in empirical data, in the definition and truth of a thing rather than the light in which it is cast. Lies are merely lacking truth. They are not inherently good or bad.

They are told for one reason - because the speaker doesn't know any better - or another - they need something other than the truth to be true - or another - they are trying to make it true. The intention is what makes them insufferable or damaging. He has never known how to explain this. Instead he continues more slowly, more carefully.]

Stories cannot alter the truth. They only alter how it is viewed. Stories are important, they can... help, or they can hurt. But they are not real unless they are real.

[She understands. She doesn't know how she understands, but she does. His explanation might be patchy and unclear, but she isn't good at explaining the things that mean most to her, either. If she's right, she can fill in the gaps.]

A story can't make something real. It can only be a story. It can make people believe something, but it can't force that something into being.

Just because people used to say that my - friend was a god. Didn't make him a god. It just made them believe. It was a story. With power, but just a story.

[Just a story.]

[It makes her feel better, but her stomach still sort of hurts.]

Yes.

[Her expounding isn't entirely accurate; if the something people are believing is intangible, sometimes a story can bring it to life. But that seems less important than the way she plugs her own personal experience into the discussion building between them, the oblique mention of something and someone who isn't here. Her friend. Ben isn't sure that she, like him, had many of those where she came from.

He is not, by nature, impulsive. His instincts have failed him abysmally. And yet:]

Will you tell me about your friend?

[She looks at him a little bleakly. Not sadly, but with some exhaustion. Talking about Kelsier makes her tired.]

He wasn't really my friend. He was too aggravating to be my friend. He was like family.

[Like a father. But she's too distanced from that concept on an emotional level to be able to say it and not feel strange. No, he can just be family; she'll leave it at that.]

Did you ever meet Kelsier, when he was here? He's very loud and very blond and Mistborn like me.

[He doesn't exactly regret asking as soon as she looks at him like that; he does understand it. He's good right now, he's good for much of his life, but he remembers when it was more than it was worth to think about Jack, about Eva.

But they deserve for people to know. Ben shakes his head, just once.]

I do not do well with loud people. I avoid them, though I... was familiar with him from a distance.

[Ben knows a lot more than that, of course, because those for whom it has always been a right do not think twice about owning any public space; they live their lives in common rooms, hold their conversations on networks, and never think about who else is able to hear or see them.]

[She nods, and would not be surprised to hear he paid - pays - attention to the networks so closely. She does, too. It's advantageous for people like them, who aren't able to navigate socially as well as they might, to keep an eye on conversations that don't require participation. People say more when they don't think you're listening, after all.]

I didn't trust him at first, because he was so loud and bright, and because he smiled all the time. That was his weapon. He wouldn't let anyone or anything keep him from happiness.

[Sighing, she readjusts on the piano bench so that she's somehow taking up less space, legs crossed at the ankle.]

He set up his own death, and made it seem like he had come back - as a spirit or a god. He didn't tell me, or anyone, that he was going to. But the people believed in him. Because I was associated with him, they believed in me. Because I was the Heir to the Survivor.

[It's obvious that she hates it, hates even talking about it. But she can't run away from it anymore; it's just the truth.]

[It doesn't occur to Ben like it might to other people to try to reach out to her and comfort her, even as obvious as her distress is even to him. He works through his own distress logically, most of the time, with reason and with thought.

So little of what she's said makes sense to him in a contextual sense, doesn't know entirely how that's possible, except doesn't he? Didn't Zack always warn him never to let people know what he could do because they couldn't, and they would fear that, fear him? Doesn't Anya, Alex, Jean come from worlds where people with abilities are distrusted and thought as more than, less than, anything but human? Is it so different, when Ben knows full well what Vin is capable of?]

So he created his story around you as well. He took you with him when he left the ranks of the mundane.

. . . Yes.

[It's such a concise, precise way of putting it that for a moment Vin is thrown off-guard. He's right: it was like a transformation, one she was forced unwillingly to submit to. One even Elend was forced to come along with, though he had more choice in the matter. He put himself in the limelight. She only ever wanted to survive, then, timidly, to do the right thing.]

[She considers her fingers, thin with bitten-down nails. One wouldn't think these hands could do so much damage. And yet people venerated her for the damage she could do, had done, the pain Kelsier had caused, too.]

I hated it. These people thought they knew him, but they didn't. I did. And they thought they knew me, but . . . almost no one knows me. Even here.

[She is alone, in part by choice but in part because she's difficult to understand. It's hard for her to communicate. And she hates people assuming her motives, her thoughts. What people think matters to her, it always has, and it's easier - most of the time - to stand at a distance. To be the knife and let that be all.]

[Ben has never had the luxury of letting what other people think matter to him; on a scale of survival, of course, it was paramount. His teachers had to believe he was stable, competent, developing into exactly what they wanted, what they expected. But the rest of the world?

It matters, of course, in the sense that he has placed his trust in select few of them. It matters that it makes it easier when others approve of him. But the opinions of others neither make nor unmake him, though he, too, stands separate and often misunderstood. Though others find him difficult to communicate with and vice, though he tries.

Ben considers her now, considering her hands. Considering herself. He doesn't expect he knows anything about it, although there's still something familiar there even when hatred is not familiar to him at all.]

What would you have others know about you, Vin?

[Vin looks up at him, slowly and carefully, as though afraid she is going to be struck. She isn't afraid of Ben, of course, not really. It's just that fear is something that's impossible to wash off once it's part of you, and it's been tattooed on the back of Vin's eyelids since she was so small.]

[The question is almost impossible. She wants not only to answer it, but to answer it well, and that means being honest with Ben when she really doesn't know the answer herself. She doesn't want others to know about her, really. She just wants to rest.]

[With a sharp, short sigh, she shrugs, a childish and abbreviated gesture of frustration.]

That all I've ever done is try.

It is obvious.

[This is not dismissive: it's confirmation, because it's true. Ben sees the way she tries, because he recognizes it. He recognizes the small victories of every moment and every day, of sitting here and speaking with him of such things, of admitting that she doesn't know how to play the piano despite its obviousness, of smiling. And maybe some of that is transference because he knows how hard it can be on some days for him.

So he clears his throat, and in an effort to be absolutely honest:] It is obvious to me.

[A quick smile, one of her rare ones, not impish or false but full of genuine pleasure. So few people get to see her smile like this. Ben deserves it, she thinks.]

You're a very perceptive person, though, Ben. So maybe it's different. For you.

[Elend would see. Elend did see. She thinks Elend would have liked Ben, that they would have been, if not friends, then at least respectful of each other, at least kind to each other, at least . . .]

[She wonders in moments like these if she should have just stayed dead. At least dead she was with him. At least dead she didn't feel so alone, so weak with self-pity, so halved. She loves so much, and there are so few people here she feels safe loving. She misses her home in someone else's heart. She misses--]

[She is crying, she realizes in a distant way, and places her palms over her eyes in an attempt to hide. She wants to go home, but she can't. Not now, maybe not ever.]

[She is crying.

Ben isn't sure what to do with this, of course, though not for the reasons others would be. Of course he was raised with the same expectations - not to cry, not to ever cry - but overall, it isn't one of the reservations he still holds. Not consciously. He doesn't think less of her for that, doesn't feel uncertain because he doesn't ever know what to do with this.

But he doesn't know where it's coming from for her, for certain, and he wouldn't try. What he does understand is the moment her hands raise to cover her face.

He doesn't speak. He doesn't try to intrude on whatever she needs, he will wait or he will go as she bids him, but he does not try to interrupt her with something as mundane as words.

He does, however, reach up to touch her near wrist with just his fingertips. His hand drops away again a moment later but for just a moment, in the way others seem to communicate best, he wants her to know that it's okay. Whatever it is, it's okay.

She doesn't have to hide.]

[She doesn't jump away from his touch. With someone else she might, but she knows it's only Ben in the room, and Ben is - safe. Marginally safe. Safe enough that she doesn't have to startle and run like a little animal, like a desperate thing.]

[It still feels as though she has to hide. But she understands what the touch means. This is a language that she and he can both speak, even if only for a little while, and one which doesn't make her afraid. She peeks through her fingers at him, so close to her but so distant in some ways, so closed off.]

[Then her fingers curl one after another into fists, revealing more and more of her face with each one that pulls away. She's still crying, she has no plans to stop and doesn't even know if she could if she wanted to.]

[But he's right. She doesn't have to hide. There is no one here who can hurt her, no one here who can make things difficult enough for her that hiding would be advantageous. She's powerful enough that she can feel whatever she wants to feel, wherever and however she'd like to.]

[Her fists meet over her ribcage, resting on her breast, still and tear-stained. Her eyes meet Ben's. She's still crying. She has no plans to stop. But it seems like Ben doesn't have any plans to leave.]

I'm not sorry, [she tells him quietly. She will be as big as she needs to, take up as much space as is necessary. This is her right, now. She is an empress. She is Mistborn. She's so much more than she ever thought she could be.]

[He doesn't. Have any plans to leave, that is. He watches her gather herself, her resolve, and he doesn't feel anything; it's not that he doesn't care. It's that she wanted someone to see her and so this is what he can do for her: he can bear witness to her, to these moments of comparable weakness and understated strength as much as any of the rest. He can see her, and know before she says anything that she is not, indeed, sorry.]

Nor should you be.

[He smiles, but not because his reassurance changes anything, not really, but because he wants to, too. Because he is a unique creature, complex and wonderful, terrible and flawed, the only one of his kind. Because he, too, has the right to feel what he wants to feel, wherever and however he'd like to, and right now that is an uncomplicated, clean kind of pleasure.

He reaches for the sheet music, arranges it unhurriedly back in order, taps it all gently back into one neat, uniform pile, and then he sets it aside with his sketchbook.]

Would you like to try again?

[She realizes, all of a sudden, watching him shuffle the sheet music, listening to the somehow-solid lilt of his voice, that she wants nothing more than to try again. She would give her life over and over to try again, because, all of a sudden, or not so sudden, so gradually that it crept up on her and she didn't recognize it, she believes she deserves it.]

[She is not only the knife. She deserves more. She wants more. Just for herself, no one else.]

[Turning to Ben on the bench, she nods, crisp and tearstained and determined.]

I want to live again. For more than four years. I want to live for a hundred. I want to feel and see everything. I want green things. I want children. I want to walk unafraid. I want . . .

Ben, have you ever wanted everything all at once?

Yes.

[The answer is easy, comes from a deep, hidden part of him that most people don't have a need for; it is honest and heavy enough that the edges of his otherwise steady voice tremble with it. Yes. Yes, yes, yes, he has wanted everything at once, and nothing.

He swallows the rest of it down, leaves the answer laid bare for her, as easy as flipping back the covers because of all the things he fears now being honest is not among them. It doesn't make it easy, rising up beneath the peace of him like the incoming tide, but he doesn't fear it, not really.

He fears the bedrock that lies beneath that, but no longer the pushing and pulling currents between.]

It consumed me, then. I didn't know how to want everything, or how to stop, or how to move beyond merely wanting. Yes.

Yes I have.

[She watches him, listens with tin-enhanced ears to the tremble in his voice. One thing about her: she is steady enough even in her flightiest moments to be a rock when people need one. Ben probably doesn't need her, but if she is very still and quiet, she might be able to help, even if just a little bit.]

[Once he's spoken, she nods and lets the silence swim between them for another moment. Then she plays a chord on the piano, contemplatively.]

Then you know it can be scary. It can seem impossible.

It seems impossible now. I'm afraid.

[Not confession. Just a fact.]

[Ben breathes in that stillness, that steadiness, and lets it quiet the subtle nerve of him. He doesn't need it, not now, not like he once did, but he never takes it for granted either.

The chord underlines her voice, the honest truth of the statement. Ben reaches up and lowers three of his fingers onto a complementary chord, slightly more complex than the one she chose, but pleasant to hear.]

I do. And having survived it - finally - I can tell you with confidence that you have the strength to do so, too.

[She smiles, ever so slightly, at the sound of the chord. It slots into place in her mind, in her memory, in a sensation that feels like a touch to the back of the head, a safe thing, a calming thing. She will never see a piano again and not think of Ben, of the thousands of subtle ways he cares, the ways he isn't used to being cared about.]

[Another chord, now, simple as the first one was, a touch discordant. She looks to him to fix it.]

That only makes me a little less afraid.

When I go home, I'll be dead. I don't want to be dead anymore. This place - it's spoiled me.

It does that.

[Spoils people. Others would scoff to hear either of them say that, of course, but this is what Ben has learned: this place spoils people who are unaccustomed to being spoiled. It works both way, knocks down the prideful and raises up the lost, the weak. The dead.

Ben loves this place like he always knew he would. Some days he still can't believe The Good Place is real, and he is in it. Ben lifts two fingers, places the other one and his two unused fingers down in a new chord, following her up the keyboard at a half step difference.]

I have been told that if I were to go back where I came from - [Not home. Not like most people mean it. Not like Ben has learned to mean it.] - I would not be dead. Even though I died to come here.

No one knows what would happen for certain, of course, because they can't. But they have told me if I want to do so, it should be safe.

I do not want to find out. I never want to find out.

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twelve. spam & voice. the sound when we come running. ( backdated post-port. )

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