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

[indispensible]

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.]

Comments

[warisart]

[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.

[indispensible]

[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.

[warisart]

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.