Sargent, can you still see the stars?

This is the Rp Blog for Circe Redburn of the Western Circle. It is attached to webtail.tumblr.com, and one day I'll figure out all the fancy links and stuff.

[sgt-circe]

Its been a long life, and an even longer apocalypse, Sergeant, and you think you might be done waiting.

You are ankle deep in a meltwater stream, as you watch as the peak of Mount Caraveral gets demolished as an eighty ton meteor smashes into it from orbit. You don’t flinch, even as the horrid crunching noise echoes across your valley. It sounds like someone turned up the bass on children playing with marbles, and its nothing new to you when a few moments later it shakes the earth you stand on.

You shrug to yourself and brush a strand of hair out of your face. Its nothing new. Your fingers leave a wet trail across your forehead and you don’t bother wiping it off as drips roll down your forehead.

  Not much bothers you anymore sergeant.

  Its been a long life, and an even longer apocalypse. From your fleeting impressions of your god, you would’ve expected some divine implosion. Instead there is a drawn out artillery from the cosmos as the heavens shatter your planet, piece by piece.

  The clouds are blown away in great golden ripples from the concussive force of the collision. The sun sets behind an intact mountain, and the last few rays shine through golden autumn leaves.

You aren’t being particularly productive as you stand like some sort of idiot in the middle of a freezing cold creek, watching the bombardment of your planet with something approaching serenity, but you really haven’t been yourself these past few years.

  Besides, it doesn’t really feel like the end.

  It feels like you’re waiting.

  (You’ve been waiting a long time.)

  Mind, you, Sergeant, don’t really know what you’ve been waiting for all these years. You consider yourself a pretty reasonable lady, but you can’t shake this lethargy that led you to set up here, next to this stream, next to a cemetery with one grave in it. That lethargy, you find, is anything but reasonable.

  So its autumn and you’re up to your ankles in frigid river water. You wade deeper, towards the middle of the creek for a better view of the clouds, and round stones clack in a mockery of the demolition of the peak. The hems of your rolled up pants are getting soaked and you wait.

Yellow brown leaves swirl past your vision and are swamped by the current dragging them through crystal clear meltwater and past the gravel banks. You drag your eyes down from the gradiated sky, framed by the branches of the trees that line the banks, and you meet his.

He’s standing on the bank opposite of you.

Your breath doesn’t catch in your throat, and your heart keeps beating its easy pace. In fact nothing is wrong here. You don’t say anything, Circe, you don’t feel anything. It feels like he belongs here, right in this moment.

  This instant, it is exactly where they are supposed to be.

  He looks startled to see you, Sergeant, stricken even. Leaves spiral around him and the setting sun wreaths him in a golden halo. He cuts an impressive figure with his coat and the perfect coif of his hair.

  He looks like he’s about to cry, and the world’s holding its breath.

  The stream continues flowing and the leaves fall as the last of autumn comes. There are bright stars streaming through the air and you hear the distant booms of their landings. They fall like artillery shells, and you think you might be done waiting.

The gap-toothed god slowly offers you his hand. You only have to think for a moment of this world, this life, of Ariadne and her empty grave, and the walls that you’ve defended and the rubble of where you’ve failed, and you takes it, gingerly. You take it in the same manner as the first time you held Ariadne’s hand, and you were so fucking nervous.  And then with an eye aching twist in reality, you’re gone.

The world exhales.

  The water burbles, columns of smoke twist in gold tinted skies, before everything breaks apart in a cataclysm befitting of your god.

[sgt-circe]

Because sometimes, Sergeant, it's as simple as shooting the flowers off cacti.

The 38th Alignment.

  A border partition of the Inner Minecraftia bounding wall, and one of the number of outposts littering the barren fucking wasteland that ate away a three hundred square kilometer hole in the land for it to rest.

This outpost is manned traditionally by three squadron of highly trained professionals at all times, and a battalion at their beck and call. And maybe once upon a time ago it was, but the 38th alignment squad has eight shitstains from a town in the ass-end of motherfuck nowhere, an old trade town called Mistral.

You are one of these shitstains, seargent, and you take a perverse pleasure in acknowledging that the only reason your home is still standing is because of the sheer bumfuck tenacity of its small populace, and the viral and improbable luck that stuns you daily with its damn impossibility.

You’ve grown up in this improbable town, with its improbable people, and terrifying connotations to the world around them. Because if you’re here, then the wall’s here, and well, that’s just something people in the shining streets of Icaria don’t want to think about, so they send you food and arms by rail, and you shut up about the encroaching sands, because there ain’t anyone on Minecraftia that wants to think about what that means.

Instead of that, you lean on the parapets of that damn wall and light a cigarette. A sweet sirocco wind sends your smoke swirling up to meet the stars, and you ignore the shifting tides of sand.

You grow up on a street named after a queen in a house made of stones and wood, with a bright red rose bush out front of it in the inconvenient square of land outside of your doorstep.

When you meet the girl with the black hair and the eyes that match those roses, you run all the way home after school and demand that your mother teaches you to make a crown.

The next day, you walk up to her at recess and hand her that wreath, and your bush is bare. That girl, with the inky black hair and carmine eyes, ignores the gift and grabs your hands, scabby and scratched after your battle with that rosebush, those thorns, and when she lifts them to her face to kiss them, with lips still sticky from the apple she was eating, she tells you with the solemnity of that Old Peculiar fellow, that kisses make everything better.

When you see those sands for the first time, fists still bloodied from that bully’s teeth,  and furious in your bones, Ariadne is the one who follows you up on that treacherous and unstable rise, overlooking that perimeter. She looked as perfect as one of those fancy porcelain dolls all done up in violet lace, and with a ribbon in her hair.

She kisses you on the cheek, and smiles at you with a matching split lip from taking down the bully’s older brother. You smile back, a quiet, vindictive thing, and you both stare out at the shifting and swirling wasteland, feeling bruises throbbing in time with your pulses.

You go to bootcamp, and work your ass off, private, because, goddamn, you’re the only ones left on that damned wall. Ariadne goes to the aerodocks, and snaps gum behind pink lips, and at the end of the day, when you go back home, and its only you in that house with the rosebush out front, she climbs in your window, and its like you’re back in grade school, with bruised knuckles, and those perpetual black eyes. You sleep in the same bed, curled around each other like the ropes that hang from the docks in great tangles.

You get your own squad two years out, and she kisses you. Her lips taste like the canvas of the sails and bubblegum, and when she slips her hand up your thigh, its smooth and cool, an adult’s hand, and a foil to the hands that held yours to those chapped lips, hot and sticky with apple residue.

When your squad sees you shoot the flowers off cacti, they call you just that. When they hear you barking orders and being “Mighty prickly, Corporal” they shorten it just to Cacti, and you’d think you’d be insulted, if it wasn’t for the way Ariadne would whisper “My Lovely Cactus Flower” like it was a confidential order, right up against the shell of your ear.

Fast forward five more years and you’re down on one knee, Sergeant, though that title’s new on you. Eight hours new. You’re holding a ring in your hand, and back in your room, back in that empty house on Victoria Street, there’s a set of silver armor resting on a stand, ready and waiting for carmine eyes and hair like the night, if she’ll say yes.

You secretly suspect its not that empty anymore, as Oleander saw the ring when you were in the showers, and really, you must invest in pants with pockets that button, because you never want to be hugged against a clothed goliath while naked ever again, but that doesn’t change the fact that your entire squad is probably camped out in or around your home, and you’d spare a prayer for that damnable rosebush not to be trampled, but Ariadne still hasn’t said anything, and your heart is pounding out a tattoo behind your ribs.

She flops down in front of you in a ridiculously graceful sprawl (and you can never hope to match her effortless grace that holds true in everything she does) and pulls out a ring from the front pocket of her apron, and she smiles, chapped lips with the scar from that deep split when you were children, and you both break out laughing at the same time, sprawled as you are over the walkways, high above your town. You’re getting splinters in your ass. If you look to the West, you’ll see that sandy wasteland, and the wall that’s yours too, keeping it back. You don’t look though, because you’re stuck on her, and that’s everything you ever need to be. You aren’t no hero.

When you look back at that moment, after fire, and ashes, and crooked toothed gods, you remember a time when all you needed to do was shoot the flowers off cacti.

You snap your gum behind your teeth. Hum a tune. You ready your gun and you fire. Watch as the petals flop to the sand, lower the nail gun, and holster it on your belt next to the morningstar.

Save your ammo, sergeant.

You’re going to need it, to be a doe.

[sgt-circe]

In honor of that iron chestplate that always breaks just before you run into your mate who is decked out all in diamond.

[sgt-circe]

I'm not really sure these clothes suit me.

Of course not, love! But you still look dashing in them.

[sgt-circe]

And then of course the full size. I'm less pleased with this version.

[sgt-circe]

Yay for art, right? Anywhosies, here's some art of our lovely Sargeant Redburn.

[sgt-circe]

For those who want to know

Our darling Sargeant Redburn finally has a character sheet celebrating her. To whom it may concern, here is the link. https://docs.google.com/document/d/12TOF1q7B06ikAd1oB4UgDRRWjNOWk61QTK9P0nfgMLI/edit?usp=sharing