tushanshu_logs | ghost by my side, so perfectly clear. [ catch-all ]

Entry tags:

ghost by my side, so perfectly clear. [ catch-all ]

Who	"Jacob Kane" (Cain) & You
When	Month of September, barring plot explosions
Where	All around Keeliai and various establishments
What	Just one of those catch-all things
Warn	Will update as necessary. Please consider filling this permissions post!

Things were tense around the city. The breezy weather had subsided, and with it went some of the feeling of just waiting for something to happen. Now the air was humid and people were scrambling to collect what they could, prepare not only in case the air dried again but for whatever was to come when the Justicar appeared. No one had any idea what to expect. Cain certainly didn't, but he was more or less okay with that; he didn't need to borrow trouble rather than make sure his own interests would be all right should push come to shove.

To those ends, Cain was being a little more directed in his wanderings of the city. Places where the natives seemed more steeled than frantic, still appreciated foreigners or at least was willing to let individuals prove themselves, anything where he could make himself appear more solid. His carefree attitude was great and genuine, but if things went to hell, Cain wanted to make sure people would look at him and not question if he had to take some kind of control. All hail Romulus, father of the Holy Roman Empire. Ha, yeah right. Not that it would even mean anything to most people here.

He went about his business. There were places to be, people to bother, and plenty of things to keep up on.

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The Chihuelans were leaving and they hadn't found Celaunn or what they had been looking for. Small blessings, but she supposed she couldn't ask for more at the moment. They were just lucky that Jacob and Anton were around, she doubted that anyone else remained who could talk her out of her own head. She was still frustrated though, upset that she knew so little.

A sound to the side caused her to spin and draw her sword, the blade shining brightly at her touch. When no one appeared, she took a breath and then went to put the sword away. She hissed, dropping the holy blade as blood began to seep from the cut on her palm. Swearing under her breath, she stooped to pick up the sword and put it away before examining the cut.

She knew it wouldn't heal on it's own, the last time she had cut her hand on the blade it had taken almost two days to return to normal, and it hurt. She tore the sleeve off her shirt and wrapped it around the cut, then she headed toward the Hotel. Berating herself for being so careless and holding the injured hand close, Valdis tried to ignore the blood that slowly rolled down her arm, until she could actually do something about it.

Although Cain tended to wander the city at any given moment when he felt like it, the Hotel was the easiest common denominator to locate him. It was where he currently 'worked' and lived, and served as a convenient point between the districts. Naturally he spent his downtime there, even if it was just sitting in the lobby and reading a kedanese childrens' books to improve his fluency in the language. There were plenty of others in and about with the heatwave still on and many kedan families were taking their turns in the relative cool of the Hotel, but he still looked up at every arrival he managed to hear come through the door.

It was Valdis. She was in here fairly often and Cain almost passed on further exception until he noticed the torn sleeve, the makeshift bandage created from the torn sleeve, blood soaking into the bandage and on her arm. She was walking by and before Cain knew it, he felt that popping sensation again. Vague lightheadedness, like a breath of fresh air filling his lungs, his body filling with it, and he swallowed it down. It wasn't even a few seconds later that she would be healing, wound reversing and blood returning and all of it disappearing as if it were never there.

Cain folded forward against the table in a slow motion as the energy drained from him for the act. He wasn't prepared for that, and he was definitely feeling the strain of the unintentional action. He needed to control this, needed to make it stop doing it on its own, give himself his own focus back. If it did this all the time he noticed someone else needed to be healed, it could mean a lot of trouble.

The darkness reared up as it tried to reject the strange magic that took affect when she passed Jacob. Though not entirely certain why her power was acting up, the movement out of the corner of her eye caused her to look at Jacob, eyes narrowed. Her irises were as red as the blood that was now reversing its direction of flow, seeping back up her arm, out of the bandage and into the cut from where it had originated. The strange sensation in her hand caused her to look down, her eyes widened as she watched the blood move, tearing off the makeshift bandage to watch the cut close.

This wasn't her magic. She looked back at Kane, eyes still red, watching him, feeling something between concern and anger. The red gem in her sword's hilt flashed brightly forcing the darkness to settle and the red to drain from her eyes, "What did you do?"

Cain had turned to earmark his book in the time that it took for her to finish healing. Her reaction was noted, but not the actual physical change that overtook her as a more complicated reaction was set off in turn. It was the flash from Revelation that took his attention back and he sat up once more to look her over, eyes turning sharp to try and pinpoint what had happened in the moment he looked away.

"Still trying to figure that one out," he said after a brief pause. He was still trying to figure a great many things out, really, but he wasn't about to bring it up more than necessary. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," she said, sharper than she meant to. To say she wasn't unsettled would have been a lie. That magic wasn't like her own, which replenished and healed with new tissues. It was different, it used the tissue already there to repair damage, no, more like turning back time to before the injury occurred. She glanced down at her sword, which had gone dark again, and then back up at Kane.

"Sorry," she continued, softening slightly, "I don't understand what just happened."

That really made two of them. He was still trying to figure out how exactly this whole thing worked, but the energy drain seemed to be consistent, as did the lack of control. Perhaps if he had time to steel himself before people came too close and things started without him realizing... He shifted, held his left hand out palm up.

"Understanding it is a work in progress. May I?" he asked, nodding to the healed hand. He saw the lack of blood, had a definite growing idea of where it had gone. This whole thing was growing beyond his ken but it was also his responsibility to get to the bottom of it.

She looked at him suspiciously for a moment, before reluctantly holding out her hand for him to examine. The skin was smooth and flawless as always, as if the injury had never occurred.

"I don't heal like that."

No one she knew did, or at least, no one she knew of. It was so unnatural and wrong, that she wasn't even sure if it could be called healing. But somehow, Kane seemed to be the source of it and that made her wary.

"No, I doubt you do," Cain murmured as he ran his thumb over the palm of her hand. He didn't have any indication of where the cut had been specifically or even how severe. It was frustrating in a way that it looked like this magic was to spread his own healing to the people around him if they needed it, that he was sharing something that was never meant to be shared.

Inspection done, he let go of her hand and tilted back to regard her. Probably for the better that he was sitting to pretend that he hadn't just been exhausted from the simple closure of what appeared to have been a small wound. "You said before that you didn't want to share your powers with anyone, what they were," he said, head tilting in acquiescence, "which is fine and I won't ask. This, however, is what I do."

Edited (...d. shared.) 2015-09-28 03:00 (UTC)

She stared at him, one brow raised, uncertain whether she should be surprised or not, then pulled her hand back to look it over herself, unconvinced that the blood had just gone back into her veins, except, that's the only place it could have gone. She shivered.

"You move against time," she said, looking at him, "You turn it back instead of simply causing it to move forward at a faster pace." She shook her head. Moving against the flow of time instead of with it, this Jacob Kane was far more than he seemed. "You said that this is 'understanding in progress', but the lack of surprise involved...Who are you?"

Because he definitely wasn't a normal human of any kind, he didn't act like a human his age acted, nor apparently, did he heal like a human.

"It isn't against time so much as..." He paused, considered how to best word his own observations of what happened when he healed. One hand went to rest on the cover of the book he had been reading, fingers brushing up and down the closed pages. Fact of the matter was, it wasn't a bad way to explain it in layman's terms, but there was something so much more about it. Something grander that he had grown accustomed to in his time. "As returning it to its rightful state."

"I'm Jacob Kane," he said, his lips quirking in easy amusement. "Also go by Cain, as in the story you probably know." References she'd made in conversations previous hinted at her earth-like background, so he wasn't going to go further into it here. "What I'm still trying to understand is this whole part where I can apparently share the love with other people now."

She crossed her arms, watching him, processing the information. Rightful state. Cain. The Bible. The first murder.

"So are you a man who exists outside of time?" She asked finally, moving to a chair across from him. She wasn't entirely certain if she believed that he was the original Cain, but with Eva's magic, and all the worlds, it was certainly a possibility. What with his knowledge of politics, systems of management and now, this, it was possible that he was a sort of immortal.

"No," Cain said, head tipping back as she moved. Once she was on an even keel, he changed his position and sat straighter. She wanted to turn this into a discussion and it was one he usually didn't mind having; in Keeliai especially, people seemed more easily accustomed to the weirdness of his situation, focused on the finer details more quickly.

After a moment, he shook his head to add emphasis to his statement. "I'm just a man who exists. Who will keep existing. There aren't many answers where I'm from, when I'm the only one like this, so I don't have many answers for you, either."

When he put it like that, immortality sounded like a tragedy, and perhaps it was, continuing to live while everyone else you came to know died. But at least time was frozen for them in Keeliai, although that didn't mean that people couldn't leave you. But it seemed that they could still find relationships.

"You're the only one like you?"

That in itself wasn't entirely strange, after all, she was the only one of her kind with a soul, but the way he said it made it seem different.

Cain nodded. It was odd for him to think that there might be other people in situations like these, in those other worlds, that had more like them. That something so fantastic and strange might be a group endeavor. Even his children, grown and eventually passing into the afterlife once they served as an Enforcer, didn't last as long as he did. Only Abel, and Abel was a completely different sort of case. They'd made a promise; Abel was keeping his side of it, even if Cain had no way to hurry his own along.

"The only one," he confirmed. It wasn't that he considered his own life to be painful, or meaningless, or too long. This was just a fact that he would have to keep going on with no choice of his own in the matter, and he'd accepted it for now. Embraced it. That didn't change the facts. "No one else lives like I do. One of life's many mysteries."

It seemed that the more she learned about the people here, the more she realized that she wasn't entirely alone. She had always kept secrets, fearing repercussions based on the nature of her magic, of what she was. But Anton knew and so did Wan, and to an extent, Dante also knew, and none of them had been disgusted or horrified. But there was always that chance.

"I know what that's like," she said softly, "Watching the world change around you while you remain unchanged. Not know exactly how your existence began, but knowing how it will end...or knowing that it won't."

Watching Valdis, gauging her reaction, Cain nodded slowly. There had always been something about her, her clock in particular and its friend that didn't belong on the same person at all, that told Cain there was much more to Valdis than was readily apparent. Her naivete had nothing to do with how old she was, merely how experienced she had become in that time, and having someone who could partially understand how he felt was both freeing and aggravating at the same time. As it was with all sympathetic experiences, it was close but not the same, and he almost wanted to hold onto the feeling for himself and guard it jealously.

But he wouldn't do that.

"Yeah," he said, his demeanor somehow still the same as the young man he often presented to the world. He was young, in mind and body, if not in spirit and life. It was an odd mix. "I got that feeling about you. Even so, you're something different. However it is you live isn't quite the same as me if you're surprised by that." He nodded toward her hand, to highlight his point.

Just as Cain was gauging her reaction, so was she gauging his. He was definitely far older than he seemed, older than she was, perhaps even older than Bakura. His mixed emotions on being understood were not unexpected, but it still set her on edge, especially when he called her 'something' as opposed to simply 'different', but he wasn't wrong.

"No," she replied slowly, "I'm not surprised." She lived by being a monster, he did not. "You are more like an angel than a demon."

It was almost like they were facing off, not having a simple conversation over a reading table in the Hotel lobby. To any outside observer, it probably looked rather casual. Especially with how hard Cain was fighting off slouching or otherwise appearing as tired as he truly felt for all that this new magic utterly drained him. He had to figure that part out, along with everything else. He'd have to contact Raine soon, be ready to practice even if he wasn't so sure.

"Angel?" Cain couldn't help but laugh at the comparison. "No, I'm really not. I'm just a person... who heals. Nothing angelic about me."

"It was simply a comparison," she replied, raising a brow when he laughed, "I've met some angels and you aren't one."

She was still interested in his healing, and the fact that he was immortal, but in a different way than she and Bakura were immortal.

"Forgive my bluntness," she continued, "But can you die? I mean, some immortals will live forever unless killed, some can't be killed and some revive from death. So which one are you?

"Of course you have," Cain said, more of a mutter than an actual comment. Angels and demons weren't really things where he was from. Unless one counted angels of death, the Reapers, and they were really their own category entirely. Nothing divine about them, simply intrinsic to the workings of the universe. Life was left up to the living for as long as they were in that realm. It was as simple as that.

That question was an astute one, and Cain quirked his lips partway in response. "Someone once told me that it's less that I don't die, so much as I repel death itself," he said. It wasn't an outright answer, although it was close to an explanation. Cain wouldn't die, that much he was certain of, but he could still feel pain. Experience the loss of consciousness as his body gave out entirely. But he would never die. "What about yourself?"

It wasn't a real answer, but since his healing turned back time, it was possible that he recovered from life-threatening injuries by doing the same thing. Hence, death never actually took him.

Her eyes narrowed for an instant at his question, but he had answered hers so it was only fair for her to answer in return.

"I do die," she replied, "But as I possess multiple lives, I am able to revive. But there is a limit to this, although not even I know what it is."

There were a lot of things Cain had yet to come to understanding, especially in regards to himself. Some things would likely never be answered and he had contented himself with simply being alive in the meantime and using the time rather than fussing over how he might make the best possible use of it. That seemed like enough.

"Multiple lives," he said quietly. Although his gaze didn't move, he drew his attention back to the second clock on her neck from his peripheral vision. "Then how do you know there's a limit?"

Her expression instantly shifted from open to guarded. There was no easy answer to that question and any evasion would be far too obvious. She simply stared at him, uncertain of how to answer, despite being certain that he probably wouldn't like any answer she gave.

"Do you truly want the answer to that?" She said, looking him steadily in the eyes, noting that though his gaze remained on her, it wasn't entirely focused, "If you do, then I won't lie to you, but you might not like what you hear."

Perhaps unfortunately for them both, Cain was far from the type who would shy away from adversity or difficult subjects. He had little patience for shielding oneself from uncomfortable things just because someone might not like them; that was their own decision to make and it was probably better to put out in the open besides. Valdis' reaction only made him more certain he needed to hear this.

"I'd be a very different man if I ran away from anything I might not want to deal with," he said, patient and stern. Nothing overly powerful but enough to show his resolve. He'd run from things before, sure, but only once they'd become unbearable and he saw no other option. Abel was the exception to that, as he always was. "It won't change the facts whether or not you tell me, will it?"

"No," she replied, "It won't."

His response wasn't what she wanted to hear, but true to her word, she would explain as best she could.

"I've been called many things over the years, one such title would be Soul Reaper." She took a breath, still meeting his gaze, but her confidence continued to fade, "My kind traditionally do not possess souls, so I suppose it was mere instinct that drove us to hunt something that we did not have. We gain a life for each soul we consume and I lost track of mine several hundred years ago."

She had been a monster, and she supposed that, despite everything, she still was.

ghost by my side, so perfectly clear. [ catch-all ]

Sept 27th (CW: Blood)

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