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Post by Pierre Antoine Giroux on May 2, 2011 15:06:21 GMT -5
I’m told that people like to call us dreamers
Because we won’t ever stop until we’ve done all we can do
There are so many things I haven’t seen
So I’ll look ’till I just can’t look no more
Aw, shit. This was starting to sound like something out of a young adult adveture novel- first the mysterious heroine takes a friend to a mysterious but wonderful place, and they talk, and somehow they broach the topic of said heroine's terribly tragic past, and then said friend comforts said heroine. Did all of the girls in this school insist on following such a rigid formula? Scratch that- Victoria had done this, too, and she was far away from South Carolina, USA. That's why he had fallen for her.
So of course he is intrigued by this vague, hazy answer. Of course he has to take his stupid mouth and ask something to get her to say more, but he didn't want tears again- tears were awkward things to deal with. Erm... "Vous avez écrit quoi que ce soit bas? Vous avez tant de revues." If she didn't want to talk about it, she could address the notebooks, instead. That was a good move, he applauded himself. A very good move.
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Post by River Tam on May 2, 2011 18:30:38 GMT -5
**follow the voices**
River hesitates. To tell or not to tell? That is the question. She bites her bottom lip, looking straight at the orange notebook. Pushing aside her doubts, the girl says, “Oui. J’écris tout dans mes cahiers.” It might not be the right answer, per se, but is there ever a correct answer? One that doesn’t upset anyone? One that answers all questions? No.
She doesn’t mean to be a damsel in distress-- it just sorta comes naturally to her. Well, the girl with the tragic past, at least. Distress means wanting someone to save you, and god knows River can’t stand being reliant, on anyone. Maybe that’s why she learned so quickly. So that she didn’t have to ask anyone. Or, then again, maybe it was a way of distancing herself from others.
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Post by Pierre Antoine Giroux on May 3, 2011 15:17:00 GMT -5
I’m told that people like to call us dreamers
Because we won’t ever stop until we’ve done all we can do
There are so many things I haven’t seen
So I’ll look ’till I just can’t look no more
She was biting her lip. Tears? Shit. Maybe just nervousness, though, or hesistantion. Her reply was as vague as his question, landing the responsibility on his shoulders again. She wrote everything down, then? She was staring at the orange notebook, so it was probably in there the tales of the experiment were contained. He could pick it up and read the story himself, provided that it was in English or French -River was an omnilinguist, remember, boy?- but that might be a too big of a leap, to suddenly start pawing through her possesions.
He didn't want to be the hero, dammit- he just wanted to know. Storybook life, storybook powers, but no storybook confidence. The curiousity was killing the cat, though, and the cat was Pierre Antoine Giroux.
"Voulez-vous me dire ce que vous avez écrit sur l'expérience?" Either she would tell or not. This was the last line he would throw out there- he didn't deserve to, but he did anyway.
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Post by River Tam on May 3, 2011 16:08:26 GMT -5
**follow the voices**
She will not cry. Not again. You can say many things about River, but you can’t say she’s not strong-willed. And her stubborn attitude is probably what’s keeping her here, at this school, in this cavern. It’s the only reason she hadn’t run back home the second she escaped from the School. Well, that, and her will to live.
The girl looks up, straight at Pierre, for the first time without any hint of River-ness, though she’s probably being the most true to herself since the two had met. When she had first approached the Canadian boy, she was cocky, arrogant. Friendly. She opens her mouth, almost surprised at the words that tumble out, “Vous pouvez le lire. Tout est dans le cahier orange.” She says softly, her voice empty of any emotion. Deadpan.
(Megsy-- for the story, if you haven’t already found it, check out River’s journal.)
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Post by Pierre Antoine Giroux on May 3, 2011 17:22:20 GMT -5
I’m told that people like to call us dreamers
Because we won’t ever stop until we’ve done all we can do
There are so many things I haven’t seen
So I’ll look ’till I just can’t look no more
Her eyes are hard now, her face has lost any impression of a soft, graceful being. She's turned herself to stone inside. This could not be good. This was not good news at all. Pierre flinched, waiting for the cold anger of an upset woman to crash upon him.
But River's voice isn't the razor sharp glass edge he expects it to be when it tumbles out- on the contrary, it's the softness he's ever heard from her. (Granted, he didn't have much to compare it with, he had only known her for what, maybe an hour now?) It's still cold, though. All friendliness has evaporated.
He doesn't say anything for a few moments, letting a pregnant silence fall over them. Then, watching River the whole time, he picks up the orange notebook and begins to read.
My name is River Tam. I am fifteen years old. I was born in London, a normal child....
He reads, eyes jumping over the words as they painted a picture of this girl's life. A genius, in addition to her powers, and then...
Oh. God.
He found himself flinching as he read of the tortures she had been put through. It looked like something out of a horror novel, but horror novels included dialogue and more description, This was a bare skeleton of the truth.
(The Sussex Institute for Gifted Children. Where had he heard that name before? Oh. God. It had been on the list of boarding schools he could have been sent to.)
He puts it down gently when he's through, and raises his head. He opens his mouth to speak, then closes it- he cannot find the words, at first.
"Tout vrai?"
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Post by River Tam on May 3, 2011 17:45:14 GMT -5
**follow the voices**
Oh, god. He’s reading it. Really reading it. If only she hadn’t written it in French. If only it was in Swahili, or Chinese, or binary, or… Oh, well. Too late now. He’s halfway down the page. She can see the whites of his eyes, every little flinch, even the twitches. She watches as he looks up at her, incredulously. ’It’s true?’
She nods, watching him warily, unsure what he will do next. Run screaming from the cave? Send her back to the School? God knows River couldn’t survive going back. “Oui. Chaque mot. C’est ma vie.” she says slowly, softly. “Me croyez-vous?”
She knows it sounds insanely like a horror story, but, well… It is, kind of. Except it’s not a story. It’s River’s life.
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Post by Pierre Antoine Giroux on May 3, 2011 18:51:45 GMT -5
I’m told that people like to call us dreamers
Because we won’t ever stop until we’ve done all we can do
There are so many things I haven’t seen
So I’ll look ’till I just can’t look no more
Every word.
Every word was true?
Good Lord.
He leans back against the cavern wall, slumped forwards and his head in his hands. "Oui, je vous crois." he manages to say, slowly, haltingly as his small, human brain works it's way around the tale.
A drumming starts in the back of his mind- a mantra of sorts. This is what it was saying-
It could have been me it could have been me ohgod it could have been me...
-over and over again. Was he saying it aloud or in his head? He couldn't tell. Pierre just sits and thinks. He was probably saying it aloud, wasn't he?
"Il aurait pu être moi."
Yup. He was. Hopefully it would not creep her out too much.
He raises his head, finally, searching for words. Mostly he looks at her- if he hadn't asked he wouldn't have ever known how lucky he was. No, that wasn't a good way to think. That was selfish.
He can't think of anything to say in response to what he has read, but-
"Qu'est-ce que tu veux connaître sur moi?" It's only fair, since she's let him into a deeply hurt part of her life, that he offer the same. It was only fair.
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Post by River Tam on May 3, 2011 22:00:10 GMT -5
**follow the voices**
'It could have been me.' Huh. She thinks about it for a moment, rolling the five words around in her head, searching for the best explanation. After a few discarded attempts, the one that sticks is that Pierre was thinking of going to the School. He's lucky that he didn't-- who knows how many others went through what River did? None of them escaped, if there were others. That much, River knows for sure. People that weren't her would have gone straight to the police, and, in turn, the story would have made it to the media. No self-respecting Tabloid author would pass up something like that.
After a minute or so, the older boy seems to calm down enough to form cohesive sentences. He had asked her what she wanted to know about him. Well. That's certainly a new one. River, stumped, has to think about it for twenty-three seconds. "Votre famille. Parlez-moi de votre famille."
Of course, River already knows everything about Pierre's past-- Postcognition and all-- but she wants to hear it, not just see it. It's comforting to hear about families. Stories are all she has now, memories the only reminder of times when she too had a mother, a father, a brother.
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Post by Pierre Antoine Giroux on May 7, 2011 17:50:42 GMT -5
I’m told that people like to call us dreamers
Because we won’t ever stop until we’ve done all we can do
There are so many things I haven’t seen
So I’ll look ’till I just can’t look no more
His family. Well, not like that was a surprise. Everybody wanted to know about everyone else's family, didn't they? Do you have siblings, are your folks divorced- those are the sort of questions friends ask each other, if they don''t know already.
It didn't help that his stepmother was kinda sorta famous back home, either.
Where to begin...? "Euh ... J'ai huit frères et sœurs, tous plus âgés que moi, un demi-frère et une demi-sœur, plus jeune, et un beau-frère, plus jeune aussi." There, get that out of the way. "Mes parents ont divorcé alors que j'avais dix ans. Mon père s'est remarié, ma mère n'a pas."
He doesn't really want to talk about that. Not yet. So instead, Pierre talks about his siblings, during the times they weren't stressing about his gift.
"Sara et Martin sont les plus anciens, ils sont déjà mariés. Ils étaient comme papa et maman à la maison quand nos parents n'étaient pas là. Fabian et Odile beaucoup lutté, et Alice serait d'essayer de les calmer. Colette n'a jamais été autour, elle était toujours avec des amis, et Dominique a été le plus beau pour moi."
He pauses. If she has anything to say, let her speak now.
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Post by River Tam on May 7, 2011 20:23:31 GMT -5
**follow the voices**
Setting the water bottle down, River leans back against the cave wall and pulls her legs up underneath her slim frame. She closes her eyes, lapping up every word that spills from the boy’s mouth.
He has such a large family-- eight full sibilings! It seems like a nice life. She had always wanted a large family, and now she has nothing. Ironic, no? Maybe more poetic justice, or something like that. But, whatever.
She can imagine them sitting around a table, laughing, saying, “Pass the butter”, kicking one another underneath the table, and acting just like a normal family. She can see them crowded around a television, arguing over what channel to watch, grabbing the remote out of one another’s hands, jostling for the best seat on the couch.
She opens her eyes as he stops, jolted out of her imaginings. She stares at him, not wanting the flow of words to cease. “Continuez.” she says softly, almost begging for it.
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Post by Pierre Antoine Giroux on May 19, 2011 17:00:21 GMT -5
I’m told that people like to call us dreamers
Because we won’t ever stop until we’ve done all we can do
There are so many things I haven’t seen
So I’ll look ’till I just can’t look no more
((ooc; for the sake of not killing Google translate, I'm going to write the next bit in English. Sorry! I might run it through later, but probably not.))
Was she having a fantasy of his life? Well, he couldn't well expect her to feel sorry for him, looking at what she went through. He sighs, and launches into the rest rest of his life.
"I discovered my gift when I was really young, so I didn't really understand that locks were supposed to keep people out. I would look in my sister's diaries and my brother's stuff all the time." He doesn't sound proud, but nor regretful, either. "After a while, they started to hate me." A strong, self-pitying word, but he forces himself to say it deadpan. At least French keep the words softer than English.
"Sara was the worst. Sometimes she would come and say how sorry she was about my problem, and then she'd follow it up with a request to hack into her boyfriend's computer to see if he was cheating on her or anything. The way she would say it, I knew it was a bad thing, and then she wouldn't talk to me for days. My brothers stopped taking me to hockey games, and after awhile Alice and Colette and Odile started to avoid me."
He breathes, listening to his own words hanging in the air. It didn’t really matter how deadpan he kept his voice- self pity was permeates every word. “I guess they were justified, though.” Was this really what she wanted to hear? No, of course not, she wanted to learn about his family, no his life story.
But then again, how do you disentangle the two?
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Post by River Tam on May 20, 2011 6:50:14 GMT -5
RIVER TAM
I’ve seen all of creation, but to it I’m incidental
But there’s more to this automaton than they will ever know
I’m more than just alloys and circuits, I have soul
And I’ve got dreams just like everybody else
I could conquer the world if I could conquer myself
She stares at him, her brown eyes oddly intense, instead of the normal hooded, guarded look. Her hands are folded, right over left, in her lap, back straight as a board, neck mimicking her spine.
“Sara ne semble pas très agréable. Votre sœur apparaît comme une contradiction, un hypocrite.”
River has to stifle a laugh when he mentions hockey. Pierre certainly doesn’t seem like the hockey type. Not the proper build, lacking (or so it seems to River) the bloodlust for the sport.
“Pourquoi pensez-vous qu'ils étaient justifiées?” It’s the first question she’d asked the whole story, but it doesn’t make sense to her, the spoiled little aristocrat-turned-runaway. She cocks her head slightly to the side, her eyebrows growing slightly together.
She knows every event of everyone’s past, but nothing of the why, the how, the how-does-that-make-you-feel.
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Post by Pierre Antoine Giroux on May 20, 2011 22:04:33 GMT -5
I’m told that people like to call us dreamers
Because we won’t ever stop until we’ve done all we can do
There are so many things I haven’t seen
So I’ll look ’till I just can’t look no more
He shrugged. "C'est simplement comment elle a été- est, vraiment. Mon beau-frère me dit qu'elle fait cela pour lui, aussi." Sara, Sara... she was as cunning as a fox. Thank the Lord he is far away from her once again. But she did regularly pay for his tickets to the Montreal Canadians ( aka the almighty Habs) games, but the things she wanted in return... he shuddered.
Why? Wasn't it obvious? He laughed ruefully, propping his head up with one hand. "J'ai regardé dans leurs téléphones, agendas, emails, sacs à main, sacs à dos-ils tout verrouillé, encore stupide petit m'a regardé. Comment vous sentiriez-vous si il n'y avait rien sur la terre que vous pourriez faire pour vous garder secrets près?" He stood up and walked the perimeter of the room, hands clasped against the back of his head. "Si j'étais à leur place, je n'aurais pas eu près de moi, que ce soit."
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Post by River Tam on May 21, 2011 7:48:03 GMT -5
RIVER TAM
I’ve seen all of creation, but to it I’m incidental
But there’s more to this automaton than they will ever know
I’m more than just alloys and circuits, I have soul
And I’ve got dreams just like everybody else
I could conquer the world if I could conquer myself
“Qui est votre beau-frère? L'élémentaire, ou un autre?” River cringes. Oops. She curses her stupidity. He hadn’t said anything about his step-brother other than that he existed. He doesn’t know about her postcognition. She forgets what people have told her sometimes, and inserts their memories into her speech, even if she could not technically have known about the memories without supernatural means. Stupid, stupid, stupid River. Just have to go one, hope he didn’t notice.
“Antione, j'avais des gens dans ma tête. Littéralement. Je ne pouvais pas garder de secrets à partir d’eux.”
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Post by Pierre Antoine Giroux on May 21, 2011 15:46:06 GMT -5
I’m told that people like to call us dreamers
Because we won’t ever stop until we’ve done all we can do
There are so many things I haven’t seen
So I’ll look ’till I just can’t look no more
She has a point- with people picking at her brain, there was no comparison to what he had done. "Pardon-moi, je n'avais pas le droit d'utiliser cette expression. Il ne serait pas une idée étrangère à vous, contrairement à la plupart des gens." He sighed. He doesn't want to continue with this- him telling the story, then River coming up and making him feel worse for even daring to think that what had happened was bad. "Il leur colère beaucoup, si."
The question about his step-brother catches him off-guard. He hadn't said anything about Olivier, had he? All he had said was that he had a step-brother, nothing more. "Êtes-vous psychique, aussi?" he asked wryly, a smile dancing on his face for a moment before he answered the question. "Je ne sais pas, je n'ai vu que quelques fois. Il a un don de quelque sorte- mon père me demandait l'été dernier comment obtenir une demande de cette école. S'il vient, il n'est pas encore là." He hasn't seen the little jerk around yet, anyway- school didn't start for another week yet. Pierre had just come back a little early, to avoid his family.
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