crossing_lostrp | [Ami] Day 11: Tending Open Wounds (tag Mara,open)

OOC: Bumping from [Lucy] Day 11: Making Her Escape due to maximum comment/replies reached.

Edited 16 May 06 to add: Maximum Posting Limit of 75 has been suspended for this thread.

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Ami ducked into Mara's shelter as Tommy and Jon made their way to the cookfire area. As they departed, her stomach grumbled a bit, reminding her that she hadn't eaten yet this morning. Tommy and Jon were too far away without shouting for them, and shouting might disturb Mara and she wasn't willing to leave the young woman alone. She figured she'd suffer through for a while longer; it wasn't like she would die of starvation in a few hours time.

Kneeling by Mara's bed, she hesitantly reached out and placed her hand lightly on the woman's forehead. Dropping her shields just a bit, she focused solely on Mara, wincing again at the rents and tears in the woman's shields. Beneath that, she was disturbed, and mentally and psychically exhausted. Ami wasn't connected to Mara the way she was to Megabyte, Mara not being a Tomorrow Person, but she thought she would try to reinforce the woman's shielding a bit anyway. The worse that would happen was nothing and the best was that Mara might sleep a bit easier, even if Ami couldn't take away the horrors she'd already experienced.

It took a few minutes of concentration, and Ami felt a wee bit more tired herself when it was done, but she'd managed to connect with Mara on the very surface and reinforce her shielding – filling in some of the gaps. It wouldn't hold for long, a day at the most, but hopefully it would give the other woman some comfort.

Done with what she could do, Ami leaned against Mara's bed and waited for Tommy and Jon to return.

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Faith gave a low, throaty chuckle at Sayid's joke about the next of kin. "You know, you're all right, Sayid."

When he grew awkward, asking about Mara, Faith's curiosity was piqued. She didn't know what Sayid thought Mara had gone through, but she doubted that it was anything even remotely like possession. (And I can't tell that story. It's not mine.)

"She did," Faith admitted, telling what she could. "A few years back. It left her pretty sensitive to a lot of stuff, I guess. I wish I could tell you more, but it's kinda not my place, you know?"

"As for Lucy..." There was a pause while she considered Sayid. "Let's just say that there was some ideas regarding what might have made her kill herself. If they're true, and I sorta think they are, it kinda pissed me off."

Sayid laughed a bit awkwardly. "I do my best."

The news about Mara had an odd effect; Sayid's inward flinch translated itself into sudden restlessness. "I...see. I understand." /It's true, then. Someone broke her. Her woundedness, her tendency toward unquestioning compliance...yes. Entirely too familiar./ Curses in Arabic were as pretty as the rest of the language; he muttered a few under his breath, seeming to take whatever happened to Mara a little personally. "I am sorry," he said simply, knowing that made up for nothing but feeling that it needed said regardless.

The mention of Lucy's suicide being triggered by something made him look at her sharply and with sudden worry. /I was right, then. It wasn't just the suicide./ "If I was not concerned before...I certainly am now. What...sort of ideas?"

Now it was Faith's turn to shift a bit uneasily, as she weighed what she could and couldn't tell the older man. The older, hot man. The anger was burning away, and she could definitely newly appreciate Sayid again, although restraint and logic that she hadn't possessed in a previous life still held her flirtatious and sexual urges in check.

Faith whipped hair back from her face, vowing to get it all into a ponytail or something soonish, "There's some suspicion that she . . . that she didn't do what she did just 'cause she was depressed. Like she might have been driven to it to escape from something that happened to her.

"We don't have any proof, yet," Faith added, realizing that even though the man had walked on a spaceship of sorts, he might not be receptive of Mara's unique psychic abilities, "But it's going to be looked into."

(If not by the people in charge, then by me.)

Sayid had to school his face into an expression of simple concern as the potential implications of what Faith was saying hit him. As was his habit, he weighed the rumor with some skepticism, knowing that there would be a temptation to both find a cause and a scapegoat for something this senseless. But as was also his habit, he considered the ways in which a person might be driven, not by circumstance or temperament but by outside actions, to take their own lives. Sayid knew of enough to make a less professional man queasy. (Or queasier, in this circumstance). But as there was no telling which scenario, if any of them, had taken place, he pushed speculation aside after a minute and sighed worriedly.

"If I can be of assistance in this matter, please let me know," he said with quiet sincerity.

He ran out of words then for a minute, and they stood there looking at each other. It was amazing, how such a small, doe-eyed woman--barely a few years into adulthood really--could have strewn this much wreckage around the clearing. What worried him most, though, was that she was just as distracting now as before he knew she could probably have beaten him arm-wrestling.

He let out an embarrassed little cough, and bent to start gathering up some of the larger pieces of splintered wood. "Well, at any rate, your exertions have saved us some trouble. This should be enough for the pyre...."

Faith began to entertain a few ideas regarding how he could be of assistance to her personally, then wondered if that was a bad thing under the circumstances. The fact that she wondered at all told her how far she had come from the woman, well girl really, that she had been when she left Sunnydale.

"Yeah, um, when we know more, we might need some assistance," Faith admitted simply.

Watching him bend over to retrieve the splintered wood, Faith felt the corners of her mouth curl into a licentious smile. She joined him in the retrieval efforts – no reason to let the tree have suffered unnecessarily after all – and said in a tone that matched her smile, "Well, my normal exertions usually only leave me sweaty."

Sayid nodded, pondering the strangeness of the situation as he gathered up pieces of smashed, sap-bleeding wood.

The pyre would be hard to light even if they left the wood dry overnight, and a corpse in the tropics would not wait that long. They'd have to sacrifice a good lot of shredded raffia to get it burning...

/Wait. Is it my imagination, or is she checking out my--?/

The tease in her voice confirmed it, and he suddenly became very aware that he'd hared off after her into the depths of the woods alone, and--the sort of embarrassing rumors that was likely to get started. Not to mention the situation itself suddenly becoming just a little bit...distracting. "I...certainly hope so? Splinters are very inconvenient."

[Ami] Day 11: Tending Open Wounds (tag Mara,open)

[Faith] There's Something About Mara (tag Sayid, open)

[Sayid] There's Something About Mara (tag Faith, open)

[Faith] Sharing Suspicions (tag Sayid, open)

[Sayid] Sharing Suspicions (tag Faith, open)

[Faith] Getting Back in the Groove (tag Sayid, open)

[Sayid] Errrm....(tag Faith, open)