[OTA] February catch-all

[tedandroses]

Who: Teddy (and you!)
When: Throughout the Month
Where: Variously around town, mostly within the neighborhood
Open/Closed: Open! I'm also posting each sub-event as a different comment just in case someone wants to post in more than one, as I've noticed that's sort of an awkward situation sometimes.
[Edit: I'm having some yellow flags wrt seizure activity, including how long it took me to get this all posted. There'll be a couple more headers tomorrow, I'm so sorry guys.]
Applicable Warnings: Just TDM and a cranky police officer.

Comments

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, pt 1: burn (Feb 4-6 or so)

[tedandroses]

[OOC: Working on actually rotating Teddy's pronouns! And getting Teds' character bleed anxiety over it, haha. HOWEVER, as usual, please do not feel like your character should know this is a thing.]

Teddy knows the way burning wood smells. Burning wood; burning leaves: it's not a season they associate with it, but it's a smell they find familiar, and comforting unless it's too early for people to be getting rid of leaves or too dry for it to be safe.

This isn't that. She's closed off the windows, but right now she stands, watching the dark smoke against the sky. It's a grey-white, clouds almost indistinguishable against each other, the cold windless air whispering of snow.

"Doesn't look like wood either," Teddy grumbles under his breath. It doesn't smell like coal, either, but upsettingly, it's a little bit more like that. Sure looks more like it. Coal smells like -- well, it smells like coal; there's nothing else really to describe it. Mines themselves, and the whole area around, always smell like diesel, sometimes hot metal, because of all the equipment, a lingering hint of chalk. In some towns a hint of rotten eggs even when the tap goes on.

They don't think they'd feel nostalgic about that. Whatever it is, it gives them an uneasy feeling in their stomach, thinking about the fish and waterways around here, the air they can't help but breathe regardless of how many windows they close. They pull down the scarf they've folded up like a headband to hold their hair back while they clean, making it into some kind of bandit-looking bandanna mask. Well, if a bandit was wearing bright abstract flowers.

She wants to demand answers, post something angry somewhere. At least find out more, stealthily -- but there's a still-discolored burn scar on her arm that counsels against that. Scowling, she picks up the trash bag she'd set down to take it to the outdoor bin.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, pt 2: sectors (Feb 7-13ish?)

[tedandroses]

4 what? she'd signed at Wrench, nodding at it, the first day she'd spotted the spraypainted number, orange and bright against the asphalt.

They're both going to school now, which is a kind of surreal little addition to domestic life. (In case the forced marriage trope wasn't enough for you, what if you walk to school together? Teddy can almost hear We're Gonna Be Friends pick up in the background, except it won't be written for another four decades, or something.)

It's kind of nice, though. There's something about learning new things. Even if he hates how limited the choices were, are: chafes against it, wants to go put on his prettiest dress and fix a cis guy's car just saying the word stenographer -- god, Theo Prime (who was, for a while, a stenographer) would hate this for him -- but Teddy can't deny that there's something beautiful about the first page of a new notebook. And shorthand's a little like a new language, and well. He's always liked languages, codes, ciphers.

Besides, seeing what happens in the courthouses here has its own fascinating implications.

Right now, though, Teddy has other things at the front of their mind.
Wrench and they don't actually have to go together, but they've been driving lately -- especially with the air like it's been, and the little skift of snow that'd come in. Today, Teddy'd decided to go ahead alone and walk: stretch their legs, head out alone a little early and get some time to think and a good walk for Scout.

She’s starting to think heading out early was a good idea when they see the road block and the police officer in uniform arguing with someone.

"I just need to get a few essentials -- "
"And like I said," the officer says in a tone that's tired of being nice and not hiding it: "this is for your safety. If this were a real disaster, you wouldn't want to be caught outside Sector 4 because you just had to have some cereal. Would you."

Sector? What kind of dystopian hell--
Teddy had scribbled down a few more notes in the past few days, spotting numbers -- nothing over 4. 1 was the heart of town; it seemed like everything else sort of went outwards, though he didn't have enough time to figure out what. Just little notes like 1 - Grocery. Sectors...

"What if there's a medical emergency?" they interrupt, trying to channel polite young woman even as Scout leans to sniff at the officer's shoes, unsure why they're stopping.

"You got a real emergency?" At Teddy's momentary pause, the officer scoffs. "Yeah, you call when you do. Now get your mutt under control."

Taking a deep breath in to stifle the flicker of anger in her chest, Teddy clucks to Scout -- who is calm and easy, just curious -- and turns away tentatively. "Come on, let's go."

[OOC: Be the person who needs food -- Teddy will help organize! -- or meet them coming back down!]

(cw, implication of chronic or terminal illness) [...]Kiss Me Goodbye (Feb 17 or so)

[tedandroses]

It's been a day and a half since the dreams, the ones with the woman and the baby, and -- and she'd been the same, wrong person again, like in that vision on New Year's Eve she'd thought was some kind of fucked-up seizure. This time, Teddy had been shaking someone's hand -- the father of the woman in labor, maybe?

It's all both vivid and broken apart: the thing they find lingering isn't even the images but the juxtaposition. The sterility and the intense emotion. The strange overarching loneliness.
They're trying not to think about it, or at least, channel it somewhere else. Selfishly, it's really nice sometimes, Wrench being Deaf: they don't have to worry they're disrupting him if they want to play (or sing). They reckon though that it's not all that terrible: it's probably nicer for him, too, that he doesn't have to worry about it or what's fair.

Teddy's playing with a fingerstyle version of Scarborough Fair and singing the Simon and Garfunkle Canticle part softly under the melody line he's picking out.
Blankets and bedclothes, the child of the mountain
sleeps unaware of a clarion c--

The TV bursts to life, freezing Teddy's fingers on the strings. She stares at the figures from her dreams, the unfamiliar garden and the now-slightly-bigger infant: still tiny, still the age you wouldn't want to go far from the house. The film, flickering, reel to reel, is soundless, but she finds herself putting down her guitar, leaning it against the couch without thinking. Standing, as though in a daze, her heart caught in her throat and her eyes fixed on the close, caring angles on the child, the unfamiliar but meticulously tended flora, the multitudinous greys that communicate bright patterns and verdant leaves so well that she can nearly smell them. The woman, speaking to the camera.

Be careful. I love you.

She presses a hand to her lips to blow a kiss, and suddenly the figure Teddy is looking at shifts and changes, replaced by a tanned white man, cheekbones and jaw like Teddy's, faintly curly light brown hair. He has echoes of the crow's feet that the woman bore, skin faintly less aged than hers; his hand is to his lips, but it's covering a cough that looks like it caught him by surprise.

Teddy would know: that man hasn't blown a kiss to anyone in his life. He does feign catching them from her mother: one-handed out the window of the truck on the way out the door, or occasionally over the top, like he just caught the winning out in a baseball game. She knows those coughing fits, too, the sound of his gasp, how much worse it'd got even being on tour for a year. How she'd shifted her eyes to her mother's and seen her own terror, only dulled and sanded down with resignation and will: don't you start: it's not worth it, that look had said.

The motion is only a fraction of a second before he lifts his eyes to the camera, bright, holding hers. Offering a smile that's just a little -- pained. Lonesome? Worried? It drags at Teddy's chest. And then it's the woman again, with the exact same smile, like it'd never happened, for a frame or less: and then they're gone.

"Wait--" Teddy breathes and presses both hands to their neck. What is going on.