oh love, oh my joy

“We’re all… fucked up,” Elanora says, and while her words slightly slur, she doesn’t say it with quite as much bitterness as she usually does. “Just in different ways.”

Maybe, Journey thinks, although Elanora would never admit it, especially once she sobers up, getting her past off her chest feels better than she thought. Her story had been… a lot. All of their stories are a lot, but Elanora’s in particular. It explains a lot. Journey wonders if she’s always been like this, or if it all changed after she lost the one person she truly had.

“We can all agree to that, I suppose,” Ven agrees beside her, her hands resting on Ari’s boots. Quite a change from their earlier predicament, with her and Mason sitting themselves between the two just in case. She’s glad.

How strange, how different her and Ven are, Journey thinks. They’re the only two of faith here, and yet they’re practically opposites. She can never understand Ven’s ways, even if she accepts them. Ven’s so traditional, and meanwhile… Journey looks at her prayer book, still on the table, covered in barnacles. Meanwhile, she’s very much not. More than that, she doubts she’ll ever be able to understand the pain Ven feels when she talks about being thrown from her temple. Temples have never meant anything to Journey. But Ven… does. And she isn’t good with emotions or empathy, but she doesn’t have to understand to know that if she can help Ven, she will.

Ophelia gives a small nod, although she still looks shaken from her earlier admission that she doesn’t know what the point of searching for a cure for the Filth for her anymore is.

She doesn’t know Ophelia. Not really. She knows what happened to her, after everything with the council of course. But they haven’t talked, not one on one. Still, Journey can’t help but feel awful. Watching the other woman visibly try not to break down in front of her and Ari while discussing her likely fate… it hadn’t sat well with her. She’d offered her assistance in whatever Ophelia needed to search for a cure even if she had no idea about anything relating to diseases, but she can’t shake the feeling that she should be doing more. Their lack of conversation hadn’t done away with how much of herself she sees in Ophelia sometimes.

The hand not playing with the ends of Ari’s hair taps the the table slowly. Across the table, Mason catches her eyes, just for a moment. Maybe it’s because she was just backed into a corner and admitted she’s from Agia Marina, maybe it’s because he now knows they’re from the same place. Maybe it’s because they both saw each other back out of confessing all their traumas while everyone else bared their scars for each other to see. Either way, she can’t help the strange pang of… kinship she feels when she looks at him. Like they’re both aware of what they just did, that they have something more in common than they thought. What specifically she isn’t sure yet, beyond the Luzinde thing, but it isn’t hard to recognize someone who’d rather leave the past in the past.

It’s not like any of it haunts her, really. It informs the way she acts, but… it doesn’t haunt her. She’s already boxed away everything and put it away in its own little place so it doesn’t bother her. It’s like she said. Life is just one fucked up thing after the other. It doesn’t do her any good to dwell on it. Just keep moving and none of it matters anymore, none of it’s her problem anymore.

(Liar, the voice in her head hisses, and she winces.)

“This is weird,” Ophelia finally says quietly, voicing what they were all thinking. A small chorus of laughter fills the table.

“It is,” Adalynn agrees.

And Adalynn is so strange to Journey, in a way she still can’t quantify. An enigma. But her story clears a lot of things up, she supposes. Makes her more like the rest of them. Unwanted, rejecting the life she was given. Journey can respect that, although Adalynn still unnerves her. She’s too… blunt. Too interrogative without ever giving her own things away until pushed by Ari.

“It’s better this way,” Journey says, dropping her eyes down from all of them to the empty table.

A crew who’d sooner turn their blades on each other isn’t a crew at all, it’s just a group of drowned people waiting to happen. It’s quite a bit drier up here, but she sees no difference between a crew at sea and a crew on land. And that’s what they are now, aren’t they? They’re a crew, like it or not.

Strange, that. To think of herself as part of a crew. Part of something.

These people are strange. Perhaps some of the strangest people she’s ever met.

And she likes them, she realizes. She likes these strange people, despite their petty bickering and eccentricities.

It’s been half intentional and half out of her control, the way she’s kept people at arm’s length. She’s always had trouble making connections, letting people be close. It’s just an invitation for them to hurt you one way or another. And she’s promised herself she won’t ever let herself hurt again.

And yet… these people. These awful, obnoxious, annoying, self-righteous, self-important, loud, nosy people. These fucked up, broken, sad, lonely people all reaching out for someone to understand them. And here she is, just as desperate for companionship as all of them, despite what she’s convinced herself.

They’re all broken pieces shattered in different ways, and maybe they don’t form a perfect picture together like a puzzle, but maybe their sharp edges fitting together is all that matters.

It’s better this way, she says in her head again, and she realizes how much she means that as she glances around the table at these people-- these friends-- as they all seem to come to the understanding that they’re all more alike than they thought.

Quite a crew. An heiress disinherited who can’t even trust her own memory. A paladin cast down from her temple by the corrupt. A runaway noble who resents the society that never let her family be a family. An exile miraculously alive despite her infection with an otherworldly disease. An assassin haunted by the ghosts of her past and the demon she thinks caused it. A wandering musician who claims nothing bad worth mentioning has ever happened to him. And her.

Journey. The tiefling cleric with her waterlogged prayer book she doesn’t know a single passage of, who hears the call of the waves, who talked to a god in her dreams, who keeps moving because if she stops moving she doesn’t know what she’ll do-- if without the constant movement the carefully constructed compartments she’s built inside her mind will break down if she’s left to dwell on them.

Her perception of herself has always been shaky at best, with nobody to solidify it for her, but--

But with these people, she feels like less of a ghost, something left over from something greater, more real. She feels like a real person.

And she isn’t a mind reader, but she wonders if they all feel the same, deep down.

“So like, this means y’all can’t be mad at me,” Ari declares, and the whole table groans.

Ah, Journey thinks with amusement. Maybe all of them haven’t been too changed by this situation after all. Perhaps that’s for the best. All they needed was an understanding of each other, in the end, and they have that now.

And Ari. Journey twirls a piece of white hair between her fingers as Ari keeps talking in her lap, not even noticing. Nearly everyone else had become annoyed with the Elven woman at some point during this partnership but… but not Journey. And maybe she’s just agreeable. She knows she’s rather neutral on most things, that it takes a lot to bother her. But she doesn’t think it’s just that. She’s patient with Ari. She listens. Ari talks a lot, of course, so it’s hard not to listen to her, but Journey listens.

Not just to her words, but to everything between them. She never would’ve guessed the full extent to Ari’kithel’s concerns regarding her memories, but she knew Ari was lonely. She thinks maybe she knew Ari was lonely more than Ari knew for a while, at least until recently.

She’s not sure why she listens to Ari as much as she does, why she pays so much attention to her. She’d been the one who started this all for her, in a way. This… opening up thing. They’d all been a muddle of faces, names she didn’t recall.

And then Ari’kithel and her swirling cloak and her strange machine that sounds like thunder had leapt up on a table and Journey hadn’t been able to stop listening.

Not just to Ari. To all of them. She knows things about them now. Not just the basics, but silly things. She knows Adalynn has reading glasses she only wears sometimes. Ophelia fiddles with her braids when she’s nervous. Ari’s cloak billows by itself, because of course it does. Elanora likes kids, but she likes cats even more. Ven bites her lip when she starts thinking really hard. Mason’s favorite colors are yellow and green.

She thinks about what Tomas said to her and sighs. Well, she ended up doing what they asked after all, didn’t she?

She trusts these… friends. She likes them.