@refuged : i'm not up late. i'm up early.
no sleep. just one long scream unfurling its way inside his head, a note that hums at a particular pitch every single day of his life. ravi knows: he'll die hearing that tone. he could end up a hundred lives from now, a different person, on the verge of stripping away every single thing binding him to this plane, and the sound would still be there.
so in that context, maybe not being able to sleep makes sense. what other option is there?
it's that impulse that makes him wander the edges of the settlement at night. he knows better than to leave it. out in the mojave are a thousand things that could kill you without blinking twice. deathclaw territory isn't close, but it isn't precisely far, either, and he's more comfortable dealing with the kind of threats made by raiders and rich men who think that nothing can touch them. those are understandable. so he walks instead, pacing sometimes the length of the tiny space he vaguely calls his own, and sometimes further, when that cage is too small.
he's seen mari do the same thing too, this pacing, the inability to rest. but when he sees this, he keeps to himself. he knows exactly where he stands in a place like this.
after all, he does what he does. he digs ditches. he builds structures out of corrugated metal and scrap. he works hard because it's what he's done for his whole life, and because his hands don't feel the impacts in the same ways they used to. layers of scarring will do that.
where he stands is here, opposite her, watching the way that she moves through the world and waiting until it turns into the blade of a knife cutting through. above them, a thousand stars peer down at them like bugs crawling across the bomb-scorched southwest, and every god that might have intervened directly is long gone. there's only what people make of themselves, and what he makes of mari is—unknown.
she's not like shakti. not like singh. but that doesn't mean he trusts her. she doesn't let go of anything. she hovers. she watches. and she doesn't seem to particularly like him, not that he's aiming for her to like him. other people are who he's more worried about. how they talk about her. how they elevate her. what that might mean.
because all things topple. this, if nothing else, he knows well.
"i don't think it really makes a difference around the twenty-four hour mark without sleep whether you're up early or late." there's no fire in his voice. really, his tone hasn't raised above conversational since he first arrived here. better to be a quiet-voiced ghost than a person whose body can be battered and broken. "i'm not judging anything here. i'm awake too."
