#tomas 002

The pizza lands between them in the corner booth and she watches the server run the round knife across it, four times, her eyes track the spinning blade and then, when it's done, she lets her eyes lift up to the person across the table.

He's persistent, she has to give him that.

Tressa takes a deep breath - she's going to regret this, somehow, she knows it. But she's also scared. It's not every day you get the inside story on what one of her patients in the morgue feels like - mostly because they're generally unable to feel like anything. If something happens to her again, it's likely less likely that she escapes. She wants somebody who might be able to get word out in that case - to Jude, to Cordelia. Spitfully, maybe to everybody. But it also means playing a little bit of ball - a little bit of his game.

"Alright, so. Tomás. Ground rules. You start."

Lily emerged from the jungle closer to the farm than when she’d left. She’d gone early in the morning with her spear and a basket on her back, and now the sun was past the midpoint in the sky and her hands were stained by the soil she’d dug through.

It had been an interesting experience, digging for tubers while earth-attuned. It’d been easier, for one, and she felt a little more solid when she was bent closer to the ground. Eventually she’d been able to move the ground in shifting pieces, which had made revealing the tubers much easier, though it was still slow going.

Maybe she could get used to this. Maybe. Once she found a pair of shoes that would fit her, now that she actually had need of them.

She didn’t see Tomas on the farm, or Libby, which was not a surprise but still a relief, after all that had happened on the Kimiko trip. Hopefully Libby was off doing other things and Tomas was alone.

Taking a breath, Lily went up to their new house and knocked on the door, stepping back to show off her basket full of sweet potatoes and taro and cassava. She made sure to smile.

“Morning, Tomas! I brought some presents!”

Toni would not be described as a organized person, not by herself and certainly not by outside observers.

She tumbled in and out of spaces on a whim and with as much dust up as she could manage. Still, Tomas occupied a compartmentalized part of her brain. He was a man so separate and strange from her former life she could not imagine any part of the life she knew touching him. Unlike Padre who was foreign but fell neatly into her old understanding of holy man, or Nolia who’s life felt out of reach but knowable and warmly familiar, Tomas was a separate sort of creature.

A man of learning who got his hands dirty, and tried to eschew so many of the inbuilt presumptions and benefits typically afforded men with positions of authority. Though she would not use the term eschew, she knew other men, many men, might have taken advantage of were they given the same the same responsibility Esther thrust upon Tomas. That he had not made him a curiosity to Toni, then a separate space inside her head for Tomas shaped problems and knowledge.

That she could ever tumble in one of these times and see an expression on his face so horribly familiar was unthinkable. But there it was, that dead eyed stare of young men who’d been through something so horrible they made space in their own heads to be somewhere else and separate for a time. Shattered something for her. Her frown deepened, face wrinkling and drawing lines in the patina of grime on her face as she stomped on over to the grown man gazing over young corn stalks.

“No way. Not having doing. No how. You cannot tell me fer’ one hollowed second the Tommy I know’d jus’ take a look at a boy with the same far off an away stare you got on and he’d jus’ be fine with throwing ya’ into a work day.” She shook her head, vehement in her objections. “No sir, he’d be insistent. Now you come with me we’ll get you what for, one of them talking parties what make a person feel better, or a laying on of hands…”

It wasn’t a long swim over to the jag, probably not more than half a mile, which was doable, but by the end of it Tamyra was definitely slowing down. Living on the island there was no way people didn’t develop a high level of endurance, but swimming wasn’t something she often did. She only really came over to the jag every couple of months, when she truly was completely and utterly fed up with everyone and needed silence and the knowledge that she was far enough from everyone else on the island.

And since most people on Meridium thought similarly, this was the best choice for their experiments, too. It had the highest chance of nobody walking in on them in the middle of possibly doing the worst of the things they could be trying out, and neither of them wanted that.

Once they reached the shore, they waited a bit in the sun to dry themselves at least somewhat, and then moved inward - it was heavily rock-filled area, but it wasn’t too bad of a situation since they didn’t move upward towards the top of the entire formation, instead moving sideways until they found a relatively nice clearing with good enough coverage that nobody on the island could see them from the distance either.

“Alright, I think we’ve found the winner spot,” Tamyra said opening her arms as she slowed down and looked around, inspecting things. “There are a couple of rocks over there if you ever want a jump start to flying, enough space to move about for whatever we want to do, and if we have anything we’d want to leave here so we wouldn’t have to carry it with us constantly, I think we can find a plce for that, too.”