OPEN | Ride It by Regard on blast

[aurable]

CHARACTERS: Drift and YOU
LOCATION: Simulation Room
DATE: Late April
CONTENT: Driving lessons! + closed starters
WARNINGS: TBD

SIMULATION ROOM

The important thing to remember is to take things slow. And ask me questions as we're going through this. Keep your left foot on the brake pedal at all times until you're ready to move.

[ Drift 'sat' in the passenger's seat where he and his student were parked in the simulation room. The simulation itself was nothing ostentatious or potentially distracting. They were idling in the middle of a nondescript parking lot in the middle of a forested area on a bright, sunny day. It was the sort of place you could find anywhere in middle America near a big box store, only without the store or any visible buildings. Drift wanted to keep things simple and remove the stimuli for dumb stunts. ]

The first thing is to keep both hands on the wheel until you're ready to shift gears. I'm automatic, thankfully. Think of a twelve-hour clock and put your hands at three and ten o'clock. [ A sigh erupts from Drift if the person receiving those instructions crosses their arms at the wrist to be cheeky. ] Alright, but with the corresponding hands — don't get smart.

Before we drive, you'll see two levers between us — the gear shift and the emergency brake. I want you to tell me which you think is which.

[ Hopefully, this wouldn't be too long of a day and Drift's transmission stays in tact. ]

SUNLIGHT ROOM closed to Yennefer

[ There wasn't much sun in the sunlight room. The artificial sky was a dying red ember splotched in the bruised purple of an early evening winding down into twilight. This late into the season, the full verdant green of the meadow had returned, now a carpet of deep blue in the dying light.

Drift hadn't wanted to meet Yennefer during the height of the illusory afternoon. One last means of him cleaving to the mask he had been hiding behind. It was an idea that was ridiculous once he sat down and thought about it. What Drift hadn't been a secret, or even a well-kept one if he had been. A few of the others had found out embarrassingly late into his time here that the man they knew was only a disguise because he tended to isolate himself out of some misguided need not to be a burden.

— And then the situation with Yennefer had turned into a uniquely well-timed mess. Drift hadn't intended to keep anything from her after that night, just as she hadn't expected naked honesty after one encounter. Compounded by the last mission, where they were out of contact through most of it, all she had to go on was a few alarming and understandably hard to believe text exchanges.

Activating his device, Drift sends out one more text — asking Yennefer to meet him in the sunlight room for the truth as promised. Then 'he' sat on the glossy white hood of the vehicle parked in the meadow just off the brook, half concealed in the grass like a crouching predator. There was enough daylight to spare, and the white sheen of this form could be spotted a mile away. ]

WILDCARED

( please feel free to hmu on pm or bretons if you want to write/receive a starter of running into drift anywhere around the station and don't feel like we need pre-existing CR! )

Comments

[choicely]

[ She hadn't sought his sympathy in the telling of it — in fact, she'd almost prefer it better if he didn't feel compelled to apologize, but she acknowledges that sometimes others offer something in the way of their own regrets when they have little else to extend by contrast.

Still, the compliment is what settles in her alongside the warmth of the vodka — nothing meaningless, even if it might not linger with her beyond tonight unless she has cause to reflect back on this conversation again.

When he tilts back, placing his head in recline against the top of the mattress, she moves correspondingly, positioning herself to drape length-wise along her side with one elbow keeping herself propped upward, the other hand maintaining its clutch on the neck of the bottle. It means that as the bed descends beneath his added weight, she nearly ends up with his head tucked against her thighs, and it leaves her glancing at the top of him, catching a glimpse of the narrow dart of his nose. ]

When other parts were not my say to lose. [ It's as far as she'll tread into admitting the rest of it, and another punctuating swig of the bottle might serve as further indication of that, but then she settles again, pillowing her cheek in her other hand. ]

Sometimes choice is all we have, when the rest of it has been taken from us.

[aurable]

[ Drift wasn't entirely sure if he was even being sympathetic or his cup runneth over with an excess of self-pity enough to share. He knows both weren't mutually exclusive, but the lines blurred. Yennefer put an end to that, however. Her gulping down another mouthful of vodka was the abrupt halt on the matter as effective as any period at the end of a sentence. ]

We're all parts in the end. [ Soon as Drift said that, a grimace pinched his expression like something rotten crawled up his nose — that sounded more profound and significantly less slurred in his head. Face half-buried in the comforter. He retreats until one luminescent blue eye crests over the rumbled fabric. He looked up at Yennefer and thought how her face cradled in her hand pushed on her cheek, making her look her deceptively younger and more vulnerable. ]

Thank you for indulging me. [ He said, voice muffled. ]

[choicely]

[ It isn't callous, but it's definitive enough that it serves to sober her to an extent — thinking about something that had been a firm part of her, only to be taken away so that she could look as conventionally beautiful as anyone else from the exterior, painfully dispensing with the crooked spine and uneven features that had made her the subject of scorn and rejection. In the end, it had just been one part traded for others, had it not? But it was that part from which her choice had been taken from her, a choice she had fought in vain to retrieve by any means necessary.

His face, half-hidden, draws her back to the present moment, and she makes an attempt to straighten her weight only to find herself tipping in toward where his head makes the bed dip. Ultimately she doesn't fight it, rolling over until she's stretched out on her stomach, chin resting on the back of a hand so that her head is directly in front of his own and that single eye now visible. ]

You're the one who had drinks to share. [ She hoists the bottle up in her other hand, the contents audibly sloshing around, but her eyes don't leave his face. ] Made some of the soul-baring almost worth it.