2019-09-16 - Este Es Un Puerto/This Is A Port

Out near the abandoned sawmill, the treeline thins out along the border of chainlink fence, and gives way to a vertitable field of waist-high indian grass dotted with prairie dropseed. This evening, as the last vestiges of light bleed toward the horizon, the sound of a high powered rifle being discharged can be heard at regular intervals. The crack of each shot is accompanied, more often than not, by the sound of glass splintering. Guy in a baseball cap, dark tee shirt and jeans, battered hiking boots might or might not be visible deep in the treeline, near the path that cuts toward the chainlink fence, with a mean-looking rifle steadied against his shoulder as he sights downrange. His truck is certainly not hard to spot, being the only vehicle parked in the lot, and about as mud-spattered as his boots.

Itzhak shouldn't be doing what he's doing alone. He almost can't help it; he woke up this morning with a siren's song in his head, a metaphysical flea in his ear, and a sensation like he's desperately horny lurking around the base of his spine. He should have made Roen or Julia or someone come with him to track this feeling down. Especially so when he let his head turn towards the source and found his magnificent nose pointing towards the old sawmill.

A thin spot in the border between the worlds. Itzhak should have asked someone to come with him, but he didn't.

He didn't pull right up to the parking lot, instead leaving the car (Roen's borrowed Subaru) on the shoulder a quarter mile down. Why he did this, he's not that sure, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. When he gets out and hears the crack of a rifle, he knows why he did it. So he's hiked up the road, following the sound of the rifle. The hair on the back of his neck is prickling; please don't shoot me, whoever's firing that thing. He whistles loud and sharp to alert the rifleman to his presence, before he knows who it is.

The air temperature drops significantly within the shade of those conifers and old growth cedars. The day's muggy heat bleeds away quickly, mingling with the scent of a fresh rain, and the tang of cholophyll, and loamy earth turned underfoot. The rifle's crack, crack, crack pauses once that whistle's heard, and the reverberation from the last shot shudders through the trees, scattering a cluster of starlings from a high-up bough.

The cha-clack of the rifle's slide being racked is heard next, and then the sound of movement. Boots snapping the grass, sliver of diffuse light glancing off the shoulder of the tallish, darkly dressed man, who comes into view at the trailhead momentarily. The rifle's raised like he's ready and willing to put a round in the interloper if need be, and the brim of his hat's lowered, making him perhaps not immediately recognisable. Looks familiar, though. "Who's there?" Voice is unmistakeable; Mexican trash, thin veneer of Southern something-or-other over top.

"Rosencrantz." Itzhak has an urge to show his hands to the armed cop, and out of orneriness, doesn't. He clambers up towards Ruiz, eyeing him scathingly. "You wanna take a shot at me? I've kinda been wondering if I can stop a bullet. Bet I can do it." Antagonizing said armed cop is his first instinct, so why not go with it?

Two more steps, until he's fully in view of the taller, leaner, ornery..er mechanic currently trying to rile him up. His movement is prowlish and efficient, like the hunter of people he is. "Rosencrantz," repeats the off duty cop. Very off duty, if his attire's any indication. There's a sidearm holstered at his ribs, in addition to the H&K 416 assault rifle he's got trained on Itzhak at the moment. Then the safety's thumbed on, and he swings the weapon low, letting its strap catch across his shoulders. "No." He doesn't want to take a shot at him? Or he doesn't want to clean up the mess, if Itzhak's wrong? "What the fuck are you doing out here?"

Despite the wiseassery, Itzhak's shoulders loosen a little when Ruiz swings the muzzle of that nasty thing away from him. Maybe he could stop a bullet. But many, many bullets? Probably not. "I'm goin' on a fucking picnic." The words are out before he even knows he means to say them, and he rolls his eyes at himself. "Yeah, so, what can I say, seeing you heavily armed gets me going. I heard something out here." He gestures to the area around them.

"I'll bet you are." Going on a fucking picnic. The smart assed replies keep coming, though they mostly seem to roll off of de la Vega, tonight. Expression on his face suggests there might be a limit to that. Itzhak gets a long look, down then up with his eyes. "You want to tell me the real reason you're out here?" Another step closer, muffled thump of his boot as he hops down the small incline where the trail winds up and around a massive cedar whose roots thrust up and out of the ground, gnarled and weathered and well-trodden.

"I just told you. I heard something." Itzhak's tone ratchets up a notch. He points at his own temple, then twirls his finger in an encompassing gesture. "Something probably at the mill. The border gets thin there. It's biting my ass." His gaze drifts off Ruiz, towards the mill. "You can't hear it? Sounds like a musical saw."

Silence for a long moment as the Mexican considers that, dark eyes flicking away from Itzhak as he follows the other man's gaze toward the abandoned mill. It's barely distinguishable beyond the treeline and the chain link fence, gone fallow in a field of scrub grass. He squints for a moment like he's trying to make out something faint, and in the periphery of his vision. Then grunts an assent at length. "Si." The rifle's strap is hitched, and he looks back to the mechanic. "Ir. Seguiré."

"I'm gonna start talking Yiddish at you, see how you like it," Itzhak grouses. He walks past Ruiz, headed for the mill. First, he visits the huge cedar, squinting up at it and setting a hand on its shaggy bark. "Hang in there," he tells it in an undertone, pats it, and keeps going. That Ruiz is following him with a mulcher of a weapon has his shoulder blades drawn together, his gait stiffened out of its usual rolling saunter.

Itzhak's treated to a sudden, dimpled grin from the cop when he grumbles something about spouting Yiddish. No comment on that; he does a brief scan of the area as if to make sure the guy didn't bring a friend and set some sort of trap for him, then hitches his rifle's strap and trudges off after him. "You're talking to the trees," he points out, as if that hadn't been obvious. He's a couple of paces behind, his own gait a stalking prowl, like a predator with the scent of prey.

"They don't talk back though. Not like they do to Roen." Itzhak picks his way down the trail to the mill. "Ain't it great that we can have a perfectly normal fucking conversation about talking to trees?" His tone is sour. Seems he didn't bring anybody. No friend. No backup. He just headed out into the haunted woods following his crooked nose, like any brujo. Now he's letting Ruiz follow him around with an assault rifle.

"So Roen talks to trees, and they talk back. Esto es bueno saberlo." Ruiz continues to sound amused about this, and ducks his head as they pass under a low-hanging bough of aspen leaves, booted feet keeping their steady rhythm. "Stop acting like I'm going to shoot you in the back of the head and dump your body in the water." His tonguetip traces the spot below his lower lip, where his beard begins. "If I was going to shoot you, Rosencrantz, you'd be facing me. And you'd know it was coming."

"Oh, well, 'scuse the shit outta me. Not all of us were in the Marines or gangs or whatevah." Itzhak just runs his mouth like a motor he's got to burn in. Poke poke poke poke poke. He slows down, suddenly, just as they reach the chain link fence. "...Sorry about the gangs part," he mutters. Then he slips through the hole torn in the fence, ducking under the top pole.

He doesn't say a blessed word until they're through the fence. The man's not a delicate creature, nor a lanky one, so it takes a bit more finagling to work his bulkier frame through. "I can't help but feel like you've got something to.." grunt "..say to me." He loses his baseball cap, and bends to catch it with his fingers without breaking stride. The grass on the other side of the fence is tall, and tipped with spikelets of seed that bend and sway with the breeze. Never mind that the gangs comment had him bristling slightly, largely unseen unless Itzhak happened to glance back.

Itzhak didn't look back. Possibly because he suspected he might take a fist to the nose if he did.

Waiting for Ruiz to figure out his situation, Itzhak looks up at the silent sawmill, and winces, hand going to his ear. "I hear ya, already," he mutters. Then he does look back, and smirks unpleasantly. "Yeah, it turns out, I do got something to say to you. What a lucky coincidink that you're out here taking out all that aggression and I run into you, huh?"

Well, it's not a completely unreasonable assumption. The guy looks like a brute, acts like a brute, talks like a brute.. it's not too hard to draw some conclusions from that.

He's drawn to a halt at the very edges of Itzhak's personal space, when the other man turns back to him with that mean smirk. It's met with a slight curve at the corners of his mouth, and an even slighter slanting of his eyes; his features are abstracted under the shadow thrown by his cap's brim, thumb hooked under the rifle's strap as he regards the mechanic evenly. His ink looks slightly faded against skin that's darkened significantly after the summer they've had. "You want me to hit you, Rosencrantz, you just say the word." His voice is a low, smoke-roughened growl, right on the edge between hunger and irritation.

Itzhak doesn't give way, letting Ruiz stay right there just a smidge too close. "Mm. Not today." The smirk gives way to something more sincere, if not quite a smile. "Not till Billy's in the ground. That's what I wanna say to you." He's wound up, almost quivering. Whatever's singing in his ear, plus Ruiz's everything, has quite an effect on him, long tall drink of tattoos and kvetching that he is. "Neither of us want that to go wrong. Yeah?"

Not today. Of all the things he expected the guy to say, that wasn't it. His dark eyes hold Itzhak's gaze, steady and unflinching. The tension remains curled through him for a moment or two more, then slowly unwinds. He sniffs sharply, flicks his eyes away and across the field of grass, toward that old sawmill lying in disrepair. Then back to that tall drink of tattoos and kvetching. "Si," is his curt reply, with a little dip of his chin. "Come on, then." He gazes at Ithak a beat longer, then prowls on ahead, and gives him his back this time. A show of trust? Maybe.

Itzhak forces himself to hold Ruiz's gaze for one beat. Two. He bites back the sigh of relief when the other man finally, flippin' finally, turns away, and rubs his eyes. When he can see again, he has a lovely sight to come back to in Ruiz's backside. One of Itzhak's talkative eyebrows quirks upwards. Then he follows him.

As they walk closer to the buildings, among long-moldering piles of cut planks, Itzhak sucks in a breath and says frantically, "Here! Right here, right here." He pats at the air, then draws his hand down, perfectly vertical, like he's miming having found a wall. Tiny glints of light pop into being under his fingertips.

Ruiz has no affinity whatsoever for the veil and its workings, though perhaps he can taste something in the air here. The charge of it, like the moments before a thunderstorm begins, thick with static. He moves in closer to the spot that Itzhak's found, and follows the trail of his fingers, watching as they're illuminated by arcs of light that fizzle out into nothing. "Qué diablos.. how did you do that?" He tries to do the same, after tugging off his cap so he can see better what he's doing.

Itzhak laughs softly, smiling. His entire narrow, permanently aggravated face changes when he does. He runs his hand slowly up and down the air, throwing sparks like a chain dragging on a road. "Wish I could explain it to you. To you, or anybody. There's nobody else as strong as me that I ever known. A couple other people, they're close. But I'm the only one who's so strong. The thin spots call to me. They beg me to open 'em. Everyone tells me I shouldn't." Itzhak's voice drops to a hoarse, intense growl. "But God didn't give me this song so I could pretend I didn't hear it."

He reaches to grab Ruiz's wrist, his expression alight, his eyes unfocused, staring right through the man. He slaps Ruiz's hand atop his own, then pushes. "Feel it!" Shoving their paired hands, he guides Ruiz to feel what he feels: a springy, resistant, thick and slippery something that fizzes and hisses against the skin.

Ruiz may just be distracted enough by that shift, the sudden warmth that blooms in the other man's taut, agitated mien, as to not have time to pull his hand back when it's reached for. Or maybe it's the way the veil reacts to Itzhak; light shifting and jumping and flaring like the corona of a trapped star. Reaching for, but not burning him.

He resists at first. He isn't someone who takes kindly to being touched without his permission, without his request, and Itzhak can feel the muscle and tendons bunching up under his fingers. No, is his first thought, his first impulse. "Don't-" he starts to say, until he feels it. That something, he feels it. Tastes it. Just at the very periphery of his senses, maddeningly out of reach. And it prompts a sudden, and almost vicious response: a surging of his mind against Itzhak's, teeth and claws and white hot rage and hunger. As if this is the only way he truly knows how to experience what the other man is trying to show him. By joining with him, whether he asked for it or not.

Itzhak's mind opens like origami under Ruiz. Exactly like origami--a thousand thousand folds blooming outwards to reveal fractal complexities. Infinite surface area is tucked into highly-organized forms. He has only a little strength to reach out to others, no ability to read objects or control his own bioelectrical field (but he's seen others do such things and he wants to, oh how he wants to!), yet that intellect is a vasty deep. Maybe it's fortunate for all involved that his strength is psychokinesis.

He lets out a desperate gasp-groan as Ruiz plunges into his mind, shudders hard. Ruiz is absolutely overwhelming, and Itzhak likes it. Likes it way too much. He can't even form a word to curse at him, just surges back at him with ferocious energy. And the way he perceives the Veil is like he's found a way to stand parallel to the surface of the ocean. He can dip his hand in, or jump. He can hold his breath damn near forever. He knows They can taste him in the water, and They come nosing around like sharks, but rather than avoid the prospect like a sane man would, he dares them to bite.

Complexity and simplicity; yet even in that animalistic simplicity, there is complexity too. Ruiz's mind is a snarling, ferocious thing when unleashed. And one thing may become glaringly obvious; that it is always, always leashed. Held back and subdued by his equally formidable self-control. That hunger is at first a slavering, snarling thing, and then a skulking thing; bright eyes and long claws and warm, oh so very warm. The flame that pulls moths in and burns them up.

<<This is incredible>> is the voice in Itzhak's mind. Clear and steady, with no trace of his accent or his stumbling over certain words. <<You are incredible. That you can do this. Show me. Show me more.>>

Itzhak's breathing hard, partly using Ruiz as a brace to keep his feet. Ruiz's mental connection isn't anything like Roen's or Alexander's. They're gentle with him. Ruiz just barged on in and set everything on fire. Yet Itzhak isn't complaining! He's admiring the long-clawed beast, basking in its beauty, in the sense of its hunger. Is he afraid of it? Terrified. And luring. Come on out where I can see you, handsome.

Still no words--Ruiz has knocked them right out of him--but at the request, he grins, panting. His hand pushes Ruiz's. The border parts, thick and yielding. Itzhak curls his fingers and pulls and...there is the Other Side, Over There, the Veil, visible through the window he opens. The sawmill is in operation, but it's backwards. Men feed wooden planks through the great saw and it knits them together to give birth to trees. The men carry the trees out from the mill and tenderly plant them, easing their roots into the loam. Then they scurry away and leave the cedars quietly standing alone.

There is nothing of gentleness, nothing of tenderness in Ruiz. There is brokenness, there is an inferno of blazing grief that wreaths the bestial apparition of his mind like white hot flame; the scent of ozone where it's traveled, and in the path it's seared, those fractals re-emerge in different, wondrous, impossible shapes.

His hand doesn't resist, this time, when pushed. He sees what Itzhak sees, as if he had his Sight for such things. He sees the workers making trees out of wood, and his physical body shudders involuntarily. His fingers curl, as if to draw back the curtain, as if to see more. <<Did you dream this? It's..>> Beautiful. The thought slips free with more ease than the word would ever leave his mouth; it suffuses him, this wonderment for what he's seeing. For the mind that's letting him see it.

<<I dreamed it.>> Itzhak's mental voice is a violin. <<I dreamed it and it called me to come see it. Or maybe it was already doing this and I saw it in my dream.>> Almost the same thing. He dreams, and the Veil responds. The Veil shifts, and he dreams.

Past the portal he's opened, men have begun dismantling the sawmill, scrambling around with tools. Teams of horses drag parts of the machinery away. Trees spring from the ground like breaching whales as the building is eaten down.

<<I think...>> Itzhak's struggling for words still. He leans into Ruiz, warm and thin. <<I think it wanted me to show you.>>

That violin's music calms the wolf, by fits and starts. Sings to it, calls to it. Maybe always has. <<It's beautiful>> whispered again; when that slavering beast speaks, there's none of the fury and none of that screaming, white hot flame. As if a river runs through all that rage, and that river is what speaks with their minds thusly linked. <<It's so beautiful. It's like nothing I have ever seen. Thank you.>> That thank you is heartfelt, resonating through the link itself; and his physical body does not shy away from that leaning contact. Sturdy, like a port in a storm, even as his mind is completely overwhelmed with what he's seeing. Who's crying? Definitely not the big bad cop.

Itzhak's mental violin sings out a little ripple, concerned or alarmed or just awestruck. Is Ruiz weeping? Did he cause that? That's real magic. That's something They can't ever understand. They only know how to make people hurt. Who's the greater sorcerer now? A thing that's so frightened it can't even take a shape of its own, or Itzhak, who can show Ruiz's ferocious soul something so beautiful that he weeps?

<<I cried too,>> his strings whisper. <<When I went across. When I saw how it can be, Over There. Not all of it's ugly. Not all of it's bad. There's this, too. There's always this.>>

He's sweating with the strain, but he doesn't want to stop. He doesn't! There's so much he doesn't understand, and seeing things through Ruiz is a whole new way he could look at them. Still. He lets the window go, spreading his fingers, closing the lips of the space together. Then his mind brushes Ruiz's, gratitude for gratitude, and lets go. He staggers, dizzy, winding up with his hands braced on his knees, sheened with sweat and panting for air.

The mental link, too, is severed as the fabric that had been tugged aside is sewn back together again. When that last stitch goes into place, and the sight of those tall cedars with their boughs lifted to the sky is finally obscured, his mind withdraws with a jarring suddenness that matches the way it had entered. The heat of him disentangles itself from Itzhak's, tiny fractals bursting free as the claws retract and the fire's smothered. As if, over the course of that contact, something in Ruiz's mind had taken root. And perhaps some trace of it is left behind, yet.

Ruiz drops back against the fence, with a clatter of the chain links and heave of his breath. His eyes close for a moment, heart galloping an impossible rhythm, like he's just run a marathon. He doesn't quite look at Itzhak, and doesn't seem to trust himself to speak right away; it's a silence that settles between them both, disturbed only by the soft patter of rain, and the flitting of insects through the sawgrass.

Itzhak's black curls grow dewy with the light rain, where they're not sticking to his face. He swipes a hand across his forehead to shove the sticking tendrils back. He doesn't trust himself to say anything either. What good are words after something like that, anyway?

If a few glinting fractals were carried off on Ruiz's talons, something of the white-hot fire is banked in Itzhak's mind now, too. He feels it, isn't sure what to make of it. Then again, he doesn't have to decide right now. He can let it sleep, like one of Roen's seeds, and grow or not grow in its own time.

Slowly he manages to straighten up, his ribcage heaving. He licks his lips. Swallows. Can't think of anything to say. Nothing useful, at least. Only a bunch of stuff that would do neither him nor Ruiz any good. Out of all the awkward things that happen to him, this might be the awkwardest.

Well, Javier is good at awkward. He excels at it, in fact, presumably much to his chagrin. There's no reaction from him at the rain that's started up, the skew of his own messy curls (that could use a cut), or the dark splotches that are starting to glue tee shirt to skin. He's still lost in what happened, reaching and yearning for it like an interrupted dream. Struggling, even now, to remember the details as they become hazy and ill-defined and the cedars, reaching for the sky, once upon a time an old growth forest cut down to build the sawmill, lumber from trees from seeds from trees from lumber carried out into the field and planted.

There's a dull thump as the rifle he'd been carrying is allowed to slide off his shoulder, stock hitting the ground. He'd safetied the thing, thankfully.

Moments after that, he seems to trust himself to speak. His voice is low, that warm, sandpapery murmur rough-edged with smoke, "A veces me levanto temprano e incluso mi alma está mojada. A lo lejos el mar suena y resuena. Este es un puerto." Poetry, if Itzhak's familiar. From perhaps the most unlikely source. "I should go," is what follows close on the heels of it, another sharp sniff of his nose, ink-dark eyes seeking the mechanic's.

Itzhak glances over, eyebrows tipped upwards in yearning. His clear hazel eyes land on Ruiz's and don't flinch away. For a second, at least. He clears his throat, drops his gaze to something safer and less stimulating, like Ruiz's chest. "Yeah. Uh. Yeah. I'll. Me too. In a minute."

The fading echo of the link lets him understand the poem, and he flushes red, and looks all the way away.

The surly Mexican, on the other hand, is not shy in the slightest. Nothing in him speaks to being abashed by his scrutiny of the younger man, or anything resembling shame. He holds those hazel eyes for as long as he's given them, and then blows an agitated-sounding breath out his nose when Itzhak's gaze is relinquished. The rain falls, and he runs inked fingers through his hair and drags his palm across his bearded cheek, lower lip pulled back over his teeth briefly as his hand pulls away.

Then he turns and reaches for his rifle, hand around the forestock, strap pulled over his shoulder again. There's something he wants to say, but he seems to settle for, "You'll be all right?" Getting out on his own, he probably means.

Itzhak nods rapidly, closing his eyes, pressing his knuckles into them. He's brick red. "Yeah. I'll be fine. Be careful, okay?" He looks at Ruiz again, unsteadily. "They might come sniffing around for a bite."

There's nothing for a time. Just the rain whispering in the canopy, painting the sawgrass, making it weep. Ruiz almost reaches for the other man, almost touches him. But seems to change his mind on that, too, at the last second. So there's only the sound of him wading back through the grass and ducking through the hole in the fence, boots heavy on the trail as he prowls back off the way they came.

People swear they've seen wolves in these woods. Teeth and claws, fearsome things.