returnjourneylogs | BACKSTORY: ANOTHER BORDER

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BACKSTORY: ANOTHER BORDER

"Slowly, painfully, I realized what I had been reading from the very first words of his journal. My husband had had an inner life that went beyond his gregarious exterior, and if I had known enough to let him inside my guard, I might have understood this fact. Except I hadn't, of course. I had let tidal pools and fungi that could devour plastic inside my guard, but not him. Of all the aspects of the journal, this ate at me the most. He had created his share of our problems―by pushing me too hard, by wanting too much, by trying to see something in me that didn’t exist. But I could have met him partway and retained my sovereignty. And now it was too late."
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

Introduction

March 23rd – March 31st, 2022
Welcome to the backstory log for the "Another Border" simulation! Here, we play out big moments in our characters' AU histories. We've included a list of ideas below; feel free to experiment and figure out what feels right for your character's past and motivations. Consider what specific moments might have prompted them to venture into Area X!

This log is set before a simulation begins, to give players a head start on ironing out the specifics of their AUs. During this time, Peregrine life will continue as normal.

If you have any questions about the event, please ask here. You can familiarize yourself with simulation basics on our events page.

Ideas

Your first meeting with an important or influential person.
Doing something important for someone.
A time you really screwed someone else over.
A personal loss in your life.
An injury, illness, or similar struggle.
Domestic events: falling in love, getting married, building a home, having a child, navigating a change in a relationship, divorce.
Getting a new job or a promotion.
Discovering a passion.
An important religious or philosophical moment, a moral challenge.
An event that changed how you see the world for the better.
An event that changed how you see the world for the worse.
A sight you saw or place you visited that made you consider your place in the world.
A dark night of the soul.
Learning about the discovery of Area X.
Getting your Area X assignment.

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Everything is a blur. There's panic and fear and chaos, and words that sound a thousand miles away. What happened? Hell if anyone knows, no one can tell her anything with any amount of certainty. It has her terrified. A numbness and a shock as she's given condolences and apologies from strangers and no one knows if he's dead or lost but it's been weeks and there's an alarming amount of flowers piling up at her door and she has to purposely step around them to open it.

For a long moment, she just takes in the sight of William.

Halfway expects to hear her husband call down the hall, asking who's at the door.

There's just a silence that makes her want to smash the nearest vase of roses.

"William." Instead, the emotion escapes as relief as she wraps her arms around him, and she's surprisingly strong for some widow rattling around a stupidly lavish home like a ghost. She told herself she wouldn't cry on him, because the poor man has been through enough already, but there's a definite threat of tears when she lets him go and takes a step back so he can actually come inside. She sniffs, wipes her face just to be sure she's not crying, and nods.

"Please. Come in, it's..." Good to see him? "I'm glad you came."

What time, he'd said when she asked him to the house. Hours in advance he'd laid his clothes out on the bed: touched his shirt at the elbows, hooked a finger inside the collar. He'd turned his hands over, examined the veins at his wrists. Blue tending toward purple, the width of a penstroke.

Thin-skinned, Robbie had called him.

He traded the shirt out for a grey one in the back of a drawer. Threadbare and short-sleeved, the cuffs worn away as though they'd been nibbled at. Faded letters advertising the Florida lottery. His awareness of time came and went: to be safe he drove to her house and waited in his car. Rang the doorbell exactly on time.

She could have said three in the morning and he'd have done the same thing.

He looks gaunt, his posture rickety as an old chair. When she seizes him in her arms his eyes widen. He doesn't lean in or relax, but his hands find her waist, resting on either side as if to assure himself of her shape. She lets go and he follows her into the house.

The flowers strike him as both simplistic—bunched together in the crude orderliness of a child's drawing—and a kind of cruel joke, although nothing in Robbie had bloomed in the end. He wishes he could explain it to her, the neat lines of her house, brick slotted into brick. Why it makes him want to laugh.

“I don't know anything new. I mean, I don't remember.” He sounds more disturbed than apologetic. Frustrated. He brushes one of the rose blossoms with his fingertips, retreats into manners. “Thanks for having me.”

The time, his clothes, none of it really matters for Claire. Her own appearance isn't that of the woman she was: leggings, a loose and faded shirt, and an equally loose knitted sweater hang off her slender frame. No finely pressed dresses and obnoxiously ironed t-shirts, here. She can't remember the last time she ran a brush through her hair or stepped outside. It shows.

Claire watches William inspect the flowers with a sense of validation. Stupid, aren't they? she wants to remark, but he speaks up before she can find the words. Her arms cross around her middle, and she lets out a deep sigh that makes her shoulders heave.

"I didn't invite you over to interrogate you," she says. "I have questions, of course, but I just... I needed to see you. None of this feels real. I don't know why these flowers are here when it feels like the both of you are still--out there."

She motions at the door. But now Robbie is the one out there, status unknown, but the business ties and so-called friends seem ready to bury him.

Claire runs a hand through her hair and lets out another long breath.

"We didn't lose you, too. That would have been too much." Lost. Lost is the only word she really accepts.

He leans in to smell one of the bouquets—the scent faint, sickly. His eyes closed, his whole body somehow involved in the process. See you, she says, and instinctively he hides his face. “The air was heavy in there.”

He lifts his gaze to her. He'd emerged with more of a beard than he'd had in his life, stared himself down in the mirror as he scraped it away, terrified of what might be underneath. Now he studies her face, sees himself reflected in her eyes. Maybe she knows: the way she crosses her arms makes him think so. “Like—some people, you can almost hear when they're thinking. They're loud about it. Like that.” The frenzy of growth, the necessity of rot.

He pulls himself away from the flowers. Wonders how long she'll keep them once they've started to die. “He's not coming back.” He says it with quiet conviction. They're only a few feet apart but it feels like parallel dimensions, like if he tried to reach for her space would warp around them. “I don't know”—his gaze breaks off, his breath caught in his throat—“if I am either.”

Edited 2022-03-26 14:49 (UTC)

Claire's one of those people. A glass face, Robbie always said, because even when she struggled to mask her emotions, it was clear something was going on under the surface. Much like now when she watches William, wanting to both pulls him close and hold on for dear life while simultaneously wanting to grab him by the shoulders and shake him because how did it come to be like this? They're ruined.

William isn't the first to say Robbie isn't coming back, but hearing it from him does hurt in a new way. It's clear that it does, too--her already glassy eyes worsen, red around the edges, and the tip of her nose goes red as well. But she sniffles and holds it back, because she keeps reminding herself that no one knows anything for certain. As long as there's that, there's hope.

"You've been through something beyond imagining," Claire says gently. After a beat, her arms unfold so that she might touch a hand to his elbow. "You just need time. Let me help you."

She touches him; he lets her. He remembers a scab there, the wound messy, dripping black blood. The skin now is unbroken. He turns his arm over. As though offering it to her—its record, anyway, of lines and creases. Fine hairs like those on a flower's stem. “Time doesn't work that way.”

Suddenly he's conscious of the house as a house—their bedroom down the hall to the left. Their cold bed, flakes of Robbie's skin scattered in the sheets. Stray hairs on the pillows. His arm drops. The questions he wants to ask—how well did you know him, how long will you keep loving him—are like something out of the Shimmer, coalescing without his knowing. Ready to tear from him.

“We don't really talk,” he says, “do we.”

It sinks like a stone.

Robbie does the talking. Claire can keep up, of course, but William is Robbie's friend, first and foremost. Hers by proxy. And now that bridge of her husband is missing and this might be strange even if he were just out of town and not gone somewhere unknown. Moments alone with William were fleeting. Waiting for Robbie to pay the tab. Waiting for Robbie to come back from greeting that face he recognized from college at the restaurant.

No time for anything significant.

Now here they are.

"Not really," Claire agrees. "Are you planning on disappearing on me, William?"

Edited 2022-04-01 00:53 (UTC)

His gaze hones in on her, works over her face like a needle stuck in a groove. He opens his mouth, makes a few tremulous gestures at speech before he produces anything. “You never saw me. How can I disappear.”

His voice is soft but he holds her eyes defiantly. The man he was had been adept at setting slights aside. Had been crushed once or twice and smiled through it. Now he's angry in this new way, an anger inseparable from who he is. That beats at the heart of him.

"Always so perceptive," she says, and this whole ordeal has aged her twenty years and she doesn't raise her voice to yell. She sounds only tired. Looks tired, and merely stares back at him until she registers that they're close to the front door. The exit.

He can't leave yet.

It's a terrible conversation to have anyway, standing by the endless vases of flowers, the scent of roses still able to get through her perpetually stuffy nose.

"Stay for a coffee?" She offers. "Please."

It's like his body seizes up, only his eyes free to move. Is he perceptive? He'd never caught a hint of the world flourishing in the Shimmer, never looked at Robbie and saw what awaited him—self-authored destruction, beautiful and stark.

Though William's hand had been in it.

“Coffee,” he repeats, his voice still tight. He can't remember the last time he had coffee. His mind slow to conjure associations: work, cream. The catastrophe of a spill on a white shirt. What a fucking life. “Sure, Claire.”

She tries and fails to not look relieved. He's the easiest company, in some sick way, and there's silence only broken by their footsteps as she leads them to the kitchen, to the stools neat and tidy around the kitchen island, everything all metal and white and black. Clean and pristine, like a medical office despite shutting out the housekeepers. She used to love to clean. It's kept her busy.

There's a part of the endless counter space that's a coffee bar, and Claire sets it to brew, then turns to bring over the cream and sugar.

"What happens after this?" She asks.

“We drink it.” Hard to tell if he's joking; he sounds uncertain. He's chosen the farthest stool but his gaze hangs on her, his eyes wide. He touches nothing: hands in his lap, out of sight. He has no sense of the future, a future—no way into it. Why should events link up, why this implausible chain?

When she sets the coffee in front of him he peers at it—it looks black—and reaches for the cream, adding a splash and observing intently as it's absorbed into the coffee. Another splash. His brow is almost comically creased. The coffee begins to lighten—dirt to mud to sand. He puts the cream down, wipes his hand on his shirt.

From his pocket he pulls something held tight in his fist, the way a child might conceal a living, squirming thing. He opens his hand: in his palm is the head of a thistle, a shock of purple bursting from a spiked sheath of woven greens. To the touch, though, it's feathery—like running a finger along a bird's wing—and delicate.

He doesn't remember picking it. Doesn't know if it was meant to fly.

Maybe if the weight of this reality wasn't so heavy, she'd chalk that comment up to his humor. As it is, it just saddens her, and she sits--the stool beside his, needing to carefully angle her long legs so that her knees don't knock into him. Her coffee remains black and untouched as she faces him rather than the counter. He's like sand slipping through her fingers, and she almost says as much before his movements keep her quiet.

She's about to offer him a napkin when she looks to his hand to see a thistle. She's never seen a real thistle, come to think of it. Botanical books, silly Scottish romance shows. Engraved on Robbie's wedding band. He's so proud of his Scottish heritage, even if scant and distant and no one would look at him and think of Scotland.

"Where did this come from...?" Claire asks quietly, eyes flitting from William's face to the thistle and back again. She begins to reach out for it before thinking better of it and dropping her hand. Afraid.

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BACKSTORY: ANOTHER BORDER

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