Jiskastya

Penny in the Well (Jiskastya x Igraine)

This was one moment where Ethan welcomed every moment he had spent exploring these towns. Because, even as he began to run, the solution to his escape from a certain determined FBI Agent presented itself to him. He would have sworn if he had been willing to spare the breath. Instead, he committed himself to spouting a random, silent swear word off in his head every couple seconds. He was going to need to stall her nearly five minutes, if he planned on getting away cleanly.

Why, oh why, had he given her the certainty of being able to run again? But then, how was he to know that the first time she would run would be chasing after him?

This was also a moment where he was glad for the fact that he had not been sedentary for the past several weeks. Ethan was not out of shape. He had, after all, walked the fifty miles from Port Orchard to Port Townsend, and he had spent most of his days roaming around the city. Whether or not this was going to clear him for a five minute run would remain to be seen. He did have one advantage over the Agent, though. He didn't need to turn around to see her. If she started to speed up to try and catch him he could pick up the pace as well. When she slowed, he could slow, giving himself a moment to try and catch his breath.

If he had been in the city, it probably would have been remarkably easy to lose her. After all, a large city constantly had things happening, and a couple of lucky events would break her line of sight and allow him to slip away. And, once he was out of sight and paying attention, the chances of her finding him again might as well be zero. Port Townsend did not have that same blessing. It was a quiet town, and a place where the most traffic it ever saw was when one of the ferries came in. Ethan only had one chance, and if he messed it up he was going to get taken to jail. Whether or not that meant he would stay there was an entirely different matter. Busting out of jail was one of the most likely ways to get the whole of the FBI on his tail. But, if it wasn't for this strange, unfortunate agent who seemed to bring the worst luck for him with her, that might not be a problem.

There weren't many alleys in Port Townsend, but he used the few that were available to his advantage. Oftentimes, knocking over one thing was enough to set off a whole chain reaction of only somewhat related events. However, by the time he got into a position where he could set off enough of a chain reaction to lose her, Ethan was so out of breath that he could barely even stand upright. And his other plan was still in place. He stopped running, panting heavily, as the Agent had to work her way around the upended dumpster that had butted up against someone's car. As soon as she was clear, Ethan took off again, his breath somewhat more steady.

Four and a half minutes. He was almost out of time, but he was also almost to his destination. He pounded steadily up main street, past the shops that had become a familiar and almost welcoming sight to him, towards the dock where he spent many an afternoon watching the ferries. The ferries and the water. That was another thing he was grateful for. His meticulous study of the water was going to allow him to do something almost impossible.

On the far end of the dock a sudden gust of wind grabbed the hat of the security guard who was guarding the section of ramp that lead to the ferry when it was docked. He turned away, reaching out desperately for it, and Ethan quickly slipped by him, darting out towards the water. The water, and Kevin's ferry, which was just pulling away from its mooring.

So long as the distance between the boat and the dock wasn't too great to jump, Ethan was welcome aboard.

And it was pulling further and further away by the second. His head was pounding in time with his heart, and his lungs hurt so bad that he knew he was going to be coughing for at least the next week. But it was worth it. Because as Ethan ran towards the edge of the dock with as much momentum as he could muster, he tweaked one final number. His feet left the edge of the dock, and at the exact same moment an unexpected wave hit the front of the ferry, pushing it back the one foot that Ethan would otherwise have been unable to clear. He soared with some measure of grace, clearing the top of the railing with less than a centimeter to spare. But he wasn't worried, because he knew he would make it. He landed heavily on deck, but, surprisingly, none of the guards in the carport seemed to notice the unexpected arrival of one last passenger.

Ethan turned around to face the dock, a smile spreading across his face. He spread his arms wide and took a cocky bow, certain that he would never forget the look on the face of a certain nameless FBI agent.

Penny in the Well (Jiskastya x Igraine)

Kevin had left him just over two hours ago. The ferry always required all staff on board for the last few hours before they shipped out, so the two had said polite goodbyes outside the Pourhouse, and headed in separate directions. It was still early in the afternoon, but Ethan found himself little in the mood for roaming. He had walked up and down the streets, offering polite hellos to those who wanted to speak with him, exchanging a few words, before wandering on again. He stopped by one of the shops near the ferry to say hello to Gracie, the middle aged woman that ran the place. Tom was getting steadily more unreasonable, and before very long he was going to have to find somewhere new to stay. He had met Gracie one evening at the Pourhouse, and had found that, of all the people in town, she was the most likely to let him move in with her. It hadn't been hard to strike up a friendship; Gracie enjoyed talking, and Ethan had one of the most sympathetic ears in town to her stories. Everyone else had heard them all at least a dozen times.

He still wasn't quite ready to ask her if he could move in, so he made sure to stop by her shop at least every other day to talk for a little while. Gracie gossiped happily to him, telling him that she thought she had seen two young men passing through kissing, of all absurdities, and that another tourist who had come into town not all that long ago had an absolutely gorgeous black cat in her car. Gracie had wanted to go say hello, but she had only caught a glimpse of it while the car had been driving towards the dock. Ethan didn't really have much to say, but Gracie didn't need much prompting to keep talking.

Ethan said goodbye a while later, and had wandered out into the slowly gathering evening. For a moment he considered wandering towards the edge of town and finding a place to lay down in the forest, but the idea was not as appealing to him as it would normally be. So he found himself walking back to Tom's house instead, uncertain of what exactly he planned to do there, but willing to follow the whim nonetheless. He watched the sky as he walked, head tilted back and navigating primarily by the numbers. It was a beautiful day, with hardly a cloud in the sky. Considering that this was Washington, and it rained 230 days out of the year, this was a rare treat.

Perhaps if he hadn't been so distracted, he might have noticed the very important little number that started to flicker in the corner of his vision. Discounting it as an unexpected current of wind that was moving in, or the action of some nearby tourist, Ethan kept walking, up the hill and towards Tom's house. He allowed his eyes to flutter closed, navigating by sound and numbers. There was something almost exhilarating about that world of darkness, an abstract sort of terror that could only be countered by his self-confidence in the fact that he was not going to run into anything or anyone.

He was only a couple steps away from Tom's front porch when the number he had ignored before suddenly reasserted itself. Ethan stopped dead in his tracks, letting out a small gasp. There was that number again, the one that he had not seen since that night in Virginia a month ago. 100. There was a 100 percent chance he was about to be noticed by a certain, nameless FBI agent, the same FBI agent who had driven him all the way up to this far corner of the United States.

His eyes flashed open, and he found himself staring directly into her eyes. He stood frozen for less than half a second, before turning and bolting.

Had you asked him, he couldn't have entirely articulated why he had chosen to run. If she was here, she was looking for him, and there was nothing to be gained from staying in place, perhaps. But a more brutally honest version of that might be that it was as though a creature from his nightmares had suddenly popped into being before him. He had no plan, no expectations. All he knew was that he needed to get away.

He would have to plan while he ran.

Penny in the Well (Jiskastya x Igraine)

Don't worry. This is the last point there will be any piece of her chasing him. I don't want it to go on that way forever, either. I just need, one more time, an outside force that pushes Ethan in. For now, that's Bree.

Ethan will be a little bit confused and grumpy when she finds him again, but he'll definitely listen. And, even if she did t mean it that way, the guilt will hold him with her until the case comes to an end. Thanks for being willing to work with me on that. But they are going to get to go back and forth a nice bit.

Penny in the Well (Jiskastya x Igraine)

Ethan is eventually going to come back of his own free will at the very end of what I think of as book one, and at that point he will explain everything to Bree and they will find a more official way for them to work together. But right now he is still convinced that the thing he truly wants is to just get away. Bree's going to need to, one way or another, drag him back for this one mission. Only this one, I promise.

What if she didn't think of it as guilting? What if she just thought of it as logical reasoning? After all, Ethan killed the only lead she had, so, since he can aid her, he should be the one to replace Victor until the case is over. Would that work?

Penny in the Well (Jiskastya x Igraine)

Ethan found himself returning to the ferries almost every day. He leaned on the railing, watching the giant boats pull into their docks. The crew worked with the efficient movements of those long-familiar with their jobs. They handled the ropes with disinterest, quickly pulling the boat into the dock like absurd spiders spinning a web for some sort of giant fish. The practicality of that comparison was almost nonexistent, but somehow the imagery made him smile. He took his smiles where he could get them these days. It wasn't so much that he was unhappy as it was he was constantly consumed by thoughts of the past month. It near drove him insane sometimes, the wondering. He couldn't change the past, at least, not as far as he knew, but that didn't stop the speculation. What might have happened? What could he have done differently to make the ending better? He woke in the middle of the night sometimes, his lip bitten and blood filling his mouth as he instinctively restrained the scream that had been building in his chest. His dreams were still stained with blood. Mostly, the death of that man, Victor, still haunted him. The fact that he could come up with no other alternative for his escape, even after a month of thinking, was only so much comfort. Because, in the end, whether he liked it or not, he had killed that man. And nothing would ever bring him back.

Kevin had started coming to see Ethan every time he pulled into port. The ferryman seemed almost to have come to expect Ethan's presence, and Ethan could see his eager expression scanning the docks every time the ferry came in for docking. It was strange, having made a friend so easily. Mostly it was meaningless, neither of them knew anything about each other, and when the time came neither would really miss the other all that much. But it was also nice to have someone with whom to share a few hours of conversation, and maybe an occasional evening in the local pub.

It was also fun getting to show off some of his skills to someone who wouldn't have any reason to be suspicious of him. Kevin quickly learned never to bet money whenever Ethan challenged him to a game, and he called some of the things that Ethan was able to do with a dart or pool ball "legendary". They wound up talking a lot about where they saw themselves in the future. Or rather, Kevin did the talking, and Ethan listened to him for hours. It seemed that the man didn't get many people who were willing to honestly listen to him, and he seemed to glow in the attention Ethan was giving him.

Eventually, the two wound up talking about the ferry on which that Kevin worked. It was a decent job, Kevin said. Not a lot of downtime, but when there was no one waiting for you at home, knowing you would always have a roof over your head and a few good meals a day was enough. One evening, when both men had imbibed a bit too much and were tottering off down the street together, Kevin promised that he would always find a space for Ethan on board, should he ever want to leave the little town. Ethan thanked him profusely for the offer, but said, when he planned on leaving, it would be on very short notice. Kevin waved away that comment with the brim of his floppy hat. So long as the distance between the boat and the dock wasn't too great to jump, Ethan was welcome aboard.

Kevin nearly fell over when Ethan suddenly stopped walking, but caught himself against the side of a shop. "Can I hold you to that?" Ethan asked, his eyes suddenly intense.

Kevin blinked, but nodded slowly. "It's cool, man. I'll take care of you."

Ethan's smile was soft and sweet, especially in contrast with his almost fierce look from a moment before. Kevin's answering grin was equally sweet, if a little more lopsided. Ethan helped the man back to his feet, and they began to totter off down the street again, wind whistling down the narrow alley. How interesting, he thought under the white glow of the moon. It's been a long time since I've had a friend.

If Ethan's new-found friendship with Keith was on the rise, his relationship with the man from whom he was leasing a room was only deteriorating. Almost all of Ethan's rent money was going towards the man's drinking fund, and while the alcohol did not make him violent it certainly made him suspicious. For the first few days, Tom seemed entirely unconcerned with Ethan's comings and goings. But lately, when Ethan returned late in the evening, sometimes sober, sometimes not, he found Tom waiting up for him, eyes narrowed. For now, he wasn't going to do anything. The money was too enticing. But if the probability of him copping out got too high, Ethan might have to look to moving on again. For a little while he actually considered going to work on the ferries, but the idea of being on a bound route for any period of time made him begin to shiver.

Other than Tom, Port Townsend was almost everything that Ethan was looking for right now. Enough people came and went that it wasn't a place where he stuck out, but nor was it a place where people always made sure they had locked the door. It was loose and comfortable, like a pair of well-worn socks. And he had to believe it was the last place that the FBI would be coming to look for him. Even the local cops were more likely to let you off with a word of warning than an actual ticket.

The patrons and bartenders of Pourhouse, a small local bar, had become familiar with Ethan. The bartenders were friendly, and took it upon themselves to socialize with everyone who came in. At first it was only the standard conversations to make a customer feel comfortable, but it didn't take them long to warm up to his quiet, unassuming demeanor. They were also as amused by Ethan's "party tricks" as Kevin had been, if not even more so. They saw a lot of "tricks", but Ethan pulled them off better than anyone they had ever met. Once he got one of them laughing everyone was soon rolling along with it, and it brought them honest pleasure to see him emerge from his reclusive shell as the evening slowly unfolded.

Josie called out a friendly hello to him as he entered, the bell over the door chiming loudly. Ethan returned her greeting with an abstract wave, and wandered his way over to a window seat, looking out over the bay. She brought a beer and a smile and sat down next to him for a few minutes. They didn't say anything, but Ethan could feel her eyes on his face, and he would occasionally glance over, only to see her eyes quickly dart away. He couldn't help the small smile that flickered on the corners of his lips whenever that happened, which seemed to only encourage Josie's attentions. He couldn't help but feel a little guilty for it, since anything between them would never last. Ethan was a city-boy, through and through, and while he might hide in a place like Port Townsend until he could deal with the consequences of his actions, he would never be able to stay in a place like this long term. Eventually Josie left him to nurse at his beer, and he sat and stared out the window quietly, green eyes watching the numbers flicker over the water and around the town.

Penny in the Well (Jiskastya x Igraine)

Port Townsend was a small town in northwestern Washington state, on the opposite side of the sound from Seattle. It was a small town that relied almost entirely on a small group of tourists who would be ferried in from Seattle and Vancouver, as the town was right on the water, and only a single highway led to it. The town was quaint, full of small, neat houses overlooking the water and a street mall full of overpriced crafts and strange little doodads.

It was not normally the kind of place that Ethan would have found himself. He was not a man for the "quiet life", and thrived on excitement and interaction. But he had been running for two weeks now, and finally found himself in the farthest corner of the continental US from Richmond, Virginia.

He had fled from Richmond on foot, hitchhiking his way out of the state and to Washington DC. He withdrew a small fortune from his bank account over a period of one week, careful never to take so much so quickly that it might raise the bank's suspicions. From there he risked a train, purchasing a ticket that would cart him across the country without the hassle of customs for planes. He had to lay-over in Chicago and Denver, but dismounted from the track in San Fransisco. He had intended that to be his final destination, a place where he could blend back in, and fall back into his usual rhythms. But two days after he arrived he found himself continually checking anxiously over his shoulder as he walked down a deserted alley, double or triple locking his door at whatever hotel he might be staying at.

He was not usually paranoid, but something about the compilation of impossible events surrounding the episode at the casino had him on edge. And, never one to not follow a hunch, he took off north. Tacoma was not as large of a city as San Fransisco, but it was still a hive of humanity. And Ethan was able to keep himself there for one week before he began to obsess again. He stayed a further two days after that, running his fingers through his hair until it was practically standing on end, checking the numbers every few seconds. The boss of the part-time job he had picked up at a local gas station kept checking in on him, but there was no surprise in his expression when Ethan said he was quitting. His eyes were too shifty for someone preparing to stay still. He stole a car that night, driving it north and abandoning it in a town called Port Orchard. He paid a small fee to cross the Hood Canal Floating Bridge on foot, before hitchhiking his way the rest of the way up to Port Townsend.

He had let the ghost of this FBI agent drive him all the way to the furthest corner of the United States. Where did he plan to go now, Alaska? This was a place he could lay low for a few months, before perhaps making his way over to Seattle. He found a local man looking for a roommate to help with the bills, and the two quickly came to an arrangement.

Tom wasn't a bad man, other than the fact that he was a widower with a small drinking problem. He was just as happy to find a roommate who wanted to pay in cash every month, choosing to overlook the implications of such a method of payment for the fact that cash was cash. No one was going to question his ability to pay his bills if he had the cash to show them. Tom didn't bother his new roommate, and Ethan was just as glad for that. He didn't spend much time in the smoke-stained house, only coming home late at night when tiredness drove him to bed, and leaving early in the morning while his roommate was still working off the hangover.

He didn't get a job, even though it would have been easy enough to acquire one. He knew there was no way he would be able to stand still for that much of the day. So he spent many of his days walking the beach or woods, getting as far from the town as he could during the morning, working his way slowly back in the afternoon. He made friends with several of the ferrymen who worked the port, as he often found himself standing on the dock, watching the distant shores. At one point, one of the men was brave enough to walk up to him and ask him what he was waiting for. Ethan replied warmly enough, but the ferryman seemed to catch some of the distance in his voice, because he came back two days later to ask what Ethan was watching.

He explained as best as he was able to about the water. It was both the most random and the most ordered substance in the world, always changing into something new, yet always staying exactly the same. He said it gave him a headache to watch it. Upon further interrogation, he revealed that, sometimes, that headache was the only thing that got him to sleep at night, and kept him from moving on again.

"You should get on that ferry someday," his unexpected friend told him one day. "It might take you someplace better."

Ethan laughed, and cast an eye out over the water. "Some day," he replied, "I'm sure I will."

Penny in the Well (Jiskastya x Igraine)

We will probably wait to talk about Tanner until you know him a little better. The conversation would be kind of useless if we don't exactly get the full context of the situation. But we will talk about him, I promise.

Okay. Here's how I set up Ethan's entry into the FBI. We can change it, but I kind of set up Ethan and Tanner's interactions around it, so it is moderately important. After Ethan convinces everyone in the FBI of his innocence (Except Tanner (-; ) Ethan leaves. Bree is set back on the task she had before this whole fiasco with chasing him down; trying to find evidence against a mob boss that has a strong presence on the east coast. Without Victor she has absolutely no leads. There is nowhere for her to go. She starts thinking about Ethan then, and what she thinks she knows he can do, and eventually she concludes that she has no choice but to track him down and guilt him into aiding her, because he does show honest remorse for Victor's death. Once she guilts him into it, they start working together in secret (because the person Ethan is pretending to be has no reason or ability to aid Bree) until Bree gets her first big, but completely unprecedented, break in the case. That's when Tanner is going to get mixed up in it, and it is going to get fun and complicated.

How does all that sound to you? I don't have any specifics on the case, just a general circumstance that can nicely guide it.

Penny in the Well (Jiskastya x Igraine)

Why was it, even when he would swear he had accounted for everything, something went wrong? It had not been an ideal plan, but it was the best he had. And he had worked it into perfection. But how could he honestly believe that perfection could be obtained within less than five minutes? He had seen the numbers. Like he always saw the numbers. But this was the second time something had come about, happened so suddenly that he could not alter it, and there was no way to alter it, even if he had the time. Certainty was a scary thing. It meant, no matter what anyone did, it was going to happen. Nothing, not man, not machine, not god himself could stop it from coming true.

She was bleeding. Bleeding out so quickly that the ambulance would not have a chance to get to her before she died. And this had been his plan. His clever little way of escaping, free of charge. All it had cost was one life. And now two. It felt as though his insides were ripping themselves apart. He stared, wild eyed, at the blood leaking down her side. A part of him wanted to rush up to her, apologize for what he had done. The rest of him just wanted to flee. He had been released by the SWAT man, there was no one looking at him. The mob would be retreating as fast as it could, before the cops showed up. It would not take him much effort to evade the incoming reinforcements who would soon be canvasing the area.

But if he left her alone, she would die. There was already a chance that she wasn't going to make it, and he could see the numbers falling as her chances at life got slimmer and slimmer. He had not wanted to take one life to be able to escape. And now he was going to take two. Had he thought he was god, that he could get away so cleanly? Had he honestly believed nothing could ever touch him? He had lived his life by pure luck, and had abused his abilities shamelessly, for his own entertainment. Was this some sort of punishment, for believing everything could always go his way?

But even that was the vanity talking. Believing that he was important enough to impact some sort of divine retribution was as childish as believing that nothing could ever go wrong. The numbers were the only certainty he lived by, and when it came to the numbers, he was a god. His eyes went hard, but it wasn't the agent he was looking at. He was looking at the numbers. They controlled this world, they registered everything, laid it out to him in a way that could be interpreted. And he could change them. He could change the world. He could change the outcome. He had done it before, so many times that it had become as natural as breathing. Perhaps there was something wrong in believing he had the right to tamper with the world. But he did not believe in destiny. He made his own fate.

Ethan's mind grasped onto the numbers, coiled among them like some grotesque worm. And then he began to squeeze. He had always relegated his ability into two categories. There was probability. The chance that something was going to happen. The chance that the roulette ball was going to slide into a certain spot, or that a person was going to hear a noise, or even bother to turn and look. He had always seen life as a combination of probabilities, and that was the thing with which he played.

And then there was luck. Something so impossible that even chance might never have seen it coming. Something so improbable that it didn't even deserve to be considered. He had only ever played around with luck carefully, skirting it like a man skirting a snake, enraptured by its beauty but knowing that a single wrong move could cause it to turn upon him. Now, now he did not care. He was one with the numbers, oblivious to everything going around him. Someone ran into him and he staggered sideways, but caught his balance by reflex. He didn't even note the disturbance.

This was far beyond anything he had ever attempted before. The numbers had never resisted his prompting before, but this time they fought. At first it was easy enough, hardly any different from his normal manipulations. And then things began to flicker. One minute her chance at survival would draw close to eighty percent, the next it would flicker to five. He would force it back up, and it would jump wildly all over the place. But he had never cared as much about anything as he did about this now. Eventually what he was doing lost all meaning. It was no longer about saving the detective, about finding a way around his own guilt. All that existed was his will. His will and the numbers.

When Ethan began to register the world around him again, his head hurt so bad that it was a miracle he wasn't screaming. There was something wet sliding down his face, from his nose, eyes, and mouth. He wiped quickly, but when he withdrew his hand he saw it covered not with phlegm, saliva, and tears, but with blood. He grabbed the corner of his sleeve and mopped up his face, before turning around and staggering away from the cops.

He had to focus. He had to get away. Now, before someone remembered him, or grabbed on to him. If they caught him now, he wouldn't be able to get out of it. But his head hurt so bad.

The numbers didn't fight him this time, but he wasn't pushing for an impossibility. He twisted them the way he always did, keeping people from looking over, keeping the cops from turning down a particular alley in their hurry to get to the scene, keeping the passersby from noticing the blood that covered his red jacket. There was always a chance they would look over, would notice something was amiss despite the odds. That was probability. Nothing was ever certain.

Right now, there was only one thing Ethan knew for sure. That agent would run on her own two feet, unaided by man or machine. She would run with the wind flowing through her hair, her long legs stretching out underneath her. That was his atonement, that was his gift. She would not fade, would not give up, until such a thing came true.

Of that he was certain.

This, That, and The Other Thing ~ PopeAlessandros x Jiskastya

Yes, that is fair. I could see that. It is kind of a mixture of what I proposed with what you see, because things can be refined into other things, but only through weaving. So a thing that exists still needs to be woven to become something new, but that doesn't mean that the thing that exists isn't still a part of it.

Cool.

Penny in the Well (Jiskastya x Igraine)

Yeah, Tanner's interesting. He's pretty much what I did this summer, since our story couldn't continue. He and Ethan actually have a whole big mess planned, which is going to be fun to copy over from hand-written notes...

At some point we are going to need to have a fairly long conversation about whether or not we want to use Tanner as a villain or not, because the end of book one leaves both possibilities wide open. We will need to see which one adds more meaning to the story.

Also. Do we want to start discussing the project that Bree is going to need to build against the Organized Crime leader? The one that she needed Victor for? You definitely get to take point on developing that if you want to, but it may not hurt to have a basic plan in place before we start it.