Defiant of Winter

Pen
There are ill-advised plans, such as going on a difficult trail in March in quest of a natural water to immerse oneself in, and there are happy plans, such as going on a difficult trail in March in quest of a natural water to immerse oneself in with someone who is quite dear and someone who can start a fire to warm away (warn away) the no doubt very invigorating, but also dangerous, cold, and someone who can monitor one's vital signs and detect the onslaught of hypothermia. There are happy plans which this outing is!

Clearly, because they have gone quite early to find the Hanging Lakes, and now they are by a river, which will feed into these lakes (they have not yet reached the ice-shot rock face, where pale spears of what is usually a waterfall are just beginning to thaw and glitter with the gentle and dim radiance of stars there in the shadow afforded by stone and rock etcetera etcetera. That is for a little further; and Pen wants it to be a surprise, because she is covetous of surprising Nicholas with such a pretty thing), or by an elongated portion of lake which might be termed a river, and there are three trees half-drowned in the dappling sunlight and eddying shadow, and the water is so clear you can see right down to the bottom of the water.

"If you go first, I'll make you nine silver bullets," Pen says, and she doesn't actually care who 'goes first,' but she likes to play a game.

Nick
[Rocking the Life 1 today because hypothermia would be pretty terrible. Base diff 4, -1 for focus.  WP.]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (3, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Nick
Nick had prepared to go out with Pen today, aware that they had said that they would swim in a river and also aware of the fact that right now it is mid March and not ideal swimming-in-river weather.  The way in which he Works has in some ways grown familiar.  He has spent time fasting for this before, he has spent time bent in uncomfortable yoga positions, he has simply spent time meditating: it is different depending on the purpose.  Awareness of the body, that's the point.

Today he meditated in his study before they left.  It wasn't necessarily for a long time, long enough to center.  It has left him a little distracted as they tread through the woods, because Spring is cresting and there is nascent life buried beneath the forest mulch and beginning to gather in the tips of tree branches.

But they have arrived at a lake which might be termed a river, and Pen has indeed surprised him with such a pretty thing.  It would be hard to tell if she didn't know Nicholas as well as she does: though there is this little intake of breath and in this quiet consideration of the star bright ice, the clear river bed, all of this before he says anything to her, and here she can see.

Nine silver bullets, says Pen, and he laughs then, and he is removing his jacket.  He is removing his boots and his pants and his shirt are going to follow.  She might be about to ask what the hell he is doing, but - well, this is a thing people do when they are about to foolishly jump into water that is only slightly above freezing.  Better to have warm clothes to step back into, at the end.  "Did you tell anyone else we're out here?  I'm trying to imagine Robin's elegy if we both freeze ourselves to death in this river."

He hasn't gone yet.  There is a little tremble in his voice that evidences how the wind is biting him.  He is gathering his nerve.  Daring does not come as easily to him as to Pen.

Pen
Pen does not ask Nicholas what the hell he is doing when he begins to peel off his layers. Pen whistles appreciatively (here is the most suggestive trill ever Springed in the middle of Spring) instead, and settles her knap sack down on the shore by a stone which is hollowed out on the top and still holds some snow-melt, rain-melt, a perfectly natural bowl, something that some might use as a scrying pool, a fairy mirror, and it is otherwise dry. Pen dips her fingertips in that clear natural cup of water, and flicks a drop or two or three out, then shrugs her own jacket off.

"Hmm," is her noncommittal reply to Nicholas's question, or rather what follows it. She would leave it there, but is a combatant and an aggressor; and she does not want to talk about Robin, so she gives a little more in the form of a very credible Robin Anton impression. "'They died as they lived, foolishly, together, and without heeding my advice; I knew it.'" The Robin impression drops away. Her own cadences: "Nobody knows where we are, but never fear! Surely if the ice takes us down where it is green and dark, someone will notice - Arianna will at least."

He hasn't gone in yet. There was a little tremble in his voice. Pen watches his back and -- he is looking at the water, but when she speaks again it is far too close for comfort, given what she is saying:

"Shall I give you a push?"

She isn't right behind him, but a Forces Mage doesn't need to be when she can conjure up the wind to do it for her, does she?

Nick
The Robin impression, it makes him smile.  Nick still talks to Robin, and there are times when he could almost forget how bitter Pen's feelings are now for their former cabalmate; there are times when he tries to imagine some trickery that would get them talking again.  They were friends before him, he was important to her once (and there is something in him there that thinks that Robin grieves, however privately, the current situation.  He has no basis for this: only a feeling informed by what has come before.)

There is another breath he takes, and the air is far colder now than it felt back when he was in a jacket and boots and canvas pants, and the sparse spray of body hair that he has does nothing to help.  How did human beings survive in the wilds for so long?  How did they not die out in the time before readily available textiles?

Another of the world's great mysteries.

"No, no, I'm about to - "

So he gathers his nerve and plunges on ahead.  And to his credit, when the water crests up first over his bare feet and shortly over his legs and then over his hips and stomach he does not scream.  Pen can see his jaw clench though, and when they say the cold can take your breath away: sometimes that saying is literal.

Pen
Her breath catches sharp in her throat when he plunges on ahead; unbidden sympathy, and her shoulders rise too in sympathy, but the caught-breath is released all at once and Pen unties her boots. This is a delaying tactic; also, she has a knife in her boot (almost always), and sometimes her wand, and these require careful handling: she is not very careful with the knife. Around Nicholas, the cold green waters ripple outward, gather up light and shadow and re-pattern them; the light has not significantly warmed anything and it is frigid.

"Nine silver bullets, forged just for you!" Pen says, a bright thread in her voice and a curl getting in her eyes blown out of the way, the boots are off. Then the socks. "I'll even etch names on them if you wish or some sort of design; do you wish?"

Then, "Is it very cold?"

She knows the answer. She feels compelled to ask anyway, like maybe by asking it will turn out not to be cold at all.

Nick
Pen knows the answer.  Even if she did not, the way Nick's eyes seek out hers and stick and she can see the whites of them and the strain still in his jaw: well, she knows the answer for sure after she sees it.

"Very," he manages, in a single shuddering breath.

As to whether or not he wishes, all other thoughts have fled at this very moment.  Pain will set in soon, and it is bright and sharp and clarifying when it does, the sort of thing that can be persevered through to the point of numbness at the end as the body adapts and acclimates.  This kind of cold is like being set on fire.  His blood has begun to slow, particularly in the fingers and toes; he knows this because his sense of awareness for his body is heightened at this moment.

Not so Pen, yet: she is still a lone torch in a winter wood.  "I don't know how much longer I can stay, so jump in!"

Pen
Dare Anything, Dare Everything. Know the Risks -
Dare Anyway.

"Wait! Stay! I'm coming!" Pen hurriedly escapes the rest of her clothing, then navigates one of the two half-sunk trees. Beneath the water, it is a dim gold. Above the water, it is a pale gold, and branches spindle out, and shadows swim around it, deeper green. The tree exists in two worlds now that it has fallen so; everybody knows that a lake is a threshold, that if you enter a lake just so, you will be somewhere else and a hundred years will pass in the blink of an eye and when you set foot on shore again you'll find yourself remembered as a legend. Pen balances on a little rill of wood, draws herself up and swings her arms once and twice - finds Nicholas's eyes, and she is readying, readied, glances at the water again - thrice, and

dive. Finned by light and shadow, Penelope, long body blanched by the cold gone as pale as milk, and when she surfaces she

(fuck!)

definitely, definitely yells. Her hair has flattened and she wipes her face and her body's gone to star tingling, but perhaps she hopes her ardence will see her through (she could warm up, but it would be cheating before she is out of the lake and can help Nicholas get warm too, that's not what a Polar Dip is), and splashes noisily and shudders, wracked, and and and says,

"I-I'm going to get to the ice ssppears,"

because of course she is going to try; so she sets herself to it.

Swim, swim, swim!


Nick
Pen: dives, far more gracefully than Nicholas did, but she is in some ways more at harmony with herself and so this is fitting.  Nick has the presence of mind to watch her as she dives, as she flows into the water and comes up again and -

yells.

Nick's laugh is half a shudder, still.  But, see, when the pain was clarifying: he has accepted it, has taken it into him and has relaxed to the point of not fighting it anymore.  Resistance, moving muscles that are screaming, would only intensify it.

So he's reached this Zen like state until Pen challenges him to go to the ice spears.  And then he watches her as she starts off toward them, and he sucks in this breath because he's about to

plunge his head under, and when he comes up again he chokes back a whimper as he kicks his numbing feet and propels himself in the direction of the ice spears.  He's not going to get to them before her, but he can reach them.

Pen
The water is more forceful closer to the spears of pale ice which are movement frozen in time (for now), accompanied by long ribbons of falling (and these are white) water un-frozen, come between the trees and roots to fill the lake-river up, Hanging Lake, suspension, where water threads air to sky: the jagged white thrust of ice is beyond the moving water, where the lake itself is deepest green and clouded with some other greening algae or water-weeds and swimming through it is like finding that a geode was not actually the immobilized stripled gem-like opalescence that one expected but it is mobile instead and would react to touch and Pen gasps when she touches the slippery dank stone behind (and it looks like a cage, Winter court-fashioned, the beginning of an enchantment) the ice and it is fucking cold what the fuck was she thinking. Her skin was pale as a ghost's (maybe she wants to steal Nick's nickname, Casper), but now there is some ruddiness come to it - her blood is trying to rally, though her heart beat is slow and strong in her chest.

Pen blink blinks her heavy-lashes, water-drop tangled, and see - Pen is definitely some long ago Pre-Raphaelite's best model, because right now she is clearly an undine or a nymph, copper hair gone dark but burnished still with this ardent hue in spite of the dark. Her feet hit stone, slippery and moss-covered and disgusting to feel all told, and she is looking in Nicholas's direction, doesn't want her feet to touch the bottom so she lets herself float again and shiver shiver shivers and gazes most solemnly (except for a spark, there; thank god there's a spark; it's probably the only thing that keeps her going!).

"I like ththis kindd of Spring. Bback?" If Nick has come near, she reaches out to take his hand. Can she even feel it? There's solidity; skin feels different under the water, and under winter's bullying threat.

Nick
He reaches the ice spears after Pen does, propelling himself in long quick strokes toward them.  His skin has flushed a deep blotchy red in places where the cold is starting to seep in; Nicholas is somewhat out of his element here.  This does not render him picturesque as the deep woods and darkness do, does not turn him into a nymph, just a young man who is foolish enough to dive after his lover into winter's heart.  His curls are clinging to the crown of his head and his ears and the back of his neck, and they've gone flat with the weight, as though he'd been gifted with a dark seaweed crown.

His toes touch the moss and he can barely feel them, and here the water is churning around the two of them, pulling and pushing and maybe in a spot or two it'd be treacherous, it would try to suck them under.  Nick carefully avoids any places that look like they might be swirling down, down - best to give the river the respect it's due.

It was during his initiation that he drowned, and his eyes had sought out Delilah's but had somehow only affixed to the chill blue of Jonas's.  He's not eager to repeat the experience.

Nick's hand finds Penelope's as his toes touch and push against the moss, and his fingers clasp hers tightly; they have to, in order to feel anything.  "Mme too.  Bback."

Kicking against the moss-covered rock is strangely like kicking against yielding flesh and hard bone, as they launch themselves off and back toward the shore.  This is easier, gathering the energy for this even though it probably seems to take longer: the last half of a journey is always easier when the end is in sight.

Pen
"Hey, chcheater I wasn't rreaddy," she says, gleefully.

In water, Pen feels comfortable: pulls herself through like a needle punching through thread dragging a rippling thread behind. Here's a truth. Pen is comfortable in water in a way she is comfortable nowhere else. Sea, river, lake. Fountain, well, spring.

This doesn't mean she is comfortable nowhere else. That would be a falsehood. But there is a certain way in which Pen feels it when she is submerged, and she loses track of the edge though of course she strikes out after Nicholas. She is one of those people who doesn't quite react to the cold as somebody should, as her body wants her to, and she pauses mid-way back to dive down and try and touch the bottom.

It's deeper in the middle than she thought and she veers toward the trees. When she does surface, gasping, making noise because noise!, she shudders and laughs and looks for Nicholas again. Is he on shore? Is he still in the water?

As long as he isn't in physical distress, Pen ducks beneath the tree (swims beneath the tree, winding between under water branches and cold cold cold, her eyes open), surfaces on the other side of it and leaves the river that-a-way, feeling quite languorous and at peace with herself and her body which has just about given up on her, though it rouses to sting sullenly when she is out of the water.

Nick
It would've been different, had Nicholas come here to do this alone.  When he'd first entered the water he'd remained there in place, this stillness to him as he let the cold soak in and permeate him, and he might've stayed there had Pen not encouraged him to move.  There was this way in which he was forcing himself not to fight despite the urges of his body, transcending the way each of his nerves had shrilled like a thousand tiny flutes playing the screechingest of tritones.

Still: he is glad that Pen encouraged him to move.  Her way is no less memorable, and more fun.

As Pen dives to the bottom Nick stops paddling, twisting to watch the shape of her winding through the water, dissonance in the play of light and shadow on her skin and in the way she fractures here beneath the water.  He can tell that she is safe.

He has drifted somewhat toward the shore, and he allows this, his toes finally once more finding bottom.  They ache as they touch the stones there, flat and cold as chips of ice.  And he swallows in a breath and waits until she surfaces, gasping and making noise because noise.  He smiles as she looks around and finds him, and then quite calmly makes his way up the bank and back out, the urgency of getting away away and out now gone.

This doesn't mean that he doesn't beeline straight for his clothes, water still streaming down the hard line of each muscle that has grown rigid and tense from the cold.  There are violent tremors that have set in now, but he ignores them and shakes out his shirt with as much dignity as he can.

Pen
[Woo, Magick Time! Let's use an instrument really well. Enochian!]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 10) ( success x 5 ) [Doubling Tens]

Pen
[Corr 3/Matter 2 thing. Diff 7 -3, Thanks Enochian. WP!]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 5, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Pen
[Paradox Counter: 1.]

Pen
The wind picks up as Nicholas shakes his shirt out, plastering it against his chest before he has even dried off. Did he bring a towel or something to dry off with?

His Hermetic lady-love didn't, but then, she doesn't need to bring something with her to reach for it -- does she? When she coaxes herself out of the water, away from the shore, (and here is a secret she has never told anybody, not even Nicholas: how once she stood knee-deep in the Kelvin and told it to take her away), she wrings her dark hair out, twisting it into a rope. Wet, her hair is almost long, going to about mid-back, maybe even longer in some places, closer to the small of her back. She needs to cut it; she will soon.

Pen puts her hand on her knap sack, which was balanced on the tree, twisting the enclosure around twice: she pronounces a careful phrase in Enochian. She is undressed still except for water and the rings on her fingers and when she opens the bag well a nerd might call it a bag of holding because the ginormous fluffy blanket she pulls out of it definitely was not packed away into the thing by normal means. The blanket can serve as a towel AND a place to lie for a while, so see, it was reality well-bent. Pen does use one corner of it to scruff her hair and back and backside and then she tosses it at Nicholas.

"Ddid you look around for rriver spirits whwhen you jumped in?"

Pulls her shirt back on and then her coat and then her underthings in that order, the bra left off for now out of sheer laziness and languor.

Nick
His shirt flies back against him, sticks to his chest which has started to look somewhat ashen.  He did not bring a towel, and now this strikes him as an oversight.

He is quite grateful, then, when Pen tosses the blanket in his direction, and he does not hesitate to wrap it around himself, pulling it tightly about his neck and shoulders and his ears and hugging his frame with it.  His shirt dropped back to the ground to rest at the top of the little heap he'd left before wading into the water not too long before now, all told.

His shaking is still somewhat violent, though hypothermia hasn't set in: a while in the blanket and near a fire and he'll be fine, though the persistent worry that he may have just sterilized himself makes him glad of the Sight he currently carries.  "Nno.  I didn't think to.  Mmaybe I'll wait until llllater in spring."

There is this hopeful glance in her direction as he lifts one foot curling and wiggling his toes, and then does the same with the other.  "Fire?"

Pen
[Okay. More magick. Fire, fire! Forces 3 (Prime 2? Meh). Diff 7 -1 personalized instrument, -1 resonance.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Pen
[Extend. >.>]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (3, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Pen
Speaking of oversights, they don't have any kindling already set up in a circle for the fire to stay on; Pen could conjure fire, but it will need something to eat once it is here. Fortunately, there are some likely looking sticks; this is nature, there are often likely looking sticks; she'll give Nicholas a Won't You Help look, and once she (or she & he) have a little pile going, she'll take up her wand.

There are those who scorn the use of wands; as if such a recognizable symbol can be nothing but fake, but paste and sequins, but New Age hokum; hasn't the Union done its job well? There are those who should know better but still smirk at the idea of wands -- fictional things:

They shouldn't smirk. A wand is wood and stone and metal, an elegant weapon; she wields hers with a fencer's aplomb, and there is that which commands in the line of the piece of wood (and stone, and metal) as she draws a circle in the air. Pen closes her eyes and Wills there to be fire;

there is no fire. She Wills it harder, cutting a sigil in the air which might linger against closed eyelids a resplendent blaze of light and that's when the fire blooms sudden and strong not just a thread of potential but hot and heat and kindled from nothing at all but her ardent yearning for it (Dare you control fire? [You dare. Control fire.]),

and because Penelope is a Flambeau she knows how to tend the flames and soon enough the bonfire is burning merrily, its barbaric gold and orange defiant of winter.

Fire doesn't understand winter, you see, any more than winter understands fire.

[Paradox Counter: 2.]

Nick
Nick continues to flex his feet to try to keep the blood flowing into his toes.  The blanket, at least, is helping, though he glances back toward his clothes as though he is torn between emerging from its cocoon of warmth long enough to put them back on and just staying wrapped up in it.  In the end he chooses the latter; his skin is not quite ready to endure the wind again just yet.  That is, until Pen indicates that there is no kindling, and at this he sighs and v e r y reluctantly shrugs the blanket away so he can first pull on his boxers and then his shirt and pants and jacket.  Socks and boots are last, in spite of his  screaming toes.

Then he goes to assist Pen with the kindling, tracking down sticks and dropping them into a little pile with his numbed fingers.

Once this has been accomplished the blanket is pulled up and around him again, covering his head like a cowl, and he has finally stopped shaking.  He watches Pen as she sketches her circle into the air with all the precision of a fencer practicing the alphabet, and watching her Will anything into existence is always a thing of beauty, at least to Nicholas.

The flames hiss their defiance and Nick goes to sit down next to the fire, though not too near: he knows his skin is about to start aching and burning soon enough.  Once he has dropped to the frozen ground he lifts an arm, blanket still clenched in his fist so that it spreads behind him like a wing, inviting Pen to come and sit with him.

Pen
Does Nicholas invite Pen to come sit with him? Pen is there almost before he has fully lifted his arm, tucking herself neatly in against his side. Cold, and cold again, cold even through her shirt but her rings are ardent and fire-kissed and the metal wants to be warm (metal often wants to be warm), and she shudders hard in reaction, and the fire is warm and warm again and they can feel the impact of it and it bends and bows and flirts and darts in the wind which makes everything bow (except for the water; the water whips; the water reaches, becomes jagged, tries to escape its confines) before it. Pen doesn't say anything. She just stares at the lake beyond the bonfire and leans against her lover's side.

She is periodically wracked by another shudder; there seems to be no rhyme of reason. There is no pattern; warmth just reaches a certain state, remembers how winter-leeched it was, and shudders.

"I would live under a lake if I could," she says, earnestly. "I'd braid rivers into your hair. What if we just stayed here for a little while?"

Nick
As Pen tucks herself against his side he pulls his arm back in, the blanket along with it, so that they are both ensconced in its fluffiness and between it and the fire and each other, hopefully on the way back to a healthy core body temperature.  Nick would like to rest his head against Pen's, cheek to her hair, but her hair is still icy cold and they're lucky there are no ice crystals in it.  So he does not.  For now.

"Maybe you're a lake spirit bound into flesh and form," he teases then, "and I won't have to look any farther than you, when I come back after the weather is warmer."

He, too, still shudders from time to time, though the interval between these will grow longer.  His hand is against her side, where it makes gentle circles to coax some heat in between the fabric of her shirt and her skin.  And in spite of the cold and discomfort, his cheek eventually does find its way to the side of her head.  "Let's stay here a little while."

And here they will stay, until the dark of morning ushers in the pale first dawn, which as it filters through the trees strikes upon the ice spheres and wavers through and jumps between until they are glittering and gold: like a resplendent chandelier or like stained glass, depending on how you are to look.