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Title: Ten Summoners Tales: Heavy Cloud, No Rain
Author: xSaBx
Summary: It would give it away, but needless to say it's an important turning point.
Spoilers: Season One stuff
Disclaimers: One character is mine, and one isn't.
Thanks: Dave, because I love you.
Category: New Character/General
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Heavy Cloud, No Rain.
She knows now that there is a storm coming, a tempest that will change her life. All she can do is wait. == She moves like water, fluid and unfathomable. I stand inadequate as she flows across my line of sight, incapable of anything but silence and wonder. When she finally stops the air rushes around her and through her, and suddenly there's a spark. The room quickly begins to burn. In moments there's steam rising in languid curls from her, pheromone-fuelled clouds that ascend to the ceiling and rain confusion and ardour upon this hapless observer. She has her own weather-system... I should have been a meteorologist. If I were I'd try to understand the complexities of her high and low pressure systems, I'd recognise the formations created above her so I could predict her moods before she even knew how she would feel. If I knew how to manipulate the weather, I'd be able to create electrical storms that would bring out her most passionate and intense feelings. I'd stand under the vapours she created and make weather of my own, and the resulting haze of understanding and wanting would be so impenetrable that we would both be lost to the world. I've held many women, and I've lain with a few, but no woman has ever moved me to metaphorical wanting before, not like this. I have desired, I've imagined and yes, I've even yearned. No woman has ever created her own weather before in an attempt to deflect me from my ultimate destination. I believe this is what is called an epiphany.
== She woke early again with a head full of fog. Sleep had been difficult of late, and she had found herself sitting by her bedroom window, observing the dawn spread pale fingers across the DC skyline, hoping for a sign of the way forward in her journey. Watching this city rise today was different: as the sun hit the roof of her apartment its warmth permeated straight into her and suddenly cleared the miasma of confused and conflicting feelings. She had spent what seemed like an age toying with the business of love and desire: never quite ready to take her heart out again and show it to the world. Lightning would never strike twice; she could have no hope of ever finding someone who would become as much a part of her as he had been for so long. This time she felt differently, and didn't exactly know why. This morning appeared like any other day, nothing had happened to alter the way she felt from yesterday, but still she could sense a change, a way forward she would not have considered before. When she was a child her parents had a barometer, a gift from a holiday in Switzerland, which had a man and a woman who would swap places when the pressure changed. The woman, who represented high pressure, wore a bright sundress and a hat; the man who was low pressure had galoshes and a raincoat. Somewhere inside her the little man has been sent scurrying back into his home, and now his wife stood outside, showing the world that things were set fair. The barometer would never show both outside together: no wonder the thing would always remind her of her parents. == I always had a plan. One day I would be big in politics: that was always the understanding, and there would be nothing that stood in the way. I suppose at the back of my mind I still count a relationship as a diversion, a deflection from my ultimate destination. This goes a long way towards explaining why I've never held onto a girlfriend for more than two years without her getting annoyed and walking away. I've had two relationships in the last four years, and on both occasions the woman involved packed and left. It's always been me who's said that I've finished the affairs, but the reality is a long way from the lie. I'd have been happy to let things drift without the need for permanency: but they were not. One of my ultimate ironies as a person is my total inability to be true to myself in a personal capacity. Professionally I am passionate, dedicated, single-minded and practised. Emotionally I am a mess, and I always have been. I think I'm actually only capable of concentrating on one thing at a time, so it has to be private or public. It's always been a one-sided fight and public always walked away victorious...until now, that is. Is it possible to find a balance? Somewhere within me there's the desperate need to dive into the emotional depths I've never explored: I'd never been aware of just how great a desire it was, until this precise moment. Perhaps this is the beginnings of a Mid-life Crisis: I'm looking at what my existence lacks and trying frantically to compensate by swinging my focus too far in the opposite direction. Can I explain how I feel at this precise moment? Can I dismiss it as simply an urge to have something that'll ultimately deflect me from my true path? Why the hell am I standing here being analytical? All I want to do is follow her to where she is heading and hold her, to plant myself next to her and breathe her in for the rest of time, to protect her and care for her and be everything she's ever wanted. What if everything I've done was just to get me to this moment, to get me to here? How the hell do I cope with that? I can pinpoint the exact moment when I gained my sense of emotional direction, and everything else shifted away from me. This doesn't make me feel any better; in fact it makes me feel worse. ==
She blamed her parents for many things: sometimes she would even blame the weather on her errant father, convinced he would make it rain so he was unable to visit her. In the end she would sit and pray for meteorological disasters to keep him from collecting her. One day she even wished him dead, and was immediately frightened of the consequences. It was always one thing or another for her; there was never a middle ground when it came to relationships. She was either in love or in hate. It was this terrible duality that in the end coloured every perception she had, and almost caused her destruction, but for the intervention of a man who gave her, for ten years, a life she believed at the time was without equal, and a love which had begun to heal the wounds of the past. She had only recently realised that this too was a lie, that again she had been deceived. Desperate to avoid another descent into Hell, she had sought answers from another, a professional whose insights were slowly beginning to help her understand what had happened to her, what had transpired to make her what she now had become. Only now, with this guidance, was she finally beginning to feel comfortable about baring her soul to anyone else. She had spent a long time hiding that soul from the world, keeping her spirit quiet and reserved. That day however was different, she had let her spirit float freely amongst all those people and she had allowed herself to be exposed...despite the terrible damage that could have been inflicted upon her as a result. She had taken a chance and hoped that someone might glance at her and see something missing in themselves. The last person she had expected to find had come looking for her.
== Don't think I'm not emotional, because that's just not true. She's already lectured me that I'm too expressive for my own good in a professional capacity, that it often lessens my intellectual impact. You have to understand: it's my passion for this life and for the possibilities it presents that took me to Nashua. It was my faith in that life that took a friend away from a job he hated and a future he dreaded: by doing so I indirectly affected her destiny without even knowing it. That thought now scares me, knowing how close I was to her when my life changed completely. Is it really possible we were fated to meet? I can cope with statistics, with physics, with big decisions and important outcomes. I can bully and I can coerce, I can stimulate and I can destroy with the power of an idea. I can feel deeply about education, healthcare, freedom of ideas... but present me with the unpredictable nature of a woman and I'm lost, confused and ultimately hopeless. That's where it all starts to really fall apart. The weather, you see, is predictable...until of course it's not, but that in itself is understandable if you subscribe to the school of Chaos Theory. I can cope with her standing there throwing out electrical storms and high-pressure hormonal surges if I can at least rationalise my predicament with a set of corporeal variables. It's this reliance on science that is slowly becoming my biggest weakness, because the more I try to lessen the emotional impact this woman is having on me, the more psychologically confused I get. At the point where it finally struck me, when I realised I was obsessed with her, it stopped being about what made sense and became about the exact opposite, it was the stuff that didn't seem logical that I suddenly wanted to understand: I felt compelled to chase phantoms or cast spells in the vain hope that it might bring me closer to my goal, closer to her. As I become more lost in this Bermuda Triangle of non-sensibility and lack of rationale I just find myself wanting to stay confused. I don't care; as long as she's there to smile at me the world can go to hell in a hand cart. Did I tell you I keep going back there, to that point when I walked towards her and tapped her on the shoulder and she promptly ensnared me, that moment when she turned and for the briefest of moments I'm convinced the entire world stopped rotating on its axis? I keep hoping that when I go back in my mind I'll be able to cope with what happened, that I'd finally find an explanation for this sickness that effects my every waking hour. I already know the answer; I just don't want to admit it. ==
She was standing alone in this city full of people, her mind wandering to another place and time, when she was very young. Her father told to her the story of Sleeping Beauty, of how a young girl slept for a hundred years and was awoken by the kiss of a prince who had fought through thorns and killed dragons to reach her. She idly wondered where all the princes had gone from the world when someone tapped her on the shoulder. He saw her every day; they were colleagues and had been so for months. He had initially been averse to her appointment but as time had passed he had grown to respect her and appreciate her for what she was, a professional. But unbeknownst to him he had in that time allowed a part of himself to emerge, which at that moment was in precise alignment with the newly exposed part of her. As she turned in slow motion and their eyes met the world did what it always did at moments like this and stopped rotating, so that both of them were precisely aware that this was a moment when destinies changed, when new directions were taken and where it was inescapable. For what the boy believed to be true of the Universe was especially accurate at that moment: everything happened for a reason, and this was the reason he was here. She was always meant to have the job she had taken a chance on trying for, and he was always meant to fall in love with her at this moment because of it. What happened next, however, was still in flux. Science and magic would have a battle on their hands. It would be an interesting contest. == I'm in love. I've done lust before; I've done desire before. I did both of those with Mandy and had the good sense to realise that love was never an issue. I met Sarah and was with her as Mandy walked away, and six months later Sarah followed her. For nearly two years I've been blissfully free of emotional entanglement, and now I've been hit by a full-blown storm. When the pressure finally equalises I know I'll never be the same again. It's the greatest feeling in the world. ==
The storm is almost here, and she is ready. It is only a matter of time. == I have to ask her to do something I swore to myself I'd never do again with someone I worked with. I want a date, in fact I want hundreds, thousands, and I don't want to stop being with her. Ever. I'll ask her as soon as we get back from Rosslyn.
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