[OPEN] funeral: humankind is united today

[carnem]

CHARACTERS ▶ All
LOCATION ▶ Throughout Zion
SUMMARY ▶ In the wake of terrible news, Zion rallies around the fallen, drawing from traditions old and new, Real and otherwise.
WARNINGS ▶ PG-13 for language and indications of death and violence
NOTES ▶ Following the Return to Harbour plot (conclusion here), the city gathers to commemorate and say good-bye to the soldiers of the four ambushed ships. Political unease cannot get in the way of paying respects.

▶ Mourning in Zion

It takes three days to prepare for a funeral of this magnitude.

Of course, some may say that the Council spends those three days doing more than running the logistics behind incense and flower supplies. However, whatever other activities might have been involved, all that the people of Zion saw were to be expected: Kamadeva rallying the cooks and the florists, Xolotl reviewing the perimeter defenses despite that it had been done for Truce Week so recently, and the Morrigan calling meetings with the more powerful economic forces of the city to ensure the importance of the occasion was understood. The city will not be brought to a halt, but nor will the Council allow the grieving time to be interrupted by day-to-day bustle and commerce.

So it begins: three days.

PREPARATIONS ◀

For three days, Zionites take turns volunteering or even time away from their work.

The work tables are immense. Flower blankets, that will either fade or burn with crisp and potent sweetness, must be woven by teams of dozens. The spiritual practitioners of the Temples welcome all help in this, but it’s children especially who tend to come and join, running spools of bright thread back and forth and perched on higher stools as they fit new blooms into the growing lattice. Each of the dead will wear one.

Artists work with paints and whittles to create dozens of tiny icons: of beds and tables, luxuries to carry into the afterlife, to burn with those of the dead who are designated for cremation. Other donations are real enough: fruit reaped from the harvest, unleavened breads out in dishes, rolls of herbs, soups, kebobs, and wines. These will be eaten afterward-- the final meal to share.

In dozens of homes and throughout the bazaar, people are otherwise at work. They dip incense, draw pictures of memories drawn from sims, build candles, soak rosewater, tell stories and make songs.

A sand mandala flowers slowly by the entrance of the great cavern, expanding under the patient precision of studied hands. For this work, few are invited, but all are welcome to look at the vivid pattern. Symbols of major religions feature on contrasting fields-- not only the faiths of Earth-that-was, but even of some known only to Matrixes, an artistic decision that perhaps the Council and ZDG officially disagree with but nonetheless do nothing to prevent. Elaborate vegetation-- or is it circuitry?-- and a spiral of birds cavort through the space, and here or there, a pale young man looks through breaks in the vivid pattern. Neo.

SPEECH AND DIRGE ◀

It’s understandable, that when Councilor Brutus arrives for the final ceremony, he draws a few looks askance. He has brought four attendants with him, but the security is implied rather than looming a threat en force. After all, much of the Defense Grid is present and they are expected to behave accordingly, as if anyone living in Zion might be sick enough a soul to foul the funeral with dissent.

Most of the time, the bodies are burned at the same time. But there had been a few Muslims, Christians and other groups. Some of the flower blankets arrive empty, symbolic of a soldier who has since been buried.

It’s not difficult to recognize their families, standing at the fore of the massive gathering. Sometimes it’s a husband or a wife who cries hardest, but it is perhaps the worst to see the children who do not cry at all.

It is Councilor Aries who steps out into the stony platform. Chiron comes with her, Orion by his side. However, the men remain silent as she turns to address the crowd, this time for an event much more somber than the last. “Humankind is united today,” is the beginning of her speech. It has the ring of honesty to it, her face hard with grief, but there are murmurs as she speaks. Little doubt, some in the cavern would disagree, but few will put words to it-- at least, until after Aries has said her piece and the funeral songs fade.

The survivor known as 'Proxy' remains conspicuously absent.

Comments

NATASHA ROMANOFF / OTA

[ex_spins462]

Grief is an ugly, important thing. Natasha values it in the same way she values memory: she understands its purpose, it's transience, and the fact that her experience with it is different to most people. Patriotism, on the other hand, is more dangerous (she loves Steve dearly but she will always call the other side of that coin.) Natasha watches for it with a canny eye, still trying to understand why these men and women died.

When she's not making careful conversation with people from all over Zion — mechanics, children, political aides — she joins in the preparations. Most of the tasks are new to her, but she's patient and curious, a good listener and a fast learner, and soon she knows how to knead bread quietly as others talk around her, and which way to place the flowers into the intricate and colorful net. She works like a bird, with bright eyes and quick movement, her hair a guttered flame crested on her head, her woolen sweater too loose at the neck and too long at the wrists, plugs visible in a line at the top of her spine. She wears a black band at her wrist, and introduces herself as Widow.

Later, she attends the funeral as a stranger. Her clothes have a military cut and crispness, and the scarce visible skin is nearly entirely inked in henna patterns. straight black hair falls to her cheekbones, and her cheekbones are heavily bronzed, her eyes lined and smudged in smoky browns. Even the way she holds herself and moves is different, older and far more indelicate. But still, those who know her will still look into her face and see Natasha looking back coolly.

((feel free to get in touch if you want to orchestrate a specific incident or meeting, and i can write a starter with more specificity.))

[echopraxia]

Grief is--

Different. She feels it differently, now, and carefully does not use the word lowered even in the privacy of her own mind, where it might fester like a wound and become something of which she cannot be proud. She feels the impermanence of life with her own hands and so she buries them up to the elbows in work, weaving flowers into place alongside Natasha, birdlike in another way-- movement and manner that declare her newness while hair that falls not far above her shoulders tells another story, gives it a different meaning.

She works, though, as one accustomed to it; permits something like gratitude for the opportunity to be absorbed in it to show in her. Not so grateful that later she will attend the funeral - she will not. But when an introduction is offered, she looks up and refocuses, for a moment.

"Anya," after a pause that's slightly awkward in a way she appears both conscious of and indifferent to.

[ex_spins462]

She introduces herself because the woman interests her; there is kinship in another unplugged here, too.

"Russian?" Natasha asks, because she knew an Anya once (twice, actually; she has not forgotten the small girl who pinched her when the instructor wasn't looking and cried for her grandmother in the night, rattling the handcuffs, but she has blurred into a long list of similar girls and is not the thickset scientist that the name calls to her mind.) After a moment, she shakes her head, apparently sheepish. "Or not. I understand not everywhere even has a Soviet."

[lostsoldier]

Grief is not for him. He's seen his share of it, of course; there are enough red-lined eyes and gaping, down-turned mouths amid enough final wails echoing in his dreams, and when an old woman's face crumples like wet newspaper over the twist of a flower stem, that part at least feels familiar. But his hand pulls tense in his sleeve, the shine to his eyes going cool and still in answer. It's not for him to feel.

The preparations are no more a place for him. He moves with the ebb and flow of the crowd, but he isn't a part of it, doesn't engage with it the way she does. Death means something else for him, the completion of one task, the start of another; dispose of the body, destroy the evidence, erase the target and then yourself. The goal has always been to nullify a life, not celebrate it, and the mourners remind him instead of the hushed crowd flowing across smooth museum floors, of a history he's still struggling to make his own.

Speeches, however, he understands. Political machinations. Her too, in bits and pieces. He'd read her SHIELD file, back before all this, but more than that the things she'd said after his extraction, the understated empathy in their interactions has fostered enough tentative trust that he seeks her out in the crowd, in her sharp clothes and her new hair and someone else's skin. It's been a week or two since he'd gotten strong enough to disappear from the Shangrila, but he steps into place next to her like no time has passed at all.

"You could almost be one of them," he says from beneath his hood, like he hadn't just crossed a deck full of people without anyone sparing him a second glance, but what she's doing is different. Being someone, instead of no one. He sounds almost impressed. (Envious, maybe.)

[ex_spins462]

It's good to see him, in the sense that she'd lost track of him for a little while there. That makes her nervous, mostly out of habit. She doesn't evince any surprise or relief, though, since keeping certain emotions wrapped in public is also a habit.

"Almost isn't good enough," she murmurs, not looking at him after that first initial glance. She wants to be invisible in her persona; Natalie Rushman was as much a complete person as Natasha Romanoff, maybe moreso. And she needs a name and voice that doesn't use the network, or ask too many questions about Counsellors Jade and Brutus, or know Tony Stark.

If it were anyone other than Bucky she might go so far as to pretend not to recognize them, but he's incognito — and fragile, she is careful with him not out of fear but because even experiencing a tenth of what he has gives her empathy. Everybody in the crowd is listening to the measured rhythm of a speech, but Natasha eschews being prosthelytized at and turns her body towards Bucky's like she's closing ranks.

Natasha peers at his expression in the shadow of the hood. "I didn't expect to see you here," she says, voice pitched low, husky. She doesn't say it like a bad thing: she likes being kept on her toes.

[lostsoldier]

His gaze flicks back toward the stage at that, inscrutable in the way that his body language tends, to extremes of transparency or opacity without much in between. If she'd been herself, she might not have. If she'd been with Steve, he wouldn't have come this close at all.

"They wake you up for a reason," he explains with a tilt of his temple toward the speakers. There are always reasons. Causes. Wars to fight. Steve Rogers' dogged determination might have been a motivating factor in his own extraction, but he doubts it was the only one.

Maybe he's seen enough reasons to want a better handle on theirs.

[ex_spins462]

"Or because Steve pesters 'em enough," Natasha says wryly, because she remembers. He could barely walk and it was already Bucky, Bucky, Bucky. So maybe he'd given the council some compelling reasons, and maybe they'd had enough of their own to say yes, but that still feels like bullshit to her. Steve wanted Bucky here, and Steve is basically incapable of ulterior motive.

Still, she gets what Bucky's saying, because she's buying into it. It's been made clear to her that her skills are an asset. If Natasha intends to exploit that, then it's only because if she doesn't then they'll exploit her.

"You could be a farmer," she suggests, like that's not totally ludicrous. Or maybe she's joking, the tone is hard to read. "Just you and a greenhouse full of plants. No politics."

[lostsoldier]

He huffs an exhale through his nose, gaze sliding back to meet hers with an evenness that's endemic of their surroundings more than the magnitude of his reaction, exactly. It's easy enough to picture an eyebrow raise to match that look, even if he doesn't.

"So could you," he says with a pointed flick of an eye over her — her wig, her make-up, her indelicate lean. She's not taking up farming. "So could Steve."

Imagine that. Steve Rogers, settling down to tend a crop of lima beans and let somebody else fight the war.

[ex_spins462]

"I'm not built for farming," is her dry reply, lifting an arm slowly as if to show him the relative lack of definition despite her frequent workouts, the movement balletic. Steve, though, they both know that Steve Rogers will be fighting for as long as he's breathing, no matter how he's been built. "Besides, I like my job." Whatever that is. Likes herself, whoever that is. It's to separate out the two.

If she's lying to herself, then she's a good enough liar that she hasn't noticed.

"There's a lot of talk a lot about second chances, new beginnings, leaving our Matrix behind." But she doesn't really buy it when they're so willing to utilize her skillset. When Bucky stands next to her with only one arm and his face in shadows. Natasha can accept the line between reality and non-reality, but it doesn't erase her past, no more than anything else she's tried.

[lostsoldier]

His gaze drops to his own hand. Too-smooth fingers curl in to the palm. Deucalion had said something similar not so long ago, with that same skepticism, but it's not the question of whether to believe Zion's propaganda that unsettles him.

"Not a lot left to leave," he manages. Not just in their Matrix, although it's true he doesn't have much to hang onto that isn't out here. But there's so little of him to begin with. There was a time he built his world out of instinct and muscle memory, a collection of skills he couldn't remember learning and reflexes he knew to trust.

What is he, if he leaves those behind too?

[ex_spins462]

She can't deny he has a point.

"Maybe it just means you don't have to worry about getting it all back," is the advice she gives, soft and musing, like they're talking about the weather. "You can go forward, instead. Use the space to build something new." Like the mind can be interior decorated.

How viable that is with Steve here, still calling him Bucky, she doesn't know. There are a lot of people from their Matrix in Zion, which is one of the things Natasha has struggled with in trying to reinvent herself, or at least create a solid enugh persona that it looks like compliance, for all intents and purposes.

[lostsoldier]

Build something new. The words seem to strike him, and quiet eyes find her again — her beneath all her disguises, building. It's a nice thought. Not so simple as it looks. Beneath his hood, he shakes his head.

"He pulled me out for a reason, too." Steve. The words are gentle, without judgment; that Steve went back for him at all is the kind of thing that makes his whole insides hurt like a bruise, but Steve went back for his friend — and doesn't he deserve that? To get his friend back?

[ex_spins462]

The way Natasha tilts her head is almost bird like, but she's not listening for anything but the intonation in his voice there, trying to figure him out even as she knows she probably can't. It's the most obvious she's been so far, with regards to any onlookers, peering at his shadowed face.

"I think Steve would want you to put yourself first," she says, because she knows Steve, knows how bad he'd feel if he'd simply replaced HYDRA in telling Bucky who to be. Adds, softer, but a little flip, "Whoever that turns out to be."