first one who touches the ground loses

Octavia hadn't been sleeping well. Night after night, she kept waking up every hour and a half or so, just to make sure she could still hear two other people breathing in bed with her. If they were quiet, she would hold her own breath until she was sure she could hear them, or she felt them move, or something.

It wasn't making for very restful nights, but she'd survive. She always did.

Granted, on Friday morning, that survival involved giving up on trying to stay asleep, slipping quietly out of bed and making her way into the galley. She got the coffee going, because she might as well. If actual rest wasn't going to give her energy, then maybe caffeine would at least keep her going.

She'd also made sure to leave the bedroom door open more than enough that if anyone else was awake, or woke up, they would either be able to hear her puttering away, or at the very least be able to smell the coffee sooner rather than later.

She hadn't vanished. She wasn't going to let anyone think she had, either.

(It felt like the least she could do.)

[ooc: For the two.]

Thursday night was still on-going had been something else. Stupid, probably, but it had made Octavia feel alive in a way that had been in short supply in the past few weeks. And she'd come back, late at night but with no major injuries, taken a shower, crawled into bed. Played it all off like a long walk. A breather. Nothing too different from all the other walks she'd been taking.

Even just this morning, a full day later, she'd already taken one. Just around the island, nowhere near the preserve, or the woods, not even in the park. Streets and stairs and beach, confined. Thinking, whether she wanted to or not, about the dreams she'd been having the past two nights. Walking into the preserve and letting the undergrowth bury her. Her mother had been there, too, bathed in a golden light from somewhere beyond the treetops.

It all seemed a little heavy-handed, if you asked Octavia.

Anyway, the walk was over. She was yet to go back inside, although she felt like she'd probably need a shower soon. For now, she was sitting on the deck, right by her little garden. Like it was enough just to be near it.

Because it had to be.

She had to be fine. She was losing entire days to pretending to be, acting her usual self for Duke and Lucifer's benefit, doing the usual things, with her quiet snark, holding hands, playing her part while they fixed the shit between themselves. (Ignoring the ache that came with them doing it someplace she'd spent years developing a big stake in. Ignoring that she'd almost dropped by the house for a bath just this morning, only to find herself unable to actually go in.) Sometimes she pretended so convincingly she even fell for it herself.

And wasn't that the goal, really?

She had her phone out. Checking out the news for anything new on the chemical plant. That was where it had started, anyway: now she was just scrolling through whatever else happened to be there. Maybe she was stalling? Didn't really matter. Something caught her eye either way, in her recommendations. A fresh discovery in Pompeii.

She tapped it open. Read, scrolled.

Came to a stop when she came up on the photo of the altar. Two snakes, surrounded by greenery, painted two thousand years ago, but their color still retained, unearthed from the ash.

Something in her chest clenched.

(It all seemed a little heavy-handed, if you asked --)

[ooc: Expecting one, open.]

Octavia had urged Lucifer to fly Duke back to the boat. Something about safety, and security, and a defendable spot that was closed off and sort of separate from the rest of the island --

So in one word: control. Which Octavia was grasping for, had been grasping for from just about the second she'd laid eyes on Mara at Selkie Peak. Something she'd thought she'd had, with the portal idea, only to immediately find out how wrong she'd been.

Making Lucifer get Duke home as soon as possible had been another flaily attempt at it.

Of course, as Octavia had come to realize very soon after, it meant she'd had to let both of them out of her sight. She didn't know if Duke had come to yet. Didn't know anything, except that this was the fastest she'd ever crossed the island, trying to race an angel back to port.

Her heart was thumping like thunder in her ears and her lungs ached when she burst onto, then into the Cape Rouge.

And yet: "Lucifer! Is he still out?"

[ooc: For the two modded with permission! Follows this. Note to squirrels: That Octavia and Lucifer got Duke back to the boat is fine for broadcast, everything else NFB pls and thank you!]

Octavia had been having a lot of thoughts since her visit to Engelsøy the other week. About her past, sure, as always. About the present, likewise.

But the future, too. Her own, that of her loved ones, that of the planet.

A lot of that last thing, actually.

And all of those thoughts were beginning to trend towards action. Like there was a restlessness in her bones, reminding her there was still time, there were resources, there were fights to join and pursuits to engage in.

(Maybe even ways to make amends for everything she'd done wrong in her own time.)

She'd been quietly compiling things in two notebooks. In one, she was trying to collect every last bit of information she could remember about how the first Praimfaya had come about, whether it was something she'd been taught on the Ark, something she'd heard on the Ground, or something she'd read down in the bunker. Anything and everything, no matter how small.

In the other, she was putting all of her research into... well, the jumble things that were running the planet into the ground right now. Who the big players in fighting it were, and what the big things they were doing were.

Probably no surprise that Octavia had been sleeping progressively worse over the last week or so. Just the cost of throwing herself at something that called to her, for the first time in years. Still, right now on Thursday morning, after a too-early breakfast, she was working on something much more practical, easy, and very, very local: the little garden of planter boxes she'd handwavily established on the deck of the Rouge at the beginning of summer.

Putting her hands in some soil was doing a lot to center her.

[ooc: Open, ofc!]

Jennifer had taken off for Baltimore. If anyone had asked Octavia about the why and how, maybe even the when of it, she wouldn't have been able to say. Something in her had shut down at the sight of the island, the knowledge that they were no longer in Haven, and she only had one single shred of focus left, and one single goal to go with it:

Just herding Duke across the island, to the port, to the Rouge, to deliver him to Lucifer.

She hadn't said a word the entire way over.

But when they finally stepped onto the dock, with the ship just up ahead, she was almost running.

[ooc: For the two! Follows this.]

It had taken a couple of weeks of slow-going work, but Octavia's new drum room (or maybe music room? or maybe they would just end up referring to it as simply 'Octavia's cabin'?) was finally just about finished. The biggest and lengthiest part had been installing the soundproofing - including in some spots, re-installing it after she'd fucked it up the first time around. She'd wanted to do it all herself because it just...

Well, it just felt like something she needed to do by herself, for herself.

(For the one here right now, and the one who was long gone.)

This morning, she'd finally set up the drum kit, complete with the replacement parts she'd hauled back from the mainland a few weeks ago. She'd even made as much of an effort to sort of sea-proof it a little as she could, to minimize everything sliding around in case of a major storm, or if they took the Rouge out of port sometime.

But now she'd done all she could. And she was sitting on the floor next to the partially open door, admiring her work.

(Someone more mean might have called it stalling.)

[ooc: Open for the other people living on this rust bucket.]

The room wasn't soundproofed yet. And that was fine. It had taken Octavia two weeks to make it this far: to not just have the drum kit in boxes in the room, but to actually be assembling it.

She hadn't set it up in more than a decade, by now. It was weird how easily it came to her once she got started. Every little bit just... finding its place, at least once she stopped really trying to think about it and let instinct take over.

It didn't take that long before it was -- all there. This piece of her old life, fully intact again.

... Well, for a given definition of 'fully intact'. Octavia examined the damage, and yes, she was definitely going to have to replace some bits before she did anything else. Between having been down in the hold for years and having had the shit kicked out of it right before that, the set had clearly seen better days. She was going to have to go shopping.

(No of course that wasn't an excuse to keep from trying the kit out just a little while longer, don't be stupid. Why would she need that?)

[ooc: Open if you have any reason to be here, sure.]

At least things on the boat had settled down in all their post-trauma enough that Octavia no longer felt like going out into the preserve would be seen as a slight against someone, or fleeing, or something else like that. But of course, now that she'd used most of her Thursday on finally getting some preserve time in, it felt like she'd maybe overdone it, because when she got back to the ship she felt exhausted. Maybe it was all the target practice, or the walking around afterwards, or --

Or just the underlying exhaustion of having been through some rough times, recently? But no. Definitely one of those other things, not that.

Anyway, she'd gotten back, and changed into some comfier clothes (fully aware that she could probably also have used a shower), and then just sort of... slumped onto the bed. She'd get up in a moment, honest. Aaany time now.

Any time.

[ooc: Open for those that live here, and no of course this level of tired isn't method RP. Of course not.]

Octavia had been dreaming of many things, this week. Mostly Haven, mostly horror, but many other messy things, too. Sheep and tilling fields and glowing butterflies and a week on a farm (sheepskin blankets and bonedeep exhaustion and a warm voice in her ear talking about what use was fighting at the end of the world?) had featured in jumbled everything of it all, but that was not out of the ordinary enough for Octavia to have really paid it much mind.

(And, well, she always felt drawn to the woods. And particularly when traumatic shit had been going down.)

So this was just any old Saturday morning.

She had a coffee cup in hand when she emerged onto the deck, with faint plans of at least finding some nice stretches to do in a bit that wouldn't irritate her wounds too much. But of course, all that was forgotten when she looked up and saw a young man standing at the edge of the deck, just barely over the gangplank.

The cup fell from her grasp as she stared at him.

[ooc: Opennn.]

As far as Octavia was concerned, it was a perfectly normal day. She'd woken up, had breakfast, and had just now rolled out her mat on a nice spot on the deck and was getting started on a little bit of yoga to get the day going.

Or, at least she had been: there was a rustling that seemed to be coming closer along the docks, catching her attention.

She squinted towards the approaching form. "What the... ?"

[ooc: For those two guys who aren't going to like this.]