They don't make jukeboxes like they used to...

[rememory]

To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To reach the unreachable staaaaaaaaaar....

From the kitchen that she'd designated as the focal point for de and reconstruction, Sabine barked, "Mimi!" and then choked out a laugh that was half a sob. Man of La Mancha had always been one of Byron's favorite musicals.

"What? You can't build without music and you don't have a boombox!"

"No one has a boombox anymore. Don't make me regret manifesting you." She shook a finger at the showgirl ghost who was lounging on the back of the couch like it was a baby grand.

Unrepentant, Mimi went on singing,

To right the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star.

"I love that line, don't you?" Mimi teased not just Sabine but Scott, even though he was out of earshot.

"Zip it, or it's Tsura's turn," Sabine snapped, cringing at the reference to their chaste, but far less than pure love.

"What was that?" Scott emerged from the next-door apartment through the hole he'd put between them to make testing the walls for support beams easier. There were two more like it in the filthy foursquare they'd chosen to turn into a community area -- for the time being.

"Nothing. Mimi was just asking your favorite musical so she could sing for you. Isn't that right, Mimi?" Mind-to-ghost she sent #Don't even contradict me.# Forbidding it with power was the simplest of her abilities, but Sabine didn't abridge her free will.

Mimi just laughed and laughed, sticking to Impossible Dream until the next person joined them Then she started in on songs from Annie:

It's a hard knock life for us!
It's a hard knock life for us!

Sighing, Sabine shot Scott and the newcomer an apologetic look then shrugged helplessly. "It's not like she's wrong."

[ooc: Gathering post! Sabine and Scott are clearing out a group of four apartments to start with to make a communal kitchen, dining, sitting area on level D. Mimi is audible and vaguely visible as a holographic figure of a showgirl with an indistinct face. She won't interact unless you ping me and ask for her. Will, Molly, Marie, Jack, Sebastian, Nick, Porthos, Maggie, all got a message inviting them for potluck and construction. Anyone else can have heard from them or have seen the 'excuse our dust' sign and stop by. Feel free; all are welcome. Tag Sabine with a note in the subject line; all other tags are top levels.]

Comments

[rememory]

Sabine wasn't going far, just down the hall, away from the noise, but still within shouting range of the door to the soon-to-be kitchen in case of unforeseen danger. Not danger from Will--that was ludicrous, but ceiling cave-ins or black market thug incursions or sudden malice from the station.

Once she'd found a spot along the wall that was relatively clean, she leaned against it and took a sip of the beer. When Will joined her, she handed the bottle to him and began, "Scott's married," and let the full complications of that with what he'd definitely observed settle in.

[wgraham]

Will took the beer from Sabine and lifted it to his lips without hesitation, taking a swallow. It didn't taste familiar exactly, but it was pleasant and beer-like enough that Will could appreciate it. His eyes went a little wide at Sabine's admission, quick and straight to the point.

"I take it his wife isn't on the station?" he replied, knowing Sabine well enough that he didn't think she would even broach the subject of a relationship with a man whose spouse was a local presence.

[rememory]

"No. But on some levels, it wouldn't make a difference," Sabine admitted after a moment. "Two years ago, I'd been captured a couple of times and really needed to learn to fight. Scott had recently been through a harrowing experience that left him unwilling to trust himself in a fight. He was trying to get himself back together, when we met in the gym one night. After a while, I asked him if maybe getting back to sparring with someone who was absolutely no threat to him physically might be a way of regaining his footing. That's how he ended up teaching me to fight. And because he was my teacher, and I was his completely non-threatening therapy partner, we ended up very close--at a time when he and his wife were being very distant with each other emotionally."

She took the bottle from Will, took a sip to wet her mouth and regroup, then said, "Before you lose all faith in me, nothing ever happened. I drunkenly confessed to loving him one night two years ago, and then I went and got engaged to my then-lover. His father kidnapped me and sold me to our enemies--" Her expression turned bitterly wry. "I only wish I was kidding. I'm not. But anyway, Scott came to rescue me. At the same time, Shola was rescued and we were getting to know each other again." She decided to pause and see if Will had questions, since it was a beast of a story and... well, the next part was the hard part.

[wgraham]

Sabine's reply implied that the situation with Scott (and his wife) was even more complicated than Will had originally thought. And though the story she told wasn't as typical as it could have been (considering the people involved and what they could do), the end result was a tale as old as time.

Some of Will's studies in forensics had included anthropology and human behavior, so hearing Sabine's story didn't make him think less of her in any way. Many studies he'd read had reported that human beings, biologically, weren't programmed for monogamy; the concept was wholly created as a social construct, either to foster familiar stability or support the concept of ownership. Of course Will hadn't had much experience with interpersonal relationships until he'd met Molly, and his connection with her had solidified one of the indisputable emotional components: jealousy. As open as a human being might be to having multiple partners for themselves, it was a much more difficult thing to see someone you loved finding a deep connection with someone else.

"For the record, I wouldn't have looked down on you if something had happened," he told Sabine. "Human emotion is tangled and unpredictable at the best of times, and there are many things that go through people's heads that are much worse than falling in love."

He took a moment then, considering the rest of Sabine's story, how wild her life had been compared to the relative calm of his own world. Of course he'd had his own traumas, but they sounded almost conventional compared to Sabine's.

"Shola, was that your lover at the time, or are those two separate people?" he queried, parsing the list of people involved. "Is that who your engagement was to?"

[rememory]

"No. Shola is an entirely different complicated story." She recalled that she'd told him a bit of it that first day and smiled warmly, grateful that they'd become so close so quickly. It made this much simpler. "The engagement was to Shinobi. A man I'd met some years before I ended up in Scotland. We had a brief fling and then he found me again, entirely accidentally, because his stepmother was living at the castle."

It was difficult, even now, to sum Shinobi up in so few words, but he wasn't really relevant to the story except, "He loved me in his way, but he couldn't say it, even after he proposed. I think the only way I made it through that engagement as long as I did, was because I had Scott, whose love was clear and strong, even if it had to be platonic."