Fractals

Fractals Chapter Thirty Three (NC-17)
Disclaimers Apply

A/N Goddess Foxfeather, Queen of Mad Plotbunnies, BUSIEST WOMAN ALIVE ™, Prophetic Muse, Hamster Witch and Uberbeta… the kitties are restless… I think they’re plotting. InterNutter, TC, Maxwell Pink and Dracena are wondermous and squishy for archiving/hosting. ProPhile: Good luck! Morgan: *twirlglomp* Readers/Reviewers: First, THANK YOU for reading/reviewing! Second, I’m going to finish putting all the fics up on Nutfiction soon so yay, another place to read ‘em, lol. *pokes everyone in the direction of Nutfiction*

He found her sprawled on the lanai, her metabolism making the chill in the air less noticeable to her than it was to him as he shivered in the doorway. “Rahne? You okay?”
“Fine and dandy,” she lied. “Mrs. Wagner just spent the past ten minutes asking me the same thing before Logan showed up with Kitty and she fluttered off after them.” She pushed herself up onto her elbows and smiled faintly. “I like her. She’s a good mother.”
Jamie shrugged and stuffed his hands in his pockets, trying not to shiver. “I guess so… I really don’t have a basis for comparison. Wanna come inside? It’s freezing out here!”
Rahne laughed a little at that. “It’s barely forty degrees. It’s not so bad.” She held out her hand and Jamie saw the beads looped around her fingers, glinting in the rising moonlight. “Come and sit with me a bit. It’s quiet out here.”
He paused, then shuffled over, his breath a smoky puff in front of him as he lowered himself onto the cold concrete next to her. Rahne slid her under his and folded her hand in front of her, the beads weaving between the fingers of her right hand as the fingers of her left counted them in silence. Jamie stare at the lattice work wall with it’s thick green growth, part of him wondering how Storm managed to keep things growing all year ‘round and the rest of him torn between being cold and being worried for Rahne. Finally, he said softly, “You missed dinner.”
“Not hungry,” she replied, a tiny growling from her stomach calling her a liar.
“We have a new girl here,” he said a moment later. “She’s in the dorm side with all the newbies.”
“That’s nice,” she murmured, her eyes closing. She moved her lips silently, breathing the mysteries.1
Jamie sighed and tilted his face up to look at the darkening sky. Night came so early in the autumn and even earlier when it became winter. It was barely seven o’clock and already the stars were coming out as the sky faded from blue to purple then to black. Rahne’s breath became words as she murmured her prayers then and Jamie felt a spike of confusion. “You’ve decided you want to be Catholic after all?” he asked when she paused to slide the beads to the next section.
“It isn’t a decision, Jamie,” she replied, not looking at him but rather at the beads in her hand. “It’s…who I am. I was baptized, I made my first confession, I took my first Communion, and I was confirmed last year, remember? You came and saw me with Kurt…2”
He nodded. He had not been able to figure out what was going on in the ceremony just that it was long, kind of boring and Kurt had been very happy for Rahne and given her a tiny white book and they had made jokes about it being like first Communion, without the annoying veil.3 “Yeah,” he sighed. “I remember.”
“I’m a cradle Catholic, Jamie. It’s how I define myself sometimes. It’s like it’s part of my blood. It’s my faith…” She paused and shifted to look at him. “But at the same time it isn’t. It’s like… you know those weird pictures they sell at that kiosk in the mall? They look like a colorful blob until you squint or tilt your head or something, then it’s the Mona Lisa or Groucho Marx?”
He snorted. “Yeah. Fractals.”4 He pushed an errant curl away from her eyes. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“That’s me, I think.”
“Groucho Marx or a colorful blob?”
She pinched his arm without malice and smiled. “Twit. No, I meant, fractals. All of us, life, the world, the universe. We all have this idea of how it looks, this big colorful blob, then we look just the right way and it all snaps into something new. It’s all the same but it all turns into something different.”
“Rahne” he said after the briefest moment, “I love you but you make my head hurt sometimes.”
She snorted. “Jamie, I’m trying to figure things out. Everything we do, our entire lives we live, they’re more than they seem to be, they’re something bigger and they all fit together like puzzle pieces to make on giant picture.”
He felt uncomfortable all of a sudden. “You’re not just talking about being Catholic, are you?”
“No,” she replied simply. “My meeting with the Bishop is tomorrow. He left a message while I was in class. I’m going alone.”
The conversational whiplash made his head spin. “What? No! I’ll go with you! You can’t go by yourself!” He laid a hand aside her face and forced her to look at him. “Rahne, quit trying to bury yourself alive in this!”
“Jamie,” she said tightly, pressing a kiss to his palm before pushing his hand away gently, “this is my problem. I don’t need someone to sit in the hall and worry about something they can’t fix, making me worry about it from the inside.” She unhooked her arm from his and stood. “I’ve got homework to finish for tomorrow, since I’ll be gone all day. Good night, Jamie.”
He sat there on the hard concrete for a minute longer, the cold seeping into his bones and spirit. He could not track her emotions lately, he thought to himself. It was as if she were more confused than he was.
“She your girlfriend?”
He jumped to his feet, narrowly avoiding hitting his head on the glass topped table set near the wall. “Yeah… Jenny, right?” He stuck out his hand. “Jamie.”
Jenny shook his hand tentatively, something in her grasp making Jamie’s eyes widen. “I was just walking around, getting to know the place and over heard… she gonna be okay?”
Jamie nodded. “Yeah.” He did not like how this girl was looking at him, as if he were a particularly interesting specimen in a Petrie dish. “Um, I’m gonna go…um..do stuff.” He edged past her, giving her one last, hard look.
Jenny sighed and tilted her face up to the now-star-filled sky. Gingerly, she pressed the button on her collar and murmured, “So far, so good.”


1 Each decade (ten bead section) is a mystery to meditate on. http://www.medjugorje.org/rosary.htm
2 http://www.fact-index.com/c/ca/catholic_sacraments.html
3 Even if you aren’t Orthodox, most little girls getting their first communion wear all white and wear the veil over their heads.
4 We have a title! Again!