John "Quirkless" Hwang (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lineman) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
stateofdecay2024-10-12 11:48 am
lineman) wrote in stateofdecay2024-10-12 11:48 am
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(no subject)
WHO: John Hwang
WHEN: 10/11, evening
WHERE: Abandoned wind farm, Meagher Valley
WHAT: John inspects the wind farm, as instructed.
WARNINGS: Genre-typical mentions and reflection of NPC deaths
John slips away before the performance starts, quietly taking his leave, saying nothing to anyone. His last vision of Whitney, what he sees in his mind's eye as he drives away, is the acting troupe assembling. All the world's a stage, John thinks, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances. Where did he hear that before? Some lecture at Ophelia's university—he had liked it, wrote it down on a slip of paper, and stuck it into his wallet, but that's the extent of his memory. Doesn't remember who said it, but still, a nice phrase. He often feels he is undertaking an elaborate performance without a script, and that everyone can tell that he is guessing at his lines and instructions. And John too has his exits and entrances, though mainly they are exits. Like this evening.
There's still a band of light in the sky by the time John arrives at the wind farm, parking his truck at the end of the access road. The farm is built on a ridge overlooking Lake Kelenqua, turbines stuck like pins in the bowl of land that slopes gently into the lake. Behind the farm, a small dip rises up again to form the west side of Meagher Valley. Below him, the lake looks like a pane of dark green glass, reflecting the spiky tops of conifers and trailing, wispy clouds. Good location for a wind farm, he thinks. Here, the turbines can catch the wind without needing to be too tall themselves. Good for anyone working on them, as well: less of a distance to climb.
Although he told Gideon he wouldn't, John parks his truck, carefully lowering himself out of the cab with his good leg first. The landscape is draped in the rich yellow and purple of evening; from atop the ridge, he can see that the sun looks like a massive, red coin on the western horizon. It's the kind of sunset you point out to someone else, although here on the ridge there is only John.
Something catches at the corner of his eye. Turning his head, John spots a bird—an osprey, he thinks, recalling all the times he's removed their nests from poles. He tracks it as it loops around a turbine and becomes a small, dark fleck against the purple sky. The bird weaves through the blades, wheeling one final time, before disappearing atop a nacelle. I am sorry, bird, John frowns. You will have to be moved.
The turbines look to be in good order, although the light is steadily dropping. John makes his way to the main transformer, walking carefully so as not to crunch the dry October grass too loudly beneath his boots. Walking up to the transformer gives him the feeling of approaching a mausoleum. Cold and silent, composed mostly of straight lines and right angles but occasionally alarming the eye with curves and labyrinthine wiring, the transformer looks like an alien monument to something dead. But all in one piece, John thinks. Tentatively, he reaches out to touch it, half-expecting it to crumble. Beneath the flat of his palm, it is solid—so maybe not a monument to something dead, but to something asleep.
He inspects the gen-tie lines next, going to stand beneath the nearest pole and squinting up and off into the distance. The wires don't look to be fraying or sagging, from what he can see. Promising.
At this point, John thinks he should head back to Lundegaard. Distantly he is aware that people are displeased with him: Gideon, Roswell, Ophelia. Maggie, too, he frowns, though for a different reason. But Gideon, Roswell, Ophelia—John's sense is that they are displeased because he is causing them to worry. When he does as he's instructed, he is a powerline running overhead, a part of the functional background. People only truly notice powerlines when they start to spark, after all, and then people resent the dysregulation, when the functional background is no longer functional and they are plunged into the inconvenience of darkness.
How do you become close to people? John wonders. Genuinely, actually close to people? He's not sure. But the pleasure of being alone is so powerful to him at this moment, no facial expressions to struggle to read, no unspoken meanings to guess at, that it outweighs his fear of displeasing the people in his life.
He's not afraid for himself at all. He feels a cool certainty that nothing bad will happen to him, the same certainty of life he felt when had his accident. He'd died, of course, technically speaking, but even through the pain—immense—he knew that there would be something for him after.
John would be more worried if he thought he was burdening the others by going out alone, but he cannot see that his actions constitute anything but a social inconvenience. This, doing the inspection alone, provides greater efficiency for all parties involved, particularly since no one has to go out of their way to spend time with him. And if Maggie is upset that he has withdrawn an opportunity for her to forage, well, to her he will recompense.
After thinking all this, John cannot bring himself to return to Lundegaard just yet. So again, although he promised Gideon he would not, John returns to his truck to fetch his climbing gear and tool kit. He steps into his harness, pulls on his work gloves, and, mindful of the dying light, stuffs a flashlight into his back pocket. Silently, he returns to the nearest turbine, picking the lock on the tower door in an unhurried manner, as if unlocking the door to his old apartment. This does feel like a homecoming of sorts, John thinks, once he pushes the door open. Blessedly, it makes no noise.
Though the bottom of the tower is dark, John can tell everything has been locked out. Someone was mindful of procedure, he thinks. Slightly funny to imagine, someone dutifully going through all the steps of their LOTO and then fleeing the outbreak. He takes stock of the equipment and control panel, using his flashlight to check for loose wires, but finds nothing out of place. It's only been a year, after all, maybe a little more. There's no reason why anything should have seriously deteriorated.
John exhales, looks up at the ladder leading to the nacelle, licks his lips. A voice in his head tells him to turn back now, to stop pushing his luck, but his physical isolation is so delicious. When he returns to Lundegaard, it will be to isolation of a different kind. John decides to climb.
Clipped into the tower itself, John allows his mind to wander as he pulls himself up rung by rung. The movement makes his leg feel good—when he is too sedentary, his pain radiates from the inside of his hip instead of staying in its place. Depending on his mood, he imagines his pain as a many-legged, chitinous bug crawling around his body, leaving behind a trail of acid, or otherwise a beam of pure, awful light. His pain is constant, but if he's not doing anything it swallows up the world. It makes him feel insane, like he needs to scoop out with his hands all the muscle, sinew, and bone where his leg meets his torso, remove everything. Sometimes he gets so frustrated with the pain that he wants to cry—but he suspects that if someone were to see him crying, they would find him disgusting. His fear of this reaction keeps him silent and neutral.
After his night with Court, John considered asking her, If I have satisfied you can you please bring me something for the pain, anything and everything that Prescott can offer. He understands however theirs is an arrangement of brevity and convenience, and it would crumble under the pressure of a request like that. When she feels good, he feels good, at any rate, and that is a kind of medicine in itself.
John is sweating now from his climb, but he still has about halfway to go. If the climb assist was functioning, this would all be much easier, but he's glad it's not. He feels capable inside his body in this moment. Like a good, simple person who belongs in the world, if the world was this turbine alone.
His thoughts now drift to Ophelia and their mother, who Ophelia looks so much like. Ophelia even acts like their mother sometimes, with her silence and the locked door of her heart, although John tried his best to ensure this would not happen to Ophelia.
Their mother worked hard. John understands, blames his mother for nothing, but after a long day of her two, sometimes three jobs, their mother had nothing left in her, no heart or soul to dole out to her children. Both would be depleted completely. She'd come home, shower, maybe eat, and sleep, and you’d have to assume her love for you was still there.
As a child, John felt that Ophelia should have each and every small affection other children appeared to receive. So at school, the park, the library; at the grocery store, the doctor's office, the mall, John would study other families, observing how parents interacted with their children, and duly provide the same to Ophelia. Feeding her while pretending the spoon was an airplane; holding her hand and allowing himself to be led around the toy store, even though they both knew they would not buy anything; picking her up and spinning her around; making up bedtime stories; tucking her in.
He cannot say he did a very good job at any of these things. In fact, as an adult, John feels embarrassed to think back on how paltry his affection would have been, delivered to Ophelia with his straight, unfeeling face and low, monotonous voice. He had mentioned his regret to their mother once, how he had wanted but failed to give Ophelia what she deserved. Bizarrely, Eomma had somehow misunderstood his meaning:
Do you think you were owed that? Eomma had asked him. Her face would take on a certain hardness when she felt hurt and defensive, and she wore that expression then, though John did not understand what he had done to trigger it. Was I a bad mother to you?
Not at all, John replied, bewildered. Then changed the subject. A few months after that, according to the timeline he has pieced together through Ophelia's half phrases and full silences, Eomma died.
He'd like to ask Ophelia how it happened, but for them to confront the fact of their mother's death means they will have to confront how John was not there. A policy of silence seems better, in John's opinion. Whatever Ophelia thinks about him and his absence can stay unspoken. He feels it, anyway, like something sharp and cold between them.
Finally, and sweating heavily, John reaches the top of the tower, emerging into the heart of the nacelle. He removes his harness and clips so as not to damage any of the hardware, and is careful not to fall back down into the well of the ladder, which is now a single shaft of darkness barely penetrable by his flashlight. John makes a quick but thorough inspection of everything; the equipment and wiring here looks to be in good shape, as it was down in the base of the tower. He has the sense that the other turbines will be much the same: cold and abandoned, but otherwise fine. Abandoning something will never break it, he thinks, and leaving it cold rarely.
Returning to his harness, John makes the final, short climb up onto the top of the nacelle. The wind is strong, here some 200 feet up in the air, but it feels refreshing. Although it is a chilly October evening, John peels off his jacket, sweater, and undershirt to let the wind dry the sweat on his body. Still panting from his climb, he surveys the landscape.
There's Whitney Field in the distance, the lake, the river catching the sunset like a snaking line of fire. A little to his right, he thinks he sees the old high school, with its potential bounty of supplies. Turning again, he sees Grace Lutheran, Lundegaard’s old home. He's too high up to really make them out, but John pretends he can see the rock cairns there, marking the bodies of the eternal dead. Lundegaard buried Hank and Logan at Grace Lutheran, he recalls, trying and failing to summon a feeling of pity for the two dead men. He can't even bring himself to make the sign of the cross for them, so he just turns away.
One of the blades stopped upright, and from this position, it blocks John's view of the sunset. He can see everything around the setting sun, however: the darkening colors of the sky, dipping from a warm purple to a cool blue; the thick cover of trees on the sides of the valley turning from green to black. Doubtless, there is danger hidden within the treeline, ferals or slow-moving zombies, or even just an ordinary, living cougar. He sees nothing in his immediate vicinity, however. Just his truck, the turbines, the lake's dark glass.
John feels it's safe for him to stay where he is for a little while longer. If the turbine was functional, John imagines the rhythmic cut of the blades through the air would sound something like a heartbeat, as if he existed inside someone else’s heart. The thought is soothing.
WHEN: 10/11, evening
WHERE: Abandoned wind farm, Meagher Valley
WHAT: John inspects the wind farm, as instructed.
WARNINGS: Genre-typical mentions and reflection of NPC deaths
John slips away before the performance starts, quietly taking his leave, saying nothing to anyone. His last vision of Whitney, what he sees in his mind's eye as he drives away, is the acting troupe assembling. All the world's a stage, John thinks, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances. Where did he hear that before? Some lecture at Ophelia's university—he had liked it, wrote it down on a slip of paper, and stuck it into his wallet, but that's the extent of his memory. Doesn't remember who said it, but still, a nice phrase. He often feels he is undertaking an elaborate performance without a script, and that everyone can tell that he is guessing at his lines and instructions. And John too has his exits and entrances, though mainly they are exits. Like this evening.
There's still a band of light in the sky by the time John arrives at the wind farm, parking his truck at the end of the access road. The farm is built on a ridge overlooking Lake Kelenqua, turbines stuck like pins in the bowl of land that slopes gently into the lake. Behind the farm, a small dip rises up again to form the west side of Meagher Valley. Below him, the lake looks like a pane of dark green glass, reflecting the spiky tops of conifers and trailing, wispy clouds. Good location for a wind farm, he thinks. Here, the turbines can catch the wind without needing to be too tall themselves. Good for anyone working on them, as well: less of a distance to climb.
Although he told Gideon he wouldn't, John parks his truck, carefully lowering himself out of the cab with his good leg first. The landscape is draped in the rich yellow and purple of evening; from atop the ridge, he can see that the sun looks like a massive, red coin on the western horizon. It's the kind of sunset you point out to someone else, although here on the ridge there is only John.
Something catches at the corner of his eye. Turning his head, John spots a bird—an osprey, he thinks, recalling all the times he's removed their nests from poles. He tracks it as it loops around a turbine and becomes a small, dark fleck against the purple sky. The bird weaves through the blades, wheeling one final time, before disappearing atop a nacelle. I am sorry, bird, John frowns. You will have to be moved.
The turbines look to be in good order, although the light is steadily dropping. John makes his way to the main transformer, walking carefully so as not to crunch the dry October grass too loudly beneath his boots. Walking up to the transformer gives him the feeling of approaching a mausoleum. Cold and silent, composed mostly of straight lines and right angles but occasionally alarming the eye with curves and labyrinthine wiring, the transformer looks like an alien monument to something dead. But all in one piece, John thinks. Tentatively, he reaches out to touch it, half-expecting it to crumble. Beneath the flat of his palm, it is solid—so maybe not a monument to something dead, but to something asleep.
He inspects the gen-tie lines next, going to stand beneath the nearest pole and squinting up and off into the distance. The wires don't look to be fraying or sagging, from what he can see. Promising.
At this point, John thinks he should head back to Lundegaard. Distantly he is aware that people are displeased with him: Gideon, Roswell, Ophelia. Maggie, too, he frowns, though for a different reason. But Gideon, Roswell, Ophelia—John's sense is that they are displeased because he is causing them to worry. When he does as he's instructed, he is a powerline running overhead, a part of the functional background. People only truly notice powerlines when they start to spark, after all, and then people resent the dysregulation, when the functional background is no longer functional and they are plunged into the inconvenience of darkness.
How do you become close to people? John wonders. Genuinely, actually close to people? He's not sure. But the pleasure of being alone is so powerful to him at this moment, no facial expressions to struggle to read, no unspoken meanings to guess at, that it outweighs his fear of displeasing the people in his life.
He's not afraid for himself at all. He feels a cool certainty that nothing bad will happen to him, the same certainty of life he felt when had his accident. He'd died, of course, technically speaking, but even through the pain—immense—he knew that there would be something for him after.
John would be more worried if he thought he was burdening the others by going out alone, but he cannot see that his actions constitute anything but a social inconvenience. This, doing the inspection alone, provides greater efficiency for all parties involved, particularly since no one has to go out of their way to spend time with him. And if Maggie is upset that he has withdrawn an opportunity for her to forage, well, to her he will recompense.
After thinking all this, John cannot bring himself to return to Lundegaard just yet. So again, although he promised Gideon he would not, John returns to his truck to fetch his climbing gear and tool kit. He steps into his harness, pulls on his work gloves, and, mindful of the dying light, stuffs a flashlight into his back pocket. Silently, he returns to the nearest turbine, picking the lock on the tower door in an unhurried manner, as if unlocking the door to his old apartment. This does feel like a homecoming of sorts, John thinks, once he pushes the door open. Blessedly, it makes no noise.
Though the bottom of the tower is dark, John can tell everything has been locked out. Someone was mindful of procedure, he thinks. Slightly funny to imagine, someone dutifully going through all the steps of their LOTO and then fleeing the outbreak. He takes stock of the equipment and control panel, using his flashlight to check for loose wires, but finds nothing out of place. It's only been a year, after all, maybe a little more. There's no reason why anything should have seriously deteriorated.
John exhales, looks up at the ladder leading to the nacelle, licks his lips. A voice in his head tells him to turn back now, to stop pushing his luck, but his physical isolation is so delicious. When he returns to Lundegaard, it will be to isolation of a different kind. John decides to climb.
Clipped into the tower itself, John allows his mind to wander as he pulls himself up rung by rung. The movement makes his leg feel good—when he is too sedentary, his pain radiates from the inside of his hip instead of staying in its place. Depending on his mood, he imagines his pain as a many-legged, chitinous bug crawling around his body, leaving behind a trail of acid, or otherwise a beam of pure, awful light. His pain is constant, but if he's not doing anything it swallows up the world. It makes him feel insane, like he needs to scoop out with his hands all the muscle, sinew, and bone where his leg meets his torso, remove everything. Sometimes he gets so frustrated with the pain that he wants to cry—but he suspects that if someone were to see him crying, they would find him disgusting. His fear of this reaction keeps him silent and neutral.
After his night with Court, John considered asking her, If I have satisfied you can you please bring me something for the pain, anything and everything that Prescott can offer. He understands however theirs is an arrangement of brevity and convenience, and it would crumble under the pressure of a request like that. When she feels good, he feels good, at any rate, and that is a kind of medicine in itself.
John is sweating now from his climb, but he still has about halfway to go. If the climb assist was functioning, this would all be much easier, but he's glad it's not. He feels capable inside his body in this moment. Like a good, simple person who belongs in the world, if the world was this turbine alone.
His thoughts now drift to Ophelia and their mother, who Ophelia looks so much like. Ophelia even acts like their mother sometimes, with her silence and the locked door of her heart, although John tried his best to ensure this would not happen to Ophelia.
Their mother worked hard. John understands, blames his mother for nothing, but after a long day of her two, sometimes three jobs, their mother had nothing left in her, no heart or soul to dole out to her children. Both would be depleted completely. She'd come home, shower, maybe eat, and sleep, and you’d have to assume her love for you was still there.
As a child, John felt that Ophelia should have each and every small affection other children appeared to receive. So at school, the park, the library; at the grocery store, the doctor's office, the mall, John would study other families, observing how parents interacted with their children, and duly provide the same to Ophelia. Feeding her while pretending the spoon was an airplane; holding her hand and allowing himself to be led around the toy store, even though they both knew they would not buy anything; picking her up and spinning her around; making up bedtime stories; tucking her in.
He cannot say he did a very good job at any of these things. In fact, as an adult, John feels embarrassed to think back on how paltry his affection would have been, delivered to Ophelia with his straight, unfeeling face and low, monotonous voice. He had mentioned his regret to their mother once, how he had wanted but failed to give Ophelia what she deserved. Bizarrely, Eomma had somehow misunderstood his meaning:
Do you think you were owed that? Eomma had asked him. Her face would take on a certain hardness when she felt hurt and defensive, and she wore that expression then, though John did not understand what he had done to trigger it. Was I a bad mother to you?
Not at all, John replied, bewildered. Then changed the subject. A few months after that, according to the timeline he has pieced together through Ophelia's half phrases and full silences, Eomma died.
He'd like to ask Ophelia how it happened, but for them to confront the fact of their mother's death means they will have to confront how John was not there. A policy of silence seems better, in John's opinion. Whatever Ophelia thinks about him and his absence can stay unspoken. He feels it, anyway, like something sharp and cold between them.
Finally, and sweating heavily, John reaches the top of the tower, emerging into the heart of the nacelle. He removes his harness and clips so as not to damage any of the hardware, and is careful not to fall back down into the well of the ladder, which is now a single shaft of darkness barely penetrable by his flashlight. John makes a quick but thorough inspection of everything; the equipment and wiring here looks to be in good shape, as it was down in the base of the tower. He has the sense that the other turbines will be much the same: cold and abandoned, but otherwise fine. Abandoning something will never break it, he thinks, and leaving it cold rarely.
Returning to his harness, John makes the final, short climb up onto the top of the nacelle. The wind is strong, here some 200 feet up in the air, but it feels refreshing. Although it is a chilly October evening, John peels off his jacket, sweater, and undershirt to let the wind dry the sweat on his body. Still panting from his climb, he surveys the landscape.
There's Whitney Field in the distance, the lake, the river catching the sunset like a snaking line of fire. A little to his right, he thinks he sees the old high school, with its potential bounty of supplies. Turning again, he sees Grace Lutheran, Lundegaard’s old home. He's too high up to really make them out, but John pretends he can see the rock cairns there, marking the bodies of the eternal dead. Lundegaard buried Hank and Logan at Grace Lutheran, he recalls, trying and failing to summon a feeling of pity for the two dead men. He can't even bring himself to make the sign of the cross for them, so he just turns away.
One of the blades stopped upright, and from this position, it blocks John's view of the sunset. He can see everything around the setting sun, however: the darkening colors of the sky, dipping from a warm purple to a cool blue; the thick cover of trees on the sides of the valley turning from green to black. Doubtless, there is danger hidden within the treeline, ferals or slow-moving zombies, or even just an ordinary, living cougar. He sees nothing in his immediate vicinity, however. Just his truck, the turbines, the lake's dark glass.
John feels it's safe for him to stay where he is for a little while longer. If the turbine was functional, John imagines the rhythmic cut of the blades through the air would sound something like a heartbeat, as if he existed inside someone else’s heart. The thought is soothing.
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