faderift | It's a fool who plays it cool

"Hope springs eternal," Jude sighs, putting his chin in his hand dreamily.

If only the Rifts would be so kind.

"I'm the farthest thing from a city boy, but it was there if I wanted to go. Still adjusting to that idea."

"Where we you from, back home?"

"United States, parts of Canada, 2022." He's coming to find that the time is important too, which knocked his head for a loop when he first realized it.

"Colorado, but I traveled a lot for work. We go as far south as New Mexico, up through Yellowstone and Glacier and into Canada. All the way to Jasper."

He gestures upwards as he speaks as if he's pointing a map, pauses, then clarifies: "British Columbia." Sometimes, that name is more familiar. He hopes that something will sound familiar.

"Was coming back from Yellowstone, somewhere in the Grand Tetons, when I came through the Rift."

Quick pause, and he tilts his head. "How about you?"

"Wow, well-traveled," she says with a smile. "Berkeley native, but I was living in Toronto when I came here. Well," she clarifies, "home is in Toronto, I was on an extended business trip when I came here this time. But I've never been to Yellowstone, I hear it's awesome. Most of my travel is like ... population centers, not so much parks."

Though from her tone, that's a practical consideration, not due to a hatred of the outdoors.

"Oh, and uh, year. I came from early 2016." It still feels weird to have to specify, even after as long as she's spent in Thedas.

"Not well enough to have been to Toronto," he admits with a chuckle, watching her thoughtfully. The gap in years gives him pause, but he nods slowly. One more thing to digest, but he'll give himself time. Plenty of people here know how hard that is, so he's in good company.

"Doesn't surprise me, most humans don't go that deep into the preserves," he says, in a way that's probably too casual.

"What did you do for work?"

"I'm a biologist. Well. PhD student, suspended my degree for wildly complicated personal reasons that I will definitely need a few drinks if you want me to explain, but I'm sure I'll finish up when I can. Oh." She brightens a bit. "I'm so used to no one having any idea but: my specialty is evolutionary developmental biology. It's, uh, studying how organisms develop to infer things about how they evolved. I usually don't even bother saying that part in Thedas, it's just like, it seems shitty to say a bunch of words where I have to explain absolutely all of them."

She's curious about not well enough, but she also knows from experience that may or may not be something to pry into. She'll leave it for now.

Jude not only knows what it is, he lights up when she explains it, nodding along with her words.

"My dad works in conservation. He's a field researcher and a forest guardian. He's studying the coastal biome just north of Seattle. Any types of critters you were focused on?"

It's not exactly talking shop for him, but it's damn close. It's something near and dear to somebody he loves.

She looks pleased to have found such an enthusiastic audience. "That's really cool. My work's mainly on the cellular level, lab stuff. At least at home. So I've worked with a lot of different kinds of cells. My doctorate was focused on epigenetics -- the way that environment affects the expression of genetic traits." Which ended up sort of ironic, but that's heavy for a first real conversation so instead: "I've also done some work on gene therapy for heritable diseases, though that's not what I'd prefer to focus on long-term."

Though he's got a surface level understanding, Jude appreciates the clarification; he has enough working knowledge to make the rest of it make sense.

"Beautiful. What are you focusing on long-term?"

He lifts his shoulders.

"If that's not too close to a drinking question."

"It's a fine question, but I don't really have a simple answer." For a variety of reasons. "The headline is that once I finish my current project, I'm sort of starting over. But I'm still interested in epigenetics, so I'll probably head back that way eventually. Or..." She squints.

"...has anyone had a talk with you about rifter metaphyics yet, because if we're doing that, that's definitely a drinking conversation."

"Not yet, but I'm willing to treat this like a brunch."

He can be that basic bitch for some info. (Kidding. Jude's a sucker for brunch.)

"Alright, so. I guess first things first. What did anyone tell you about rifters, like, as a group. Anything?"

She takes a roll, for good measure. They're going to be here for a minute.

"Basics of closing a rift," he says thoughtfully, and settles along the counter to hunt up some fruit. Blackberries, blueberries, and a precious few strawberries for starters. A peach. He washes and cuts them while they talk, filling a plate.

"That we're all from different worlds. Or maybe the same world, but different timelines, or realities." Jude lifts one huge shoulder as if that's normal.

"That the Venatori will take us alive and torture us if they get the chance, that we very narrowly escaped being categorized as demons by the religious system here, and that we're seen as potentially dangerous wildcards by everyone with a shred of power."

He presents the plate.

"As well they should. We're the strangest of the strangers. But you mentioned metaphysics, and that wasn't my first lesson."

She takes the plate gratefully. "One up on me when I arrived, then. What are you working with, knowledge-wise?" Magic still seems like some Arthur C. Clarke-level advanced technology to her, but she supposes given her resources, the difference doesn't really matter.

"K through twelve? Taken a few classes in psychology, but no degree."

He could get into that, but he figures that's not exactly what she's asking.

"I know the basics about Thedas, magic, the Fade, the different cultures. Still reading up on history, but I've concentrated on Riftwatch, The Inquisition and the history of Kirkwall. If I'm understanding your question, that is."

She realizes she misunderstood his earlier comment, but takes it with good grace. "No, that's helpful. OK, at least we're getting rifters the basics these days, that's good." She exhales.

"Alright so ... this part isn't like ... the official position of Riftwatch as a whole, OK? But there's been a lot of research and observation, and I feel pretty confident that we're not." She pauses. There's no gentle way to say this; she has a brief, bittersweet memory of Alison blurting out something similarly weighty to Sarah, back when they first met. But she shrugs that off and continues.

"I don't think there's any evidence that rifters travel physically through the Fade from our home worlds. I think our minds and our memories do, and the Fade constructs us the bodies we're supposed to have, in the state we expect them to be in. Mostly. We have to look like one of the sentient species here on Thedas, technology come through working magically or not at all, that kind of thing. And that's because it's not ... I didn't bring an actual iPhone, I brought the Fade's best guess at what an iPhone is for, based on what it pulled out of my mind."

Jude slips easily into something that he's good at doing: listening quietly. He slowly tears apart a roll, poking the bits of it into his mouth while he chews, but it's debatable whether he tastes it, because all of his attention is in the here and now.

He reaches, without meaning to. Way down into the earth and stone beneath his feet, into the tides that crash between souls, and again feels that cold parched nothingness. Blind again.

Maybe she expects him to be upset about the revelation, but instead, relief breaks across his face like he's finally setting down a heavy load.

"Then you mean the real us is still back where we came from? We're not missing?"

A muted little smile. She tends to feel, on balance, more like Jude does, but she doesn't expect it from other rifters, many of whom cling hard to the idea that they could get home, one day.

"Yeah. I mean, I can tell you for sure, when my memories of home started up again, after the first time I was in Thedas, there was no gap. I hadn't been missing, I woke up the morning after I went to sleep. Didn't remember anything about here. Or, as I think is more likely ... the me whose memories I got in addition when I came into Thedas the second time didn't have anything to remember, because she wasn't ever here. She was where she was, the whole time. And." She plays with her fork absently; this is also the crux of it for her, in a lot of ways.

"I don't think I'm physically exactly the same Cosima who was here in Thedas before, either. I mean, I have all my memories of being here the first time, so like, that gets into some philosophical waters I'm not fully equipped to navigate us through, but. I had a chronic disease at home, and I had it here last time. And I was cured, between my last time here and this one. And this time here, I'm healthy. But I think it's because this time, the Fade was building the body of a woman who knew she was healed, and last time it was building the body of a woman who knew she was sick. I can't prove that, but it feels most likely to me, based on all the evidence we have."

Peace eases into Jude's eyes as she speaks. He'd been picturing his pack splintered, fractured, broken- he is a metaphysical pillar for so many souls, keeping them grounded in the present, on their tenuous holds of reality. Shifters are connected to each other, and none so connected as wolves.

Nothing pack-bonds harder than humans and wolves, and shifters who are both are beyond the norm.

They feel each others' deaths. Cruelty reverberates. He's seen mated pairs suddenly sundered in violence and tragedy, an Alpha driven insane with grief, so much so that she nearly took her pack with her headlong into the darkness. It had taken a sentinel, half a dozen betas, and her son to surround her and bring her back to reality.

Jude is the center of so many tides, the point of gravity for so many currents, that his loss would devastate his pack in a way it would take years to rebuild.

She's telling him that the people he loves most are all safe.

It is lonely. And later, it will hurt.

But for now, he rides that high and listens.

"That sounds like an incredible gift," Jude says softly, catching his breath. "Living with chronic illness is far from easy. Obviously it's beside your point," he allows, with a dip of his head to one side.

"But if it works that way, I'm glad it does."

"I get why a lot of people resist the idea," she says, frank. "It's... it means that this life, however long or short, is all this version of us gets, as far as we know. That there's no going home one day. But. I'm with you. I'd rather my family and friends have Cosima prime than grieve or wonder what happened without ever getting an answer.

She exhales, playing with one of her rings absently. "You know, it's kind of funny. What we're discussing, it's what a lot of pop culture stuff about clones is about. The assumption that a clone is a copy of you, like a xerox. But clones aren't you, they're your siblings. It's like identical twins, it's not ... this. Where we're all carrying around memories duplicated from our selves at home."

She realizes, after a moment, that it's not self-evident why that's funny, so she adds: "I am one. A clone. It turns out. I didn't know until a couple years ago, but. Guess I'm just collecting major readjustments to my worldview at this point."

Jude can't say his eyebrows don't lift at the revelation, but frankly, he's seen so much frankly weird shit in the past few months that it doesn't immediate strike him as too far outside of the realm of weird shit he was dealing with already.

Maybe it's strange of him not to get ruffled, but he doesn't know any other way to be.

Instead, he thinks on it, passes her more cut fruit while his brows furrow and he puts one elbow on the countertop.

"Siblings or twins isn't quite right, either," he says slowly, tapping his fingers on the surface. "At some point, you diverged. You are no less yourself, you're just a version of yourself who went a different way."

He half-smiles.

"If we want to get into sci-fi bullshit. There are millions of us out there. All the branching possibilities. There's a me out there who decided to have a bagel one morning instead of a waffle, and that guy's married with three kids now. Or something."

The half-smile turns into a full-blown chuckle, but he's no less serious for it.

"At the point we diverged, we became our own people. No less ourselves. Just our own version of ourselves."

She takes the offered fruit. "No, the us back in our respective homes aren't even our clones, that was my point. They're us, just ... before. But this is the umpteenth day I've wished I knew more physics, biology doesn't prepare you for discussing the multiverse in any useful way."

She sits back a bit in her chair. "But rifters ... I do have to feel like we're a bit of a unique breed. We didn't make choices here at all until we fell out of a rift. And I think if we had a way to determine how physically old we are, like on a cellular level, I wouldn't expect any of us to be older than our arrivals. This isn't just a variant."

"Was talking about you, but I see what you're getting at."

Jude offers an apologetic smile, takes a bite of his own. He chews thoughtfully, watching her face.

"Does that make us any less real?" he asks. "Even if we were our original selves, all the proof we have of the past is our memories."

He strokes the grain of the wood, thoughtful.

"It seems to me that we carry the important parts with us."

"Oh," she says, with a brief smile off his clarification. "I got you. But no, back home, my sisters are my sisters. I don't look at them and see sliding doors me. Maybe briefly when we first met, but... a couple of them were here, years ago. I think if you'd met them, you'd..." She makes a small sound, sort of a verbal shrug. "Helena would like you, you know. She appreciates a man who appreciates his food."

A brief pause, and then: "I think it makes us, if anything, more real. You know? There was a time, less so now, but a lot of rifters were like ... why should I fight Corypheus. Why should I care? But if this theory's right, Thedas may not be the only would remember, but it's the only world we'll know firsthand. It's our home too. Plus," a small digression, "it is kind of shit not to care if a world is destroyed just because it's not your world, but I don't know how to explain that part to people it's not self-evident to."

Jude nods, caught up in the idea of sisters- because he would view it one way doesn't mean that another way doesn't also work, but it's still a fascinating concept. The rest, though:

A look crosses Jude's face, one of upset, disgust, confusion.

He's never understood the mentality of fuck you, I've got mine. It just doesn't compute. It's in part because of what he is, and it's in part because of who he is. A person can't live constantly wrapped in the thoughts and feelings of others and not care.

He tries to understand people who think differently, but ultimately he's not sure he ever will.

"Haven't met any of them," he admits. "And I'm glad for that."

It's a fool who plays it cool

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