One-Tracked Mind Closed PV Marshal

For one brief moment, relative silence would fall upon the little compartment. It wouldn't be complete. Muffled laughter would mix with tampered objections beneath a cushiony barrier, but it would be a significant improvement from before. She had hope it would be enough. That the action to cover his face would, like her hope for having thrown a pillow at him in the first place, be enough to pull him from this ridiculous charade and snap him back to a state of reason. Her hope, it seemed, would transcend the limitations of reality. Was Marshal ever, truly, reasonable?

"Oh would you just submit already?!" Evelynn's tone trilled, this time more easily heard over the continued antics. "Have you not already laughed yourself to death?!"

Rather than conclude his little mental break, it would only hamper it. Every time silence seemed truly to fall and she moved to pull the pillow from his face, it would only start up again. His rolling and struggle hardly helped, working to impede her efforts. Shifting her position, her left knee lifted enough to press down against his chest in an effort to keep him still and balance herself in the tight space. Body moved forward, pressure increasing as she tugged down on either side of the pillow's edges. She really hadn't been meaning to try to hurt him, per se, but neither did she perhaps realize just how occlusive the pillows were. That is, not until he experienced a sudden shift in his behaviour.

Rolls of laughter quickly turned to something more akin to bucking, eliciting perhaps a counter-productive reaction from Evelynn. Years of riding had ingrained a sense of balance, and in order to ride out a buck, leaning back was needed. Which meant pushing more heavily against the pillow in order to shove herself back more upright. What balance she possessed would find itself challenged seconds later when one hand reached to grab hold of her wrist in a firm grip, another scrabbling and grabbing hold of her opposite leg.

Two things occurred to her then in a flash of clarity. The first was that Marshal apparently leaned more heavily towards the fight when it came to fight or flight. She could certainly understand that in this moment He was scrabbling to clear his airway, but rather than reach to wrench the occluding object from the way, he had gone for the perpetrator. The second, that he was quite a bit stronger than she might ever have given him credit. The closing of his fingers around her wrist alone had elicited a wince of discomfort, fingers pried easily from their own grip on the pillow. And with the removal of that hand as a pillar of support, Evelynn was forced to bear the brunt of her weight on the left, pillow sliding slightly off his face as her knuckles connected with the floor beside it.

That was to say nothing of his wrenching at her lower leg, yanked to slide off his chest and over to the other side as her boot was given freedom. She heard the vague thud against the compartment door wall before it fell to the bench where Marshal had been sitting only moments before, but her thoughts were not there. Instead, the world seemed to pause in that breath of moment when the sobering realization of the situation fell upon her like awakening from a fevered dream. If she thought he had been acting a child, it was nothing compared to the way she currently viewed herself, straddled over his torso, skirt askew, boot departed, and dignity in tatters. The feeling of his arm returning to anchor itself around the small of her back and tug her off balance served as the spark to the leak.

Air expelled itself the moment her weight bore down on him. There existed half a second when the world seemed to pause for a second time, acutely aware of his warmth beneath her, and the heavy thrum of his heart beating a melody within his ribs that reverberated against her own. But with a sharp inhalation laced with cocoa butter, she was back up in a flash. Some say that fortunate favours the bold, and in the wake of her reckless assault, she had been graced with a shred of that mercy. With her disabling came the release of the pillow and the subsequent relinquishing of Marshals hands.

Wrist and torso freed from their temporary prison, Evelynn bolted upright, rocking back and away, first to her knees and then standing, attempting in her dazed state to just retreat and put as much distance between herself and him as she was able. It worked just well enough until her second step caught the back of her heel on his ankle, and all of a sudden she was falling backwards again, thumping heavily onto her rear with her back against the sliding door. She had just enough time to dive her hands to pull her skirt down her legs before Marshal managed to right himself.

Time certainly would seem to take a step back, but in this moment it would have no deference for the situation. No canvas would capture the scene in romantic hues of sun-faded pigments. No stroke of the hand would pen the moment to be memorialized through the decades. No. Rather, the tick of a second hand would stick by. Slowly. Painfully. Time itself mocking the situation, laughing silently at the shame of the moment, bent on drawing it out as long as possible.

The dash of her hands to the hem of her skirt would spare her the worst of it, at the very least. No sooner had modesty been returned had a mop of blonde popped up from the floor. Wide-eyed steel would meet hazel, their depths surrounded by a face that had been washed blank of any expression at all aside from shock. Its effect permeated the widening of her lids, the faint elevation of her brows, and the stiffening of her neck. Like awakening from a dream, Evelynn was suddenly made uncomfortably aware of the moment. Of just how ridiculously over-reactive she had been. How his maniacal laughter had tipped her past her point of patience and stirred her into action that she would not in a million years have thought herself capable. Behaviour she would have scorned as reckless and melodramatic. She wasn't a child without filter, without the ability to temper herself. And yet, even she would not have been able to recognize it in that moment.

She wasn't sure what to make of it. How to proceed. self-disgust fought against embarrassment. Hot and cold, pallor and blush.. they quarrelled upon her countenance, roiling and mottling themselves in a rivalry that may just have compared against her own with romance. The only fortunate side effect being that she might have gradually returned to the happy average of normal pigmentation. Still, a chill of electricity would travel the length of her spine, sending her shoulders to shiver. In truth, the weight of it all, of what she had done, was beginning to press down upon her. Shoulders sinking with her pride countered by an insurmountable desire to be able to just sink through the floor entirely and be removed from the moment. From his eyes.

Their searching, questioning inflection pierced her in a way she couldn't quite explain. It left her swallowing down a lump in her throat and running a rasping tongue across dry gums. To his question, she couldn't even quite bring herself to speak, the corner of her mouth twitching with the effort to force herself to say something. But what? What was she supposed to say to that? You would not stop laughing, thus I was forced to make you stop by any means? Ridiculous. The entire thing had been drawn grossly out of proportion. She had crossed the line. He wasn't the one who had been making himself the fool with his childish display, lolly-gagging and choking on his own breath.. She was.

The eye contact would break then, dropping down and to the left even as he shot to his feet. She wished he hadn't. Wished he would have just... disappeared. Or that she could blink and find that the cabin was empty but for her overactive imagination. There would be no such luck, however, his steps gently reverberating as the crossed the short distance to her. Limps crimped, brows furrowing even as he knees shifted to lift and pull together. He hadn't even gotten to her yet before she felt her back pressing more forcefully against the door, unable to meet his eyes, and certainly wanting nothing to do with the hand that had been extended out to her.

It made little sense. What reason had he for the concern. She had been the one to act brashly. Her aciton swere the ones to prompt his fight response. he hadnt deliberately tripped her. She was undeserving of any such consideration. In an odd way, it almost felt like a slight. Salt on her wounded pride, the generosity contrasting heavily against her own disappointment with herself. Setting her jaw, she would turn her cheek, ignoring his hand. She would have batted it away if that wouldn't have made her think of herself as even more petulant than she did already.

As it fell away to his pant, she would recover enough to stand, piecing together what dignity she could muster and placing a hand against the window for support in doing so. She would have been content to leave it at that. For the pair of them to separate, figuratively shake off the tension and move on. To scratch out the words, blot out the memory, and tear the page to be burned to dust in the fire. The world would not be so kind. The hand of generosity would turn to prosecution, the palm that had been held to her overturned instead into the image of an accusatory finger.

"I did not!" It was soft, but a snap in his direction nonetheless. She would deny it now and would deny it again any time the topic was ever raised in future. Mock or not, the betrayal that flecked his tone were shards against her being. But that one simple phrase would serve to force the resurrection of her shields. Brick by brick the resolve would return, the hint of indignation furrowing her brows. "You already could hardly breathe for want of air in the midst of your fit of hysterics," she sniffed, rising to her full height of a grand three inches above his own and brashly swiping up her boot from where it had fallen to his seat. By the time she had lowered herself back to her own, hands already working to secure leather about her foot, the haughtiness had almost fully restored itself. "You were f-"

Snap.

Evelynn froze, eyes fixed on whatever obscure spot of the train compartment upon which they had rested the fraction of a second before the sound. It was not a sound anyone wanted to hear. In lieu of a walk in the woods or a night at a campfire, there was no reasonable explanation that anything could possibly make that noise. Not here. Not in their compartment. The look she would drag up to meet Marshal's would be one of guarded trepidation, eyes silently pleading that he had not heard what she had, that the noise had been locked to her own consciousness, a mere trick of hte mind. But this time, she would not be alone in her pallor and the look of horror on Marshal's face would be all the answer she hadn't wanted.

As though time were jerking itself into fast forward, Evelynn severed their shared gaze, hands frantically tearing into her boot. That one reassurance was all she wanted. The feel of wood to dismiss the ridiculous fear that the noise could possibly have anything to do with the loss of her independence. Fingers would grope within the seam. Lips parted in growing terror. And the grope further. "Oh no.." First right, then left. But hte more she pulled at the leather, the more the new reality descended upon her, suffocating in its own way. "Please.." For too long, her fingers felt along her boot, leather plied from her leg to reveal the empty sheath that she just couldn't accept as true. Until she really couldn't fight against it anymore..

"It.." Hands gradually stilling, she would stare at the holder for a solid while, mouth parched all over again. "Marshal.." A completely new battle would be waged against the tremor that threatened to steal her voice. Gooseflesh pricked her skin. She swallowed. "Marshal..?" There was a definite grittiness to her voice as she dragged her gaze up to meet his again. "What.." The corner of her mouth twitched. If the room could reflect the growing thunder of her voice, the light might have flickered out of existence, windows shuddering against a growing tempest. "What was that..." Her enunciation was impeccable, the words spoken slowly and deliberately, the calm behind them in contrast to the coiling of her fingers into a fist or the piercing of her narrowing eyes. "Stand. Up."