Ronan still had his sense of self. Underneath, he was still himself. On the surface, though, he’d gone fully over into Elijah.
He was cold. Truly cold, down to the bone. And the strange part was that the water they’d soaked him in wasn’t near cold enough to account for it. On his own, Ronan would barely have felt it. This cold was Elijah’s, coming off the scene the [Full-Immersion] had built around him.
Because that was what the immersion did. With it running, he wasn’t standing on a soundstage at all. He was on the ship, real deck under his feet, a real swell rolling beneath it, and around him a whole crew of living, breathing people. That last part came down to the actors and the background players. Where the immersion would have filled the scene with blank, generated figures, they gave it real faces instead.
His body shivered on its own. His eyes had gone a little sunken. To the cast watching him, there was something worn and rough-edged about him now that hadn’t been there before.
Even the voice wasn’t his. Gone was the soft, mild way Ronan spoke. What came out now ran rougher, a shade deeper. It sat exactly right on Elijah.
The lines came easy. And as Elijah, he spoke ones that weren’t in the script.
"Anyone got a cigarette?" He was already digging a lighter out of his pocket. "I—I need something to steady my nerves."
Jane didn’t have an answer ready. Neither did Woody. Neither of them had known Ronan had a lighter on him, and now there it was in his hand, Elijah frayed at the edges and reaching for a smoke to take the edge off.
In the script, Elijah was no great smoker. But whatever Ronan was doing now told a different story, and the strange thing was how completely it fit.
Off to the side, Jenny watched with Henry, and the word that kept coming to her was natural. Too natural. The way Ronan stood, the way he moved, all of it read as a man fighting down a wave of dizziness, the brain injury Elijah carried showing right there in his body. The set of his face, the way his lips pressed thin against it, none of it looked like acting.
"My God." Jenny kept her voice low. "We struck gold with this kid. I can’t name another actor who’d bring Elijah in like that."
Henry didn’t take his eyes off the monitor. "Look at his face. He’s got the makeup on, sure, but makeup doesn’t do that. That’s all him."
Jenny couldn’t argue.
For all they were impressed, though, both of them turned the same worried eye toward the rest of the cast. Ronan was off the page and running, and the real question was whether anyone across from him could keep up. If nobody could answer him, they’d have to call cut and lose the whole natural run of it.
They needn’t have worried. Jane found the thread.
"A... cigarette?" She said it as Rose, turning the word over like it was foreign in her mouth. "I fear I’ve never heard of such a thing. What is it, exactly? What does it do?"
She’d caught his lead and gone with it. Since the table read, the whole cast had been warned that Ronan liked to improvise, that he’d wander off-script with no notice at all. So they’d come ready for it.
Elijah looked done with all of them. He snapped the lighter shut and shoved it back in his pocket. "What is with people these days? It’s not enough to put some ancient ship out on the open sea. Not enough to dress everybody up in these old rags. No, they’ve got to take it so far they’ll look you dead in the eye and act like they’ve never heard of a cigarette."
Everything about him sold it. The set of his arms, the gray tiredness in his face, the sunken, worn-out eyes. What the cast had in front of them was a man who’d nearly drowned and washed up among a boatload of lunatics.
"Forget it." Elijah let the matter drop. "Just point me somewhere I can change. I need to get out of these."
He got his answer in the end, after a muddled back-and-forth with the ancient people around him, and headed off deeper into the ship to change.
From there he stayed right with the scene, taking the lines as they came, playing off the others, until he found the only clothes on offer were as ancient as everything else. Nothing for it but to make do while his own dried out. He wasn’t used to wearing anything like it.
And then came the cut.
The moment it did, the shift ran through him fast, [Full-Immersion] dropping away in an instant. The dizziness thinned and let go. His head cleared, and he was himself again. Ronan again. The sheer speed of it, one man and then the other in the space of a breath, left him unsettled.
And it was a relief, being Ronan. Elijah had the stronger body of the two, no question, but his head was a wreck, the brain injury and the frayed nerves and all the rest of it. Coming back to himself felt like breaking the surface for air.
Ronan brought a hand up to the side of his head, still not all the way back from it. What the [Full-Immersion] had done to him, how far under it had pulled him and how complete it had felt, was going to take more than a moment to shake off. He was still standing in the middle of it when he caught Jane crossing the set toward him.
"Hey."
Ronan turned. Out of character now, the softer, easier manner had settled back over him. "Oh—hey. Hi, Jane."
Jane didn’t ease into it. She looked at him dead on, something unsettled moving behind her eyes. "I want a straight answer. Were you ever a soldier? Before all this. Like Elijah."
The question caught him sideways. "What? No." He almost laughed. "No, of course not. Why would you—"
"Because nobody plays it like that out of nothing." Her eyes stayed narrow on him. "The way you were moving out there. The way you held yourself, like you couldn’t trust your own body to stay under you. You don’t make that up. You’ve either lived something close to it, or you’ve watched someone who has."
Ronan let out a breath, caught somewhere between a laugh and disbelief. "I promise you, there’s nothing to find. I’m nineteen." He saw that not quite land, and pushed on. "I started acting at fourteen. Five years. And in all five, you know what I ever booked? Background. Every single time. A body in the crowd, a face at the back of the shot, somebody to walk past the lead and keep walking." He almost laughed at the thought of it. "When was I ever supposed to squeeze in a war?"
That stopped her a moment. "Nineteen." She said it flat, weighing it. She’d heard the number from Henry back at the read, but set right up against the half-drowned wreck of a man she’d just watched him become, it wouldn’t sit right in her head. "I had you around my own age. A year younger, maybe two. Not four."
"Do I look that old?" A wry note got into it.
"No." Something in her eased, the edge of a smile slipping loose before she could stop it. "It’s the makeup, mostly. And the acting. You carry yourself like someone older, like you’ve already been put through a few things. Easy to forget you’re a kid." A small pause. "There’s a maturity to you. I’ll give you that much."
It threw him, Jane of all people handing him something that kind. He wasn’t sure where to put it. "...Thanks. Coming from you, that means something."
It didn’t last. The stern set dropped back over her face as quick as it had lifted. "Don’t let it go to your head, though. You can act, fine, I’ll say that much." She held his eyes. "But make no mistake. When the dust settles on all of this, I’m the one walking off with the spotlight. You can count on that." And with that, she turned and left.
Ronan stood there with no answer for her. He shook his head, and a smile came with it. "She’s really something else."
For all the time he’d spent around her now, the table read and this, he had the measure of her. Jane Kingsley was a professional down to the bone. Prideful, sure, but the pride came straight out of how much she cared about the work.
Competitive, yes, but only because she wanted to be better than she already was. However he turned it over, she’d impressed him. She’s one of a kind.