[ She's to be found in her chosen room, small, tucked into the corner of her bed, her legs under her and an arm looped over them comfortably, save for the fine slices on her fingers where she hadn't been careful. Her head against the wall, and on her the bed around her is the cannibalised parts of her since destroyed datapad, scattered around like so many pieces of an animal skinned. Wires like tendons and metal plates like organs. Living things, to her, but now they're a desecrated mess from her own mistake.
Doesn't bother speaking so much, she's better in mind than body. She was exhausted before, wore herself out and she knew she'd crash eventually. No eridium, and a semi-constant use of her abilities had given her a hard lesson in her new limits - it would have been manageable by itself. But that hadn't been how that turned out, was it?
[ In a beat there's a proper sense of him being there. He's quick to understand that he underestimated her exhaustion from the past few days. The sense of something gone, so suddenly. His intention to offer her distraction through physical work (his way of moving forward) is abandoned.
His mental presence is larger than his physical self, less breakable. ]
(I'm sorry.) [ That empty space is a void that nothing will ever fill. He doesn't know what to offer, doesn't quite know how to comfort. Comfort as he knows it is his mother's hand through his hair, long stretches of silence between him and his friend. ]
[ She will, later, try and do something. She's too physically weak and she needs that stamina and yes -- she's special, she's different, she's gifted, but sirens still died, so having a head start wouldn't help her or anyone else stay alive, long term. She must move, eventually.
But right now she really doesn't have it in her.
The room is quiet, save for the hum and chatter of the nest. For awhile, she doesn't move, then slowly, she gathers up the broken pieces and moves them out of the way. Doesn't say - thank you, or I forgive you, because what is there to say? Rather she just doesn't want to be alone, right now, which comes suddenly, because she can't have Parker back, she can't fill this space ever again.
But this might do.
So she clears the space for him to sit beside her on the bed. Pale as the rumpled sheets, her hands move over the small pieces, her tenderness for animate objects still there. ]
[ It takes him a moment to approach the door-less opening to her room from the hallway. Hesitation, born out of ingrained manners, invitation or not.
He finds the place she makes on the bed for him. Sits on the edge, leaning forward with forearms resting on his legs. The emotional bleed is easier to contain compared to the first time they met. He's learning a bit more about holding himself behind walls (guilt, concern), and they lack the deeper, immediate connection broodmates share that can more easily bypass those defenses.
There's nothing to say, so he doesn't try to fill up the air. ]
[ By contrast, she's not kept. It trickles like blood seeping from a wound, down her arms, into her fingers as they reach for him, then to brush his shoulder, a little at first. The fine little cuts that already begin to heal with their blessing ( curse? ) of a symbiote.
Then she pushes forward a little more, rolls her weight carefully, a shuffle that's loud in the silence to press her forehead against his shoulder. She's fever warm, exhausted, and no, maybe he doesn't know how to give comfort and she doesn't know how to ask for the nearness of other people. She just leans forward then like a stack of dominoes toppling under their own weight, until her forehead settles against his shoulder. Her fingers still fiddling with the sleeve of his shirt. Brushing against it back and forth with a faint absent fiddle, she tries to keep the tenderness still, things were still so new to her, in so many regards.
This too, felt so carefully undoing. No one had ever come to see if she was okay. Not anymore. ]
(Tell me about your... Earth? About the lights again? The people?)
[ Being near to him, close to him, makes it easier. Her eyes close as his memories rolls over her like a fresh breeze. Washing away the hurt for the time being, giving her something else to focus on. His warmth and his happiness and all the experience she'd never had but she didn't feel bitter for it, right now. Sharing like this. ]
But you did, didn't you?
[ He's brave, he's so, so brave. She couldn't imagine he didn't do it. Throwing herself into his memories as he offers them, faintly again she begins to glow, and so too does her small room. She might change the whole thing if she could. But she's too tired, instead, she strings it with the lights she sees in his mind. No more than an illusion, a twist of reality, because it's not solid to her, never will be. But it's excusable sometimes to make life bearable. ]
[ The mental effort causes the beginnings of a headache to throb in his left temple. He ignores it, the ghost of a smile forming when she asks her question. ]
Yeah, I did. [ Paid for it too, but at least the he could say he tried. ] Don't think I would've without my friend.
[ A brunette boy, young man - a single spike of pain the first time you look up at him and realize you'll never be of a height. She'd asked him if he missed home yet. He misses it now (misses what it was like not to watch someone die a violent death). ]
[ She seizes on the image, locking it away. There was so much warmth to his thought, affection even if he might use another word for it. Her head turns where she rests against him. ]
It must be nice... to have someone there for you like that.
[ It seizes her suddenly, how much she hasn't. Easy to slip into something she fights off so often, a choking damp feeling in the back of the throat that was even before the rawness of this loss. Loneliness, she's been so, so alone. ]
Are we... are we friends, Steve?
[ She knows her own image of it is distorted by the sphere of violence and lies and other people's intentions. She'd considered them her friends, but that didn't undo the things she had done to them for her father's sake. It doesn't leave her much clarity for honest interactions. Fretful, her fingers curl in the material of his clothes, her head turning in closer like he might just turn her away, even now. That terrifying speed up in heart. How long had she wanted friends of her own? To help her be brave or laugh with her, like Steve had, someone to face the bad things with. ]
[ It was nice. Took it for granted, sometimes, and wasn't always as grateful as he could've been. That's what Steve thinks about now, wondering if his friend is still somewhere in the trenches, worlds away.
He swallows, her pain and loneliness digging deep into those places he'd rather leave unearthed.
(easier to not think on how that night at the fair really was their last goodbye)
His chin dips down, stuck on her question like it needs to be translated from another language. ]
Yeah. [ He finally gathers himself, glancing down at her briefly and managing half a smile. ] We are.
[ Carefully, with a meticulous consideration she shifts her hand down to his, settles with her wrist over his, and her fingers laying a top his, softly, softly, she is so new to these tender things. Friendship seemed such fragile thing, all glass like, with the light shining through, beautiful but easily shattered.
Her eyes closed, content in the quiet. Takes her time before she speaks, because it's rattling around in her head, nothing she'd admit to the others, outside of this. ]
I don't know why I was so naive... I knew the people were scared of us, but I thought... some how, that if we helped, maybe, maybe it would be alright in the end.
[ His fingers curl against his leg, gaze distantly centered on her wrist over his own, just as new to this. Friendship is solid and constant to him, skinned knees and laughing over bruises. ]
Scales don't always balance that way. [ Not often. The good that his mother did as a nurse didn't protect her from getting sick. Those families they helped on Avera didn't matter to whoever hired the bounty hunters that killed Parker. ] That's why we do what's right because it's right.
[ Keeps him moving forward, even when things get bad. ]
[ Her eyes fall to the same place, doesn't feel like a person that's able to touch, or be close, it's still too knew. But with him, he wasn't brood, and it was much more a choice of her own to do it at all -- made it better, some how. Like she was filling up this hollow space inside her ribs with something sweeter. ]
No one says things like that on Pandora. My father would have just... told me to kill them all and take whatever was left as compensation for what I lost.
[ says it faint like humour, a pull at the edge of her mouth. ]
[ She adjusts where her head settles against him, turns her forehead into him to muffle her laughter that comes out in a soft huff of breath. ]
You have no idea. [ she has a million memories, and million awful things she could show him, none of them would even be half of it, of what kind of monster. ] A planet full of baby eating psychopaths, and Handsome Jack is worse than all of them.
[ They were just insane, they had no more and less excuse than that. They felt nothing but their own fits of madness. Jack told her every single day that he loved her, that he'd do anything for her, he'd give her anything. ]
[ He spares another glance at her when she laughs, eyebrows raised. Most people don't laugh when you insult their fathers - but then, he's glad to get some kind of laughter out of her. ]
[ There's another huff, a little bitter -- once he hadn't been Handsome Jack, once he hadn't even been John. Once he'd just been daddy and she'd clung crying to his knees. No burning vault symbol in his face, no mask, just the tutt and brush back of her hair with a smile. ]
How else do you think? He scared enough people into calling him that.
[ It's a good question, one she takes awhile in answering. There's a lot there, a lot of thing between her and Jack, like there was between any father and daughter. But fear?
Maybe, when she was little and to every little girl their dad might as well be a superhero, there is nothing he couldn't do, and then he had done it, -- and then she'd found out just what kind of man he was. It's a jilted memory that comes up sharp, of pain, immeasurable pain and her throat is burning and her eyes are stinging and the air is a cacophony of gun rattle and bullet smoke, sulfuric, she remembers, her own voice calling over it all grit with the force of keeping on, what it's like to be nothing but misery and the need to get this done : he's lying, the coward would never face you in person. ]
No, not like you'd think. It's... hard to explain. But he was just the same scared man he always was. He just had a multi-billion dollar company at his disposal. He pretended otherwise, but -- [ she shrug, a simplistic gesture that covers a lot but mostly, she knew. ] -- knowing that didn't exactly change anything though.
[ His jaw goes tense at the sudden burst of pain, biting back the urge to cough from smoke that isn't actually in the air of this room. His eyes water just a little bit, adding to his disorientation. He waits a moment before continuing, to be sure his throat is clear. ]
What happened to him?
[ Was he alive when she left? The memory doesn't give him any certainty, and she flips between present and past tense when she talks. ]
[ If she really was as good a person as she seemed, as she tried so hard to be, she wouldn't want the things she did. In the end, she doesn't know, she hopes more than anything he was dead, that somehow she had helped to undo all the awful she had caused.
It's a lot -- in fact, it's too much. Her breath hitches as shakes her head, blinking her eyes against the sudden sting of wet in her eyes. ] I don't know. [ crying is a strange thing, she notes, it's messy, not just that she's sure she looks awful, but that the tears blot oddly between eyelashes, curves around cheekbones. With no idea what else to do, because there hasn't been anyone around her for so long, instead she just presses her face to his shoulder. She doesn't miss Pandora, there's nothing to miss for her, but she worries about the vault hunters and if they managed alright without her to guide them, if they managed to stop Jack, if it changed anything at all. So many variables, in all the instances she's run in her mind, she still can't be certain. It's too much to say, would have to explain it all - so she says none of it. Just shuts her eyes tight and hides herself away where ( he is ) it's safe. ]
[ He peers down at the top of her head again, lips parting as his expression twists in the exact instant he realizes too late that this was the wrong question to ask.
Frozen in his uncertainty there are more memories of Bucky, an eldest child, and his younger siblings. The age gap was significant enough by the time Steve met the Barnes family that he didn't often see an abundance of sibling squabbling (or maybe they were more well-behaved around him). But he had been witness to a number of times when one of the girls would come running to him with her face wet. Bucky had been good with them, he knew what to say or do to calm them down.
With one last flicker of hesitation his arm wraps around Angel's shoulder, pulling her closer so gently that she might as well be made of glass, half expecting and ready to let go if she pulls away. ]
[ She hasn't cried on anyone in -- years. They'd always made Jack uncomfortable, and any other time, so often in excruciating pain, the research teams did nothing but observe her. There had been no comfort, just a cold alienation of herself until she knows no more what to do now than Steve does. But that he tries anyway might as well her own undoing. No one tried, not for years, and it's more than she really expects. Turning into the curve of his arms, taking the small space he gave her and settled in safe.
But it's just that she's tired, and it hurts, it hurts so much and all the talking, the pretty lights, is nothing else but an impermanent distraction, that changes nothing because it will keep hurting. She will never not feel this. She will never not be empty. Doesn't know what else to do but curl into him and keep crying, the hiccupped rise and fall of her shoulders, the wet that stains her cheeks. It accomplishes nothing, she knows, then giving her some break to it, all chips in a damn wall. Says nothing else, it's already been said anyway, just cries and cries until she's really sure there is nothing else left.
Finally gives into the exhaustion of it all, her hand curls in the material of his shirt, her eyes stay shut and in the comfortable dark of it, trickles away, how easily it goes from nothing to weeping to just uneven breaths and in the next and perhaps she shouldn't, so very, very close to sleep. Seems almost natural that way, like there was only so long she could keep this all going before it all burned itself out. Grief was like that, she figured. ]
[ The pain resonates, threatens to trigger his guilt all over again. He can't promise her that everything will be okay after this. It won't. Nothing can change the loneliness that she was forced into as a child, and that empty place inside her, at least the one that once connected her to Parker, won't ever be filled again.
All he can offer is this place to release some of her pain, someone to share it in this particular moment. He only knows how to move forward, tunnel-visioned at times, but his isn't a bitter march to the end.
He lets her sob into his shoulder, arm rising and falling with each shuddered breath and unable to tell how much time passes until he can start to sense that she's getting to the point of exhaustion. That's when he shifts his arm again, gives her a gentle nudge to try to get her to lie down where it would be more comfortable to sleep. ]
[ She's not hard to move, getting better, getting stronger, actually eating these days - but still less than she ought to. Bird boned, so she goes easy to the push. Exhaustion addled brain seeing the logic of it. The bed was soft, she could lay there for awhile, it would ask nothing from her.
In that way, she supposes her pillow will do instead of his shoulder. Groggily she, in turn, reaches for it. Going at his nudge the rest of the way with a fumbled heaviness. One day, one day, the bend and twist of limbs will feel seamless again, she reassures herself. For now, though, she curls up on her side, clutches the pillow into her with a clawed grip. Fixes her eyes, if still tired, on him where the rest of her face is hidden. Might be smiling there, but there's something else to it. Like she cannot quite believe that he'd let her cry on him like that. Like she cannot quite make him out, like a child looking at water ripples.
Or maybe she's still just a skittish animal and still expects a rebuke. But when it doesn't come, she doesn't have the energy to form the words, so it comes in dulled white noise. ]
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circumspector) wrote2016-03-14 03:55 pm
no subject
Doesn't bother speaking so much, she's better in mind than body. She was exhausted before, wore herself out and she knew she'd crash eventually. No eridium, and a semi-constant use of her abilities had given her a hard lesson in her new limits - it would have been manageable by itself. But that hadn't been how that turned out, was it?
Answers quietly, in return, come in. ]
no subject
His mental presence is larger than his physical self, less breakable. ]
( I'm sorry. ) [ That empty space is a void that nothing will ever fill. He doesn't know what to offer, doesn't quite know how to comfort. Comfort as he knows it is his mother's hand through his hair, long stretches of silence between him and his friend. ]
no subject
But right now she really doesn't have it in her.
The room is quiet, save for the hum and chatter of the nest. For awhile, she doesn't move, then slowly, she gathers up the broken pieces and moves them out of the way. Doesn't say - thank you, or I forgive you, because what is there to say? Rather she just doesn't want to be alone, right now, which comes suddenly, because she can't have Parker back, she can't fill this space ever again.
But this might do.
So she clears the space for him to sit beside her on the bed. Pale as the rumpled sheets, her hands move over the small pieces, her tenderness for animate objects still there. ]
( Stay? )
no subject
He finds the place she makes on the bed for him. Sits on the edge, leaning forward with forearms resting on his legs. The emotional bleed is easier to contain compared to the first time they met. He's learning a bit more about holding himself behind walls (guilt, concern), and they lack the deeper, immediate connection broodmates share that can more easily bypass those defenses.
There's nothing to say, so he doesn't try to fill up the air. ]
no subject
Then she pushes forward a little more, rolls her weight carefully, a shuffle that's loud in the silence to press her forehead against his shoulder. She's fever warm, exhausted, and no, maybe he doesn't know how to give comfort and she doesn't know how to ask for the nearness of other people. She just leans forward then like a stack of dominoes toppling under their own weight, until her forehead settles against his shoulder. Her fingers still fiddling with the sleeve of his shirt. Brushing against it back and forth with a faint absent fiddle, she tries to keep the tenderness still, things were still so new to her, in so many regards.
This too, felt so carefully undoing. No one had ever come to see if she was okay. Not anymore. ]
( Tell me about your... Earth? About the lights again? The people? )
no subject
Coney Island. [ He uses his voice to answer her request in part, lets his eyes close to concentrate:
a ferris wheel lit up against the night sky, spinning a slow circle round and round -
wooden horses chase each other to the same tinny music as before, their riders are all children and couples -
standing on line in front of a mountain made of tracks, a hand on slapping against his back and a good-natured, familiar laugh - ]
Took some convincing to get on that one. [ The roller coaster. ]
no subject
But you did, didn't you?
[ He's brave, he's so, so brave. She couldn't imagine he didn't do it. Throwing herself into his memories as he offers them, faintly again she begins to glow, and so too does her small room. She might change the whole thing if she could. But she's too tired, instead, she strings it with the lights she sees in his mind. No more than an illusion, a twist of reality, because it's not solid to her, never will be. But it's excusable sometimes to make life bearable. ]
no subject
Yeah, I did. [ Paid for it too, but at least the he could say he tried. ] Don't think I would've without my friend.
[ A brunette boy, young man - a single spike of pain the first time you look up at him and realize you'll never be of a height. She'd asked him if he missed home yet. He misses it now (misses what it was like not to watch someone die a violent death). ]
no subject
It must be nice... to have someone there for you like that.
[ It seizes her suddenly, how much she hasn't. Easy to slip into something she fights off so often, a choking damp feeling in the back of the throat that was even before the rawness of this loss. Loneliness, she's been so, so alone. ]
Are we... are we friends, Steve?
[ She knows her own image of it is distorted by the sphere of violence and lies and other people's intentions. She'd considered them her friends, but that didn't undo the things she had done to them for her father's sake. It doesn't leave her much clarity for honest interactions. Fretful, her fingers curl in the material of his clothes, her head turning in closer like he might just turn her away, even now. That terrifying speed up in heart. How long had she wanted friends of her own? To help her be brave or laugh with her, like Steve had, someone to face the bad things with. ]
no subject
He swallows, her pain and loneliness digging deep into those places he'd rather leave unearthed.
(easier to not think on how that night at the fair really was their last goodbye)
His chin dips down, stuck on her question like it needs to be translated from another language. ]
Yeah. [ He finally gathers himself, glancing down at her briefly and managing half a smile. ] We are.
no subject
Her eyes closed, content in the quiet. Takes her time before she speaks, because it's rattling around in her head, nothing she'd admit to the others, outside of this. ]
I don't know why I was so naive... I knew the people were scared of us, but I thought... some how, that if we helped, maybe, maybe it would be alright in the end.
no subject
Scales don't always balance that way. [ Not often. The good that his mother did as a nurse didn't protect her from getting sick. Those families they helped on Avera didn't matter to whoever hired the bounty hunters that killed Parker. ] That's why we do what's right because it's right.
[ Keeps him moving forward, even when things get bad. ]
no subject
No one says things like that on Pandora. My father would have just... told me to kill them all and take whatever was left as compensation for what I lost.
[ says it faint like humour, a pull at the edge of her mouth. ]
no subject
No offense, but he sounds like an awful person.
[ There's little humor in his voice. With that kind of logic the guy sounds like he'd be great friends with Ren. ]
no subject
You have no idea. [ she has a million memories, and million awful things she could show him, none of them would even be half of it, of what kind of monster. ] A planet full of baby eating psychopaths, and Handsome Jack is worse than all of them.
[ They were just insane, they had no more and less excuse than that. They felt nothing but their own fits of madness. Jack told her every single day that he loved her, that he'd do anything for her, he'd give her anything. ]
no subject
How'd he get a name like Handsome Jack?
no subject
How else do you think? He scared enough people into calling him that.
no subject
Did he scare you?
no subject
Maybe, when she was little and to every little girl their dad might as well be a superhero, there is nothing he couldn't do, and then he had done it, -- and then she'd found out just what kind of man he was. It's a jilted memory that comes up sharp, of pain, immeasurable pain and her throat is burning and her eyes are stinging and the air is a cacophony of gun rattle and bullet smoke, sulfuric, she remembers, her own voice calling over it all grit with the force of keeping on, what it's like to be nothing but misery and the need to get this done : he's lying, the coward would never face you in person. ]
No, not like you'd think. It's... hard to explain. But he was just the same scared man he always was. He just had a multi-billion dollar company at his disposal. He pretended otherwise, but -- [ she shrug, a simplistic gesture that covers a lot but mostly, she knew. ] -- knowing that didn't exactly change anything though.
no subject
What happened to him?
[ Was he alive when she left? The memory doesn't give him any certainty, and she flips between present and past tense when she talks. ]
no subject
It's a lot -- in fact, it's too much. Her breath hitches as shakes her head, blinking her eyes against the sudden sting of wet in her eyes. ] I don't know. [ crying is a strange thing, she notes, it's messy, not just that she's sure she looks awful, but that the tears blot oddly between eyelashes, curves around cheekbones. With no idea what else to do, because there hasn't been anyone around her for so long, instead she just presses her face to his shoulder. She doesn't miss Pandora, there's nothing to miss for her, but she worries about the vault hunters and if they managed alright without her to guide them, if they managed to stop Jack, if it changed anything at all. So many variables, in all the instances she's run in her mind, she still can't be certain. It's too much to say, would have to explain it all - so she says none of it. Just shuts her eyes tight and hides herself away where ( he is ) it's safe. ]
no subject
Frozen in his uncertainty there are more memories of Bucky, an eldest child, and his younger siblings. The age gap was significant enough by the time Steve met the Barnes family that he didn't often see an abundance of sibling squabbling (or maybe they were more well-behaved around him). But he had been witness to a number of times when one of the girls would come running to him with her face wet. Bucky had been good with them, he knew what to say or do to calm them down.
With one last flicker of hesitation his arm wraps around Angel's shoulder, pulling her closer so gently that she might as well be made of glass, half expecting and ready to let go if she pulls away. ]
no subject
But it's just that she's tired, and it hurts, it hurts so much and all the talking, the pretty lights, is nothing else but an impermanent distraction, that changes nothing because it will keep hurting. She will never not feel this. She will never not be empty. Doesn't know what else to do but curl into him and keep crying, the hiccupped rise and fall of her shoulders, the wet that stains her cheeks. It accomplishes nothing, she knows, then giving her some break to it, all chips in a damn wall. Says nothing else, it's already been said anyway, just cries and cries until she's really sure there is nothing else left.
Finally gives into the exhaustion of it all, her hand curls in the material of his shirt, her eyes stay shut and in the comfortable dark of it, trickles away, how easily it goes from nothing to weeping to just uneven breaths and in the next and perhaps she shouldn't, so very, very close to sleep. Seems almost natural that way, like there was only so long she could keep this all going before it all burned itself out. Grief was like that, she figured. ]
no subject
All he can offer is this place to release some of her pain, someone to share it in this particular moment. He only knows how to move forward, tunnel-visioned at times, but his isn't a bitter march to the end.
He lets her sob into his shoulder, arm rising and falling with each shuddered breath and unable to tell how much time passes until he can start to sense that she's getting to the point of exhaustion. That's when he shifts his arm again, gives her a gentle nudge to try to get her to lie down where it would be more comfortable to sleep. ]
no subject
In that way, she supposes her pillow will do instead of his shoulder. Groggily she, in turn, reaches for it. Going at his nudge the rest of the way with a fumbled heaviness. One day, one day, the bend and twist of limbs will feel seamless again, she reassures herself. For now, though, she curls up on her side, clutches the pillow into her with a clawed grip. Fixes her eyes, if still tired, on him where the rest of her face is hidden. Might be smiling there, but there's something else to it. Like she cannot quite believe that he'd let her cry on him like that. Like she cannot quite make him out, like a child looking at water ripples.
Or maybe she's still just a skittish animal and still expects a rebuke. But when it doesn't come, she doesn't have the energy to form the words, so it comes in dulled white noise. ]
( Thank you. )