fridgetothefire | 015 ☣ Voice + Spam

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015 ☣ Voice + Spam

[Private to Alex, Bruce, Ben, Cass, and Pietro.]

I'm going to be okay.

[Private to the above + Riddick, Felix, Cassel, Rhade, and Dean.]

Let me know if you made it. Please.

[Public, a day or two after.]

If anyone who got hurt is still laid up, in the infirmary or wherever else, and wants me to bring them some books from the library, I'd be happy to.

I can read to you too, if you want, although I can't make promises how long my voice will last.

[It's still a little bit hoarse from screaming, but Anya knows all about painful, boring recoveries. She imagines most people on the barge will have more company than she used to, but it can't hurt to offer.]

[Spam for Erik]

[After a night of deep, utterly dreamless post-adrenaline-crash sleep, Anya manages to drag herself into out of bed, because she can't stand the thought of more trail rations when she could get real breakfast. And there in the hall, just stepping out of his own room, is Erik. He's not her father, he never was and he never will be. But he's something like it, and he told her stories once, trying to protect her from the man who keeps haunting her all too literally. After a moment of staring, Anya flings herself at him and clings on tight.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Are you in need of medical assistance?

I'm fine, I -

[The rote reassurance falls off.]

- kind of am, actually. In need of it. I mean, it's not urgent, I was going to wait for the infirmary to clear a little, but.

[But she hurts and she suspects Ben wants to be helpful even more badly than she ever does.]

Can you come to me? I'm in my cabin.

I can come to you if not.

[Part of her seizes up, doesn't want to leave her room. It's hers, bright and open and colorful, with her wide bay window and her hand-painted door. But she doesn't know what shape he's in or how to ask in a way he wouldn't demur, and his room has meant safety too. If he's asking her - well. She can walk.]

Be there soon.

--jump to spam--

[She can't imagine knocking, so she kicks lightly at the door instead. Her hands and the outsides of her forearms are a bloody mess, layers of skin scraped off by banging against the rough lid of her coffin. They've been cleaned and bandaged once, in the field, but Anya already managed to awkwardly tug off the rancid remnants of them on ship. One of her shoulders is swollen where it was dislocated before she popped it back in, and her opposite elbow holds her communicator against her chest. There are a few other scrapes and bruises, one ugly dog bite on her calf, but that's the worst of it.]

[Ben's room has changed since she stayed here; the military barracks is gone, replaced by a generic but comfortable hotel room complete with a bed, two padded chairs, a couch, a bookshelf, nightstand, and dresser. Everything is in neutral tones, cream and white and tan.

Ben, who takes a moment to answer the door, is pale amongst it, his bright brown eyes slightly too wide in his tired face giving him an even younger appearance even though the circles are gone. He's still wearing the scrub top from the infirmary which covers the most massive bandaging around his torso, though he guards it nonetheless with slightly hunched shoulders and spine; his utility pants cover whatever is making one leg stiff, and additional bandaging disappears under one sleeve of the top.

He has to move carefully and slowly, but it's all gone from his consideration the moment he sees her. He opens the door wider, eyes narrowing even as he looks behind her to make sure it's safe, that she's unfollowed, stepping back sharply to admit her.]

Come in. Sit down. Have you taken anything already? [The moment the door is closed she has all of his attention, concern flooding his drawn features even as he moves for the pack of supplies that had been sent with him for his own injuries. He doesn't panic - Manticore gave him basic field med and triage training and he's already categorizing the visible injuries - but something in his gut goes cold and nauseous at seeing her like this.]

Edited 2013-05-30 19:33 (UTC)

You're worse off than I am.

[It's very gently accusatory, as though she signed a contract somewhere obligating her to calling out her friends on their stoic machismo and taking care of others before themselves, noting it duly for the record. But he's bandaged, at least, and she knows neither of them has the resources to argue about it tonight, so it doesn't really rise to the level of even perfunctory objection. She sits on the couch, where he can reach her without having to stand up any longer than necessary, injured arms held gingerly in front of her.]

A couple of ibuprofen. It didn't really make a dent in the pain, but hunting down anything stronger didn't seem quite worth the effort.

I never claimed I wasn't.

[Ben isn't trying to be stoic for machismo's sake; it's a different, much more basic instinct altogether, and the fact of the matter is that he's simply much better suited to taking physical damage than the majority of the people on the Barge. He was designed that way. It wouldn't have been an issue, had he not been powered down in that place.]

Regardless, I won't be. I'm transgenic. My healing ratio is roughly fifteen times that of a normal human. [This stated matter-of-factly even as he retrieves the pack, brings it carefully back with him to where she's sat down. His abdomen is effectively ruined for all but the gentlest of activities, but he's mindful of it, taking the time to settle himself before he reaches for her arms, selecting the worse injured of the two.] Do you have any adverse side effectss to any known medications? I have hydrocodone as issued to me by the infirmary, but I am not equipped to deal with allergic reactions.

[He's already pulling gauze out of the pack, and a small bottle of antiseptic, with the hand not carefully, almost delicately holding her wrist so she doesn't have to hold her own arm aloft.]

[It makes her smile thinly, the contrast with normal humans instead of just humans. She accepts it with neat nod, peremptory and fond.]

Just don't overdo it in the meantime.

[It hurts either way, wieght on her shoulder or contact on her raw wrist, however careful he is, but she relaxes a little more in his careful hold in spite of the tiny wince around her eyes. She feels a little safer with him; it helps more than she anticipated.]

Ben, you look like something tried to chew you in half. I can't take your meds.

[She hopes that isn't actually accurate, but it would not surprise her.]

That i-... [He's about to correct her assumption when he realizes it's an ironic anecdote, not an actual assertion of what happened; she won't thank him for giving her the details, so he sniffs gently and cuts himself off instead, focused on what his hands are doing.]

You may have them because they are ready to hand. My warden will bring me more as it becomes necessary. I am known to be free of addiction to any manner of pain controlling substance, and you need them sooner rather than later.

[He's not as guilty about the necessary pain he's causing her as others might be: healing wounds often involves pain, and he knows that as well as any X5. He's still cautious to cause as little as possible, though, his hands deceptively gentle, almost delicate.

He's more skilled with repairing mechanical items and, he's learned, preparing foods than he ever was at combat. He pauses in his inspection and subsequent cleaning efforts only to produce the pills and a bottle of water, both from the night stand next to the unmade bed, retrieved with the same uncharacteristically careful, brittle quality of movement.

Ben holds them out, raising his eyes to meet hers, gently but firmly imploring.]

Please. They will help.

[The eyes work. The eyes work really well, and also hand injuries are incredibly painful due to nerve density, and as long as he isn't being self-sacrificing about it, she doesn't actually have any objections.]

Okay, alright. Give me one now and stick the rest in my pocket?

[She's got a very small smile, one that means, thank you for caring.]

Of course.

[Ben eases back down and complies, double checking that the cap is on tight before reaching to slide the rest into what he guesses will be the most easily accessible pocket. He unscrews cap from the water bottle and offers that plus the one pill he kept out, relinquishing them to her control and waiting patiently until she's finished.

He's not, exactly, smiling but his features are satisfied as he watches and then reaches to pick up where he left off, starting carefully on one hand and cleaning his way up first one arm, then the other.]

Do you w-...want to talk about it? [He offers, somewhat awkwardly, after a moment. There's an audible hitch in his speech that never happens with him - he's never unsure of what he wants to say once he decides to begin speaking - and after, well. It can't exactly be said to be like flicking a switch because the military will always be there in his personality, as inherent a part of him as his skeleton; but definitively more relaxed, a conscious decision to drop his guard a bit. He watches what his hands are doing.] I won't be offended if you say no. There's a lot to process.

[She sighs, and the pill can't have even hit her stomach yet, but there's something to be said for the placebo effect. Or maybe it's just that she feels safe, partly because because of Ben, partly just because the barge is home to her now, in spite of everything, more than any place has been since her family left their village for the city. She closes her eyes as he tends to her damaged fingers, trust and weariness blurring into something with the timbre of peace, letting the pain trickle through her without marking it too much.]

It is a lot. It's so complicated. I don't even know where to start.

[She thinks about the things that other Magneto said, the awful world-splitting resonances in his scream, the gutted ashen look on his face as he shut her in the coffin, still not listening to a word of her begging, in the throes of loving grief and still unable to see her as anything but a talisman of human cruelty, the tragic victim to his elevated and unhinged protector. She knows she died in Wanda's world, and Pietro's. It felt real, at the time, like she had slid through a terrible mirror, into a glimpse of how it really happened for another Anya. But she has no idea if it was like that, or if the place was just trying anything to hurt her, to make her blame herself and give in. She thinks about Wanda crying, begging her to say, shrieking and threatening and laying down ultimatums in a tone of voice Anya knows best from her own bitter victory speech.]

There was an attack...similar to one when I was a child, only we beat them back. And then a thing like my father was there. He kept saying that they killed me, that I died, like - like I did in other worlds.

[Not like I was supposed to. That's the belief it was trying to play on, but it's just not in her anymore, the spot where it used to be stinging a little like the bed of a lost baby tooth, freshly bloody but soothed by its own emptiness.]

[Ben waits patiently, true to his word, intent on his work. If she never utters another word about it he won't press, uninterested in wresting from her any secret she doesn't want him to have of her own volition. He doesn't think about anything while she considers, though he's fully aware of the rise and fall of her pulse, the hitches in her breathing; he can hear her remember. He waits.

And eventually she does find her starting point, and then he listens. He's learned by now to ignore the actual words - father has no meaning to him, he barely understands the concept of other worlds, he doesn't really understand why childhood attacks are so traumatic considering his own childhood - and listen to the way that they're said, and he makes a small, encouraging noise in his throat.\

And you are still not dead. [It's both an observation and an invitation - and a statement, in the mild but significant warmth in his voice, that he is glad for the truth of it.]

No. He buried me, as if I was.

[It's quiet, spooled out idly, to no purpose, like yarn the cat got into. It's why her hands and arms are damaged the way they are, from desperately battering against the immovable barrier of a rough wooden coffin lid, pinned with earth. But the horror of it, the weight of it, is behind her. She got out, she can breathe now. Those terrible hours breathing shallowly in the dark are no longer what disturbs her most.]

He sounded so...devastated. I've spent so much of my life wishing he still cared about me, instead of shoving me out of sight like a broken toy. And he's not kind but things are better, in the other worlds Wanda and Pietro came from. I thought - I don't have all the details but they seemed that way. I kept thinking it would have been better, if I died. For them, for everyone.

[This, too, is something Ben recognizes, though it takes him a moment out of context. He's idly turning the words in his mind, studying them for how they apply to her, the figurative meanings behind each sound; then he makes a small adjustment, shifts from father to brother, from family to unit as he so often has to, and that's when he sees it.]

That is... not a comfortable thing to believe about oneself. [He states this blandly, almost casually, eyes on where he's supporting one of Anya's hands carefully in one of his own, smoothing a gauze strip down over the least marked part of the back of her hand with his fingertips. He repeats the motion twice, ostensibly to make certain the bandaging will hold. That's not why, but he lowers her hand to her lap and withdraws his, keeping his eyes down as he picks up the discarded wrappers beside him on the chair.]

Then what happened?

No. No it isn't. But he wasn't - he wasn't different, even loving me. He was in pain but you could hear it transmuting into the kind of bitterness that wants to break the world. He didn't listen to me. He couldn't hear me screaming unless it was part of the story he was already stuck in.

Sometimes children die. Sometimes they get hurt. I can't be responsible for what kind of monster he becomes.

[She says it fiercely, a little nervously, eyes searching his face for a reaction, for judgement. The resolution carried her through, but she hasn't said it out loud before to anyone, and it sounds so petty, so callous and so selfish to her in the stark light of survival. She's surprised she even managed to expose it so much, but it's at the core of her now, and if she let uncertainty linger in it, she thinks it would eat her alive from the inside out. And - it's Ben. She trusts him with more than her bandages.]

[Ben looks up as she continues to speak, wrappers not forgotten in his hands, but stilled with the rest of his movement. There are shades he recognizes there, too - Ben couldn't see the people under the guise of the Nomlies when he was doing his utmost to believe in the Blue Lady, but that had partially been the point and he's not sure if that makes it better or worse; it is, in the end, what it always was. He can't change that part anymore.

Ben is, perhaps, not the best gauge for what is selfish and what is acceptable in the name of survival; there's no judgment in him, though. That's true for more than just this, he doesn't really have the capacity to be offended by others for their choices, but it's true now as well. It's there in her language, though: she can't be responsible for what happens.

His voice is gentle, but firm.] You're not responsible.

[He pauses a moment, considering the rest - it needs to be right. He knows what he wants to say, he just has to find the language so that she'll know it too; it doesn't help that it's new knowledge on his part as well, learned by fierce, unrelenting determination to fit into this world he knows nothing about outside of Manticore. A place where there are children with fathers and mothers who should have loved them and didn't, instead of a place where parents didn't even exist and children were products made in a laboratory.]

Children are the responsibility of their parents. Not the other way around. He was supposed to treat you well, not use you for an excuse for his own ends.

[In some ways, she knows Ben's perspective is skewed. In others, that's why she wants to hear from him instead of anyone else, because even if he doesn't really understand family, he understands her desperation, the shape of her world defined by his authority. She lets out a low, shuddery breath at Ben's last words, at use you as an excuse. It's plainer language than she ever put it in, but it's right, and it bolsters her.]

Thank you.

[She centers herself, continues. He asked what happened next.]

Lua kept me - not sane, really, but. Talking, on the comm. They got me out eventually.

[There are a lot of glossed over details there, about radios and the monsters and a stunted tree as her only marker, but survival is the part that matters.]

[Oh, Ben understands family; he understands that very well. Just not in the context that others use it, not with the same criteria, the same language and labels. Others say brothers, sisters, those they are related to by blood and genetics; Ben says unitmates and means the same thing in reference to people that share only the genetic engineering.

He blinks to acknowledge her gratitude, and looks down again to continue his work, relieved that he found the right words.

He knows about the glossed details, too; it's difficult not to. He was separated from the group, Rhade found him again right before the end - this is how he explains his own experience. It doesn't describe the two days in between, being alone in a place meant to drive the people in it insane and suck them in and keep them there, but it's how he explains it anyway.]

I'm sorry that so often, it's all anyone can seem to do for you. [Hands freed he looks up again, not quite frowning.] Is Lua alright?

I was alone for a long time. Maybe it's just what I need most.

[Her voice is very soft, just above a whisper, halfway between speech and the privacy of a thought.]

I think she will be. I think - maybe getting to be a hero is good for her. I hope so.

[He's watching as she says it, and he acknowledges the second half, but the first part is what interests him most. What he understands.

How it's difficult to be able to tell the difference.]

Is it actually what you need? Or what is just most comfortable?

It helps.

[She doesn't know which of those options that qualifies as.]

I'm not scared of pain. I'm not scared of death either, really, even though I don't want to die yet. But I'm scared of being trapped and alone again.

Yes. [It's an agreement, simple and broad; every word she just said is true of both of them. He didn't used to be able to tell the difference, either, and maybe he still can't, but it's something he's had a lot of time to think about, a lot of time to consider. He used to honestly believe the best thing he could do for... not the world, but the people in it that he cared the most about, was to be as far from them as he could get.

But he's always needed them, too. To stay away from them was to trade one type of insanity for another and he could never make up his mind which was worse. Now, Ben settles carefully back into his chair, pulling his good leg up underneath him, hands in his lap.]

When we... escaped Manticore. When my unit was first submersed in the world outside, we had to become a part of it with basically no knowledge of what it even was. We were designed to be fast learners, to be adaptable; many of us were able to do it.

But I found the cities to be too crowded, too chaotic, and I became... overwhelmed and confused very easily. I hurt people, and made them afraid, and people become dangerous when they were afraid.

So I retreated into the wilderness outside of the cities, where I could be alone and hear myself think. But out there it was too quiet, too isolated, and it became very easy to lose myself.

I never found the solution, there. I never figured out how to compromise and no one could help me. Then I came here.

[She wants, badly, to lay her hands over his, but of course she can't, raw bundled wrecks that they are.]

I didn't ever really have a plan for after. I knew I wouldn't get away with it long enough, deep down. I mean, I could have faked my way through if I had lived, I had plenty of books for context. But I didn't imagine anyone would welcome me, or that it would be worth trying to convince them to. I was just going to steal supplies and sneak in the vague direction of Paris until my father's followers caught up with me and I died.

[It hardly sounds worth all the trouble she went to, when she puts it like that. And yet.]

I wish it hadn't been so hard for you. But I'll really glad you're here.

[Ben wouldn't know what to do with the contact anyway; Rhade, Alex keep trying, but Ben just doesn't get it. He fidgets with the seam of his BDU pants, small and subtle movements, instead of shaking his head.]

We didn't know it was hard. We just knew that's what it was. It's okay.

[Which, some have told him, was even worse. Rhade had been so upset with him for calling the Barge a good place. He looks back up at Anya, though, and finds that it's true again. It's been a good place for him. Something he can understand but also something kinder than what he's used to.]

I'm glad you're here, too, if not for the rest of it. I'm glad you came to see me.

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