fridgetothefire | 025 ☣ private to the admiral + spam

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025 ☣ private to the admiral + spam

[Spam]

[Anya is not taking Lua's disappearance well. She wraps herself in her father's cape and sits on her windowseat, staring out at the strange void beyond. For the first time, it seems more empty than amazing. She skips her maintenance shift and hides in the library, searching for the most out-of-the-way rooms and dim corners sheltered by dusty long-undisturbed stacks and reads Doctor Zhivago for the third time. She doesn't turn up to meals, grabbing snacks from the Dining Hall when she can't sleep in the wee hours of the night, subsisting off that and her emergency 'weird flood' stockpile rations. She doesn't call anyone else. She just wouldn't know what to say.]

[OOC: This is a catch-all post for anyone who would reach out to her after Jesse's announcement; replies may be either spam or network. She will probably answer.]

[Private to the Admiral; Voice]

I'm grateful that you decided to give me a chance. I've said it to other people, maybe it's time I said it to you. I know you probably don't give a damn if any of us like you, but there it is. I think your goals - as stated - are ambitious and worthwhile and that you're doing the best you can, even when things seem awful.

So I like you. But this is not a request. This is a fact.

You will not pair me with any other warden. When I graduate - and I will - you will give Lua whatever she was going to ask for, wherever in the multiverse she is. Because I wouldn't be anything like who I am if it weren't for her, because you made a goddamn deal. And I will hold you to it, one way or another. I know you know what I'm capable of.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[She gets to the end of the chapter, marks her page with an old ticket to the London Eye that almost makes her tear up again. She holds the book between her chest and her knees, stares at a shelf. He's there, and that's. It's less awful than being alone, and also more difficult. Engaging people requires effort and decision making and being someone either constructed or vulnerable or some particular sharp-edged alchemy of the two. She doesn't speak.]

[ Harvey doesn't either. Books get put away, less hovering to do. He can't remember the last time he comforted anyone, though he knows keenly what it feels like to lose people important to you, at the vagaries of fate. ]

[ He thinks of Chris -- you just remind me of my dad -- and then immediately tries not to think of Chris. He is nobody's family. Two-Face reminds him of that, the longer he's nearby. Two-Face hates Anya, worse than he hates Chris and Cassel, worse than Ivy, worse than anyone on the barge so far. She's just bad news. Harvey chocks it up to the usual; anyone he likes Two-Face is almost obligated to hate, but it doesn't always work out that way. ]

[ In the end, he empties his cart, letting her work through her chapter, and eventually approaches. The next step? Well, the question is simple. ]

You want me to stay a while, or you want me to go?

I don't know.

[Her voice is wavery, a little choked. She really doesn't know. She tries to think through tactics - the emotional power of getting to be the comforter to someone lonely and isolated, the odds that she might lash out or slip up or otherwise say something wrong in her compromised state - but it all seems like so much work, suddenly. How does she even manage to think like that so much of the time?

She just wants to reject all of it, almost says fucking flip for it, why don't you, but she isn't quite that reckless. She hurts, but she's not really adrift, she has people who would hurt if she did something that stupid. Ben, Cassel, Erik.

She doesn't really want them around - they'd want to make it better, and they can't, not really. But being alone is full of so much silence to think in.]

You can stay, I guess. Unless you're busy.

Is anybody really busy on this boat?

[ It's meant kindly, truly. He's just-- not any good at it. He doesn't remember the last time anyone wanted anything from him that wasn't a keen mind or his weight in the criminal underworld. ]

[ But he doesn't go, just pulls down a chair; close but not too close. He doesn't know the rules with her yet. ]

I don't know. People find things to do. I guess.

[She picks at a loose thread of her jeans. They got scuffed a little, in port, nothing worse than that. Something else from London.]

Have to. Or the empty spaces will echo in your own.

[ Harv knew all about that. It's why he did what he could -- why he didn't say no to the work detail, why he found himself things to do, to keep busy. If he didn't, he had empty time and Two-Face would fill it instead. ]

[ He rests his arms on the table, elbows down, hands up, a fist against his palm. ]

Bea's filling the art room with tiny paper birds. I work the library, draw or beat the bags when I'm not here.

But-- that's not what I meant.

What did you mean, then?

[It's a little less dull, a little more present. She actually is curious. She knows, intellectually, that most people don't spend their lives finding productive uses for endless unsupervised downtime in confined spaces, but she's done it for most of her life. Most of her knowledge of the outside world still comes from books, where action moves at the speed of the plot, not according to the rote rhythms of normal life.]

We're killing time, between time. Some of us -- will probably never leave, less-- well. [ Unless it's like Lua, dumped on the curb like last night's leftovers. ] Lifers and prisoners and wardens. Eddie keeps telling me this isn't Arkham, but sometimes it's a fair shade worse.

The rest still stands, though. If you don't find something to do in the empty space, it will eat you up.

[ He shakes his head. ]

Bad topic. Haven't-- been a counselor in years. Used to be a skill I had.

[ Not so much anymore. ]

[She wonders if she kept busy enough. She was always - driven. But the way he phrases it, she feels like her life has been nothing but empty spaces.]

What kind of counselor were you?

[It's a different topic, anyway. Easier for her. No telling whether it'll be easier for him.]

Victim's Advocate. I was an intern, a volunteer-- I was still in college. I was an Criminal Justice major, English minor, Pre-Law. Normally that sort of stuff, it went to sociology majors, social workers. But my adviser, he said to me, "Harvey, nobody doubts you have the fire, the retribution in you. You'll be a great prosecutor one day. But learning a little compassion might be helpful." Pulled some strings, got me in.

[ He shook his head, rueful. ]

Didn't stick. I was letting battered wives cry on my shoulder, holding little kids while their parents talked in harsh, hushed tones. Listened to teenage girls blame themselves for getting drunk at a party. Watched the system fail over and over again.

Got a lot more fire. Not much mercy.

[ Two-Face sneers in the back of his mind; and now we fight fire with fire, our way. Harv can't disagree. ]

Fire's easy. All it needs is a spark, and something to feed on. The world tends to oblige.

[There's no judgement in her for it; she feels like she was born in fire, figuratively and literally, and she always carries it with her. It's been a hard road, clearing space to try to grow something in the ashes. She wonders what she would do to him, if she had no mercy in her, painstakingly cultivated.]

Doesn't change a system, though. Not on its own.

Nothing changes the system. It perpetuates itself, exists like an animal to feed, reproduce, and excrete. All systems do. Ever read Wilde? "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."

[ He leans back now, and then gestures. Barge is just another one, and they're trapped in it. ]

Individuals are smart. Groups? They're just animals.

[Have I read Wilde, the man asks, she thinks. But she only tilts her head, lifts her eyebrows gently as she meets his gaze. Her voice is a smooth, easy murmur.]

You think animals don't change?

[ She's a woman from a tiny village in the Ukraine, as far as Harvey knows. He has no idea what she's done - not evryone wears their crimes like a banner, like they do in Gotham. ]

[ She might've read Wilde. She might not. ]

I think animals change according to forces outside their control. A master's boot on their neck, scarcity of food.

Or an abundance. Or a change in temperature. Or a hundred things.

Even mountains change, Harvey.

No. Mountains erode. Decay's not the quite the same as 'change'.

[ He leans back in his seat, hands unfolding. He lets then curl around the armrests. ]

You trying to inspire hope in charge?

[Quietly, looking down at her hands, seeing something else entirely.]

They grow, too, if the plates are moving that way. Sometimes they fold over into new shapes entirely - you can see it, when the glaciers carve through, where everything twisted or turned sideways. Snow packs into the cracks and shatters a cliff face into a new slope. And I've never seen a volcano, but I'd like to.

[She shakes her head.]

I don't think of it as hope, exactly. Things can change for the worse. But they change, wholesale sometimes. People change them. I saw the beginning of World War Three, right before I died. That world is never going to be what some people where trying to forge it into. But it's not going to be what it was, either.

You think it's rigged. I think if you pick your moment right, you can grab the deck and call a whole new kind of game.

[ God, what was it like to to have that spark? To believe you could change the world. He remembers being like that. Having that drive, that ambition. To believe you could accomplish anything with will and a way. Yes, a type of hope -- but unable to believe it was a vain one. ]

[ Then he remembers that they've both been burned. ]

[ Two-Face snarls in the depths of his mind; deceit, lies, trickery. She's just going to use you for your own ends. Or, worse, lead you back into the madness that consumed them in the first place, trapped in a system that was broken, that broke them. ]

[ He puts a hand to his temple, rubbing in a small circle. Three's company he thinks to his companion, and Two-Face lapses into hateful silence. Harvey regrets it; now the asshole will just bide his time. ]

Guess you got some fire in you, too.

What's the change you're looking for?

[She looks down the long rows of books, and her eyes go very far away. Her voice is solemn, soft, measured, like the sort of voice one would used in a cathedral, hushed and carrying, with the reverence of vital things.]

I stood at the fulcrum when the war began. It was supposed to be one-sided. A clean global coup, safety and slavery for a deserving world.

I took a wrecking ball to all their plans. It will be bloody and awful and I have no idea who will win, because I am never, ever going back there. But the game wasn't rigged when I was done with it, and the field was wide open, and the people of Earth did not wake stunned and stumbling to the inertia of fait accompli, will not go gentle into that good night.

[She turns to face him, becomes something like a sad, lonely girl again.]

Now, I don't know. I need a new project. Plenty of worlds to choose from when I'm ready.

[ Harvey listens; Two-Face stirs -- new interest here. Yes, good. An agent of the same service of their own. ]

You asked about coins, when you were small.

[ Harvey remembers those conversations vividly. A child shouldn't have to ask those questions. To know how the world worked. But his own father hadn't spared him (Heads you win a beating, Harvey, tails I'll let you go to bed without), and the world hadn't spared her. ]

[ And that's why we're here, Two-Face reminds him. That's why. Not that you don't fuck it up all the damn time, but still. Points for effort, Harv. But you don't need another one of us. I'm here. I'm here and I'm all you need. ]

[ Two-Face turns sibilant, soothing, giving soft sussurus of assurance. Harvey lets it lull his temper. ]

What do you want to do?

[ He'd asked Abigail -- another dark haired girl, another set of masks, Harv's strange need to look at duality exemplified in the two young women. Anya wants to graduate. To move on. Abigail doesn't. ]

I want to go somewhere with spaceships. I'll find problems to fix when I get there.

[It sounds so young, compared to the moment before. But she likes great open spaces, and actual space is the greatest one of all.]

[ That answer takes him off guard, makes both eyebrows lift. One is finely made, the other is white, grows in strange, wiry tufts. But they both lift in unison. ]

The final frontier, huh?

There are people like that at home. Lanterns. [ His knowledge of them is very thin; enough that he didn't recognize Aya for what she was. ] You'd have to ask someone else about them, though. I was always grounded. Part of Gotham.

I never felt part of anywhere in particular before the barge.

[Solemn, a little melancholy. It's the community that makes it, not the walls or even the horrors, and she's lost her a keystone of hers.]

Maybe I'll steal the Admiral's keys, that could keep me busy. Or at least find someone who can teach him to drive.

[ Harvey can understand where she comes from, though he doesn't share the same feeling. Instead, he just nods once; he can't comment about belonging because he already had a place where he was a part of something larger. ]

[ Now, he's a part of Gotham's mythos. That's fine by him, too. He'll be a ghost to frighten children with, someday. ]

Good luck with that.

[She thinks, it's been done. And she thinks, I don't need luck. But she thinks about him, too, flipping his coin.]

Thank you.

[Quiet and somber, but she means it.]

025 ☣ private to the admiral + spam

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