Dillon Cole || Scorpion Shard (
orderfromchaos) wrote2014-06-16 09:57 pm
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8. Public + messages
[Public, video]
So, uh. Some of you who frequent the eighth floor common room might have noticed. An extremely geometrical tree where your coffee table used to be.
I can fix that. I mean, I'm going to. Fix that. Unless you guys like it? I mean. Whatever. It's not my floor. Let me know.
[Private to Vin]
[There's a long period of silence. Okay, it's only like ten seconds, but that feels like a lot.]
So. That. Happened.
[Private to Elsa]
...have fun?
[Private to Rogue]
A while back you offered to help people work with their powers. Is that still a thing?
[Private to Helena]
You, uh. Don't have to respond to this at all if you aren't comfortable, or anything. But if there's anything you want to ask me, I'll try my best to answer. And I won't be mad or anything.
So, uh. Some of you who frequent the eighth floor common room might have noticed. An extremely geometrical tree where your coffee table used to be.
I can fix that. I mean, I'm going to. Fix that. Unless you guys like it? I mean. Whatever. It's not my floor. Let me know.
[Private to Vin]
[There's a long period of silence. Okay, it's only like ten seconds, but that feels like a lot.]
So. That. Happened.
[Private to Elsa]
...have fun?
[Private to Rogue]
A while back you offered to help people work with their powers. Is that still a thing?
[Private to Helena]
You, uh. Don't have to respond to this at all if you aren't comfortable, or anything. But if there's anything you want to ask me, I'll try my best to answer. And I won't be mad or anything.
[video]
'Ave you met my bus yet? Promise not to do owt to 'er, I think she'd like to see you.
[video]
I'm worse. The whole suite of human insecurities and temper and selfishness and carelessness and fear, trying to aim a firehose of laws-of-thermodynamics-what-laws-of-thermodynamics. I can do it to people, you know. Just push a little and smooth all their pain and doubts and nicks away. I don't always even have to push. It just happens.
The admiral suppresses me like an inmate, you know. It's the only way I could let myself walk around here. Everybody's so broken and even knowing it's wrong I just want to sink my teeth in and fix it.
[He covers his eyes with one hand. How did this happen, why is he talking about this. He misses confession like someone scooped the comfort of it out of his chest. And part of him wants her to be horrified, like the priest in Los Angeles was horrified, wants a definitive sentence, even if it's condemnation. It just feels so wrong. He swallows.]
Sorry. Sorry. This isn't your - whatever. Problem.
[Quietly. He sort of expects her to take it back, but she should have the information she asked for.]
We brushed thoughts, when she first came back. Bowled me over a little. Chatted, kind of. I wouldn't change her. I mean. Since I can help it, here.
[Just a little bit bitter, that.]
Temptation aside, I really don't like doing it to people. And she's people, in her way.
Re: [video]
Come 'ere. Come 'ere, sweetheart. I'm going to to put you on me filter, and I'm going to take you to see 'er. Not that I need to take you there, but she's attached to 'er body.
[video]
Alright.
[He comes easy, slumps a little with hands soved into his pockets, leans against the doorframe. He is capable of deliberate asymmetry, but on some level he's very like the tree. His hair, his clothes, probably the arrangement of his pores are all interminably neat - hell, even the faint white scar spiderwebbed across the bridge of his nose and one cheek, apparently an aberration, is on closer inspection a perfect branching pattern, Pascal's shatterglass.]
[spam]
Sweetheart.
[It's the equivalent of screwing her eyes shut, clenching her teeth and holding her breath, and there's so much of it that he still makes her skin crawl.
But side by side with that, there's a lost boy that she wants to hug breathless.
She doesn't. She's not entirely sure that getting that close might not make her retch or seize, and not entirely trustful of his limits either. But she does reach for his hand, and doesn't allow it to be reluctant.]
Come with me. She's got summat I want to show you.
[There are two timeships, now. There's a raw eggful of pure new singularity putting out its feelers in Iris' bedroom, and she has a feeling it'll find him interesting.]
[spam]
The dangers are different now, subtler and broader, less immediately terrible and less relentlessly cumulative. But he still has the habit of it, the way of grinning and accepting, ducking into her space and ambling through it without touching anything at all.]
Your bus? Or something else?
[spam]
Yes.
[She opens her cabin door, and they're there: Iris' bus, warm and wise and wondering, her mental touch reminiscent of one of Digby's decorous hand-licks.
She's visible, which is uncommon, and her doors are open. Inside, an apparently-living dodo peers out at Dillon, head cocked in perfect avian cranky curiosity.
(Dodo is a machine, a human-made machine designed to pull the warp and weft of reality into new patterns, and his shape - genuine, flesh and blood and beak - comes from his having turned his function whimsically on himself. He's part of the bus, knitted inextricably into her physical shell and her extradimensional realities.)
The dodo has made a nest of couch cushions, discarded lingerie and music and fashion magazines inside the bus' living compartment, and he sits defiantly on top of a blue-speckled egg that's larger than he is. This is the something else: it's plainly the same order of being as the bus, but new, raw, tenuous and unformed. It takes nearly all of its energy to keep itself contained and safe, but the remaining strand of its awareness positively vibrates with delight and curiosity. Dillon is a New Thing! It craves New Things with a passionate hunger that echoes itself in the bus and in Iris.]
I thought it'd like you.
[spam]
I, um. I like them too.
[He's staring, staring in a way that makes the energy that emanates from him pulse a little faster, a little stronger, pushing the universe to reveal itself to him event though everything is is seeing is so far removed from his experience, too far to interpret. It's like he's trying to read hieroglyphics in the dark with his fingertips when he knows neither ancient egyptian nor braille, and also they are painted rather than carved. He gets a faint idea anyway.]