orderfromchaos | 10. messages + open spam

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10. messages + open spam

[Private to Elsa]

How do you feel about working on your powers wth Rogue?

[Spam for Helena]

[He talks to Cosima first, waits a day or two before turning up. It's unfair, maybe, using his presence - but his mirror self did it, and he wants the chance for his words to have at least as much weight now.]

Hey. Bucky said it was okay with him for me to visit. Is it okay with you?

[Open spam]

[Sometimes, Dillon just lies on his back on the deck, staring up for a few hours at a time, trying to understand the things his powers are trying to tell him about the stars, about whatever strange ether they're passing. If he understood it, really got what it was and how it worked, he's pretty sure he'd be able to get to the place between, with the red sands and strange ruins and Deanna's body. If he could just - reach.]

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[Though he doesn't stop frowning his expression changes at some of those words, eyebrows raising. "The place between worlds". "The part of it where I left her".]

...What exactly are you trying to find, Mr. Cole?

Faith.

[Her name is Deanna Chang, he might have said under other circumstances, might say later. But names are a very human thing, and he is as far from his human tether as he has been in some time. Faith and fear were hers, as order and chaos are his. He's never known what to do without her, how to hold everyone together. If it's possible to look beatific and heartbroken at the same time, he manages it.]

[That gets another pause, though not as worrisome a one. He follows Dillon's gaze up and stays there, and when he speaks again it's in a tone that might almost have been a sigh.]

Well, people have been looking to the heavens for signs of that for countless generations. Who knows? Maybe they did find something.

Maybe you will, too.

She's there. Her body's still there. Okoya tore a way back last year but I couldn't - I had to stop him. But she's there.

There has to a way.

[He's mostly in himself again, sighs, sits up enough to hug his knees loosely.]

That's where I come from, you know. We used to be a star.

[He sounds, when he says it, much smaller than such a sentence should indicate.]

Edited 2014-07-23 13:32 (UTC)

[His gaze slides sideways, looking back at the younger man. Trying to get a read on his face, on his mood, that he could state such grandiose things so feebly.

Before coming to the ship, before meeting Dillon or any of the others, Powers would try to pick his way through that sentence. Try to find some other meaning behind it, assuming it wasn't the product of boasting or pure insanity. But he's seen miracles and nightmares in his time here, was torn to pieces by a godlike alien in a parallel reality and then came back from the dead again, had his memories rewritten. And Dillon is Dillon; he makes order out of chaos whether he means to or not, and one time he turned a coffee table into a tree.]

This is what you were talking about, isn't it. Your 'soulmate'. Do you think if you find her you can bring her back again? Or do none of you ever really...die?

I know I can. I didn't know how before, but it's easy now.

Souls don't die, nobody's do. Or they're not supposed to, anyway. They go somewhere, and I can pull them back. But Deanna - hers is stuck there, and. We're broken without her.

[He doesn't want to think about whether he can die. Whether he's even aging anymore. It's too much, and he has more immediate problems.]

[He tries not to display the vague discomfort he feels with the topic of souls coming up in a context like this...where it's much harder to flat-out deny their existence.]

So you need to get her back. Somehow. You have to find a way to where she is, only you can't seem to find it.

That's about the size of it.

Everything I ever met that could rip straight there...well, wasn't the kind of thing you make deals with. But the barge has got to have its own ways, so.

Is that it, then? Is that what your deal is for? Is that why you're here?

Edited 2014-07-27 04:40 (UTC)

My deal is for saving Earth from soul-eating aliens.

[Really.]

[He can't help it, he has to narrow his eyes at Dillon for a beat.]

You're completely serious. Aren't you.

[It isn't the taken aback way he said those same words to Abigail, the first day he was here. It's flat, resigned and knowing when it comes to how things usually are around here, but no closer to letting them go without comment.]

Yeah.

[It's basically his fault they're coming; his power that reconstituted Okaya, his trick that sent the parasite of destruction to bore through their dimension like an invasive species of weevil leveling an old forest.][Before he can be selfish.]

[There's another pause, though this one carries the air of a tired but silent sigh. He walks forward so he's standing at the railing, leaning forward with his weight rested upon his arms.

This is as close to actually sitting down next to Dillon as he's going to get. In his own twisted way, this is his version of being commiserative.]

Who's your inmate? The literal ice queen, right? Well, I think she has personal issues more than she has real problems so...I'm sure she'll be an easy task.

Thanks.

[A tiny bit dryly; but he understands how it's meant.]

She's not cruel, you're right. But she's - tied in knots, you know?

I worry about her.

If it were my job, I'd worry too.

[He's about as dry on the subject as Dillon is. It's not his nature to worry about other people - and though they've spoken a few times, he can't say he knows Elsa. She's not one of 'his'.]

I can sympathize with her plight, a little, you know. Seems like all she ever wanted was to be normal. Not burdened with these abilities she can't control.

Something like that.

[He feels a little awkward discussing it; he wants to defend her, to explain her, but he should keep her private emotions private, he's been trusted with things not everyone would be, by the file and Elsa herself.]

It sucks, doesn't it.

[But it's easy to talk about being your own ground zero; he can sympathize too.]

You ever try to run?

I did. For like a year. I guess I still am. Not that it matters, because there you are, you know?

[He doesn't care about the subject deferral; honestly, he's more interested in Dillon than he is in Elsa. If he cares about her it's only by correlation.]

I only ran at the very end. When hiding was no longer an option.

[He keeps his gaze up, skyward, rather than glance back at him. But his hands tighten a fraction where they grip the railing.

To some extent, he's still hiding. Trying to, anyway. Got his fake skin back and put it back on, once again doing everything he can to ignore what's wrong with him and pretend it never happened.]

At first I didn't have anywhere to hide.

I tried the military after dying didn't work. That was stupid. And now I'm here.

[A smile, tired, something past self-deprecating, not quite self-loathing. He is what he is.]

[It's coming to him that an awful lot of people he talks to here have mentioned trying to take shortcuts out of their own lives. And that many of them are wardens.

That...could be funny. If he were more twisted than he really is.

For a beat he glances at Dillon over his shoulder. Then he turns around so he's facing him, back to the railing with his elbows resting on it instead.]

Well. You were young, yes? No resources. Not much of a life to hold onto. Me, I had the opposite. Too much to lose to simply walk away. Backed into a corner of my own making. I clung, and grew more and more desperate.

In the end it was all gone anyway. Hence the running. But that didn't end so well, either. [A beat, and then, mildly ironic:] And now I'm here.

Yeah. Fourteen. After my parents passed - I couldn't stay there.

[Everyone was so sympathetic, when he was the one who destroyed them.]

I don't actually. Have any advice. People started calling me a god after Vegas, the Second Coming, something, it always creeped me out. I couldn't even take care of one other kid.

But if it helps any, I know what it feels like to lose everything.

[He frowns at that sympathy, but it's mild, rather than with any severity. Dillon lost out on having a normal life, having a chance to grow up as any young person should when he was only just beginning.

Powers lost a city, a company, a massive corporate empire that he spent nearly thirty years working hard shaping. Dillon, in the end, is just a boy who had to run away from home. Powers is a king deposed of his throne.]

"Everything" is...subjective. [He does consider it, though, gaze drifting as his voice softens.] But it certainly doesn't hurt any. And I suppose that maybe, it does even help. A little.

[A past, he considers, or a future. Home and family either way, along the way.]

Variable in content is not the same as subjective.

[But he doesn't sound pressed about it.]

That's something, I guess.

[He smiles, tiny and crooked. But it's there.]

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10. messages + open spam

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[spam] TW oblique suicide attempt mention?

[spam] tw ; mention of suicide ideation

[spam] tw ; mention of suicide ideation

[spam] tw ; mention of suicide ideation

[spam] tw ; mention of suicide ideation