orderfromchaos | 25. the driver was left-handed

[Spam for Cassel]

[He's just popping into the art room to grab a new sketch pad, but he pauses when he sees Cassel, hovers. He's in the middle of transforming something, and to Dillon it looks a little bit like eating pop rocks feels, alien static-y crackling, sharp bursts of understanding. Working doesn't supervene on physics even slightly; it's not something he could decipher without having seen it.

But when he does - the piece reflects the whole, the type reflects the kinds, and something that's been nagging him about Chris for weeks snaps harshly into place.

He is, he tells himself firmly, probably wrong. Stressed, projecting after what his other self did. It's not like Chris is here, so he can't be seeing - he just wants and answer, and of course he's assuming the worst possible -]

Cassel - hey - are you. Okay?

[They aren't really friends, though they've spoken a few times in passing, know each other mostly through Chris. He's distantly aware that he sounds both overbearing and like a socially maladapted idiot, but it doesn't really matter. The important thing is making Cassel react, so Dillon can get a proper bead on him, reassure himself that he is misunderstanding the powers he's only just gotten his first glimpse of.]

[Private to Bush]

...if you've got the time and the rum, I made Shepherd's pie.

[Obliquely referring to their agreement, sometime, to discuss his counterpart. Too many people are twisted up wrong. It's time.]

[Private to Jean and Iris]

Hey. Cassel's in the artroom with me, and he's all messed up - worked - but it's feelings so I can't fix it. It's really - he needs not to be like this.

[It is really hecked up.]

[Spam for Horatio]

He slides into a chair next to Horatio at the library, close enough for a low undercurrent of rejuvenation and calm, but not really enough to notice - like soft background music in a movie. He wonders if this is a good time. Probably not. Horatio is - concentrating.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Thing?

[He widens his eyes. It's an uncanny gesture on Cassel, who's never done doe-eyed innocence well but is pulling it off really accurately in this moment.]

The work? Sure. All the other kinds of work are exclusively effective on people, actually.

Chris has been. Um. A little off, for a while, and I think it's. That.

You too.

[You're dying, aren't you? It's a blood disease. AIDS? No, leukemia.]

[Leaning back in his chair so the front legs come off the floor, he gives Dillon a long, hard stare. He looks less innocent now. More angry, like he's trying to conceal it but he doesn't quite know how.]

You know, you're the second person who's said that. I don't think you people really know what you're saying.

[All but squirming, miserable and half-hunched and jumbled into fragments where Cassel is a smooth barricade.]

I don't. I don't, okay, I don't know anything about - work, but I know what it looks like when someone's had bits of their soul rearranged, I know that. It's a different mechanism but it's the same, all the gaps and tells, there's nothing else that does that.

[That looks wrong like that. The parts don't add up to the whole. The present doesn't nestle into the past. The future wavers and meanders and lists back to the path it always should have been on, wounded, limping.]

I get that you really. Really don't want it to be true, I don't either, but I can't ignore it again.

[He'd argue more. He really would, and he still doesn't believe it, but - again, Dillon says, again, and Cassel starts, sitting up so the legs of the chair bang flat on the floor. Everything comes crashing down. He takes the pie tin in his hand, turns it, a nervous tic, worried, worried.]

Again?

[Who?]

Edited 2015-01-13 03:42 (UTC)

My - brother. He could change people.

[It always feels impossible to explain what the other shards are to him. Not friends, never yet that. Brother feels as honest as anything else. Born from the same strange stellar ichor.]

He had a friend who wanted to be straight. But it wasn't him. It didn't fit. And I'm getting a lot of the same - like. Signals from you. Not about sex. Obviously. But - still the same.

[The way he's fighting himself, even now, grating and lurching, that's completely different from sly vicious way he usually fights himself.]

I don't fit?

[He doesn't understand. He feels like he fits. He feels perfectly natural.]

[But he remembers what Horatio said about his mother, about what she must have done, and what she said what feels like a hundred years ago. You wouldn't know good if it bit you in the ass. Maybe he wouldn't know himself, either.]

[The gears grind against each other more weakly, now. He's still fighting, but not quite so hard.]

[He doesn't hear the thought. He doesn't know the wording. But he knows, in his core, that someone told him it was for the best, just like Okoya told him - everything will be better, when you've brought the world into order. Even, maybe, believing it on some level, looking down on humans as self-destructive animals, scurrying about. But what it really means, always, is better for them, for the person saying it.]

They lied. Whoever told you it was good. You're - you were good before. You're wonderful.

[He doesn't, doesn't know Cassel well. But Dillon's seen the effects he has on people around him, too - Chris and Iris and Needy and more. Cassel didn't need to be fixed. But now - he does, and it's sick.]

You don't know me.

[One of the things he and Chris have in common - neither of them really believes they're all that wonderful. At least this time there's no sardonic smile to go along with it. Just a sad, sort of blank look, down at his feet.]

[He sets the tin back on the easel, pulls at it by the top until it's long and dull and snake-like, an ugly misshapen un-alive monstrosity. It looks about how he feels.]

[Dillon thinks almost everyone is wonderful; it's a hazard of knowing them so well. Without the breakneck urgency of the Vectors to divert his attention, no one is superficial to him.

He wants the unnamed thing twist and stretch.]

I know you don't want to keep feeling the way you feel right now.

Let us try and help. Please?

[His soul is overhung by a soot-gray cloud. He is melting, misshapen, broken. He knows, now, he knows, he does, but he doesn't want to feel anything. He can feel his own self, blocked, too far away and too amorphously inaccessible.]

[He can feel Chris, too, his mannerisms and melancholies overlaid like a gauzy cloth. It feels as though he's suffocating.]

[Looking down at his gloved hands, he shakes his head, shakes his head. But it's not a no.]

Edited 2015-01-17 02:04 (UTC)

[He's going to take the headshake as no, he doesn't want to feel this way. Which, while not exactly the kind of consent that would pass legal muster, is enough for Dillon. He stops asking, starts informing.]

I'm going to try something. I'm not going to touch you, but it's me, and it might feel a little strange.

[It feels nice. It feels - not like emotional calm, but like the intellectual concept of rightness, the satisfaction of looking at a perfectly organized bookshelf, a tangram solution, symmetrical arches. Like that notion of everything fitting together just right is suffusing the air around him like perfume, a harmony of base and middle and top notes he can't name off hand. And then it settles on his skin, mist, but charged, heady, sifting into him. And parts of him sing with it, unmangled fringes fitting into the chords, becoming smoother and steadier though not cleaner. But it stops, balks, hits a sheer wall at all the places that are really wrong, that are anathema to it, and cannot touch them.

Dillon's breath comes short in frustration and worry; he catches himself, eases off, seeps back into the circumference of his passive leash, the half-rightness fading like the last notes of loud music, echoing in the ear.]

...okay. That's. Out of my wheelhouse, then. But we're going to find a way to set you right, okay? I'm gonna. Call some people.

[Which he is already getting out his comm to do.]

Edited 2015-01-17 02:39 (UTC)

[It feels, to Cassel, like rocking in a hammock in a summer breeze. Not, to be perfectly clear, that he has ever done this. His childhood home didn't have space in the yard for a hammock, and anyway, outdoor activities were a priority for neither parent. His father was elsewhere, his mother was otherwise occupied, and his brothers, well, they were working. Everyone was working.]

[Everyone always works, Cassel thinks to himself, and thinks that this must be what relaxation feels like. He closes his eyes and leans his elbow against the table. So calm. So right. Just for a moment.]

[And then it's gone.]

[He opens his eyes and blinks at Dillon, eyes hollow and filmy like a sick animal.]

. . . Stay with me?

[He's a such a sucker for it. He remembers having things tangled and wrong inside of him, the kind of hollowness that came from being eaten from the inside. Cassel might not forgive him for it later, but he pushes out again, wraps as much of Cassel in his presence as he can, crisp like ozone, metronomic with his heartbeat, the sense that everything is just how it is supposed to be, except where it's incomplete, the pockets in Cassel it can't reach.]

Yeah. 'Course I will.

25. the driver was left-handed

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