Dillon Cole || Scorpion Shard (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
orderfromchaos) wrote2015-01-12 07:40 pm
orderfromchaos) wrote2015-01-12 07:40 pm
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.]
[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.]
[private/Iris/Dillon]
Re: [private/Iris/Dillon]
[private/Iris/Dillon]
[private/Iris/Dillon]
[private/Iris/Dillon]
[private/Iris/Dillon]
You can look in my head, it'll be clearer without English.
[private/Iris/Dillon]
But she remembers the song of the stars, and she misses it.
So she opens her mind, and reaches out, gentle and careful. Show me, she says without words.]
[private/Iris/Dillon]
[Iris can't reach out that far to an alien mind under her own steam, but Jean can bridge that gap for her.
She's a curious, sparkling presence edging Jean's like a refraction of her inner light. And Iris can share her own experience of Chris' mind, the exact shape of the alterations from her perspective and the way she couldn't catch hold of it. Only a little of her frustration and rage colour her thoughts; the rest is kept safely shut away.]
[private/Iris/Dillon]
[A little bit wry - there is a reason she's so wary of touching him. But he's okay with it.
And sure enough, Dillon's perspective is totally distinct from Iris's. He's not an Empath, and he doesn't feel what Cassel feels except with the very mundane, human sort of empathy that echoes pain it sees. Because Dillon sees it.
Everything is fractal to Dillon, if he looks hard enough, everything is pieces that echo wholes, histories that unfold and replicate, futures on a tree of deep-ply possible forkings, not determined but still predictable, pathways and possibilities. He sees the world like the wide-eyed entranced tinkering nephew of some absent-minded Clockmaker God who wandered off before screwing the back of the world over the cogs again.
And Cassel is one gleaming intricate exquisite node of that watch, whirring and connecting, but there are pieces - this mood, that particular brand of reckless - that do not fit, that are patently and obviously wrong, that don't belong with the parts around them, that weren't built in the same forge or from the same material, no matter now skillfully or neatly they've been inserted in place of the pieces that should be there. It's wrong in the essence and the existence, soul and life that ought to be inseparable substrates of each of each other. It horrifies Dillon and it hurts Cassel, that discordant chasm, now that he's aware of it, or it would hurt him, if Dillon weren't pressing him with the equivalent of psychic anesthesia.]
[private/Iris/Dillon]
He sees the world so much like the Phoenix does; the bare gears and guts of the cosmos, shifting and grinding. What is, what will, what could be. And, most importantly, what shouldn't be.
She views it with a visceral distaste, every part of her agreed; this is wrong. Defective. Insulting.
(It reminds her, just slightly, of what the Barge felt like before she fixed it.)
Jean doesn't bother to shield or suppress the feeling, or the echo of memory; she lets it come and go, and then focuses on Iris' perspective. It's a more intimate view, vaguer but closer; another piece of the puzzle. Another tool in their repair.]