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sincerity may be too much to ask for

Passengers: Grace Gibson and Volk
Location: Mess Hall
Date: 1/29
Summary: Unpaired Warden-Inmate Bonding Time over Coffee, possibly some sort of shenaniganry?
Warnings: probably a lot of cursing

Volk, apparently, has a lot of feelings. He seems like a smart guy, from what Grace could glean through text, or at least likes other people to think he’s a smart guy, and he’s not afraid to let people know about it. Possibly this is one of the things that led to his being here as an inmate in the first place, not that she knows anything about what those actually are.

Maybe that’s something she can get him to talk about in person? Or at least just let him open up and blow off some steam. Seems like he could use a friendly ear, and isn’t that exactly what Grace came here to be? It’s not like she has any expertise in anything else that might be of use, here. She couldn’t even provide him with cigarettes. Great warden.

Ah, well. She gets herself a couple of cups of steaming-hot coffee, and takes a seat in the cafeteria— Mess Hall, she corrects herself, god, she has GOT to stop calling it that, stupid habit, terms are important— where she can be easily seen, and waits.

It's uncomfortably exposing for Grace, trying to be seen. She tries not to let it get to her.

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Volk rolls in like a tiny, shitty thundercloud of tobacco smell. The automat hasn't given him coffee in weeks, and he was on a daily amount of caffeine slightly short of a lethal dose before he arrived here.

He beelines to the cups, almost doesn't register Grace.

"Hi."

Then he stops. Oh, she's. Uhhh. She's real creepy, in person. This can't be anyone but her, because new people don't arrive that often, but, yes, creepy.

Volk weighs the instinct telling him to run and does fast math. She could be asking him in here to murder him, or some shit. Volk weighs this against, one, the presence of coffee, two, his own inflated confidence in his ability to talk people into, and out of, bullshit, and, three, the fact that if he died right now maybe it'd serve everyone here right for kidnapping him and then hiring a murderer.

Volk sets his jaw stubbornly and sits down.

"I'll be frank. There's an explanation for this place that's a lot worse than whatever you were sold on. If you can go, you should. If you can't go, think about why they'd hire people that are desperate."

When Volk arrives, Grace sits up a little straighter. Gotta project capability, an open, honest friendliness... and then she sees him tense, and she knows exactly what just hit him.

Ah, well. Her hopeful expression crumples, just a touch.

"What kind of 'worse explanation' are you thinking of?" She passes a coffee over towards his side of the table, gently. Her fingers are long and thin, and she's very quick to retract her hand before he has a chance to reach for his cup. Can't be too careful.

"I think there's a high chance that a lot of us aren't who we think we are. The question nobody can answer is - why us? Why this combination of people."

Volk knows why him. He's always known why people want him safely in a facility being supervised 24/7. He sips the coffee. This coffee is so bad. It's wonderful.

"I missed coffee so much. I'm going to actually cry. Hang on."

He gets up and walks in a little circle shaking out his hands just to get some of the god damn energy out of him, like an actor rehearsing a soliloquy in his head.

Grace smiles, just a tiny little upward twitch of the corners of her mouth, to see his reaction to the coffee. At least she did something right, here. He's still agitated, clearly, and the coffee's not gonna help with that, but sometimes just having something to hold on to helps.

She looks down at the cup in her own hands. She hasn't even tasted it, just used it to keep her fingers warm. It's awfully cold in space.

"So, rather than Wardens and Inmates, you think we're all prisoners here?" She poses this very calmly-- the last thing she wants is to set the poor guy off again with her tone. Anything could do it, given her whole... thing. Be careful, careful, so careful...

"First of all, there are too many wardens that can't leave even if they wanted to. Ask around. Some of these guys were inmates and they still can't leave. They finished the program and got nothing."

He's still circling.

"Second, you guys can't actually do anything to us. Did you notice that?"

He finally settles back down.

"You can't lock us into or out of anything, you can't decide if we need redemption or not, you don't have access to camera feeds which would let you monitor things, you can't help us if we're having serious problems with food or medical facilities, you can't keep us from killing each other, and most of all - you can't tell me who owns this place, why they do what they do, or how. And I don't mean the Navarch."

More coffee now? Yes. He takes a swig. More energy is never bad, that's Volk's philosophy. Talk faster. Argue louder.

Edited 2022-02-05 08:06 (UTC)

Grace just sits still, listening patiently, rubbing the rim of her cup with her thumbnail. A few of the things he posits strike her as at least slightly inaccurate, the way he presents them to her-- Inmates can be locked out of a bunch of places they're not allowed, and they can absolutely be prevented from killing one another, provided somebody gets there in time to do so. She's not even sure what he means about problems with medical facilities; Claire is literally a doctor, after all. Still, she nods, just taking it all in. The last thing she wants to do is imply that he's wrong or crazy or something like that. That would not be building trust.

"So what conclusion have you come to, from all this?"

Being dragged out of your bed and then hit on day two really leaves an impression. That impression is: if Silco had decided to kill me, I'd be dead.

The medical facilities are ...a touchy topic.

"If I were going to lie to a bunch of people, to control them, I'd do it to people who no one would ever believe. Who the fuck are we going to go to for help?"

"If all you wanted was to control a handful of people," Because really, they are just a handful of weirdly disparate people from what seems like random parallel universes, from what Grace can tell, not that she's an expert, "Do you really think they'd need to go to all this trouble to do it?"

Not that it's impossible, just... really, really unlikely. Most people don't need crazy future space technology and a prison spaceship to control others; they just need money and social media. "There's easier ways to isolate and manipulate a bunch of weirdos. Look at Scientology."

"You're right. I can really just guess at why they're doing this.

But ...

Let me guess. You've got a story that if you told me I wouldn't believe it. Right?"

He tips his head, drinks more coffee. Maybe this is going to be a good guess. Maybe it's not. But every single person he's asked so far has at least one weird thing that they're convinced really happened.

Edited 2022-02-05 17:37 (UTC)

Grace shrugs, noncommittally. "You might. I don't know what you've been through."

And anyway he seems to be able to convince himself of just about anything, as long as it's something other than what someone else told him.

"Alright, great. Really good to know that the power is all on your side, and that it's never changing. Love a good reminder of that."

Sip. Coffee makes it worth it.

"Everyone has a story. Everyone's a fucking alien or something. What are the odds, right?"

"Pretty high, if we were selected for it. People with higher risks are more desperate for a higher reward. That's why I was approached. I'm sure the rest of the Wardens are in a similar boat."

Except maybe William. Who knows what that guy's motivations are?

"Aren't you an exceptional individual where you're from?"

Volk doesn't answer.

He drums his fingers instead, thinking.

"Do you think we're really in space? Millions of miles away from where we've ever been?"

It's soft. It's uncertain, and frustrated, and sad.

Grace searches his eyes for a moment, eventually dropping her gaze back to her coffee. She takes a sip.

It's gross. Of course it's gross.

"Maybe. It's as likely as us being anywhere else." A small, sympathetic shrug. "I didn't get any tickets. I was going to ask for my photoboard, from home. The kind with all the pins?"

Just in case Volk needed a reminder that the creepy weirdo untrustworthy dirty Warden sitting in front of him is also a homesick 23-year-old girl who is just as displaced from everything she knows as he is.

Volk doesn't hate her.

There are animals with no claws or fangs, whose defense is that their insides are deadly. There are caterpillars that gorge themselves deliberately on poison, so that the ones that live through it can cocoon and come out toxic on every inch. Volk is someone who has built himself out of sweetgum and nettles, fast-acting venom. If anyone cracks him, he wants it to be the last thing they ever do.

Normal people's hostility goes from a 1 for people they love and to a 10 for people they actively want to hurt. Volk's only goes as low as 4.

It's nothing personal. He actually feels kind of sorry for her. He's grateful for the coffee.

"Can't you go home and pick it up?"

She shakes her head.

"Supernatural things are trying to kill me. If I go back with no solution, I'm toast." She picks at the rim of her cup with her thumbnail. "As hard as it's been here, it's practically been a vacation. Just one where I don't get much sleep at night, and I have a day job that's way outside my area of expertise, and most people don't like me, and even the ones that do lie to my face or tell me how weak and naive I am for even wanting to help, like it's so crazy to want to do the thing I came here to do."

Her head tilts to the side, resting on her shoulder. She looks sad.

"Rock and a hard place. But that's all of us, I think. So."

There it is. Now he's actually being talked to.

Volk holds up one hand.

"Just tell me to shut up if I'm wrong. Anxiety?"

Like, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, from the DSM, not just an emotion described as lowercase-a anxiety that's happening to her currently.

Volk is met with an emphatic shrug.

"No idea. Probably no more than anybody in my situation would have. Not nearly as bad as what the inmates are going through, I'm sure."

Grace has never seen a doctor in regards to mental health. She'd have to have parents who actually wanted her to be healthy for that, as opposed to what she actually had, which was people who ignored her until she fucked up somehow, at which point they'd just tell her what a terrible person she is.

Aaah okay. There are pieces falling into place.

"Why did you suggest therapy if you've never actually like, seen therapy?"

"Well, I didn't know anything about prisoner rehabilitation before I got here, so after taking a tour of the ship, pretty much the first thing I did was go to the library to see what experts had to say about how to help. Some of them talked about it, and since it's easy to implement and doesn't take a lot of resources and can be broadly helpful on a bigger scale..."

She huffs and pouts at Volk, just a little. "You read the post. Everything I said. I wasn't lying. I don't have any reason to. I just want to help everybody achieve what they want and then go home better off."

"I don't think you're lying."

True.

"I think you just don't know how complicated it is. How hard it is to even participate in, let alone manage. It's probably easier to find every single inmate on this ship a girlfriend that likes them than it is to find them a good match for a therapy environment."

"I dunno about that, I'm a really good wingman."

Was that, pray tell, a joke??

"I know it'll be hard. I know it'll be complicated. Why would that stop me?"

"Because if you do it wrong, even once, people will get hurt."

Blunt.

"It's not whether it'll happen. It's how bad it'll be."

Grace considers her answer to that for a good, long moment.

"I think you have a point about how important it is to do therapy correctly. We should absolutely have someone qualified in charge, to supervise and mitigate anything that might get out of hand, if anything like that gets implemented. The issue with that is that we might never have anybody with the degrees needed to be what everyone here needs, and we still have to do something. But it was just a suggestion, anyway. I didn't know what our population's skillset was when I asked about it."

A shrug.

"Sometimes it's better to take the risk and try. If we all sit here taking no action whatsoever forever, and what the Navarch says about sending people home after successful personal growth is true, then we're all stuck here. Maybe forever. Or maybe she's lying and we're all stuck here forever anyway, in which case, it's still better to try something and see for ourselves. Doesn't have to be therapy. Maybe we start a book club or something, I don't know. I guess the real question is where we all fall on risk versus reward."

"Then start a book club."

It's like coming from another world, sometimes. You forget how little regular people know groups, sessions, dosages, wearing socks with sticky shapes on the bottom because your shoes have been taken. Shifting diagnoses. Shifting pills. Insurance runarounds. Side effects and side effects and side effects and starting from square one every time your therapist changes.

And how it's still made up, individually, of extremely educated people trying very hard. How it's an imperfect, chaotic nightmare and if you don't advocate for yourself you slip between the joints when the behemoth that is the entire system shifts around you - and it's still the best that people working together can possibly do.

And this whole thing ain't that. This whole thing was made by someone who has no idea that they're not just asking Grace to reinvent the wheel, they want her to invent the entire car from scratch.

What he wants to say is: You can't do this. They're asking you to do something you just don't have the tools for. I don't think any of the others can, either.

What he actually says is more diplomatic.

"Do we have to?

You're thinking of it in black and white. Do what the Navarch says,"

Volk taps a spot on the table -

"or just give up."

He taps a spot further to the left.

"What if there are other options?"

He draws a circle between the two points. This whole area, here. This area we're not talking about.

Edited 2022-02-06 23:53 (UTC)

"Which are?"

At least she's listening. Entertaining this notion that inmates and wardens need not be adversarial, as some of the others seemed to think, but work together. William had emphasized that to her, and given his experience as an inmate, she had listened.

He was, if nothing else, proof that the system as presented to them worked. Or rather, that it could work. Volk didn't seem to believe that any of this was as it seemed at all, which in Grace's eyes, was directly counter to William's experience. So who was wrong?

Well. She only had herself to rely on, there. And she'd been wrong before. So what's wrong with a little intelligence-gathering? It couldn't hurt. Probably.

"Many. Just try to break out of this box and you can think of a bunch. Off the top of my head, though - find a solution to the things trying to kill you. Shit, just take Travis home and throw him at them, he'll probably take it in exchange for a ride back to the real world."

Oh no. The coffee cup is getting lighter. Volk slows down. Have to make this last.

Grace snorts a brief laugh-- unattractively, she's been told.

"If it were that easy, I wouldn't be here. Though, I don't doubt Travis's enthusiasm in the slightest."

Her hand moves up to her bad shoulder, giving it a few subconscious squeezes, a gesture of habit.

"How does somebody kill the unkillable? You don't. You find a way to convince them to make a different choice. Sound familiar?"

What a rude thing to tell a woman, honestly.

Volk snorts and looks away.

"Unkillable is a myth. Even as a punishment."

He finishes off his coffee. Fuck it.

"What exactly did they promise you?"

"A resolution. Nonspecific. I wasn't in a position to negotiate."

Grace passes her coffee over. Volk needs it more, and let's be honest: she's not exactly sad to let it go.

"Take it. No cooties, I promise."

"What, why?"

Is there something wrong with it?

"It's coffee," she returns, with a sheepish shrug. "I never had much of a taste for it, unless it was full of so much sugar and cream and flavor syrup you can barely call it coffee anymore."

In case Volk needed more reason to find her Basic, there you have it.

She just comes off as ...younger. A lot younger, even though she can't be that far off from his own age. One of them's had a weird life. Maybe its both?

"...It's not really about the taste."

Thank you, he means. He's going to take it.

"So, they could have just promised they could help and either not be able to deliver or do something that's not what you're counting on."

Edited 2022-02-19 19:21 (UTC)

Grace nods.

"Sure. Either's possible. Believe me when I say it was worth a try. And so far... I don't know. It hasn't given me anything to say they can't deliver. Guess I'm just a hopeful person."

Another little shrug-- this time, her shoulder cracks, and it's loud. Loud in a way that says 'This Joint Has Been A Problem Before'. She doesn't seem to pay it any mind.

"There's a difference between hope and having no plan. You could be doing both."

"Oh, definitely. I was never the one who came up with the plans. Right now, it's just... do my job, get paid, go home. Unless something else happens."

After barely a pause, she sits up straighter, like something just occurred to her:

"But, I have to mention, there's some wardens here who say they used to be inmates. I don't know how much I trust them, or, you know, anybody here. But that's a thing, right?"

"According to them, yes. They finished what they were told to do and still couldn't go home. Their lives were still ruined, they had nowhere to go but back here. I have no idea why the hell they would advertise that."

But they sure did, huh.

"I've also been told that once these things pick up steam, the culture is more or less one of abuse. We're not at capacity, you can tell. This ship is going to get bigger."

Volk cups his hands around his (new) coffee.

"You know what part of the job of a therapist is?"

Hoo boy that sure is a lot of assumptions. About former wardens, about their results, about the future aboard the Peregrine. None of that will come to pass, if Grace has a finger on the scale. Or at least, she'd do whatever she could.

Whether that'd be enough is, after all, out of her hands.

She just tilts her head to the side, a go on, I'm listening implied in the gesture.

This is him paraphrasing what Loki and William told him as well as he could - no embellishments.

"Trying to get you to actually listen to things you don't want to hear. Trying to get you to consider things that you have to think about, even when it's hard and unpleasant."

Volk smiles humorlessly. He's so tired.

Edited 2022-02-25 01:27 (UTC)

"You think you've been doing that?"

It's a genuine question.

"Fuck no, nobody listens to me. I could be screaming about a fire and people would roll their fucking eyes."

Big drink of coffee.

"It's great. I love it."

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sincerity may be too much to ask for

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