meeemory all alone in the moooonlight

[kaijuice]

Passengers: Silco + Grace
Location: The SIRE
Date: After this
Summary: Show and tell
Warnings: Violence



Silco's rolling a sleeve by the time she arrives, inspecting some yellowed bruise. It's difficult to say what draws his eyes up to meet hers — not the click of heels, hovered as she is above the ground. A neat trick.

He's spied her across the room more often than not; it's an altogether different matter this close. His forearm prickles, bumps of gooseflesh rising between scar. Sudden as a chill.

Peculiar.

"Thank you for coming, Grace." His hand drops, a gracious splay of palm. "Have you been within before?"

Comments

[expectaspectre]

Grace has been... let's call it what it is, avoiding the SIRE. It's true that 3d/VR stuff usually gives her a headache, but mostly it's about what could be inside.

There's nothing it could show her that would do anything but hurt more.

But Silco seemed insistent, and since he clearly views it as some sort of test, up she showed. Silently. Cautiously.

"It's not really my kind of entertainment," she admits, with an accompanying apologetic raising of her shoulders. "I prefer books."

[kaijuice]

"I'll have to get your recommendation." The door opens as anything else aboard: Smooth, sanded white. "The last that I saw this in use, we'd some power malfunctions. The results were —"

His head tips aside.

"Unique."

The sweep of an arm, polite. After you.

[expectaspectre]

She nods, politely, and unlocks the room with her CommLink for the two of them before entering the big, cube-shaped room. It reminds her a little of an empty pool.

"You mentioned you'd like to show me a memory," she murmurs. "Is it the reason you're here?"

[kaijuice]

"Mm," The sound rolls in his teeth. I would not be who I am without it — "What are any of us, but the sum of our questions?"

"Piltover. Central bridge, the evening of ██." A glance to Grace. Silco considers, adds: "North end."

Night falls, deep and cold as the waters that lap this ironwork.

From behind them, one spotlight bursts, then another; illuminates an advancing rank. They stand within a phalanx of dark armor, and long guns. The air here is heavy, hangs thick and acrid. If it weren't for their visors, it would sting —

(The sensation is at once personal, and strangely abstract: Subject to some memory they don't truly occupy. As though a figure in a dream, seen omniscient through wandering eye.)

[expectaspectre]

She blinks, and she's a stranger in a strange land.

It's dark, and there's something smog-like in the atmosphere, an unfamiliar industrial tang Grace doesn't recognize. The loud clang of manual spotlights activating make her squeeze her eyes shut for a minute, adjusting, before she realizes where they are: a bridge, an unfamiliar city behind, and an army between. They're in odd, old-fashioned uniforms, but the weapons they carry look plenty dangerous enough.

"A siege?" She whispers, turning her gaze to Silco, expecting to find him as implacable as usual.

[kaijuice]

Hands fold behind his back, easier to conceal the white lock of knuckle. His lip curls.

"A day's work."

Rifles chamber into the fog, a wall of grey. Time clouds into shape: Hulking, studded with glinting points, with the rough posture of violence. There must be dozens of them.

(A mob.)

"Hold — !"

Bellows a voice from their line; feminine, and deep. Sweat prickles, collects about an itching collar. This uniform never fit right.

[expectaspectre]

This group of people materializing out of the fog... no opposing military force, just people. Something has happened to make them stand against something with an army at its beck and call, and now they stare down their own deaths, a wave against the rocks. Tale as old as time.

It never ends well.

"Are you among them?" Another whisper. As if she doesn't want to interrupt.

[kaijuice]

His mouth opens to reply —

And then all hell breaks loose.

The first explosion breaks the line, sends shrapnel arcing beside shredded armor; bone. The retort lights muzzle-flash orange. A roar rises furious, encompassing — orders impossible to divine from the deafness that rings to swallow them both. The throat is hoarse. Everyone is screaming. Pretty glass, embedded in an eye.

The second blast blurs. The third,

Stone shudders. Hair sizzles. A knife takes a neck, a fist finds teeth — boom, boom — every new blast shocking the skull. Something snaps underfoot, splintered in five-point succession: A hand, still trembling. The mass tramples itself, blood and blue; alive and dying.

[expectaspectre]

Nausea rises in her throat; this kind of violence is overwhelming, sickening, a flood of adrenaline and pain that rattles her brain around her skull. The only thing keeping it at bay is knowing it isn't real. Still.

She wasn't wrong about getting a headache.

Grace forces herself to watch the madness ensue, trying to focus: what's happening, who's surviving, where they're going. What's going to happen next.

[kaijuice]

It's impossible to say how long it's been: Hours, only minutes — but progress grows easier. The street is clearer. The riot has shifted direction, away, into the warren of a burning city. With every explosion, there are fewer afoot. Smoke billows, the pace slows. Uniforms fan out. This is the end,

Nothing to do but mop up.

A straggler cries out, broken fist clutched to her chest. The casual lift of a sight. Shell and body drop. In the distance, a child's song, high and improbable:

Dear friend across the river,

"Victory," Dry on his tongue. Silco shifts, drags his hands free. "I believe that's enough for today."

One final face, all rubble and wild eyes. Sea green. Its expression contorts.

Darkness again.

[expectaspectre]

If the earlier part of the battle is disorienting, nauseating, panic-inducing, then the latter part is just disgusting. In the literal sense of the word; Grace is disgusted, watching them pick off stragglers, the wounded, those far, far beyond being able to fight back anymore. Briefly, she wonders what it says about her that this is the part that repulses her-- watching faceless uniforms putting their big, shiny weapons to the heads of filthy, bleeding people screaming for mercy, for help... some just screaming.

The thin voice of a singing child, incongruous amid the blood and smog, heralds the end. In the darkness, Grace's eyes find the vague silhouette of Silco. If she could see more than a shape, she wonders what it was she would see.

"This was a part of your history," she murmurs, obviously. "What was it you hoped I'd learn?"

[kaijuice]

"Numbers."

The room is kinder than its dream: Lights rise slowly, scents fade. The temperature — the illusion of it — cools. Silco steps toward her. A pale man is always so, sallow and skin-worn, but something arcs his shoulders sharper. Oratory,

"The night which you observed bought five years of peace," His good eye shines, green. Wild. "Five years without agitation. Unrest."

[expectaspectre]

"Peace for who?"

She remembers the dying faces, the shining buttons on the military uniforms, the dirty shoes of the dead rebels. The voice of the child in the distance, who'll have to live with the violence Grace was just shown, not as a clip of virtual video, but as a real, tangible trauma. She doesn't know what they were fighting for, these people.

She's willing to bet they never got it.

[kaijuice]

"The good people of the city," He gestures. "The high houses of Piltover. The inventors, the academics; tradesmen, and sailors, and merchants. The labourers below."

Silco smiles.

"Provided they remain in place."

[expectaspectre]

Grace closes her eyes, shakes her head, like if she tilts it just the right way, the injustice will just dribble out of her ear.

"And did they?"

[kaijuice]

"Stasis kills more slowly than a bullet," Change, or die. (Die, and change of it —) "For some, that will always be enough."

Is that an answer? His shrug is too jagged to properly roll.

"These were criminals. Thugs," As delivering a joke: "Murderers. What would you have done?"

[expectaspectre]

She knows he's referring to the common people when he speaks about criminals and thugs. Them, and the other inmates. A test. Naturally.

Her stare turns to the spot where the troops had taken their formations. Pointed their guns at the desperate and fired indiscriminately. They'd gone home and eaten dinner, afterwards. Shot into a crowd, then kissed their kids goodnight.

"Not that."

[kaijuice]

"And if you were among their number?" The crowd. "Would you keep the peace?"

To stay where you belong.

[expectaspectre]

"Peacekeeping was never part of my job description."

Her weird, dark stare meets his, strange artificial eye and all. He has a better excuse for being reluctant to blink. Grace just forgets, sometimes.

"Mostly the opposite."

[kaijuice]

The crinkle of his remaining eyelid shifts the tilt of his smile just a little more genuine; less a baring of teeth.

If this is a test, it seems she could be doing worse.

"Tell me of that."

[expectaspectre]

Grace shrugs, hugs her arms as she takes some lazy steps around the room. Sometimes stories make you move. There's a tiny, near-imperceptible angle to her walk that implies, perhaps, an old injury of some kind, but it's so slight that less scrutiny wouldn't notice.

"There's a reason they call us vigilantes," she murmurs, accompanying a glance over her shoulder. "The establishment has never been our biggest fan. If it were, we wouldn't exist."

chefkiss @ 'sometimes stories make you move'

[kaijuice]

"And what do you stand vigilant against?"

He watches her walk. If he notices its skew, it isn't with particular consideration. Not yet. The Undercity steeps in scar; old hurts undernourished. Even the young might hitch a hip.

(This is not the Undercity, and Grace does not often stand under her own weight.)

hee hee

[expectaspectre]

"When it comes down to it, money, mostly. People with it will do anything to keep it out of the hands of people without it. Anything."

A nonchalant shrug. "We stop them. They don't like that."

[kaijuice]

"So I've found."

Though he little expects their methods to overlap. I've never killed anyone. He prompts:

"A tall order, to stop a ruthless enemy."

[expectaspectre]

"More of a calling. Power and responsibility being what they are."

It's strange, talking about this with what's essentially a stranger. Grace has never been the one of her group to do the communication with outside elements, for obvious reasons. Part of her wonders whether she should be discussing any of this at all, whether anything said here could have repercussions at home. Maybe it's like Vegas; whatever happens on the Peregrine...

"Injustice is everywhere. If you can do something about it, and you don't, what does that make you?"

[kaijuice]

"Not a Warden, one hopes."

His head cants. Given his druthers, he'd summon a desk; but the situation hardly warrants. If they're to look again into memory, he'd sooner it be Grace's own. So he settles down against the wall, arm draped over knee, the way he has a thousand times: To examine a child's drawing, to bring a small voice close.

He watches her.

"When did you find yourself powerful?"

[expectaspectre]

Grace stops pacing-- why explain, when she can just show him? A whispered word to the SIRE is all it takes. The overly-bright light in the room fades down, and we see:

The dim interior of a four-door sedan on a drizzly night in a city, the perspective from the back left seat. Raindrops streak trails, riverlike down the window, glowing with the vivid colors of each passing light. The atmosphere is oppressive, silent-- the parents in the front are having a cold, hushed "discussion". It's clear, from the reaction of the children in the backseat, that this is nothing new. The girl in the seat next to our perspective is an older teen, her hair and clothing neat and perfect, her face impassive. She appears to be studiously ignoring everything around her, lost in thought elsewhere. Our passenger, having no other means of escaping the tension, turns back to the window and the wet-shimmering moonless night beyond.

It happens so suddenly that one would almost miss it. (The driver certainly did.) An intersection, ordinary, except that our passenger sees the oncoming truck run the red light to the left. It isn't stopping.

It doesn't stop. The horrific roar of squealing, crunching metal turns instantly to total blackness. It remains black for a long time.

Grace stands in the dark, her eyes squeezed shut. She doesn't need to see it all again.

[kaijuice]

He's long enough only to recall the ATVs — her hesitation — before the memory swallows them. Surfaces in light, water; the shade of an alien dynamic. Some argument: A family, by the resemblance. Well-dressed. Wealthy.

Light soaks the sky. Raindrops trickle by. A race to see which slick shimmer tracks first to the edge of the window, blinded by the occasional flash of a beam.

Not a flash. Bright, brighter as it bears down, and then it comes and then it comes and then it comes. Steel screams. Red-red-black.

Black.

The blossom of pain is vestigial, sympathetic. No product of technology. Silco lifts a hands to his cheek, skin pulsing a neon reminder. Life. This is what it costs, this is living.

"This made you stronger?"

Soft. He'd like to stand, but he sits. The girl's distress is plain.

(Good. Then they're getting somewhere.)

[expectaspectre]

It's a moment of steeling herself before she's able to unclench her jaw, relax her shoulders, fill her lungs with a deep, less-shaking breath. She lets it out, slowly, and just as slowly turns her gaze to Silco, in his seat on the ground, sounding surprisingly gentle.

"Surviving it did. It doesn't always, but it did, for me."

Flashes of tiny memories pop around the SIRE-- waking in the ICU in traction, barely able to groan in pain around the tube helping her breathe. Surgery after surgery after surgery after surgery. Excruciating physical therapy. The maze of hideous scars stretching across her abdomen like angry red lightning stapled across pale sky. Losing months and months of normal life to recovery, and losing all her friends in the process. The way her parents looked at her afterwards-- a burden, a problem, a sacrificial goat to blame all the problems of their marriage on. Abandonment. Loneliness. Rejection. And through all of it, an enduring pain that never really goes away.

"I didn't have a choice."

[kaijuice]

"Don't sell yourself short."

There's always the black. Bizarre to glimpse it like this — the loom of alien faces, each identically rapacious: Get well, get well, so they might grasp for more. If Silco may say anything for his own salvation, it is that the Doctor has never named himself a friend.

(Is this what Jinx would have endured? No. No, he spared her this much. A single night's hell, and never a burden for it. She knows. He made certain that she knows,)

"Plenty choose otherwise."