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

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."