8th Wave

[tentacruelest]

Th' next time this Barge feels like poking around in my head, I'll be keeping to my quarters. The lot of yeh - useless dregs not fit to scrub a floor. It's bad enough I'm locked in here with you, I don't need to call any of yeh friends.

[Private to Bush]

Was dealing with me yerself so difficult that you sought to work through less offensive channels, Captain?

[Private to Arthas]

A word, my king.

[Can you feel that heavy sarcasm, Arthas?]

Comments

[myironeyes]

Stop.

The more threats you make, the more people will fuss at you instead of leaving you alone.

Iris, come help me feed Aster.

[tentacruelest]

Only because they feel my threats will go unfulfilled.

[myironeyes]

No.

I've been watching Hannibal Lecter since his release.

More people approach him now. It is harder to cow people who don't die. A few may weary of it, but the most bothersome ones will only see it as a challenge to continue aggravating you.

So stop.

[tentacruelest]

I'd love t'hear how you intend to force me, Marsh. Torturing others is the only entertainment I seem to get these days.

[myironeyes]

I don't plan to force you. I'm simply telling you that - entertaining or not - this will have the opposite effect from what you want.

[tentacruelest]

Nothing else appears to be working.

[myironeyes]

What else have you tried?

[Because mostly when he hears you talk, it's threats. Just saying.]

[tentacruelest]

Being left alone. Ignoring others in the hopes that I too will be ignored.

[myironeyes]

Well then. That's two tactics down.

I understand the desire to be left alone. More than I can say. And I am sorry this place is not...conducive to peace. But picking fights is even less so.

[tentacruelest]

If I cannot have peace, I would have screams instead.

[myironeyes]

You could, if you did not abandon the possibility.

I will not say swiftly, or easily, because I do not know the length of your suffering. But I will say that I have found...measures of peace, long after I believed it impossible.

That would not have happened if I had turned to cruelty.

[tentacruelest]

I turned to cruelty long ago. I was a feared name among cruel men. There will never be peace for me.

[myironeyes]

[Quietly, because this is not something he's told...anyone.]

There are people in my world who worship me as the face of death. It is a position I - thoroughly earned.

Peace does not erase, and is not forfeited by, what came before. It is a matter of - small moments of quiet on our journeys.

I will leave you be, now.

[tentacruelest]

And there are those who feared me as the face of purgatory before their final step into hell. But those times are over.

Off with you, Marsh.

[voice]

[routemistress]

[It would be stupid to start crying again now. Good thing Marsh can't see the comm screen. She switches it to voice anyway, because Jones can and she has her pride.]

On me way, love.

[spam]

[myironeyes]

[He puts an arm around her as soon as she's through his door.]

[spam]

[routemistress]

[She's shaking with rage and grief, and she clings to Marsh like a child.]

M'sorry. I should know better. Shooting fish in a barrel. Now I might've set 'im on Zane or Rorschach or Chris or someone.

[spam]

[myironeyes]

[He just holds her and pets her hair. She should know better. But, well.]

It'll be alright, Iris.

He acts a bully. It's your better impulses that won't stand for it.

But he acts a bully because he has no power, and you do. Try to remember it.

[spam]

[routemistress]

[She leans against him, infinitely grateful.]

S'good of you to say so. I'm not so sure I weren't just lashing out.

[He does have a point: the conversation took the same shape as other ones have, outside the barge where Iris was fighting for better reasons than a sudden impulse. The same shape, but not the same point. She is capable of better control than this. She's exercised it before.]

...next time I'll try and catch meself doing it before it's too late. I am sorry.

[spam]

[myironeyes]

There's no need to apologize to me.

[It's very mild. He does not emphasize to me at all; she's smart enough that he knows he doesn't have to.]

It's all any of us can do, being a little better next time.

[There there. Cluck cluck. Pet pet.]

[spam]

[routemistress]

Oh, I will.

[Apologise to Jones, she means; she's already working out how to phrase it.]

I think I might need to keep meself right off the network for a bit. This isn't the first.

[spam]

[myironeyes]

Mmm. I know it's more my way than yours, withdrawing. But everyone needs...a little sanctuary, on occasion.

[He pulls away just enough to hand her a small bowl of blueberries and shoo her toward Aster's cage.]

[spam]

[routemistress]

That's what me bus was for.

[Because this is Marsh, because he is everything he is and has been, she touches him - the most careful surface contact - and shows him what it was. A TARDIS isn't exactly alive, but it's very far from simply being a thing. It's more of a process, Iris' own personal golden needle that could thread her into the tapestry of any reality. Its existence was part of hers and vice versa; without her it would lose cohesion, disperse its essence back into the fabric of wider existence. Without it, she's lost and stranded, an unbalanced fish out of water.]

[spam]

[myironeyes]

[It's still scary - scary and bewildering and bracing, like a steep drop-off and sharp winter wind. Ruin couldn't do this, couldn't see his thoughts and didn't care about them anyway, couldn't express or convey meaning. He just shouted, or pulled Marsh's strings. Bianca could do it - but then, for the most part, she didn't bother. No one shows themselves to tools. This is something that only happens with her.

He shows her something back, lurching and tentative, focusing on it and hoping his constant state of machiolation lets it through. It's just a memory, less conceptual and more vivid, a memory of himself from the Oxford breach, stumbling down an unknown road, leaning on Sedge, with chunks carved from the donkey's flanks and the last vertebra cut from her tail, and the sick soul-deep ache in his stomach and his skull and his fingertips. Missing pieces, he thinks without words, wisps of association flitting from his spikes to Zane's like a calytpra moth. He won't be mended, but Zane was, could be again. He remembers Riddick's shoulder, steady as a cold mountain under his arm. Yes, it leaves one unbalanced.]

You've got plenty of us to lean on.