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

[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.