a_shadow | Savrou IC Contact

He's been walking along beside her through the corridors. It would be natural to pull back a little when she approaches the door, to give her a chance to get inside first, but seeing the box there, he doesn't. Instead, he anticipates the request to bring the box in and is bending over to pick it up the moment she asks.

"It probably doesn't have a bomb in it," he says dryly.

What's weird about the box is that it's a little too large for its weight. A small, heavy box would be normal; this one has a few relatively heavy things inside it, poorly distributed, but the overall weight seems inconsistent.

Once they're inside, he sets it on the bed that doesn't currently have an owner, the one that had belonged to the blind roommate.

She snorts a little when he says that, keying the door open and letting him through. "I wouldn't be surprised," she remarks, following him in. "I'm just going to get this over with," she adds. "I'm not good at waiting on surprises."

After he puts the box down she approaches it, setting her cane alongside the box on the mattress, and using the bed as leverage to lean on. She sets her hands on the top of the box, pauses a moment, then opens the flaps.

The item right on top is recognizable to her immediately—she saw it in the files about Allison when she was retrieving Connie's evidence. It's Allison's hat, with her unit insignia on it. Her hand goes to cover her mouth momentarily before she reaches in and takes it, holding it with one hand and thumbing at the stars in the insignia with the other. She doesn't really need to keep looking at it, though, and she determines right away she's not liable to ever wear it—she'll just put it in her bottom dresser drawer with the baby doll. Things of Allison's aren't hers and she wishes the Ingress would stop pulling in reminders of that.

She flattens her mouth in a line and sets the hat down next to the box, then reaches in again. This time it's a sturdy, thick hoodie that appears to be about her size with the UNSC logo on it. She holds it up to herself and then drapes it over her arm. This she'll wear. She reaches in again—the next item is a pair of black BDU pants, apparently to match with the hoodie. "See, this is the kind of shit the Ingress needs to pull in," she says. "Useful stuff." Reminders of home that aren't reminders of bad things.

Speaking of which—she looks back in the box and scoffs, shaking her head. "Not a bomb," she says. "Just two dud grenades." They're clearly duds because the pins have already been pulled.

It's interesting that she clearly doesn't consider the hat useful, and that it had shocked her somehow, but he frowns and tucks that aside for a moment in the presence of dud grenades. Those make him look slightly alarmed, although they do serve to explain the weird weight distribution in the box.

On one hand, they might still be dangerous, but on the other, they hadn't exploded coming through the Ingress -- they probably won't explode sitting quietly in a room.

"What's wrong with the hat?"

Edited 2016-10-17 04:17 (UTC)

Of course he would notice and latch on to her reaction to the hat. She'd tried to suppress it, but it had been shocking to see and she hadn't been able to keep it completely under wraps.

"It's not mine," she mutters. She rubs her cheek, sets the clothes down, and picks up her cane and the hat so she can go to the dresser and put it away. After doing so she straightens and turns to face him. He's so intense about such things; just looking at him and his curious expression is too much and she glances off to one side. "Please don't ask me any more questions about that."

She doesn't know what threshold she'll reach where she feels more inclined to share her origin story with him—and maybe they'll never get there at all—but she knows she's not there now.

He responds with a long look, troubled and perplexed, then replies, "All right."

That presents a problem: he would pursue the subject if he didn't care on some level about upsetting her.

On the other hand, if he didn't care about her at all, would he have any interest in her reaction to the hat? It seems unlikely... it's clearly an item of personal importance, nothing that's likely to affect the ship or him, except as it affects her.

If not hers, then whose -- whose could it be that it would have this kind of effect on her? It's just a hat... and more than a hat, but he doesn't understand why yet.

"At least some of the other things are useful. But what are you going to do with those grenades?"

"I'll just space them," she says. "Fucking hell." She lets out an exasperated sound and pushes her hair back off of her forehead. "You know, it's supposed to be that the Ingress just pulls these things in from our universes randomly, but sometimes it sure doesn't seem random, does it?"

He sits down heavily on the nearest mattress -- that of the kid who's in cryo.

"No, it doesn't. Although I suppose it could be worse. On the last ship, I was given a tin of surstromming once. It was remarkable... it wasn't labeled, and once I'd opened it, I couldn't stop throwing up."

Edited (icon) 2016-10-17 04:59 (UTC)

"Random disgusting stuff is better than stuff that seems like a targeted reminder," she disagrees. She returns to the box and picks up the sweatshirt and pants to put away—not in the bottom drawer, but with the rest of her clothes. That leaves the box and the grenades, which she figures will be fine on Matt's bed for now. She moves over to her bed and sits. She doesn't call him over to her right away, instead sitting with her hands folded on the head on the cane, looking a bit pensive.

Reminder?

Of what?

"Differently bad. Another of the tins I was given was filled with jam and human teeth."

But that had been a reminder, hadn't it -- in a way, if he tilted his head.

"Still... if it's targeted, how is it getting here? Through something Mana is doing, but Mana is apparently the ship." He sounds more genuinely interested in figuring this out than like he's trying to reason with her. Sometimes the things do seem targeted, but why? It's not for the reasons that they were on the Tranquility.

"Okay, that's just gross." She shakes her head. "I know I'm not the only one this sort of thing has happened to, so it's not like there's someone in my home universe directing which items be sent to me." That's an implication Wash had made when they had argued after the arrival of the doll, but it wasn't an implication that made much sense in that light. "So it must be Mana, I guess. If there's an intelligence behind it, that's the most likely source." Occam's razor and all that.

She hadn't been looking at him—hasn't looked at him since she told him not to ask her more questions about the hat—but she finally looks over toward where he sits. "Sometimes it feels like...I don't know, like all of this is the biggest, stupidest accident, but there's just no way at all for it just to be an accident. Not with the way things are timed, and..." She frowns. She can't explain what she means further without discussing Church and his various appearances on the ship. And she doesn't want to broach the subject of him with Daniel. So instead she'll be vague. "It almost seems better not to show any sort of reaction toward someone from home showing up. If you're happy they're here, they're liable to disappear again. And if you would rather they disappeared, well...they just stick around like a cancer."

He holds her gaze, raising his hand to his chin and tapping the pad of his thumb against his lower lip contemplatively.

"No one from my home has ever showed up here -- not since I was originally pulled in on the other ship. Not here, either. I've seen people here who were on that ship, but they had no memory of it, so I can only assume... I don't know, different parallel universes, different timelines, something like that. If you remember Clara Oswald, I've known her at least three times, but she never remembers the last."

It's easier to talk about Clara than Darcy... and likewise, he expects that she's discussing something specific rather than something general. He remembers her conversation with Washington -- one he doesn't intend to let on that he's read. Not yet, anyway.

After a moment, he tilts his head and concedes, "It could really be a problem if someone from home did turn up here, however, particularly if they had any staying power. But Mana... I'm not sure it makes sense to conclude that Mana does this consciously. It's too scattershot... maybe it's a side effect of her existence and the way the Ingress has been broken, some kind of strange combination. Still, we can certainly examine the subject with an eye to whether or not it's intentional."

"Right. I was thinking there may be some absorption of knowledge somehow—and it could be she's using the knowledge unconsciously. I'm not good at thinking about the metaphysical though." She deals much better in the here and now, with the physical. This theory sort of makes her feel better, though the grenades still seem like a chilling reminder of her own failures and she would prefer to get rid of them before doing much else. She's been keeping the box in the corner of her vision and she turns her head to look at it before returning her attention to him.

"Daniel?" she says then. "Can you help me space those grenades? They're going to bug me as long as they're here."

She's tucked away the mention of people from home causing him problems for later. This seems to be the priority right now, and besides, it doesn't seem prudent to ask when she had just rebuffed him asking questions about her own life.

Edited 2016-10-17 05:42 (UTC)

"Of course. Although to be honest, I'd rather we got someone else to carry them... I suppose it's best just to get them out of here, though."

He gets to his feet again, his hand falling to his side.

"Have you ever airlocked anything before?"

"Not here," she says. "I was going to once, though, so I know the procedure." She stands with him and goes to open the door, preparing for when he goes to exit the room with the box.

"Before we go, I really think it would be a good idea to wrap these in something."

He glances around, then pulls the blanket off of the bed that doesn't currently have an owner, then sets it between the grenades so they won't shift and knock against each other.

"All right."

He precedes her out of the room, not particularly happy to be carrying the box. His mouth is a straight line, but not a tight one.

Tex isn't as concerned, though what he's done is sensible. So she doesn't comment on it, simply comes to his side after he gets through the door and walks alongside him to the nearest airlock. It's some way, but she's more capable of walking distances now, even if she does need the assistance of a cane.

Once they arrive she keys the control to the inner airlock door to open it. "You just have to set that in there and then we reverse the doors," she says. A quick and easy solution to their problem.

He nods, removing the blanket, then setting the box inside. The expression on his face is complicated: watchful, a little unhappy, also a little curious.

She doesn't notice his expression right away—first she toggles the door closed. Then she glances over at him as she begins the sequence to open the outside door. This is a bit complicated, but only in that the system requires that the doors both be closed before that one can open. "It's okay, Daniel," she says as she works at changing the orientation of the switches. "This is the best solution to the situation."

"It is," he agrees. "It's only that I'm worried that the change in pressure will somehow... well. If there were an accident in this situation, it would probably be catastrophic. Better that they're off the ship, though, even if it's unlikely that they're live."

He'll look more relaxed once they're really gone.

Which they are, moments later. She closes the hatch again and goes over to him. "You've been really helpful to me lately," she says, acknowledging not only this but his help on the minicolony earlier in the month when they retrieved the AI units. "I guess I don't say it much, but thank you."

He nods; his relief allows a tiny smile to make its way to his face.

Reaching out to take her hand, he says, "Thanks aren't necessary, but still... you're welcome, Allison."

He has been helpful. It's a combination of following her cues and attempting to perform the role of "good boyfriend," one that wouldn't come naturally if he didn't put some thought into it, into doing it intentionally. It would be easy to bury himself in his new job, never leave the Tower. But the thought of her pulls him out of that a little, enough to divert some of his attention.

Her reaction is odd; she takes his hand, but she grips it too hard.

"Don't," she says. "I know I gave you permission before but just don't...don't call me that. Call me Tex."

It's weird, it had seemed before that hearing Allison's name in his accent made it okay, but now all she can think about is the Director calling out that name, causing it to echo amongst the AIs and their agents. Allison, Allison, Allison. She knows it's her name but it's not hers in the way Texas is. It will always belong to the shadow of the Director's lost love and so it means death and destruction to all the people that the Project touched.

Tex doesn't realize she's actually blanched. She's usually strong in the face of such things, but this evening everything has come down on her fast and hard and she can't help the physical reaction she's having. She sort of feels light-headed, thus why she's holding on so hard. She pulls his hand to her chest and tries to settle herself, gripping her cane just as hard.

It's easy for him to see that she's distressed -- pale and unsettled -- and he responds with a searching, perplexed, perturbed look.

The way she's gripping his hand means that her request is unlikely to be the result of something he's done. Timing suggests that it's probably something to do with the mail delivery, and she hadn't seemed too concerned about the grenades... she'd been pleased about the clothing. The only part of the delivery that she'd been unhappy with was the hat. But what the connection is between the two things, particularly for an A.I., he can't say. Maybe something has been building for a while, as she regains her strength, and some small element of what's happened in the past fifteen or twenty minutes finally got her to the breaking point.

What, though?

She hasn't told him to leave; she's merely asked for him to call her something else. That's not too difficult, although he thinks of her as Allison... when he thinks of her as he falls asleep, he thinks of Allison, what Allison will like, whether or not he can make Allison smile. More than anyone else, though, he knows that a different name does not make someone a different person.

"I'll call you whatever you want me to call you," he replies quietly. "Tex. Are you all right?"

Tex's tendency is ignore it when she's off-kilter like this—she just grits her teeth and moves on, regardless of the physical reaction going on. Being questioned directly like this makes that harder. She's hanging on to him as if for dear life; she's far beyond hiding the fact that this is bothering her. She takes a slow breath and rolls her eyes upward for a second before forcing herself to soften her grip on him.

"It's okay," she says. "It'll be okay." It's one of those, anyway. She sighs and lowers his hand to her side, not really seeming prepared to let go. She's not really a fan of walking hand-in-hand but maybe she'll just hold on for a few moments longer before preparing to return to her room.

She had meant to treat the reminder of Allison that came via the hat as matter-of-factly as she treated the reminders of her own failures that came via the grenades. It wasn't that simple though—she should know that already just by her decision to put the hat away with the doll. She had thought it would be easy to space the doll once, and look how she failed at carrying through with that.

So she stands there, holding on to his hand with her head turned to the side, away from him, and if someone didn't know her better they'd wonder if she was trying to prevent herself from crying or what. It's not that, though—the only time Tex has ever cried was when she was hashing things out with Wash at the beach party on the planet where they ended up having sex. It wasn't like her then and it wouldn't be like her now. But quiet contemplation isn't beyond her at times, and she holds that pose for a few moments longer before she draws another breath, turning her head back toward him.

"Let's go back," she says. She deliberately releases his hand and starts for her room again.

She doesn't like to be seen as weak, nor does she like to be forced into a position of weakness. It's something he's been aware of for a while, and he's wondered if their relationship will end when she's fully back on her feet -- if she'll see it as a reminder of a bad passage of time where she wasn't herself.

He understands it because he doesn't like it either. Not necessarily weakness, physical vulnerability, but being too emotionally tangled in his past. It's part of why he'd wound up here with her: he'd left the party with her rather than trying to leave it with Darcy, because there was too much meaning and too much failure there.

And he watches her as she folds her disquiet back up into herself, holding his hand and eventually letting it go.

"Are you sure you wouldn't rather go to my room?"

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject