[log] 'cause I've got too much life running through my veins [closed]

[warriorscribe]

Characters: Angel, Rhys, Beckett, Enoch
Location: EEF - 309
Date: Days 295-296
Summary: The event ends, and Vamperion + Enoch (Angelic Vamperion?) have a lot of pieces to pick up. Also Enoch sleeps for a whole day, how exciting.
Warnings: Probably talk of death, specifically of old age. General blood warning for Beckett just in case.

309: A house, green on the Geiger counter, that probably should have been redecorated ages ago. Everything looks to be from the 60s or 70s. There was carpeting here, but it's gone now, revealing a trapdoor leading to the maintenance tunnels in the bedroom. There's a bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom. "зеленый" is written on the inside of the door. A ration box from the convenience store has been attached to the inside of one of the kitchen cabinets with wood glue. On the kitchen wall beneath it, a message has been painted in black: "i left a ration box here for storing food. if you want to leave rations for the people exploring it should hopefully protect them from radiation. any other supplies can go in the cupboard outside the box. contact davesprite (@featherydouche) if some fucker steals it".

General purpose log for the hypers and their immortal pals to interact with each other in the days immediately following massive time dilation! Make your own starters!

Comments

[warriorscribe]

Day 295

[It's all too much, the emotions of what happened. The extra centuries, raw pain of losing again and again and again... Enoch is asleep most of this day, aside from a conversation with House and maybe a sleepwalking-like trip to the bathroom after. He still occasionally cries in his sleep, maybe mumbles something that sounds like "please, no" or "don't go", but most of his 32-hour slumber is heavy and dreamless. Not even these scattered nightmares wake him completely. He's exhausted, physically and emotionally. Still, it might be possible to rouse him for a talk he may or may not remember, or catch him immediately after said conversation or a nightmare.]

Day 296

[Yeah. 32-hour slumber. Eight hours into this day his eyes finally flutter open and stay open. The bed is, at least, rather warm from trapping his body heat for a day and more. It nearly lulls him right back to sleep. His mouth and throat are unbearably dry, though, and this drags him into the next stages of true wakefulness as he fumbles around for his bag, completely forgetting what side of himself he'd left it on.]

Mmph, where...?

[...It's at his feet. Someone help him out.]

296

[phaseshifter]

Hey, don't -- hold it!

[ Angel has been checking in on Enoch every so often throughout the sleepathon, so she isn't far from the bedroom when he finally stirs. She pokes her head around the doorway, motions for him to stay still, and promptly disappears.

She's back a few seconds later with a half-empty bottle of water and one of the group's remaining Anti-Scurvy Oranges™. Huzzah. ]

Dude. I was just asking Rhys if he thought we should call one of the doctors for you. Take these! And don't sit up too fast.

[ THE FUSSENING. IT BEGINS. ]

[warriorscribe]

[Good thing, too, since he's in no state to assess what kind of care he needs right now. He pushes himself up slowly, groaning at the inevitable dehydration/oversleep headache, and takes both. What's left of the water in that bottle is very swiftly halved again as he drinks greedily, slumping a little in relief after that last gulp. He needed that more than he'd been prepared for.]

I...I take it I was asleep for quite a while?

[phaseshifter]

Uh-huh. For three weeks.

[ Look

If you can't enjoy teasing Enoch now and then, then what is there in this life that you can enjoy

Meaning that she lets that hang for a few seconds before grinning. ]

A day and a half. Give or take a few hours. You can see why we were concerned.

[warriorscribe]

[He blinks at her, uncomprehending, instead of being panicked or anything. At most, he raises an eyebrow. It'll take more than a headache and brainfog to convince him he could sleep for weeks without dying here. Unfortunately he's also not awake enough to comprehend it as a joke, either. He can't even laugh along with the teasing. So sad.

Of course, that means that reaction is saved for the actual info...]

I- I missed a day? That's-

[Well, not as bad, all things considered. It's not centuries.]

-better than it could be, I suppose. I've never slept that long before. I don't know why, or how, but... I'm sorry I worried you. Are you two all right?

[phaseshifter]

Of course we're alright, you goof. Not even Rhys and I can get into trouble just lounging around for a day! Probably.

[ THEY COULD AND SHE KNOWS IT ]

Unless you're feeling ill, I assume your extended nap was just a product of the last few days. It can't have been easy on any of our brains. Sleeping for so long was probably your brain effectively defragging its--

[ She stops herself, searching for a better analogy. One that doesn't involve computers or anything that would confuse Ye Olde Angel Guys. ]

-- I mean, it's like your brain is a library that just got a heckload of books delivered, all in a pile, and the brain librarians have to take time to catalogue it all and make room on the shelves. While you sleep.

296, after Angelfuss

[headjacked]

[ Rhys waits for Nurse Angel's checkup. Waits for Enoch to shake the brainfog that comes with an Advanced Super-Nap. He's relieved that the guy's, like, not comatose, though he can't shake the foot-dragging when it comes to approaching.

At least he's gotten good at keeping his expression relaxed. Body language, less so. It's a work in progress. ]

You, uh. You sure you're okay?

[warriorscribe]

[By now, he's pacing the bedroom, nervously glancing down at the trapdoor whenever he passes it. At least he's polite enough to stop when Rhys enters, and conscious enough of his discomfort to have a seat on the edge of the bed. Nonthreatening posture is everything.]

Well, I'm not sure what to make of losing a day, but I feel all right. Aside from...all of that before it. I'm sorry for worrying you two.

[headjacked]

Oh, it's not like you missed much after the --- all of that. And when your body konks out like that, it's probably a sign.

[ Rhys actually sits down beside Enoch. With a good two feet of space between them as a buffer. ]

[warriorscribe]

[Enoch offers a little smile of gratitude for that simple gesture. It must be so difficult for him, considering he'd acted as if the awful events of that tower hadn't happened - not for him, anyway. To Enoch, Rhys had been the second or third or perhaps fourth version of Rhys to arrive in Norfinbury.]

A sign of what, only being able to take so much compressed pain? Centuries' worth of loss in a day, when I think I'm prepared again for what may come...

[He shakes his head. The imagined centuries had been relatively kind to him, compared to others, and the mortals were spared that experience in full.]

...I'm glad not everyone experienced so much time.

[headjacked]

...yeah, th-- I don't envy you. Or... or Beckett.

[ Twenty years felt enough like a hellish slog. Rhys brushes his fleshy fingers through his hair, hair that's still gray near the temples despite his youth. He scratches, trying to pull as many brown strands over the gray. ]

Were you dreaming?

Day 296

[bookofnope]

[It's almost lockdown by the time Beckett emerges from the tunnel into the house. It's taken him a long time to return.

He thinks he's returned, anyway. Everything is a little oddly gray about the edges, like an almost-clear film over the world. It's the remnants of the dreams, or perhaps it's the leftover dust of time. Nothing is, after all, forgotten, except as it's blended into the constant gray present that had been being the Beast. In that present, time doesn't feel so long, so inexorable. But the cycling of death, returns, familiarity and loss, all feel equally immediate. All in a single day, and that day centuries.

He thinks he would have gone mad of it, if he weren't several kinds of mad already.

And yet, the Beast had felt so natural. So innate to his kind, it is unnervingly simple to let what is left of the dream-memories slot into place in his conscious mind. He holds those centuries in his hand - briefly, when he puts all his focus into remembering them in detail - and is struck by how straightforward it all feels. He had retreated from time as his kind would do. He can wrap that time up carefully, and put it in the back of his mind, and -

And survive. Is that all there is to it?

So it's taken him a long time to return. To shape that box, fill, and seal it, and move away from it. To travel down the tunnels confidently without fear of melting back again into the timeless comfort of their empty, silent darkness. The door opens and he climbs out looking not too worse for wear: his eyes are bleary behind his glasses, and the two cold, neglectful days in the tunnels haven't done his persistent shivering and coughing any favours, but these are very small things to suffer from imagined centuries of mindlessness. He pulls himself up, and stands over the door for a moment, blinking in the light, at the faces.]

I'm back, [he says with only a little hesitation.] I - think.

[OOC: Can tag him immediately on return, or a little while later when he's settled down in Random Corner!]

[warriorscribe]

[He'd failed him. This he had come to be sure of. He remembered keenly the way it felt to bury Angel and Rhys the first time...and what it felt like to turn around and realize while he had tried to make their final years comfortable he hadn't noticed how badly Beckett had begun to slip away, to slowly lose himself, and that gut-wrenching day when he stopped responding as a human would entirely... He doesn't remember the details but he remembers every second of how it felt.

Part of him has been hesitant to accept that things are truly back to normal, even after a worryingly-long sleep to set things as right in his mind as they can be. Only when Beckett stands before them, alert and aware and spoken, does he finally feel a rush of relief to soothe the raw edges.]

Beckett!

[His initial reaction is probably going to be very similar to whatever Angel and Rhys do, the way he throws his arms around him and just clings for several long seconds, or as long as he is allowed, should it be unwelcome, trying to choke back his sobs of relief.

Beckett has only two arms to hug back with, though, and he makes way for the pair of mortals (if he hasn't been made to already) as soon as they show up, leaving Beckett with his star-patterned blanket around his shoulders for warmth as he retreats to give them room. He remains nearby, though, just in case.

It's when Beckett has found his way to a corner somewhere that Enoch joins him, more composed, but still clearly ragged around the edges, sitting nearby.]

A...a piece of furniture would be more comfortable, [he offers, something still somewhat brittle in his voice.]

[bookofnope]

There's barely any thought in the first moments of thrilled reunion. Which is a relief, Beckett supposes a while later when he's again off to recollect himself, sitting aside with a private sigh and realizing he longs for the much simpler reunions after mere... deaths, or other forms of traumatic separation. Every face he sees come with a cascade of memory and emotion and compared with the utter blankness of the last two days, he's quickly overwhelmed. He doesn't want to think that his newfound grip on himself is that tenuous.

With Enoch it's the hardest. The deepest-running, and so the hardest.

He gives a bit of a start when finding his friend besides him again: from the outside it must look almost alarming, how he's sunk into his thoughts - totally immobile, in his inhuman way - and then emerges from them at the sight, eyes filling with reason again. And then a long moment's silent staring.

Where does he begin?

"You," he stops and swallows. Maybe they can just... not talk about it. About how Enoch had told him to wake. About how that had been like a shaft of sudden sunlight in the half-remembered dark of the Beast's mind, and so bright it blinded him even as it illuminated everything he had kept shut off in that dark.

He doesn't want to tell Enoch he ran from it, as his kind always run from the light.

"You're right. I suppose I'm just... used to this." That... is probably not the best way to avoid talking about how the false time may have changed them both.

[warriorscribe]

It is alarming, the distance in his eyes. It reminds him of the beast he became, the man he failed to reach out to in time. He lets out a breath he didn't know he was holding, and settles beside him, slow and awkwardly tense. He'd been torn between relief and dismay at the lack of response to his message - relief because it had been something real among the fake memories and there were so many things he'd said he can't even rationalize anymore without the self-awareness he'd had with more years behind him. It's frustrating, but he can hide, if need be, behind I don't know anymore.

Dismay? That was obvious. He'd wanted a response. The whole point was to talk to him again, to make his feelings clear and to maybe, hopefully, set him back on his path again. Less obvious was that piece of his core, so weary of sitting on truths and feelings and guilt and desperately needing to express it all but having forgotten quite how. It had been denied these truths so hard to speak now.

He unclasps his cloak and shrugs it off his shoulders, pulling it over his lap to fold up as he speaks.

"It didn't happen...but somewhere in our hearts, in some fashion, it did." His hands are shaking. "I'm sorry, Beckett, I'm so sorry. I didn't see the true depth of your pain until it was too late."

[bookofnope]

Not even a minute off the hook, then, and part of Beckett resents that. As he always resents it when someone sees through him so clearly, and has such a total grasp on him, whether he uses it or not, knows it or not. But surely Enoch knows, in his kind way, that Beckett is clay in his hands. How deep he can touch.

He wouldn't have tried what he did otherwise, never mind succeeded.

And he can't resent that. The response - the fear, the panicked flight - that was all him, on him, his conscience such as it is. He stares for another long moment at this man who can throw him off then reorient him so quickly, so surely, and all of a sudden he laughs.

Well, cackles. It's a dry, weary sound, humorous only in a reaching and bittersweet way. But there it is.

"I can not believe you," he says once the laughter's faded into a faint cough. "All this, and you speak of the depths of my pain? Enoch, I've spent most of the time I remember barely sentient enough to know what pain was. You think I suffered, when I lost my human mind? It's losing it that let me stop suffering. Letting it happen was the best thing you could have done for me."

And trying to pull him back... he'd rather Enoch not make the connection. All he wants is to make his friend understand that not all the pain in the world is on the shoulders of his failure.

cw: suicide

[warriorscribe]

"Was it?"

It was not knowledge so much as hope, that he meant as much to Beckett as Beckett did to him, and that it would lend his words the weight they needed. Without a reply, he has no way of knowing whether or not Beckett even heard them, let alone that they had worked. For all he knows, he had been sleeping.

He regards his friend with a faint, sorrowful smile, worn throughout his tired laughter, now accompanied by tears that build at the corners of his eyes. There's a familiar pain tightening in his chest, like the terrible anticipation of impending loss. Like it, but not quite - just as the way Beckett had slipped away was only a shade removed from suicide. A partial, metaphorical death. If he makes the connection, it doesn't add noticeably to his guilt - he has been there, almost exactly. How often had he had intrusive thoughts in the midst of battle, the idea maybe it's all right if I can't win? He can't so readily agree with it, this less final version of it. His false future self had found some strength in what life was left, but now the pain of it is too immediate, too raw to accept.

"Was it really the best thing, to let you lose yourself and all you've made yourself to be? To let go of everything you'd taken pride in, everything you were so grateful to him for?"

The smile fades. He blinks, and the tears spill.

"Did you really want that? You couldn't have, could you? The suffering could be overcome. I know it could, I've lived it, and I should have tried harder to help you do the same!"

li'l after he's settled

[headjacked]

[ Requisite hugging has long since been accomplished. In the immediate aftermath, Rhys is oddly reserved, cautious and unsure how to approach and broach the topic of.

That.

Whatever that was.

He comes in with the star blankie, the well-regarded offering of love-slash-comfort in the Hyperfam ranks, and drapes it around Beckett's shoulders. ]

Sooooo.






[ Rhys hasn't really planned past this part. ]

[bookofnope]

[Rhys is absolutely not alone in not being sure. Perhaps they can just... not talk about That? Repress like the champs they are? He'd stepped back because he needed to gather his thoughts after all the hugging, and then as soon as Rhys appears with the blanket all of Beckett's thoughts are ungathered again.

They're not real, the memories he has attached to that damnable blanket now. Or at least he thinks they're not real. But there are many of them.]

I'm not brooding here, I swear, [he says, a bit airily.] You can sit.

[headjacked]

[ Rhys' expression breaks, eyebrows wagging in a 'oh, can I sit?' fashion before the worry returns. He realizes Beckett has already been blanketed; it seems this group is determined to turn him into a starry burrito.

Nothing wrong with that. Burritoing is comfortable.

Rhys settles across from Beckett, maintaining some distance. ]

You sure? I feel like you're pretty much always brooding. Even during good times - brooding. Just - just a vampire thing.

[bookofnope]

[A counter eyebrow-wag results. He is totally not the broody kind of vampire, sunglasses at night nonewithstanding. And traumas. But those aren't his fault. He'd been doing pretty good with the traumas, even. It's just how they keep happening.]

I'd ask if I at least make the brooding look good, but somehow I'm fearful of the answer. [That's what you do, right - jokes?] Thank you for the blanket, by the way. I'm well on my way to total soft fluffy immobility.

[phaseshifter]

[ Angel is patient enough to wait until Beckett has been thoroughly fussed by the boys before approaching (yes, they're the boys now. Mostly because they aren't cool enough to be Da Boiz). Anyway - she lets Beckett get re-settled, leaves an extra few minutes just in case, then unceremoniously plonks her butt down beside him in the Brooding Corner.

She is holding a very forlorn-looking object that seems to be an untoasted poptart. Her last untoasted poptart. She snaps it in half and offers a piece to Beckett in what might be the greatest display of selflessness in the history of mankind. ]

So when we get out of here, you're going to chomp me right away. Right?

[ wELL, ]

[bookofnope]

[He's not brooding jfc kid let a vampire breathe.

He needs to breathe. The fussing happens and is appreciated, but the whole situation is... intense. He has had more than a century stuffed in his head of... them, being with them, watching them, losing them. It's blurry now, but that makes the patterns blur into each other. All her deaths in one sinkhole of emotion. Even for an immortal, that's a lot.

And now instead here she is, offering him a poptart. And her blood.

He swallows.]

Thank you, but no. Not to the chomping, anyway. [His fingers hover just short of the poptart. Exquisitely torn between wanting it, not wanting to deprive her, and not wanting to deny the nobility of her sacrifice.] I've - it feels like I've been in the beast mind for eons. It can restrain itself for a bit.

[phaseshifter]

That isn't what I meant. I meant --

[ Her face scrunches into one of those little frowns as she pushes the poptart at him more insistently. Take your medicine, grumpire. Sugar. ]

-- when we get out-out. I think it's sensible if you make me a vampire asap, so you don't end up as a broody loner and I don't become old and cranky.

I had a grey streak, Beckett. Like Jack's. That can never be allowed to actually happen.

[ She realises, as she says it, that she probably doesn't have to tell him about the grey skunk stripe in her hair. The weird fabricated future-memories probably did that for her, right? Eurghrrghrgrrrghhhh. ]

[bookofnope]

[He takes the poptart, at last, just in time to feel his fingers go limp in that particular nerveless way that happens when one in shocked into paralyzing silence. It is a miracle that the poptart does not slip from his hand. By the smallest of mercies do they live.

It shouldn't surprise him so much. They've talked about this. He'd all but promised her. But he'd promised - no - it was him who insisted on time, wasn't it?

He can't deny seeing the appeal in this request. Now.]

It... wasn't that bad, I thought. A rather graceful aging, given the circumstances? Everyone was cranky.

[Is it still time for jokes.]