snowblindrpg | [log] Event: Metamorphosis, Part Three

In the flesh. What's left of him, anyway. [And enter he does. He is nothing if not purposeful. And if the room is not very large, well, that's no real issue. She's all about hugs, isn't she?]

Did you miss me? Or were you too busy with Squalo? Congratulations on the learning curve. You are very clever. Or it's that eager young blood, I suppose, just boiling over.

[She'd been embarrassed, of course, but he could tell that she'd been happy. How dare she be happy?]

Of course I've missed you! As if you even have to a-ask-- oh.

[ SPEAKING OF YOUNG BLOOD. She puts a hand to her nose as it starts bleeding, grabs a wad of toilet paper, and attempts to use that to stem the flow. Being trapped in a bathroom where these things are freely available sure is handy!!

Well. Kind of. Because the tininess of the room means there's nothing to look at except Beckett, and oh boy. Seeing her own corrupted self had been nauseating, frightening, but seeing Beckett just makes her sad. Even the smell isn't making her back off. She probably seriously would be trying to hug him, if she wasn't worried about making things worse.

Is anyone surprised, though. After all, Angel rarely makes good decisions when it comes to family. ]

Does it hurt? Can I do anything to help?

[Her kindness very nearly throws him off his monster game. God, it hurts. He wishes he could just tell her so, lay himself down, curl at her feet like a faithful, dying dog and let her sooth what little of the grief she can. But she can't, can she? She's run out of chances just as he has. He's been fooling himself all along.]

Nothing, [he hisses out, flakes of ash coming with the words.] What exactly do you imagine you can do? There's nothing you can offer me. You're everything young and bright, and I'm - [What he is is, quite suddenly, choked with tears.]

Damn you, you had me hoping! You made me think there was something more! Why should anyone get another chance when I get this!

I'm sorry!!

[ No no no. He hates her. He hates her and she's too useless to do anything to help him and it's just like when --

She's back in the bunker. She's a traitor. The vault hunters hate her, she hates herself, and it isn't something she can fix. She can only settle for trying to atone as best she can, which means it's finally time to die.

She's had it planned for a while, in a vague, dreamy sort of way. Stupid of her to not put the plan into action before now - her fear to act has caused immesurable suffering. No more. All she has to do is tell one last lie. Just to make it easier. She can't be saved. Telling them what she really is would only complicate things, and she's frightened that if they knew, they might try and rescue her. Worse, they might not. One more lie.

Just one.

She tells them the vault key is in her AI core.

She waits to die. ]

--ugh.

[ The flashback is so sudden, so vivid, that she stumbles and bumps her back against the wall. Effing cuffs. She offers Beckett a distressed little look, and then - her hand. ]

I can - I can offer you anything I have. Love, or comfort, or - I just wanna help. Blood, if there's anything left after my nose stops - ngh. Anything.

No! [He flings an arm out, but can't quite bring himself to hit her. The blow just misses her head and crashes against the wall instead. Bits of rot go flying at her face, her hair.]

Can you give me my world back? My faith? All the choices I've made wrong? No! All you do is remind me of everything I've lost!

[The hand creeps up again, slow this time, shaking at he stretches fingers towards her cheek. He half thinks that if he touches her she'll crumble in black dust. He can't decide if he wants to see that. He can't decide if it would satisfy him, or be the only thing he can imagine would hurt worse than everything that already does.]

All I have is death - and you're alive, and you can be happy - and you say you love me?

[ She flinches as Beckett lashes out and - bizarrely - feels guilty for it. She should know that he'd never hurt her. Then again, she'd thought that about Jack, and --

-- and she's waking up in the bunker after her surgery, touching the freshly-shaved area on the side of her head, and she's bursting into tears.

-- and she's crying out as Jack activates her shock collar, curling into herself against the pain and the indignity of it.

-- and she's looking at Jack in Rhys' body, not believing what's happening even as he lashes out at her face with a stolen hand. ]

Of course I love you! You know I do! You have that. You have me.

[ Which feels like a pretty crappy thing to have right now, but whatever. She doesn't shy away from the slower movement, at least. If he wants to touch her, he can - danger or decay be damned. ]

If I could help you by trading places, I would.

But you can't.

[The very last inch is the hardest. His hand trembles violently, from weakness and atrophied nerves and also from a mix of emotions too tangled and confused and terrible to name. He brushes her face. The touch is gentle.

It blights where it lands. The rot creeps from dead to living skin. Creeps into the blood to infest the stomach, the lungs and the edges of the spine. Just a touch, not enough for death to take her where she stands, but less a taste and more a mouthful.

They can't trade places. He can only take. They'd be together then.]

So what's the use, Angel?

[ Oh god. He touches her face. He touches her and she's crumpled on a metal floor, coughing up purple blood and relief and regret and dad, you're an asshole. She's sitting in the ice tunnels after lockdown with Rhys' blood still on her hands, wishing she could see the sky. She's falling as the Fiona anomaly grabs her ankle. She's sitting in the snow with Rhys and trying to stay awake. She's leaving the bunker in the throes of cabin fever and she's dying she's dying she's dying.

Her legs give way at some point, but she isn't sure when. She stares up at Beckett, hand on her cheek and her nosebleed forgotten, and she starts to cry. ]

Is that how - how you feel? What you just did?

[ Of course she's not crying for herself. This is Angel. But the idea that Beckett might be constantly experiencing anything like that is definitely a thing worth crying over. ]

It's what I am. [And if that sounds melodramatic, well, death and madness tend to have that problem. It's more than how he feels. Calling it how he feels implies there's a him past the feeling.

He's given up on that. When he was kneeling in the morgue calling on the brother who has never and will never come. When he sat down in the snow and Haurchefant had to physically carry him inside. When he was breaking himself against the tower door while she and Rhys were dying just outside. When he didn't go outside to look for her when she fled the bunker. In a way he'd given up on it when Lucita told him come with me and he'd -

Some regrets even he still recoils from. He tries to indulge in her tears. It's not working. It's working. It's working too well.]

I thought you could be my childe. But you burn too bright. You - and Rhys - so alive, how dare you -

Don't be stupid. I'm already your child in everything but blood, in... one form or another. And you're not just --

[ the decay and the dread and the heavy sickening rot ]

-- that. You're Beckett, and that's important. You're important. Don't write yourself off like that, it's insulting.

[ She's struggling back to her feet as she talks, though it's taking considerable effort. When she finally manages it, she has to brace herself against the sink as her legs wobble dangerously beneath her. Ergh. ]

But on the subject of what you - of what - ugh.

Are you going to kill me?

[The way she just asks that, God. She knows exactly what she's doing. And he's proud of her through everything. Clever girl. In another life, he might have looked and seen a legacy.

He could have had so much. In another life.]

I don't want to kill you. I want - I want - [What do you want, Beckett? What have you ever truly wanted?]

I wanted to live. I wanted to escape from here. I wanted to see if I could exchange the past for forgiveness and what I might be if I did. But I can't. And since I can't, I want no one to be able to!

[Anomalogic. Laid bare. He's snarling and crying at the same time.]

[ She's quiet for a second, thoughtful as she absent-mindedly wipes at the blood streaming from her nose and smears it across her face. Nice. ]

I can understand that more than most, I think.

[ She's in danger of slipping back into memories again - echoes of a time when she wished she could throw everything aside and escape the bunker. Of when her only comfort was believing that if she died, Jack would follow soon after. It had been exhausting, like -

Well. Like a living death. And here's Beckett, who's been through too much already. If she trusted her legs to carry her, she'd be trying to hug him despite the consequences. ]

You know I'll stay here with you, if you need me. It's not everything you wanted, but it's something? And there's also - there's the other. The other Angel.

[ Who he must already know about, surely? God, even thinking about her in the vaguest sense is disturbing. ]

[He knows she means that promise, and his first reaction is to nod. Yes, this is what he wants. This is how it should be. Perhaps this way he can stop hating her.

But at the same time, that would be destroying her - the potential in her that he knows he's helped build. Any good work he's ever done, come to nothing again.

There's no answer. There's no way out.]

You've - met her? [He's briefly distracted from that new pit of despair when she mentions her other self. Other than bickering with Flynn, he'd paid very little attention to the other anomalies. They had nothing to take any kind of bitter revenge on.]

She's like me. Not real. None of us are real, you and us, I mean, but we're - we're the furthest logical progression of that.

[Yeah. Anomalogic.]

We're all real, Beckett. Whether one set of us are copies or both. It isn't even like copies are anything new!! There's another Rhys and two Fionas in the morgue, Jack's an AI...

[ She doesn't sound cross, exactly, but there's definitely an element of scolding in there. Is anyone actually surprised that Angel would lecture death incarnate, though? Really? ]

Anyway, that wasn't - she's. Lonely, I think. Well. Presumably less so now that she kind of abducted Squalo, but, um. I doubt that's helping very much at all, really, and since she doesn't seem to be able to die I think it's worth bearing that in mind. Even if anything happens to me, and if everyone else gets out, I'll still be here with you! Just not. Me-me. Still me, though. I-- you know what I mean.

No! [The way he snaps it, for a second there he's almost just the monster again. He snaps his teeth shut much, much too close to her face for comfort. She can be kind and loving and absolutely destructive to his original hateful intent as much as she wants, but there are things he won't take even from her.]

We're all lies! Everything was a lie! All our dreams, all our memories - everything - grgh! [He had to give into it, and it's lucky that he doesn't take it out on her. Instead he swings at the nearest wall and rakes his fingers down it as though he still had claws. He doesn't. All he manages to do is leave gummy black trails from broken fingertips.

He looks back at her, panting and sputtering.] We'll stay here. The cast-offs. Those shells. Where we belong. And you'll all go off - I hope he knows it isn't going to matter. Of course he knows. Doesn't matter which of us came first. It's all lies. A joke. A waste.

Oh --

[ She doesn't flinch this time, but she can't help slumping further onto the sink as her nosebleed gets worse. Her head is spinning and the memories she's being bombarded with are dreamlike and garbled, but she can't black out now. She can't. ]

How - how freaking dare you tell me what I am? It's possible that I'm not the Angel who was on Pandora, but I've made friends and done things and - and I've lived more than she ever did! That's real enough for m-me. And loving you is real, too, cheesy as that sounds. Some things might be lies, but nobody's gonna take - that's mine. Ours.

[He knows where this is going. He knows what he is, after all. If he keeps pushing she'll die. If he comes too close she'll die. If he stays near, sooner or later, she'll die.

Maybe that'll teach her to want it. Maybe...]

It's just a dream. [His ruined voice is soft again. He looks her in the eye, holds her gaze while he still can. Or while he can. Tracking every change, every expression.] Just a fantasy we both had. That things could be better. This is what is real. Your death. My - this. My damnation.

[Would he do it? Damn her, too?]

If it wasn't real, then tell me you don't love me. And mean it.

[ She tries - and fails - to straighten back up, and ends up just peering up at him through her bangs. It'll do. Dignity doesn't matter too much as long as she can make eye contact. ]

Bec-because if you think everything we've gone through was just a dream, that's what it boils down to. Doesn't it?

[ It's very faint, but she can hear Jack screaming.

Angel, you can STOP this! I'll still forgive you, baby! Please. Okay. Are you hearing me? Please don’t kill my little girl.

She blinks it away, teeth clenched. ]

So tell me.

[log] Event: Metamorphosis, Part Three

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cw: suicidal ideation here we go,,,,

not-quite-cw for the Most Dramatic Vampire

drops a separate cw for physical parental abuse just in case uhhh

what fun times we are having

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[log] Event: Metamorphosis, Part Three

no subject

no subject

no subject

cw: suicidal ideation here we go,,,,

not-quite-cw for the Most Dramatic Vampire

drops a separate cw for *physical* parental abuse just in case uhhh

what fun times we are having

no subject

no subject

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no subject

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no subject

drops a separate cw for physical parental abuse just in case uhhh