bigapplesauce | Don't Believe Me Just Watch

Current Location: Carl Schurz Park on the East River (Rift's edge)
Current Music: September 10th (forward-dated)

Entry tags:

Don't Believe Me Just Watch

"All right kids, here's what it is," says Iman cheerfully. She's punchy today. Spent the last couple days helping Greta move into the formerly-ROMAC apartments, now just apartments - under whose maintenance, well, that's still a bit of a jumble but Greta has a home now, a good safe distance from the former Base, and moreover, it's a beautiful day for some science. She flexes her left hand and gestures demonstratively at the park's edge, the river beyond it, and more to the point, the Rift's border. Not that anyone she knows of has tried escaping Manhattan via the East River, but Satan's notes definitely helped her construct a solid map of its perimeter, and now that she's so close she can almost feel the crackle of energy, tingling a little in her fingers. Exciting stuff.

It's dawn, almost no one's out yet, and at least one of her companions doesn't look too pleased with the choice of hour, but he never looks pleased, so it's moot.

"This is the Rift's edge," she says with a mostly mocking long-buried academic air. "Runs all around the waterfront keeping us boxed in. The rumors tell us that its recent, what do we want to call it, tantrum was immediately preceded by two rifties breaching the border, if not physically, then some other way. We don't know how they did it but we know it can be done." She gives Greta a little smile. They know now that the escapees were Andrew Noble, his husband, and their children, the very same Greta had been looking after - and she knows Andrew had been her first friend here. But the escape has left them with something very important: a proverbial jumping-off point.

"What I'm gonna do is feel it out with this baby." She gives them a little wave with her left hand. "This is what I do back home, and this is possibly the first and last time I'll ever be presented with so clearly delineated a membrane. So if I can't breach it, I can at the very least interact with it, study it, get some idea how far it might bend under the right circumstances. And that's what I'm gonna do."

Well, she's excited anyway. Rush knows he's more or less here to spot her in case something goes horribly wrong, an eventuality she's assured him won't happen, she'll be careful, she promises. Greta, she invited for a little clean fun showing off, and because, well, she wants Greta to know if there's hope of getting home. Much as that eventuality pains her to think about.

Anyway. She cracks her knuckles unnecessarily and gives them a big grin.

"Ready?"

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"Greta," says Rush with a polite nod, as though he is initiating a nebulous, courteous, moronic exchange of superfluous introductions prior to some routine social gathering and not returning an injured, wayward dimensional physicist to an apartment that is not hers.

He sweeps in once Asadi has crossed that threshold and spreads out the unexceptional arrangement of tools procured from the desolate canvas of his old apartment, depositing them neatly in a lateral spill over one of the more immediate lateral surfaces. Asadi had not been terribly responsive for the majority of the trip and had crossed into a territory of locked, deadened silence, and it had been a state of affairs he had found manageable if not ideal. Greta, he has found, is rather more adept at interpreting and reciprocating those nameless conversational cues and he will leave that task to her capable skillset while he organizes his own.

Iman steps in, keeping her arm wrapped around herself as though trying to make herself look smaller, keeping her eyes first on the floor, then on Rush as he walks around her and deposits his paraphernalia, oh great, looks like he's all set to figure out his 'workaround', she so looks forward to having that conversation.

Finally she looks up at Greta, feeling her heart sink with the shame of what she'd said, how she'd treated her. "Greta, I-" she stammers, feeling herself flush. "I'm so sorry."

Rush steps past and sets an assortment of tools on the table - just as well he didn't pick the counter, or she would have had to scold him - but she only gives him a cursory glance, most of her focus on Iman. Iman, who stands there, shamefaced, as if she only caught the trace of impatience in Greta's sigh and not the overwhelming rest of it. Iman, apologizing.

"Oh," she says softly, appalled. "No, it's--I'm sorry, I, I shouldn't have..." Oh, dear. This is all wrong.

And she should probably give Iman the space she obviously wanted and might still want, but now that she's standing right in front of her... she can't stop herself. Greta closes the little distance between them and pulls Iman into her arms, taking care with her left shoulder. "I'm glad you're back," she murmurs.

"No, it's okay, it's-" With relief and surrender Iman slumps into her arms and lets Greta hold her up for a bit, resting her head on her shoulder. This moment isn't going to last, in fact it's going to die very soon because Rush is still laying out tools, working away over there, and she's going to have to confront that and soon, but not just this minute.

"I just needed to breathe," she murmurs. "I'm sorry it was like that. I..." She won't get any further, she suspects, without her voice wavering, and that would be unacceptable. After another moment she pushes back gingerly. "I'm okay," she lies.

That's done. She can't hide there anymore. Slowly, heavily, she turns to look at Rush.

"What are those for," she says dully.

"What do you think," he says, halting abruptly so he may brace one hand atop the table's surface and grind the heel of the other against his temple in a vicious, ipsilateral press of skin-to-skin. "I assumed you'd want to begin immediately."

With more effort than is possibly necessary, he tears himself from that skewed position and faces Asadi fully, punctuating the sharp jerk of motion with the meaningful supination of a hand. "Though it is your choice, naturally."

Thank goodness hugging her wasn't the wrong move. Greta lets out another little sigh as Iman leans against her, relieved that she hasn't made a misstep, relieved Iman is letting her do the only useful thing she can do, considering how much of this whole disaster is technological in nature. There is nothing she can do for Iman's arm, but at least she can do something for the rest of her.

"Come sit down," she urges, gentle and practical, giving Iman a light, encouraging nudge in the direction of the table and then going on ahead to pull the chairs back over from beside her bed. "There will be food soon, but in the meantime, you two can..." she flaps a hand at the tools in general incomprehension.

Iman mostly ignores Greta, allowing herself to be nudged and directed into a chair. She keeps her attention fixed on Rush, saying nothing until she is sitting. She starts to undo her sling to give herself something to do.

"You think you can fix this?" she says, and it's not at all a question. There is no grain of hope in her inflection. It's a challenge. She nods pointedly at his menagerie. "With those?"

He folds his arms fluidly over his chest, eyes narrowing.

"I think I intend to do whatever I can," he says quietly, his tone a delicate veneer over the sudden expectation of flagrant doubt and opposition. "Unless, of course - you have some sort of objection."

Well, that's not quite the spirit of cooperation she was hoping for, but Greta decides it's best to just leave them to it. She heads back into the kitchen - there's only a little island separating it from the rest of the apartment, so she can still keep an eye (and an ear) on how things are going over there as she starts to brew some more tea and checks on the dough.

"Whatever you can is not going to be enough." She pauses her fussing with the sling to press her hand to her forehead. "This is not just fixable. Do you understand? Everything inside it is totally fried, irreplaceable. What you had to do, severing it like that, you're not supposed to do that, it wasn't built to withstand that kind of strain. It was an emergency fucking procedure. There's no coming back from that. It is dead."

She can't keep the edge of bitterness out of her voice. Yes, Rush helped finalize the death of the limb, but he did it at her request, to save her life, and it's not something he can take back now. She's too tired to humor him. She can't afford hope.

"This technology doesn't exist here, we can't just rubberband it back together good as new. We helped bring down the only place that might have had the resources, if you remember."

He waits for the resolution of her bitter diatribe, fingers drumming against the surface of a folded arm.

"Nothing," he hisses with an abrupt flare of icy self-possession, one hand unfurling into the savage jabbing of a finger in her direction, "is not fixable. I create workarounds all the fucking time. You haven't evaluated what we have on hand. You haven't even attempted to."

His eyes harden with a cold, faintly mocking edge, digging the bladed edge of his tone behind every ground syllable. "In fact, you've made an alarming number assumptions in the last thirty seconds alone. You seem quite eager to dismiss any and all possibilities, Ms. Asadi; I never categorized you as defeatist."

"You don't fucking get it," she snaps, looking up at him abruptly. "This isn't about scientific method, it isn't about logic, goddammit Rush, this is me. This part of me is gone. I can't get it back, and I need to face that now because hope will fucking kill me."

She wants to get up and pace but she doesn't have the strength or the balance. She sits tense in Greta's chair, staring him down even as her voice starts to betray her, starts to shake. "Don't tell me I'm being a defeatist, don't you fucking dare. This isn't defeat, it's survival. I know this tech better than you do and I know there's an extremely low fucking probability that we can get it back to what it was, so no, I don't want to waste any energy trying, because I'm not that person anymore. That person is gone. If anything happens to either of you now I can't go busting you out, I can't do shit. I'm nothing now. Just some regular fucking nobody."

Well.

She didn't mean to say about half of that.

But it's too late now. Just like a lot of things.

Never going home. Never gonna be that person anymore.

All gone.

She buries her head in her hand and shakes with brittle laughter.

Greta listens to their conversation with rapidly unfurling discomfort. Iman's refusal to even try to fix it surprises her as much as it evidently does Rush, but she's still half-expecting Rush to talk her around. Then it abruptly stops being about just her arm and starts being about how worthless Iman apparently thinks herself to be without it, and Greta looks back over her shoulder in astonishment that quickly gives way to indignation. She lets the kettle clatter back onto the burner and she turns to face the table, hands akimbo.

"No," she snaps, aghast. "'Nobody'?! How--how can you say that?" She can feel her face flushing, and this is probably a mistake, snapping at her again, but she can't just let that awful sentiment go unchallenged. "Don't you dare presume to tell me that you're worth nothing to me without your arm. I didn't even know it was a prosthetic until a few weeks ago! Was everything that happened before then worthless?" She cuts herself off, quivering a little with the effort of holding herself back - not just from saying more, but from marching right up to the table and doing something truly regrettable, like whacking Iman upside the head.

Greta's interference is the necessary buffer between himself and the physicist who is so obviously and utterly at sea. He has at his disposal too many points of reference aligned with this, too many spirals into the embittered slide away from self-worth, and in the tensing of his shoulders and the darkening of his gaze he slams the memories bound in loss into the forefront and neglects nothing, dismisses nothing, conceals nothing. His hands drop and his eyes blaze an escalating warning, and he closes in on the chair and its occupant in a brusque stride and pins her with a glare vicious and direct.

"You're not," Rush growls, the words ground out, slow and deliberate, between teeth gritted on an unstable edge, "nobody. You're fucking brilliant and you've one of the finest minds I know. Your worth is not defined by mechanical or technical skill. I'd have thought that was fucking obvious."

His voices lowers, soft and vibrating with cold, furious intent. "Do you have any idea how many problems with extremely low probabilities of success I have circumvented in the past five years alone. Do you think a lack of technology has in any way impeded me in the past." He straightens, his contempt bare, his scowl hard. "One solves the problem. A solution," he hisses, "always exists."

Edited 2015-05-12 05:03 (UTC)

She flinches at Greta's unexpected interjection, the vehemence of it, can't bring herself to look, oh god what is happening here; Rush, she cannot so easily escape as he practically corners her, forcing her to meet his eyes, and she doesn't so much flinch this time as shrink wholly and completely into herself, the half untangled sling draped across her lap and her open working hand.

She already solved a problem once. It was easy. Arm lost to a malfunctioning door, of all things, sure, it hurt like hell but it was such an easy solve. Mother crying that she'd never be the same again, that her career was over. And she was wrong. That was just the beginning. I'm not less of a person now, mom. I'm more.

And now she's less than when she started.

She recognizes some of the hypocrisy here but it's very distant and not much good to her. She can't bear sitting here like this, pinned under the glares of her two closest friends, the closest friends she's ever fucking had, how sad is that, had to come to a new universe and the first couple people she met were gonna be the most important people, well, things are different here, aren't they? Everyone latches onto each other. They have to.

She has to say something. Has to. Time has run out.

"What if there isn't one this time," she says quietly. "What if we can't fix it, Rush?" She looks up at him, fucking pleading with him, begging him to understand. "I need to be okay if that happens, I need to - I need to be prepared."

The silence is beyond tolerance; the air is stiff and silent and the cadence of uneven breathing in triplicate will drive him mad. When Asadi speaks, it is bleak but not the utterly hopeless collapse it was, and the plurality is, potentially, promising.

"Unacceptable," he snaps, and he finds he cannot confront the immediacy of that judgment and so he backs to lean against the table, fingers curling over edges, the heels of palms wrapped over wood in an even, bracing press.

Having accomplished that buffer, the space between words and consideration, he continues with a leveling off of pitch and inflection.

Reassurances are not what he would regard as a skillset he possesses, but the necessity of their function is inescapable, and undeniable. He claws for that instinct for consolation, knowing its inadequacy.

The snap of past context layered over present is earsplitting and utterly silent.

"You continue," says Rush, quiet and even and unequivocal. "You live. I could refer to a number of vague platitudes, but I doubt you'd find them very constructive." He suspects that Asadi may, like him, find such aphorisms to be contemptibly short-sighted, and infinitely unhelpful.

He shrugs slightly, a fluid lift of both shoulders. "It took me roughly twenty seconds to decide that you were both interesting and pure dead brilliant. This was prior to any knowledge of technological advantages." With a shadow of his former composure as her arm had fractured under his hands, he inclines his head. "You're gonna be fine."

Rush's absolute confidence is bolstering, however misplaced it might be. That, at least, is beyond Greta's reckoning. She can't begin to guess how difficult Iman's arm might be to repair, even with both of them bringing their considerable minds to bear against the problem. Perhaps their combined skill won't be enough.

But she's not friends with Iman's arm. And as fascinated by technology as Rush might be, she's quite certain that her arm isn't what he dove into the Rift to save.

Greta exhales slowly, leaning against the island with her arms folded. "And you will continue to be worth just as much to us as you ever were," she says, her tone gentler, but no less firm, the cadence giving it an implied 'the end,' like the conclusion of a bedtime story. No room for arguments. That's just how the story goes. "If not more."

Edited 2015-05-12 11:20 (UTC)

Iman doesn't know what to do with any of this. She can't muster the appropriate gratitude or acknowledgment of their reason. She drops her head back down, looking at her limp, demolished arm. Even if they can get it working again as a limb, well, that's not something she's concerned about, this world has made plenty of advances in functional prosthetics, but she doubts, truly and completely, that they'll ever get hers back to the level of functionality it once was.

But she can't voice that. Rush will just keep insisting. It's exhausting to fight him on this.

"Okay," she mumbles. She doesn't thinks he can manage any greater response than that.

"Good." He nods, short and emphatic, and returns his attention to what is not an the most ideal collection of implements for the intended task but is what is, regrettably, all he has available to him.

It is supremely perturbing to be addressing Asadi without the presence of her typical focus and unshakable resolve, and the silence is unnerving and his short, sharp economy of motion stills and he does not face her because he cannot face her because he cannot look at either of them just now, but the conversational vacuum is unbearable and there is something profound and unsettling that hovers outside his periphery, dense and unaddressed.

"Iman," he says, his voice level and abruptly intense. "You were successful in dismantling a government-sponsored organization in a resource-poor situation. You did what should not have been possible on both my account, and Greta's." His hands snap again over the table's edge and he leans over it and he does not look at them he looks at his tools but he does not see them he stares unwaveringly ahead. He breaks off the words in a short sequence with a low, quiet ferocity. "I intend to return that favor."

Iman's response isn't very enthusiastic - if anything, it just sounds like a different kind of defeat. But being resigned to accepting help is better than being resigned to utter misery and self-loathing, so Greta supposes it's a reluctant quarter-turn in the right direction.

She's not quite sure how to follow Rush's promises, delivered with such intensity that she half expects all of his tools to roll a few inches away from him. But she has to say something; the atmosphere in the room has grown unbearably heavy, and Iman's in no shape to lift it. So she takes up the two cups of tea that have been standing by since just before her outburst and carries them over to the table, nudging aside a screwdriver so she can set one before Iman and the other a few inches from Rush's hand.

"I'll help any way I can, of course," she says mildly. "I don't suppose I'll be of much use with all this, but at least I can feed you." None of them have eaten since this morning, and it's getting on towards lunch. She hesitates by the table long enough to rest a hand on Iman's shoulder, then returns to the kitchen to rummage for a bread pan, the domestic clatter fending off another oppressive silence.

Iman looks up at Rush when he uses her first name. It's weird hearing him use it, but he probably did so calculatedly; it's enough to finally pull her back out of herself, at least some if not completely. She watches him for a moment before nodding slowly, searching out his eyes.

"Thank you," she says.

Greta's interjection helps pull her out all the more; it gives her something to focus on, something nice, comforting. She manages to reach up, almost in reflex, to touch Greta's hand on her shoulder before she returns to the kitchen. Tea, that'll help. Tea and listening to Greta move about the kitchen like everything is normal, and then maybe a forty-eight hour nap. She lifts her tea to blow gently on it, looking over the rim and the steam at Rush's tools, tired, nervous, not sure how much of this she can handle. She takes a little sip. It's hot but that's good. Sensation is good. Better than numb.

The tea placed by his hand is a mild surprise though not a wholly unwelcome one. He regards Greta with a faintly perplexed air but does not question the decision on her part, simply lifts the cup and takes a soothing pull of the liquid that is surprisingly successful in sharpening his sensory perception appreciably.

Asadi appears to be equally grateful for the substance and its beneficial properties, but her trepidation is obvious, even to his limited understanding of minor kinesic cues.

"I suspect we will not be able to begin immediately," he says, fingers curling more securely around the cup and its bracing warmth. "There are a number of concepts with which I will doubtless have to familiarize myself." His understanding of neuroanatomy is most likely woefully inadequate in comparison to what will be required.

Greta catches the vaguely baffled look Rush sends her way, but chooses to ignore it - and is rewarded a few moments later when they both start drinking. It's already been a long, stressful day, and it won't be improved by either of them neglecting themselves on the basic sustenance front. She's a bit more worried about Iman than Rush. Her friend, she fears, might not have the heart to eat, but she's beginning to suspect that Rush will put away whatever's put in front of him, as if he just forgets food and drink are things worth having until they're set right under his nose. Ridiculous man.

Rush's comment catches her as she's in the act of sliding the bread pan into the oven, and she raises an eyebrow. Does this mean he's cluttered up her table for no reason? Or was it merely for show, a demonstration of his willingness to help? That seems an odd choice for someone as deliberate as he is.

"Well, neither of you are doing anything exciting until you've eaten something," she says as she fetches a few apples out of the fridge and begins to slice them. "And if you're not going to be using those," she pauses to waggle her knife at the tools spread across the table, "you can clear them away, or at least make a little room."

"Mmhm." Iman nods noncommittally, her eyes drifting somewhat unfocused over the array of tools. She reaches out at a bit of an awkward angle and starts separating the tools into two little piles. Potentially worthwhile, utterly useless. She expects Rush will be able to follow her intent.

If he won't let her argue that he'll never be able to bring the arm back as it was, then she'll focus on fixing its functions as a prosthetic, a working limb. That will be her goal. His can be whatever he likes.

She's so tired. She wants to lie back down and sleep. She can't sustain this for much longer, conversing with them, taking so much kindness and generosity without being able to give enough back. She focuses numbly on her little task, the warm smell of baking bread only a distant comfort.

The original intent had been to require use of them, obviously, though Asadi's current state is not amenable to a great deal of experimentation or arduous work or mechanical progress on his part, and this will have to be acceptable. He is not the one with the disengaged circuits, nor was he one to survive the potentially fatal buildup of an internal charge, and he may not have any reasonable metric for how one typically recovers post-brachial-prosthetic-overload, but he is not about to force her into some recovery scenario against her will because he does not do that to valued colleagues for fuck's sake.

Asadi has engaged in a meaningful division of tools based on a criteria that is not difficult to ascertain, and he observes her choices with his head at an oblique angle.

"Fuck's sake," he says, and the abruptness of his tone is somewhat startling as he had not intended for it to emerge at a brusque pitch and volume, but he continues regardless. "Get some rest."

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