bigapplesauce | what's mistaken for closeness is just a case for mitosis [closed]

Current Location: Greenwich Village, Iman's apartment
Current Music: September 14th, 2013

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what's mistaken for closeness is just a case for mitosis [closed]

Waking is not, historically, what Rush would regard as a favored activity. He is where he always is after being unexpectedly beset upon by sleep's inevitable grasp. The floor is solid and bracing, forming an aching spandrel between that plane and the paralleled arch of shoulders and spine. His skull is no longer the fractured mess it was, in reality left smooth and whole.

The entirety of the Rift's irritating, interfering traversal through the less fondly remembered aspects of his own past is etched into the anterior of his mind, still frames printed behind closed lids. He grinds the heels of both palms into his eye sockets with a fierce, fervent energy, as if it would be possible to scrub away the echo of that experience through execution of pressure alone.

He wonders how much of the dream's content is plausibly dismissible, an idea whose own plausibility he dismisses. Asadi was always too smart for direct obfuscation; it was what he liked about her, what he has continued to appreciate and value about her, but intimacy with one's past as exposed by the Rift is the unfortunate lead-in to a conversation he is certain they will be required to have and would prefer not to have, with her or anyone.

He is also aware, however, that he has been left very little in the way of personal autonomy in relation to that choice. Particularly since his latest endeavor in becoming more deeply acquainted with neuroanatomy has ground to a lamentable standstill, and to best acquire a more extensive knowledge base he will have to be - considerably more hands-on.

Fuck.

The trip to Asadi's apartment passes in its own dull-edged, lateral blur, instructions snapped out briskly to an unlucky taxi driver until he arrives, disheveled and recently woken and completely uninvited. It does not occur to him until after he has rung for her repeatedly that this may be potentially construed as socially unnatural or unacceptable, but he has already set certain events in motion and must see them to their uncertain conclusion.

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She's awake before the buzzer goes but she doesn't answer it right away. She knows who it is. She finishes dressing herself before pressing the button to let him in.

He's probably here to see about her arm. He's been holding off pestering her about it, but she can sense it in his silence just as well as his original urging.

Of course if things end up being about that dream they just both had, well, so much the goddamn better.

She unlocks her door and goes to add a little bourbon to her coffee. It's gonna be that kinda day.

Edited 2015-06-14 04:16 (UTC)

He seizes the invitation of the opened door and enters steadily, easily, unerring, as if he has not recently endured a jointly harrowing, vividly hyper-realistic recreation of his less-than-reputable past.

The scent of coffee, thick and dark, does not entirely offset the air's sharp alcoholic sting. Considering recent events, Rush decides he cannot hold her at any great fault for that personal choice.

Rather, he can't immediately think of anything to say.

This is somewhat atypical for him.

"Starting early, I see," he says, his resolution shattering beneath the clipped remark with a tone unintentionally redolent of a sneer.

She regards him, and his sneering remark, with almost no reaction, merely an unimpressed lift of her chin and a casual sip.

"Dunno," she says. "You might be joining me sooner than you think."

She turns her back briefly, setting her cup down on the table. "Okay. We can work on it today. I'm ready." She turns back around, her hand clasped over the opposite shoulder, working out a lingering, chronic ache of having the weight hanging, pulling down against it. "But first we need to fucking talk."

"Do we." The quiet rasp of his laptop sliding onto the table does not quite cut into the uncomfortably tense silence Asadi's promise or, perhaps more accurately, implicit threat leaves in its wake.

Rush places himself in the chair opposite to her, laptop opening under the fluid press and release of a wrist. The collection of tools assembled for this purpose is desultory at best, as is his woefully inadequate level of admittedly recent education involving the finer points of the human nervous system.

It will have to be sufficient.

"To what would you be referring, exactly?" he says, a crisp topical avoidance that fools neither of them. His eyes remain carefully locked on the monitor. His shoulders tense, anticipatory and imperceptible.

"Don't do that. Don't waste our goddamn time pretending you don't know exactly." She leans over and puts her hand on his laptop, threatening to close it unless he meets her eyes. "We're both too smart for that shit and this isn't a fucking playground."

She eases off after a moment, straightening up slowly.

"I didn't realize it was a dream," she says. "Not until after we were on the ship. I didn't know until it was too late. Okay?" She picks up her mug again, staring into the dark liquid before taking another fortifying sip. "I wouldn't have done that on purpose. I didn't mean to fucking... pry." She shoots a look back at him, trying to look staunch, resolute, not to let show the strong undercurrent of her anxiety, the fear that nagging this is going to fuck them up forever.

"But I was there and I saw it and I know it wasn't just a dream," she says as steadily as she can. "I know that was you. I know it was a memory. I just don't... I... How many people were on that ship, Rush?"

It isn't strictly her right to know. Isn't strictly her right to ask. But it's too late for that now, and he should have seen this coming, if he was gonna come right here right after.

Rush stills, gaze dark and fleeting and intent, flicking up to meet hers and away again in a seamless shift.

"Technically that's classified," he answers in smooth, apparent unconcern, leaning back. He arches one eyebrow, tone dry. "And I can't simply sever all ties with anyone who's ever trespassed into my head uninvited. Professionally speaking, it simply wouldn't be sustainable."

His arms fold across his chest. One finger uncurls to point in quiet warning.

"I believe I'm under no obligation to explain."

"You could choose to trust me." Wanting to match his gesture but unable to fold her arms, she sets her cup back down and lets her hand stray back up to her shoulder. She heaves a sigh, softening some, looking down at the floor. "I'm sorry I hit you. I was scared and I was angry. I'm sure I wasn't the only one to react like that." Her eyes flicker back to his. "You're not obligated. I'm asking you. Please."

He tilts his chin, insouciance written into every angle in the slope of his posture. "Up to that point you were considerably more rational than almost anyone actually involved."

Contemplating the potential outcomes of Asadi being confronted with a flesh-and-blood Colonel Young is not an efficient use of his time and energy, though he finds the mental tableau to be briefly, immensely entertaining.

"If you were curious about my history prior to the Rift," he says, his stare sliding across the room's interior before settling, again, on his laptop's impartial display, "it would seem the Rift has solved that little problem."

She chews her lip for a moment, shifting her weight back and forth before adopting a less confrontational stance, sitting at the table to focus back on her coffee.

"I wouldn't be asking if that hadn't happened," she says. "I wouldn't ever have asked. I mean it's your business to tell me or not. That's always how I've seen it." She passes her hand briefly over her face, no longer tense, now just feeling slumped and tired. "But it's kind of different now. The Rift made me part of it, I guess just cause it loves to fucking jerk us around or something, but... yeah, now I'm curious. Now I'm asking."

She gets back up, heads back into the kitchen and pours another mug of coffee, which she slides over to him, the bourbon sitting on the edge of the table in an open offer.

"That was incredibly fucked up," she says as she retakes her seat. "I hope you realize that. I know you thought you were doing what you had to do, but - you stranded how many people galaxies away from home because it was your only chance to test a theory, Rush, there is no way you could expect rational reactions to that. Come on."

She's looking at him now, almost pleading, desperate to see that he gets this, desperate not to feel like she's about to have to re-evaluate her entire opinion of him.

"Please." He shoots her a withering look that somehow contains less than his usual aplomb. "They all made it back."

Except for the ones who didn't.

The ones that met their unfortunate end. The ones that had to be sacrificed. The ones whose conscious minds were uploaded into a dying ship as it approached the horizon of its own end.

"If I'd never taken that chance," he says mildly, with a sharpened, curling edge, "then I'd never have come here - and certain circumstances," he lingers tellingly over the word, "would have been drastically altered."

Causality. Conclusion. At one point he had not been any great subscriber to theories on fate or destiny - that classic, weak-minded response to the overwhelming complexity of the universe. Nearly anyone familiar with Dr. Nicholas Rush, professionally or otherwise, could examine his academic predisposition and extrapolate a probable conclusion that would claim his active, appropriate disdain for such things.

They would all be wrong.

"The ends justify the means, then," she says coolly, lifting an eyebrow. "That's what you're going with."

She's not sure she buys his implicit theory that causality is so linear, that only through one path would he have been brought here. But she's not quite ready to imagine a different Rush from a different chain of events. She likes the one she has, as much as he is a flawed prick.

She lifts her hand, a wearily pacifying gesture. "Don't get me wrong," she says. "I'm glad to know you."

It feels like she should say more, something prefixed with 'but...'. But as she arrives at that point it no longer feels relevant, like why fucking bother, this isn't her argument to have and there's no way she'll ever have enough context to justify having it. It'll always be there for her to ask about, some other time, when she's not so fucking tired, and not experiencing residual relief that he didn't actually die on that ship.

So she lets the awkward silence, the sense of an unfinished thought, hang for a moment before letting out a wry chuckle and lifting her prosthetic up onto the table.

"Fuck it," she says. "How do you wanna start."

Claims for the greater good were frequently made, less frequently supported or believed, but, assuming Destiny's mission was always meant to terminate in the blaze and distortion of some inescapable fissure torn through the universe, he finds the assertion more than justified. Asadi's trailing indecision is unsteady and continuous, until finally she banishes the silence she created.

"I thought we would begin with the more basic hardware," he says evenly, extracting a number of fine wires from his laptop bag and spreading them across the table's surface in an organized spill. "As I recall, some of the interior wiring got rather badly burned."

The image of wires melting into one another beneath the hot crackle of discharging electricity flares briefly between blinks.

"Yeah." She sighs and rolls up her sleeve, pressing open the panel in her forearm. She stares dolefully at the fried tech inside, then looks up at him. He's eager as hell to move on and she can't blame him, so she just sips more of her bourbon-coffee. "We'd need to clean all this out and replace all of it. I mean, we could probably get the limb working again, like an arm, you know, but the other stuff..."

Ugh. She turns away, staring at the window. Let him work on it as much as he wants. She can keep her depressing commentary to herself for a while, surely.

The moment of hesitation elapses a shade longer than necessary, fingers hovering uncertainly as he debates efficiency versus speed versus - care. Instinct would dictate he simply devote all his focus to ripping everything out with little to no regard for the subject of his work.

He begins gently working some of the damaged interior out from the arm's shell, clipping away knots of blackened conductors, wires burned and twisted in on themselves in a pattern of fused contortions.

Electromagnetism was always a merciless, overly complicated little fuck. It was what he had admired about it, the remorseless inflexibility to the thing. Unforgiving on principle. Perhaps he had only admired it because he was not a physicist. Working with electromagnetism in a truly closer capacity has begun to feel more and more like a particularly specialized hell.

"We've no clear idea of what we can restore," he says, words that verge on a lie sliding easily out from beneath lowered brows. "It seems prudent to reserve judgment."

"Yeah, yeah." She can hear him pulling things out but she can't actually feel it, and that's weird as fuck. She glances over to watch impassively. "Look, I can help you out with this part, this part shouldn't be too bad. Let's just focus on that today, all right?"

On that, and nothing else - not dreams or future restoration plans or anything. Getting the arm to work mechanically again is going to take enough time as it is. Should keep them occupied for a good while, and that'll buy her time to get used to his insistence on trying to work out the other thing. His impatience is obvious and expected but he's being slow and methodical now, and hopefully he can just maintain that for a while.

Ignoring the stumble of the conversation prior to this one, Rush snorts.

"That is what we've been doing," he answers wryly, attention fixed wholly on his work. Mechanical tasks were always a talent of his, a cruelty to the theoretical mind. What is currently required is a familiar function upon which he can execute and continue to execute; he can scrape Asadi's prosthetic clean of its accumulated detritus. Reconstruct it and its various functions. It does not fall squarely within his skill set, but he is certain he can do it. He has set his mind against the problem and he will find a solution and he will succeed because nothing can withstand that unwavering, energized focus.

But for one exception.

He refuses to indulge his mind with tired mental loops. Pointed evasion of certain topics does fall within his skill set.

She nods, going quiet for a while, watching dully as he continues to clean her out. She feels a small bubble of gratitude rising up slowly as the unpleasant shock of the dream fades out more and more - it's not her business and it doesn't really change anything, it doesn't change that he's here, he came over anyway even though he had to know she was going to ask. He's still here for her, he will be pretty much no matter what, sometimes infuriatingly.

"Thanks," she mumbles, taking another long pull of coffee to avoid looking at him.

He does not entirely know how one should respond to that and therefore chooses not to acknowledge it. The arm is their joint priority. He continues to divest its outer casing of its knotted, scorched interior, depositing the distorted electrical circuits upon the table in an efficient scatter.

A flicker of movement in his peripheral vision breaks him free of that serial loop. His head snaps up sharply, pinioning the source of motion with abrupt, nervous precision.

The cat crouched comfortably atop the refrigerator remains stock still apart from the gentle curling back and forth of its tail. It does not even seem to acknowledge at first that one of the apes at the table has turned to look at it, but continues to stare past Rush at Iman -- more specifically, at the dead prosthetic attached to her shoulder. When it does glance at Rush it looks at him only momentarily, not particularly concerned by his presence at present.

His silence, though it's to be expected, just makes things weirder, so she's looking down at the table when Rush's hands suddenly go still, and she looks up in confusion before following his gaze and startling abruptly.

"What the-" she blurts, stiffening. For a brief moment the question is 'how did a cat get into her apartment' until, pretty immediately, it becomes 'that is not a normal cat what is this thing'.

"Um..." she says slowly, looking at Rush, eyes wide and trying to silently communicate what do we do?

"When, exactly," says Rush, even and deliberate, eyes fixed on the feline-shaped thing perched atop the refrigerator, "did you acquire a cat with monochromatic eyes?"

His fingers fall away from the prosthetic and glide over the surface of the table until they grip its edges, weighted with an implicit intent to rise. He pauses, evidently unconcerned, watching the curious organism with his head angled thoughtfully.

"Been watching for some time." He keeps his voice low, pitched as a theory rather than outright interrogative. "Haven't you?"

I have been...observing you, yes, replies the cat, though there's no outward, physical sign that the voice they hear in their heads comes from the furred body. Who else would it be, though? It doesn't elaborate, but fans out its whiskers as it leans forward and asks, You intend to repair her?

"I definitely did not acquire it on purpose," she says, failing to sound as even as he does. She watches him nervously as he addresses the cat which obviously isn't a cat, does he know what it is? She sure as hell isn't expecting it to reply.

"Ffshit," she hisses, jerking back in her chair. In their heads, no less. She assumes Rush 'heard' it too.

Repair her.

Like she's a thing.

Okay.

Uncharacteristically she doesn't really have any vitriol rise up, nothing stored. She just sits there, feeling a little smaller, like yeah, you're right, magic cat, this is stupid, it's not going to work, it's useless and we should probably just not do it at all.

It's sickening, how easy it is to bring her to that point now.

The voice in their heads - Asadi's reaction is a fair indication that it lacks an individualized effect - appears to operate on its own frequency, potentially telepathic. Certainly not a typical cat; perhaps something that simply chooses to appear as such.

Interesting.

His eyes dart to Asadi momentarily, noting her atypically subdued reaction.

Less interesting.

Also more than mildly concerning.

Fingertips splayed over the table, Rush rises, brusque and fluid, expression tightening with the barest fraction of distaste.

"I intend to assist her, yes," he says, his disdain smooth and restrained.

The cat thinks this over, still not moving. Still forgetting to move. Permissible, it decides. But I will not be so lenient if you make another attempt to interfere with...

What is the word? Even in their heads these creatures require words, and the cat lashes its tail in frustration as it grasps for the knowledge of how to express what it means. The concept is as familiar as anything can be, but the word --

Ah, that's right. It is a little word, difficult for its insufficiency. With the Rift, it concludes.

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