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

Entry tags:

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Rush shrugs fluidly in a motion he hopes conveys nothing but a complete lack of concern, nothing but composed civility.

"Retribution. Recrimination. However you choose to define it." A painfully human motivation, but he has never been beyond that, a fact of which he is wholly aware. His unperturbed air sharpens, his tone laced with a fierce, defiant bite. "You hurt someone who happens to be rather important to me. Surely you anticipated repercussions."

Edited 2015-06-23 05:01 (UTC)

Iman keeps her eyes fixed on Rush (because she doesn't dare look at the stupid cat), a complicated mess of expressions flickering across her features; she's tense, furious with him for playing the agitator so soon after they both witnessed the Rift's idea of 'gentle punishment' - she's desperate to redirect things, angry with herself for not fighting back alongside him. She's grateful for his, what, his dedication to her - the casual declaration of her 'importance' - sure. But that's a low priority in the grand scheme.

"This is inadvisable," she hisses to him, her one hand drawn into a tight fist.

You are capable only of -- the cat has to stop and search for a word again, one sufficiently diminutive, --annoying me. The repercussions would all be yours.

This was not its purpose in coming here. It does not care for these micro-interactions the way certain of its counterparts do. No, the purpose was to investigate the aftermath of an escape attempt, and the cat abruptly refocuses its blank gaze on Iman. You are correct, it informs her. The...pathways...you would have exploited are gone. You will not attempt it again.

His eyes flick to hers in an even, perfunctory glance. She is quite correct. However, he finds himself utterly beyond the general giving of fucks in regards to this creature and whatever aspects of the Rift it represents.

It has, intentionally or not, made things rather simple for him.

He smiles faintly, a brazen, one-cornered twist to his mouth that approximates a bladed edge.

"I wouldn't be entirely certain of that."

She shrinks slightly, left helpless and frustrated as they continue to talk around her, Rush continuing to be a stupid shit - she presses her hand to her face, peering between her fingers at the cat-creature.

"You can't cage and torture people without expecting them to try to escape," she says quietly. "That was your first mistake. Your second one being that you're trying to tell him what to do."

I can, argues the cat, because it can and it did. It's not the cat's fault these creatures are so unreasonable. Can they not see that they belong to it? It really is quite a simple matter.

I will do as I please with you, it decides.

He fixes it with an even stare, cool and unrepentant, progressing them to whatever outcome is derived from two forces opposed.

"Likewise," he says, the word a charged hiss.

She stares at him, eyes wide and maybe a little terrified in addition to impressed. She'd be saying the exact same shit if their roles were switched, she knows that.

And as scared as she is, as much as she's felt the sting of the Rift's wrath, nothing will make her demur when told explicitly that she belongs to something else.

So she turns on the cat, allowing herself to be bolstered by Rush's absurdly overconfident assertion, as well as bolstered by his general presence. "We are not your things," she says coldly. "And we are going to find a way out."

They are both making an immense gamble with an entity which, as Daniel's example has shown, can kill them at any moment, for no reason at all. And they're essentially giving it one. They are jointly assuming that they are interesting enough specimens that it will not destroy them completely; and they are hoping, too, that it will continue to underestimate them.

Let it do what it will, she thinks, reckless and afraid.

She needs a drink. No, fuck that. They just essentially declared war on a sentient spacetime entity. She needs, like. Thirty goddamn drinks.

You are...strange little creatures, says the cat, baffled by their collective insistence that they are otherwise than it knows them to be. It stands, staring down at them imperiously, seemingly unaware that its fur is standing on end. It is bigger, it is stronger, it is more intelligent. They should comprehend this. I may decide it is not permissible that you repair her arm. I may decide that it is not permissible either of you remains intact.

They have left it in a state of imbalance, whether it is perturbed or unsettled or startled or some other variant. Feline body language is altogether somewhat beyond him, but its reaction is stark and unmistakeable. Asadi is, perhaps, equally unnerved, but she has aligned herself along his axis of ill-advised human brinksmanship versus that of a spatiotemporal aberration of a frankly indiscernible nature.

Rush lifts his chin, his expression one of unfettered scorn.

"I'd advise against it," he says in a tone that suggests that what he is saying is perfectly reasonable.

Edited 2015-06-24 04:18 (UTC)

All right, you know what, no. Iman swings back to Rush, looking somewhere between aghast and outraged. "OKAY," she says in a clipped tone, reaches out and grabs the first thing she can find, which is a small screwdriver. She uses this implement to gesticulate at him like a teacher scolding a student, which is mildly ironic, given their falsified relationship in the previous night's dream. "And now, instead of continuing this conversational arms race until it literally kills us, you're going to fix my fucking arm. You promised me you would, and you can't do it if you're dead, can you?"

Much as she is repulsed by the idea of letting him work on it under the luminescent eyes of this feline asshole, which probably won't leave until it wants to - much as she still isn't convinced he'll be able to do anything for her at all - this would be preferable to Rush willfully driving the thing to make good on its threats. Honestly, this arrogant idiot. How did he ever survive before he knew her?

She finds his eyes, holding his gaze with intensity, and a bit of a plea. "Please can we just do this," she says quietly.

It could break them, what does the ape not understand about this?! The cat leans off the edge of the refrigerator, looming over them as its tail lashes back and forth. Advise against it, will he --

It lets out a huff as the other one steps in, a voice of reason despite her ridiculous assertions of a moment ago.

He continues to look at it, disconcertingly pearlescent eyes swirling with little more than pointed, possessive annoyance, or whatever other nebulous things are experienced by externalized aspects of spatially-temporally-anomalous entities.

It has occurred to him, in light of recent events, that this may not have been the intended outcome of Destiny's mission at all.

It has occurred to him that the Rift has the capability to be infinitely more powerful than whatever message happened to be buried in the cosmic microwave background radiation of his universe.

It has occurred to him that he has been untethered from his brane for a purpose, and this purpose did not entail any sort of reasoning as to wanting him for his talent or his genius or his mathematical ability. It amounted to a spatiotemporal irregularity's randomized interest. It amounted to something unpredictable, something that could have easily seized upon some other iteration of him or anyone else than it did this particular version of Dr. Nicholas Rush. It tore apart an Ancient ship at the event horizon of the intersecting chiral matter, shredded it beneath gravity and pressure and pure shearing force. Done out of spite, possibly, or, more simply, because it was in the way.

A muscle in his jaw works. His stare hardens, briefly, into something flinted.

He looks away.

There is a tool extended to him and he takes it.

"Yes," he says, his voice ringing rough and distant. "Yes. Of course."

He's not okay.

She can't discern what precisely just happened under his stony features and that one little muscle spasm, but it wasn't good. She lets him take the screwdriver, eyes still flicking nervously back and forth over his face, though he isn't meeting her gaze anymore.

Having too, too recently been through a singularly unraveling existential crisis of her own, she's pretty sure she can spot its symptoms, but she can never be too sure with him.

They can't talk about it right now. And probably not ever. He doesn't talk.

She moves wordlessly to the kitchen, ignoring the prickle on the back of her neck as she passes directly beneath the cat's leaping range, opens a cabinet, pulls out the first bottle she sees, and returns to the worktable. She plunks it down between them with a matter-of-factness that is approaching nihilistic indifference, and sits, moving her arm to reach between them, the better for him to tinker.

The bottle may be utilized now, or later. Its presence is a clear indication that she has no fucks left to give whether or not he works sober; the ball is resoundingly in his court.

As far as the cat is concerned, this is all well and good. They're settling in now, doing the work it came to observe -- it watches Iman fetch the recreational poison and attempts to estimate what perceived benefit they could derive from imbibing it while working. Deliberate impairment is a foreign concept, but perhaps it will make what follows more interesting.

Better, it mutters as it settles itself back down, a low psychic rumble.

The ripple of its word pulls through him as though moving through some molten, viscous sludge, tightening the lines of his shoulders and darkening his face into something locked and immovable. Even the illusion of compliance curdles every nerve and cell, contradicts every instinct.

He performed admirably in front of Colonel Young. He can do so for one incomprehensible being sealed in the shape of a feline.

The bottle lands with the ringing tone of two planes aligning, and he fixes it with a mildly incredulous look before transferring his stare to Asadi.

"That seems rather ill-advised, given the circumstances," he says, relieved to have established a more typical dry control over his tone. The screwdriver inserts itself delicately into the arm's innermost workings as he sorts through the prosthetic's remaining components, steadfastly ignoring the lingering presence of the Rift's consciousness and its undivided attention.

"Yeah?" she says mildly. "Well, give it a minute."

Stay sober, Rush, see how that goes for you. She's already one up on you, as she polishes off her bourbon-laced coffee.

She goes back to watching impassively as he messes around with her arm. It's much easier now to just sit still and let it happen. They're putting on a show. Under surveillance. Gotta fuss around like good little lab rats. Ugh.

She pushes her empty mug aside and pulls the bottle over, holding it steady between her thighs to open it one handed. Awkward but workable. She lifts it up and takes a good sharp swig of - what is this, whiskey? Oh yes. That's precisely what she needed.

The bottle is reset between them with another quiet thunk, and she watches Rush with an eyebrow arched, subtly challenging.

Rush watches the bottle scrape over the table's surface, opened with the sharp one-handed twist that prefaces a full swallow thrown back. She replaces it as the table's impromptu centerpiece with a pointed emphasis, a gauntlet thrown down in the crisp click of glass set against wood. He matches her look.

"Fuck," he sighs, and sets down the screwdriver.

He's not been properly pissed in what he will assume is years, though the specifics are somewhat beyond him. The products of Brody's distillery, being only a mark above rubbing alcohol in taste and alcoholic content, hardly qualified as valid incentive whilst aboard Destiny.

"Fuckin' slainte," he says with wry distaste, and takes a long, searing gulp.

Atta boy. She grins at the ridiculously Scottish toast and props her elbow on the table to lean her chin on her hand. She's never seen Rush drunk. This is gonna be good. Or, at the very least, informative. Since that's apparently what they're about now.

"I figure we got about twenty more minutes of solid productivity before this gets dangerous," she says, taking the screwdriver to poke around herself. "But to be wholly honest that's probably about all I had in me today anyway."

It's been a real fucker of a day. That dream and now this cat, which is still staring at them from atop her fridge, tail twitching. Whatever. Look at what you have done, you ginger asshole. We were gonna do science but you RUINED IT.

She pulls out a few straggling pieces of the arm's fried mechanisms, leaving a fairly clean working area. This at least will allow them space to get it working like an arm again. Hopefully. That's scary as shit to think about, really. If they can't get it to work mechanically the next logical step would be to scrap the limb entirely and get her a prosthetic that functions as an arm. And that would be the true end of it. No more false hope. No more Rush bravado. She would just be an ordinary person with two working arms.

Fuck, okay. She sets the tool down heavily and reaches back for the bottle.

"Please," he says, dismissive, sliding the bottle back across to her and retrieving the screwdriver in the same fluid movement. Some of the more damage-susceptible areas have left certain constituents fixed to the interior of the arm's shell. He throws the weight of his shoulder into prying one such component free and is rewarded by a low twinge of pain shooting from wrist to shoulder blade.

"Inebriation is hardly any obstacle," he continues, freeing the fused piece of metal with a satisfied grunt. "Manual construction is a particular talent of mine. I'm certain I could it."

"Ah, but you have failed to factor in my abiding desire to not having you mucking around in there inebriated," she says rather coyly. "We'll just see how long this lasts, hm?"

It is perhaps the next swig that gives her the inspiration to add, "I'll make you a wager." She smiles pleasantly at him. "We've got the arm pretty well hollowed, but the hand is its own separate segment. All the tools are in there, those are gonna need to be stripped out, and if you want to be able to put them back, you're gonna have to take them out a lot more carefully than the rest of that shit." She nods at the mess on the table. "They need to be handled real delicately, lots of little interlocking parts. So I'll wager you can't get those out completely in, mm, I'm feeling generous, so forty minutes." She grins. "If you don't, you finish the bottle. If you do, I'll finish the bottle."

A dangerous game, one that stands a chance of actually making this bearable.

Edited (science things) 2015-06-26 00:40 (UTC)

"You're failing to account for several key factors," he snaps, adjusting his grip on the tool to brandish it in a more sufficiently assertive manner. "Up to and including the basic principles of mechanical engineering."

The last two words emerge as a low, grinding pull from between clenched teeth as he reaches in with his chosen implement and begins to lever at the hand's center, executing with the full thrown weight of his elbow.

She smiles and slumps forward a little, resting her chin once again in her hand. Watching him struggle with her arm is both entertaining and... odd. It would definitely hurt if she had any sensation left in it. Should she tell him that's not the way to get it open? Nah, he'll figure it out.

Honestly she doesn't give a shit whether she wins or not. She realizes distantly that she's still smiling, and she feels... good, warm, something. He came here at the crack of dawn after a truly terrible invasion of his privacy to do something stupid and pointless because he promised her he would. He threatened an angry spacetime entity because it hurt her.

She realizes she's staring at him, and she adjusts her gaze elsewhere, refocusing on the bottle. She takes an awkward swig, trying not to move her shoulder too much.

It becomes rapidly clear that he, while not having been blessed with an abundance of upper body strength, is also approaching the problem at an entirely unworkable perspective in rather more than one sense.

He scowls at the obstinate device, rolling one shoulder smoothly back, and wedges the sharp edge back into the center of the mechanism, angling it away from him rather than in adjacency. The parallels between certain current and past events are irresistible, but to exist in a state of reminiscence is perilous and ill-advised. And so he resists.

Yet - when he embarked upon his relentless unraveling of the ninth chevron address, he did not embark with the expectation of failure. He would devote every inch of his mind to feverishly exploiting its every twist and nuance, because nothing could resist his mind and it would have no choice but to yield to the superior, immovable force that opposed it. He'd commenced with every confidence that the address would open to him as all things inevitably opened to him, only to be met with, what - defeat by an alien cypher encrypted in another language, to be solved by a child with no meaningful forays into academia whatsoever.

Any similar failures now will not be tolerable. This is an entirely different arrangement of wholly distinguishable, separate factors. A strictly mechanical undertaking. No locks. No cyphers seeded into 'gates whose properties were incompletely understood.

He will not fail her now. He will not fail her now.

With a low, angry hiss and the groan of separating edges, the hand opens to him.

She can't keep from grinning as he succeeds in opening her hand, though it's a bit brittle, the sight of its dormant internal mechanisms tugging at her a bit. The instruments are still intact, at least, but they're just sitting, useless without the neural connection that allowed her to activate them.

"Hey, you're making very good time already," she comments lightly, sliding the bottle over. "Have a victory sip."

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

warning: this tag contains gratuitous platonic love feelings

no subject

no subject