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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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."

"Of course I am," he says, exercising as much of a dismissive tone as can be considered reasonable. He contemplates the compact arrangement of tools packed inside, spinning the screwdriver between his fingers in a thoughtful, continuous revolution. "And I will celebrate my victory after, thank you."

Ideally he will be able to extract much of the hand's interior without damaging the varied implements, as he has no particular desire to reconstruct those as well. The plausibility of that goal may not be achievable. He wouldn't know; he's not a mechanical engineer, though experience would indicate such a maneuver is, at least, a potential solution. Possibly not in the time allotted.

He will begin with the farthest finger and work methodically from there, he decides, loosening and freeing whatever mechanisms are capable of being loosened and freed, and upon completing that preliminary sweep he may execute on the more difficult mechanical constituents.

"You're no fun," she half-sulks, sinking forward onto the table as much as she can and watching him work. This won't be as challenging as she'd meant it to be, if he's not going to drink during, but that's probably for the best. It's distantly alarming how little she cares if he works intoxicated, but then, the arm is already so messed up, what's the worst that could happen?

"Well if you win I have to drink all that by myself, I might die," she points out after a moment. "So maybe you better help me out." She smiles sweetly.

"Sabotage," Rush says, drawing the word out with an energy both intensively focused and thinly applied, "will get you nowhere."

He frees several components with a quiet snap and debates the costs and benefits of acquiescing to the suggestion. In all truth he has not had to employ a costs-benefits analysis in relation to alcohol for some time, and he finds himself disinclined to apply any sort of cogent baseline of reasoning to a substance that largely exists to be contradictory to the very concept.

The settling warmth of his next swallow does not offset his progress in the slightest as he sets the bottle back down with a pronounced swish of liquid and continues along his predesignated work pathway.

"In the supremely unlikely event that I lose," he says, the edges of the words a fraction less pronounced than what he would consider to be strictly the norm, "I am choosing to blame you on the grounds of purposeful obstruction."

"Bring it," she says pleasantly, reclaiming the bottle for another pull. "Sabotage is my middle name."

She is feeling better, she thinks, than she has in a while, not counting the time spent curled up with Greta - which wasn't so much good as it was complicated. This is fun, and it's far from emotional honesty which is uncomfortable and difficult, and she thinks if she could just drink herself into oblivion and exchange sassy banter with Rush every day for the rest of her miserable one-armed existence she'd be okay.

Oh, no, wait, that got depressing.

Fuck.

She slumps a little, just a little, looking at the table, her free hand drawing abstract, invisible patterns into the surface.

The steady serial deconstruction of the instruments folded into each digit takes priority, obviously, though the silence that trails in the wake of Asadi's pronouncement is not highly indicative of an ideal outcome. While he may generally consider himself profoundly untalented in the art of detecting subtle social nuances, Asadi's uncharacteristic silence does not lend itself to any hypotheses he wishes to entertain at any length.

"Steelworking," he says with a sense of spontaneity and conversational grace he does not feel, "was my first paid job. At sixteen."

Seizure of that topic, seemingly irrelevant, seemingly at random, does not achieve much by the way of establishing a natural flow of discussion, but he feels this is a sequence of events they have come to jointly accept and anticipate at this collective stage.

She perks up at once. This is so unusual, so wonderfully unexpected, she can't help but smile at the freely offered information.

"Yeah?" she leans her hand back into her hand, a sort of go on gesture. "Sounds kinda miserable. Or did you like it."

"I won't deny the usefulness of acquiring an applicable skill," he says, successfully loosening and freeing a mechanism he recognizes as the lighter Asadi demonstrated upon their first day of meeting. He smiles faintly. "I worked two jobs until I could earn a scholarship."

He debates the potential advantages to claiming a premature victory and decides there are no clear advantages and reclaims the bottle with the smooth catch of a wrist and throws back another swallow.

"How industrious." Holy shit he smiled. He smiled. She manages not to grin stupidly at the sight of it.

It's good to know all this stuff, as well - explains more than a little about him, the various chips on his shoulder, the cutthroat desperation to fix every presented problem. It's just not that he has something to prove, it's that he has proven it, and there will be no slippage. He made it to the top and he has to stay there at all costs.

She's the same way. Charmed life, supportive academic family, but still the same way.

She takes another sip from the bottle. My but it's beginning to hit. Is the cat still here, watching them have this conversation? She forgot to notice, and now she doesn't want to look.

"When I first moved to Manhattan," she says, because it wouldn't be fair to let him do all the sharing, "rent was so expensive, and I had already turned down every fancy fucking job London and Geneva offered me, so..." She shrugs with one shoulder. "I paid for my apartment by fighting dirty in bareknuckle boxing for about six months." This time she grins. "I was pretty fuckin good at it. Part of me misses it, but..." Well, she doesn't need to look pointedly at her dead arm, does she?

He continues to empty the contents of the progressively-hollowed-out, dead appendage in a finely tuned, flawlessly orchestrated process. He deposits the next of several delicate instruments he cannot put a name to onto the table, consolidating them into their own cairn of efficiency.

"I am unsurprised," he says dryly, both in relation to her history in combative sports and her reasoning for acquiring the talent. "I'm certain the American economy is pure shite in every iteration."

"Well, it wasn't quite so bad," she says lightly. "And not for the same reasons." She gazes distantly at her arm as he works on it.

"It's nice there," she says, allowing herself to get a little wistful. "Lots of things I'd like to go back to, eventually."

Her eyes flick back up to him. "You know-" she starts, then cuts herself off with another mouthful of whiskey.

The phrase possesses a thoughtful reminiscence whose significance beyond the more obvious sense is lost to him.

He watches her drink, exercising an impressive amount of controlled intrigue in the fractional lift of his eyebrows. One corner of his mouth twitches.

"What," he says, closing the word with a slow, languid pull.

She looks at him more steadily. Can't hurt to say it. Even if it is premature. Even if it might not be received well. Well, can't hurt more than they've both already been hurt.

"I mean, I'm just... guessing, here," she says, "that people back home aren't too happy with you." If her own reaction was anything to go by. "And I mean, it's kind of a shit situation to go back to, isn't it? I guess that isn't fair to say, but I dunno, I just..." She's getting lost here. She looks away, clears her throat awkwardly, pushing her free hand through her hair, adjusting her hijab with a distracted tug.

"If you wanted to," she says, "if we find a way to get home, um. You'd be welcome to come home with... with me." She wants to look at him, assess his reaction, but she can't. She stares fixedly at the table, fingers fidgeting with the label on the bottle. "You'd probably do well there. And I'd be - I'd be happy to have you there."

All right then. Time to drink more.

Edited 2015-07-02 15:29 (UTC)

His look intensifies, eyes narrowing more critically, the sole indication of his surprise. He continues to exert regular effort into detaching a particularly stubborn piece of equipment with automatic precision, his attention divided.

"I doubt there's much to go back to," he says, a dry lacquer over his own persistent sense of loss. "The point in space from which I departed very likely no longer exists."

As Destiny ceased to exist, so likely did his sole remaining avenue to the D-brane from which he personally originated.

"Assuming that offer is still open by that time," he continues, voice softening incrementally, "I would be amenable to that."

Oh, well, that's even more complicated than interpersonal issues. Her expression twists briefly with surprise and pity, which she banishes as quickly as she can, he's like her and he'll detest pity.

"I don't want to rule out the possibility that we could set our own spatial endpoint," she says, forcing herself to sound reasonable. "I mean, I never got that far in my efforts, but it's not impossible, it was a goal I was working toward."

Of course, to do this, they'll need to make significantly more progress on her arm than she thinks they are capable of.

"Either way," she says. "Uh. Yeah. I can't imagine the offer will close."

Okay enough of that. She swipes the bottle back and drinks a little bit more than would qualify as a single swig, sets it back down heavily and immediately drops her head onto the table.

"Oh-kay," she says, the full effect encroaching in earnest. "Yup. All right. Are you done yet, jeez."

His forty minutes have not elapsed, but surely he has to be getting close.

Rush finds himself equally eager to shift the conversation from the scope of their current topic, primarily for the sake of navigating to subject matter he feels more adequately informed in discussing. He eases out the latest in the long string of instruments freed from the complicated expanse and surveys the remaining constituents with a displeased scowl.

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," he says, compacting as much airy hauteur into his tone as possible. "I've been making considerable progress."

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warning: this tag contains gratuitous platonic love feelings

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