[she descends the stairs in something like a fugue state. all fight has gone out of her. she didn't clean up, she's still covered head to toe in blood, that's important. she still doesn't feel like she has any sense of where she is, who she is, but she's also reached a state where she's just given up on fighting back. maybe something like that helpless terror she felt before, the one that froze her in place, is a better protection right now than any proactive impulse.
she sees the others, anders no doubt also bloodsoaked and del with a gaggle of people he managed to evacuate, and...]
Andy? Del?
[some memory blooms, like seeing long lost friends, but along with that sense of reunion, the horror, the recollection of what happened to them.
and then the fog lifts. and she realizes that she's here with a man who she doesn't know at all, who may be nothing more than a character in this story, the story of a girl named jen hallow who never existed. maybe this man is someone she created, an amalgam of her own secret hopes and wishes. she had always dreamed of that night, of being abandoned in the forest, pursued by wolves, waiting for help to come. and she had always joked, either she was an orphan or she'd simply been abandoned, there's no good explanation for why she was there, no loving explanation for leaving a little girl alone in the woods with no one to protect her.
but there was still that secret hope, that secret wish, that once back before the time she can remember, maybe somebody had loved her. maybe that someone had looked for her, had missed her when she was gone. maybe the whole time she was the subject of some cruel experiment, a project to take a little girl and twist her into another shape for shar's hideous amusement, there was someone somewhere else who still wanted her.
he isn't real, but part of her accepts finally how much she wanted it to be.
anders and fidelio, andy and del, though, they're... they're both real. so is eupha, so is taair. so probably are all of these strangers. oh god - what's happened to them?]
Anders, you're -
[he looks so fucking bad. the horror of everything she went through hits her like a ton of bricks, and she imagines the same for him.
but there's very little time to process it before this story ends.]
[ yeah in an absolute fucking foogoo state man. the grink is HERE.
it takes a moment for him to realize that he's back from the desert. that color (red, blue lights) and music (sirens) are returning, like blood rushing into your ears at incredible volumes. the only cure for Tranquility is death. Or a Spirit reaches out to touch your mind, to return you full force into yourself. it's enough to break a person. but he's already broken, already something no longer human, but human enough to not be a monster.
he drops the bloody knife - maybe just because his hand can no longer hold it, now that he can feel pain and fear and relief again. Enough twists and turns though the sewer to end up here of all places. Funny how that works out. ]
Hi, Jen. Hi Del.
[ no where to run this time. but maybe that's for the best. he'd accepted judgment once before, and this feels like another opportune time.
he's just going to start hysterically crying in the moments before the curtain drops, but maybe that's not a bad thing. at least he can. at least it's something. ]
[ with the staggered timing in their arrivals at the building, fidelio had missed anders and shadowheart entirely. he'd only had the vaguest understanding of what he was actually supposed to be evacuating these people from in the first place, and had just assumed it would be the clown itself, or some other local under its influence that he'd barely ever heard of.
so the sight of the two of them here, covered in blood and visibly disoriented, throws him for a loop. he'd been perfectly lucid since before he ever set foot in this building, and it hadn't even occurred to him that their own roles in this might have ended up so different to his, that they were who he'd been trying to save these people from. ]
What the hell happened to you two?!
[ but then the sirens are wailing and anders is following suit and there's no time for any explanation before the fuzz are here pulling their guns on all three of them and the innocent bystanders alike. fidelio hurriedly shuffles eupha and taair behind him before they fire — not that he thinks these versions of them really matter, still, but it's an instinct he'll apparently never be able to let go of — for all the good that does.
he feels like he must have fucked up somewhere big along the way for things to end like this. but he always feels like that. ]
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holyspirits) wrote2025-03-09 04:46 pm
no subject
she sees the others, anders no doubt also bloodsoaked and del with a gaggle of people he managed to evacuate, and...]
Andy? Del?
[some memory blooms, like seeing long lost friends, but along with that sense of reunion, the horror, the recollection of what happened to them.
and then the fog lifts. and she realizes that she's here with a man who she doesn't know at all, who may be nothing more than a character in this story, the story of a girl named jen hallow who never existed. maybe this man is someone she created, an amalgam of her own secret hopes and wishes. she had always dreamed of that night, of being abandoned in the forest, pursued by wolves, waiting for help to come. and she had always joked, either she was an orphan or she'd simply been abandoned, there's no good explanation for why she was there, no loving explanation for leaving a little girl alone in the woods with no one to protect her.
but there was still that secret hope, that secret wish, that once back before the time she can remember, maybe somebody had loved her. maybe that someone had looked for her, had missed her when she was gone. maybe the whole time she was the subject of some cruel experiment, a project to take a little girl and twist her into another shape for shar's hideous amusement, there was someone somewhere else who still wanted her.
he isn't real, but part of her accepts finally how much she wanted it to be.
anders and fidelio, andy and del, though, they're... they're both real. so is eupha, so is taair. so probably are all of these strangers. oh god - what's happened to them?]
Anders, you're -
[he looks so fucking bad. the horror of everything she went through hits her like a ton of bricks, and she imagines the same for him.
but there's very little time to process it before this story ends.]
no subject
it takes a moment for him to realize that he's back from the desert. that color (red, blue lights) and music (sirens) are returning, like blood rushing into your ears at incredible volumes. the only cure for Tranquility is death. Or a Spirit reaches out to touch your mind, to return you full force into yourself. it's enough to break a person. but he's already broken, already something no longer human, but human enough to not be a monster.
he drops the bloody knife - maybe just because his hand can no longer hold it, now that he can feel pain and fear and relief again. Enough twists and turns though the sewer to end up here of all places. Funny how that works out. ]
Hi, Jen. Hi Del.
[ no where to run this time. but maybe that's for the best. he'd accepted judgment once before, and this feels like another opportune time.
he's just going to start hysterically crying in the moments before the curtain drops, but maybe that's not a bad thing. at least he can. at least it's something. ]
no subject
so the sight of the two of them here, covered in blood and visibly disoriented, throws him for a loop. he'd been perfectly lucid since before he ever set foot in this building, and it hadn't even occurred to him that their own roles in this might have ended up so different to his, that they were who he'd been trying to save these people from. ]
What the hell happened to you two?!
[ but then the sirens are wailing and anders is following suit and there's no time for any explanation before the fuzz are here pulling their guns on all three of them and the innocent bystanders alike. fidelio hurriedly shuffles eupha and taair behind him before they fire — not that he thinks these versions of them really matter, still, but it's an instinct he'll apparently never be able to let go of — for all the good that does.
he feels like he must have fucked up somewhere big along the way for things to end like this. but he always feels like that. ]