Alec McDowell (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kissthatgoodbye) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
lastvoyages2016-11-16 11:42 am
kissthatgoodbye) wrote in lastvoyages2016-11-16 11:42 am
|: 028. Video/Spam : There's Nothing Here, But What's Here's Mine :|
(CW throughout this post and the comments below: possible mentions of institutionalized abuse including children, mental torture, some physical torture)
[Alec does not respond to Steve's message on the network. He recognizes the kind of threat someone like that is on a deeply personal level, even if the trappings are different; he's seen what one person trying to do something good by making decisions for the many can do. It's the entire reason he and those like him exist: because someone with resources wanted to end wars and the loss of human life they bring with them. He's never been this close to this strain of it before, but he knows exactly what self-righteous singlemindedness looks like. Lydecker remained heavily involved with the Manticore program all the way up until his fall from grace, after all.
What he does do is go dark, slipping away from where he is when he hears the message and silencing his communicator. He takes up position tucked behind cover on the deck and he watches and he listens, neither in support nor defiance, withdrawing from the chaos the Barge very quickly descends into as some scramble to help and some scramble to stop Rogers and some do exactly what Alec is doing and get out of the way. He means to be ready to jump, either into the way to fix something if he can, or out of the way if he can't. He means not to give anyone that would stop him either way a chance to do that. He doesn't need anyone to help him. He's an X5. This is what he was created to do.
But when whatever happens actually happens, when the Enclosure jumps its banks and spills over into the Barge proper, he doesn't get so much as a chance, and the part that will bother him later is that he doesn't even know why. It's jumbled and fractured in his memory, from standing motionless beside the railing at the opposite end of the deck, using his zoomed vision to watch what's happening, to a falling, heavy sensation, to fighting - he's always fighting - to anger and then the familiar crackle-zap-burn of electricity and something else. Something that makes his mind blank involuntarily, that shuts down every ounce of progress or change or difference he's made in the past year and a half. Something he knows down to his bones because if he had nightmares, this would be it.
When he knows himself again he knows, too, the familiar straps - forehead and ankles and wrists, chest and waist and thighs, too tight to breathe, although he knows exactly how much leeway he can work into them in sixty seconds, sixty minutes - and he knows this chair and he knows this ceiling. He knows exactly where he is, where he has to be, where he swore he'd never let himself be again while there's still breath in his body. And he panics.]
[ Video ]
[Alec eventually realizes his communicator is still in his pocket, he's still in the clothes he was wearing on the Barge, so it wasn't entirely in his head; that makes this a flood or some other Barge contrivance. That means he has a chance. He works to reach it, but in the end the feed that opens publicly is a clatter of it hitting the floor, unable to close his fingers around it to keep it in his palm. He's panting in short, unsteady breaths, calm only by force of will, and the camera view is from under what might be mistaken for a particularly gothic dentist's chair, Alec's hand and strapped wrist visible, and past that a fairly benign looking machine overhanging him, a red light blinking. The room is dark except for the harsh white light that glares out the rest of the room.]
Anyone read? [He keeps his voice even, manages to keep it steady, but it's barely above a whisper. Please, please, please.]
[ Video : Ten minutes later ]
[And once he confirms this is in fact the Barge, and people can in fact reach him, and that all he can do is trust that they will and that they'll hurry? He can't do a single thing but sit here and wait? His fear does what he taught himself to do a long, long time ago and transmutes directly into rage. The camera angle doesn't change. He can't reach it. But his tone definitely does.]
Steve Rogers, go fuck yourself. You want a speech? Life is subjective, there are no guarantees, there are no promises that won't be broken, people run out of chances. If you don't want to support something you voluntarily signed on for, if you can't possibly bear the idea of everything not going exactly the way you want it to, instead of blowing up the ground everyone around you is standing on, maybe go the fuck home, you self righteous, deletrious, terminal megalomaniac.
Tell yourself whatever you have to but do it somewhere else. You're not helping. You're self-destructing and risking taking us down with you.
[He has more to say, he has so much more to say, but that's when the first shouts leak in from the background, and when the laser clicks on, shooting down out of frame. It only takes a few seconds before Alec starts to groan, and eventually to scream.]
[ Spam : Later that day, throughout the event ]
[Eventually, people show up to help Alec. Eventually, they break him out, they pull him forcibly from the hold of his own personal hell that he was using to overcome exactly this reaction: he must be invulnerable to survive this, his instincts tell him. He must be a weapon, and it is not luck that he is one. He made himself this. He clicks back over into the very mindsets that Manticore valued and he sets himself loose on the ship, and this time he doesn't hold back even a little. He'll regret it later. This is why he hates emotion: adrenaline drives him past reason.
Occasionally the Manticore operatives - units of generic humans lead by generic X5s, or groups of identical nine year olds in the distinctive grey fatigues and carrying automatic rifles and barcodes and blank, inhuman expressions - that are his own doing catch up to him, try to subdue him with electrosticks, try to drag him back. He fights like a wildcat when they do, but of all the horrors and not so horrible things leaking out of the Enclosure, this is where he meets his match and would gratefully accept backup.
When there is no immediate threat, he checks in with the infirmary, but he never stops moving entirely even when he slows to catch his breath. He doesn't have to. He doesn't want to. Not ever.]
[Alec does not respond to Steve's message on the network. He recognizes the kind of threat someone like that is on a deeply personal level, even if the trappings are different; he's seen what one person trying to do something good by making decisions for the many can do. It's the entire reason he and those like him exist: because someone with resources wanted to end wars and the loss of human life they bring with them. He's never been this close to this strain of it before, but he knows exactly what self-righteous singlemindedness looks like. Lydecker remained heavily involved with the Manticore program all the way up until his fall from grace, after all.
What he does do is go dark, slipping away from where he is when he hears the message and silencing his communicator. He takes up position tucked behind cover on the deck and he watches and he listens, neither in support nor defiance, withdrawing from the chaos the Barge very quickly descends into as some scramble to help and some scramble to stop Rogers and some do exactly what Alec is doing and get out of the way. He means to be ready to jump, either into the way to fix something if he can, or out of the way if he can't. He means not to give anyone that would stop him either way a chance to do that. He doesn't need anyone to help him. He's an X5. This is what he was created to do.
But when whatever happens actually happens, when the Enclosure jumps its banks and spills over into the Barge proper, he doesn't get so much as a chance, and the part that will bother him later is that he doesn't even know why. It's jumbled and fractured in his memory, from standing motionless beside the railing at the opposite end of the deck, using his zoomed vision to watch what's happening, to a falling, heavy sensation, to fighting - he's always fighting - to anger and then the familiar crackle-zap-burn of electricity and something else. Something that makes his mind blank involuntarily, that shuts down every ounce of progress or change or difference he's made in the past year and a half. Something he knows down to his bones because if he had nightmares, this would be it.
When he knows himself again he knows, too, the familiar straps - forehead and ankles and wrists, chest and waist and thighs, too tight to breathe, although he knows exactly how much leeway he can work into them in sixty seconds, sixty minutes - and he knows this chair and he knows this ceiling. He knows exactly where he is, where he has to be, where he swore he'd never let himself be again while there's still breath in his body. And he panics.]
[ Video ]
[Alec eventually realizes his communicator is still in his pocket, he's still in the clothes he was wearing on the Barge, so it wasn't entirely in his head; that makes this a flood or some other Barge contrivance. That means he has a chance. He works to reach it, but in the end the feed that opens publicly is a clatter of it hitting the floor, unable to close his fingers around it to keep it in his palm. He's panting in short, unsteady breaths, calm only by force of will, and the camera view is from under what might be mistaken for a particularly gothic dentist's chair, Alec's hand and strapped wrist visible, and past that a fairly benign looking machine overhanging him, a red light blinking. The room is dark except for the harsh white light that glares out the rest of the room.]
Anyone read? [He keeps his voice even, manages to keep it steady, but it's barely above a whisper. Please, please, please.]
[ Video : Ten minutes later ]
[And once he confirms this is in fact the Barge, and people can in fact reach him, and that all he can do is trust that they will and that they'll hurry? He can't do a single thing but sit here and wait? His fear does what he taught himself to do a long, long time ago and transmutes directly into rage. The camera angle doesn't change. He can't reach it. But his tone definitely does.]
Steve Rogers, go fuck yourself. You want a speech? Life is subjective, there are no guarantees, there are no promises that won't be broken, people run out of chances. If you don't want to support something you voluntarily signed on for, if you can't possibly bear the idea of everything not going exactly the way you want it to, instead of blowing up the ground everyone around you is standing on, maybe go the fuck home, you self righteous, deletrious, terminal megalomaniac.
Tell yourself whatever you have to but do it somewhere else. You're not helping. You're self-destructing and risking taking us down with you.
[He has more to say, he has so much more to say, but that's when the first shouts leak in from the background, and when the laser clicks on, shooting down out of frame. It only takes a few seconds before Alec starts to groan, and eventually to scream.]
[ Spam : Later that day, throughout the event ]
[Eventually, people show up to help Alec. Eventually, they break him out, they pull him forcibly from the hold of his own personal hell that he was using to overcome exactly this reaction: he must be invulnerable to survive this, his instincts tell him. He must be a weapon, and it is not luck that he is one. He made himself this. He clicks back over into the very mindsets that Manticore valued and he sets himself loose on the ship, and this time he doesn't hold back even a little. He'll regret it later. This is why he hates emotion: adrenaline drives him past reason.
Occasionally the Manticore operatives - units of generic humans lead by generic X5s, or groups of identical nine year olds in the distinctive grey fatigues and carrying automatic rifles and barcodes and blank, inhuman expressions - that are his own doing catch up to him, try to subdue him with electrosticks, try to drag him back. He fights like a wildcat when they do, but of all the horrors and not so horrible things leaking out of the Enclosure, this is where he meets his match and would gratefully accept backup.
When there is no immediate threat, he checks in with the infirmary, but he never stops moving entirely even when he slows to catch his breath. He doesn't have to. He doesn't want to. Not ever.]
Voice > Spam
[He's lost a fight against Steve already, he was out of action for he doesn't know how long, and he feels like he's failed the Barge and his inmate in a very real way. But he recognises where Alec is from his shared memory, and he's not failing on this. What he's doing is getting himself tooled up properly, getting his location, and going at a run.]
Spam
It would be easily mistaken for a normal military compound from the outside, except there are squads of transgenics - varying ages from six to twenty six, all with barcodes and grey fatigues and the demeanor of any professional, seasoned soldier no matter their age - amongst the squads of humans, there are identical packs of nine year olds with automatic rifles at the perimeter, and there are no signs or flags or insignia of any kind. Alec is in the main building in the center of the compound, as big as a football stadium, up the stairs instead of down.
Eggsy is human, so the constructs populating the base notice and watch him, but seem content for the time being to operate along the parameters of their programming until he starts heading into restricted areas or attacking them.
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He has to believe that. He has to believe that when he breaches the compound and those guns start to turn on him. He can't trust any more that they're incapable of killing him, as they are in the simulations. So he doesn't.
He doesn't know these hallways, these staircases. He has to let the HUD on his glasses do the work for him, guiding him to his inmate, hoping that they're still doing their job. (Kind of hoping that they aren't, as well, because he still understands where he is now and he doesn't want to find Alec in the middle of the same nightmare he said he was unable to escape.)
When he gets into the room, there are two figures in there with Alec, and he lifts the gun in his hand and pulls the trigger twice and then they're just bodies.
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[Don't really know you, but this is the navy equivalent of a thumbs up.]
~~~> Spam ]
What's important is what comes after, when Alec is free, when Horatio is doing more than just talking, when the dust starts to settle at least in some ways. Alec just dumps Horatio at the infirmary so he can return to ground zero, as it were, to make sure Rogers is dealt with. But later, he's active in the infirmary again, basically unmarked physically himself and working without any signs of fatigue to put everyone else back together that he can reach.
Which means he's around, in general.]
[Spam!]
He can think straight enough, however, to catch sight of Alec as he's passing, and to reach out with his surviving, bruised hand, to touch the other man's leg in an attempt to get his attention.]
Sir.
[Attention please, because his breath is evasive enough right now that he doesn't want to waste it.]
They told me you brought me in. What happened?
[To Steve, to the Enclosure, hell, he'd take answers about Bill at this point.]
[Spam!]
Re: [Spam!]
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It isn't an instant arrival, and it isn't an easy one. The barge is going to hell around him, the scenery and settings and landmarks are uncertain, and his innate awareness of space around him makes that more rather than less difficult. There is also the little problem of mutant hunting robots and other bullshit. They're not exactly treated to his more restrained and cautious shots. He'll apologize to the ship, later.
He still doesn't stop. He doesn't back down, he doesn't back off. Not until he's found him.
And then it is straight toward Alec who, know, he doesn't expect to greet him warmly.
Truth? This is a half-step from giving him flashbacks of things he refuses to remember about Sinister's lab, but like fuck is it stopping him.
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It feels like he never really escaped his life, to be honest, and isn't it an unnerving thought that Manticore won't let him go even into death?
He ran this time, when the unit of X7s marched out into the hall in front of him. He's confident in himself, he's efficient, he's the goddamn ideal that this program produced and he built on that until he was invaluable to them, but he can't fight against half a dozen different bodies all moving with the same single thought, with abilities and training to match his own, and electrosticks besides. So he runs, and that's how he ends up cornered in one of the barracks blocks - cells, they're cells - and having to decide if he dares call Eggsy into the middle of this or if he should wait until they've arrested him and moved him somewhere that they won't just light his warden up from six different directions at once.
They're children - nine years old and all the poise of a seasoned soldier, confident with the weapons in their hands, no expressions on their faces at all and their eyes wide and pupilless black, chittering between themselves at supersonic frequencies Alec knows are there but that he can't make sense of - but he doesn't see children. He sees fellow transgenics and he sees soldiers and he sees loyal Manticore operatives but not children.
And he sees Scott, and the way first one of the X7s and then half the others in a smooth ripple effect look back at him, and he makes his decision: he blurs left and then forward, trusting that he's fast enough to beat the spray of bullets that hit where he was.
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He has buried so many kids....
He doesn't have a gun. He doesn't have enhanced speed or strength or reflexes or healing. He's already been shot once today. He's pissed off.
There's only really one kid here he cares about, and he doesn't have solid black eyes. He's also taller than the ones with guns.
He feels more than he sees Alec start to move (and presumably not be in his way). He doesn't lift his hand toward his visor but clenches it into a fist to hit the trigger in the palm of his glove. It's not a wide open blast, but it's got a wide field and it's still got a hell of a lot of force behind it. A potentially more than lethal amount of force.
He's a horrible person. It isn't news.
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way to the infirmary
"All clear past this point. And well said earlier, incidentally."
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So he doesn't smile back at Clark when he sees him, surveys the damage - and how little comparative damage there is to anything that actually belongs here - in one quick glance, and then looks back at him.
"You're holding this route?" he asks instead of answering the praise. He barely remembers what he said right now. It doesn't matter until they can get this situation under control, keep the ship together, and end Captain Rogers and his team if that's what it takes.
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"From what I could tell, other people are taking care of the food supplies and there's more than a few people headed straight for Captain Moron and the Asshole Brigade."
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[video]
Luckily, they fall to her rifle fire and her horse keeps her mostly out of their reach; less luckily, the terrain is one that horse and rider will both sink in if they don't pick their way through with excruciating care.]
I can 'ear you, my darling, but I don't think I can get to you. D'you know where you are?
[video]
She can hear him. Iris can hear him. He's still on the Barge.]
Of course I do. Not where, where, but I know -
No. Yes. I don't know.
[video]
[There's a brief interruption - a horrible, slobbering, moaning sound, Iris squawking in outrage and a burst of rifle fire.]
They're not very fast but there's an awful lot of 'em. I tell you what, I'll think twice next time I programme a training course. Keep talking to me, my darling.
[video]
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[Spam]
There are a lot of things on his mind right now, but he halts when he recognizes what Alec had showed him only a week before. He never got a good look at it to begin with, but he knows what Manticore is now, and without thinking, brings his gun up to fire at the operatives spilling out from where the Enclosure had started to wrap around a cabin]
[Spam]
He spots Cold before they do, in the splitsecond before his gun takes out an outlier waiting for an opening to help his unitmates; he makes a splitsecond decision, and hipchecks one of his opponents directly into the line of fire for Cold, even though the second one buries its electrostick in Alec's gut and stops him in his tracks, his vision going white.]
[Spam]
Not for Cold, though. There's a reason he wears rubber-soled boots even indoors. He reaches a hand for Alec, shoving his way through]
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[Hope's currently lost in a twisting maze; full of traps and monsters and - most annoyingly - occasionally things that she's pretty sure are supposed to be practical jokes. There are some strange people on the ship. She doesn't know where he is, doesn't know how to try, but she can at least do this.]
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He's still on the Barge.]
Report.
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Private
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Private ~~~> Spam
Spam
Audio
[There's a brief break and the sound of a single gunshot, then rapid footsteps as Eliot's voice picks up again.] D'you know where you were when you were grabbed? [Because that would at least be a place to start to try and find him, given all the crazy from the Enclosure seems to have leaked out into the barge in general. He's recognized things already--Dean's zombies, the weird cartoon cityscape Hardison took him into once, Furiosa's hellscape world, places and things he can't even begin to identify.]
Audio
Deck. [An explosive sigh of breath, relief and something more dangerous.] I was on deck.
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Audio ~~~> Spam
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Infirmary
But where he's going next, he anticipates injury, much of it his own. And on the way, there will be injuries to administer to--provided the injuries belong to people he gives a damn about.
He knows Alec is here. He doesn't call to him, doesn't check on him, because if Alec is here he's either on his feet or being taken care of, and Lark has a very small window of time to operate in. So he digs around, gathers bandages and pressure wraps and ready-made splints.
Infirmary
He's not fine, not remotely, and it's not because of the superficial array of injuries he's managed to accumulate himself - and they are extremely superficial, they'll be gone before the day is out, he'll have a harder time getting the stain of his own blood out of his clothes than he'll have from the scratches and scrapes. But that's for another time, so he's sealed up everything he doesn't need, everything he's learned, everything more than he's been trying to be, and this is what is left; most don't notice. They have their own concerns, and there is precedence for Alec being all business while the ship is on fire, be it metaphorically or literally.
He doesn't feel anything when he sees Lark, not good, not bad. He saw him on the deck, saw him with Rogers, knows he was a part of this. He'd be furious if this were a few hours ago. Now he assesses both how Lark moves and what he's taking as he finishes setting up a curtain for the most recent dead body deposited at their door and he moves to intercept, and he says "What are you doing," in a calm, even voice because this is who he needs to be right now to hold himself together. (The wounds in his skin are not the ones that would kill him if he let them. He won't let them. The tourniquet cuts off emotion, too, and he'd be okay with that if he were okay at all.)
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spam
But even with all of that in place she sometimes gets ambushed. This time she runs into the scene, little boys carrying guns, walking up to Alec, who looks terrified, who looks like this is his worst nightmare come to life.
Not that she doesn't understand that. She feels her own sense of deep horror at the sight of children carrying weapons, children who look like they're as old as Henry, her own little boy.
But this isn't a normal situation. These are figments of the Enclosure, and Alec is real. So she pulls out her weapon, and says firmly, decisively:]
Walk away from him right now or I will shoot.