- A Flood in the Life : Feeling My Way Through the Darkness -

Solitary at Manticore is only solitary in the sense that no one else is in the cell with any of the transgenics unfortunate enough to be on this level. There is nothing in the room besides the hole in the corner for refuse, no light, no window, no bed. Ben has been here before, they all have, it doesn't matter how good they are. There's always some mistake to make. There's always a taste, so they know what the consequences are for failure, for disobedience, for giving up. This time, he was caught out of bed after hours, and the sentence is a week. He's three days in and there are Nomlies in the cells to either side of him as well as the one across the corridor from him. That's the only one he can see now, but he saw them all on his way in.

They're mindless, violent creatures, and they bang around in their metal rooms at all hours of the day, and they're hungry. Even when they aren't scraping their claws at the bars on the tiny slot used to slide food and water in, they're pacing incessantly, because these creatures? Have no end to their sentence.

Ben sits on the floor in the exact center of the back wall, huddled in his grey cotton shift with his knees drawn up to his chest, staring down at the floor and trying not to shake.

There are Nomlies on the cells to either side of them as well as the one across the corridor.

Alex raises his head from where he's bowed it, the light from the single tiny window shining on his bared shoulders. He sees this boy on the other side of the cell, and around them is the endless scuffling of monsters.

This boy is so young. Too young to be here. His presence doesn't feel quite right, a broken piece in a very simple jigsaw, but Alex looks at him anyway. Doesn't speak. Too afraid to.

Too angry and tired to do much of anything at all.

The fear is familiar. When Ben looks up and sees someone else there he isn't alarmed, but only because he's already at his threshold. He'd spent the day before violently shivering and unable to stop, but he's past that now. Everything is shut down, including his ability to react. Each new nightmare is a scratch on a wrecked surface.

This is, of course, the point.

It's a strange sensation, knowing at once that he doesn't know this person and that he does; that he's alone in solitary and that he's standing next to his friend on the Barge and he's sitting in a cell with him in his world's, his prison's, version of solitary. One of them is real. As the memories overlap, he can't say for certain which one it is.

The youngest, most terrified version of him stares at Alex, and when he speaks in the real world, the child speaks too. "Why did you let them do this to you?"

In life, Alex wants to reach out to Ben, to put a comforting hand on his shoulder, and knows as well that he can't. That it wouldn't be a comfort at all. In the memory, Alex shakes his head, confused that there's someone here with him, sure that it's some kind of hallucination.

"To keep everyone safe," both of him says, both in the tones of a man in a trance. Hypnotized. Reality and ex-reality bleed together as he looks at Ben in both. It's nauseating. This boy so small and this man so broken, both of whom he feels an indescribable urge to protect.

"But you never had a choice." This is only the version of him that is nominally an adult, the one who knows better; the one in the dark prison stares blankly. "You never had a choice, I know."

The child Ben blinks slowly with his lack of comprehension; Ben, eleven years older and still sometimes trapped right here in this exact room in his mind, blinks slowly instead of shaking his head, says, "I didn't know what choosing was. I had choices. We all did."

He knows what is happening on the solitary level of Manticore, so Ben carefully, gently blocks it out of his own perception - it's as easy as it ever is, he does it daily, sometimes more, along with everything from before the escape - and focuses on what he can see of Alex's memory instead.

He, of course, can't hear or see or smell or know anything that Alex did not himself, but he doesn't need his transgenic hearing to know there are men nearby in other cells, just not speaking, not moving. He cocks his head, back to the silently staring spectre of his own childhood, and says, "With your power, even here you might have accidentally harmed someone. You have to know that. Yet you stayed."

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warisart - 2013-09-24 17:55 (UTC) - Expand

Ben has come here before. Some days it's unsettling to watch the flawed humans stumbling around under the weight of their illness, and he remembers a basement full of nightmare creatures and failed soldiers and is afraid; some days it's almost a flavor of reassuring, to see that other people are uncertain of their realities and their lives, their places in them or how to fix them, and he wonders if this building and the doctors in it could help him find his way.

Other days he sees only Nomlies, and has to remind himself not to kill them all.

It's been nine years since he escaped Manticore with his unit, and it's not getting any easier to remember the ever changing rules of his new existence, to find his way through the maze set before him. Zack has been to visit him several times, he's helped set him up with a job and an apartment and told him what he needs to do, but he always goes away again and Ben can't keep it straight. Zack says the others have managed it, are living happily. Ben still feels like he's standing in a herd of sheep waiting to become one but unable to.

Today is one of the worse days, so he's come here, to the familiarity of the hospital he can look at from the outside, to see what they tell him today. Is he one of them? Is he different enough to be repulsed by them? Is today the day he picks up the purpose he once had and the Lady's favor and cleans the Nomlies from the grounds? He lingers across the street in a vacant doorway, arms folded tightly over his chest, shoulders and spine military-straight and eyes intent for the one sign that will tell him above all others what to do.

Abigail makes a little yelping sound when she realizes whose memory this is, what it is, where it is. She'd never felt as much imprisoned by the hospital as she might have, but she still didn't like it, feeling like a constrictor behind glass, powerful muscles flexing with nothing true to hang onto.

Her head whirls with Ben's, the strange logic of his mind click-clicking along with her own confusion and fear to create a dangerous, volatile concoction. She wonders vaguely if he is going to kill someone, hopes a little bit that he will.

But despite her fear, despite her uncertainty, despite everything, she stands beside him, looking up to him for cues. If he's a monster in this memory, it'll be even easier to follow them, to do what he wants. She'd be happy to.

Doesn't mean she's not afraid.

Ben doesn't seem to notice her, of course, but it is difficult to tell in any case. He has learned to give more physical cues on board the Barge than he had in his life previously, and now he stands stock still except for the movement of his eyes over the various things he's watching in front of him, or the wind that blows by every now and then ruffling his hair. He doesn't seem to notice.

He's singled out a particularly strange-acting man at the corner of the yard: two employees are watching him, their sickly green scrubs marking them out clearly from the patients' blue, but he's not doing much that they seem to care about. He's older than Ben - but most of them are - and kneeling, alternately digging furiously at the dirt with a stick and pausing, bent over with his head cocked, to listen to nothing that Ben can discern. Then he smiles and begins digging again.

When he pushes to his feet and, taking his stick with him, moves to a different part of the yard, Ben follows. He goes from stationary to moving as silently and smoothly as a jungle cat, backing three steps to the narrow path down the alley so he doesn't have to move into plain view on the sidewalk and pacing him, crossing the street to another doorway without much regard given for traffic. There isn't much anyway. Not down here.

The man goes to his knees again after searching the ground for a while, but this time he lays the stick down and stares at it intently. Ben watches, breathing out slowly, and then asks quietly, "Are you searching for Her?"

Ben moves like a robot, she thinks, following him as quietly as she can. She knows he's not the Ben she knows, but she doesn't want to disturb him anyway. He's after something in particular. It's a predator's stance she's looking at now.

Once they get closer, she watches the man, too, her expression not changing when she hears Ben's question. It's not all that surprising, really. That's the sort of question he would ask, especially given the fact that he appears to be - ha - pre-redemption.

She stands beside him with her head on one side and her hands clasped behind her back.

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warisart - 2013-09-21 23:56 (UTC) - Expand

Ben likes it here, as much as he likes it anywhere, loud and crowded and run down and busy. There are a lot of rules to remember, rules about sector passes and lunch tickets and rent and scheduled shifts, but there are a lot of rules everywhere and this time he understands the job. Patrol the perimeter of his employer's building. Keep out intruders. Simple. He knows how to do that better than anyone else in the city, potentially, and no one bothers him.

But Zack has been gone for weeks and when he's not on the job, everything about this world is still so confusing. Humans avoid him. Police officers take long looks at him. The noise echoes against his skull until it's all he can hear, and the lights are too bright, the air too thick, and he can't feel Her anywhere in this overpopulated mess. Today it's raining, and that in and of itself isn't a problem for him, but it saturates every odor and surface around him and makes the city - Chicago, he remembers that much anyway - twice as heady to his transgenic senses. He's coming home late in the morning, to the apartment where he's supposed to wait for Zack, and still uncertain from the events of the night. Someone had tried to break into one of the warehouses and Ben had caught him, and when he refused to submit, Ben had broken his arm.

His employer was upset. Something about insurance and liability, yet another thing Ben doesn't understand. He did his duty. He stopped the man. He's still wrong.

Ben is shaking the water back from his eyes, bent over where he's operating the key and lock to the door, when the man walks up too quickly on him from the side.

"Hey!" The voice is unfamiliar and sharp, a punch against Ben's consciousness, and he goes instantly tense with the resulting adrenaline spike. Glancing sidelong, Ben straightens up but doesn't answer. "You got money for me, freak? You're overdue."

Individually, Ben understands all the words but they make no sense to him strung together like that. His pulse speeds up, and all he does is stare back at the man he thinks he should know but doesn't.

She is a shadow, an echo, a double-image. She is him, in tension and confusion, eking her way through. And she is herself, hovering just behind his left shoulder, face drawn, heart in her throat. She wonders what she's gotten into, what he's been through, what she is resigning herself to watch, unable to change. She was able to comfort Felix a little, in his memory, but she doesn't know what she can do for Ben now, knows that a touch, a distraction, might make things worse if the memory is malleable at all.

It's difficult to focus like this. The man is standing too close, his breath sour beneath the artificial mint of the gum he was chewing, toothrot and tobacco; Ben can easily read the threat in him, summarily dismissing it as inconsequential. This man is human. He can't hurt an X5, not unarmed and on his own. But he's dangerous still and Ben should pay attention to him, except he's distracted by the sound of a television in the apartment next door, a dog barking down the hallway, the way the electric lights overhead hum and flicker, the sickly yellow of the man's eyes and the way the faint pink of the wallpaper makes everything in the hallway slightly pink.

Ben waits for an order without noticing himself doing it, because the words don't make any sense. He doesn't know how long they look at each other but it must be too long - the man shoves him, hard, in the chest. Ben sways with the pressure, unconcerned by it, though his muscles tense to keep him upright and more or less in place.

"Hey spacecase, are you on something?" More words that don't make sense. Ben's eyes narrow, and he waits. "You know you can't bring that shit in here." Ben hasn't brought anything but his clothing and his sector pass, the one with his face and someone else's name on it; he doesn't know what the man is talking about, what's expected from him. He listens, now, for Her to tell him what he should do, but the Lady is silent as ever. "And whatever you're using to buy it is mine, two months due, right now." The man shoves Ben again, and this time he reacts.

The X5 moves faster than the human eye can follow; but Anya isn't seeing with human eyes, and so the lift of the landlord's arm towards him seems to be in slow motion, at least compared to how Ben moves in response. He takes hold of the man's hand by reaching over his wrist, wrapping his fingers around his thumb, yanking back and down and shoving forward. There, finally, something that makes sense: the man's arm bends, his body folds, the bone cracks exactly as it's meant to, easily and neatly with this pressure at this angle. The man starts to scream as the world speeds back up to regular pace again. Ben knocks him out with a swift, but not blurred, elbow to the back of his head, and pulls him along into the apartment as he slumps into dead weight.

It's not until the door is closed and Ben is looking down at him that Ben remembers, he's not supposed to do this, no matter how right and simple it seems.

He's not sure what, then, he's supposed to do.

She should know what this means, she thinks, even though she hasn't lived it. Except she is living it and she doesn't know, the jolting bewildering weight of the memory pushing it out of reach, and her frustration is Ben's frustration, coiling and mingling. She doesn't know what he's supposed to do. She doesn't know what she's supposed to do, either. She hums something, a tune that once played over and over while she was helpless and uncertain, until it was indelibly inscribed in her. She doesn't remember where she heard it, but she hopes it's soothing.

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Everything happens very fast, even for a boy designed to be able to operate in motion at speeds faster than the human eye can follow. It's the chaos, really, being a part of the heart-thudding fear of watching Max jerking and seizing on the floor, Zack crouched at her head and Eva at her feet and the rest gathered around hoping, hoping, hoping she'll come out of it before anyone notices, terrified that she won't. There's not a one of them that doesn't see Jack there, doesn't see him being hauled away by his elbows, the last any of them ever saw of him. His genetic twins in other units are around, of course, but not their Jack. Maybe, very soon, not their Max either.

She's still jerking uncontrollably when the door opens and the flashlights sweep over the gathered unit, not a one of them older than eleven, all dressed in unisex cotton grey shifts, hair shortshorn,all terrified. Ben knows then that she's gone, that they're done, and he's frozen in place as the guards file into the room with the guns trained on his brothers and sisters.

"Stand back," comes the order, though they're all already backing up anyway, unwilling to be caught in the crossfire, but not happy about it. All but Eva, who stays crouched beside Max, glaring up into the bright light with one hand shading her eyes. He reaches for Max, and that's when it happens.

Eva blurs, hand closing on the guard's wrist, yanking him forward and off balance. Everyone is taken by surprise but she keeps going, pushing smoothly to a stand even as her free hand yanks the handgun out of the guard's thigh holster, her momentum sending him to the floor behind her where she kicks at the back of his neck with one bare foot, and he lays very still.

She only stops, tall and slender and blonde-haired and blue-eyed with strong, clean features, arms steady and extended with the gun in them, feet shoulder's width apart, between the men and her sister. Zack is moving forward. Ben is frozen, unbelieving, numb.

The gun shot is loud and almost instant. Eva crumples.

Fry's eyes are tracking around in the darkness; another reminder that she can't see the perfectly clear world around you picked out in UV, in IR. She comes at you anyway, and you throw her down.

"Come with me," you tell her, and the unease you've been feeling clicks into place.

This is when you understand that she's like you, or that you're like her, or that something has happened. This is when you understand you care, feel a surge of the empathy the doc in Tangiers told you you were incapable of when he diagnosed you with (sociopathic tendencies and a primitive fight or flight response).

She has to come with you because you cannot watch her die. You don't know why. She's just a pilot, a woman who was ready to end your life to save hers. You respect that, but you don't know why this switch in your brain has flipped, you didn't even know you had this switch in your brain.

You feel her rage, her terror, she screams that she won't leave them. She's going back for them. Back into the dark.

And you have to come with her.

(When she comes for you and you're bleeding in the rain, surrounded by whooping hammerheads, when she grabs you, you feel grateful like you never have before.

when she's ripped out of your arms it hurts like it never has before.

This is the first time you have known family, and you don't even know a word for it yet, only it's like you died too.

This is the first time you have really felt grief.

You limp back to the ship in the dark and don't know how to patch up the hole in your mind hemoraging sorrow.)

There's no time to stare in disbelief at what's happened. Max is weak but pushing to her feet, and Zack is suddenly in action, taking out the man who shot Eva and signalling to the rest. The unit moves as one, clearing the door, pushing out into the hallway. Ben is swept along with them, heart a triphammer in his ears.

It's dark, though this is no problem for transgenic eyes; the patrol coming down the hall is more of a problem, semi-automatic rifles already out and at their shoulders. There's no time to hesitate. Zack signals them out the window and they all throw themselves against it. They fall into the drifting snow, barefoot and barely clothed but determined, and scatter for the trees. It's too late to turn back now. Eva is dead, Jack is gone, and they're all going to be punished if they're caught now. The sirens start up, the search dogs begin barking, there are snowmobiles whining to life at the perimeter as orders are barked; thirteen child soldiers make a break for it. One turns back. The rest will not be seen for almost a decade.

---

Ben, expression closed down and blank except where his eyes are blown wide, steps back smartly from where he and Riddick have had a rare moment of contact while working side by side at the prep counter. It takes him a moment to sort out which memory is which, which loss is his to bear and which he was given a mere glimpse of for a moment.

His bright brown eyes are steady on his friend while he does so, taking in his reaction as well, trying to decide what to do with his own.

Riddick makes a low, discontented noise in his throat; without realizing it he's shifted his grip on the paring knife from 'peeling potatoes' to an overhand stab. He puts it deliberately down, and shakes himself.

"Eva."

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warisart - 2013-09-25 00:11 (UTC) - Expand

At age five, they learned the days of the week. It made more sense, then, as the first step towards expanding their curriculum. Different classes could be taught on different days as their maturing minds and bodies were able to handle a wider array of activities and subjects.

Today is Sunday. To many people that Ben will not learn about for several years, this means it is a day of rest. All it means to Ben is that beyond the hour of laps at 0500, showers at 0610, and the morning meal at 0630. At 0700 is Languages, 0900 is Mathematics, 1100 is another half hour of laps, the midday meal at 1200, and two hours of Electronics at 1300.

Then, at 1500, is endurance training.

There is a pool at Manticore. Sometimes it's used for swimming laps, sometimes for specialized recovery, and sometimes for underwater training maneuvers. There are, however, fifteen sets of leg cuffs at the bottom of one side, bolted into the tile flooring and secured with cables. Ben, along with the rest of his unit, is in the pool, far enough under the water to touch the bottom, holding his breath.

If even one of them cannot stay under for the full length of time today, all of them will be secured into the cuffs, and they will be forced to find a way to do it anyway.

He fits into the memory as though he is another - not child, not pupil - trainee. He is beside Ben, small, undefined in his physical particulars, he feels as Ben feels. They are holding their breath. They hope to do well. This is not strange.

(This is bizarre. He has lived under regimentation, at medical school, but never with this totality, and never as a child. He has authorized brutal training methods - and yet, again, never for children. He has seen children used as slaves, but as labor, as some venture with immediate results in exchanged for the exploitation. He doesn't understand the purpose this serves.)

He does not need to understand; he obeys.

On the sliding scale of the units' collective abilities, Ben falls somewhere in the middle in this regard; he is neither the strongest nor the weakest and he knows this. There's no gain in lying to oneself when straightforward knowledge of one's abilities, strengths, and weaknesses is paramount to survival. They all know more about each other in this regard than the handlers think.

Ben is not the weakest. Today, Jondy is. Jondy, who is sweet and even-tempered but already struggling not to open her mouth and gasp for air.

Zack and Eva are too far away to see, sandwiching Jack between them, who normally is the first to fail this test. The others are distracted with themselves. Ben's eyes find the Emperor's beside him, dart purposefully towards Jondy; repeat. They can't use the hand signals Manticore taught them or the handlers will know.

Jondy, her hands fluttering in building panic in the water beside her as she fights her body's natural urge to push to the surface, has already begun to lose air when Ben drifts close enough to reach her. He seizes her wrist, and holds her so her feet are firmly against the bottom of the pool.

For now, she panics. Later, she'll be grateful.

He is a mirror.

He is a mirror, he is an accomplice, he understands the message in the moment it is given. He is holding her wrist from the other side, feels her pulse jumping under his fingers.

(The part of him that was a doctor counts instinctively. Slow for a panicking human, fast for the dead. For a transgenic doing endurance, also fast. The awareness of her desperation is instinctive and interstitial, a corroborated by all sources.

It is delicately familiar, as familiar as his sister's face picked out on a coin or a laser-carved cameo, all thin relief and compressed detail. The timbre of closeness is different, camaraderie rather than responsibility, but hurting his people to help them, because he must, because the other options are worse, unflinching - this he understands.)

Later, she'll be grateful.

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warisart - 2013-10-13 03:45 (UTC) - Expand

((Any last minute people that want to run into Ben and exchange memories are welcome here. Just tag in with a setup and hit me up for a quick planning session or whatever so I know what you want from him!))

This flood is worrying.

It's not the action itself; the memory switch is fairly unimpressive, as far as some of the floods they've gone through. It's not as flashy as everyone turning into animals or bursting into song, but the possibility of pain is there as it always is, and Beatrix knows the people she loves have no shortage of painful memories.

A large percentage of the passengers have begun to avoid all contact when they figured out the effects, but not Beatrix and not today. She is wandering the ship looking for her people, some powerful caretaker's urge spurring her to make sure she can protect them -- even if she can't.

The mess hall is all but empty between shifts like this, only a few people milling around to grab snacks. None of them catch her interest and she walks past them to the door to the kitchen, knocking on the frame instead of entering.

"Ben, are you in here?"

If Ben knew her thoughts on the flood, he would be in agreement. It's lucky that he shares space with only a small selection of people, normally, although perhaps that is negated by the fact that nearly everyone moves through the dining hall at least once a day. He concerns himself normally with avoiding touch so that's hardly a problem now, the only thing he can think of to keep people safe from the memories dug into his own past.

And then of course, there are those that have come looking for him. He's in the kitchen. He's always in the kitchen. Her voice draws him around the corner beside the flattop grill, first alert and then softening somehow. He stays where he is, clearly visible.

"Hello, Beatrix. May I help you?"

"I just wanted to see if you were all right," she smiles, then her look turns more concerned. "Are you?"

It's his dedication to his responsibilities that made Beatrix worry about Ben in the first place, wondering how he's doing with so many people depending on him and coming in close contact. She knows Ben's not likely to abandon his post due to someone else's memories but she anticipates sharing would be hard on him.

Still, Ben is strong and loyal and dependable, sweet as he can be even though he doesn't see that. She can recognize the qualities in him so easily it seems impossible that others don't, as it's some protective pride that makes her prize him so. The same type she'd had for her little girl the instant she found out about her, when that pregnancy test had turned blue.

She’d stood there in astonishment, mouth hanging open, a thousand thoughts racing through her head as her heartbeat quickened until she thought it would burst. Then the bell outside her hotel room suite rang, and she peered through the peephole to see a young Asian woman bearing a large bouquet of flowers on the other side. “Hello, can I help you?”

“Hello, I’m Karen Kim, I’m the hospitality manager for the hotel, I have a welcome gift from the management.”

“Uh, that’s nice, ah--” The pregnancy test slipped from her hand and onto the floor, and she leaned down from the peephole to pick it up. “Can you just leave it by the door --”

The space immediately above her exploded, a spray of buckshot blowing a fist-sized hole through the door right where her chest had been moments before. She rolled out of the way, ghosting into the bathroom as she heard the woman kick open the door to follow her, and somehow her heart pounded like a drum in her chest, echoing hard in her ears, so loud she can barely keep track of the woman’s footsteps. It’s this anxiety that causes her to miscalculate, to throw open the door a second too early and miss.

She’s never thrown a knife that hard before but the woman blocks it with the butt of her shotgun, giving Beatrix just enough time to dive for the ground and flip out of the way of a fresh shot. It peppered through the door, light shining through the holes into the dim suite. She had half a second to get across the room behind the bed, to the nightstand where she had stashed her .45, and as she aimed -- and the woman aimed back at her -- she had never been as frightened in her life.

Her shoulders were shaking but her hands were somehow steady, her body -- her training -- for perhaps this last time taking over and guiding her instinct to survive. “You pretty good with that shotgun?” she growled, staring down the woman with unblinking eyes.

The woman considered her for a second before she answered with a sneer. “Not that I have to be at this range, but I‘m a fuckin’ surgeon with this shotgun.”

“Well guess what,, bitch,” she breathed, her voice dropping to a dangerous low. “I’m better than Annie Oakley and I got you right in my sight.”

“I could blow your fuckin’ head off.”

“Not before I put one right between your eyes,” she countered, and then came the difficult part. “So let’s talk.

“Karen, I just found out, right now, not a moment before you blew a hole through the door, that I’m pregnant.”

The woman’s aim stayed true, but her finger didn’t move on the trigger. “What is this?”

“On the floor by the door is a strip that says I’m pregnant.”

“Bullshit.”

Beatrix laughed. “Any other time you’d be 100% right. This time, you’re 100% wrong.” She moved to right herself, keeping Karen in her sights. “I’m the deadliest woman in the world,” she intoned. “But right now?“ Her voice cracked and became rushed, as she pushed out the truth to this strange enemy: “I’m just scared shitless for my baby. Please, just look at the strip.” Karen stayed where she was. “Please!”

Closed to Alex : CW for institutionalized abuse of children

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Closed to Abigail : CW for insanity and reference to child abuse

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Closed to Anya : CW for insanity and reference to child abuse

Closed to Anya : CW for insanity and reference to child abuse

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Closed to Riddick : CW for violence against children, institutionalized abuse of children

Closed to Riddick : CW death, happens in shiny-eye-ovision

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Closed to the Emperor : CW for institutionalized abuse of children

Closed to the Emperor : CW for institutionalized abuse of children

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OPEN

Mess hall/kitchens

Mess hall/kitchens

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