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Entry tags:
- alias,
- anders,
- captain jack sparrow,
- cora,
- frodo baggins,
- gideon "mouse" graham,
- harry dresden,
- jack kelly,
- jaye rinnark,
- jesse pinkman | au,
- laughing beauty,
- libby,
- miles edgeworth,
- niall o corcoráin,
- nikolai luzhin,
- percy jackson,
- quinn fabray,
- sawyer "soysauce" sciarrino,
- sirius black,
- the girl (subject 23)
video
[Why are things floating.
Libby sits (this time on a table in the kitchens--chairs exist, girl, why are you like this) and she is surrounded by slowly drifting utensils.
She's already figured out how to lie about it. She never told anyone she wasn't telekinetic. (Because who does that?). So she'll just say they made her like this, and Jesse's secret will be protected while Libby gets to show off--because this is wicked sharp, and even makes her confident enough to roll up her sleeves, baring scars and soft white feathers.
She grins at the camera, which she turned on with her mind.]
'Sup, bitches.
[She's not opening this up to the network for any reason. Can't a girl just be bored?]
[What she sends to her--crew, that's what she calls them. Her crew, like she's some fucking gangbanging idiot.
But they're not her friends, and allies sounds so formal. So crew it is. (She knows that Jesse is a surprisingly good hugger, that Mouse has a sweet smile, that Nikolai doesn't want to be called Nik. She has to be careful, here, because if she's not--she's going to end up wanting to keep them around. She'll actually like them, and then where will she be?)
(It's already over.)
What she sends them is different. Still things floating, still on a table, but she looks serious for once.]
'Kay.
Status reports, if you got 'em. And I got one.
So--we're Jesse, Mouse, and Nikolai, right now. And me, obvious. Jesse, Mouse, Nikolai is going to be our protection around here.
But that's complicated, because--I've got in with Loki, too, and he is--wicked dangerous. But I want what he's got. And he can be useful. But I'll handle him, 'kay? He doesn't know you, just me, and--look what I can do.
[She waves her hand around and smiles, briefly, before--serious, again.]
I'll drop him when we can't use him anymore. Promise. But stay the fuck away from him, he's bad fucking news.
Libby sits (this time on a table in the kitchens--chairs exist, girl, why are you like this) and she is surrounded by slowly drifting utensils.
She's already figured out how to lie about it. She never told anyone she wasn't telekinetic. (Because who does that?). So she'll just say they made her like this, and Jesse's secret will be protected while Libby gets to show off--because this is wicked sharp, and even makes her confident enough to roll up her sleeves, baring scars and soft white feathers.
She grins at the camera, which she turned on with her mind.]
'Sup, bitches.
[She's not opening this up to the network for any reason. Can't a girl just be bored?]
[What she sends to her--crew, that's what she calls them. Her crew, like she's some fucking gangbanging idiot.
But they're not her friends, and allies sounds so formal. So crew it is. (She knows that Jesse is a surprisingly good hugger, that Mouse has a sweet smile, that Nikolai doesn't want to be called Nik. She has to be careful, here, because if she's not--she's going to end up wanting to keep them around. She'll actually like them, and then where will she be?)
(It's already over.)
What she sends them is different. Still things floating, still on a table, but she looks serious for once.]
'Kay.
Status reports, if you got 'em. And I got one.
So--we're Jesse, Mouse, and Nikolai, right now. And me, obvious. Jesse, Mouse, Nikolai is going to be our protection around here.
But that's complicated, because--I've got in with Loki, too, and he is--wicked dangerous. But I want what he's got. And he can be useful. But I'll handle him, 'kay? He doesn't know you, just me, and--look what I can do.
[She waves her hand around and smiles, briefly, before--serious, again.]
I'll drop him when we can't use him anymore. Promise. But stay the fuck away from him, he's bad fucking news.
action;
(He's almost honest with Anna, almost, because he can't help himself. She's a breath of innocent air, but she's so stupid sometimes, coming all alone to Semyon's restaurant. It's a good thing that Semyon only asked him to take care of Stepan- and he wonders what kind of man would spare a young woman, but would rape a child.
He doesn't want to think about it.)
He plucks the cigarette out of his mouth, smoke trailing around his lips. ]
Suits I got from home. [ Dry. ] You so bored you asking me about clothes?
action;
[Libby wants to figure you out, Nikolai. There are things she thinks are discrepancies in how you behave, little glitches. Why you're still here when she is so difficult. Human interaction is a programming language she's unskilled in, but she learns fast. Not fast enough to figure out Nikolai alone, though.
So it reminds her of Jesse, but she thinks that could never be what's actually going on. She's good for what she can do, good for using. Who cares about her as a person? She's not even real.
She scoots to the edge of the table and swings her legs over the edge, keeps them swinging while she sets her computer aside and bites her lip.]
If you're right--about him. What am I supposed to do? If you're right, I mean--he's gonna want to kill me. And I don't want to die. So what do I do?
action;
Because see, if she's curious about him, he's curious about her too. Not curiosity for its own sake, but because he needs to be able to predict her actions. He acts like a pathmaker, setting fences on her sides so that she has only one or two paths to go and she cannot go too awry. Nikolai knows the power of his words; knows exactly how to manipulate.
He's fucking proud of that. It's why he's survived amongst the vor, after all. ]
You stop talking to him. [ Dryly, and he walks over to the kitchen counter. Stubs out the burnt down cigarette butt on the table. ] You don't do stupid shit. Don't try to look inside at his conversations.
[ He picks up an apple and chomps on it, crunches upon it and looks at her. There's probably something incredibly jarring about a man like him, with smoke still clinging to his clothes, eating a red apple cheerfully. Nikolai's lips quirk upwards at the thought. ]
Like a fucking mouse, you learn to hide from snake.
action;
[Not a protest, just a fact. Every time things got too hot in one place leaving was only as hard as running--she's lost two computers to that, built new ones. Lost everything she owned in the world because she is always ready at a single sign to drop it all and go. She's never worth pursuing and no one she offends has the resources to catch her. So that's how she's survived.
It's also that she does adapt: case in point being that she's subdued around Nikolai by choice. She could keep mouthing off, reflexively, but that won't get her what she needs. She watches him eat curiously, not bothering to conceal it.]
I'm a bird. It's sort of what we do. But yeah. 'Kay.
[She looks away and ruffles her hair, a little, finger catching on bent wire that holds it all twisted. What holds her together? Even Libby couldn't say. Maybe that one more breath and one more day--those would be the ones that counted.]
If he does kill me, will you stay with everyone else? They're useful. Promise. Nobody's dead weight.
action;
You don't think. [ He lets his hand drop back to his side like it's nothing. It's almost affectionate, really, that smack. Not particularly hard. Not painful at all. Something that would be a rough ruffling of the hair if he had left his hand in her hair for a longer time. ] Here, no place to run.
[ He looks at her, and there's nothing more he wants to do than to reassure her that she's going to be safe, that he'll take care of her. But that's giving false hope, and Nikolai isn't stupid. That- that, and he doesn't think that he knows how to use those words anyway.
He snorts slightly, crunching onto the apple. ]
No reason for me to. [ He points at her. ] Your deal, rest of them like baggage. You dead, no more deal. [ And the rest of them dies too.
That, he thinks, should be incentive enough. ]
action;
Not at the smack--that made her laugh, a little, bringing up a hand as if to playfully bat at him until she thought better of it, but at the idea that it all hinges on her. It's not just Loki. It's that either way she's been sick almost two and a half months now, that gives her--what, seven, eight more? Maybe a year and eight months with treatment. In a few months she won't be able to walk, probably. Medbay can't spare what she needs. Her throat closes.
She wanted to leave something behind. Something--good, a good thing she did. She is horribly aware she could cry now. But she doesn't. Just--nods, tinily.
More incentive than he knows: be smarter, stay alive, make him see they're part of the deal too. She grips the edge of the table.]
Then I better not fucking die, I guess. I--if I stay alive, can that change? Would you be willing to change it if I just--if I stay alive longer. Because this ship might kill me anyway if he doesn't, I just--if I stay alive two months. Can we talk about it?
Re: action;
But there's something about the way that she speaks about her death that makes Nikolai's eyes narrow. He's known people with terminal diseases. It's not their bodies that give them away - he's known as man with AIDS that had worked perfectly well as a bratok - but it's in the way they acted. Their complete recklessness, as if they are defying death by courting it, by daring it to come and pluck them from their earth all the sooner.
He's not sure, with her. Not yet. It's too soon, and Nikolai's eyes are sharp and his mind works fast, but not this fast. He stores that information in his mind even as he leans back against the kitchen counter, finishing the apple. ]
Must have shitty view of yourself, if you think you only live for two months. [ He pushes himself off the counter, walking over to a trash bin and tossing the apple core inside. His eyes flicker towards her. ]
You planning to run out of airlock?
action;
[Half true and obviously so, but this is one thing she's not going to crack on. She doesn't want to tell him that not only is she an idiot but she's one with an expiry date, because then he has even less reason to be invested in her.
So she shrugs. Realism, right? Just being smart about her chances.]
Or I don't come out the other side of a jump. You know that could happen and who the fuck knows where we actually end up after that. I don't think we go home, that's for fucking sure. The odds are fucking ridic.
[A beat.]
You didn't answer the question.
action;
[ He's realistic too, and he knows that whatever she says is true. Girl like her, they don't live long. Just look at Tatiana, dead at fourteen on an operating table, dead from rape and heroin and Semyon's atrocities that leave marks all over her arms. Which brings him to the next point.
He reaches out and slips her hair off of her shoulder, fingers grazing the air above her skin. Then he looks down at the modifications in her body before his fingers goes to her chin, tilting her head up so she looks at him. ]
You do this to yourself?
[ Almost idly. ]
action;
He ghosts his fingers above her skin and she feels no threat. He tilts her chin and she smiles softly, happily, because he sees what good work she did.]
Yeah. Isn't it--I made these, you know. All of them, from nothing. And I put them in. You know how hard that is?
[She touches the back of her neck, where her spinal shunt is. This is one of those things that just makes her happy: she took her body back, made it hers, from the ugly shunt on her neck to the piercings in her face. It distracts her.]
Aren't they beautiful?
action;
He's not shocked by body modifications. There's plenty of people that he's met with piercings everywhere; who stretch their ears wide open until you can shoot a bullet through the hole because it's so fucking big. And of course, there are the tattoos. But this?
This is new. ]
Don't know beauty. [ A little dry. Beautiful things don't last long amongst the mafiya. They die easy, they die fast. Especially pretty girls like Anna.
(But plainness doesn't help either. Tatiana was plain, as far as he knows.) ]
What they do?
action;
Spinal shunt. Self sealing so, you know, I don't fucking die when I don't need it. Memory card, for keeping sensitive things I don't want to get hacked--you'd have to rip it out of me. Lockpick for electronic seals. Earbud in here--you can't see it--mostly because I hate headphones and want an ear open. Vitals monitor to know if I'm getting sick.
[A maze of scars, wire, and wrongness underneath her skin, and Libby is so proud of the Frankenstein's monster she's become.]
I did my first one when I was--fourteen and a couple months? The lockpick. I'm self-designed.
[Why would she be afraid of someone who bullies her into safety?]
action;
He doesn't even bat an eyelid when she strips off. Sex hasn't been for pleasure for a long time, and he's seen too many women naked or near to that to look with any real interest anymore.
Jaye is a strange case, and he thinks it's because she offers sex without strings; sex with a woman strong enough to protect herself. He thinks about Anna again, the warmth of her lips against his own, and he knows that he will never have her because he will ruin her eventually. ]
Looks fucking painful. [ Idly, as if he's commenting on the weather. Pain doesn't mean much to him, and he knows that physical pain is the lesser of all possible evils. It's the pain that digs inside your brain and splits your self that matters, and these things are obviously not that. ]
You got memory card. [ Pause, then he chuckles. ] So you what? Plug yourself in?
action;
It's wireless. But it's got--you wouldn't know what I was talking about if I told you. [Fact. Not saying he's stupid, just...fact. most other engineers of her breed wouldn't even understand.] If you're not me and you can't hardwire it you can't get in.
That one was when I was fifteen. Just fifteen, I think. I'm supposed to be a May kid but who the fuck knows. Anyway. I was on my second computer when some fuck tried to jack my virus collection, and I got him, but--it made me think. So I built it and sewed it in.
[She looks at him, appraising.]
Yeah. It hurt. They got infected a lot, I used to--I tried putting it on the other side first. But your tattoos hurt. Things that matter hurt.
[She's still swinging her legs in alternation, one foot then the other arcing out.]
Have you ever read Frankenstein?
action;
But he doesn't say that. He doesn't think she'll understand what he means, and he won't blame her for her confusion. When you smoke, do you blame people for telling you that you smell of smoke? Same principle.
Instead, he only shrugs. ]
Don't got much time to read. [ The last thing he's read was Tatiana's library. Before that- he doesn't even remember. Nikolai isn't a scholar; far from it. ] Especially not English books.
What is about?
action;
[Not even in his day, she thinks. In hers almost no one has heard of it, but Anderson had a copy in his dragon's horde of a library, and Wren had fallen in love.]
There's a guy named Victor Frankenstein who wants to make life, and he does. But he sees what he did and he can't handle it, he didn't know whay he was getting into. So he runs away and leaves him to die. But he doesn't die. He comes back, and he shows Frankenstein that you have to take responsibility for the things you make. Everything you make is always your responsibility.
[It's not the moral most people take away. Libby knows it's supposed to be about the hubris of man, the folly of trying to be god. But Libby is the product of hubris, and she will read it any way she wants to.]
His name was Adam. Who Frankenstein made. They never name him in the book but--there's this line, 'the Adam of your labours'. That he should have been more but now he's just wrecked because Frankenstein couldn't handle something ugly.
[She looks at her scar-wrecked arms, her lightly fluffed embarrassed feathers--because she never talks about this. But she never talks to someone who seems to understand as much as Nikolai, and she wants him to understand why this matters so much. Not the stigma of stars, no, but indeliable and meaningful still.]
I used to be really pretty. This is better, you know? I look on the outside like I do inside. When people look at me they have to see what they made. They have to fucking own up to it.
action;
But they know his name. They've crowned him now. Vor, King of Thieves, and Russian desk wants him to come back. They don't want to see what they've done to him. The tattoos on his body, all of them real, paid with the blood of the Organizatsiya, of the bratva. Of Nikolai's own soul.
Yeah, he gets it. Clean, unmarked skin doesn't suit him anymore. It's better this way, with all of his sins on display. But he only says- ]
People don't make people where I come from. Not like they make you. [ He leans against the counter again, half-folding his arms. ]
But you look fake like this, they want to kill you more. [ Because, you see, people would rather erase the mistake and make it such that no one has ever seen it than to own up that they have made a mistake. ]
You want that?
action;
Yes.
[They killed her sister. No shame. Now or ever; her pain and guilt is bright and obvious.]
Even if they kill me they have to live with that.
[Now she makes her smile bright and painless. For Nikolai. She reaches out to gently push his arm.]
You look like Adam, you Boris Karloff fucker. It's a compliment. Act like him too. I should send you the 1931 movie.
[The one with the little drowned girl. She gets the symbolism. She gets it and it's hope, too, because in the books that little girl gets saved. Only in the film does she die, and Libby is something of a purist. People may want to erase their guilt--if it's not Libby it's every girl she stands for, every failed child who fell through a net and ended up Just Another Girl with a sharp tongue and sharper eyes. But she has Nikolai and the story can be different. Maybe she won't drown after all. And all of that fucking unkillable hope shines in her sharp eyes.]
action; why the fuck are you bleeding
Semyon. Slaves give birth to slaves, and he can't help thinking of his own words when he looks at the bright hope in her eyes, and wonders if he has to watch as it's being strangled out of her.
He doesn't want to see it, he thinks. ]
Plenty people kill without regrets. [ He shrugs. ] Little girl you might be, but not that special.
[ It's a kind of warning. If you make your meaning in death instead of in life, you have no control over that meaning. You put it all in the hands of those that kill you, and that's a fucking foolish mistake. ]
action; don't have nightmares next to glasses man
She has never been special. Expensive but not special. She's been bought and sold and traded by people who thought they could keep her--never special.
Nikolai can likely see the flicker of death in her smile. An easy thing to spot if you have even one clue about this girl tucking her knees up under her.]
I'm not. I'm nothing. But I will make them remember me.
[And you, she doesn't say. You remember me. Remember sometimes I was funny and I believed in you and I cared about silly things. Remember me.]
action; .... face or hands.
Don't know why you keep talking if you not going to listen.
[ Because it drives back to the same point again: that whether or not he remembers is up to him, to his memory, to his fucking choice. Not hers, never hers, because she doesn't control his head and she never will be able to.
There's no point being remembered, because there's always something disagreeable about someone else's memories of you. They're never fully accurate, and more importantly, those memories die with that person. What's the fucking point of trying? Nikolai builds his reputation when he's alive. When he's dead- when he's dead, he isn't going to give a shit.
He gives her another look before he turns around to walk out of the kitchens. ]
Got things to do. [ Like return Jaye her lighter. ] Don't get into stupid shit.
action; arm and I will have some badass scars according to the doctor
A little funny and it crushes her heart in her chest. She'll never see twenty, no matter what. Her whole life will fit into two decades with room to spare and she can never tell anyone. He turns to go and she just--feels lost. Like she wants to explain why she can't listen to everything, because it's different for her.]
'Kay.
[He's almost gone--her voice rises like the chirp of a bird.]
I listen. I listen to you. I'm just--learning. But I listen. I listen to--everything you say, I'm trying.