ataraxion | NINE: video

[The room Taylor's sat in is dark, unidentifiable from the wall behind her, but soft, blue-tinged light from another source washes over her face intermittently. It highlights how drawn she looks, pale, tired. She's a mess, really. Even by Tranquility standards.]

It's January, right? Been counting on the jumps since I got here. [She isn't slurring as she speaks, but the lack of focus in her expression and sluggishness to her movements makes it clear she's inebriated to anyone who knows what to look for.] Guess it doesn't matter though. Just start calling them by numbers. I was meant to turn twenty in December. Be an instructor back at the Academy. [She frowns for a moment, taking a drink out of an unlabelled bottle.] Or maybe they'd have terminated me.

[Another pause, and she shifts off to the side for a moment, putting the bottle down. When she comes back into view she’s holding something else – a mask. Her mask, an mongrel canine face, beaten, bruised and bloody. She holds it up, hanging off the fingers of one hand.]

Turns out these show you ghosts. Hallucinations. Whatever. If that isn't fucked up enough to get you thinking don't touch them, you're a fucking idiot. [Very evidently angry, suddenly, half a snarl on her mouth. She looks at the mask again, then drops it to one side.] Didn't want to see my old man the little he was around, sure as fuck didn't want to see him here. Thing I've been thinking, though - what do you see, you wear someone else's?

[She doesn't hold the second mask up for the camera, but it's there in her hands, looks like a modern military gas mask. She's quiet for a long while, like she maybe forgot she even had the comms running, all of the anger and energy drained out of her again.]

Tommy's gone. Gone last jump. Told him he would, cause everyone goes. [A thin smile, strained, sad, and then gone again.] Guess I didn't wanna be right.

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[Everyone keeps saying that name. It's the way it's meant to be, like that, her real name kept hidden. But it makes her frown, because she doesn't remember who's left that knows Taylor, wonders if something's slipping away from her.]

No. [She shakes her head.] I need it.

[She hadn't claimed she'd make sense about any of this.]

You don't need ghosts.

[ He still remembers seeing them on his way back to Earth through the Ark. Mac, holding onto his own head. Jumper, head blown off and one eye hanging out. Duke and the Kid, who had still been alive but had died shortly later. All of them had said it was his fault. All of them had said the way to fix it would be to put a bullet in his brain, to die so that no one else died like them.

He hadn't. He doesn't know if that would even work now, but he'd killed Sarge, stopped the spread. It didn't bring any of them back, never would, just like this isn't going to bring Tommy back. ]

Don't need him. Drunk fucker.

[Her father, she means. Angry and railing against her, shouting and ranting just the way he used to. Sometimes completely silent, just watching. But if the mask gave her some other ghost, her mother, that'd be different (except she knows, it wouldn't. They weren't really there. It wasn't worth anything at all).]

Ghosts and hallucinations are never the people you actually want to see, even when they look that way.

[ Believe him. He knows. ]

[Taylor would say she doesn't want to see her father anyway. Instead she just leans over, grabbing the bottle and twisting the top off, taking a drink before she uses it to point at the comms.]

You see them, when you wore yours?

Thought I did. Always out of reach. And before that, in the Ark.

[ Which is what really matters, because those were the ones that hurt. ]

[The Ark. She's not sure she remembers what that is, but he's saying it like she should and he was her team, she wasn't meant to forget-- but she's screwed up enough on that already, talking like this on the network. None of the rest, of thinking of them as her team, it wasn't gonna matter anymore.]

They say anything?

[ Reaper's not sure if he told her. It was something most people knew about though, back home -- the mysterious Ark. A ship, most people thought, but no... a fucking metaphor, alien technology that they learned may not be so alien after all. ]

Yeah. Most of 'em shouldn't have been able to, the way they were tore up. It was on the way back to Earth from Olduvai -- going through the Ark's never fun, but that trip was... the worst. [ He exhales. ] Told me it was my fault they were dead, my fault they were going to die. That I should just end it, and maybe that'd make it up to them. I almost did.

[ He looks at her, really looks at her now, tries to catch her gaze if she'll let him. ] Like I said. You don't need ghosts.

[Even through the video feed, holding his gaze like that is hard - all the things he's just told her, what he's asking her, everything that's built between them already. It itches uncomfortably under her skin until she's ducking her head, looking back down at her hands.]

Not them I'm holding onto.

[Even if she has the hope, strange and fucked up as it was, that putting Tommy's mask on would show her something of him. His ghosts. Maybe just him (it couldn't bring him back).]

I figured.

[ He sighs. ] But that's not the sort of thing you want to hold onto. Him, sure. But not anything the masks show you.

Not like he left much else.

So you're going to hold onto something he didn't even want? You've got memories. Hell, if you need something tangible, there are old network posts. Hold onto those.

But not that thing.

[She doesn't want to look at all network posts. Doesn't want to be getting pressured like this, how she should remember Tommy, what she should do with the masks. Temper already close to the surface, it's easy to just snap.]

I had a fucking choice I wouldn't be holding onto anything. He'd still be here. But I don't have a choice. So I'm keeping what I've got.

You keep wearing those things and you're going to get someone killed.

[ It might even be her. He hopes not, but he's also not sure that she'd care as much -- so he says "someone". ]

You think that's what he wants?

[No, Tommy wouldn't want that. It'd be the last thing he'd want. But she's too angry now, too raw, and she can't take that she knows Reaper's right.]

Don't make out like you know what he'd want. You don't know shit.

[She doesn't give him a chance to respond before she cuts the feed.]

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