HARK! How the bells, sweet silver bells...

[piper90npcs]

Who: Everyone
What: Holiday Events
Where: Piper 90 - The Rig
When: Post-Rose Tattoo
Warnings/Notes: Holiday cheer, smooches, tactical snowball action

It's the Holiday Season in the Gone Away World and on the Rig in particular! Though they claim to be open to any cultural celebration of this time of year, the dominance of Santa Claus, reindeer, and elves in decorating really kind of blunt that claim. But the PA system, when not blaring alarms or fuzzy announcements for working party C to show up at the maintenance bay, play Christmas tunes of all sorts at inconvenient volumes. Decorations hang limply from the walls. And every worker with children has been issued a shotgun and a bandoleer of shells loaded with pellets of cold iron.

Just in case.

Comments

[zerg_rush]

Nice try, but she's a telepath.

"Whoa, hey, sorry." Kerrigan raises her hands in placation and takes a step backwards, dropping her telekinetic efforts. "You okay?"

[greyerrant]

"I am sorry. I react poorly to things like that. My first impulse..."

He stops, and lowers his head. "My first impulse was to map out a way to try to kill you. I do not think your powers are going to solve this."

[zerg_rush]

Kerrigan just snorts again. "The usual ways will work." Not the first time someone's threatened to kill her, she doubts it will be the last, and besides, he feels bad about it.

"I wonder why the kiss didn't do it." She drums her fingers against a thigh, channeling her agitation into one small movement. Her training tells her to suppress it entirely, but you know what, she doesn't work for the Confederacy anymore and doesn't have to do a constant robot impression. "Maybe you have to mean it," she suggests, dubious about both the idea and what it entails.

[greyerrant]

"Mean what?" Loken asks, clearly confused by the whole kiss discussion and the idea of 'usual ways.'

[zerg_rush]

Oh, goddammit.

"I'm just wondering if maybe the...magic spell makes it so the kiss would have to have real emotion behind it, not just a symbolic thing." She sighs yet again, this time with the air hissing out between her teeth. "You're certainly good-looking, but..."

But.

But...she doesn't even know. But basically everything.

[greyerrant]

"Oh. I think I see the problem. Well, I am certain the stuff will have a limited life span. So if worse comes to worse I can be left here as long as someone brings by food. "

Loken thinks for a moment " I am not sure if my sus-an organ still works but if it does I can just take some rest for a few weeks. "

[zerg_rush]

"What?" What a dumb idea that is, what's a sus-an organ, what the hell. Kerrigan pulls out her comm and starts typing search strings. "No, there's got to be another way. I'm not leaving you standing in the middle of the damn hallway for a week."

There are people she'd cheerfully subject to that, but Loken is much less of a burning toxic waste dump than most of the people she knows.

[greyerrant]

"I guess we're down to kissing then. So how do we do that right?" He looks very intent, not so much passionate as dedicated to his craft, be it war or just getting out of an awkward situation in a direct and decisive way.

[zerg_rush]

Kerrigan blinks up at Loken as though she hasn't understood what he said.

What.

"I..." she trails off, because what do you say to that? "You, uh, want a kissing...lesson?"

What.

[greyerrant]

"I was expecting more directions but I suppose lessons are also a practical way of approaching things." He still looks at her with a stoic expression, clearly having no idea this is a flustering thing to ask anyone, let alone someone you have barely met before.

[zerg_rush]

Kerrigan can't quite manage to tell Loken that it's functionally the blind leading the blind, and she's not sure his if utter lack of guile and pure businesslike intent makes it better or worse.

"Uh, well, the point is intimacy," she says, scrubbing at the back of her head. "I don't really know how it feels for non-telepaths." Is this happening? When does she wake up? "You press lips together, and for the, uh, romantic version, your tongues touch, too."

She pauses, mentally replaying what she's just said.

"...It sounds ridiculous when I say it aloud."

[greyerrant]

"I have an idea." Garviel reaches out and slowly, gingerly gives her a hug. "I have seen baseline humans give each other this kind of embrace, sometimes as a prelude to kissing. Perhaps this will get us accustomed to the idea."

He notices she is very small, and much like an old friend, very pretty. Some sadness wells into his mind, and expression during the awkward embrace. There was a kind of love there lost, even if it wasn't the grand romantic types which Astartes cannot at all imagine.

[zerg_rush]

"It's called a hug," Kerrigan says as she lets herself be pulled in. Not much she could do against those muscles, anyway, at least not without making things telepathically unpleasant for them both. "It's...not always about romance," she adds, pointlessly.

Tentatively, she returns the most awkward hug in human history, holding Loken with the sort of loose embrace a high schooler uses on that one aunt who smokes too much, the proximity and focus meaning she couldn't avoid reading his mind if she tried.

"Is she gone?"

[greyerrant]

Loken blinks, then remembers she is a psyker, so that's normal. He says, very softly. "Yes." He remembers the goodbye. The Mersadie that was not mersadie, but Samus, the Mersadie that was mersadie. 'I have always struggled with poetry.' The goodbye. The fall. The plasma tube. And the wrenching sense of grief that followed. He stares past Kerrigan, lost in his own hurt.

technically cw: suicide?

[zerg_rush]

"Oh." Loken's grief fills her mind as well, very human and at the same time alien to Kerrigan. She's never known anyone well enough to mourn them that way. Her arms tighten around Loken's chest, her half of the embrace becoming something more authentic in whatever inadequate comfort she can offer.

"I...know how she felt," Kerrigan says, because she can't say she knows how he felt, not in the way the expression means. "That was good of her. To jump, I mean."

[greyerrant]

"I have been made to protect humanity. And when I wanted to protect my friend... one of the few humans I was close to outside of the fraternity that was lost to me, I failed. And in the end she was the one to protect me."

He holds Kerrigan, arms almost uncomfortably cinched around her. He is nearly weeping, and obviously forgetting where he is at least for a moment. He should probably be reacting poorly to a psyker in his memories, in his thoughts. But he is so tired, and the siege is so far away. There is only grief in a strange land. And so for the first and only time, he allows himself to truly mourn and feel some of the emotions that he has had walled away, or sublimated into anger.

[zerg_rush]

Kerrigan is the last person to come to for advice on healthy coping methods, but at least telepathy means never being forced to explain how you're feeling.

"You do your best. Sometimes it's not enough." She sighs, feeling the rough fabric of Loken's jumpsuit under her cheek, the pull of her ponytail trapped under his arm. "If you're lucky, sometimes you get a chance for revenge."

[greyerrant]

Loken nods, thinking on how he butchered Horus Aximand. If Kerrigan is peeking into his mind, she can see him shoving a chainsword through another scar-faced space marine in black and gold armor, with a big red eye on it. There is a lot of mutual hate there, but... only emptiness, at the end. "I have had my revenge. It feels like a hole where I just want more. Another brother of mine, someone I only met once said the war would never end. I suppose that is all that is left to me."

He thinks for a moment about the life that they had been intended to lead, after some theoretical end of war. He pushes it away as too distant, and looks at Kerrigan, his rain-colored eyes locking with her more vibrantly colored green eyes. "I take it you're pressing towards the same kind of revenge?"

ty for remembering her eyes are green BLIZZARD SURE DIDN'T

[zerg_rush]

Kerrigan purses her lips. "If I go back to where I was, I'm dead," she says, matter-of-fact. Ghosts don't live to a ripe old age. "But if being here somehow changes something, there's a man named Mengsk whose life isn't going to be worth a cubic meter of vacuum."

I could have said blue JUST TO BE A BUTT.

[greyerrant]

"What did he do to you?" He holds her gaze, curious about how she was hurt, not realizing he's about to hear something fairly familiar.

:P

[zerg_rush]

"He left me to die because I wouldn't sell my soul to follow him," she says, bitter and resigned and not knowing that the idiom she's chosen isn't an idiom to Loken. "I just kept giving him second chances, like an idiot, but the moment he saw an opening he sacrificed my unit to get me out of the way."

At least Jimmy and the Magistrate had gotten out in time. She hopes. Kerrigan wouldn't put it past those two to do something stupid like try to extract her from the center of the zerg swarm.

[greyerrant]

His hug gets very tight as he flashes back to Istvaan III. His voice roughens further and he says. "I know exactly what that is like. My... my gene-father sacrificed me and my dear friend Tarik to his own ambitions in a similar way. I lived."

Nobody else that he knows of survived the massacre, though there were a few here and there in various battlefronts over the great Heresy war, as it is already being known colloquially."But he is beyond my power to kill. What is a man, however enhanced, to a demigod?"

[zerg_rush]

"Nothing's unkillable," says Kerrigan the assassin, reflexively and a little breathlessly as Loken squeezes the air out of her. She gets an image of Horus from his mind without really intending to, a man imposing and charismatic and inextricably bound in Loken's psyche with a complex tangle of love rotted into hate. "You just need the right weapon."

Which, granted, can be hard to come by.

[greyerrant]

"Perhaps." He frowns. "We got a long way from kissing, have we not?" That might be deflection. That might be worry that she's been poking around in his memories. That might also be just a bit of comfort at touching another person. While sexual response is not a thing for Astartes, the comfort of companionship and intimate touch certainly is, though normally not touching well... women.

eww GIRLS

[zerg_rush]

Evasion or otherwise, he's not wrong.

"Oh yeah, right. C'mere." Kerrigan reaches up behind his neck to pull his face down to hers, none of the pull-up bullshit this time. They've certainly broken down enough of the intimacy barrier that Kerrigan's hesitation and awkwardness are gone--and maybe she's just a bit sick of standing the hallway, hugging this strange man and soaking in secondhand grief. "You're lucky you're handsome."

Now that Kerrigan's no longer tripping over her metaphorical feet, all her movements are swift and smooth, and she presses her lips to Loken's, her hand moving to his cheek. Nothing too special about getting to first base with a marine, right? She'd managed it easily enough with Jim.