goneawayworld | Being Alone

Entry tags:

Being Alone

Who: South and anyone who encounters her
What: South trying to avoid everyone and her problems at once, and failing
Where: Various places on the Rig
When: Several days after South and York's arrivals
Warnings/Notes: None up front

South’s not really used to being alone, not really. Growing up with a twin you can’t shake for trying does that to a person, she supposes. As much as she resents it, resents him, it’s… a difficult adjustment, to make, one made infinitely harder by her lack of anywhere else to turn.

Turns out pissing off everyone you know from home is a poor choice, who’d’ve thunk it, huh?

Dealing with things in a healthy manner isn’t one of South’s strong suits, so rather than doing so she decides the best course of action is to simply avoid anywhere she might encounter her brother or get into another fight with Washington (he’s more than capable of handing her ass to her on a silver platter and she’s getting tired of it, if she’s honest) or have to deal with York (who’s just a pain in the ass, really).

For days, rather than get involved in anything festive or going out of her way to get to know the other New Hires, South spends her time in a few places:

a) On the Top Deck, which she finds supremely uncomfortable thanks to the daytime heat, but it also means most people won’t appear to bother her, so she considers it a fair trade. Sat near the edge, she sits and watches the fucked-up world outside and finds that it is possible to miss home, even when home sucks too.

Of course, it’s not a fool proof plan. When someone does come by and join her, she sighs to herself, but comments, “Weird fucking view, huh?”

b) In the Training Area, where she spends all of her time whaling on punching bags, lifting weights, running, or beating up training droids violently enough to break a couple. She could request her equipment but she’s not training to train, she’s there to exert restless energy and rage without directing it at the poor fucks around her. Easier to focus on the feeling of punching something than on your emotional turmoil!

The sound of someone coming up behind her makes her pivot, fist raised— but she holds back and huffs, instead, rolling her shoulders as her arm falls. “Watch it. Unless you wanna get hit, stay the fuck back.”

c) She wanders the gardens, the once, because even South sometimes needs somewhere relatively quiet to go. She’s not looking for anyone; quite the opposite, really, she just wants to get away from everything else for a while.

Unfortunately for her, she’s not the only one. Fortunately for whoever else she encounters, she’s at her least combative down here and simply says, “Kinda nice in here. Don’t remember the last time I saw so many fuckin’ plants.”

d) The Mess, is one of the few times she can’t get around communing with the group, but even during their shifts there the she tries her best to keep to herself by sitting as close to alone as she physically can. Perched at the ends of tables, not looking anyone in the eye, but occasionally glancing up at the sound of familiar voices before setting her gaze firmly back on her plate.

When someone sits nearby, she rolls her eyes and swallows her mouthful of food. “There’s other open seats, y’know.”

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"Yes, it is nice here." A man in barely-fitting coveralls turns to her, his pale form splattered with soil and a trowel in his hand. Apparently he'd been doing some gardening before she approached. He is scarred, and holds himself like a warrior, not a laborer, but despite all that, he looks to have been planting some flowers before she got here.

South gives him a once-over, brow raised, but the look doesn't linger. She makes her observations and then she just folds her arms, leaning her weight back on a heel and looking down at the flowers he's been planting.

"Almost feels outta place, in the middle of all this," she gestures vaguely around at their surroundings, at the rig. "Didn't expect to find anywhere on here that's actually... well, not horrible."

She holds herself like she's always ready for a fight, as if she's always expecting a fight, but otherwise appears relatively relaxed, contrary as that may seem.

"Yes," Stacia agrees cheerfully, "but high school cafeteria rules say the popular girls can sit where ever they want, so here I am."

She gives South her most winning smile.

"I'm Stacia. Are you South Dakota or South Carolina? Since you're not answering the "what's your real name" question."

South raises a brow and snorts, a sound that balances somewhere between amused and a 'really?'. "And that's you, huh, the popular girl?"

Looks young enough to be exactly that, South figures, which is enough to push down even South's instinctive urge to tell her to fuck off and mind her own business.

Stacia's the first person to make the connection between her name and the other Freelancers—at least, that the first to do so where South can hear it—and South sighs, dropping her fork.

"There was no South Carolina," she says, answering without answering. Her gaze flicks subconsciously across the room to the tall blonde that she shares half her features with, before flicking away just as quickly. "But it's just South. Nothing else."

"No one has argued when I've said so, so it must be true," Stacia says, grinning like she's letting South in on a joke. "Besides, I'm cute and can instill terror in grown men, I'm pretty sure that's the definition of a popular girl. Wash almost threw himself off of a bench entirely when I sat down next to him."

Why yes, she did see Wash and South's encounter on the network, and she is absolutely going to try and use that knowledge to get South to like her. She politely busies herself with her utensils and pretends she doesn't see South glancing across the room at the guy who is obviously her brother, with whom South is very obviously not sitting. He and the confrontation with Wash was what had put her onto the 'Dakota or Carolina' question in the first place.

"Just South it is," she says agreeably. "I usually stick to the names people tell me to call them, unless I'm trying to needle them. And even then, it's usually something snappy, like 'Cupcake'."

The mental image inspired by that anecdote, of hard-ass Washington—who has kicked South's ass no less than twice since she got here—throwing himself away from a teenage girl, is more than enough to get a snicker out of South.

"Now that's something I'd fuckin' pay to see."

She can't argue with that definition of popular girl nor does she feel inclined to, so she doesn't. She just takes a swig of her drink and wipes her mouth, then leans forward against the edge of the table, her food ignored for now.

"Good policy," she says. "Always better to piss people off on purpose than as a side-effect."

That's certainly what she's been doing, much to her own detriment.

The heat isn't unmanageable, but Ric would agree that it's uncomfortably hot. Climate-controlled utopias have a lot in their favour, compared to this nightmare-scape.

It's not the worst view that he's had since arriving. That would likely be the aliens. But there's something tremendously disturbing about the grey-green cloud in the distance. It bends and swirls, like a cloud should, but the sickly-coloured mass has the cleanest edge that Ric has ever seen in a cloud, and it's the same uniform width despite its twisting shape. It hangs too heavy in the sky.

"At least you're outside." Ric would prefer being on the ground instead of taking a seat atop a mobile work prison, but this is preferable to his quarters. "You gonna tell them the view's too crazy for you?"

"Likely some executive took a liking to the place, so they actually invested some currency and energy into making it decent."

He shrugs his shoulders. "As for me, I do not care why, I am just glad it exists so I can garden."

South relaxes a little at the realisation that he’s at least a face she recognises from when she arrived, rather than some other random New Hire who she’d have to deal with introductions and all that shit from. Even better, she didn’t piss this guy off at all; at least, not as far as she could tell.

“Would you believe me if I said I’d seen fuckin’ crazier?” she asks, leaning back on her hands. “Not weirder, nah, this is weird, but...”

She shrugs a little. She doesn’t know where anyone else here has come from, the kind of stuff they’ve seen at home or here. However, she’s spent the majority of her life under the shadow of intergalactic war with aliens and years of it fighting in that war, she’s seen some shit she’d rate higher on the actual crazy scale. Of course, such things are still a much more familiar kind of crazy than what she expects that this place could conjure up, but for now the thought still stands.

“Oh yeah,” responds Ric, who has definitely seen crazier as well. This is somewhere around the Skrull invasion of Earth and a sentient living island, but it isn’t a demon dimension (or he hopes it isn’t). “If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t be so pissed about being here. You’d be too busy pissing yourself.”

He doesn’t outright offer to let her vent in his direction, because no one really wants to stick their nose in someone else’s misery, but Ric also doesn’t steer the conversation to safe complaint topics like general life on the Rig. They live in a doorless dormitory. Keeping each other sane is self-preservation when most of the New Hires are mutants or superhumans. “Most New Hires don’t act that spooked by it.”

South snorts, idly blows a strand of her purple-dyed bangs from her face. "Guess that's true."

She doesn't say anything else for a moment, gaze set on the scenery and her fingertips drumming against the floor. Thinking.

"This shit isn't all that different from what I left. Not the," she gestures out ahead of them, "but the rest of it. Went from one fucked up program pretending everything they're doing is for the good of humanity to another. What're the fucking odds, huh?"

She shakes her head with a humorless chuckle, but she doesn't sound... upset. It's simply a statement of fact. It's just how things are.

"This thing's new, course," she says, tapping her throat. "But yeah, guess I came primed to be pissed instead of freaked."

Ranulf's actually up in a tree when she comes through, but he jumps down when she speaks, because conversing from the same level seems like the polite thing to do, and most humans he's met don't seem much into tree climbing. He could almost be mistaken for human, from up in the leaves, but once he's more visible, the cat ears and tail clearly toss that right out the window.

"Really? That's a shame. This is about as nice as it gets on the Rig, of course, but it doesn't really hold a candle to home."

Real forests, he misses you.

South does a visible double-take at the ears and tail. Her mouth opens and closes a couple of times as if caught on some sort of exclamation that never quite makes it out, before she remembers that the first New Hire she saw was the Easter Bunny and just decides not to ask.

Shit's weird here. People come from weird places. Maybe it should be concerning how quickly it's become easy to accept this shit, but what energy she has for worrying about things is more than occupied elsewhere.

"Really. Haven't seen anything like it in years," she says with a shrug, casting her eye around the area. "Guessing that's not true for you, uhhh..."

She makes a vague gesture. God, she hates introductions.

She pulls a face at the word 'executive'. The corporate side of things here is honestly one of the most unsettling parts of it all. Things relying on the whims of corporate types is never encouraging.

"Didn't even know we were allowed to do things we actually enjoy," she says with a snort, then continues, not sounding much like she buys into her own words, "but guess we gotta be grateful for the good shit."

She shakes her head. She couldn't name any other 'good shit' if she tried.

"I'm uh, South, by the way. Still pretty new around here."

"I do not think they realize I take pleasure in it, given that I am primarily martial in focus. Also I think they are concerned I might hurt planker if I see him more often, given that I already broke his face once."

He offers her a spade. "If you would like to plant, or move earth, there is plenty of work to be done. I'm Loken."

Edited 2021-01-03 08:15 (UTC)

"You broke that fucker's face?" South hasn't been here long enough to be subjected to more than a few of the mandatory training sessions with Planker, but that's all she needs to have experienced to say, "Don't even have to know what happened there to know he deserved that."

She eyes the spade for a moment, her arms still folded and her foot tapping, before she takes it. "Sure, why the fuck not. Not got anything better to do. Point me wherever."

It'll keep her hands busy and stop her wandering aimlessly for a while, at least.

The man who'd been coming up behind her only raises an eyebrow at her warning.

"Unless you were about to start fucking flailing like an idiot walking into a spider web, you have plenty of room," Brand retorts. South, even irritated, is certainly good enough at what she does to notice that he's absolutely prepared for her to take a swing at him: the right side of his body is turned toward her, minimizing his body target, his knees are loose, and his weight rests on the balls of his feet, which are shoulder-width apart. Clearly someone who knows what he's doing, even if he's an asshole.

"If I do it again, I'll try to record it," Stacia says. It's a lie, she doesn't like to make people uncomfortable without good reason, so the next time she invades Wash's personal space it's going to be to shove a magic key in him and rifle around in his memories. But still, selling it. "It was hilarious."

She raises her drink in a toast to pissing people off on purpose instead of by accident, though she taps it back on the table before she takes a sip, because etiquette training says that's how you do it with non-alcoholic beverages.

"Big fan of only pissing people off on purpose," she agrees. "At least you know which direction the murder attempts are coming from that way."

Weird think for a teenage "popular girl" to say, isn't it?

South rolls her eyes and scowls, falling instinctively into a loose defensive stance to mirror his. What a ball of fucking sunshine this guy sounds like (not that she can talk).

"I don't 'flail'. I was talking about you fucking coming up behind me," she says, a little bit breathless. She's clearly been in here a while, sweat sticking her hair to her forehead. "May as well be looking to get fucking punched, doing that."

South's not exactly the paranoid type, usually, but she'd had more people than usual out for her ass since she got here and, well, she didn't exactly get to the recommended amount of time off after the concussion from her last fight. She's more on edge than usual.

South lazily raises her own drink before taking a big gulp, which doesn't at all disguise the raised brow at that comment. It's a sentiment she can agree with, especially after recent events, but coming from Stacia?

"And how many murder attempts have you had to see coming?" she asks, almost dryly, as if taking it as a joke, but South isn't stupid.

If Jorgmund's dragging people here somehow, like she figures they are, they're probably picking people for a reason. She'd have to be naive to actually dismiss the idea that there's more to this teenage girl than meets the eye, even if she can't imagine for a second what.

"Just a handful," Stacia says. "It turns out that I'm really good at annoying supernatural bullshit that ought to be above my pay grade and surviving the experience." She takes a bite, chews, swallows. "But the political bullshit is the worst by far."

South blinks at her. That kind of deliberate, pointed blinking that perfectly embodies the very simple sentiment of 'what?'

"Supernatural bull—? Y'know what, nope, not even going to question it." She shakes her head and snorts. "I keep doing that. Being fucking surprised as if I didn't get greeted by the fucking Easter Bunny when I got here, fuckin..."

She mutters vaguely and takes another gulp of her drink to buy herself a second to think.

"Just a handful. Fucking hell. And I thought I got up to dangerous shit when I was a teenager."

Which she did; lots of fights, lots of other impulsive decisions, bids for attention. But by the end of her teen years she could more than handle herself; at 6'6" there weren't many things she couldn't come out the other side of better off than the other party. Then she went off to war. Arguably that was a dangerous teenage decision, too.

"Whatever, supernatural and political bullshit, okay, sure." There's the same dry edge to her voice, but it doesn't take a genius to realise that this is simply how South is with pretty much everything. "So, what, you fight monsters or something? Dodge political assassinations in your spare time?"

"I am forming a small new area for these flowers here. If you would be so kind as to help me dig I would be appreciative." He begins to dig, filling some sacking he got with the extra soil, probably intent on using it elsewhere for some other gardening project.

He takes a moment to look up and smile briefly at her. It's obvious he doesn't do it much. It doesn't look forced as much as... an emotion he hasn't done much recently, for whatever reason.

Stacia giggles, swinging her feet under the bench beneath her, because she's five-foot-nothing without the wedge heels Jorgmund only breaks out for her on missions.

"An angel tried to kill me when I was fifteen," she says, clearly enjoying South's suffering. "Which probably would have given me a crisis if I hadn't found out that I was a werewolf a few months before. Ending up in my ass in another universe was basically a matter of "I guess this is what's happening now"."

Whatever South expected to come out of Stacia’s mouth next it was not any of those words, let alone in that order. Yeah, okay, that qualifies as supernatural bullshit to the nth degree, but any attempt to process attempted murder via angel is immediately derailed by the second fact.

“Wait a fuckin— you’re a fucking werewolf? You. Little miss five-foot-fuck-all. A werewolf. An honest to god fucking werewolf.”

It’s that special kind of disbelief where no, she doesn’t doubt that Stacia’s telling the truth, but the truth is, quite frankly, batshit insane. It’s one thing to accept there’s universes where the supernatural is real, and another to realise a werewolf is just casually sitting beside you eating the same mediocre mess hall food that you are.

“What the fuck.”

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