goneawayworld | The Lost and the damned

Entry tags:

The Lost and the damned

Who: Garviel and you!
What: Being sad, sparring, Eating, Gardening
Where: Rig Gardens, Top of the Rig, Cafeteria, Gym depending on prompt
When: Post Babadon't
Warnings/Notes: Will add if they become necessary

Prompt one: Garviel is eating in the Cafeteria. There are plenty of seats nearby as he consumes the best slop Jorgmund has seen fit to send his way as nutrients. He doesn't appear to be enjoying it, just scowling and it gamely. He is approachable enough, and seems ready to talk if someone were to approach.

Prompt two: Loken is doing sword forms in the Gym, 3 blades lying out and ready for use, his chainsword, which is exactly what you might think, an oversized sword with chainsaw blades which he cycles doing his practice, a Power sword, which is a large two-handed weapon with crackling energy pouring off it once activated, and a gladius force sword, which has intricate circuitry which doesn't do much as he continues close combat forms with it, a lot more punching, stabbing, and shorter cuts than the other two heavier blades.

Prompt three: Loken is breaking a sweat in the Gardens, planting a few columbine plants as he continues to dig and transfer them from pots, covered in sweat and with cut-down overalls that barely contain his too large to be human form as he labors mightily to create a little ephemeral beauty in a sad, ugly world.

Prompt four: Garvi is on the top of the rig at night, bundled up in his best attempt at clothes that fit him that are mostly just other people's stuff sewn together in a sort of cloak. He'd probably look a lot more badass in his actual war plate but Jorgmund has got that locked up, as usual. He stares off into the distance as the below-freezing cold hits him, sternly refusing to acknowledge the cold beyond his clothing. It's like a contest between him and the weather. Or maybe he's just dramatic and likes to stand outside at night on top of large buildings. He watches the Helipad and seems to be occasionally looking over the rig and taking note of -where- things are. Like he's planning an assault, or an Exfiltration.

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Loken pauses, unsure how to say this.

"You seem to have been making yourself a bit scarce from my presence. I understand you are a stealth operative, so perhaps I am simply assigning your natural skill to an intentional action. However, if I have given offense I am happy to apologize and make recompense if I have wronged you in some way."

That...is the opposite of what she'd thought was going on, and it takes her a moment of staring blankly at Loken, feeling his apprehension-tinged sincerity, to get her thoughts in something resembling order.

"I, uh." Great start, Sarah.

"I was giving you some space after forcing you to relive Istvaan 3." She purses her lips, her recollection of the mental conversation containing both his emotions and her own guilt at the trespass. "I didn't realize what I was going to be stirring up when I asked."

He smiles, sadly, and removes his helmet after realizing she cannot see his expression. "While it was unexpected, and unwelcome, we are gifted with eidetic memory as part of our augmentations. The past is always with us."

He meets her eyes, quiet for a moment. "You saw something horrific. But it is not my life in totality."

He decides to change the subject a bit. "I am glad we were able to survive the ah, Babadon't. Did you find anything of interest during our explorations?"

It doesn't make much difference to her whether someone's wearing a helmet or not; the melancholy but composed cast of his thoughts tells Kerrigan the same thing his expression does. She wants to explain more, to ask more—Loken recoiled from learning about her telepathy, barely kept his temper over the touch of her telekinesis...why is this time nothing of concern? But he changes the subject, and she lets him, equal parts disappointed and relieved.

"There are some weird people here, Loken," she says, thinking about 'Cure Passion.'

"Yes. We have several stable mutants who can switch back and forth between human and wolf-like forms. I had heard rumors of such things in the other Legions but to see it from what are presumably second millenium humans is incredible."

I mean, really, what are werewolves if not Magical Girls of Gaia though?

"The..." It takes a Kerrigan a second to remember the word. "...Werewolves? Stacia acted like it was strange I'd never heard of anything like that."

Maybe you're the strange one, Stacia.

"They were lost myths in my time. I only remember them because I had recently looked at some books about myths and strange romantic legends." He shrugs. "I know little about humans from that time. Dan has been something of a guide there. Apparently they lived in holes in the ground." Like hobbits!

"Uh." Kerrigan gets the puzzled frown of someone who is pretty sure what she just heard is incorrect. "No one from my sector has been to Earth in a couple centuries, but I don't think the majority of people live underground there."

"I wonder why dan lived underground then? I shall have to ask him." Time for lots of awkward questions about his past.

He's quiet for a while. He looks at Kerrigan. He can't stop looking at Kerrigan. He feels worried and his hearts start pumping quickly. He looks away, entirely uncertain of how to deal with a rush of unfamiliar emotions.

Taking advantage of what seems to her—initially, at least—to be a normal conversational lull, Kerrigan racks her hand weights, fanning her too-large Jorgmund t-shirt a bit to keep it from sticking. Maybe she'll see if she can convince someone to dig up her armor next time. It's as familiar to her as her own skin, and she doesn't need practice wearing it any more than she needs practice breathing, but they don't have to know that.

Kerrigan might not be able to hear heartbeats, but she can hear thoughts, and Loken's sudden unease has her looking around the gym for whatever threat his enhanced senses have picked up. "Everything all right?"

"I am not entirely sure." Which is true. He looks at the weights, those are safe. "I had a thought. You have seen some of the darkness of my past, and that is unavoidable. Might I ask something of yours? Preferably not something that hurt." He looks back, meeting her eyes. Get her talking about herself. Yes, good that's advice some of the helpful people here gave him.

"Oh." That's fair.

But there's a problem. Kerrigan's memory is spotty and fragmented, her childhood lost almost entirely and her years as a ghost a gray blur punctuated by occasional flashes of horror from missions, memories too intrusive for the memory wipes to suppress entirely.

"Ghosts don't get invited to a lot of parties," she says, matter-of-fact but a little lost as to how to answer Loken. "I've run a lot of successful ops for the Sons of Korhal?"

She doesn't think that's what he's asking, but if he's looking for positive memories, even her best are shadowed by pain.

"That is one advantage the Astartes have. We get to stand in all the parades afterwards. Even if they are rather loud and vulgar, at times. At least there is wine." He looks towards the door and sighs. "Little of that to be found here." He looks back to Kerrigan. "Am I correct in understanding the only thing you have in your life that has brought you joy or pride is your combat record?"

Kerrigan shrugs. "I'm ghost," she says, as though that explains everything. "At least with the rebels I'm killing people who deserve it."

There's Jim, but...that doesn't matter anymore. Remembering Jim just hurts now. He was right, she was wrong, and now she—and whoever manages to survive the hopeless battle for Tarsonis—gets to live with that.

"Anytime I get close to someone, they die." Or she dies—the zerg were moments from breaking the terran line, and then it would be over. Standing here talking about it is just some sort of cosmic accounting error.

"I understand that very poignantly." He meets her eyes again. She's seen Istvaan through his eyes. "I can only advise you to enjoy what time you have, here. You can find comrades. Guts, Saturday, Dan, all very trustworthy. I think Stacia is too, for a juve. Even the Abominable Intelligence isn't so bad."

He thinks for a moment, and says, "I had a friend. He was a poet. He suggested that all things were ephemeral, even the things we toiled to make eternal. The only thing we can derive is the joy we find in the moment. Of course, he was a drunk, a womanizer, a vulgar man in all things, but I think he offered good advice in this case." He smiles as he talks about his friend's flaws. An indulgent expression.

Kerrigan doesn't think about her future. She can plan an engagement or an entire war, but a strategy that can't survive the loss of one of its commanders isn't much of a campaign, so it's never about Sarah Kerrigan, only the sharply limited resource that is ghosts. It doesn't bother her much. Death is an occupational hazard.

"I'm not looking for reassurance, Loken. Whatever future I'm building, I know I'm not going to see it. I'm going to die in a decade or two when age slows me down and I make one too many mistakes. I've always known that." She shrugs. Loken feels more strongly about it than she does, she can tell. "Hell, I was about 30 seconds from it when I suddenly found myself here."

Loken doesn't know what to say to that, other than it makes him very sad. He opens his mouth a few times, closes it, then tries again, remustering and regathering thoughts.

"We share a fate then." Is all he can manage. He looks a little lost, his offer of friendship seemingly misunderstood or ignored. However, hen say says she was about 30 seconds from death, he thinks to ask. "Is that something you wish to speak about? I will understand if it is not."

It's not that big a deal, Loken. The emotions flickering across the surface of his mind don't match what she knows—or thinks she knows—about him, and it's confusing. Maybe he's projecting about that one dead friend of his?

When he asks about the battle, Kerrigan's expression darkens the way it should have when she was discussing her life as a ghost. It's anger, though, not pain. Anger is so much easier.

"New Gettysburg? Yeah, I'll talk about that. What do you want to know?"

"What happened to you there? Why were you about to die?" He supposes that is as good a place as any to start. He meets her eyes again, intent on being attentive and listening, not to an after action report, but to try to understand what made her angry.

"Right. Get comfortable." Because boy, does she have some complaining to do. Kerrigan takes her own advice and sits back down on the weight bench.

"Remember the guy I told you I was going to kill? Mengsk?" She prompts but keeps talking. "He leads the Sons of Korhal, an insurgent group working to overthrow the Terran Confederacy...and trust me, those bastards are long overdue for a bloody revolution."

Loken nods at the prompt, and lets her continue. "So you agreed with their revolutionary goals, but you wish to kill this man? Why?" He seems slightly uncomfortable. If only because of his own Imperium's recent encounter with a revolutionary foe, but he suspects this was an altogether pettier affair.

"He's the one who pulled me out of the ghost program. I was his second-in-command for years. Then he got his hands on a Confederate black project I'd really hoped had been buried." Kerrigan's jaw works at her memories of the zerg experiments and her unwilling participation.

"There's an alien hivemind, the zerg. They infest any planet they come across...including the people. It turns out zerg are...responsive to some kinds of psychic commands, and the Confederacy had figured out how to broadcast those commands with a machine. They could more or less summon the swarm." She trusts she doesn't have to explain to Loken why that's bad, or why a government that thinks it's a nice card to have up their sleeve really needs to be overthrown.

"Such a foul thing...."

Yeah, it is quite apparent he is unhappy about the idea of it as well. "An unworthy weapon and tool to be used by the powerful, I should say. Using Xenos like that never ends well."

Funny he should say that.

"Yeah. About that." This is the part in the story that doesn't make her look all that good, but she's not going to leave it out. "He talked me into planting one in a Confederate base. We were trapped on planet and the zerg gave us the opening to break out, but..." Kerrigan shakes her head. "I tried to get him to promise never to use that tactic again, but he wouldn't."

Loken does look disappointed, and a little disgusted, but when she says Mengsk would not promise to use it again, his disgust deepens, and is clearly redirected from Kerrigan to him. "There are weapons people just should not use. We have sealed away many in our time in the stars. I have seen men try to win galaxies only to lose their souls. Though, from your oath to slay this men, I suspect he has very little soul to begin with."

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