Piper 90: Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
goneawaymod) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
goneawayworld2021-04-10 09:37 pm
goneawaymod) wrote in goneawayworld2021-04-10 09:37 pm
3..2...1...CONTACT!
Who: The New Hires
What: Sudden Memory Share
Where: Their Memory Palaces
When: After "Don't Touch That Dial"
Warnings/Notes: Possible in every memory, warn in subject lines.
Contact.
It's during a pause in their day. A nap. An idle moment looking across the Top Deck. Taking a slow breath between reps in the training room.
The New Hires are connected. Mental pathways locking together, they're forced into one another's innermost beings. Thrust into one another's memory palaces where the mind collects and stores everything that makes them who they are. The core of their beings are only a few steps away and no one can help the violation.
To make matters worse, it comes with no explanation or no ability to pull out and stop. Once they're through the first memory, perhaps they can find a way out, but they're already witnessing some event from their host's past. And, if they left, who knows whether or not they'd end up accidentally invading another memory palace?
And if they were there, who was in theirs?
[[So, how this works: the memories can either be viewed in spectator mode or the guest can be experiencing everything themselves. The person whose memories are being shown, the host, can watch as their current self or take the form they had of their past self. They can talk about the memory with the "guest" that's visiting.
They cannot control the first memory shown, the player decides that, but they can control any other memories they'd like to show people after. Of course, there's also always the option of an extreme emotional reaction bringing up other memories unbidden.]]
What: Sudden Memory Share
Where: Their Memory Palaces
When: After "Don't Touch That Dial"
Warnings/Notes: Possible in every memory, warn in subject lines.
Contact.
It's during a pause in their day. A nap. An idle moment looking across the Top Deck. Taking a slow breath between reps in the training room.
The New Hires are connected. Mental pathways locking together, they're forced into one another's innermost beings. Thrust into one another's memory palaces where the mind collects and stores everything that makes them who they are. The core of their beings are only a few steps away and no one can help the violation.
To make matters worse, it comes with no explanation or no ability to pull out and stop. Once they're through the first memory, perhaps they can find a way out, but they're already witnessing some event from their host's past. And, if they left, who knows whether or not they'd end up accidentally invading another memory palace?
And if they were there, who was in theirs?
[[So, how this works: the memories can either be viewed in spectator mode or the guest can be experiencing everything themselves. The person whose memories are being shown, the host, can watch as their current self or take the form they had of their past self. They can talk about the memory with the "guest" that's visiting.
They cannot control the first memory shown, the player decides that, but they can control any other memories they'd like to show people after. Of course, there's also always the option of an extreme emotional reaction bringing up other memories unbidden.]]
no subject
She'd blunted the sharp edges of her own Rage kicking at things and snarling during the wait, because if she has to watch this, she's going to watch it. She's not a Galliard, she won't be able to tell this story the way it deserves to be told, but she can at least bear witness and try.
Tia's death hits her in the not-fully-healed wounds left by Lilly and Bares-His-Fangs, and she weeps openly as she follows Kenzie's path out of the warehouse. Holding the tears back would only blur her vision, and that's not what she's decided to do here.
no subject
The gunfire only seems to increase in volume and intensity, bullets flying at them from what seems like every direction. A mint's worth of silver is being slung at them and even if some of these ghouls are terrified and shitting themselves, enough bullets will find their mark. Another bullet hits Kenzie, scoring a shallow wound along her belly to add another scar. Hymn-of-War is only a dozen feet away, carving a bloody smear through the leech's henchmen as a fresh staccato barrage of gunfire catches her. She falters, but continues to press on, charging after Deeds and Kenzie. Another explosion as some kind of grenade or bomb goes off between her legs midstride and she's sprawled out on the pavement. One of her legs is gone beneath the knee and despite that she's dragging herself forwards by her claws, refusing to give up.
Deeds looks back at their injured packmate, then thrusts Mourns-the-Prey into Mackenzie's arms.
"Go! I'll be right behind you with Hymn-of-War--!" It is an order that Mackenzie doesn't want to follow. She wants to be the one to charge back for their fallen packmate. That is her duty--but then Deeds-Above-Words is the leader. The one who feels most responsible.
"I can get her!" Mackenzie protests.
"Don't challenge me on this, not now!" Deeds' voice is cracked and strained, even in the Garou tongue. She grabs Kenzie by the scruff and for a brief moment presses her forehead to Mackenzie's in a gesture of affection, love, trust. Pride.
"Go. We'll be right behind you." She turns back and springs through the hail of gunfire as if it were spring rain, ignoring the bullets as she barrels back towards Hymn-of-War. It is the last Mackenzie sees of her as she turns to run, her every instinct screaming at her to stand and fight as she vanishes into the darkness, gunfire nipping at her feels. She cannot weep in the warform, but her heart wails as she hears the howls, screams, and gunfire begin to recede. She darts through the streets and into the maze of alleys, until finally she feels sure she has found a place where she can't be pursued--another dirty alley, another place of the Weaver, tangled in her web. Gunfire fades.
Did they make it? Mackenzie shifts down into homid, flinching as silver bullets lodged in flesh are forced free by her shift to leave oozing, unhappy wounds that burn with supernatural pain. She cradles Eli in her lap, supporting his head and weeping as she tries to press down against the horrid wound in his belly that won't stop bleeding. Distantly, another burst of gunfire. Staccato. A pause.
Pop.
Pop.
Two final shots and she knows, horribly, what that signifies even before she feels the pain of them being wrenched free from her.
No.
Nononono.
She has to go back. She has to die.
But Deeds told her to get Eli out and Eli... Eli is still here, breathing shallowly. His eyes flicker open, glazed and distant. He tries to focus on Mackenzie in the dark, his face waxen in the dim light of streetlamps.
"Kenzie...? Feathertail?" He says her stupid nickname and she laughs through her tears.
"Eli. Stay with me, okay?" She says, desperate. Silver. Why did it have to be silver? Of course it is silver. She presses down harder and the blood just doesn't stop.
"Where's--" He coughs weakly, voice distant. "Where's Gabby an' Lydia?"
"They--they didn't--" She can't make the words come out as tears drip down onto his face and there's a flicker of understanding.
"Fuck," he says in the way that he always does. As if it were a leaky pipe or the car had broken down or something. "Fuck, Kenzie..." He is crying now, too. His voice is weaker, breathier and his gaze more distant. Shock has settled in and she knows what that means. She leans down to press her forehead to his, desperate.
"Please stay with me Eli. You have to keep fighting. I can't--" She's sobbing, unable to do anything else but weep now. Her hand is wet and slick with his blood and she can't get a purchase on his skin to press on the wound.
"I can't do this alone, please, I can't be the only one." It's such a selfish thing to ask for in the moment but it is all that Mackenzie can think. Please don't make me carry this weight all by myself. Don't let me be the ahroun who lost her pack. Please, Eli. Please, Mourns-the-Prey.
"I'm..." He takes a breath, faint and rasping. One of his hands, slick with blood, scorched and bubbling from the fierceness of the flames they had leapt through, presses against the back of her head, weakly attempting to hold her close and comfort her. Still Eli.
"'M doing...my best, Kenzie..." His voice fades, reed thin and whispy. "Mother Gaia..." He mumbles the words, eyes seeing nothing now. "Why did it have to... have to be in this shitty alley..."
Kenzie sobs in response.
"Couldn't they fuckin'... ambush us...in... in a park...someplace with...some green...?" He continues, a last joke. Ironic and a little cruel. It's not fair. It's not fair for them to die here surrounded by the Wyrm and the Weaver, so separate from the Mother. Kenzie can't speak, her whole frame wracked by sobs and she holds him close, all thought of staunching the flow of blood forgotten now.
"I'm sorry," she says weakly. "I'm sorry it should have been me--"
But Eli can't hear her anymore.
She is alone.
Terribly, awfully alone.
no subject
It hurts. It hurts. Poor Kenzie. At least when she'd lost Lilly and Bares-His-Fangs (and Bulletproof, but at least not to death), she'd still had Ace. Kenzie had lost all of them.
Garou aren't meant to be alone.
no subject
"...You shouldn't have had to see this," she whispers, hoarse and unhappy. "This is some Jorgmund fuckery, this is mine it's not for anyone else to gawk at, fucking godammnit." Her voice cracks and she breaks into tears along with her memory-self, her face buried in her hands. Slowly, she folds in on herself, hunching down into a crouch and wailing her grief. Her pain. Her loneliness.
"He should have died somewhere green at least! Mother, why? Why did I have to fucking live?"
no subject
"I don't think its Jorgmund," she says, stroking her hair. "I think it's something else. Stuff, maybe."
Which isn't the actual problem, but at least Jorgmund can't see the worst night of Kenzie's life.
"There's no reason you lived," she continues, beginning to rock them back and forth. "It was dumb luck. It always comes down to dumb luck in the end. Our wisest, fastest, and most cunning can be struck down for no reason other than than they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's not your fault that you lived and they died."
cw: heavy suicidal ideation
"I should have gone back. I shouldn't--" It's the same grief and unhappiness and guilt that Stacia has always seen from Mackenzie. This time it feels more raw in the face of her remembrance, perhaps.
"I should have gone and killed as many as I could and died and then I wouldn't have to fucking be here knowing that I failed them." Would Gabby or Lydia or Eli or Tia want her to think this way? Of course not. None of them would say that she had failed, but they're not here, only she is. She is and sometimes it is too heavy to carry that burden.
"I just want to die. Please. Nothing-to-See-Here-rhya, please just do that for me--" It hasn't been this bad before but confronted with the memory in such stark, visible way instead of half-remembered dreams and the weight of muted grief has Mackenzie more than a little fucked up. She's experiencing it again, fresh and raw on top of the barely-scabbed wound she struggles to hold closed every day.
"Please!"
Re: cw: heavy suicidal ideation
And god-fucking-damn the Garou Nation for putting no time or energy in figuring out how to handle her people when they get like this!
"I'm sorry that you're in so much pain," Stacia says, cupping Kenzie's jaw in her hands and pressing a kiss to her forehead. "Nobody should have to go through what you're going through."
She pauses, struggling for words, for ideas. What would happen if she snapped Kenzie's neck here in the memory? Would it be a symbolic death, or would it leave her brain-dead outside? She'd been able to use Open Seal on the door in that vision of Wash's future, but she can't think of how she'd use any of her Gifts to help Kenzie here and now.
But there's no time to think, and Stacia is a Ragabash, so she does what she's supposed to and what Kenzie has to listen to from her:
"How deep does the pain go?"
Re: cw: heavy suicidal ideation
"I feel it every day," she says, her voice scratched raw. "In my heart. In my bones."
Re: cw: heavy suicidal ideation
Stacia has no idea how to help. So she keeps asking.
"How wide is it?"
Fuck, she should have asked Bunny for help with this. He knows this kind of grief better than she does.
Re: cw: heavy suicidal ideation
"I don't think I can make it to the other side, Stacia."
Re: cw: heavy suicidal ideation
She presses her forehead against Kenzie's, holding her close.
"I know it hurts. But have you let yourself feel it? Or have you tried to push it down because it hurts too much?"
Re: cw: heavy suicidal ideation
"I don't want to feel this. I don't want to feel anything anymore, Stacia."
Re: cw: heavy suicidal ideation
"I know you don't want to feel it," she says. "But grief is a wound, not a-- grief is a wound. What happens when you don't treat a wound? When it isn't allowed to heal cleanly?"