ataraxionlogs | thirty-fifth jump;

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thirty-fifth jump;

CHARACTERS: Any and all.
LOCATION: Gravity Couches and beyond.
WARNINGS: Maybe some swearing, or even some violence, and more than likely some implied (and possibly explicit) nakedness.
SUMMARY: Another month, another jump, another round of new faces.
NOTES: You wake feeling cold and alone. There is a strange sense of emptiness, and the jump holds no surprises for you. There is nothing buffering the jump sickness and disorientation for you this month, and those still suffering the lingering effects of August's plot may find it more difficult than usual to get through the post-jump routine.

New arrivals will find messages spraypainted across their lockers telling them not to follow their tattoo numbers, and instead to find a room on Floors 001-010.

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You wake up in darkness.

There's a breathing tube jammed down your trachea, and you're suspended in a tube of clear blue fluid. Upon registering your level of consciousness, the gravity couch drains the fluid surrounding you and retracts the breathing apparatus; the doors in front of you open, and you're deposited on the floor of a stark, sterile medical bay.

You are not alone.
There are others who have come before you, others who are awakening beside you. Some may be familiar to you, perhaps even friends. Others have much less amiable plans. Some are merely alien and inexplicable, but there are always those who might mean you harm.

After you catch your breath and your vision returns, you notice a number on the inside of your forearm. Maybe it's a familiar number. Maybe it means something. Maybe it's just a number. But the number—completely unique to you—is a tattoo, and it does not come off.

If you enter the room adjacent to the medbay, you will find a small locker with your number on it, surrounded by rows upon rows of identical lockers. Inside, you will find a few of your personal items, a communications device, and a ship's uniform in your exact size. The comms device is fully powered and connects directly to the ship's network; it's your only means of communication beyond physical conversation. Upon turning the device on, a neutral, automated voice will say, "Please take the blue lift to the passenger quarters." Any other attempts at communicating with the rest of the network are met only with static.

This is your welcome party.

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I don’t remember yours.

[ A slight lift at his brows might be taken for apology, insofar as he seems aware that he should already know.

He doesn’t tilt his head to follow when she looks him over, all lean lines and blocky muscle. Thick veins ripple down his forearms and around his wrists, woven into a network across ridges of tendon and bone in the backs of his hands. His Tranquility tattoo is offset by another hand-laid in ink that’s since had time to fade: the number 214782 in raw, greenish black.

He’s not moving much at all, really, save to breathe, but a weary look and a longer breath answer her question without answering.

He’ll survive. ]

Emma.

[ Her eyes land on the tattoo, linger a moment too long in an attempt to decipher what it’s from. Some kind of … registration number? Just where the hell did they come from? Erik, Raven, Charles—they’re all from the same world, she knows, but she can’ imagine what kind of world it is sometimes. Was that a mutant thing, one that Raven just got rid of using her power? ]

Did you forget mine because you forgot more than that, or through sheer force of will?

[ Check for amnesia seems like a reasonable step, these days. She tracks the movement of his eyes once she finally distracts herself from his secondary tattoo. Honestly, they’d never been keen on one another from the start, so she wouldn’t be shocked if her name just hadn’t mattered enough to ever stick or get picked up by osmosis from Raven and Charles. No hard feelings. ]

[ For all that he’s having some difficulty holding her in focus, an extension of that same look spells it out for her.

He just hasn’t cared to file it away.

Rather than rub in old apathy, he glances away, first to other members of the crew in other showers, and then to the inside of Emma’s arm, where there’s just the one tattoo reading S E C.

Of course. ]

Hey.

[ Her tone is sharp, but she doesn't swat at him again. ]

Eyes on me.

[ Initially, her command seems born out of concern, some check for a concussion or similar. However, her face is hard and tight, brow drawn downward. ]

I didn't pull you over here out of the goodness of my heart.

[ Well. Not only. ]

You owe me answers. Give me the right ones, and I'll get you to someone who can see about those gills.

[ Humid air whistles and wheezes gruff through a flex and fan of the gills in question: impatience rife in a flint and steel side-eye to match. But everything about him is too worn down and damp to take a spark, down to the soul, and he’s left to do as he’s told.

Resistance in this context is too petty to hold meaning. He looks at her, bloodless and bald and blinking often against the shower he’s still propped beneath. There are scars nicked in his scalp and around his mouth.

Unsurprising, all things considered.

Especially when he says, with no break in affect: ]

They’re growing on me.

Where else would they be growing?

[ The joke comes in complete deadpan, and she leans forward onto one knee to turn the water off. ]

Charles was one bad decision away from putting you in some serious traction. You wanna tell me what a trip home did to provoke something like that out of him?

[ She doesn’t think she needs to tell Erik that Charles is usually the poster child for pacifism. ]

No.

[ The answer clags rough in his throat,

flat disrespect in the lock of his eyes to hers. Challenging.

Clean water is left to bead cool on his skin, breaking into isolated runs when he breathes. His near side remains a raw, gummy mess, but the majority of the gore is older blood. The flow clinging cold to his ribs isn’t branching any further outward.

He waits for her to try again. ]

Great.

[ Undeterred, Emma reaches out to clap one hand at the slope of his neck, grip digging into his muscle. ]

You don't have to want to: you're doing it anyway.

[ The earlier phrasing was just her being polite: she doesn't have to stay that way. ]

[ A gurgle of fresh blood and snot squishes wet from Erik’s side when he tenses in on himself against contact, teeth grit down at his chest.

The progression from grimace to grin is started by the sound of wet gravel low in his throat: a chuckle at her expense. ]

What are you going to do?

I’m not gonna do anything.

[ Because that’s the person Emma is. But she’s also not going away, and she’s certainly not helping get him where he needs to be until he caves. They can hang out naked (well, him naked) in the shower until he decides to cave tbh. ]

And until you tell me, neither are you, or any of the med team that could help take care of that.

[ 'That' being the whole gill situation. ]

[ Tempered steel rolls fluid beneath her fingers when he turns his head to take her on directly.

His eyes are too sharp and too clear to match well with the rest of him, splintered glass against moist, milky skin and weeping gills. ]

I did what was necessary to secure a future for our species.

[ He speaks clearly, the last trace evidence of his sense of humor bled away between them when he exhales. ]

You’re fortunate I hold the crew of this ship in similar regard.

Your species?

[ What the hell does that even mean? Emma looks reasonably befuddled, scraping at some kind of understanding with no means of securing context. She does, at least, loosen her grip on his neck, backing off somewhat. ]

I’m beginning to think your definition of necessary isn’t the same as Charles’.

Mutants.

[ There’s still stasis fluid spackled up the walls of his throat and in his lungs, packed into his sinuses, roughing his voice. He’ll be coughing blue for days.

The fact that he isn’t blinking half as often as he should is something else, tension trembling thin on an invisible wire between them. ]

If you’re unimpressed with me, [ he says, ] I’m beginning to think you don’t know Charles very well at all.

Edited (AH GAD) 2014-09-18 05:37 (UTC)

[ It takes every ounce of maturing she’s done over the past two years for Emma to hold herself back from grabbing his jaw and slamming his head back into the shower wall to knock him out for that one. It’d shut him up quickly enough.

Instead, holding onto the person she’s become and not the person she was when she arrived in Storybrooke, she pushes herself to her feet, physically restraining herself through forced distance. ]

And I’m beginning to think Charles wishes he didn’t know you.

[ Her tone leaves no question of which position she’d rather be in. Despite her grousing, she reaches her hand down, offering it to him to help him to his feet. ]

[ There’s a dumb fade to the scalpel edge of the glare Erik follows her up from the ground with once what she’s said has had a beat to sink in. He furrows his brow.

All said it’s as or more effective than cracking the shower wall with his skull -- he’s late to react to the hand she offers, and even then only with a glance.

He doesn’t reach for it, looking back to her face to make it a conscious denial. ]

Seriously?

[ Emma doesn’t mince words, calling him out on the absurdity of refusing the help simply because of who it’s coming from—or what she’d said. A helping hand is a helping hand, and pride never did favors for anyone.

Her hand doesn't drop, hanging out insistently. ]

Thank you,

[ says Erik, who drums up the energy to reach up with his far hand

and turn the shower handle over his head. The pipe squeaks and then hisses; a rush of cold water stiffens his shoulders into harder resistance. ]

You’re a credit to your species.

Yeah, that's what every woman longs to hear.

[ Emma rolls her eyes, grabbing his hand tightly in hers and pulling him to his feet. Dramatics. She reaches with her other hand to turn off the water. ]

Come on. Tsang’s gonna want to look at you. We need to do something about the gills, the nanites aren't gonna fix it by themselves.

[ She grips on and hauls him up just as the water is starting to warm, leaving him to shiver irritably on his feet, stooped and drawn and nobly resisting the urge to snare her up in piping and sit back down in the heat.

He doesn't say anything. Irritation shows terse in the cut of muscle behind his jaw, and in how hard he’s working not to look at her, lest self-control fail him.

It’s a little like being forced to wrangle an ornery telekinetic horse. ]

Come on.

[ She pats the back of his shoulder and then starts nudging him along, grabbing a towel for him as they pass them. That’s more than enough of Magneto’s dick for one month, though she’s not overtly commenting on it. ]

The more you work with me, the less liable we are to both biff it.

[ After all, slip-n-slide is a dangerous game to play when the floors are hard metal. Still, she leads him diligently towards the actual medical examination area. ]

[ There’s no give in Erik’s shoulder.

She might as well be patting a damp block of marble. It makes the same sort of wet smack, cold and clammy and resentful.

But he does take the towel, and he does loop it dimly around his waist, aware enough of himself despite everything, including the late arrival of this particular courtesy, what with his testicles all but having crawled up into his intestines to get warm.

Onward, then, to examination. ]

Edited (lol) 2014-09-21 04:01 (UTC)

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