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CHARACTERS: "Todd"/Guide, James T. Kirk, and all volunteers
LOCATION: Medical Bay
WARNINGS: Extensive description of the Wraith feeding process, and internalized self-loathing. Possible profanity.
SUMMARY: You can never win, you can only break even. With a Wraith, you can't break even - even if you are one.

He's growing used to the fire in his bones, and the thought disgusts him more than he would dare to admit. This repetition of siphoning off a bit of life and then slowly starving again is not the way of a Queen's man. It is short-sighted - but the kine are a short-lived species, as it should only be that they cannot imagine so far into the future. Yet he has agreed to this deal, and their short-sightedness is his own. It will not be long before he starves again, and then more humans will have to sacrifice themselves to him. So this vicious cycle will begin anew.

He kneads the dark vein that winds itself abound his wrist so that it does not swell with enzyme, but he closes his fist as he does so. He can grow used to the fire in his bones, but never shall he look upon a hungry hand without shame.

Guide waits in the medical bay, squinting at the too-bright lights. When he has the strength to do so, he stands; when he hasn't, he rests, sitting as regally as one can in torn leathers.

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She doesn't mention the change in his posture, because she mirrors it. Because they move in tandem and because her attention is largely held by the cape and cowl ensemble (alright fine, minus the cape) walking towards them. Towards them. She doesn't stop breathing, or anything ridiculous like that, but the part of her that is scrambling to process, to string together conversations over text and align them to an identity (obvious, obvious jesus how could you even miss that) is swallowed by momentary delirium. Hayley Stark this is your life, her chin has to lift to a degree that's probably laughable, but it's impossible to keep the ghost of a smile from her face.

"I take it the pot isn't hot."

Edited (i can't type anything ever) 2012-09-26 04:06 (UTC)

Bruce takes the moment to really look them over as he approaches. Hayley he'd seen in the video looking for a name; her texts had been sharp, sassy, and there was no doubt at all that she was unusually bright, for all that the intelligence hadn't seemed to diminish her optimism. A rare thing in such an environment.

Kirk, on the other hand, was a Captain, a leader among men, but still followed someone. He straightened up like a fresh cadet in the presence of a superior officer, rather than the blazing streak of pure cocksure attitude that Bruce had expected to see after his videos. So even starship captains can be pressured by theatricality--good to know.

Quicker than the captain, she's ready with words before him, and Bruce presses his lips together to keep from smiling. He likes sassy, it keeps him on his toes. His voice is bass when he speaks, but not smoker's-cough levels of gravelly. This isn't an interrogation.

"Perhaps too hot to touch, but that doesn't usually keep me from trying." A pause, and then an acknowledgement. "Captain."

For Jim, the action is less a response to theatricality than it is a gesture of respect. Even if he knows remarkably little about Gotham, he knows what Batman does and- well, Kirk will respect anyone who throws the rule book in someone's face to get shit done.

"Sir," He says, nodding his own acknowledgement. It's clear that these two have spoken before, likely somewhere on the network, but judging from Hayley's surprise his identity hadn't been revealed until now. "Thank you for coming down, I know the situation is unusual." And there is the cocky tilt to his mouth that had been missing previously, though it's incredibly wry.

In the beat that passes, where Batman's attention moves to Captain Kirk (oh god that's really a thing that just happened, isn't it-) Hayley's shoulders soften. The tension eases out, but her alertness certainly doesn't. "Yeah well, we're on a ship in an alternate reality a billion years in the future. Feeding the space alien isn't exactly the most unusual thing that's happened in the past few months." She takes the moment to glance further into the chamber, surveying the surroundings. She hasn't commented publicly on becoming a donor, but figures her presence here could really only mean one thing.

There's no sight of him yet, but given the way he'd looked when the feed began, he wasn't likely to go running around for kicks.

Unusual is probably the understatement of the century. 'A billion years' is something he considers and throws out as exactly the opposite. Laid beside Hayley's words about keeping to what she understands, he wonders why she's here, and yet he could extend the same question to almost anyone, even to the Wraith himself, and perhaps never get a suitable answer. Even his own would take too long to explain.

For now, he'll keep the questions about the process for when they speak. It would be strange, not to mention rude, to talk about him in third person.

"Listening to archive footage doesn't really convey what it must have been like to live through it." A pause. "But you're still here, still fighting. How many times have you done this?" A question for either, but directed toward Kirk. He can see the gray in his hair clearly now, and yet Bruce is confident that he himself is older. The contrast is strange.

"This as in this" and Kirk gestures to the room at large, "or the Tranquility?" But he figures Batman might like the answer to both, so he goes on to give him what he asks for. "I've been here for ten months," If he's going to calculate by the wave number, and the most recent one had been ten. It was something of a horrifying notion, but Jim couldn't linger on it and keep his sanity.

"This is the third time we've gone through this particular process." But that isn't how many times Jim has been the victim of a feeding. He won't supply that information unless asked, but somehow he doesn't think Batman will let it slide.

Bruce already knew how long Kirk had been here, just as Kirk could know how long most others on the ship had been present. Despite concealing his own numbers, he suspected he could only propose that he had arrived a month earlier, and even that was pushing it--why would he have stayed quiet so long? Yet anything that he could do to separate himself from his own identity would be preferable. It was too narrow a list, too small a pool of people; what a coincidence that only one seemed to come from Gotham.

Perhaps it would be simpler to make Bruce Wayne disappear for a little longer, or perhaps not to have come at all.

The wording of Kirk's second explanation caught his attention. It was very different to the first, laid out deliberately without any kind of evasiveness. The third time they'd been through this process, but not the feedings. No, they'd happened before.

For a moment he simply held eye contact, let Kirk know that he wasn't buying it wordlessly, and moved on.

"Have you made up the numbers every time?" Self sacrifice was something they had in common, and frankly he wouldn't be surprised if the answer was yes, despite that there were clear inherent risks. "Tell me--in the long term, what kind of effect do you think it will have on you?

Not everyone was keen to wording, but from the look Batman gives him, Kirk knows his phrasing doesn't fly under his radar. Well, he wouldn't really have expected much less from this guy, if he was who he appeared to be. But anyone else would have to put a hell of a lot of work into a get up like this from materials on the Tranquility.

His jaw flexes, just briefly, a tightening in the muscles. It's something Kirk has been avoiding saying, unless asked directly, and with Hayley at his side-

there's no avoiding it. People deserve to know what they could be losing, but in the same breath how many would recede their offer? Is a year or two worth starving someone to death? Jim's hands lift, come to rest on his hips.

"Yes, we have." A beat, "Long term effects can be the literal shortening of one's life span. It's why we aren't allowing people to volunteer more than once." Unless they know the consequences and accept them.

And that, if nothing else, explains why Kirk looks curiously older than his twenty five years.

His stare doesn't waver for a few long seconds after Kirk has finished speaking, and then the chill of it simply drops away, turning back toward the rest of the bay. Everything seems remarkably still, all of this done with an ordered dignity, despite it being literally the forces of life and death at work here.

"If you'd said anything else I wouldn't have believed you. The only thing worse than the truth when people are already afraid is a lie." Kirk hadn't lied, but he'd seen his jaw work, known he was chewing over the admission. Even so, he knows he sounds like a book of grim morals, and that everything he is is at war with the sterile environment. He silences anything else he had to say about nothing being given without sacrifice. He hasn't left yet, surely that makes his intentions clear. A few words solidify them.

"Some of us don't expect long to begin with. I'm not planning for my retirement." What he did was dangerous, and he knew the same went for Kirk. What did a year or two from the end of his life mean to him? Besides which, a flash of grey might make him look distinguished.