twenty-eighth jump;

[ataraxites]

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: It could just be the standard sensation of air on wet skin, but if you bother to check, you might notice the steam rising from your body, barely there and gone within a minute. By the time you get to the showers, it will be clear that it's not just taking you time to adjust. The room is cold — colder than usual, but no worse than the last jump. While it's nothing dangerous, it's certainly motivation to hurry through the usual routine and get dressed quickly.



It's getting closer.




YOUR EYES ARE OPEN.

KEEP LOOKING.

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.

Comments

[ex_heightens219]

[ it's obvious almost immediately that this stefan is not the one she left in mystic falls. for one, that stefan didn't remember her, and she never got far enough to tell him her name before the ship took her. for another, he seems to be surprised that she's a vampire, and that places him...

well, far before her time. almost a year, if not that exactly.

elena tries not to be disappointed -- her stefan was stuck in a safe drowning for a whole summer and then he had amnesia, maybe it was a good thing this one had come from an earlier timeline -- but what she sees in his locker makes her stomach drop. blood bags, whole stacks of them, too many for her to count before stefan closes the door and shuts them away from view. he doesn't want her to know they're there, which means... nothing good. nothing good at all.

it's hard for elena to pretend she didn't notice, but she forces a smile, running her hand nervously through her hair. ]

Yeah, I am. Have been for about eight months now, give or take. I guess you're from before then?

[salvatus]

[His arms cross over his chest, rocking back on his heels to be able to look down his nose at her a little better, an eyebrow arched pointedly. A summer ago, the implied 'obviously' would have carried a touch of humour, of fondness for the girl in front of him.

Now it just carries an air of impatience, of not being sure if she really needs the confirmation- or if her surprise stems from being just as new as he is, and discovering what the explanation of timelines actually means is a bit too much for her]

You weren't in any danger of becoming one, when I left. [At least- not until he got hold of her, but details] How?

[ex_heightens219]

[ even the stefan she left behind back home wasn't this cold to her. the only time she can remember stefan being like this, he was the ripper, or newly recovering from it, and that has a pit growing in elena's stomach.

she needs damon, she needs to talk to damon now. ]

I was driven off Wickery Bridge. I had vampire blood in my system, so... Ta-da. Here I am.

[salvatus]

[There's a moment where he's so unnaturally still- where he doesn't process anything but the fact that she drove off Wickery Bridge, like an error message- like a computer rebooting. His first response is to swallow hard, hard enough that his teeth click together. He cuts his eyes away to the number embossed on his locker, sees himself walking away from Damon, back up plan already formed.

But like the confrontation she'd had with him over Jeremy, like Damon's effort to get him to see the personal losses that will start to pile if he doesn't stop- he slots it into the category of things that aren't his problem any more.

He'd already lost everything the moment he'd signed his life over in exchange for his brother's, the rest of it? It's just making it official. At least- At least he'd won. No more hybrids.

He tries to feel anything about that other than hollow, and fails. When he glances back at her, he's as unresponsive as ever]

You don't sound broken up about it. [Which out of everything else- he wasn't expecting. Expecting her to accept it eventually, yes, out of a lack for having any other choice. But she's skipped right passed acceptance into settled, into finding some kind of joy in her new life.

It's completely beyond his understanding]

[ex_heightens219]

[ elena watches stefan closely for anything that would tell her how he feels about her being a vampire -- a nervous swallow, a twitch of his mouth, anything -- but there's nothing, his face as impassive and unfeeling as it has been this whole time.

that hurts, in a strange and unexpected way -- he had been the one most dedicated to finding her a cure, even when she didn't want it, and as much as it stung to know that she wasn't good enough for him as she was, it was also comforting, in its own way. stefan knew how much she hadn't wanted to be a vampire, and he'd wanted to fix it for her. but this stefan doesn't seem to care at all, and he wasn't around to see her begin to accept herself. he doesn't care not because he knows she doesn't anymore, but because...

because he just doesn't care. ]

Well, like I said, I've been one for almost a year now. I didn't take it so well at first, but now that I'm used to it... It's not bad. I like who I am now.