ataraxionlogs | 07. in a gadda da vida, honey

[Well gosh, William, we're bad at this whole attentive thing.

Takeshi doesn't notice anything amiss, all wide-eyed wonder.]

Yeah, I do! But! But... You really don't have other people you're close to, 'cept for Hed-for Heather? Nobody you got closer to? [He's just surprised, is all. He's always had people around him since he got to the Tranquility, so... so that's strange, to him. That that was it. Everyone needs more than that, don't they...? But maybe William's real smart. Not having people to be close to means not feeling that pain when they're gone...]

[Yes Takeshi.

This is definitely the most emotionally healthy course of action. Take it from William Tsang.]

Not like it was with Heather, [he answers. It's hard to emote when one's voice sounds like the movement of tectonic plates, but something about the shape of his inscribed eyebrows and the slow, terrestrial cadence of his voice seems sad. Which he would be.] Other people have got their own— special people. You know? You can have a hundred friends, sure. The real close ones, though, you choose them, but they've also got to choose you.

And the right place, the right time. Things like that have got to choose you both. [He makes the mistake of sliding into the abstract, which is what happens when he's threatening to slipping in thoughts about Remus. Other people too, of course; Rey, Charles, Dr. McCoy, everyone at Medical Bay. But Remus particularly weighs on the back of William's mind, symbolic of his failure, in general, to anchor himself with greater strength than the tidal pull and erosive pressure of bad blood, bad history, bad habits, bad moons, bad— situations. He and Sirius agree on one thing: someone else could be the one that Remus chooses. Someone else will be.

Not that William thinks of it in those terms, of course. He just thinks he could use a break, even from those people; a break from the treadmill to nowhere. Focus on survival awhile.]

We can't love everybody like we love Heather, [he says, simply. And then he glances toward the river, when he finally hears a rather conspicuous splash.]

Edited (better word choice) 2015-09-25 05:57 (UTC)

[He frowns, concerned, uncertain. It's true, he thinks...

It's true, that you can't love everyone the same. There are some people you just love more. And that's okay, isn't it? Everyone has those people. He flusters, trying to remember that he's supposed... to want to push people away. They could all vanish, and he'd be sad. But the things Will is saying, it's so sad. Too sad... He picks at his cast, quiet.]

Maybe... I think Dad — I think Mr. Ned couldn't love anyone like he loved Mom, too.

[Spoken sagely. He's pretty sure that Ned loved Heather more than he might've... loved him. But that's okay, isn't it? If something bad happened, he's not sure who Dad would've picked, but he hopes he would save Mom first. Would have. Even if it meant Mom being mad at him. Takeshi would rather Heather get saved. Did she ever know that, that he cared that much? That he would have always wanted her saved first? He's not sure if she'd want to know. He thinks she'd say some pretty serious words about him, that he shouldn't think like that.

But that's love. Takeshi's learned it in a way children wouldn't. He's learned a lot of things in ways that children wouldn't, like how puddles of blood smell or how people can still scream and cry even though they got cut off under their belly button. He learned how much you can love someone, but have them not love you back. Not enough to save you when you cry for them. And he learned there are people like Heder. Who hug you and tell you it'll be okay.

He stares at William, face passive.]

I think...

[splash

He looks quickly toward the river, eyes widening.]

Whatsat?!

[Fast as the blink of an eye, there's a massive metal-and-ceramic arm plugging down into the sod in front of Takeshi, blocking out a big bar of shadow over him. Despite his girth, his height, his raw bulk, towering and heavy, he's startlingly quick the way that only machines can be. People don't like to fight woodchippers for some fairly sensible reasons.

William glares about, suspicious. Still sad too, of course; that's not the kind of condition that simply disappears

And from underneath his arm, it's fairly easy for Takeshi to see what's happening. The stream, as it runs past, is not as broad or as deep as it was when the rain ran heaviest and a creature has gotten lodged in the inadequate cross-section of its flow. Its armored back protrudes, overlapping scales jutting, bristling with what's probably irritation as it scrapes, tugs, kicks in the water, sending liquid acid rumbling over the edge, a few tentacles roiling briefly above ground-level and into view. It'll be awhile before enough of them have been sighted to make this assessment, but the creature's young and lost, doesn't really know what it's doing.

A recurrent theme around here apparently.]

What the fuck, [William says, loudly. A beat.

Realizing that danger is not imminent, he thinks to remove his hand from where he embedded it in the ground beyond Takeshi's feet, his jointed fingers scraping with infinitessimal mechanical parts, smeared with mud.] I mean, what is that, [he translates himself suddenly, glancing back at the boy.] Alien zoology, mate. You ever seen anything like that?

[Takeshi only stays behind William because he — for once in his life after death — realizes that he has no power in which to defend himself. It's not usual that he has thoughts like these, really. He puts his hand on William's side, watching around him with wide, curious eyes.]

... Yeah.

[He bites his lip, thoughtful.]

I saw lots of aliens. They tried to kill me and my friends, sometimes... 'cus we had to fight 'em.

Mate, there was something wrong with your childhood, [says the most reliable source on this matter on THE PLANET. It's a little late to note this when he's already heard about Takeshi's mother, his mother's bastard boyfriend, but those pieces of insider knowledge aren't something that they've really explicitly discussed before. At most, they were inferences when he and Remus carried Takeshi out of the artificial paradise that the Tranquility had warped into reality around him.

William stares at the creature floundering in the acid water. He doesn't feel Takeshi on him, exactly, but somehow he knows that the diminutive boy is there. Honestly, he'll be the first to celebrate when he can put on the suit again.]

Oi, [he says.] Tak. Reckon we should kill it and see if it's worth eating.

[Even two months ago, he wouldn't have thought about it, really. William wasn't a violent man; sometimes fails to be, even when perhaps it would be better. The intervention of space and manipulation of time changed that just a little. Heather's disappearance has probably done more. The massive joints of his leg creak as he takes a step forward. The creature in the water flusters, tentacles scrabbling on the silty edges of the river.] You ain't a vegetarian, right? That was just spaceship bullshit.

[Takeshi considers the rather squiggly beast for a moment.

Still hidden halfway behind Will, of course.]

... Kill it?

[He sounds — a little nervous at the thought. He's never killed anything except for self-defense before. And he's always felt kind of bad about it, 'cept when it was something trying to hurt someone he cared about. Saying a prayer for them seemed like the best way to apologize.

... But this is kind of scary. Killing something outside of a fight, or a mission. He remembers Erik saying that hunting and killing are different things, but...]

It's stuck anyways. I think, [William is humble enough about alien taxonomy to know he should modify that statement somewhat. Maybe the creature is fine. Maybe the creature is setting up a trap. But it looks to be having difficulty, throbbing unhappily in the shallow riverbed.] And acid can't hurt me too badly when I'm like this.

[It could go terribly wrong, he means. But new creatures, new food, when he has his new charge-- that's enticing to him.

It doesn't occur to him, just yet, that there are real options besides killing it or leaving it to die. William is not a very imaginative creature these days, and frankly, his treatment of people seems to err on that side of simplification as well. He hunches slightly, his eyes lambent on his mechanical face, intent. It's not an uncommon adult fallacy. It's probably not an uncommon child fallacy either, when those children are exposed to problematic demonstrations from caretakers (heh) (sorry). But Takeshi has already felt that, by now. The doubt that caring is a good idea.

Still, it might be something, to have to look at a being thrashing and struggling to live, and see food instead.]

Edited (more wurds) 2015-10-03 00:12 (UTC)

[He ducks his head, thinking about it.

Well... It'd... but good, to have food. Food comes from all kinds of places.]

Sometimes — you gotta... hurt things so you can live.

[He says it with experience. He's hurt things to live, too.]

I think... I killed things before, too. [He looks up from under his bangs, realizing, slowly, that he's done things. Attacked monsters.] I'm a killer, right?

[Just because he was the good guy doesn't mean he wasn't the killer. Right?]

[William wants to say no. No, that's not quite right. He looks down at Takeshi from his hulking height, the boy's little round face and his leg in his cast below that. He feels something that can't be his heart kick painfully inside of himself. Knowing Takeshi's past doesn't make it any easier to look at the bitter evidence that that past marked him for the rest of his young life. And really what that means is--

Takeshi deserves better than to be lied to.]

You have been, [he grates out, slow, careful, his voice lower even than it was before. The worms in the earth feel reverberate through their skins, gently seismic.] Most people let others do the killing for them, when it comes to stuff like food. I'll do it now. Death is part of life, mate. I don't know much, but I wager, the most we can hope for is we don't cause it when we haven't got to.

[He nods, looking as though he expected William to say those very words.]

... We should. Make him food. We need to eat, so we stay strong.

Sometimes we gotta.

[And that, that was spoken as if he's entirely willing to try and help Will.]

[It is sad and terrible, the way that ordinary aspects of living can be sad and terrible. There's nothing that survives without doing so at some expense to something else, and it's probably only the overinflated complexity of the human psyche that presses them to wish it were otherwise. You won't find too many birds who give a shit about justice or mercy, never mind the maggots or the flowers.]

All right, [he says, solidly, or at least pretending to be— and it's easier to pretend, when you don't even look like a person.] I'll get it out of the water. You've got to make sure you don't get wet, right, mate? Don't get wet.

Or if you do, tell me immediately. We'll rinse you off and I'll heal the spot. [The compartment of his midsection creaks open, the dense panel of armor tricking up through some secret shift and grumble of hidden parts. Inside, he's packing a generous claim of supplies. Perhaps no more than the fair share of two people, given what is accessible aboard the Tranquility. Tarps, medicines, water, string and tools. Including, it turns out-- when he hauls out two large handfuls— a kit of carefully packaged knives. These, he settles on the ground where Takeshi can reach them, despite that it is generally inadvisable to leave knife kits lying around near toddlers.

On the other hand, most toddlers aren't highly experienced killers-in-self-defense.

The next moment, William locks up again, hauls up onto his feet. The ground is turfed up where the hard edges of his armored frame dug in, a clot of grass on the back of his heel as he hoists it up into a slow but steady run; more of a plod, than anything. It's only a moment before he's at the river, wading in, his metal and ceramic parts fizzing visibly as the water laps up, eats him in fractions. The cephalopod puts up an impressive fight: churning, kicking, tentacles wrapping double around his arms, trying to use its bulk to bring its enemy down into the killing waves. But William is big too, and strong; he falls backward, and the motion topples the creature out of the water and onto the land.

The river eats a few inches off his hands and feet, makes his armor bubble horribly. But it's fast.

Faster, anyway, than the cephalopod shrieking and dying of suffocation in open air. William rips free of the tentacles with systematic, mechanical strength, but there are many of them. Its many eyes flash in pain, fear and frustration as it squirms on the grass, kicking the strength in its body in a vain effort to return to water.]

Be careful — be careful...!

[He's mostly worried William's gonna hurt himself being stupid. But he's not in a working gantz suit, so he can't exactly rescue him from sudden doom if things do go wrong. This is nail-biting, okay. When it's finally in the grass and trying to get back to water, Takeshi just forgets that he's a normal-powered kid the size of a bug anyway and dives forward in his cast, pulling roughly at the creature's sticky leg while William re-joins them.

The water beast kind of just picks him up in his tentacles and shakes him a bit, though.

WHOOPS???]

You be careful! [bellows the golem, who is experiencing extreme scandalized feelings at the moment. Burning water sloshes over William's feet as he turtles on the ground, but then one massive hand comes crashing into the ground. He digs up clods with his big blunt fingers and anchors himself enough that he can roll over inside of its tentacular grasp. Hoisted half-upright onto his armored leg, he reaches over to clamp a massive hand down on the armored space dead center of the creature's numerous eyes.]

Are you all right?!

[William's enormous hand suddenly erupts into view from Takeshi's peripheral. There's the sound of cracking and thumping when his machine parts start to try and pin down the cephalopod's solid parts and then pry apart the squishy parts so he can retrieve the little boy. In a moment, a huge, armored glove closes around the tiny boy's right leg. Despite the frantic energy and colossal strength driving William's strange form, he's gentle in trying to tug, tug, tug Takeshi free of the critter's grasp.]

[He sort of gives up and just hangs out until William can pry the poor lil' fella from the creature's sticky mitts. He's flustered, though, cheeks and ears turning red from a combination of embarrassment and shame; he's supposed to be way tougher than this.]

I-I'm okay...!

I forgot m'not wearing my suit.

[Stupid leg cast.]

Takeshi winds up bundled in enormous hands, metal fingers bent to conform to the curvature of his little ribs. William is furious. Not at Takeshi, immediately, because-- well for one thing he's a kid, obviously. None of this is really his fault, to the extent that any of them on this Godforsaken planet have control over bloody anything, lately. But also because he was just trying to help.

The tiny boy is scooped up high in the air as William gets his footing. He's not fast, but nor is the creature now removed from its natural habitat. Holding Takeshi close to his wide metal-plated chest, William's masked face turns to level a glare down at the creature's many-eyed head. For once, he doesn't see the fluid flowing out of its face, finds nothing human or sympathetic in the slippery flail of its tentacles. Raising one broad foot, he aims a hard kick at the creature's head. And then another one. And another one. A fourth.

By the time they get to twelve, something has cracked and begun to smell meaty in the jungle sunshine. Despite some dying synapses, nervous twitches running through the animal's many appendages, it's pretty much dead by then.

Which makes the timing quite good, when William finally loses his balance and scuttles to catch his balance. He shifts, too, at the same time. Ceramic and stone parts drift, and the stiffness of his mechanics relaxes back into flesh, bone, and fabric. Abruptly, William is merely William again, clutching a baby to his chest. "Are you wet," is the first thing he asks.

He slowly shakes his head, looking a little nervous. He knows from experience that hitting like that goes beyond survival and into emotions, and emotions can be scary and dangerous and not good, not at all. So he's a bit frozen in William's arms, as if he's afraid of Will - as if he worries that maybe he did something wrong, and Will may just aim his foot at Takeshi if he does something to make him angry.

He swallows hard, feeling helpless without his suit, in the golem's hands.

William wouldn't, would he?

"... M'sorry..."

The last of William's golem form vanishes, leaving only flesh and bone to hold Takeshi above the damp earth. Despite that he may look more human and less monstrous, well— that probably matters little to the boy who met more than his share of abuse in the hands of mundane people in the course of his short life. William's chest is heaving and his eyes are still sharp and strange from spent rage, a violent hormone cocktail that transitioned seamlessly from dead mechanical parts to throbbing veins.

He staggers away from the river, eight, nine steps. Enough to put what he deems a safe distance between them and the carcass. Winds up dropping carefully to his knees, not too concerned by the impact of packed soil of the earth on his silly human bones. His bones are barely human, anyway. He sets Takeshi carefully on the ground, patting his tiny arms to reassure himself that the child is intact. Not really paying attention to the expression on the boy's face until they are on eye-level. And then he goes still, his dark eyes widening under the cloyed strings of his hair.

"What's wrong?"

Takeshi shakes his head, hands unconsciously wrapping around and giving himself his own hug. He's anxious, but there's a small relief when William's looking less angry — less violent. It's dumb. It's dumb 'cus he's seen a lot of people be violent; he's seen Dad get violent a lot, fighting monsters. They've made him super mad before. But he was never... It was always for the game. Gantz's games. Was this for any game? He looks down at his feet, ears turning red.

"N-nothing... I didn't... know if you were mad at me. I'm sorry. I didn't know if you got mad like — " He stops, shakes his head. "I know you're not mean, you're not like..." He doesn't know how to say it. He's kind of scared to compare, like that'll make Will mad for sure, and maybe Takeshi will be wrong about his friend and he'll be so so angry. Maybe he'll be mad that Takeshi would ever think like that, and he'd leave him here by himself..

nooooooo, the small voice in the back of William's vice starts to scream, high-pitched, drawn-out, longer than it could be if it were utilizing William's actual lungs. A limitless, endless, fading noooooooooo. Takeshi, nooo.

"No. No," William has the urge to pet Takeshi's tiny shoulders some more, but finds his hands and arms arrested by the sudden and paralyzing question of whether that would be making this particular situation worse or better. There are a lot of trauma theories in the clinical culture of his homeworld, and while in general, treatment is a lot about learning to bear through wrongful associations, he suddenly finds himself uncertain if those associations are so wrongful today. He did go a bit postal. On the weird alien monster thing, but still.

There's blood on his feet, he realizes abruptly. Spattered stuckily up the back of his thigh, something fibrous trailing in the grass behind him. It smells of brains and death.

Abruptly, William shifts feet five, six degrees to the left, edging them out of Takeshi's view, even though he knows well that Takeshi has seen far worse than that. But it wouldn't have been on William Tsang, who was, among other things, too fragile to be brave, generally found shivering behind career soldiers and other hero types of people like that. After an instant's retrospection, William decides to stop looking backward.

(It's a strange and private realization: that he does not even recognize that part of himself, the one that did those things.) (But he says this part firmly, so that he might believe it to be true:) "I-- won't do that again, mate. I was worried about you. It'd never be at you." His hands fall uselessly on either side of his knees, and then he folds them on his lap, looking more like a penitent waiter of Japanese persuasion or at least affectation, than a demon thing.

He shakes his head, shakes it fervently.

"It's okay. It's okay! M'sorry."

But he shivers a little, containing it too much in the heat of memories that bubble up.

He remembers that smell. He remembers the smell of brains. He remembers heads halved and falling and acid bubbling as it bites through human body tissue. But none of it is as bad as the phantom pain of his ribs, caved in, cracked and piercing his lung. The taste of his blood in his mouth. He remembers home — something he thinks about less and less often — and the sound of a man's voice, so angry and scary. Scarier than the monsters he fought in the Tranquility, by a mile.

"Sorry, I just thought about bad things. I'm sorry."

He should be better than this now. He's a fighter.

He was supposed to be better than before.

"I musta' just got confused; I'll do better."

"It's not your fault." William's fingers are like water-striders tripping down Takeshi's foot, when he answers the urge to do something with his hands but nothing productive. "Horrible shit happens to good people, sometimes. It's this horrible trick of life, Takeshi. Like-- with dogs.

"You beat one hard enough, and eventually it starts to think it did something to deserve it." That story does not belong to him; William doesn't know dogs. But he knows something of its meaning. The moral of the story, if you will. The story belongs to his handler, who had meant it for him, when he was younger, if not nearly as young as this small boy sitting with one leg in a cast. Being older was no doubt a blessing for the most part. He'd had a decent childhood, despite the squalor and poverty. He'd had a greater sense of agency, job prospects, a capacity for rationalization, no one, really, to answer to. But he'd also been set in his ways by then. It requires more than insight to change.

Something stretches thin and uncomfortably tight in William's gut, precariously like hope, uncomfortably like fear. He would like for it to be not too late for Takeshi, but he isn't sure how to even begin--

"Can I be sorry too," he says, stupidly. "Like I'll do half."

He gives a nod, after a moment's pause. He's still kind of embarrassed, but...

"People... shouldn't beat up dogs. Dogs are nice."

And then -- he grabs the edges of his stitched up, slightly tattered sweater; it's always been in pretty bad shape, but Heather and the others had stitched it up so much that he doesn't want to throw it out. It's like a memory. A piece of how they cared about him. Right? He looks down at the palm-sized hole there. The creature had gotten just a tiny bit of the acidic water there, enough to chew through some of the cloth.

He frowns deeply, huffing.

"This is my favorite sweater...!"

... It's his only sweater.

William mumbles, "Oh my God," and "I'll make you another sweater," because he has not yet learned the importance of avoiding lying to discerning, bright young children whenever possible. But he is somewhat mortified by the hole in his sweater. What was he thinking. He had never properly thought through the degree to which Takeshi's resilience and tolerance for adventure relied upon him wearing his supersuit. As opposed to his. sweater. William taps Takeshi's knee consolingly.

"Maybe we should set up camp here," he says. "Have something to eat, and get our mind off things." The moment he says it, he regrets it; he glances back over his shoulder at the giant heap of juvenile cephalopod creature laying on the river-bank, and has to suppress a wince. Despite that he's fairly certain Takeshi is aware of where such foodstuffs as meat and eggs come from, in light of recent events, that seems like an especially tactless turn of conversation. He lifts his arm to rub his nose, trying to disguise to concerned look he darts at Takeshi afterward. Takeshi is Asian, and even in his time, even city dwellers of their ilk had a weird ability to cope with butchering.

Obscurely, he knows that Heather would believe he is doing his best. It's dim and distant comfort.

Takeshi simply agrees, calmer now, a bit quiet but not as nervous about William's intentions — he just has to remind himself a few times that Will said he wouldn't hurt him. That wasn't him; that was mom's boyfriend, was mom's angry, violent boyfriend that made the room smell like beer and smoke. He sits down, fiddling with the hole in the sweater, and smiles a tiny bit.

"It's okay... Um..." He looks over at the dead creature, putting his hands together for a short moment to pray over it. He didn't learn it from his real mom, but from TV. He watched a lot of TV — and he learned how to do it better in the Tranquility, where Murphy's church was.

Murphy was gone, too...

He speaks up, "I'm not scared of it! I saw dead things before, a lot."

07. in a gadda da vida, honey

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p.s. if u want to go mercy route i feel like takeshi could have a n animal friend, cuz theyre smrt

psht naaah

ashlee youre so hardcore

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i ffwded, lmk if this is ok! (and feel free to take the killing blow)

LMFAO HE'LL TRY BUT THIS DOESN'T GO AS EXPECTED EVER

cries my baby

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GIVES UP ON LIFE <X(

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1/2

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no;;;;;;;