03 ▒ EVENT: STRELA OUTPOST ▒ ASSIMILATION

[ataraxites]

CHARACTERS: Ensemble production!
LOCATION: Strela Outpost.
WARNINGS: Mind horror, hivemindery, etc.
SUMMARY: Communal brainwashing.
NOTES: Divided by locations; players are free to indicate which day/stage, and to begin new subthreads wherever they'd like!

Looks like the authorities have apprehended you and have brought you in for processing. After being forced to wait in the waiting room, you're brought to the assimilation room - a terrible white cell, where you're trapped for hours, sentenced to be slowly stripped of your individuality.

Comments

[hostage]

"Libby," replies the thing that looks like Jesse, with Jesse's voice. They know her name - the name she's given herself, that is. His hands find her wrists, wrap around them to draw her hands away from her face, to capture her. "Come with me."

[amethysts]

Here's the worst part: Libby wants to go.

She does, in that second, and maybe she even would, but he takes her wrists and not her fingers. Jesse would never be that stupid. Jesse would know better, knows how she flinches, remembers the way she almost screamed once when he moved too quick at her back. So Libby rips her hands away and snarls.

"No. Fuck--fuck no!" She spits it, spits blood on the floor (she just killed two people, she just--she puts it away in the box), fists her hands. "No. Fuck you, Jesse, this is not--I won't let this happen, they don't get you! You got that, you sick fucks?"

She bets they can hear her, through him, and even if not she has to say it: "You're coming me with. You're coming with me if I have to break your fucking legs and drag you, and we're gonna go to the ship and get you back and--and I'm going to kill them all."

That last part isn't snarled. Isn't loud. It's hissed, so angry she cannot even lift her voice. It's a soft and vicious promise.

"I'm going to kill every person who gets in our way, for touching you. I swear. All of them--they're going to die for doing this to you, Jesse."

[hostage]

"Why?" Jesse utters in a patient tone that implies he's gently guiding her to reconsider, rather than asking for an honest reason. Because there is no reason, no reason at all for her to react this way. They can fix her.

He doesn't learn from his mistake. He reaches for her again, not violently but more forcefully than a moment ago. He's going to keep trying until he succeeds or she eliminates his body, as she did to his companions. And then another will come to replace him.

[amethysts]

"Because you're my best friend, you fucker," Libby says, wretched and torn, and she pushes his hands back with her TK. She can't let him touch her, or he might take it, and she needs it now. Her best friend by default, only friend, and Libby won't let them take him because everything else she ever loved is gone. She doesn't love Jesse, but it's as close as she's come since she was four.

"I'll drag you. I swear. So will you walk or--the other way?" She forces herself to be stern. Guve orders. No permission allowed.

[hostage]

"This is unnecessary," is Jesse's response. "Come with me instead." His hands push up against the air, where it feels like there's glass between him and her. He doesn't stop when he feels that barrier, however. He keeps pushing. His fingers begin to turn white with the effort. His joints pop and crack. He'll break his own wrists trying to get to her.

[amethysts]

Oh, fuck that.

Libby drops the telekinesis and tugs her sleeves over her hands--will that help? She has no idea. But she seizes his fingers clumsily and squeezes them.

"Listen--" this makes her physically sick, it really does, but she doesn't know what else to do. She's not stupid enough to really think that talking to him will bring him back.

"Come with me. We'll find more people who didn't--who didn't get it right, 'kay? And we'll bring them back here." She could knock him out, but she doesn't know how hard she'd have to hit him, and anything hard enough to keep him out long would brain damage him. (If he isn't already, some sick whisper tells her, but she won't listen.) "And--"

Hopeless, voice trembling, she hates this and herself and everything in the entire universe: "You don't care if I hurt you anymore, do you?"

[hostage]

"Pain is nothing," Jesse answers evenly. "Death is nothing. We endure. What is one life when the rest go on?"

He isn't fooled by her attempt to distract him. His task is to capture her, not the others. He looks at her hands, gripping his fingers through cloth. It's a clever solution to her problem; she guessed correctly about the limitations of his power. But she's also let slip that she doesn't want to hurt him. Her sentimentality can be exploited.

Rather than fight her with his hands, he leans in. He brings his face closer to hers, staring at her with those empty blue eyes. "Everything is beautiful and good with us," he murmurs serenely, "so pain cannot exist. Let me show you." His head dips down as he moves to kiss her lips.

[amethysts]

Libby jerks away harder than she did when they electrocuted her, eyes wide and impossibly betrayed--it's not Jesse, she tells herself, it's not, this is a trick to touch her skin, but it still--she flattens against a wall and hyperventilates. Which is stupid, she's already dizzy.

"Don't," she says, but her voice is tiny. Begging. And she knows, hideously, that if he tried that on the ship she'd let him. He can have anything he wants from her, anything, but this isn't him right now.

And that makes her hate again, even purer and brighter than before, and rips her out of shaking with fear and nausea. Because if this isn't him, and they're trying to make him do that? That too, that after what they already did?

Libby is going to burn this place to the ground.

She focuses, and pins his arms and legs together. Holds him altogether as still as she can and picks him off the floor, and maybe he'll hurt himself anyway, and she'll live with that. Since she can't live without getting him out of here. They want to take her pain away, his pain away, and pain is so fucking precious. Pain is everything she is, and if they take that she's nothing. They took it from Jesse and it's ripped the heart right out of him. But she'll get it back.

"I won't let you kill yourself," she says, sharp as razors, "Hurt yourself, see if I fucking care. We're going."

[hostage]

Jesse's expression doesn't change when that attempt fails. Disappointment is beyond him now. He's not capable of it anymore. He goes slack for a moment when she traps his body with her mind, registering this new state and weighing the benefits of waiting versus fighting. He decides that she's likely bluffing when she says she doesn't care if he hurts himself. His head tips slowly to the side while he looks at her, considering.

"It's over," he tells her. "There is nowhere to run, Libby."

His head gives a violent jerk back as his muscles seize. He's fighting her grip with all of his strength. His fingers contort. His arms pull as his body twists to dislocate them from their sockets. His spine arches dangerously as he struggles to break his own neck. He stops sounding calm, finally, but it's replaced with a wet choking sound - and the worst is the lack of actual cries, like he's dying but it all makes no difference to him. It's only the body that's dying.

[amethysts]

Libby only lets him move so much. Her control shivers and twitches but doesn't break--he needs more slack to kill himself, but hurting? Oh, hurting he can do, and she was lying but that doesn't make her let him go. He can decide whether or not to forgive her later. She won't forgive herself--her fault, her fault, because she's stupid and can't find a better way. A smart person could save him without this.

She's a coward, so she puts him at her right, where her dead ear muffles his warped pain, and starts walking. As she does, she reaches for the wall and tears, with a shriek of metal that drowns out even Jesse. That's good, so she keeps ripping it, into smaller and smaller shreds like paper until they're surrounded by torn metal shards. She's never hated anything like this. They killed Larkspur but they didn't take her mind, she died herself, but now Jesse talks like a stranger because they ripped the lyrical bounce out of his voice and the gleam from his eyes and everything that she likes about him, everything that made her feel like she could trust him, and how is she ever going to look at him again and not remember him leaning down?

"It's not over," she says, flatly, for her own benefit because really, does she think he's in there to hear her? (She does, he has to be in there, he has to be as horrified as she is and after they'll be able to remember it wasn't his fault what they made him do because sometimes you have to do things with your body you don't want. Please, Jesse.) "Not until I'm fucking finished."