sixthiterationlogs | [closed] to hell with the sorrow and watered-down scenes

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[closed] to hell with the sorrow and watered-down scenes

WHO: Kira Akiyama
WHERE: Kira's house
WHEN: Early September, shortly after the Bunker distress calls
OPEN TO: Karen Page
WARNINGS: Alcohol and other substance abuse, existential crises

He hasn't actually been drunk for several days. Life goes on. The dog needs to shit out of doors, the laundry piles up, Mark serves as an ever present and talking reminder that the crops don't wait for sci fi plots to resolve before needing care.

Mostly, Kira keeps to himself in the days that follow the signals. As with most changes in this place, the ability to fly away from his problems doesn't last, and he's gotten over the fact of his father's lighter enough to start using it. He's just lit the fire pit behind the house, usually reserved for the still, when Aurora paws at the back door and there are only approaching footsteps to explain her excitement.

"I imagine good timing made the reporting gig easier," he greets, making room for Karen on the halved log that serves as a seat.

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The fire is small but a surprisingly welcome sight. Plodding her way here, there had been too much to think about, too many emotions colliding in Karen's chest to let her steel herself for whatever argument may or may not come. As she pushes open the back door and steps outside, she realizes she's glad that however this shakes out, it doesn't have to happen inside, even if the cozy corners of Kira's bungalow are a far cry from the concrete walls of the bunker.

Wordless, she steps over and plunks herself beside Kira on the log, watches the dancing flames a moment as she pushes her hair from her face with a sigh.

"You told him," she says, and presses her lips into a line.

It's been a week. Both of his sides are sore for different reasons, necessitating more than the ground to sit on. The scratches and splinters are mostly gone, and considering where they are right now--he'd still take dodging around the woods with a hallucinating Kremlin plant on his ass over being here, in the village, while people processed what he's known for almost a year.

At this point, Frank seems like such a small part of it. But it's him, and it's Karen, and it's this. When hasn't Frank managed to loom over them, trying to hash this out?

"Yeah," he says, tipping the jar back reflexively. Even his nostrils burn from the sip, and he coughs. "Like a week ago. I was losing my shit, and he was there. He's always fucking there, I couldn't not talk about it anymore."

Which isn't an apology, but he's not--sorry. Not in that way. Kira looks at her when he hands over the moonshine. "But he'd know anyway now, so if you know I fucked up, I assume he found time to be a dick about it."

"Yep," Karen replies, popping the P at the end. "He is definitely not invited to my next existential breakdown."

Drinking moonshine straight is really not her style, but it's been that kind of a day, and at least it'll get her drunk quickly. "I really hope this doesn't make me blind," she mildly adds as she tips the jar to her lips, the scent of it already scorching her nostrils.

The first sip is almost spewed across the fire, Karen forcing it down just in time to avoid making a mess when her cough wrenches forward after. She lifts a hand to her mouth, clears her throat against it, and then takes another, bigger sip. This one goes down a little easier, bur still burns all the way from tongue to stomach.

"I don't even know how to feel about any of it anymore," she says, passing the jar back. "It's like I'm not allowed to feel anything at all, but maybe it doesn't matter if I do. I don't even know if any of this is real."

For a moment, he just closes his eyes and sighs. Even dodging sobriety for as much of it as he had, a week isn't enough to forget what was said, out there in the woods. Maybe it's a blessing, not having more than scraps of the people he knows. Or being a person who actually fucks up, deeply, on a regular basis. He is tired of defending her to someone who doesn't seem to hear it, and ostensibly shouldn't need it.

"Feelings are all we've really got," he says, letting the jar pass back and setting it between his feet for the moment. "And no, they don't matter, but we have them anyway." As verbal permission goes, it's not entirely straightforward, but he puts his arm back over her shoulders and takes some of her weight on his bruised side.

"I keep finding pieces of that life I had. And I think, you and I got ahead of this shit, and those pieces are just trying to make me go backward. They want us to hold onto the past, even when we aren't sure we really have one."

It's easy to go with the tug of Kira's arm, Karen sighing as she leans in, letting her head fall against the bony slope of his shoulder. As gestures go, it's simple, but all the more potent for that: Seeking nothing, expecting nothing; just uncomplicated comfort. The band across Karen's chest is still there, still pressing in over her lungs and heart, but it loosens a little for the effort.

She slips a hand into her pocket, pulls out the vial labeled with Matt's initials, holds it up before the wavering light of the fire so that the blood inside glows crimson.

"Backward," she echoes.

In the light, it's the color on the label that tells him the blood isn't hers. Kira sucks a breath through his teeth, gives her arm a squeeze. "I didn't realize it was out in the open, this time." He'd put as much distance as he could between himself and the information trickling in, Karen's last few messages left unanswered.

The knowledge that he'd fucked up, in telling Frank, hadn't been appeased by the bomb dropping on the village at large. He should know by now, whatever he says, however he defends her--Frank takes his shit out on people.

They have that in common, but Kira likes to think he doesn't have a preferred target. "Who were they?"

"Right there on the shelf," Karen confirms, her voice threaded with bitterness. Would it have been better if the samples had been behind glass again this time, unreachable? Probably not, now that she considers it; the fact of them existing in real life and not just in a simulation was the real sticking point.

"My ex," she adds, and tucks the vial away again. "He was a vigilante. Always doing too much and it caught up to him. He was here before, not for long, and before he died back home, if the timelines even line up that way. I don't know how to even feel about it, to be honest."

"Why do you know so many vigilantes" isn't the most helpful thing to say in the moment, but he doesn't know what would be: he just asks it, wry, giving her another squeeze. Did you stand on his feet is the opposite of helpful, and he swallows it--chases the fact that he can't parse the context of the thought, long enough to let it go.

Turned back to the fire, he rests his teeth on his bottom lip, breathes out. "That shit always catches up. And there's no stopping," he shakes his free hand at the fire, trying to name the thread between vigilante and special ops bullshit.

His other hand drops to her elbow, there if she wants it, easily shrugged off. "I've got this journal, from Kira 1.0. That parka I've got, that was--my? our? An ex, fuck it. I don't know what they did, but that last one, he thought he was dead. Me, I know better. I know he's dead, we're so--far into whatever the fuck this is, everybody's dead. But we found that stupid room, and they left the bloodstains on the coat, and I thought--good. They have that.

"And then I thought, I don't know whose fucking blood that is. Yeah, we're clones. Yeah, we have visual confirmation of people in tubes. But a bunch of blood samples on some fucking shelves? Does that even have a point, in that setup, other than making us feel something?"

The vigilante quip prompts a hard little huff of laughter from Karen; the truth is, she doesn't know. They're like tribbles or gremlins: Once you get involved with one, they just multiply. Not that she can really say much, given that if they got wet or were fed after midnight, it was probably at least partially her own fault.

"That's the big question about all of it, I guess," Karen replies to the rest, rubbing a fitful hand over her forehead as she watches the fire, and then sits back. She's had her moment — Her crying, however little and sharply restricted it was, her hugs both aborted and purposeful, her mind-reeling existential whiteout. She has to push it away or swallow it down now, not for fear of vulnerability but simple self-preservation. Karen Page is not good at being a hot mess for long.

"We know for a fact that someone purposely put us here and that they're manipulating us. And yeah, that's a given, but it's important too because it's one of the only things we know for a fact. How do we build from there and get the evidence we need about the rest of it? Because everything seems to point to us being clones, Kira, but the fact that we're being pointed at all means we can't know whether we can trust it."

Kira picks up and passes the jar, sensing the shift in posture--and able to guess what it means. Being allowed to feel and seeing a point to it are separate things, and he'd rather think himself in circles to tight he drills down, than confront what it feels like to wake up in that coat everyday. What it feels like to come downstairs and find Mark, and a dog, and a goat--and no one he knew and no one he was writing about too much in that journal.

The fact that it isn't that bad, that he likes Mark and his stupid dog and his smarter goat--maybe he has a sip before he fully commits to giving the jar over.

"What does it mean to ignore it, though? Shouldn't we just be critical of it as we go? I will put my big boy pants on at some point and go look this bullshit in the face, but that doesn't mean I take it at face value." And he'll--well, he probably won't take her to the fucking snake pit, and he wonders if filling her in would just lead her to the snake pit, but he knows you can't protect anyone from themselves.

"I mean, you and me--are we really going to Home Ec our way through adversity, pretending we're being smart by playing this place safe?"

Karen waves off the jar; a mystery to solve is a better distraction than booze once she's taken the opportunity to get her teeth around it.

"Have I ever struck you as someone who plays it safe?" she asks, more rhetorical than not. They met when she was out in the wilderness in the simulation-that-was, climbing canyon walls. Things have been a little... muted, maybe, the last few months, but fighting off a horned werewolf-thing probably earns a little downtime if the emotional wrenching doesn't.

"The adversity is going to be there regardless of how we tackle it. And setting aside something that might be intended just to screw with our head to me isn't ignoring it so much as just being practical. It kind of feels like a distraction, doesn't it? The blood, I mean. If that's what it is, maybe we should be looking in the opposite direction."

"That's what I'm saying," he clarifies, glad she came to the same conclusion regardless. It feels less asinine to put his head on straight if she's doing the same, neatly sidestepping their feelings like ducking out of a metaphorical hug, for all they linger at the fire.

"It's just--there. It makes sense that it exists, but it wouldn't just be there. Little souvenir shop of horrors." As he says it, it cements: that's all it is. Get a vial for the road, think about that while you ride the weird pod.

"What's the opposite look like, though? Something in the bunker, or out here on the surface?"

"Well, and they set it up. Gave us a little preview in the cave, and that had to be on purpose, even if most people never realized it was there." Things had been different, back in the sim. The mood less permanent, more lackadaisical, as if the better portion of them were just waiting for whatever comes next to fall into their laps. Which it did, so maybe that makes her the bigger idiot.

"And I don't know. I mean, that's what we need to figure out first, right? Lay out everything we know and see which way they point." She shakes her head, frowning. "I don't think it's down in that bunker, but I've also got an emotional bias right now."

Lay out everything they know; accept that they don't actually know anything.

Knowing's not a thing of facts for him. Knowing's always been tied to a feeling, and it's flexible, and facts change. He doesn't need to kick back another burn of liquor to let go of the blood samples, but he's acquired the taste. He's earned the fluidity it melts into his brain, and how much better the licks of flame distract him when he sets the jar back down.

"What about the blocked off parts? They got us in there when the tubes weren't functioning, but the stairs were blocked, right? So what didn't they put on display."

"I don't know," Karen allows with a slight lift of her shoulders. "Maybe the more salient question right now is if it's blocked off intentionally. Because everything that happened with the songs people heard and the pod rising up out of that water — That was a Broadway-worthy reveal, Kira. They even fake-killed one of us so they could have a second, emotional reveal when she was found again. And maybe that was the same Elena, or maybe it was a copy, but I'm kind of thinking the fact of us being clones might be an intentional distraction, and the bigger question is why are they showing us this stuff at all?" She pauses a tick, and then adds with a motion Kira's way, "Or not showing, as the case may be. Why would they even put us down there? It doesn't really track with everything else."

He licks the sharp and sour taste from the back of his teeth, too much in him for a proper round of sleuthing to start right now. "I think we should like, physically lay out what we know. All of it, and look at the new whole. You're talking about what does and doesn't track like we can trust any of it enough to say one presides over the other."

When he sucks a breath through his teeth, he still gets the taste. "Also we started this with moonshine, and I started earlier than you. I'm not the kind of idiot savant who leans more savant when I drink."

But the gears do turn, sloppy as they are, and there are new ones in the shitty little machine of his mind. "And I haven't kept you up to speed, on everything. We found something out on the river. Big fuckoff building full of snakes. I'm wondering how any of it tracks, these days."

"A big fuckoff building full of snakes," Karen echoes, her eyebrows immediately arching. "How big are we talking? Intentionally full of snakes?" He's framed this as important, but whether from moonshine or cynicism, the descriptive details are a little lacking.

"I wish we had coffee," she adds, offhand, frowning at the fire. Claire had gotten some in one of the magical mystery boxes, but it was all but gone and always thin on the ground in this place.

"Karen," he says, head swinging on its axis to drop the perfect, level, stare. "We are coffee. We just have to figure out how to turn it on when we aren't being chased by shrieking animals."

Or being carried out of The Temple of Doom by a reformed KGB operative, or whichever of Barnes' seven old man lives applies in the given situations. "In the meantime, we have those flowers. Come on, tea." He levers up from the stump, rolls his eyes when his foot catches the jar and tips the last shot into the dirt.

"Grab a stick, bring a light for the stove. I'll tell you all about it."

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[closed] to hell with the sorrow and watered-down scenes

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