sixthiterationlogs | we're falling apart to half time

Entry tags:

we're falling apart to half time

WHO: Tommy Shepherd
WHERE: The fountain, around the village
WHEN: Backdated to Sept. 19 and a few days after
OPEN TO: Errybody in the village
WARNINGS: Might be some talk about remembered trauma/light body horror vis-à-vis medical experimentation, will use subject line CWs if it comes up!

and these are the lives you love to lead (arrival; fountain; closed to picard).

Waking up underwater is definitely not the most pleasant thing Tommy's ever experienced. It's also not the worst, but it is the most current thing he's experiencing, which is the more salient fact. Does Tommy even know how to swim? It's a mystery, but not an important one, because it isn't too long before he has his fingers wrapped around the edge of the fountain and starts pulling himself out onto dry land, coughing and spluttering.

He's disoriented - thinks vaguely about David and a warehouse and someone (or something) wearing his old teammate's uniform, but the more pressing matter is getting his lungs to work so he can breathe properly again. The air feels heavy here, just like his own body feels heavy, like it's cased in concrete, or like he's trying to run through the water currently soaking through his teal-colored scrubs. What happened to his uniform, his goggles? And just where the hell is he?!

this is the way they'd love if they knew how misery loved me (around the village; open)

Tommy legitimately hates this place. He's now basically living in the sticks, and being forced to move this slow feels like suffocating, each long second stretching out into forever. Will he ever get his speed back again? He tries not to think about it.

Unfortunately, living in the sticks means there are not as many distractions from thinking as Tommy's come to expect from 21st century urban life - no traffic noises, no television, no video games, no cell phones, no apps. If the slowness doesn't kill him, he's fairly certain the boredom will. So he regularly leaves the house he's claimed to explore the village - walking, at a painfully slow pace - and poke his nose into anything that looks even mildly promising.

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Wanda's hair was tied back into a ponytail as she worked outside of the house. She fed the chickens, cut some wood and occasionally tossed a ball around to give Arado something to chase. The large dog would grab the ball and return to Wanda's side to get her to throw it again. This pattern changed when Tommy walked along the edge of the yard.

Arado took the ball to him and whined softly for attention. Wanda didn't mind, it'd give her a break though she didn't think she'd ever see the young man around the village before.

She ran her fingers along her jeans and set her work to the side to follow the pup's lead and approach the young man. "Hello." Her accent was thick, rounding and pulling each word. "I don't think I've seen you around the village."

There's something about the woman that tugs at the edge of Tommy's recognition, though he can't quite put his finger on what it is. He shrugs at her statement, dismissing the weird feeling as a product of getting poofed to - wherever the hell this is, all the residual disorientation of being depowered again.

"I'm new meat," he says, crouched to offer a hand out to the dog to sniff. "Name's Tommy. Just checking out what's here. Nice dog you got." Then, to the dog: "What your name, pup?"

Wanda smiled as Arado jumped up and licked Tommy's face. He was a very well trained dog but he knew when he could get away with playing. This was obviously one of those times and Wanda wasn't going to wrangle the dog back when it meant meeting someone new.

"His name is Arado." He'd been given to Clint after his original owner left and Wanda wasn't really sure where the name had come from.

"I'm Wanda Maximoff. It's nice to meet you Tommy. How are you doing here?" It was usually a surprise and Wanda wanted to help in whatever way she can.

Tommy laughs at the dog’s enthusiastic licks to his face and gives him some scratches behind the ears in return to reward his friendliness. He’s about to say something about the dog’s name, but when Wanda gives hers, everything else on Tommy’s mind falls out of focus. Blue eyes go wide as saucers, and Tommy’s jaw drops open in surprise.

“Wanda?” He straightens back up to standing, staring at her - that’s why he thought she looked a little familiar. Her accent’s different, and she’s a bit younger than the Wanda he knows, but now that he’s made the connection, the resemblance is impossible to ignore. Tommy glances around to make sure there’s no one else around, drops his voice anyway, like he’s speaking a secret: “Like, Scarlet Witch Wanda Maximoff?”

She wasn't sure what solicited the reaction or why he was suddenly whispering.

There were a few people who knew of her in the village but most of the people who found themselves here were from a different version of Earth entirely, one where the Avengers didn't exist.

Her lips pressed together and Wanda nodded her head in confirmation. "I am." Her brow furrowed together as she took another look at the kid. He was young and reminded her a little bit of her brother but she didn't know him. "Do you know me?"

In any other situation, it would have been an odd question but she wasn't ruling anything out. It was always possible that he knew of her but she hadn't met him yet or maybe he was from an alternate version of her world. Wanda had already met an alternate version of her brother and while that had been painful at the time, she'd adjusted to the idea of many worlds. That or the overseers are just fucking with them.

Sometimes it was hard to tell.

More likely than not, they were from the same world and he'd seen her on TV or something.

Where Tommy's from, mutants are still not entirely accepted, and Wanda's still fairly notorious among them. M-Day may be in the past, but it hasn't been forgotten. Even if she, like Tommy, no longer has abilities in this village, he wouldn't want to accidentally out her if anyone is within earshot.

"Yeah," he answers, nodding, suddenly nervous about answering the unspoken follow-up question, how he knows her. "I mean, not you-you, the Wanda I know's a little different. I don't know her that well, we haven't spent a ton of time together or anything, but ... she's kinda my mom."

'WHAT?!'

Wanda needed a moment.

Her eyes ran over Tommy again, she noticed the set of his eyes and the curve of his nose. The reason that he looked so much like her twin brother was because he looked like her. "I've met my brother here. For a short time, from another reality. I know that it's possible but-" She frowned. "Who is your father?"

It was obvious that she had no kids and absolutely no kids that were Tommy's age but that didn't mean that she wanted nothing to do with him. In a weird, twisted sense, he was family and Wanda was slowly running out of family. She barely knew him but she didn't want to lose him.

"Why don't we talk inside?"

It seemed safer.

Tommy winces; he knows that can't be an easy thing to hear from some strange kid she's just met. Wanda's clearly too young to have teenagers, and she's not the Wanda from Tommy's world, either. It must be a pretty big shock to hear this, much like Tommy was a little shocked to discover he had a twin he'd never met.

"Sorry," he offers, with a light shrug. "My dad's name is Frank Shepherd, but Wanda was married to Vision. It's - kind of a long, weird story."

One that would probably best be told inside, yes. Tommy nods, willing to follow Wanda.

Wanda smiled, her expression calm and warm. "I'm used to weird." Her smile softened and she exhaled a tired breath. "I welcome any family here, even alternate universes that I don't know anything about."

Tony had already told her that she was getting close to Vision. So that, at least, was less of a surprise.

"I'll make us tea." She gestured towards the couch for Tommy to sit and then continued towards the kitchen. After setting the pot near the fire she returned to find Arado sitting on the couch, waiting to snuggle up with Tommy.

"You don't have to tell me everything but I'd like to know." At least some of it.

Wanda's use of the word family makes Tommy's insides lurch a little; the Wanda he knows back in his own world had made some good talk about being there for her family, but in reality, she didn't have much to do with Tommy afterward. Tommy had been so resistant to believing Wanda really was his mother-of-sorts for exactly that reason - why should he bother, he'd asked, to acknowledge that connection if she was only going to disappear again?

He tries to ignore the bitterness in the back of his throat that rises up when he thinks about it by not thinking about it. His own birth parents didn't want much to do with him, either - why would a woman he barely knew be any different?

But the Wanda in front of him is clearly different from the one he and Billy and the other Young Avengers had searched for. She wants to know, and she's already been nothing but kind to Tommy. There's probably no harm in explaining to her the weirdness of his life. He sits on the couch and gently pets Arado until Wanda returns.

"It's not really a huge secret or anything," Tommy says, glancing up to Wanda with a light shrug. "I'm a mutant - so's my twin, Billy. I grew up in New Jersey, and I didn't even know I had a twin until a couple of years ago. Normally, I've got super speed, and Billy's got magic." Much like the Wanda and Pietro of Tommy's Earth - that part goes without saying.

"I was in juvie when Billy and the other Young Avengers found me," Tommy continues, "broke me out, gave me a chance to join the team and turn my life around. Be a hero, y'know? But Billy got this idea in his head that me and him must've been Scarlet Witch's reincarnated-soul children. See, the Wanda back home did some reality-warping at one point, and part of that was that she had twin boys with the same names as me and Billy. Reality got unwarped eventually, but me and Billy still ended up with those kids' souls, I guess?"

Wanda's expression softened and pained at Tommy's story. She understood the oddities of life but she never wished for any child of hers to go through something like that. It hurt because she knew what it was like to lose her parents and her brother.

She took a minute to collect herself, checking on the water to make sure it wasn't sitting to far from the fire. "Sounds complicated." She agreed when she felt like she could trust her own voice. "I'm sorry that you went through that." Wanda's lip curled and she paused for a moment before standing and taking the seat next to Tommy.

"I won't ask you to treat me like your mother Tommy but I do think we're family." She let that sink in before continuing. "I lost my parents at a young age. My brother and I were fighting for our freedom and we ended up on the wrong side." It was hard to talk about, even though it'd been years since her brother died. "In our attempt to fix it, Peitro died. I've been with the Avengers since then." Recent events were more complicated and Wanda didn't think it was important to mention just yet.

"I don't know what the other me with thinking but I know what it's like to lose family and it never gets easier." Even family that you don't like.

The tea pot whistled and Wanda rose to her feet to finish their tea.

Tommy shrugs, like everything he's just talked about is no big deal. That's how he manages the weirdness of his life - by pretending it doesn't affect him, by acting like he doesn't care. "It's OK," he says, "I mean, I pretty much figured my life wasn't gonna be normal anymore once I started being able to run fast enough to break the sound barrier."

He listens quietly and attentively to what Wanda says about losing her parents and her brother, and a heavy soberness settles in Tommy's chest. It's hard to imagine Wanda without Pietro, but it isn't hard to guess that Wanda might be very lonely. Tommy ponders for a moment what it would be like to lose Billy forever, and decides very quickly that he doesn't like where that thought leads, so he abandons it.

Moving on.

"Well - yeah, you're obviously way too young and pretty to be anyone's mom." Is that a little weird to say? Oops. Tommy realizes that a half-second too late to stop the words from exiting his mouth; instead, he says more in an attempt to make it less weird. "Uh ... not that you'd be ugly if you were someone's mom?" Nervous, he rubs a hand over the back of his neck. Nice going, Thomas.

"Anyway ... I've got another mom back home and I haven't heard from her in a couple years, so I guess I'm doing OK without one. How 'bout ... you can be the cool older sister instead? Or ... distant cousin I just met?"

Wanda's expression softened as her lips broke into an amused smile.

Listening to Tommy fumble over his words was kind of adorable. He was young in many senses but also fully grown, forced to grow up in a situation that demanded an adult. Wanda hadn't wanted that for her children, it was one of the reasons she had joined the Avengers, to protect people from the hardships she experienced, but there wasn't anything she could do about it.

Whatever she might want, he wasn't from her world.

"Thank you and I think I can be an older sister." She was used to being the younger sister. "I'll worry. If that's okay. I don't know you but we're family and I want you to be safe."

Wynonna having an axe in her hands is probably a good argument for keeping the tool shed locked up a little tighter. At least she's being productive- chopping wood is something simple she can do, and it relieves a lot of stress.

And it's kind of obvious that this is probably why she's doing it, since one can hear her swearing under her breath (and every so often, a little less under her breath) as she goes through the soothing, if muscle-straining motions of splitting logs, then stacking them against the nearest wall. Free firewood for whoever needs it.

"-shit-eating goddamn Truman Show kidnapping psychos-"

So she's working through some stuff.

It's probably not the smartest idea to stop and heckle someone with an axe in her hands, and yet. That sure is exactly what Tommy's doing, head tipped slightly to one side while he watches Wynonna work.

"Man, what did that log ever do to you?" He grins, obviously pleased with his own joke. He seems to have forgotten, for the moment, that it's not a given he'll be able to outrun her if she turns out to be violent and unappreciative of his brand of humor.

Even with people arriving in the bunkers just as often these days, Picard still makes a habit of swinging by the fountain. After all, there's no guarantee that the Observers aren't still using that method of arrival, and he'd much prefer to check the fountain and have it turn out that no one's turned up in the fountain that not, and have someone arrive without a helping hand. Or perhaps more relevantly, someone to answer the sorts of questions that seem to almost inevitably come with arriving in the village.

He arrives just in time to see Tommy finish hauling himself out of the fountain, and that's enough to have him making his way over without so much as a second thought. And all the more so, once he draws close enough to spot that Tommy seems a bit disoriented.

"Is everything alright?"

He suspects he knows the answer. But that doesn't mean he's not going to ask, just in case.

"I don't know." Tommy's too shocked to offer anything more snarky than the truth - he's extremely disoriented, blinking rapidly, still slowly coughing up water and remembering how to breathe. He pushes his bangs back from his forehead and shivers.

"What happened? Who are you? Where am I?" He may not be talking as fast as he typically does, but his words are still rushed, clipped, mildly panicked. Tommy gulps in a deep breath and quickly exhales. "Where's David?"

Given that arriving out of the middle of a fountain is disorienting at the best of times, Picard doesn't blame Tommy for needing a moment to stop at think about the question at hand. It doesn't mean that he's any less concerned, mind you. But he's willing enough to give Tommy a moment or three if that's what he should happen to mean.

"My name's Jean-Luc Picard. As for where you are... I'm afraid it doesn't really have a name. Most of the people here simply refer to it as the village; I don't know what you were doing prior to arriving her, but finding oneself abruptly in the middle of a fountain is the most common means of arrival."

No longer the only means of arrival, no. But it's still common enough, for all that it no doubt sounds more than a little ridiculous.

"And if that's someone from where you were prior to arriving here... it's most likely that they're still wherever you were."

"How does it not have a name?" Tommy mumbles, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment, an attempt at reorienting himself. Clearly that's not the most pressing question at hand, but it's the one that comes to his mind first, so it's the one he chooses to vocalize.

Think, Thomas. What were you doing before you showed up here? He remembers first that he was with David, of course, and beyond that - there was a warehouse, and some kind of impostor wearing Eli's uniform, or something entirely too damn close to it. He'd run in, fists ready for impact, and -

Everything else between that and the fountain is blank.

"David's a friend. From work. We were - doing something," he explains, weakly. "Trying to help - that's what I do."

"I'd imagine because no one's bothered to come up with one."

Plus there's the matter of getting people to agree to any specific name, when thus far the village hasn't really had a name. Which he expects is largely on account of the fact that there's not a whole lot of need to differentiate this village from any other when there are only to the two to speak of, and the one the fountain happens to be in is the more populated besides. Which doesn't mean that there aren't likely to be any of a number of unofficial names for the village, but those are most likely to all be in the general category of 'things people mentally refer to it as'.

Still, he's more than willing to wait while Tommy works on figuring out what other questions he has in regards to the village and the rather unorthodox method of his arrival.

"There's nothing wrong with that. Although I'm afraid that it might be a bit before you're able to get back to where you were previously."

Edited 2018-11-15 04:19 (UTC)

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we're falling apart to half time

Around the Village, outside of House 20

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around the village

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