eleven. spam & video. i'm not just made of parts.

[indispensible]

[You will notice a few things where Vin walks. Not a healing, not exactly, but the sense of refreshment. Regrowth. Skinned needs are unskinned. Cells grow. Plants experience the most noticeable change, growing more in minutes than they have in years. (She shies away from the garden for this reason - it would become a thicket quickly, easily.)]

[Hair grow where she passes, and nails. She can feel a tingling on her own scalp and under her nail bed, and is wild-eyed with anger - under which is fear. She hasn't been this out of control in ages, but then, she hasn't sensed the dead before, either.]

[Her hair is down past her waist when she gives in and broadcasts, peering through the camera as though her gaze can make people reveal their secrets. Behind her, a green tendril uncurls and rests on her shoulder.]

Give me Dillon Cole. Now.


( ooc; vin is a star shard from dillon's canon, um, star shards! tl;dr she is part of dillon's soul and her power is growing shit out of control. open to spam or video, more info here. )

Comments

[orderfromchaos]

He's - look, either you're different or I'm different, it doesn't really matter. The point is we'll get through it together.

[It matters, it matters, why aren't you Winston - but he takes her hand, because he can't not, because they're pieces of each other.]

[indispensible]

[Tangling her fingers in his, she feels herself - exhale. All of her deflates, as though some great pressure has finally found an escape through the warp and weft of their combined presence. She does not smile, but at the same time, she feels herself slowing. She's not afraid anymore. Not really.]

I know. I wasn't worried about me. I was worried you'd done something stupid again.

[orderfromchaos]

Not recently.

[So aggrieved. It's just - so easy, to fall into it, the breathtaking ineffable intimacy of syntaxis, they just fit. She seems exactly like the kind of person who would have threatened to shoot him with a gun as tall as she was when he was being crazy.]

I mean. Erm. Depending on...when you think it is.

[indispensible]

[She blinks slowly, seeming satisfied at this reaction. Both halves of it. It feels right to her, too. A simple but also too complex to comprehend thing, a whole that they are both part of. Some of the seams of her have been sewn up.]

[He's such an idiot.]

The dam.

[Her fingers quiver, just slightly.]

[orderfromchaos]

[He flinches, a little.]

I had to. I didn't know - I'm sorry. I'm so damn sorry.

[He gulps, grips her hand tighter, his arms shaking just a fraction from the tension. They weren't supposed to be there.]

[indispensible]

They're dead.

[She leans her head against his chest.]

They're both dead. You killed them.

[It's not particularly accusatory, although that will probably come. She's just - shocked. And numb. Lost, like a child, which she still is, just like him. She would like him to make it better, to bring order to this situation - and yet she knows that he can't. Won't. Can't.]

[orderfromchaos]

[It doesn't matter that it doesn't sound angry; he's talked to a half dozen profilers and therapists, told them frankly what happened because it didn't matter, because none of them really believed it. But he never said that part, the thing he thinks quietly with every heartbeat, bleeding out endlessly. His parents, then Deanna, then Michael and Tory. He always kills them, always.

He can't stand it, not hearing it from her, the usurper, the fake that he's clinging to so desperately, and it rips out of him, ragged, snarling.]

They weren't supposed to be there!

[His hand tightens on hers and the power spikes the way it does with syntaxis, the way it's supposed to, his power using their joining to construct something unified that exists outside the Admiral's restrictions on him. A coffee table nearby explodes into individual wooden pieces, laid out in a neat array like gravestones, each plank unvarnishing and beginning to sprout shoots.]

[indispensible]

[His anger just fans the flames of her own, which she had so carefully banked upon finding him - upon feeling the tendrils of his presence brush lightly against her cheek. Upon holding him, she becomes all quiet devastation. Strange, given her natural tendencies - or maybe not so strange, when you consider that each thing holds in itself its own opposite.]

[She listens to the effects of their syntaxis, doesn't bother to look. Then she twines her fingers with Dillon's and sighs.]

But they were.

[What is growing behind her, she wonders, and will it grow into something ugly or something beautiful, and will Dillon Cole admit what he's done or retreat with his words like he always does? Once she told him there would be no pardon for what he'd done. Part of her still believes it.]

[Part of her hopes she's wrong.]

[orderfromchaos]

I know, damnit, I know, what do you want me to say? That I'm going to fix everything? Would you believe me even a little?

[Vicious, scathing. He will, he will, he has to, will burn out his entire disproportionately incandescent being trying - and he truly doesn't believe he can.]

[indispensible]

[She pulls away, sneering.]

Do you need my belief now? Mine of all people's?

Don't ask for faith. Just do it.

[She's glad to see him. Pathetically glad. But she can't say it. So this is what she does instead.]

[Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a tree growing in the hallway, branches spaced at perfect intervals.]

[orderfromchaos]

[No. Not hers. He doesn't even know her name, christ. She looks a little like Deanna and feels like Winston and it's fucking him up.]

I need you not to shoot me in the meantime.

[Bitter. If he were from the time she is - if he still believed he were the core of the doom - if he'd met Winston, right after the dam - he'd have asked for it, flat-out. But not now.]

And I need your help. Okay? I know it was me first but not working together always fucks us up so, so. You have to believe enough to try too. I need that. Yes.

[I need you-not-you.]

[indispensible]

[It's a curious thing. He's less self-flagellating, less self-destructive than she's expect. Her eyebrows quirk in puzzlement, but she accepts it, for once, without fighting.]

I'll try to hold back. This once.

What do you need me to do? [Because the thing is, she'll do it. Not without doubt, not without complaint, but she'll do it. For Dillon, she thinks she'd do anything, in the end.]

[orderfromchaos]

[He breathes. This is - this is ridiculous. He wants to say find me, when everything changes again come and find me, because I don't know if I'll be able to do it, but she won't be there, she isn't really his soul.]

It's going to get worse. The overflow. In a few months, it's going to get a lot worse very suddenly. We should practice coordination now. Here.

[indispensible]

[Now. Here.]

[Maybe she should be afraid at the potential of their powers combined, but she isn't. Coordination - what they can do - her ego is banked somewhat after the demise of Okoya, but she's still curious. They could be so much. This is knowledge that isn't in any books.]

[She nods, and holds out her other hand for him to guide into place.]

Show me how.

[orderfromchaos]

[No, he thinks, visceral and harsh. Not, not that hand. He covers the moment poorly, turning and tugging her along with the one they're already holding, up the stairs toward the CES.]

Not here here. There's a place we won't wreck everything.

[indispensible]

[She notices, but doesn't say anything, probably because halfway to connection she feels the spark of wrongness. She does not connect to Dillon this way. That way is for someone else. And more than before she feels their absence, the aching loss that she doesn't want to even think of too loudly, much less mention out loud.]

[Tight-lipped, she follows him.]

Tell me why you're here before we get there, or I won't help.

[orderfromchaos]

I turned myself over to the military after dealing with Okoya. I figured if death didn't work, maybe if they stuck me in a deep enough hole, I'd stop wrecking things.

No such luck, but the prison was more effective than I planned on. I actually did break out but only after I promised to help someone here, and I can't just leave her. It's complicated. Okoya's people are going to invade en masse so I could probably still use a miracle above regular my pay grade.

[Wow it's a lot easier to say this stuff while climbing eight flights of stairs and also not looking at her.]

[indispensible]

[She's more important than us? Vin wants to ask, with clingy desperation. In the next instant she knows, somewhat smugly, that not only is this not true, it's impossible. No one is more important to the five of them than the other four. This is just a fact. Insecurity is an uninformed response.]

I didn't think there were miracles above your pay grade, [she says instead, vaguely snide as they make their way to the deck.] What kind of soul does miracles like that?

[orderfromchaos]

[Dillon is just being Dillon; stubborn and weirdly principled. It's part of his charm, or something.]

I don't know. But I'm clearly awful at getting things to work out right. General reviews say this guy is a little less monkey's paw than I am.

[indispensible]

You trust that?

[They emerge on deck with her scoffing.]

General reviews say we're gods.

[But she knows what it is in the end. It's all just desperation.]

[orderfromchaos]

I trust that I have no idea what I'm doing.

[So. Yes, desperation it is.]

[indispensible]

No. You don't.

[But she squeezes his hand anyway. Vin has never known Dillon knowing what to do leading to anything good, so maybe this is better. That and . . . Well, she loves him. He's part of her soul. That's just how it is.]

[orderfromchaos]

[After Deanna died, Winston was the best of them. It still kills Dillon, a little, that he fell for Okoya too. It just - they didn't depend on each other, so they couldn't depend on each other. It all comes down to him, in the end, letting fear rule him even when he had her by his side. So: not today.

He pulls her into the CES, and it could be California but it's not, it's plateau halfway up the north face of the freaking Grand Canyon. Which, okay, there's fierce and hardy things growing here, there are geological patterns that span tens of millions of years, it's kind of perfect. But holy shit.]

[indispensible]

[She clings to him instinctively when she sees the ground fall away before them. Not, precisely, because she's afraid, but because security flows from him like a stream.]

Here?

[orderfromchaos]

[He grins, then, because he's an asshole, kicks a pebble off the ledge to watch it tumble down and vanish long before it hits the distant twist of the river, too small to see, though he can feel the trajectory of it.]

Yeah, sure.

[His arm is around her waist, and he's not sure how that happens, but he squeezes her a little, just - enjoying the closeness, because he's been alone for so long, because he gave up so much the last time he was here.]

Just don't look down.