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

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

[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. )

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[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.]

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.]

[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.]

[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.]

[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.]

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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.]

[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?

[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.

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.]

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

[So. Yes, desperation it is.]

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.]

[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.]

[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?

[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.

You're an ass.

[But she presses close to him anyway. This is where she fits; whether it's against a rock face or at the bottom of a river, this is where she fits. It's strange and impossible to be so comfortable in this place, after all that's happened and that hasn't happened. But it does feel sort of like home.]

[She leans her head against his chest again to listen to his heart beat, which hits the down beats of her own pulse. In doing so, she looks down, but she is not afraid because of how tightly he's holding her and how warm he is under her cheek.]

[A tiny, dying, scrubby brush just below their feet grows green, then sprouts flowers.]

[His free hand splays against the rock face, feels the weight and grain of it, layers of pressure and time, where the fossils and fault lines are. He pushes, squeezes Vin's hand. He doesn't use her ability, because he can't, because they are two wills with one fire and neither of them really controls it. But they can steer. The hardy little shrub grows and grows, tiny white desert flowers opening as the roots bore through flaws in the rock, syntaxis humming and fizzing and sparking inside them and around them. The rock fractures with a noise like gunshots that rattles and echoes slowly off the other side of the canyon and rock tumbles down and down the cliff face. Their ledge doesn't so much as shiver; through the swirling dust, a perfect staircase cuts its way down the rock.]

[She can feel syntaxis working within her, and better yet - stranger yet - she can feel it working in him. The growth of the shrub resonates in her bones, but she can feel him working in the stone like a heartbeat in her temples, too, even and orderly and perfect. It's power like she's never felt before, but it's more than that: a sense of peace, like this is how things are supposed to be. Like one great exhale.]

[For a few moments while it's happening, she closes her eyes and just feels. Normally her brain is working overtime, taking everything in, processing, learning, growing. Now she works blind, feeling full, whole. Efficient.]

[When she opens her eyes and sees in the world what she felt in her mind, she smiles wide and digs her fingers into Dillon's shoulder, turning her face up in a smile like a flower to the sun.]

We did it.

[And she kisses him on the cheek, lingering to breathe in the clean boy-soap smell of him as the wind buffets her hair around.]

[He feels like something's wrenched loose inside him, or finally snapped into place. She kisses him and it's a jolt like syntaxis, like coming back to life, like nothing except his stomach lurching and his heart accelerating, like the vertigo he should have but didn't until now. Like really looking for the first time, seeing the possibilities suddenly fan out, except he wasn't looking for it at all, and he isn't looking at the consequences now, just reeling from the single realization like a riflebutt to the face, that right now she's part of him and he's part of her, and he could hurt her, maybe, but he can't unmake her.

And it'll all be over in day or two but he doesn't care, he doesn't care at all, he's resolutely not thinking about it because what good has planning ahead ever done him anyway, so he kisses her instead, on the mouth this time, still full of that exultant-bright feeling, still surrounded by the echoes reverberating back and forth across the canyon.]

[There has never been anything in the world like Dillon kissing her. They have seen and done a hundred things, half of them stupid and most of them amazing, but nothing in the whole universe could have prepared her for this. She wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him back with her whole body, launching herself at him on the cliff face with all the exuberance of someone who has just done something they didn't know they could do.]

[It'll all be over in a day or two, but a day or two doesn't exist right now. All there is is the two of them, their power and grace and their clumsiness, too. She feels like she's been waiting forever to kiss Dillon Cole, and like it could never have happened except in this moment, too, that this is the culmination of every fight they've ever had, a perfect and imperfect axis of their existence. His mouth is warm and she's home, not safe but secure, blooming.]

[He thought it would be different from kissing Deanna. (It is different.) He thought it would be less. (It isn't.) He thought he knew what he meant when he said they're my soulmates but he didn't, he didn't know at all, because even with Deanna everything vast and bright except their own desperate hopes was being siphoned away; even the rush of syntaxis was a jumble happening through them and past them, but this feels like every layer of who he is finally bubbling up joyfully in synch, personal and physical and powerful, and the sweet settled soothing wholeness where the places they were ripped apart are cold welding back together, clean and easy. He touches her hair, her back, tries to press closer and can't, just kisses her while the feeling builds on itself, multiplies, freed from the axioms of mortality.

But they are still human, separate shapes with anchorpoints of blood and fingertips and eyebrows, lips with a specific neural density, lungs that need oxygen. They slip apart like a lid coming unscrewed from a jar, perfectly manufactured grooves that can also be apart, that are still constitutively meant to be back together, undamaged by the separation, unchanged. He laughs, sheer happiness, nuzzles her nose, gulps down air, kisses her again.]

[The separation makes the joining together again sweeter. Getting to see his face makes it sweeter, too, the joy on his face that's so often drawn and lined with fear, worry, concern, the weight of the world. He still has so much to answer for, but right now, for the first time in forever, being stuck in her own skin doesn't feel too small for Vin. It feels just right.]

[She traces his cheekbones with her fingers and doesn't tell him she loves him, because wouldn't it be strange to say something out loud that's always been the case? Even back when she hated him she loved him, because they're part of each other, of a whole. Soul mates, fitting snugly into the universe right next to each other, defying reality in what is, for once, perfect synch.]

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

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