towerofanimus | Freedom Can Be Confusing

Entry tags:

Freedom Can Be Confusing

Characters:

2nd_dii2ciiple & whoever would like to talk to him!
Setting: Room 2-08 and surrounding areas
Format: Any!
Summary: He's... not quite sure what to make of this
Warnings: slightly broken troll ahoy

The first thing he noticed when he woke was that he was not where he was supposed to be. There was no sign of his control block, or the biowires that should have connected him to his ship. The constant ticking of the computer in the back of his mind was gone as well - he wasn't connected to anything at all.

Panic tried to encroach as his conditioning insisted that he needed to get back to where he belonged right the fuck now, but he fought it off. He hadn't brought himself here, so it wasn't his fault he was disobeying. And flailing around in blind panic wasn't going to get him back to his station any faster.

Besides, if he was very lucky, this might be his opportunity to finally break free of his punishment of slavery. He'd almost lost hope that this moment would ever come.

The distress of finding himself dressed in plain white without even the tiniest indication of his symbol was enough to distract him long enough to read the letters and scout the tiny room. Thankfully a cursory search was more than enough to reveal the clean change of clothes waiting for him in an otherwise empty trunk, and he changed quickly.

Not a single hole for the biowire connectors. No sign of his hated helmet. He felt more like the Ψiioniic than the Helmsman, for the first time in nearly a sweep. Although he couldn't remove the collar, and he assumed the blue colour meant he was now owned by a blue-blood of that shade. It was actually a fairly ingenious method of identification. The problem was that he had no idea who it was, or where to find his new master.

Or, for that matter, why the Condesce would have suddenly decided to sell her most powerful Helmsman.

Time to find out what was going on.

Outside the room he found himself in a corridor full of doors just like the one he'd come out of. He turned to look back at his door, and saw a list of names, presumably the occupants. His was the last.

Right above it was a name he'd thought he would never see again. The Signless.

Just the sight of it was enough to send his panic rushing back in on him, intensified by the forbidden name. He reeled against the wall, staring in shock and disbelief. It couldn't be him. The Signless was dead.

And a part of Ψiioniic had died with him.

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He jumped at the sound, not having any clue that he wasn't alone any longer. He nearly gave himself whiplash as he jerked his head up to stare at her, and red and blue electricity crackled between his horns as he readied himself to deal with whatever threat he was facing. He'd been acting contemptuously vulnerable, and most trolls facing something that pathetic would probably kill it to put it out of their misery.

Instead he found himself facing a completely unthreatening girl, at least as far as he could tell. She was an alien of some kind, with pale, delicate-looking skin and equally pale hair. She didn't even have horns, or sharp teeth, or claws - he was pretty sure she wasn't actually capable of hurting him in any way, unless she was a mage.

He let his power drain away, and ducked his head sheepishly. "Uh, thorry," he murmured. "You thurprised me."

Her eyes widened at the display, her body automatically curling inward slightly, like someone expecting to be struck, perhaps even someone used to it. She stayed where she was, though, the smile definitely gone. Even once he relaxed, she stayed tense, at least until he spoke. It was certainly a funny way of speaking, but she made no comment. For a moment, she'd regretted her willingness to help, but... he hadn't actually hurt her. She knew she shouldn't be hasty. "...It's alright." Although it sounded just a little guarded, her expression similar. "I'm sorry-- for surprising you." She took a moment to regard him, as if to make sure he wasn't going to do anything else threatening, then said, with a trace of the gentleness from before along with a hint of caution, "You're new, aren't you?"

He felt bad, he'd obviously scared the fragile little alien. He made a real effort to gentle his tone and expression. "It'th okay, I won't hurt you. I thought you were going to attack me, but I would never hurt you first, I promise."

Her question and the purple collar around her neck told him this might be a fellow slave, and potentially a good source of information. "Yeah, I'm new," he agreed. "I jutht woke up, and I'm really, really confused. I'm called... the Ψiioniic." It took an effort to give that name and not identify himself as 'the Helmsman', and he shuddered with the little shock of pain his programming sent through him as he defied it. "Are you a thlave here, too? You serve a purple-blood?" Technically he supposed that meant she outranked him, if her master was higher than his.

Whoever his actually was.

The tone made her a little more comfortable, even though she was very familiar with false gentleness. Still, he didn't seem to be faking it. She wasn't about to move closer, but she also wasn't about to run away, especially after hearing those questions. They were definitely not the ones she was expecting. "Slave...?" That was what he was trying to say, wasn't it? But... why would he think something like that? Was... was that what it was like, where he was from? She hadn't heard anything about it from the other trolls. Maybe it was unusual, like her own situation. She found that her sympathy had gotten stronger at that thought; in a sense, it sounded like they might have something in common. At first, she wasn't sure what he meant about a purple-blood, but then she recalled that Molly had talked about trolls having different color blood. Automatically, her hand drifted up towards her collar. Purple. So that was why.

"My name is Naminé." It was spoken a little bit more quickly than necessary as she found herself eager to remedy his misunderstanding. "And-- no. You're mistaken; I'm not a slave, and neither are you."

She touched her collar, so she must have understood why he asked the question, but it seemed he'd been mistaken about his assumption. "I am a thlave," he corrected her, shaking his head and touching his own collar. "I thought this meant I'd been sold to a blue-blood, but even if that'th not true, that just meanth I still belong to Her Imperial Condescension."

On second thought, maybe he shouldn't have admitted that. He'd been intending to take this opportunity to make a break for freedom, if he possibly could. On the other hand it wasn't like he was going to be able to hide his origins for long, not given the way he'd already had to fight against his conditioning.

The mention of his own collar confirmed her assumption about why he'd thought she belonged to a 'purple-blood', and his insistence that he was a slave only confirmed her other suspicions. "Her Imperial Condescension?" It was clear by her expression that this term was completely unfamiliar to her, although the look might also have been due in part to her attempts to work out what kind of place, exactly, this person must have come from. After a moment, she shook her a head, deciding to go about this in a different way. "Did you read the letters?"

"Yeth, but... I couldn't really understand," he said, still puzzled. "They didn't make any thense. I know my world will be dethtroyed someday. Signless thaid so, in his latht words. But it's not suppothed to happen for many sweepth yet - and how could they have taken me from my post on the Condesce's ship?"

He shook his head. No matter how he ran through it in his mind, he couldn't make the pieces fit together. "She's our ruler, the highetht of the high-bloods, and she's incredibly powerful. And I wath grafted to the ship as her Helmsman, they can't have jutht taken me."

That explanation helped her understand his situation just a little more, but... grafted to a ship? And what was a Signless, or a high-blood? "...But they did." If only she understood this better herself. "I'm not sure how much of what the letters say is true, or if the worlds really are gone, but... they've taken a lot of people, from different points in time and even from different universes. If they can do that, they could take you, too, couldn't they? No matter where-- or when you were." She paused, as if uncertain that she should say what she intended to. "I was taken from... a strange time, too."

Could it be true? If he'd really been removed from his reality entirely - though he had no idea why they would choose him, a half-broken ex-rebel slave - then perhaps he was truly out from under the Condesce's influence at last. "You mean... I might really be... free?" he whispered, stunned by the very concept.

He'd struggled and fought for so long when they'd enslaved him again, and all the while he'd known it was useless. Nothing he could do would possibly win him his freedom a second time. They were being too careful, and anyway this time his owner was not going to be foolish enough to send him on a mission out from under her watchful eyes.

But if she wasn't even here...

"Where were you taken from?" he asked, eager to hear more of her story. The more he knew, the closer he could come to believing in his own freedom. "Why ith it strange?"

Free. Freedom was... a hard thing to accept, sometimes. She knew that all too well. She still couldn't quite accept her own; it was both the good kind and the bad kind, all at once. No one was there to tell her what to do, but at the same time, no one was there to tell her what to do. The same, in theory, but different in practice. Something in his response, though, made her hopeful that for him, it was the good kind of free. "Yes." Although that freedom was limited to the confines of the tower, but it was still freedom, at least in a greater sense than anything she'd ever experienced before. "Nobody's really sure what's going on in this tower, but... no one-- no one makes us do things."

It had been a bad idea, indeed, but his eagerness chipped away at her discomfort. There wasn't anything wrong with talking about it, was there? She'd been realizing more and more lately that there were plenty of unusual people here, and even if she did admit to her own anomalous qualities, that didn't mean anyone would be able to figure out her abilities. "I'm... different." She shifted slightly, her shoulders raising just a little. "People like me are-- only half a person." She pressed a curled hand lightly gainst her chest. "Normally, the other part of them is gone, but-- mine was still alive. I... I was just becoming whole again when I was taken."

"Half a person?" Ψiioniic considered that for a moment, and smiled wryly. "Funny. Sometimeth I feel like I'm two people crammed into one body by mithtake. But it sounds painful, I'm sorry. You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."

Better than most people, Ψiioniic understood the idea of memories that were too painful to share, too painful to even think about. He had so many that were slipping away from him, pushed to the back of his mind and lost because thinking about them just hurt too much.

Two people? She tilted her head slightly, making her own considerations. Painful... not in the physical sense, but perhaps in another sense. "Thank you." She really was grateful, too - explaining things partially seemed to tend to drag other things to light, things she'd rather not discuss, and... it was true, it was probably best not to think about such things. It hardly made any difference, now. She would always remember what she was and what that meant, but with so many of the people from those worlds being absent from this one, a fresh start was unavoidable. "...What does it feel like? Being two people, I mean, if you don't mind me asking."

"It feelth like..." he had to pause to consider it. He'd never really tried to describe it to anyone before. "Sometimes I'll be feeling something, and then all of a sudden I'll be feeling exactly the oppothite thing, with no warning. Thometimes I hear things coming out of my mouth and I don't even remember wanting to say them. And the voices of the soon-to-be-dead screaming in my head all the time doethn't help."

Huh. To feel two opposite things so quickly, or say things like that-- it sounded... confusing. It made sense, though; if being half a person meant feeling nothing, wouldn't it be right for someone who was two people to feel twice as much? That last bit, though.... "That sounds hard. But... what do you mean, hearing the 'soon-to-be-dead'?" She was actually hoping she'd misunderstood that part.

"It's part of my powers," he explained. "For about a week before someone is going to die, I can hear their voice screaming in my mind. It's very annoying, though occasionally helpful. Mostly just annoying, though." He sighed, and bit his lip. "Especially when I start hearing people I care about," he said, very quietly.

He'd known when the end was coming, for Signless and the rest of them. He'd known, but he'd fought it anyway, hoping that this time he was wrong, that this time he could change things. All for nothing. Signless had died anyway, and for the entire week before, Ψiioniic had to listen to the double harmony of the screams in his mind and the screams of his friend being tortured.

Powers. The similarities just kept piling up. The rest of that answer made her suck in a gasp and press her hands over her mouth, especially that last part. It took her a moment to recover, but when she did, her expression was sympathetic. "I'm so... so sorry." She wished there was something she could say-- and then realized there was. If she'd thought about it more, she would have considered the possibility of it being cruel to get his hopes up, but as it was her intentions of easing his discomfort kept her from thinking about it too much further. "...You know, sometimes... sometimes people who are gone in one person's time end up here."

"Then..." He looked up at her, blue and red eyes shining brightly with something other than power for once. "You think... it could be real? His name, hith name is on the door. That'th why I was freaking out. Could he really be here?"

He gasped, the very thought striking him so hard it stole the breath from his lungs. "I'd give anything to thee him again," he whispered. "Anything. I had to watch him die, they tortured and killed him right in front of me, and I couldn't do anything to save him."

Suddenly what he'd been saying when she'd first seen him made sense, only in a different way than it had originally. She was eager to encourage him, but that last part-- that last part made her stop short, feeling sick. All at once, she thought of the deaths she'd seen, of the replica Riku when Larxene... it didn't bear thinking about. More and more, she wished she knew what kind of world Ψiioniic was from, although at the same time, she didn't want to. It sounded like an awful place. Once she was certain she wasn't going to lose her lunch, even she was relieved to say, "It could be." That seemed so lacking, but she didn't have the heart to tell him it might also be someone from a different timeline. After all, most of the people she'd met who were supposed to be dead were from the same timeline as she was. That didn't prove anything, but she could let it be encouraging, couldn't she?

"Oh, god, I hope so," he sighed, resting his head between his knees for a moment, overcome with emotion. He had to take a moment just to remember how to breathe - and to wrangle his tears under control, before he upset the alien any further. She seemed distressed by what he was saying, and who wouldn't be, when he was talking about torturing and killing friends.

When he looked up, there was only a faint yellow sheen in the corners of his eyes. He smiled at her, the most genuine smile he'd given her yet. "Thank you," he said sincerely. "Jutht knowing that there'th hope is enough, even if this doesn't turn out to be him."

She'd hoped to make him feel better, but it only seemed to make him more upset. At first, she was afraid she'd said something wrong, but when he smiled at her, she realized it was a good kind of upset. Cautiously, she smiled back, the guilt she'd begun to have about getting his hopes up subsiding. "You're welcome." She wasn't sure what else to say than that, especially since she really meant it. She did wonder what that was on the edges of his eyes, but she was already becoming comfortable with the fact that trolls were still a mystery to her. Who knew what they were really supposed to look like? There had been a lot of variation amongst the one's she'd seen. "I hope it really is him, too." For both their sakes.

"What about you? Ith it better for you to be in this place, or harder? Are you happy?" he asked. He barely knew her, but after everything she'd just done for him, he felt like he needed to do something to ensure that she was happy as well.

She raised her head slightly, surprised. "Well..." Her eyes drifted toward the ground and her brow knit. "...That's a hard question to answer." She definitely seemed to be giving it some thought, though. It was a hard question for more reasons than one. "I think... that in a way, I am." Or at least she would be, if she, you know, COULD be happy. "I'm more free here than I've ever been, even if I can't leave this place. I just wish--... I just wish that some of the people who aren't here were." Shifting slightly, she seemed to reconsider. "...They might not like it very much, though, being away from home, if it really still exists and they're not already...."

((No worries! Though I was going to PM you and ask if you wanted to do something with them after Ψiioniic is rescued from Condesce?))

Ψiioniic nodded hard when she mentioned being more free, despite being stuck in the tower. "I know. Right? Nobody else underthtands. They all feel restricted... but I'm allowed outside the room for the firtht time in a year."

Allowed to move in the room, even, in his case. Just having the use of his arms and legs was a major step up for him.

((Sure, if you want to. C: She will be most happy to find out he's been rescued ~~although also kind of guilty because WHOOPS THE CONDESCE ACTUALLY IS HERE her bad~~.))

Her own nod was similarly emphatic, and she was glad to have her attention shifted from the direction it had started to turn toward the end. "Exactly...! It was like that for me, too. I always had somewhere that I couldn't leave or something that I had to do, whether I wanted to or not. Now... well, I really don't know what to do with myself anymore, to be honest." She admits this with a very small, almost self-deprecating laugh. "Maybe you'll have better luck."

((Well, Condesce wasn't here when they were having this conversation at least, lol))

"I doubt it," he admitted. "I'm already getting panic attackth because I'm not where I'm supposed to be. Well, you just saw me. All of my conditioning ith screaming at me that I need to get back to my post or she'll kill me. And at the thame time I'm sort of... lost, without anything to do. I don't remember what 'free time' ith anymore."

Freedom Can Be Confusing

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I never got this notif jgbgkjfgbkdjg sosorry

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