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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"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."

((HER GUILT KNOWS NO BOUNDS I mean logic.))

A frown settled on her mouth along with a sympathetic, "I'm so sorry." It sounded like he'd had it much worse than she had. "I wish I could help. Maybe it'll... wear off?" She shifted slightly, her voice uncertain. "I remember that at first, when I got here, I always felt like someone was going to stop me when I stepped through the door, but it got better." It didn't really sound completely comparable, and the awkwardness of it was not lost on her, but it was the only experience she had with anything like that. "Well... do you remember what you liked to do, before?" Assuming there was a before. It seemed like a long shot if he couldn't even remember was free time was. If there was any good use for her powers, it would probably be something like helping him remember, but they wouldn't have been able to affect him without certain connections that she was fairly certain he didn't possess. ...Would they even work on trolls in the first place?

"It will get better, if I can jutht stick it out," Ψiioniic agreed. "I... escaped onthe before, and managed to break my conditioning. I thpent three sweeps free, following a troll who believed that we weren't meant to be enthlaved. Of course," he added with grim humour, "That meanth when they captured me again, they made the conditioning twice as strong. Tho it won't be as easy this time. But it is possible."

All the more so if what the sign on the door said was true and Signless was really alive.

"Before... I like computerth," he offered, thinking back on his adolescence. "I'm a damned good hacker. And games, I write - wrote - computer games."

She nodded, starting to smile; so she'd been right. However, the smile never reached fruition in the face of the rest of that thought. Belatedly, to his assertion that it was possible, "...Right." This was followed by a more conscious attempt at a smile. He could probably do with some encouragement, couldn't he?

"Computers?" Huh. "I've never played a game on one, but I've... been around some before." And in one. She'd done some hacking herself, but that was through an entirely different method than the average hacking, and there was no way she could have done it in a normal situation. She decided against mentioning it, at least for now; that was not a can of worms she wanted to open. "They are pretty interesting. There are some computers here. I don't know how useful they'll be, but they might be worth a look."

The way her smile kept faltering worried him a little, but she seemed to be trying hard to be cheerful. He smiled back at her, just as uncertain, but trying hard to respond in kind. She was being so nice, he wanted he to know he appreciated it.

"Computerth just... make sense, to me," he confessed. "They're logical, they always give you the thame answer, and they do what you want them to if you know how to tell them to do it. Not like people. People are tho hard to predict, and even harder to understand. What about you? What do you do for fun?"

His own attempt at a smile encouraged hers as well as encouraged it to be more encouraging. It was a vicious cycle, but in a good way?

"I know what you mean. A heart is so much more complicated than data is." She knew someone who'd learned that one the hard way. "...Me? I..." She tilted her head one way, and then the other. "I think I like to draw." It was the answer she usually gave, anyway. "Other than that, I... don't really know." It was obvious she was still thinking about it, and the evidence only piled up when she added suddenly, "I guess I like seeing new places and people, too" She'd never gotten the chance to, before, and being surrounded by others who could and did on a regular basis certainly nurtured that interest.

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Freedom Can Be Confusing

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I never got this notif jgbgkjfgbkdjg sosorry

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