Logs:Something Spooky

Something Spooky
Dramatis Personae Hive, Matt
In Absentia Charles, Sera, DJ, Polaris, Dawson, Lucien	2023-10-22 "Knew this was haunted."
Location <XAV> Phoenix Room - Xs Third Floor
The guest rooms at Xavier's are spacious and comfortable, well-furnished suites readied for visitors. This one is among the smallest of the available suites, consisting of a small sitting room, a bedroom with queen-sized bed, and a large bathroom. The windows look out over the side yard, with its playground and playing fields. The decor in here heavily favours rich reds and dark woods, and the artwork that graces the wall leans fiery in theme. There is a fireplace, here, stocked with wood in the niche beside it; on the mantlepiece above it, small glassworked figurines of birds in reds and oranges and yellow look half on fire themselves, when they catch the light. The kids aren't quite through with school for the week just yet, although Friday afternoon means a greater than usual number of them electing to skip class early anyway. The first half of Matt's first class had more than its usual share of acerbic telepathic peanut gallery, but for the last period there has been radio silence from Hive's corner of the mansion. Just at the moment, there's a somewhat harried looking OT exiting Hive's suite. Hive himself is slouched on the couch, staring balefully through his holographic computer display (which has shifted to an entirely unnecessary screensaver mode, building up and then deconstructing several of his previous projects.) For all the conscientious care he's been getting he still looks approximately as unhealthy as he did in a coma, far too gaunt and far too sallow, a short dull fuzz of regrowing hair doing little to obscure the new thick scars still red and garish, laced across his skull over the faded old ones. Matt slips in after the OT makes good his escape, flashing him a brilliant empty smile as they pass, though he does not flirt--this time. His idea of Friday casual is a lilac oxford shirt, charcoal slacks, and black brogues, a gray waxed canvas satchel over his shoulder and a silver thermos in his hand. "How was your therapy, darling?" He sinks down onto the couch beside Hive, the faintest ripple of worry stirring in him at his friend's appearance, then subsiding. "Has he helped you find an occupation, at long last?" His eyes stray to the holographic display and linger there, not really seeing the screensaver, not really seeing past it. Hive shifts as Matt joins him on the couch, tucking a little closer to the other man's side. In contrast to Matt he is actually casual, plaid fleece pajama pants and an old soft Theta Tau sweatshirt. << All fixed, >> thuds heavily into Matt's mind. << Turns out I'm very suited for a career as a hermit. >> He shifts the thick blanket he has draped over himself to cover Matt, too, and his eyes close. "You heading out soon?" His words come more sluggish here than in mental space. Matt drapes his arm around Hive's shoulders, tense as a thoughtless matter of course until he remembers to relax. << What nonsense. >> He pops the cap of his thermos and takes a sip of the latte before offering it to Hive. << He ought to find himself a new profession. >> There's no real heat behind this, though. "Not yet. We could watch something spooky." In his mind "something spooky" feels like something real lurking just beneath the surface, and it also feels like his ironic amusement at that thought. "Or I could wheel you out there to take the air." He doesn't seem in too much of a hurry to go anywhere, though, pressing his cheek gently against the side of Hive's head. << Though that would only mildly cut down on teenaged psionic bombardment. It's a glorious day out there, and I fear the students might have noticed, also. >> << Been watching something spooky for years. >> Hive reaches for the thermos, but only manages one or two somewhat ineffectual attempts to close his fingers around it before dropping his hand back to his lap. There's a small flex of power, a squeezing-heavy pressure at Matt's mind; the familiar shift of perspective only lasts long enough for Hive to steer Matt's hand so that he can take a sip. << ... don't know how Xavier fucking lives like this, >> he is grousing, one eye squinched up tight. "Was here... two goddamn minutes before --" This finishes in a frown and rather than words, a mental image of a new pair of dorm halls out on the grounds, distinct in some of Hive's aesthetic leanings but harmonizing with the existing mansion. << Man can afford a little more space. >> << Well, it doesn't have to be spooky, but there's something to watching awful things happen to imaginary people from a safe distance. >> Matt yields control of his hand without complaint or resistance, futile or otherwise. << I suspect it's a bit of a boiled frog situation for Chaz. >> The faint twitch of his smile is easier to feel physically than mentally, but he's less disdainful of his employer than he's been in the past. << Have you pitched this to him? You should make it blast-proof. >> There's a sense of lazy batting at Hive's mental blueprints floor plans concept drawings, Matt attempting to rotate them like a holographic display of the same. Less clumsy, less literal is the faint but familiar press of his power. << I could make it quieter, for a little while. >> << Blast-proof is only the beginning. I'll pitch it when it's ready. Readi...er. >> Hive's mental picture of the potential new Xavier's dorms rotates obligingly. It's shifting perspective, now, highlighting rooms with psionic shielding or suppression grids together with a faint bafflement that the school with all Charles' money has not yet taken advantage of these technologies -- how much of a relief a psi-blocked meditation room or power-suppressed rec room would have been as an uncontrolled teenager struggling to interact without putting everyone around in danger. Thinking, too, though at a quieter register, of how much of a relief it would be now, his still-damaged brain continually struggling to retain clear boundaries. He's not quite leaning in to Matt's offer, though. His brows furrow. He's turning over watching from a safe distance, fitting this clumsily up against his own strange panopticon view of so many people's lives. "I don't --" he starts, slow and uncertain and in mental space untethered, an ache that feels very like and very unlike loneliness. At Matt's side he fidgets, fingers curling hard into the blanket. "What movie?" Matt gives a small huff, barely amused enough to not be a scoff. << {The administration must have got it into their heads that power suppression gives you cancer.} >> He's not thinking, not really, about how any kind of working suppression tech might have saved their Sera. He is thinking about about how fearfully small Hive feels tucked against his side. "Where are your--?" It's less that Matt can't think of words for DJ and Polaris, and more that he is carefully keeping anger at bay while thinking of them. His power shifts with a soft sigh, bolstering and stabilizing Hive's, now. << I'm not him, but take me if you think it might help. >> His arm tightens fractionally around his friend. << {Are you on a break from y'all?} >> Hive's thoughts echo back with a bleak ghost of his own amusement, shaped heavily by Matt's mutation against the backdrop of his unfortunate habit of breaking into cancer at the drop of any hat. His mental blueprints highlight the mediation room: << {all that yoga gonna keep the cancer away.} >> He leans into the offered support with an almost desperate hunger that's pulling back as soon as it has bared its teeth, anxious about the ways his fractured mind could hurt even one other person, without his wonted compartmentalization, reluctant to lean too much on Charles who has had Plenty Enough on his plate lately. "We're --" And he doesn't have words for this. Not for the strange but natural shift, unspoken and automatic, of his relationship with Polaris from romantic back to comfortably intimate friendship, and certainly not for the fraught and painful longing where he and DJ should be we but are instead barely able to even share space without falling back into -- Here his breath just catches, sharp and small. He starts to reach for the coffee again but drops his hand; doesn't quite trust the unsteady tremors in his mind to become Matt long enough to yoink it again. "It's complicated." Matt tenses as something stirs beneath the surface of his mindscape, barely noticeable in itself but attended by a tight clench of physical pain in his chest. He's thinking about a different friend, a different hunger tightly controlled. It's a kind of hunger, too, that curls his fingers in tight against Hive's shoulder, but he eases off before it becomes painful. He lets go of the frustration at his inability to help, and with a wordless apology presses a kiss to the side of his friend's head. "Polymorphing," he suggests lightly. Then moves his own hand with his own mind and brings the thermos to Hive's lips, concentrating hard to give the telepath better reference for his coordination and timing as he carefully tips it for Hive to drink. "It was already complicated, darling. Try me." Hive leans forward, taking a careful sip from the thermos; for all his focus as well the psionic proprioception here feels off, ill-fitting, and he doesn't quite stay in sync with Matt. He rubs a trickle of coffee from his chin with his sleeve, subsiding against the couch with a small resigned puff of breath. As he settles back there's a shiver of worry that ripples against Matt's mind. It presses against the clench in his friend's heart, touching there lightly and then simply staying -- not digging further into the pain but not ignoring it, either. << {It's painful,} >> he adds, and the reluctance here is complicated, too. His own grief is there, and Matt's, but it's more than that -- an uncertainty built up from years of holding Everybody's Secrets and struggling now to figure out where the boundaries are between Their Privacy and His Trauma. He hasn't quite worked that out when: "... polymorphing." Apparently this joke is only belatedly finally clicking into his disjointed language centers; the amusement that washes out from him does not actually make it into a laugh, but Matt feels it all the same. Matt takes a sip of coffee himself before snapping the lid of the thermos back on and settling it down against his leg. << {I'll keep your confidences, and theirs, also.} >> He takes a little longer to think on pain, abstracted but not fully detached when he reminds himself that's what the twinge in his chest is. It's not that he likes hurting, but in some distant way it's a relief when he does. << {It's painful,} >> he agrees, finally. << {I think it's meant to be.} >> Hive's exhale is slow and shaky. His mind pulls slightly back, fighting against its intrinsic desire to coil closer; in compensation he's leaning closer, pulling the blanket more snug around the both of them. "I don't..." His words come even slower here without mental support to lean on, and this trails off at first into a small frustrated noise. "Don't know how to. Explain." His expression has gone slightly glassy but Matt can feel the active struggle of his mind, trying to expand and then reeling back in. What he finally comes around to, slow and apologetic for its inadequacy: "Dawson is alive. But." Matt does not rush Hive, but holds him just a little tighter, as much for his friend's comfort as his own. Somewhere, distant and deep, there's a stir of fear that doesn't feel all that closely connected to the vague anxious speculations he's ignoring successfully enough they don't even resolve fully into thoughts. It's a near thing, though. They churn closer and closer to his consciousness, and then all grind to to a halt. There's no pain--or, no more pain, anyway--but the dread feels huge now where it still lies in wait to swallow him whole. "But," he echoes, already inventing ways this could have happened. << (time travel?) (someone cast True Resurrection?) (oh gods are the Mormons right?) >> A bark of laughter follows this, rough and sharp. "Look at DJ. Fuckers might be right." His eyes are wet with unshed tears and they don't, at least, seem in any current danger of flowing, just an irritable-bright sting that he is currently ignoring. "I don't know. How. He's in my fucking head." His teeth clench and then relax with an effort. "-- sometimes. I thought it just felt like that because we were -- us. But Chaz fucking. Saw him. Talked to him." Now his teeth do grind, slow and creaky. "... s'only there when I'm DJ. S'made shit. Complicated." Matt goes still and tense, bracing for the dread as it breeches the surface of his mind, but when it does there's just--nothing. He doesn't let go of Hive, but lifts his head to peer down if he could somehow see through his friend's much-scarred scalp and patchwork skull to Dawson. "His memories are in there, but memories aren't enough..." He's thinking of Godel, Escher, Bach and Neuromancer and Ghost in the Shell and Pantheon. << ...because consciousness is an emergent process. >> He frowns. "Did the surgery somehow jar him into existence? Or the...other treatments?" His conception of Lucien and Xavier's powers comes not in words but in the sense he has of their inner workings through his own power, subtle and complex. << (only there when you're DJ) >> "So then...it's especially hard to sort out because {you haven't been able to safely be you?}" The mid-sentence switch to French probably wasn't necessary when Hive can simply know that the first "you" was singular and the second one plural. "{Memories aren't enough}," Hive agrees, "{but they made it fucking confusing. When I'm me I have all his memories. When I'm we --}" His brow creases, and he shakes his head uncomfortably. "{... so is he.}" << {it's just a lot} >> thuds up against Matt's mind, and at least some portion of those reasons are clearer under his mental speech than he's currently able to find the words for: yes, hiving is dangerous right now but even if it weren't how do they sort out the ethics behind choosing to Be Them again when doing so forces into existence someone who isn't even sure he wants to be alive? But he's not sure he doesn't want to be alive, either, so is it unethical to be apart? How can they ever make that choice again when severing the connection effectively kills him every time? How do they even begin to think about it without talking to him -- how do they put him in a position to make that call when his life is dependent on their autonomy? Hive exhales slow, his teeth grinding hard. "... complicated," he sums up again. An oppressive weight falls over Matt's bleak psychic landscape. "Ah, ben tabarnak." He's thinking about Flicker's smile on DJ's face the last time he invited him--them--over, and dully checking the place where the hurt had settled in his chest. No change. << (can't even do broken right) >> He's quiet for a few moments, his thoughts strange and abstracted and dark. << {I think...sometimes, all the choices are bad, and you just have to make do and find somewhere to start. Something you can live with.} >> It's "vous" again, here. << {All of you, ideally, even if there's no fair way of getting there.} >> His head sinks back down as if it were too heavy for him to hold up, and he presses a kiss to the crown of Hive's head before laying his cheek against it again. "Knew this was haunted." This comes out very flat. "Didn't imagine it quite so literally." "{I'm being seasonally appropriate,}" Hive replies lightly, and though he's not reaching for the remote he's giving Matt a mental nudge that direction with the thought of Spooky Movies undergirding it. "{I'm just that good a friend.}"