ArchivedLogs:Sukha

Sukha
Dramatis Personae Bruce, Hive	2016-05-21 "{It was cloudy. Your mind was brighter than the stars.}"
Location <NYC> Observatory - Harbor Commons - Lower East Side
The night sky is beginning to clear, the evening's drizzle done and patches of starlit sky peeking down from gaps in the gray clouds. The reconstructed Workhaus is by-in-large complete, if as yet unpainted and unfurnished. In the darkness it's a bit eerie, the walls blank and the rooms vacant. The observatory which protrudes from the roof of Geekhaus is still hollow, the future telescope absent, though the dome is open as far as it will go, leaving only a hemispherical roof sheltering the space inside. Bruce sits cross-legged in the center of the floor. Despite the slight chill that remains in the air, he has shed his navy blue blazer, dressed remarkably casually in a royal purple button down with fine blue stripes, blue jeans, and brown shoes. He's tugged his glasses off and is turning them over in his hands while he stares up into the sky. Equations spin through his mind, not all of them easy to link to less abstract aspects of his work; some of them morph and twist and blossom into shapes and texture and sound and scent. Just to one side of Bruce, Hive is lying on his back on the floor. His head is pillowed on one folded arm, one knee crooked upward and the other leg stretched out. He's dressed more casually even than Bruce, faded old jeans, thick soft grey socks, a t-shirt reading 'resistance is futile (if <1 ohm)', soft fleecey blanket with Captain America's shield logo kind of half draped over one arm but half thrown off. There's a pair of bottles of ginger beer resting on paper towels on the floor, two plates of som tam -- though Hive's has barely been touched. There has been quiet for a long time -- eventually broken, though Hive's gruff voice is low. "... What's that one." Somewhere in Bruce's mind, one particular shape -- not the most complex of the forms that has been spinning, perhaps, but with its own intricacies of structure -- gleams just a little brighter, drawn for a moment into the forefront of his mind before returning to fit back into its previous place. Bruce does not turn to look at Hive, does not really move at all. The entire flow of his thought, however, reconfigures around the equation Hive had indicated. A myriad of words--time, metabolism, glucose, blood--drift up through the dizzying flow of mathematical information. The shape unfolds like origami and becomes an hourglass. "{I'm working on something that will tell us how much he needs to eat.}" He closes his eyes. The hourglass cracks and starts leaking out sand that dissolves into streams of numbers. "{Difficult. How much I've been eating has an effect on it, as does his activity levels.}" He has little emotional attachment to it, but even while he speaks he's continuing to tweak with the equation beneath the hourglass. His hand seeks out the ginger beer and lifts it for a sip. After this, there is silence again. Hive pulls the blanket over himself, rests his hand against it. His fingers trace against its soft nap, his eyes unfocused in their upward gaze. There's a question that brushes up against Bruce's mind, only half formed -- not quite in words but in uncertain memory-query, idle wondering about whether the other guy has been present enough to collect enough of a data sample to finish working this problem -- But then even this mental process fades on a long slow blink. A long slow breath. A wispy thread of mental touch that drifts away to pull, instead, a different one of Bruce's busy processes forefront -- this time a light trill of notes cascading through the other man's mind. "{-- This?}" Bruce opens his eyes again, setting the bottle down again. "Not often, but when he is at the Commons, I can usually obtain an estimate of what he's had to eat." Numbers spin through his mind and feed into the equation, the hourglass resetting. It does not fade from his thoughts even when Hive draws his focus to the notes. "Spectroscopy. Absorption lines in starlight caused by an extrasolar planet. The song of an unknown world, hundreds of light years away." He hums the simple theme. "I used to talk to them," he murmurs. A much younger Bruce sits in his room, eyes puffy from crying, tiny palms pressed up against the glass. "Stars. Made up my own names for them in music. My guardian angels." He suddenly turns and looks at Hive, dark brown eyes fixed intently on the other man. "Why does it interest you? All this clutter in my mind?" "{... I did, once, too.}" Hive's words are quiet, now; they've unthinkingly switched from soft French to soft Thai though Bruce's comprehension hasn't seemed to change. /His/ eyes stay turned upwards, distant and unfocused. Back to French, a moment later: "{Do they still watch out for us, you think?}" There's a small twitch pulling at one corner of his mouth. "{It was cloudy. Your mind was brighter than the stars.}" Bruce doesn't look back up at the stars. The spectrum theme echoes through his mind, and gains accompaniment, grows in complexity. "{I don't know. Maybe.}" << I can believe just about anything these days. >> The tumble of equations scatter away for a moment and leave a perfect replica of the sky as it would look at the moment without clouds -- it matches the gaps in the clouds above them. "Even if the stars are watching...I think we need to look out for each other." Though Hive's eyes have been focused upwards already, his breath catches softly at the sudden panoply of stars spread across Bruce's mind. The music that had been playing echoes back, swelling full and bright. "{... I don't think you're wrong there. The stars are so far away. Even if they see, what could they do to help?}" There's something wry, though. Perhaps bitter? Almost self-deprecating, in his tone. The night sky in Bruce's mind takes on a new dimension -- not of space but of sound, each speck of light singing its own theme and melding into a vast and unlikely harmony of spectra. "{What can I /do/ to help?}" he asks softly, the question not in the least rhetorical. Hive's hand lifts just a few inches off his chest, fingers dancing lightly in the air in time with the galactic harmony playing in Bruce's mind. The mental view expands -- shifting downward to a encompass the planet below, as well. It is alight, too, glowing pinpoints of light dotted across the planet's surface, each with their own shifting notes of mindsong. Somewhere in between earth and space, fainter but present, shapes shift in and out of existence; the structures that had been formed from Bruce's equations before. "{You? Probably a hell of a lot of things, but --}" The lights on the surface of the planet are glowing brighter -- the warm light starting to blend together into a soft radiance. "{That really depends who you want to help, doesn't it?}" Bruce focuses in on the myriad lights dotting the planet's surface. << Are these people? Are these...you? >> One of his equations unfolds into a brilliant flower, a lotus with a thousand petals, its color a concept that doesn't quite translate into the range of normal human vision. It calculates the parallel processing potential of human minds. "{In that moment, I meant you.}" << I guess that doesn't really narrow it down, though. >> << Yes. >> The lotus in Bruce's mind's eye shimmers, glows like the pinpoints of light all around them. Hive's hand falls back to his chest, his gaze abruptly snapping back into focus as his head turns. His eyes are slightly wider as his gaze sharpens on Bruce. "{Do I need help?}" There's a hint of something startled in his expression, though his tone is only mildly curious. Slowly, his head turns back up towards the sky. "{In that moment --}" Somewhere, inside, the spread of light is fading -- growing more diffuse over the surface of the Earth until it is just a hazy glow, and then nothing. "{You share your mind with me. That's -- not nothing.}" Several petals of the lotus become rays of light that extend out to touch other the other shapes slowly tumbling through Bruce's thought processes--a slowly morphing series of polyhedra, an origami crane made of glass, a cascade of spheres that moved in complex synchronized harmony. "{I tend to think that every sentient being needs it, but perhaps 'help' is not the right word,}" he murmurs softly. "{How might I ameliorate your suffering? Contribute to your happiness?} Sharing my mind is--" He pauses, considering. His gaze drops from the real sky above them, though in his mind his focus has shifted back to the starfield he constructed. "--Not nothing, I suppose." Once more there is silence, from Hive. His eyes are shifting out of focus once more, some trace semblance of /presence/ spreading itself through Bruce's shifting thoughts. Faint, more amorphous, but /there/ in myriad soft threads of light weaving themselves in and around the tumbling-changing shapes. There's an answer that starts to well up, (tugging) (pulling) formless and wordless, only half conceptualized before it fades back into the stream of lights: << (happy) >> comes somewhat like a puzzlement, followed in feel more than thought: an ache, hollow, yearning. /Lonely/. And a dissonant jumble that is creeping back towards puzzled -- so /many/ different identities with so /many/ different needs and desires: << (so many answers) (we could give.) >> Hive's fingers curl tighter against his chest. "{You're here,}" he answers. And with a very wry smile: "{For /some/ gorram reason, you're /still/ here. When so many people would have fucked the hell off by now. That's.}" Despite the smile, his voice isn't entirely steady. "{That's not nothing, either, you know. Do /you/ need...}" He hesitates, here, his mind filling in where his words do not -- some mashed together amalgam of << (help)(happiness)(ameliorate-your-suffering) >> The rays of light--connection and feedback between the nodes of ideas they link--thrum with faint music as though they were the strings of some infinitely complex instrument played by a dozen hands. Bruce's /conscious/ mind is patient and polite, and waits for Hive to form words--spoken or otherwise. But some part of him responds at once to the loneliness, echoes it and turns it over and over, studying and trying to make sense of it the way his mind does with everything. "{I am here,}" Bruce agrees at last. << What do I /need?/ >> The question shivers through the music in the network of coherent light linking his equations. His mental focus reaches deep inside, feeling about gingerly for the place where the other mind lies dormant. "{You have already given us comprehension and communication and control where we had none, and been a friend when we have so few.}" He rolls onto his side, studies Hive with his own eyes for once. Then, very tentatively but quite deliberately, << Touch me? >> There's some automatic reflex somewhere within Hive -- shimmering threads of light starting to reconfigure, retwine, pull back and thread themselves into new patterns so as to carefully section off-and-away that hollow-lonely-ache when it comes to Bruce's notice -- -- but it's a reflex that he stifles at the man's last question, /his/ mind relaxing instead. Easing back into its previous gossamer web spun intricately through Bruce's, where its threads glow a little brighter, twine a little firmer. It takes a moment longer for his head to turn, his eyes to meet Bruce's -- there's a faint widening of realization, though no tentativeness in /him/. An almost familiar ease, rather, with which his wiry arm curls out, hand coming to rest on Bruce's shoulder before sliding around to his back. A shiver of longing runs through Bruce, rippling his vast and complex mental landscape. << {Please...} >> But he never completes the plea--didn't have the words, despite the dizzying efficiency of his mind, to make it anyway. He doesn't need to. His muscles ease at the touch of Hive's hand--some corner of his mind quietly amazed by how tense he had been before this--and. His eyes close, and the chorus of stars grows brighter. The constant kaleidoscopic shifting of his mind stills, and though his calculations and equations and models never wholly cease, they recede from the sharp focus of his conscious mind. Bruce opens his eyes again, wide and wondering. His hand lifts, trembling, to the younger man's arm. He sucks in a sudden breath, having very briefly forgotten to breathe. "{Would you--}" his voice comes quiet, shaky, struggling out through layers of socialization and existential terror, "{--would you hold me, for little a while?}" Hive's breath has caught with Bruce's -- has resumed, again, in time with the other man's as well. Despite this bit of synchrony his own touch is steady, no tremble in his hand, no fear in the still-softly-glowing mental presence threaded gently through Bruce's own -- which expands, now, Hive's shimmering net shifting and curling to wrap itself in carefully supportive coils. Calm. Steady, where it touches up against Bruce's fear. Quiet once more, he lies back where he had been, on the observatory floor. One arm tucked beneath his head again -- the other gathers Bruce closer to his side, tucking the older man up against him. His hand rubs slowly between the other man's shoulders, his eyes, once again, fixed up on the stars.