ArchivedLogs:Vignette - Resistance is Futile

Vignette - Resistance is Futile
Dramatis Personae Hive
In Absentia	2013-12-28 On the eve of murderfacing, kind of concurrent with holding tight.
Location <NYC> The Unicomplex - Village Lofts - East Village
In contrast to the messy apartment outside, this room actually tends to be fairly neat. Clothes in the two laundry hampers, books and clutter relegated to the bookshelf or the desks. It's set up for two, Flicker's neat-made bed on the left wall and Hive's generally unmade one on the right; the shared closet is large, on Flicker's side of the room, the shared bookshelf on Hive's side packed full. The back wall holds a pair of desks side by side, both with their own desktops. The walls are eclectically decorated. A replica of Arya Stark's Needle, a few bright-colored but anachronistically somewhat morbid paintings of Jax's, a Mega Man X poster, a stained-glass suncatcher hung in the window and a collage of feathers framed on one wall. The building doesn't sleep. Not really, not ever; maybe it's a microcosm of the city, that way. Even now Leena in 414 is watching Sons of Anarchy with her girlfriend and two floors up Jordan is wrestling with a digital painting he hasn't been able to get quite right for days and there's sex filtering in from four different apartments in his reach and fighting pounding on his head from two. He struggles to push these things away but they push back in. And sleep, too, of course, at this hour; on the eve of his birthday Flicker's dreams are filled with thoughts of home, of family that doesn't want him, of the twin he left behind. Flicker will probably call her tomorrow. She probably won't answer. Elsewhere there are dreams bright and absurdist, dreams with talking trees (no, wait, he knows one of those) and endless hallways full of shrimp and oceans made out of soda. Spencer's dreams are full of spiders but in his case this is a good thing, a giant army of spiders that he leads in their adventures, riding on Jerusalem at their forefront. It's hard to block out these, too; he closes his eyes but opens them again quickly, discomfited by the dreams that start to press in. It's been a long time since his dreams at night were his own. Dusk doesn't sleep, now. Nighttime is his domain and usually he makes the most of it. Tonight, though, the darkness is weighing on him; Hive feels it perhaps more acutely than Dusk does. In the living room he stares at lines of code he's added nothing to in an hour, while the chicken wings he ordered grow cold. When his eyes drift away from the screen they linger, as they always do, on the patches of shadow and pools of dark around the dimly lit room, and though Dusk barely even notices this habit anymore, Hive twinges with each habitual pause. Twinges at the blood streaking Dusk's wandering thoughts. One floor below there are other things mingling with Spence's dreams. The twins don't sleep, either, arrived home late and up late now with Daiki; he tries to filter out their conversation but he can't filter out the sick-stressed-anxious pull that tears at both of them, can't filter out Shane's restless anger or B's hollow-numb refusal to cry. Can't filter out Micah's tears, either, spilled against Jax's shoulder and burning themselves into Hive's mind. Can't filter out Jax's desperate helpless worry, can't filter out the bloodstained nightmares this eventually slides into. Can't filter out the guilty sick fears racing through Micah's mind, for once nearly as bloodlaced as Dusk's. Tries and tries and tries and it all creeps back in until it's hard to tell what part of the sick stressed worry is his own. He takes one deep breath and then another. His fingers curl in and press flat down again, meaningless grasping against his chest at nothing. Always so much grasping at nothing, useless attempts to cling to -- what. These worries don't belong to him, that much has been made abundantly clear. Not his stress, not his dreams. Not his family. The reminder burns itself into his mind, too, echoing there to bolster his resolve not to meddle. Not to get out of bed and go talk, go hug, go pull the fucking trigger so that his family (their family) does not get torn apart. Lie still. Grasp at nothing. Pretend for one more day and then another and then another that he can't hear the screaming all around him. Pretend for one more day and then another and then another that it's not tearing him apart. His fingers are clenched into his hair, palms pressed to his temples and fingers clenching hard as though they can rip these voices from his mind. He doesn't really notice when they got there, only notices when he tears them away, when he has to roll out of bed to dust the long black strands of hair out of his fists into the trash. There's a distinctive shake to his hands as he opens the wide bottom drawer of his desk. Stares into it a long time, all the myriad voices around him knotting into just a fierce desperate push to -- He draws in a sharp ragged breath, scrunching his eyes briefly shut. Reaches into the drawer, past Flicker's neatly-wrapped birthday present, past the black metal of the pistol waiting temptingly alongside it. His fingers close instead on the crumpled half-empty pack of cigarettes sitting there, shoving them into his pocket and shoving the drawer closed. The restless myriad voices of his family the city follow him out of his apartment into the cold night. As they always do.