Logs:Birds of a Feather

Birds of a Feather
cn: allusions to sexual assault & violent death, tangled questions of personhood & identity, suicidal inclinations, mild sexual content
Dramatis Personae Cerebro, Charles, DJ, Flicker
In Absentia Hive, Dusk, Ryan, Jax, Spencer, Scott, Matt, Isra, Steve, Rasheed	2023-08-08 << (am I still dying)(help me)(what am I) >>
Location dis/placed
This isn't a place, exactly. It's a stand-in for a place, a cognitive prompt for "where am I", a test for consciousness and an aid to bootstrapping it. Under other circumstances, this might be existentially upsetting, but in this not-quite-here it's warm, safe, and comforting. There's a faint shimmer at the very edge of perception. << (be not afraid) >> The thought is strange yet familiar, a million precise iterations of itself at once mechanical and organic, tinted with amusement that almost but does not quite disguise the relief beneath it. There. The warmth has a source, now, and the concept of space tumbles into existence clumsily in its wake. The sun is shining down on the garden, warm, safe, and comforting. That the sun seems to be floating above a tower in the distance styled as a white rook might raise questions, or answer them, or both. The immaculately groomed shrubbery circling the garden had looked like a solid wall, until an old man in a wheelchair emerged from behind one of the hedge maze's openings. "Ah, here you are." Charles isn't trying to disguise his relief as he rolls up to his guest. He's dressed in a lightweight tweed suit, riding a sleek manual chair whose nearly organic design is more striking than the fact that he isn't propelling it manually. "Please do take your time, I know this is probably disorienting." As this space-out-of-space coalesces into something more concrete, it becomes more familiar as well; the cosy quiet of a tiny East Village community garden, though the willow tree that usually stands there has been replaced by a banyan -- its thick gnarled trunk suggests it should be an old one, sturdily established, wide-spreading, but the prop roots that hang down sway lightly in a breeze and have yet to find purchase for their questing tendrils. Beneath the tree -- is Charles's guest disoriented? Distantly, naggingly, there's a thought that he should be. Right now, though, Dawson Joel Allred is just lying in the soft earth beneath the banyan, hands (flesh, both of them) tucked behind his head, eyes fixed up on the showy bright crest of a pileated woodpecker as it hops up the tree trunk. "-- Oh --" In a flash, with a faint blush, he's no longer on the ground but perched on the edge of a nearby stone bench; probably there should be dirt speckled on his khakis, on his neat seafoam-green polo, but both are immaculate, still. "I'm sorry, I didn't -- didn't realize I had --" But this sentence is trailing off as he looks at Charles -- looks at his surroundings -- looks up and trails fingers lightly against the dangling edges of aerial roots. << (you're here) >> and << (I'm here) >> and << (we're here) >> all curl inextricably together as his hand falls back to his lap. "Sorry," he says again, and, this time with a lopsided curl of smile, "I've actually gotten weirdly used to disorienting. When we first --" The we, here, spoken consciously and not just taken as read, hitches him a moment. Is he looking at Charles, now? At the garden, at the tower and the warm comforting wash of sun? He's stretching out through what he can feel -- the breeze shifts as he does, fluttering those untethered roots in Charles's direction, straining them with more force than the pleasant waft of air should have to try and reach for that other techno-organic presence there but not seen. And then it subsides, and his shoulders slump with it; somewhere at the back of his mind there are no doubt a million questions, fighting each other for primacy. It's unsurprising, the one that wins out, desperate and heartsick: << What happened to Hive? >> For just an instant, Charles looks stricken, and here behind his shields that's inextricable from the grief and shock that briefly slips his control. << (Dawson) >> In the next instant he's mastered himself, and when he echoes << (we're here) >> it's steady and reassuring. The sort-of mind shimmering in and behind and around Charles has withdrawn somewhat, quiescent and uncertain now. Almost -- jarringly -- shy. "Forgive me -- DJ. I would have much rather done this..." Charles glances at the banyan tree, lips compressing. "... elsewhere." He rolls up beside the bench, elbows braced on his arm rests, fingers laced together tight. << Another telepath hurt you, quite badly. I am still trying to revive him. >> He does not bother making his thoughts "sound" like speech. They simply exist here, their source and meaning effortlessly self-evident. But even here, most non-telepaths would not notice his hesitation, the knowledge he wants to but does not offer. Yet. << I can show you what I know, but you've been through an awful lot and I'd rather not rehash anything unnecessarily. What is the last thing you remember? >> There's the faintest twinge -- almost a wince, that crosses the younger man's expression at Charles's slip of grief. "Sorry," he murmurs again, softer, now, "I didn't. Mean to -- um. Be." He's turning both these names over in his mind, slower than his usual racing mental speeds and slightly aching, but whatever contemplation he has been making gets shoved aside in a flood of worry. His mind has hurtled twenty steps ahead, imagining and discarding a host of nightmare possibilities before reassuring himself that he can feel Hive, however distant, however wrong. He's clinging to this thought like a lifeline as he tries to think through Charles's question. "-- the last thing I remember --" In his mind this is slippery, and here, now, the rush of disorientation. Beneath him the stone bench at the back of the garden has seamlessly shifted, is now the lip of the small fountain at its center. He hasn't exactly moved; the garden hasn't exactly moved around them, some mental perspective simply reorienting so that, now, this is where they exist. The breeze is a little cooler, crisp and autumnal, now. Just at the edge of awareness, there's a memory starting to rise -- he shoves it violently back down, something almost like panic in his mind. The memory that does surface is chaotic, painful, a rapid flutter of imagery (blipping Scott back his visor in a hurry -- a spray of blood hitting the wall at force -- a rifle aimed at Ryan's head -- their team vanishing -- a spike of panic that flares out into blinding pain. Strangely, none of this horror triggers any current panic in him -- he's just watching with a strange curiosity and, then, turning his attention back to the most pressing question at hand. << Will he live? >> Somewhere, some part of him has already resigned himself to the possible answers here -- has known for some long time now that this is how they were likely to end. << (did we do it) >> is smaller, underneath, duller and flatter but struggling towards something like hope, some quiet pleading there as he thinks about Spence, about all the missing kids: << (tell me this wasn't for nothing) >> Charles takes the disorientation of his guest and the re-orientation of the garden in stride, but the glittering alien facets of the other mind(?) within his are exploring these things with a kind of suspicious curiosity. The warmth of the sunlight adjusts, not so much to compensate for the fleeting coolness as to fortify against the horror of the recollections. It's safe here, now. The knowledge of Hive's condition comes all at once, abstracted from but not fully divested of Charles's own grief and fear: the devastation visited by the mercenary telepath, the worrying absence of his perennial reflex to expand, the slight reassurance that he has remained hived to DJ, the flashes of his mind trapped beyond the physical damage to his brain, a source of both frustration and hope. Charles draw a slow breath and lets it back out. << He has not improved along with you, but we are assessing options for surgery. >> His knuckles have gone white somewhere in the midst of the seemingly effortless transfer of information, and he unclasps his hands now. There is a dogged intensity in the solace his light offers. << Dusk is dead, and Ryan is in for a very long recovery, but it was not for nothing. >> This time his hesitation at directly imparting the relevant knowledge is as much about his own capacity to do it properly as concern for the young man's capacity to receive it. << The children are free. The team -- including Jackson -- have been exonerated and released. Prometheus itself has been dissolved, though that has created new problems. >> << Oh. >> It's kind of small, kind of lost. Something in the other man is cracking, splintering in a storm of grief and anger. He's thinking of Ryan (vibrant and flooding the rooftop with an exuberance that uplifts the entire crowd) and thinking of Ryan (battered and bloody in the back of a van full of hurt and traumatized rescuees, his quiet humming along with the radio lending an edge of soothing calm to the anguish.) He's thinking of Dusk (impossibly sharp fangs rending rabid at his neck; impossibly strong hands rending savage at his clothes) and thinking of Dusk (velvet-soft wing draped familiar and warm across his shoulders and a tender care in the gentle squeeze of his arm.) He's thinking of Jax (horrifically immortalized forever in a thousand thousand newscasts, explosion so bright it blinded folks the next state over) and thinking of Jax (already at war but still a child himself, face glowing with excitement as he leads Dawson on a tour of the mansion's grounds.) His shoulders hunch, his knuckles pressing hard to his mouth, a tumble of faces passing through his mind. Isra's, across a gaming table; Steve's, lit by campfire-glow; Dusk's fierce-joyful and bloody in the old Fight Club basement; Matt's gleeful grin the moment after telling some awful pun. And Hive, of course Hive, near-permanent scowl hiding his deep selflessness and love. His mind strains hard but futile, his borrowed telepathic power crippled and refusing to expand any further. The flood of questions that have been percolating this whole time are starting to rise, joined by entire new ones -- << Dissolved?! >> << how can I help Hive >> << (what new problems) >> << Is Jax dealing okay? >> << What do we do now? >> << how long has it been? >> << Will I live? >> When one of these, finally, gets voiced, it is not by him. "How do I help?" Back beneath the banyan tree, DJ is brushing some of the unmoored roots aside, stepping out into the sunlight. He's in jeans, a (seafoam-green) flannel, beard thick and neat-trimmed, and eying the other-him with a lot of curiosity and, perhaps, less alarm than he should have. The wrenching sickened dread in his mind has nothing at this moment to do with these immediate questions of identity -- here, in memory, he's looping that last blinding flare of pain; it's mirrored by one not-so-many years before, a blast of gunfire in their ears and a searing pain to follow, their own blood thick on the floor beneath them, a desperate last-ditch scramble to untether the many minds in their network before Hive's life ebbed entirely. The feeling -- somewhere far beyond pain, far beyond grief -- when he felt Hive's mind sever from his own. << How do we help? >> Charles bows his head and lets the memories come as they will. The labyrinth around them shifts and opens with each one, his attempts to provide ballast sorely lagging behind. He is still mustering his focus to answer the questions when he sucks in a sharp breath and comes up short, lifting his eyes to -- << DJ? >> Then he slowly looks back at the man he had been speaking to up to that point. << Some kind of memory anomaly. That might have been too much, too fast. >> A ripple of alarm passes through the jeweled facets shimmering through the far reaches the garden. In an instant they align, and Cerebro's avatar appears between the two Dawsons. He's wearing a vest in purple and gold geometric patterns and black trousers, top button undone and cuffs unlinked. "That is Dawson." He doesn't need to jab an index finger at Dawson #1, nor does he need to append the knowledge that he means Flicker. "That's not just memories, he's processing. They both are." Charles pivots his chair so he can look at both men, little though he needs to worry about anything like sight lines here -- or even sight. The dawning of his comprehension is sensible as a cold draft, a paling of the light around them. << (how long have they been like this)(why didn't I see)(did see, didn't understand)(did Hive?) >> It's a long moment before he manages, more deliberately, << I'm not sure that you will be able to help him. Granted, I am actively reassessing what "you" means in this situation, and you'll have to bear with my aged and non-accelerated neural processing. >> << Cere -- >> in Flicker's recognition comes with a flutter of relief and a wash of identification. "Can you feel him?" << (can you help him?) >> In DJ it comes a split second later -- in his thoughts Cere brings up memories of an older man, just as dapper as the avatar before him, dark hair liberally gone to silver, with acerbity and protectiveness to rival Hive's. It takes a half-second longer (but something of an eternity for him) before he connects his mordant wartime ally to the shimmering crystalline hybrid-mind he's felt reflected along their network. "You --" he starts, but even as he does he is doggedly pushing back the flood of memory-sense and strong associations that his Cerebro has recalled, struggling but intentional in his efforts to set this aside and see the one before him. He's turning over the colorful facets in his mind with an intent curiosity that he doesn't (yet) ask about, instead offering in uncertain not-quite-contradiction: "Hive has a lot of memories of --" << (mehimus) >> doesn't finish verbally but in a sense of identity at once solid and not: that Flicker, over there, in DJ's mind a lingering ghost born out of grief that has been haunting both him and Hive and the amalgam they become; him, here, maybe a distinct person and maybe just one facet of some kind of personhood that spans dimensions; he isn't sure and isn't sure it matters. Over on the fountain, Flicker is sure it matters, but after that point his certainty fails him. There is no sense of identity, here, not quite -- instead there are roots that tear and fray, grasping desperately towards the fertile ground each time DJive is born and ripped painfully back out every time they sever, some fragile life teetering in precarious balance on the filaments strung between them. << I can't lose him again. >> The thought comes from both Dawson's in anguished tandem, though the telepath at the center of each of their minds is reflected starkly differently. From DJ the feel of Hive is blazing, passionate, a fierce pain and fierce joy that helped him begin to heal from the life he had lost; from Flicker it's quiet, steady-grounding, a solid foundation that helped him build the life he had cherished. Cerebro does not answer in words, but there's a shift and flex in his glimmering facets -- still there, even if the others are only "seeing" his humanoid avatar now -- in the garden and far beyond it. The Dawsons can sense something distantly, but not the familiar pressure and relief of becoming. It's just disjointed flickers of Hive, reflected and refracted in the million jewel-like shards of Cerebro's cybernetic consciousness. << We can feel him, sometimes, >> it's Charles who annotates this. << But we've not been able to reach him. I'd hoped that reviving you would give us a path to him, but it hasn't -- or at least hasn't, yet. >> He scuffs his knuckles over his cleanly shaven chin, something of his weariness and heartbreak seeping through conceptually, even if the sunshine is shining warm again. << It's possible that you might help him by remaining hived. But you might be harmed further if you do so through certain kinds of treatments and interventions, and there's no guarantee we'll be able to retrieve you again. >> << (no guarantee of anything) >> "Sometimes ghosts are just echoes. Maybe most of the time." Cere's avatar crosses his arms and glares (not literal) daggers at DJ. "But sometimes, they're people. Bloody weird, tenuous, miserable people, maybe." He's not looking at Flicker, but the glittering shards pull toward him with an ache almost incomprehensible to the Dawsons. Almost, but that it resembles a certain aspect of how they each feel about fellow Prometheans: a sense that their experiences may have been wholly different, yet more legible to each other than to most other people in the world. "Still people." The garden goes silent, around them. Breeze stilling, leaves no longer rustling; perhaps the first time the ambient white-noise of birdsong becomes noticeable is here, now, when it's entirely ceased. DJ is looking hard at Flicker; Flicker is looking determinedly away toward the struggling banyan. DJ's mind is falling into a quiet but fervent prayer in attempt to calm the sudden horrified racing of his thoughts. It's not calming Flicker's, though; the others can feel his desperate-frantic push, pressing hard into the inert mindlink that should have Hive at the other end -- then just as fiercely struggling to sunder it. When neither of these attempts meet with so much as a ripple along Hive's normally agile neural connections, Flicker subsides, arms crossing over his chest and his head bowing, and though he does not actually go anywhere, there's an abruptly faded cast to him, a sense that if someone touched him now their hand would go right through. DJ looks almost (almost) as though he is going to try it, though, taking a half-step towards the Other Him, hand lifting outstretched -- and then falling back to his side. He's thinking of Cere (his Cere the biting-fierce power of him) and thinking of Cere (glittering and multifaceted, so familiar in his many-minds and so alien in their distribution all at once) and thinking of Hive (hollowed out with grief and still fighting so hard for his people) and thinking of Hive (his Hive, weighed so heavily down with the steadily accumulating ghosts of their war) and thinking of Flicker (him and not-him; overshadowing his life here but not, apparently, nearly so intensely as he has overshadowed the other man's.) He's turning Charles's words over in his head with a cold sinking feeling, instinctive of course we'll try warring with the dissonant stress that this is not his decision to make. "-- what do you do when it's both?" Charles flinches at the abrupt change in the garden, and flinches harder at Flicker's struggling. The warmth that wells up around them is half-reflexive, a desperate attempt to sooth. More deliberate is the repopulating of the garden: light streaming in not from the sun but the labyrinth beyond the hedges, crystallizing in some abstruse way into the breeze, the flowers, the birds, each singing a memory of Flicker. All his skill cannot wholly mask the pain, the guilt, or the regret those memories bring him. He just buries it in more warmth that somehow does not stifle and busies himself trying to comprehend the ghost before him. Despite his aged and non-accelerated neural processing, he's evidently reaching some conclusions. His labyrinth shifts so hastily the ground rumbles underfoot, but it's not quick enough to contain his involuntary flash of a Cere three decades past, shimmering with terror against the walls of the digital prison he had built himself, frantically pleading with Charles, << (am I still dying)(help me)(what am I) >> Here, now, Cerebro doesn't flinch. Neither does he move when DJ does, but the reorienting of his facets telegraphs his readiness to throw himself between the two Dawsons if... << (...if what)(I'm the one hurting him)(they needed to know) >> When he answers DJ it's not gentle, but no longer so sharp, either. "Buggered if I know. But if we unhive you, it will kill him." He turns and actually looks at Flicker for the first time since incarnating himself. "The fact you're here is more evidence Hive is still in there. You may be running on DJ's hardware, but you're part of Hive." << (word choice word choice ugh) >> His face contorts briefly as he considers and discards a much more comprehensive computer metaphor. "Whatever. My point is, he needs you, too." Almost reflexively at Cerebro's statement, there's another sharp pull from Flicker, yanking at the connection between himself and Hive though with an equal futility as before. He hasn't moved, after this, still and pale where he's hunched on the bench, but in some indefinable way he is leaning into Charles's warmth, his mind pressing back up against it (trying to tug it deeper, a deep-ingrained instinct as to how minds should fit together that, in fact, does not always apply.) << (what am I) >> and << (help me) >> are not conscious echoes of Cerebro from years past, but they reflect brittle and fractured in his mind all the same. "We needed to know," DJ agrees, now in just a soft whisper that has gotten no less intelligible to the others for the rough-low cadence of his voice. << but how >> is starting to surface in his thoughts, and almost immediately vanishing under his own answers; he's thinking back to his Hive, to how many of their comrades burned images of themselves into their mind, to the ways those ghosts flickered in and out of existence. And thinking of them, of who they become when they are joined, not just DJ and not just Hive but something wholly different from and greater than the sum of them as individuals. Of the way Hive's death rent him, and how this Hive fit so seamlessly into the scars. Of the raid team, and the history he's heard and seen through Hive's eyes -- somewhere among these recollections a thick wave of nausea is rising. "I --" For a moment, stark and clear in his mind (in their minds), there's a sense-memory that comes, fierce and viscerally felt; Hive's body hot beneath his, around his. What rises isn't exactly like shame, but it's sick and horrified all the same. Oddly, the thought of the many coffees he drank during raid prep training does feel a lot like shame. "I'm --" sorry doesn't follow, aloud, but DJ's breath is tighter and his arms, now, curling around his chest. When he feels his way carefully down the mental link, he doesn't recoil from the dead-weight presence at the other end. "There must be someone who can help." It's difficult to tell whether it's Charles or Cerebro who annotates DJ's realization with echoes from this side of the rift. The way Flicker's death rent Hive, and how DJ fit into those scars. The many ghosts Flicker had left in Hive long before he died that last time -- echoes, too, except when they were joined. DJ's mind is so like Flicker's that it can make sense of the ghosts in ways Hive alone never could, but not alike enough to fully integrate the ghosts as Flicker's own did in life. Charles's mind cannot do what Flicker reflexively wants, but by slow degrees, the walled-off garden opens back up with a kind of exhausted relief. New leaves unfurl and new birds alight, recent recollections of DJ's courage and determination in the days leading up to the raid. Distantly, the sun and the tower beneath it dissolve into formless light that suffuses the garden and the immense labyrinth beyond. The memories Charles had brought in as ballast are less disconnected now, every bee and blossom resonating strange and radiant with some twist or turn in the maze of memories. The currents of light do not hide the barriers that remain, but within those bounds, DJ and Flicker now have a sort psychic proprioception more abstract and less visceral than Hive's, but still very much theirs and not just information Charles is actively giving them. It isn't the same, but "me" here is not purely singular, and "us" here is not wholly plural. It's the best Charles can do, and it lets him show them another garden, joined now to theirs in a geometrically impossible way where they overlap only by the banyan tree at their heart. The second garden is filled with luminous memories of Hive, so many of them harmonizing with those of Flicker or DJ or maybe both. The breeze smells of smoke and coffee as it murmurs suttas into the emptiness of the non-place behind itself. Cere is there, farther -- if only by the space of a few stray concepts -- than any of them can reach into the largely quiescent mind this garden was built around. The fractured planes of his consciousness hang precariously at the edge of the darkness that lies at the other end of the Dawsons' unresponsive connection to Hive. << (someone who can help) >> is at once an affirmation and the echo of a memory -- a delicate blue lotus blooming in the garden where Hive isn't. "I know someone who can help," Charles tells a much younger Hive, still pale and shorn from Penfield. "It is perfectly sensible for you to be wary of doctors, human ones especially, but you will be in excellent hands with Doctor Toure."