Logs:Death Unbecomes Her

Death Unbecomes Her
Dramatis Personae Akihiro, Mystique, Scott, Kyinha, Amo, Ion, Scramble, Joshua, Destiny
In Absentia	2024-09-18 "...didn't see this coming, either." (after a little game-changer)
Location <MOJ> Outside the Arena
While Akihiro is mostly physically fine his clothes are burnt and ripped, it’s clear that this whole thing is starting to weigh on him. Or maybe it’s Destiny’s corpse gently cradled in his arms. He’s seemingly forgotten everyone else with him, focused solely on his grim task of delivering her back to her wife. “This is the worst part.” Does he mean the death? Does he mean handling the incoming fury? He does not expand further upon the thought, instead just continuing towards the team box. It's the wrong box for it, certainly, but there's a storm of yellow and blue descending upon the returning Brothers. Mystique's eyes are wide, her fists clenched. There's something raw and guttural in the cry torn from her multitoned voice as Akihiro first enters. It is probably the fact that he is carrying Destiny that means the cocktail fork Mystique is holding does not get thrown at him but, alas, with distressingly unerring accuracy towards the shoulder of the Brother just behind him. "You 'monsters'." --- Team X is somehow less bedraggled than the supposed winners of the "Roller" "Derby" as they stagger over the finish line, a splattery Jackson Pollucky trail of blood in their wake. Perhaps to Scott it's all the same, behind smudgy ruby quartz -- when he wipes one hand across his visor it leaves a wet smear that could be either blood or sweat, for all anybody can tell. He's not speaking at all as he veers clear of the Brotherhood to limp doggedly toward his own team, but -- at the sound of Mystique's cry -- his already halting gait stutters, just shy of the teammates coming to meet them. He's only still for a moment before he just keeps walking, though his brow wrinkles over his visor, and his voice when he gulps and finds it is very hoarse -- "What'd I miss?" Kyinha coasts to a stop when Scott comes up short, looking past him to the other team's box. His expression is stark but difficult to interpret, eyes wide quivering blazes set in darkness, his mouth pressing shut tight like a banked fire. The tick of his gaze over his teammates tells of a frantic headcount ending in uneasy relief. "The Brothers caught the worst of it." His voice is hushed and faintly distorted by the waves of heat he's giving off. "They ended it just about in time. But not quite." He grimaces hard and starts to herd their survivors to shelter. "Come, you all need to get medicked at." ——— Amo’s breath is shuddering, the same as it was in the arena, except there’s no place for the adrenaline to go this time. No shopping cart to push, no forklift to hop onto. And no hostility to attack a teammate with unwarranted. Exhaustedly seated on the floor of the x-house, back pressed against the wall, armor pulses across her skin in waves, threatening to overwhelm, but with each forced slow breath it recedes, inch by inch. One arm is a mangled mess all the way up to her shoulder, now only sluggishly bleeding through the bandage it’s wrapped in, and the armor attempting to form in the meatloaf of remaining skin probably isn’t helping. There’s a thin trails of missing skin that run outward from stray bugs that burrowed their way under her armor. She grits her teeth, swallows harshly, “Are you-” hurt? okay? The word doesn’t make it out of her mouth. She breaths in, once more. This time, she seems to gather herself, and her eyes are a bit clearer, sharper, when she scans Scott, “I’m sorry.” Her voice is strained, but there at least, and manages to carry her apology. “I lost it. I couldn’t even recognize you.” She looks nauseous, suddenly. Only now is Scott -- further down the triage list than Amo, tonight -- bandaged up and taking a seat, dropping with an exhausted, rasping sigh into one of their many many eclectic chairs. He's holding a repurposed pickle jar in one hand, serving as a water glass, but after a moment he sits forward with his elbows on his knees, a small and tight frown forming around his glasses, and holds it out for Amo to take instead. "That wasn't you," he says -- maybe this tone is Scott trying for 'gentle' but in his present state the closest he can manage is 'quiet but firm'. "Someone messing with your head, not your fault. Happens to the best of us." There is a pause, before -- perhaps in a bid to be even more reassuring than this has doubtless already been -- he sits up straighter and taps one finger at the bruising on his face, with a slim and somewhat wry smile -- "Did me a solid leaving the visor alone. Can't thank you enough." --- There's a terrible unhealthy stench thats lingering in much of the house, these days, and though it isn't quite death it isn't not that, either. Too many torn and bleeding bodies in too close proximity, the stale and rotting bandaging starting to accumulate despite best efforts just like the buckets under the latrines not-far-enough-away in the tiny sad yard out back. Ion has dragged himself here to one absurdly luxurious bathroom, its elegant tile smeared with blood and scratched up heavily by his hook where he's fumblingly levered himself onto the edge of a tub. He's running cool water down one leg, crisscrossed liberally with chunked-out rivulets and fractal Lichtenberg scarring, though he's barely watching as the water runs from red to pink. His head has fallen heavy against the mosaic-tiled wall but he manages to turn it, slight, looking up with one eye squinched against lights that flutter in the unstably fluctuating power. "{Wasn't gonna end till someone ended it,}" he's saying, grimly. "{We thought if we could stay together --}" his head shakes slowly. "{I'm sorry.}" "{You thought.}" Ion may have said we but it is definitely a singular you that Mystique is hissing back, sharp and sharply accusatory. Though she's gone through none of the Arena's ravages today, she's looking fairly rundown, blood drying on her blue skin, red hair wild and unruly around her face. The gauze stretching between her hands warps and tears as she wrings it, pulling it thin and tight in a manner more befitting a garotte than a piece of bandaging. "Did you, though? And still that was how you saw fit to end it? {You should be sorry.}" Her teeth are clenched hard, her shoulders shaking. "{It should be you rotting in there.}" --- Scramble is leaning on a leg press machine, the sharp angles of her long limbs looking all the more pronounced for the weight she's lost. "I know you ain't exactly had the time or space to get your head around this fucked up incident," she says evenly, "but we gotta start thinking about funeral arrangements." The too-bright artificial lighting makes her look a bit corpselike herself, with all the cuts and bruises and scrapes she's accumulated over the course of the games. "You're gon' have to let her go, someday. Having a service can help with that." She bows her head. "It's not the same, but we still got your back. We'll get through this -- she'd want you to get through this -- together." "Together." Beside the weight bench where Destiny's body is lying in questionably peaceful repose, Mystique is a flowing silhouette of black on black on black, layers of elegant mourning dress and the glow of her eyes not entirely obscured behind the intricate lace fall that flows from the wide downswept shade of her hat. "What could you possibly know of what she would want? What arrogance to try dictating to me how I have to behave. We were reshaping the world before your mothers' mothers were born and will still be long after most of you callow children are gone." She's rising, sweeping past Scramble in a rustle of layered crepe. "She has seen our future and it did not end in this forsaken pit. Maybe all of her so-called Brothers are content to simply move on, but trust me." She lingers only a moment in the doorway, here. "I have no need of your assistance. I can burn this dimension to ash well enough on my own, and all the wretches in it, if need be." --- Is anyone here on anything resembling a real human schedule anymore? It's hard to say, but probably, regardless of what the fake sun has decided it's doing right now, it should be dinnertime. Today's dinner miracle will probably be late; as Joshua is finishing up with Round One of healing he's looking already pretty ashen. He's just chucked his own large medic bag off into the void and slumped heavy against the kitchen counter, downing a handful of stimulants and ibuprofen that, for the moment, will have to suffice for supper. "Little surprised it took this long." His eyes are fixed a little blankly forward, where his hands clutch his water glass somewhat unsteadily. "Not really liking the way this goes if more of us start dropping." "No," comes in swift, if subdued, agreement; Scott is standing in the doorframe, more of a lean to his posture than is really characteristic, his eyes trained steadily on his teammate and his arms folded across his chest. Though he only pauses briefly, to draw in his breath, he is so statue-still that it might as well have been an eternity before he says, "If we don't get out of this soon, more of us will die. I don't know who, or how, but our numbers can only go down from here. We're tired and angry. We'll make mistakes. We'll get discouraged. We'll keep dying. There are damn few of us to start with." His gaze is still very intent, even behind the glasses, even with an exhausted rasp in his voice. "Some of us will lose hope a lot faster than others and stop playing nice. We might be playing killer Calvinball with Mystique again as early as tomorrow. I think the last thing we can afford to lose right now is each other. Not just in terms of life and death, but goodwill too. Trust. I don't trust Mystique. But I do trust you." His eyes are still on Joshua when Scott tilts his head, though the motion casts his face into sharp enough shadow that the reflective gleam of his glasses dulls into the fainter glow from behind them. "How do you see this going?" --- Perhaps Mystique has been on her way out, geared up as she is for the hostile terrain of Mojo World. She may be making ready for a one woman war, but she still has had time to intercept the X-Men on her path out of the Brotherhood house, hand on her hip and her lip curled into a sneer. "-- cannot begin to comprehend this strategic loss," she's been holding forth imperiously to Scott -- his companion seems almost beneath her notice, right now, furious as she is. "To lose her wisdom -- her experience -- her gift of prophecy, and for what. To trade for the miserable lives of Xavier's starry-eyed lackeys? She was worth all of you and then some. You've a nerve darkening our door at all, after what you've stolen today." Though Scott is standing straight and tall he seems uncharacteristically diminished in front of Mystique, war-ready as she is -- maybe it's his civilian clothes, his hands clasped behind his back, his head tilted to hear her better. The sole concession he's made to the enmity between them is the visor on his face instead of glasses. Only when Mystique finishes does he lift his head again, fixing the bright slit of his gaze on her. "It wasn't my team that stole her from you, Mystique," he says, his voice low and measured, "any more than it was yours that traded her away. None of us stand to gain a thing from each other's losses, and I'm not convinced we have much to gain from our wins either. But we can bring her back to you." It's a reasonable bet that further tirade was just on the tip of Mystique's tongue, but here, finally, she closes her mouth sharp. She pulls herself up, eyes wider in a rare and stark surprise. The folds of her armor are receding into just her trademark flowing white dress, her arms crossing and then uncrossing in an oddly restless anxiety. She studies Scott's face a long moment -- the yellow of her eyes narrows a touch, then looks away when, perhaps, she finds his visor just as inscrutable as ever. Her shoulders tighten, mouth twisting momentarily with a passing shade of a threat and then, even more ephemeral, the considerably more distasteful specter of some acknowledgment of gratitude before she just nods numbly toward the basement. "She's downstairs." --- Even with three whole living people down here, it's been quiet for a while, the air heavy with the weight of the monologues that Mystique is valiantly holding back and to which Scott is stoically not responding, and with the focus that Joshua is steadily pouring into his patient. It only becomes marginally less quiet when the population of the gym goes up to four. Destiny's breathing starts out shallow and uncertain, then evens out as Joshua repairs the worst of the damage to her vital functions. It's still a little while longer before she stirs in any voluntary way, her breath hitching once before evening out again, her hand not so much reaching as turning in certain expectation for her wife's hand, her eyes opening without flinching up at the harsh lights, pupils maximally and permanently dilated. When she finally does manage to speak it is soft and breathy, though clear enough in the near-silence of the make-shift morgue turned make-shift ICU, even if it doesn't seem to be addressed to anyone other than herself. "...didn't see this coming, either."