Logs:State of the Union

State of the Union
Dramatis Personae Ion, Scramble	2024-02-12 "Ionno how much anybody told you bout what gone down while you was dead, but. S'a lot."
Location <BOM> Jenner Ruins - ???
It's not actually that late, but the days so far have had many other priorities. Between killing the dead, burying the dead, stocking up enough food and water -- getting the power back on is going to be a problem for Another Day. With little artificial light, the darkness makes it feel late. After exhausting work all day and plenty more on the horizon before it's really properly livable in here again, plenty of the Brotherhood are opting for early nights. It's quiet in the frigid courtyard, just a slim sliver of moon occasionally peeking out from behind the clouds to light the weedy expanse. Buttercup is out for a pre-bed pee break that has segued into scratching hopefully at the abandoned mouth of a rat burrow in a corner. After a couple days off-grid, Ion's erratic sparking has started to quiet; he's no longer quite as readily visible as he's been, tucked away at a bench to one side of the yard. The jangling erratic disorder of his mind has quieted considerably in tandem. The snkt of his lighter and flare of its flame are clear enough, as is the distinctive sharpness of the menthol cigarette he's lighting, slumping back against the side of the building with an uncharacteristic heaviness in the droop of his shoulders. Scramble's visible contributions to the work of cleaning up have been highly irregular, contingent on the side effects of her careful efforts in keeping her bereaved and terrified siblings sane. Relatively sane. Slightly less insane. She slept right through dinner, but is making her slow way outside now with a blanket wrapped around herself. At the spark of Ion's lighter she's drifting over to settle on the bench beside him. "Trade you one." She's offering an open sleeve of cheese sandwich crackers (the "cheese" is spelled with a "z" so you know it's fun and zany) and indicating his cigarettes a bit more vaguely, in the uncertain light. Ion doesn't open his eyes, but he does dig the pack of cigarettes out from his jacket. He holds it and the lighter out to Scramble on a palm. "How your brain going?" Scramble's laugh is little more than a harsh breath. "Crazy." She takes the pack and the lighter, handing Ion the dubiously cheesy crackers instead. "But it been crazier before. I'll be aight." Shakes out a cigarette and lights it. Inhales a little too deep and has to stifle a cough against her arm. "Ionno how much anybody told you bout what gone down while you was dead, but. S'a lot." "{For once I got sanity to share.}" Ion sounds kind of wry, here. "{Take some while it last.}" The plastic crinkles in his fingers as he works a cracker out of the pack, shoves it whole into his mouth. He exhales heavy while he's crunching it down, and now his eyes do open, fixed up at the wan moonlight overhead. "Shit, yo, when I got off the damn island and Erik wasn't here I think he must be dead too, how else --" His teeth clamp down tight. "Talk to me." Ion has barely finished making his offer when Scramble's power digs into him with a desperate hunger. Probably, she is trying to hold herself back. Probably, that doesn't make the sinking twisting sudden distance of perception and less unpleasant. "Ion even know where to start," she says, but then starts with, "All the shit that went down at Lassiter was like a blur. Whole thing felt unreal." She closes her eyes. Opens them. "Then shit got real again." She inhales and blows a long stream of smoke into the darkened sky. "Sameass day the Club voted me President, some Nazis rolled up on a Jewish service in town square." Even with her newly borrowed chemical equilibrium, she sounds a little unsteady. "That pryo Sword Wick straight killed Henney -- you know, lived up in Thorne House, talked to birds? Just burned him to nothing." She swallows, studying the brand of the cigarette with a weird intensity. "Erik full lost his shit. Tore up the street tryna kill the Nazi, but he hit Jax's bubble and, incidentally, Jax." Her head shakes, slow, repetitive. "Meanwhile that motherfucker Deep was -- look, just, it was a goddamn nightmare. We got everyone out the way before Jax went boom, and we thought he was dead for a hot minute till Joshua blipped him back all healed up. But B saw the whole thing and it fucked her up somethin fierce." "Fuck, Henney." Ion's teeth grit hard -- is it against the news or against the abrupt dissociation? Maybe the latter helps, honestly, because he's listening to this litany of terrible with an oddly absent nod and a looong drag of his smoke. "{-- man made Tae-Yeon's little girl the bomb chicken soup every damn day when she got sick last winter. Only thing she'd to eat two straight weeks.}" His thumb flicks at the cigarette, and he shifts a little closer to Scramble. No jolt, when his shoulder leans up against hers. "You pack a whole lot of presidenting into one day." There's a pause after this. Another puff of his smoke before he dredges up, reluctantly: "... how fucked up we talking." "{Didn't even have nothing to bury.} Some president I am." Scramble leans back, hard. Smokes hard, too. "Folks was scared, after that. Some of 'em started thinkin they'd be safer with the Swords than with us. Maybe if I ain't had my hands so full with Freaktown..." She sets her jaw hard. "B quit. Not the Mongrels, the Brotherhood, on account of Erik. Now, he'd holed up in his cabin since that attack. Ion even know if anyone told him 'bout B, but if so he didn't give a shit. Some point he fucked all the way off God knows where, but the Raes been handling the day-to-day anyhow." She taps the ash from her cigarette and searches for Buttercup amongst the shadows. "Mostly. Without B we didn't have no hacker on the island. When I asked her to come back she said we was already fucked. At the time I thought she meant about our leadership. Now?" She shakes her head again. "Fucked if I know." "That pyro been full fucking crazy. You can't..." Ion exhales, hard. His next words come tighter, half spat through his teeth: "Told him? He ain't even try to -- kssh. The fuck kind of leader -- if one our dogs going through it, you need someone to write you a fucking report? {Nick could stub his fucking paw, I bet it be on your mind when you thinking on a run.}" He sucks at his teeth, pulling a leg up against his chest. He's kind of vaguely looking across the yard, now, in the direction of the continued snuffling and scraping paws, little though he can actually see Buttercup in the dim light. "She take her guard-bots and all?" Scramble shakes her head. "I can understand freaking out. I wasn't exactly thinking straight, and I ain't even gone through what he survived. But he came back after he calmed down that night, and I thought..." She slumps over a little further, her head sinking Ion's shoulder. "Shit. Ionno what I thought." Her shoulders shrug and do not fully relax again. "She ain't take shit with her. Mostly seemed like it all just kept chugging along, but when those Sentinels attacked the island? B's pet Sentinels turned on us, too." Ion's cheek rests against Scramble's poof of hair. "Fuck," again, sounds soft and deflated. "I know that little shark fierce about her family but I thought --" But then he's just shaking his head, small and mostly just felt by the shift against Scramble's fro. "Ionno what I thought." He stubs his cigarette hard against the bench. His next few breaths are slow. Deep. Eventually he straightens -- whistles quick and sharp, which brings a rapid thumping of paws back in their direction. He scrunches his fingers into Buttercup's fur, then, slowly, stands, offering a hand out to Scramble. "C'mon, Sister. You need some proper meal, yeah?" "Ain't nobody in her family would want that, no matter how little they like what we do." Scramble gives her cigarette one more long pull and crushes it out, too. "And I thought we was her family, too." But when Buttercup arrives her shoulders ease a little. "Yeah. I'm so goddamn glad you come back to us, Hermano." She grips Ion's hand and hauls herself up. "'Almost enough to make a crazy old dyke believe."