Logs:This Is War

This Is War
Dramatis Personae DJ, Hive, Jax, Lily, Polaris	2021-10-26 "How are you all still alive?"
Location <NYC> Chimaera Arts - Dumbo
This is just one of the many abandoned warehouses in DUMBO, and like many of them it has recently changed hands. Unlike most of those, however, it does not have some corporate developer's sign out front promising a transformation into luxury condominiums or a boutique shopping center or the latest concept restaurant. Instead it's marked by a piece of weathered but wildly colorful plywood propped up on a stack of broken pallets, which reads "Chimaera Art Space!" above "chimaera.org" in smaller letters. The warehouse is moderately large and decorated with graffiti art in various styles--some of it recognizable as the work of renowned local street artists. A pair of monstrous scrap metal sculptures, perhaps still works in progress, flank the entrance. The building itself has undergone significant renovation recently, complete with wiring, plumbing, and a modular partitioning system. The grounds, too, have been cleaned up, ramshackle fences torn down and rusting detritus removed in favor of reclaimed (and brilliantly repainted) outdoor furniture ringing an impressively engineered firepit. It's grown very late, and for once, Chimaera is quiet. It's never really deserted in here -- there's a young woman absorbed in her oil painting in one of the cubicles, a trio clustered around a bonfire smoking weed in the chilly fall air in the courtyard outside -- but for the most part, the warehouse has wound down its activity for the day. Over in the woodshop -- still a bit messier than it used to be, a bit less well-loved, yet to find itself a new permanent point person, no current classes on the roster and fewer regulars taking advantage of its tools -- there's a light on in the back. A cabinet -- long, long past its expected delivery date, but there were some extenuating circumstances -- half-built in reclaimed maple and well on its way now to being finished, though DJ is going at it considerably slower and more painstakingly than its original artisan might have. He's in heavy jeans, boots, grey and black flannel open over a grey tee, sleeve carefully pinned at his side, goggles on his eyes and ear protectors on his ears as he runs a plank of wood carefully over a circular saw. Stacks it with several others the same length. It's grown very late, and Jax is just arriving at the warehouse -- from where, who knows! But he's got a fair amount of paint flecked on his boots and hands, dressed mostly in black in contrast to his usual bright attire. His hair is still its trademark peacock-toned ombre. He was heading to the medical storage but instead frowns in the direction of the woodshop, drifting over toward it only long enough to peek in the door. Then vanish, admittedly with a heavier melancholy in his expression. When he returns it's with a pair of mugs, steaming and smelling richly of hot cocoa. He doesn't enter the room but fetches up in the doorway, lifting one slightly to try and catch DJ's attention. "Thought those'd just be unfinished forever." DJ sets his wood down and glances up when Jax appears in the doorway. His breath catches for a moment, but only a moment; he pushes the ear protectors back down to hang around his neck, shaking his head briefly. "Sorry?" he says, and then, "Sorry. It was presumptuous to -- I just." He glances around the shop -- there's a low-backed chair and a small end table also clearly started in Flicker's hand but finished in another. "They seemed sad just hanging around here." He looks at the two mugs in Jax's hands, then up to Jax, a slight flush in his cheeks. "-- You must really like cocoa." "Kinda were, I think. Feelin' a bit neglected. Glad you're givin' 'em some love." Jax ambles further into the room, lifting one of the mugs to sip from it. "S'feelin' like proper fall out there, finally. M'a Georgia boy, can be you blame me needin' a bit extra bolsterin'?" But he's holding one of the mugs out toward DJ all the same. "If the wood can spare you for a few, anyways." Outside by the fire pit, Polaris has relatively been quiet, by her usual standards, anyway. She's wearing a black canvas motorcycle jacket, unzipped now to let in the warmth, green and black plaid flannel, black jeans, and black jump boots, with her usual wealth of steel accessories. Without makeup, her light skin looks almost unearthly pale in the dancing firelight. The anger and pain and hypervigilance that has kept her keyed up these last few days are pleasantly dulled now, her thoughts meandering between her companions, the prospect of training again, and the dancing flames. She takes a long draw and passes the joint, staring up for a moment at the low clouds ominously saturated with skyglow before exhaling. << Brookelyn is gonna be "very disappointed" (Brookelyn doesn't need to know) >> Hive seems like he might could use some extra bolstering himself -- despite the flannel-lined corduroy jacket, heavy workshirt, lined jeans, sturdy boots he's wearing, he's still shivering any time a gust of wind blows the flames just that much in a different direction. He takes the joint from Polaris and is just about to take a drag when his hand hitches -- only briefly before he completes the motion. "Jax is back." He's drawing a pull all the same, passing it on, getting to his feet. The shivering gets worse in the time he moves away from the fire into the (nominally) heated warehouse, scuffing his way toward the woodshop to drape a smoke-scented arm over Jax's shoulder and pilfer the cocoa. He doesn't look at DJ, but he does look, long and hard, at the furnitures, both completed- and in-progress. Last to the joint, Lily takes a long, long drag off of it, knocking the last of the ash off with an agitated flick. She's dressed in black barrel-cut jeans, a green knit crop-top, and an oversized brown chore jacket, her scuffed chelsea boots shuffling against the ground as they wait. Her thoughts are following the flames, looking for shapes, seeing a spider and thoughts wandering to Peter, then to Skye and then to guilt. She checks the joint is burnt out before tucking it into a pocket, following Hive back into the warehouse. Her eyes, too, glance over the furniture, but then travel to DJ's face. "Thought that might be you," she says softly. "It's good." DJ flips the goggles up to the top of his head, dipping his head in thanks as he steps forward to take the cocoa. He's trying (and failing) not to compare this Jax to his Jax (<< good ol' Georgia boys >>), trying and failing not to think of Georgia, of the farm this time of year, of the mountain air, of the twins and -- "-- Polaris. Lily." No greeting for Hive, just a mental pull of ache, of hollowed-out-wrongness where a piece of himself should be. "Thanks. Took me a while to get back in the right -- rhythm." His left shoulder hitches a little exaggeratedly, drawing more attention to the empty sleeve. He takes a sip of the cocoa, savoring it as he looks at the others. "-- you're all here pretty late." << Protests still going on? No, those wound down. >> Jax has heat to spare -- not near so fierce as in the summer but still considerably warmer than average body heat, radiating off him at this close proximity as he leans into the drape of Hive's arm. He relinquishes his cocoa easily -- kind of full already from snacking while doing artcrime, the cocoa more an excuse to talk to DJ than anything else. "City that don't sleep, y'know. We take it to heart. 'sides, this month's kinda -- full of busy for us." His shrug is small and light and not at all matched up with the bloody-fiery explosions coloring his thoughts. Polaris trails Hive, her steps stuttering for just an instant before she sees the two men in the workshop. The surge of joy when she senses DJ's bright lively bioelectrical signature is reflexive, quickly replaced by a grief no less reflexive, which in turn is shadowed by a creeping shame shortly banished by tense wavering lines of worry. << He looks better. Shouldn't ask about a lot of trauma in front of other folks... >> In the end, a small friendly "hey" is all she offers Jax and DJ, though her eyes are drifting to the furniture, too, as she fetches up against a currently unused bench. She does not--perhaps cannot--disguise the sudden tension that cuts clean through the soft haze of her intoxication, driven by a blaze of remembered agony. "Kinda," she agrees. "Probably next month, too." The worry has rippled out to encompass Jax, the scintillating complexity of his halo fading slowly but steadily in her senses as the season wears on. Hive's mind creeps out, a little mushier than usual in the tendrils it wraps around DJ's. "You guys have Prometheus in your world?" he asks. "Shitty government torture labs?" He's passing the mug back to Jax with this casual question. He is evidently not subscribing to the same conversational rules as Polaris. There's the briefest pang of grief when Lily looks at DJ, perhaps softened by the weed or the exhaustion of the last couple weeks. It doesn't leave, though -- it glows, softens, then slowly grows, weighing heavier and heavier in her gut as her eyes roam over the chair, the cabinet, all the projects that Dawson began and DJ finished. "Better than I did. Couldn't find the rhythm at all." In the corner, her own paltry contributions to the same cause rest against a wall. <<Should I have stayed with it? Stay close to him?>> Memories of chisel cutting her skin banish that passing thought. She perches on the edge of another worktable, pulls the chore jacket closer around her as the others explain. In her head, a vision of an eagle swooping low, about to clock in for another day of tearing at Titan intestines. "You want to finish them up together some time, there's still a few left. And -- Uh -- yeah, I --" DJ's mind darts back over a series of cages -- ones he was in, ones he broke open. Operating rooms and guards bloodied on the floor and labs up in flames, newly-freed rescuees injured and uncertain in the guest rooms of the farm, juggling med school and training. "-- think next time I'm going to pick a world without torture labs. There's gotta be a world without torture labs, right?" He sips from his cocoa again. << Probably only in a world without humans >> clashes up against << we'd probably just be torturing our own then. >> He's just a little wary with the follow-up: "Why?" "Gosh I'm hopin' next month looks up a bit." Jax scrubs a palm against his cheek, trying with not much success to will himself into a sense of optimism about the prospect of bringing their friends home. "They've got some of our friends. We gotta get 'em back. If you do find that world I'd sure like t'know it. Meantime we'll be doing the best we can with the one we got." The twitch of Polaris's eyebrow is minute. The flashing strobe of snapshot memories at least pass quickly this time, not of the raid but Blackburn, from its banal daily horrors to the chaos of their escape. "I'm sorry, man. We're trying to make this a world with--well, fewer torture labs, anyway. Some folks have been at this for a while." She glances at Jax with a surge of admiration, then back at DJ. "Did you all have--like, people who'd gotten out and. Just can't let that alone?" Her steel wire rings flow sinuously over her knuckles to form a crude wire cage in the palm of her hand. "He got out," Hive tattles, after these flashes of thought. "-- and went back in?" His brows lift, questioning, less confident here. The long tendrils of his mind are still coiling -- not actually melding themselves as is his habit but just pressing in increasingly firm grip down against DJ's. "Fuck, is there a world where you catch a break?" “So he’s like the rest of you, then.” There’s a coil of sadness sinking down into Lily’s stomach with Hive’s announcement, twinned with more guilt as memories of her time with Prometheus (full of praise and promise and exciting future plans) flash and blend with the faces of the liberated lab rats she’s been healing for ten days. <<he deserves (deserved) better than them (me).>> “If you have any tips on the going back part. We’re listening.” "All of you?" For a moment DJ looks about as horrified as he feels; there's a sharp twist of rage in him at the idea of Polaris in Prometheus, of Lily in Prometheus. "Kinda sounds like you all need the vacation-world as much as I do." He shrugs a little uncomfortably, simultaneously leaning into Hive's mental contact and trying to redirect his thoughts away from years of bloody raids, friends dead or captured or simply vanished. "I mean -- if you all have been at this a while you probably know your world's labs better than me? The Sentinels were always our big problem, we had to keep coming up with new strategies to deal with them. Kept evolving, though." "We --" Jax's thoughts stutter-hitch on a memory of guards with their anti-Flicker ordinance, of the air filled with debris, of the feel of it in the mental network as a life goes blinking out. "-- our human -- well, mutant -- but the people-guards been learnin' and adaptin' to our team a lot, too. Don't hardly feel right just keepin' on dragging new people into this when they don't -- they can't know what they're getting themselves into." Here a thought of talking with Ryan months ago about the ethics of risking people's capture when they don't know what Prometheus is like -- of Skye getting locked up her first run out with them. He clutches his mug tighter, and takes a small sip of cocoa. "But kinda feels like that's the best option we got left, how good they're learning all of us. Don't like it none at all." "Well, uh--" Polaris glances at Lily, lips pulling back though she's trying not to grimace. << Technically yes? Awkward... >> "I don't know about going back in, but...if Dawson hadn't ended up in our lab--" << --I'd probably be dead-- >> "--we probably wouldn't have gotten out. But that wasn't intentional." A flash of Dawson and Wendy and motherfucking Jamie at a dingy table in the Blackburn defectory. Then a flash of Joshua, steady and quiet and calm, of Skye, hard-working and irreverent. << Heavenly Parents bless and keep them. >> "I've only been on the one raid, but the f-frakking bots were just endless." "Were you all good?" Hive asks, bluntly. "I mean, did you get a lot of people out? Keep your people alive doing it? If so, there's probably something we could learn. We're great at the one thing, on the other --" His hand seesaws in the air. DJ, at least, can feel some of the rage and grief that lance through him. "If you know some sweet hack to stop the Sentinels in their tracks or the secret handshake that gets the guards to give you a bye for the day we'll take it." “Not all. Not me.” Lily’s correction comes on the heels of Polaris looking at her, quiet but firm. <<some joke of a blessing.>> “I was. Part of the problem, actually.” Sirens echo in her memory — a facility on lockdown, hiding behind a lab bench, the whole memory stained with the curse of knowing who was causing the alarms to sound. Her lips press together, right, buttoning down a surge of anger for being played for a fool. “We got stomped, and I think —“ she looks to Jax and Hive for confirmation, here, “— that we still got off easy. So.” Her eyes lift back to her not-brother. “Anything you got.” "The bots we got through all kinds of ways. Brute force? Had some good hackers. Vect -- Leo, here, days he was with us, that was a blessing, he could take them all out at once." DJ's mental image has a field of Sentinels all gone eerily still. "Don't think most of the people stuck around long enough to learn what to do against us. I don't know about a secret handshake," his voice is quiet and serious, and his hand drops to pat the pouch he wears Just About Always at his hip -- it rattles with a quiet metallic jingle -- "but if you put enough shrapnel in one they'll let you through, alright. Pretty much for good. I don't think the hazard pay was high enough for the ones who did survive to stay on the job too long." "Leo take out the Sentinels, how'd he --" Jax starts, but then stops at the rest of what DJ says. His eyes fall to the pouch, his mind with it's too-vivid imagery skipping to Flicker (riddled with holes); Flicker (sending a guard with one touch back several feet, boots so-very-carefully lodged just-barely with a quarter inch of sole enmeshed in the concrete floor); Flicker (taking the gun from a guard and sending that to vanish into the floor); Flicker (briefly collapsing to the ground after appearing in a hallway too-filled with debris in the air until Hive forces him back up.) Around them, the lights briefly flutter. "... well," Jax says, softer, that's one way to do it. We ain't never killed any of 'em so I guess that's -- that. Probably makes a big difference in their learning curve." Polaris raises her eyebrows. "Whoa. The Leo on that side do computer viruses, too?" Perhaps this was meant to be humorous, but she doesn't sound exceptionally amused. << Oof. Too soon? >> Whatever speculation she's spooling up about Bizarro Leo as a hacker is blasted clean from her mind by DJ's other handy tip. Her eyes track his hand, growing even wider with realization. "Ohhh that's what those are for." << The shit I could do with a handful of those inside--pretty much anything. >> She chews on her bottom lip, fighting back nausea at the image of the contractor at Rikers, his body starting to dissolve before he'd even hit the floor. Her face has grown paler. "Did that make them..." She grimaces. "I don't wanna say 'escalate' when their baseline is torture and murder, but did they retaliate--outside of raids?" Once again, a spike of rage and grief felt through where Hive's mind has curled itself around DJ's. His hand flings out incredulously in DJ's direction. "The fuck I been saying, why don't we try killing them first for a change." Lily has gone very pale, eyes riveted on the pouch. It takes her a moment to put together what he means, piecing together her memories with those Hive showed her a year ago. <<Inside, the internal damage alone, (going to hurl) (want to know how)>> She just grips the edge of the table harder, fingertips going white against the sawdust covered surface. “Little bit I knew before, I thought you all were already doing that. Killing first.” "I don't know that yours doesn't," DJ replies with a shrug, "I just don't know if he does yet." He reaches into the pouch, comes back out with a small handful of plain steel ball bearings. "Comes in handy. Not exactly the kind of weapon police tend to give a darn about but it's useful in a bind." He tucks the small beads back away with a soft rattle, his eyes slightly wider. "I kinda figured you were, too. How have you been doing this all these years?" is his first question, and, "How are you all still alive?" His brows pinch at Polaris's question. "I mean -- we were." He hesitates, his head bowing, slightly. "We were at war. I guess the trade-off there is they don't -- seem to spend as much time hunting you down where you live. Where I come from, this --" He gestures around them to the warehouse at large. "Couldn't have been a thing, anymore. Evolve, the school, none of it. You hid, you left the country, or you fought, those were the choices. I'm not really much for fleeing, so --" He shrugs. "-- oh," is all Jax says at first, softly. He doesn't say, I told you so, doesn't say, This is exactly why we draw a hard line on Declaring Open War On The Government. Maybe it's in the back of his mind. Probably it's in the back of his mind, but for a stark few moments the colors have bled out of his mental landscape, the blood and fire of the raids spreading in grayscale to everyone he knows and loves. And again, quiet, "Oh." "Jesu--" Polaris keeps getting paler, her eyes fixating on the ball bearings, then ticking up to DJ's face, then to Hive's. << Not really much for fleeing >> "It's not like we haven't worried about that but--shit." No self-conscious correction or breaking off mid-curse or belated bowdleration this time. "Anyway we aren't," she says, low and subdued now, "all still alive. Not the rescuers or the rescuees. But I think a lot more of us would be dead, or still in the labs, or in the labs again--" Another shimmer of distress and an attendant restlessness to go get them back already. "--if the Dawson from this side hadn't..." She doesn't seem to know where to take this sentence all of a sudden, and looks to the more senior raiders instead. "We're not all still alive," Hive's answer comes sharp, not-quite in time with Polaris's. His jaw tightens through the rest of DJ's reply, arm tightening its curl around Jax's shoulders as well. All of him tensing, the hard-coiled grip of his mind squeezing tighter and finally bearing down, spreading in enveloping canopy over and through the other man with, for a moment, nothing more than an all-consuming sense of protectiveness. "If this is the world where you caught a break I'm real fucking pissed." In Lily's mind, an image is being constructed; Dawson, her Dawson, still a child, flickering in and out of sight in a ghostly dance. Around him, Prometheus guards fall, skin puckered with ball bearings lodged underneath and blood pouring from their mouths. She shuts her eyes, tries to banish the imagining away. "Is it causal? The -- being hunted. Did that start before or after killing guards and contractors." <<which answer is worse I don't know.>> As ever, something eases in DJ at the connection, like a quiet inward sigh as that hollowness feels a bit less empty. He leans back against his work table, palm bracing against its edge and his answer slow in coming -- mind filtering rapidly back over years of fighting, years of the tense-stressed uncertainty that preceded it. "-- I don't think," he answers, finally, slow, "anybody really declares an -- official start to a civil war. If you started killing them now, what would have come first? They've been catching you and putting you in torture labs for years, right? Your friends are dead, or locked up, or gone. What's first, there. You're already at war, you're just fighting it guerilla style and we --" His head shakes. << Would there have been less bloodshed if we chose the same? >> "It all started the same, at home. Registration, the Sentinels, the labs, people getting quietly disappeared. We fought it, things got less quiet. Is first when we fought back or is first when they started caging us to beging with? I don't know, but if I'm being honest, I kind of just -- spend my time waiting for the other shoe to drop, here." The grey in Jax's mind is bleeding out into the world around them, for a moment, small wisps of shadow coiling around his arms as he wraps one around himself in a half-hug. << This is fine. >> "Okay. Okay." His hand lifts, scrubbing through his hair and then dropping back to the crook of his opposite arm. He takes a long swallow of his cocoa, frowns down into the near-empty mug. "So we're fighting this on the wrong front. We need to get people out, obviously we do, but -- they want this quiet. If they didn't they'd have arrested us all long ago but they don't want the lawyers and the press and -- maybe that's just where we need to be turnin'. Write that story before they can paint this as -- as a war." Though the continued fiery destruction in his mind suggests that perhaps he knows it already is. There's a faint rattle of tools all around the workshop that starts easing off at once. Polaris pushes aside an intense feeling of déjà vu from some general assembly meeting long, long ago, trying to concentrate on Jax's words, trying harder to find them reassuring. << It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. Got a bit more to lose than chains, maybe. >> "So this is kinda. Chuck the shoe at them before it drops?" She closes her hand around the wire cage she'd been fiddling with, and the wires flow out from between her fingers, slowly twisting themselves back into rings. << I have sworn in my wrath, and decreed wars upon the face of the earth. >> "Hope it's a heavy shoe." "You got a hell of a lot more faith in this country than I do." Hive grumbles this low, his mind skimming to thoughts of overcrowded ICE detention facilities, of inmates baking to death in uncooled summertime prisons, of so many clips of police brutality the names and cases have blurred together into his mind into some wretched amalgam of a person. "America's gonna learn they've been torturing us and shrug. A few clutched pearls online, maybe, for a week or so, and then --" He turns a hand out toward DJ. "I hope you're right. Maybe that's the way. But if he's right? If war is always where this goes -- are you ready to do what it takes to win it?" Is she ready? Lily turns this thought around in her head -- there's hope that Jax is right, a sinking feeling that Hive's realism is closer to reality, that either way bloodshed is inevitable. Her eyes linger on the sleeve pinned at DJ's side, the pouch on his other side. The Battle Hymn of the Republic plays, soft and steady in the undertow of her thoughts -- As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free... Lily sucks in a breath, unclenches her sawdust covered hands. "We're not ready. Yet. But. We will be."