myironeyes | Brighteyes McStabbass, Party of Two

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Brighteyes McStabbass, Party of Two

[Spam in the infirmary, shortly after this thread.]

[Marsh arrives gingerly bearing an unconscious, injured Riddick. He has several damaged ribs, a dislocated shoulder, and possibly a conscussion. Marsh answers questions curtly and does not interfere with Infirmary staff, but nor does he allow himself to be sent any farther that a few feet from Riddick's bedside. He's angry and worried and agitated, not that anyone who didn't know him well would be able to see it among his usual scowls.]

We have reason to believe he is not in his right mind. Are there restraints available?

[OOC: open to Infirmary people, whether official or just hanging around there, and to anyone who knows about the fight and wants to check in on Marsh and Riddick before Zane's announcement.]

[Spam slightly later, near/after Zane's public query, for Riddick and then Ben]

[Riddick wakes up, ribs taped, his shoulder back in its socket and wrapped with an ice pack, wrists and ankles in metal cuffs, with Marsh looming attentive and still beside him.]

[Private to Iris]

[He's even more shut down than usual.]

Please come to the infirmary. Riddick appears to be one of those modified.

You can...help. Right?

[Please.]

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[He considers asking what cottage cheese is, as a method for delaying dealing with all of this a little longer, but decides that he really doesn't need a more visceral image of the comparison. He doesn't tense under her hand this time, although this may be simply because he is already completely wound up.]

He was - he was acting like an Inquisitor, when he first woke up. Like someone poured destruction into him and it crowded out the rest.

[It's a very low, quiet horror. Inured to it, resigned to it, but underneath that still recoiling, still mournful. He hates, hates seeing someone else like that, hates more not having any way to fix it.]

He was hurting himself worse struggling, until I soothed him a little. I'm not now.

[He feels incredibly guilty for that, guilty and scared that he might have made it worse, putting pressure on Riddick's mind at all. But it seemed better than the alternatives.]

[She might have been able to stop herself, but it would have taken a conscious effort and by the time it occurs to Iris to make it, she's already half-turned, squeezing Marsh's arm in hers, smiling up into his blind gaze. Her affection, her admiration-laced compassion flows out of her like cool steam, settling on the outer limits of Marsh's like dew.]

Good man. Your turn, Riddick love; Marsh, whatever you do keep 'im still.

[She turns, thought-swift, and reaches for the man on the bed.]

[Riddick jerks bodily away from her touch, and one hand--he has long practice getting out of full body restraints unnoticed--flies out to grab her wrist and twist. But he's pain-slow and weak, hasn't got the leverage to just snap the joint immediately.]

[Marsh frowns, shifts to catch Riddick's wrist in turn, squeezes enough to be a warning.]

Don't.

She isn't here to hurt you.

[Marsh has no authority to say this. Iris could puppet him on a whim. But she doesn't, and the light reassuring mist of her mental touch against his torn unhealing places is perhaps a different kind of authority. There is no doubt in him.]

[They haven't tangled physically before. Riddick is strong; but Iris is also a good deal stronger and tougher than a human equivalent.

More importantly, Iris doesn't give a stuff if he breaks her wrist as long as she can get her work done, and she can do it through any skin contact. So she doesn't resist; she just goes pliant in his grasp and lunges her mind along the electrical surge of hers and Riddick's nerve-endings, snaking up into his mind as irresistibly as the rising tide.

She leaves her body standing; Marsh can look after it or let it break. It really doesn't matter.

She'd been aware he wasn't quite human; she finds, now, that his mind is constructed more like her own than an unaugmented human's. This both elates and concerns her; she edges further in, her hindbrain sniffing the air. She's not, yet, trying to change anything; only to get the feel of it, to be absolutely certain what's Riddick and what's been superimposed.]

[What is Riddick is tied deeply to the primitive parts of the brain-- consciousness rubbing elbows with instinct and reflex, shaped by breeding and generations-past engineering to combine the sleek mind of a predator with the thinking mind of a human-- mingled into a cohesive whole. There are the very rudiments of latent psychic ability, irritated and chafed by the barge's floods and breaches, and before that the brush of another psychic, who left an explosive pool of rage like an IED from his brain, the defiant scream of a brutal warrior race that was destroyed and scattered.

This is the brain of a pack-hunting animal who was orphaned, who has no pack and is deliberately wired to regard anyone not of his people with sociopathic indifference, but the pack instinct is too strong. He's made strange connections, formed an unnatural family unit of people who have become real to him. He is territorial; he is maternal; he is strong and canny.

Then there's the other thing, the other personality-- which is Riddick, with the best of him filtered out, the worst of him made huge. A hunted animal that has to hide or kill, that doesn't trust even the people the real one loves. There are the shreds of something like loyalty that made this personality attack Zane, dimly remembering that Ned is Family and entirely without a concept of proportional response. He is strong, he is too frightened and paranoid to be canny. The connections of this thing to the base instinct are flawed and misfired, and the real thing is sluggishly trying to reject this overlay like a mismatched organ.]

[He's strong; stronger than human-norm, more resistant, and besides, Iris doesn't dare to risk trying to subjugate him. There are reasons she'll only ever try that as a last ditch, and one is that it can cause lasting damage. She's not completely confident Alpha hasn't done that already; using force on top of force risks entangling the two identities more deeply as they unite instinctively against her.

So she steps carefully. She doesn't look at the construct-identity, turns her face away. The real Riddick is familiar in the way her own ancestral hindbrain is, and Iris flattens herself into him.

(head lowered, tail sweeping, playbowing, golden fur and long limbs; a lazy warm tongue licking your face)

She doesn't call out to him in words. She simply insinuates herself lightly into his awareness, every strand of her flagging the same intent: den, home, drive off intruder. us.

(we be of one blood, ye and I)

She can see the places where the construct anchors itself to the reality; as clumsily obvious, from this perspective, as a plastic daffodil nailed to a rosebush. It smells wrong.

(This is where to bite.)

Here, Iris manifests as her golden-maned Hound self; her jaws can crack bones, and she knows exactly where to aim.]

[The animal woven into Riddick's DNA all those generations ago wasn't canine or feline, though superficially like both. It is a bone-eater too, spotted, black-pawed, aggressive. It's uncertain about the intruder, suspicious of the promise of kinship even as the right neurons fire

Wary-- part of his brain is still pushing at hers, rejecting her as just another splinter--he starts to work with her, to erode the connections. They're deep, for all their imperfection. Alpha's machine wasn't poorly made, and especially at the centers of memory and muscle memory this other-self is layered very, very close. There's damage one way or another. Memories that will be gone until the barge scrambles him and puts him back together. Overwritten places. It's slow work.]

[It's like picking shreds of meat and sinew off bones; not, admittedly, a thing Iris has ever done in her own body, but the racial memory of her ancestors remembers when it was built to do just that. That, or freeing a comrade from a trap.

She's careful, infinitely painstaking, keeping her presence light and narrow. Every brush of her consciousness against Riddick's carries the head-lowered acknowledgement: his space, not hers, and she's not here to take or harm it. Her own aggression is every bit as real, but banked; reserved to be turned against the construct, if it turns on her.]

[There's a tipping point when the construct is too shredded to sustain itself, no large pockets left of it big enough to change him, and any more repair will start into real damage.

The message comes through, not in words, though if it were in words it would only be STOP and OUT. Mostly it's a shove.]

[And she does; it's strange, momentarily, to find herself once again upright on two feet when her mind's still standing foursquare, tail up and tongue lolling in a grin of triumph.]

...You can let me wrist go any time now, lovey.

[Riddick takes a few seconds to establish his surroundings, to figure out where he is and whose wrist he's holding before he actually lets go. He untwines his fingers carefully, almost delicately.

His brain feels scrambled, his memories feel disjointed and disconnected and wrong, like they don't fit in, and he's in some pain here actually.]

...did I miss a flood announcement.

[He didn't break it, but Iris can feel the ligaments and tendons protesting as he releases her wrist. She rubs it absently with the fingers of the other hand while she finds an elastic bandage and another icepack.]

Bloody Alpha got at you. I've got a banging 'eadache now and all. It's still a bit of a mess in there, but you'll recover.

[Anger clouds her face briefly, then it's eclipsed by a swift grin of satisfaction.]

That's a lovely brain you've got there, sweetheart.

...Thank you. I think.

...Ned's inmate. Is Ned all right. The kid with the coins, Zane, he was bleeding, is he-?

Ned's ...no one's attacked 'im.

[All right isn't what she'd call it.]

Zane got 'urt but 'e's fine now. I noticed you were a bit grumpy. At the party and stuff. I just never thought nothing of it; like I told Ned, this is the barge, we all act unusual on a regular basis.

I'm rambling so I don't go and rip Alpha's 'ead off and piss down the stump.

Listen, lady, if me and Rogue don't get to kill him, nobody gets to kill him.

[She grins, because she knows that they're both absolutely sincere. And that neither of them will.

And then she dips and, unless he cues her plainly not to, drops a gentle kiss on his forehead]

That's my Riddick. Welcome 'ome.

Your Riddick, huh. [He's amused, a little wary but not aggressively so, and tips his head to offer it up for her kiss.]

What did you ... do in there? Something's different.

I'd've 'ad to 'old off Fake You and Real You both if I'd just charged in. I 'ad to come at it sideways. Got under 'is guard being part of you.

[There's an echo of it in the brief contact, too; not from inside this time, but Iris-normal contact, brushed affectionately against the bounds of his private self.]

I couldn't've pulled that off with a baseline human. Your brain's a lot like mine, you know. It's nice.

Can't say anyone's ever flipped that switch deliberately before. Including me.

[The brief tactility, mental and physical, is welcomed. It's not too much of an invasion at that surface level.]

...I got that sense with Narvin, too, when he was on board. Just... familiarity.

...I couldn't 'ave made that work if I 'adn't meant it, Riddick. Calculated, aye. That's sort of 'ow we work. But that deep? I couldn't bring along owt that weren't true.

I miss Narvin a lot.

[Those two statements are not unrelated.]

It was real comfortable when he was around. But I'm glad he's out. This ain't a place to stay longer than you have to.

I love it 'ere. But everyone knows I'm bonkers.

[There's nothing defensive in her tone, only Iris' perennially amused pleasure in the wide spectrum of sentience.]

...Aye, Narvin didn't want to stay any longer. And I'm not short on family, not really; but 'e left a big hole all the same.

You are a little insane. [Friendly confirmation.]

They always do when they go, people you care about. It ain't an environment I can live in forever. I just have to make sure I'm not leaving anyone who can't make it out.

You're a settler, same like Narvin. I've never been owt but a traveller, me. There's nothing settled about this boat. If I could just get Panda to join up, I could stay forever; easy as anything.

Brighteyes McStabbass, Party of Two

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