myironeyes | (no subject)

[Public Video]

The kitchen is, as usual, understaffed. We were understaffed before this latest shake-up and now we are more understaffed. We require at least one temporary warden supervisor for the lunch shift and four or five new inmates.

Those interested should speak to Riddick or myself.

[Open spam, backdated throughout the last few days]

[Marsh can be found in odd times at odd places - late and night on the deck or early morning in the greenhouse, hunched over, making soft, choking noises, his little cockatiel crooning worriedly and attempting to preen his short hair. Folded in a corner of the ice-damaged stairwell, a hand splayed over his spikes, breathing hitched, shoulders shaking, looking like nothing so much as a man desperately trying to sob and unable to manage it.

The crying from Iris's room - it's psychic, he doesn't just hear it. It gets in when he is too tired to fend it off from ripped-open places, and then it becomes him, the loneliness and fear and grief, the confusion of the very young. He remembers himself - it is not overwhelming, not like Ruin at its worst, nothing like that - but he cannot stop feeling it. And the feeling is not entirely unfamiliar.]

[Private spam for Bianca]

[He decides, eventually, that it cannot be a trick, that something is real, must be suffering. Or perhaps he doesn't care anymore, as long as it stops. He arrives at her door with his jaw clenched from the effort of holding the lost, abandoned feeling back, and it still drips through his cracks, stings like salt in his punctures. He knocks.]

[Private spam for ~~C'Rizz~~ the Dalek Emperor, backdated to shortly after the arena]

[It's not a pleasant return, but he falls to the necessary housekeeping with a grim sort of gratitude. He asks the admiral for a resurrection, then swallows a truly foul amount of powdered pewter and a small sliver of feruchemy-laced gold. Then cooks until he stops seeing Iris on every blank nonmetallic surface, and brings the egg soup to C'Rizz's room. He knocks, then lets himself in.]

It's me.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[He could break her in half; could tear her limb from limb with relatively little effort. Bianca knows this, and she hits the non-existent wall that should only be a perception filter hard.

He's bruised her; but he's also given her back her self-possession, and she's smiling again when she looks up at him from the floor.

The dogs shift uneasily and whine, but make no move to interfere; she makes a vague hand gesture and they come to her sides, press against her.]

You only had to ask, Marsh dear.

Edited 2014-10-06 23:54 (UTC)

[He is not composed; he manages to get his harsh breaths under control after a lull in which he considers shutting the door and then - doesn't. His shoulders hunch, everything about him drawing back in, a ruffled owl, a cat with its ears pressed flat.]

I hear it. I feel it, like it's me.

Can you just - show me where you think it's coming from.

[She is not composed either; she glares back like a coiled serpent surprised on the bathroom tiles.]

So do I, Marsh, and I don't choose to discuss it in the hearing of this entire barge.

I don't think. I know exactly what and where it is. Shut the door.

[It's different, when it's her call. It still makes something old and irrational prickle with unease, the woman shut in with an Inquisitor, but he does as she says, without a word or change of expression. When the latch - or whatever technical equivalent Iris has - clicks, he turns back to her.]

Go on.

[She draws up her knees, wraps her arms around them and eyes Marsh over the top of them, unsmiling.]

It's a timeship. It's inside my - her bus. She and her human lover have spawned a new one, with no care for the potential consequences.

Now they aren't here, and it doesn't understand. It reaches out and finds a man with the same shape and a different substance, and it's not going to stop howling for him till he returns.

If they ever return, of course.

[He doesn't have any doubt that Iris will overcome - whatever is causing this. But there's a pang all the same, because sometimes parents don't come back. Sometimes they don't.

He puts a hand on the side of the bus. It's hard for him to really pinpoint the source, this close, because it feels like the crying is echoing all around him as well as through him, but he supposes it doesn't matter. He burns brass, low at first and then stronger, wanting to soothe that terrible familiar ache away. He thinks of Kelsier, hands still tiny bit chubby, the devastation still fresh, balanced on Marsh's knees and curled resentfully against his chest. He'd been angrier than this child - ship or not, it's a child to him - but underneath it was the same.]

Shhh. Shhh.

[He doesn't really realize he's saying it out loud, lost in the muddle of memory and compassion, wanting to comfort what he knows so well can never really be comforted. But it can be bourne, can be made bearable. Shhh, we're still not alone.]

[It is only a child, but it's vast. It hears Marsh - Iris' bus, at least, recognises him, remembers that Iris loves him, and does her best to modulate the other ship's shrill desolation.

Marsh is not its person, and at first it feels as though he might only be about to make it worse: there's a rise in pitch, a sort of escalation of the tantrum now it can recognise that someone hears it, is reaching.

And then it quiets: not completely, the jagged absence of the person its life entwines with is too big and terrible, but it holds onto Marsh, breathing in his brass, and the volume and sharpness of its grief seem to decrease.

Bianca is still on the floor, still clutching tightly to Iris' dogs, and when she raises her eyes to him again there are tears running down her cheeks.]

I need a drink.

Edited 2014-10-07 19:24 (UTC)

[Marsh knows all about ripped edges and empty places. His and the ship's don't align, precisely, but there is an ease of sympathy, a cool stinging mutuality of pain, cleansing, like alcohol on a wound.]

Shhh, I know. We'll set it to rights. Shhh, there there.

[He loves the little incomprehensible thing already; he loves easily, and it is a child in pain. He is not enough, he is not who it wants, but he's used to that, too, and nothing in him resents it, not like this. He sends is all care and reassurance and ragged aching affection, leaning against the invisible wall as he soothes and soothes.]

I don't want to leave it.

[Without even meaning to, he makes it sound curt, logistical, as though it's about having finally gotten the thing quiet, nothing like the formless and sincere sentimentality of his bleeding mind, stubborn without plan or recourse. He will have to, eventually, of course. He has dinner shift and C'Rizz to look after and more brass to acquire, eventually. But he doesn't want to. He is, perhaps, obliquely, asking for help, hoping she knows better than he does whether it will understand a promise to return.]

Edited 2014-10-12 18:18 (UTC)

Marsh, it's a timeship, not a puppy. Physical distance means nearly nothing to it - it'll be with you anywhere on the Barge. The same as it is with its own pilot.

[Iris would have been hugging him, offering backup, and Bianca knows it, can recall clearly the self whose first impulse that would have been.

She rises shakily to her feet, wipes her eyes impatiently and starts to pace the room, arms folded around herself as though she were only physically cold.]

My bus will help it keep the contact, if need be.

Well.

Maybe it means something to me.

[This is true, but also not at all what he was considering when he first raised the objection.]

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