IC contact for lastvoyages

[cactusy]

[If I don't have an active post up, feel free to use this post to have your character call, videochat, text, or knock on Shaw's door.]

Comments

[cactusy]

Fine.

[She starts to lift her hand to touch it, then forces herself not to, balling her hand into a loose fist instead.]

I should change the bandages today; you wanna help with that?

[themostfun]

[ All Root wants to do is hold that fist in both her hands. It's almost enough to tear through the exhaustion of being imprisoned after all that chaos. ]

Absolutely. I'll be your personal nurse. Then after, we can have some soup and relax on the couch for a while.

[cactusy]

[Shaw's instincts tell her that she should get her bandages changed, and then get back to work immediately. She's spent the past six days being useless, three of them during an active crisis; how can she just rest when there's so much to do?

But then, there really isn't anything to do right now, is there? That's the paradox of the Barge, at least to her mind. She's always on duty, never between jobs, doesn't really have any downtime. But the number of active tasks and concrete things to accomplish? Criminally low.

But Root's here, and she looks exhausted. She probably needs to relax on the couch. And that's a concrete task, too.]

Take a nap with you?

I'd really like that.

[littletonoidea]

You know, one of those dinky grabby claw arms you use to reach things that fall in awkward places.

[cactusy]

Do you have one of those?

[themostfun]

[ Now her smile is more relaxed. It's like Shaw said the magic words to let relief start to creep through Root's veins. ]

We deserve it, after the week we've had. I'm sure Bear and Jet miss us.

[cactusy]

Who took care of them?

[littletonoidea]

I can make one!

[cactusy]

Dumbass.

[It's said very tiredly, but very fondly.]

You can stick it through the bars as long as you back up right away after.

[littletonoidea]

Bet I made you smile, though. Be there in two ticks.

[It takes a few minutes to make some coffees to bring down for the pair of them, but soon enough he's in Zero after a passing chat with Yunlan, and he knocks on the bars of Shaw's cell with his knuckles.]

Delivery for Shawp Shooter?

[cactusy]

[To get to her, he'll have to pass Root's cell too, all the way at the other end of the hall. The murder wives are both in time out right now.

And Shaw, it turns out, is in even more than that. She has a pair of fancy padded restraints cuffed around her wrists, which are in turn securely fastened to the bed frame, offering her limited freedom of movement even within the cell.]

Hey.

[She says, tensing just a little when he approaches the bars.]

Can you, uh, slide it?

[cactusy]

"Probably best if we don't get into it, yeah?" she asks, her brow crinkling a little. She's fine with having topics that they just don't touch on, if that's what's most expedient and least trying for everyone involved.

[deuceoftears]

[Jedao lets himself in quietly. He looks harried and tired, but in roughly one piece.]

[cactusy]

[Shaw also does not look like she'd taken his suggestion that she rest to heart, but whatever Root's response to her question is, she'll give Jedao a quick nod during it.]

[littletonoidea]

The fact she's handcuffed immediately makes Eiffel look uncomfortable - not for the reasons she thinks, though. He's just vaguely distressed about seeing her all tied up.

"Uh- yeah, sure." He bends down to put the coffee on the floor, trying not to get closer to the cell - and then sits down with it, and uses his sneakered foot to very carefully eke Shaw's coffee closer to the cell, within her reach. Admittedly he's more focused on making sure the coffee doesn't fall over than he is worrying about whether or not Shaw can grab his foot, but the coffee's more important.

[cactusy]

She tenses further as his leg extends out towards her, unwillingly but automatically running through a mental list of all the things she could do to harm him if he came within reach. She thinks of fighting against Lestat's directive to kill him, knowing all the while that she wasn't strong enough to keep it up forever. She thinks of holding her gun to Reese's back, feeling the world glitch as Samaritan's chip spasmed inside her head, and then coming to to find she'd already pulled the trigger. She thinks of leveling her gun at Root's head, thinks of I killed them, and now, I'm going to kill you, and can the fact that she hadn't actually done it really completely make up for the fact that she'd threatened to? Nothing else is real inside the simulations, but she is. She always is. And if she could do it then, she could do it here.

"Eiffel."

The note of distress in her voice is subtle, but it's there.

[littletonoidea]

Eiffel actually yips with the sudden bolt of alarm that sends through him, and he yanks his foot back - it rocks the coffee dangerously, but it settles safely, and even just inside the edge of Shaw's reach.

"I'm okay you didn't do it--" Even if there's now a wet patch on his own sleeve from where his jerking motion spilled his own coffee, but he's not hurt.

[cactusy]

He's scared of her, is how she immediately interprets that. That's a good thing. He should be, even if it feels like crap.

"I'm sorry," she says, pulling in the coffee and settling it in her hands.

[littletonoidea]

His heart settles a little as she takes her coffee, but the mechanical response makes it ache instead.

"Shaw." He scoots closer, still out of arms reach, and nurses his coffee in both hands. "You didn't do anything. You know that, right? You didn't kill anyone."

[cactusy]

"You're wrong," she says quietly; evenly. "I've killed the people I care about thousands of times. There's no reason they'd do things any differently here."

[littletonoidea]

"Okay, but did you kill your people, or did you kill the super creepy T1000s of them that were being used to torture you? There's a difference, right?"

[cactusy]

She's quiet for a moment. Still.

"Not if I didn't know that's what they were," she says - and even though her voice only shakes a little, only does a tiny crack at the very end, it's still the most blatantly vulnerable he'll ever have heard her sound.

[littletonoidea]

"You know you're not making it easier to stop myself from coming over and hugging you," he points out, but the dry comment is a little bit thick in his throat.

But he looks down at his coffee, and he's... quiet for a minute. In a way Eiffel rarely is, except when something is weighing on him.

"..I had to make that call once, you know," he comments quietly. "It's not quite the same, sure, but... yeah. The good old Two Guards puzzle, except both of them were telling the truth."

[cactusy]

Luckily, he can't, so she just delivers him a flat look. It fades to something more contemplative when he says the second bit, though.

"What happened?"

Spoilers for ep 42 heyoooo

[littletonoidea]

He doesn't lift his gaze, instead just rolling the coffee cup between his hands.

"We were two weeks out before the contact event," he starts. "So there's four of us in our home-grown Mystery Shuttle launched around the opposite side of the Wolf to check the weather before we don't get another chance. Me, captain Lovelace, Maxwell and Jacobi. And within like an hour of losing contact with Hephaestus actual - which was expected, we knew the solar flares were gonna screw that up for us - we get a situation."

He doesn't want to take a drink now, but his throat feels suddenly dry.

"We got Jacobi back inside the rowboat right before the first wave of solar flares start hitting us, before it gets real choppy, but after we locked the doors and got ready to settle down, well." He frees a hand from his coffee and knocks on the floor, three deliberate raps of his knuckles.