cactusy | IC contact for lastvoyages

Okay, but have you ever met someone who can successfully imitate me? Aliens have tried and failed, like hell the government can do it.

Not the government.

[But she gets what he's saying.]

Root's the same way. You annoying assholes with crazy personalities.

I'm, uh. I'm still kinda out of sorts. I'm keeping myself in Zero for a bit until I can be more sure I'm not going to go nuts on anybody.

Does that mean I get visitation if I stay on the right side of the bars?

... Okay. But no funny business; staying on the right side of the bars is a hard requirement.

Is coffee funny business? I can pass it to you in a picker-upper if the problem is proximity.

In a what?

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

Do you have one of those?

I can make one!

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.

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?

[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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

"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."

"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?"

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.

"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."

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?"

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.

Shaw pauses, mulling this over.

"... One of the others got stuck outside while you were dealing with Jacobi?"

Sorry, Eiffel; her fluency in sci-fi tropes is very low.

He lifts his head to give her a good-natured flat look.

"God, I need to get more sci-fi in you," he comments dryly, but hey - it does get his mood to lighten a little. "But... not quite. There were four of us on the boarding list, and four of us inside the boat - and someone freaking knocking on the door, of the shuttle. In space. Orbiting a star. On the other side of the freaking galaxy from any other human life."

IC contact for lastvoyages

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Spoilers for ep 42 heyoooo

no subject

no subject