come on and rise above it

[wille]

CHARACTERS: Misato + Sam, Damon and you!
WHEN: DAY 012
WHERE: Training area
SUMMARY: Work, work, work, work, working on my shhhh
WARNINGS: None really!

FOR SAM: When you're born in the dirt the only way to grow is up.

[ Misato has her forehead against the floor, her arms forming guards on either sides of her head as she kneels there gasping for sweet, sweet oxygen. The thought that runs through her mind is becoming more familiar, punitive, blaming herself for having spent so many endless nights and days poring over battle reports, test results, requests to different arms of the UN, superfluous apologies for collateral damage, rather than keeping up her physique. There was never enough time for exercise, not enough time for proper meals let alone to think about them, not enough time to prepare or to live life as it should be lived.

She silences it all with a decisive statement: It was necessary. To survive.

She turns her head at the same time as she allows herself to fall to her side in a loose fetal position, letting out a pained groan as she does. ]

Damn it.

[ She never makes any concessions for herself. That feels too much like cheating. It doesn't matter that Sam can probably bench press her with one hand or that he's a veteran of real wars, unlike her pseudo ones fought against amateurs, or that he has had more time to train. She measures herself against him and falls far short, and uses that as reason to drive her further onward.

She may seem defeated, lying there on the floor, but her mind resonates only with resolve, unyielding, ironsteel. She needs to get better, and soon, now, regardless that her body is crying out for merciful release. ]

Another round. I need all the training I can get.

FOR DAMON: Gotta know where to go where angels fear to tread.

[ There's no such thing as overpreparation or too much training when the days leading up to the mission stretch on, turning her anxious with anticipation. She needs to be as strong as possible in all the ways she knows, only then will she feel ready-- no, that too is a lie. She will never feel ready, forever standing on the balls of her feet, prepared for the worst.

Only this time that extends to her broodmates, those extensions of herself, knowing that she needs to ensure they are just as strong. Shepard can fend for herself, Beth is proving hardier than she seems and Kavinsky has powers that renders him godlike. That leaves Damon. Being undead doesn't necessarily make him invulnerable. He could still fall to the same strange sleep as Sirius, he could be incapacitated, he could turn mercurial and useless to her, there are no guarantees, but that has never stopped her from trying to make her own hedges. Misato raises the stakes when presented with unknown, impossible stakes. It's the only way she knows.

So here they are. Her with her arms wrapped in the hems she cut off of her white slacks to turn them into shorts, all the better for mobility, standing with legs apart and ready for a fight. ]

If you can knock me down, I'll let you take a bite.

[ Why does that even sound sexual. Vampires, why. ]

FOR STEVE: Better make the shot go straight just like an arrow.

[ Misato lives a binary life. All or nothing.

When she's awake, she's awake, filling every moment with an unending list of pending tasks. Going, going, going. When she sleeps, rare as that may be, she's sleeping, dead to the world, commonly helped by alcohol when sheer exhaustion fails to do its work. It's probably fortunate (for her, unfortunate for others) that most people who snore hardly get the luxury of hearing their own horrifying sounds and as such she has little point of reference for the cacophony that makes its way through the walls of her room. Persistent, rising in volume every time she nearly drifts off to sleep, like a kind of auditory water torture.

Eyes still half open, she casts aside her blanket and stomps her way toward the sound, never allowing herself even a moment to rethink this. The knock on his door is unabashedly angry, with the might and force of a raging bull. ]

Are you strangling a lawnmower in there or what?

WILDCARD!

[ Throw me anything for last-chance station shenanigans! You can check out Misato's offscreen activities and bad habits right here. You're also most welcome to PM me or hit me up at unhedged to plot something out. ]

Comments

[wille]

[ Misato is an open book for any who would listen and take the time to read. It's a long story. But she's not prone to hiding her expressions, heck she's near incapable of it, her feelings bared for the world to see, face shifting from mild curiosity when he begins to talk to all-out irritation when he says It's not enough to just keep pushing yourself, before settling on grudging acceptance by the time he's done. She's thinking of walls and defenses and the near-crippling headache she earned from the latest mental exercise she took upon herself, but then, she does need help patching them up. Or trying something new.

She scoots closer, knowing not to touch him, this time wearing an expression of restrained enthusiasm. ]

I wanna show you something I learned it while practicing with Ilde, but you have to try to come in. It's invisible otherwise.

[ The force that holds each living thing apart from the other is unseen, what the eyes grasp is only the form of the thing, held in shape and in place. It's true of human hearts too. Individuals are formed by the shields they put up, erected at the moment of birth, mother is the first other, dissolved and made flimsy in the act of falling in love and built upon the wreckage of itself at the moment of betrayal. It's this barrier she uses, clear like a film and not quite substantial but undeniably present and forceful, the cracks there but invisible. ]

Come on. I won't bite.

[sizeofyourbaggage]

[ It's something that Sam really likes about her, actually. Sam himself is a pretty expressive guy, whether he's content or pissed or amused, and it... makes him feel more comfortable with her, knowing that she's the same. Misato is complicated as hell, but at least he doesn't usually even need a mental connection to get an idea of what she might be feeling.

His eyebrows raise a little when he hears that she's been practicing mental training with Ilde as well as physical, but her enthusiasm is catching. Hell, all right, he can go with it. ]

You sure about that?

[ But he's teasing, and he focuses on their connection. He's not sure if she's inviting him in or inviting him to try to get past her defenses, so at first he just brushes gently against her mind, just the smallest hint of pressure to see how much give her barrier has. ]

[wille]

[ It's unfair, really, how much worth others place on her emotions because she's unashamed of expressing them, when others with deeper, hidden feelings go unnoticed. Much of it, still, is for show. ]

Don't ask me that.

[ Her tone is clipped, dismissive, easily construed as rude. She doesn't need any more reminders of how alike Sam is to a certain watermelon farmer-slash-couch philosopher and the way the latter used to ask Katsuragi, what do you want? Is this what you want? Is this what you really want? At least-- at least Sam doesn't wait for her to answer, the question being nothing but courtesy, and therein lies the difference.

Her barrier is deceivingly flimsy to the touch, transparent, like the surface of an air bubble. But it's flexible, bending against his touch without letting him in. She quirks a smile, challenged. ]

I'm going to try to come in.

[ It's a warning, not a request for consent. She hasn't tried this before, having only recently discovered that the world of the mind isn't limited by the laws of physics, with her imagination being the literal limit. There's no hesitation, even if her moves are clumsy and unpracticed: attempting to push back against the surface of his mind with her own, wall against wall, while mulling over the idea of dissolving both to form a pathway. Like bubbles merging together. The barrier between the souls can only be eroded by another soul. The AT Field's nemesis is another AT Field. ]

[sizeofyourbaggage]

[ Don't ask me that, she bites out, and he wants to ask why, wants to know what nerve he touched so he'll know to approach it more carefully the next time, but he doesn't. She'd explain it if she wanted him to know.

They're supposed to be working, anyway, and there's a flicker of delight when he feels it bend under the press of his mind. His shields are similar, both layers of them - flexible and durable, meant to bend without breaking, instead of focusing on solid strength.

He hums an acknowledgment of the warning, ready for her - they're training, after all, as far as he's concerned he's already given his consent. He wouldn't ask for it before every punch he threw, after all.

His own mental wall is a rolling blanket of clouds. They shift as she pushes against them, fluffy white to pale grey to dark purple, heavy with rain, but it's like pushing through fog that won't clear. ]

[wille]

[ How like him, to have clouds as his defense, deceivingly soft to the touch but mighty in its own way. She has never mistaken him for weak, well, maybe that comes with the package.

The risk in using a mind to invade another's mind (as is true if one were to invade a heart with a heart, as is true if one were to bridge, breach the barrier surrounding another person to establish connection), is that she has to allow him in as she steps inside too. There is no attack that doesn't leave one vulnerable too. But Misato is nothing but persistent, and if it takes going through miles of clouds to get through to him then reach through she will, a hand grasping through the fog to reach anything solid. It's hard for her to tell whether she'll just find herself reaching for air no matter how far she tries to extend herself. ]

Are you gonna let me down easy?

[ She thinks that if she were to plunge through these clouds, he'd just find a way to break her fall. ]

[sizeofyourbaggage]

[ Honestly, it's something that he really appreciates Misato for. There's many things they don't know about each other, many ways they may disagree - but there's so many more things they see about each other. There are a more than a few people in the Nest that write him off as soft or weak on first glance, but she's never been one of them.

He's not as good at entering other people's minds as he is about keeping other people out of his - mostly because he never has, not unless he was invited. At most, he's tested other people's shields for weak spots to draw their attention to, for them to build up. That's the strategy he takes now instead of trying to push, breezing invisibly around her mind like wind wrapping around a house searching for any crack to whistle through.

It's easier to keep up his cloud layer, as long as she's going slow and steady. He's built his mind up with more than one defense, to switch between them as needed, but it's only ever been tested with a sharp and sudden attack. It's good to strain his mind a little like this, to practice keeping it up. ]

I'd never let you fall.