station72 | at the end of the war what's mine is yours (closed)

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at the end of the war what's mine is yours (closed)

CHARACTERS: Elliot & Darlene
WHERE: The Red Coast.
WHEN: DAY:027
SUMMARY: Reunion sponsored by Folgers: the best part of waking up.
WARNINGS: Mr Robot spoilers. Will edit if anything serious comes up.

Elliot's a fuckdamned mess right now, losing time again, homesick, not sure what he wants from the symbiote or the Nest anymore, roused from sleep and dragged up a hill with three brand new minds suddenly bargjng in on the delicate, private cocoon he and Peter had spent the last week weaving together. So he doesn't actually realize at first. Not when she wakes up, not when she steps off the ship and onto the same planet as him, and not when they all head back down to the coastal town together.

Maybe it's because of the brood thing — how can anyone possibly be closer to him than Darlene, right? So if she turned up, of course she would fill that tooth-gap space in his mind that he tries not to brush up against, the emptiness of incompletion that his new broodmate assuage. They're saplings from the same branch of the same fucked up tree, so of course their symbiotes will be the same.

So his first words to her in space are:

( What the fuck. )

Via the telepathy link. Because they're in public. Because they just passed each other, both in those head to toe robe disguises, and new arrivals aren't great at shielding and neither is Elliot and he likes kind of picking shit up from people as he goes around. A radio being tuned, but all the stations are other people's secrets. Their inner lives.

Only this mind was Darlene, even if her thought voice sounds slightly different from her real world voice. He'd know her anywhere.

He badly wants to grab her, but again: they're in public. If someone from one of the other delegates came along and they weren't all fully robed and mysterious... well, he hasn't had to use the little memory eraser yet but he'd kind of like to keep it as an in case of emergencies thing. Which this is not. Not to anyone else.

( Is it you? I can't believe it's you. Holy shit Darlene, I can't believe you're okay. Are you okay? Fuck. )

Chattier than Elliot usually is with his mouth words, and with a bonus avelanche of miscellaneous useless other bullshit, like opening a kitchen cupboard and having the entire contents fall out on you.

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( What the fuck. )

The sentiment reflects off of Darlene and feeds right back to Elliot: ( What the fuck. )

It's Elliot. It's Elliot, and Darlene stops in the street and looks back at the guy in robes who just passed her, at Elliot, and her eyes are wide under all those veils and layers and robes and vests and shit that's swathed her off from the world. Doesn't matter: there is nothing clogging up the conduit between them, which is bleeding this blitz of information that is so much it is nauseating. Elliot, volume turned up, is like meatspace Elliot on speed, unfiltered. Darlene is usually the one filling the silence. In the fritz of this connection, it's the opposite.

Holy shit, Darlene thinks, which also comes through the feed between them, fizzling with fear and relief and nerves, all raw ends. ( Holy shit. )

She wants to grab him, a firm enough desire that doubles down on the impulse that they're sharing. Not good at denying herself, so maybe it's Elliot that stops her. Mentally. Something. The feeling of having her lines blurring into his is not one Darlene knows what to do with; the feeling of thinking at each other is so fucked, that Darlene thinks, only, ( Elliot, ) and it's all raw and needy, and then, tighter, ( Alley. )

No arguing. There's one a few steps ahead. Darlene pushes through the other people on the street to get to it, more brusque than her disguise would suggest. Only three steps in before she's turned around expectantly, looking for him to follow. He will follow.

It takes a moment for his limbs to work right, but then he crosses to they alley with her. She can probably imagine what he looks like under all that dark brown fabric, wide-eyed, a little distressed even though this is a good thing, should be a good thing.

( Darlene, ) he says again, not particularly to her, and then aloud in a soft, smoke roughened voice, "Darlene."

She still mightn't grab him: there's a background hum of don't touch me don't touch me that crackles with the static of anxiety, running constantly like an electricity buzz beneath his thoughts. Above that, the primal ooze of emotions, relief-horror-affection-disbelief-loneliness-adoration-shame-fear-love, none of it unknottable into the individual strands. Above that, his internal monologue and living memory, something he's tried to teach himself to encrypt, to keep from the data packets of communication, but sometimes it leaks through anyway — Darlene certainly just got plenty. And above that—

( Did you come last night? Shit. I can't believe I didn't notice. )

Somewhere between self-recrimination and confusion that they aren't specially linked in the way he always thought they'd be.

Instead of grabbing hold of Elliot, Darlene grabs hold of herself, folds her arms tight across her chest. The don't-touch-me vibe is hard to ignore when it's being passed across brainwaves, crawling its way under her skin. It hurts a little that he's beaming it at her, but it's stupid to be hurt. That's Elliot.

And if Elliot's thoughts are a buzz and an ooze and a complex knot, then Darlene's are like those pieces of paper they give out in elementary school: all black, impenetrable on the face, but apply a paperclip to the surface and it scratches off easy, reveals big swathes of orange and yellow, fear and anger, tender below the surface. Freaked out, and mad that she's freaked out.

Last night is answered in this a tangled mastercut of all the shit that she's seen: bodies on the ship and pods and a tube in the back of her head, masks, Dark Army, Cisco, her hands not shaking but tight on a bat. All of it exposed raw, data to be mined before Darlene remembers, quickly, to encrypt, shut that door off from being owned. But it is weird, right? That he didn't notice, and she didn't notice. Now that she has Elliot on her radar, it's like how did she ever overlook him? He is a familiar mess. She hates looking under the surface. The Aldersons are fucked up. How fucked is Elliot? Very. Darlene loves and hates that. She is looking at it anyways, seeping in.

"Talk." She reaches to claw away the layers impeding her, uncovering even as she's locking away all her mental shit. "Don't do the Witch Mountain psychic thing at me, okay, it's a little much. What the fuck, Elliot."

What the fuck means a lot here, disbelief and confusion and a soapbox he can stand on to explain to her. He has been here longer. She can tell, somehow. How much longer? How is this happening? Anxiety like a buzzsaw surgery, cutting through before a clumsy stitch job hitches each unanswerable question to the next. And above even that: ( Elliot. ) His name, echoing back after she's said it aloud. Tinted with a lot more complexity in her head. Relief, fear for, fear of, affection, rotting history, admiration, adoration, anger for, anger at, anger around. Harder to block that one out. Darlene puts her arms back around herself.

For his part, Elliot likes the mental link. It feels like he's been given a way to communicate — really communicate with people, the way words just couldn't encompass. But he also understands the need for separation, especially from him. They already knew each other too well: this new insight is too much.

"Chill," he says, as though he has a leg to stand on there. But he does feel a little more calm and controlled in contrast to Darlene's freak-out. "Don't let this shit DDOS you. They've put something in your head, and sure it's alive, but it's mostly just a networked connection."

Because of course he thinks of the whole thing in digital. Still, Darlene knows how to protect her computer from a two-way connection, so she can figure out her headspace too, rightt?

"Thanks for the advice, dickhead," Darlene fires back. But for Darlene, that's a good sign. Only in the grip of deepest freak-outs is she unable to be snappish--and even then, sometimes. "You do realize how fucked you sound, right? Like I'm supposed to be soooo chill about someone putting their fingers in my freaking grey matter and giving it a good swirl."

Networked connection is something concrete, similar to the analogies that Darlene has been coming up with on her own. She takes a step back, trying to let the suggestion of chill take some effect. Bumps up against the wall of the building behind her and sags against it for a second, head tipped back. There's a sky up there. Buildings. Clouds. All the usual shit, if a little distorted and weird. And sure, the something in her head is alive. But at least Elliot is here.

After a second, Darlene exhales, then levels another look at Elliot. "Okay," she tells him. "Chilling. How long have you been here? The last I heard you were more than a little indisposed. Not that I am surprised that aliens do jailbreaks now."

How actually happy she is to see him is complicated by relief, and fear, then garbled and distorted by a lot of other shit. This is not the homecoming she would have thought. They're nowhere near New York, fsociety, subways, moonpies, skyscrapers, skeeball, burger joints, Dark Army, shitty dogs, ECorp: the works. More like their roles have been reversed, her on the inside, him on the out. Wouldn't it be nice if everything was just okay?

Wouldn't it?

But there's too much fucked up shit going on in the world, any world, for that. There's too much fucked up shit in their past, the baggage of it always weighing them down no matter how much fucking therapy or alcohol or medication they have.

"They're not really a someone," he murmurs. He kind of thinks of the Hive as bees, even if he saw the symbiote, in its sad tentacled state amidst the wreckage of Lavellan's brain. Bees, that live in all their heads and let them communicate. Bee-modems. He... doesn't share this analogy.

Anyway, Darlene has chilled out and there are clearly more important things on the table for discussion, such as: "They didn't have to jailbreak me."

( Or wait, shit. Is she right? Could you see that I was still in prison? Did I just imagine getting out? All that stuff with Wellick... was that in my head? )

Belatedly remembers that projecting out to his friend is now projecting out to anyone who wants to hear it and forces himself to shut up, but his jaw is still tense, his gaze jittery as he considers if this is yet another revelation of a break from reality.

Darlene holds off on the huge eyeroll she was going to give Elliot. In other circumstances, this would require a considerable effort. Not this time, because her sarcasm has been replaced by a flicker of concern. The specifics of the symbiote, the place to assign blame: all of it is so important to Darlene, but not more important than Elliot.

"Okay," she says, again, this time more slowly, "well, now is not the time to debate semantics or whatever, so why don't you just tell me what you mean. What happened, Elliot."

Or, else, show, if he can't or won't tell. It's an option that she considers with some reluctance, and only because she's caught the tail-end of his confusion. It's a weird realization of something Darlene has only ever picked up in the peripheral. She has only ever able to explain or predict or guess at the triggers that make Elliot look at her the way he is looking now, like there is something moving around inside of him, like he's sifting through his hard memory for some explanation or backup or resolution to the task that she has asked him. Now she feels the question, the uncertainty that sinks in deep like a slow bruise. Things forgotten, overwritten, deleted. A memory bank with burn scars. A chip sizzling in a microwave.

It's not in Darlene to let down walls or verbalize her intentions. Everyone is welcome to try to figure her out. Elliot knows her pretty freaking well, and anyways, they've got this network connection between them. He'll be able to tell that she's being as inviting as she can. What happened, plaintive. An invitation.

Elliot gives a raspy noise that isn't quite a laugh, some humorless expression of helplessness. His mind is still buzzing, though he doesn't slip up and project it again. He can sense that Darlene is both genuinely confused and genuinely concerned, but — where does he even begin?

"What happened? What happened." He shakes his head, reaches as though to run a hand through his hair but gets the cloth instead, fuck. "I got shot. I met Cathaway. Not — in that order. Everything was ... I mean, c'mon, you must have seen, right. The Enemy," and oh how he wishes she could see the way he rolls his eyes whenever he has to give it that sci-fi bullsht title. "I had a chance to help, I took it. But that was— after they got me out. The Dark Army. After we found out about Stage Two."

Shitty lame-o bullshit sci-fi title, and Darlene shares the sentiment, right down to the implied eyeroll. Can't quite repress her own, which, unveiled and unmasked, is really obvious. Yet she can't quite shake the feeling she had when she turned down the alley outside of Cisco's building and saw the mask floating halfway up the wall.

"Yeah," she says, tightly, "I saw."

And leave it to Elliot to get genuinely altruistic about it. She re-crosses her arms over her chest, shifts her stance.

"Jesus Christ, Elliot, what do you mean, you got shot. Who the hell shot you, and when was that?"

Elliot presses a hand almost absently to the place he remembers the bullet — though this isn't the first time he's wondered if it had just been a dream. If it wasn't for the neat hole in his shirt when he unplugged on the station...

"Tyrell Wellick," he says, though he blames Mr Robot if he's being totally honest. His raspy voice sounds a little dreamy as he imparts this information — Wellick is alive and Wellick is real. The shooting was incontrovertible proof. "He's still working with the Dark Army." Or did Darlene already know that? He's watching her closely, internally and externally trying to track any indication that she knew Wellick was alive.

Tyrell Wellick, bland smile, creeper eyes, a blank handsome face on the E Corp hydra. Darlene has seen the news. She knows a little. All the shit going down with E Corp, internal shakeups, APBs--it's only helped the chaos that fsociety is raining on their asses. And yeah: it is a little insulting to see Wellick touted as the face of fsociety, getting all that media credit for work that they are doing, work that he has seriously nothing to do with. If it keeps the FBI guessing, Darlene has reasoned, why the hell not. But still.

"Tyrell Wellick shot you." Flat, unimpressed. "You get out of prison, I somehow do not make it to pick you up, and wanted man Tyrell Wellick intercepts you and then shoots you, because the Dark Army told him to. And he's been some-- goddamn assassin this whole time?"

There's a swell of panic that she's trying to keep under wraps. The picture of her on Cisco's computer. Her Dark Army contact. A string of Chinese characters. And Elliot touches his hand to his stomach and Darlene doesn't remember the bullet with him or anything dramatic like that, but she knows it's true. She pushes her hair back from her face and grips it in place, right at the back of her skull.

You're sure it was Tyrell Wellick, she does not say, for real Tyrell Wellick, a start of thought that flickers but doesn't take. Flushes out, hopefully quick enough that Elliot won't notice it.

"Okay," she says. "It doesn't matter. Right? Because Tyrell Wellick, the Dark Army--all that shit--it isn't here."

And Elliot isn't shot. Important.

Edited (forgot words) 2018-01-11 21:30 (UTC)

That's not... that's not the correct timeline of events at all, and Elliot squints at her, confused disbelief. Is Darlene the one forgetting this time? Or is this something he made up? He doesn't know, and he doesn't know how to know without tangling this all up further, diving deeper, talking about the end of the world.

She's right. It doesn't matter.

"We're here now," he agrees. "The focus is the mission. Cathaway briefed you, right?"

And he's not Mr Robotting out but there's probably something familiar about the way he says that, the leadership charisma he used to exert when he lay down an fsociety plan.

"I got the jist."

Elliot she trusts way more than Cathaway, enough so that Darlene responds without thinking toward that note of command in his voice. The twinge of his confusion definitely comes across, not easy to ignore, but she cuts short her study of his face when he says that. Pushes her shoulders back, folds her arms a little tighter, more like she's bracing. Take a curtsy, sarcastic, as she led the way in to fsociety HQ like a million years ago. Everyone applauding Elliot, the grand architect of all their plans. Truthfully, Darlene would follow Elliot pretty much anywhere.

"You're into it. Saving the world. Saving a lot of worlds." Not a guess. Darlene knows her brother. "At the expense of being absorbed into a hive mind which I gotta say, is less cool."

Is it, though?

Elliot's been thinking about this. Individuality is important to him, normally, but enough erosion of self and it wouldn't be anymore. And wouldn't it be nice to just relax into being one of many for goddamn once? He's never had that, never managed to even fake normalcy successfully for any length of time. Maybe it'd be peaceful.

Besides: "I'm used to voices in my head," he points out.

And it's a small price to pay. Death, absorption, whatever. He can put his own fears and ego aside for what they're going to achieve (maybe that, too, is an aspect that makes him more suitable for a hivemind.) Because Darlene's not wrong, and the confirmation is a ripple, a flicker in his mind: he's into this.

Darlene's firewall has this short, and the hole that fritzs out briefly shows through to the other vulnerable side. The gritty orange of industrial cleaner on the commuter train. The back of a headstone. Pushing past coats and slippery plastic dry cleaner bags to get to the back of the closet. A keyboard smashed on the edge of a desk. A blank disc drive, overwritten or deleted. And then she patches the hole and she's just looking at Elliot, sharply, again.

"Don't," she says. And then, as she looks away, back down the way they've come, "Jesus. Get your jollies playing hero if you want, I will not get in your way, but you cannot get lost in this shit. I need you out here, with me, okay?"

It's an order but it's plaintive too. All those times she thought she was standing next to Elliot. And she was. But she wasn't. This is the mega version of that. Them, not just him.

Edited (better words) 2018-01-31 06:48 (UTC)

Elliot draws a long breath through his nose. It had been so much easier when it was only him here; he didn't owe anybody anything except the Nest, and if he was the Nest and so was everyone else he met then it was all the same connection, the same debt. No parents, no companies, no long time best friends or Dark Army contacts or people he's made promises he no longer knows how to keep.

No sister.

Darlene complicates shit by a magnitude.

"Okay," he says, a little defensively, not wanting to see her seeing him, the recursion of the fear. Not wanting to have this conversation. "You know we're always going to be a team."

She nods, first, tightly.

And then--because she feels stupid and needy, and that's why Elliot's tone is the way it is, and Darlene thinks, shit, last ditch and angry at herself--she says, "Okay." A little defensive too. Overcorrecting her way out of insecurity.

There's still more shit to talk about, but she has got to cool off. Too desperate and she'll give herself away, even if all she wants to do right now is hug Elliot, or have him hug her, or be back in New York without all this fate-of-the-world sci-fi bullshit hanging over them. Regular fate of the regular world only. Freedom from capitalism, the easy enemy.

"Don't worry. I'm not gonna make you pinky swear or anything lame."

She'll know Elliot has been truly Invasion of the Bodysnatchers turned into someone other than himself on the day he initiates a hug between them. Instead he just lifts his eyebrows a little, nods, mouth a line.

"I've gotta go." Does he really, though? He's not actually Clark Kent. But he was on his way somewhere when they ran into each other, so maybe. "Don't do anything stupid, okay. And make sure you read all the shit they give you." It's kind of big-brotherly, that don't embarrass me attitude. But then, that's how Elliot gets people to do shit for him, trying to prove they're better than his expectations for them. And maybe it's a little protective, too. Even all grown up and buying his meds, Darlene always feels a little like she's his responsibility.

"Read the manual. Real good advice."

Darlene puts her back against the wall behind her, posting up while he's turning to leave, determined not to tag after him or cry like a bitch about any part of this. Chip back on the shoulder. Let him walk off and she'll go on her way too.

As she watches Elliot pull into place any stray layers of the mandatory disguise, her thoughts flicker for one sec to his stupid-ass hoodie. The compulsive way she's seen him adjust the hood, the brisk way she's seen him shove it down again. It's enough that she pushes away from the wall, quick.

"Hey." She teeters on the edge of second-guessing before she takes the plunge. "He's still around, right."

Encouraged by a hivemind if anything. That's what Elliot meant. She knows it without asking which means it is stupid to ask, but for this, there is no manual. And if Elliot dares to push out toward her mind in this moment, Darlene is keeping it purposefully blank, free of any thought or impression or bad fucking memory. Tense, the way you hold yourself when you know a punch is coming.

Elliot stops in the mouth of the alleyway, still as a startled deer before it bounds away.

"Yeah," he says, because he can't exactly lie. Not now — he would even say, infrequently — but he loses time and knows it isn't just some blackout, has to ask his broodmates to keep track. But the asshole has a way of pulling the shutters down and keeping himself invisible that Elliot himself can't actually imitate.

What Mr Robot's motives are, here, in this place where there is no more capitalism and no more ECorp to taste his revenge, Elliot still doesn't know. But he dreads to find out that they are nothing good.

"I don't think he'll ever go away," he says thoughtfully, voicing a deeply upsetting thought he has a lot just right out loud. But he doesn't reach for her mind and doesn't let her reach for his, just steps out into the crowd and is gone.

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at the end of the war what's mine is yours (closed)

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