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incinerates) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
station722018-01-14 11:15 pm
incinerates) wrote in station722018-01-14 11:15 pm
( closed ) they being dead yet speaketh by jóhann jóhannsson
CHARACTERS: Bakugo, Elliot & Hadrian
WHERE: The Red Coast ( Barracks )
WHEN: Day :037, after The Bad Thing Happens
SUMMARY: A sad, bad, horrible day ends with stressed trio doing stressful things to one another.
WARNINGS: Body horror, frank portrayal of mental health and drugs, a teenager with new cusswords to try out, the mods were mean and we're coping via roleplay. More to come if necessary,sorry Avior.
WHERE: The Red Coast ( Barracks )
WHEN: Day :037, after The Bad Thing Happens
SUMMARY: A sad, bad, horrible day ends with stressed trio doing stressful things to one another.
WARNINGS: Body horror, frank portrayal of mental health and drugs, a teenager with new cusswords to try out, the mods were mean and we're coping via roleplay. More to come if necessary,
THE DREAD / KEYA.
took it from her, and promised he'd use it for her, if she just had his back and it should have been the other way around. He should have had her back. Someone should have had her back. By now, the nest-nausea would be running its course, ripping through all of those with symbiotes as the foolhardy rush TOWARDS danger, and find her. Some poor, hopeful alien girl who was dead now. There's not much to see, because for a moment -- all there is to feel is a static, hissing thing. The shriek of wind atop a cold peak as it rips through even the thickest clothing. The sensation of your fingers burning, the fires licking down to the bone. Shock, horror, indignation. Someone has too many emotions for a single body, and they're happening all at once. Suddenly, violently and all over the brood connection.
Fuck.
there u go have fun with that. ]
#BAD
@pax ( handwavey encounter just for our record books )
bakugo's entirety screams across avior's connection like piercing hot iron driving right through each of peter's vertebrae. the sensation is something he lets prickle at his stomach, turn it and twist it into knots, but he remains quiet, observant, listens out for the others. maybe listens a little too closely because by the time he feels bakugo's reaction, it's like something's grabbed a handful of his guts and put them in a vise so tight he can't pull away without digging the tips of his fingers into his palms, feeling the uncomfortable slide of bone through skin press and press and press until there's wet blood on bare, ungloved palm. disconnect, disconnect, disconnect
it only gets worse from there. bakugo returning for a fleeting few minutes to the barracks, trembling and rageful with his findings. hadrian's patience seems to know no bounds at first, unraveling and unwinding, trying to soothe him, to calm him, the volume of his voice never rising once. but eventually he hits bare spool, tugging and twisting, breaking. hadrian doesn't want it to end the way it does, in frustration and another spark of pain with bakugo's shock surging hot. he's not done trying. he's viper-like in his quickness, grabbing him by the arm and jerking him forward with all the strength he has - startling in how much effort he has to put into it, startling in how much strength he has at all for a lithe-limbed thing that plays a pretty, sight-seeing wisp of a man.
and he sinks his fingers into him, but with it come the distressed pinpricks of bone with a sickeningly slick sound, razing skin enough that peter, who can't remember the last time he's flinched at shedding blood, pulls back away as if bakugo were scalding him. i won't draw a knife on my family.
the moment gives bakugo enough time to pull from the brief scuffle that tries to mean well - for the brood, to keep them all calm in a time when they need it most with all this churning, sickening dread.
-
@ elliot
there are seldom times when peter feels this unwound, stretched too thin, razed over by the unforgiving gouge of bakugo's wildfire of shock (not his fault, not his fault, not his fault) but this is one of those time in particular, mind stalled out like a car, constantly turning the key, turning it turning it turning it only to hear the engine gutter out repeatedly. unpleasant, whining, grinding. but he's trying.
he'd rather take care of this on his own, after all, what good would anyone else be? he doesn't need his hand held, doesn't need to cry? but god when he thinks he needs something, it's a brush at elliot that he makes. he's the most familiar, as old as he is on this particular wavelength, as comfortable to coil around as anything. it's tacky, wet silk sliding forward instead of warm and light and it slaps against skin, clinging, tired and limp instead of sensuous and flirtatious per the norm. there's something wrong and too anxious about it to seem like hadrian, but it tastes just like him, smells like him.
damn this stupid, wretched, ugly, beautiful parasite dug so deep in his brain. the thought makes him twitch as he keeps his hand close to his chest, cradles it's bloodied form, a thing with shards of bone jutting up from the pad of each finger, red with blood (his and bakugo's). he's perched on the edge of one of the tables in the barracks, singing without singing a love song gone all twisted and wrong, crooning without words at elliot to come here, come here, please come here, come talk to me, come here. bakugo's a wildfire fever he's gotten too close to that eats him up. ]
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At least, he thinks callously, it wasn't one of them.
(Okay, so maybe that isn't really Elliot's thought at all. Part of the reason he isn't hurt or angry is because he created someone else to feel all those things for him, someone tougher, someone downright mean.)
What he has less control over is what comes down the line from his broodmates. Bakugo's white heat, and then later, Hadrian's wet silk, liquid and sticky, needy. The former makes him want to run away, but the latter he runs towards — quite literally. Come, it calls, and he does, because he cares more about this one sharp presence than just about anyone here he's not actually related to. They were the first, folie à deux. ]
( What is it, ) [ and, immediate, regardless of response, ] ( I'm coming, ) [ and, because he's not far, into the barracks and he's already: ] ( Let me help. )
[ Then he sees the blood. ]
Hadrian.
[ Rough, worried voice as his pace picks up, nearly running those last few steps to the table, wanting to look at Hadrian's hand, wanting to cradle it in his own broader ones. It takes a moment to realize the bone shards are coming out from the inside rather than some hideous impalement. It looks like the result of torture, and his gaze when it lifts to Hadrian's face is wide-eyed and stricken even as his brain calculates, fast as a computer. It's coming from him. Maybe it's his power. Did he know he can do that? Can't we all do something? What can I do?
What can we do echoes the symbiote, wordlessly. Reaching. ]
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Not mine. [ he shakes his head ] The blood. Bakugo's.
[ no eloquence, just breath. i'm alright, i'm alright, i'm al - a pause to collect himself, aiming to loosen his grip on elliot's scarves, but it never comes - the peace he normally can find at the bottom of his bottomless pockets, always there like a knife. instead, he feels like he's reaching and he's reaching, and when fingers try to glance over it, he's scalded before he can find his calm, burnt out.
the symbiote in peter is young still, eager to fight against its host's stressors. peter's mind stalls, gutters, revs loudly in frustration, and then chokes out again and the symbiote responds in kind, still prepared for a fight that's long since left charred remnants behind. he can't calm himself, a rarity because he's always calm, a cool and easy-going presence barring the moments late a night when juno's collided into him full-on contact. even then, he wakes with a smile, as if nothing's gone wrong, a dream is just a dream.
this is not a dream, and the blood is real and the panic and rage is real. not his own and terrifyingly tattooed all over him, impressed upon him so deeply he can't claw it out of himself.
he meets elliot's eyes, mouth twisted, a rictus of sharp teeth as he keeps him close, physically, tries to find some kind of peace in pressing up against him mentally, they way you feel the pulse of someone's heart at their temples.
he doesn't know what he's asking for when he says please help. the words even sound like an obscure jumble of a language that he's never spoken before. but his brain is begging as he tries over and over again to set himself right and failing miserably with each turn. ]
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I don't know—
[ How.
But.
That's not true, suddenly. What he means is that there's nothing he can do to change this when there's no distinct cause, can't patch Peter up or tell him it's going to be okay or even guide him in shielding himself because fuck knows Elliot doesn't know how to do that. He's open, wide open, so when Peter grasps for him their edges blur together with how willingly he takes that connection.
His eyes close.
Like one hand gently touching the other, the Elliot symbiote reaches to soothe the Hadrian host, and Elliot offers it up like it's all he has even though he's not sure what he's offering. ]
( Here. Here. Let me— )
[ He doesn't even realize he's not speaking aloud; maybe his mouth is even moving. But it's his inner voice, resonant, monotone, always accompanied by the whir of process, >> feeling = input >> if feeling => this: >> run ('calm.exe')
In reality, all he's doing is touching Hadrian's bare skin, blood-sticky, his spine curved in a way that implies holding himself distant from that urgent clothing pull. In their minds, though, he reaches out, smothering, and maybe there's an offer in there somewhere but mostly it's a heavy, muting blanket and a relaxing warmth like the morphine had been. ]
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let me it says.
and before he can think again on it, come inside he responds, both hands white-knuckled on the door as he lets elliot in.
he remembers the cloying heat of the sauna, and the static sensation of the morphine before, and he bucks against the way the sensation as it comes together over his connection, willingly given over but suddenly realizing just what it's doing. the panic is partially to blame, racing around, trapped as piece by piece it's very slowly smothered by a warm blanket of morphine-like calm. the whiplash leaves peter's mind heaving, bruised and aching thing keening along the soothing touch.
peter's mind bobs along with the sensation now instead of against it. he's moving along it, sluggish and contented. whatever elliot is... giving to him is enough to let him breathe, enough to cool the fire at his temples. what was squirming before, uncertain of the feeling coming over it like some hungry beast, is soothed, the rage and anguish blanketed. it's simmering, but finding itself gradually being cooled with every passing moment of elliot's presence. peter swallows cold air once. twice. deep, big, hungry gulps instead of short, pained gasps as his eyes widen, dark and swimming, searching sleepily almost. ]
( Elliot, what... )
[ softly, a song on a lazy cadence more in tune than the first that clings as much as peter's fingers do in reality. whatever this is, he feels it pressing him under, weighing him down. still, he tries. what are you doing what have you done don't go far. ]
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[ Whispered, aloud. ]
I told you, I've got your back.
[ Something tight-strung in his voice: he can feel what he's doing now, the way the soothing calm radiates from him without actually finding its origin in him. In fact, his own emotions, as if in counterpoint, are jagged with anxiety, bright like magnesium. But again, still, he knows how to cope when his own brain is sabotaging itself, or chemicals slice through his detachment.
His own eyes just as huge and dark. ]
( I think this is my power. )
[ Knives and drugs and explosions, what a brood they are. But it's helpful, at least in the moment. Like he's hacked into Hadrian and found a way to reprogram all that overload before he melted down entirely. ]
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( This is you? )
[ the fire in him is feebly licking out on the last of its fuel. elliot, wrapped around his every nerve ending, keeps him still and quiet, swaying in the dark ocean. It's still unsettling and unnerving. somewhere in peter's guts he detests it, but he knows this is... preserving him. keeping him afloat here between the two of them. there's no room to feel anything but the calm here washing over him wave by wave. so he... he trusts elliot to control his emotional intake and output, swallowing up every command to fire off bakugo's residual mourning wail inside of him. his eyes close a moment.
hand one drops from elliot's scarves, the second in his palms twitches a bit, the wet sound of bone pulling back, skin knitting together into a soft, fine white line against the pad of each slender finger. soothed. danger now at bay. ]
( Feels a bit familiar. )
[ warm steam, the look in elliot's eyes before, how he'd settled his head in his lap. his breathing gradually slows now, dull glass smoked over. he flexes a little against the hold of the symbiote, pushes further with his mind now as he gathers up all his pieces, scattered so explosively before. ]
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[ Breathless, even mind-to-mind; Elliot feels constricted by his own body. In order to soothe the explosive burn of Hadrian's borrowed emotion he has to take some of it on himself, and even third hand Bakugo's guilt and grief and anger is hideously familiar.
But Elliot has his own symbiotic relationship that takes care of those feelings: he represses grief masterfully, tucking it away somewhere where it will feed and strengthen Mr Robot. He feels all those things for Elliot, and all that's left for Elliot himself is the post-traumatic sensation of raw nerves and shaky hands, his heart as rapid as a hare's.
He holds out as long as he can, growing more and more agitated as Hadrian rebuilds from the rubble up, and then he breaks away with a drowned man's gasp, flinging himself back, wide eyes in a pallid face. When the touch is lost, so is the muffling quietude, the power ebbing away. ]
Fuck.
amber style aka phone tags
it comes back to him like a storm, a broken window colliding back together in reverse at the last second as elliot jerks away. peter hears the “fuck” like a chorus in his ears, breaking murky water as he immediately focuses his gaze on elliot, shifting forward to his feet as elliot jerks away. he keeps a distance, but posture says he’s prepared to dart in and steady him. his hands hover a bit, prepared to tug him forwards if he looks like he might lurch in the wrong direction.
bakugo’s emotions, volcanic, are smoke and ash now, tamped out for peter but somehow alight there in elliot’s expression. ]
Easy now, Elliot, easy. I...
[ gratitude, but concern (god when did he become so goddamned concerned for him? damn this.) he moves forward a little more purposefully now, reaching out to herd elliot gently in the direction of a place to sit. ]
Rest. What you did was [ a shake of the head, disbelief as he feels the dregs of the phantom sensation in his mind space ] incredible.
oppa amber style
He'd known they got extra sensory abilities. He was stronger, fitter, he was telepathic. But he hadn't known it would be like that. Still, there's gladness in him when he looks at Peter, whole and capable again, put back together. It had been too disorienting to see him falling apart. ]
You're welcome.
[ A touch of irony in his low, rough voice. Elliot looks down at his hands — there's a little bit of Hadrian's blood on them, but that weirdly doesn't both him right now. ]
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truth be told, he’s been embarrassed. he prides himself on the idea of being in control of his own narrative, careening and wild, but always of his own volition, and as it stands he’s had it rent from him with every ounce of bakugo’s grief. it’s a wail set through a canyon, echoing in varying degrees of mourning, pounding on the walls.
the feeling of it is denied purchase, claws scraping uselessly on dark glass, gathered up, tempered for the heat because peter is a creature of keen adaptations, growing and learning the shapes of his broodmates. but where he’s glass to bakugo, he’s soft silk and satin for elliot to skirt or fall into as he wants, a bed mussed and then remade as he faintly traces elliot’s exhaustion with a mental fingertip that trembles for half a moment, aftershock in a twitch. ]
I’m sorry that was so unpleasant for you, darling. [ elliot’s awe at his power, and his statement, indicator enough. a suggestion: ] Put your head down a moment, maybe.
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He does lie down eventually, though not to sleep. He's wired and awake, mind jumping frenetically like a skipped record, despite the accentuated dark smudges beneath his eyes. Mostly he's thinking about the mission, though — this isn't unusual, it's easy to catch Elliot sorting through the facts as he knows them like a seashell collection on any given day, and he spends more of his time sifting around for more than actually doing normal activities. But in this mood it's especially frenetic, as he adds the black circles and Pidge's samples and the death of a young diplomat to the nested folders of what they know. ]
and soon after hadriot's tender moment:
[ When he looks back on this moment, he'll be able to retain some measure of pride -- after all, his emotions may have detonated ( less panicked, more utterly distraught -- ) across the length and width of his brood, but at least he'd held himself together until he'd entered the privacy of the barracks. A loose thought comes to him, that perhaps he'd have done better at managing himself if only Hadrian FUCKING Black hadn't been there too. What happened was an echo chamber of rising distress, because Hadrian just. For all the calm that Bakugo was hoping to find in the man's sweetly-smooth mind, for all that he'd dove in among Hadrian Black's person in the hopes that he'd settle his fucking mind down -- he'd broken his broodmate.
Dragged him right down into the shrill, fluttering depths of his own mind. The sight of Keya's body. The sense of failure, a lack of purpose, the strangling, suffocating-thick guiltguiltguilt -- running deeper than should be possible, for a young man who'd only just met the equally young alien. Running back along his heartstrings to a memory cautiously tucked away under a neatly-made bed. Nothing to see there. Nothing to observe about him, but the heat and the fervor. And Hadrian had just, gone looking. So, he broke him, in the end.
In the distance, he can feel the number that Elliot's doing on him. The TRUST that Hadrian feels for that guy is strange to him; unwarranted. ( Who is Elliot, really? What's with the soft whir-hum, the gust of heat that Bakugo feels along his ankles, reminding him of overheating CPUs and long afternoons spent watching and rewatching old All Might videos online with -- ) He's struck, with how little he knows about his mysterious broodmates. How little he wants to know, but how deeply he'll be unable to avoid them. And still, his mind splits. Fractures along old scars and seams, bleeding horror and disorientation and something mournful in the way that his arm bleeds. ]
-- ah.
[ Basic recognition. Something's calming Hadrian, and Bakugo wants it. Wants out of this loop he's stuck in, but he won't reach for it. Not again, not after he'd busted Hadrian up like that. ]
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( Here. )
[ He can't do it without touch, and he doesn't really have the capacity to verbally express that right now, so it's just a one word command, but surely the siren song of Hadrian's residual quietude lingering behind it is convincing enough. ]
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There is a push-pull within him; the combination of the symbiote wanting it's own closer and his own fierce pride. It's a burn inside of him, tearing him into a pile of needs-wants. He needs to keep clean of the dangers of his connection to Elliot, to Hadrian. He wants, more than anything, to bury himself in whatever-the-fuck it is that his strange "broodmate" is putting out. The rapid fluttering of code being written, methodical and monotonous. Elliot reaching out, bridging the physical space between them. ( He can't, for the life of him, get the image of Keya out of his mind. The vibrant pulse of guilt and loathing -- )
Bakugo raises a hand. Somewhere along the way, as he'd entered the barracks, he'd torn the foreign robes and bangles from himself. It's the only thing that prevented them from tearing, from being soaked in blood, after Hadrian seized him with sharp, slicing fingers. Palm out, he holds up that hand, fingers shaking and spread. It's the most contact he's able to ask for from anybody, let alone someone he barely knows. ]
Just -- oh FUCK -- just do it.
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He does it.
It happens as soon as their skin touches, hand closing over Bakugo's — Elliot's broad palms and blunt fingers are even as an adult a weird counterpoint to his skinny body. The power wells up, and he floods it down that connection. For Hadrian the pill had been coated in honey; for Bakugo it's not as sweet, or as careful. Elliot has been aching to shut him up, and it shows.
The power is one of smothering, spreading numbness, a thick blanket thrown over the fires of Bakugo's explosive emotions. Elliot can taste the acrid smoke of them in the back of his throat, feels the young flex of muscles and the sick guilt. It's worse than what he took from Hadrian, maybe because that was mostly second hand, or maybe because that particular conflagration had similar roots in Elliot's own. Whatever the reason, this time is different, and he lets out a sharp breath of air like Bakugo just punched him in the stomach. ]
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The calm comes over him, though. Needed, reluctantly desired ( he broke his stupid broodmate -- ); trickling through him like a strong rain, soaking him to his bone, turning his emotions soggy and heavy until they just... wash away. It leaves him muddled, disoriented. Clearly not a youth who's felt anything less than the full force of his emotions, brutal and bright as they are, by the way he physically reels. ]
Is this you -- all the time?
[ Like being underwater, the question comes slow and garbled. Still invasive, though. ]
very: vomit
But he doesn't respond, shaky and breathless, broken out in a sweat all over. It's not just the mania that he felt when he used his power on Hadrian a moment ago, and it's not just the emotions that he gets off Bakugo in trade. It's a train-brake-shrieking sensation of his symbiote straining, trying to work with Bakugo's — and it's easier, for a broodmate, but it's —
For a moment he's not even Elliot, just a string in a tassel that is part of a fringe on some vast creature that is also him, and yet too big to fit in his brain, too much —
The migraine hits him like a trainwreck, and he feels his stomach expel — vomiting the garstall flesh he'd eaten earlier into his own mouth, bringing up his free hand to cover before it could spill all over the floor. That's enough, and he breaks the connection jarringly, leaving a Bakugo to manage the flood of chemicals that leave him dopey and mind-quiet on his own. ]
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Gross, Bakugo's mind supplies, woozy and vacant. He has enough sense and control to pull his feet off the floor, his knees to his chest, folding up and into himself in the least supportive way, while Elliot struggles under the weight of their tangled psyche. He feels like -- he's in a pool, a big and dark pool, with the soft top drawn over it. The plastic sheet that keeps little kids from falling in, except he's under it, pressing his hands along the liner, looking out at the things that made him what he was.
He can't reach them. Knows he should feel panicked because of it, but the chemicals firing in his brain are just --
it's very quiet, now. ( His chest is sore -- guilt and grief leaving him bruised and shaken, and his head is melting?) ]
Ha. Two down.
[ Broke them both, in a way, didn't he? ]
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