legionworld | The Sad Blanket Tour [Open]

Entry tags:

The Sad Blanket Tour [Open]

Who| Wash and whoever else wants to join in
What| Those last two missions were terrible, and Wash is checking in on his friends to make sure they're okay and nudge them in that direction if they're not
Where| All over the ship
When| After Silent Horizon and No Sanity Clause; the rest of the afternoon/evening after Kid Q's briefing
Warnings/Notes| This is mostly for Wash's extant CR, but I'm absolutely down for him meeting new people. He's not going to turn anyone away right now, after all. Also, behold the mighty planning spreadsheet.

It has been, to put it lightly, a shitty day.

They'd beaten the Joker but lost one of their own. Half the team had been through what sounded like literal hell. Clown in a fridge victory aside, things hadn't gone well for anyone.

So, once Wash had gotten himself out of medical with a promise not to do anything strenuous until he'd healed completely, he'd hunted down as many blankets as he could find and gone looking for his teammates. He couldn't fix what had happened, but at least he could try to help.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

She's coping.

Not well, and not beautifully, but considering the scale of everything, it's not exactly out of bounds. That said, there are worse ways to shrug off a detrimental loss of control, and for Sombra? It amounts to a vacation. A long, miserable vacation. Her biome, her beach— and a lot of alcohol.

Only it has to be hauled all the way to her biome from the mess hall, that's the catch.

Dressed down into a loose-fitting cutoff shirt (the words NEW VEGAS printed cheerfully across the front) and a pair of throwaway jean shorts, shamelessly barefoot, she cuts an evasive path through the halls to reach her final destination. Circuitry still burned out, it means she's harder to spot than usual, preoccupied with stacking a couple of crates full of tequila, beer, and a few tall bottles of...what looks like space vodka. Hard to tell. Either way, it's an exorbitant amount.

Talk about planning a party ~~for one~~.

Honestly, it's the clothes that catch his attention. There's casual wear and then there's fuck off wear, and that is absolutely a fuck off outfit. It takes Wash a second glance to realize it's Azucar, looking almost nothing like herself. Devoid of all of her flash and shine, she just looks...small.

Then again, she'd been on the hellship, hadn't she. From what Wash understands, that would wreck anyone.

So he approaches, gives the leaning tower of alcohol a very obvious once-over, and looks at her. "Need some help?" It's light and unassuming. He's just offering to carry a ridiculous amount of alcohol for someone who's likely just gone through a traumatic experience. No big deal, right?

The look she gives him isn't anything like what they'd had during their first meeting: her eyes flick up, watching him for a moment (how tired he seems in turn) with obvious contemplation scrawled tightly across her features like an animal cornered. After a beat, she concedes. She'd intended to translocate her way back and forth initially, but three overloaded crates ought to be enough for two people to carry...

And if she can avoid potentially tipping off Lena to the technology she'd stolen via teleporting through the hallways, the better.

"Knock yourself out, vato." It's said with a wave of her claws, offhandedly gesturing towards the closest bin stocked full of alcohol. "But it's a long walk to where I live. You might get tired."

There's a long, oddly tense moment before she agrees - long enough for Wash to realize that he doesn't really know Azucar at all. He's seen her at her best; this is assumedly her worst, or something close to it, and he has no idea how she'll react to anything in this state.

Tread lightly, then.

He nods and calmly rearranges the crates, plunking the small stack of blankets on top of one of them and stacking the other two. "I'm ex-Marines. I've carried a lot more weight than this a lot further than the hab deck." He's assuming that's where they're heading, at least, because this much booze in a single room in crew quarters is flat-out depressing.

As if to make his point, he hefts the stack of two crates easily, then nods at the third one. "Lead the way."

"For a soldier, you look like you've seen better days."

It's a morose commentary, not necessarily a bitter one: from what she's heard things weren't much better off for the Legionnaires that stayed far away from the Silent Horizon. And as far as Sombra knows— eyes watching the small stack of blankets as they walk, clearing crowded space to find themselves in open hallways— focusing on someone else means conversation (or attention) won't shift towards her instead.

Besides, he really does look like he's seen better days.

"Everyone here has," Wash replies flatly. "Like yesterday. Yesterday was a lot better." Sky blue, water wet, but the conversation has to keep going somehow.

"What the hell happened on that ship anyway?" The mission report had the overall summary but lacked details, and he wants to know what he's getting into.

Yesterday. Sombra scoffs out a low breath, stare fixed straight ahead; she can't remember how long it's been since they'd left Legion World, she hasn't had it in her to bother checking, either. Later, when it's all been dulled away and forgotten, she'll file away records, memories— whatever recordings survived her own cybernetics getting run through the fire.

"Everything you've probably already heard: some creature— one of Chronoblivion's 'heralds'— turned the ship into a living nightmare. Anyone he swayed? Changed." Calling them monsters is too much: she can still remember it, the familiar contours of Gabriel's mask, Locus' armor or how Jack's ribcage jutted grotesquely from his own chest. A single eye glinting in the dark.

They weren't monsters. They were them.

Her grip on the crate cinches tighter by degrees, expression unchanged. "We fixed it."

Edited (autocorrect pls) 2017-01-21 02:45 (UTC)

Yep, sounds like hell. Wash keeps walking, keeping pace with Azucar, like they're discussing the damn weather. "Changed how? Into what?" It's calm - this is a friendly conversation, not an interrogation, and he's not about to treat it as such.

That doesn't change the fact that he needs the information.

There, she hesitates. Trying to forget has consumed the entirety of her time since she'd left the Silent Horizon. Asking her to remember it well enough to describe those details? Not a route she wants to take.

Her shoulders square off; pace quickening by degrees. The sooner they reach her biome, the sooner she can return to blissful isolation.

"They were..." Not mindless. Locus seemed to pause in his hunt every time she managed to still his aggression, Delta was clearly in control of himself and York— while Gabriel and Jack had been different, feral. "Aborrecible— mad. Their bodies twisted like some kind of nightmare and they hunted the rest of us down. Didn't care who we were, just that we didn't belong in that place with them."

She doesn't want to talk about this, and he's pressing her under the guise of a friendly conversation. All he's going to do is get half-answers and push her away. This isn't sustainable.

"Azucar, wait." Wash stops and moves to the side of the hall; hopefully she'll listen. "Let me level with you."

Her eyes narrow by perceptive degrees, she watches him, blinking slowly through a somewhat suspicious line of thought - bottles clinking softly in her arms as she comes to a stop. He wants something. Why.

Why her.

"Go on."

It goes against everything in Wash - everything he's had to do to survive, all the secrets he's hidden for years, everything - to just lay his cards on the table like this. The problem is, he's not going to accomplish everything if he doesn't, and maybe full openness on his part might prompt the same on hers.

"I don't know what happened on that ship," he says. "I wasn't there. But a lot of people that I care about were, and I can't help them if I don't have any information. You're either handling it well or a really good liar or both - either way, you're the first person I've talked to who might actually be able to tell me what I need to know." He shrugs helplessly, the movement truncated by the crates he's carrying. "I need your help."

He could be lying to get more intel on the mission: anything that might've slipped through debriefing sessions, a tool that could be used against the people he's inquiring about. It's the kind of thing she'd do, given half a chance (if she hadn't been on this mission, that is).

But the flattery helps— and the idea that it might get him off her back does even more. Besides, she'd seen him setting up for movie night: there was a kind of earnesty to it, a sincerity even she'd find hard to maintain for a long period of time. If he's got an ulterior motive to this, it's probably secondary. Negligible.

Not to mention the fact that he'll owe her.

"All right." Said with a tired sigh, a nod that motions for him to follow her again as she takes to walking. "Who are your friends?"

He falls into step easily beside her. She's not walking as quickly as before - evidently full openness is working, or at least looks like it is. It's too early to tell yet.

"Locksmith," he says immediately. "Paladin. Paperboy. Captain Mystery. Doubletime. Mirage." He pauses for a moment, considering, and adds, "Locus." Friend is pushing it for that one, but Locus was unstable to begin with; if being on the hellship has fucked him up further, Wash needs to know how before he goes to check on him.

The names she recognizes, easily. Legion code names are the simplest things in the system to dig up, and even the few she doesn't personally know or have any experience with at least strike her mind as distantly recognizable.

So she starts with the last first.

"Locus was like an animal." It doesn't do justice to the way he'd looked, that description, but there isn't any point to delving that deeply into details: did Wash need to know about the jagged, split mouth filled with inhuman teeth? The blindness, the gears? No. And unless the problem comes up again— some resurgence of dead symptoms— Sombra figures they're all better off filing it away and putting it behind them. "I saw other Legionnaires go mad before I met him, but he was the first one that was completely changed. Consumado."

And Cortana wanted him dead. All things considered, it was the smarter choice.

"When I finally outran him? I found a dead body. Armored, like him. Grey and red, or maybe orange— the lighting made it hard to tell." Something from his memories, she's certain of it now. "Then it started moving. Talking. Throwing knives, and no matter what I did, I couldn't kill it. Lo juro por dios todopoderoso I must have put half a clip into him and he laughed it off."

A waste of time. Intentionally, in hindsight.

"I almost got through to Locus after that. Talking to him seemed to calm him down, but that thing— that corpse— grabbed him and started controlling him. Didn't have a choice after that: I left."

Evidently the reports of bodies and minds being influenced include physical transformation and madness, if what Sombra's saying is correct. He keeps in step, jaw tightening and neck tense as Sombra continues to talk. Felix. Fucking space Cthulu had reached into Locus' past and brought Felix back.

There's no doubt in Wash's mind that turning down the mission had been the right move; if he'd come face to face with a lovecraftian horror with the power to rub his nose in all the awful shit that had happened in his past, he never would have survived.

Also, Locus is going to be a fucking wreck when Wash gets to him. Great.

"Gray and orange," he says, immediately tipping his hand as to what he knows. "And if he shows up here alive, either put a bullet in his head or do not engage." A beat. "If he shows up as a zombie, we have a whole other set of problems." The levity is probably not appreciated, but Wash needs the distance.

"Did you see anyone else?"

"Believe me, I don't need anyone to tell me to shoot him right between the eyes." History or not— real or not— Sombra doesn't like competition when it comes to fellow manipulators.

She is, after all, a former member of Los Muertos: protecting her turf is always personal.

"Locksmith had it just as bad: he was trapped in his own body, controlled by his AI." She can still recall it, those brief glimpses into his coded misery, his hands bloody as they bared down on an inflexible wall of code. "Together they hijacked my cybernetics, forced a confrontation that as far as I could tell was meant to keep us stalled." There's a brief tilt of her head towards fried circuitry, what's usually brilliant gone dark.

"He was probably working with Locus. Cortana and I did what we could to try and help your friend— and then we left."

As far as choices go, theirs were limited at the time.

"Mirage seemed exhausted. I don't know what she saw while she was in there, but I know that like me, it didn't change her."

The bottles clatter together as her grip shifts just slightly. "As for everyone else, I don't know the details."

"It wasn't an insult - it was a warning not to give him a chance." But if she's already willing to shoot Felix, so much the better, and Wash lets it go.

There's a momentary brow furrow at us, but- Cortana was riding with her. Right. And York...

He'll dig into that later, because there's no way he can really consider his AI wrecked him without heading smack into Epsilon territory, and there's no way he's doing that in public. He locks the memory down and keeps walking.

"Thanks." Because he appreciates her help, if nothing else. After a moment, he continues. "What about Cortana? Did she make it through okay?" Cortana isn't going to tell Wash a damn thing, and he's not certain if she'll tell Chief anything; information from a third party might fill in the gaps, if there are any.

"Don't worry, vato, I didn't take it as one." Her anger wasn't with him, after all.

But she should be doing a better job of masking it— all of it— and his comment is a good reminder of the fact that she's being entirely too sincere in showing the cracks in her veneer of calm.

"She's pretty tough, actually. Don't think I could have done it without her." And maybe, just maybe, that was entirely true in return. Too much could have gone wrong without the kind of synergy they'd found by the end of it, the camaraderie they brought in with them.

"Her memories were...hard to relive, but I don't think there was a single person on board that couldn't say the same. Now that she's back with Chief, my guess is they'll help each other figure this mess out."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The Sad Blanket Tour [Open]

Sombra | Not long after Kid Q's briefing, before everyone else

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