Event Log: Memories Past

[hadrielmods]

Who: Everyone
What: Memory Share Event!
Where: All around the city
When: November 14th-20th
Warnings: Please remember to tag all warnings for memory shares!

Have you ever looked through someone else's eyes? Heard through their ears, spoken with their tongue? The gods have tried to teach some of you empathy, but it's time you learned the hard way, exactly what the others here have been through. For a week, every time you brush skin to skin with someone, you'll experience a memory of theirs: happy, sad, it doesn't matter. All that matters is that it feels real to you.

The first touch may come as a surprise- it lasts only for a split second but may feel like an eternity, where you're trapped in someone else's memory. After that, it could be more expected, and some may even figure out how to control it and share specific scenes from their past with others. Or, you might wear gloves and long sleeve shirts for awhile, nobody's judging.

Maybe curtail the handholding for awhile- or go right ahead, if that's your thing. After all, you never really know somebody unless you've walked a mile in their shoes, right?

► This log covers November 14th-20th.
► Feel free to make your own logs as well
► Please tag headers of threads with content warnings where they apply
► Please put your character's name and open/closed in the subject line of your starters!
► If you die in a memory, you don't die in real life, but if you do die in real life please let us know here.

Comments

cw: torture, imprisonment, reference to suicide

[hardwearing]

Seeing it coming would usually mean Wash could dodge in time, but he isn't prepared to. He only sees Ephemera as a threat about a third of the time these days, and realizes that a split second too late. He'll have to consider it later, because right now Hadriel is fading away.

--

Wash is strapped to the chair he’s in and everything is blurry. Spinning slightly, or maybe just tilting, or maybe that’s because he can’t hold his head steady. He can’t tell. He isn’t sure of anything anymore… where is this? Another room, but it could be anywhere. They keep shuffling him. He doesn’t remember. He can’t keep track. His arms are heavily bandaged and still there’s cuffs around his wrists, and if he wriggles he can make it hurt…

“Agent Washington. Look at me, Agent.”.

That steady, even voice. Too calm, detached somehow. Not real. It can’t be real but it’s familiar.

“Allison?”

“No. I am the Counselor for Project Freelancer. Do you know your name, Agent?”

“Agent..? I’m… Church. Where’s Allison? Is she okay? I need to--”

“No. You are Agent Washington. May I call you David?”

“That’s not my name. I’m not...”

There’s a sliding sound, something across a tabletop. Wash struggles to lift his head from what he can see, which is still just his arms strapped down, his legs in white pants he doesn’t remember. How did he get here? There’s a table, yes, and a man across it, his hands are free. He’s in a black uniform jumpsuit, holding a tablet and scrolling down.

“Where--?”

“You were… injured. You don’t remember?”

“No. Why..?”

“I believe you may be too heavily medicated for this session, but if you are comfortable continuing, I can answer some of your questions. If I may ask my own.”

“I-- okay. Okay.”

“What is the last thing you can recall?”

It’s a struggle but he tries, he’s quiet for a moment while he tries, everything in his head feeling fragmented and sharp, the pieces grating together. It hurts. His wrists hurt. Is he moving? “The Director told me about Tex. Tex is dead because I couldn’t--”

“After that.”

Wash’s vision blurs further, the Counselor obscured until he blinks and then he realizes it was tears. He blinks again, feeling them hot on his cheeks and then he can see better, even though the stuffy feeling in his head gets worse. “There’s nothing. I’m sorry.”

He can’t do anything right. Couldn’t save them, didn’t Washington die too? How is he..? Allison…

“It’s my fault.”

“No. You did the best you could. We’ll need your help again, we need you to get better, David.”

“That’s not my name!” Sharp pain now, shooting up his arms and somehow into his neck, a stabbing at the base of his skull and deep through, all the way through. Something missing, something torn out. His memories, maybe? No, not torn out, shoved in and it broke all that he was and then they took the new self away too, and now he’s… what? Who? Who is he now? Church? David? Washington? He wants to scream at the pain but he just feels more tears, and that makes him angry. He remembers anger, that it was familiar once, it was part of him and so he tries to hold onto it, but it gets eaten by the emptiness like everything else.

“I’m sorry you’re in so much pain. Perhaps we should increase your dose, for the time being. We can do this later.”

“No-- no, don’t leave me alone. Please don’t leave me alone, I need to know… what happened?”

But the Counselor is already getting up, his chair-that-he-isn’t-strapped-into scraping behind him as it’s pushed away. No. No no no no no no….

“Please!”

“Take him back to his room. Make certain he cannot harm himself again.”

And then Wash does scream, the sound raw and agonized like a sob, like someone lost who knows they will never be found. The memory fades on everything tilting again, a sharp sting in his neck before the world goes black in preparation of him waking up somewhere else, again, not sure of the journey. Or who he is at the end.

--

Wash stumbles back as soon as he can move again, and he can tell from the expression on Ephemera's face that the other man saw something too. Great. How bad..? These are the worst events, the ones where people can get in his head. When they can see. There are so many things he wishes he could keep hidden, even if he's learned to talk about them, that Hadriel keeps digging up and showing people. At least Ephemera's not his enemy anymore. At least--

--he's getting ahead of himself. He isn't actually... all that disturbed by what he just saw, which probably says volumes about him and his life, but he'll have questions about it when he knows where his end is at. Right now he just tries not to sound too worried when he asks, "What did you just see?"

[requiemshark]

Okay. That's a thing that happened.

Ephemera steps back, resetting. Focus. Washington looks more confused than anything, which is - good? Maybe? The gods are fucking with them again.

"You. After Epsilon."

Not much else to say about that, really.

Ephemera runs a hand through his hair. "Guess I knew that already. But that was fucked up."

[hardwearing]

"The truth is worse than the dream," Wash says bluntly, because it's true. In the dream, they saw it, sure, but it wasn't reality, it was just his fear and misery and they fixed it. They both interacted, got him out, made things better. In a memory you can't do that.

He breathes slow, tries to relax. It's Ephemera, he's seen it, he's not going to do anything with it, nothing has changed. But the other soldier is right -- it was fucked up. And Wash hates that Hadriel would show it to anyone, and keeps sticking people in his head. Breathe.

"You were uh... your squad was killing the COs." It was rough, but Wash has seen worse in the war. "You made it quick."

[requiemshark]

"Yeah."

There's really not much Ephemera can say about that. The aftermath was ugly. Seeing it again only drives the point in that much harder.

He blinks, taken aback. Of all the things for Washing to see....

"...we all killed one. We decided. So they couldn't just blame the captain. Had to be all of us or it wasn't fair."