hadriel_logs | Event Log: Memories Past

Event Log: Memories Past

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.

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She is glad that she had gone around, seeking out what items could be found, when all that strangeness had come around. The rations will likely be more of a last resort, but the other items have been nice. Coffee, for instance... A nice strong cup has no equal. Carolina has kept her eyes open on her morning runs - waking up earlier and pushing herself harder at them since the disappearance of a certain someone- although it appears just to be whatever is at the shops now and no more surprises, well, everywhere.

She can hear movement in the kitchen although she knows that she has hidden some of the items well enough that others aren't going to be able to find them without some effort. No reason to go through them all right away. As she comes down the stairs, tying her hair back in a loose ponytail, she would guess that it's Wash, which is confirmed as she rounds into the kitchen. "Hey. How about a hand putting things away."

Team work, after all, does make things go faster, as she reaches for items, putting them away in the shelves, and repeating- at least until her fingers brush against his arm, each going for the same item. It is then that she stills, almost lost in thought, but it isn't her thoughts, and she can only stand there, watching, until the trance-like state is done. Only then can she pull her hand away, sucking in a breath and feeling her pulse quicken. "... sh it."

Wash sees her hand coming but doesn't pull back in time, and... whoops.

--

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.

--

Did he see anything of hers?

She's freefalling, spinning, falling. She reaches out, grabbing the railing to steady herself. She can see a piece of the ship move by, Texas landing on it and she glares from beneath her helmet up at her.

"Give it up, Carolina."

Her voice makes her clench her teeth. She remains looking as Texas, upside down, shifting through the area above her. She wants to end this, to finally come out on top.

"Never. I can beat you."

"No, you can't."

She can. She will. She must. Carolina watches as she somersaults backwards, kicking the metal panel down towards her. Yet she's not that easily taken out, springboarding back to land on the glass window of the ship. Even as she does, feeling the cracks splinter beneath her feet, Texas is there. It is only a split second before both are fighting- punches, blocks, kicks, hits.

Carolina kicks her back, but she still comes, and she backflips beneath the punch aimed at her, aiming another punch that misses. She can feel the arms around her waist, tightening, and there's nothing that Carolina can do as Texas swings her up and over.

She lands with a heavy thud, helmet against the glass, the two of them splintering apart. Faster. Quicker. She needs to stop Texas, and now. The ship shutters around them as it starts to burn up in re-entry to the planet. The flames lick all around the vessel as it careens down toward the planet and she tries to stop her fall, to turn around to face Texas again.

"You can't win, Carolina, but you can come with me."

She's turned York already, York who she's left in the shaft, but there's no answer as the glass cracks, and she curls up, trying to shield herself from the inevitable impact. The ship hits against a mountain, it's course altering every so, but not slowing down.

She screams, thrown through the glass as the nose hits ground, sending her flying out in to the planet below. The snow shelters her a little as she lands on her back, but not enough. Every part of her body screams in pain, and she's not even certain how long she lays there, the wind knocked out of her.

It's the crunch of footsteps that dimly register, someone coming closer, and her brain screams, get up, win against Texas. But it's not Texas. She groans, swinging up, before twisting on to her knees. Where she's going, she doesn't know, but some part of her is yelling to move, to get away, to flee. The edge of the cliff comes closer, yet she doesn't make it any further.

Maine. Her friend. Her team mate. The solid mass of muscle that never seems to be stopped, that just keeps getting back up and coming. He's grabbing her, picking her up, pulling her helmet free. She's confused as he tosses it aside, looking at him.

"What are you doing?"

Her voice is hoarse, rough, but there is answer. No, rather he is impassive as always, cold, his hand reaching back, and it clicks what he is doing a second before he does it.

"No, no!"

She screams out loud in pain, trying to break free from that iron-like grip, but there is nothing that she can do to stop him as he pulls her AI free. Eta. Iota. They are in his hands, and there's nothing that she can do, locked in disbelief, in the pain, in the confusion. Then his arm is moving, and she realizes that she's falling backwards, flung over the edge of the cliff without a second thought-

---

There is that shuddered breath, sparing a look to Wash. Church... Her mother. Her father. She knows of what happened, far after the fact, having been gone, assumed dead, but to actually see it, to witness it. Her father had fucked a lot of things up. She can't deny that truth, had tried to kill him for that, to bring some justice, maybe even some revenge, to all those who had suffered. Her fingers curl against the counter, a tightness in her jaw. "Shit..."

Wash stumbles when the memory ends, and with the shock of it all he can't catch himself. He lands on his butt on their kitchen floor, the only sign he acknowledges the fall a soft whoosh of breath. One hand comes up to cover his implant protectively. The pain there... he knows it. But even knowing what the Meta had done to Carolina, seeing it -- through her eyes, no less -- made it worse.

And there's no telling what horrors she might have seen. It might not have even been his own memories, he's also got her father and both Churches rattling around in there. So he sounds wary when he speaks, and still looks visibly shaken.

"How bad?"

There is that moment of surprise as Wash falls back, and it is instinct that has her leaning forward, body moving as she goes to give him a hand- yet she stops, drawing it back. That waiver in her eyes, a soft chill as his hand moves to the back of his neck.

"... after. You didn't-" Shit. Because she goes to draw in another breath, eyes closing for a moment. It's one thing to share the memory, to put it in to words, but another to actually see it again, as if he had taped it and was showing it to her. Yet it's nothing of the sort. "It was an evaluation. After Epsilon-"

Yet her voice drifts off there. It's intimate, that, something deeply personal. A hurt, a mark left by her father.

Carolina isn't the only one with problematic instincts for this situation. Wash starts to reach for her hand to accept the help up, then realizes no. Duh, think about what just happened. He lets the hand that was stretching out for her fall, just sits there a moment longer while she explains what she saw.

"...oh. So 'very bad.' The worst memory ever. Of all time." It's his line, but it's delivered without much of the usual life. He sounds angry instead of animated, not at her but at this damn city and its gods, how they always pick the worst thing possible. Wash sighs, forcing himself to drop his hand from his neck. It hurt, but he's not in pain now. It's just an echo. "I'm sorry, Carolina. I'm sorry you had to see that. And that I wasn't around for... what I saw."

He glances up to meet her eyes, to judge if she needs more than that to figure it out, but her eyes are closed. Maybe she just needs a minute.

"Hey..." That hint of solidarity in her voice, as yes, yes she can see what it would be just that for him. It should never have gotten that far, never. So often she wishes that she would have realized sooner, stopped things before they had gotten so out of hand, that things like that wouldn't have happened. The pain of Iota and Eta screaming Allison in her mind had all but done Carolina in. To think of Epsilon...

Her mouth does open, although pauses, a frown on her lips and lines furrowing her forehead, before her eyes reopen, flickering back down to him. There are plenty of things that he could have witnessed that could fall in to that category, so Carolina isn't entirely certain what he has seen. Back to her own encounter with a memory that wasn't hers. "No. It's- You shouldn't have had to go through that alone."

Not that her presence would have helped... It may well have confused matters. Knowing something, and actually witnessing it, even like this, are two different things. To know what he had actually gone through, that he had thought- Her father was never the same after her mother died.

Oddly, Wash goes quiet where he sits. Just breathes, looking down at the floor between his legs for a long moment before he gets up.

"I was angry at all of you, too, you know. Not just the Director and Counselor for knowing exactly what they were putting in my head. But all the rest of you, even though you were used to, because..." He can't look at her admitting this, but he needs to say it. "No one came for me. I think I didn't want to admit just how angry I was, that I might still be holding it, until York showed up here. And apologized for that. And I didn't get it, at first, but. It did hurt."

None of them had crossed her mind, not for a long time after her fall. Even then, when she had come back looking for the Director, she hadn't come looking for Wash. Rather, she had come searching as a means to an end, knowing that someone, somewhere, had to have some clue as to where he had gone.

There isn't a day that she doesn't regret that, that she doesn't wonder what might have been different had she done something different. Maybe she would be dead, but maybe others would still be alive.

"I deserved it." Any anger, any hate. She had deserved it all, and most days still does feel that she deserves the weight that rests so heavily on her shoulders, pressing down. She'd ended up a shitty team leader, caring nothing at all for anything but that leaderboard, at proving to her father that she was still the best. A breath slowly exhaled through her teeth. "I am sorry for that. Sorry that you had to go through that. That I wasn't there."

For once Wash doesn't tell her she's wrong. He doesn't blame her for any of it, exactly, but this specific situation, his distress at being abandoned... maybe she did deserve some of that anger, because she'd never thought about him specifically. Never tried to come for him, they just crossed paths again by chance. Carolina didn't save him, didn't consider trying. So despite all of his own guilt, he won't beat himself up for having felt the anger. He'll let himself acknowledge it, just a little, and because it's in the past.

"I'm not mad anymore. And I'm sorry, too... I didn't really see, back then, how you were struggling. I didn't know why. But it's over, right? We're not those people anymore."

He'll always hate her father and the Counselor, that piece of shit -- from what Ephemera's said he's also dead and Wash would spit on both their graves -- but he's not angry at Carolina anymore. They're closer now than they ever were, because he understands.

She hadn't spared a thought for any of them, for any of the people who had been her team mates for years on end. Even before her trip down the side of a cliff, she had given them little thought, thinking only of one thing - Texas. Looking back, she can beat herself up daily for that, for not seeing what was happening around her.

There is that subtle shift across her face. Few might have seen her struggles- York, certainly- although Carolina would have continued to brush it away, to deny, to be angered at anyone questioning her strength. She hadn't wanted help and wouldn't have accepted it. "No. No, we're certainly not those people."

He was no longer the rookie, someone who held that innocence and fell for things. In a way, there can be sorrow for that, but at the same time, people do grow, they evolve, and while Carolina knows that things could have been different, she also knows that Wash should be proud of where he stands today. There is a shift, a little nudge, making certain that there's no skin contact. "I might not have thought it back when I first came stomping back to life, but I am thankful for everything you did, Wash."

Wash just looks confused, at that. She's thankful? "For everything I did when, exactly? If you mean just helping you, I was trying, sure, but before that..." he shakes his head. "All I did before you showed back up was get people killed. And I'm not sure I can ever really be forgiven for that."

Just because he's better now, because he's trying so hard, doesn't mean the past is gone. He sighs softly.

"Carolina, do you ever wonder... if we'll really be able to balance things back out? After all we've done wrong? Sometimes I feel like I'm going to be climbing out of this hole for the rest of my life and never really make it clear."

"... with Texas, all I had focused on was her. It's the same with the Director." That same destructive path that she had taken, just with a different target. Wash had given her something as much as Epsilon had, and in their own way, the rest of the sim troopers. It doesn't mean that they still don't drive her to the point of wanting to shoot them some days, but, they are family, each and every one of them. "You stood up to me, and I had needed that."

Yet she does pause. She doesn't ever expect the scales to be even, to find herself as the good guy that she had once thought that they were, but it doesn't change her resolve and it's not about that, exactly. "I'll do it until I can't anymore, because that is the right thing to do, even if I have to go across the whole damn galaxy to pry things out of the hands of people who shouldn't have what they have."

There's a long pause while Wash processes that, before he says softly, "Then you're welcome. It was the guys, though. They changed me in the first place, and they backed me going in after you. We're good as a team, you and me and all of them. I don't think we could've done a fraction of what we've done if we were alone."

And he echoes Carolina's sentiment about trying to be better, honestly, not caring if it tips the existential scales back far enough for him to consider himself good. He doesn't. Maybe someday he will, but they have to keep at it.

"Yeah it's.... we might never break even but we have to keep trying. We helped make this mess. At least we're working at it together, right?"

"We do, surprisingly, work well together. ... for the most part." Although the last part holds a certain wryness to it. They are unconventional, and while she might have found that utterly annoying and unprofessional in the beginning, they do get results, and they do look out for each other. Under all the banter and arguing, there is no denying that fact.

"I'm glad though, you know, that you've found some measure of happiness here." She doesn't know what the future holds, but there will be an uphill battle to recovery.

Wash smiles slightly at that comment, though it's a little sad. The whole finally finding someone who loves him thing is bittersweet, because they could disappear at any moment and never see each other again. Or both go home and just plain forget.

"Yeah, I.... we decided over a year ago now that it was worth it, even if we were going to forget or be split up. But it's harder now." He's gotten very attached, as attached as he is to Carolina and Tucker and the rest of his makeshift little family. And he doesn't want to give either of them up. "We still both need to go home."

In a way, even though they are out of their world, it works much the same. Nothing in life is guaranteed. They could well wake up one morning and have their whole world change by the evening. Heck, it has happened, so many times before, that she is learning that the nice things do need to be savoured, like that banter with Epsilon.

"One day, sure, we'll all end up back home, but," that small shrug of her shoulders. "Not today."

"Or not," Wash says carefully. Let him finish, he has ideas. Tentative plans. "If we can figure out how to send people safely to other places, as they are here... maybe we can save them. And then world hop. Kyna knows this spell that can shift between planes, it just doesn't work here. We could send Epsilon with her, and then she'll find a way to get back to us."

Although it doesn't help for people who have already come and gone, or died in their past. Wash's expression falters a little.

"...I'm sorry about York. And Tex."

There is that perplexed turn of her expression at those two words, wondering what is going on in that mind of it. An eyebrow arches slightly, although her face does take a slightly unreadable look to it. The chance that Church might still be in existence had lead them down the path that they'd currently gone down, and it had been false. She'd be lying if she said there hadn't been the slightest glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe... It had been a rouse.

And yet there is another twist of her features at the mention of those two. It's particular that he brings them up, but for- "Just what did you see?"

"I-- It was about Maine, not them, I just meant." He waves a hand helplessly, unintentionally glancing upstairs towards her room. Where she'd spent time with one of them, before he'd disappeared. "That they were here and we couldn't do anything to save them."

"Ah." That light response for a moment. Her mind is split in two direction, noting that no matter how much Wash changes, some aspects still remain the same. Like that small flailing. It is endearing.

The other direction acknowledges where he's going with that, knowing what awaits the both of them back home. She hadn't spent too much time with Texas here, although the anger that had driven her back then is gone towards her. Always failing just shy of what she was aiming for...

And York? Even now that still brings a tightness to her heart. "It's more than we would have gotten otherwise, you know, back home?"

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Event Log: Memories Past

7.

cw: torture, imprisonment, reference to suicide, and the fight with tex/the meta, please!

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