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|: 012. Video/Spam : Blind Eyes Shine Bright :|

     [ Open Spam : Previously through Day One ]

     [The Barge goes dark: Slevin's awareness comes back. He is, of course, in excruciating pain, but that's normal. What isn't normal is that he can't remember anything about the past week, he doesn't know how he came to be here, he doesn't know anything. Cassel is changing him, it's the kind of pain he recognizes, and he's only saved from it by going dark himself. When next he wakes up, everything is even worse than it was before.

     He never gets that time back, but it's not as concerning to him as the new ease with which he can put distance between himself and his warden. He's good at this, despite the closed environment, and his desperation pushes him further into the lower levels than he really should be hiding. He should be afraid of whatever's in the dark, if there is anything, but he isn't. He knows where the monsters are.

He just doesn't know where the exit is.]

     [ Open Spam : May 10-13 ]

     [It's so strange, having allies that aren't yet beaten down but are neither naive enough not to know what's going on. It stirs something in Slevin, protected by his stubbornness, by sheer determination, but unable to sustain itself or grow. It isn't hope, it isn't anything like hope, but it might be what he's been waiting for. The end game. The perfect opportunity he's been waiting for. The Barge crashes and he absolutely makes his break for it, because it doesn't even matter what's on the planet. It's better than what's on the ship.

     But it's better than what's on the ship. He's nervous with all the open space and light at first, but there are people here, they can understand him, and they don't immediately kill him; that means he can make this work. If he can only remember how.

     He's a conman, though, or he was in another life. If he's careful about who and why, he shouldn't graduate. He won't have failed her.

     If he can help others, he might even be able to get back to her someday. He finds Mindy, and he sets to work.]

     [ Public : Video : Last Day of Port ]

     [The camera is focused on a long-range shot of what will turn out to be an oblivious Chris D'Amico, down on the planet with the Barge visible in the background. It's zoomed in as close as it can, and there's someone breathing from behind it, the sound of footsteps in the sand and rock, and then Slevin's voice from off frame - rough, but calm and clear.]

     Wardens, I know none of you aren't very good at taking the hint. But take the hint, take the loss, and go home.

     [There's a click, and a quiet whip of air, a telltale zing for those who are unfortunate enough to know what bullets sound like. On the camera, Chris jerks and falls over into a heap, The communicator keeps rolling to push the point home: Slevin got his hands on a sniper rifle, and he's free on the planet.]

     This is ours now. You can keep your ship. I don't miss. [This last sneered. Just a fact, not a challenge.]

      ...sh- [And then the scrambling of movement when the heap of black and red leather that is Chris looks like it begins to move just before the feed cuts out.]

     [OOC: Affected Mirror Inmate Slevin along with his tiny murder shadow Mindy will be fucking up any wardens they find on the ground, and he'll be setting up other sniper spots if you want to encounter him. Just let me know what you want and we'll see what we can do!]

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Protection. That, and getting all these other wardens out of commission. I know you've already started on that, but I can help, I swear I can. You know what I can do.

[Maybe, probably, the wrong thing to say. Slevin knows too well what Cassel can do, has felt it all firsthand and not long ago. He shouldn't keep going. He should shut up. But--]

It's the right thing to do. We gotta stop this, man.

[He barks a laugh, a harsh, cruel noise at the first word, but he lets Cassel finish. Protection.

The hatred in his eyes glitters when he thinks about what Cassel can do. Yes, he knows. His lip curls.]

Well, you're good for entertainment, anyway, so let's hear it. What's the big plan? What's my guarantee you're not trying to save your own hide from me, or any of the others gunning for you lot?

[He snorts.]

Oh, right. You're used to the version of me that has a fucking plan.

I don't have a plan, Slevin. I just have a vague idea and you here, and where I come from I trust you but you don't trust me. So nothing's new, right?

If I come down there, you're gonna shoot me, right?

[Guess where he starts making his way down to, right now. Bet you can't.]

I don't trust anyone.

[And he does have a good guess for where Cassel is headed, but that just makes this easier. He already said: they come down, he'll shoot them. Easy as that. All he has to do is keep his word.

All he has to do...]

That's right. I'll shoot you and you'll be dead before you hit the ground, you try to come down to this planet. You should absolutely test that theory.

I don't fall for puppy eyes anymore, Sharpe. If ever I did.

[He doesn't think Slevin ever did. Definitely not anytime in his memory. Which makes what he's about to do incredibly stupid, horrifically stupid, absurdly stupid, but . . .]

Okay.

Okay. I'll be right down.

[And he hangs up.]

[Here are the facts: Slevin is in bad shape. He hasn't eaten in days, he's barely stopped to drink, and he's been living in the airless passages in the black underbelly of the ship. The only time he's been dragged up to where oxygen is still plentiful, it's been at Chris's sadistic whim, to answer to his bloodthirsty lunacy. From the last couple days, he is sunburned and he is still sore from the markless brutality of the cattleprod Chris had been using on him when Mindy intervened, and he is exhausted.

He desperately wants to believe, between what Mindy has been saying and what Bucky has been saying, between Chronarch and Ben and Crichton, that there is a possibility of escape here. That the strangers are here - again, apparently - and they might be able to provide some manner of exit. He wants to believe that so badly that he is nauseous with it, and his hands shake on the barrel of his rifle when he spots Cassel at the bottom of the ramp from the Barge.

He remembers the cool, insane glaze of Cassel's eyes as he described the snake-like creature he wanted to tear Slevin apart into pieces and then reconstruct him into; he remembers the wide-eyed look of fear in his eyes from only moments ago. And he aligns the sights of his rifle on his wide and searching eyes, now, shaded from the sun on the planet that might be the inmates' best and only chance. Slevin breathes in, closes one eye, and forces his hands to steady.

He fires once. A plume of dust shoots up beside Cassel's foot, within an inch of his shoe. A warning shot. Only one person could be its source.]

[That look of fear isn't gone now, but there's shit piled on top of it. A determination and something cooler, too, something pragmatically impractical and unquenchably idiotic. Maybe still a little insane. He looks around for Slevin like he's searching for a lifeline, which isn't so far from the truth at all - Slevin will either save him, or Slevin will kill him.]

[When the shot comes, Cassel only jumps a little, then laughs out loud, bright and pleased.]

Don't waste ammo, dude! If you're gonna kill me, kill me!

[The laughter annoys Slevin, even when he realizes it's not ridicule but actual pleasure. This is not a laughing situation, nor is it one he likes in the least.

Realigning the gun on Cassel's chest, he breathes out and considers his options again, tries to make his brain work like it should. To follow the paths of logic, all of them, and find the catch here. Find what Cassel's plan is.

But he says he doesn't have a plan. He says he needs Slevin's help. And while Slevin has never been ashamed of what he chose to do with the majority of his life, though he knows himself for a killer, he has also never forgotten that he can choose not to be, and he did. He's forgotten the exact color of her hair, which brand of toothpaste she uses, but he will never forgot that he chose her over being a hired killer. He cannot, if he ever wants to see her again and still be able someone she could love.

Swearing under his breath, he drops the rifle from his shoulder, and he backs out of his makeshift blind. No need to give it away to anyone else watching, not when his strategy depends on him covering this particular stretch of land. Maybe Cassel is drawing him out for Bucky.

Maybe.

When next he appears, it's from beside the furthest outlying building of the city, and it is unsmiling and silently, standing and watching from beneath dirty and too-long hair with hard eyes set in hollow features and bruised cheeks.]

[Cassel does not expect Slevin to be smiling. In fact, what he's mostly expecting is a bullet, right between his eyes. He doesn't brace for it, but waits for it, breathing in and expecting death, breathing out and expecting it again.]

[What the rest of him is waiting for is exactly what happens, which is Slevin's sudden, very nearly miraculous appearance. Cassel smiles double for him, a bright grin radiating across the dusty landscape like a second sun.]

[He doesn't shout, at least; just smiles and smiles and walks, slow with light steps, to this man who remembers torture at his hands as recently as yesterday. Maybe to his death. He isn't sure. But what he knows is that his chances of dying are going down with every passing second he still breathes.]

[He doesn't trust that smile, not in the least; in fact he shrinks away from it a little. No one is ever that happy to see him, not that genuinely joyful; no, that's not true. Someone was, once. He can't remember who, but he remembers trusting them, loving them, whoever they were. More than anything. More than himself, more than his fear of this place, more than his fear of pain and of death.

He does not lift the rifle to his shoulder again, though he wants to; though he wants to put a bullet right in that smile, and the closer Cassel gets, the more that desire comes from a place of fear, of sickening, denied flight instead of the anger roiling off him in short, cathartic waves. Hatred, even, undermined and cracked through like barren earth where nothing can grow, and beneath that the unfettered panic of not knowing what to expect.

His fingers tighten on the barrel of the gun, and he steps back a little, timid in a way he would hate if he were capable of recognizing it. He makes up for it when he speaks, his voice sharp and slashing out like a knife, like a punch, though he doesn't move. Only glares, and glares, and doesn't smile; he doesn't remember who else looked at him like that, or when, or why. But he definitely remembers torture. He definitely remembers death. If only he could remember if the three all belonged to the same person.

(They might have. They might. He doesn't know.)]

What now, Sharpe?

[His smile now is almost sorrowful. He lets it be. He does not attempt to control it anymore, even though he should. Just lets himself soften into something that his other self never was, even in his most genuine moments.]

Now you have to decide. What you want to do and who you want to be.

Are you going to kill me, or not? Shit or get off the pot.

[If he dies, he thinks, at least he'll die surprised. At least he'll die smiling. That's something, right?]

[He stills at last, coming to a stop a few paces away. Something tenses up around his shoulders when he is backed away from and at the way Slevin looks at him, like a cornered animal. He sighs.]

C'mon, man. It's hot out here.

[He laughs, then, and it's a short, sharp sound that reveals more than he means to, not the least because he doesn't realize how much there is to reveal: how thin the veneer has become, more than threadbare and on to just barely even existent at all. There's nothing to back it up, but it would take someone with fresh eyes to know it.]

No one here gets to decide that. There's no choices here, not for us. There's only how bad it's going to be when your strength runs out.

[But this is more muscle memory, as much as the death grip his fingers have on the gun, which he raises for a moment back to his shoulder, sights down the barrel like he's changed his mind, like nearly point blank is a better bet than the distance this rifle was made to cover.

But this isn't how any of this goes, and Slevin is desperately lost within this array of suddenly new options. He's paranoid, of course, because everything he hasn't ever understood before has turned out to be a ploy. He has no friends, not with the kind of abuse Chris heaps on anyone that thinks fondly of him or that Slevin thinks fondly of in return, a pariah in a boat full of victims; no one helps him more than once when Chris and his pack of lunatic wardens goes hunting. He's paired. It brings his warden down on him in the end, and engulfs whoever is closest.

But he can't smell the deception in this. He doesn't know what that means, then, and he's been dealing with only the limited options the Barge has to offer him for so long that where once he knew how to adapt to anything, now he stares blankly at an unlooked for third option. A road untraveled and strange for that. One he does not know at all what to do with.

Breathing out, he does not pull the trigger, as he was once taught. Breathing in he does not pull the trigger, for which he was once reprimanded. Finally, arm trembling with the exertion of holding the weight of the rifle up, this junkyard dog of a man makes a low, half-growling, half-keening noise of frustration in his throat, and spins to walk back into the shade of the abandoned building's interior, ducking his head to get in under the door.]

[Slevin's frustration, his confusion, they frighten even Cassel. He sees in this man the muscle underneath the skin of the man he knows much better - or the man he would like to know better, anyway. Here is a wretched, affection-starved thing, a determined urchin, a violent criminal, a bad dog.]

[Cassel wants to take him in his arms and hold him tight, tell him all the bad things will go away. But they never will, and anyway, they don't speak the language of words. Not really. Not well.]

[He follows Slevin into the building, quiet as a mouse and staying just a few paces behind him.]

Thank you, [he says in the dingy quiet, though there's a hint of regret trembling in his chest, too. He can taste dust in his mouth, and swallows it down.]

[He taps Slevin on the shoulder, so careful, to get his attention.]

[There is clutter in the dusty, relative coolness of the building; shot through with rays of starkly bright sun from the landscape outside, framed out in doorways and windows, Slevin picks his way carefully through, comfortable moving in the dark and the forgotten, abandoned places like he wasn't standing out in the open and the sun. He is safest from his warden in places like this. He can breathe easier amongst the decay.

He's paused to check his rifle in a thin streak of dirty sunlight, ever wary of where Cassel is in relation to him, when the warden speaks and he shakes his head, mouth set in a grim line.]

Don't. A bullet would've been quick and clean. God knows what'll happen to you now.

[It isn't real regret in his voice, but a stinging, acidic kind of bitterness. He's just slid the magazine back in, the snap of metal on metal masking Cassel's light step so that he isn't quite aware that he's ended up within range. He certainly never expected him to touch him, anyway.

No, that's wrong: he did. He knew he would. The only surprise is that it's not skin on skin, that he feels the pressure through the stiff fabric of his t-shirt, and his muscles go panic-taut underneath that.

He swallows and turns, eyes flashing white in the darkness, his grip on the gun too tight to be useful at all.]

God doesn't know anything.

[He wonders if Chris would be upset to hear that. Once he might have been upset, too. When he was a little boy, he believed in God; God was the one whose job it was to protect his family, while they protected the Zacharovs. But his family never was protected, and in the end, it was other people who needed protecting from them.]

[None of this is really relevant, but it runs through his head anyway, one of those disconnected threads of illogic that pop up when bad things are happening. This is a bad thing - for Slevin, even if not for him. Slevin is afraid.]

[He lets his hand rest there for a few moments, quiet and still, looking at Slevin's wide animal eyes in the darkness. Then he leans forward and pulls him close, wrapping his arms around him in a tight hug. His hands never stray past cloth to bare skin. He wouldn't dare, and he doesn't have the right. Not after the evil things he's done.]

No.

Thank you.

[That was rather his point: God doesn't know anything. There is no plan, no rhyme or reason, no vengeful spirit or heavenly father. There is only whatever can be touched, whatever can bleed, gasp in breath, hurt and die. There are only those with power over others and those over whom power is held. Slevin will give up nothing like power over himself willingly, not even a smidgen, not even belief: if he fails, if he succeeds, if he hopes, if he despairs, it's his. It's on him. No one else.

This is very important. He can't remember why.

He doesn't know what's happening, now, but he doesn't dare resist, not with Cassel's hands so close to his skin; he doesn't even breathe, his muscles frozen where they are all that are wrapped around his bones, painfully tight but still his, still his for just a few moments longer, still...

He makes a small, torn sound, the remnants of words through his closed throat. He stands, confused and terrified, he doesn't remember what this is, doesn't know what he's supposed to do, if he's supposed to fight, if that will make it worse, he doesn't know, he doesn't know-

And then, abruptly, he does. He remembers that he knew what hugs were, once upon a time, there were even people that would have done so: he shudders violently, and realizes that even if he's wrong, even if it makes no sense, he's at the absolute end of his rope. He doesn't know what's at the bottom of the drop, but he knows he's right there, knows he's going to find out sooner rather than later, and that terrifies him as much as not knowing.

He makes the sound again, arms raising stiffly, and then all at once he's just hugging back.]

[It's not fair, what Cassel's doing. It's not a fair or kind thing, especially given their history, given what these hands have done to Slevin's form and soul in the months they've known each other in this place. This version of Slevin's memories of Cassel are all of gleeful cruelty, pain, and violence. There is nothing good associated with him - nothing at all that didn't get turned on its head and used against him.]

[The embrace is its own form of cruelty, but it's also, Cassel thinks, necessary. That's the trouble with being a moral person - it's never wholly possible. There's always something not quite right that you have to do to make things better later. He doesn't want to think like this, but he does.]

[He begins to doubt himself right before Slevin makes that sound, but once it's out, he knows it's only a matter of time. This is right. This is safe. And more than that, it feels good in his heart. So few things unequivocally do that he knows this must be what this moment in time requires, that if he were to do anything else, he would ruin everything.]

[He buries his face in Slevin's shoulder, his ribs creaking under the man's tight embrace, and sighs contentedly. Yes, this, this is what he almost got himself killed for. A moment in which they understand each other without saying a word. This is why touch is important. This is what he's learned.]

[This is part of what Slevin has to learn again. Love and support at the touch of fingertips.]

[He smells good, Cassel thinks. He smells like dirt and sweat and a little like family.]

[This is the most terrifying thing Slevin has done in a long, long time.

Somewhere, he knows without doubt that this will never happen again, that this Cassel does not belong here and the one that does will never do this, may even use it against him if he remembers it, if Slevin doesn't remember not to let him. That seems to have absolutely no bearing on what his body is deciding to do, however, because he can't turn loose. There's a wiry, distilled kind of strength about him here, but it's purely physical: behind his eyes he is brittle, flagging, swallowing his anger again and again for the strength to keep going. Going where, though, he doesn't know, and he doesn't want this, but he does, he needs this, he doesn't know why and that distresses him as much as the touch itself.

There is no love here, no support, not for him, not at the tips of fingers or the end of arms, nothing and no one, forever and ever amen. But he misses this so. Damn. Much.

Cassel buries his face in Slevin's shoulder; Slevin lifts his chin and drops it atop Cassel's head, buries his face there instead, because if he has to need this, if he has to be this stupid, he doesn't want to see. And he doesn't want anyone to see that he's crying.]

[Cassel is crying, too, but he doesn't realize it until he feels teardrops falling on the top of his head. Even then, it takes him a while to parse how, exactly, and why - what is the purpose of this sadness, where did it come from? But in the end, it's not buried so deeply.]

[He has always wanted to be loved. Wanted to wrench love from the jaws of uselessness. Here, now, in this place, on this ship, there's so little about him that's useful. He's not that strong or fast or clever, comparatively; he isn't even usefully cruel, not anymore. The version of Chris that is here doesn't want any part of him anymore, and he can't trust anyone else. He can't. Not even Slevin, really.]

[But Slevin can love him in this small way, right here and right now, because there's no one else to love either of them now. Slevin can be what Cassel has always so desperately wanted and never got, because Philip had bigger plans, because Philip hated him, because Philip died. Because Philip always left him behind, for one reason or another.]

[It isn't fair to Slevin, but what Cassel feels is rarely fair to anyone. So he cries into Slevin's shoulder in the dark, dingy building with desert all around them, and he is wildly, wickedly unfair, but he's with family, even if only in the privacy of his own head.]

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|: 012. Video/Spam : Blind Eyes Shine Bright :|

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