ph_logs | [OPEN] You always dreamed that there'd more to life than all the lies

[OPEN] You always dreamed that there'd more to life than all the lies

Who: CT (

liesdontfindyou) & you!
What: Catch-All for CT; work, investigation, and just hanging out
When: July
Where: Various places, in headers
Warnings: Cult discussion, death discussion, etc.

1. A place you'd find where you weren't all alone [around town, O&I]

CT is back to work immediately after her return to life. To sit idle would only invite her to dwell on it and that's not something she wants to do at all. Not that routine patrol shifts do much to occupy her mind, but just the act of working helps her to focus her mind on things besides cults and sacrifices and experiences thereof.

She's relatively easy to find around town whilst out on patrol, whether because you just want a chat or because you're having some kind of issue that she might be able to help with.

Most days, after she's done with work, she stops by the O&I for a drink and a meal that she doesn't have to make herself. That and maybe the bustle of real living people is good for her in controlled doses. She's generally sitting alone, with plenty of space to join her if asked, or may occasionally have to ask if a seat is free herself.

2. But now you look around at what you've learned and face the truth [library, enforcers office, other]

When she's not working on actual assigned duties, CT's still working on her own investigative angles. Following some initial discussions with other attendees of the cult gathering, she has multiple little bits and pieces she plans to follow-up on with or without help. These include: verifying the reported deaths of each cult member via official records at the office; cross referencing missing persons reports to see if it's possible to find out who they replaced in the past; searching through old newspapers and photos and the like among library records to narrow down the year it took place; and so on.

Those who attended the cult gathering may find themselves invited or sought out for further discussion or to help her with what she's doing. Other Enforcers may also find her seeking them out for discussion or to get properly acquainted for the sake of future endeavours.

3. That you may never find a home [northwest hollow residental]

Even in CT's downtime, it's hard to say she's relaxing. Pieces of her old routine adapt well enough to the town and that old routine was built around keeping herself as busy as possible during long days travelling or holed up in bases. So, for example, she can be found going on a daily jog to keep herself fit, weaving through the streets of Northwest Hollow on a route she figured out for herself.

Around her home at 517 Meadowlark Lane, she can also be heard or seen practising knife throwing with a makeshift target attached to a tree in her yard. Her gate is cracked open, because she prefers the easy exit and is very aware of her surroundings—anyone who peeks in will soon find her looking back at them, holding a throwing knife between her fingers. "You can watch. Promise I'm only aiming at the tree."

Sometimes she's even sat on the porch, appreciating once again living under real sunlight whilst she reads through a book checked out from the library—all, invariably, some kind of non-fiction about the town or world as a whole. Research.

4. Wildcard

Hit me or find me in the discord to plot. Happy to write custom starters and the like.

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He nods, grateful that she understands. On the list of regrets he carries, losing his father's ring ranks lower than some, but it still hurts. For every big sacrifice people like them make, there are one hundred small ones they never get the time to really mourn.

Now, a few years ago, hearing a deflection like that would have been easy for him to gloss over. But he's met a lot of new people since then. Learned a lot. One of his former best friends, Klaus, comes to mind. So, he feels compelled to ask, "Just to set the record straight? If you don't want me calling you a lady all you gotta do is say so." CT can take that as an invitation to explain or not, but he's got his listening ears open.

And the more he hears about the state of her home through childhood, the more his belly clenches tight. "I can't even pretend to imagine the hell that must have been growing up." He gestures openly with his hand for her to continue.

That catches her by (pleasant) surprise. She wouldn't have made so much as the deflective overture if she didn't think Crichton was decent, but it really is hard to place people on the timeline of tolerance when it's such distant history. "...I generally prefer avoiding outright gendered nouns, yeah."

That's the short version. He might get the longer version later.

"I'd say it screwed up an entire generation of humanity." More than one, if you get technical about it. Twenty-five years is a long time. "When you're facing down extinction, people get... desperate. It's like I said, I don't think there's a single branch of the military that's not doing something unethical. Everyone is trying to find the magic bullet that'll end this war. The most successful has been the Spartans. They're physiological enhanced supersoldiers wearing power armour as dense as a tank. Highly effective, but expensive. The experimental program that picked me up, Project Freelancer, was something of... a cheaper alternative. Lighter power armour, unique technological enhancements, and focused on partnering agents with an AI.

"In hindsight, I really should've known. They only recruited agents who they could offer an out of a criminal conviction. Nothing too heinous. One guy knocked out his CO so he could take over and prevent a team wipe. I leaked documents on a UNSC supplier's shoddy equipment. Stuff like that. But they wanted us loyal, they wanted us to think they owed us everything because if we quit? We'd be right back where we started. In jail or worse. And it worked. Even I ignored the signs for a long time, but... it all just kept adding up. Psychological experiments. Agents dying off in suspicious circumstances. Our targets stopped making sense. I did some digging and our Director was experimenting on the AI he'd been given. Torturing it. Making it split into pieces."

She sounds disgusted by it, she does. What he was doing to that AI was horrific. What he was doing to his agents was hardly better. But...

"Doing that? Damaging a military AI and sending it out into the field where the Covenant could attack at any time and get their hands on it, on all its information about the Core worlds? About Earth? He was practically inviting our extinction."

"Had a friend who felt similar and went by 'they' but Klaus was pretty vocal about it. When I'm talkin' about ya to others, what should I use?" He's not here to accidentally out CT to anyone. As far as he's concerned, that's the only question he really needs answered.

"Yeah, that sounds about right. Generations have been screwed up by less." And Crichton doesn't even know the half of it. The America he left was in peace times.

He shakes his head somberly, "It always comes to super soldiers. I've seen that before, too. Former love of my life used to be one. She's who you remind me of." But Aeryn was born and raised into it. She never got a choice. Freedom for her was escaping that life, not joining it.

When CT gets to that part about the AI, though, he finds his feelings on the whole situation... complicated. Boy is he glad Harvey isn't here to laugh at him about it. Rest in piss.

"That's... one hell of a pet project he had. I'd ask what the hell he was thinking but I think that might be giving a mad scientists too much credit."

"With people we both already know, 'she' is still fine—though 'they' wouldn't be wrong either. But if you're talking to anyone I probably don't know... then I generally prefer just 'they'. It creates less assumptions, if that makes sense."

If she meets those people later, then they don't come in assuming woman (uncomplicated). Broadly speaking.

'Love of his life' gets filed away into that mental dossier alongside the person and comparison in and of themselves, though she makes a point of trying not to assign much weight to the latter as she does so.

"He was thinking a lot of egotistical things. That he knew better than the protocols keeping us safe. That if the AI was based on his own mind then it didn't actually count as torturing another thinking being. That this new process he'd figured out could and had brought his wife back from the dead, if he did it just right." She sighs. "He was playing god. With the AI, with his agents... once I saw the worst of it I knew I couldn't just sit back and let it happen. I couldn't tell anyone on my team because... well, most of them wouldn't have believed me, and those who might've would have been split between telling me to stop or getting themselves hurt. So I worked alone except for contact with members of another program that the Director had been stealing from."

"Sure thing. I can do that." He doesn't fully understand it all yet, but he doesn't need to completely get it to not be an ass either.

"Damn...dude skipped right over several lines of ethics in there didn't he?" Crichton sympathizes with the pain of losing a wife but that's not a good enough excuse for any of this. (Wow, a part of him says, sarcastic to the end, this is going to be really awkward when he starts telling his side and Harvey comes up.)

"How long were you going it mostly alone knowing what you knew?"

"Couple years, give or take. It's hard to pin down the exact moment the switch flipped. I'd always noticed things the others didn't, but..." it wasn't until certain things fell into place that she dived in without reservation.

"About eight months of that was the time on the run—again, give or take. We never stayed anywhere longer than two weeks and eventually my contact tried to... consolidate our resources in one place, ahead of actually passing my intel onto someone who could do something with it. That's when the program caught up to us. And... now I'm here."

"Damn, that's a long time. Must have been hell for you." He's impressed. He's not sure he could have made it alone that long without cracking in half like a coconut, all the milk and meat sloshing out...

It's a shame she got caught in the end, anyway. "I'm sorry it went down like that. But, hey, if we manage to figure out what's going on here, you'll have a second shot at it. There's always hope. That's what keeps me going."

It's probably a bad sign that she doesn't even seem to be able to acknowledge aloud that it was, in fact, hell, instead breezing by that detail.

"Yeah, once this is all said and done... I can go back, shake Needles for being an idiot, and then actually finish what I started." Maybe. Needles was still being so cagey about his boss and... no, she's not going to think about that, right now. "Alright, well... that's me. Your turn."

He noticed that dodge, don't think he didn't. Thing is, if he presses on her now, she'll be within her rights to press on him when he gets done with his side and, well, there might be some things he's not ready to acknowledge yet, either. Reciprocity and all that.

"All right. Hang on tight, this is one heck of a story. I'll try and keep it short." Try being the operative word.

"I worked for an international space organization called IASA. I was the project commander for the Farscape-One test flight. I designed that module myself and helped build it. The idea was that I'd go up in a shuttle, take the module out on her maiden voyage, and use it to prove a theory of propulsion I wrote. I theorized that I could use the gravitational pull of a planet to accelerate without fuel if I broke away from that orbit at just the right angle. I was right, by the way. I'll get to that. My theory was going to be the next step toward deep space exploration. Funny, that's what all the newspapers were saying before the launch. They were right, they just didn't know how much."

Dammit, he said he'd keep this short. "Anyhow, I went up. I was in the middle of that test flight when, BAM, wormhole opened up and swallowed me down. I'm damn lucky I survived the ride. When I came out the other side there were spaceships in front of me. It looked like a battle, something out of the movies. Before I had any time to get my bearings, I collided with one of the single-flyers. It ricocheted into a passing asteroid. I didn't mean for it to happen but... the pilot died on impact. That's when things really went wrong..."

CT winces sympathetically. She's never seen a real space battle in-person, but the occasional vid hits the newsfeeds and being thrown into one without preparation is a nightmare scenario. "When you said you had a messy first contact... well, unintentionally causing the death of one of their pilots is certainly up there, yeah. I'm assuming they didn't take kindly to the intrusion."

"Oh hoho you have no idea." Oh no, the manic grin is back. "It wasn't just any soldier I collided with. That poor son of a bitch was the one and only brother of Captain Crais, the man in charge of half of that battle. He swore vengeance on me and he did everything including abandoning his own orders to chase me and the crew I hooked up with across all of Kingdom Come. He went insane over trying to catch me. But let me back up a minute." Because, of course, there's more.

"I call it a battle but it was actually a prison escape. My crew were those prisoners. They were being transported on an enslaved sentient Leviathan ship named Moya. She grabbed me in her tractor beam and pulled me onboard. That was my first face-to-face with other alien life forms. They injected me with translator microbes so I could speak their language but most of what they had to say was 'help us escape or perish.' So I did. Moya was dead in the water and she couldn't outrun that gunship after so I used the slingshot maneuver I'd gone up in space to test and it worked. We got out of there and I became one of the escaped convicts on the run."

"They really must have been desperate. No offence, but that seems like it would've felt like a hail mary of insane proportions." A manoeuvrer that had only ever been performed once, in an entirely different ship... it's lucky it worked out, for all of them.

"Crais's carrier was charging the laser cannons so it was do or die. None of them had a better idea. It's a good thing I'd done the math in my head so many times that morning I could calculate it in my sleep or, in this case.... in sharpie on the floor of the bridge." Yes. It really was that desperate.

"I didn't even know how to pilot Moya yet. I had to let Aeryn do the guidance while I directed. Believe me, I was crapping myself the whole time." Not literally, but pretty damn close.

"I uh... may have neglected to mention in the heat of the moment that the theory was still, until that moment, untested." But they lived so it was fine!

"You didn't even—" CT makes a noise that starts as a groan and turns into a laugh, "Crichton. Oh, my god. I can't decide if you're the unluckiest or the luckiest person in the world in this story."

"I ask myself that question every damn day. I've lived through things I had no right surviving. I mean, right now all I've told you about is the first hour or so." Yeah, it all happened that fast.

"Crais chased me for the better part of a year. We had some close calls but always managed to give him the slip. Then Aeryn got wounded. Now, Aeryn was part of Crais's squadron, but she got stranded on Moya during our escape attempts. Because she'd spent time with me and had the nerve to try and suggest to Crais that I wasn't some cold-blooded killer, she ended up being declared 'irreversibly contaminated.' They were going to kill her, just for sticking up for me. So she ran with us. But when she got injured, we realized we couldn't save her without a compatible tissue donor from her own race, the Peacekeepers. Don't let the name fool ya, they were anything but peaceful."

He shakes his head and works to reorder his thoughts. Damn, this never gets easier to explain. "We found a secret Gammak base with Peacekeepers on it. Since humans look identical to Peacekeepers outwardly, I decided to go under cover as one to get on the base and find her a compatible sample. Just my luck, Nosferatu's uglier cousin, Scorpius, happened to be the guy in charge. He saw through my disguise and put me in his mind-reading torture chair." He's not being hyperbolic, that's actually what it was.

"He gave me enough spins in that chair to get it out of me that I'm the guy Crais has been chasing. So he called his dog home. Bastard..."

"Mm, yeah. In my experience the people that go around calling themselves something like 'peacekeepers' are almost always exactly the opposite." They usually have a very twisted idea of what peace means, at the very least.

It's always a little strange for her to think of worlds where some aliens actually do look like humans, like in all the old movies. There's not a single Covenant species that looks human enough for that trick to ever work for the UNSC.

She can see something going wrong with the plan even before says it, and she's quickly torn between a laugh at the description of Scorpius and a more concerned sound at the phrase mind-reading torture chair. "Well that's horrible."

"Bingo," he says, shooting her a finger-gun.

"Oh, that was just the tip of the iceberg. We got deeper to go yet. See, Scorpius thought I was a spy sent to steal his research for what he was studying on the base. Obviously, he didn't believe me when I said I didn't know what they were doing on that damn rock in the first place and I didn't care. Then, when he put me in his chair, he found something even I didn't know was there."

He takes a moment in what seems like a pause for dramatic emphasis but is actually him gathering his strength to explain this next part.

"A race of aliens I'd encountered months before left a little present in my head for me without telling me about it. The Ancients knew how to traverse through wormholes. I tried to get them to tell me how but they said it was too dangerous for anyone to know. They told me that and then the bastards slipped it into my brain anyway. They put it under the equivalent of a mental firewall so I'd only ever be able to access it unconsciously. Wormhole technology, the ability not just to travel through them, but to sense them and maybe even make one if I got far enough. They gifted me that hoping it might help lead me home." In theory, was nice of them, but in actuality it cursed the rest of his life.

"But wouldn't you know it? The thing Scorpy was studying on his gammak base that whole time, the secret he was obsessed with cracking, it was wormholes. He was looking for a way to turn them into a weapon. And here I was, like an answer to his devil prayers. Crais wasn't my problem anymore after that. The moment this came out, I became Scorpius's new pet science project."

"Shit."

That's all she has for a solid few seconds, processing the information. The closest analogue to such dangerous information she has is, well, the coordinates to Earth and every other colony that the Cole Protocol was supposed to prevent. The very reason she turned on the Director directly in the first place. It's a good enough comparison for her to feel the weight of the risk.

"That sounds a lot worse than just being on the run."

"Yeah, that about sums it up." Which is both how he feels and also feels like such an incredible understatement.

"I managed to escape the base. An old friend came through for me when I least expected. She... paid the ultimate price for it, too. Scorpius shot her. Her name was Gilena and I don't think she knew what was at stake besides saving me, but she deserves to never be forgotten. I couldn't have saved Aeryn or myself without her help." After all this time, the bitter grief and guilt of her death is still as acrid on his tongue as ever.

"We blew that base to smithereens on our way out. But Scorpius is the closest thing to a cockroach in humanoid form there ever was. He got out, and he kept following me. Kept catching me, too, but I always managed to give him the slip. Until he changed his tactics. Aeryn got heat-sick again, and this time none of us had any way to help her. But he did."

Crichton leans forward and scrubs his face with both hands. "We let him on the ship. I became frelling roommates with the guy. Not even my own cabin was safe anymore. He was breathing down my damn neck night and day asking for wormholes over and over and over. I tried to tell him."

He looks back up at CT again and there's something painfully desperate in his eyes, "Wormholes aren't weapons. They're an apocalypse. I couldn't let him crack me. I had to do whatever it took to keep him out of my head."

There's an empathetic wince without elaboration, when he's talking about Gilena. She knows the odd grief and guilt of someone dying on your behalf, though what's always felt the worst about getting Mass killed is how they didn't even get on. She turned to zir out of a desperation for help from someone aboard and ze had the right skillset, but they'd always clashed. Ze helped not because ze trusted CT, but because ze knew it was the right thing to do. And then ze died, and CT used zir death as a smokescreen to stop herself being caught too.

She tries to shake the memory off and focus on the rest of what Crichton's saying, almost but not quite reaching out to set a hand on his shoulder. "Hey. I get it. You have to do what you have to do in these situations, even when it feels like hell the whole time—god only knows I know that well enough."

The subtle way he shifts closer, gravitating to her near-touch, says what he can't bring himself to. He needs and wants the support.

"In my case, it was drugs," he admits. It never stops hurting to have to say it, but the more people he trusts with this, the more people there will be to keep him in line if he ever trips off the path.

"Something called Lakah, made from bug guts. Can't get it here, and I wouldn't want it even if I could. It numbed me to everything, good and the bad. I gave it up a year and some change ago. I don't even touch beer now."

Ah. That explains what he said before about not drinking. CT bites the inside of her cheek, but ultimately her hand settles on his shoulder and squeezes.

"...if you weren't feeling anything, he couldn't use anything you felt against you."

It should, perhaps, be concerning that she finds herself thinking that she would have been tempted to take advantage of the stuff had she had such a thing on hand during her time at the program. Even for all her best efforts, there was many a late night where her wall broke down more than she'd have liked.

"Well, I'm glad you managed to give it up."

"That was the idea," he answers with a wan smile.

In his defense, it did work as intended. Not that he'd recommend it to anyone.

"Thank you. It's one of the things I've done, recently, that I can be proud of. For the record, if you see me reaching for something I shouldn't, I give you permission to slap it out of my hand."

CT gives a little play-salute. "Permission noted. Luckily for you I've got good reflexes."

There will be no hesitation, should the need arise.

"Your life sounds like the definition of being unable to catch a break."

He doesn't say anything in response to the salute, but the gratitude in his eyes is unmistakable. She's a real one.

"Hah. Tell me about it. After that midnight party, I'm thinking that ain't about to change. We'll take it as it comes, won't we?"

yes!

liesdontfindyou - 2024-09-16 21:56 (UTC) - Expand

End~

ss_buttcrack - 2024-09-20 21:35 (UTC) - Expand

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[OPEN] You always dreamed that there'd more to life than all the lies

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cw: torture

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cw: drug addiction

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good place to start wrapping?

yes!

End~