Edwin Seabeck is a killer in potentia (elusive_control) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2012-11-25 08:03:00 |
|
|||
Edwin was trying to make the most responsible decisions while he was still conscious to do so. He was not a drinker for the simple fact that the last thing anyone needed for him to have was poor impulse control. How many years of his life had he spent trying to subtly convince the outside world that he wasn’t dangerous, wasn’t a threat? Some had been waiting to obliterate everything in sight. Some had been waiting for him to break into some furious rage. All had been waiting for the bonds they thought barely held him together to snap. But the truth was, or at least, truth had been -- well, did it matter anymore? What was truth? Edwin looked at the night sky, glasses discarded beside him, unthinkingly drinking in the sunlight reflected off the moon. The whole universe felt like it belonged to him. Maybe it did. Every star in the sky with a purpose. Every student in the school with a purpose. Glittering independently in the dark but dancing around each other in a web of gravity. Yes, it was a good thing he stopped at the 2. He could see the appeal, but he wasn’t sure how much he liked feeling like this. Whereas Edwin had just come out of pub night, Nawal was on her way in. It was late, but the decision to come down had taken far too much internal debate, and she'd put off the process by stopping to brush her hair. That took longer than expected, given how infrequently she had done it in the past few weeks. Walking down the dormitory stairs with her head held high, she almost felt like she could be the president again. IVI was real, there was a cease-fire in Gaza, and she would soon see her sister again for the first time in years. Why shouldn't she enjoy a drink? The doubts settled in before the warehouse was even in sight. None of those things were really certain. Looking at a news headline earlier in the week, she had felt a rage bubbling inside of her, and she dropped the paper before she could accidentally burn herself on it. Had that rage always been there? She couldn't tell. Nawal remembered the criticism Allegra had faced only a week before, but only vaguely -- she avoided the school network these days. Should she have taken that to be some sort of warning? Still, she stayed the course. Drawing closer to the warehouse, she saw a long, familiar figure outside. Though the light of the not-quite-full moon reflected on his face, his eyes were dark. He looked more unreal than he had in the asylum (Nawal still couldn't bring herself to think of it as "in the nightmare"). Nawal glanced over at the warehouse, where she could hear the chattering of dozens of drunken Vols wafting out of the doors, and then to Edwin, who was silent. She decided to approach him. On impulse, she greeted him in French. "Salut, ça va?" After those long weeks, she was in the class again, and that seemed real enough. She couldn't have taught herself a new language in a delusion. That was curious. He was pretty sure that was French. Who would speak French to him? Audra? Not likely - she rarely spoke at all these days. He looked behind him slightly and saw that it was Nawal. “Oh. Hello. Are you French now?” he asked curiously. Edwin set his head right and looked back up to the stars. It really was a nice evening - very clear. Very unlike his head. A starkly illuminated contrast. Yes, he should write that down some time. If at the very least reality did prove real, he was going to be able to write a hell of a book. Kafka, eat your heart out. "Non." She smiled, ever so slightly, in the dark. "I just thought I would use it, as a reminder that I learned something here." Then again, if this was a shared delusion, one of the eight participants was French, and Edwin had taken classes before. Perhaps she had even picked up some in the past without realizing it, from Syrian music or Lebanese television. She couldn't see the line of Edwin's gaze, but it was clear enough that he was looking at the sky. The moon was bright, more than a half-circle but not quite round. Nawal identified with it, in a strange way. It was trying, and so was she. The difference was, the moon was sure to be full eventually, soon, and she didn't know when her doubts would leave. "La lune et les étoiles," she said. Her French accent wasn't very good. "They are quieter than our drunken friends?" “Haven’t gone quite mad enough to start overhearing their conversations,” he replied, smiling to himself in a dazed sort of way. He wondered if the moon could feel the pull of the objects around it. That was the problem, he thought, with alcohol: it made you feel detached from things. From your actions, from your thoughts. Like he needed more of that untethered feeling. “Mainly if anything goes wrong, I’m fairly sure I can’t shoot them out of the sky. Although... that would be a sight.” He held up his hand in the shape of a gun to the sky and pointed it at a dot he could see. “Pew. Pew, pew,” he said, taking out another two. They, of course, remained just where they were at. “I told someone once - maybe Harry, maybe Davi - that I thought it was all a very good facsimile of the night sky, but probably computer generated. That this was just a dome above us, cast to look like the proper constellations. I think I knew then, maybe,” he remarked, thoughtful at the end. If anything went wrong with the stars, they were already balls of fiery, combusting gas, and there wouldn't be much Nawal could do either. She nodded, even though Edwin wasn't looking at her. "When we all met at the lake on Monday-" (she didn't have to specify who "we" were) "- I thought the same thing. It looked natural, but even if it was real, that land should have been barren like the rest of this." She gestured at the red dirt beneath their feet, at the foundations of all the buildings. "So even reality is fake," she said, giving voice to the conclusion that had been lingering at the back of her mind since she had first awoken from the nightmare. "If this were a delusion, I don't know that my mind would be subtle enough to include the artifice. The force field, the landscaping. I don't know." “If your mind is producing the illusion, it’s only as subtle as it needs to be. I wonder sometimes how much of this was here before,” he mused aloud, “and how much of this I’ve shaded in since because I’ve paid more attention. You know. If the sky only goes as far as I can see.” Edwin looked over at Nawal, confusion chasing across her face in a now-familiar way. “Why don’t you sit down?” He offered the spot next to him. "The sky has always gone that far," Nawal observed, sitting down in the proffered spot. She couldn't help but glance back at the warehouse. Still lit, still loud. A part of her felt like sitting down here was giving in. Sitting and picking apart her delusions was easy. She had been doing it, with herself and others, nonstop for what felt like eons, and she had come here with the intent of facing others. "I'm not going to stay for long." Saying so out loud held her to it. "I haven't had a drink yet, and I could use one." Edwin couldn’t help but smile at that statement. “I didn’t think you were of the drinking sort,” he chuckled and maybe that was one of the things that had been filled in by noticing now. Or had been filled in by his own desire to try. It made sense, he thought: counteracting the constant sense of flux with a bit more flux - like wave interference. Or it had when he’d started. He still didn’t think he altogether enjoyed the feeling. “What are you going to have?” "I don't know," she said again. Those words had become a too-constant refrain to her life. "You're right, I'm really not much of the drinking sort. I'd never really had the opportunity before this, whether I was in a prison or an asylum, but I don't know, after everything, maybe it's time." She sighed, thinking about the past week. Despite the care package that could only be from one of them, she discarded her team's attempts to connect with her, unless called by Isla, and even most of Harlow's. She was barely present for academics and trainings and spent most of her free time in her room, listening to sad Lebanese music, trying to rationalize and explain everything she knew, sometimes reading the news with her hand curled around a tiny bag of beans that she could choke instead of accidentally activating her powers (it mostly worked -- she would need to sand off her desk again and get a new copy of Vengeance of the Fathers). When she'd slept, the lighthouse featured in her dreams only once, in that haphazard, hazy way that she recognized as a dream upon waking. She couldn't yet discard her muddled memories, and she still felt that anger burning deep within her, but it was becoming easier to accept the present as real. "Even if this is just a delusion, we aren't waking up," she observed. "Perhaps it is better just to live it, even if it might not be real, just in case it is." Edwin was starting to think much the same. He’d thought - no, he knew - that of anyone, he’d done the most soul-searching, the most research, the most to try to try and find some sort of instruction on how to either break from this unreality or prove to himself that it was real. He’d twisted himself in philosophical knots for this cause... for what? If all of his wanderings were true, then he’d be returning to a life where his whole life was different, HE was different. One where there was no Edwin Seabeck, a man that only existed as a germination of this shadow-person in this other, terrible life. And who was he if he wasn’t himself? He still didn’t have the answer to that. “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened,” Edwin quoted with a faint smile. “It’s from a book I used to read endlessly. Still do when I’m in a certain way. I do feel quite like the main character of it, just being shuttled around; everyone seems to be perfectly aware of how the universe works and I’m just bobbing along, trying to sort out just enough to not fall behind.” That was all more to himself than it was to Nawal. He frowned and turned his head to look over at her. “I think I could live with this being a delusion if I just didn’t feel so disconnected from it. None of my interactions feel... “ Edwin started, but trailed off without a finish. He couldn’t put it into words. He didn’t want to. “You should go get your drink,” he finally concluded, corners of his mouth turning up into a slightly encouraging smile. Nawal generally wasn't an overly physical person, and, as far as she was aware, neither was Edwin, but she reached over and rubbed his shoulder, pulling her fingers away slowly as she stood. She only had a few months' experience with counseling, but she could already imagine what her counselor might say here, that Edwin felt disconnected because he wasn't trying to connect. She'd already heard a similar line in her own sessions, and she knew it wasn't anything her friend would have wanted to hear. "If I ever do figure out the secrets of the universe, you will be the first person I tell," she said, even as she already began to drift in the direction of the warehouse. "Provided we both exist at that point." Only after the words escaped her lips did she realize her poor choice. He couldn’t help but guffaw a little at the thought. “Yes. If we both do,” he said to himself, unsure of how long that would be the case. |