Conner Lewis | Total Recall | Team Flamingo (totalrecall) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2013-01-13 23:10:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | ! log, ! plot: kidnapping, conner lewis, hunter mackenna |
WHO: Conner Lewis & Hunter MacKenna
WHAT: Taking a break during admin duties on day two of the kidnapping plot.
WHEN: BACKDATED to 27th December, 2012.
WHERE: American Safehouse
WARNINGS: Language
STATUS: Complete
HUNTER: Though he'd agreed to stay back -- go under the knife for the chip, but only so he could remain in the safehouse doing administrative duties and screening the kidnappers apprehended before their interrogations -- Hunter was far from happy with that mandate. Everyone was telling him that he would be better off in front of a computer, and he couldn't deny that it was true, certainly. He was at his most capable and most useful when he was manipulating lines of code, not in a physical fight. There were small benefits to his volunteering, too, that were undeniable. He was among the first to know that the GPS tracking chips were working, though he wasn't allowed to spread that information to anyone he knew on the rescue ops. He was given oversight and access to some of the IVF's defense programs, and he tried to learn as much as he could about them for the sake of making them work as well as committing them to memory for his own use later on. Between hacking into security feeds, writing programs to collate footage of each of the kidnappings for whatever information they could scrap together about the operatives, hunting for blueprints of the locations and wireless signals from the area and everything, anything that could possibly be of use -- Hunter should have had his hands full. But there were moments between projects when he was staring at the numbers blurring on his screen and he was overwhelmed. It felt like a hopeless waste at best. All he could think about was what was going on outside the room where the administrative volunteers were working. Outside of the safehouse. Vic. Daisy. Elsa. Carter. Mason. Lottie, somehow. More than a few of his teammates, both on the rescue team and taken by the kidnappers. People who had been with him in the asylum. It made him queasy, made his chest tight with a bubble of anxiety that pressed against his heart and his lungs, made him chew at his lower lip until it bled again and again. He didn't know what was happening to them. If they died, would he be the first to know at the base, seeing their tracker go offline? What would that feel like? Would it torment him as much as the goddamn waiting? In one of those moments, having finished forwarding a new folder of data to someone else in the room for their review, Hunter sank down low in his chair and pressed his shaking hands against his face. He needed sleep or coffee. CONNER: It was strange to think that only a few months ago Conner had argued against being chipped like an animal for IVF to track and now he had his very own piece of metal surgically implanted in his body. There was something to be said for an external stimuli, especially when it involved his classmates, he teammates and his friends getting kidnapped. Something that he had honestly believed would never happen until he received the alert on his phone and barricaded himself into a small room in his parent's Brownstone. Before then it had been a possibility, but like so many other things that were possible (winning the lottery, getting struck by lightning and somehow magically being free of IVI) he didn't think it would actually happen. Not to them. But it did, and at the revelation that Daisy was one of the ones taken, Conner changed his mind and got chipped in order to volunteer. He had wanted to run off into the field to rescue his friends and teammates, and had tried to argue that he could be useful if given a chance but he was refused. His anger had calmed once the work started, looking through hours of awkwardly pieced together security footage, going over and over things that were handed to him in the hopes that his memory would connect something together. That maybe there was something similar in each of the kidnappings, something that the IVF and the rescue teams could use. Conner had found the whole thing calming, that being focused on the details and trying to find something in them, a pattern, a scrap of information, a familiar vehicle, or anything was a distraction from his worry and his anger. The breaks were the hardest part, where his mind could work a thousand miles a second and bring up memories of Daisy's smile, Astrid's laugh and Damien's complete inability to look after a plant. They would've haunted him if he let them. So he refused to indulge them for longer than a brief moment, and instead he looked for company. Conner grabbed a couple of coffees before going in search of a familiar face, and it didn't take him long before he found one. "Here, you look like you need it." Conner put the cup down next to Hunter and leaned against the desk. He had the feeling that wherever Daisy was, she'd want someone to look out for him. "How's it going?" HUNTER: Pulling his hands away from his eyes, he blinked up at the person who had interrupted his moment of anxiety. He wasn't sure if he was grateful or annoyed -- just unsettled at having someone invading his space, mostly. Conner had been on his team since the beginning, and he was definitely one of the Flamingos who Hunter found most tolerable, but as he'd told Daisy more than once, he'd never wanted to make an effort to get to know the other people on his team. Just because they were thrown together arbitrarily at IVI didn't mean that he wanted to be their friends, or that he owed them any kind of loyalty. Hunter had never been a very good team player. If he was going to work with others, he wanted the luxury of being able to choose who he was relying on, handpick them so that he knew he was putting his plans in the care of the best and most capable. And Flamingo was far from whom he considered the best and most capable at IVI. Most of them wore at his nerves. Conner, however, did not. Conner was alright. Conner wasn't stupid. And working firmly in his favor was the fact that Conner was on the other end of many of his video streams, analyzing what he collected. His decision about how he wanted to respond took a few moments to register while those thoughts trickled molasses-like through his head. He barely even realized what Conner was talking about until his eyes tracked down to the desk and he saw the mug there, around the same time that the alluring smell of hot coffee reached his nose -- picking it up with both hands so as not to spill thanks to his limited reserves of strength, he tested a sip and nodded his approval. "Thanks," he muttered, then looked up at his teammate for a moment before he stared at the screens again. "It's...going. Not fast enough. Military-grade processors are great, but I could use about three more of these and I'd get a lot more done." Hunter laughed a little, tiredly. "Dais just started using her power hands-free over break...too fucking bad she can't re-task a satellite and give us a ping, huh?" CONNER: "She'll just have to work on that when we get her back." Conner said. He was sure that they would find her, that somehow between all of them, all of their skills and powers they would be able to track down their friends and bring them home safely. To consider the possibility, to have the thought enter his mind and be remembered forever was something that Conner would not allow to happen. He couldn't let himself get swept away by despair and pessimism or it would never leave, and would cling to him and never leave. While Conner couldn't force himself be upbeat or cheerful - and honestly, he wasn't really either of those things on a daily basis - he wouldn't entertain the idea that his friends would not come back. "And let me guess, they just don't have enough resources to go around?" Conner asked, bitterness crept into his voice and he sipped his coffee and hoped the equally bitter liquid would wash it away. "Fucking typical." He wasn't angry, or even annoyed, just accepted that somewhere down the line there had been a budget cut that had decided this area couldn't have the extra resources it wanted and it hadn't mattered until now. He'd heard enough rants from his parents about budgets to know how it went, and now they were on the other side of 'stretched resources', it made Conner feel fucking old. "At least it's going. I feel like I keep going around in circles. Everytime I think I might've found a lead it just goes dead, or something contradicts it." He'd keep trying to put it all together. "I'll get there." He promised. HUNTER: He heard the "when" in Conner's words, the lack of hesitation or doubt, and he wanted to cringe a bit. How was it that Conner could be so certain when his mind couldn't stop running over worst-case scenarios and possibilities on loop? Even if he was frustrated with their progress, he seemed to still be positive that there was something to find, that the chase wasn't already over. Hunter knew better than most what the terrorists were actually capable of achieving, with the particular powers they'd snatched. Sure, some of them weren't offensive, but he could think of uses for the less obvious abilities. And if he could think of ways to utilize them -- he remembered the state that the Vol in Argentina, the state that she'd been in, how she'd clearly been tortured before unleashing her powers on innocents -- well, those were the kind of thoughts circling his head as he typed. Instead of making a face, though, Hunter shrugged and adjusted his grip on the mug. Maybe you will, maybe you won't. He didn't say that out loud either. "It's a lot of information to go through already," he replied carefully. "I should know, I'm the one giving it to you. Must feel like you're wasting space." Hunter tapped the side of his temple to indicate where he meant. As a Flamingo, he knew Conner's power casually from practice -- but now Conner was aware that Hunter was helping with tracking and interrogation, Conner would also forever know what it was that Hunter did. Yet another thing he'd conceded to give up for the sake of the search. CONNER: Conner shrugged. He didn't know how his brain worked, if it was just a vast vacuum of space that would never be filled up regardless of how many memories he would get, how much information he would pick up, it would just be filed away in the vast space that was his brain, or maybe it was different and would one day be filled to the brink of memories of the past and unable to take in any more. He didn't know what would happen then, and he didn't like to think about it. Although his thoughts would often wander to the subject, unbidden and unwanted. "Not really." Conner said, and pushed the thoughts about his powers from his mind. "Although if I start dreaming in grainy security footage then I'm going to blame you for not cleaning it into high def and colouring it all for me." He joked, and tried to make it sound as easy as possible, like their friends weren't missing. Like Daisy wasn't one of them. "Trust me, if anything's wasting space it's Astrid's gossip and 85 percent of the network posts. Including mine." HUNTER: If he reached out and put his fingers on Conner's wrist, dug slowly into the goldmine of information that every Vol presented, he could maybe find out that answer for Conner. The longer he touched people, the more he knew about their ability -- their potential, how to use it, their limitations. All these things he knew or could know and nothing he could do about it. But he kept his hands to himself. He was too busy running Conner's words through his head, trying to dredge up the sense of humor that usually helped him cope, the one he'd utilized only a moment ago. He could manage a laugh and ease some of the tension, couldn't he? But he was too exhausted by the prospect, suddenly. Hunter rubbed at his forehead and glanced up at Conner against the desk, hovering somewhere on the verge between confusion and complete exhaustive collapse. He didn't know what to do anymore, what to say -- how to respond in a way that seemed calm and collected. "Yeah," he mumbled quietly, then drew a deep, ragged breath. "How are you -- how can you keep it together like that right now? I mean, I'm fucking trying here, I really am, but you know what we're up against and what these odds are. Even with the chips, I mean, if they haven't already realized they're transmitting a signal, they probably will soon enough." And then they'd either dump the chipped Vols or they'd dump their bodies. "We know what these people do to Vols. We know what they're trying to prove. I mean, Daisy alone could --" Hunter clenched his jaw on the words before he could go any further. He wasn't going to have a meltdown in front of Conner, goddammit. "Sorry," he interjected shortly. "Tired." CONNER: Conner frowned and gripped his coffee cup a little tighter. "I guess I compartmentalize better than most." He said, although the words felt hollow on his tongue, almost like a lie but not quite. He had to lock some memories and thoughts away in his head, had to refuse to access them until he was ready for them, or some bullshit like that. However, that wasn't the only reason he was holding it together, and to not reveal the whole truth to Hunter would feel disingenuous. "I also just can't let myself think like that. Or it would be the only thing running through my head when I look through the footage or pour over some data to look for - I don't know, just something that stands out. Something that would help. If I let myself think that our friends - that Daisy might not come back then I'd never be able to stop thinking it." He drank some more of the bitter coffee and shrugged. "I know what could happen, I just can't afford to think about it. Or I'd never stop." It was the only way he could think to explain it, how the thoughts would run through his head on a loop and how each of them would be perfectly recallable and unforgettable. Even his thoughts would never fade from his mind, not entirely. "You should get some rest." Conner said. Although he knew how impossible that would probably be for him, and he didn't expect Hunter to follow his suggestion. "Maybe an hour or two of sleep would do you good." HUNTER: Conner couldn't allow himself to think such thoughts -- good thing he had Hunter there to put the words into his head for him, then. Hunter could rarely keep his mouth shut even under the best of circumstances, and they were currently very far down the scale from normal. He wasn't sure if Conner entirely understood how he felt, or if he'd just really embarrassed himself, but at least Conner seemed to be letting it go gracefully, without much skepticism in his tone or looks of pity or even annoyance for Hunter's blundering through his carefully constructed compartmentalization. He understood enough to know how hard all of this was, clearly. "I'll get some soon." As much as he desperately wanted to get something accomplished and wasn't even the slightest bit hesitant to masochistically push himself to his own limits to get his friends back, Hunter wasn't an idiot. He'd be no use to anyone if he didn't sleep at all, if he couldn't even see straight. He lifted his cup to tip it slightly at Conner. "You did just dose me up, I'm not going to be able to pass out with caffeine in my system right now anyway." He didn't have to say that, like Conner, he would just end up lying there with those thoughts running through his head if he tried to sleep with nothing to occupy him and his brain stimulated by coffee. Worse, he'd end up missing them, and fear would be courted by the ache of sadness. He was silent for a moment more before he glanced up at Conner. "I work best when I'm angry," he said at last, trying to formulate some kind of explanation. "I'm trying to get there. I mean, I will, eventually. Once I get past the rest of it." The anxiety, the panic, the uncertainty of not knowing. He had to fuel himself with the knowledge that these kidnapping fuckers needed to pay. CONNER: Conner nodded, and he understood what Hunter meant. The way caffeine sparked his memory - or sparked his brain which automatically went to the thoughts that would become, and then were, memory - and he wouldn't be getting any rest soon either. Although he probably needed it just as much as Hunter did. "Well, no one can say I'm never counter productive." He pointed out, but trusted that Hunter would get some rest soon. Even if it would only probably be once the caffeine wore off and left nothing but exhaustion in its wake. "You'll get there." Conner said. He trusted Hunter not to give in to any of the other emotions and just latch onto the anger once it showed itself through the haze of everything else. "I know you will." |