OCTAVIA BLAKE + CHARLES PIKE (NPC) + ROSE BELIKOVA
MEDIUM | COMPLETE
“You’re leaving yourself open,” Pike said. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he stood against the wall simply watching Octavia and she pounded one of the training dummies as hard as she could. He’d been stuck at her side since she’d woken up that morning and hadn’t left her alone since. Octavia didn’t even look over at him as she continued to hit the head, chest, and torso of the dummy with rapid punches.
“You’re letting your emotions take control of you, and you’re getting sloppy. Take back your control, Blake.”
Octavia wanted to yell at him to shut up. She wanted to tell him to fuck off and get the hell away from her, but she’d already done that countless times earlier in the day. Throwing shit at him hadn’t helped either since he was either a figment of her imagination and she was going crazy or he was a ghost sent to drive her insane.
Pike continued to give commentary on her fighting session with the inanimate body stationed in front of her. The more he talked, the angrier she became, and she let that intense anger radiate from inside of her chest out to her fists. Her hands might have been taped up, but her fingers were throbbing in pain, only she didn’t care. She simply imagined that it was Pike’s bloody face instead of the dummy that bore no battle wounds from all of her expelled rage.
Seeing Lincoln last month had brought everything back as if it had just happened yesterday. She could see him kneeling in the mud and looking up to the sky. She could feel Marcus Kane at her side and hand on her shoulder to keep her from doing anything rash like charging forward to her own death in order to try to spare the life of the man she loved. She heard the shot go off from the gun in Pike’s hand, and she saw Lincoln fall to the ground dead. She saw the hole in his head and his blood on the ground. She saw everything, and now Pike was here literally haunting her. She couldn’t take it.
“You’re going to get yourself killed if you don’t figure out a way to put it behind you,” Pike said after a moment of blissful silence. “If you don’t figure out how to put me behind you.”
“SHUT UP!” Octavia screamed out and in a moment of pure, unadulterated rage, she grabbed hold of one of the swords laying on the weapon’s table next to her. With one swing she lashed out at the dummy and sliced its head completely off then spun around and stabbed it in the chest.
She dropped the sword to the ground after that and sat down on the seat of one of the exercise equipment machines, leaning over to hold her head in her hands. She breathed heavily in and out and stared down at the floor.
“Well,” Pike said still from his perch against the wall. “Have fun explaining why the dummy doesn’t have a head anymore.”
“I told you to shut the hell up,” Octavia mumbled under her breath but still concentrated on her breathing while staring down at the floor. Why was he here? More importantly, why wouldn’t he leave?
“I always thought that dummy looked kinda shifty,” Rose commented, directly a bemused look at the decapitated training figure and, well, it’s head as she came into the room. Whatever had prompted the violence against a mostly inanimate object, it was kind of a funny sight.
Anger was an emotion she was well-acquainted with and it wasn’t hard to notice the signs in Octavia. Still, she was trying not to make a big deal out of it. Octavia reminded her of herself sometimes and she had a feeling the last thing she needed was a lecture, especially after watching Lincoln come and go again. Rose had some experience with that, too. Opening with a joke she thought would give Octavia the option to talk about it or not.
Octavia’s head shot up the second she heard another voice in the room - a voice that wasn’t her own or Pike’s. She looked between Rose and Pike who was still standing on the other side of the room. She wasn’t sure if Rose could see him, but so far she acted like it was just the two of them alone. She didn’t want to let on that she was going crazy if no one else shared in that crazy. Pike hadn’t said anything so far once Rose entered the room.
“Yeah, I guess I got carried away,” she said and stood up. Walking over to the dummy, she took hold of the hilt and jerked the sword out of the chest then placed it back onto the table with the other weapons. “I’ll make sure it gets replaced.”
“Who’s your friend?” Pike asked. Octavia glanced up at him as she went over to pick up the severed head but didn’t say anything. She wasn’t going to talk to someone that no one else could see. She tossed the head in one of the trash cans and returned to the table to pick up her bottle of water for a long sip.
“It happens to the best of us.” Rose shrugged, not really that bothered about the dummy. She suspected even Dimitri wouldn’t really be that bothered by it. Amused, probably. It wasn’t like Rose hadn’t killed her fair share of practice dummies when she was pissed off about something.
She saw Octavia look at, well, nothing, before picking up the head, but it was just an instant, and she shrugged it off for the moment. “Anything you want to talk about?”
“It’s just one of those days, I guess,” Octavia said with a shrug and took another sip of water. She purposely kept her back to where Pike was standing to keep from having to look at him. That would have worked great except he decided to approach the two girls and stand next to them. He gave a glance to Rose but then focused again on Octavia.
“One of those days?” He scoffed. “Try weeks, months even. Probably more than that. You need to figure your shit out or it’s going to end up being years.”
Octavia’s only reaction to his words was a small twitch of her mouth. She didn’t look at him but just stared forward and took another sip. Why was he still here? Ignoring him wasn’t doing anything to shut him up. “Some days it seems like this place wants to drive us crazy,” she said with a sigh and moved to start picking up some of the training instruments she’d used during the day.
Rose wasn’t entirely sure she believed her, mostly because it sounded like they kind of answer she might give whether there was more to it or not. Still, she wasn’t sure she knew Octavia well enough to push. If she didn’t want to talk about it, she wasn’t sure she wanted to push her, even if she knew the other woman hadn’t had an easy time of it lately. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to guess that she’d be affected by some of the things that had happened here.
“Sometimes, it does seem that way, she agreed, automatically moving to help clean up the area. She would have felt stupid just standing there watching Octavia work. “Sometimes it’s funny, but sometimes the shit they put us through here makes you want to punch Poseidon in the face.”
“I’d be satisfied if I was able to punch my annoying shadow in the face,” Octavia mumbled to herself. She didn’t know if Rose heard her or not since her back was to the other woman, but she heard Pike let out a dramatic sigh. She glanced up long enough to see him roll his eyes, so she turned back around and picked up the two swords she’d been working with earlier.
She hesitated a second, but finally bit the bullet. “I know this is Atlantis where the words ‘anything can happen’ should be taken literally, but do you know of anyone else who has seen ghosts here?” Wow, she sounded batshit crazy.
Rose didn’t think she sounded crazy. “Yeah, actually,” she said. She knew Jill had been seeing someone from her past. “It’s enough to make you think you’re losing your mind, isn’t it?” She seemed to be exempt this time, but seeing ghosts was something she’d had way too much experience with.
Octavia was a little surprised but also thankful that Rose didn’t seem to think she was crazy and even sounded like she understood to some degree. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “Something like that.” She kept her back to Pike as much as she could but knew she probably wouldn’t be able to avoid him for too long since every time she tried, he’d make himself known again by getting in her face or commenting on her life choices again.
“I just hope it doesn’t last long.”
“Knowing Atlantis, it probably won’t,” Rose offered, hoping she sounded reassuring. “This is just one of those things that happens here. It’s not like [...] seeing them in the real world. I’m sure it’ll go away on it’s own after a day or two.” It hadn’t been that simple for her, but she knew from Jill that this sighting wasn’t the same as being shadow-kissed at all. Whether that made it easier or harder she couldn’t really say, but she believed she was right in saying it would just go away on its own before too long. Atlantis seemed to mess with them a lot - whether it was the city or COS behind it - but it rarely lasted more than a few days at most, she’d found.
Octavia got it and knew that this kind of shit happened in Atlantis, but it didn’t make it any easier to swallow. Maybe if it hadn’t been just after Lincoln’s arrival and near immediate departure it wouldn’t have hit her as hard, but Pike would forever get under her skin no matter what even with the extra six years of memory tacked onto her brain. Despite his insistence that she needed to let things go, she would always hate him.
“Well, being here was probably a good idea in theory, but clearly didn’t work out well,” she said, gesturing to the decapitated dummy. “I should probably head out and see if I can get rid of my shadow some other way.”
Rose nodded. She thought this as as good a place as any to work out some aggression. “Trust me, it’s nothing Dimitri hasn’t seen before. I doubt he’s going to hold a little decapitation against you.” It’s was obvious (to her, anyway) that Octavia was shaken by the ghost she was seeing, whoever it was, and she hoped for the other woman’s sake that it wouldn’t last much longer. “Good luck,” she said in parting and she started toward her aforementioned husband’s office.