All Night, Me And My Wretched Device

[string_instrument]

Who: Nova Pastos, Lil Cal, the Abyss, and-- (you!)
What: Catch-all for Nova Pastos' time in the Abyss
When: 7/31 and on until they're saved
Where: The. Uh. The Abyss.
Warnings: Suicidal ideation, derealisation and depersonalisation, break with reality, child neglect, more to be added as things are written



Like failure itself, the Abyss knocks the wind from him.

Not physically, and not like a punch, but mentally and like the hard, bone-shattering impact with the water's surface tension. It cracks across his psyche just like that, splintering across the sheer plane of his mind. It wants him to break first, of that he's sure, but he doesn't.

The pain, however, wraps around his brain the same way his body was engulfed by ocean--in that dream.

But this is not the Abyss of his ocean. In some ways, it's similar. Endless, with an infinite depth and a vastness of existence that renders any single living object irrelevant. But it still has solid ground, and gravity, and air to breathe. The terrain varies from lifeless sand to gritty soil, peppered with inert rock. It's like the earthy quasi-beach before one reaches the ocean shore, but without ever seeing the sea at all.

There is no ocean.

The dark sky yawns hollow above him, void of sun or moon or stars.

This is also reminiscent of the ocean, but without the pressure, the movement, or the power. It's thin and strange and empty. There is an absence, a death of substance, that he feels every time he breathes in, filling his lungs with nothing and leaving him aching for purchase, for presence, for reality--for any sense of realness at all. It is as though reality itself has disincorporated him, and it...

It is horribly familiar.

It feels like home. Like his penthouse suite, its rooftop 168 metres in the air, a perfectly isolated habitat soaring above the Chalra skyline and filled with a restless accumulation of stuff. Computers, horse statues, movie posters, horse prints, puppets, furniture, weaponry, mechanical dreams, workout equipment.

But it never felt any less empty.

Now, in this uncanny echo of that infinity of loneliness, that lonely infinitude--the reality he holds in his mind gives way to the tangible waste of his existence. It seeps into him through the cracks of his broken heart--the soup can, rent asunder into mere atoms, compressed and devoured by the sea. A discaded husk whose failure was inevitable. And that was okay. It was always meant to be.

But not like this. Not like this. There is nowhere for him to go, nothing for his essential nature to become.

This is not his ocean.

There is no ocean.

This is just stone, and grit, and Nova Pastos, and Lil Cal.

And--

Comments

[kneecapshot]

There's a horrible lurch low in his chest when Pastos speaks, but Justicar realizes suddenly that Pastos is right--obviously Pastos is right, none of this is real. It's just this place trying to fuck with him. Some of the absolute rigidity leaves his spine as he realizes, and his breathing evens slightly. It only takes a few moments for what Pastos was saying to penetrate the clearing haze in his brain.

"It looks real," he says softly, his face easing a little until he just looks weary instead of bursting with barely-contained emotion. "And, it used to be my job. Back when I didn't question who I was killing or why. It didn't bother me at the time, but now I know that the commanding officers I trusted were lying to me. I have no idea how many of these are innocent people, but I know at least some of them are." He looks out over the carnage, forcing himself to stare at the various injuries on the corpses, signs of torture, missing limbs. He can't help but look at Jessica again, his jaw tightening.

"That's a mistake I can't fix, no matter what I might do in the future or how many people I help. Nothing can undo this."

[string_instrument]

"This is what real looks like?" Pastos asks--and for once, he's watching Justicar closely. Not just to try and see into him, or communicate something from Pastos to Justicar, but to actually read him--or try to. He's got that same slightly cocked head angle that he carried when studying the corpses. But now it's turned on Justicar himself.

And... he listens. He does. It's not that he doesn't listen in general--Dirk listens to everything said to him, actually. He doesn't have the passive listening skills (or any other reciprocal social skills) that might indicate as much, but every single word that Justicar has said to Pastos or even in Pastos' vicinity has been heard and noted.

But now, for once, he kind of almost looks like he might be listening? Maybe?

True, he does get distracted again quickly, at least to appearances--there are simply too many gruesomly mutilated bodies to look at, in so many different directions. He starts to wander, walking around one without moving his head at all, like a pigeon or chicken. He stops by Julia, who is pretty intact overall.

But Justicar's words sink from his brain down to his gut, finally--after all these seconds, or is it minutes?--imbuing this experience with a kind of non-impartial horror. It's a lot easier to process that while looking at the ghastly consequences of the atrocities than their simple, human-shaped perpetrator.

But he's not the perpetrator. To call Justicar the 'perpetrator' would imply he had made the conscious, informed choice to do... this... whatever this was at the time it was happening... to innocent people.

Innocent people were always going to die and suffer, that is the nature of what this is, to Dirk's understanding. That itself doesn't bother him. And he knows that the fact it doesn't should bother him, and so on. The recursive digression could go on indefinitely.

But language matters, distinctions like that matter, and to be the perpetrator means purposeful and knowing action or inaction. And that's not what this is.

That, finally, sits uncomfortably.

Not 'uncomfortable' in the sense that he intellectually knows this should bother him, whether or not it actually does (and whether or not he is actually bothered by the fact that he's not, and so on. Again: this could be an infinite digression.)

But actually--physically and cognitively and even emotionally--uncomfortable. He turns away from Justicar, walking a new path through the blood-caked and gore-stained bodies.

Death, to Dirk, has a kind of... conceptual pull. One that he finds himself returning to. A lot. There is a finality to it, a completeness of state, in perpetuity. Something about the absolute and total absence of Self, of Existence, in a body upon death... it tugs on something in his brain.

Death as a result--direct or indirect--of conscious, purposeful action, of choice? That's one thing. It feels fine. Again: not uncomfortable. Maybe 'uncomfortable,' but the thing itself feels fine to him.

What Justicar is describing, however... that's different. That sits uncomfortably. He can't figure out how to approach directly--either the topic or the feeling. So he circles it--not entirely on purpose, but not by accident, either.

For example: he doesn't look at Justicar, or Jessica. But he's noticed Justicar looking at her. She's not even remotely the most interesting corpse in a visual sense, but he keeps looking at her.

"Who is she?"

Dirk walks a few more steps away from them, towards a different corpse.

But he's asking about Her.

[kneecapshot]

"It is," Justicar says quietly. He watches Dirk look around at the bodies in what seems like fascination and understands, a little. He can't really relate--he's so used to death now that it's commonplace for him, and all the bodies strewn around them make him feel guilt, not any kind of mortal horror.

He keeps both over- and underestimating Dirk, which is very annoying, because occasionally it means a knife is slid between his ribs accidentally. Of course Dirk would be observant enough to notice him looking at Jessica, but of course Dirk wouldn't have the tact to not ask about it. Justicar forces his shoulders to relax, and his face is horribly blank when he turns back to Dirk.

"A woman I knew a long time ago. Her husband killed her. He should be around here somewhere." Justicar looks, idly, then turns his attention back to Dirk. "I wasn't there, and I should have been. That's all."

[string_instrument]

A woman.

No name, no specific relationship. Just 'a woman.' The fact that she has a husband and it's not Justicar is kind of surprising, considering, but maybe it shouldn't be. He just kind of expected an obvious connection. Girlfriend. Coworker? That might be plausible. Or maybe a friend. Or a witness? A contact?

There's clearly a lot Justicar isn't saying, even aside from... well, everything, because it's a real tenuous line to 'responsibility' otherwise. Dirk doesn't take this as any kind of a hint, though. It only makes him more interested--especially now that he knows what he's looking at is 'real,' even if it's not--and it narrows his focus. He wants to know more. More of what's happening here. What, and why. Who. There's a narrative, a cause. This is something here, he can feel it.

He watches Justicar look around, and takes that as his clue.

"Alright. Then let's find him."

[kneecapshot]

"Why?" Justicar asks, genuinely curious. He knows trying to put a lid on Dirk's desire to know more will just make it worse. "I know what happened to him. He hit her, so I hit him back. He's one of the few people here I have a bit of relative moral clarity on, actually."

Possibly obscure reference to how diesel engines work

[string_instrument]

Pastos might be catching Justicar off guard with his particular combination of sharp mind and blunted, unskilled tactics, but Justicar clearly has a sharp bead on what Pastos is about, because he is absolutely fucking right: trying to shut him down--or even simply apply some brakes--is worse than meaningless to the ravenous diesel engine that is Dirk Strider's brain.

Asking him why, however--

Not a bad strategy. Not a perfect one, but not a bad one. He pauses as Justicar tells him the story, bare bones though it is. The skeletonised narrative is at least a complete one, a full picture he can recognise and identify.

"So there should be no problem," he says immediately. Dirk doesn't let go of an idea that easily.

But he does answer the question, too.

"Call me curious. Not just about--" he glances down at the woman again, and lets that speak for itself, "That." He doesn't apologise for insensitivity. "Or--" he gestures, extending one arm to indicate the personalised expanse of Justicar's lifetime achivements. A visual gallery of terrible deeds. "This."

This: a field of ghastly and gruesome fascination. A smorgasbord of details in death. Studies in violence. Variations on a theme, and the theme is finality. The fact that so much of it is dressed in the trappings of mutilation and pain isn't incidental, but it's not exclusive to what makes him want to stay a little longer, either.

He just has to be careful. He knows (because yes, even Dirk Strider knows this)that he needs to stick to practical explanations.

And he does have them. If he didn't, maybe he wouldn't be so bold about it.

Especially not under the circumstances.

"Although I am. Curious, that is. It's just not a coincidence. You being here, and this being what we find. Which means there's a why, or a what. Maybe a how. I want to know that, too." This is the practical explanation--the socially conscionable one. The one justifiable reason to do what he's going to do anyway.

It'll just be a lot easier if Justicar says yes, instead of no.

This is his chance to learn something. Is that so fucking wrong?

[kneecapshot]

"I'm making the reasonable assumption that it's this place. These aren't actual dead bodies, that's completely impossible. I'm guessing this is their attempt to torture me, somehow." He doesn't look particularly impressed by the effort.