recinerate | ic

Your cabin.

[If he's going to be taking care of her she wants some more leverage, something else to know about him.]

[That surprises him even more, though he does his best to recover from it before replying.]

I'm in 4-13. Stop by whenever you like - I'll leave the door unlocked for you.

Fine. [She signs off without any further goodbyes, and is at his door ten minutes later.

She looks impeccable, as usual. Her hair and make-up are just right, the purple blouse she's wearing neatly ironed. But her expression is annoyed, tense, and her shoulders are hunched.]

[Beyond isn't the first to greet her when she opens the door, but rather a fluffy orange no-longer-quite-kitten, who gives her a questioning mrow? and then dashes under the pristinely made bed. Beyond himself is tidying stacks of books at the plain oak desk on the left side of the room; other piles of books have already been arranged neatly on top of the matching oak dresser to the right of the bed. Everything in the room - the master bedroom of a suburban home - is plain, beige, unremarkable, from the paint on the walls and the lamp on the desk to the gauzy curtains around the single window to the outside, where bright sunlight, rows of palm trees, and a yard sign reading MODEL HOME can be seen. Except for the books, everything about the room looks unnaturally tidy, like no one actually lives here, a picture in stark contrast to Beyond's own personal casual sloppiness.

Beyond looks up and murmurs something in Japanese in the direction of the bed - the cat underneath - and waves Elizabeth inside.]

She's a little shy at first, but she'll come out eventually.

[He finishes arranging the books on the desk and turns the chair out to face the bed, gesturing to both of them with a sweep of his hand, a silent invitation to sit wherever she'd like, if she wants to sit.]

[She gives a soft huff at that- isn't everyone?- but steps over the threshold easily. The cat is a surprise, even if she knew that people had pets, Beyond didn't exactly seem like the type.

She sits on the bed, because it lets her see more of the room.]

This wasn't your home.

Edited 2016-04-30 19:26 (UTC)

No, it wasn't.

[He takes the chair opposite, sitting sideways with an arm wrapped around the back of it, one leg folded underneath him, the other propped up on the rung underneath.]

This ... was one of the places I stayed in Los Angeles, after I left the House.

[He goes silent for a moment, considering whether to add the last part, which he eventually decides on.]

Before the third murder.

[He falls silent again, chewing the end of his thumbnail, then adds another addendum:]

I don't think I could have tolerated being here if it had been the House.

She straightens the blanket next to her, just stroking it with her hands as she looks around a little more.

"Why not? What would you have done?"

Beyond considers his answer for a moment before speaking it. But he's already decided to be honest with her, so there's no sense in lying about this.

"I would have looked for a way to hurt the Admiral. Or, possibly, a way to kill him instead and make death permanent."

It's what he had thought about, at various points during him time as an inmate. But he'd been dissuaded from taking that course of action.

The last few times they'd spoken, she'd been emotional, high-strung-- she would have scoffed those times, at that sentiment. And it is stupid, too emotional, impossible from what she's read on the network. But she doesn't scoff now.

"It isn't possible," she says, considering, neutral.

"No," he says, gently, "it is possible. It's been done before - Arthas was able to kill him once before. It apparently threw everything into quite a bit of chaos. Everything stopped working while he was gone, including death revival."

Beyond shifts in the chair, draws his knee up close to his chest. "I was quite miserable at the idea of spending an eternity imprisoned here. I thought this plan would enable some kind of final ending for me. That was really all I wanted - to be finished. And the Admiral took that from me, twice over - once in bringing me here in the first place, and once after I'd been killed and he brought me back."

"There's no way to get off this ship unless you graduate or the Admiral sends you back," she says, still soft, but there's a flash of muted anger in her eyes.

"And then you're dead, and no one will be the wiser."

"I would have been fine with that," he says, with a brief, apologetic smile. Dead and forgotten was better than dead and remembered for his failures, in his mind, or alive and forced to keep living in the aftermath of defeat.

"But, as you can see, I didn't follow through with that idea. And I made a promise to someone that I'd stay."

"Who did you promise that? Why?" He's been so honest: she's perhaps searching for something, one thing, that he won't tell her.

He'll tell her this too. It may be exposing a vulnerability in himself; he realizes that, distantly. Giving someone a map of yourself with your weak spots outlined is a gamble, a risk. But one of the things Beyond learned from Cassel's example was that this gamble was worth it, no matter the outcome, no matter if the person you show your weaknesses decides to capitalize on that knowledge in order to wound. Because this is how trust is built when you've had distrust indoctrinated in you so deeply it becomes part of the very fiber of your being. Trusting someone when you have no reason to do so - or every reason not to - is a revolutionary act, and it can change everything. Beyond himself is proof of that.

"Shiro," he says, simply. "She's my friend, and ... friends don't leave. That's why I promised to stay."

Edited 2016-05-02 15:24 (UTC)

It's not a lesson he'll be able to teach Elizabeth, she suspects, or at the very least it won't be taught easily. She hasn't trusted anyone since Philip, and even him she's mistrusted from time to time.

The only person in the world who knew her for everything she was, and still she couldn't always know who he was. It's no way to live, and he's told her just that: but she still hasn't been shown another way.

Her eyes flick back to his when he says that name. "Shiro? She's a nice girl." And she suspects something is very, very wrong with her, but that will come.

"She is," he says, with a slight nod of his head. "But she's been through a lot of trauma." That was evident even before Beyond saw her what she was like as a child, before he saw her memories; it's typically only as a result of something deeply horrifying that a second personality emerges.

Beyond hesitates for a long moment before he continues - it doesn't really feel like gossiping to him, to tell Elizabeth a bit more about Shiro. He just isn't sure whether it will benefit her to know. In the end, he decides to give her the information and let her decide what to do with it.

"She's the one who killed me, the second time I died."

That makes her sit up, resting her weight on her palms as she pushes herself up.

"She did? What happened?"

Beyond takes a moment to chew the end of his thumbnail and pull together the right words. "She's not typically violent," is how he starts - which may or may not be a reassurance, in light of the rest of what he's about to say. "I take it you're at least passingly familiar with the concept of split personalities? It's found in popular culture fairly frequently, usually applied incorrectly. But that is the case with Shiro - there is a second person living inside of her brain. She called herself Aceman."

It's not like this information is a secret, exactly; Elizabeth could find references to the attack, if she looked back far enough on the network. Beyond takes in a slow breath and continues: "I told Shiro once that I wanted to die. I'd made a terrible mistake, and I didn't think I could recover from it. I did, of course, but Aceman remembered what I'd said, and later, when she awoke instead of Shiro, she sought me out and made it happen."

He shifts in the chair again, folding his arms atop his bent knee, thinking back on what the girl had said to him: Love hurt you. Death didn't want you. I can give you both, you know. I can give you what you want. Isn't that a kind of love?

"I think, in her way, she was trying to help - or she thought she was, anyway."

That's-- dangerous. Interesting and very, very dangerous, but it doesn't scare her off. And with Beyond, she doesn't have to pretend to be horrified or scared. She can just lean forward and frown.

"What caused the other personality to come out that time?"

"There was a port," he says, "a carnival resort, and the wardens were all forced into sideshow performances on their inmates' behalf, to satisfy a debt. Those performances were nearly impossible to survive, but either successful completion of the series of performances or death of the performer was what was necessary to pay off the debt. Or there was a third option - offering a trade of a memory to the Ringmaster running the place. Inmates also had the option of trading places with their wardens in the performances, and that's what Shiro did." A slight frown creases his expression as he remembers everything that happened in that port, all the upsets his own actions had caused. "She was killed, and she fell into a coma for a while. When she awoke, it was as Aceman."

A trauma like a violent, bloody death would seem like a logical cause for jarring an alternate personality to wake even for anyone who didn't know what Beyond knows of Shiro's history, what he's been able to glean from her memories - that Aceman developed as a direct result of the tortures Shiro had endured.

It makes her shiver, the thought that someone could be so fundamentally different than you expected-- without the other person even knowing that it was happening.

"But you're still close now," she posits, tilting her head, biting down on the inside of her lip in thought.

"We are," he says, nodding. "I'm not upset with her over what happened. Sometimes ... you end up hurting the people you care for, despite your best intentions." He understands this now, even better after time away from the incident. He's made his fair share of mistakes and hurt those he was close with, too. It's part of the tradeoff for deciding to embrace emotion, he's learned.

"I think that was the only time we've seen that side of her since she's been on board."

Her eyes flash with something that might be pain-- it would have been clearer last week, during the flood, but now he can only guess at what it really means when she looks back outside, at the window.

"Thank you for telling me," she says, lightly. "It's good to be prepared."

"Of course." Beyond's attention shifts to the cat, now re-emerged from underneath the bed. He drops his hand and wiggles his fingers to call her over, and she complies, rubbing her face along the side of his hand. "I don't wish to alarm you, and I'm sure you already know what a dangerous place this is. But information is necessary in order to be prepared."

He glances up at Elizabeth again, silently studying her for a moment. It was right to be completely honest with her; he's certain of that.

"Did you have any particular thoughts about the month ahead of us?"

She looks back to him, flicking her eyes from the cat to Beyond's hand to his eyes.

"Yes," she says and then bluntly follows it with: "I need a weapon. I have no way of defending myself right now, and I need something."

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cw vaguely suicidal

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