come_sailaway | [Closed] You're not who you say you are

Max pauses outside the door because, well yes, that does sound like Skulduggery. It may not be him, but they definitely got the voice down right, complete with accent. Max doesn't recognize the song ~~being from a world that tragically doesn't have Shrek~~ but the lyrics are so suitably ironic that he rolls his eyes before looking over at Ava.

"Let's get this over with before whoever this is damages Skulduggery's reputation beyond repair." Time to save a skeleton from himself.

With a nod to Ava he opens the door to enter the Chatterbox, letting the doors shut behind them. There's no way to stealthily get into a room that only has one entrance so he's not going to try. Plus Max's eyes and the lights in his head are extremely visible in the dim lighting.

But then again he's not the one who's going to try and maneuver behind this imposter. So he stands there with his arms folded as he watches this wannabe Skulduggery ooze off the stage.

"That's a cry for help if I've ever heard one," Ava laments. Because if it is Skulduggery he's clearly asking to be put out of his misery.

There may not be a stealthy way for Max to enter the room, but Ava fades out or view before the door is completely open.

Max's role is to distract, so she allows him to it. Ava circles from behind, slow and silent and invisible. Scoping out possible obstacles and potential weapons, if he doesn't go down without a fight.

Bonnie Tyler is not a cry for help! She's the cry of a generation!

Given that Skulduggery actually enjoys singing, he's not inclined to stop for just anybody. Max's entrance displaces the air, sending a ripple to alert Skulduggery of the potential threat; he doesn't quit singing, but there is a tenseness in the way he turns his head to the door.

Max, of course, is no threat, and truthfully Skulduggery is both confused and pleased to see his friend standing there. It could be that he's only a figment, given that China hasn't been back to bother him since Darcy left him alone, but that's alright. He can deal with a hallucination of Max. He's probably going to have something very snide to say about this classic eighties hit, and he'll likely put up a huge fuss about not being able to sing himself, but you know what? Skulduggery has given it some thought, and he thinks there might be a few spoken-word bits out there suited for Max. Maybe some William Shatner covers? Heh. Just as long as nobody tells him who that is...

Oh, he's forgotten the song. He holds up a finger for Max, just, you know. Hold on a second. "...Out where the lightning splits the sea, I could swear that there's someone, somewhere watching me!"

There's a brief moment where Max has second thoughts. Because that gesture is just.. so something Skulduggery would do. He would absolutely finish his ridiculous song before doing anything else. But then he looks at this skeleton with the wrong skull, wearing a hat from Tommy Bahama and singing his non-existent lungs out in an empty room, and remembers that this can't possibly be Skulduggery.

Max sighs, walking to the front of the stage to be opposite where he assumes Ava will pop out of the ground. He's left his bag of tricks outside the door so it's not suspicious, he'll grab it later, but he does have several ties neatly folded in all his pockets for the initial: tie the skeleton to a chair, plan.

This is great. Skulduggery doesn't even have to pretend to enjoy the situational comedy happening here, rolling onto his side so that he might watch Max's approach better. After all, as the lyrics say, "Through the wind and the chill and the rain, and the storm and the flood... I can feel his approach like a fire in my blo-o-od!"

And then, because the rest of the song really is just the chorus over again and he certainly has proven he knows that part of the song, he lowers the microphone a bit and addresses the situation directly. Normally, he wouldn't bother, but Max is a friend and deserves that courtesy, figment or not.

"You can't sing, but you can certainly be a lively audience," he says. "Assuming you're actually..." Well, there, but if he is, then Skulduggery doesn't want him to know that he's seeing things. That would be... bad. "Well, I don't know. Why are you here?"

Max is so done with being sung at, even if the lyrics are pretty hysterical given the situation. All of this is vaguely uncouth and beneath him. And not only because he can't sing so he's going to pretend like that makes him better somehow.

But okay fine. He will give Skulduggery a gentle golf clap for his singing prowess, not that it can be heard over the karaoke machine blasting out the next two minutes of chorus. It's all he can do really without feeling like an idiot.

"I came to see how your vacation is proceeding. I can obviously hear that it's still happening." He can see that Skulduggery has apparently leapt into the whole vacation thing with reckless abandon, but he can't say that it looks like the skeleton is having a good time. For starters he's laying on the ground while singing, which is what drunken humans do when they're regretting their life choices.

"What are you doing? And.. why?"

Aside from the obvious.

Aw, truly a sweetheart. Skulduggery pushes himself up, sitting with his legs free over the edge of the stage, and accepts the applause and potential criticism with equal amounts of grace.

"It is still happening. As to how it's going..." Mmm. Middling results. On the one hand, he feels like he's slightly more cognizant of his presence here on the ship, better than he had right after the timeline skip. On the other, he's unfortunately had to confront reality on a few too many occasions. People looking for answers after his text, or simply confused by his new face and... different attitude.

"Well, it is certainly going." He lifts the mic, tapping his finger against it. "Karaoke is one of the very, very few things on this ship that I can indulge in. And since I enjoy singing..." It makes sense to him, why he's here! It makes less sense why Max is here, honestly. But it's a good thing he is:

"Actually, assuming you're..." here, "Not busy, I was going to ask if you'd seen Ava anywhere. I..." Made a huge, awful mistake that only served to highlight his own fragile state of mind. "I... Well, it's complicated. I have something she dropped." In his jacket pocket, right next to his gun. Don't mind if he just goes ahead and reaches for the former, not the latter.

As convinced as Ava is that this is something else parading around as Skulduggery, for a moment she wonders if instead this is Skulduggery pretending to be something else. Whichever way it is, it's a poor and unsettling imitation. She listens carefully to the conversation for slip ups, deviations from the truth she can dig her nails into, and it's difficult to keep detached when she's so emotionally invested. But she must focus, stay alert.

He knows a lot. Somehow. She doesn't like the implications of that. It'll be harder to separate it out, if this thing has stolen Skulduggery's memories as well that he'll surely use against them.

Hearing her name catches her off guard though, and she almost wants to give in. But no, it's a trick, trying to lull her and Max into a sense of familiarity with the imposter.

When he reaches for the pocket, however, her only thought is to protect Max if not-Skulduggery is using that distraction to go for a weapon. She flickers out of thin air, a swift kick of her boot for his elbow. "DROP IT."

Everything he's saying sounds right, sounds reasonable, sounds like.. well, sounds like Skulduggery. And Max isn't sure if that makes it better or worse, that whatever this is he's such a good copy that it's almost hard to tell the difference. Probably worse?

He doesn't have time to dwell on that, because Max already knows he has guns (though he does recall being told they have no ammo at one point), and Ava said that he'd tried to light her on fire. Is this some witty banter about the 'thing she dropped' being a bullet to the head? Because this fake Skulduggery should workshop that one a bit more.

Either way, he assumes he's about to get shot, and at this range Max isn't sure his tungsten plating would reflect it. He does not want to go to César and admit he got shot. Again.

Everything happens at once, Ava manifests into reality and kicks at this masquerading skeleton, and Max drops a thin metal pipe into his hand from where he'd been hiding it in his sleeve. His fingers tighten around it and his entire hand crackles with electricity, funneling that into the pipe and pointing it directly at the wrong skull sitting on Skulduggery's shoulders.

"Don't. Let's not make this more troublesome than it needs to be." His tone is the same soft, low voice he always uses, but he almost sounds a little sad about doing this. "Let's save ourselves all a lot of effort, and you can simply tell us who you are, and what you've done with Skulduggery."

Especially because he's not actually sure if electrocuting a skeleton will do anything. He doesn't really want to find out.

Friendships are not magic. They're hard.

Skulduggery hadn't felt Ava's approach but he certainly feels the way the air moves as she appears. There's no hiding his startled yelp as her boot connects, his own foot lashing out to kick at Max, who's truthfully too far away for a swift knock to the chin.

Coming in from behind is a mistake; the kick snaps his hand into his chest and he immediately reaches for his gun, his thoughts spiraling swiftly from you shouldn't have a gun to thank God I have a gun before he fully registers Ava's voice. Guns do nothing to the Faceless Ones but they certainly work on their feral hunters --

Max's comment, though, cuts his move to draw his weapon in half. He goes abruptly and completely still at the words, almost as if they've served a better blow to him than the kick. "What--? What are you talking about?"

In the moment that Skulduggery freezes, Ava reaches a hand straight through his chest and snatches the gun before he can. She feels slightly vindicated, that's what he must have been going for. (With thick gloves on, she doesn't have the sensitive tactility that allows her to feel the brush of the photograph, only the more solid weight of the weapon.)

"Where. Is. Skulduggery?" Her electronic voice hisses near where his ears would be if he had them, barrel of the gun pressed to the back of his skull.

Max moves closer now that Skulduggery is distracted dropping the electrified pipe more to his side, but still within range to clock him with it. Electricity might not hurt a skeleton but it's still a pipe and Max can hit hard.

"What we're talking about should be obvious. You heard her. You are not Skulduggery, you're some.. imitation of him. Though it's not a bad attempt. But that's beside the point. Who are you really, and what have you done with our friend?" He sighs, looking the picture of someone who is just ever so aggravated from having to take the time out of his day to do this. "And please don't lie. I think we can respect each other enough for honesty."

He doesn't move, even when Ava passes through his chest and removes the gun from his hand. Not even when the muzzle presses against the back of his skull. He can't do anything but stare at Max.

"I'm...?" What does that even mean? Who is he? As if that question is any easier to answer now with weapons drawn than it was standing there in the Tommy Bahama. Even then, had Max really not known who he was talking to? Is he really so fundamentally changed that the people closest to him here can't recognize him anymore? He'd thought he'd been doing a fairly decent job at being himself -- but apparently not, because his own friends are looking at him like he's an alien. Something wrong.

"I told you at the --?" Did he not explain it? Was that not really Max there with him? "This isn't the first time we're talking since it happened, is it? I've seen you both, I... I know I have. You were there. I told you." And now his voice is edged with something that might be anger. Or, more accurately, betrayal. "I told you what happened. And you didn't believe me?"

"You tried to set me on fire," Ava reminds him, her modulated voice not properly conveying the sharpness of her tone.

"Trying to deflect questioning through guilt, classic tactic of an imposter." She's not falling for it! "If Skulduggery is being held hostage somewhere," she wraps her other arm over his shoulder, around his neck, flashing her new claws inches from his face. They glow dangerously, and she actually has no idea what they're capable of.

"I will tear you apart to find him. But. If you were actually Skulduggery with a face lift," she pauses, because that sounds so absurd. Yet she knows he's apparently had other skulls before. "You'd understand the desperate importance of this situation. So. Prove it."

"You told me there was a thing with the timeline. You said you had someone elses memories, a different version of you. Which means this isn't you - not the Skulduggery we know. So where is he?" His eyes flick to Ava's mask, unsure exactly how someone is supposed to prove they're themselves. But that's a problem for this Skulduggery to figure out, isn't it?

Though something about Skulduggery's tone of voice is bothering him. Not enough to stop this, obviously. But.. it's something, "You sound confused, like maybe you don't have your story straight? Would you like us to give you a minute to collect yourself?"

"I said I had my! Memories!" he snarls, remaining completely still even as his anger momentarily surges to the surface. "I told you, it happened to me! And you ran away!" He doesn't turn his head to address Ava directly, can't bear to even move. "You leaped out at me and you attacked me and you ran from me!"

Don't move. Just sit still. Wait for the moment to pass. Because now, feeling his anger so keenly means that he can feel that violin string of tension in the back of his skull. He can hear Serpine's playful banter, muffled through the walls as though he were on his way here, and now he'll never be completely sure he isn't talking to thin air. And worst of all, sometime in the future, he'll wind up back there on that godforsaken planet. It terrifies him that he isn't thinking about the one occupied by the Faceless Ones.

"If you're going to shoot me, Ava, do it," he snaps. "It should give me a few hours of respite from the madness, assuming the captain doesn't lose me all over again."

"I ran! Because you attacked me! First!" She doesn't want to hurt him, and her hand trembles and the gun along with it as he shouts at her to pull the trigger. "And you didn't even apologize..." This is so much easier with people she doesn't care about, and doubt claws through her stomach.

There's a lot being said she can't quite make sense of. Timelines and memories and a lack of actual explanation. Ava's breathing is a bit heavy as she tries not to panic, lose her nerve.

This fake is far too convincing, babbling about the Captain. But nothing adds up! Lose him? He was never even gone!

"Something's terribly wrong," she mutters to herself, to both of them, tightening her hold on Skulduggery as if trying to hold onto something more. "WHAT MEMORIES?"

He's about to agree with Ava when he seizes on something this Skulduggery said. "What do you mean the Captain lost you?"

What could that possibly be? And how could that happen?

"Wait no, one at a time. Ghost's question first, you said you have a year of new memories. What memories? And how?" He'd almost called her Ava, not that Skulduggery doesn't know who this is, but they mean serious business and she doesn't wear the suit for fun.

"You must understand how this looks correct? That the Captain replaced the Skulduggery we know with a replica and gave this copy enough to pretend to be him? We just want to know what happened to him."

"You know what memories," he hisses through his teeth. Because she does. Of course she does. She's the only person he told. He remembers that so clearly now, the moment in the grass under the stars burning like a dagger in his hand. Paralyzing him with an overwhelming sense of fear and betrayal, which coalesces into a familiar anger.

(There's no voice for the thing he feels in the shadows behind him. Doesn't need one. All it has to do is stand there and wait for the moment that anger turns to fury, for his fury to metastasize into something more hateful than himself. It's scratching at his temples, now, scraping against the bone so loudly he thinks they should be able to hear it, if they were half as mad as he is.)

And he barks out a laugh. It isn't a happy one. "I cannot believe this. You think the captain is capable of replicating me when he can't even create a convincing tree?!"

He moves abruptly, pressing his hands over his face as if he could simply push it all back to its appropriate place on the timeline, far away from him. "I wasn't supposed to go back," he gasps, "Ava, please, just shoot me."

Edited 2022-07-01 06:34 (UTC)

"NO!" she protests, to his horrible request, to all of it. If he's the real Skulduggery, she'd never be able to forgive herself for shooting him. And if he's a fake, she'd lose out on her chance to get answers and hope of rescuing him.

Except she's beginning to realize if he's being held hostage, it's right here, in this moment, by her.

Ava can feel his anger, drowning out her own, and the blue energy from her claws deactivates.

She doesn't know what memories he means, despite his insistence. Because she's thinking about it too linearly, that memories are of something that already happened. In the past. And her own are failing to come up with anything that makes sense for this context. There's something important she's missing, and she feels frustrated with herself, a hopeless look at Max from over Skulduggery's shoulder as he tries to reason through the situation.

But Skulduggery's last statement hits her hard. Because it's what she told Max. That he didn't want to go back. That he never would have agreed to such a thing, because he was so certain death waited for him on the other side. Ava's grip slips into something that's just as tight, but a bit gentler. Perhaps a hug, if everything weren't so tense, if she weren't still holding the gun she refuses to use to his wrong skull. "What... was on the other side of that portal?" she asks, terrified of the answer.

"He doesn't care about the trees so he expended no effort. But he cares about you, so he would put forth every effort imaginable." Obviously. The Captain has the capacity to create things, Friday is certainly almost a person; why bother with the trees when they were just set dressing? Maybe he's holding Skulduggery in his private quarters for nefarious reasons. They don't know!

Max's eyes flick from Skulduggery's empty sockets to the lights in Ava's mask, and then back. He is most definitely missing some crucial bit of information here. That's what he gets for not wanting to talk about uncomfortable things like the fact in some diverging timeline he's wearing those horrible Overwatch sweats right now.

"What portal? What are.. " He sighs and the electricity coursing around his hand and the pipe he's holding shuts off. "No one is currently shooting anyone. Let's start again with some basic explanations. What memories? What portal? And what was on the other side?"

You know, communication or something.

It feels as though his bones are strung together with candyfloss, only one firm push away from falling apart. Ava's arm around his shoulders is a brace that forces him into the moment, staring first at Max and then at the empty audience as though waiting for someone else to show. Something else to shake this moment back into a dreamier, easier to avoid state.

The laugh that Max's comment draws out is more-or-less a single hysterical sob that dies as abruptly as it starts. When the moment passes and he doesn't fall apart, when the ship fails to collapse into a mass hallucination, when the Faceless Ones don't com for him, he lets out another awful noise.

"There's no escaping it," he says at last. "What happens to us is always going to happen. I was always going to wind up in that... place."

That eleven-month-old exhaustion finally hits and he finds himself barely able to sit up right. "I don't remember what I was doing. I just woke up in my bed after it happened, with these... memories crammed inside my head. Of falling through the portal, of the..." He tries to shake his head, but the movement is just too much. "...The things that were waiting for me... We call them Faceless Ones. And they... Do not like me. For some unimaginable reason."

It's a massive understatement, a catastrophic miss, but he can't bear to tell them the truth. That he'd laid eyes on madness-inducing gods, that they'd hunted him, tore his body apart and repeated it every night once there were no other playthings to distract them.

It's an awful sort of sound that escapes Skulduggery's mouth and mingling with the fading notes of the forgotten karaoke song. Not even resulting from the pain they'd intended to inflict upon him for answers. This is all going so much worse than she imagined, worse than her friend just being hidden away somewhere that she could rescue like a princess in a castle. Nothing that can be solved with threats and violence, her most reliable methods.

Everything he'd confessed to her, the fear of going back, somehow flooding his mind all at once. It aligns with what Ava suspected of the timelines, that they go on uninterrupted without them. But not quite the way she expected any of it to work, how his consciousness might cross over into the life he's deviated from. She has so many questions, but that's not the most important thing right now.

"Hey," she speaks hesitant and hushed. "You're here. Right now. With us." Maybe that's not so reassuring, in the present context. She finally removes her mask, so her voice is more familiar. "I've been so worried about you," she tells him with a small tremble to the words. "I wish I could have come with you."

Max tucks the pipe back into his sleeve, more to have something to focus on that isn't Skulduggery. The sound he makes is terrible and Max doesn't know what it means, for all that he tries to pretend he knows how to manipulate and out negotiate humans, and does so all the time, he does not at all understand them emotionally. The amount of people he's seen cry could be counted on a single hand.

The reason he got along so well with Skulduggery, the reason he'd even spoken to him to begin with, was because he was so obviously not human. Even after all these months of interactions Max still sometimes forgot that Skulduggery actually had been human at some point, he hadn't simply manifested as a skeleton from the beginning.

Max has decided that he's no longer qualified to really assist in this emotional debacle anymore because anything he says or does is likely to be wrong and make things worse. Ava would know what to do, already does seem to be fixing it by what she's saying. He'll let her take the lead so he doesn't say the wrong thing.

"So then, you really are you. You're actually Skulduggery?" Better to focus on the basics, the facts. The things that don't require empathy or emotional maturity. "But with, more memories, more time that you've lived in your reality while remaining here."

A pause, "That sounds awful. My... my apologies."

So much for remaining emotionally neutral.

The image of Ava on that dead planet very nearly drives him to his feet, although he only gets as far as dropping his hands to brace himself against the edge of the stage before going still again. "No," he hisses. "No, it would only have been worse if you had been there."

But that thought doesn't help, and he just barely manages to drive it away. One thing at a time, he thinks, reassured to hear his own voice this time around. Focus.

"As much as either of you are really yourselves," is the easiest way to explain the first point. "We... Here, we exist outside of time. But we still exist in the timeline. And occasionally, for reasons the captain either could not or would not explain, we... can connect to those future points in our lives. I think. I was... not in any position to understand his explanation."

Next point. "And that's because I cannot trust any of my senses. I... see things, hear things that aren't real. Which is why I attacked you, Ava. I didn't realize it was you until it was too late. And then I started to question my reality, and... Well. You both see how that turned out."

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