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

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."

She immediately wishes she kept her mask on, flinching away at being told her presence only would make things worse. Is making things worse, her mind unhelpfully adds. Max's little stumble over his words hurts, she feels guilty for dragging him into this.

"That's what I suspected all along, that time goes on without us," Ava says softly, but had tried to take comfort in it. That Bill would never have to miss her the way she does him. Except now everything that Steven told her of the future, she's not so sure of that anymore. She might've disappeared anyway, after everything.

"We're the only versions of ourselves that each other know," Ava insists. "Which makes us the most important versions. I would have torn this entire place apart with Max, to make sure you were safe. And I hurt you instead..." Ava brushes her gloved fingers down the side of Skulduggery's jaw, still cradling him in her grip.

"But why is your face different?" That's the part that she can't shake!

"It's his original skull, the other was someone else's." That much Max knows, he unfortunately has not been made aware of the fact that Skulduggery won it in a poker game which is unfortunate because he would be delighted by that.

"That's why it looks better with his suit." Which is the first thing that Max noticed, he is an Omnic of dubious priorities.

There's a pause while Max tries to understand what Skulduggery is telling them, there's one part that he understands extremely well. And that's not being in the right mental state for literally anything. "As nice as it would be to have a full explanation of what has happened from the Captain, I spent four of seven days while camping pretending to be a tree so I understand why you might not have absorbed all that information."

He maybe sorta understands something about mental breakdowns now.

"Ah," and now he knows for certain that it was Max there with him in the Tommy Bahama. "That is it, exactly." On both counts. Really, on all counts, as he lets Ava touch him to satisfy her own curiosity. "We are the only versions of ourselves we need to worry about. The rest can deal with their messy Earth business."

He's come to the conclusion that he's the most well-off version of himself out there. On the timeline, he'll have to face down the Death Bringer. He'll likely have to reveal himself to Valkyrie and ruin her trust after she'd gone through so much to get him back. He'll have to deal with the Sanctuary's destruction and all the awful bureaucracy and politics that will ensue.

Here on the Eterna, things are much simpler. Clearer. He prefers it that way.

"Neither of you could hurt me in a way that matters," he says, like that's supposed to be comforting! "Really. I've found out that my threshold for pain far exceeds falling a few floors or being beaten with an... iron bar? Where in the world did you get that?"

"No, I know, I know how you earned your old skull in a poker game," Ava sounds near hysterics because that isn't the part that's even halfway weird in all of this. She already reacted to that with appropriate shock back then. "But if this is your original and you mentally synced up with the future of a you that can no longer be, how did you possibly get. It. Back?" Why are they both acting like it's so self explanatory when it makes no sense at all!

She peers over his shoulder to inspect his profile closer, taking in the higher cheekbones with more appreciation than before. Now that it wasn't the face of a supposed stranger attacking her. "Max is right."

He lets the pipe slide back into his hand and gives it a flip, there's the sense that he's probably broken someone's jaw with one of these before. "It's part of one of the morgue drawers. On the inside of the drawer it's the piston that causes the tray to slide out. I have a few, I brought supplies, just in case."

And then it's back up into his sleeve. For future interrogations.

"You won it in a poker game? You didn't tell me that." His eyes narrowing, suddenly all offended that this piece of information that's absolutely relevant to Max's interests was kept from him.

Skulduggery simply laughs. It's nowhere near his normal dry amusement, but at least he doesn't sound like he's about to break down (literally?). "I don't know how it happened. The captain doesn't know how it happened, either. Horrifying, I know. He says that it's part of his research." As it usually comes back around to.

"I hadn't seen it in decades. Valkyrie had to track it down from the police. She... used it as a sort of magical compass to find me in that other dimension. And then she brought me home." He reaches up to pat Ava's hand. "You both would find her terribly obnoxious, but she would have done the same thing if she'd suspected I wasn't myself." And for Max, he gets a special toe-bump of Skulduggery's shoe to his knee. "And yes. I won it after some goblins stole this one while I was resting in a church."

Yes she's quite impressed at Max's resourcefulness and musters up a small smile of approval and mostly relief they didn't have to carry through with any of their haphazardly thrown together plan. "Sounds like this Valkyrie friend had far more creative problem-solving methods," Ava sighs. She still likes to think if she was there, she could have done something.

"Maybe the Captain was hoping to... change... your mind," Ava suggests the joke with a hesitant delivery. But research. Into what? Converging multiple instances of self across timelines? What good could that possibly do.

None here, clearly, Skulduggery is one of the strongest minds by her estimation, and this has nearly broken him (and them along with.) But she places a gentle kiss to his cheekbone, and please just ignore that her own cheek is a bit damp.

"So is that's what causing you to... hear and see things? Because of overlapping consciousness?" Ava asks uncertainly.

That raises so many more questions! None of them are relevant now but, his skull can be taken by goblins? It's detachable? His original one was sitting in a police evidence box for years? What is going on in Skulduggery's reality????

"I want you to appreciate the restraint I have right now in not asking you several dozen questions about your skull alone." He huffs, because wow, just leave out all the important juicy bits.

Instead he will go to the closed door and retrieve his leather bag of goodies so it's not sitting in the hallway suspiciously. Plus then he can get all these ties out of his pockets.

"So you are hallucinating then? Hallucinating us?" That's weirdly touching actually.

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