come_sailaway | [OPEN] the labour and the wounds are vain

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[OPEN] the labour and the wounds are vain

Who: Arthur Lester and YOU
What: The walk of shame after rafting with two other idiots off the edge of the world
Where: Around the ship
When: The day after the beach party
Warnings: The normal Arthur stuff. Traumatised man hours. Death happened. Sad about blind. Also, the thread with Bash eventually contains a couple references to 1930s homophobia, plus displays of ignorance about queer people.

Mistakes were made. Big ones. For those sensitive to that kind of thing, an invisible death counter has ticked up in Arthur from zero to one.

i. scoops

It's a big ship, but unless you count Tommy Bahamas, it's not infinitely big. Why the hell can't he find Smith or Steve? Particularly Steve-- you know, the teenager he just helped kill?

In truth, Steve is hiding in his cabin and he happens to keep missing 6, but Arthur's brain is pleased to conjure some more unpleasant scenarios, and the effort of talking it down is exhausting. Looking for people while fucking blind only compounds his frustrations, and he's already feeling a few SAN points down after the whole 'fell into the fucking void' fiasco, and he's currently searching on the promenade which is already fucking overwhelming, and so his reaction when he collides with a fucking stool that's sitting outside of Scoops is, as soon as he's regained his balance, to pick it up and toss it as hard as he fucking can across the fucking ground.

"Fuck!"

ii. tauva

...not long after that, Arthur realises that he needs to calm the hell down.

He forces himself to stop pacing and pacing and pacing and pacing. And once he stops, it's like the energy leeches right out of him, both physically and mentally. Part of his mind is still just spiralling down that invisible void, screaming.

The whole raft thing is a part of it, but it's far from the whole. He's so far out of his depth and he doesn't even know which way up is, and he's been holding his breath for as long as he can, focused on the possibility of escape, but now escape has put him right back on the ship and it feels like he tried to take a breath and instead filled his lungs with salt water.

He ends up in Tauva. It's not consciously planned. But he has been thinking about someone else who frequents the place: someone to whom he once again owes an apology.

Arthur's slumped back in one of the leather armchairs, his useless eyes closed. Until now he's perched on the edges of chairs, sat with his feet beneath him, ready to move if he needed to. This time he's just... folded into it. Head tilted down. As still as if he was asleep, or even more so, because even sleeping people murmur or turn over once in a while. The only parts of him stirring are his lips, which move as if silently singing to himself, and his hands, whose long fingers bat restlessly against one another and against the soft arms of the chair.

He is not super okay.

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With Arthur quieting down, Jack loosens up a little too.

"There's another one, yeah, if you follow the edge of that table about a foot." Jack says, and shrugs.

Smiling a little, now, he adds, "And it's not the worst thing someone has thrown at me."

Or that Jack's thrown at someone else.

Arthur nods his thanks, finds the stool, and performs a kind of controlled fall onto it. One hand is on his shufflecane, but the other hand stays on the table, middle finger tapping gently and repeatedly.

"Do I dare ask...?"

Jack watches him, as if just the presence of an observer is enough to keep him from falling, feeling safe to relax again when Arthur finds his seat.

Technically, Arthur hasn't asked, but Jack gets it over with anyway:

"Boathooks, fireballs, grenades." he lists with the enthusiasm of a shopping list.

The finger stops. "Christ," says Arthur, with a good bit more intonation than a shopping list. "Why?"

(Wait, did he say fireballs? Arthur predates D&D, but the word itself is evocative.)

"I wasn't a very popular guy." Jack says dryly. But, knowing how much of a cop-out that is, he sighs quietly, and adds: "It's kind of a long story."

One he may or may not have touched on already, but a reminder wouldn't hurt, especially not after how much everyone was drinking last night.

After Arthur and Jack's impromptu tag-team against the Scoops patio furniture, this table now only seats one. Jack actually considers just leaning on it, but remembers this isn't Rapture and the amount of intact furniture isn't dwindling. He glances over to another table and stools set up in front of the place, and pulls the nearest stool over with telekinesis.

The legs only scrape on the ground for a second before it takes off, but unlike before, Jack carefully switches that plasmid 'off' and catches a leg with his other hand, and then sets it down on his side of the table. Legs scrape the floor again as he tugs it back just a little further and then sits down.

... Should he have grabbed ice cream, first?

Edited 2022-09-29 23:24 (UTC)

Arthur hears something move against the ground at a distance, and while he notes it -- has no choice but to note it, really, since his ears now pick up a lot of the slack that his eyes left behind -- he doesn't think it's strange until the exact same movement happens right at their table. And then... then he's not sure exactly what he just heard. Which is frustrating, but only remotely. He's been really burning through his energy for active frustration, and after a peak he's coming into a trough.

"A bar got overzealous about its right to refuse service?"

Jack opens his mouth to counter Arthur with a dryness Rapture could never hope to see again, but then he thinks about it for two seconds and snorts, and chuckles.

"I mean, yeah, kind of." he says, thinking of the Kashmir, Fighting McDonagh's, Worley Winery, Sinclair Spirits, Eve's Garden, various cocktail lounges, and more. "I uh, pissed off some powerful people."

... And, hell, he'll probably talk about it anyway, so he shrugs and leans his arms on the table. "Also, the city had gone to shit, so all the non-powerful people were pissed off too. Rough town, and all."

But Jack's not here to talk about his life story, so he turns it back around to Arthur: "You get that hangover cure already, then?" he asks lightly.

Arthur is about to make a comment, something along the lines of being glad Jack is good at dodging boathooks, before he remembers that some people were brought to this ship from the moment of their death. He still looks worried, but he at least has the restraint not to immediately ask whether those people include Jack.

...Whether that restraint would have lasted another five seconds is up to the audience to debate. We'll never know for sure, because Jack hits him with a question of his own, and Arthur grimaces.

"I, ah..." A good liar would have just said yes, but suddenly having to bluff is not something with a high roll on Arthur's character sheet. Especially not when what actually happened is still right there in the front of his mind. "I-I... Something... something like that."

Nope. On this occasion, he cannot even pretend to have nailed it.

Arthur breathes out sharply. "All right, no, nothing like that," he admits, saving Jack the trouble of having to select (x) doubt. "I don't--"

The water. The clawing. He flattens his palm against the tabletop, cold and hard and present.

"I-I'd rather not talk about it, if it's all the same."

Wow! Today sucks!

Well! That sure isn't about a hangover!

Luckily, Arthur can't see how obviously concerned Jack looks, though the awkward pause that stretches after his words probably gives it away. As does Jack's voice, slow to answer.

"O-okay." Jack says, and means to leave it, he really does, Arthur seems so bothered and he just said, but - "Did something happen?"

"What on earth," says Arthur, using all the dryness that was going to go into Jack's answer earlier, "would give you the impression that something happened."

His jaw and his throat are tight. He wonders if he should add aloud that this is not an invitation to further discussion, just in case Jack doesn't get it.

Arthur's entire everything is a start, and Jack even starts to motion his hand before he remembers. Which, thank god, because that's enough time for him to reconsider if he really does want to keep pressing this with how uncomfortable Arthur sounds.

"... Look, I just... Are you okay? Do you need anything?" Jack says.

It's ultimately the part that matters; is Arthur okay, does he need help or something.

"You don't have to say more than that if you don't want to, either. I just want to check, y'know."

Despite appearances, Arthur does in fact grasp that he should probably stop jumping down Jack's throat before he throws yet another budding interpersonal relationship into an open fire. He lets out a breath, abashed.

"Right. I... right. Sorry." And a muttered aside: "I forget people want to help, sometimes."

Arthur's not going to find either of the others by running about getting frustrated like this. He needs to be smarter than that, and sit, and calm the fuck down. He lets his cane fall into his lap and leans over the table, his fingers twisting together against every effort to stay still. They grasped the paddle and rowed so hard he thought his back would break, and it did nothing.

He blurts out: "Some, ah, company wouldn't go amiss, i-if you weren't on the way anywhere." And if throwing a stool at Jack didn't put him off hanging out. "A bad day to be alone with my thoughts, I think."

Jack nods- ah, fuck it, he's going to talk anyway, so he nods.

"I get it." Jack says, about - well, "I get all of it, I mean, the help, the company, being alone with your thoughts."

He shrugs. "Sometimes people want to help, but sometimes it's the last thing you want, so... It's fine, whatever works for you."

Which in this case, is company. And he snorts a little.

"But company's easy, I can do that for you. Not a lot of pressing appointments on this ship, y'know?"

"No, I suppose not. Nothing of anything very much."

Nothing but parties and dying!

"Except a risk of low-flying furniture," he adds, attempting levity.

Jack chuckles, so the levity works, though it risks petering out conversation if Jack doesn't pick up on something quick.

... Well... He did uno reverse out of a conversation about himself earlier, didn't he?

His fingers tap against the table, but eh, fuck it.

"I've got that before too." Jack says, opening the way to that line of questioning. "At least this one wasn't on fire."

Arthur sees the train heading down that line of questioning, and hops straight on.

"God," he says, wondering. "Exactly how rough was this town of yours?"

"When I ended up in it, it was less a city and more of a disaster zone." Jack is happy to explain.

Not cheery, just very casual about an experience he had to accept very quickly to live through. Or - well, to get out the other side of, more accurately.

"It was a city at the bottom of the ocean with civil unrest, and that's before you bring genetic modification into it, so picture a powder keg next to a furnace."

"At the bottom of the ocean," Arthur repeats -- not disbelieving, because he's fairly sure no impossible location could surprise him at this point, but surprised all the same.

So many questions, and so much time, but first:

"I'll need to ask about genetic modification before I can picture it properly. I- I don't think we have that in my world, or if we do, it's not something I've encountered. We have-- well, the, the concept of genetics, of course, so I can make a good guess, but you might be ahead of me on that one."

Jack's relieved that Arthur at least knows about genetics - that'll make it easier.

He nods without realizing it, but his answer is still clear without the gesture.

"You'd probably guess right - it's modifying a person's genes to make them stronger, faster, smarter (whatever that's supposed to mean), or to change hair and eye colour, apparently even your sex?"

Granted, the man who said that wanted to be 'the Picasso of surgery' so Jack's not wholly certain what the final product of that looked like in Rapture, but it seemed a lot less complicated, messy, and weird than shooting bees out of your hands so probably that worked as easily as the hair and eye and muscles thing.

"And while they were at it, they decided to push beyond that, give people the ability to move things with their mind or shoot electricity from their fingertips, that kind of thing." Jack looks at his hand and shifts Eletrobolt forward, just enough to watch the light flicker down his veins. This one consciously is a gesture just for himself.

"And when the companies behind these genetic - they called them plasmids or tonics - anyway, when the company behind them noticed the drugs were addictive and the people splicing themselves - using the drugs, giving themselves those plasmids and tonics - were mutating, or having their genes break down, or something, some side effect from using them too much or going into withdrawal... They just kept making them." Jack shrugs. "Possibly even charged more. Anyway, you can imagine what that did to the situation."

Arthur nods along to the first part of the explanation, because that's very unfortunately a widely-shared idea in the time and place he hails from, though it's a bit of a science-fiction concept in his opinion. (In... what was his opinion, before he found out that science can visit other planets, after which something that boils down to selective breeding seems pretty basic in comparison.) Changing sex is a new one on him, but damn, impressive if true.

The second part of the explanation, from magic powers onwards, is much wilder -- and yet, sitting on a ship in a pocket world, having come back from death for a second time, it's also completely believable. Arthur's a bit too early-20th-century-America to hear about a company being evil and think 'ugh, of course', but he's also not completely naive, so he also doesn't 100% not think that.

"Fuck," he says, in the tone of someone hearing high casualty numbers from a place far away. "And the government didn't step in? You'd think someone would give a-a-a half a damn about this when it started to get that bad."

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[OPEN] the labour and the wounds are vain

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