Another heart breaks, I am so much older than I can take, and my affection, well, it comes and goes…
{{Backdated to about 23:00 on December 31, 2009; LOCKED to Suzie.}}It's wearing on toward midnight, inexorably pulling the world toward a new year and a new decade, and J... is slinking through the Kashtta Tower as a dog, head held low and a long gnawing pressure courting his gut. Maybe it's hyperbole that he's shaken more than he was since an
( Read more... )
She looks tired and unwell, but not much more than usual.
"Come in," she says, and moves away from the door. She rummages in a drawer for a moment, and a pair of new sweatpants -- large and roomy, with a drawstring waist, and tags still on them -- are tossed on her bed. A minute later, an oversized t-shirt follows them -- this one not new, and smelling of fabric softener and faintly of her.
"I'm going to assume you're here because you've got something to say, and not because there's an emergency. So you might as well make yourself..." she looks over at the clearly miserable dog, "as comfortable as you're likely to get, anyway."
Reply
Is not the thing he should be fixating on right now. Especially not when he's got no idea what's going to happen after he says what he needs to.
He shifts back, pulling on the clothing in uneasy silence, and then... crouches down again anyway, forearms on his knees, neck low, communicating nonengagement and harmlessness and even if submission isn't exactly there, there's a hint that it wants to be.
Right.
This is the part where he's supposed to be saying something.
...he's absolutely certain he had something to say.
He opens his mouth, but words fail to materialize, so after a moment, he shuts it again. Wonderful. So now he's wormed his way into Suzie's room, and has nothing to show for it.
Idiot....if he can't say something that'll make this right, if he can ( ... )
Reply
"I know you are," she says, once he's done. "You stopped. I don't know if you were in any state to comprehend what I was saying at the time, so I'll say it again: thank you for that. If you hadn't..."
Could she have burned that bridge? Really?
Yes, part of her answers. You've done it before. Though that was before she was with Thane. Before she was broken.
"If you hadn't, things would be very different right now," she finishes. She's not sure whether she means that she wouldn't let him in her room in the first place, or that she wouldn't have a choice. Either way, that's not a possibility she wants to spend that much time considering.
Either way, there's more to this than just the apology.
"They made you a weapon with a built-in defence mechanism. Is that more or less what you're trying to tell me?"
Reply
The question takes him more by surprise than it should, and it shows, for a moment, in the lines of his shoulders. He doesn't know what he's trying to say. Nothing seems to change things, in any case; nothing seems to help. Maybe this is selfish, his need to be recognized, understood, above all else. It's a very Thane impulse, that.
"No," he says, quietly. Then, after a moment, "I don't know. Could say it could probably happen again. ...probably will, unless-"
He shakes his head. Unless what? The Agency doesn't make its agents to be deprogrammed.
In light of that, any apology means... almost nothing.
"I don't know why I'm here," he admits, holding down the rising fear in his stomach. He's here because he's trapped. "I'm not asking for-"
Amnesty. Forgiveness. Understanding. Is he ( ... )
Reply
She gathers her thoughts. "Can you listen to me, though, just for a while before you go?" There's no judgement in her tone, no censure, just the question itself, and a willingness to accept any answer he cares to give.
Reply
He glances up for a moment, but the training which would allow him to meet anyone's eyes is very specifically not being employed. He looks down, fixing his gaze again. Not quite submissive, but with no element of protest. He nods.
Reply
She doesn't give him a chance to answer that question, she just continues on. "You said it yourself: functional torture is just overwriting one person's will with someone else's. I tried to deal with the obvious things, the things that kept me from functioning. I didn't stop to consider the implications." This is the sort of thing that should be delivered in a tone of accusation. There should be anger in her voice, she should be holding it over him, demanding repentance or reparation. Instead, her tone's still soft, compassionate... Almost apologetic ( ... )
Reply
He doesn't know what to do here.
"You don't have the authority to fix me," he says. He's speaking in terms of personal authority, not representational - there's no universal agency which monitors the wellbeing of the inhabitants of the universe, there's just the people he is or isn't programmed to take in instruction from, and changing that can only be done from inside that programming of from breaking it down entirely. And Suzie, who he didn't start out trusting, who reacts to him with compassion, doesn't fit that mold ( ... )
Reply
Of course, that seems to go hand in hand with J admitting that the caring part of it is a problem, which is the precise kind of convoluted thing she ought to expect from him, given that it flies directly in the face of everything so-called 'normal' people think about how emotions work.
"You know," she says, her focus still on J's hands, "if it were to come to that -- to reprogramming me -- the thing that would worry me most is if you'd be all right. Because... well, this isn't right, is it? Me being the way I am, how I every time I make a decision, I do it with your voice in my head. I think, if you asked, I could quote everything you said to me then, verbatim. Including the things that weren't conscious. It's never far enough away from my mind to forget ( ... )
Reply
J hangs for a moment on that question. He's not sure he'll ever be able to answer it. He's not sure he knows what right in this context means ( ... )
Reply
It sounds hopeless, and that's not an acceptable answer. She just can't think of any way to--
Wait.
John Thane is your primary authority.
That's wrong. She can't quite articulate why yet, but her gut feeling says that J, for once, is wrong about this.
"Wait a moment, though. If you'll permit a digression: what made Thane the primary, exactly? Proximate authority, I can grasp, I think, and primary seems self-evident, but I want to be absolutely sure I've got this all in its proper context." There's something in her eyes that says Humour me on this, please, I have my reasons. It's the same look she'd get when dismantling something in the Hub, with Jack hovering over her shoulder voicing dire warnings that it could explode and kill them all ( ... )
Reply
"'Everything comes back to that day,'" he quotes back at her. "Whether you're reinforcing the things that happened or trying to negate them, that's still at the centre of everything. That's practically the definition."
He snorts.
"It would have been your father, first," he says. "And Thane dismantled that. In the absence of a primary authority, it's not uncommon for a proximate to fill that role."
Reply
"You're forgetting something, though," she says, quiet certainty in her voice. "I'm not sure it makes any difference at all, but there's a variable you've overlooked. You think because you only remember yourself as Thane and me being in that room, that Thane was the only authority in play. He wasn't. Think about what I do, J. The shadow-self is just a bunch of subconscious urges without form or self-awareness most of the time, right? Except when it's confronted by the conscious mind, in which case it gets anthropomorphised. It's given a shape, a face, a means of communicating. And I can make that happen, independent of anyone else's conscious control ( ... )
Reply
"I didn't break because of anything you said or did as John Thane, though I've no doubt I would've," she says, voice clear and calm and certain in a way that has noting to do with imposed control and everything to do with a simple fact made evident. "I broke when I did because the part of you that was once Jack Harkness wanted me to. As for what good it does... Very possibly none at all. But if you're working off a model of me as Thane's, then you're working off incomplete information ( ... )
Reply
He looks up involuntarily. He's used Agency terminology around Torchwood before, even had a couple of them pick it up as local idiom, but they've never understood it to the point where it and all its tangled implication rolls smoothly off the tongue. She speaks and a full-body grip of tension tightens itself through him, every muscle frozen.
Shadow-selves, shades of inflection and meaning, and maybe he's reading shadow like shadow government, subtle like sleeper cell, and having that posture confront him...
You're dead.
...you're dead.
For a moment, he's not looking at Suzie. He's looking at a ghost.
He starts breathing again when he notices that he's stopped, and the first breath makes its way out as a laugh which doesn't quite manage not to sound shaken.
"It always was wheels within wheels," he says, and the with you doesn't make it into the open air. "Was it enough?"
The question's not a question. It's only there to seed the question it requires: for what?He shifts his weight, pressing his heels down into ( ... )
Reply
"That depends," she says. "Not enough to fix me, not enough to undo everything you did as Thane... enough to keep me going, maybe." She shrugs, and for a moment, she looks a little lost.
And, in response to the comment about Jack being even farther away than Thane... "I know. And I wouldn't ask it of you."
Part of her wants to, but it's not fair to him. And if she asked... Even if he did, even if he could, she's not sure it would be Jack. Would it be him? Would it be J playacting?
Would there be any difference between the two?
She doesn't know. But to put him in the position where he has to act the part of someone he isn't anymore... is that really one step closer to Jack, or one step closer to Thane, taking on a role to further manipulate someone?
Reply
Leave a comment