completelysane:

reeberry asked you:

Sandtrap AU! *drowns you in prompts* “and now we pass just like glass / i see through you and you see through me like i’m not there / you could make my head swerve / used to know my every curve / and now we meet on a street / and i’m blind. i cannot find the heart i gave to you”

The desert got into her head. It made her forget some times that there were green things in the world, or that the sun could be kind to pale, protected skin. Sand trickled into vulnerable synapses and then everything seemed distant and half-real like a mirage. She had tried to fight past the done-dry and the dark-and-cold and maybe dig some sand out of her head but by that time the desert was in her heart too.

CT turned over onto the sharp edge of her shoulder armor and looked across the hallway at Wash. She had been waiting for him to speak, but someone needed to now. Everyone else was asleep, and talking was easier when they weren’t alone.

She said, “Are you just going to stay quiet all night?”

He stared at the cave ceiling. “Yes. That’s called sleeping.”

“Shut up, Wash. We’re not going to wake up the blue guy. Talk.”

“I don’t need to.”

So they weren’t going to make a ritual out of this. They weren’t going to find themselves revealing weakness in the dark again. She said, “Fine.”

He didn’t let her think she had won. “You always got like this so easily.”

“Like what?” She accused right back.

He was laying on his back with his hands crossed over his gray chest as if in preparation for burial. Doc, Tucker, and the Meta were another almost-square further down the hallway. “You’re being snide, CT.” You get snide when you care, is that it? he had said to her once. “You don’t need to be any more. You made your grand statement and left the Freelancer program before the rest of us, and look where it got us now.”

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oh my gooood

I love everything that is this Sandtrap AU and and and and

everything that you touch and

“You get snide when you care, is that it?”

and

and just the end

when what he says and it hurts her in such a way and and and and

;A;

completelysane:

reeberry asked: “Be afraid of the lame, they’ll inherit your legs / Be afraid of the old, they’ll inherit your souls / Be afraid of the cold, they’ll inherit your blood / Apres moi, le deluge, after me comes the flood” For/About the Director, as seen from the freelancers? Or just CT or something, this part just really reminded me of him, the Director, and I’d love to see where you take it :)

It’s like living history.

The Director watches the Freelancers walk off into the sunset (metaphorically). It’s really just a nearby sun shining off the edge of the dropship, plus the running lights on the roof of the hanger, but he can picture the sun going down over scrub and campfires lighting the backs of their legs. They are the best and the most desperate of the gold-seekers, looking for a metal that is precious because it is rare, and they will discover a new country.

He speaks to the Counselor, standing on a ledge well away from the splash zone of the dropship’s engines. “If this were five hundred years ago we would be explorers, Counselor. We would be out in the frontiers. But then, as in any other period of history, there are always people who have to stay behind.”

“Do you envy them, Director?” The Counselor’s voice was quiet.

The Director turns, raising the back of his hand to his face for a moment to block out the glare of the sun. “What were you assigned to me for, Counselor?”

The other man’s blank aspect does not change. “To confirm compliance with UNSC codes of conduct.”

“Therefore,” said the Director, “you arenotauthorized to comment on my personal stake in this, or any other matter.”

The ship slipped out of the striped energy lock like a bird on the wind.

Leonard Church said, “Maybe I fear that their kind will replace me. Men of action are successful in wartime. Men of the mind wait. We develop things that other people use. But we survive, Counselor. We endure. The West gets won.”

Holy shit this is way better than even the amazingness I was expecting!

I just, oh man.

So many great visuals.

And the Director and and and and and

and yes.

and thank you.

and holy shit.

completelysane:

I keep finding old fics in my big word document o’ RvB. Someone yell at me if I’ve posted this already.

    One day, they made the mistake of giving him a comic book.

  There had been a whole pile of them, sitting on the thin-legged brown table in the middle of the common area for crazy soldiers. Wash didn’t want to look at them. He sat where he usually did, in a blue chair near the window, rifling his fingers through his hair or around the criss-cross pattern of scars at the back of his neck. Sometimes he had to remind himself that he was still here.

    But then an aid came over and handed him a floppy bundle of papers in the shape of a comic. “Hello David. Would you like to read?”

    Wash took the book. Might as well look at it, right? He was used to taking the things people handed him: confidentiality forms, trays of food, pills. The paper slid in his fingers. At first he just recognized colors, blurry blue and red made up of big dots the size of the targeting reticle on a sniper rifle. Then he saw the words.

    (These aren’t Epsilon memories, they’re just…they’re so strong, the image of North setting his comics down on the table or York reading in the common room in the middle of the night, his feet up by the coffee machine.)

    Wash said, “No.”

    The aid retreated right away, leaving the book in Wash’s hands. “All right, David. Would you prefer something else?”

    “No.”

    Wash lunged.

    He punched, grabbed, hooked one arm around to snap the aide’s thin elbow and then there were security guys on him, pulling at his shoulders. He whipped his head back and cracked his skull against someone else’s. All of them writhing, Wash pulled them across the room and knocked over the table.

    “No, no, no, you’re not actually going to give me Captain America-”

    With all the denial of how stupid the hospital staff could possibly be, with all the thoughts of North and York and South, Wash fought his aides all the way down the hall until someone jabbed a syringe into his bicep and everything went slack.

I need this on my blog.

I think I remember you posting it before (because I remember my intense emotional reaction to it), but I’m not complaining, at all, ever.

This is just so heart-wrenchingly perfect, seriously.

completelysane:

I haven’t the foggiest why I didn’t post this here before.

*

Sarge believes in heaven with the utmost assurance. That’s where he’ll go when he dies, probably, unless he’s done something wrong and winds up in hell, in which case he’ll just keep on fighting the dirty Blues he took there with him. In Sarge’s worldview, God is, if not on anybody’s side, most definitely somewhere.

Maybe He got left back on Earth, and somebody’s still waiting at the office to pick up the package.

But to a soldier of such abject faith, AIs cause a lot of problems. What are the darn things? Are they alive or not? Are they Red or Blue? Most importantly, are all of them likely to start commandeering people’s heads and/or radios in order to go on killing sprees?

Only slightly less importantly, do they go to heaven?

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….. <3

The entire conversation with Simmons is pure gold.

(also the title yes yes that made me so happy)

completelysane:

sometimes I write attempts at academic essays based on my online experiences

<3!

Seriously, the points you make are completely awesome and really hit my feelings on the subject, too. I love the concept of round robin fics (obviously) and participating in such an impromptu one myself was kind of…kind of epicly awesome.

I’m always self concsious about my work. My new year’s resolution was to actually share more of my writing and art with people, haha. (success? :P) It honestly surprises me when people say they like reading my writing or they like my art, or they’d want to see more, every time. (I kinda like it that way, too, because I’d much rather be humble and thankful for everyone who takes the time to look at my stuff than get to the point where it’s not a surprise, not unexpected. But that’s a different post all together.) That’s why, for me, the concept of a writing game of round robin is so amazing and, at the same time, so unlikely in my brain. I thought I’d feel like I was intruding on someone’s plan, that I’d feel like I’m sullying their story with my words or ruining what they were going to do next because I’m arrogant enough to think that they’d want my input on their story.

I was so happily surprised when we went back and forth like we did and none of those things came up. It was just amazing fun, to take what you’ve given me and work with it, build on it, and then have it come around again, richer for having your handywork on it.

Basically, your point at the end of your article was just reaffirmed 110% by me - I was worried about it, about how I’d do, about stepping on any toes, about having my writing be good enough or high quality enough compared to where I see yours, but none of that mattered because in the end, it was illegal amounts of fun. Stress-free, just feeding on your creative energies, a spontaneous burst of fanfiction that served to make me more comfortable with sharing my writing, and more excited and thrilled to be doing it with someone.

completelysane:

reeberry:

completelysane:

reeberry asked you:

Church never got the hang of possessing someone and looking through their memories. It was always high pressure situations of on the spot jumping into someone else’s skin, intense focus, and no time to wonder about their name or their family back home or when their first kiss was. But when he jumped into Wash, in those last few minutes, the Freelancer’s memories opened up like a book. It could have been force of habit, but Church got the feeling that Wash was *showing* him, like a proud child.

Connecticut wasn’t a surprise, really, although the vividness of the memories coupled with Wash’s uncaring affect was. Church thought ‘this guy actually got a girl once?’ and ‘naming them all after states was the hokiest thing that old man ever thought of but it does have a ring to it’, and ‘dude, it’s crowded in here’. Wash’s mind seemed to shift. Never a stable landscape, it showed pictures and feelings that almost overwhelmed Church. Maybe this was why Wash was so OCD on the surface. But there was also that pride in his mental landscape, a straight-shouldered kind of demand to be heard.

All Church said was, “You know I can see why you didn’t want anyone else in your head. Got some pretty heavy stuff going on there.”

“Don’t touch anything,” Wash said firmly.

“Finally got the place how you like it, huh?” Church said, the new experience still grating. Through the waves under his feet came the waves of memories, bombarding his mind, glowing fondly as they showed the other agents, his friends. Glowing fondly with happy images, vivid memories, instances Wash cherished to keep for himself.

Next came the wave of feelings associated with the scenes. If Church still had a body, he would have staggered back at the sudden dump. It had been like that since he came through, but, still, every time it caught him by surprise. Under that current of apathy Wash had built up lay a carefully laid out web of vibrant emotion, probably inaccessible even to Wash’s conscious mind. It was there for a second, long enough to wind the breath Church didn’t need or shouldn’t have been holding out of his body, and it was gone again, just as quickly, just as violently.

He supposed it was normal for the agent to give himself so completely to any mental intruder. A reaction hammered into him by the Director, a habit he never had to break because he never thought it’d come up again. (Or maybe it was a remnant of a defeat, a lack of fighting in a battle that Church wasn’t even aware of, despite being the attacker.)

“Something like that,” Wash said.

Epsilon wasn’t here any more, although part of Church instinctively looked for him. The memory unit had left scars, as visible to Church in this mental space as if someone had scarred Wash’s face in the real world. Church didn’t want to examine those further. First of all it was boring. Dead memories were dead. Second of all, though, Epsilon now was only something dark and rotten and scabbed over. A ghost of a ghost. It was hard enough for the living to deal with that, but in the mental space, Church could have been lost in it.

So he controlled it instead, took stock of himself, and kept talking. “You’ve got all of this in here because of me?”

“Not because of you.” It’s hard to tell what someone’s movements are when Church isn’t actively trying to possess them, but that straight-shoulder impression gets more foreceful. Wash is walking out of the vehicle bay. “Because of the Director.”

“Yeah, but, he’s me. Or he was, anyway.” Church’s mechanical voice is almost sarcastic. “He put Epsilon inside your head, and we’re meeting up with him to…get Epsilon, or something? I get a little confused when nobody’s talking about me.”

“We’re going to kill the Meta.” Wash is jogging now. “Do you really want to take credit for what went on inside my head?”

Church doesn’t answer that. Instead, he says, “So, if I’m the Alpha - which I am still not sure about, by the way - shouldn’t I have some sort of magic ghost power over the other AI?”

“They want you,” Wash said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that you have any power.”

Church cackled. “Doesn’t necessarily mean - yes it does! They want me. I’m like the messiah to their enslaved peoples, the freaking moth to their flame.”

Wash paused to think about this, the idea that his passenger was a messiah, paused to reflect how utterly sad it all was, and was promptly reminded of the lack of privacy in his own head at the moment.

“Hey, I’d make a fucking good messiah,” Church said defensively.

“They should all be thankful your holy weapon can’t possibly be a gun,” the agent said with a forced smile, a forced joke, a forced lightness to the situation to distract him from the fact that Church was in his head, that someone else was hearing his thoughts, that privacy was once again long gone, and yet more secrets had taken its place.

“It’s a sniper rifle,” Church said, crossing his arms in Wash’s head with such gusto that Wash slowed down his running and almost repeated the gesture. “Oh, fuck you too, buddy.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Wash said defensively, picking up speed again.

“You didn’t have to, I felt it, man! Your entire mind rang with laughing and disbelief.” He said this and Wash could hear the childish pout, so out of place with the memory of the last time this voice had been in his head. “I can hear it, you know.”

“I know.”

“Can’t we turn it off or something? Can’t I just be a quiet passenger and not have a first class pass to your…you?”

“Sure, Alpha. You start being quiet, we’ll call that step one.”

Church looked around as he became aware of the tiny amount of glee giving this snarky command inspired in Wash. “It’s Church.”

“Right.”

“Don’t just fucking ‘right’ me, man, it’s my name.” Church was starting to get used to the sensation of being a passenger, or invader, or whatever he’d qualify himself as. Intruder. That’s what Wash’s mind supplied, easily, and Church realized he also wasn’t alone in his brain. It made his not-technically-existent neck itch. “I call you Wash.”

“David,” Wash supplied in a flash of insight about name association and it suddenly became very important for Church to call him David where Epislon and the Director himself had always called him Agent Washington, where all his old friends always called him Wash.

“Fine, David, but don’t you start calling me ‘Leonard’.”

completelysane:

reeberry asked you:

Church never got the hang of possessing someone and looking through their memories. It was always high pressure situations of on the spot jumping into someone else’s skin, intense focus, and no time to wonder about their name or their family back home or when their first kiss was. But when he jumped into Wash, in those last few minutes, the Freelancer’s memories opened up like a book. It could have been force of habit, but Church got the feeling that Wash was *showing* him, like a proud child.

Connecticut wasn’t a surprise, really, although the vividness of the memories coupled with Wash’s uncaring affect was. Church thought ‘this guy actually got a girl once?’ and ‘naming them all after states was the hokiest thing that old man ever thought of but it does have a ring to it’, and ‘dude, it’s crowded in here’. Wash’s mind seemed to shift. Never a stable landscape, it showed pictures and feelings that almost overwhelmed Church. Maybe this was why Wash was so OCD on the surface. But there was also that pride in his mental landscape, a straight-shouldered kind of demand to be heard.

All Church said was, “You know I can see why you didn’t want anyone else in your head. Got some pretty heavy stuff going on there.”

“Don’t touch anything,” Wash said firmly.

“Finally got the place how you like it, huh?” Church said, the new experience still grating. Through the waves under his feet came the waves of memories, bombarding his mind, glowing fondly as they showed the other agents, his friends. Glowing fondly with happy images, vivid memories, instances Wash cherished to keep for himself.

Next came the wave of feelings associated with the scenes. If Church still had a body, he would have staggered back at the sudden dump. It had been like that since he came through, but, still, every time it caught him by surprise. Under that current of apathy Wash had built up lay a carefully laid out web of vibrant emotion, probably inaccessible even to Wash’s conscious mind. It was there for a second, long enough to wind the breath Church didn’t need or shouldn’t have been holding out of his body, and it was gone again, just as quickly, just as violently.

He supposed it was normal for the agent to give himself so completely to any mental intruder. A reaction hammered into him by the Director, a habit he never had to break because he never thought it’d come up again. (Or maybe it was a remnant of a defeat, a lack of fighting in a battle that Church wasn’t even aware of, despite being the attacker.)

“Something like that,” Wash said.

completelysane:

Wash sequesters his feelings away.

It’s always been natural for him to separate battle from the rest of life, and it comes so easily now that he almost doesn’t notice it. It isn’t Connie that they’re fighting now. It can’t be. She’s from life, not from this battle where engines roar and York’s back smashes against the dirt twice in thirty seconds. Wash just keeps living in the moment. This way, he can fight and kill and not think about her giving orders to the people he’s killing.

For her, sending the troopers against the Freelancers instead of going herself is both natural and easy. They’re strong, she’s seen how they work, and she has other business to attend to. Every step, every keystroke, gets her closer to defeating the Director, that mad dictator who, finding no way to control the people around him, ruined them all by parsing up himself. She sees Sigma on one of her troopers’ helmet cams and shivers. Her enemy is throwing unquiet ghosts at her. Thinking about Sigma starts up other thoughts: how long was Maine in that pod? Was he happy? Did York and Wash joke about putting him in there? But then she looks back at Sigma’s nacreous glow again and reminds herself that even if the Freelancers think they’re the superheroes in this story, laughing and joking like they’re having so much self-assured fun, they’re just minions who were tricked into this war. She lost them behind the line that Wash (stupid, predictable, reliable Wash) did not understand.

CT sequesters her feelings away.

completelysane:

reeberry said: Mythsmashers. Definitely. Wash knows these things. He remembered every single line from Firefly but can’t remember the name of the show Connie always watches alone at 1 am when she can’t sleep. XD

I love that and it’s hilarious. It will make me giggle next time I see that show.

And of course everyone in fiction seems to know Firefly at some point these days but I love the idea of Wash-as-fan, and Freelancer movie nights, and sleepless CT wandering in going “shut up guys I’m watching Mythbusters”, and York going, “Shh, this is the part with the ‘I can kill you with my brain’”.

I feel like Wash would be a die-hard Firefly fan. And then everyone else just politely tolerates his obsession. And yeah, they’ll watch and enjoy episodes, but it’s Wash who can quote it all easily. Well. Him and Niner. :D

Which is even better because Firefly is all about not obeying The Man, and Wash watches it and CT is sitting next to him like “um, HELLO?” and he’s just all “what? what? it’s science fiction, Connie. The Alliance doesn’t exist here.” And she just throws up her hands and wanders off to get popcorn or coffee or something as he continues to watch it all.

completelysane:

reeberry asked you:

“It occurred to her that in every relationship in which she had participated, in every union older than a year that she’d observed, imbalance existed. Of a couple, one person invariably loved stronger than the other. It seemed a law of nature, a cruel law that led to tension and destruction. She was dismayed that a law so unfair, so miserable prevailed, but since it did, since imbalance seemed inevitable, it must be easier, healthier to be the lover who loved least.”Allison/Church / CT/W / both?

There was this odd transition period after she knew and before she left, after he got Epsilon and before anyone realized what exactly was boring into his brain. She would come to visit him and York wold be standing outside the door with his arms folded. She’s ask “He locked his keys in the car again?” and York would nod. There was nothing funny about Epsilon murmuring through Wash, endless strings of another man’s mistakes, mostly all the wheels and highways and lost keys that kept him away from Allison. But once York had coined the code phrase it had stayed. They all felt they needed to hide something now, and that made CT feel even more that she was right.

During this period she would sit next to Wash’s bed while he muttered and curled in on himself. She could do nothing but wait and look for hidden cameras in the walls if he didn’t recognize her. If he did, he would grab at her hand but shy away to arm’s length, not looking at her eyes, still recognizing the skittishness in her and transferring it to himself.

If he thought she was Allison, though, he wanted her. Then he would look straight at her with the Epsilon-blue of his eyes. Usually she left him, cursing the disembodied blue and that other name that was, these days, always on his lips. Usually, she saw herself as the weak one, unable to help, unable even to stay.

Other days she saw herself as the strong one and him as confused, rightfully punished for being on the board, so out of synch with the world that he would never get it back. She was the one with vision. She was aware of what had been done.

On those days she would stay. She would let him pull her to him and whisper someone else’s name against her neck. Because she knew the truth, she was strong enough to be Allison. She was strong enough to lie to him. She could take what she wanted, and leave when he began to shake and talk about torture and needles and horror instead of Epsilon’s lost love.

(Tex never got involved because she was never in Wash’s room. She was never even in the common room. Presumably, she recharged somewhere else. But sometimes CT wondered.)

God, I just LOVE “She was strong enough to lie to him.”

And the code phrase.

And this. All of it. Alllll of iiiiiiit. <3

completelysane:

reeberry asked you:  “It occurred to her that in every relationship in which she had participated, in every union older than a year that she’d observed, imbalance existed. Of a couple, one person invariably loved stronger than the other. It seemed a law of nature, a cruel law that led to tension and destruction. She was dismayed that a law so unfair, so miserable prevailed, but since it did, since imbalance seemed inevitable, it must be easier, healthier to be the lover who loved least.”Allison/Church / CT/W / both?

It takes Church some time to remember things after he is reconstructed out of Epsilon’s memories, but eventually he gets himself back. The smart-mouthed personality is always the same.

The other thing that’s always the same too is the niggling thought that “Tex - Allison - Tex- is dead.” Then he remembers with some disorientation that she’s alive again, as robotic but as alive as before, and then he remembers that she has always, always, been dead. That’s just how the cycle goes.

So when he comes out of the Epsilon unit to Carolina and the teams working together (let’s see how long that freaking lasts) , he goes through the normal process and then realizes that no, in both worlds, she’s really dead this time. She’s stabbed and lying in the snow, and he has forgotten her.

But he had to. The only way to stop their endless, circular chase was to be the one who loved the least.

I love the idea that he’d have to adjust.

Wake up and go through the motions only to remember she’s alive.

(but not really)

God that’s so fucking brilliant I don’t even have words anymore.

And then as I said before in the ask, I love that you took it a different way than I would have expected! It made it even better for me and just. Mrrr. You’re so cool!

completelysane:

“Symptoms most commonly produced by Enrichment Center testing are superstition, perceiving inanimate objects as alive, and hallucinations.”

    Wash sat on the white ground and worked with his nails at the dirt between his ankle prosthetic and his skin. It was important to pay attention to the little things in here. Keep clean, follow the instructions on the walls (don’t die, don’t drink the water). The Director is watching, or more rightly, the Alpha is watching.

    Some say she was his lost love, some say that she was his mother, some say she met him in a sandbox. There were a lot of discussions about that, back on the Mother of Invention. But none of the Freelancers knew it was all going to go wrong, or that they would be separated and put through these test chambers that so literally reconstructed the dead ends, tunnels, and leaps of logic of a damaged mind. (CT had known the experiment would take a deadly turn, but no one had listened.)
   
    And now the Alpha is talking and laughing. Maybe she was human once but now she was a program that warned against other programs, eternally self-referencing even while denying that she could ever tell the truth about herself.
   
    “If the Companion Cube does speak, please disregard its advice.”
   
    Wash looked aside at the cube sitting serenely next to him, its rounded gray sides splattered with the paint that had been applied to make the messy blue E.

    At the end, there would be cake. Sweet, tasty, artificial intelligence-free cake.  And Wash would be safe.

This is everything I need in life that I didn’t know I was missing.

I just

I just love this

I love this so much