eschatological | [psl] post-mortem; closed to @destinymaker

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[psl] post-mortem; closed to @destinymaker

[ This office has always been quiet, but now the silence is unnaturally absolute. The usual ambient sounds have all vanished — the muted rumble of feet and serious voices beyond the door, the hum and crackle of electronics, the omnipresent pulse of Aprilius’s environmental support systems. But, then again, there’s no reason for the environmental support systems when the familiar noises of breath and heartbeat have ceased as well.

Two armies of chess pieces lie toppled and abandoned on the floor, leaving the low table bare save for the empty board. Rau sits languidly on one of the two wide sofas with his chin in a gloved hand. Even though he’s corporeal now (or as corporeal as anything in this scene, which is to say, gentlemen of the jury, ambiguously), the dim light and the white of his mask and uniform combine to give him an uncanny, still-ghostly appearance. He shows no interest in the scattered chess pieces. Instead, he is waiting very patiently, intently, for.... ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ Rau should always be laid bare to him like this. Gil doesn't think he'll ever get tired of watching his minute reactions. ]

Precisely. And the worst that can happen is that we'll feel about as sheepish about it as we would have in life.

[ So yes, he does think this is worth testing. Having a perfect 1:1 geographic recreation of Aprilius One in the metaphysical sphere really seems just as likely or unlikely as being able to impact their environment with their thoughts. ]

And though you seem convinced that this is primarily my realm, I wouldn't discount the impact of your consciousness just yet, so I'd say for a first test we should coordinate and pick the same target.

[ If that is successful, solo teleportation experiments should follow. But for now... ]

You're a bit more familiar with my house on Mendel than my current one, but I still vote for the latter.

[ We're not going to shower on Mendel, that's just weird. ]

But I had such an interesting time returning to Mendel.

[ His attention has snagged on the place for a moment. The words are deliberately lazy and his mouth slips into a very benign and very artificial smile, but at the same time Rau's nails dig into skin and his shoulders tense, just a bit. An interesting return, but intense and not altogether good. This position is relaxing but terribly bothersome for a conversation; so many of his lifetime of tricks for masking his mood are useless. ]

[ Gil doesn't know what exactly happened to Rau on Mendel during the war. Rau was already such a distant figure then, consumed by fighting and rarely in touch... It was a time when Gil felt like Rau was slipping out of his hands, when he no longer felt certain what Rau was thinking...

Very unlike now, when the tension is perfectly obvious and Rau's body is an open book. ]

The situation is interesting enough already. We can spare that bit of excitement.

[ Gil's tone is perfectly even, not betraying any concern.

To Gilbert Durandal, Mendel had simply been a workplace. A colony he'd lived and researched on for a few years. Nothing about it disgusts him viscerally, even as he'd walked to work past fetuses in formaldehyde.

But Rey had nightmares about it, when he was little and just came to live with Gil. Gil remembered sitting at his bedside until he fell back asleep.
And Rau hates it with every fiber of his being, the birthplace of all his misery.

No, Mendel may not disgust Gil in the same way, but he holds no love for a place that causes his precious people so much anguish. They don't need to return, not even in their minds.

Gil runs his hand up Rau's spine, coming to rest on his shoulders. ]

The only thing left to expect of that place is its complete collapse anyway.

[ Rau arches up into the touch over-exaggeratedly. His smile stretches real and wide and glinting with teeth for a moment before it shifts into a deliberate, calculated frown. Mendel really gets his inner drama queen going -- a temple to unfettered desire and yet so spectacularly mundane, simultaneously a vehicle for myopic fear of death and for relentless optimism about the potential of the species as a whole, a place where dreams were bought and sold. What a wonderful, sordid microcosm of humanity. ]

All your fascination with "destiny" and you don't want to hear what happened at that place.

[ His voice is affectedly, theatrical playful, inviting Gil to follow him down the rabbit hole. The same way he lured Mu and Kira into the core laboratory facilities, really, just less voluminous. And with fewer bullets, although his nails are still sharp against Gil's skin. ]

And here I was, trying not to pry. I should have known better.

[ Gil does not need a whole lot of bait to go down that rabbit hole. He's been wondering for quite a while - knowing that there was a major battle with the Three Ships Alliance right there at Mendel, knowing that Rau was there... How could he not have contemplated the event? He'd been meaning to ask Rau personally, way back when. A naive little intention, soon to be crushed. In reality, he'd never meet Rau alive again. ]

Tell me, then. What happened, Rau? A place of encounters. The colony where we first met. How did it go, your final return?

[ Two can play at being overdramatic. Gil's always been fond of pathos anyway.

But he'll settle to listen, attentively clinging to Rau's every expression while his fingers idly run through the tips of his hair. ]

[ Oh no, hm, he has once again slightly miscalculated -- Gil has such an inconvenient ability to yield sincerely and apologetically where a less confident person would push back and bluster. Rau would very much like to tell Gil about the wildly improbable (fated, destined!) encounter with Mu and Kira. The drama! But he's not interested in having that conversation while naked, that's just too weird.

He frowns in a slightly unfocused way that makes clear that he's more fussed by the predicament than with Gil's words or actions in particular, then shrugs slightly. ]

You'll need to get up, first.

[ At this point, they have cooled off enough that getting up, cleaned and dressed is starting to sound actually appealing. ]

Well, I would. But you happen to be on top of me.

[ Signaling his actual intent to leave their cuddlepile, he removes his arm from Rau with one last teasing poke to his side. ]

[ Rau swats Gil’s hand away lazily without looking down. Gotta flex that enhanced spatial awareness somehow. ]

I know, I know.

[ It hasn’t been unpleasant to stay like this, but Rau can’t (won’t) linger after Gil has called him out on it. Time to make a clean break. With no warning other than a near-inaudible sigh, he pushes himself up and back in one fluid motion, so that he comes to rest sitting up straight near the far end of the couch. After being badgered into action, Rau isn’t particularly sentimental about the loss of contact -- but he does keep a watchful eye on Gil, because he expects some entertaining emotions on that face. ]

[ Rau isn't mistaken. The moment Rau's warmth fades and cool air envelopes Gil, he furrows his brows in an unhappy little frown. It's a reaction he'd have no trouble suppressing if needed be, but there's no reason to put on too much of an act around Rau. Rau dropped the literal mask, so Gil will drop the metaphorical one in turn.

With a little groan, he sits up as well and smoothes his tangled hair out of his face. His frown deepens. He's got a brush in a desk compartment, maybe he should make a pitstop there.

Gil doesn't really like looking messy, nor does he want to put on his old clothes before washing himself, but... on the offchance of meeting the soul of Patrick Zala, it's better to not walk to the door naked. Time to fish his underwear off the floor and at least put on the lower half of his outfit.

Finding Rau's undershirt on his side of the couch, he tosses it over. ]

Catch.

[ Caught. ]

Oh? Not willing to face the unknown looking out of sorts?

[ Rich coming from someone who typically wears a mask and gloves, but Rau reaches over and runs a finger down Gil's neck to his heart, retracing the path that his teeth scraped over soft, pale skin, and the deliberate mark left over the heart. He smiles mildly, like he's giving the most sincere, well-intentioned advice and not indulging in smug shit-stirring at all. ]

Don't forget about those.

[ Careful now, Rau, someone might misconstrue you for a romantic if you keep indulging in gestures like this. It makes Gil grin, not thrown off his game in the slightest. ]

Oh, please. Those I'd show off if I were able.

[ No shame in this walk of shame. Not for the sex part, anyway.

The idea of walking into work with hickeys plainly visible on his neck is unrealistic, solely because he wears high collars by habit, but it is also highly amusing. Makes Gil wonder if anybody would be brave enough to comment He doesn't doubt he'd be able to play it off and come out the winner, in any case. ]

Scandalous. I'm not sure how you managed to get elected to anything.

[ He tucks his hair behind his ear and puts a hand to his neck for a moment, evaluating the marks that Gil left there. Yep, he's fair-skinned enough that those will be visible as well. He shrugs faintly and reaches for pants. If they're going to run into anything else sentient, it's time to find out whether the Venn diagram of "people who won't comment on wearing a mask" and "people who won't comment on bite marks" is a perfect circle. ]

I'm personable and I have sincere ideals. Isn't that enough?

[ Gil chuckles, clearly facetious. His election strategy was a bit more involved than just banking on natural charisma, even despite a sincere belief that he is destined for leadership in some form. (He's seen his own genetic profile, he's got the receipts!)

He finishes getting dressed pretty quickly. His legs still feel the tiniest bit wobbly when he gets up, but he doesn't remark on it. ]

[ Rau straight-up laughs. Not unkindly, just delighted. ]

And a shameless manipulator.

[ Putting on pants doesn't do much to make Rau look any less disheveled, not when there are still little wisps of hair stuck to his face with cooling perspiration and bites along his neck. Clothes are plausible deniability at best. He stands and taps Gil's lips with a finger with mock-thoughtfulness, still smiling. ]

The sincerity and shamelessness are the most dangerous parts.

Ah, but you make me sound so devious.

[ Which he is.

But he's gotten so good at deflecting about it that it's hard to turn it off. You can only spend so long gaslighting others about your true nature until it becomes almost uncomfortable to stop and honestly admit that you're a conniving bastard. When Gil admits to it at all, it has to be cushioned in a playful sense of sarcasm. (Because he's also a good person, always a person with noble goals. Isn't that right?) ]

It's just easy to be shameless when you're sincere.

[ Feeling shame means doubting the actions you take and the path you are on. Far be it from Gilbert Durandal to experience a feeling like that. He may feign embarrassment and humility for sympathy of outsiders, but it's all just part of the game that he likes to win.

Gil holds out his hand for Rau to take. He was kidding about permanent hand-holding, but now he just feels like being provocatively shameless in his own way to prod for reaction. ]

As I said, dangerous.

[ Patrick Zala and Muruta Azrael had sincere, albeit inherently genocidal, ideals, but they were rigid and straightforward -- Gil's capacity to smile where they would fight, bend where they would break, makes him more troublesome. Rau is shameless, too, of course, but his particular form of shamelessness is more about smiling agreeably while giving away military secrets than it is about acknowledging weakness. And he has a sincere lack of ideals.

And speaking of shamelessness, Rau picks up the lube and drops it in Gil's outstretched palm rather than taking his hand. While smiling agreeably, of course. ]

[ A pretty creative way of rebuffing him, Gil's got to hand it to Rau. Without missing a beat, he nods and bends down to return the bottle to the convenient compartment it came from. And while he's at it, he'll even place the remainder of their clothing that they've been too lazy to put on over the backrest of the couch. Gotta be tidy! ]

Well then. Will you help a dangerous man try and test the limits of post-mortem timespace?

[ Rau takes his discarded mask from that tidy pile and places it in a pocket. He doesn't bother to be discrete about it, because that would be pointless -- Gil's obviously going to notice, and Gil's smart enough not to say anything about it unless he wants Rau to punt him out the door to explore post-mortem timespace solo forever. The mask is an emotional crutch and it's going to take a lot more time in purgatory or whatever to work through the fact that he's a walking identity crisis. ]

That's a dramatic way of asking for help finding a shower.

[ But he holds out his hand and takes a step toward the door. Yes, yes, he's fine with handholding and a buddy system does make sense when exploring an afterlife with untested rules, Rau just likes doing things on his own terms. ]

You like being dramatic as much as I do.

[ The capriciously cute way Rau has given him the runaround about handholding only proves that point. Gil wastes no time taking hold of Rau's hand, giving it a quick squeeze as he does so.

Rau can have his mask, if he really needs it. A pocket is a decent place for it. Much better than Rau putting it back on as though it were a natural part of getting redressed.

With all that settled, Gil leads them towards the door. He's walked in and out of this office hundreds of times when he was alive, but this might well be the last time. It's a strange feeling, but he doesn't allow himself to linger on it. ]

[ Rau smiles faintly and shrugs faintly at being described as dramatic. Yes, of course, guilty as charged.

And there's something nicely dramatic about doors -- literal, metaphorical, existentially-questionable. Rau spent a long time wanting to unlock mutual annihilation, and now he can't quite shake the thought of Rey's fervent want for something better around the corner. Whether this leads to the same old Aprillius reception area or to Mendel or to an abrupt end of existence, Rau is genuinely, visibly interested in seeing what's on the other side. The little smile stretches wider, and he matches Gil's pace because he's absolutely not going to get lead through to something new.

He reaches out his hand to pull the door open and --

Mendel, yes? Experiment in wishful thinking successful? ]

[ Stepping out of the office, uncertain if they would ever return, into a space that Gil had been certain he would never return to.

Mendel Colony - a laboratory complex first and foremost, structured around the Human Gene Manipulation Lab in specific. Remote from the rest of the PLANTs, for the quiet sanctity of science and also because it makes the dodgy use of human material in experiments a lot less notable to the general public. With commuting to work obviously out of the question, the living quarters of Mendel were a town to themselves. The scene of Gilbert Durandal's young adult life - freshly heartbroken, and ready to pour himself into science.

When Gil had first set foot into this house, he had not yet known that it wouldn't be long until he'd meet someone new who'd pique his interest, someone new who'd occupy his every waking thought. He didn't know that he'd move check-up appointments for one of Mendel's crowning achievements from the labs into his living room, every once in a while, playing house with the experiment and being drawn deeper and deeper into his thrall.

Mendel. They'd left it together, Rey in tow, and it was closed down for biological hazards soon after. Gil has never felt any particular desire to return to it. His new house in Aprilius, alive with the sound of Rey's piano practice, soon felt perfectly like home.

Mendel. A fateful place, indeed.

It feels... anticlimatic to return to it by stepping right into the bathroom. Gil looks around, feeling a little dazed. He's not letting go of Rau's hand yet, simply because he's too distracted to even think of doing so. ]

It's just as it was... before I moved out, that is.

[ He certainly wouldn't have left shampoo and towels out when giving his boxes to the movers and locking the door a final time. ]

[ Rau laughs in just shocked, fascinated, disbelieving delight. Stepping from one place to another in death, but stepping into the most domestic setting possible -- it's completely outrageous and completely mundane. But the same could be said of Mendel itself, where people devoted themselves to human insatiability and then came home to their exquisitely ordinary lives.

If Gil isn't letting go of him, Rau is going to drag him to the nearest window, to look at the greenery that well-to-do colonies planted to offset the sterility of life in space. It's still there, still alive, not the wasteland of red-brown dust that had covered the place on his last visit. ]

Before it was sterilized.

[ His blue eyes go very wide, racing through the ramifications. There's some malleability to time as well as space, though whether it's bounded by their own recollections and whether it requires some level of mutual familiarity will have to be worked out. ]

Oh, this is exceptional.

[ Gil allows himself to be dragged - it's not a long path anyway. His house on Mendel wasn't small but it was by no means a mansion either. There is limited space in a bathroom, still. ]

I have not returned here since I moved out - and you were never inside this house after all my belongings had been packed up. We've returned to the last point in time at which our memory of this place overlaps - or at least, that's my working theory.

[ 'Working theory' is a fancy way to say that he's literally just thinking out loud. There are a thousand variations to how this could truly work and all he's done here is broken it down to the easiest assumption - but that is not always the correct one.

It's only after he's established that line of thought that Gil stops looking at the view and turns to Rau instead... Ah. What a beautiful expression. Such childlike glee, caused by something other than imminent destruction for once. Maybe they'll both enjoy testing every little detail of this space's capabilities.

His mind is still racing about that, too. Even being really gay about the face Rau is making can't stop him from running theories in his head first and foremost. More thinking out loud is inevitable. ]

The state of my office suggests that memories you've obtained by 'haunting' me post-mortem count as shared perceptions for these purposes. Which means we might be able to access the living world in some form and replicate it....

All that fuss about coming here, and you want to leave already.

[ But that's purely reflexive banter, without any sharp edges; Gil wouldn't be anywhere near as interesting if his mind didn't go a mile a minute.

Still, Rau's own curiosity is tinged with practicality -- he glances out a corner of the window to a stretch of colony where there ought to be people at any time of day and confirms that no one is there, then presses an ear to the glass to confirm that, yes, this place is as quiet as the office on Aprillius. The fascination is still clear in his face and posture, but his brows knit thoughtfully as he turns back to Gil. ]

This particular replica is empty. Or perhaps dead.

[ Will that be true of every location, or is it a mutable characteristic? And more immediately, will the shower still work? ]

We haven't been asking to see anybody, either.

[ Plenty to talk about with just themselves, after all. It suits Gil just fine that no souls nor replicas of souls are here to clamor for their attention right now. In the future though... Rey and Talia should both be 'here' (for lack of a better word) and Gil's going to want to try reaching them. And even beyond personal desire... If he and Rau have any ability at all to call someone else to them, then Rey is their likeliest bet to test that theory on. ]

I'm also curious about the dimensions of the copy. We can see outside just fine, but just visual confirmation means nothing. After we're cleaned up, we should go for a stroll.

[ Is it going to take conscious effort to expand the space of their memories or is the entire colony just 'pre-loaded' into their afterlife? Gil finally lets go of Rau's hand so he can head to the bathroom door and open it up without stepping through - what he sees is the expected hallway, the door to his bedroom slightly ajar on the right. He nods to himself.

Only then he realizes that maybe going for a walk in Mendel isn't the smartest idea. There isn't much space where the lab isn't right in sight. Gil recalls the reports of Rey's panic attack at Lodonia; bad enough that the doctors suspected physical contagions.

Ah well. Rau's an adult and he would hate to know Gil is even worrying. ]

[psl] post-mortem; closed to @destinymaker

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