castaside | Seasons Inbox

"That I don't know. Probably not Spring, there isn't a lot there that screams Carolina. I could make an argument for any of the other ones," he said. "Hopefully I can convince her to go learn how to do it. She'd probably be great when she was accepting of it. She's a pretty fast learner when she gets going and she might be able to out speed you. She used a speed mod with her armor, and that one is real easy to hurt yourself with without AI assistance and she was able to use it fairly effectively solo all things considered."

When he says her reaction speed is insane, he means it. The mod made her run as fast as a speeding car.

"I imagine he would have been a lot harder if he wasn't mind controlled. You might get someone whose more ruthless while mind controlled, which can make them more dangerous, but they're also a lot easier to outmaneuver. Easier to lead where you're want." He's had to deal with it a lot. "A ruthless puppet will never match what a person could do going all out on their own."

"Its been years since I had real Chinese food other than what you guys have made," he said. He hummed "Meena had a recipe from her grandparents...it was this dumpling thing with sauce or broth in it? It was...xiao....lang? Long? Bao?" He frowned, fingers carding through his fur. "She had a couple of those, but its a lot harder to remember what those are, I was a teenager." Which was before his memory got freakishly good.

"There's that limit on how quick we can learn magic here, but once she learns creation and manipulation getting good at those has a high reward." Hmm, interesting that she's so quick.

Mind controlled MK is absolutely petrifying, as they learned with the Relius thing. "Yeah, well. I still got myself impaled, so. But I guess that was more because I thought I was seeing some sun peek through the mind control clouds."

Macaque nods. "Xiao long bao, soup dumplings. I can make those. See if what I make lives up to your memory."

"They really are. Even if fire is more limited than Autumn or Winter," he said. Wind kind of has that insubstantial problem. Though Spring does still have plants too.

"Oh, its still dangerous. Its just anyone who goes on how taking away a person's ability to feel bad makes them their strongest selves is just kind of an idiot. Being a puppet always hamstrings their ability, and once you can account for their raw power, they're always going to go down fast. Its just MK has a stupid amount of raw power to account for," he said.

"It might. It has been a few decades. I hadn't actually gotten the nerve to write a letter home yet," he said. "Preeeetty sure they were told I was dead early on in Freelancer."

Macaque nods. "Wukong was mind controlled once, and I fought him. But I was in my "no mercy" phrase and I also knew that he couldn't die no matter what I did. Things here were just a bit different, and Candid was talking to me like things were normal. Even before I really opened up I was pretty open, comparatively."

A wince. "The project was just the worst in so many ways."

"It did seem the clones were retaining at least some semblance of themselves," he said. "Which probably does point to them being able to become their own people thing. Need MK for a source of life, but not necessarily determine all they are. Given more time, they probably could have maintained themselves," he said with a thoughtful hum.

"To be fair, that's just secret organization bullshit too."

Macaque pauses for a long few beats, then nods. Talking about the clones is still a hard subjject, particularly about them maybe being their own people. That's what Macaque believed before things went to hell with Candid.

"Secret organizations can be bullshit but also less bullshit than that."

He is noting that pause.

"Hmm, sometimes. Other times....eh. I mean, there was a decent chance all us agents would just go straight mad," he said.

"Soooo. Want to talk about that pause or no?"

"I and many others are very glad it didn't come to that."

Talk? He's not sure what good it will do.

"You already know what the problem is. I'm still navigating my way through guilt over the Candid thing and what he almost did."

"I know, just saying there is kind of a reason to maybe hedge those bets," he said with a shrug.

"Well, yeah, there's the guilt, but I was just wondering if part of that was a reaction to potential personhood," he said.

"A little. I was encouraging him to be his own person, that's how we got close. I didn't realize that I was accidentally encouraging him to try and take over to be his own person."

"That wasn't really on you. Its more...its the problem of being a splintered existence," Wash said. "Its a risk of being a splintered existence, because Candid is certainly not the first to try that kind of move."

A light sigh.

"At the end of the game," so after the monitors went out, "he told me that he thought he was doing the right thing because he thought that I loved him most, and he loved me the most. More than MK. I'm not sure it's as simple as 'this was the inevitable result of a fractured existence'."

"...it kind of is?" Wash said. "I think...I think the reason it happens is because the splinter remembers what its like to be whole. Even if their memories aren't clear, that feeling is still there. They remember what it means to be a full person. But they're not that, not yet. And they get desperate to be like that again. So they try and figure out a way to get there and that usually means focusing on the thing they value the most at the time," he said.

"MK, as a person, puts so much of his self worth on the people around him. And Candid, from my understanding, was meant to be a means of mending problems he thought he was causing in his relationships. So it stands to reason Candid puts even more emphasis on relationships, but he doesn't have all the other stuff in MK to help balance it out, so he went over the edge about it."

"I guess so." The logic works. "But I still should have seen it. We spent so much time together. I knew that he resented MK but I didn't check in enough about that. And if he thought that I loved him more than MK to the point where I wanted him to try and take over, I could have corrected that."

"I mean, its not like people are used to accounting for 'this splintered existence wants to take over the original or other insane thing to try and feel whole.' This is a pretty niche problem, I've just seen it several times because multiverse reasons," he said. So its not like it comes up A LOT, just happens sometimes in all of existence.

"You were dealing with the problem rationally, when things were far outside the norm."

"All of which makes perfect sense and all of it would have been cold fucking comfort if MK had died."

"Yes," he said. And that part he knows all too well. "But he didn't die. You were able to help him and not even kill Candid for it."

"No thanks to anything I did. Red had to do something beyond awful for him because I couldn't help."

Yeah, he's still very much not okay.

"I know that I told him not to see me until he can tell me the truth. Ironic, I know, given his name. But I sometimes wonder if that means forever."

"You were there to help Red Son pick up the pieces. Never discount that. Sometimes that makes all the difference for things like that," he said. And he's not just saying that to be comforting.

Losing Maine entirely had felt like the final nail in Wash's coffin. The one little spark of hope he had offered himself in his villain arc. That maybe Maine was reachable without Sigma anymore.

Then he had to throw him off a cliff.

If the Reds and Blues and Doc hadn't essentially bullied him into staying alive, he wouldn't be.

"He may not know what the truth is."

"...Maybe not." Macaque doesn't really believe it, he just doesn't think Wash deserves to be prying apart his issues right now.

"Sorry, Wash. You don't need this junk right now. My bullshit will still be there tomorrow."

"I asked. You don't need to apologize for that," Wash said, leaning up to kiss his cheek. "You're dealing with a hard, extremely rare situation. I can offer insight that's hard for anyone else to have."

Wash is really just too good of a person.

"You can, and you're good at it, but I'm supposed to be helping you, not distracting from what you need with my own shit that's a month old at this point."

"I mean, to be fair, my shit is both new and years old all at once," he said. "Just..."

He pauses for a moment, tapping Macaque's shoulder.

"I think...you were expecting Candid to be a person all at once," he said. "Its important. Its good to treat a fragment like a person so they can grow as a person. But its also important to remember they aren't there yet. Its like a weird toddler. In some ways, they can be a competent grown person. In others, they simply don't know how to live right. They haven't learned the stove is hot because they never got close to touching it before."

He leans back a bit, studying Macaque. "He hurt you. You deserve to be mad and make him suffer the consequences for it. But it might be good moving forward to remember he's still learning what it means to be a person with memories that really aren't his own anymore, and emotions that still need time to grow. Right now, memory is the key for him to become someone new and that takes time."

He taps Macaque's collarbone. "And...it does help to say that, I think. Because Carolina like this, just...reminds me I need to remember. Who she is now isn't the person I know. So I need to learn to be her friend when she's this person instead of who she was going to be."

Macaque had been about to say something about how he's not mad at Candid, but then Wash makes a point about Carolina and Macaque can't bear to dive back down into his own crap.

"I know that you'll be a good friend to her no matter what. She might be different, but you're not. It's fine to be sad about the disconnect even as you make new connections."

"Just brushed over the rest of that," he said with a dry chuckle.

"I am different," he said. "From the person she found after the snow. Even from the person she saved from getting shot in the neck. Less different from that guy, but still. We were a lot closer to the same spot when she showed up again. Hard to trust, still tempted by revenge. I was just recently suffering the extreme consequences of it and a new support network and it took longer for her to let them in. Took a while for me to be the person you know."

Re: Evening After Carolina Arrives

castaside - 2024-10-13 06:13 (UTC) - Expand