agogelogs | i belong to the blank generation,

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i belong to the blank generation,

WHO? midnighter

circumspector
WHAT? two cybernetically enhanced human weapons walk into a bar... one says 'ow'.
WHEN? after shapergate, but before theyre all flushed into space.
ANYTHING ELSE? uh.

Midnighter kind of looks like a mess.

Liberally splattered with drying flecks of blue shaper blood, he's sitting outside the entrance of Capsule 14 drinking something out of a can and staring blearily into the distance. It's not beer. He's not super into beer, not really. If he's going to drink, it might as well have more flavor than shitty pool water. But it's some fizzy drink one of the droids in the mess hall gave him, and it's... okay.

Really, he's just here because a kid asked him to be here, and Midnighter is a reckless murderer who genuinely enjoys the sound of bones crunching under his fists, but he's good for his word. When you are what he is, you've gotta have some ground level consistency, or you're just a serial killer.

So he sips his drink and he waits, participating in the world's most boring stakeout. Don't let anyone kill the fifty fucking dangerous aliens a teenager has been collecting in his apartment. Why is he doing this again?

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"He didn't - ? " She watches him with interest, making sure to give him as much space as was possible. Or maybe herself. That was probably more likely.

"I'm Angel, then, and just... just a shirt and maybe my hairbrush if that's okay?" It was one thing when she was sending vault hunters off to kill, quite another when she was asking someone to do a little errand for her when she had otherwise her own two legs.

"Nah, just lectured me about the frogs. I'm Midnighter, by the way," he says with a nod, and slips inside the capsule. He's back a few minutes later with a loose shirt (hers? She'll tell him if it's not) and a hairbrush (hair in it's too long to be Noctis').

It's enough time for him to think, to panic a little. Should he tell this girl-? He hasn't told Noctis or Hei, not sure if he wants to, but this girl didn't know him before, and something in his pride stings at someone only knowing him as the sniveling, panicked, fake Lucas Trent. That, and... she hurt herself for him, reached into his head and didn't take anything. It's a risk, but she did him a serious solid, and...

Fine, fine.

When he steps out of the capsule, he hands her the items she requested. "Hey, look," he says, crouching down a little so he's on eye level with her. "I gotta tell you something, okay? Important."

She takes the clothes wordlessly. Hooking it over her arm, hairbrush going into her pocket and shifting forward. Ready to give her polite thanks and head off. He was being nice - she didn't need to press more than she had too. He was already doing a big enough favour to Noctis.

It all goes out the window though, when he stops - gets that little bit lower so she doesn't have to strain her neck so much, which was nice enough too. Not flying ten feet off the ground at all times sure made her feel small. "Yeah, sure. What can I help you with?"

"No, no, you-" I don't ask for help from kids. But that wasn't always true, was it? He knows it's a dream, but some part of himself wants to slot it in as a memory. Anything to make him less alone, less helpless and worthless in those early days.

He shakes his head. Fucking sap. Get over yourself.

"You gotta promise you won't tell anybody. Not Noctis, not... look, it's not their business, alright?" This is coming out really badly, holy shit.

She watches him, careful, leaning in that little bit further. Because this is easy - she'd done nothing but pretend, here, since she came, pretend things were better than they were, deflect with stories about Pandora or Vault Hunters or anything else but herself. Tucked all those other things as deep as she could.

What was one more thing?

"Promise, it won't be anyone's business but ours." At least she's practised at sounding as reassuring as she means.

Midnighter sighs. He almost wanted her to say no.

"You had a dream, a while back. Some stupid kid in a ventilation shaft, let you touch his brain?" Midnighter looks up, meeting her gaze fully. "That was me twenty years ago. Don't spread it around. I'm only telling you..."

Because she helped him, she actually helped him, if they'd met back then, maybe they'd have escaped...

"Because you reached inside my head. I gotta know you won't do that here. It'd be more dangerous outside a fucking dream."

A second - where she understands, to click something so vivid to her it had hurt - hurt more than her own dreams of being caught and trapped, her life before being here, now, with COST and the freedom they had given her.

The shirt and the other things drop out of her hand - he's older now, thinks and realises. He got out - he got out - the sound of the objects hitting the floor are gone as she steps into him. Her hands cupping his face, sliding to where she had braced as she had slid her mind into his systems, her power into his. Made him so briefly what he needed to be to get out. Freedom and it wasn't death. Freedom, real freedom. Had he lived his life, had he gone on and done all the things that life was supposed to be? All the years on him now. "Trent - ?" She pulls in. She'll answer his question later because the world comes down to so finite a thing. She knows him, like she knows herself. Knows him perhaps in that one second, better than herself. Because she could not settle inside her own body, her legs unsteady and her grip too soft to really know how to hold onto anything but he -

"You got out - didn't you?" Her eyes sting, wet, happiness, that burns something. Because of course, it hurts. She thinks hope is supposed to hurt. After all, everything else did. A damp brightness she blinks out of them as she comprehends. "You got out." She leans in, looking at him a new, like bewonderment, like awe, like happiness itself. "You got out."

That's not what he was expecting. He wasn't sure what he was expecting, but not this, this... elation. He moves her hands-- gently, gently-- to his shoulders. Away from his brain, away from what little he has that can be called his.

"Midnighter, call me Midnighter," he says. "Lucas Trent isn't a real person."

But that doesn't matter, because she's... crying? Fuck, this is weird. "Uh, yeah," he says, "When they gave me the final strength enhancement-- ripped open the walls until I found an escape pod. Ended up in DC. Ran from there."

It's easy from there - where he settles her hands onto his shoulders that after he's finished speaking, she launches herself that step a bit further to wrap both those thin, bony arms around his shoulders. Hardly a weight, even though dimly, she remembers, how that computer in his mind talks. But at least it'd register that he could throw her across the room one handed if he needed too.

Probably not fair to do it, but she can't say what it means to her. That would mean starting at the beginning of everything she wants to forget. Just like he wants to forget. What is easier is hugging him as tightly as she can. Pressing her face into his shoulder and holding on like he was everything to her.

"Midnighter." It's choked, or maybe she's just choking on the feeling in her chest that is so utterly unnamable. "I knew you would. I told you. I knew you were going to make them regret it all." It's a deep, shakey mutter. Hidden in the small space.

The computer says he could rip her apart with his bear hands. He ignores it, because that's the furthest thing from his own desires. He's not sure what he wants anymore, how he feels about any of this. How many times has he been held by someone who he wasn't sleeping with? And hadn't all those relationships gone to shit anyway? This is... strange and new and he doesn't know what to do with it. He just... endures it, gently patting her shoulder.

He's not sure he hates it. She seems... to care.

"Yeah," he says, "I did," though not in the vicious way he suspects she means. It should be surprising, but it's not. Viciousness never is. "They're gone and I'm here. But that's... that's nobody's business but mine, you got it? Think you can keep it to yourself?"

She nods into his shoulder. "I understand. They wouldn't."

To want to be more than what you were made to be, made to do.

Eventually, though, she does pull back, arms loosening around his shoulders. Face turning up to look at him again. Sincere, she means it, she wouldn't. "I won't tell them. Not until you tell me too."

And just like that, it's said and done.

And that sincerity... he trusts it, somehow. It just makes perfect sense. He nods, solemn, and leans back against the wall, away from her graceful hands and inexplicable empathy.

"I'll tell them... eventually. It's not right yet." He looks over at her. "What did you do to me, back there? How's that work?"

That answer is at least easy. "I'm a siren."

She looks down at her blue markings where they're exposed on the left side - cut the sleeves off, she wouldn't hide it. No siren, apart from Steele, she supposed, had ever hidden their markings. Maya and Lilith definitely had. She wouldn't either. But even so, - "one of six that can ever be in the galaxy at any given time. When one of us dies, another is born." She hooks up, and its rehearsed. "That's about as much as I really can tell you about that anyway. None of us... really understand what we are I think. We're just born."

Her hand lifts, her body glows, and in her left palm, an orb of light forms, white and clear. It has no substance, it gives off no heat - but it is purely hers, and with it, the air ripples, like it had only ever been something to shape. "We're all a bit different though - I've got something of an affinity for illusions, shaping things, altering malleable states. Whether that be a world of code like I did in your head or - "

They're not standing in a corridor anymore. Around them, they stood now on a rocky outcrop overlooking a grassy open fields. Above them, a sky is open and blue. A moon and a space station and a flying city. Water from streams rush by and distantly a stalker and a thresher fight each other. Clawing at each other in a battle of dominance that tears the earth up, spitting acid and fire at each other. Life as she knew it best. To its details, it is exact, the way the grass dapples in shadows, the splash of drops of water against the bare rocks. The breeze that moves her hair, the sound of the grass crunching. A world alive.

It takes its toll to hold, the sheer of sweat that breaks on her skin for holding the illusion of something so vast. "- an illusionary world." A sliding sense of reality that could make everything seem unreal.

"Holy shit," is the first thing, because this is just-- a lot. The computer doesn't even register it, but his eyes see it. He sees all of it. A place he's never been to, but must be her home. It's wonderful and terrifying, and he feels breeze through his hair, the vibrations on the ground, the heat of a foreign world...

And it's gone.

He looks back to the girl, pale and sweating. Obviously she doesn't do shit like that all the time, but obviously she wanted to impress him or something. That's... cute? He feels his confused affection for the kid grow. "You must be a monster in a fight, holy shit."

She laughs - but that's shy, bracing herself when the false world is broken. A second to get her breath she covers under the easy smile she seems to be able to constantly keep up. "Don't know yet. I've never been in a fight yet - as... as myself."

A truth for a truth. Edging on the whole of it. She has killed more in her twenty years than some soldiers will their whole lives. She'd never listed her fists against a single person in any of it.

"I used to the run a full security suite for a major intergalactic corporation. Coordinated robots formations, droids strikes, surveillance, all of it, across a whole planet."

Her arm braces across herself. She doesn't think about killing really. "But the other sirens. They're... worshipped and feared all at the same time for the thing they can do." That they all had in common, their destructive power might be different, but when they lost control... there was never much left. "Not that it means much, bandits are... pretty dumb. But the only thing they would ever worship would be destruction anyway." A poor attempt at a joke, leaning her weight still shy, still nervous.

"Holy shit, kid." Because she is a kid. And he knows kids are more than capable of that kind of shit, with or without tech screwed into their skulls, but still... He wouldn't have guessed.

He won't underestimate her again.

"So you were some kind of... mainframe-slash-cult-leader?" He lifts a brow, willing, hesitantly, to believe.

"AI. That's what people thought I was..." she scratches at her arm, nervous skittering. He'd understand. He might just be the only one.

"I was so good, they just thought I was a machine because only machines can work like that."

If there was a cult leader, it was Jack. Jack and his stupid ego. Jack who was as powerful as he was because he had a daughter that was one of a kind, a daughter he was more than willing to exploit. It stings, her brows furrow and her eyes lower, fixed at some angry low point. "But it was me the whole time."

And Midnighter does understand. He's only been insulted in being called a robot a few times, but every time, there's a compliment in there too. You couldn't possibly be human.

"So how're you gonna pull that here? More illusions?" Because whenever you're a freak, you have to make sure you perform.

"Maybe... don't know yet. I've... killed people before. Killed a lot of people. I think I could probably do it again with... some time."

It's uncomfortable - it's nothing she'd say to anyone else. What could the understand? About any of it. The stories of Pandora were enough to turn most of them green, let alone the thing she'd done. Still not sure about it either, does she want to be that? Does she want to just be a product of Handsome Jack? Or of Pandora?

"But that tends to be... obvious. Bright lights and... people in pieces."

Midnighter shrugs. Killing people is whatever. He leans back, casual.

"Did they deserve it?"

Her eyes drop, her head shaking. It's nothing she's proud of. Because there was no one in that situation that had a choice - not her, not the scientists. They had too, just like she had too.

"Some of them... I guess. They were scientists. A lot of them were there because if not... their families would be killed. Others... the chance of running experimenting on a siren? It was one in a million."

Paid for it, is the silence at the end of the sentence. "Guess that's the nature of experiments. Sometimes they don't go the way anyone expects." A sober, small breath. "I've said it to a few people, they don't really... get it. Things aren't... great where I come from."

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