trans_9 | The Lurking Fear

"You'll have to excuse me if I disapprove," he replies, attempting to scoop her up and finding that he can. The Nightmare King wasn't just capable of making things feel real, after all, "Sit up. You'll breathe easier."

Propping her against the nearest surface he can find, he narrows his eyes, "This is you. It's the you that you're most afraid of, like how I was earlier. You got me out of it then and I'm going to get you out of this now."

The fantasy was as delicate as tissue paper, so when Bruce put his fist through it, the world around them went gray and filled with a high, loud pervasive ringing. It was a result of the traumatic stress of being forced to recognize this disgusting construction of fragile, motile muscle and bone as her own. Motoko's vision was red and spotty, a reaction to the same, and it took all her fortitude not to lose consciousness again. Her teeth ached, true pain for the first time in decades, but it grounded her enough to recognize the sensation and, eventually, to remember that it was a bad thing.

"You're not helping," The Major gasped, when she could, "I haven't had an organic body since I was six. I need to disassociate. This cannot be my body."

Her eyes were still red, and without the buffer of a cyberbrain they blazed up at him with all her emotion at once. It would take more than a matter of hours or days to readjust and the Major had no desire to adjust to this development. She wanted it gone, and in order to facilitate that, Motoko needed to disassociate. Needed, not wanted, and that desperation showed in her voice in a way that would have appalled her if maintaining her calm professionalism were anything like the priority it usually held.

He wants to tell her no. That disowning the trauma rather than facing it just meant it could sneak up on her some other time, perhaps when no one was there to shake her out of it. That it was okay to be only human.

But that's not the part of him that has her wellbeing in mind. That's the part of him that wants to press his own trauma onto someone else, to take the steps that he'd never been strong or brave enough to take himself. Just to prove that it was possible for someone to make piece with the things like what he'd suffered as a child.

"Fine," he replies bluntly, staring back at her, "Make it quick."

Motoko would probably be capable of facing this brand of crippling in a less indirect fashion, if she had wanted to try. It was horrifying in an atavistic fashion, like reaching down to masturbate and finding that a live and angry spider had grown in place of the expected genitalia.

Just. Wrong.

It took three minutes before she decided to try sitting up, and her first attempts were clumsy and ended with the light, slight form overbalancing sideways into Bruce's chest. She pressed a palm against him and pushed herself upright, then up onto unsteady feet. This was not her shell, and if she could just forget the niggling sensation that something was very very wrong, she could function well enough. For now.

"Fine," and Motoko's voice had taken a more normal disdain, though it was still laced with more emotion than she'd have liked. There was no attention to spare for it, only that she must catch the trick of bipedal balance again, without the use of a gyroscope. This was not herself, this was a body she was riding in, a place to stay while they hunted down the bastard who'd dumped her in this fragile waste of carbon, and kill him. Soon she'd be back in her own body, where she belonged, "I can walk. What next?"

Six minutes had elapsed, and the nightmare couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a wavering apparition of an operating room, or a dim hollow under some anonymous rubble. Occasionally, dim flashes of a landscape of children in neural-feedback helmets, tethered to the ceiling from their floor-inset seats by thick cables. The Major ignored the world around her with an iron will, though she did see it and was afraid— she was sweating.

He helps her up and keeps a hand on her arm to steady her. No doubt she'd loathe the idea of relying on someone else to walk, but to hell with her. If she wanted him to take some of the weight, he would let her.

"I'm working on it," he replies. The metahumans were having their abilities suppressed and in all honesty, he'd been counting on the baseline aliens and synthetics like her to take up the slack.

No such luck.

"Brainiac 5 and Brenda Del Vecchio are retrieving Invisible Kid but there are more out there. We need to find who we can and reconvene with them."

"Who the hell names themselves 'invisible kid'?" She muttered, then was even more chagrined that she'd done so. Ordinarily that kind of note would have been made and ignored internally. We will politely pretend that the hand on Bruce's shoulder is to be certain of his position in the confusing environment, not for balance nor anything else.

"We need to keep moving."

"I know, it's preposterous," he replies, fully aware of the irony of the 'Batman' making such a statement, but really it was. At least the word Batman didn't reveal what Bruce was actually capable of to those who might have nefarious use for that knowledge, "He should have a more inconspicuous name, like 'Motoko Kusanagi'..."

He checks his omnicom and starts to lead her through the twisted, fractious corridors of the Nightmare Stacy, "We've got life signs up ahead."

"You're wearing a hat with ears," she pointed out acidly, though her tone wavered. Kusanagi might not be a common name, but at least it was plausible. Walking was a joy in the same fashion that lobotomies were pleasant, but she managed it with a minimum of wavering and if anyone ever asked, despite the copious amount of leaning, there was no leaning whatsoever.

Leaning? What leaning? As if she'd ever lean...

Bruce smirks at her outburst and considers retorting, but thinks better of it. The Major as he knew her didn't get defensive like this, "A cape, too."

"Are you two done flirting?," a voice, somewhat raspy, but annoyed, asked.

Congratulations, Major, you're not the only one who has to adjust to being a weak, feeble, and near useless flatscan.

Julian looked like hell. After fighting his way through World War II, he ended up scraping the edges of a few other dreams before finding this one, and his journey left him all the worse for wear. Individually, the injures ranged from minor to 'better get that looked at', but the sheer number of them was staggering. The pieces of shrapnel sticking out of his back looked the most problematic.

His legs were covered in blood that had largely dried, though very little of it was his own. That was Kon's, whose death was the reason for the almost hollow look in his eyes.

"That depends," she snapped, rather proud of how good she was beginning to get at picking out conversation from the background noise. She'd gladly have traded you, Julian— Motoko cut her teeth in a World War, "Are you going to whine when we excise the shrapnel?"

Edited 2010-02-27 02:11 (UTC)

"Kon's dead," he stated flatly. "He lost his powers and a mortar shell landed a little to close.

"I'm not gonna whine over a few jagged pieces of metal."

The Major had better hope her balance holds out, because any weight that Bruce has been alleviating is suddenly hers once more. He stares at Julian for several moments, gauging just how lucid he is. He could be delirious, Kon could have been one of the Nightmare King's constructs. But those blank, deadened eyes staring back at him... They at least were convinced it was the truth.

"Sit." he spits back through his teeth, procuring what's left from his first aid kit having already liberally raided it for himself.

She couldn't reply to that, far too busy masking the half stagger when Bruce moved away. There was a retort for that, Motoko just knew it, but it was beyond her to force it to hold still in her mind so she stayed silent and found a wall to lean on. Her jacket smelled of leather, and that was fascinating on it's own. Motoko had never possessed sense-memory for the vast majority of things she encountered on a daily basis, most notably smells. Scents weren't experiences, just chemical analysis read-outs scrolling past the bottom of her visual informatics.

There was something of a glare at Batman, but that turned into a pained grimace as he took a seat on a stool.

Unfortunately for Julian, the finer points of treating injury are sorely lost on Batman. Given that he was more prone to be the patient than anyone else, it was Alfred who had the real skill for it. He's not about to give him morphine in the midst of one huge trip, either. But his skills are functional, as the occasional plinking of scrapnel hitting the floor will attest.

Bruce removes what he can, stops the bleeding where he can and dresses him head-to-toe in bandages. He'll need to see a professional eventually, but at least the immediate risk of him bleeding to death is curtailed.

"Stitches will have to wait. We're going to find the others."

Equilibrium was slow in coming, but the focus re-learning to pace required was a blessing. The aching wrong-ness in Motoko's brain was still there, curled up in the center of her brain like an affectionate cat that took up far too much room on the bed. No, don't look at it, don't even think about it. You'll only encourage it.

"Ordinary humans should be the priority, they'll be the least disabled," she realized aloud, then had the grace to look annoyed at the obviousness of it. The Major was having difficulty screening her responses. That they should have been able to predict this would occur to her later, when her brain was her own again.

Outside of a few grunts here and there, Julian had managed to remain quiet during the procedure. He was too busy replaying not only Kon's death in his mind, but Brian's, Laurie's, and so many others that he was unfortunate witness to. The only common thread was that, whether with or without powers, he had been too late to save any of them.

"They don't have anything worth crippling," Julian added in, looking at his hands like they weren't quite his own. He was trying to will his tk back into action, but still had not even the faintest glow of energy. Not that it would make much of a difference anyway, but he'd at least feel like himself.

"Ready to go when you are." Truth be told, he wanted to lay there and die, but he still had just enough stubborn pride left to force himself to get up again.

The Lurking Fear - Group 14

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This may squick you.

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