awakener | CARRY ON

CARRY ON

Fragments of scripture, of varying age and legitimacy, littered the respiteblock around the Awakener's feet. He was sat on the floor, a battered notebook on his knees, writing distractedly, and had been for a few hours.

He didn't have his own devoted scribe, so for a good few perigees now he'd been in the habit of keeping a record of things that had happened to him, in the half-hearted hope that somebody might think it was significant one day, and also because travelling alone meant he had nobody else to remember things with.

Quite a lot more had happened tonight than usual, but he was having trouble committing it to paper. He felt that having chanced to come across the descendant of the Psiioniic was worth recording, but he found himself dwelling instead on everything else. The attack on Yasidra Six, he felt, was worth going into quite a lot of detail on, as were his mixed feelings about the rebel movement who'd picked him up – he admired what they did for enslaved psionics, and although he knew he was supposed to be opposed to any violence or death, regardless of who was on the receiving end, he couldn't find it in himself to earnestly disapprove of attacks on the hated oppressor. But he was having a hard time convincing himself that no innocent bystanders had been harmed in all that.

He could already see himself getting into a heated argument about that one – he was pretty sure the Sufferer had said something relevant to the subject, but it wasn't anything he'd been able to find in any of the writings he'd managed to pick up on his travels. He made a note to ask about their policy on collateral damage, and also about the Summoner who Starfall had mentioned, and...

He stared at the page.

He'd run out of things to write about that didn't involve people who'd known him more than two sweeps ago.

He tapped his pen against the paper and frowned. Well, there wasn't any need to mention that, really. He'd never had cause before to write in here about much of anything that had happened to him before he'd been removed from Alternia, it would only be confusing to mention it now.

Probably the biggest shock, though, he started, and then scowled at the paper, and crossed that out.

Maybe, he thought, it would be better to wait until he had a better idea of the situation to go into any more detail about it.

If Sollux could actually haul himself out of whatever stupid funk he was in for long enough to –

The Awakener gritted his teeth, and inwardly corrected himself – if Sollux felt up to talking.

That was definitely what he had meant, because he was completely overflowing with compassion and acceptance.

He pushed a hand through his hair and sighed. This was going to be a long flight.

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Aerolith looked at him, raising an eyebrow.

"Well you and me are here, so what does that tell you," he quips. He shrugs as well. "Joining a cult doesn't require a winning personality."

"It's not a cult," said the Awakener, looking slightly offended. For a moment it looked as if he was about to elaborate the point, but then he paused and grudgingly conceded, "I guess it's a bit of a cult. You know. Like a sort of gross culty crust on the essential righteous grubloaf of what is at its core a movement." He frowned. "But you only join it if you think people shouldn't be dicks to each other, that's, like, the whole fucking point."

The Aerolith shrugged. The specifics of that definition didn't seem to matter all that much to him.

"Yeah, well, not everybody is actually very good at being nice, even if they say they want to be. Or they're just annoying because they're dumb as breech plaster."

He looked briefly sort of painedly uncertain, the expression that the Aerolith would, in time, most likely learn to recognise as the one the Awakener made when a conviction that he held had been challenged somehow and he was trying to decide how to rationalise it. After a moment, though, he let out a short laugh that was, if anything, kind of relieved.

"... Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I guess that's true." He paused for a second, briefly uncertain about what he was about to say – and then went on, with the cautious recklessness of someone testing forbidden waters, "I mean, I'm supposed to pity everyone, but holy hell some of these followers are stupid fucks."

Aerolith looked at him like he'd been caught a little off guard by that statement, but from the way he relaxed a little and snorted afterwards, it apparently wasn't in a bad way. The expression of amusement was brief, but there was something more familiar about it.

"Yeah, pretty much," he said, with another quiet, airy snicker. "Maybe stupidity is supposed to be pitiful, I don't know."

The Awakener smiled a little, relaxing more himself. "I don't know, I mean, it's not like I actually want them to go leap off a bridge or anything and it's great that they're supporting the cause but – shit, sometimes you just want to ..." He clenched one hand into a fist – then he shook his head, and looked at the Aerolith, still smiling. "I'm not supposed to say shit like this but I swear to fuck some of the trolls I've stayed with need a swift kick to the bile junction."

The Aerolith watched him, faintly fascinated, like there was something he hadn't seen before. His head tilted a little in thought.

"What kind of shit are we talking about here?"

"All kinds of shit," said the Awakener, with palpable relief. "Like – I was staying with this guy a few perigees back, right, and he was like embarrassingly caliginous for this oliveblood and she was, like, one, not interested and two, totally out of his league, and he just spent all his time being all, 'hey I know you've got important messiah shit to be getting on with instead of putting up with my bullshit hate problems but can I run this by you, do you think she'd give it a go if I put a sack of Iducan burrowing crotch scorpions in her respiteblock', and I had to be all like, 'you can't force serendipity my child' when I wanted to fucking deck him in the teeth and tell him to staple on his post-pupation legtubes, give it the fuck up, and stop making everybody else embarrassed to be alive..."

He trailed off, looking very slightly embarrassed.

The Aerolith was just kind of watching him through that, up until the point where he trailed off in embarrassment. His brow creases a little at that.

But then he snorts again.

"But you didn't, so gratz I guess," he says, smiling faintly again before letting it fade. "Probably would have been your default response before."

He frowned a little. "Yeah, well, I'm trying not to be that guy because actually saying this shit to people doesn't help anyone. It's just, you know," he let out a dismal laugh. "Sometimes kind of tough."

"I guess I wouldn't know," he said in a flat voice, with a similarly flat shrug. He was full of conflicted emotions, and he couldn't decide what to be. So his exterior did the only thing it could, and defaulted to nothing.

The Awakener's ears drooped. It had felt like maybe they were getting somewhere back to normal for a moment back there, but of course he'd gone and fucked it up by being a jackass.

Which was, of course, what constituted normal in this context in the first place, and perhaps he should have given that a little bit more thought, but, well, he didn't.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I swear I am trying, like, I am practically winning the gold in the being polite to douchebags who don't deserve it olympics here – I mean, I don't mean that because everybody deserves kindness, but being polite to douchebags, I guess, I just..."

He slumped forward a little, apparently giving up.

"I'm sorry," he said again. "I guess I'm actually kind of terrible at this."

At first Aerolith didn't seem to even comprehend what the Awakener was reacting to, though for a moment he went so far as to be visibly distressed by it. But it all faded into confusion soon enough.

"What?" he asked, ears folding back defensively in response. "I wasn't even...I was saying I..." His attempts to explain what he'd actually been referring to fall short as well. He just tried to shake it off, frustrated.

"Whatever, I'm sure you're doing great at that and everything, I wasn't saying you weren't..." He exhaled quietly, gaze wandering. "Know that you are objectively way less of a douchebag than you were before."

The Awakener opened his mouth.

Then he closed it again.

He stared at the Aerolith helplessly.

"Then what's the matter?"

"I don't know," he said with a certain resigned terseness. He turned his head away. "It's probably just the whole being insane thing again." He grit his fangs. "Just go back to whatever you were doing and i'll get over it, okay, just..."

And something seemed to break down, his voice getting tense.

"I'm tired, from piloting, and I want to sleep, so we can talk later. Is that okay?"

He didn't sound like he could afford to care too much about how okay it actually was.

His face fell.

"... Yeah. Of course."

His half-outreached hand hovered, for a moment, as if he might clasp it over the Aerolith's, before he realised what he was doing and folded it away. He pushed himself up from the resting slab, and didn't look at him as he started to leave, although he did pause before he opened the door.

"I ... this probably wasn't what you needed right after that. I'm sorry."

Wow, he thought, what a stupid thing to say.

"I said you could come here, dipshit," he mumbled, already curling up on the resting slab with his back facing the door. "So don't even start."

That was apparently what qualified for 'have a good day' at the moment.

The Awakener looked over his shoulder with what might have been a smile, albeit a sad one. Then he dropped his head, and sighed, and opened the door.

"Yeah," he said. "Okay. I'll... later."

He lingered on the other side of the door for a while after he'd closed it behind him. Going back to what he'd been doing, as the Aerolith had suggested, wasn't really on the table, since what he'd mostly been doing had been waiting to be allowed to speak with him in the first place – and he still didn't feel up to going into their encounter in his journal.

Still, his papers could probably use some organising, even if he didn't really feel like reading them...

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