thisavrou_log | [open] these voices won't leave me alone

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[open] these voices won't leave me alone

Who: Wanda Maximoff and you!
When: The latter half of the month (16th and on)
Where: Various corners of the Moira
What: This was a bad month to be a telepath. Wanda tries to cope.
Warnings: References to past blood and violence

Wanda's always had a talent for compartmentalizing and pushing through - it was a matter of survival, really - but now that they're all out of danger, the last two weeks have hit her all at once.

Steve almost dying. Athena actually dying and not coming back. The terrible things she saw in some of the Emirians' minds. The just as horrifying things she put there.

Being in her room is a painful reminder and sleep is difficult enough without the ambient psychic noise. Wanda isn't the only one who's had a bad time, after all. So she goes in search of other places to rest...

I. Supply Closet
Maybe you needed something, or maybe you just heard the familiar sounds of Bonsai or Red Thread coming from an odd place. Either way, Wanda's curled up amid boxes of something, clearly failing at that sleeping thing.

II. Library
It's pretty late, so Wanda can be forgiven for falling asleep in a corner of the library. There's a book balanced rather precariously between her knees and hands and that really can't be comfortable. Wake her up?

III. Mero Deck
Or maybe you've come across Wanda ducking out with blankets in tow.

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It is pretty late, and Pepper really is only there to grab a book to read while she fights off the thoughts that keep her up at night. Tony is likely also still awake, so she doesn't feel particularly bad about sneaking into his room rather than returning to her own, possibly disturbing Trish in the process. Before she makes it that far, however, she notices a girl curled up nearby, head bowed down in a way that could be reading--or sleeping.

Given the late hour, Pepper thinks it might be better to check on her either way. So she walks over, her voice soft as she tries to coax the girl awake.

"Excuse me." She doesn't want to startle Wanda, but she also doesn't want to just leave her like this. With a soft sigh Pepper crouches down, hopefully able to raise her voice enough to wake the girl without disturbing anyone else who might be stealing into the library this late. "Excuse me, Miss?"

Turns out rooming an ice mage and a fire 'mage' together gets a bit messy. Earlier that morning Yata had woken up freezing, automatically reached for his aura as he got out of bed, and promptly slipped in a puddle of melted snow. That had been nearly a full day ago now, but he hasn't forgotten. He pulls open the supply closet, hoping to find a mop he can keep in the room for future occasions.

Instead, he finds a person. Yata stares, suddenly feeling awkward and unsure of how to proceed.

"... I don't think this is your room, you know."

River knows the need to hide, to try and get away from the noise of too many minds all around. She's better than she used to be, when she would hide amidst the cargo and whisper about hands of blue. She'd learned to control it some, to focus on one voice in the clamor. People she considered hers in some way. Some nights she strained like she might hear Kaylee or Simon's voices if she just tried a little harder. And now, knowing that someone else has seen the files from the Academy. That Miles had seen her being broken has her seeking out the one person on the ship who knows because she told her.

She follows the threads of music, barefoot and picking her way through the halls quietly. She knocks on a nearby box to give Wanda warning. River feels small again, the broken pieces of her rubbing uncomfortably with the shape they'd come together to form. She folds herself down onto the floor across from Wanda, pulling at a loose thread in her sweater.

"Sometimes it's easier to pretend you're stone, to act like you can't feel what's around."

She's had worse dreams, but this wasn't the nicest, either. Wanda startles, bolting upright and sending the book tumbling towards the floor. Fortunately, Pepper's managed not to send her straight into where's-the-fire mode. Her eyes stay green, though a little unfocused at first. She knows Pepper is sort of familiar, but nothing immediately comes to mind so she only relaxes slightly.

"What..?"

He's on his way back to his own room when he sees Wanda down the hall, and he reroutes to end up beside her in a flash, falling in with her pace. There's a smile on is face and he reaches out to loop an arm in hers, plucking idly at the blankets. "You having some kind of sleepover, sis? Kind of hoping it's just a friendly one. If it's really friendly it's none of my business, but. You know. "

Pepper straightens quickly when Wanda suddenly jerks awake. Well, at least she managed to accomplish that. Still, the girl gets a sympathetic smile as Pepper steps off to the side, bending down to pick up the fallen book.

"Sorry; I think you fell asleep." She offers the volume to Wanda. "I'm guessing this must be a pretty good read. You might be more comfortable taking it back to your own bed, though."

It's meant only as a friendly suggestion. Wanda's clearly tired, and Pepper thinks she might be better off sleeping instead of struggling to stay awake here.

Wanda jumps a little when the door opens - who else is even awake at this hour? She doesn't recognize this person, and she's not about to explain the actual problems to a complete stranger.

Sorry Yata, she's not going to be mean but she will be blunt. "No, it isn't."

Digital archives are more efficient, but Rinzler's grown used to the user preference for hardcopy. He moves through the shelves without hesitating, homing in on the reference section. And stalling, noise skipping quietly in surprise at the figure curled up against the shelf.

User. But more than user, known. Familiar. Wanda had been present for interrogation when he'd tried to derezz Tron, and they'd worked together briefly on the planet to pin down a fleeing saboteur. Not an ally, but capable enough, with no particulars worth objecting to.

At least, he'd thought so. After learning of her ties to Peter Maximoff? Things weren't quite so simple after all.

The program hesitates, fingers twitching slightly as he stares down at the prone figure. The other user had made threats. Tried to command him. Claimed he would put Rinzler down for so much as looking at her, and infuriated the enforcer enough in the doing that Rinzler had all but promised to delete them both instead. The thought is tempting. He'd enjoyed the (too-brief) chance to outmatch the user physically, but it didn't completely erase the cold prickle of rage. Rinzler wants to hurt him. And she's that user's ally, which makes her a not unlikely threat to him.

Long seconds tick past before the circuit-lined fingers curl shut and open, line cancelled and deleted before execution. No. Future simulation is one thing, but there's no purpose to deleting his enemy's peripherals. Especially when they'd probably come back. Noise rattles out a little louder, static-edged with frustration, and Rinzler resumes scanning the shelves for his book. It shouldn't be far.

Wanda senses River before she sees her, but the knock is appreciated nonetheless. She closes out of Bonsai and uncurls a little, wincing when her feet tingle in protest. River is a safe person; she doesn't have to be so guarded.

"I try, but...the only time I can't feel is when I'm angry." She remembers quite vividly standing over the sniper who had almost killed Steve. She'd only broken the fingers he needed to use the rifle but if she wasn't very urgently needed elsewhere, it would have been worse. And she wouldn't have cared, not until much later.

Sometimes the depths of her own vengeance frighten her.

"Trouble sleeping?"

Wanda laughs, but it's not entirely sincere. "Not quite like that." It would be easier if she could lie to him about this. Unfortunately for her, that's a line she's not willing to cross. "My room feels...wrong."

Peter's in front of her in half a second, hands hovering above her shoulders to stop her. He spends a moment scrutinizing her face, frowning the longer he looks. "Wrong?" Peter parrots, carefully settling one of his hands at her shoulder. "You want to tell me what you mean by that?"

It takes nearly a solid two minutes of studying before Lara even approaches Wanda. There's vines winding their way up the bookcases and a bloody skeleton at her elbow, Lara feels she can be forgiven if she's not initially certain if the sight of the woman sleeping on the floor is real.

She's aware of the inverse of their positions from days earlier, wonders if Wanda was having nightmares too. It certainly didn't look like an easy rest.

You know what they say, no rest for the wicked. Not-Sans' chuckle is familiar in it's casually cold tone by now. Lara's gotten rather good at ignoring him. She does so now, in favor of kneeling in front of Wanda.

"Wanda? Wanda, wake up."

Wanda's a light sleeper and the rattling wakes her, red-eyed and red-fingered for a brief moment. But unlike Peter, who threatens because Rinzler's found a way to frighten him, Wanda isn't scared. Why should she be? She lost count of how many Ultron Sentries she destroyed in Novi Grad; Rinzler certainly doesn't appear to be a greater threat. And when you can literally kill most people with a thought and a wave of your hand...well, it takes a very powerful person to actually scare her.

But it doesn't look like she can come back here to rest. She may not be frightened but she's not stupid. So Wanda starts gathering up the blankets, unsure of where she's going as long as it's away.

"How long have you been standing there?"

Edited 2016-02-23 09:19 (UTC)

Using her own memories of the experiments on the Emirian forces has made them perfect nightmare fuel. Sometimes Wanda dreams she never left, isn't completely sure which is real when she wakes.

But Lara's voice is familiar, so while Wanda startles awake she doesn't go into battle-ready mode. The book tumbles to the ground but she leaves it where it is for the moment.

"Lara...what?"

She looks more tired than normal, even with her makeup. Wanda and sleep have never exactly been friends, but if she could use her powers to force her mind to shut up, she would.

"You know what happened to my first roommate, yes?" The one who didn't come back.

If Rinzler were aware of that comparison, he'd be offended. Sentries are canon fodder, batch-rectified combat functions copy-pasted over a hollowed shell. If his faith in his own origins has been shaken, Rinzler is still unique, and was always more than that. He's the most skilled combatant in his world. And certainly, he's not afraid of Wanda either.

The flare of red gets his attention, though, not least of all for the lack of a corresponding power spike. He'd seen it before outside the cell door, but assumed the thick material was interfering with his scans. Is it just a threat display? Or some user power too arcane to detect? Insufficient data, and it frustrates him.

Still, he only angles his mask at the startlement, noise back to its usual even whir. She should leave, yes. Or at least get out of his way. Visual scan isn't complete, but Rinzler's beginning to suspect the book he's after is behind her. He reaches for his MID, calling up a text screen Wanda should be familiar with.

40 user seconds.

☄ Supply Closet

Niko attempted to be a good friend, and in being a good friend he was going to get someone a box.

Yup. Just a box.

He swung open the closet to dig around to see if the perfect one was in there, but instead he saw Wanda curled up in the bottom. Then he canted his head back out into the hall. "Hey, me and Steve are alone again if you want to get somewhere else." The stupid round beds were probably infinitely more comfortable than this.

"Yeah. I heard," Peter says, tone apologetic. He sighs, hand squeezing at her shoulder. And he can imagine that's the problem. He's never lost anyone himself, but after what she's shown him of her own life, he knows it must be upsetting her. Honestly, he feels like an ass for not asking about it before. "I'm sorry. I didn't even think about this bothering you."

Wanda stretches out her legs and winces. "I don't know if that would help." It would be more comfortable, yes, but sleep would probably not happen. She's grown accustomed to things being a certain way, certain people being around...if Athena had left the way Steve did, it wouldn't be so difficult, she thinks.

But her sleep is poor anyway without adding more layers to it. At least out here it will only be her own nightmares and not pieces of everyone else's.

Al found it hard to tell the difference between day and night aboard the ship, especially with the blackness of space outside any windows, but it doesn't make a difference to him anyway. There is still a time when everyone goes to sleep, still a time when he is left alone once more.

He hated the nights. Always has done.

It was why he had come to the library. He wasn't sure if he was even meant to be here in the middle of the night, most libraries he knows have opening hours, but he had to do something or he'd go mad. What he wasn't expecting was to find Wanda with her head pillowed on a book.

"Wanda?" A quiet question, his hand on her shoulder to shake gently. "Wanda, you should probably go to bed."

Well, fair enough. That does mean that she's sleeping in the closet on purpose, however. That's even weirder than the prospect of her having ended up in there on accident.

"You lost or something?" Yata's words are mostly motivated by curiosity and skepticism but there's an undeniable undercurrent of concern as well. He's gradually getting used to thinking of the crew of the Moria as 'his' people, and that's enough for him to worry a little about someone he technically doesn't know yet.

Part of her feels like she should be used to it, that it shouldn't bother her so much. But Wanda is learning that befriending people has a price now, and it's not really a thing she knows how to deal with. At least she'd had a change of scenery to help her after Pietro died, but here...

"She did not make a lot of friends. She was...not a soft person." Wanda sighs. "I knew she was going to get in trouble, I warned her, but..."

Little does Wanda know that her offhand statement about saving the violence for the real monsters is exactly what caused Athena's death.

"But you couldn't predict that would happen," Peter follows up. "And she had you as a friend, so soft or not, she had good taste." He cracks a little smile, hoping to lighten her mood, just a little and just for a moment. He might be out of his depth, but making his sisters smile had always been a good place to start when it came to comfort.

"You miss her. That's why you don't want to stay in your room? It's a reminder?"

"Is there something wrong with your room?" Pepper poses the question gently, knowing it could be a rather loaded issue. Wanda's problem might be something minor, like not feeling comfortable in her own bed or having a roommate who snores. But there could be something else that haunts her, ghosts she sees when she closes her eyes for too long. For Pepper it's fire, the flames of an inferno she falls endlessly into, with the last thing she sees before her eyes turn to ash the face of the man he loves most, frozen in shock and despair.

"Do you mind if I sit here?" Since she's in no rush to go back to that, she places her hand on the back of the chair next to Wanda's. Of course the woman doesn't have to talk if she doesn't want to. Pepper wonders if it might help though, so she makes her offer in a roundabout way. Something easy to escape from, if Wanda wishes.

Well, at least it's someone she doesn't mind. If it was Rinzler again there would likely be a problem.

"I don't know if it would help. Not unless you have something to stop dreams."

It's not quite the same room, at least, but it won't do a thing to stop the nightmares. Would being that close to Steve help or hurt this time? Sometimes she dreams that she messed up or was too late and he did die - those are the kind of dreams that make her frantic when she wakes until she realizes all the psychic threads are still intact.

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[open] these voices won't leave me alone

Library!

( supply closet )

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Mero Deck

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Library, 25thish?

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Library

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Library

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