thisavrou_log | [ miles catch-all: one-way train to crazy town ]

Chara's head snaps up to face him, caught with their hand on a heavy looking weight. They don't snatch themself back, but instead eye him like a dog suspecting another of planning to take its meal.

"What do you care?" If he watches them laboriously haul this thing off to the pool he might try to stop them. He'll certainly interfere with their second journey. Chara looks at the entire weight stand, noting--with interest--the structure's tiny wheels. Chara squats beside them, touching the nearest one. Its brake doesn't disengage...

"I don't."

Miles's voice is a mild drawl as he comes to a halt on the treadmill, patting his neck down with the towel and stepping down off of it. He's a little fatigued after the workout, but still wired through the creeping exhaustion, his mind alert -- his consciousness buzzes so hard it burns, almost. Miles rubs the towel over his face again and starts away from the treadmills, in Chara's vague direction. A swim might not be a bad idea. He's got his swimsuit in the locker room.

"Come here for a little weight lifting, did you?" Miles's gaze has already been following Chara as they creep around the weights, and it falls to the one in Chara's hand. One corner of his mouth curves up slightly, as if in amusement. "I didn't know you were trying to bulk up, kid. I recommend starting small. I'd hate to pull something if I were you."

Wow. That's honest. If they didn't hate him, they'd be impressed.

"Up yours" They mutter, throwing a look at his ankles. He's walking, and the second brake is also jammed. Should they just abandon this shit-heap and go find something else to break? They could think away that ache on their sternum more easily if they did, but leaving won't be any escape. There's nowhere they can go where they know they won't find anyone.

Fuck solitude. Fuck this whole ship, and fuck running away from some asshole jerkwad that talks too much for his own good. They ought to punch his teeth in and wipe that stupid-ass smirk off his face. If he doesn't leave them alone, maybe they will.

They switch tactics and reach for the second smallest weight from the rack's top. It has a rubbery outside, but still plenty enough metal to be used hammer-like. The second brake knocks unlatched with a sharp tap. Chara scoots quickly back to the first, mind churning while they work.

Edited 2016-03-19 04:53 (UTC)

The slight smile goes tight, and Miles's eyes narrow. While Chara's busy trying to chip away at the brakes on the cart, Miles crosses the distance between them with a few surprisingly quick strides. Stepping in front of the cart, Miles braces his foot up against the edge of it with a deceptively mild look down at Chara.

"No thank you, and if you're going to dump the entire weight section into the pool, would you kindly wait until I've finished my workout?" His lips draw back to show teeth, and there's not very much about that expression to go along with the word kindly. "Show a little consideration, kid. The rec room is for everyone, y'know. Didn't you ever learn to share?"

"Fuck off. You already had your turn."

A fleet of tiny nuances all blare equally tiny alarms in their mind, and they throw another glance, this one burning faintly. How amazing. Most people's transformations aren't so thorough: he's gone from being the insufferable prying busybody at his last visit to someone that's now withdrawn all pretense of caring. They picture themself flinging the small weight at his skull. The imaginary adult proceeds to try and beat them senseless.

He won't get far if he tries. Quiet murder oozes into the hatred in Chara's eyes, and they finish releasing the brake they're at, hissing when their fingers are pinched. Is it enough? How far can it move now--almost not at all. They sneak another glance his way, but secrecy is a hilarious pipe dream at this point, and they spring to their feet towards the last brake on their side of the rack. They stamp at it--once, twice--on the third time it starts to move, and by the fourth it finishes. The rack rolls no more than a hair under Miles' foot, but the message it broadcasts is clear.

One brake left. It's by Miles' left shoe.

Miles watches Chara lazily, idly testing his foot against the cart with a noncommittal hum that nonetheless manages to sound like a drawl. He doesn't have to follow Chara's line of sight to know where they look next. "Mm."

In the blink of an eye, Miles drops his foot and kicks the last brake free -- and he's rewarded for the gamble, it's not as stuck as the others -- and then his foot flashes back up against the bottom edge of the rack and he shoves it back with one solid kick of his leg. Not a matter of strength so much as strategically applied leverage, though he feels the strain in both muscle and bone -- but a little momentum added to the weight of the cart sends it sailing back away from the pool with a distinct rattle.

"Funny, I don't remember saying I was done." The cart crashes into the opposite wall with a loud, heavy clang. Miles, suffuse with some barely contained energy born only out of the will to remain conscious despite screaming exhaustion, doesn't bat an eye at the sound. "If you're going to make trouble, make it somewhere else, kid. I'm a little busy here."

The whole mess slides right out from under their hands. Chara stumbles back, and unlike Miles, the noise makes them flinch.

It's gone. Out of reach, and out of any possibility that he wouldn't just foil them in all future attempts. All they have left is the pathetic little weight in their hand, probably just as good for smashing skulls as it is for stuck levers. It seems larger and hyper-detailed when they look down at it. There's the marks left by the brake's edge. The rubbery texture was printed with relief, and worn edges still peek out from under their hand.

Smells like chlorine and sweat.

Chara looks at Miles, picturing those cruel images from before. It's not enough. They surge forward, swinging at gut level.

At this point in the conversation, if you could call it that, Miles wasn't really expecting much in the way of an answer from Chara, at least with words. He's not too surprised when Chara takes a swing at him, and Miles, ever quick on his feet, jumps back out of range, affording only a glancing blow to his stomach by the end of the weight -- soft tissue only, and it might bruise a little later, but it's hardly worth noting. But it slows the momentum of the swing, and Miles seizes that to grab hold of the weight in one hand, his other hand going to Chara's wrist to break their grip on it in a disarming maneuver. One he's practiced and used countless times, although never, admittedly, with a hand weight. Miles bares his teeth in an expression that only vaguely resembles a smile.

"And what did I just say about sharing?"

Edited 2016-03-23 16:18 (UTC)

The weight is whisked from their grip, as easily as tearing it from the grip of a newborn babe's. Now that's gone, too. Perhaps later they'll connect one disarm to another one just like it, but right now it falls to the side. They don't have anything left, and he's going to kill them in a reenactment of every nightmare still crowding them. Pain shoots through their rib cage, highlighting the overall path that so many spears have taken. Air turns to clay in their lungs, suffocating.

Chara won't let him. They'll kill him first.

They bristle, baring their teeth in a snarl more feral than any smile. As soon as they can bunch their feet under themself they spring at him like a human-shaped flea, raking claw-shaped hands at his face

Edited 2016-03-23 16:56 (UTC)

Miles is ImpSec. He's trained for this. He's been in dozens of combat situations, worked under high pressure again and again, gone down to the wire. Chara poses a far bigger threat to him than most children, certainly, and Miles is overtired and underslept -- but they don't have soul power right now, as far as he knows, they're otherwise unarmed, and they're coming at him from a place of raw frustration and fury, no finesse to it. Miles, despite the peculiar buzzing filling his ears, is far more composed by comparison, however narrow his focus is at the moment. Right now, Chara is the only thing he needs to focus on anyway. He tosses the weight to the floor, a safe distance away so as not to land on his foot. The rubber casing on the ends keeps it from rolling far.

He might be the more breakable one here, but he's still loath to really hurt a child, even Chara. The second they reach out to slash at him, Miles doesn't move back -- he moves in closer, trapping one of Chara's arms between his forearms to point it away from him, his back to Chara. Before they can try and wrest their immobilized arm free, Miles swiftly pulls back and turns, twisting Chara's arm behind them and forcing them to their knees on the cold rec room floor. He could make this hurt a hell of a lot more -- he could force them all the way down onto the floor, break their arm like this if he really wanted to, but he doesn't. He doesn't aim to hurt. He just uses it to keep Chara in place.

"This is the last polite suggestion I'll make," Miles says quietly, leaning in. "Go find somewhere else to throw your tantrum. I'm not interested in being your punching bag tonight."

Edited 2016-03-25 22:51 (UTC)

Chara's reaction to being twisted around is very similar to if they were hurt: They yell, flinch, and the arm and shoulder he's in contact with are shaking in restrained fury. They hate him more than anything on the ship right now, and for those several few seconds they want nothing more than to dash his oversized skull on the ground, smash the rest of him with heavier weights, and then dump anything that's left to drown in the pool. It would be a mess, and they would revel in it. Blood everywhere, and hysterical joy that'd be better than the hell they're in now.

He's leaned in close to speak. They only need a twitch to confirm that he's right on the edge of their current range of motion. He knows his distances. Chara's shoulder tugs.

He doesn't know Chara. They twist sharply and swing their head back as hard as they can, and for one horrible moment their shoulder pops. Pain explodes from the joint, and as soon as they stop pushing the shoulder pops again, and they're doing their best to crawl away on all three's. They'll only get anywhere if their arm was released; if that headbutt didn't free it, then they probably deserve to stay trapped anyway.

Edited 2016-03-26 03:13 (UTC)

Miles might be in a less than forgiving mood, but he's not cruel -- when Chara's shoulder pops he lets go instantly, a look of shocked horror flickering over his face for just the split second that he wonders if he did that. But no -- he wasn't applying nearly that much pressure, and he sees it in Chara's face, in their body language as they headbutt him fiercely and jerk away. He realizes, in that instant, that Chara might be just as much an expert in self-sabotage as he is. Not dealing with an amateur here...

"Shit," Miles breathes, startled -- he's off his guard, a precious moment of hesitation that allows Chara to scuttle away, and then he's moving forward again, han held out. Chara's a far bigger threat than your average nine-year-old, Miles knows that, but he'd still never intended to hurt Chara. Hurting Chara doesn't interest him. "Shit, kid, are you -- "

A blunt impact swings into the back of his forearm with as much force as Chara can muster. Their injured arm is tucked close, and the dropped weight is back in their hand: crawling towards it when they'd fallen hadn't been their original goal, but it was one they planned to take full advantage of.

"H-ha!" Their lips peel back, eyes glittering. "Bet you--didn't see that coming, did you?"

Miles, perhaps by fatigue or just Chara's own ingenuity, realizes what Chara's about to do a microsecond too late. Too late to pull back, out of range -- so he doesn't. Eyes flashing like a live wire, Miles clenches his jaw and lets the weight connect with his forearm, feeling the bones shatter on impact. Quick as lightning and at least as sudden, he twists his wrist and wraps his hand around one end of the weight within a heartbeat of the impact and wrenches it from Chara's grip before the pain catches up to him -- and it does, goddammit it does, and Miles clamps his teeth down on a pained howl, reducing it only to a guttural snarl of pain in the back of his throat as his arm jerkily pulls back as soon the sensation in his arm goes blind with screaming pain. He doesn't remember dropping the weight, can't feel his hand for a few awful moments, but he hears it bounce heavily against the tile just once before it splashes into the pool.

"Oh, kid," he breathes through his teeth, eyes burning -- not with anger but some unnamed energy, some unstoppable force that seems to live just beneath his skin. He's breathing hard, his face drawn taut, and he swallows the initial urge to vomit in response to the pain. His broken arm hangs loosely at his side, but he rolls his shoulder as though it were whole, letting it crack audibly in the hollow air of the rec room. "I really wish you hadn't done that."

He could have lightning crashing and wind howling behind him, or maybe even just fake smoke and spotlight imitations. They should've smashed his face instead of just his arm--but that wouldn't have been any better, would it? They could slice him in half, they could yank whatever plug powers that inhuman drive in him, and he'd still stand without swaying, murmuring those same words.

"S-shit." For a vivid moment Chara looks like some frightened kitten, hair standing on end and eyes perfectly round.

They force the moment to pass, because there is no way they're going to be freaking intimidated by some asshole for being unstoppable. Chara is the unstoppable one, not him. A hysterical voice notes that they make a matching pair--both of them one-armed, and both determined. Chara tell it to shut up and searches wildly for options.

Fight.

Their eyes dart to his side, deciding in an instant and unintentionally broadcasting intent with flashing lights and klaxons. Their lunge forward comes a split second later. It's their good arm towards his bad one: will they reach his holstered stunner before he does? Unless he stops them, they will.

Miles has never, in his life, had a child look at him with an expression of abject fear like that, even for just the fleeting moment that it passes over Chara's face. It makes his stomach cold. But his hesitation doesn't last a second longer than Chara's -- their line of sight might as well be a laser pointed at his hip and he knows, instantly, what Chara wants to do. Whether or not they know just what kind of weapon it is, they know it's a weapon, and he gets the sense that right now even a stunner blow could be deadly.

He moves quickly. He hasn't survived this long by being slow. His broken arm hangs limply at his side, but Miles grits his teeth against the pain and forces muscle and tendon to move around shattered bone, white around the lips with nausea, and he grabs the stunner from its holster, clammy fingers closing around the grip. At the same time his good arm lashes out, aiming to grasp a fistful of Chara's shirt as they lunge at him to keep them away, but his hold on the stunner as he draws it is weak, his grip strength all but gone.

The arm that should be broken clutches at the stunner. Chara's chest hits a barrier an instant later, and maybe they should've been watching the hand that was actually coming up to stop them, because it gets a grip on their sweater that they can't wiggle out of. They twist--there's no finesse, and it doesn't free them, straining instead against their sweater's limitations.

They don't slow. Maybe this twist wasn't to break his grip, but because it put them in position to heave down and swing a foot at his other hand. Off balance, disarmed--why should any move have only one goal?

Chara's foot is enough to break Miles's weak grip on the stunner and it clatters to the floor, skittering a few feet across the tile. He snarls as fresh pain shoots up his arm, his vision bursting into color for a half-second before he catches up to himself.

"Son of a bitch," he heaves through clenched teeth, eyes blazing. He ordinarily doesn't curse around kids, but that's the least offensive thing he can think to sway right now. He doesn't let go of Chara's sweater, if only because he's not sure what the hell else to do with them right now, but he does hold them out farther away from him, to the limits of his exhausted body. His arm shakes slightly. He knows he's not nearly out of range of Chara's thrashing limbs, but he's choosing to ignore that for now. He locks his uncanny gaze on Chara's face.

"So are you getting something out of this, or are you just trying to see if you can hurt me?" Miles's grip on his fistful of Chara's sweater tightens, refusing to let go even as his chest heaves. He never realized how light children are. "Because if so, congratulations, you've proved that theory beyond a doubt. I, on the other hand, am not so eager to prove its corollary, because I know I can hurt you. I merely choose not to."

It feels like threatening a child. It is threatening a child. Miles steels himself against self-judgment and stares unblinking at Chara. Maybe he's benefiting them with too much doubt. Maybe he's still seeing too much of Mark in Chara and their furious struggle, and maybe it's only so he doesn't have to see himself. But it's the only hook he's got right now.

"Does this make you feel safe?" From anyone else, it'd be a taunt. From Miles, it's just a question. "Will hurting me more change anything for you at all?"

They twist mentally away from the questions as though shying from a hot poker, because they won't feel safer, and hurting him won't change nearly enough to make a real difference.

They'd rather just hate him more than anything else in the universe. 'He could hurt them? He deigns not to?' And when will he stop, when will this promised outclassing crack Chara's head on the ground? 'Does it make them feel safe.' They can't slip their sweater over their arms, but his own arm is close.

They reach suddenly to try to bend that elbow the wrong way, fail from their lack of leverage, and then drop their weight completely towards the floor. If he still doesn't let go, then they'll grab at his arm with sudden, mindless purpose, and lunge towards his wrist with their teeth.

The teeth earn Chara a yelp through clenched teeth, and that about seals it -- failig to see any other immediately available option, Miles throws out his arm toss them bodily into the pool. Safer than just dropping them -- for the both of them -- and Miles was just about running out of strength to hold the kid up one-handed like that. Miles half-doubles over, panting.

"Guess not."

Pain is screaming through his arm now that nothing pressing is distracting his attention away from it, but Miles ignores it with clenched teeth, dragging himself step by step toward the stunner, where it'd skidded nearer to the edge of the pool. He watches Chara for a few moments to make sure they can, in fact, swim -- a belated but alarmed concern -- but he tossed them in the shallow end, and once it's clear that he's not going to have to figure out how to save a drowning child with a freshly broken arm, Miles stoops down to pick up the stunner with a pained grunt. He straightens slowly, white around the lips, and he resists the urge to sit at the edge of the pool. He's not sure he'd get back up.

"Right then," he breathes, his hand closing around the stunner. He doesn't holster it, but he doesn't raise it, either. "Now, I could do this all night if I had to, but I'm tired, and I'd like to go to sickbay. I don't want to stun you, and I also don't want any more broken bones, so why don't you call it a day and go to bed?"

By the time he finishes talking they've dragged themself from the pool, sitting down in a pathetic, shivering huddle. He has the stunner. Would he make good on his threat? Yes. Do they especially want that? No, they don't even want to stop him from leaving. In a sense that's what they'd wanted all along, even if they themself hadn't known.

Chara doesn't stir immediately, caught in a spinning sort of numbness, as though when they'd hit the water they'd also hit their rage right out of its seating. They want to cry again, more than ever, and hopefully he'll just go before they do.

Their head is bowed, and their voice has hollow, mumbling quality to it.

"Don't wanna go to bed."

They also, perhaps, don't want to attack. They haven't stood despite the puddle of water forming under them, and as they spoke they started trying to squeeze water ineffectually from the edges of their clothes.

Miles watches Chara steadily, trying to focus on the soft, hollow echo of the room instead of his own pounding heart in his ears. He lets out a tiny breath of relief when Chara doesn't rise immediately, when it seems the crackling anger has mostly fizzled out, but he doesn't put away his stunner. He stands there, trying not to let the pain in his arm drown everything else out. His voice comes out cracked and short of breath, but soft.

"Why not?"

'Why not?' It's as though he's dumped a weighted blanket across their shoulders, and they draw up tensely, balking at it. Their hands clench like teeth, and their mouth draws tight.

"I don't want to sleep. Not--not with nightmares." They drop the last word like it's something foul, and admitting something like that had a hold over them is apparently far more shameful than any mindless attack. Who does this, wakes in the night and gets this upset over things that are long past? Someone unreasonable. Chara fits that bill. Their chest aches like an echo of when they walked in the room, and their hand touches their sternum where the splintered bone would be.

Even with this latest fight, there's no wounds.

An erratic surge of motion has them scramble abruptly to their feet, where they wring their sweater's hem until the fabric is stretched and flag-like. Pointless, they're ruining it, and there's no way to fix anything anyways.

Edited 2016-04-09 04:17 (UTC)

Miles's breathing slows and he exhales slowly, not quite relaxing, but his whole posture's changed. There's a light of understanding on Miles's face. Chara looks more like a child now than he's ever seen them.

"Ah," he says softly, and he doesn't move any closer to them, but there seems to be less of a distance than moments before. He permits a small, ironic grin to creep slowly onto his face, a little mangled by the pain. "Neither do I. Why'd you think I was in here this time of night?"

With the quiet now descended on the room, the searing pain in his arm is impossible to ignore, and beads out sweat break out in Miles's forehead. He ignores it with clenched teeth and barely controlled breathing. His attention fixes wholly on Chara.

"What kind of nightmares?"

"What kind do you think?!" Chara snaps, words lashing out like tiny firecrackers. They can sense the closeness that this shared suffering suggests, but they don't want it: he's the sardonic presence that baited them in the Hold and whisked the weight rack right out of their hands. Is he leaving soon? Any minute, now. He's got a broken arm, he won't be entertained by Chara's suffering forever.

"Dying ones."

Can they leave sooner? Maybe, but they'd have to walk around him. They stay where they are.

Edited 2016-04-10 15:29 (UTC)

[ miles catch-all: one-way train to crazy town ]

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OK SO I THOUGHT I POSTED THIS TAG THREE HOURS AGO WHOOPS

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