logsinthenight | Truth is like a loaded gun

She snorts as if to instantly dismiss that idea with but it's perhaps made a little awkward by the fact that - look - she's not blind. He also happens to be the only person she's become comfortable simply existing around. At the end of the day, though? Just - no. For reasons that have nothing to do with him, no.

"Yeah, you wish army man." Dragging herself up from the ground to move over to the night stand by one of the beds in the room, heavy wood grating against wood as she drags open a bulky drawer. She drags out the same red and black flannel shirt she'd been wearing when he'd patched her up, giving it the smell test before tossing it his way.

"A trench?" Yeah, she caught that. "Didn't realize they still did that."

He hardly even notices the awkward moment, too worn out and on edge, lucky you Scarlett. Instead, he just wearily accepts the shirt and sees about folding it over his knees. (Don't I know this thing? Sure I've seen this before somewhere.)

In the end, he has to actually holster his gun, no matter how exposed that makes him feel, in order to manage getting it into a decent shape for tying around his face. "Guess it was a bigger deal in the first world war, but they still do it some. I've been in a couple, and they stank like you wouldn't fuckin' believe. Not just dead bodies, either."

He ties the shirt around his face and neck with the sleeves, and pauses, hands still behind his head, brows coming together. There's a familiar sensation to that. Not the trench mouth-protection, that was lighter, scented with some kind of herb. No, it's... something else.

She'd chosen that shirt for a reason, Scarlett watching the way he looks at it as if hoping to spy some flicker of recognition. Trying to get a sense as to whether his other half was still there somewhere, worried that maybe he might not be and yet not quite willing to admit as much to herself.

"Hmph." Shaking her head as she moves to take her place back on the floor, quietly noting that it seems to be a thing his other half did like he was always putting himself beneath her and yet she wouldn't allow it.

"I'd forgotten what it was like not to smell death before I came here." Those words said far too casually, almost like she forgets how different her life had been in the years before her death.

"I don't like it - I'm not a sadist or some shit but - I don't know. It's familiar, I guess?" Scarlett sharing little pieces of herself without somebody feeling like their pulling teeth.

"That's kinda. Shitty," the Sergeant says. "You can get used to a lot of things, but that's not one I'd want to... you know. Get used to." He sounds distracted. His brain is still working on the whole "why is this sensation familiar" thing.

(The fucking mask.)

When it finally clicks, more than one thing clicks at the same time, because that's a Soldier feeling, not a Sergeant feeling. Both hands come back up to tear the shirt off-- thankfully the shirt doesn't actually tear-- and hurl it across the room. The Soldier then runs both hands down its face, as if making sure it's still there, and only then focuses on Scarlett with a wince. On her shoulder, not her face, and when it speaks again, there's no more Brooklyn in its voice.

"Fuck. Sorry."

"Sometimes we don't get a choice." Only the slightest of strain in her voice as she speaks. She might accept the world she'd come from, she might have even felt vindicated by The Rising in a fucked up sort of way but she could still acknowledge that the world would have been better had Charles Harker been wrong all along.

She never really noticed the difference in him when 'Army Man' had taken the wheel before, but after so much time with him and then seeing the Tinman she'd gotten to know, take control? It was like watching two different people. It wasn't just where he would look, the way he'd hold himself or his voice. She could have sworn his features altered before her eyes, even though she knew them to be the same person. The same person.

"Nothing to be sorry for." Her tone is as easy as it had been before as if all this wasn't as jarring as it might have been to somebody else. "Army man and I were just getting to know each other, is all."

"Sergeant. We've been calling him Sergeant. That's his rank." The Soldier takes a shuddering breath, then settles back against the wall again, a slump that should resemble the Sergeant's but somehow just... doesn't. It's both less comfortable-looking and yet easier with both the arm and its surroundings. "That's the second time today. I think something about the smell keeps. Bringing him out. With new memories."

Now its gaze lands on her face, to say hurriedly, "Scarlett. There was a time before HYDRA. When I didn't belong to them." This is a major revelation to the Soldier, okay, even if Scarlett and literally everyone else pretty much assumed that already.

"We?" Him and the 'Sergeant'? She was still getting used to the fact that they could communicate with each other, and yet seemed to be able to exist as completely separate entities, especially when they were in times of emotional strife, or caught in a bad memory.

"Yeah I, got that impression." That it was the scent that had brought him to the surface. Scarlett not entirely sure how much Tinman even remembered about the other one being in control. Wasn't sure how much she should even be telling him, just in case it pushed him over the edge.

He'd see no surprise in her eyes at his words, Scarlett nodding slowly and trying to muster up a small smile. Of course, she'd figured that much out, but it had to be progress to see that he had as well.

"You caught that, huh?" It cast everything he said to her in a whole new light, all the things he thought about himself. Like how he wasn't a real person because he didn't have family or friends. Here was his proof that he existed outside of the lab, whether he was ready to embrace that or not was another matter.

"Do you... get what all that means?"

"Yes. And Crowley, since the first memory malfunction with the Sergeant's memories was with him. He calls him 'the Sergeant person'." Amusing. Crowley talks funny. (You're one to fucking talk.) "Crowley doesn't know he's always there, though." Which does make the Soldier a little nervous. Scarlett has reacted surprisingly well to that information, but Scarlett has similar experiences, with dreams and that elder vampire person. Crowley might not react as well.

The Soldier rubs at its cheek again, still feeling the phantom sensation of the mask. Standard mission equipment, sure, but not pleasant. "I'm still working on. Placing things. It's new. It's. Overwhelming, the way he thinks. And the memories don't have a lot of detail. Just the immediate shit. Like he'll think about people from his unit in passing, but I don't get faces or names. It's frustrating. For both of us."

(And I still can't remember my fucking name.)

The Sergeant is still careful not to say their name, even in the privacy of their shared headspace. The Soldier still needs that remove.

Her brow furrows, Scarlett doing little to disguise her obvious unhappiness at the fact that he was still involved with Crowley but short of ordering him - which is something she refused to do to him - there wasn't shit she could do about it. That didn't mean she hadn't considered threatening the other man (or whatever he was) into keeping his distance, but where Tinman was concerned? He was just going to have to deal with her grunts of displeasure every time that name came up.

"It's probably going to take some time. You don't have to figure it all out overnight." The brunette more sure that pushing wouldn't help, yet already in the short time she'd known him she'd seen small changes in the person she thought of as 'Tinman'. It was like watching flickers of humanity return to him as he the two halves slowly tried to merge. "You might be able to, learn a thing or two from each other."

A month and a half isn't, objectively, a long time when it comes to counteracting the conditioning of a literal lifetime. But things are still changing, slowly but surely. One change being that today, the Soldier can deal with her displeasure without the urge to try and do something about it, and it will do so mostly by ignoring it. It can be a stubborn bastard, and Crowley is one of its two (2) designated friends in Beacon. Not giving that up just because the two of them can't get along. (If and when the threatening ever happens, there might be a freak-out, but for now? Ignoring works just fine.)

"Yeah. Like maybe not calling someone a 'dame', Jesus. At least I know where all his slang comes from. The memories are from the 1940s. World War 2." Guess how much older the Soldier is than you, Scarlett? Come on, guess. "And he's the one who knew what a hamburger was. And a-- milkshake." Small things. It's not entirely ready for learning big things from the Sergeant yet-- just knowing that there was a time Before HYDRA is big enough to adjust for now, without getting into the implications.

Truthfully? The 'dame' thing was kind of growing on her but she didn't have too much time to even snort her amusement at what he'd said. His further explanation wiping the half-smile from her features as she openly stares at him for a long moment.

"The what?" Her gaze automatically shifts to his metal arm, confusion knitting her brows together. Scarlett struggling to reconcile the idea that somebody alive during the forties could be fitted with something that was clearly technologically superior to the day. "You're sure?"

Yet even as she asks the question, there are things that do ring true with that. Talk of trenches and even his accent, while decidedly Brooklyn? It wasn't quite the Brooklyn of today. "Do you... remember what year it was before you came here?"

"I think so. That was was the war with the Nazis. HYDRA started off the Nazi science division and went off the rails from there. The two memories I have, now, are from escaping from a battle with HYDRA on our heels. And from later after we'd been working there a while and they hauled me off for their labs. I don't know how I got out of there alive." It obviously wasn't just by bolting blind and burrowing into the nearest safe place it could find. There would have been guards or technicians.

That's probably the longest the Soldier's talked on its own without getting stalled out or choppy over something in a while.

Her second question gets a shorter and more distracted answer, as it works through the memory set in its mind, trying to fill in the blanks. "It was 2014 I think." It doesn't see anything particularly strange about this. It woke up to different years all the time. Sometimes different decades.

Edited (sleep-deprived typos wow) 2019-10-13 16:51 (UTC)

The things Scarlett knew about the many wars that had been fought over the years, weren't the sort of things you learned in High School. Her normal education had been cut short when her death had been faked during her early teens. The history she'd been taught had centered around tactical warfare, the methods of the Nazi's and the allied forces who'd gone against them chief among them. HYDRA had never been so much as a footnote in those history books, which only made the group that had him all the more terrifying. That they could commit such atrocities and remain in secret...

She does notice his use of we now, a possibly unintentional slip that tells her something of where he's at with all this. He might not be ready to think in terms of that other side of him as himself, but he is fully acknowledging that he isn't just there now, but always has been. Not the life of one, then the other but something combined.

"What?" For a moment she's certain that she's heard him wrong, Scarlett shaking her head as she replays his words. Her gaze raking over his physical appearance as she tries to guess his age. "2014?" A hint of disbelief in her tone as she does the mental math. "That - " She lets out a huff of air, her features scrunching up as the words seem too ludicrous to say. "You'd have to be in your nineties. At least."

Yeah, it does kind of flip-flop on the pronoun usage: singular versus plural. It's still getting used to the situation, itself. It glances over at her briefly at the tone. What's so surprising about that? It'd basically considered itself an ageless thing after so long of coming out of cryo to find its handlers getting older while it never changed, somewhere in its messy brain, so ninety doesn't seem that bad. "That makes sense," it says. "I hadn't thought about the numbers yet."

"Well I'm glad it does for one of us." A not of incredulity in her voice as she lets out a disbelieving huff of laughter in response to his reply. She can't exactly throw words around like 'impossible' given all that she is - something that shouldn't exist and yet thanks to a bunch of Scientists, did. Were they really that different?

"You look my age." If that, but she did suspect his age might be hard to tell given the amount of shit he must have seen, but there was a long way between 33 and 93. "How is that even possible?"

It's not a person, okay. The same rules of aging probably don't apply. But it does sit and think about it for a minute. A long minute, frowning to itself, head leaning back against the wall again and eyes focused in the middle distance while its brain chases a feeling down. "I have. The impression," the Soldier says at last, haltingly, "that I've watched handlers age. While I didn't change. But my idea of time is. Kind of fucked up. Since I don't remember much of anything. For all I know I spent decades at a time in cryofreeze."

"Cryofreeze?!" Apparently she really is just going to keep exclaiming over the strange things he says like they'll help it make sense to her somehow.

"I thought that was all, sci-fi bullshit." Here she is again, acting like something could be impossible when she's got the blood of 'The Dark One' in her veins and she's from a world overrun with Vampires.

"You're saying you didn't just... live." It's not exactly a question, more like she's piecing it all together.

"They just -" She caught herself before she said 'booted you up'. "Woke you up whenever they wanted you to do something and sent you back to the freezer?"

The Soldier looks back down in her direction, looking vaguely surprised at her shock. "Yes. If they ever kept me out for longer than a mission, I don't remember it. I don't think they did." It makes a soft, annoyed little snort. "It wouldn't be tactically sound, anyway. I would have had to actually sleep, which means remembering dreams. Learn how to interact with people without killing them. Maybe have memory malfunctions then, too, and then they'd have to wipe me again." Given how it's reacted to being awake for this long by starting to get horrible memories back, and all. It's pretty sure this hasn't all been just because it's dead and people keep trying to tell it, it's a person.

Scarlett closes her eyes against the sympathy and fury that's waging a war behind her lids, not wanting him to think she pity's him, even if that's perhaps not something he could resent the way that she would. Was it any wonder he was the way that he was? Fuck - the fact that he was't far worse was a testament to the person he must have been before they found a way to control him.

"Do you understand - " Her voice tight with barely controlled emotion that leans towards anger. "How unbelievably fucked up that is?"

She opens her eyes to look at him, Scarlett trying to keep the rage from showing so he won't think it's meant for him.

"The memories you keep having? As fucked as they are? They're yours. Nobody has the right to take them away from you." Even if he wished they would, they were still a part of him. "They won't all be bad and even if they are? You should get to make new ones. Better ones."

There's still a dozen little signs that she's upset, and even though the Soldier is like 90% sure she wouldn't take that upset out on it, the reaction is still automatic. By the time her eyes come open again, its expression is Asset-neutral and body language entirely unthreatening-- not quite shrunk in on itself, because cowering doesn't de-escalate; it often makes things worse. But it isn't focused or tense in any way, eyes down on the floor and hands resting in plain sight on its knees. "Scarlett. It's okay."

Then it ruins the act (well, not for Scarlett, but if she'd been an actual angry handler) by saying, quietly, "I know. I don't want to get wiped again. No more Chair."

It breaks something inside of her, to see the way he shuts down. The nothingness that shows behind his eyes and Scarlett closes her own against it, swallowing hard as if not seeing will make her feel less. It's not okay and she has to cover her mouth with a fist to keep from yelling that at him because she knows it won't help.

"You won't." Her fingers trembling as she opens her hand and forces it to drop to her lap. "No my chair. I promise."

A long time ago, it feels like, the Soldier learned the way to keep its gaze just unfocused enough to pick up everything going on around it even when not looking at anything. So it sees her reaction, and it's. Confusing. Why does she look so distressed when it's being so very carefully non-threatening?

(Because she's not a fucking handler, pal. I don't think she cares how non-threatening you are. Everyone cares how non-threatening I am. I'm dangerous. You're a fucking moron, is what you are.)

How to fix that, though. Not the moron part, that's probably never going away, but the "Scarlett is distressed" part. The Soldier focuses again on her hand, falling back to her lap, where she'd almost reached out. Hrm. Touching Scarlett has never made it panic in the past, the Sergeant even commented on it once. Maybe that would help. So it hesitates briefly, still not looking directly at her, then uncurls its knees from up against its chest and holds out a hand, palm down. The flesh one, just in case there does wind up being panic, that one's less likely to accidentally squeeze her wrist off or something.

What she hates just as much as what's been done to him is that she has no idea how to help make it better. How to help him see that he doesn't have to fear the ghosts of his past any more than she does. What she might hate more, however, is that she knows she can even be sure that she can keep the promise that she's just made. That she has no way of knowing whether this place could turn around and inflict that same brutality on him once again.

She's aware of his movement but doesn't even feel the need to watch him, that sure that he isn't the dangerous thing he believes he is, Scarlett not even lifting her gaze until his hand comes into her field of view. It's perhaps the most human gesture she's ever seen from him and she can't help but fixate on that extended hand. The action helping to stall the twisting thoughts in her head, as she slowly lifts her hand from her lap again. She doesn't just try and simply grab it, but almost tentatively turns her hand over so her own is palm up beneath his. Her fingers lightly grazing his palm as she allows them to just barely touch.

That feels weird. The Soldier doesn't remember the word "tickles" very clearly in regards to physical sensation, but it almost does that. Not comforting, but not panic-inducing, either. It leans a little further away from the wall and instead wraps its fingers around her wrist, in a manner that lets her do the same in reverse if she wants.

"It's okay," it says solemnly. "You're okay." (Don't be distressed, Scarlett.)

Edited (that's the word I was looking for and couldn't find until after I hit "post" dammit) 2019-10-19 06:38 (UTC)

Her gaze still transfixed, she watches as he slowly responds to her touch. Her eyebrows knitting together as he isn't the only one uncertain about what they're doing. She allows it to be his choice, however, not responding until he grasps her arm. Again, her own mirroring his action as her fingers wrap around his wrist.

She can feel the thrum of his pulse beneath her fingertips and is almost startled by the unexpected surge of feeling that comes when he speaks. Her mouth falling open as she takes in a quick snatch of air and rakes him over with her gaze.

"What about you?"

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