Miles to Go

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remi2_icon.gif ff_silas_icon.gif

Scene Title Miles to Go
Synopsis Remi and Silas have a heart to heart.
Date May 1, 2019

Novelle Vue


It’s a fucking Wednesday.

The middle of the god-damned work week.

And it’s back.

Everyone’s favorite timeline-displaced ginger telepath is currently holed up in the captain’s quarters that she has been staying in since the ship arrived — she hasn’t come out since she stumbled in last night, freshly come down from the effects of that strange drug she tried out last night.

At first, it was a slight hangover from the rather copious amount of liquor that she tossed down her throat to numb the fresh memory of that peaceful time spent eating a simple lobster roll with Geneva. But then, as the construction workers trickled in, it became pretty abundantly clear that whatever happened, it kick-started her ability back into action.

And hungover is not the best state for the telepath, curled up in bed, to be in when trying to reign in the powerhouse that is her mental capacity. It’s just like a bicycle, she never forgot how to control it — but after four months, it’s like a muscle that has not been able to flex.

And so, Remi has spent her morning working on intermittently shrinking her range and trying to drown out the mental voices of the construction workers. Currently, she’s got her range mostly shrunken down to the front half of the enormous ship, but it is intermittent at best. From within the captain’s quarters, the woman groans at her own discomfort, hands held over her face.

It's after noon on a Wednesday, and Silas is running doubletime; starting up a small business is a hell of a lot of work, after all. The construction is moving along apace, they've got an afternoon meetup with Devi, and… he hasn't caught sight of Remi yet today. He's been cruising the ship for awhile now — have to know the territory, after all — but he's seen neither hide nor hair of Remi.

That's unusual. He'd have thought that maybe she'd left the boat and not told him — fair enough, although he'd have liked to have her pick up something for dinner if she'd been going out — but he'd chatted up a couple of the construction guys on their lunch breaks, and no one had seen her leave the boat.

Worrisome.

Well. There's one place he's not checked for her yet. It'd be unusual for her to be laying abed this late in the day, but it's either that or she left and didn't tell anyone. Or she's lying in there dead, a voice comments offhandedly in the back of his mind.

That's… a possibility. Not a pleasant one, but… a possibility. Although… it's actually a bit worrying to him that his first reaction wasn't shock, but a sort of considering acceptance at the possibility. Wouldn't be the first time he's seen it happen, although he'd hoped he wouldn't have to deal with any more of that anytime soon.

Considering the many idiotic choices she’s been making of late, she could very well end up dead — it’s no small wonder, really. Between mild alcoholism and the recent foray into drugs, life has been a bit more precarious for the former ship’s captain. Instead, she has to live with the late-onset survivor’s guilt. The guilt from seeing Geneva is fresh in her mind, leaving behind the raw knowledge that she made it and the young girl did not.

At least Jasper didn’t make an appearance in her drug-addled brain. That might have been a bit too much for her to handle.

Silas can’t feel the telepath’s mind suddenly focusing on him, nor can he feel the fact that he is quite suddenly Remi’s new rock, without even trying out for the job. From within the captains quarters, she groans again. Not dead, Remi’s voice suddenly states in his mind. Just…getting used to the lights being on after nearly four months in the dark. They’re really bright lights. A pause. Door’s unlocked.

She’s back.

Should Silas dare to venture into the woman’s lair, he will find her still laying in bed, a sleep mask on over her eyes, wearing little more than a silky nightgown with the blankets drawn up to her belly.

It's a very good thing Silas is not drinking at the moment; hearing Remi's voice in his head under the current circumstances provokes a reaction that could best be expressed as #FF0000|!##, and would probably result in a spit-take had he been availing himself of their supply of bourbon (which would have been a tragic waste of good bourbon).

For a split second afterwards there's a few flickers of some rather colorful invective in Silas's mind, followed by an enforced calm. Okay, he thinks, both in response to the Remi-voice and in response to his own thoughts. Either he's hallucinating, or someone is messing with him, or… Remi woke up this morning and had her ability back.

Welp. Easy enough to find out which, at least; all he has to do is head to Remi's quarters and see what happens. Either he's jumped by ninjas (real or imaginary), which would indicate one of the first two possibilities… or Remi's got her ability back, with all the benefits and drawbacks that would entail.

Happily, he was on his way there anyway to check, so it's not a long walk; he pulls up outside the door and knocks, then gives it a moment for her to make a reply before he gingerly pushes the door open. "Remi?"

“No ninjas, no hallucinations, and nobody’s fucking with you,” she replies to those thoughts that run through his mind after she makes herself known as the door opens. The covers are drawn up a little further, but otherwise the telepath doesn’t move. “The construction workers are loud and it’s a little much today,” she adds.

After a moment, one hand lifts to her face, peeling the sleep mask away from her eyes — which are bloodshot and slightly sunken, signifying at the very least a lack of sleep. Slowly, she sits up, rubbing at her forehead.

“One of them had a fight with his wife this morning before he left, and he will not stop thinking about it, and he’s apparently stuck at the front half of the ship today.” She sounds less than pleased. “And being hungover is no help,” she adds, shaking her head. Sorry I’m so useless.

Silas nods after a moment, making a note of that and considering how that problem might be resolved; he thinks he can pull some strings and get the worker in question transferred to the back of the ship. All he has to do is find out who it is.

As she broadcasts her last thought, though, the response is sharp and immediate. None of that, he thinks back, sharp as the crack of a whip. "None of that," he adds verbally, his voice milder and quieter, hopefully taking some of the sting out of it.

He's silent for a moment. "Okay," he says, his mind whirling as he tries to figure out which question he wants to articulate first. "Alright. So… what happened? You just… woke up and your ability was back?" he asks; better to settle questions of the past before moving on to thinking about the future.

Rubbing at her forehead, the woman grimaces a bit. “He goes by Bo.” The telepathy thing might take a bit of getting used to — especially with the open book that Silas tends to be. It’s why she always liked him — he’s genuine, to say the least about the man. That, however, might not be so comforting to Silas, having his thoughts answered just as readily as his words.

She drags her hands down her face after a moment, shaking her head. “No,” she replies, scooting back so that her back rests against the headboard of the bed — which for some reason has a man’s tie hanging from one corner.

“I went out last night. To — to, ah, a strip club.” Something in the way she says it hints that she wasn’t entirely there for the show. There’s a better way to introduce the concept of what she did last night. “I…haven’t been doing so well,” she admits, pulling her knees up to her chest, covers still over her legs. “I feel…I don’t know, I feel awful that I made it and none of my crew even lived to see the portal.” She shakes her head. “Anyway, I’ve been…drowning my sorrows, I guess you’d say, since…well, pretty much since we got here. And last night…I took it a step further.”

She winces, steeling herself for the flood of thoughts bound to come from her friend. “There’s this drug, Zeitgeist. It’s — it’s apparently an evolved form of this other drug that’s floating around, called Refrain. Best I can describe it is, it makes you have flashbacks — really vivid ones.” She stares down at the shape that her feet make in the blankets, a troubled look on her face.

Silas nods absently at Remi's answer to his unspoken thoughts; there's a moment of awkwardness after the fact as he realizes she answered something that he hadn't spoken aloud — it took awhile for him to get used to it, and it'll probably take a bit for him to get used to now that it's happening again, but for now it's not important. As Remi starts to talk, though, he focuses on listening.

Drowning her sorrows. He studies Remi very carefully at that; he's been guilty of that before, oh yes, drowning his sorrows to try to stave off drowning in his sorrows. He thinks back on their previous conversations; had there been signs there that she hadn't been doing so well? Things he's been missing, right under his nose?

Yes. Yes, he thinks there were. She's always played her cards close to the vest — actress, after all — but yes, he thinks there have been clues. She's almost always had a drink in her hand; she's been drinking more than he has, and he drinks like a fish. And then there's the whole sleeping with Magnes thing; Christ, that should've given the whole damn game away right there, shouldn't it?

There's a certain horror to be found in the sudden knowledge that someone he thought was fine was very much not fine; was, in fact, in the midst of a downward spiral. Especially given that he himself spent years and years circling that drain, and has only recently managed to wrench himself away. But…

None of that now, flickers at the back of his mind again, this time directed at himself; fair's fair. If he's not gonna let Remi beat herself up, he can't beat himself up either.

He does raise an eyebrow at the name of the drug; there's a joke in there somewhere. Yeah, Zeitgeist does sound like the name of someone you'd meet in a stripclub, floats up from somewhere in the depths of his brain, but he bats the joke aside; this isn't really the time for corny jokes. Going out to try weird ass drugs with names like 'Zeitgeist' sounds like an Eve thing to do, but Remi? Not the sort of thing he'd have imagined from her, ordinarily. Another thing to add to the 'worrisome' list… though he wonders if he'd have ever even known, had it not been for her ability coming back, and again he feels that chill run down his spine.

"Flashbacks…" is what he finally says aloud. He looks at her and nods, grabbing a chair and sitting down. "Go on," he says softly.

She hears all of it — the gears turning, the comparison to his own circling the drain, the resolution not to let her beat herself up over all of this. She doesn’t answer to any of it — it’s something that she is, well and truly, ashamed of. She’s always prided herself on being the strong one — it’s why she was the captain of the Sayonara.

“I saw Geneva. Not…not the last time I really saw her, but the last time I saw her when things were happy. When we ate lobster rolls on the Sayonara, and the sun was out and the water was calm, and we talked about what it’s like to be a telepath — I told her it was like being in a room with a lot of people who have no concept of volume control, and while you’re used to it, your ears are still pretty sensitive.” Funny that she got a flashback of her describing her ability just before getting her ability back.

“It was happy…” She focuses very intently on a piece of lint on her blankets. “It was a good memory that I wasn’t really able to look back on after…you know.” She shakes her head, her azure gaze sweeping up to meet her companion’s eyes. “I kind of want to go back — to do it again, you know?”

Silas notes the coincidence — the subject of the conversation being the nature of her ability, right before she ended up getting said ability back — but while he's not ready to start positing a connection between the two just yet, he's not quite ready to file it under mere 'irony' either… and when Remi says she wants to do it again, his frown deepens slightly. He's more than a little wary about that. Unknown drugs strong enough to kick a broken ability back into functioning? Who's to say another shot won't send her ability full on haywire?

But… everyone's got their own methods of coping. He drowns himself in work, but Eve had been prone to… self-medication to get her through the day. It had apparently helped her. He's still not too sure about this 'zeitgeist' stuff, but if Remi needs something like that on occasion, well…

"That's your choice to make," he says, letting out a heavy breath. "Just so long as you've got a grip on it, and not the other way around," he says with a wan grin. He's done business with a few of the sort who hadn't had a grip on it; it hadn't ended well, more often than not.

“If I still didn’t have my ability, you probably wouldn’t have liked the answer to that,” Remi points out, trying to push herself back into her habit of not answering everything that goes through Silas’ brain — this is good practice for out there, too. “But with my ability back…well, being a telepath does wonders for keeping substance abuse in check.”

She throws the covers off, apparently not really caring if Silas sees her bare legs. She’s worn shorter dresses than her nightgown. After a moment, she swings her legs off of the bed, letting them dangle. “If…if I do end up doing it again, I’m going to request better…accommodations. To make up for my ability.” A shrug lifts her shoulders, azure gaze turning to Silas.

She doesn’t mention the Refrain she heard about — something that she knows will work now that her ability has returned. But that one is addictive, as she hears — she’s not sure about Zeitgeist. “Thank you for not being upset with me,” she murmurs, sweeping her gaze back down to the floor.

Silas certainly doesn't mind the view of Remi's legs, but there's more important matters at hand. "Yeah, well. I try to avoid getting upset too much. Doctors say it's bad for my blood pressure," he quips, but his eyes are serious as he studies her. He considers several things he could say to her, only to reject them all one by one; finally, he sighs. "Do what you need to do, Sunshine. Just don't give up." I didn't.

With that, Silas turns back to the doorway. "Welp. I'll go see if I can chase Bo to the other end of the ship without ruffling any feathers. I think I can keep everything under control for today, if you want to take it easy awhile longer," he says, grinning.

In another life, Remi might have been more modest — but as it stands, she knows that Silas has seen her films (and thus has already seen all there is to see there). Instead, she smiles to Silas. Waxing sentimental here, but I hope you know that you’re probably my best friend in the world, ripples through the man’s brain, the telepath smiling faintly.

Then, she’s pushing off of the bed, moving over to her whiskey set…which she passes over in favor of a decanter of drinking water. Hydration might help. “I’d appreciate it. If I have to hear him rehash his argument with his wife one more time…” She shakes her head. “He was an asshole and needs to apologize to his wife, just to note.” She lifts the glass normally reserved for liquor, draining it in one go.

That thought catches him by surprise, though it would probably pass unnoticed by anyone who didn't either know him very well or have Remi's mind's eye view. The only outward sign he gives is a half-second's pause before he chuckles. "Thanks. That means a lot," he says, offering her a smile that's perhaps a bit more heartfelt than his usual easy grins.

He lingers for a moment longer, considering what else to say. In the end, he settles for adding, "If you need me, I'll be around," and offering a jaunty wave before stepping back out into the corridor. Remi's okay for the moment, at least… and maybe headed towards okay in the long term, too. He hopes, anyway; he makes a note to try and watch a little more closely for signs of bad times in the future… and then his mind is already moving over the day's revised itinerary. Work, work, work; promises to keep, and miles to go before he sleeps. In the past, that's been his coping mechanism, and now… well. It's a habit he sees no reason to change.


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