Participants:
| Scene Title | Moroi |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | In a way, Francois Allegre's power is a selfish one, it flees a body that is dying to save itself, whereas Kazimir's flees to a dying person to spare them death. It is the cruel dichotomy between the two, and one that may never truly be understood. — This Twilight |
| Date | January 17, 2009 |
The Ruins of the Amundsen-Scott Antarctic Research Facility
Up is down, and shadow is a tangible thing that can crush you. In all the ice white, unfeeling blackness cocoons and sedates. There's no moving, down here, none at all, except for a heart that insistently beats, pushes sluggish blood through veins and arteries. Slowly, like dawn, pain blossoms in his chest. Not breathing. Oxygen, no oxygen. Slip back, away from the uselessness, except that something else feeds it where air should. A warmth, in all the numbness. Francois knows it. He remembers it, as much as he remembers nothing.
Healing. As slow as his heart is going, it manages to skip one of its precious beats.
Move.
He doesn't have the strength or conviction to summon up any kind of response to the irritation when something orders him around. Now, of all times. But he gathers what's left of his willpower in order to create simple refusal, and then sink back into catatonic darkness. But it doesn't let him.
Stop that. That's a waste of time. Move or perish.
No argument, no strength, just another push of denial intangible enough that he doubts it was ever there.
They need that gift of yours. Can't you feel it?
Hesitation. Confusion.
They're dying, Francois. Heal.
He can feel it, and he certainly doesn't have the strength to deny something that's true. He doesn't know if it's up or down or some other strange direction, or what those directions are. But he can sense it, their injury, their need. Tentatively, he issues forth that healing. Muscles twitch, and the pain nearly makes him sink back. That voice grips him, like a hand around a twitching bug, offers reassurances, encouragement, threats. It takes a long time before he can try again.
Eventually, he does. Movement. Impossible. No, just slow, and always towards the healing, towards the dying, lending the strength of his ability and receiving it in turn.
The detail to factor in is a sense of time. Before that, everything else settles in just fine. There's parts of him, unneeded parts, that are dead — which is fine, they hurt less than the mass of flesh forced alive and warm. Snow is sharp, rubble is sharper, cutting deep tracks into skin, fabric, almost as bad as broken bones under flesh that knit together wrong, break again, reattach. By the time he beats a hand upwards and breaks through broken snow, the strange low sunlight is flooding against eyelids frozen closed, and shadow is spilling out, like a nest of snakes overturned, black on white.
He lies there. Time eludes. But he jerks awake when the whole world suddenly plunges into vibrancy and noise fills his ears.
Gunshots like thunder echo while bullets tear holes through his back, and he's fast. Healing. When one splits his skull open, his entire being seems to surge out from the wound, leaking his consciousness out into some all seeing and all hearing cloud of devouring awareness. When that thread of life reattaches it, it reels him back in, slams him mercilessly into healing flesh.
Francois opens blue eyes.
Now he can feel seconds cross by. His vision blurs, and he looks at his hand lying limp on the snow, twitches fingers gone dusky with frostbite, but not as much as he remembers. Sees beyond it, the crumpled orange on the grey and white, thick, protective fabric. From the radiation. But not from him. Six, seven, and then military garb and a dessicated corpse hand clutching the weapon.
And then shoes. Polished shoes, set against the rock. Swallowing around a dry mouth— when did he start breathing?— Francois tilts a look up to the neatly dressed visage of Kazimir Volken. Not the scarred youth, or even Richard Santiago, his clothing militant and of another era, his face stern and without pity. In the distance, Francois can hear engines on the wind. More are coming. He doesn't look, body beginning to wrack with tremors that have everything to do with the cold and nothing to do with what he might be thinking or feeling.
Instead, he lets the image of Volken give him his instructions, one repeated sentiment:
"Move."