Underneath It All

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elliot2_icon.gif ff_elliot_icon.gif wright2_icon.gif

Scene Title Underneath It All
Synopsis all i do, i can still feel you / all i do, i can still feel you / all i do, i can still feel you / all i do, i can still feel you
Date July 7, 2021

prime.gif flood.gif
November 8th, 2006 November 8th, 2006
He’s barely been able to process whatever Eddie has been saying. The whipping of the bitter late autumn wind. The thudding of his heart. The feel of the terrible, slick-seeming fabric of the other boy’s coat as his fingers ache trying to hold on for life. Because he’s going to die now.

Eddie’s eye looks like the pale, waning gibbous moon in the sky above them. He’d thrown a steak knife in the air as a child, something he blames other kids for. Only Elliot has been living here just as long, knows better. The other kids got lucky, adopted, replaced with fresh orphans.

“Any last words?” Eddie says in a lull in the wind. So cliche, so fucking trite. Something the bad guy always says for the thrill of being bad. He leans forward, and Elliot’s position tips well past precarious. He can see the frozen ground beneath them. The scattered leaves. The pavement.

Even if he could put the words in order, it wouldn’t matter. Elliot knows he’s powerless. Wishes he was special. Wishes he could reach out, take that one good eye. Take the baseball bat propping the door open to break every one of Eddie’s bones and never stop.

He feels the beginning of the push, the accident, knows this motion will be the one that carries him over the edge to plummet three stories to the ground. Everything feels so slow in this moment. There’s a prickle in his scalp as his hair tries to stand on end in his terror.

The door slams open.

I'm not going to die here?
He’s barely been able to process whatever Eddie has been saying. The whipping of the bitter late autumn wind. The thudding of his heart. The feel of the terrible, slick-seeming fabric of the other boy’s coat as his fingers ache trying to hold on for life. Because he’s going to die now.

Eddie’s eye looks like the pale, waning gibbous moon in the sky above them. He’d thrown a steak knife in the air as a child, something he blames other kids for. Only Elliot has been living here just as long, knows better. The other kids got lucky, adopted, replaced with fresh orphans.

“Any last words?” Eddie says in a lull in the wind. So cliche, so fucking trite. Something the bad guy always says for the thrill of being bad. He leans forward, and Elliot’s position tips well past precarious. He can see the frozen ground beneath them. The scattered leaves. The pavement.

Even if he could put the words in order, it wouldn’t matter. Elliot knows he’s powerless. Wishes he was special. Wishes he could reach out, take that one good eye. Take the baseball bat propping the door open to break every one of Eddie’s bones and never stop.

He feels the beginning of the push, the accident, knows this motion will be the one that carries him over the edge to plummet three stories to the ground. Everything feels so slow in this moment. There’s a prickle in his scalp as his hair tries to stand on end in his terror.

Elliot begins to scream.

I'm not going to die here.

Fifteen Years Later


Elliot has kept as low a profile as possible considering the obstacles. Eyes down, distant, distracted, he only looks here in as much as he’s mostly looking at the wall in Wright’s hotel room. It’s the first time in months that they’ve both had a shower on the same day, though his was far less glamorous. She’s drinking coffee, neither of them would have slept tonight either way.

“Wonder if she got sober?” Wright asks with a bitter chuckle.

Elliot merely remembers his local iteration drinking rye as a way to say, Doubt it. What would that Wright be like? Ten years after the end of the world, likely no reason to ever stop drinking other than supply. Likely as furious as Wright herself used to be, as prone to settling arguments with violence.

He finishes a bowl of mediocre noodles, enjoyed heartily, and stands from the bench in front of the shop. The ringing in his ears is moving again, as he’s been hoping it would. There’s so much he needs to learn from the other man still. With Squeaks released from the network and—hopefully—off to bed, there’s actually a chance that he can have the conversation without being overheard.

Wright lays back to gaze at the ceiling, picking her socks off and discarding them on the floor where they belong. “Probably not as buff anymore,” she supposes, flexing demonstratively.

“A shame,” Elliot agrees quietly. He doesn’t mind the idea of sustaining less damage if this world’s version of Wright were to get punchy after finding the wrong man wearing her Elliot’s coat.

Wright asks a rhetorical question with a memory of the local Elliot's tattoo and a wave of frustrated curiosity, knowing he won’t have anything more to guess about it now than he did earlier.

“Tarragon,” he says, feels her shrug. There was a time he thought he’d picked the figure-eight amphisbaena for an air of mystique. A time before the minotaur scribed it on the wall of the Apartment Complex with mold. What could it mean to this Elliot?

Wright taps her fingertips on her jeans, those not long for her legs. Not saying anything, just practicing. “Palletize?” she wonders, adding for clarification: “Introvert.”

Elliot can only blink out an UNKNOWN. He’s making his way toward his other’s last known location, and feels the other man’s trajectory adjust to compensate. It’s not long before the directional quality of his tinnitus is lost, it’s only a few moments longer before he approaches his reflection in the street. He runs his fingers under the lapels of the other man’s jacket from afar, he could get used to wearing this.

The Elliot wearing his waxed canvas raincoat gives a disapproving quirk of one brow from beneath the hood as he closes the distance, then nods his head in an invitation to follow. One follows the other to a warehouse, a key is produced to access an office in the back.

The office isn’t as damp as it looks from outside. The Elliot wearing the canvas jacket waves for the one wearing the fur-lined coat to find a seat. There are a couple options: a well-preserved office chair and an army cot. Considering one of them has the key to this place, the cot feels presumptuous and Elliot takes the chair. Neither of them offer to remove their jacket for its owner.

A gas lantern is lit, the flame kept low to cast an orange glow into the space. The windows have been obscured with cardboard, and the door leading into the warehouse looks too damaged to easily open. This would be a good place for one of them to kill and replace the other, one of them thinks in passing.

“Any idea when she’ll get here?” Elliot asks. The other one shakes his head.

“She was,” he admits, “not entirely okay with the idea of killing her father. Yours would probably relate.”

Wright shakes her head, she’s angry enough to kill hers right now. She focuses instead on the thought of holding her daughter again.

“Not really,” Elliot says. “Her father just kidnapped her daughter last week, and is holding her at some kind of human-supremacist terrorist woodland retreat.” There’s a lot to process there, and he waits patiently as the other man does so.

“Daughter?” he offers eventually.

Elliot nods. “She and her wife Marthe have a girl, Ames,” he says quietly. “She’ll be six in a couple of months. I was a donor.”

Wife?” Elliot balks. He laughs nervously. He scratches at his short beard, nearly a mirror of Elliot’s own. “Christ.”

Elliot chuckles, scratches his eyebrow. “I’m married too, actually," he admits. "Though that's a very recent development. Merlyn."

“Marthe and Merlyn,” Elliot muses, pondering the unusual names. He's never met anybody with either of those names, never thought of himself as particularly marriageable. He opens his mouth to say more, but Elliot watches him go through a series of false starts instead, interrupting none of them. He becomes annoyed, clears his throat, and shakes his head.

“Wright says hi, by the way,” Elliot says when it's clear Elliot's stopped trying, though that’s more of an assumption on his part than truth.

Elliot looks confused, he’d been told she’d stayed home in an alternate fucking timeline. “You have some,” he says, baffled, “kind of… Do you have a working phone or something?”

“No,” Elliot admits, testing the other man’s capacity for weird. “I’ve been telepathically linked to her for a decade. She’s in a hotel room in Kansas City right now, complaining about the aftertaste of my dinner.” An actual truth, not an assumption.

The look of bafflement only increases, and Elliot can see he wasn’t wrong. This man has surely never heard of telepathic networking. “About a year after your world ended,” he explains, “I was kidnapped and put into a mad science laboratory, where I was given an ability without my consent. Normally it’s temporary, a few weeks at most, but my link to Wright is self-sustaining. We can share memories and sensory information at will.”

Elliot doesn’t know what to make of that, it is absolutely alien to him. What could he do with that ability? Ranging while able to see through his partner’s eyes. To not have to wonder when she would finally show up and help him kill her father? “Huh,” he manages. "I figured the safe kid was some kind of clairvoyant."

"No, that's me," Elliot says, recovering from a brief stumble. The other Elliot knows that Squeaks is safe?

After some more thought, eyes in the middle distance, Elliot asks about something that's been bothering him. “Why are you,” he says, pausing because he doesn’t like the question, not because the words won’t behave, “so different from me?”

“Therapy,” Elliot lies smoothly. He can remember being just like this man, though it seems so long ago as to be another person's life. “A lot of it. I’m guessing you didn’t do any mad science dungeon time?”

Elliot laughs. “No,” he says. “I did not. Hi, Wright.” The last awkwardly.

Wright finally becomes uncomfortable enough to wriggle out of her jeans, as the other Elliot can’t see it and the one she knows has seen it all before.

They sit in silence for a while, Elliot taking a moment to adjust the lamp flame. He snaps his fingers a few times, feels for the book beneath the raincoat.

“How did the meeting go?” Elliot asks.

Elliot sighs, it obviously took a lot out of him. “I got Gregory’s location,” he says eventually. “They’ve been obstructing his access to supplies for a trip. He’s apparently been spreading the word of remnant government out west.”

Elliot’s eyes narrow, that is important to learn more about. He opens his mouth to ask for elaboration, but the man who doesn’t like to be interrupted is already talking again.

“That and everybody is fake,” Elliot continues, “obviously. Bastian went to absolute fucking town on him. He never really got over it. Thinks he’s fucking dreaming.”

Any questions about remnant government are immediately forgotten. “I don’t,” he says quietly, perhaps embarrassed, “I don’t remember what Bastian’s ability was. My memories of that time aren’t in great shape. We met in the mad science dungeon.”

Elliot looks surprised at this revelation. When he’d met Bastian, it was official government action to find and contain him. “But,” he starts, honestly confused. He’s seen the signs of touch aversion in Elliot. “Why don’t you like to be touched if you can’t remember what his ability was?”

A fist clenches in Elliot’s chest, tears form, a door opens, an item falls from a pedestal and shatters—


The Commonwealth Arcology
Cambridge, Massachusetts

July 7th, 2011
11:31 PM


“There was a storm,” Bastian explains. “The house collapsed.” It isn’t true, and the man in the other room can feel the evasion. “I ran away.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Elliot asks in the discomfort of his spartan accommodations.

They’re the only two awake right now, separated by however far away their rooms are from each other. Neither of them saw the hallways between where they first met and here. Bastian just shrugs.

“What’s your favorite book?” the man asks, allowing the conversation to fall away. He can feel the flush of embarrassment in the boy’s face. “The one about you, I’m guessing?”

“Yeah,” the boy says. “I like the part about wishing. And forgetting.”

“Is that when you manifested?” Elliot asks, pacing the cell for something to do.

Bastian grimaces, but nods.

“How did that make the house collapse?” Elliot wonders, getting it wrong so the boy might feel compelled to correct him.

“Hammers,” Bastian replies. “I was afraid, so the scape was scary. There was something in all of the walls, moving. When it ended, it was all my dad could think about. Just saying over and over, ‘I gotta get it out of the walls.’ He did construction when he was younger.” He doesn’t go into detail, real work was a frequent excuse to be belittled and he doesn’t like to think about it.

“The idea left the place with him?” Elliot asks, worried. That is decidedly not what he wants. A monitor on the wall begins to boot up, catching his eye.

“I guess so,” Bastian said. “He didn’t sleep for a week and got really scary. He told me to take the thing out of the walls but I couldn’t. We weren’t there anymore. I didn’t know how to get back, and it was never the same place twice until now.”


Ten Years Later
A World Away


Elliot emerges from the memory crying, sniffling. Like a an artist revealing a statue, one of the pillars of the Foundation reveals itself to him. “Bastian could draw people into a mindscape,” he whispers. Not just a mindscape, a growing, ceaseless nightmare of progressively more unimaginable horrors. And you didn’t even have to be asleep to get there.

Elliot gives him time to deal with what must be the return of a bad memory. “I suppressed a lot of it too,” he says sympathetically. “It was a terrible place. But we found a way for him to get control of it. He’d already broken Gregory’s brain though, and the old man never forgave him.”

“How did he take control?” Elliot asks. Of all these revelations, this is the most important to him now. He would do anything to make the minotaur go away again.

“We found his dad and killed him,” Elliot admits off-handedly. Just like that. "Once he pulled the trigger, everybody was safe."

Elliot nods, heartbroken that he won’t get the chance to do it a second time. Proud of Bastian for dealing with his demon directly, even if it's horrific that it had to happen. “Wright and I found him a few years ago,” He says just above a whisper. “Years after Bastian died. Killed him in his living room and ate his fucking dinner."

Elliot nods in understanding, glad that justice was done in both worlds. “Did Gregory kill him there too?” he asks.

Elliot shakes his head. “He died in the Ark,” he says. “The mad science dungeon. But we were linked in the network, and his trauma left with me. It’s not always bad, but it came back recently. Killing his dad was a temporary solution. I was hoping he’d survived here so I could do it again.”

Elliot nods slowly, glad suddenly that he does not have a telepathic network. It weighs on him, and they sit in silence for a long time. "Fuck," he says. "Sorry."

Elliot nods gratefully, it's not ideal.

Eventually, Elliot decides to get to the real reason for this visit. “I want you to kill Gregory,” he says quietly.

“What?” Elliot says, confused. He wants to, but this is unexpected. He’s never regretted any of his kills, doesn’t expect this one would be any different. He doesn’t have much hope that he can corner the minotaur in a sector before it’s annexed a second time, the Switchboard doesn’t seem to be annexing anything right now. He’s not sure which part of that frightens him most. But like all things in that place there is power in repetition. In ritual.

“Wright will never forgive me if I do it,” Elliot explains. “If you do it, I can honestly say that I didn’t. She always knows when I’m lying.”

Elliot sighs as he thinks about it. The other man is correct, he never could lie to his own partner and get away with it. But he thinks about the logistics of doing it here, looks away to another world for a moment for words that Wright doesn’t supply at first.

“Do it,” she says finally.

“I'll need a gun,” Elliot says.

“You can use mine,” Elliot replies.


Walking into the night, toward the bed he’d been given, Elliot’s thoughts are a jumble. Agreeing to murder the local Wright’s father doesn’t really bother him. Instead, memories play over and over in his mind.

He tries his best to reel himself in, feels Wright’s pulse through her fingers pressed into her neck. He realizes that there’s no clean walkback from his reaction, but gives it a college try. “That wasn’t you?”

“It— was. Sort of.” Gates looks at Elliot, tracking his eyes from side to side as if only seeing him for the first time. In the state of shock that he is, Gates doesn’t do as well of a job as he usually does moderating his expression, and Elliot can see the plain confusion on his face. The surprise. The fear.

“I recognize the phone.” Gates says softly. “The voices were—” He puts a hand to his head, wincing at a throb behind his eyes. “We must’ve have tangled our Schwartzes,” he mumbles an opaque Spaceballs reference.

“Part of my ability is… the construction of a mind palace.” Gates says, moving his hand from his brow. “That phone, that’s my safe room. I can invite others into it, communicate over vast distances. I’m like a…” he searches for a word and Elliot shivers at the one he lands on, “switchboard for the DOE. All of our interdimensional communications happen through my mind, while the Looking Glass is open, providing a gateway by which telepaths on their side can project agents’ minds over to mine.”

He doesn’t want to linger on any of them, because they paint a picture he’d be broken by.

Gates glances at Wright. “We got separated, I took the long way back. Suffice to say, you saw the day I manifested. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since Elliot and I first talked about his ability, how he was worried that I’d… inadvertently copied it while we were training.”

He looks back to the road. “My fear now is that I copied it back at the diner.”

“You can’t—” Wright says as the scope of what happens unfolds in both of their minds at once. “You can’t…” she tries again. She takes a deep and sudden breath, braces her hands against the dashboard. Doesn’t look at Gates as though it will make him go away. Her hands don’t shake because she took medication to keep her steady. They both did. “You can’t.” This isn’t what this conversation was supposed to be about, and she’s up against the Lock.

A picture that cuts him deeply even as he refuses to engage with it.

"Have you ever heard of a memory getting dislocated from a locus?" Wright asks, able to be mostly blunt about this as the Lock doesn't apply to the minotaur and Gates already has the relevant facts here. "Have you ever had a memory learn something it shouldn't know?"

Gates arches one brow slowly, looking side-long at Wright before turning his attention back to the road. “I’m not sure that’s how it works. That sounds more like a person than a recollection.”

The notion makes Gates pause in mid-thought, brows furrowed and eyes distantly focused on the tail lights ahead of him. He looks at Wright again and asks, “Has anyone ever died while a part of the network?”

Gates couldn’t have copied the Palace, because the Palace is not an ability; it’s a place.

But Gates could have copied Bastian’s.


The Palace


PROMISE? [it whines in heartbroken, pitiful earnesty, the way you whine when you're alone but being alone is a limited resource and you're going to run out soon]

YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO SAY I PROMISE


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