Come Sail Away IC Inbox

[crushed_pearls]

Erin's voice mail message is in a weary voice: "Erin Peters. If you called in the middle of the night and I didn't answer, I'm dying. If I pick up and someone on your end isn't dying, they will be shortly. Text otherwise."

Comments

[pointofhonoria]

That gives Daisy a moment of pause. She swirls the drink in her hand, but still doesn't drink from it, just watches the liquid twist. "Doing what needs to be done. Doesn't matter if it's ugly. You do what you have to. You don't back out just because it's not the nice answer. You don't roll over for anyone. You never become prey."

Someone's taking a very different perspective on the choices Crabb has made in her life than Crabb herself does. Daisy can see countless places where a willingness to just get her hands dirty would've solved problems far sooner. She sees her version of justice as naïve, for someone only a few years younger than herself. It adds up.

It just adds up to what is clearly a very specific, very skewed perspective.

[crushed_pearls]

"I see." Erin stops the whiskey's song so she can take another sip; her ears twitch, gently, focused on her conversation partner. "That's a vision I've had pitched to me before. It's one I have not, typically, found to be compatible with objective reality. There are things that currency can buy you, no denying that. I can respect commitment, drive. Even the honesty it took for you to call it ugly, an honesty so many other adherents of this vision lack."

Erin sets her glass back down. "If it worked you'd be having this conversation with me in your body and not Crabb's, though. Sovereignty is an illusion. Lone wolves don't become mighty, they become dead."

[pointofhonoria]

Daisy's grip on her glass tightens. She's once again aware of just how much this body lacks when she doesn't feel the glass try to give way under her fingers. "I was doing just fine before this place. No one could lay a hand on me if I didn't let them. And I wasn't alone. I had someone. I didn't— I don't. Need anyone else."

And yet for all that she was untouchable to anyone who had remained untouched by Fear, she was only ever driven deeper into her own. She couldn't be weak. She had to Hunt, just as much as she wanted to.

She huffs. "Anyway. I didn't come here to get lectured."

[crushed_pearls]

"And you're not being lectured. You asked what we see in Crabb." A very small sip of the whiskey; Erin doesn't take her attention away from the woman in Crabb's body for even a moment. "...She knew I was dangerous the day we met. And yet she reached out to me anyway. She has real valor. Me? I've got malice. It can do duty for valor, but it's not the same, and I know that. Even if...even if things don't work out, the way I'd like them to, I want her in my life. She's humble enough to know her limits, perceptive, compassionate. In a world of horror it takes real strength to care, to remember that the strength of the wolf is the pack and not the teeth. I forget that, sometimes. I am, after all, a very big wolf."

[pointofhonoria]

Daisy's eyes (not her eyes, not the eyes with a touch too much of a predator in them, not the eyes that suit the wildness that Crabb's simply don't) narrow at Erin as she starts talking again. They roll at the idea of real valour, or the idea of the real strength being in caring.

"She still sounds like a naïve fool to me. All these things you say you like about her? They won't last. Or she won't last." She bites back a bit of a cruel smile. "Well. She hasn't. But even if I wasn't here... this place gets everyone. Eventually."

[crushed_pearls]

"Nothing lasts. Entropy always wins. Selling off my humanity bought me maybe another twenty years on the outside and that's if I don't die violently. I don't value endurance as a trait very much. Legacy...legacy I do." Erin takes out a cigar, cuts the tip, and seems to realize something. Wordlessly she offers it to her conversation partner; you want one?

"I don't think it's this place that got you, miss. I think you were like this before you ever became a nickel, and you broke before you ever bent. Now you're back, a second chance never offered to us coins from the Captain's pockets. This is your garden too. You tell me you want to be here, you tell me you wouldn't give up Crabb's body even if you could, so tell me: why are you willing to exist on these terms? What is it that makes holding on like grim death so much better? Fear of the alternative? This place got you once before. You don't seem unintelligent to me, you can't imagine just doing the same thing again will turn out any different. So what's the play? What's your future, in that body, on this ship?"

[pointofhonoria]

"I don't smoke." She still hasn't even touched the drink in her hand. It's honestly a waste of alcohol, when the boat isn't restocking.

She doesn't take her gaze of Erin. Doesn't stop staring holes in her.

"Never said it got me. I know what I am. I fit right in with every other murderous bastard on board. I saw all of those people who started off soft either disappear or join us. I don't know what's different about you lot, but is it so hard to believe I just want a chance to live? Not be a damn shade?" She huffs air out her nose. "I don't know what my future is, but I'm not. Going. Back. And if I find a way, I'm getting my partner back. It's that simple."

She does not sound any more sure about how to do that than she did when she talked to Murderbot. Not really. But damn if she isn't clinging to it anyway.

[crushed_pearls]

Erin lights up without a word and lets Crabb's passenger's words hang in the still air. Smoke trickles into Tauva around them. She props her elbow on the table, still attentive, still there, and yet there is quiet. Such long quiet.

"...I do wish we could have met under better circumstances," she says at last. "I think you might be the kind of mistake I'd like to make for a night or ten. I do get it, you know. The appeal of being sovereign. Of having some small group to just be alone together with, and damn the fires outside the door. People can be so fucking aggravating. Deluded. Annoying. Weak, small, petty, vicious. The days I stay in my cabin and see no one are when I wake up and all I wanna do is let the hate run free, make them understand that every day there's not a massacre they should be throwing me a fucking ticker tape parade for my self-restraint."

Erin tilts her head up and blows a ring of smoke. "...But y'know what? I did my time like that. Carved my way through the abundant world like a burning saw. I was king of a mountain of bones and the only thing it ever made me was tired. I can't be that person any more."

[pointofhonoria]

There's what's almost an... amused? Raise of her brow at the first part. Or maybe it's insulted at being called a mistake to make. Daisy herself isn't actually quite sure. It's probably somewhere in-between, in the end.

What she says is... familiar. Until the end, of course. Until the part where Erin is trying to move beyond that whilst Daisy is digging her claws in and refusing to let go.

"Well. Bully for you. I'm not done. I don't want to be anything but what I am. I don't want anyone but Bas— my partner." Honestly, the way she says it, it's really hard to tell what kind of partner she means, things with Basira never did quite keep their colour between the lines. "I am who I am."

[crushed_pearls]

"And who is that, sovereign?" Erin asks softly. "I mean it, when I say this is your garden too. If there really is nothing to be done, then I'm for you. You're one of us. Who is this who's come back to live in a home made strange to her?"

[pointofhonoria]

There's another dismissive noise made at the idea of being one of them, one of any us except the us that she and Basira occupied for each other almost so as to create a them to be against, but then there's quiet.

There's a real war here, even stronger than when Murderbot asked her name of her. She doesn't want to be Crabb. That should be plenty clear, by how she sees the woman she's shunted from her own life. But she also hesitates to be seen as who she is by these people she doesn't care for.

The glass would be shards, if only she had her own face.

She makes a low growling noise that doesn't vibrate right from Crabb's chest and stands in stark contrast to the name she finally spits out, "...Daisy. My name. Is Daisy."

[crushed_pearls]

Erin nods softly. She drains half her whiskey in one go before setting the glass back down; she makes no move to get up. "It's my genuine pleasure to meet you, Daisy," she murmurs. "Even with all this going down. Even here, with the ship listing and torn, alone among strangers, it's nice to meet someone who understands a little. Thank you, for that."

She tilts her head up, 'looking' at the face Daisy is wearing, and folds her arms over each other on the table. "I came when you called. Now I'll ask my favor in turn. Think about what it is you want. Really, honestly think about it. I hear anger in your voice but I don't hear a lot of conviction. I genuinely hope your partner can be returned to you, but once she is, what then? She, too, is not sovereign. Any more than you are. Any more than I am, be I ever so mighty. There's no escape from the abundant world. Its generosity ensnares us all. I hope the next time we talk you have an idea about your future here, in the garden we share."

[pointofhonoria]

She regrets saying it pretty much as soon as she hears it on Erin's tongue, but it's too late at this point. Erin wasn't a threat that night, crying on the floor and exhausted from a lack of sleep, but Daisy isn't stupid. She knows Erin could fuck her up in this body. She could probably fuck her up even if she had her own body.

So despite the way her teeth grit, despite the way she considers slamming the glass down hard enough to shatter it... she bites it back. Self-preservation comes first.

She really doesn't know what happens if this body gets killed.

"...I'm not going to make any promises. But. Fine. Whatever. I'll think."

[crushed_pearls]

"I can't ask anything more," Erin murmurs. "...And I wouldn't even if I could. Good luck, Daisy. I hope you can make your fate your own."

[pointofhonoria]

The noise she makes at that is somewhere between a growl, a grunt, and something that's not so easily categorised. She sets her drink down a little too hard and... pushes it Erin's way. She isn't going to drink it. She never was.

"It already is," says the woman who's fate has been entangled with an entity no one can ever truly comprehend since she was eleven years old. Her choices are her own, but her fate hasn't been for a long time, has it.

She pushes up from her seat. "Keep up your end of the deal. Alright?"

[crushed_pearls]

"You contacted me, Daisy. I'll only breach the silence if I have serious reason to believe you'll be affected, or at your request. You have nothing to fear from me as long as the state of harmony our truce is founded on persists."

Erin combines the two glasses and sighs. "I think I'll stay here a bit. Stay safe."

[pointofhonoria]

"Good. You do that."

She doesn't know how to deal with the 'stay safe' sentiment so she doesn't say a word about it, just slips away from her chair and strides off to go find somewhere to process the conversation she just subjected herself to.

She's going to go mad if they don't do something soon.

Whatever that something may be.