control_freak | [OOC] Lost Carnival Contact

Yeah, that's basically the response he expected. But, hey, he answered, which means speaking to Taako has to mean at least something to him, right?

He's quiet for a moment before he speaks again; his tone is hushed and serious, focused, a rarity.

"How are you holding up?" He can pretty much imagine what this answer will be before he even asks the question, but asking seems like something he should do anyway.

How is he holding up--

He wants to die.

But that isn't what happens, out loud or in his mind, not in the nucleus of the moment. Instead, he blanks, his brain simply blocking off his ability to think, and he starts to laugh--a hollow, miserable laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. He laughs at Taako's question, at how worthless this conversation is, at how tightly constricted his chest is and how raw his lungs, at how much he wants to die, at how much he hates even the act of breathing and laughing and speaking, at absolutely nothing to be completely honest, but he doesn't have anything else to say.

A couple of seconds after he starts--and even as he does--his eyes start to run with tears, and he manages to stop laughing, but it grows strained and more breathless before he cuts himself off.

Instead of grief, he voices anger.

"Why. What do you want."

Edited 2017-08-19 00:40 (UTC)

Taako cringes at the sound of that laughter, the hollow pain in Foster's voice.

"... yeah, okay, I mean... ask a stupid question and all that. Uh. Listen, I'm bedridden right now because a fuckin' fae crushed my ribcage like a soda can, so I'm not able to do a whole lot else but just talk anyway, right?" He sighs, the gesture painful, a dull ache reminding him to be careful; his breath catches in his chest, and he lets it out even more slowly, through his teeth. "Besides, like... we were a team once, you know? Shit didn't work out, but we were still a team once, and you got pretty seriously wrecked, so I thought I'd check in and see how you're doing."

Foster's mood cycles through suspicion, surprise, and rancour in equal measure; his disbelief at Taako's audacity is rooted in multiple factors, his anger in the memory of the way Taako backed down the instant his plans were challenged. Taako flinched first.

He has no idea what happened to get Taako's ribs so brutalised, and honestly? It's inconsequential. The fact that Taako is hurt at all is inconsequential. If anything, it's actually galling, insult on top of the injury he wishes would destroy him already. He begged for death and was denied even that. But Taako caved so completely that he not only tried to back out, he effectively prevented Foster himself from getting the only thing he wanted, and for this he was rewarded with more pain than Foster could merit even when asking?

His breathing can be heard, ragged and wet.

There's still an open wound in his side from the ice spear's laceration (and subsequent avulsion of flesh), which has bled freely into his sheets, plastering his skin to the fabric like clotted black cement, but it's only flesh, only blood.

The only other mark on him is symbolic.

When he answers, it's so pointed it might as well be a harpoon.

"I'm fine."

"Horseshit," comes Taako's immediate response, his tone sharper for just a beat. "You were literally telling an angel to kill you, it doesn't take a fuckin' therapist to be able to tell we're pretty far from okay here."

Foster can't honestly think he wouldn't immediately see through that. Taako of all people knows too much to ever believe it when Foster claims to be "okay," and Foster knows that--hell, he got an enraged phone call on that very subject only about a week ago now. Portland was another world, but what happened there was real, and the consequences still linger.

"Unlike you--" Foster's voice rises immediately--cracking and hot with something that sounds like very real emotion.

It sounds like emotion. It looks like emotion. It even feels like emotion, the burning rawness of his throat and violent ache in his head and the stinging tears, which he can spit out now but which keep threatening to start anew.

But behind the volatile facade, it's empty and wrong. He isn't feeling anything. It's fake, he's fake, all of it is meaningless and he just does not care--

"I'm fine." His tone is cinderblock blunt, disconnected from whatever other 'feelings' he's falsely expressing now.

"Fine. Okay. I get it. A fae didn't slam you against the floor like a fuckin' party popper and break your shit. That's cool," Taako responds, rolling his eyes, a hand falling against his face to rub his temple. "But that's not what I meant and I think you know it. You're pissed at me because I didn't help you burn a whole world just so you wouldn't have to go back to this, right?"

"I'm... pissed at you for after that!"

Foster stays detached enough to begin the sentence at all, to identify his real grievance, to put it into words--but not enough to keep it together for the whole thing. There will be a loud crack and some atrocious feedback on Taako's end as Foster suddenly grabs the walkie talkie and slams it into the wall. But the resurgence of rage, of grief and violence and hate doesn't last long enough to express--or to feel--anything strongly enough. He loses the meaning before he even hits the wall with it, and so neither breaks the walkie talkie nor tremendously dents the wall, cheap as its materials are.

It's just a pathetic gesture, in the end.

Taako recoils, holding the radio at arm's length until the static fades; and then he heaves a sigh, though he doesn't broadcast the sound to Foster.

Gods.

"Okay, can you be more specific? Because everything after that was kind of a blur."

After that futile gesture, he just sits in his bed, the walkie talkie lying untouched as Taako's voice crackles through it, and he very nearly succumbs to the urge to fall back into sleep.

But his wound has reopened, sticky and red and fluid, and he reaches across his fae-marked chest, digging his claws into it as though seeking some essential comfort from its bleed.

And the pain... revitalises him. Rejuvenates him? Repairs him, such that he no longer craves that oblivion, no longer malingers on the verge of unconsciousness His digits sinking into a cover of blood, he retrieves the walkie talkie with his other paw, manipulating it clumsily into place with the tips of his claws.

"You...." It starts with all the ferocity of an indictment. An accusation. "You tried to stop it."

The brief rupture in his control is closed, its premature, pathetic payload spent. But instead of that delusive anger, instead of some desperate need to experience and consume anguish, it reveals only how much empty space was really under the false heat of his botched detonation.

"You knew I meant to die." For all his affliction, he no longer remembers how his other self even felt in that moment. If he could ever summon emotions, could remember how they felt, could recall his experiences as they were experienced in the moment--but he can't. He can't even remember--

"You tried to stop her."

Oh. Oh.

"Shit."

Taako now remembers exactly what Foster's so mad about; the moment when Pru threatened him with violence, and Taako, entirely on reflex, stepped in to intervene. Honestly, it was born of habit, probably learned from travelling with fucking Magnus for so long, because god knows it isn't naturally in him to intervene when violence that doesn't directly involve him breaks out. Situations like this illustrate exactly why.

He sighs, rubbing his temple.

"... yeah, okay, fair enough, that was a whoopsie on my part."

Edited 2017-08-21 17:32 (UTC)

"A whoopsie." Foster repeats it back at him in a deadened tone.

It's not that he expected anything more out of Taako--or even wanted more out of him. He wanted nothing. He wanted nothing from Taako. Infinite, soul-blanking miles of nothing, hours and days and month of emptiness in which nothing, again nothing was given or exchanged ever again.

He--his other self--were they the same? Were they? Were they both him? No. That was impossible. (Factual, final.) A life with a sister, a friendship, something of value? A... life? (Scorn.)

A life as a person?

A life.

He--

"He" never should have counted on someone else. "He" was a fool. Believing in himself, believing in someone else, as though success were ever a possibility for anyone like him.

But he'd wanted, he'd hoped, he'd had

Didn't he get a chance

There was never a choice.

Except--

Well. It was too late now.

"... yeah, uh, maybe a little tone-deaf, huh," comes Taako's mumbled response, punctuated by another sigh. It's a long moment before he speaks again; he thinks, turning his words and Foster's over in his head, tapping the side of the radio with his fingertips idly.

"Look," he says at last, "If you wanna die that badly, like, I can make it up to you once we're off these fuckin' contracts."

Make it up to him?

Foster is... he doesn't know what he's feeling, if anything.

"How?" He asks, but it's a touch emptier than his usual enthusiasm for death would have implied. "How? Drowning? Bludgeon? Strangulation? Cut me open, a bullet to the brain, decapitation, electrocution? Impalement? Through the eye?"

As he advances through the list, his volume rises, a mounting intensity like excitement, like ardour and vehemence and anticipation and... anger. Agitation crept in, and something else took over. He couldn't figure it out at first, why he felt not just expectant but wronged.

But it's because it doesn't matter now.

Taako's offer, now, after the opportunity that really counted... it's too late. It's too late, it's too late, it's too late.

It's too fucking late.

And once it clicks, he understands exactly what hurt about it. Why he was so ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓.

"Why... didn't you kill me then?" He asks, intertia taking him to the question he'd been holding, hiding, coiled like a cask of acid in his aching chest. His tone is somewhat dispassionate, hollow at first, but the momentum builds, and with every word it swells inside of him, emerging with an increasing pedantism that belies his simplistic refrain. "Why didn't you kill me then? Why didn't you kill me then? Why didn't you kill me then?"

Then he takes another breath.

"Why did you wait?"

And then:

"Why do I have to wait?"

Edited 2017-08-22 01:01 (UTC)

By the second repetition of that accusatory question, Taako's radio is held at arm's length, his long, animated ears twitched back against his head tensely; he watches the radio as though Foster might climb out of it, grab him and shake him.

When Foster is finished, there's a silence; Taako collects his words quietly before he starts to speak.

"... because if I did anything then, they would've-- there was a fuckin' angel right there, my man! You think she would've put up with a demon straight-up murdering somebody in front of her? And, yeah, like, we've gotta wait now, because we're back in this fuckin' place and I don't wanna get turned into a potted plant or whatever they do to murderers around here." He lets out what's left of that breath in a huff, and then laughs mirthlessly. "So, yeah, you've gotta wait, but like, if you think you can handle that, I'll put you down and you can just... chill out in whatever afterlife you're headed for, and we'll go on with our-- well, I'll go on with my life, anyway."

It takes Foster a few seconds to really process Taako's excuse. And when he does--it hurts. It hurts, it hollows him out, leaves him empty and aching and desperate for the ability to sob, to break down and wail, cries ripped from the gut, the heart, even if it's into an empty trailer, an uncaring void.

But he can't even do that; whatever 'feeling' he can experience is locked on the other side of that black glass, and his own wish to feel, to express what will destroy him from inside simply slides off the sheer pane.

On a basic level, it's simply that Taako's excuse is so... selfish. It's only natural, of course; had Taako had any other excuse, he would have hated the elf immensely for even trying to justify his inaction. But he has not, cannot remember ever having hurt as deeply, ever having needed so deeply, ever having felt as deeply as he did there at the ritual site, and he has, in every sense of the word, suffered for his entire life.

And that's what pierces him now, the barbed truth ripping through his stomach and leaving his intestines, his visceral organs in bloody tatters. How much more does he need to hurt before the universe sees him, before his pain is worth acknowledging? At what level of agony will fate notice and finally grant him mercy?

How much more pain does he need? How much blood, how much anguish, how much--!

"No." It hits Foster with the force of a diagnosis: the realisation that Taako doesn't understand anything. The dizzying exultation of blood shed from an empty body, the insatiable hunger for death and life and relief, the endless craving for that milky oblivion.

The cruelty of a meagre death offered far too late.

"No, you won't."

"... I won't what?"

What the hell does he even mean?

"What, I'm not going to go on with my life?" He has no idea what exactly that implies. "Or I'm not going to make it up to you? Because one of those is considerably more worrying and less presumptuous than the other."

Taako went and got himself tangled up in something truly nasty, and he's only now realizing just how nasty it could potentially get. All he can do is offer to make up for it; what else is there? He can't go back in time-- he passed on that relic, after all, and for good reason.

"..... I don't care what you do." Foster's tone is dead. Blunt, anaesthetised with indifference. There's no flicker or spark, not even the faintest light in his chest at Taako's offer ("promise") of a real, delivered death. His own death--its time, its method--is empty. Meaningless. Taako could kill him next week, or tomorrow, or at the end of his contract and it wouldn't matter.

Taako could kill him right now and it wouldn't matter.

And he wouldn't care.

No--he does care.

It... is this anger?

Maybe. Maybe not.

He really doesn't care.

He had his chance. And he wasted... he lost... the chance he'd spent his entire life, his entire rotting, disintegrating existence trying to find, to provoke. He had a chance, one shining, brilliant opportunity, his narrow margin, his hope--

He feels disgusting, loathsome for thinking there was hope, for even wanting--

But it still feels like--it still feels like that was hope, and that's what disgusts him the most about it.

At this point--

"It doesn't matter. Just let me rot."

Who cares.

"I'm most of the way there already."

Edited 2017-09-27 17:58 (UTC)

Taako just... sighs; for a long moment, he's quiet, unsure of how to respond to this, or if he even should. Foster's shit is fucked-- it's something pretty much everyone in the carnival who's talked to him is aware of, as far as Taako can tell. Honestly, "why bother" is a pretty good question.

But... well, he's gotten himself this involved already, and it's kind of shitty to just leave him hanging after their plan went to shit.

After several quiet moments of thought, he holds down the button on his radio again.

"... okay, so dying isn't a fun and exciting idea anymore, I get it. So, what about just... starting a new life? Like... get rid of the brain problem somehow, and start over?"

Why wouldn't Taako just leave him? That's what everyone else does--it's what Foster encourages them, forces them to do.

He doesn't want help--there's nothing to help.

Helping him is a waste--of time, of energy, of self.

And Taako especially has worn out his ability to be a welcome opportunity.

Foster laughs at him. It's the kind of hollow, bitter, wretched laugh that is only remotely humourous somewhere in the rotten tunnels of Foster's diseased brain.

"Oh, so now I'm to ask RM after all? Forsake my fate to writhe and beg supplication at her feet?" He stops laughing.

"The problem isn't my brain." Taako can't see him, but he'll be able to hear the downshift in Foster's voice, the dispassionate fatalism which he nurses at the root of his decay.

"Cure the disease and you're still left with something rotten. 25 years of waste. It doesn't matter what you fix in me, I'm still... myself."

Disgusting.

Taako makes a pensive sound, high and set in the back of his throat.

"Mmmmmmm... except I think I know a way to get rid of that, too, kind of. You can make everyone, including yourself, forget it ever happened, anyway, if that's good enough for you."

The voidfish. Whatever information is fed to it is erased from existence, except from those who drink from its tank-- normally, the idea is kind of creepy, but in this case, it may be just what Foster needs to actually fix his shit.

"Patch the holes in your brain, then just throw whatever you want to get rid of to our little friend the voidfish, and you're set, my dude: a whole new Foster. Or, uh, I guess you could actually pick a new name, too, if you wanted to?"

[OOC] Lost Carnival Contact

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

TW: suicidal ideation IT'S PROBABLY A LITTLE LATE FOR THIS CONTENT WARNING FUCK

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject