pc catchall | superhell | lavi

[engineers]

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[bookpapers]

[Lavi's grin turns thoughtful, and he turns to look around for a moment, brow creasing as he takes in the crowd around them, then he'll gesture for Bixing to follow him.

As they walk, he glances aside at the other man.]

...Do you want to win, Bixing? At the party. I realized I never asked when I was still over there.

[engineers]

[ yeah. it's nice to just kind of relax into the city crowd, as they're moving along. lu bixing clearly fits into this environment - he soaks it up like a sponge, the familiarity of the city itself, the cadence of a raucous, loud place full of questionable people. he's thinking about that as they're walking, and as lavi asks that question.

he's thoughtful, for a moment. and then... ]

I'm terrified of dying. [ almost bluntly. ] I always have been. [ for so many reasons. lu bixing is the eighth galaxy, after all. their lives rest on his shoulders, in more ways than one; his guiding arrow has long been shot from its bow, and there's no turning back when the hopes of his people rest with him. there was a time, here, where he considered the alternative, but with both him and lin jingheng surviving the entire countdown, and... frankly, after his own countdown of sorts reset, there's no other option.

lu bixing glances up, for a moment, like he might see the stars, and absently reaches to touch the inside of his own arm, fingers brushing up against something under his sleeve. ]

... So, I do. With my chip, I'll have an advantage I didn't have when we first got here, and one I wasn't expecting. It should make things a little easier. I don't have any intentions of losing.

[ there's a pause, and he glances back to lavi. ]

But, I don't like the idea of a half-won victory. I have every intention of negotiating with Satan to ensure all of us are given that ticket out. It doesn't sit well with me to run off and leave you all behind.

[bookpapers]

Geez. That answer's just like ya.

[but it's not a sound of frustration, more immeasurably fond? His eye tracks the way Bixing touches his arm, eyebrow going up at the mention of a chip, but the rest of his face turns into a smile.]

If it helps, I don't think Satan's the hardass type. Dedicated to his job, for sure, and in keeping the ratings up so he can implement what he wants later down the line. [a politician type. he thinks bixing could relate to that,] But more importantly, he wants to have fun at his party.

[there's no disdain or suspicion in his voice, lavi is of the opinion that Satan is just a guy, and he likes him too, despite the circumstances.]

He's definitely expecting us to try and sabotage him. But in a 'game on' kind of way? So you've got a chance.

[engineers]

[ listen sometimes when you decide to do something you have already begun an action plan and you are unstoppable in achieving it. this is how lu bixing has lived his entire life, and he returns the smile with one of his own. ]

I got that feeling, too. He's got a reputation to uphold. Don't we all? [ there was a little camaraderie there. he can relate to managing a group of a little bit unruly teens and an entirely unruly... galaxy... hell.... it's real similar. ]

Right now, we'll have to come up with a few ways to make things work - the more plans we all come in with, the better. We have to find a way to prove both that he's not too lenient, and that all of you get to get out of here. But, hey. If there's anything I'm good at, it's negotiating! And with all of our skills, I think we'll be just fine.

[bookpapers]

[Lavi tilts his head a little, like he's taking the time to think of the picture Bixing is painting. It feels a little strange to see one in broad, optimistic strokes after all this time.]

So first up, winning the contest. You think he'll let you guys tag in?

[he stops, thinks]

Well, not you guys -- since you'll be competing with each other, but maybe us? Call a friend, so that one of us gets your drink for you. The fun part could be that you don't tell us which one it is.

week seven, wednesday

[bookpapers]

[stands here knowing im about to die

but lavi doesn't know... YET, that is, until the hole opens up beneath him and Bixing, sending Lavi FALLING TO THE GROUND. he at least catches himself at the last second so he doesn't land on his ass, but he just -- groans when he sees the television screen descend from above.]

Why....

[SHAKES U U KNOW WHICH ONE TO GIVE ME!!!]

you asked for this!!!! cws for attempted suicide & self harm

[engineers]

[ hey these memory holes are terrible. bixing closes his eyes when they fall in one, and he does, in fact land on his ass. and then just sighs, and mumbles: ] Please be normal.

[ alas. ]

[ after lin jingheng and monoeye hawk die, you spend one hundred days locked in your house.

you're working. the eighth is a mess in an aftermath of the battle with the seventh galaxy, and zhanlu has been destroyed. you have to fix him. you spend one hundred days in your house, alone, sending out missives. speaking to prime minister edward, too sickly to do much, taking over his duties where you can. you try and fix zhanlu.

five hundred days into your restart of life, prime minister edward passes away, of sickness, of old age, and you officially take his spot. you, as the new prime minister, host the state affair of his funeral. there was a eulogy. you think you remember people looking at you. staring. watching. you remember the caskets of nothing and the tombstones and now... you're home.

home. for five hundred days, this is where you've spent all your time. five hundred days ago, monoeye hawk and lin jingheng perished, in the battle for the seventh galaxy. five hundred days ago, your entire world ended.

there were no funerals, then.

when you first arrive at the home of engineer 001 and commander lin, as the sign cheerfully reminds you, hanging over the door, you make it all the way inside. you go to the kitchen. the ai of zhanlu, in butler mode, greets you, you think, but it sounds like it comes from underwater. you go to the refrigerator. you think - a drink. i need a drink. and you open the fridge. there's hardly anything in it - supplies in the eighth galaxy are heavily rationed, right now, and alcohol is no exception - but at the back, an unopened bottle of beer, and as your hand curls around the neck, you remember -

you see the mental image, of lin jingheng in his pajamas, bedhead, staring at the beer bottle like it personally wounded him for being so disgusting, and putting it back, and sulking to the kitchen table to a cup of cold tea, instead, and for some reason, the grief and the memory snaps the last remaining piece of your stability in two.

you scream. you just scream, at the top of your lungs, as the image vanishes, the bellow of a miserable animal, and the whole world goes dark as you stagger to the area of the house where the medical capsule is, you bang your fist on the edge of it in your frustration and start asking it, i need a hallucinogen, i need an opiate, i need drugs, give them to me, i need it, i don't want to be awake, i need it, i need it - and the capsule doesn't respond. you're shaking too hard to do anything or type anything and your fingers claw in desperation at the metal. you scream, again, despairing, drowning, miserable, slam your fist against the capsule again.

zhanlu's voice comes over your head. soft, quiet, concerned - you scream at him, too, the AI unable to do anything but warn you. "Headmaster Lu, I can't accept those requests right now, you're too unstable. Headmaster Lu, this is your first warning."

he's an AI. he has to listen to you. you ignore him, shaking, almost hyperventilating, and after the second warning, you snarl - ] Zhanlu, give me a gun.

[ because you've lost everything. in one fell swoop, in one moment, you've lost everything and you can only run from it for so long. you've worked so hard. you've done so much, to not look it in the eye, but the grief is a monster that lives under your bed and in your brain and today it rips you in two. it's all-consuming, like it was when you were a child, and zhanlu can't ignore you, and as the gun is placed into your hands, you start to bring it up, to your head, start to --

then

zhanlu projects footage on the wall in front of your head.

A 14-year-old Lin Jingheng was attending the opening ceremony of the Black Orchid Academy. The ceremonial hall was decorated with heroic histories of the Union since its founding, motivational and inspiring. The young boy sat in the corner with his attention being pulled away occasionally. But even then, he still wanted to act cool, and pretended to look around in boredom whenever he remembered he was still in the middle of a ceremony. He then accidentally noticed the small camera beside him that was recording his every move; his face reddened in embarrassment and anger as he slapped his hand down and turned off the recording.

you forget everything.

you sink down to the floor, and you watch the clip again. you watch it again. you watch it again. you watch that clip hundreds of times and you don't sleep, and the next morning, you drag yourself to your desk, grab a pocket knife, and carve a single hatch mark on your desk. you push yourself to standing. you turn off zhanlu's automation function, so he can make conscious decisions, because you - you can't be trusted with yourself, all the time. you know that, now you've fallen and burnt to ashes, and now you have to rebuild yourself. one scratch mark says i fell, and i nearly quit, but i dragged myself to standing, because the world needs me more than i want to be in it.

--

three years pass in the new independent era in the eighth galaxy. you are their leader, the face of their revolution and their prime minister, and no one outside of your home knows the turmoil that you go through. they can't see you that way. in those three years, a group of pirates and black market illegal merchants reemerged, emboldened by the chance to disrupt the economy you've worked so hard to build. it launches the galaxy into a war that lasts three long years, and you command your military forces and your political forces like an expert. you are an expert, you're the prime minister lu bixing. you can do anything.

five more scratch marks are carved into your desk.

you promised prime minister edward before he died this - if you fell seven times, you'd get up eight. these are your falls. these are your dips into despair that are so deep that you want to die. you want to die. locked into the misery of your ruthless job, alone, you want to die. you want to die, you want to die, you want to die.

you can't die. the eighth needs you.

after the first one hundred days on your own, your house is invaded by other engineers who come to help you work on zhanlu so he's no longer just in emergency mode. it takes you all a total of four hundred days to get him online, but the other engineers are so crowded and messy that you force them out, and you need to move things to the attic. the attic is untouched and filled with lin jingheng's things. you could almost see him next to you. you could almost have him there.

you light up a cigarette. you inhale, just for the sake of the familiarity. to feel like he's there, that you could see him, that he's not gone and you were just delusional the whole time, stupid -

- the smoke burns your lungs, and you start to cough, violently, violently, and you take the cigarette and you smash the burning end into your arm until the pain is so bright and smart that it forces you to come back to your senses. he's dead. lin jingheng is dead. nothing will bring him back and he is dead.

two hatch marks.

another day, you find yourself trembling as you inject a biochip in your arm. it's an opium biochip - the kind being used to create 'perfect humans', though the data is incomplete. it won't be, for you. it becomes your pet project. you work. you experiment on yourself. you inject yourself, over and over again. you work. you work. you don't sleep. you rule the eighth galaxy, you unite its forces through carrot and through stick, monitoring public executions and supply rations and economic growth and population happiness all at once, and you pull an entire galaxy to its feet while you tremble on your knees in the dark.

three hatch marks. (you keep experimenting. you inject yourself with the opium chip. you fuck with the rainbow virus in a dark lab, because you know secrets about yourself that no one else knows.)

four. (you create a hologram of lin jingheng and you stare at it for an hour, and then you hate yourself, and you cry until you throw up, and you dig your knife into the desk and you push yourself back up again. you end the war with strategic brilliance.)

five. (you download all of the video data of lin jingheng in zhanlu's system. you watch every single part of it. you work. you work, you work, you work, you throw yourself into your duties and at night you take sleep aids and hard drugs and force yourself to sleep only when you need to, or when zhanlu forces you to, like a tiny hand tugging at your pinky finger when you're about to let loose on the world.)

--

in the seventh year of the new independent era, one of your students, brilliant, brilliant mint, pilots the first program to travel through the heart of the rose, the wormhole at the edge of your galaxy, your natural barrier. you are told not to go, but you go, anyway. what's the worst that could happen? you'll die? you don't care. you go on your own.

the people in the eighth praise your courage when you return with fresh research for mint's project. you didn't die. instead, you gathered data, and from the inside of the wormhole, the data gathered gets you the visuals on what happened when the seventh and the eighth galaxy fleets, respectively, were destroyed. your father's ship. lin's. gone. destroyed, in the blink of an eye.

you come home from your trip. you order captain turan to station patrols around the wormhole, now that it's active. you lock yourself in your lab. you take a strand of lin's hair you extracted from the couch and you open a breeding tank in a fit of madness and you think, i could just reconstruct him, because you could, you're a genius, it would be easy, it would be so easy, and zhanlu blows up the breeding tank.

you stay in the dark lab for three days afterwards, but when you emerge, the knife comes out, and you scratch the sixth mark into the wood of your desk.

--

the final hatch mark is the product of your research, nine years into the new era of the Eighth Galaxy.

you stand there on the precipice. you stand there, with your completed opiate biochip research. with this completed project, with all the tests you ran on yourself, you've given yourself those abilities. you are fast. you are strong, you are, in essence, the perfect human, and you've found a way you could transplant it into anyone. tested on mice, tested on yourself. you have learned that the rainbow virus can be used to break humanity down to ashes, and rebuild them as something greater. you know, now, why you lived through that first outbreak.

you could have an army of superhumans, you could take over the IUS. you could take over the entire universe. it has taken you nine years to prove this scientific theory, and you found out that it's true.

(you could wreak destruction, on the people who took your father and lin jingheng from you.)

you stare at the papers in your hands. they tremble.

this time, you don't call captain turan. this time, you don't call the engineering department. this time you don't deliver the research. you go to your office. you work, all day long. you come home, and you stare at the papers.

you walk to your lab, where you've secretly kept those strains of the rainbow virus, papers in hand.

and you set the sample and every single paper ablaze, and destroy it for good.

when you return to your desk, you mark the final hatch mark.

if you fall seven times, you have to rise eight.

with a storm in your heart, you turn away from destruction.

with a storm in your heart, you rise. ]

[ ... definitely not normal.

when the memory ends, lu bixing's hand is resting on his own forearm, and he's eerily still. ]

I DID ASK FOR THIS LIKE A FOOLE

[bookpapers]

[It's not normal, and yet...

Lavi had almost forgotten -- that this is what grief is. Not an abstract sort of grief, but something so personal and so intimate, that seeing it feels as violating as having his own memories exposed in return. This is the howling in the darkness, this is the other side of having loved someone so deeply -- this is what the Order thinks it's eliminating, this is what the Earl thinks is humanity's weakness.

Loving, and mourning.

This is what Bixing meant, in the dark corners of their shared room, expression taut -- that he'd lost Jingheng once, and through him, had lost himself.

For a time.

...This is that time, isn't it? And what a long time it is. This is grief that lingers, the desperation that Lavi can see coloring the memory. But in this one, Bixing rejects the miracle. In this one, he takes no one else's hand, dooms no one's soul but his own. It should feel like a victory, maybe. But it doesn't.]

...Does Jingheng know? Where your marks are from.

[engineers]

[ ah. well.

in a way, he should've been expecting this one. so far, it's just been the worst of the worst at almost every turn with these memories, so go figure, lavi gets to see this. it's even a conversation they've had, before, of the darkest part of lu bixing's life but nothing ever prepares him for it.

it's been on the back of his mind since he returned from his little adventure, and that's part of why his hand covers his forearm, even now, almost absently, his thumb pressing into the skin under his shirt, and he's a little lost in it when lavi finally speaks up.

bixing's still looking up at the screen, and when he talks, its with a slow exhale that sounds a little bitter, though his voice stays measured. calm. ]

... He saw the same thing.

[ the same memory, of course. the worst part of his life, the slow crumbling meltdown of grief that threatened to suck him under like a riptide. the ugliest parts of lu bixing. sometimes, he still thinks jingheng must have been disgusted. he thinks it every time he rolls up his shirt sleeve. ]

[bookpapers]

[beats up bixing in agony, me not lavi

Lavi crosses the already small distance this pit affords, (thinks about how lavi is taller than bixing), then slides his fingers around the crook of Bixing's elbow, tugging so that he can hold his hand with the other. touch week? or....?]

...A one-two punch, huh? Figures. [how every appropriate for this place, nothing beats putting your memories on live TV if it won't hurt the person seeing them.

He doesn't say anything else. Doesn't apologize or ask why. He just holds Bixing's hand and looks down at his knuckles, and thinks about how warm and alive the other man is, even if the rest of Bixing doesn't feel that way.]

[engineers]

[ valid

he doesn't seem to mind too much - he lets lavi take his hand with no resistance, lets him pull it off of his arm. interestingly, it's not his right hand pressed over the track marks, but his left hand pressed over something on his right. either way, there's no fight, and he lets him take his hand and hold it.

a one two punch. yeah. it makes him laugh a little, actually, and he lifts his other hand to run his fingers through his hair. ]

Mm. [ a pause, and then a little ruefully: ] I saw one of the only things about his life I didn't really know, so... I guess it was fair.

[ he guesses. ]

It was a bad time. [ understatement of the fucking century ] But, it's over now.

[bookpapers]

[bixing with a gift for science and for understatement. Lavi doesn't comment or protest. He's said as much to all of his own traumas and feelings -- it's over, so no use dwelling on them now.

He squeezes Bixing's hand once and then draws away,]

Well, luckily for you -- you're about to be distracted.

[he nods over at the screen as it blinks back on (until 5:40)]

[engineers]

[ holds lavi tenderly in my hands

oh. a memory within a memory, and one that evolves as much as lavi did, it seems. his time as a bookman, the person who stands beside him as a mentor, hints at a life that's been lived over and over, an inhuman life with different names and different pasts, and the concepts of recording histories; bixing is quiet as the screen slowly fades to black, and leaves just the two of them sitting there.

the idea of a neutral party is the sort of thing a scientist would dream about, but, well. bixing's never been a neutral party himself, even when he had to force himself to be. he can't actually imagine lavi doing as well as he might pretend with that lighthearted, easy remark at the end, either, but he keeps that to himself.

instead, in the slight dark, he says, softly: ]

That was your mentor, right?

[bookpapers]

[hmmm, well. as memories go, this isn't the worst one, though Lavi doesn't categorize his memories in terms of trauma, just by their importance to the Bookman legacy.

This one... is troublesome, but nothing too bad. now, what would be REALLY bad is if Bixing got to see what Lavi looks without his eye patch! But since canon will never tell us, Lavi's secret will continue to be secret.]

Yup, that's Gramps. He goes by his title 'Bookman'. I call him Panda too, because of the rings under his eyes.

[he makes circles with his hands and places them over his eye,]

[engineers]

[ DON'T TAUNT ME LIKE THAT???

it's kind of cute to see lavi talk so affectionately about his 'gramps', and the panda gesture does make him laugh, lightly, as he finally looks back at lavi and away from the actual screen. ]

You must look up to him a lot. [ a pause, musing: ] You were a very cute kid.