Voicemail

[ratherbelocky]

"York here. I'm probably busy getting my ass handed to me by adorable woodland creatures, but I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Over and out."

Comments

[Text] Like 2 AM on 2/7

[wing_attack]

sorry if you're not awake or something

i just need to talk because dreams suck

[Text]

[ratherbelocky]

[Well, he was sleeping, but he's carefully attuned to any sound that isn't North's awful, peaceful snoring, and the beep of his 'Gear wakes him as surely as an alarm would. North and Carolina work night shifts, anyway. York rubs the heel of his hand against his eye, squints at the screen, and feels his own face fall when he sees the message.

Poor kid.]

Nah, it's no problem. We keep weird hours here. You want to talk about it or around it?

[In the meantime, he goes to make himself some coffee.]

[Text]

[wing_attack]

it's just stupid. keep dreaming about getting shot out of the air and i can't morph it away and i end up rocketing towards the ground and

i don't know dreams are stupid. i just want them to go away. sometimes not even my munna helps.

[Text]

[ratherbelocky]

Yeah. I get you.

They say talking about it's supposed to help, but they also taught us some other tricks back in the service to reduce how often those nightmares happened. Guess they figured, yeah, bunch of military guys, probably not gonna open up about their dreams.

You interested?

[Text]

[wing_attack]

sure. i'll try almost anything at this point.

[Text]

[ratherbelocky]

One thing I learned was that, if you're having the same kind of recurring dream a lot, you should think about how the dream usually goes and then change the end, before it gets bad. I mean, you go through it again while you're awake, over and over, but with a new ending, so it gets imprinted in your head.

Doesn't always work, but it helps sometimes.

[Text]

[wing_attack]

so like

instead of hitting the ground i pull up?

[Text]

[ratherbelocky]

If there's enough lead-up into the dream to work with, you might even be able to change it before you get shot. Or maybe you can imagine that the morph works, and you're powerful enough to get away.

[Text]

[wing_attack]

honestly it doesn't works that fast, but in a dream it might.

you okay tonight?

[Text]

[ratherbelocky]

Yeah, well enough. Getting used to having the house to myself at night now that I work during daylight hours again. Carolina and North both take night shifts.

[Text]

[wing_attack]

you're lonely? i mean aside from the pokemon

[Text]

[ratherbelocky]

Well

[Dude, he's a thirty-something-year-old soldier, he's not lonely.

He's so lonely.]

I like having people around, yeah. Someone to talk to. Get used to spending every waking moment with someone, the quiet gets too quiet, you know?

[Text]

[wing_attack]

i guess so. i mean i tend to prefer being on my own. it's just how things are. i used to hang out at ax's scoop and watch tv sometimes when we didn't have a mission but hunting's lonely. and i guess i kind of stopped trusting people for a while. hard to trust someone if you don't know if there's an alien in their head or not.

but it's different here. i don't have my hawk instincts here and it's weird and sometimes i'm not sure which set of feelings is 'right'.

[Text]

[ratherbelocky]

[...]

Hey. Did I tell you about Delta?

[Text]

[wing_attack]

i don't think so?

[Text]

[ratherbelocky]

Delta was the AI I was partnered with back in the military. Now, I don't want you to freak out, but what that meant for us Freelancer soldiers was that he was hooked up to neural implants we'd agreed to have installed in our heads. He couldn't hurt me, he didn't have control over my motor functions or anything even if he'd wanted to, but...he was always there, you know? We could always hear each other thinking.

[Text]

[wing_attack]

[It takes a bit for him to respond.]

that's weird but if you were still in control i don't have anything to really complain about

[Text]

[ratherbelocky]

Won't lie to you, dude, it was pretty weird for a while. He had access to the power armor I wore but that's about it.

Anyway, I'm telling you about him because I kind of understand what it is you're saying. The years I spent with Delta, we changed each other. For the better, I think, despite our...circumstances. But I catch myself thinking about things in terms of numbers and variables, or analyzing a situation with colder logic than I once would've. Less like a human and more like a machine, I suppose.

But I don't think it's wrong, necessarily, to think like that. We needed both our approaches to survive, and if it's sometimes hard to tell where I start and he ended, well. That's just who I am now, I guess, after everything I went through. And it's not wrong. That's the most important thing Delta taught me: That there's no such real thing as good or bad, just different ways of living to get different results.

[Text]

[wing_attack]

i guess. i miss it, though. i could just give up control to my hawk instincts and just live for days or weeks without thinking too much. hawks don't feel sadness or stressed the same way humans do. but you have to deal with it eventually so... i don't know if letting go like that is healthy or something.

i mean sometimes it was helpful but

[He pauses.]

great now i'm thinking about taylor again

[Text]

[ratherbelocky]

Taylor?

[Text]

[wing_attack]

sub-visser fifty-one, technically. visser three's top lieutenant. well he was later visser one, but whatever. he was the one in charge of our invasion but she

they had a weapon. an anti-morphing ray to force us to demorph. so we let them capture me and use it on me. since my normal form was a hawk they wouldn't think it had worked, right?

she tortured me. used a machine that brought up my most painful memories and then my most pleasant ones and it felt like it went on forever and i was dying and i saw my father's memories and she broke me and i thought i admitted everything but i don't know if i actually said anything or just thought i did and

[He wants to stop typing, but he can't. He needs to tell someone, someone who might understand. It's not looking for pity but maybe, just maybe someone can understand.]

i still have problems with it. it was a while ago now but some nights i'm still trapped in that little box and all i can do is scream i can't even cry

[Text]

[ratherbelocky]

[Holy shit.

He says it aloud, to himself, and Delta Two's awake with a gentle hand on his back and a gentle comfort to his mind, but that doesn't erase the knowledge that a child was tortured as part of some "war," if he can call it that. That his team had offered him up as a strategy, as if he really were a soldier. Like any Freelancer would have done. And like Freelancer had done, to the entity that broke itself apart to create Delta.

To create all of them.]

That's

That's really fucked up, Tobias. That that happened to you. That any of that happened to you. Of course you still have problems with it, anyone would. I would.

Letting your hawk instincts take over so you wouldn't have to think about it, that's what any person would do. We all do what we have to, to keep going.

[Text] Some spoilers for later in the series

[wing_attack]

even after that i didn't let rachel go and kill her. she wanted to and i never really told her all of what happened.

and then she showed up again and i thought she'd changed and then she tried to kill us and some of her people that were trying to find a more peaceful solution and i still don't know if she died in that. i think she did but i'm not sure.

i'm not like cassie who's hurt by every single yeerk we killed but i understand that they were doing what they thought was needed and we did the same. i understand kill or be killed but i couldn't even let someone kill the person who tortured me. even if we had killed the yeerk without killing the host she'd still volunteered to be infested. she was the enemy and she's still hurting me even now with everything that she did and i still don't know if she should have died or not. she should have but i can't convince myself.

i don't know. sometimes i hate being human again i miss not having to really think.

[Text]

[ratherbelocky]

[It takes some time for York to gather his thoughts for an answer that could be helpful at all.]

It's hard to justify killing, period. That might sound weird coming from a career soldier, but when you get down to it, right and wrong don't factor into it as much as we'd like. It's like you said: They do what they need to do, and we do the same. That's what it comes down to.

It sounds like this Taylor, or Sub-Visser Fifty-One or whatever, was a pretty irredeemable bitch. And if there is an evil out there, she's the closest I've heard anyone come to it. Maybe killing her then would have saved lives, or spared you and your friends some future pain. Maybe not. But putting ourselves in a position to decide who should and shouldn't die, that's not really how it works. We kill to protect ourselves, or out of revenge, or, hell, because we want to. There's always a reason. Doesn't mean it's just.

But still, I don't think choosing to stop your friend was wrong. Even if you were soldiers. Maybe especially then. Don't know if that helps, and it doesn't give you a real answer, but that's what I got. I don't think you're wrong to wonder about it.




You might have a better talk with Carolina about this. I was never in a position to get back at the son of a bitch who did this to us. She might have more to say about it.

[Text]

[wing_attack]

thanks.

... i'm sorry i'm dumping all of this stuff on you but you were the only person i could think of who might have an idea.