fandomtownies | Trooper Station, Friday

Entry tags:

Trooper Station, Friday

There were cupcakes on his desk when Liam arrived at the station today.

Apology cupcakes, as it turned out. Ralph, it seemed, felt especially badly about that whole 'taking him to get executed' thing from last week. Though he'd assured Liam that no, these were from JGoB, he absolutely didn't bake them himself.

(He'd tried baking some himself. It hadn't gone well.)

"Thanks, I guess," Liam said, a little awkwardly, scrubbing absently at his neck. And wincing just a bit as he ended up rubbing up against the bandage that the turtleneck he was wearing didn't quite hide. "None of your business," he said, maybe a touch too sharply, at Ralph's curious look.

[ooc: trooper station is open!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It wasn't long after the station opened that Beau showed up, stalked up towards Liam's desk, and tossed a Pizza Planet box down onto it, rubbing at the back of her neck with her free hand.

"Can you maybe, like, stop getting yourself into shit I end up having to report on the next day?" she asked, scowling and also managing to look somehow vaguely constipated. LOOK, HAVING FEELINGS WAS HARD. "Asshole."

Apparently she was just going to worry about people by feeding them now or something. With a side of questionable use of insults.

“I, uh,” Liam blinked, a little startled by the sudden appearance of a pizza-bearing Beau. “Sorry?” he tried. It wasn’t like he was doing it on purpose! ~~It was just convenient timing given the player’s RL schedule.~~

"And tell Verity I owe her like a wine basket or something too," Beau grumbled, still sort of glaring at him. "Shit, should've brought one back with me."

She leaned forward and planted both hands on the desk, peering intently at him.

"You going to need to break shit in the gym again after this one, or what?"

You know, she could have just asked if he was okay, but that was for people with functional people skills.

"Nah," Liam tried to sound dismissive. "Rosa's class was first thing this morning." Though obviously, gladiator-ing against students meant he'd kept a pretty tight rein on that whole 'destroying things' tendency.

Which had occurred to Beau, given the dry, raised-eyebrows look she gave him.

Followed by a slow, suspicious glance around at the troopers, and it was maybe belatedly hitting her that she was in a police station. Of her own volition and not because she was getting arrested, which was a little weird, though that was balanced out by her absolute disdain for the troopers and the fact that she was, you know, in here yelling at the sheriff.

Because he was a friend, so that tipped things right back over a bit into the realm of weird.

Maybe not in a bad way. Hilarious, though.

"Seriously, man," she began, though she wasn't sure how to go on from there. Ugh, worrying about people was difficult, and what she ended up settling on was: "Are you gonna need to beat up on someone who isn't a student so it's not like weird and ethically dubious or some shit?"

That got it across, right? Nailed it.

"You offering?" Liam asked, hint of a smile playing about his lips as he finally actually opened up that pizza box.

... After taking off his gloves because ew, greasy pizza and leather gloves didn't exactly go together well.

"Fuck yeah, I'm offering," Beau said immediately. "That's kind of like a perpetually open offer."

“Figured,” Liam said. “But,” he sighed. “I don’t think this is the kind of thing that a sparring match will help.”

"Well, shit," Beau muttered. "That was the only suggestion I had."

That she was going to offer to the sheriff while standing in the Trooper station.

"But look, there's pizza?"

Honestly, it was cute how people seemed to think that having the title of ‘Sheriff’ meant Liam must have very particular ideas about things like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.

“There is pizza,” he agreed. “And cupcakes.” He nodded to the dozen sitting in a box on his desk. “Pull up a chair and share with me?” he offered.

Hey, Beau had plenty of bad experiences with authorities. She wasn't going to invite more of them, not here.

"Sure," she said after a moment, and turned the chair around so she could straddle it and lean against the chair back. "I brought you some shit too, by the way."

She'd set a bag down on the floor on her way in, probably for the sake of making a more dramatic entrance, but she went and scooped it up, then tossed it to him; it looked like it was from a souvenir shop on the Santa Cruz boardwalk, and there was a kite inside.

And then she went and dropped into the chair.

"Wha-" Liam started to say as he pulled the kite out of the bag, trailing off once he saw what it was. "Beau," he said wonderingly, gloved hands tracing the edges of the kite. "I- thank you."

You'd think he would've been burned out on all things toy-like after last week, but this was different enough from the whole 'dolls, plushies, and action figure hell' while still being something intended for play. Which was not something Liam had a hell of a lot of experience with.

Really, it was pure fucking luck that she'd picked something out for him that wasn't a more traumatic toy, but then again this had made the most sense to her anyway.

"Saw a bunch of people flying 'em on the beach over there," she said gruffly, trying to act nonchalant about it even though she was relieved and very, very glad he liked it. "Thought you might appreciate something like that. It's like, very Zen and shit, you know, super relaxing?"

But also fun. Which, yes, had been the point.

"I've never had anything like it," Liam admitted. "I'll have to test it out this weekend, if the weather's good."

"I might have to come check it out if you do," Beau told him. "Maybe just for the entertainment value if you get all tangled up in the string."

Or, you know, because watching him do something for enjoyment just because he felt like it, a novelty she was too familiar with herself, would be kind of gratifying.

"Oh, I see, watching me flop around like a-" he almost said 'marionette' there, but caught himself and went with "-dead fish, that'd be entertaining to you?"

Beau snickered. "Maybe just a little, yeah. I mean, I guess I could come help you get out of it if I had to, maybe, I guess . . ."

She absolutely would. She'd reserve the right to give him a hard time about it for approximately forever afterward, but she would.

"True friendship, right there," Liam said, his tone dry. ~~Also THANKS BETHESDA for that momentary wardrobe glitch. The gloves were back on the desk now.~~

Edited 2019-08-24 02:27 (UTC)

"Yeah, I thought that was how it worked," Beau drawled idly. What, like she actually knew how friendship was supposed to work? She was figuring this out as she went.

She reached for a cupcake and gave it a quizzical look. "What was the occasion for these, anyway? Not that they need one, but."

"These are 'Sorry we tried to execute you' cupcakes," Liam explained. "Ralph bought them."

Beau blew out a long breath, grimacing the whole time.

"Awkwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaard," she said finally. "I'd ask how they can look you in the eye after that but they have that whole helmet situation."

"Also I didn't exactly get a headcount but I'm pretty sure there were more of them when they were plastic than there usually are," Liam said. "So not everything the Troopers did then was technically them."

Funny, how easy he was willing to forgive others and yet struggled to forgive himself.

"Sound logic," Beau agreed after a moment, nodding, and hey -- she'd rationalize the hell out of other people's actions if she wanted to but didn't know the first thing about how to forgive herself for anything, so she couldn't really blame him for that.

She took a bite out of her cupcake and exhaled slowly as she chewed on it.

"Gonna be a pretty shitty time for a lot of people for a while," she said after a moment. "Like the ones who went along with all the shit all week and aren't gonna be too okay with that after the fact."

Turning the cupcake around in her fingers, she snorted softly. "Bakery could have a real boom in business for a bit for that, maybe."

Liam's hand went up to touch the bandage at his neck again.

"Yeah," he said, his own voice quiet. "I bet."

That was not the sort of gesture that someone as sharp and observant as Beau was going to miss out on, no. Her gaze flicked up toward the bandage and held there for a couple of seconds.

"If you need to talk about it," she began, but there was no way she could think of to phrase the rest of the offer without feeling really weird and awkward about it, so she trailed off and just kind of hoped he'd figure out what she meant.

"Or if not, you know, that's cool too."

It was weird, and complicated, and all tangled up with trauma and guilt in his head and Liam wasn't even sure where to begin with trying to explain it.

"Where I'm from," he tried. "Most people who held the job I did were implanted with something called a CVI- a Cyber-Viral Implant. It gave the user enhanced reflexes, senses, recall... and also contained a Motivational Imperative. To ensure that Companion-Protectors would hold Taelon interests above human ones."

Beau took a moment to run those words through her brain and pick them apart, and by the time she was done her eyes were narrowed and the corners of her mouth were tight.

"Like a form of mind control, in a way."

It wasn't a question, no.

“My father,” Liam’s expression twisted into something dark and bitter, “had his own wife involuntarily committed to a mental hospital when she started to express concern over his level of devotion to the Taelon agenda. Had another man’s wife killed in order to convince him to become a Companion Agent.” Of course, Sandoval had also done plenty of reprehensible things even without a functional Motivational Imperative, and, okay, he might still have been willing to have Kate killed? But he’d loved Deedee.

Edited 2019-08-24 19:40 (UTC)

A few crumbs fell off Beau's cupcake onto the desk, and was the cupcake itself a little squashed now? Maybe. Her grip on it did seem to be tighter.

"Fuckin' --"

Did she know anyone who'd had decent parents? (No one who she'd asked yet, anyway.)

"So maybe partially that," she finally said in a low, taut voice. "But also, fuck the establishment, man, am I right?"

You didn't have to be mind-controlled to be dangerously obedient, she knew that. She'd seen that with her own father.

"A little bit of 'fuck the establishment', yeah," Liam said.

He'd believed in... well. He'd believed in Da'an, on a personal level. Believed in the right of the Taelon and Jaridian species to continue existing.

"I never had to be implanted. Not really." The surveillance CVI he'd briefly been saddled with had contained no motivational component, even if the idea featured prominently in his nightmares. "But my father had one. My mother, too. So I... I remember what it was like, even if I never experienced it myself."

"You remember what --"

Well, thanks for being the opposite of everybody Beau was ever going to know in her life who had memory gaps at least, Liam.

"That's like . . . huh." She shook her head. "Like an ancestral memories thing?" Shut up, despite her anger about the whole fucked up situation, her inner nerd was intrigued.

She picked a crumbling bit off the top of her cupcake and popped it into her mouth. "This sounds all kinds of fucked up, man. I'm -- sorry, I guess?" That sounded so inadequate.

"Of my human parents, and the non-human one too," Liam confirmed. And with Ha'gel's memories came a whole 'nother mess of issues that he wasn't going to get into right now.

"I can't. I can't go through that," he shuddered, thinking of how easily he'd gone along with the Toymaster's wishes. How happy it had made him to do so. "Not again."

"Wait, how --" Beau didn't even finish the question before she realized she knew the answer. "Last week. Shit hit too close to home, didn't it."

"Keep trying to tell myself it was only a little over a day, it shouldn't matter," and you deserved it anyway that part of him whispered, the part that liked to remind him of his failures, of how he wasn't good enough, could never be... but he'd promised Verity he was going to work on shutting that stupid voice up, not letting it overwhelm him anymore.

Oh, that voice. Yeah. The voice in Beau's head sounded a little bit different, but it sang the same kind of tune.

She sighed and broke off another chunk of cupcake to eat, leaning forward against the back of the chair she was straddling to look squarely at him.

"This place fucks with everybody that way at some point," she said as evenly as she could -- which wasn't quite even, but she was trying. "And you snapped out of it, didn't you? That's more than some people can say, going by what was on radio. Shit, Liam, I think that says something good about you."

She might never stop beating up on herself, but she wasn't about to let her friends do it.

"Not saying much. Plenty of people snapped out of it way before me," Liam tried to protest. Verity had been among them, in fact. And thus had had to live with him while he was still under the influence.

"And plenty of people didn't at all," Beau countered. "Who knows, maybe they're decent fuckin' people who just had some shitty luck, but at least some of them have to be questioning that now. It takes willpower to break out of that kind of shit. You did."

She jabbed a finger into the surface of the desk several times as she spoke, trying to emphasize her point.

"That's fuckin' impressive. It's not nothing. Just saying."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Trooper Station, Friday

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

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

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject