multiversallogs | wonder if he'll ever know

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wonder if he'll ever know

Who: Benji Ryans (and later, Wolfgang Einhorn)
What: Just a little law and order.
Where: The Spatters
When: All of 31st.
Note: During the raid, there is a halt on all communications going in and out of the Spatters -- no media is leaked, and the reception for CiD is just flat out poor. In the aftermath, there's a blackout of information.
Warnings: References to police brutality.

The book lies neglected on the kitchen table as they share coffee instead and talk lightly. Benji will have to coax her-- Sepa, the mother of one who has lived here for almost five years-- into returning to it, thinking ahead already to what better literature might make this more enjoyable than tiresome.

With her attention out the window, Sepa speaks of her home world, of the volcanic earth and the hot springs and the devastating winters, of the epic on-foot journeys and the enormity and scale of their governance. How small and petty and cluttered Baedal seems to her and how the fog at least reminds her of home. Second eyelids blink horizontal in a gesture that has begun to read to Benji as uncertainty. In the corner of the kitchen, her daughter, Kidirin, is drawing. She's being raised Baedal, Sepa had said, when she'd told Benji she'd given birth to her in the Glory Shada. The little girl's skin is the same pale green as her mother's, but more human features show in the shape of her tiny jaw, the tiny nails on her fingers.

Setting down her coffee, reluctant to end the conversation but feeling guilty should she not try to do her job, Benji reaches back for the book. But before she can say anything, Sepa hisses and points out the window--

"Look."

~

The fog was rolling in thick today, disguising some of the activity beginning to brew in the Spatters. There was no calming down Sepa, who kept slipping into her native language but was more than able to express her urgency that she couldn't remain in the building. Benji could only take her word for it, only urged her into a coat and helped her dress Kidirin. She told Sepa she should leave her CiD before remembering that Sepa had gotten rid of it a long time ago. They'd left out the back and ducked through a gap in the fence.

Benji hugs a corner as she observes the street. Heavy barricades erected to cut off the street, the roaming shadows of the Militia men and women patrolling it, conversing with one another. Veiled in the creeping mist, they seemed to be almost the only tangible things in a ghost-like world of uncertain definition. She sinks back as a group of them move down the street, on foot and horse both.

The sound that follows, less than a minute later, is one she has heard before -- the breaking of a door beneath handheld battering ram, and it takes three blows. Something breaks. Tension and anger. The arrest of one turns into the arrest of several when someone is dragged from their home and those that love them and those that don't even know them rise to their defence.

Benji has zero compulsion to get arrested, especially not when she can feel Sepa anxiously watching her back. She stops recording on her CiD -- because that's what they do, isn't it? -- and turns back to her.

~

They wait it out, for a while, with a few others who discover the cover they've found behind a building, and Benji gladly keeps Kidirin in her lap as Sepa accepts a cigarette. One of them reports a story of a criminal -- maybe, maybe not -- who'd breached the barricade on horseback. It sounds heroic, and someone asks what happened to him.

Shot in the back, of course. Someone else confirms they heard gunfire.

Soon, they disperse as quickly as a flock of birds at first word that a line is closing in on them. Benji stays with Sepa and her child, unsure who is protecting who, before realising that no one is.

~

Underground, with old world cobblestone that is slippery underfoot. Sepa has to use her powers to break down the barred off way someone had installed some more recent time ago, and it's too dark to see. Benji uses her CiD as a light, and they feel their way with their hands. It's meant to come out somewhere in Ketch Heath, making it a lengthy journey for being underground, but Benji would settle for emerging somewhere beyond the guard set up, sealing off four winding blocks of Spatters.

She keeps expecting the click and whirr of camera bots, the green-turned-red eyes of a hunter in pursuit, the choking yellow smog. But soon, Benji finds the metal rungs of a ladder, the faint light of an opening. Sepa climbs first with her child riding her back, arms around her neck, and confirms safety. Benji comes up just for the fresh air and to see the sun's position in the sky, to share a quick and awkward embrace.

And as agreed, at least by her, she goes back down, and makes her way back through the tunnel. It will be a journey she repeats until the barricades are taken down.

They aren't until sunset.

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There's a moment where she just leans against the door, kind of peering accusingly down through her eyelashes as she navigates key into lock. It's the same posture and slow deliberation of someone who is coming home late from something fun instead of awful, but this is the opposite of true and it reads on her expression even if there is no one immediately around to do so. She's left some of her things-- reading and writing material, mainly-- back in the Spatters, but has the necessities jangling in the pockets of a jacket that feels slightly too light against the chill of the small hours. She tips her way inside, shuts the door quietly behind her.

She's been out of contact all day. Messages going unanswered because they went unreceived, even though she had mentioned she was probably going to be around again in the afternoon after her appointment across town. Frustration at trying to contact people earlier had meant she hadn't touched it again, where it stays switched off in her pocket.

Shoes off, then, bent over double at the front door as she goes to work them down and away, masculine ankle boots that have, at least, served her well. She counted on doing a lot of walking today anyway, and some of the grit and grime have shaken off them on the journey back to Badside. She could use a shower for years, she's pretty sure, but has long since cleaned her hands, her face, during her paranoia-inspired delay in getting back home.

Unsure what to do passed this point. Her body is exhausted, but her mind is racing.

The house is dark, no lights are on - which usually means either no one's home or the electricity's out again, although every time that happens Wolfgang yells and stomps upstairs to futz with the panels on the roof, so probably not. When he hears the lock turning in the door - or more accurately he hears the mind or feels the presence of the person attached to the hand attached to the lock at the door - he wakes up, and when he does all the lights come on at once. A bit creepy, but useful.

Sitting up, he peers around and then over the back of the couch at her, rubbing at his face and his sleepy eyes. "Hi." He's disoriented, it's dark - she said she'd be back earlier and he's not sure when he fell asleep or for how long, it happens. After being gone for three days (he'd come back, cringed, said "don't ask" and crawled into his room for twelve hours) he's still a bit confused about the passage of time. Is it still Tuesday or Wednesday?

It's her face that catches his attention, the expression. He leans his head on the back of the couch. "All right?"

Probably the most clockwork of them all happens to be Shrieky, for virtue of the fact that he dials into bed at an actual bedtime, unlike at least the two live-ins in this room. She hadn't startled too much when the lights came on, only thought absently that she'd woken someone up just by existing, looking towards where Wolfgang is visible at the couch as hands kind of vaguely undo the buttons of her jacket, navigates it off her shoulders. She misses the opportunity to say hi back, and further misses the opportunity to force enough of a smile in order to get upstairs.

But she wouldn't sleep anyway. Probably. "No," she says, following that with a kind of exasperated laugh, more of a hnn sound as she bundles her jacket to her chest and opts to drift closer. Her voice is very creaky, rough, but kept quiet so as not to disturb the rest of the house. "Just a very long day. There was, um. At the Spatters, the police?" It's an old habit, sentences coming out disconnected and out of order.

But she's been wanting to tell someone about it, someone who wasn't there, all damn day.

At the word 'police,' his reaction is predictable - Wolfgang tenses and pales, his mouth setting in a thin line. He sits up properly and pulls his feet over, tucking his legs close to his chest, making himself smaller. There's room to sit down if she'd like, or there's other chairs. "Are you okay? Not hurt?"

He guesses it doesn't have much to do with her, and it's horrible because it's the fact that she's not currently bleeding or limping. That he can see, anyway, and maybe he's wrong but he's not inclined to give the police the benefit of the doubt these days, and he's braced to hear that even if she's not, other people weren't so lucky. This is how it goes everywhere.

"Sit down, you look - pale."

She does as bid, moving on closer to take a perch at the other end of the couch, vaguely grateful to be off her feet again but, more importantly, somewhere safe. The house, mainly, but Wolfgang is certainly that, whether its his manner or the fact she isn't unconvinced he could magically rip apart anything that needed it. Up close, she doesn't appear to be hurt, just weary to the point of her movements become loose, heavy. She rubs along her eye socket with the tips of her fingers.

"I kept out of their way," she says, an assurance, hands folding in her lap. "They were after, um. Other people, they arrested them, but they-- with concrete and horses, sectioned off this big area. We-- the woman I was tutoring, her daughter, we waited it out for a while. They had firearms, so it was hard to do much -- some people were hurt but I don't know what happened."

After a momentary pause, Wolfgang gets up and makes his way towards the kitchen, wobbling slightly, still a little disoriented as he wakes up fully. He thinks - tea would be best, but that involves so much stuff and anyway if it were him, he would prefer something stronger. Probably he shouldn't use himself as any kind of measuring stick in regards to coping, but.

Anyway, he comes back with the last bottle of red they opened but hadn't finished - his compromise, he would go for the cheap whiskey tucked on the top shelf - and a glass. He sets both on the coffee table then sits down, upright, facing her. "How many, do you know?"

What is frustrating in Baedal is that there's not even the illusion of a fair shake. That maybe once they pass from the police's custody into the courts', they'll have a shot, they could still get justice. He doesn't believe in that at home either, but he can see how much easier it is to believe there. Here, there's none of that - but maybe he's just biased, having been through the entire process and unwilling to listen to other, unmarked people's opinions about justice in Baedal.

What do you do, who do you petition over the police shooting unarmed civilians in Baedal? Where is rescue supposed to come from?

There's a hint of a smile at the gesture, and she eases forward to fill glass with red, hands steady but movements careful. "No," Benji says, easing back with her charged glass and folding herself up in the corner of the couch, soaking into its comfortable support. "It was difficult to get a sense of anything-- they did something to the phones. The CiDs. I tried messaging you earlier." ...but she frankly figures that messaging Wolfgang is kind of a coin flip in the first place.

However, she wasn't the only one getting zero replies. "Dozens, though. There was a fight near us, when they were arresting someone and they ended up taking everyone."

"Sorry," he says, reflexively, then winces and chooses not to apologise for apologising, lest he get stuck in one of his endless loops.

Instead he runs his hands over his face. "Of course. After last time, they're learning." He's thinking - whatever they did to blackout communication, there has to be a countermeasure. And a counter-countermeasure. I could do that. "I wonder what they are afraid of, though. Most people don't care about the Spatters." He winces slightly when he says it, even if it's true - the majority of the city is content to pretend it doesn't exist and the ones who care are too small in number.

That does give Benji pause, once she kind of puts aside the 'that's a horrible thought' response, wine glass rested against her mouth before she tips back a deep sip of it. When was the last time she ate. At some point. She winces at that uneasy feeling of rich alcohol hitting a relatively empty stomach, makes a note to eat something cold on her way upstairs, and--

"Either... if it's something new, they were testing it. Or maybe it was to do with the people they were arresting. Maybe not all of them were Strangers. Or avoiding, um. Heroes. People who do. Care."

Her attention is tipped down into her glass, gently turning it in her hands. "What was last time?"

"Someone's been recording their activity. Raids, but also... other things." His mouth thins into a tight, disapproving line for a second - those are things he doesn't even want to talk about. He goes to chew on his thumbnail, stops - he's trying to quit biting his nails - and tugs on the agate hamsa he wears instead, tucking it under his lip, an anxious habit. "They went out randomly through the CiD, a few months ago - um, not just our cohort, but others. I don't know if you got any. The first was in Ruudary."

Leaving that one off would be tempting, but - it's not about him. He hasn't forgotten that most of the others never came out of that jail. So instead he talks about it clinically, like it happened to someone else, like he saw it on his CiD like everyone else did.

He opens his mouth, closes it. "But maybe this isn't the first time they use it." Maybe it's just the first one either of them has heard of, which makes sense if they're blacking out communication during raids, but surely he would have heard, he knows all these people...

"I arrived-- after the monster siege, in Ged," Benji says, after having to think a moment about which one is Ruudary. And also how long she's been here. Months. Her expression remains bleak, which always makes her look more severe, a little older, drained.

She wants to ask where they go, after they're arrested, but feels somewhat-- unqualified to be asking that, and also there are a lot of questions to be asked. Ones she hasn't been asking. "Maybe I haven't, mm. I don't think I've said anything about it very much, about when I was taken. To here. I don't really like thinking about it, but I did, all today, because it's really nice here usually. I mean, I don't like to go on about it, people generally don't like that they're here, and I miss-- my family, too, and everyone."

Hnn. Sip of wine. But she isn't finished. "But it was nice thinking that it's a place that can't be at war with anything from the outside, or-- just. No more supply runs. No one can leave so no one has to be smuggled out of the state, out of the country. You can have almost anything you want for yourself, and go anywhere, and there's magic." Which she still finds kind of enchanting, the idea of it, even if she knows that it can be just as brutal and gritty and exhausting as she's seen superpowers to be. Sometimes it's full of ghosts and throws tables at people, but it's still magic.

And yet-- "Today wasn't forgiveable. How they treated them, how they treated anyone. Just because it's the Spatters, and no one cares. It's so dangerous, it becomes so dangerous, especially when they make you think that fighting it makes it worse." She glances at Wolfgang, briefly self-conscious, down again at her glass.

"They bring you in with nothing, you miss your family and hate being here, but you have to take care of yourself or you starve. You have to make a life here, and you get attach to it because you make it out of nothing, it's yours. A good accomplishment. And it's nice, everyone here who isn't somewhere they like people not human, they're treated better. Then they give you little things, reminders of home, make you grateful to them for those kindnesses. They, um -" He can't think of the word he wants in English, gestures broadly and uselessly. Sleepy and anxious and agitated, he speaks quicker and his grammar suffers for it. "Give you Stockholm syndrome. So when the Militia, they do these violent things, you don't want to watch it too hard, because if you get involved, they destroy everything you work for. And you can't ask most people to give up everything they have for probably nothing. And you can't just go somewhere else."

He pauses. "I don't think this is an accident, I think they design it this way, so most people never see this, they never think about it too much. It's fucked." He laughs but it's joylessly bitter. "I think sometimes I'm crazy, no one seems to see. It's like this everywhere. Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Baedal, it's all the same."

"They," Benji repeats, following a quiet mm that is lost in her wine as she drinks deeply. Wolfgang's words sink in and remain unsettled, aggravating, and they are words shaped from the experience of living here and living elsewhere. It rings familiar -- there is much here that is unique to here in a way she never had before.

A hand comes up, rubbing uneasily at her jaw, tucking hair behind her ear. "You aren't crazy," she says, after a moment, a glance to him along with a minor smile, back down at her drink.

"Where I'm from, they put depressants in the negation medications and made it compulsory if you were over tier two. Or tried to. The hunters-- you saw them, when we dreamed-- they were installed with a... it's a compass, for people like us." It's easy and thoughtless, how she includes Wolfgang, how her perception of Evolved has expanded to xenians, magic-users. "They just kept making so many laws and the laws weren't there to protect anyone.

"I didn't have to, um. Do any of that, I wasn't even legal. It started a long time ago, maybe-- 2010, earlier, a few decades, and we lived off grid. When I came here, it was when we were meant to be going back. In time." Now who sounds crazy? "To, mm, to try and stop it from getting that bad, somehow. It was easier to be," gesture with glass to indicate Baedal broadly, "wooed, I suppose."

"That's horrible." But not surprising, not really. It's better than what the Technocracy would do if they were in power - eradicate everyone but the baselines, anchoring the world into a static reality that they would control - but then again, they also don't have HIT Marks and cyborgs running around in the street in broad daylight, either. One of them was enough, those teeth. It stands out, his normal dreams are all the same.

He brushes his hair out of his face, it's all tangled on one side where he was laying on it, then picks at a loose thread on the arm of the couch. "I don't understand what that's like, not really, only... abstract, sort of. So I try not to judge people who get complacent, I think, maybe it's the first time they're able to go outside without being afraid. I just." Tugging on that pendant again, barely restraining himself from gnawing on it and getting teeth marks in the setting - "Just tired of seeing kids get shot, and everyone looking the other way."

"Yes," is quiet, kind of over Wolfgang's words, not interrupting or bringing anything new to the table, just-- yes, Baedal can be beautiful sometimes, sometimes its easy to be part of the problem. Evil is apathy, that was one of the things they'd tell each other. Benji shuts her eyes for a second, feeling the weight of the day and the wine in her mouth.

Opens her eyes again so that she doesn't take a miscalculated sip, taking a measured one instead. "Thank you," she says, after a second, even if she knows it might be confusing to hear. For what? "Just for. Talking, but understanding too. It's been a day.

"I only wish I knew what to do, you know. It was easier in New York, in its way. You help people leave the state, or leave the country." That you can't do that here goes without saying, glancing to Wolfgang again, hand twitching like she'd like to right one of his pale locks gone awry, but refraining -- also there is more than just one, so. "It's like you can't just... help people, when they're trapped. I mean. You can, for a day."

But not for as long as they're here.

Wolfgang opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again - fidgets, shifting back and forth, then gives up and starts gnawing on his thumbnail, the tip of his finger.

"There are people here who are," he says finally. "Helping. Or they're trying to. Here, in Badside, um. And others. I could take you."

Of course there are. Of course he knows where they are. For someone who spends over half his day asleep, who gets anxious when the doorbell rings and has to psyche himself up for hours just to make a phone call, he sure does manage to get into a lot of trouble.

Not that there's some grand anti-police conspiracy underground, it is, for the most part, concerned citizens trying to enact social change through protest, copwatch programs, disseminating information - small grassroots actions. They don't even have that much momentum. But it's there, and these things start somewhere. And there are factions of them talking about going beyond peaceful protest and civil disobedience. They are starting to arm themselves.

There are ways things start, too. The Ferry began with one woman with a capacity to gain information, and some kids with pamphlets. A long time ago, granted, before she born.

Benji looks to Wolfgang, a bit too tired to be surprised. She's not even sure she would be. She finishes her drink, anyway, and sets it down, hands folding and allowing for a fleeting smile, a nod. "I'd like that." In as much as this isn't enjoyable, but there are different ways to want things.

"All right." He is too something to smile. Tired, sad, anxious, pick one. So that's that - he feels a general reluctance to invite other people into something so dangerous, like anyone would, but Benji is an adult and he knows how patronizing it is when others don't allow you to make your own decisions, and anyway he would be mildly disappointed to have heard no, anyway, despite how he tries not to judge people for it.

"Word will probably get out. About this. They can black out the CiDs, but they can't stop people from talking." He rubs at his face like scratching the sleep out of his eyes. "I guess we'll hear in a few hours." In the morning, but he can't tell if it is or isn't yet.

"I don't picture a lot of people going home right away," Benji says, agreeing, palms sliding together in a slow fidget, before she studies her palms, the faint healing patterns of shallow injury from a while ago and the dirt collected in the lines. Which somehow inspires tiredness, but that's likely the wine. And everything else. "There are other places to lay low, I think, she-- um, the lady I was with. She said she was making for the woodland areas if she could get that far. I might go see."

A shrug, and Benji goes to stand, taking empty glass with her. "After I sleep for a month, of course."

"Okay. I'll be here." Since he's up, he'll stay up, probably at least for another couple of hours. And checking his CiD over and over, seeing if anyone else has heard of this, if anything's starting to happen - he sort of doubts it, but...

"Let me know if you need anything."

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wonder if he'll ever know

later, in badside ;

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