[PRP] Mortality (Rodney + Lawrence + PODMERICA)

[Baneful]

It had taken some time to get access the pod rooms, the hunter assigned on supervising them taking none too kindly to being forced to look over the paperwork thrust at him, seeing the task of watching Lawrence as a task he evidently felt he wasn't paid for and hassle he didn't need.

"Lawrence Weiman?" he'd read aloud from the paper and Lawrence had wanted to reach over and strangle him for uttering it with his worthless tongue, twisting the phonemes in his crass accent. He'd signed his real name only to avoid administrative tangles and immediately regretted doing so, forced to nod and gruffly affirm that it was correct while his pride rankled.

He was not normally impatient, in fact he was capable of almost insane levels of it, but the time it had taken the man to get his things together and let him in to visit the pods had felt interminably long and a deliberate defiance in the face of inconvenience.

Finally he'd been there and had made his way to her pod, half smirking and expecting to gloat at her vulnerability in getting herself podded - no doubt for bad behaviour - only to find the desire to gloat icing over in his chest, replaced by something more alien.

She was naked, and that was irrelevant but she was also wounded he realised, a shard of something sharp and shiny jutting from her chest, reflecting broken facets of the inner pod, her own freckled skin and him. It had to have broken ribs, maybe shattered the sternum and potentially could have lacerated arteries, he found himself trying to calculate the damage and potential ways to treat it as if he was once again back on the night shift and a dog had been brought in bleeding to death, trailing every one of the tangled emotions of its owners like nearly severed threads. But there was nothing he could do, this wasn't urgency, not really, she was held in stasis of the sort that only the pods appeared capable of maintaining, out of his reach to help or harm.

He'd had the conversation with her before that everyone left, it was something small in the constant disagreements they normally experienced which they had had in common and he'd told her that he wouldn't leave and wouldn't change. She of course had made no such promise, as brilliant and changeable as the seasons, a summertime in her (rare these days) unguarded delight, an autumn of warm fires and crunchy leaves in her desire to craft something tangible in the world and a grim and terrible winter in her anger and callous dismissal and othering of him. She was reborn like a phoenix in the flames of her own emotion time and time again.

And yet he'd only ever thought in terms of emotion, he'd never really considered her physically vulnerable or fragile in any way. He'd thought if she died it would be at his hands and after a tremendous struggle which would be more likely to claim him as collateral. This, well..this almost looked like it was at her own.

There had been mirrors everywhere in the rooms, uncanny mirrors which seemed to stretch out the very self and tax the mind. Perhaps she had gone mad, finally snapped and decided to join Taym. Which made sense, he assumed, there was always someone else who was more important, more alive. Taym was a given, relationships, actual human relationships outstripped whatever he was, Dawson had been the other, more human, more in general than the poor reflection of a human being he passed for most of the time. Perhaps it was essentially his punishment, cursed to be forever fixated on someone who in every iteration would reject him and choose someone else, someone human.

He set his palm against the glass of the pod, like a dog looking out of a window, longing for something it did not understand and could not conceptualise, nothing more than the abstract feeling of "out". He wanted her out, he wanted her alive. Everything in the world lately was all wrong, set to challenge his divinity and undermine his godhood. He was in his desert and satan tempted and goaded him at every step.

It would be so easy to start something here and now and get himself murdered and more and more each day escape from the island was looking like one of two routes, death or flight towards inevitable death.

But not yet, not while she was here, not while she was alive or somewhere on the very cusp of it.

He didn't like it.

He didn't feel the visceral emotion he had a sense should be there, though he had no idea which emotion it would be, smugness, sadness, happiness, delight, heartbreak. He didn't know which was appropriate, but looking at her made him feel so restless, a stirring which tended unchecked to end in violence. The hunger controlled it. Melvin was gone, off island on an EM or something else stupid. His own fault, he'd started it intentionally. Everything needed to crumble to set him free.

Rodney had been left dinner and he'd be eating alone and it would be no significant loss to him he thought.

He sighed and turning his back to the pod, sat down, pressed up against it like a lost dog waiting for its master with Butch solemn and silent in his thoughts.

He had hours and he had nowhere else he wanted to be.
 

[Toshihiko Two]

Melvin was out on mission, which meant it was just Lawrence and him in the room. Rodney worked for a while on his own projects, working at the small desk that had been allotted as his, and lost track of the time.

When he noticed, it was well past dinner.

Lawrence was...endlessly skilled, complicated, and dangerous. He had been unravelling like a spool of gold yarn.

Rodney checked his phone, warmed up the pre-prepared meals, and wrapped them in a paper bag. He had some idea of where Lawrence had gone. But even if he wasn't there, he felt like...he should probably visit anyway.

As it turned out, he didn't have to look far. He walked quietly on the hard floors, the buzzing flourescent lights making the fact that everyone in the pods was slowly dying a clean and sterile process.

"Hello, Lawrence. Hello, America," he said quietly, holding the bag with both hands and turning the top anxiously.  

[Baneful]

Lawrence had lost all sense of place and time as he sat there with nothing but the thrum of business as usual for company. It all simply felt irrelevant, sloshing pointlessly around him while he attempted to hold a fixed position in a world which refused to sit still even for a moment.

He looked up when Rodney spoke, the first movement he had made other than breathing in some time, his muscles protested at the action.

"Hello Rodney." he echoed, his gaze flicking momentarily to the bag and back to him, feeling as if in some ways he was unspokenly holding onto his own hunger pains in a mirror of the other man's bag. A bag which smelled like food. He was good at smells, whether he wanted it or not.

 

[Toshihiko Two]

The horror of what had happened was written into America's chest, and Rodney immediately looked at the floor.

"S-sorry, America. I didn't know you weren't dressed. I won't look. I..." His voice faltered, "I hope it doesn't still hurt."

He asked, "...Did you want to have dinner with her?"  

[Baneful]

Rodney got a quizzical look as he addressed America as if she was present, as if she was her usual self rather than simply a point on the precipice between life and death, a question without an answer. He didn't know if she could hear them or see them and he assumed that it did not matter.

"I am not..." and the lie faltered, normally so easy. It was difficult to lie to Rodney and he was hungry.

"She is not here." he said. "Not really." And yet even absent of motion and life, she loomed, more human than he would ever be.

"What do you want Rodney?" he asked.

 

[Toshihiko Two]

Rodney didn't look over, but he said, "...Of course she's here."

He seemed a little taken aback by the question, but answered honestly.

"For things to be alright," he said.

He continued gripping the bag, "and to have dinner with you."  

[Baneful]

Lawr couldn't help the sharp bark of mirthless laughter at the very idea that things would ever be all right in any possible meaning of the phrase, in the world or in their immediate lives in general. "That is a significant pair of desires." he said grimly.

"I can only be of any use to you with one of those things. I would ask that we eat here." He did not explain why, he didn't even know if he would have been able to explain why if he had wanted to, there was simply that feeling, the vague and distant impression that somehow he was tethered here.

Besides, each of them represented some opposing force of morality and with both of them here, he felt like they might balance one another out and that somehow he'd be safe from the magnetic pull which tugged him always in two directions.

The bag still got a slightly queasy look and the colour seemed to drain from his features even further at the prospect of eating food, even food meticulously prepared at his own hands.

 

[Toshihiko Two]

Rodney only smiled faintly and sadly in response.

"Yes, that's alright," Rodney said. "America, I'm...only sorry it's not under other circumstances. Maybe when you're awake..."

One of his brothers had been killed on impact. The other made it to the hospital, but had never woken up.

Rodney sat carefully on the floor, folding his legs and gently unfolding the top of the bag. "Don't worry, I didn't use the microwave." He carefully set out each part: napkin, silverware, canteen, tupperware, and pulled his own meal into his lap. Rodney was used to fixing his own meals, he just wasn't a gourmet chef.

"I was thinking about places to go. I don't know if...that's changed. But the cherry blossoms in Japan will be opening in a few weeks, and there were some temples and gardens I'd like to visit."  

[Baneful]

There was a feeling of hollowness which overtook Lawrence then, the idea of being on some sort of precipice, looking down into an endlessly dark fall. He honestly didn't know if he would be here in a few weeks, finding himself eyeing the portals at times and musing on how far he would get before he would end up much the same as Melody. Anything was better than the trap he found himself in, cornered and held up for inspection and ridicule, a predator who had thrived on the very lifeblood of stupid humanity but who now was woefully maladapted to the world he found himself in.

America held him in place, a singular entity and fascination which chained him like a shackle to the island, wherever he went in the world even if he ran, he would be tethered to her, bound to loop back to seek out the sanctuary she represented when he was near her. Here and now he was in the eye of a storm, a quiet place full of thrumming machines where his past and the future felt held in the balance, a purgatory which promised not to last forever.

Distantly he eyed the food as if he was so far distant that it might not have mattered if the microwave had been used at all, something which normally provoked indignance or at least a reminder lecture about how there were times and places for it. He didn't want to eat, he never wanted to eat and as always there was the temping thought that maybe he could just eat it and get rid of it later, when it was just him, when he was alone. But with Rodney that would be a betrayal, like lying to him and it was something he didn't want to do.

"That sounds nice." he said and retrieved his food, something he'd prepared based on an old recipe alluded to in one of his books. It tasted delicious but that was almost an insult in the face of how he felt, the pleasure and endorphins conjured up from eating simply a counterpoint to how little else there was in him. The hunger had been like banked embers, merely casting a flickering shadow, but the physical satisfaction laid everything bare.

"If America is out by then, perhaps we could go there. It would be pleasant to get off of the island. To get away." And he seemed to ignore the fact that he had only just returned from an unannounced trip.

He did not say what it meant if she was not.

 

[Toshihiko Two]

"Alright," Rodney said. "We have time. They open from late March to early May."

He looked morose, though, at Lawrence's lingering get away. The aroma of the potato and chickpea jalfrezi drifted up, warm and inviting.

"Have you been...thinking about getting away for a while?"  

[Baneful]

Lawrence nodded. He wasn't sure how he'd deal with a trip with Rodney now either, as much as he wanted to see things through the other man's eyes and enjoy art and sights via his enthusiasm, he was beginning to doubt whether he had any real right to. Rodney was a rare and pristine thing and the longer he spent in Lawrence's company the more tarnished he became.

Every forkful seemed to take forever and Lawr seemed to spend more time toying with his food than actually eating it.

"Some time." he stated. "It was my first thought when I was brought here and what led me back to Melody. I do not like to be trapped." And there was a world of difference between being in a room with the door closed by his choice and locked against it. "My independence is and has always been something important to me. I have none here and perhaps at some point I will have nothing here."

He inclined his head in the direction of America's pod. "We agreed on one thing. Everyone leaves. Either through choice or through death. I had and have no intention of leaving her but if she leaves then who else am I benefitting by staying? Certainly not you."

 

[Toshihiko Two]

"Your choice got taken from you. I don't think...I really understood either. Although I came here on my own, and I told myself...I knew what was at stake."

Rodney looked at his shoes. Had Lawrence really stayed for America's benefit?

"If I asked, would you not go until I did?"  

[Baneful]

"My life was saved and they expect me to be grateful for that." he said. "Despite the fact that what life I had was everything about who I was, they act like it was a blessing they brought me here when in many ways Jan died on that day regardless. This island was just a death rattle, an attempt to protect myself with a self which no longer fitted." he took a slightly vindictive bite of food. "Who am I now?" he said. "Because I don't know, I am trapped by this hand, unable to redefine myself or change, a fractured mirror reflecting things it should not, constantly trying to find a way to become whole again." It was melodramatic but it was how he felt, constantly confused by physical tics or verbal accents showing up where they should not have been and unable to remake himself to escape it.

Rodney got a long cold look for his request, as if he had asked Lawrence to hand over everything he had in exchange for nothing. "Why would you ask such a thing?" he said and pointed the fork in his direction briefly. "It is only a matter of time before you leave, you don't want my loyalty." And he nodded in the direction of America.

"Look how happy it made her to have it."

 

[Toshihiko Two]

"America, you didn't ask for it, did you?" Rodney asked quietly. He didn't look, still leaving America her modesty.

If he'd known anything about the tanks, and how much it might interfere, he would have put a blanket over part of the glass.

He had known, in some ways. That she and Lawrence both felt disconnected from everything except a strong and blood-soaked cord of grief. Tied to the lost, or the dead. He wore the same cord.

"I may be taken. But I won't leave."

He took a bite. "There are a lot of ways to leave."  

[Baneful]

"She got it anyway." he said grimly.

Rodney got the same long and slightly hopeless look for his comment. "Have you considered them I suppose?" The food always sat all wrong in his stomach, making him feel out of control, severing the ties which bound him to his body, satiety without satisfying anything as deep as he needed.

He narrowed his brows. "Why do you even stay around me?" he asked. "At this point you KNOW my history. You know that I have had two wives, something which is likely against all manner of biblical rules. I am still technically married to both of them. I have done heinous things, my daughter died because of my own curiosity. I am a horrible, horrible person who exists on the vicarious emotions good or bad of others." he set his mouth in a thin accusing line, setting down his fork to slap his palm down on the floor in a very rare expression of frustration.

"Why?"