Welcome to Gaia! ::

Taym met Jordan's eye for a long few seconds, defiant, but when he looked away with sudden irritation, the irritation was edged with obvious despair. He liked Jordan in spite of himself. He respected him. He'd shaken hands with him not just to avoid getting a lecture later but also because he'd felt he deserved it, but he had trouble reconciling that Jordan--sensible, business-focused, friendly--with the Jordan that attached himself to Rep.

Taym told himself he didn't want friends and didn't want to be loved, but the ease with which someone like Rep accrued those things and the struggle he had to keep even one friendship was building up the pressure.

"Stop trying to rescue him. Cut him off," he said suddenly, with startling vehemence. "They can't punish him more than he's already punished himself over and over, if he's as good a person as people keep trying to insist he is. Because if you're genuinely decent--genuinely human, even, even if you aren't decent--I can't think of a single ******** thing worse than having to be aware that you keep hurting the people you care about. If he gave a s**t about you he'd stop."

He jerked an elbow at Rep as he talked, and his voice had the thin, brittle quality of a person aware that their emotions were running away with them and unable to bridle them, words spilling out uncontrollably and rage mounting with every syllable. "I know. I ******** know. I gave up every single ******** thing I had, every good thing in my life, because it was the only way I could stop ******** up and hurting people. I left behind--I gave up everything. Rep couldn't even stop picking fights with trainees. And you think he cares? You think his little heart is breaking for you every time he ******** up? Bullshit. The only real punishment to him was this--" he jerked a hand at Rep's gaping chest through the glass, at the destruction wrought by H "--because that was all about him. You think they didn't know that when they did it to him? Because he's a psychopath. No empathy. He doesn't give a s**t about any of you people, or he wouldn't do what he does. He wouldn't be able to. He's manipulating you. He's faking it. Every single on you eating out of the palm of his ******** hand because he'll crack a joke every now and then, and here I am trying my damnedest to--"

He didn't finish that thought. He'd started shaking instead, a full-body shiver that was strongest in those perpetually-unsteady hands.

"To a real person nothing's worse than hurting the people you love," he repeated, fairly spitting it. "He never learned from that mistake, but everyone's hoping he'll learn from having his own life and happiness threatened, and what does that say about him? I don't know about your-- ******** lifestyle," he said, voice suddenly exhausted again, all the emotion drained out in an instant, "but if you're going to indulge in it I at least figured you of all people'd be smarter than to fall for his particular brand of bullshit. Save yourself the ******** heartache. I have a hard time believing you did anything to deserve it."

Again the long silence before he answered.

"Sometimes you have to hurt people to do what's best for them and what's best for the people around them," he said finally. "It's not a ******** punishment, it's just common sense. He doesn't give a ******** about you, so you don't owe him anything. He's just going to drag you down with him and he's going to use you, again and again, as affirmation that he can do whatever the ******** he wants to and get away with it. Every time you forgive him you give him a chance to hurt someone else. Hell, he's probably banking on that."

A hesitation.

"And destabilize? Compared to what? Has he ever really been ******** stable? I heard he cut off a woman's arm, for ******** sake, and then he runs Shiloh through a meat grinder and you think that if you leave he'll destabilize? You think this is how he acts with the benefit of your ******** so-called positive influence? This is just positive reinforcement for him. ******** up, it'll be OK, my life won't actually change much. ******** that," he said, with a bitter little laugh. "I was wrong. Maybe you do deserve it."

This time it was Taym that turned to go, to go set himself back up for the endless hours of silent surveillance, for the waking up that never came. "Shiloh was a good kid," he added, apropos of nothing. "If you need someone to mourn, mourn him. Maybe you should take a long look at him and realize that that's what comes of you indulging Rep so you can be a 'good influence.'"

"If you were unhappy?" he asked quietly, his exit arrested.

He watched him go, and felt his respect for Jordan draining away as surely as if someone had physically yanked a plug.

"Delusional ********," he said quietly to himself, after a long few seconds had passed in silence.

Visibly steeling himself, he went to go do what he'd set out to do before discovering Jordan: he stepped over to look at Shiloh, and stayed there for a few seconds, hands in his pockets and shoulders hunched, before turning to Rep's pod and examining his face and the hole in his chest. This last he did dispassionately, without a flicker of expression. And then, without any fanfare, without any soliloquy, without any sneer or spitting or indeed any outward acknowledgment at all, he turned to go.

Why?

It was a question Rep couldn't answer, even if he had voice, because right down at the heart of things, he didn't know. Action and reaction, instinct and reflex, it was all the same thing. The truest and most honest answer would be simply because. Events had happened how they happened, he had reacted the way he always reacted despite all the conditioning to the contrary, and here they were.

The fact it wasn't and hadn't been personal, hadn't been a deliberate defiance didn't make Jordan's clear pain any easier to take. And he knew the parallels, remembered the earnest conversations they'd had in the soft comfortable darkness where nightmares had paced around them like wild animals at bay. Jordan had lost his brother once, been as unable to stop it as he was unable to stop Rep's decent into self destruction at the hands of his own stupidity. And knowing that, knowing how deep and vast those wounds were made it hard to cope. He would have broken down again, heavy apologetic sobs, but even that catharsis was withheld from him, he could only watch people suffer, he could do nothing to reach out.

Once again there was that phrase, I don't know you. All it took was that seed of doubt for people to question everything, if they didn't know one thing, what was to stop them ultimately deciding that they knew nothing at all? That everything was a lie? It hurt, like everything else here in his torture chamber and he could only look on helpless as the doubts went unassuaged, as Jordan resigned himself to another wait to see if Rep would come back from this ******** up unscathed, all the while maintaining his impeccable front of calm, wearing that mask while he suffered with no sanctuary from the act he lived every day of his life.

I didn't mean to kill him. he said mentally. He wasn't Blue. He didn't have the strength or the confidence to be deliberate, he blundered and reacted, always afraid and always vicious, it made him much more dangerous but also far more prone to hurting those he cared about time and time again.

He considered for a moment if it was a mercy he was spared the nightmares which so often dogged him when he was alone and decided that these waking ones were of a higher calibre and much less tolerable.

But the words hung unsaid on the air as Jordan turned to leave, as all of them did.

Dwight likes to visit Rep sometimes and remind the man that everything terrible that happens to him is his own damn fault, no matter what anybody says. They had been wrong before, and Rep had been the one to prove it with his own actions. They were too close and couldn't see the forest for the trees.

Tonight Dwight's been reading his helpless audience the applications of the TiM RP because Mark was busy counseling his little Deathies for PSTD or whatever. Caelius had apparently set his phasers to MURDER and while Life wasn't exactly the safest place at the moment, at least no one knew for sure if the boss was quietly offing people or what. Either way these applications were s**t, so obviously he had to share them with someone who deserved to endure every word of Robert's writing.

After awhile, the tech got up from his comfortable lawn chair, took one final sip of his giant fruity umbrella drink, and said his usual goodbyes.

"Don't forget that I ******** told you so." Spinning to Shiloh, he continued, "Do the world a favour and don't wake up. Just take him with you."

The pod hisses open. There are voices talking outside. Someone has moved a stretcher down, someone else is grabbing Rep, carrying him. Names. Words. Then nothing.

He would wake up in a nice hospital bed, one by a small window. There was a curtain partitioning his room, most likely some occupant on the other side, though he was still strapped to the bed, literally. It would be a couple more days before he could move freely again; at least someone had had the decency to leave both Rep's cell phone and a wheelchair for when he was ready next to his bed.