we’re ready to make you one of us.

[headandhand]

WHO: Open to all Dualizens
WHAT: When Roboclones Attack
WHERE: Anywhere in the city!
WHEN: The night of Oct. 19
WARNINGS: Please use these if applicable! And if you happen to end up dead by roboclone, please fill out the death form!

It’s an ordinary night in Dualis, until it suddenly becomes a very dark and stormy night in Dualis. There hasn’t been a single day of unpleasant weather since any of you arrived, but soon after the sun begins to sink behind the city’s skyscrapers and the neon lights intensify for the night, storm clouds begin to gather overhead and unleash a cacophony of thunder, a deluge of rain, and brilliant spikes of lightning arcing across the sky.

It’s a violent storm, to be sure, but surely severe weather is no challenge in such a technologically advanced city as Dualis, right? As long as you stay indoors, you can keep safe and dry until the storm passes.

Except … less than an hour after the storm begins, the power all across the city goes completely out. All buildings are dark except for the illumination cast by lightning across brick and steel and glass. All electronics - including phones - are dead, all biometric locks are disabled, and no attempts to call, text, or reach the internet or the network succeed. Eerily, the streets are silent and empty.

Under normal circumstances, such a widespread blackout would merely be odd and inconvenient, but tonight, circumstances are anything but normal. About half an hour after the blackout begins, something approaches you, wherever you are. In the dark, you’ll be able to make out that its shape is humanoid, but maybe its motions are jerky and mechanical. As it draws closer and you get a better look, by candlelight or flashlight or flash of lightning, you recognize the face staring back at you.

That face is your own.

The face, like the rest of the body, is likely some degree of incomplete, an incongruous jigsaw of metal and flesh, but it’s definitely yours. And this machine doppelganger’s mission is soon made apparent as it launches a targeted attack on you:

It’s here to kill you.

After nearly four hours, the storm subsides and the power is restored and the city falls back into its normal rhythm. Will you survive until then?

May the odds be ever in your favor, friends.

Comments

[notalive]

He doesn't know if he'll ever understand why Hank bought or kept that gun. But shooting the clone so quickly? He understands, or thinks he does, albeit maybe in a simplistic fashion. He shot something with his own face, staring at him in the kind of hateful fashion Hank sees himself. Maybe the temptation to shoot such a thing as if it might excise your own hateful thoughts is just that strong.

"Wait." His voice is gentle, he hopes, but it's still firm. "People here are tough, they'll be fine without you for ten minutes."

He wants Hank to... He doesn't know. Calm down? He suspects they're going to have to split up at some point - and he doesn't want Hank to be there when his own clone pops up, if it does. If Hank felt like this on some normal night, he doesn't know what he'd do. Take him to bed, maybe, lie with him and talk to him, talk at him if necessary, take his mind off it.

Whatever he'd do, they don't have time for him to do it.

"Come here and sit with me," he says, and tugs Hank back into the main room, where he gently nudges him to sit down on the bed before sitting next him, watching him with still-wet eyes and a torn expression. They're still connected, and all Connor can do is tell him, not with words, but with an idea, that he's not alone. He's wanted. Nothing he's telling himself is true.

"I wish I could fix this," he whispers into the oppressive quiet.

[sociallychallenged]

Hank lets himself be guided out of the bathroom. This isn't how he wanted to first use this connection. He was hoping it would be for something better, more positive. But he'll use it for something productive and patch himself together.

But he uses his free hand finally to wipe at Connor's cheeks.

"Look it's on fuckin'... me to fix. And I used to be pretty well put together. Went through a fuckin' divorce, did a lotta shit. Held it all together. It just got shitty when I stopped seeing good in the world.

"I can't fix it now. Fixing it means letting someone dig around in my head and helping me sort it all out, and I don't wanna put that on you and I sure as shit don't trust anyone here to."

He leans their heads together then, swallowing thickly. He'll listen to that assurance. He's not alone. Right now. No, he's not alone. He's not alone.

"It's not your job to fix this but I guess if you're gonna be with me it's somethin' you gotta know is there. I figured you'd already seen the worst of it- I didn't think about how you deviating might change how you could handle it."

[notalive]

"I saw it," he says aloud, leaning into Hank and pulling his partner in to lean heavily on Connor himself in turn. "I knew it. I just didn't feel it till now."

He felt something before. Vague consternation. A total lack of understanding. A sense of duty. But nothing like this, not then. He wasn't capable of this. Now it feels like something's grabbed his innards and wrenched them around violently.

"I know it's not my job to fix. I don't know how, I don't know what to do." He sounds miserable in admitting that he just can't make this go away, no matter how much he'd like. "But I want to be here. I don't want you to deal with this by yourself anymore."

He's using the words I want over and over, trying in the only way he can think of to really drive it home that Connor doesn't feel any obligation to this - unless it counts that,

"I need you to be OK. I know you're not and it--it hurts." It actually hurts. This is what pain is.

[sociallychallenged]

"Everyone just seemed to want me to 'get over it'. But that's what it's like. It hurts. It hurts all the damn time... Or it did."

It doesn't so much anymore. But that survivor's guilt has become a powerful monster, blossoming into other forms of guilt, stretching and reaching, planting its roots firmly in his brain.

Even the idea that Connor can understand the 'hurt' is condemning because it makes Hank feel good to find that maybe, on some small level, he understands. Even if he doesn't want Connor to actually feel that.

"Okay, I'm not dealing with it by myself. I have you. I got it." He repeats it out loud. He doesn't have it. But if he says it enough, he just might at some point.

[notalive]

"You've got me," Connor repeats. "Not just right now--" because he felt that little protest from deep inside Hank's brain-- "whenever you need me. Always."

His throat still feels like it's blocked up with something, but the deeply unpleasant feeling throughout his body is almost fascinating now that they're sat here quietly. He's felt negative feelings before - annoyance, frustration, embarrassment - but this isn't any of those, it isn't just something uncomfortable that his brain doesn't like. It's a full body sensation, juddering in his thirium pump, churning in his systems, clogging up his throat.

The churning turns into an almost physical ache, like a real wound, whenever he realises that Hank probably feels like this a lot more of the time and so much worse.

"I know I don't understand this very well," he says out loud, slowly releasing Hank's hand so he can finally pull Hank close with both arms around him. The blue light thrown around the room from thirium in his joints fades as his skin reappears, leaving only the thrumming yellow light of his LED. "But I want to. If you'll let me."

[sociallychallenged]

HANK🠵 LOVE

He might catch it a moment before he lets go. A little hope there as Connor tells him that he wants to understand. As he promises that he'll always be there for whatever Hank needs, which is so much more than he's ever been given. Yeah, sure, his wife might have given him wedding vows, but 'I will try to understand you' means so much more.

He hugs Connor to him, tightly.

"I'm shit at explaining stuff. But I'll try to open up, alright? And not just use that fucking mod for it. I want to try and use that for something... I don't know... not so depressing."

He pulls back enough to gesture helplessly into the air.

"Are you okay?" He turns it around again, taking Connor's face in his hands, rubbing his thumbs along the streaks on his cheeks.

[notalive]

He feels that little glimmer of something positive, one of the last things to filter through their connection before he severs it, and it gives Connor that tiny bit of hope in turn that there is something he can do, even if it's not much - or at least, even if it doesn't feel like much.

"We can use it for both," he reassures Hank, pulling him in tightly in turn and leaning their heads together. He wants to use it for anything and everything, the good and the bad, whatever will help them both. If this helps Hank share what he's going through, Connor'll take it.

Then Hank withdraws.

"Me?" Somehow he can't remember the exact feeling of the pain. Like his brain has cast it out, or like it wasn't something concrete that could be saved to memory. "I'm OK now.

"I just...part of me was convinced it was you that was dead. It still is, but I just deactivated it. I'll go into standby and fix it later, but..."

He looks down, then back up.

"It felt like the world was ending."

[sociallychallenged]

"Yeah. Yeah, that's what it feels like when someone you love dies."

He rubs his thumbs along his cheeks, wishing he had more time. That it wasn't the eerie dark of an empty city and he could stop and explain both that this is why he hurt, really try to commit to his memory that Connor would hurt without him, try to do something more productive with it.

Instead he just stares at him for now, rubbing away those streaks the previous tears had left.

"We'll work this out, okay?" And then he moves his hands from Connor's face to holding his fingers again, this time pressing kisses to his knuckles and whole-heartedly ignoring his own fucked up body out in the hall. "We gotta go take care of this. I'm still alive. I'm gonna come back here alive."

[notalive]

The misery still on his face is clear as he looks at Hank. He's felt this kind of overwhelming emotion before, but it was always good. Excitement. Determination. Love. Negative emotions like irritation and fear and dread, they've always been brief and died out quickly. This feels like it's going to consume him.

"OK," he whispers, watching Hank kiss his knuckles and trying to will back the happiness that motion should bring welling up in him. It works, a little - maybe what a balm over a wound feels like. "We'll both be fine."

And then, because he knows he has to say it and not particularly because he wants to, "You need to take the gun. I can take care of myself without one, you know I can."

He's always done that. And he needs to trust that Hank isn't going to turn that gun on himself the first chance he gets - after all, it's been in their room this whole time. The whole four months Hank's been here, maybe, so has that gun. And Hank's still here.

[sociallychallenged]

"I have my automatic." And then Hank can't help but smile at the morbid joke he's about to make, a saddish sort of thing but he has to do it because it's ridiculous. "You can't play roulette with an automatic."

He had his service weapon when he was brought over. But as it turns out, he's still too much of a coward to pull a trigger with absolute certainty. Which at least stopped him from discovering people rezzed early.

"So you take it. It'd be better in your hands. Like I said. Protecting you instead of something I got to fuckin' hurt me."

[notalive]

He twitches at the joke, a nervous little movement, and the grin he attempts is half a grimace. Instead of trying to hold up the awkward expression, he leans forward to kiss Hank, remind himself one more time that he's alive, they're both alive, and they'll get through this night and this year because he refuses to believe there's an alternative.

"OK," he concedes, murmuring it against Hank's warm mouth. "I'll take it.

"You go," he tells him again, though this time without the need behind it, the desperation. "I'll take care of the body. Try and call it in."

Although if the noises he's hearing around their room are any indication, the department's got its hands full.

"We'll get more done if we split up."