theairlock | week 4

Entry tags:

!round 2,
!week 4

week 4

[Just like the previous week the status quo is restored with frighteningly quick efficiency. PAL still makes the morning and night time announcements through the PIP on each Champion's arm, and still the Champion unitards are freshly laundered and re-hung each morning in their closets. Even the glass roses Choromatsu and Takumi broke after the trial in their fit of anger have been replaced with fresh ones. All signs that there was anything amiss this weekend are completely gone.

There's a new floor to explore, their "reward" for a job well done.]

Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday

[ooc: Don't forget to to turn in your AC for week 3, submit your memory regains and put in your threads for the Benefactors!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

...Of course we can, Church. [Ardyn stood up, looking more genuinely concerned than mostly dead.]

What's going on with you two?

Nothing! Something. We just need to talk to you, mano y mano...y mano. [church] Back in our room might be a good idea. [vamanos?]

Shitsurei shimasu.

[Vamanos.]

[i don't speak spanish, lopez]

[Once they had gotten back to the room, Ardyn shut the door behind him and turned to face the other two in clear confusion.]

What's wrong? Has something happened?

[He shares a look with Junpei, and, welp. Here goes something.

He jerks a thumb at Junpei in all his Izunia-fied glory.]

He's infected with the Starscourge, isn't he.

[Implication: you are infected with the Starscourge.]

[Just casually leans against the door so Ardyn can't open it again.]

Is it the Starscourge or just Starscourge, no article? Unclear.

[And that was how Ardyn turned white as a sheet and looked like he wanted to warp clear through the door and out into space rather than have this conversation.]

I-...it's-

[Damn it. He'd known what this affliction was ever since he'd caught sight of an ashen pale reflection lined with corruption...no, possibly since Mai's demon had scratched his ankle.]

[...Ardyn's blood had been black, and ever since then he suspected what Church and Junpei had now caught on to.]

'Infected' isn't...the right word for this situation. If he were actually sick, we would all know it. He doesn't show most of the ordinary symptoms, and what is there would have progressed to something worse by now.

[Then he paused, glancing away in an attempt to collect himself before looking back to Church and Junpei.]

There's really no point in trying to hide it anymore, is there?

If I were truly afflicted, every single person here would be daemons by now. Myself included.

Maybe PAL's holding it back. [It's a suggestion he makes more in the direction of the floor than at Ardyn.] Whatever the case, it's related, right?

If it's not an infection, then I think it's because you healed people.

[Junpei's not avoiding eye contact, but he's got one arm wrapped around himself, the other supporting his elbow.]

I remembered last night. You said that your powers let you remove the plague before it turns people--remove, but not cure it. Right? So, with nowhere else to go...

[After a beat, he breathes out.]

I should have put it together sooner. I thought it was weird at the time.

I--that's...

[It seemed for a moment that Ardyn had forgotten how to breathe, taking half a step back almost like he felt cornered by an oncoming fight. For a moment he struggled to find a way out of this, fumbling for the right words....and then the resistance simply dropped out of him, Ardyn's legs giving way in favor of sitting on the edge of the nearest bed with a resigned sigh.]

I can't use traditional white magic. Simply healing wounds and afflictions through magic is not something I'm capable of.

[The single greatest secret of the savior king, kept for a lifetime and yet decoded in a matter of weeks.]

My power is...transferral. Every scar on my body is that of a Lucian life spared, every single ounce of the scourge an afflicted soul brought back from the edge of an eternal night.

I'm not truly infected; if I were I would be long since dead. What I think I became is...the bearer of that I wished to save others from.

[His head snaps back up, clearly not expecting that. Jesus lucian christ what the fuck more is there to this? He's hesitant, because he doesn't...know, he doesn't know if Ardyn wants the comfort, but he comes over to sit beside him with a heavy sigh, fluttering some of the hair dangling in his face.]

I thought all those scars were from...fights. From your fights with daemons, before we figured it out. [He maybe maybe maybe should apologize for the pool. He won't, though. Because he doesn't really regret it. Because at the end of the day, nobody gave a shit about his scars or gave him more than a double-take anyway.]

No wonder you think you're supposed to carry the weight of the world. Because you really...really are. You helped all those people, and then... [Vague hand motion. And then something. happened.]

[He holds his tongue. He bites his tongue. There is so much he wants to say about this, about transferal, about the wrong of innocents taking the wounds of others, and all of it is laced through red and black with his own anger.

That's not what Ardyn needs right now. That's not what they need right now. So Junpei grits his teeth, holding his fist before his mouth, and bears it long enough for the next thought.]

Are you supposed to, Ardyn? If white magic is a thing that exists, and you don't have it... is it actually on you to do this?

[With great power comes great responsibility. But Spider-man only does what a spider can.]

It has to be. It-...I'm--

[He faltered again after that first sharp insistence, a very real and very human uncertainty snaking its way into his words.]

...I was chosen by the Crystal. [His right hand brought in close to his chest, Ardyn reminding himself that replica or no, the Ring of the Lucii was still on his finger.] The king foretold in the prophecy, to banish the night and save the world. No one else had this power. Even true healing magic-...a simple Cure or potion couldn't take the plague off the shoulders of the people. So of course I was doing what I was meant to do--saving the innocent and forestalling the night until it could be banished completely!

[He wasn't wrong. Ardyn kept telling himself that, over and over and over in his mind. The gratitude of those he saved, the elation when he told them that yes, of course he could help relieve that pain--he refused to betray any of that and say 'I made a mistake'.]

[But even so, said a dark corner of his mind, was the price to be paid worth the result?]

I was...accomplishing what everyone needed. Gods and mortals alike--I was saving the world--!

Ardyn. There's--I think there's something--there's a difference in what you're saying. There's two concepts here, and I don't--

[He wants to protect Ardyn from himself, but...]

You were forestalling the night. Until it could be banished. But if you were the one to banish it...why forestall it then? What were you supposed to do, heal every single person until all you had left in you was--this? What banishes it?

...Something about the Crystal. The ring--that's a conduit for the line of kings. But to wield the Crystal's power as a whole...

[He's sure he's on the right track. But he doesn't understand enough about Ardyn's world, and he... he wants to help Ardyn. With the Scourge sitting pretty in his head, Junpei knows he doesn't have the empathy to keep from kicking him in the metaphorical face if he keeps climbing blindly after the truth.]

I-...I just wasn't strong enough yet. That must have been it. I just needed to stall for time until I...until I knew how to rid the world of it completely...

[Ardyn trailed off, looking to the ring on his hand and then staring very distantly at the floor.]

But I'm not...the Chosen King. Not anymore. In that last memory, of a world two thousand years ahead of all I once knew, there was another. So I must have failed. Everything the people of Lucis believed I was, everything I dedicated my life to, everything I turned myself into--Ardyn Izunia betrayed all of it, and now it falls to the one hundredth and fourteenth king...Noctis Lucis Caelum now has to bear whatever must come next.

[His fingers clench around the edge of the bed, hating every single moment of this.]

Maybe he stopped caring how to figure it out. But we want to stop it with you. For you. We don't want you to have to go back to...what Junpei has. It's not fucking right, and if we can figure out a way to get it out of you, permanently, and not have to transplant it into someone else...that's what we want.

And don't get us wrong, Ardyn. We don't just want it. We're going to do it.

[Junpei doesn't need emotions to know this for a fact.]

Maybe you're not the Chosen King, Ardyn, but neither the fuck am I, let alone Church. [Sorry, Church.] And we're still here to carry this with you. I'm carrying it right now. We're in a desperate situation with our lives on the line, but there's also--there's an opportunity here. PAL suppressed our powers, shuffled them around, did... things to our bodies and minds that wouldn't be possible in any other place or time. If we can find a way to deal with this here and now--we don't have to leave it to that Noctis kid.

[He sounds like a nerd, anyway.]

Sometimes... sometimes you end up in the history the gods abandoned. [He takes a deep, steadying breath.] But that just means it's ours, now, assholes.

[Ardyn laughed, a sharp and sudden venting of nervous energy instead of the hollow half-emoted sound it had been in the weeks prior. He felt everything as sharply as swords piercing every inch of his body; the cold terror of what he would become, the resignation that he had to carry this for as long as it existed, the guilt that Junpei now held the plague of thousands, and the fear that he had gone about this the wrong way since the day he'd first stepped foot out of Insomnia as a child.]

[So he just laughed, dropping his head into his hands and sounding pained more than anything. Gods, he'd even forgotten how difficult it was simply to be human.]

I'm not myself anymore, not with a body and soul made of Starscourge. And I don't know how long I'll be able to hold on to what little I have left of the Ardyn you all know when I get that back.

Right now, this is who I originally was. Before my coronation, before I was the Chosen, I was this living and breathing person. And that Ardyn doesn't want anyone else to have to shoulder this. Not either of you, Noctis, anyone. If some power we can find here can surpass the Crystal--if there's still an Eos to save, if we can just eradicate all of this, then I want to find it.

But if there isn't...if someone does have to bear the remnants of all those countless lives saved, neither of you are going to stop me. Compassion is the one thing I still have that Ardyn Izunia does not, and even if compassion leads me to forsake myself body and soul I won't turn from it.

Edited 2017-06-09 00:48 (UTC)

[Church has no idea if Junpei's confidence is natural or forced, if it's a product of the scourge in him dulling all else out, if it's because he's so used to being the person that says this sort of stuff that he has to believe it in the face of everything or if he's just...saying it for their sake.

He doesn't have that kind of confidence. Because sometimes, you can't change anything. Sometimes? Sometimes it is what it fucking is, there's nothing you can do, and you'd better get used to it, Nancy, and quit yer bitchin. It's almost funny, when he thinks about it like that. Time after time of not being able to change the outcome. Maybe how they unfold, just slightly, but never, ever the outcome.

Who is he to think that he can change the fate of someone from another universe, one with magic and monsters he doesn't understand? Sometimes a person has to take on everything and be ground into the dirt. It just happens, and ain't that a bitch. Maybe they can do it...and maybe they're just resigned to this. What it is. Would it even be fair to let him go back...?]

We either tear this place apart looking for a clue to help, or we get the fuck out of here and find one out there. You can't go back with this, if you get it back, if we survive this fucked up game. We won't let you. If there's anything out there...

Junpei doesn't sound like he's got much to go back for. And, hey, even if I do, time travel. It took us away, it can put me back where I'm supposed to go.

[Junpei glances at Church for a second, blinking. Oh. Right. Yeah, he's four thousand years removed from where he's supposed to be, right? Even with their group's mismatched backgrounds in his face every day, Junpei still finds it hard to believe time travel brought them here.]

Uh--yeah. Exactly.

[He's distracted for a moment, finger curled at his chin, thinking through the implications of that. Time travel... that's one more possibility, isn't it? For them. For Ardyn.

Right. Junpei looks up again.]

If we blow through every possibility... if there's nothing we can do... then yeah. That's--that's your choice to make, Ardyn. [And far be it from Junpei to take that away from him.] But...

[Only now does he glance to the side, arms crossed.]

I've gotten really damn good at solving impossible puzzles. And I meant what I said yesterday. It's never too late to find a new way out. Or make one.

...You two are truly unbelievable. I hid the truth of my healing for most of my life--as far as I remember--and you put it together in no time at all.

[Ardyn straightened up once he was sure the look on his face resembled something calm rather than the Hydraean-level torrent of worry and concerns he felt.]

I can't imagine there to truly be anything like the Crystal's power. But on the other hand, I would not have imagined most of what's happened here in the past weeks. [As impossible as it seemed to find anything else that could erase the Starscourge...it was just one more impossible thing on a growing pile of them. Was that so unfeasible?]

...Don't tell the others about this yet. If the scourge itself were a danger to them, I would have said so long before now. But I have to be the one to explain what they've been trusting this whole time, and let them do with that information what they will.

Edited 2017-06-09 01:51 (UTC)

Shield. [A nod to Junpei.] Armor. We've got your back. [Does this mean Church is also Captain America?]

I've only ever told Junpei anything, and that's because I'm sure you've told him even more, and he kinda needs to know. Like I said before--I'm not gonna run screaming out of the room about what you are. Whatever it is we want to call you.

[If Junpei is armor, does that mean they're both Iron Man?]

I don't like people keeping secrets from me. Doesn't mean I can't keep my mouth shut myself.

[Finally, Junpei comes away from the door, uncrosses his arms, and sticks his right hand out in front of them, palm-down.]

I'm not used to working on a team. But I'm under the impression that this part's traditional.

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