( on one hand, clarke is very aware she's prying with a bordering edge of doing so rudely. but on the other hand she really doesn't care, the proverbial bit usually shoved between her teeth slackened and curiosity running away from her. and on the third hand, which is really just her left, there's the softly gleaming computer screen looming in front of her which she tentatively reaches out to test the reactivity of.
she's distracted for a long, silent moment. swipes up, swipes down, comes face to face with — )
You can write me an essay if you want.
( — an entirely foreign alphabet comprised of symbols, arrows, numbers. oh come the fuck on she thinks to herself for one vehement moment before resigning to the fact that of course this was going to be encrypted. otherwise it would have been too easy, there hadn't even been a lock on the door... ah well, she's got time. and company. and settles in to try plodding at the keyboard.
the busywork makes settling back into conversation easier. )
Okay. Resonance, huh? ( it's like fonons all over again, but also different. at least her mind is fuzzy and pliable, ready to filter through every answer krouse provides and extrapolate from there until she just gets it. ) Not weight, not shape, just heft... And if I'm remembering correctly, you probably also have to accommodate for momentum, direction, gravity... You do a lot of math in your head, don't you?
But you were stuck in that well for a minute. So you can't just switch with anything, otherwise why not just pick some rocks at the top and — ( clarke makes a zwoop sound to imitate teleportation and... yeah. just yeah. the chorus of slowly clacking keys in the background is slow and plodding, but somehow only serves to undercut the tension. ) So you're constrained by sightlines. But it doesn't have to be a living creature because: backpacks. Name tags.
( she is talking herself through this and he is doomed to suffer through it on the other end of the line. though, counter-take, at least now krouse knows exactly how much attention she'd paid to him and all his little slights of hand. )
...you should probably try to test your limits at some point in the future. Just in case.
[ Krouse leans out into the dark as he listens to Clarke run through her analysis, following the smooth leaps of her logic as she fills in her working theory with details. She's been thinking about this since the first time she saw him do it. He can't say he's surprised, knowing what he knows about her. Of course she'd want to figure it out.
But it still gives him another oddly self-conscious jolt to know that she's been paying that much attention, giving it this much thought. Giving him this much thought, to the extent that she's evaluated his strategic usefulness. She even has notes. ]
You're good at this.
[ The breeze helps cool off the prickling buzz on the back of his neck. He tucks his chin down to encourage it, eyelashes shading over his vision as he lets his eyes almost close. ]
That's almost all right. On the right track, at least. I wouldn't say I'm doing math in my head, exactly. It's more like spinning plates, or drawing a circle. There's math involved, but you do it by feel.
I have to be able to see things to get a lock on them, unless I'm touching them. The closer two things are in mass, the easier it is to switch them. I can adjust if I focus on it, but only up to a point. Which is why no [ he echoes her zwoop, underpinned by something that sounds suspiciously like the verge of laughter ] out of the well.
[ He takes another drag off his cigarette, considering how far he wants to take this. What he thinks she can handle, and what he wants her to know. ]
And I didn't say I haven't tested my limits. I just haven't hit them.
[ At a certain point, things get big enough that moving them starts coming with considerations of collateral damage that outweigh the potential practical applications. ]
Maybe I will write you that essay.
[ He doesn't mean for it to come out as soft as it does, or with as much of a half-promise. He flicks ash from the ember and blows out a thin stream of smoke. ]
So are you going to tell me what this is about, or do I get to live in suspense?
God, math by feel sounds so much better than having to show your work in long division.
( that little modicum of praise rolls off her back — because, yeah she's good at this; had to adjust her whole view of... not just the world, but all worlds in a relatively short span of time after originating from a place that never contained magic or parahumans or powers and finding herself dumped in a reality where they all coexisted. adaptation is key to survival, not just the scratch to the itch curiosity. the preview of a chuckle at her expense also goes ignored, zwoop feels like a perfectly fine use of onomatopoeia, especially if he'd obviously understood what she'd meant by it. idly and unseen, clarke nods along with every bit of information krouse drops, cementing it to memory no matter how hazed it'd be upon review.
and maybe he's soft and endeared when half-promising her a real essay, but she's just doubling down. )
Test them again, then. Find your limit.
( unbothered while doling out homework, equally unbothered when repeatedly questioned as to why they're having this conversation in the first place. lightly; )
It's not about anything specific. I just wanted to understand you better.
( simple. easy. no ulterior motive, though also no gloss over the fact that you could easily translate to your power. it's already common knowledge between them that she enjoys chess, but one cannot play the game without knowing how each piece on the board moves.
then quietly, so quietly, and under her breath, very distracted: )
What the fuck does that even mean? We weren't even here in January...
[ Most of the time, Krouse doesn't go in for being told what to do. He doesn't think he's being difficult about it. The majority of people who want to order him around just aren't people whose input is worth taking into consideration. When someone comes along who happens to not be an idiot, he doesn't have a problem with listening. He might not always do what they say anyway, but he likes to believe the spirit counts for something.
And he likes that she's decided he's worth giving direction, even if she also currently thinks he's insufficiently dedicated to exploring his power. He can change that. ]
Yes, ma'am.
[ There's a crisp little note of humour in his agreement, the kind of thing that would pair with a snapped off salute that would probably earn him one of her rumpled nose half-annoyed, half-confused looks. That's what he's hoping, anyway.
He could keep going like that. He's got a joke about a telescope and getting her an interview with someone in the other bubble city already lined up. But the interest in understanding goes both ways, and he hasn't missed the sounds of her fingers working ponderously over a keyboard. ]
I take it I'm not the only thing you're researching right now? [ And because she seems to prefer it when he's direct: ] What are you working on?
( tragically, today her nose rumples are reserved for a computer. the annoyance directed at windings and odd dates, the confusion compounding every time she glances over her shoulder to find the companion bots just idly plodding along in the background allowing all of this. but clarke hears his assent, and appreciates it. this is good, she'll follow up with him later.
krouse's first version of the question gets a mild hum of acknowledgement — a maybe, in the form of an almost coy hmmm. but upon more a more direct ask, she answers easily. breezily. covergirly. )
[ Krouse stares down at where his fumbled cigarette dropped out of sight, straining against the dark to make out the glow of the cherry before he catches up to realizing it's a) pointless and b) the least of his current concerns. Still half-hanging out the window, he closes his eyes and centers himself. ]
Mind elaborating on that for me, Clarke?
[ Alarm smooths over into tension as he pulls himself back inside his apartment, thumbing the window latches with the heels of his hands against the top edge of the frame so he can ease it shut as quietly as possible. ]
( the importance he places on silence pays off, the scuffle of lunging after a dropped cigarette not even registered because her eyes have just alighted on the very recognizable shape of a folder on screen. )
The computer. The one she has in the basement of the hospital, hardly guarded and not even under lock and key. Though it's obvious why none of that was required, I can't read a single thing in here.
[ He pads across the carpet lightly, careful on the transition to the linoleum in front of his door. ]
So our universal translators don't work on at least one language after all.
[ He picks up his sneakers and carries them back to the couch, sitting down to put them on with the same dedication to quiet he gave closing the window. ]
How are you defining 'hardly guarded' here, exactly?
There's a few of the omnics — ... the bots around. They're all being very pleasant.
( and the light, higher pitch of her voice falls here. because isn't that so very suspicious? clarke had pressed on when she hadn't immediately been dragged away from the opportunity to pry, but still wildly confused as to why. is it just because there's nothing to find, or because aurora and echo believe she wouldn't be able to muscle through the hieroglyphic style text to find anything they don't want her to stumble upon?
almost on cue, when she looks over her shoulder this time, one of the orange painted robots shuffles forward and politely inquires if there's anything it can help her with. and clarke's voice pitches right back into a very (fake) casual high pitch. )
No, I'm fine, just looking. Thanks.
( and somehow that's enough for it?? because it just turns around and goes back to whatever it was meandering with in the first place. a harsh gust of air is snorted out of both her nostrils, and with a faux smile still broadly plastered across her face, clarke turns back to the screen and taps on the folder. )
[ He double knots his laces and tucks their trailing ends under the weave between the eyelets as he listens in on as much of Clarke's conversation with the bot as he can hear. There'd been more voices earlier. Four or five, he thinks, but that doesn't necessarily give him a headcount. ]
Well, I'm glad you're getting along.
[ He's not going anywhere yet. He might not be going anywhere at all. She hasn't asked, and it'd be more than a little overbearing to just show up at the scene of what may or may not be a crime.
He sets his elbows on top of his knees and knits his fingers together, head bowed and eyes half-closed. ]
What does the room look like? Are there servers in there with you, or just a terminal?
The room's clean. No miles of hardware you might expect when it comes to keeping a city this size up and running, it's just a computer. There's a couple files. I'm seeeeeeing...
Yeah, I think those are relatively regular uploads from somewhere every month. ( from elsewhere presumably, which has proved to be aurora's canned response whenever anyone inquires about the whereabouts of echo. ) But I can't figure out where, it's all just — symbols. There was a really, really big one back in what looks like January, but when we got here it was already spring, right? There was all that rain. April showers bring May flowers, or whatever people used to say in the old world.
So was January when Echo picked this planet? And sent Aurora down to start canvassing and laying the groundwork for the infrastructure? How do you think they came up with the name, Etraya? Worlds don't generally have names unless there was a native population around to give it one in the first place.
( she's really just spit-balling for the sake of spit-balling here. with the mild, poorly executed ulterior motive of maybe kinda hoping something she says would trigger a response from the companion bots or computer itself, but thus far they all keep buzzing along. )
[ He builds out a sketch of the room. A set of stairs leading down to an unlocked door, a single computer attended by bots, Clarke seated or standing in front of it. There's only so many places in the hospital that would give access to a space like that, and he doesn't know any of them well enough to narrow it down. ]
It was spring.
[ He rubs his thumb over his knuckles, bouncing his knee as he thinks. The dates on the newspapers have all been strange, jumbled and inconsistent, but the days have passed in regular sequence. The weather has changed steadily, even though that also doesn't make any sense. ]
So we maybe have an idea of when they got the computers up and running. But that doesn't mean it's when they started building. And that's assuming you're looking at something significant. Regular uploads could be anything. Weather reports. Maintenance sweeps. [ He presses his tongue against the backs of his teeth. ] I hate to be this guy, but if you're allowed to be seeing this, there's a reason they're not stopping you.
[ If one of his teammates was pulling this, he'd be telling them to get the fuck out. He doesn't have that luxury with her. He can't even push, or she'll dig in. ]
It could be a name from wherever they come from, I guess.
— yeah, either they think it's not important, or they think I'm an idiot who can't figure it out.
( we're idiots, more likely. all of them, since it wasn't like clarke had jumped through specific hoops or even asked to be granted access to this basement. both of them, considering there's been no interference with this audio call thus far and aurora is undoubtedly watching, like she always is. and maybe there's something to that, this level of encryption is significant and even clicking on the standard, english keyboard is offering her no easy translation key to the symbolic text that most of this information appears in. it'd be frustrating if she were sober; lightly intoxicated as clarke currently is, it's downright infuriating.
for an unseen entity that might as well be acting as their god, for being as omniscient and all known as to specifically tailor the tests to their weaknesses and histories — echo sure does seem to underestimate the traits that probably made them the best candidates for world champions in the first place.
for clarke, that's bull headed stubbornness. give her an inch, and she'll take a mile. )
Weather reports and maintenance sweeps should be a daily occurrence, and something I imagine Aurora could handle internally. All of these look like incoming transmissions, and they're on a — ( monthly pattern. )
...did you notice exactly how long ago the newest group of people arrived here?
[ They'd be the idiots if they thought you were one is also true. He's not going to say it, which is more superstition than justified caution. Clarke hasn't made a secret of her agenda or how she's carrying it out, so it's a little late to try to keep things inconspicuous.
He doesn't think it's a good idea, but that doesn't mean she's stupid. It means she cares more about what she thinks she needs to do than she cares about the potential personal consequences. (So what does it say about him that he hasn't hung up, or even said anything for the sake of the third observer to their conversation - )
Krouse rubs the bridge of his nose as he ducks his head, face screwing up with frustration. ]
About two months ago. [ He doesn't need to check his notes for that. ] So yeah. Maybe it has something to do with that. We know they have information on us.
[ And he keeps following the train of thought, because she'll get there anyway: ] That could be why it's not guarded. They haven't exactly been keen on our privacy.
No they have not, ( clarke agrees easily, but also with the tonal shift of someone who's trying and failing to hold a conversation. all of this would have been information better communicated after the gathering stage, and ideally sober. yet here she is, having dialed krouse up on a whim and subsequently subjecting him to peak anxiety and the occasional long moments of silence while she taps through the touch screen.
but at the same time, information is information. if he'd had to ask about the room, he'd obviously never been down here. and there's a bit of a payout at the end of her studious quiet, having finally revealed — )
Oh, they've got files on every single one of us.
( and it is a long list. scrollable, and in plain english as opposed to coded beyond recognition. there is a cheese grater with a taste for human dignity in clarke's chest, and it chips away at hers when she reaches the C's and double taps on her own name. another long stretch of silence as she skims the page. there's her name, her height, her approximate weight. there's her blood type, engineered as a universal donor like everyone on the ark had been, and in parenthesis, Nightblood. there's the note about her missing kidney, a lack in bone density she'd never really considered but makes sense considering spending the first seventeen years of her life in artificial gravity. there's a brief summary of her as a person, which is insultingly bullet pointed.
Stubborn. Excellent leadership qualities. Impressionable. Kind hearted. Traumatized. Repentant. the list goes on, and while her entire buzz has already been harshed, clarke spares herself reading it to completion and just skips to the next bit, which is Likes & Dislikes. and — )
Damn. "Stale coffee, two packets of sugar, one cannister of cream". If I'd known we could have cheated the drink game by just breaking in a little sooner...
( what would she have done? not embarrassed the two of them by suggesting a game of charades? they'll never know now, and clarke sighs; unseen, brings a hand to her face and pinches the bridge of her nose at eye level. )
[ The long quiet as Clarke navigates through her new discovery goes unbroken on the other end of the call.
Krouse sits through it with his hand cupped loosely over his mouth, his chin in his palm. He's not anxious, exactly, as he waits to learn if she'll give into an obvious temptation. There's nothing he can do about it if she does. Not even any immediate way to know if she does, unless something in his file is damning and jarring enough to make her react thoughtlessly. She'll do whatever it is she's going to do, and he can't change it, so - he waits.
When she makes her second, far more banal announcement, he lets out a soft rush of stale air followed by a crackling burst of quiet, relieved laughter as he buries his hand in his hair and rests his forehead against the heel of his hand. ]
Sorry. I know what you mean, just - that's one way to put it. [ He shakes his head, crooked smile bleeding into his voice. ] 'Oh, if only we had access to the semi-hidden prisoner information files for the icebreaker game, what a missed opportunity that was.'
[ She checked up on herself first, so she'd find out what her opponents think of her. It's smart, in a reckless, nervewracking way. ]
( she'd checked her own file first, and there are dozens of others that practically beg to be read next. there's the one on f. krouse followed by a series of nonsensical numbers right there, but clarke has already exhausted the line of questioning she'd had about him and his powers. and in the long run, this isn't what she came for. )
Oh well. Next time.
( absolutely what she will return to pursue at a later date, just on the off chance it ever comes in handy, but what she actually wants out of this venture is to force past the lines of code on the computer and find some sort of back-alley way to speak directly to echo. given their shared history of somehow unintentionally manifesting worst case scenarios, that's not an objective she's willing to share out loud, or even via text, so there is another unhelpful, lacking silence as she buckles down and tries to focus.
only clarke is no hacker. and no matter how desperately she'd like to interpret raven reyes in this moment, none of the windings make a lick of sense no matter how hard she stares at them. and no matter what she taps on, it's just more symbols. two minutes, and an exceedingly frustrated sigh later, clarke seems to remember she's on a phone call at all. )
Oh, I don't mean to keep you. This is going to take a while.
[ Krouse falls back against the couch, eyes still closed, and listens to the faint sounds coming through the other end of the line. It's not a long enough quiet to lapse far into reverie before she heaves a sigh he can feel in his bones. ]
Keep me from...what do you think is my busy two am schedule, exactly?
[ He knows it's an expression not meant to indicate anything other than politeness, but he'll capitalize on it anyway. ]
Listening in on this is much more interesting than my previous plans. Believe me. [ He shifts on the couch, arching his back to get more comfortable, and lets out a slight resettling sigh of his own. ] Besides. It'll be easier to organize a search party if I have the exact time of your mysterious disappearance at the hands of a mob of robots down.
[ Much as Clarke reflected on wanting to avoid speaking a worst case scenario into existence, Krouse regrets actually saying it as soon as it's said. He falls silent for a second, curling his fingernails into the couch upholstery. ]
You called me for a reason, right? [ More than curiosity about his power. ] I figure the least I can do is stay on the line.
( she has the return quip of sleeping? locked, loaded, and ready to go — at least before krouse manages to drag them both down into some sort of off shoot of gallows humor.
it can't be entirely a joke, not when she'd absolutely called him up just to have some sort of breadcrumb trail left behind in the eventuality she died for pushing too far. but it feels infinitely more ridiculous when so easily caught on to, then spelled out. any other day and clarke would have felt a flare of embarrassment. but also, any other day she wouldn't have reached out in the first place, so.
she doesn't point out that a search party would be stupid, or that the companion bots could probably draw and quarter her before he even got out the door, if that was their initiative. instead clarke just exhales through her nose, sharply and tinged with good humor before immediately going back to uselessly tapping at the touch screen. )
Well, alright. If you insist.
( tap, tap, tap. then almost as an afterthought — )
If you have any questions for me, this is a great time.
( it's reasonable, it's logical, it keeps them both awake and engaged. )
[ Nevermind that he wasn't until she gave him the endorsement to go ahead, or that he doesn't actually have a leg to stand on when it comes to insisting on anything with her.
It's just cracking one thread of tension in the middle of many to drop his voice back into casual lightness and say something semi-ridiculous. He shouldn't feel any better. Nothing has changed except that he's less worried she's going to hang up on him.
But the less reasonable half of his brain is latched onto the open line like a tether. If they're still talking, she's still fine; as long as he keeps her connected, she'll stay fine. ]
And oh, do I have questions.
[ He settles into the couch more comfortably, mostly through determined intent, which makes his relaxing not quite as relaxing as it could be. ]
( clarke isn't so much teasing as she is answering a little too literally, and rambling for good measure as her focus is too diverted towards tapping away at the screen of the computer and squinting at windings like maybe if she glares hard enough she can scare the figures into rewriting themselves into english. the second it exits her mouth she realizes he probably means — )
Living in space is... It was fine, when I was younger. But it was also the only thing I or my parents ever knew. When talking to people whose Earth's never experienced a nuclear apocalypse, it starts to sound a little grim.
( and that always sucks, because the ark in childhood had been the only place she'd ever managed to feel safe. even if that was a self-centered, privileged, biased lens through which to view it. the ark was childhood, and thus still holds a piece of her heart, along with almost all her memories regarding loved ones lost. but time, distance, and perspective have a special way of turning something joyful into something bittersweet. has she ever really known peace? the promise of a death sentence for any minor infraction had swung above her throat like a pendulum since birth, it'd just been a shadow one grew accustomed to. )
Did you mean what the view was like? The food? Recreation? Do you want to know how it all started?
( the simple, the banal, the stuff she's already been over in the middle of corrine's due to an introductory plaque and many times before that. the history. the safe stuff, the bits that were out of her control and thus in no way her fault. )
[ Fine followed by a little grim from Clarke is suggestive of circumstances that most people would find inhumane, intolerable, or both. He hadn't been imagining her on a Star Trek style space installation, but now he adjusts his approximation downwards a few degrees.
It should mean he shifts the topic to something else less likely to be lined with hidden unpleasant stumbling blocks. But there's also vast, dark, cold, and beautiful, a fragment of description that almost was an inadvertent joke even as it gestures at something Krouse, for all his cynicism, still thinks of with a certain kind of wonder.
He could pin all his curiosity on that, but that's not really the whole story. He hums a single quiet, thoughtful note. ]
Not a specific enough question. That's on me. I mean...let's try this. What do you wish people would ask you so they'd actually understand something about what it was like? What would you want me to get, if you had to pick one thing?
( oh. well, now — there's a question. one that somehow manages to strike clarke right between the ribs, puncturing her lungs. air only escapes through her nostrils, but she's still incapable of stopping it as her fingers pause and mind drifts.
what would she like other people to know? in what way could she properly summarize the ark's everything in a way that other people would completely understand? so many small things fall by the wayside here; ask me about our stock in the medbay. ask me about the time strep throat quarantine shut down an entire wing of the ark. ask me about the laws. ask me about our prison system, the class disparity and how little i thought about it because i was one of the privileged. ask me how boring it must have been sometimes, to the point i doodled enough to advance to decent portraits. ask me about the food. ask what it was like to genuinely believe we were the last of our species, and did everything in the name of hopefully seeing through to a return to the ground. ask me how much i loved earth before i'd even managed to step foot on it.
moonshine pulls her thoughts to wild edges in that last stretch, and scatters any better ideas entirely. but in the end clarke still manages to scrounge up )
They could ask what our education was like. I think you can learn a lot about any given population based on what they decide to teach their youth.
And to that I'd answer: our two main mandatory classes were Earth Skills, and then whatever apprenticeship we adopted when we were young. You could pick, but people tended to keep to their own stations for that a lot; sons of farmers because farmers, daughters of mechanics became mechanics, hydro stayed with hydro, anyone could become a guard. My mother was the Chief of Medical, and I was seven when I decided I wanted to follow her. We were also taught general health and safety, and math, and grammar, and — other things. But it always managed to circle back around to the main two. And we weren't even expected to go back to Earth; it was supposed to be another 100 years before the planet was habitable, we were just supposed to pass it all down to our children.
When he was a kid, he'd never had to think about surviving. The idea that children were the future was a nebulous sentiment, not a practical reality. What he was going to grow up to be was a source of sometimes embarrassing, sometimes flattering speculation, but it wasn't a decision he had to make based on anything but what he might want to do with himself one day.
He tries to imagine what it'd be like to grow up with the weight of passing down a legacy you'd never see through yourself. The kind of things that you'd do if you took it seriously, like Clarke does, with no reason to question the reality pressing in on you from all sides. ]
That sounds like a lot of pressure.
[ He keeps his tone deliberately neutral, his curiosity soft. He doesn't want to sound like he's implying it was too much. If the fate of humanity post-apocalypse really did depend on them, what could be too much?
It just still doesn't sound great, but hearing that from someone raised in a relative lap of luxury probably wouldn't go over well. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
she's distracted for a long, silent moment. swipes up, swipes down, comes face to face with — )
You can write me an essay if you want.
( — an entirely foreign alphabet comprised of symbols, arrows, numbers. oh come the fuck on she thinks to herself for one vehement moment before resigning to the fact that of course this was going to be encrypted. otherwise it would have been too easy, there hadn't even been a lock on the door... ah well, she's got time. and company. and settles in to try plodding at the keyboard.
the busywork makes settling back into conversation easier. )
Okay. Resonance, huh? ( it's like fonons all over again, but also different. at least her mind is fuzzy and pliable, ready to filter through every answer krouse provides and extrapolate from there until she just gets it. ) Not weight, not shape, just heft... And if I'm remembering correctly, you probably also have to accommodate for momentum, direction, gravity... You do a lot of math in your head, don't you?
But you were stuck in that well for a minute. So you can't just switch with anything, otherwise why not just pick some rocks at the top and — ( clarke makes a zwoop sound to imitate teleportation and... yeah. just yeah. the chorus of slowly clacking keys in the background is slow and plodding, but somehow only serves to undercut the tension. ) So you're constrained by sightlines. But it doesn't have to be a living creature because: backpacks. Name tags.
( she is talking herself through this and he is doomed to suffer through it on the other end of the line. though, counter-take, at least now krouse knows exactly how much attention she'd paid to him and all his little slights of hand. )
...you should probably try to test your limits at some point in the future. Just in case.
no subject
But it still gives him another oddly self-conscious jolt to know that she's been paying that much attention, giving it this much thought. Giving him this much thought, to the extent that she's evaluated his strategic usefulness. She even has notes. ]
You're good at this.
[ The breeze helps cool off the prickling buzz on the back of his neck. He tucks his chin down to encourage it, eyelashes shading over his vision as he lets his eyes almost close. ]
That's almost all right. On the right track, at least. I wouldn't say I'm doing math in my head, exactly. It's more like spinning plates, or drawing a circle. There's math involved, but you do it by feel.
I have to be able to see things to get a lock on them, unless I'm touching them. The closer two things are in mass, the easier it is to switch them. I can adjust if I focus on it, but only up to a point. Which is why no [ he echoes her zwoop, underpinned by something that sounds suspiciously like the verge of laughter ] out of the well.
[ He takes another drag off his cigarette, considering how far he wants to take this. What he thinks she can handle, and what he wants her to know. ]
And I didn't say I haven't tested my limits. I just haven't hit them.
[ At a certain point, things get big enough that moving them starts coming with considerations of collateral damage that outweigh the potential practical applications. ]
Maybe I will write you that essay.
[ He doesn't mean for it to come out as soft as it does, or with as much of a half-promise. He flicks ash from the ember and blows out a thin stream of smoke. ]
So are you going to tell me what this is about, or do I get to live in suspense?
no subject
( that little modicum of praise rolls off her back — because, yeah she's good at this; had to adjust her whole view of... not just the world, but all worlds in a relatively short span of time after originating from a place that never contained magic or parahumans or powers and finding herself dumped in a reality where they all coexisted. adaptation is key to survival, not just the scratch to the itch curiosity. the preview of a chuckle at her expense also goes ignored, zwoop feels like a perfectly fine use of onomatopoeia, especially if he'd obviously understood what she'd meant by it. idly and unseen, clarke nods along with every bit of information krouse drops, cementing it to memory no matter how hazed it'd be upon review.
and maybe he's soft and endeared when half-promising her a real essay, but she's just doubling down. )
Test them again, then. Find your limit.
( unbothered while doling out homework, equally unbothered when repeatedly questioned as to why they're having this conversation in the first place. lightly; )
It's not about anything specific. I just wanted to understand you better.
( simple. easy. no ulterior motive, though also no gloss over the fact that you could easily translate to your power. it's already common knowledge between them that she enjoys chess, but one cannot play the game without knowing how each piece on the board moves.
then quietly, so quietly, and under her breath, very distracted: )
What the fuck does that even mean? We weren't even here in January...
no subject
And he likes that she's decided he's worth giving direction, even if she also currently thinks he's insufficiently dedicated to exploring his power. He can change that. ]
Yes, ma'am.
[ There's a crisp little note of humour in his agreement, the kind of thing that would pair with a snapped off salute that would probably earn him one of her rumpled nose half-annoyed, half-confused looks. That's what he's hoping, anyway.
He could keep going like that. He's got a joke about a telescope and getting her an interview with someone in the other bubble city already lined up. But the interest in understanding goes both ways, and he hasn't missed the sounds of her fingers working ponderously over a keyboard. ]
I take it I'm not the only thing you're researching right now? [ And because she seems to prefer it when he's direct: ] What are you working on?
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krouse's first version of the question gets a mild hum of acknowledgement — a maybe, in the form of an almost coy hmmm. but upon more a more direct ask, she answers easily. breezily.
covergirly. )Oh, I'm snooping through Aurora's computer.
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You're w-
[ His precipitous spike of alarm is interrupted by a scuff against wood and sucked inhale. ]
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[ Krouse stares down at where his fumbled cigarette dropped out of sight, straining against the dark to make out the glow of the cherry before he catches up to realizing it's a) pointless and b) the least of his current concerns. Still half-hanging out the window, he closes his eyes and centers himself. ]
Mind elaborating on that for me, Clarke?
[ Alarm smooths over into tension as he pulls himself back inside his apartment, thumbing the window latches with the heels of his hands against the top edge of the frame so he can ease it shut as quietly as possible. ]
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The computer. The one she has in the basement of the hospital, hardly guarded and not even under lock and key. Though it's obvious why none of that was required, I can't read a single thing in here.
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[ He pads across the carpet lightly, careful on the transition to the linoleum in front of his door. ]
So our universal translators don't work on at least one language after all.
[ He picks up his sneakers and carries them back to the couch, sitting down to put them on with the same dedication to quiet he gave closing the window. ]
How are you defining 'hardly guarded' here, exactly?
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( and the light, higher pitch of her voice falls here. because isn't that so very suspicious? clarke had pressed on when she hadn't immediately been dragged away from the opportunity to pry, but still wildly confused as to why. is it just because there's nothing to find, or because aurora and echo believe she wouldn't be able to muscle through the hieroglyphic style text to find anything they don't want her to stumble upon?
almost on cue, when she looks over her shoulder this time, one of the orange painted robots shuffles forward and politely inquires if there's anything it can help her with. and clarke's voice pitches right back into a very (fake) casual high pitch. )
No, I'm fine, just looking. Thanks.
( and somehow that's enough for it?? because it just turns around and goes back to whatever it was meandering with in the first place. a harsh gust of air is snorted out of both her nostrils, and with a faux smile still broadly plastered across her face, clarke turns back to the screen and taps on the folder. )
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Well, I'm glad you're getting along.
[ He's not going anywhere yet. He might not be going anywhere at all. She hasn't asked, and it'd be more than a little overbearing to just show up at the scene of what may or may not be a crime.
He sets his elbows on top of his knees and knits his fingers together, head bowed and eyes half-closed. ]
What does the room look like? Are there servers in there with you, or just a terminal?
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Yeah, I think those are relatively regular uploads from somewhere every month. ( from elsewhere presumably, which has proved to be aurora's canned response whenever anyone inquires about the whereabouts of echo. ) But I can't figure out where, it's all just — symbols. There was a really, really big one back in what looks like January, but when we got here it was already spring, right? There was all that rain. April showers bring May flowers, or whatever people used to say in the old world.
So was January when Echo picked this planet? And sent Aurora down to start canvassing and laying the groundwork for the infrastructure? How do you think they came up with the name, Etraya? Worlds don't generally have names unless there was a native population around to give it one in the first place.
( she's really just spit-balling for the sake of spit-balling here. with the mild, poorly executed ulterior motive of maybe kinda hoping something she says would trigger a response from the companion bots or computer itself, but thus far they all keep buzzing along. )
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It was spring.
[ He rubs his thumb over his knuckles, bouncing his knee as he thinks. The dates on the newspapers have all been strange, jumbled and inconsistent, but the days have passed in regular sequence. The weather has changed steadily, even though that also doesn't make any sense. ]
So we maybe have an idea of when they got the computers up and running. But that doesn't mean it's when they started building. And that's assuming you're looking at something significant. Regular uploads could be anything. Weather reports. Maintenance sweeps. [ He presses his tongue against the backs of his teeth. ] I hate to be this guy, but if you're allowed to be seeing this, there's a reason they're not stopping you.
[ If one of his teammates was pulling this, he'd be telling them to get the fuck out. He doesn't have that luxury with her. He can't even push, or she'll dig in. ]
It could be a name from wherever they come from, I guess.
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— yeah, either they think it's not important, or they think I'm an idiot who can't figure it out.
( we're idiots, more likely. all of them, since it wasn't like clarke had jumped through specific hoops or even asked to be granted access to this basement. both of them, considering there's been no interference with this audio call thus far and aurora is undoubtedly watching, like she always is. and maybe there's something to that, this level of encryption is significant and even clicking on the standard, english keyboard is offering her no easy translation key to the symbolic text that most of this information appears in. it'd be frustrating if she were sober; lightly intoxicated as clarke currently is, it's downright infuriating.
for an unseen entity that might as well be acting as their god, for being as omniscient and all known as to specifically tailor the tests to their weaknesses and histories — echo sure does seem to underestimate the traits that probably made them the best candidates for world champions in the first place.
for clarke, that's bull headed stubbornness. give her an inch, and she'll take a mile. )
Weather reports and maintenance sweeps should be a daily occurrence, and something I imagine Aurora could handle internally. All of these look like incoming transmissions, and they're on a — ( monthly pattern. )
...did you notice exactly how long ago the newest group of people arrived here?
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[ They'd be the idiots if they thought you were one is also true. He's not going to say it, which is more superstition than justified caution. Clarke hasn't made a secret of her agenda or how she's carrying it out, so it's a little late to try to keep things inconspicuous.
He doesn't think it's a good idea, but that doesn't mean she's stupid. It means she cares more about what she thinks she needs to do than she cares about the potential personal consequences. (So what does it say about him that he hasn't hung up, or even said anything for the sake of the third observer to their conversation - )
Krouse rubs the bridge of his nose as he ducks his head, face screwing up with frustration. ]
About two months ago. [ He doesn't need to check his notes for that. ] So yeah. Maybe it has something to do with that. We know they have information on us.
[ And he keeps following the train of thought, because she'll get there anyway: ] That could be why it's not guarded. They haven't exactly been keen on our privacy.
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but at the same time, information is information. if he'd had to ask about the room, he'd obviously never been down here. and there's a bit of a payout at the end of her studious quiet, having finally revealed — )
Oh, they've got files on every single one of us.
( and it is a long list. scrollable, and in plain english as opposed to coded beyond recognition. there is a cheese grater with a taste for human dignity in clarke's chest, and it chips away at hers when she reaches the C's and double taps on her own name. another long stretch of silence as she skims the page. there's her name, her height, her approximate weight. there's her blood type, engineered as a universal donor like everyone on the ark had been, and in parenthesis, Nightblood. there's the note about her missing kidney, a lack in bone density she'd never really considered but makes sense considering spending the first seventeen years of her life in artificial gravity. there's a brief summary of her as a person, which is insultingly bullet pointed.
Stubborn. Excellent leadership qualities. Impressionable. Kind hearted. Traumatized. Repentant. the list goes on, and while her entire buzz has already been harshed, clarke spares herself reading it to completion and just skips to the next bit, which is Likes & Dislikes. and — )
Damn. "Stale coffee, two packets of sugar, one cannister of cream". If I'd known we could have cheated the drink game by just breaking in a little sooner...
( what would she have done? not embarrassed the two of them by suggesting a game of charades? they'll never know now, and clarke sighs; unseen, brings a hand to her face and pinches the bridge of her nose at eye level. )
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Krouse sits through it with his hand cupped loosely over his mouth, his chin in his palm. He's not anxious, exactly, as he waits to learn if she'll give into an obvious temptation. There's nothing he can do about it if she does. Not even any immediate way to know if she does, unless something in his file is damning and jarring enough to make her react thoughtlessly. She'll do whatever it is she's going to do, and he can't change it, so - he waits.
When she makes her second, far more banal announcement, he lets out a soft rush of stale air followed by a crackling burst of quiet, relieved laughter as he buries his hand in his hair and rests his forehead against the heel of his hand. ]
Sorry. I know what you mean, just - that's one way to put it. [ He shakes his head, crooked smile bleeding into his voice. ] 'Oh, if only we had access to the semi-hidden prisoner information files for the icebreaker game, what a missed opportunity that was.'
[ She checked up on herself first, so she'd find out what her opponents think of her. It's smart, in a reckless, nervewracking way. ]
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Oh well. Next time.
( absolutely what she will return to pursue at a later date, just on the off chance it ever comes in handy, but what she actually wants out of this venture is to force past the lines of code on the computer and find some sort of back-alley way to speak directly to echo. given their shared history of somehow unintentionally manifesting worst case scenarios, that's not an objective she's willing to share out loud, or even via text, so there is another unhelpful, lacking silence as she buckles down and tries to focus.
only clarke is no hacker. and no matter how desperately she'd like to interpret raven reyes in this moment, none of the windings make a lick of sense no matter how hard she stares at them. and no matter what she taps on, it's just more symbols. two minutes, and an exceedingly frustrated sigh later, clarke seems to remember she's on a phone call at all. )
Oh, I don't mean to keep you. This is going to take a while.
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Keep me from...what do you think is my busy two am schedule, exactly?
[ He knows it's an expression not meant to indicate anything other than politeness, but he'll capitalize on it anyway. ]
Listening in on this is much more interesting than my previous plans. Believe me. [ He shifts on the couch, arching his back to get more comfortable, and lets out a slight resettling sigh of his own. ] Besides. It'll be easier to organize a search party if I have the exact time of your mysterious disappearance at the hands of a mob of robots down.
[ Much as Clarke reflected on wanting to avoid speaking a worst case scenario into existence, Krouse regrets actually saying it as soon as it's said. He falls silent for a second, curling his fingernails into the couch upholstery. ]
You called me for a reason, right? [ More than curiosity about his power. ] I figure the least I can do is stay on the line.
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it can't be entirely a joke, not when she'd absolutely called him up just to have some sort of breadcrumb trail left behind in the eventuality she died for pushing too far. but it feels infinitely more ridiculous when so easily caught on to, then spelled out. any other day and clarke would have felt a flare of embarrassment. but also, any other day she wouldn't have reached out in the first place, so.
she doesn't point out that a search party would be stupid, or that the companion bots could probably draw and quarter her before he even got out the door, if that was their initiative. instead clarke just exhales through her nose, sharply and tinged with good humor before immediately going back to uselessly tapping at the touch screen. )
Well, alright. If you insist.
( tap, tap, tap. then almost as an afterthought — )
If you have any questions for me, this is a great time.
( it's reasonable, it's logical, it keeps them both awake and engaged. )
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[ Nevermind that he wasn't until she gave him the endorsement to go ahead, or that he doesn't actually have a leg to stand on when it comes to insisting on anything with her.
It's just cracking one thread of tension in the middle of many to drop his voice back into casual lightness and say something semi-ridiculous. He shouldn't feel any better. Nothing has changed except that he's less worried she's going to hang up on him.
But the less reasonable half of his brain is latched onto the open line like a tether. If they're still talking, she's still fine; as long as he keeps her connected, she'll stay fine. ]
And oh, do I have questions.
[ He settles into the couch more comfortably, mostly through determined intent, which makes his relaxing not quite as relaxing as it could be. ]
What's space like?
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( clarke isn't so much teasing as she is answering a little too literally, and rambling for good measure as her focus is too diverted towards tapping away at the screen of the computer and squinting at windings like maybe if she glares hard enough she can scare the figures into rewriting themselves into english. the second it exits her mouth she realizes he probably means — )
Living in space is... It was fine, when I was younger. But it was also the only thing I or my parents ever knew. When talking to people whose Earth's never experienced a nuclear apocalypse, it starts to sound a little grim.
( and that always sucks, because the ark in childhood had been the only place she'd ever managed to feel safe. even if that was a self-centered, privileged, biased lens through which to view it. the ark was childhood, and thus still holds a piece of her heart, along with almost all her memories regarding loved ones lost. but time, distance, and perspective have a special way of turning something joyful into something bittersweet. has she ever really known peace? the promise of a death sentence for any minor infraction had swung above her throat like a pendulum since birth, it'd just been a shadow one grew accustomed to. )
Did you mean what the view was like? The food? Recreation? Do you want to know how it all started?
( the simple, the banal, the stuff she's already been over in the middle of corrine's due to an introductory plaque and many times before that. the history. the safe stuff, the bits that were out of her control and thus in no way her fault. )
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It should mean he shifts the topic to something else less likely to be lined with hidden unpleasant stumbling blocks. But there's also vast, dark, cold, and beautiful, a fragment of description that almost was an inadvertent joke even as it gestures at something Krouse, for all his cynicism, still thinks of with a certain kind of wonder.
He could pin all his curiosity on that, but that's not really the whole story. He hums a single quiet, thoughtful note. ]
Not a specific enough question. That's on me. I mean...let's try this. What do you wish people would ask you so they'd actually understand something about what it was like? What would you want me to get, if you had to pick one thing?
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what would she like other people to know? in what way could she properly summarize the ark's everything in a way that other people would completely understand? so many small things fall by the wayside here; ask me about our stock in the medbay. ask me about the time strep throat quarantine shut down an entire wing of the ark. ask me about the laws. ask me about our prison system, the class disparity and how little i thought about it because i was one of the privileged. ask me how boring it must have been sometimes, to the point i doodled enough to advance to decent portraits. ask me about the food. ask what it was like to genuinely believe we were the last of our species, and did everything in the name of hopefully seeing through to a return to the ground. ask me how much i loved earth before i'd even managed to step foot on it.
moonshine pulls her thoughts to wild edges in that last stretch, and scatters any better ideas entirely. but in the end clarke still manages to scrounge up )
They could ask what our education was like. I think you can learn a lot about any given population based on what they decide to teach their youth.
And to that I'd answer: our two main mandatory classes were Earth Skills, and then whatever apprenticeship we adopted when we were young. You could pick, but people tended to keep to their own stations for that a lot; sons of farmers because farmers, daughters of mechanics became mechanics, hydro stayed with hydro, anyone could become a guard. My mother was the Chief of Medical, and I was seven when I decided I wanted to follow her. We were also taught general health and safety, and math, and grammar, and — other things. But it always managed to circle back around to the main two. And we weren't even expected to go back to Earth; it was supposed to be another 100 years before the planet was habitable, we were just supposed to pass it all down to our children.
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When he was a kid, he'd never had to think about surviving. The idea that children were the future was a nebulous sentiment, not a practical reality. What he was going to grow up to be was a source of sometimes embarrassing, sometimes flattering speculation, but it wasn't a decision he had to make based on anything but what he might want to do with himself one day.
He tries to imagine what it'd be like to grow up with the weight of passing down a legacy you'd never see through yourself. The kind of things that you'd do if you took it seriously, like Clarke does, with no reason to question the reality pressing in on you from all sides. ]
That sounds like a lot of pressure.
[ He keeps his tone deliberately neutral, his curiosity soft. He doesn't want to sound like he's implying it was too much. If the fate of humanity post-apocalypse really did depend on them, what could be too much?
It just still doesn't sound great, but hearing that from someone raised in a relative lap of luxury probably wouldn't go over well. ]
Do you mind if I ask about the 'supposed to'?
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