thecapitol | you're caught in my head like a thorn on a vine [closed]

Who| The Signless, Roland and (later) the Psiioniic
What| Signless has a small meltdown in the wake of Sigma's broadcast, one he can't weather alone
Where| D4/Roland's room
When| Right after Sigma's broadcast
Warnings/Notes| Mentions of violence/brainwashing/slavery, possibly other terrible things.

Three days. Three days of only knowing the Initiate's fate as a vague uncertainty, of assuming the worst and hoping for the best. Signless had known going in there was a high chance that if anyone would take the hardest fall for this it would be his moirail. He'd thought he was prepared for that, but what he'd been preparing for was an execution. This is worse. This is worse in a way that is deeply personal, and it's with mounting rage and disbelief that he watches it unfold on the communicator. He can't even finish watching the broadcast; once Sigma becomes the focus again he physically takes off his communicator, shoves it in a drawer, and walks across the room to put as much distance between him and it as he can. He can still hear it muffled from the drawer and presumably from the television in the District 12 commons but none of the words manage to register.

A long time ago the Signless described his anger as liquid filling a cup. With each new atrocity he witnessed both on Alternia and later in Panem a little more liquid would pour in, until he would either have to risk his anger spilling over the brim or find a bigger cup. For the very first time there is no cup big enough. He cannot look at this objectively and set it aside in a box in his mind with the knowledge that it will one day be repaid with due justice. It's too raw, too close too his heart, too much after how much Kurloz Makara has already suffered trying to atone for a future he'll never act out. He understands now, he thinks, why his Disciple held herself like she'd been burned through to the core by his own execution. He understands that grief and rage that fate could be so cruel to someone who just wanted to do good.

He feels as though he might vibrate out of his skin. There's a fire at the back of his throat and behind his eyes. He can feel that he's on the verge of something and the boiling energy inside of him hasn't decided what yet. He paces around his room once, twice, and then finally leaves it and directs his bare feet toward the elevator and District 4. He needs someone to tell him not to do something he'll regret because right now he doesn't trust himself to have anything resembling good judgement.

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Roland reacts immediately, sliding one arm around Signless' back, one over his front, and turning toward him. He presses his face against that thick dark hair, ignoring the blunt, rounded horn digging into his cheek. Familiar as Roland is with grief, he doesn't know which way this particular grief will turn - Signless has kept it from becoming dangerous once, heading here instead of making a public protest or, worse, trying to confront a gamemaker directly. But that's not really a guarantee he'll be able to do it again. This safer sadness is more what Roland was expecting than the startling, red-eyed rage with which Signless had first greeted him, and if he were thinking of such things Roland would find it impossible to figure which reaction he prefers.

"You did well coming to me, dear," Roland says in a quiet, steady voice, because comforting lies like everything is going to be okay may always be beyond him. "You did very well."

If Roland had tried to tell him that everything was going to be okay Signless might have actually hit him. He doesn't have time for empty words and he's glad Roland doesn't either, glad that out of all of the humans he could have fallen into a quadrant with he's managed to find one with some practicality.

He turns into the hug and slips his arms around Roland's shoulders, holding him like he's afraid he might disappear -- and who could blame him? This keeps happening. Everyone he's loved has been taken from him eventually in one way or another here.

"Thank you," he says, voice harsh and strained in the way voices often are when the speaker is trying to talk through tears. More than 'thank you for the comfort' he means 'thank you for still being here, for being alive and relatively safe'. He lets himself cry because it's easier than talking, because he knows Roland won't mind, not even when the red of his tears makes unsightly splotches on the fabric of his shirt.

"I couldn't be alone with that kind of anger," he says once the sobs have died off into quiet sniffles and hiccups. "I would have burnt myself up. I have that inside of me all the time, Roland, and I hold it back because there are still things in this world worth caring about and hoping for. That's why I needed you. I needed to be reminded of that."

Roland considers it, that anger. It isn't a foreign topic, generally speaking. That rage is what he'd shaped so carefully in Susannah and Eddie, what moves him through all the battles he's ever fought - or what used to, when those battles weren't arranged and recorded for an audience of greedy fools.

In any case, he knows that anger. More than knows it. But he's said before that Signless isn't a gunslinger, and knowing about the rage in him makes that no less true. So this new fact does not truly surprise Roland - it's interesting, though, and he takes a moment to consider it and file it away. Then his hand starts moving slowly and firmly up and down the line of Signless' back.

As Signless predicted, his tears have stained the starched white of Roland's shirt, but that is so low on Roland's list of priorities that he almost doesn't notice it. What he does notice is the color of those stains. A little unsettling, first seeing that, in the same way that seeing the alien red of Signless' eyes when he first arrived had been. But this, at least, is easily shaken off; if that weren't supposed to happen, Signless might have at least acted surprised.

Or perhaps not, considering. They both have a few other things to focus on.

In a gunslinger, that anger could have been molded, used. It wouldn't need to be held back so much as controlled. Signless is not a gunslinger. Besides that, he is an adult in ways that Roland does not recall Eddie and Susannah ever quite being. He is old enough to know himself, to be set in some of his ways. Signless knows what he needs. If he needs to hold his anger back, if he needs to be reminded - "Then that's what I'll do. And if you need to spend some of that anger on me I'll do that, too."

What might have been a smile flashes at the corner of his lips for just a moment before it disappears. He doesn't have the heart in him to smile right now but the gratitude is there all the same. He also doesn't really have it in him to wipe away the smudges of tears on his face -- and that would require letting go of Roland, something he really does not want to do right now.

He knows what will happen if he doesn't hold back his rage. He's seen pictures, read transcripts, been told by trolls who watched it happen. There is a difference between holding his anger inside of him as a reminder and letting it consume him and turn him into a bitter and hateful person. It isn't a matter of strength of character, he doesn't think. It isn't that he's too weak. It's that the kind of strength he might gain from letting his anger out isn't the kind he wants to wield. That, probably, is why he'll never be a gunslinger -- why he'd never want to be.

"I couldn't. It isn't your fault." If he couldn't even raise a hand against Roland earlier then he certainly won't be able to now that he's a little more himself. Maybe if there was even a little bit of a black tinge to their relationship, but there isn't.

"Crying helped, anyway. We'll find ways to burn off the rest of it."

Roland nods, thinks briefly that when people mention burning off emotions what they usually mean is fucking.

He looks Signless over a moment. Decides against the suggestion.

"Come on," he murmurs instead, adjusting his hold around the tired, grieving man pressed against him and moving to stand. "If you're done with anger for a while, let's get you up off this floor. See if you can take a rest." Roland's hand moves over the curls on the back of Signless' head, and he pulls him a little closer. Rest won't truly help, because nothing is truly going to help. But Signless needs it, and Roland will be here when he wakes.

That's probably a good decision, because that's not at all the kind of burning Signless means. Not that he wouldn't appreciate the physical and emotional closeness sex can entail, just... not now.

Human beds aren't exactly like cocoons, but being curled up beneath the covers simulates that feeling of comfort well enough. Signless slips in and out of wakefulness. There's too much going on in his head for him to really sleep but at least he can fitfully doze. It's better than nothing.

you're caught in my head like a thorn on a vine [closed]

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We can probably call this done!