2010-04-15 - Resonant Frequency

MERIDA ISLAND

MEDICAL CENTER

EVENING OR SOMETHING, I GUESS

*LAW AND ORDER SOUND*

It's been hours since Rachel's eye operation - slightly fewer hours since she passed out in her personal recoery room in Merida Island's medical center. Compared to the de Danaan, Merida is a very clean place - clean hallways lead to clean hangars and engineering spaces, and the medical center is no different, with walls a soothing pale yellow. Most of the medical center is of the military style, with long lines of beds set up next to each other with no real privacy aside from occasional curtains for people who need them. But Rachel is a VIP, by virtue of Tessa's interest in her if not her name, so she gets the comfy rooms with the monitors by her bed that are /currently/ showing a sandy, tropical beach, but which can be reprogrammed to show various other useful data.

Tessa is currently sitting in her room, quietly reading through reports with her legs crossed. The cloning is going well. It won't be too long now until they're able to run the operation...might even be before Rachel fully regains her sight.

There was an unnatural spike in her heart rate as the anasthetics were administered, a nervousness that could not be explained. The push of IV drugs, the gas in the facemask being laid over her nose and mouth-- and then, uncontrolled and unabashed fear welling up inside of her. Still, she succumbed. Still, she seems to be all right, especially as she wakes up in her own personal room, something that she didn't expect.

The left side of her face is wrapped in bandages, a few twining around the crown of her head. The device clipped on her left index finger keeps a check of her pulserate, wireless pads and monitors set on her arms, her neck, and chest.

She can feel the swelling in the left side of her face. It hurts-- it hurts a lot, like someone had just, say, tore out her left eye and fitted a new one into the socket. Her eyelids try to move, shift-- but only the right side manages to actually open. The world's blurry, and she feels like she's been in this situation before.

She doesn't see Cagalli holding a gun.

She sees Tessa, sitting in a chair.

Her head lulling to the side, her lips smack once or twice before she instinctively attempts to sit upright-- and feels rather dizzy for all the effort. "Nnnnn-- T-Tessa?"

Well, all things considered, a healthy fear of hospitals and drugs is probably not an unexpected thing, for someone like Rachel.

Tessa continues looking through the papers, humming to herself a tuneless melody from somewhere on the far side of the unconscious - falling out of her head without really being processed at all. The Tau drive has been retund for orange particles. It's a process even Nora can do. Well, 'even'; Nora's their brightest mind, an MIT grad with top honors. She just...can't keep up with Tessa.

Tessa tries to keep her stimulated, keep her working. She doesn't like the feeling that her presence makes someone unimportant.

Either way, with the drive fixed up, they /should/ be able to safely simulate a catastrophic particle dump by just putting the cloned leg in a sealed environment pumped full of particles. Hm hm, flaws, flaws - always little flaws, even without knowing the formulas Tessa can see places it might go wrong, places the lie shows through. She just has to hope they miss the little gaps; it will be easy enough. Only an ace analyst would be able to see it...she hopes.

Her eyes track up, and she gets that soft smile on her face again, uncrossing her legs and setting the files down on her lap. "Rachel," she says. "You're awake. Are you alright?"

As she sits up quickly, it becomes obvious that she's dizzy. The slope of her head, the sway of her shoulder, and the eventual grip onto the rails of the hospital bed to keep herself steady. The disorienting side-effects of the painkillers that she's on doesn't seem to help the situation, either.

Her mind is a million miles away from the idea of cloning limbs or setting up the evidence to make it look like she's dead and gone. It is, however, swirling around all the things around her, all the people she's come to know and trust. It's a rather violent torrent of emotion rushing outward at once--

-- and then it settles, as she seems to lean forward, rather than backward. Even under the effect of the drugs, she seems to get a grip of her situation, where she is, and why.

Rachel's hand lifts slowly to her left eye, gingerly resting upon the layers of gauze, padding, and bandage wrapped around her head.

"D-Did it... m-my head's all... urhh..."

Tessa can't feel her spinning head, her whirling thoughts; Tessa is, in truth, a pretty mediocre Whispered, but she has developed a razor sharp sense of herself. It's a necessity - she works with Katharon. If she didn't have that...she would already have been lost, dragged away into some newtype's resonance, unwitting of the damage he had inflicted.

But still, she's fairly empathic, and understands most of that body language. She smiles, and stands up, stepping over, closer to Rachel. "Everything went fine," she says. "Your implant needs to stay bandaged for a while until everything heals and adapts, and then we can start you with rehabilitation." Rachel is, after all, accustomed to being monoptic - having two eyes is going to take a lot of getting used to and practiced training, especially if she wants to be /piloting/ anytime soon. She stays there - just an inch outside Rachel's reach, that little bit of polite personal space she gives everyone. "Do you need me to get Lieutenant Goldberry to get you some more painkillers...?"

Her fingers spread, her hand slowly moving up and up until her palm covers the layers of padding. The look on her face grows somewhat awkward, as though waves of nausea were passing through her. Slowly, she shakes her head as they begin to pass. "I... I think I'll be fine. I just... I can feel it moving around while I look around. It... it's a strange sensation."

Leaning backward slowly, elbows used to catch her weight and lower herself down carefully, Rachel lays back on the comfortable bed and blinks a few times. Even if she does seem to have an amazing grip of herself, she's still under the influence of painkillers-- and they seem to be dulling a lot of the rough edges around her right now.

For example, she smiles a little. It isn't a real one, honest and full, but obviously full of that sleepy emotion-changing drugs. "Thanks, Colonel Tessa."

"Yes, I imagine so," Tessa says, kindly. "Something you've not experienced in so long...I'm sure it's quite unusual." She stands there - not even a step outside of reach, but facing Rachel with her hands at her sides.

"You seem to be pretty calm, considering everything," Tessa muses, thoughtfully. Probably the painkillers, actually, she doesn't add. "It's good to see." She smiles, warmly. "I was worried, but it looks like you'll be just fine."

A moment's pause, and Tessa closes her eyes, satisfied by Rachel's warmth, even if it isn't entirely right-headed. That'll come with time. "You're welcome, Rachel," she says.

Maybe it's the painkillers. Maybe she really is happy. It would be another on the number of times that she could count on one hand, even after her "awakening" as a member of Katharon, if it was. Tessa closes her eyes, and Rachel's gaze swivels to the side, straight forward.

Her head starts swimming.

It's not normal.

"Urrgh--"

Machines begin to beep faster as her heartrate begins to uncontrollably accelerate. Her chest begins to tighten up, and her eye-- the good one-- starts to go wide and vacant. As her hand lifts up to her head, the pressure that builds in the back of her mind begins to increase and heighten; her body begins to feel hot.

"G-gaah--"

Rachel Miu Athha's medical problems extend beyond the normal range. While GN particles in and of themselves-- the burnt orange ones-- don't cause the "reverse cancer" phenomenon, having the entirety of her body irradiated in such a way may have it's own strange reactions.

On paper-- the Orb Islands' paper-- she's a Newtype.

In reality, mind and body are still unstable.

The pressure in her mind begins to shape, sharpen as it always does; the spike begins to form in her own mind. Instead of a single "spike," her mind reaches out in every direction, wildly stabbing outward in all directions.

Unfortunately, the closest person to her is Teletha Testarossa.

"Rachel--?" Tessa says, eyes snapping open at her groan - and then the beeping. Tessa turns around and away, thumbing a button on the wall to cause the entire panel, which had appeared to be a window, transform into stats readouts. "What's going on?"

High exposure to GN particles - really, an exposure the likes of which Rachel received to almost any kind of energy concentrated enough to power a Mobile Suit, up to and including solar - would be inevitably dangerous, possibly even in the short term. They don't /know/ what the effects of the GN poisoning will be. She doesn't show signs of traditional poisoning, but it could manifest as more standard cancer, later in life, or...or anything. GN Particles...their nature is beyond even Tessa, who has solved equations thought unsolvable.

Tessa monitors the readings for a moment...and then she feels it. Resonance is subtle - establishing a connection isn't necessarily a very obvious feeling, when it's consentual. But this is not, by any means. Tessa's eyes widen at the sickening feeling, like a psychic spike piercing through the hard defense of her Self and leading to her leaking out. She's resonating, but she can't /stop/ it and, and, "Rachel, what's--" she gargles, falling to her knees, but the voice is strange, because half of the sentence comes out of Rachel's mouth.

"C-Co-l-- n--el--"

Rachel's mind becomes a torrent of emotions, panic, worry, and fear-- something was wrong, just-- massively, incredibly wrong. The voice that was coming out of her mouth was not her own. Her fingers tighten up in her hand, her chest feels even tighter, and it feels like someone's running a chainsaw through her mind.

All of the thoughts that sit at the surface of her mind come rushing outward all at once; a swirl of memories that reach through her recent life, memories that storm in the last year. It moves in a cluster and blur, the first time she woke up in the Karaba cruiser. Cagalli climbing on top of her, jamming the gun into her jaw. The pair of them, breaking down into tears.

The first party she ever remembers having fun at, in the desert. Quatre holding her hand, Cagalli introducing her to arak.

The first time she met Tessa.

Laying in her bed, a sleepy Cagalli Yula Athha laying next to her and asking, 'Do you still hate me?'

Merida Island, at the party.

Amuro Ray in a dark, blood-filled cockpit, carrying her out into the light of day, looking after her, worried about her. The look in his eyes.

Then, darkness--

-- deep, penetrating darkness. There's someone there, off in the far-flung distance. Then, three hundred voices. Three hundred sounds of panic, three hundred voices of horror. Three hundred people clamoring all at once, crying, begging for someone to help them. Three hundred voices that sounded out in this one sixteen-year old girl's heart and mind.

Three hundred death cries, branded into her soul.

Her chest is tight, her hand tight against her body, but, but it's /not/, her hands are on the /floor/, her knees against the tiled ground, and her head is pulsing - she can feel both of them, and that's why she knows she's in trouble, remembering it clearly - they're in too deep, but how did it ever even HAPPEN, her fingers curl into her hair and clutch at her skull while she whimpers against the floor, and it takes her one second, two seconds to confirm they're /hers/.

Rachel's panic would destroy anyone else. Tessa, she thinks she's Tessa, she's /pretty sure/ she's Tessa, has a rock solid sense of her own self developed across years of hovering in military life around people who could destroy her entirely by accident, entirely through moments like this, but this is a thousand times worse, and she tries to call to mind what she'd been worried about before, to anchor herself to her own thoughts, but she CAN'T, because there's the memory of a gun under her jaw that isn't her jaw, the furious look in Cagalli's eye. The taste of alcohol, and the feel of Quatre's hand against hers - seeing the nice Colonel for the first time and seeing that smiley face and a panic wells up in her, because she's been found out, discovered. Blood. Amuro. Darkness - crying, overwhelming, shrieking, sorrow, destroying her, branding her forever, and she reaches out because she's not even sure, anymore, which is her and which is Tessa.

The voices don't stop. The shrieks and cries abate, but they don't, they can't. The whispers - the whispering voices. Because that's what she is, that's what this is, this is their curse to their chosen ones, the whisper whisper whisper, keeping her up at night, catching her attention during the day. She saw the Zeta Gundam for the first time in design documents and understood it better than its own designer. She saw the Guren and they whispered, whispered, always whispering, the secrets of the radiant wave surger. They wouldn't let her sleep for six weeks, until she built the ZERO system, and she did it because she didn't want to yield in front of them, and she hated every second of it. Knowledge. It's impossible, unfathomable - secrets and answers, truths that the greatest men in the world alive today will spend their whole lives creating the first stepping stones to understanding. Secrets the Whispers tell her in full. He asked them. She remembers him, he wanted to know and he delved into the whispers, and

Image, bright and clear: Bani Morauta, her friend, hanging from a noose of his own crafting, in the just-barely-finished TAROS cockpit of the ARX-7 Arbalest.

The darkness is closing in; the whispers are so loud, but she can hear over them, the sound of her mother crying for them to stop, to please not take Leonard away into the night. She's in the closet. Mother hid her here. Hid her from them. She remembers him - she had seen him just a year ago, half-mad, shrieking about his plan to murder her. His face at the de Danaan massacre. He had been behind it - again. Always hunting, hunting her, because she is his sister, yes, hold on to it, she is--her forehead touches the cold ground, and she thinks, she hopes, it is hers.

Kaname, smiling at her at lunch time. Sousuke is sullen. Tessa tries to pound the railing, but she hits the tile - wait, no, that's-- "STOP!" she yells out, and she hopes it's her voice because she's not sure which is.

Whimpering, sobbing, crying, screaming. All of those people, all of those thoughts and prayers, all of their sorrow and rage, all of their pain. All of it, like a bloody scar carved in her heart, a memory that especially now she cannot ignore. All of that pain was caused by her own two hands. After her Mobile Suit had made it back to the nearest friendly hangar, it took close to a half-hour for her to be talked out of the cockpit.

Yes, even then, even "before now," before she was reunited with her sister, did that bury into her. Like a gel-cap version of subconscious torture, the breakdown of her programming brought those memories plain and true to the surface of her mind. Three hundred souls on her shoulders... and Cagalli gave her the names of most of them. Now that she's free... now that she can think for herself...

... no wonder she's so desperate for redemption.

... no wonder she worries if Cagalli still hates her.

But Rachel's side of the fence is just as terrible. Voices, voices, voices-- voices that surround her on all sides, reaching deeply into her own mind and memories. The sounds of the voices heard only by a Whispered, and to a Newtype, it sounds garbled, indistinct... but a terrible cacophony of voices all the same.

And then, she sees something absolutely awful.

Then, she sees Bani Morauta dangling by the noose as though she were the one standing in Tessa's shoes. She can hear the noise of the noose and his weight. She can feel the floor under her feet, and smell the smell of Arm Slaves. For her, the memory is vivid and real beyond words.

Death, murder, and massacre. Kaname and Sousuke-- wait, who were they? No, wait, they were-- they were friends.

'STOP!'

Rachel's back arches as she takes a deep, hard breath of air, her arms jerking up at the elbows. The tightness in her chest releases, and her body drops back to the bed with a heavy thump, enough to make the braked four-corner wheels shudder and skid.

Simply put, the younger of the Athha sisters looks like she was just run through the blender, coughing hard and loud into her hands. The corners of her eye fill with tears, and breathing hard. Breathing loudly. Slowly, her stats start to drop back down to normal.

She grips on to the scraps of memories she knows, she thinks, are hers, and she assembles herself around them as she has before - a towering psychic pillar, a wall of impenetrable soul, expelling the intruder, while Tessa lies on the floor - her body curled up around herself.

She doesn't talk, because it takes her a full minute for her mind to finish deciding it's in the right place, and sluggishly, as if her whole body were numb, drag herself into hands and knees, with her forehead slumped against the cold ground. The input gives her grounding, which she needs, because she's still processing the trauma that just burned her soul to ashes.

Three hundred souls. God in heaven. She'd heard stories - heard that newtypes near the firing of major superweapons often suffered extreme breakdowns, and that those with high kill counts often just collapsed. She tries to reach for the rationality but the memory of it, the sound of it still howling in her ears, has marked her as surely as the memory of the one it belongs to.

This is what she does for a living. God save me.

She manages to stop herself from vomiting until she can crawl - slowly, pathetically, one palm more /slopping/ than slapping into the ground at a time - over to the trash bin.

She hovers over it, eyes closed and that /taste/ in her mouth, and tries to decipher what just happened. They resonated - suddenly, catastrophically, like a knife through the brain. Normally Tessa's good enough to stop an unwanted resonance, because failing cauess /that/. Rachel never seemed like an especially powerful Newtype. Was it the GN particles? The whispers murmur in her ears, a little louder for her shattered concentration, urging her down that path. Formulas, just outside perception - you could know, if you'd ask. Of course--

She swallows out of spite, and it's the most horrible thing she's done all day. She groans, hoping to God Rachel hasn't called for a doctor because the last thing Tessa needs right now is Peggy wasting her time with trying to figure out a Resonance backlash.

She breathes harder still, body slowly rolling. Rachel rolls onto her side, her legs drawing closer to her body, and arms curling around herself. Laying on her right side, her eye is partially obscured under the pillows on the hospital bed, but it's fairly obvious that she starts to cry.

Hard.

The souls of three hundred are a brutal scar, but something about the death of a single friend-- the suicide of a single friend-- seems to resonate within her loudly, hard. Yes, it was one person. Yes, her crimes against Orb are insurmountable... but what if that one friend, what if it was Leo? What if it was Soma?

What if it was one of those people she cared about?

The feeling is awful. With the painkillers in her system, her head starts to swim, and nausea builds up. But given that she just went into surgery, it isn't like she's had anything to eat in awhile... and as her hands grab the rail of the bed and her head lunges over the side.

After the third or fourth attempt to throw up, she slumps against the rail, still breathing hard. She doesn't look at Tessa just yet-- she can't. Tears falling from her face, her gaze remains straight down. The back of her hand drags across her mouth, and pauses halfway through.

"T-Tessa..." she says, voice hoarse.

... It is her voice, right?

Tessa isn't actually in much better shape. For a moment her head is swimming like she was the one on medication, as she tries to sort through the facts she took with her back into her soul. Two eyes. She's the one with two eyes.

It doesn't stop her from being suddenly acutely aware of the feel of her eyes moving in her skull. She hovers there, eyes closed, trying to get her identity in order in case of another attack.

Three hundred voices clawing at the inside of her skull. It's why she's grateful for the limits of the Whispered. She's suffering in her own way...but she doesn't need to hear that. Not with the violence she's committed, and will commit again.

"It's OK," she says, slowly, pushing herself uneasily up from the floor, and what she does next she does entirely automatically - stepping over the splatter and resting arms on Rachel's head, gently, stroking soothingly. "I'm over here," she says. "You're still there, it's...that was..."

"We're fine," she says, and her fingers curl into Rachel's white hair, momentarily, automatically.