milliways_bar | (no subject)

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[OOM: One commission, two gifts and an unexpected visitor. Small warning for a bit of blood and gore.]

Weyland returns to the bar sometime later, when he has recovered enough to appear calm again, and he carries the gifts he has made up to the bar. It looks like it's going to be another Atlantean night.

He takes a seat at the bar, and waits. There's one person in particular he's waiting for and several others he'd be very happy to see, but really any distraction would be welcome.

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"It would," he says. "Strange enough just to take the shape of another--stranger still to take one's powers. Especially when they are such an innate part of what we are."

"Yes."

She contemplates it. "I doubt I'd realize what how much I take for granted until they were gone."

"Does it ever feel like a burden?" he asks quietly. "The pull to do your work, the inability to avoid it? Would you take a break from it if you could, and not even have to think about your work?"

She looks at him, still.

"Maybe."

"It does for me, and yet... I can't imagine life without it. The week I spent in another person's shape, I lacked the strength and coordination to do my work, not to mention the parts... and I nearly went mad from it. But then, I still had the need to craft. If I had another's powers, I might not."

She tilts her head.

"You changed shapes with someone? I didn't recall that one."

"I did, while I was here," he says. "It was... quite a while ago, now. We didn't do as much preparation beforehand as I would have liked, so I was all but going in blind, but luckily, I doubt anyone noticed."

"Well... people see what they want to see. So I'm sure that made it easier."

"Definitely," he agrees. "Also given her nature--capricious, hard to pin down--well, I suspect my performance simply made her a little aloof for a week. We all have our moods."

"To be sure," she says, not without irony.

"And she probably had an easier time of it than I did. My relationships with other people are very... well, most of them are strictly business, very formal. Whereas hers were all over the map."

"Like what?" she asks, taking a sip of wine.

"Apparently having children--I'd simply not even thought about the possibility, but I was asked about some of them, and had no idea what to say. There were a few conversational fumbles like that."

"Mmh," she says, contemplatively. "Sounds like fun."

"It can be liberating, to live someone else's life for a while, is the point," he says, "but better still to have their powers, or at least not a need for your own."

"I suppose it could be," she says, but it's flat.

(You could probably only here the wistfulness if you were listening for it.)

"But I still owe you a vacation, I believe," he says, more quietly. "If you're still interested."

"Of course," she says.

"Things are... not what they ought to be, in my world. Strange things have been happening. It may not be safe."

Her brow wrinkles. "What sort of strange things?"

"What was the last you heard of it?" he asks. "Quite a lot has happened lately... I don't remember whether the egg had appeared, the last time we spoke."

Her eyebrow goes up, now.

"No. I hadn't heard about that. Not sure that you've told me about much, really, aside from the wars."

She pauses, tilts her head. "So... an egg?"

"My aircraft laid an egg, apparently," he says, and takes a drag on his cigarette. "An impossible thing, and yet there it was. An omen--the beginning of the end."

"An egg signifies the end of the world?"

She tries to look grave, but she can't help smiling, just a little.

"What it contained," he nods. "The dragon of the end-times, the devourer of the dead. All made of metal, but the venom is as real as anything."