gravitys | karteria ic inbox;

[ he is 1000% the grumpy control group here. sorry, chuuya, but at least oushi's willing to share his findings. ]

yeah, okay
something's definitely in the air then
or it's because of the damned things they put inside us

[ he has to pause to put his head in his heads. he's back inside, and it feels so stuff he can't even breathe. but suddenly the thought of being outside makes him want to hurl. ]

how the hell do we know what's real or what isn't anymore

[ ...He doesn't like this guy enough to comfort him about bullshit. That's what Chuuya tells himself, throwing his Syntrofos down with a scowl. But that question rattles around uncomfortably in his brain as he pretends he's done with the conversation and goes over what he's learned, what he has to do, who he can trust.

how the hell do we know what's real or what isn't anymore

It takes a while, but it prickles under his skin. Chuuya's lived that sentiment for most of his life. What's him, what's not. What's real, what's not. Corruption might be a thing that will come to effect all of the Augmented here but Corruption has been eating away at Chuuya since he was sixteen. There's been something other than himself inside his own body for longer than that, as long as he can remember.

He growls and picks the phone back up. ]

you find a lodestone. an anchor. some kinda mantra. and you hold onto that come hell or high water and never let it not be true.

tell me something about yourself that you knew to be true before you woke up here.

[ to be honest, oushi wasn't really expecting an answer, but the helplessness of the situation had caught up to him, and before he could help himself he was typing his fears out... as if getting it out there might somehow stop it from eating him up inside.

it doesn't, of course.

instead, he makes it chuuya's problem, and apparently it is not true what they say: misery does not love company.

thank god chuuya is a better man than he is, that he answers. thank god he even has an answer. ]

something about myself?

[ where does he start, though? where does he find the parts of himself that won't ever move? ]

my name is oushi ashioki
i'm 20
i'm a student
i have an older sister
i know sign language

[ even now, away from the tampered food and the infected air, he can feel clarity slipping out of his desperate grasps. how can he find one thing to matter when it feels like they all do? ]

i had my heart broken by the first girl i ever loved

[ Chuuya has an answer. He has no idea if it happens to be the right answer for anyone other than him, but this is the conclusion he's come to over years of struggling with his own concept of self and humanity. When you're a stanza of poetry away from losing the person you are, you have to find some sort of way to hold onto the things you have to lose. At one point the way to figure out what was or wasn't true was to wait for a hand around his wrist and a wash of cool blue light. That would always wipe away everything that wasn't. That hadn't been something he could rely on forever, and Nakahara Chuuya has had to figure out step by step through his life what he does and does not believe to be real. There's a scar on his wrist that may be proof of humanity or may not. He gave up on solid proof in favor of sheer willpower ages ago. ]

that's a good start. those are real things. repeat them to yourself when you feel like you're not sure what's real, and if they don't feel real? you have to decide to believe in them anyway.

[ He says it like it's a choice you make, holding onto what's real. Deciding what is. Because that is how Chuuya handles it. In the absence of Abilities, without partners who don't stick around, without the proof you had to sacrifice in order to protect people? You only have the things you decide are real. You make your own fucking reality and you get defensive when anyone tries to shatter it. ]

and if you forget them while we're both here, just ask me. i'll remember them for you.

[ He types that one out so fast, like if it's off his phone and elsewhere in a second he didn't actually say it. It's just an offer. It's whatever. Chuuya thinks about nightmares he can't remember and looking in mirrors wondering if he was just a line of code and how easily that code could be edited. ]

and you ARE younger than me, fucker, so take my advice as your senior.

[ just ask me, he says, with all the confidence oushi doesn't have. all the confidence he can't quite muster, when faced with all the absurdity of the past few weeks of his life. how will i know you're real? is what he doesn't dare ask, not when he's already asked too much of chuuya, not when chuuya's already given more than he ever needed to.

he supposes the irony's the point. when you find yourself unable to even trust your own instincts, you've no other option left but to trust in someone else's.

is that why patho-gen keeps stressing connections? a part of him hates that the people at blame for all this might just so happen to be right about the best way to deal with it all. ]

not by much

[ it's stupid to hang onto that, those two measly years, but it grants him a bit more space to process it all. to breathe it in and let it stick. ]

thanks though
i'll... keep that all in mind

[ now is probably the part where he offers the same comfort in turn. but that would require chuuya to tell him something about himself, and if it's not something the other man is freely offering, then does he have any right to ask for it? it sounds like, at least, that he more or less understands this far better than oushi does... and maybe that means, then, that he's got his own failsafes already in place.

not for the first time, oushi finds himself at the precipice of do or don't... and not for the first time, he falls back on the latter. ]

[ He doesn't have to offer anything. Nakahara Chuuya has been holding himself together without help for years. He's lived with Corruption lurking over his shoulder and no Dazai fucking Osamu to bring him back from it for years. Four. Even before that he had faced his own questionable humanity in the mirror and decided he would be himself and fuck the other options.

He's always been stubborn. It hasn't changed at all since he was a kid. ]

so you've been having outside adventures that freaked you out?

[ He circles back to that, casual as anything. ]

[ chuuya finds the words to fill in the silence oushi lets linger, and instead of relief he just finds himself feeling an entirely new flavor of shitty.

he puts his head between his knees and tries to remember what the kind flight attendant had told him, when he was just eight and on his very first plane ride feeling like the air was too thin way up there.

breathe through your nose. count the crosses your shoe laces make. then sit back up and try again. ]

you said it yourself
there's no reason to be as happy as i felt out there
but i still was

[ and then there was the... especially weird part with the preening....... but he's definitely not going to talk about that. ]

yeah, can't say i was a huge fan of it myself. it looked like it wasn't entirely just us, at least. some locals were showing signs.

[ So it's some sort of...souped up pollen or something. Fuck if he knows. ]

waste of my fucking liquor

[ cool cool cool so literally no one and no where is safe cool ]

what happened to your liquor?

euphoric me thought it was a great idea to share it out with people and now i have none.

it was a romanée-conti

[ Does anyone else even know wine from Earth well enough to understand how fucking devastating this is. ]

[ is oushi from earth? yes. does he know fuck-all about wine? no... but at least he can presume it's a Big Deal. ]

was it one of the things you found in your bag?