Scene #8813:

Owner	Pose
Petra Soroka	<J-IC-Scene> Flamel Parsons says, "Hard to estimate what happens if we amplify a psychohazard. A psychohazard juiced up is... it's a terrible week, it's being in a bad place that nobody can help you with, it's a month where you sleep anywhere besides your bed and hurt anyone besides the people who deserve it. It's being really miserable until your mental defenses can fight it off or put it in remission, but more specific than that, it's hard to say." Petra didn't respond well after the others emerged from her mindscape. With The Long Quiet only somewhat contained inside her head, presumably dooming the entire section of her subconsciousness where they found the mental construct of the Beauty of Ash, it's no surprise that she's on a severe emotional downswing; even besides the psychohazard, the less-than-surgical removal of her most deeply held wish couldn't have felt great for her. And letting people into her mind for the first time in two years, and then seeing their reactions-- It was the best option, at least the least worst option anyone came up with, but after that ordeal, can she really be blamed for not wanting to be near any of the people she cares about? Avoiding work, avoiding Quicknest, avoiding Elite duties, even avoiding Lilian, the one place Petra has to herself to rot and wallow is her little studio apartment in District 12. On the second floor of a brick building in the Nest, Petra's apartment has gotten gradually less and less attention from her as her other responsibilities take more of her time, mostly being used as a transport hub to Lilian's manor. Ironically, most of her clothes aren't even stored there anymore-- the teleportation circle in the one closet she has means there's barely any room for them-- so even the most basic functions of a 'home' are being slowly diminished. The writing desk that Woz gave her is scattered with the materials for another few half-built ratbots, one folding chair is still set up in front of the television on the wall, while the other is at the breakfast bar opening the kitchen up to the rest of the apartment. That's where Petra's sitting, head laying on her crossed arms on the bar while Qetra washes dishes, when Berislav knocks. The door opens, and the globule of morphmetal that turned the handle squirms and twists in the air, condensing into irregular spikes before softening in an offbeat pattern. Petra doesn't pick her head up off the counter or verbally acknowledge Berislav's presence when he comes in. Qetra looks up at him and smiles, waving a hand with a soapy plate and nearly dropping it, before nudging Petra. "There's company, ajoeto~" Her answer is the blob of morphmetal darting across the room and flattening into a reflective sheet for Qetra to vanish inside.
Father Berislav	Berislav enters, not in his cassock, but in casual wear. A forest green tee matches with the green clouds and cacti of a zip-up hoodie depicting an expanse of mesa beneath a white sky and a golden sun. Matched with khaki, slim cut pants and white sneakers, the only hint of his faith upon him is the small silver crucifix hanging from his neck. "Hello, Petra," says Berislav, closing the door behind him. "Have you eaten? I brought some food." It isn't on his person, per se, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have it. After all, 'I brought guns' could be just as true, given his abilities. He looks tired. It resides in his silver eyes with concern, even though his tone tries to hide both. "And I could also put some tea on, if you'd like. It's no trouble." Nodding to the unused folding chair, "Do you mind if I sit with you for a while?"
Petra Soroka	Rather than answering, Petra shoves her chair back and staggers to her feet. She staunchly avoids looking at Berislav's face, head drooping-- it's easy to imagine, with that lifeless curl of her neck, her not having a face at all when she turns away like that-- though she can't conceal the sleepless pallor of her skin without staying buried in her arms. The scattered trash around the apartment isn't nearly as bad as the Kana was (or, for Berislav who never saw it, it isn't nearly as bad as what was in her mindscape); it's a fairly typical mess for a nineteen year old living on her own, and almost admirable for a dysfunctional and severely depressed nineteen year old. Still, her first action is to wordlessly tidy up, whether it's as acknowledgement of a guest being in her house, or, and it's easy for Berislav's mind to jump to the assumption, the manifestation of whatever anxiety he and the others glimpsed inside her head, potentially magnified by the damage done. Everything about her seems just slightly recontextualized, now. The dull look in her eyes being reminiscent of The Long Quiet's lack of them, though it's also a stark return to the kind of expression she used to have constantly last year, that gradually became less and less entrenched on her face ever since leaving jail. The similarity in demeanor only makes it even more obvious how much better she looks nowadays, even in this emotional state, compared to back then; and the brief look at the selfie of the Petra from years before she met anyone here is a comparison he can make now too, with how even in good spirits the current Petra looks less well off than she used to. Whether that means less happy... well, if Berislav wants an answer to that, there's still plenty of other sections of her mindscape to explore. For a girl who wears her heart so painfully openly on her sleeve, it's strange to have perspective on how much else she's been holding close to her chest. That's something Petra's been thinking about ever since the Beauty of Ash first came up, and Lilian remarked on how little she actually knows about Petra. After mutely collecting up trash and scooting things into their proper places by hand and by morphmetal, Petra sets the dog bed that she seems to have in place of an actual mattress back down on the floor. On her way to the kitchen to throw it away, she grabs the back of the second folding chair and roughly shoves it across the floor to the bar with the other one. That's a 'yes' to sitting with her for a while, though it's unclear what she wants about the tea or food.
Father Berislav	Berislav takes the shoved chair to mean that company is welcome, if not particularly articulated. He nods, his hand dipping into a burning orange tear in the air, retrieving a branded, brown paper bag. The bottom and some of the sides are darkened with grease spots, and warmth radiates from it--fast food, recently bought and brought in from off-world. Next up is a little hotplate, followed by a humble blue ceramic teakettle and matching cups. Berislav enters into the kitchen with the kettle and hotplate, filling one and turning on the other before returning to take a seat beside Petra. "I don't know how much you heard, of what I said," says Berislav quietly. He doesn't bother elaborating 'when' because it's obvious, with the next thing he says. "And I don't know if you heard what I was thinking." He heaves a shuddering sigh. "Even if I've been short with you at times, and outright failed you at others, I'm proud of you. To see you making friends, laughing, smiling, putting together what was important to you, and what you were willing to protect, filled my heart with gladness." "...the fear that it might all be an act of deception on your part, or foolishness on theirs, broke it to hear," he says, his voice slightly wavering. "There is so much out there, so much of yourself, to discover and build and find joy in. It's... difficult, and sad, to explore at a crawl; or to feel like the space you have for holding those things inside you is... limited. I know." His silver eyes close, softly, and he nods. "I know." "I've taken a lot of Earth into me, to make Earth a little more like space. To force it to listen by speaking the language it knows the best. So... when the table is set, in space, I'll be just unfamiliar enough to be a stranger there, if there's a seat for me. But I'm comfortable not having one, if it means that the people who came after me have the means to find their way to the table." "...what is it that Lilian likes to say about 'deserving?'"
Petra Soroka	"I don't know how much you heard, of what I said," Petra shakes her head, unable to meet Berislav's eyes. She doesn't sit back down in her chair, and shuffles out of the kitchen to keep some distance from Berislav when he goes to make tea, though it doesn't seem like she's avoiding him out of some particularly intense feeling towards him specifically. With the way her hands are flexing and fidgeting by her sides, it seems more like she's afraid of herself, not of him. None of it, apparently. She heard nothing spoken, she didn't get any of their thoughts, she didn't even see it, and she left before Angela or any of the others might've given her a report. No matter what was said to the mental constructs of Petra inside her head, the privacy imbalance was purely one-sided. Despite giving Berislav a second chair, suggesting that she meant to sit in the first one, Petra retreats to the writing desk instead, putting her hand on the edge of it bracingly. The smell of fast food fills the small apartment quickly, and Petra's eyes flicker up from the floor to the bag, before falling back down to arbitrarily fixate on the charger for her DS, plugged in at the outlet next to her dog bed. She's in the same clothes she was yesterday, Berislav notices, though the bomber jacket is crumpled beside the door instead. "...the fear that it might all be an act of deception on your part, or foolishness on theirs, broke it to hear," Petra shudders and rubs her thumb on the edge of the writing desk hard enough to scrape loose splinters embedded in her skin. It's only half a step backwards, more of a lean than a step, before she's pressed into the corner formed by the desk and the wall, as if she's trying to disappear into it. Her voice is hoarse and buzzing with a repressed something, when she finally speaks up for the first time. "... Looked into my heart and it hurt yours. Yeah. That's exactly it. That's how it goes. Knowing anything about how I feel just ruins the people around me. Kukuru literally fucking came out of my head dead." "And-- and Lilian, and Kore, and Angela. All of them were miserable." She's only really assuming on Persephone's part, but reading Persephone's feelings off of Lilian is easier for her than actually trying to get anything from her directly. "You all looked like you saw the fucking end of the world. That's just my head. That's just what it's like." "That's just what I'm like." She's not crying, but the guttural choke coming through her throat when she emphasizes that word feels worse than a sob. She tightens her hand into a fist, fingernails scraping across the desk. "Name literally anyone who's better off because I'm around. Besides Angela. I don't know how, but it'll happen to her eventually, too. Anyone else. How can it be-- be anything but 'foolishness' when you, and all the-- everyone else, you just see 'making friends and laughing' and not what's actually there." "There's-- there's a reason I hide it. I'm not fit for this. Any of this. Anything." Rust flakes off of Petra's voice as she talks more, since she hadn't said a word to anyone since leaving Lobotomy Corporation. That doesn't make her sound any less raspy, but she's speaking faster and her breathing's picking up, shivering a bit as the words spill out. "I hurt everyone I've ever known." "I bet Angela's-- no. I bet the Manager saw all the damage I did to Angela from letting her too near me, and he's going to make me do more mental corruption tests until I fail them, and then I'll lose my job, 'cause they'll know I can't be trusted. That's why I've been getting phone calls. And--" "So... when the table is set, in space, I'll be just unfamiliar enough to be a stranger there, if there's a seat for me." Petra flinches, staring angrily at the floor and harshly whispering. "Stranger's better than pariah."
Father Berislav	"...So, you really didn't hear. Alright." Berislav sighs, but not out of disappointment--it's just the kind of gesture someone makes when preparing to bare themselves out of necessity. "I often use scripture as a way to ground myself; to remind myself of why I'm doing any of this, and to defend myself against mental influence." The tea kettle begins to whistle, and Berislav gets up, heading back into the kitchen. There's some soft sounds of motion, in there--plus a brief orange glow as the tea leaves themselves are retrieved. Then, the gentle burble of pouring. The soft blue teacup is brought over to the writing desk, but Berislav doesn't linger after depositing it, returning to his seat at the breakfast bar to pour his own. Sitting with one leg crossed over the other and his hands in his lap, "I'll paraphrase--the passage is beautiful, and important, but it's important to me that I give it to you in my words, and not Paul's." He pauses, searching for them, his head inclined towards her once he finds them. "Your perspective is a product of your circumstances, and your age is one of those circumstances. Now, you see a reflection that you don't like--but the mirror is dirty and unpolished, and what you think you see may not be there at all. As you grow older, experience more, you'll polish and clean it, and see better the parts of yourself that need changing and the parts that don't. Eventually, you won't need a mirror at all; you'll see yourself, face to face, complete and true, and understand what others saw in you when they looked at you." "You're still getting used to the idea of being loved, and to the shape of love. So I'll tell you what it looks like to me, and hope that you can see the shape of it a little better." "Yes," he says, tiredly, "It hurt to see that side of you--but you're assigning blame where it doesn't exist." He shakes his head. "Suppose you were to trip and fall. If I wince at the sight and rush over to help, it's not you that's hurt me. Something has hurt you, and that is what hurts me--and I would endure any number of hurts like that, not because I expect a reward, not because I expect you'll fall into lockstep with me if I do it enough, or because I can withhold my help to punish you." He sits up a little straighter in his chair, resolute. "I would do it, because there is no reason for me to be doing anything I do, if not for love. Not only would I do it, but I have done it, and I wouldn't take it back." A sip of lavender tea. "The people calling you, I'm sure, don't feel hurt by you. And from what I know of this place, you've probably made their lives better--a little pocket of warmth in the biting cold." Another sip.
Petra Soroka	"... and to defend myself against mental influence." "Yeah? I'll make sure to grab a Bible." She really only does talk to Berislav when she's in a mood like this. Maybe that's something she should change at some point. Petra also sighs; it's a little bit like preparing to bare herself, and a little bit just the resignation that she already has. She picks up a loose bolt from the desk, rolling it around between her fingers, as something to do to occupy her hands from squeezing hard enough to ache. "Paraphrasing it with mirrors. Yeah, I get it. I guess I must've gotten into your head too." The idea that mirrors can be a metaphorical tool beyond specifically referring to her doesn't seem to come to mind, and she assumes that specifically invoking it right now has to be speaking to her own themes. "You're putting me on the wrong side of the mirror. That's not how the metaphor goes, not for me." "I don't think there's any way to separate 'me' from 'my circumstances'. It's up to 'me' to decide what circumstances do what to me. If I'm stupid because I'm young then I'm just stupid, that doesn't... make anything I do any less shitty." "In your version of the metaphor..." Petra brushes her knuckles against her pocket, feeling for her compact mirror, and then her eyes flicker past Berislav to the mirror sitting on the counter. She still isn't up to approaching him, or asking for him to hand it to her, so she doesn't, and just gets fixated on picking at the corner of the desk with her nail, without looking at it. "I don't want it clearer. Or-- clear was already what I had from the start. A person who's almost all empty spaces makes it impossible to miss the worst parts that are left. You still don't get it. I'm not 'discovering' the image of me. I already know. You already know, since you fucking saw it, whatever that looked like." "It's not a smudge I can just wipe away. It's not-- how can you even say that the worst parts of me might not even fucking exist? Like-- did you forget last year? Have you seen Tachibana anytime recently? Talked to anyone else in the Watch? Fucking-- Lilian? Do you have any idea how many more I could name? How many people have you massively worsened the lives of? People who matter, obviously." Petra squeezes the bolt between her fingers and loses her grip on it when it suddenly twists around and flies away, rolling across the floor. She clenches her hands into two fists, but rather than puffing up with aggression or stomping around, she slides her back down the wall to slump on the floor. She presses her knuckles into her forehead, shaking with tension that goes nowhere, like she's holding back from hitting herself, or ripping out her hair, or reaching straight through her skull to crush what's inside. "I'm not blaming my circumstances. I can't blame anything but me. You're going to endure infinite hurt from being near me and it won't make me any better at all, because it never, ever does. No one-- no one in my place ends up like me. No one just, accidentally hurts people this much. It's me. Obviously. People who love me get hurt for as long as they tolerate until they leave."
Father Berislav	"No, Petra, I haven't forgotten any of it--not your transgressions against the Watch, nor against its members, nor your many against Lilian or the subsequent internment." Out of habit, he reaches for his reading glasses--but he didn't come in wearing them. A little smile at his own forgetfulness, before his hand falls, and he takes another sip of tea. There's a pause--more searching for words. "I'll be frank," he says, peering at her over the rim of the cup. "You should never have been allowed into the Watch to begin with. You were angry, sad, isolated and confused when you came to us, on top of being young and inexperienced. Even Hibiki had the benefit of experience with SONG. Your actions were your own, yes. But it's also true that everyone in your onboarding looked at a girl who so clearly needed anything else and proceeded anyway. Are those people not responsible for harming you with their negligence, as surely as you're responsible for your own actions?" "One day, I may ask your assistance, as an act of penance for the effects of your mistakes. What I will not do is allow you to be punished for -someone else's- mistakes." He finishes his tea, standing up and bringing his cup to the sink to clean it under running water. "If we cannot overcome the cruel apathy of systems many times larger than us without resembling them," he says over the gentle hiss of the sink, "Without resorting to the same disgusting calculus, then there's no point in fighting them at all." "As for you," he says, drying it and leaving it on the neighboring counter, "Your assessment of yourself is biased." Berislav stands next to his seat, rather than sitting back down. "I didn't see the whole of you, regardless of what you may think," he says, hands gently clasped before him. "What I saw in that mindscape was one part of you, sealed away, compressed down, sat in the midst of a great, rolling expanse, living with the memories of a different time in your life." "Since we're talking about personal responsibility, I think perhaps we ought to talk about some other things that you've done, as of late." His tone is intentionally bordering on accusatory--a misdirection, only for his words to convey the true warmth he feels. "The Petra from one year ago wouldn't think to defend Meika, like you did. She wouldn't have made the difficult decision to let any of us in, and she certainly wouldn't admit to any wrongdoing where Lilian was concerned, much less learn from her. It was you who made the decision to change, piece by piece, little by little." The expanse he'd seen, surrounding that picnic table, was empty. But-- "Empty spaces may be decorated," he says, gesturing towards the writing table with a nod and a small smile. "I should be going. I'll be back to check up on you again, if you'd like. And to get my tea set, if you don't," he adds with a gentle, impish quality to that smile.
Petra Soroka	"If I didn't get in the Watch I just would've shot up a school or something." Even as the words leave her mouth, with the possibility, and even the steps leading up to it, weighing heavily on her mind, there's a feeling of dissonance. Holding up a construct of her mindset from back when she joined the Watch forces her to confront, privately, how different it is to how she feels even in this slump right now. Not just in the mimicry that typically sustains her, but in the actual changes she's managed to internalize, to the point that she flinches at herself. Change is good; it's her only option. "... Or stayed where I was, which is worse." The words feel numbing against her lips. She picks at her sock with a fingernail. "I can't blame people for making the bad choice to let me be around them. Everyone makes that mistake at first. I can't just blame everyone for being stupid enough to not notice how dangerous I am, or I'd... blame everyone." "Penance is fine. Penance makes sense." Petra's stomach grumbles audibly, and she shifts uncomfortably on the ground; standing up is beyond her at the moment. "I'm good at penance. But it's not just the Watch. The Watch is just... one bunch of people in the trend. Even just what happened yesterday, even if it all went perfectly and you'd all come out fine, I'd still be spitting on people who sacrificed everything for me. It can't be something I've outgrown and it can't be anything I can just... repent my way past, if I'm still ruining things for people by existing." "And I-- I don't want to. I can admit that, I'm able to. I want to hurt people less. But-- but I'm not allowed to kill myself anymore, not until Lilian gives up on me and lets me, so the only way I can keep people safe from me is not letting myself be near them. At least, not until...." Without Petra looking up at the counter, morphmetal coils around her mostly cooled teacup and brings it over to her, and she takes it with both hands. Petra winces at the praise more than she does at the building accusation, which is probably why he snuck it in under that tone in the first place. "The Petra from a year ago should've been killed by Liza. The Petra now isn't allowed to. That's the biggest difference, it's... responsibilities, and rules, and penance, and owing. It's working around how terrible I am and trying to minimize damage. If I wiped the mirror totally clean, I'd just disappear." "It was you who made the decision to change, piece by piece, little by little." As a somewhat less than serious aside-- not because it's really a joke, and not because Petra's feelings about it are lighthearted, but because the only way she can believe it is by being a little disbelieving at the same time-- she mutters, "I think you're glossing over what it took for 'pieces' to happen. But I-- really am better, a bit, compared to back then. And I'm really glad for that." After a little bit of hesitation, when Berislav stands up and starts walking past her to the door, Petra reaches up her hand to implicitly ask for help up, so she can start eating something.
Father Berislav	I think you're glossing over what it took for 'pieces' to happen. But I-- really am better, a bit, compared to back then. And I'm really glad for that. Berislav takes Petra's hand, helping her up. His grasp is warm and firm, with a subtle hardness just past the give one would normally expect in the palm. "I am, too," he softly answers. When Petra is on her feet, he releases her hand, his own falling to the side. The other lifts up, resting a moment on her shoulder. "Take care," he says, his silver eyes warm and not without a measure of relief. I'm glad that you're here, and still moving forward. I can't be the only one, either. Berislav gently slides past her and out the door. Outside, Berislav resists the temptation to look over his shoulder at the closed door as he leaves, but that doesn't mean it isn't felt all the same.