2019-11-18 - Null Hypothesis

Alexander is lying in bed, holding his phone in his hand. He smiles briefly at the text about typos, but nods. He puts the phone aside, and pulls on his headphones. Flicks on the power, and the opening bars of 'Enter Sandman' blast in his head. He closes his eyes, and sends his mind ranging through the night, to knock at August's mental door. The music is very muted here, shut away but for the the suggestion of a drum beat almost like a strange heart. <<August>>

Blue Bell jumps up on the bed, but refuses to come close enough for pets. She is angry, and is mostly here so she can turn her back very obviously on Alexander and start cleaning herself.

August is laying in bed in his cabin, staring at the ceiling. A few days in Portland like that means he needs to be out here, in the forest. Especially after the prison. Eleanor's been a balm on an aching wound, but he's still wrestling with this new understanding of himself. He can't do that in town, where he hears and smells the reminders of another city from decades past.

He responds to the knock with an affirmative: a hand held out to be taken. The injury is apparent in a few felled trees, blackened and burned as though by a fire. Some have clogged up the river, forming a pool that churns as water races inside it, seeking the downstream path. <<Alexander.>>

He's quiet a spell. <<Itzhak doesn't think I'm upset with him, does he? I'm not. It wasn't his fault.>>

Alexander's starscape spreads out over the forest as he takes that mental hand. Starlight flashes. There's lightning, too, in the sky - remnants of anger that flare briefly at Itzhak's name, then die down again. <<No,>> he assures him. <<Itzhak doesn't think you're upset with him. He's worried about you; I gather the dream was a rough one. There was killing. I think, when he gets back around to worrying about it rather than you, he might worry that you think less of him for it. But if he starts that shit, let me know, and I'll thump him.>> It's only a semi-idle threat.

August ponders the lightning, curious, though the rest of that draws him away from examining it too closely. A twinge of regret and gratitude at Itzhak's concern, a branch lost in the river. In other circumstances, the threat would have August bright with laughter and telling Alexander to take a number. It's different this time. <<They showed me something he doesn't want other people to see.>> A cryptic explanation of why Itzhak might think August would feel that way. <<But I couldn't think less of him for that. Only of the people who did that to him.>>

He's quiet a time. Finally, he confirms, <<It was bad. We killed people. Had to, to survive and get out.>> There's a roteness to that last part; he's reciting something he knows, a bit he's aware he should tack on to such a statement, regardless of his personal beliefs.

<<It seemed to stir up a lot of his issues with himself,>> Alexander says, quietly. For once, he's not asking for details, even in the curiosity that tinges his mental space almost all the time; he knows that it's not August's story to tell. But there is that frustration, shading to bright sparks of fury, at the way the younger man talks about himself, and his voice is sharp as he says, <<He is so bright and complex, and I hate that he sees himself as broken.>>

But then he pulls away from that, from the storm that threatens to rise again, and his sigh is the lazy spinning of stars as he refocuses. <<You did. Have to. But I'm guessing that knowing that doesn't help at all.>>

<<It did.>> August is mourning that even as a magma chamber of rage is building up under that volcano in response to it. He'd known they'd do something like this to Itzhak, same way they'd dropped him and Eleanor into a ruined hellscape. Take away all the good which had come after he'd been released. Ruin his life in his own eyes.

He knows rage is what they want from him, so it's pointless. Alexander's frustration is a little easier to grasp. <<The world doesn't understand him. It's easier to convince him he's broken rather than accept he's being asked to conform to a shape he doesn't fit.>> He thinks back to a similar conversation he and Itzhak had about this a long time ago: that he's a violin turned differently. Not bad, just not the 'accepted' way. Only those who understood tuning was a matter of need and use, and not of strict fact, would hear the instrument the way it was meant to be heard.

His attention shifts to the stars which are Alexander. Maybe he does't mean just Itzhak, either. <<It'll take a while, to convince him to not feel that way, think like that. It was a survival mechanism. Accept society's definitions, or be crushed by them.>>

Silence, save for the wind in the trees. Then, <<Not really. I didn't even think I'd be able to do it, honestly. I can barely heal people without losing my stomach.>>

<<The world is stupid.>> Very mature, Alexander. But there's a hint of dark humor, weary acceptance - the world is stupid, but it's also the world they have to live in, with all its ill-fitting injustices. <<Well, we'll just keep telling him the truth until he pays attention.>>

If there's any message meant for him in that observation, Alexander adroitly avoids acknowledging it. Instead, there's sad affection. <<It takes concentration and care to heal. It only really takes desire and a moment of the right sort of power to kill. If you can heal, you can always kill.>> There's no condemnation to the thought, just an observation of the world as he sees it. <<It's the aftermath that hurts more.>>

<<That's been my plan so far. Seems to work okay. We've got our work cut out for us, though. Gonna take years to talk him out of that thinking.>> Decades, maybe. Well, like August had better things to do.

<<There's ability, and then there's will. I can't-->> He remembers dragging Ruiz back to life, remembers healing Finch's greivous wounds that first time, remembers dozens more in between. (But he's not over-using his Gifts, how dare you think that.) <<I can barely handle people's injuries. Making them myself...>> Just the thought of it makes him uncomfortable. He shifts on the bed.

A bitter laugh, turned inward. <<But I guess when the chips were down that didn't actually fucking matter.>>

<<Takes a long time to learn to hate yourself that much.>> It's perhaps a mark of how skilled Alexander is, in this particular realm, that the words are entirely shorn of any emotional resonance. But then, that almost certainly means he's hiding those emotions away, which is almost as damning as laying them out there in the first place. No one said he was good at deception.

He falls silent to listen. Finally, he says, <<Good. I'm glad it hurts to think about using your abilities like that. It should. I'm also glad that it didn't stop you when you needed to do it.>>

If August notices Alexander's utter lack of inflection (and since he's also not one for deception, it's likely he does), he makes no comment. He speaks like they're still talking only of Itzhak. That's fine--Alexander can go over what August says later, privately, if he wants to. <<It does. He's had most of his life.>> He leaves it at that. The rest is Itzhak's to tell, or not.

The volcano rumbles in another laugh, sad and hollow. <<It should. And it did, but it was--Christ, Alexander. It was so much worse than I thought. And I didn't have to kill him, I could have settled for maiming. But I was so angry at-->>

The memory has started to take shape; Itzhak, in rare form, a picture of rage unchecked. August cuts himself off before anything else comes through the link. A note of revelation takes its place. <<They made us be people we don't want to be. Fuck, I hate them so much.>> Eleanor had been right: this was a war. And They, were fighting dirty.

<<Yeah.>> Alexander's voice is sad. <<It's hard to think of that, in the moment. Especially when you're angry, and afraid, and you're facing something that really, truly wants you dead. It's not that it's easy to do it, to end something, but the anger can be...very persuasive. In the moment. I'm sorry, August. They're assholes, and while they may have been torturing Itzhak by putting him in prison, I don't believe for a second that they didn't know what it would do to you to be provoked into killing. The fuckers go for the throat when they get the opportunity.>>

The starlight which is Alexander is the only light over the forest right now. It's a dark, forbidding landscape when you don't know it for what it is, can't interpret the shapes for what they really are. <<That's just it--it was easy, when I had the right driver.>> This, at least, is something he can willingly share: the poor groomsmen, at the wedding, attacking Eleanor against their will. August had been a hair's breadth for stopping them, one way or another.

But then Eleanor had asked him to do something else, and because it was her, he'd done it. Ruined the piano the way he'd wanted to ruin those men who were hitting her, even though they weren't the ones at fault.

With Itzhak it had been different. Neither of them had been thinking clearly. And then had come the anger, with its persuasive argument: how dare someone hurt Itzhak like this? Do this to him, when he was working so hard to heal? And just like that, where he'd thought there'd been a wall there'd now been a clear path to an obvious method by which August could make it stop.

A little more light enters the landscape. <<They sure fucking do.>>

<<Because you're human, August. You're a good man - but that doesn't mean that you can't kill. Can't want to kill, when you're angry enough.>> Alexander's voice is soft, and there's regret threaded through it, although for what isn't immediately obvious. <<Anyone can. Even if it hurts them to do it. Even if it disgusts them afterwards. But it says good things about you, I think, that not even Gohl could get you to cross that line, or even try, but you were willing to do it because people you loved were in danger. I'm not saying you should kill, or that it's a good thing. I don't know that killing is ever good, and it should never feel good, even if what you're killing is evil.>> There's a grimace of disgust that can be felt, along with a flicker of memory - the smell of charring flesh as he holds onto a dark haired woman, and a sense of such dark and malicious glee that it can only come from Them. <<They don't care that what we're hurting works for Them, as long as we're hurting, and killing.>>

<<But let me ask you: When you reached out, did you want your target to hurt? Or did you want them to stop? And yes, I know you could have chosen to maim or disable - maybe. These are constructs, so it's quite possible they would have ignored less than fatal damage. But why did you kill?>>

August listens, quiet, weighing what Alexander's said carefully. It's really the same thing Eleanor said, in effect, yet it's reassuring to have it repeated in a different context.

Regret drifts into the link from him as well. Not that he couldn't have guessed that Alexander's done this before, but he wishes they could all be spared the pain of their Gifts coming to that sort of use. In the end, all it did was make them feel like guns, and not the truly wonderful things they could be. Weapons, not tools of art.

The question makes him think. He doesn't want to go back to that moment, yet Alexander's asked him to. No visual, just a taunting, ugly voice ('you'll die in solitary') followed by Itzhak's ('Mireleh won't have a mom'). Not fear for himself, for being trapped in that hell, but for his niece and his sister. For his family, who needed him. For the people he loved and would never meet, if he died in there. The thumping and grunting of someone being beaten mixes into that, and another sound which blots out all others: a fissure forming in a wall miles high and decades old.

<<They were cutting him open for me look at, knowing he didn't want me to ever see this part of him.>> The same way he's never shown Sarajevo to Itzhak.

In the cabin, in his bedroom, August wipes at his eyes. He tries to consider it as impassively as possible. <<Whether they'd be in pain wasn't on my mind. I just needed them to stop. To stop hurting him.>> He might not even have done it if they'd stopped.

...which is Alexander's point, had been Eleanor's as well.

A thread of surly annoyance works its way into things. <<Are you enjoying using your logic at me.>> It's companionable grumpiness; it lacks any real heat.

Fond amusement, as warm as sunlight, flows through the link. <<I am, a bit.>> The amusement part, at least, is brief, because it's not hard to know how much Itzhak loved having the ugly parts of his life exposed (not at all), and he can feel August on the other side of the link. It gives the last remnants of Alexander's earlier anger a new target, to wish he'd been there, that he could have done the ugly work and spared his friends, both of them, that. There's a ready violence in him that wishes it could reach through the hints of memories and rip and tear at the taunting voice, at the people doing the beating.

But he can't, and it keeps the desire as a distant storm on the horizon, as clear of the dark forest as he can make it. <<I'm maybe not the best person to talk about this - I've hurt a lot of people, and killed a lot of not-people, over the years. But, I think. If it bothers you, that's good. If it hurts, then that's better, because then it'll never be your first choice, and it'll never be something that you come to enjoy. But having to cross that line to protect a friend, or a loved one, or yourself? That doesn't make you a bad person. It just means that you love some people a whole lot. Enough that you're willing to hurt to keep them safe.>>

August doesn't mind the amusement, lingers in it for a time. It's a welcome change from how he's been feeling these last few days, the numb and achy by turns knowledge that he didn't want about himself making everything more difficult, everything uglier.

Sympathy for the storm brewing comes in the form of a brisk wind in the trees. August can't say he doesn't harbor that sentiment in other ways, and well, maybe now he does in this one too. Hadn't Eleanor said she wished she'd been there and his first thought was 'Christ no'?

She and Alexander were right, though: this was a war. And he already knew, in at least one sense, what that could entail.

He can't deny any of that, so doesn't try. It's true that he'd rather have don't what he did to spare people he loved further pain. Even if it meant things about himself he wished weren't so. <<I can learn to live with that. I think.>> Wry amusement. <<Probably still going to throw up any time I do it, though.>

Alexander smiles, the stars glimmering with it. <<We'll try to make sure you don't have to do it often, August. And if you do, then I'm told one of the purposes of friends is to hold your hair or shoulders while you throw up, so I guess we can do that, too. And carry a supply of breath mints in case they're needed.>> Although his hope that they aren't is clear in the link - he doesn't like having his friends forced into things that hurt them. But there's also a hint of resignation, a sense that this is just the way the world is, and that he's used to dealing with it.

<<I didn't get a chance to ask Itzhak - were either of you badly injured, physically? Or was it all in the heart?>>

August laughs at that--a real laugh, not the morbid and bitter humor that's been plaguing him lately. It eases back the darkness, soothes his hurt a bit more. <<My hair's not long enough to need holding, but mouthwash, that would definitely be appreciated.>> Could they do that? Bring things with them into the constructs, the Dreams? Will them into being, even? Something to ponder and experiment on in the future.

<<Not badly, no. Just bruising, maybe a few cuts.>> First aid kit stuff, he means. But of course that's because they'd both cut loose pretty ferociously. And... <<They were more focused on the rest.>> He'd have almost preferred more physical injury. That he could easily deal with. But so it went.

His presence in the link softens with appreciation. <<Thank you. For talking to me about it.>> He lets that sit. Then, <<How areyou doing? Think that gun will help out with the whole Foster thing?>>

<<So noted.>> And mark it, Alexander will probably start carrying a small travel bottle of mouthwash, just in case of need. His voice shades wry. <<And they usually are. Even when things in Dreams have been trying to kill me, I always felt it was more about the pain having something want to kill me caused than about just wanting me dead. I feel like, a lot of the time, the Shadows are operating on a catch-torment-release program.>>

<<You're welcome. I hope it helped, even if only a little.>> He's pleased, at the appreciation and the thanks, stars spinning in complex patterns of subdued happiness. <<I think so. Javier echoed a concern that I had, although I think we might both be paranoid-minded. It's not ideal - if the cops could have found the weapon where we found it on an official warrant? That would have been better. But, of course, if they could get a warrant, I wouldn't have gone. And if they had a warrant, the weapon would not have been where we found it.>> He sighs. <<So. I have a couple of other ideas to follow up. It's always frustrating, trying to go after someone who is insulated by money and power.>> He doesn't just mean Foster - flashes of both Monaghan and Margaret Addington echo down the link, tinged with the same frustration.

<<It did.>> In truth, August feels somewhat the same about preparedness for the Dreams. Well, except the wearing shoes to bed part. That he's just not doing.

He matches Alexander's wry tone with one of his own. <<That'd be a bit of poetic justice, given all the fish I catch to eat. Maybe they're just gods the fish made up to punish me.>> Okay, he might be a little tired.

Margaret Addington in particular gets a curl of August's lip. Not only does she have money, she has the Gift. Doubly powerful and dangerous, as far as August sees it. Maybe the loss of their reach wasn't such a bad thing, considering. <<Like you said, at least it can give you some leads. Of course, gotta wonder why they didn't just take it out to the harbor on a rowboat.>>

<<I feel like the gods imagined by fish would involve more large mouths and shiny things.>> Alexander seems to be considering the issue more seriously than it deserves. <<And yes. That's part of what concerns me. It was just lying on a table in a locked room. Technically, it was being guarded...but why not put your murder gun in a safe? Or just dump it in all that convenient water out there?>> The edges of the stars are sharp, cutting at the questions, dissecting them. <<But, at the same time, they had no reason to expect anyone would come along and find the damn thing. I didn't tell anyone my plans.>>

Flashes of confusion and suspicion. <<It just sits oddly for me, August, the more I think of it. But it's also possible that it's just a moment of arrogance or stupidity. The guards we met were not exactly the brightest stars in the sky.>>

And yet now August is giving it serious thought too. <<Only some. They don't all go for shiny things. And some have tiny mouths. It's more a question of, would their gods look like them, or what their enemies should fear? And what does an apex predator fear more than something it can't fight back against?>> But this could also be giving Them too much credit. Maybe They were just cordiceps fungus from beyond; nothing more, nothing less.

So he turns to the no less thorny but certainly more concrete question of the gun. <<This is one of those cases where you want to think carefully about rejecting the null hypothesis. What would be worse: assuming Foster is a moron, and him turning out not to be, or, assuming he's playing eleventh dimensional chess, when it was just checkers?>> The question's rhetorical; August is well aware Alexander knows which of those is the beta error, the false negative. <<Digging deeper would be at most a waste of time, if there's nothing there. Failing to do so could put you on the receiving end of a nasty surprise, if there is. But,>> mild resignation colors his mindvoice, <<I know your resources aren't infinite, and neither are de la Vega's. So it's a question of resources.>> He thinks on that a bit. <<Have either of you tried to find the gun's owner? I don't know how strong you have to be to do that, and our reach being shorter won't help.>> More thinking. <<There's also a question of, why would they kill those people in such an obvious fashion. No car accident, no 'sex gone bad', none of the classic think veiled excuses. Just a straight up gangland execution. You only do that if you have enough money and power backing you to make it stick. So is there an outside interest? Or is Foster that rich?>>

Not that he thinks Alexander and de la Vega aren't asking themselves these questions. Just, now he's asking them too. Not that he can provide any insight. All he can do is heal someone if it goes bad.

<<I feel like it might be just a giant arrangement of hooks and bait to be appeased so that it might pass over you and land on your enemies, instead.>> Then Alexander sighs. <<Which, I gather, is sort of what those who sign on to help Them do, except that they take the part of the hook and the bait.>> He shudders.

<<No. I tried to read the gun a couple of times, but never got anything except the act of the murder.>> A shudder, and a doubled sensory impression before he smothers it: both the feel of the gun in his hands, bucking as he pulls the trigger, AND the feel of the bullet ripping into his skull, the shock so great it doesn't really qualify as pain. <<It's possible Javier will get something more useful out of it. And I have theories about the executions, but...I don't know. Insufficient data.>> Frustration pulses. <<But Foster is fairly wealthy, yes. His other casino makes a quite decent profit.>>

August flinches from the sliver of reading. An echo comes back: a thousand doors torn off their hinges, releasing chaos; three much smaller ones severed, allowing the contents of their chambers to spill everywhere, darkening the castle of the body which contained them. Nausea threatens, and August pulls back for a second, waiting for that to pass so Alexander doesn't have to feel that too.

Presently he manages to dredge up some sardonic humor. <<So. Reading murder weapons is bad news.>> He sobers. <<In that case I'd be careful. There might be more going on than just a rich asshole trying to get richer.>> A pause, then, <<There could be an Addington connection. The mayor did approve the casino despite everyone's objections. Maybe that's something to look into.>> And, of course, it Margaret Addington was backing Foster, he could be certain that supernatural elements would be dealt with as well.

<<Sorry,>> Alexander says, quietly. He shores up the walls around what he shares, curiosity threading through at the image of the doors and chaos. <<And reading murder weapons is...useful. But, well. Murder.>> A shade of dark humor as he admits, <<I seem to attract bad shit when I read. Screaming ghost girls, tides of blood, getting set on fire, having my skull cracked, getting shot. My brain is a magnet for it. It's just the way things are.>>

Again, that resignation, that it's just the world that has to be dealt with. Much the same way August views Their torment as the price to be paid for healing, Alexander sees the trauma that his mental abilities inflict on him. Too useful, too likely to help people, to avoid using, even knowing the cost. <<Yeah. And Patrick seemed to supporting it at the City Hall meeting. DeWitt, too. But I'd wager actual money that if Monaghan is in league with Foster, he hasn't told his people that. Sumpter was going there to cause trouble, and Stewart was under the genuine impression that Monaghan had Miss Kruger's parents killed. If it was a straight up turf war, I'd expect Monaghan would be mobilizing people to push back. If it's a merger or cooperation, then why the aggression from Foster, and why's Monaghan not keeping his people informed?>>

August sends faint reassurance. He knows it was an accident. This is the risk of the link; that sometimes things will bleed through.

He can (reluctantly) admit there's more than a little in common with his healing and Alexander's reading. Of course, the reading brought both Them and had negative side effects for Alexander, but in August's case, healing did as well. So it was a fairly good comparison.

<<I guess it's possible Monaghan is trying to frame Foster to get him shut down. That would explain a turf war without involvement from his people. It'd put him at odds with the Addingtons, though, and I would have assumed he'd know better.>> A tangled web, and not the kind August cares to pick at, except to help Alexander and protect the environment. Otherwise he's perfectly happy to allow Felix and company to fuck off to their corner of existence and leave August and his the hell alone.

A wave of sleepiness hits him. <<I should get some sleep.>> August starts to drift a bit; the forest fades back to being lit only by Alexander's starlight. <<Thanks. For talking to be.>>

In contrast, Alexander seems almost driven to gnaw at the edges of it, to try and understand what exactly is happening, even knowing that quite a lot of roads down that path end the way they did for the Kruger's. It's clear that he's more than prepared to launch into hours (actual literal hours) of speculation and theorizing about the workings of organized crime. There may be diagrams.

So it's probably for the best that August's body pre-emptively nopes right out of that with the need for sleep. <<Anytime, August. Sleep well, and don't die.>> With that, he gently releases the link, the stars winking out all at once. Back in his bedroom, the music pounds in his head, and his cat has deigned to curl up against his hip. He doesn't open his eyes, but doesn't sleep, either. Instead, he sits there and tries not to think for a while.