duplicity inbox / cw for nsfw shenanigans.

[unlawful]

TEXT / VOICE / VIDEO / ACTION NOTE: felix generally responds to everything in text, even voice or video calls. expect 90% of his replies to be text-based regardless of urgency.

Comments

[requiemshark]

[ It works. It gets Felix off on a tangent. For now, at least. ]

karma.

[ Or something. They probably deserve this shit. ]

he was solid, for what it's worth.

[unlawful]

he was off his fucking rocker
but he was the best

( especially when felix was at his worst. )

only reason i didn't throw you out the airlock alongside price is because of him

[requiemshark]

i didn't need you. all i needed was the armor. everything that happened after was just noise.

[ An easy trade, at the time. ]

dont know why you bothered with price. that fucker was useless.

[unlawful]

he had information locus thought was vital to understanding the freelancers and their motivations, as if it fucking mattered when they were walking corpses anyway
didn't need to understand how they tick on the inside to blow them the fuck open
i thought he was useless too
locus insisted

( very firmly, leaving little room for argument. felix submitted, unwisely and against his better judgment. if he'd known he was going to be fucking with locus' head in the process, he would've slit his goddamn throat and watched him bleed out. )

i think you made a stupid fucking choice on chorus and you're making stupid fucking choices now

[requiemshark]

apparently im crazy. and dead. so that's fun.

[ Opinions seem to vary on the crazy part. But Grey was pretty damn clears about how he ends. It's hardly a surprise. ]

[unlawful]

yeah you've mentioned
inevitable if you were going 1v1 with a freelancer and her battle-ready ai

( not to mention if she had wash flanking her six. he must've been nearby, at the very least. she'd shown up with wash on the bridge shortly after ephemera stopped responding on comms. )

[requiemshark]

[ So it goes. He used to think he’d do it again if he had the chance. ]

You and locus still tried it. Money that good? 

[unlawful]

carolina wasn't written into the initial equation
it was just wash and his simmies and wash was a soft damaged bitch

( in retrospect, he should've ended up with felix. it was a mistake leaving him with locus. wash turned out to be more of a threat than felix could've ever anticipated. )

we didn't need to kill them head-on, besides
we just needed them out of the fucking way
that's where you came in, obviously

[requiemshark]

Should’ve asked for more money. Charon plays tough but they bitch out the moment something threatens the bottom line  

[ Idle, pointless words. Filling space while Ephemera decides whether or not he’s going to burn his sketchbooks. He’s itching for a cigarette already, a hit of nicotine to slow his fucking roll and stop his brain from racing off to parts unknown. Smart move would be to stop engaging entirely. Walk away.

Yeah. It would. ]

doesn’t matter anyway. 

[unlawful]

it sure doesn't

[ none of it mattered in the end. and why ephemera is continuing this conversation despite his better judgment is a mystery beyond felix's understanding.

it's a cyclical game of russian roulette. eventually the cylinder will hit another live round. ]

do you draw my face every time we meet?

[ like now. ]

[requiemshark]

[ Click. Boom. ]

only when i'm bored.

[unlawful]

( right. ephemera's trusty fallback excuse. )

you are perhaps the shittiest liar i've ever met.

[requiemshark]

[ He gets that a lot. Unfortunately. And of course Felix is too smart not to zero in. ]

yeah you’d like to think so. go fuck yourself.  

[unlawful]

( it helps felix is a professional liar. )

i don't know what the fuck to think of you man
you know how used i am to being left on read?
you can walk away from this conversation any time but you don't, you take the bait every single time even when you know it's bait

does it help? talking to me like this? does it help like how drawing me down in detail helps? or do you just like to torture yourself?

[requiemshark]

[ The really fucked up part is sometimes it does. Art forces things into alignment or at least a bit of sense. It's why he took the time to paint his armor back on Chorus when any old rig would have done. Why he sketches everyone he meets in this place so he knows how he sees them. His memory is faulty. Sometimes, things get lost. And he knows, deep down, that saying that shit - any of that shit - would twist things up, knot the two of them together even more than they already are. They run in parallel tracks. Not all the time, but often enough. It's almost comforting to find someone who understands this shit, who doesn't need it explained.

Almost.

Ephemera chucks his phone at the wall again. This time, he doesn't respond. He's going up to the roof to work on the goddamn mural and chain smoke and forget this conversation ever happened. Like an adult. ]

[unlawful]

( the following silence is predictable, especially after felix's goad calling him out on it. what's strange is that felix feels like he owes him this. mercy. a way out. a way back, away from the noose he's tied tight around the both of their throats. don't fucking follow me. there's nothing here but rot.

a good twelve hours later, once he's mostly sober and no longer on the verge of a splitting migraine: )

good boy
see you around terrence

[requiemshark]

[ He knows better. Or he should. Things settle as much as they’re going to for a while. He paints, he comes back to the center. Leaves his phone where he threw it until he finally runs out of yellow acrylic and has to come back down off the roof. And then, of course - of fucking course - Felix has to have the last word.

Ephemera stares at his phone for a long time, twitching with rage he’s got no outlet for.

No good one, anyway. He exhales through his teeth and then he does something potentially very stupid, and tears one of the sketches out of the pad. Folds it up and tucks it away inside his jacket pocket, and then he heads out to the Down. And then he goes over to Felix’s shitty building and shoves the damn thing under the door. ]

get. fucked 

[ It’s one of his older sketches, drawn long before Felix ever showed up in Duplicity. A memory, something he spent the time to detail. It shows Felix and Locus standing shoulder to shoulder, Locus straight backed and serious, Felix’s stance deceptively loose. Both of them in full armor, surveying field reports. He hasn’t cared about them when he was Sharkface but he saw enough. He’s observant when it counts. And it wasn’t hard to clock the way they moved around each other. Training and time will go a long way, but that sort of unit cohesion comes from trust. And even then, even at his craziest, Ephemera had recognized it. His team had been like that.

Unbreakable, until suddenly they weren’t. Until suddenly he was alone. The Felix in the drawing is different from the one he keeps colliding with. That one had a partner.

The drawing is done in ink. Intricately detailed. And unsigned. ]

[unlawful]

( felix finds the little slip of paper late, after a long shower where he absolutely 100% uses all the hot water.

it's acknowledged but ignored at first. harding slips him stupid ass notes under his door sometimes, scrawled in pencil, usually detailing some terrible joke or requesting felix's presence in his room for a drink as if texting is a concept beyond him entirely. felix doesn't look at it again until after he's dressed and notices the smudge of ink in the corner. first red flag. harding doesn't write in pen.

he crouches on the floor, hooking the folded paper with his index finger and twisting it toward him. ephemera. again. left for him intentionally this time, and it takes felix all of two seconds to understand why.

ortez, his bulk and towering elegance sketched in sharp, stark lines, and felix leaning archly into his space, like the earth helplessly submitting to the sun's gravitational pull. a memory, drawn from the perspective of an outsider. before everything went to shit on chorus. before ortez left him. before felix lost everything.

the world goes a little fuzzy and cold at the edges. felix sways back on his heels. he can't breathe, like on the roof when he was a single gasp away from hyperventilating on top of a convulsing ephemera, glassily staring at his unfinished mural. panic attack. too much liquor fucking with his senses, overcompensating for all the shit he can't get his hands on to make the quiet that much quieter. he rocks forward again, splaying his hand flat on the floor, and exhales shakily. oh, fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck. think about something else. not reach. not ortez. not chorus.

think about ephemera, then.

he launches to his feet and kills the lights, then eases the door open slowly and peers out into the empty hallway. then back into his room, plucking his knife and phone off the bedstand table on his way to the window. )

you know what ephemera

( he pops the window and silently hitches himself over the sill, landing feet-first on the fire escape. the street below is crowded, people moving shoulder-to-shoulder as one writhing mass illuminated by blinking neon lights and yellow-bulbed street lamps.

felix leans over the railing and scans the swarming sea of faces. fucking asshole's probably long gone. )

i think i get it now
why you kissed me back

[requiemshark]

[ Yeah. That gets a response, like Ephemera knew it would. The way digging a blade into a wound always gets a response. He ought to feel some brutal satisfaction at the fact, take advantage of the opening - the sergeant would've, she taught him well and she was a fucking monster in the field - but she's gone and he always telegraphed everything. Still does. And this doesn't feel like a victory worth keeping.

It just feels like a wound. Like something he dealt just for the sake of it and now there's blood on the ground. Growing tacky.

He's back up on the roof. Again. It's the only place he feels centered in the whole goddamn city. He lights a cigarette and lets the nicotine burn all the way down into his lungs. ]

you're gonna fucking tell me so just get it over with

[unlawful]

thought it was some self-flagellation bullshit at first
a way to punish yourself
seems appropriately fucked up enough for you

( there's not a familiar face in the crowd. water hits his lashes, splashing down his cheek. felix thumbs it away and looks up. a leaky pipe, just above. it's oddly grounding, but it doesn't stop his trembling.

his responses come mercilessly quick. )

maybe you got daddy issues, i thought, that'd be super fucking cliche
maybe i'm an enormously misplaced stand-in for all the shit you lost and can't get over
maybe you look at me and see everything you wanna forget because it puts you back in the pod all over again, t-minus ten seconds from a drop
but that's too complicated, isn't it? i'm overthinking it
i do that sometimes

no, i think what fucks you up the absolute most is that you don't fucking know why you kissed me back but you know you liked it and your brain will kill itself cycling around that shit, unable to make sense of it
sometimes shit doesn't make sense but we do it anyway
like you biting my lip and putting your hand on the back of my neck
like you knowing you'd fucking do it again
you fucking pussy

[requiemshark]

[ At first, he's tempted to laugh it off. Daddy issues, really? Gotta have parents for that, or one of those tragic childhoods he keeps hearing about. Gotta have enough emotional investment to actual give a shit and he doesn't, zero for two on that score. He grew up in foster care and the woman who raised him might've had a fucked up sense of humor when she named him Ephemera, but it wasn't like she beat him or anything. She did her job and he did his and they parted ways the day he turned eighteen and enlisted. No story there. It's just a thing that happened.

But of course, Felix doesn't stop there. That'd be too easy.

Ephemera breathes out. His hands are shaking. He takes another drag on his cigarette, waiting for the nicotine to do its thing and chill him the fuck out.

It doesn't. ]

you kissed me first. after i put a blade into your shoulder. so what's that fucking say about you

[ A weak deflection. The sad part is, he knows why he did part of it. He knows why he put his hand on the back of Felix's neck and that's a real simple answer. Protecting the implant. A reflex, like they gave two shits about each other. Like they're the sort of people who do shit like that.

He turns around and punches the wall. Once, twice.

Three times. ]

[unlawful]

says i'm a fucked up masochist you repressed twat

( not the kind of pain he gets off on, but felix has fucked people who have done far worse to him than violently stab him a couple times. that's just foreplay, like he said. an escapist's game, from liquor to valium to violence to sex. no hard feelings until someone dies, and even then it's rarely personal.

it's slightly personal with ephemera. )

this isn't about me
i know who i am and i know why i did it
you were a warm body and i wanted a taste of you, end primitive thought process

( everything about that moment entwined messily. felix straddling ephemera's lap, his hand and gun caught between the unyielding vise of his thighs, pinning him close. his fingers in his hair. the coppery scent of blood. the race of his pulse next to ephemera's infuriating calmness.

he'd never wanted to kill and kiss someone so much at the same time. )

but i bet you wish i did it to fuck with you
that would've been so much easier to write off
try again

cw for self-harm

[requiemshark]

[ You could do better, Ephemera thinks viciously. You could go find anyone in this goddamn city, so why me? He's never wanted to kiss someone so soon on the heels of trying to break them in half. He's never wanted to fuck Carolina and he fears, deep down, that the city's going to force them into proximity one of these days and that choice won't really be one. Everything feels raw and brutal. Edging onto something manic.

His hand is bleeding. He barely feels it when he presses the cigarette into his knuckles. ]

okay. you wanna fucking go? you were too fucked up to kill.

[ He bares his teeth at nothing. His skin sizzles. ]

no point in it.

[unlawful]

( like fucking clockwork. )

how's that implant treating you, ephemera?
what was it that did you in? the missile strike? the building? something else?

[requiemshark]

[ Goddamn it. Trap set and baited and he walks into it like a moron. Every goddamn time. ]

covenant booby trap. fun fucking times.

[ Turns out getting hit point blank by an EMP really does a number on a neural implant.

But, because he can't not strike back: ]

your armor still fucked?