Discord

Who: Jay, Cassandra
Where: A bleak and deserted beach somewhere in the Doombringer’s processing substrate
When: Not long before everyone woke up and the Dwarf drifted through a meteor swarm

<ooc>Apologies for the back-postiness – must try to write faster!</ooc>

<snip>
"Now how about you get us a fire started while I figure this data out? - I'm smegging freezing"
</snip>

Jay frowned and glanced around, taking in the bruised sky and kilometres of deserted rocky beach, bordered by barren, craggy hinterlands
"How about just jumping us somewhere warmer instead?" he asked "We're going to be worrying about hypothermia if we stay here too long"
Cass stared pensively at her psi scanner for a moment, shivering in her wet clothes
"Yeah, I can’t argue with that" she eventually conceded "We should be ok; the Doombringer'll still be reeling from the psychic shock I hit it with, although we shouldn’t do too many jumps - If it senses us, it’ll be on us like a ton of bricks once it recovers"
She tapped the scanner’s screen a couple of times and the environment stuttered and warped violently around them to be replaced with what appeared to be the gloomy interior of a blood besmirched slaughter house, replete with a half dozen stinking and flyblown carcasses, dangling from chains and meat hooks suspended from the ceiling
"Bloody hell!" Jay coughed, his gorge rising as Cass narrowed her eyes, staring at the carcasses
"Are those...?"
"Yes" Jay said sharply "They used to people. Get us out of here!"
"Smegging right"

Cass executed another few jumps, with each location successively worse than the last
"You know, hypothermia’s starting to look like an attractive option" she archly observed, her lip curling in distaste at a stygian landscape of blackened and tortured flesh "At least we could have huddled together for warmth; you never know – it might have been fun!"
Jay flashed her a look but said nothing as she busied herself with performing another jump, this time onto the veranda of an old tumbledown wooden shack, surrounded by gently rolling grassy plains and massive sky
"This looks better" Cass nodded "Although knowing the Doombringer, it’ll likely be the abode of some crazed, family of inbred cannibals or some such similar clichéd shit"
Peering into the shack through one of the cracked and dusty window panes, Jay shook his head
"Nope - Looks empty to me"
"Huh, there's a shock!"
Strolling over towards the door, Jay glanced briefly at Cass in silent askance, and pushed it open with a forlorn creak
"Hello?" he called, stepping inside after a moment when he received no response and peering around the interior, scrutinising the layer of dust and cobwebs coating the dilapidated furniture "Looks like nobody has been here in ages"
"It’s too quiet" Cass grumbled suspiciously as she stole around behind him and into the room "But with luck it’ll do for a few hours while I trawl the scanner's data"
"You think it’ll take that long?"
"Probably not" Cass glanced back over her shoulder at him "But you know me – Assume the worst..."
She walked out into the middle of the room, half expecting to be attacked or to fall through the floor into a cellar full of horrors; but when nothing happened she turned to Jay and shrugged
"I suppose I'd best get on with the job of saving us all"
"That'll make a change" Jay smiled as Cass gingerly sank into a creaking chair "It's normally me that has to save you"
"Yeah, I was thinking it was about time I returned the favour..."

They lapsed into silence while Cass worked after that, Jay listlessly pacing the room in boredom after twenty or so minutes, the floorboards creaking guiltily beneath his boots
"You can talk to me if you like?" Cass murmured, absorbed in her work
"What would you like to chat about?" Jay asked, somewhat apprehensively
Cass sighed and glanced tiredly up at him
"Just stuff... Doesn’t matter"
She turned her attention back to the scanner, leaving Jay to close his eyes and silently shake his head
"About us, you mean?" he asked with a due sense of resignation
Her eyes flicked sharply back up from her work at this but she said nothing, leaving Jay to breathe a low sigh of his own
"Cass, I wish I had the answers you want" he said gently "But I don’t - I don’t even know what's happening myself"
"Well, I guess that it could be worse" she shrugged, trying to feign indifference "At least you're not dumping me"
Jay licked his lips nervously
"I won’t lie" he murmured apologetically "It might come to that"
Cass just stared up at him, her expression unreadable
"It's just..." Jay gestured helplessly "I mean I... I spent six hundred years looking for a way back to Katrina; looking for a way to undo what had been done to her and our son... to us; and then after six long centuries of trying, when I finally accept that she's truly gone and that I should try and move on, she's suddenly back in my life, and she's so different it's terrifying"
"And then there's you…" he continued "You're amazing; you’re smart, beautiful – challenging! What's not to like?"
Cass shrugged, but remained silent
"Do I want to be with you?" Jay asked rhetorically "Yeah - In many ways, I do! But Katrina's my wife and I've spent years with her - I've spent years looking for her, and although she's changed a hell of a lot, I've barely even got to know you"
"I mean: Who are you? – Who is Narcissa!?" he demanded, referring to the name he had heard her called by the Doombringer when it had attacked her "Is that your real name!? Were you ever going to tell me? How many other little secrets are you hiding?"
Surprised at himself Jay stopped with that final little barb, and paused to take a shaky breath, ruefully running a hand back through his hair
"Look, I'm sorry..." he started, but Cass interrupted him with a slow shake of her head
"Jay, you've been so badly abused by the STCP" she said softly "I used to know Brittany, so I'm pretty confident in my assertion that there’s absolutely nothing she won’t stoop to - and that includes messing with your mind to keep you motivated for more than half a millennia"
"I mean: Listen to yourself" she continued "Six hundred years trying find a way back to someone? That’s not right! Most people get over bereavement in around five years, and okay, you'll always miss the person who died, but after that, you move on and learn to live with your memories"
She paused to gaze unflinchingly into his eyes
"You’ve had one hundred and twenty times as long as that Jay; and right up until the moment you left the STCP you were still there in that mind-set, only to be moving on, and in my bed within a few weeks once you had escaped their influence! - Is that not even remotely suspicious to you!?"
Jay's brow furrowed as he absorbed the implications of what she was saying
"How can I even be sure if any of my thoughts or feelings are my own?" he muttered darkly
"You'll drive yourself crazy thinking that way" Cass smiled sympathetically "But I'll break us the science labs and give you that trawl I've been promising, and then you’ll know for sure; but if I were in your position, I'd view anything I thought or felt during my tenure at the STCP with immense suspicion"
"Smegging hell" Jay sighed, rubbing his face with his hands "What a smegging mess"
"I’m glad I’m not the only one that thinks that!" Cass smiled
"But does any of it even matter now that Katrina's back?" Jay shrugged "She's my wife and..."
Cass cut him sort, the frustrations of the last few days finally getting the better of her
"Damn it man! I don't know why Brittany is doing this to you, but just look at Katrina: She has moved on! She's in another relationship!"
"With a backstabbing, smegging traitor!" Jay spat, suddenly angry with her for daring to say what he had been trying hard to avoid confronting "Who's to say Kitty hasn't been subjected to the same kind of conditioning as you suggest I have!?"
"I suspect that Max being kept in stasis was more than enough to motivate Katrina" Cass retorted as calmly as she was able "And given that Ishani did what she did in order to mitigate a paradox, I would imagine neither she nor Katrina were happy with her having to leave"
"Bullshit" Jay snapped "She sold us out at the first opportunity to go running back and report everything her handlers! If the STCP are even half as bad as you say they are, how can you even begin to believe that!? - Or, given that my point still stands about me not knowing who you really are, is there something else you're not telling me about your meeting with that director, or your relationship with Brittany!?"
Cass momentarily looked like she had been slapped
"No" she replied in a small voice "...It would be nice if you took the time to get to know me?"
"Oh, really?" Jay snapped, his anger still white hot "So what is your real name!?"
"Cassandra Jones!" Cass replied forcefully, already anticipating and not liking where this was going
"Yeah!? So who's this Narcissa?"
"I don't want to go into it!"
"See!?" Jay snapped "How can there ever be any trust between us!? We should never have even got involved!"
Cass scrambled up out of her chair as if she had been stung
"If you really want to know, I'll tell you!" she yelled "And then you'll wish to hell you’d never been such a smegging prick and forced the issue!"
Glaring at her, Jay shrugged superciliously and folded his arms
"Go on then"
Glowering back at him, Cass took a ragged breath and unhappily drew herself up to her full height
"My given name is Narcissa Jane Aldridge" she began "I haven't gone by that in more than a decade because those were the names given me by my father - the goit that ruined my smegging life!"
Jay’s expression softened slightly at this and he was about to say something but Cass ignored him and pressed on, denying him the opportunity
"As for why: I was eight when my mother died and he began his descent into alcoholism" she continued in clipped tones "I don't even think he was aware of what he was doing sometimes, but abuse is too short and too trite a word for what he smegging well did to me"
"Shit" Jay croaked, involuntarily glancing away, but Cass moved back around into his line of sight, commanding his gaze and refusing to let him look away
"I murdered the vile goit when I was sixteen" she hissed "I cut his throat from ear to ear after years of physical and mental abuse, and after he had ruined me and my life in more ways than I care to mention"
She paused, to take a shuddering breath, Jay hardly able to ignore the tears glistening in her eyes
"I murdered him for raping me one time too many!" she cried, her voice cracking with emotion "And all things considered, I am a remarkably together person given what I have been through!"
She span away from him to walk back and scoop her psi scanner up from the rickety chair, angrily tucking a stray lock of hair back behind an ear as she turned back to him
"There you go!" she near sobbed "Happy!? Do you think you know enough about me now!?"
"Oh, Cass…" Jay started towards her, but she rounded on him furiously
"You have no idea what it takes for me to want to be intimate or to trust and care for someone like I do you!" she shouted, the tears streaming down her cheeks now "I’m so sorry I thought you were special!"
"Cass, I had no idea..." Jay tried again
"Oh, shut up!" she yelled "I don’t need your smegging platitudes or your pity!"
She paused to take a deep shuddering breath to calm herself and tapped at the scanner’s screen a few times before pausing to look up at Jay again
"If you breathe a word of this to anyone else" she said, wiping her tears away with her free hand "I’ll deny it all – It was the Doombringer you were talking to and not me. Got it!?"
She executed a final jump before Jay could say another word, the psychic feedback from the complex routines she had programmed, burning the psi scanner out and killing the Doombringer, tearing them all from their respective hells