Viola Rain Hackett

33 - Delma - Survivor - Deluded

[violarainhackett-blog]

zachbastiaans‌:

Zach shook his head. He hadn’t met a lot of deluded so far, just Roy and Ellie if he was correct, and he didn’t think they were crazy. Neither of them made him think they were crazy, and Rain wasn’t showing any of the signs he was described. He hadn’t been here for long enough to set his mind completely on what he thought about it, but Zach didn’t see the deluded state as some kind of superpower, some manifestation of infection that led people to believe they lived different lives. He thought that those who became deluded probably already had some form of mental health disorder that had been left untreated, they were only for the suggestions of a different life, and the crazy thing was, in Ellie’s case he had believed her, in Roy’s case he figured it might as well be true. 

And then there would be this whole government system that completely wrote them off as delusions, not even offering them the help they needed. If they truly wanted to help them, they would come up with a solution that didn’t include testing and giving them the title “deluded”. No, in order to try and locate what the problem was, you had to believe them first. And not just say you believe them, but really try to imagine your life from their perspective, emerge yourself in such a way with their story that you can accept their version of the truth. 

“I don’t really believe in that crap. I think they just branded people ‘deluded’ because they were too lazy to listen to their stories.” Zach was sincere about this, not just because Rain seemed displeased with the title, but because it was one of the things he sought to change. “So, I’ll ask again.” He leaned forward a bit. “Why would anyone want to hurt you?” There was some seriousness in his voice, a hint of worry which he figured she would either kill him for or think the world of him for trying to understand. Though he was guessing as something more near trying to kill him. 

The second answer sounded more close to the truth, so he nodded. “What branch of the government did your father work for?” he continued his line of questioning. Zach was too curious for his own good. But part of him felt like he was trying to gain information here again, knowing she was deluded, but she came off rather composed, like all of them really, and he hadn’t looked into it yet, even if he had talked to Roy and Ellie before. 

She threw a question back his way, and Zach gladly answered, he felt like he had learned a great deal from Andee, when she was trying to help him, but while he could never reach her level of expertise, he could at least use some of her techniques, even if those might be faulty. He did have new feelings to write down, but he didn’t bring the forms with him everywhere he went. “I think I probably developed it over the course of my short career in activism,” he admitted, to most it gave the best insight into his character. “So to answer your question, yes, I developed that from digging into other people’s business.” He grinned. 

Her voice was bordered by sleepiness, and he had to suppress a yawn, because he suddenly remembered he was drawing on the last of his energy, and suddenly felt the longing for some hot coffee. 

“Actually, I am pretty sure you didn’t,” he said, looking for a moment at her with the sort of studying look he barely ever had, because he tried to act inconspicuous when he studied people. Not openly as he was doing right now. 

Rain let out a bemused sigh. She felt her metal hand clunk against the table, remembering the time she lost it.

Zach was relentlessly righteous in his ways, it would have been almost admirable if that energy didn't currently translate into bothering her.

So. He wanted to know about the bad men-- the assassins, the murderers for hire, the lions and the alligators. Maybe it was because she was so exhausted, but she might as well tell him-- there was no advantage in keeping the bare minimum of her past on the down low anymore. 

Something told her he was going to keep asking anyway-- and with that stupid, sincere voice to boot. The way he talked about the deluded: well, she agreed with him-- it was refreshing for someone to take her seriously like that, she had to admit. But at least people who didn’t take her seriously left her alone. "Fine. Fine. I'll give you two more facts about me--but don't think it's because I trust you; I'm just tired of your antics..."

Nine, Eighteen, twenty-seven. "People were hired to kill me because my dad worked on something top secret for the CIA. I had spent most of my adult life making sure they didn't succeed in doing so. Happy?"

Rain's gaze turned away from him, receding back to the computer. Her metal hand gleamed a reflection of the computer monitor in the steel as her fingers clacked against the keyboard.

“An activist huh? That explains a heck of a lot. I presume you were pretty disruptive. I mean, your security class finishes that story, doesn't it? I bet you were way more annoying without the Colony's restrictions." It would explain his eagerness toward learning about her past, too. He answered for himself on the stubborn question-- at least he knew what his vices are.

Well, now she was just plain curious. “What kind of things were you focused on, as an activist?” She steeled herself against her own openness. She was heading dangerously into a chummy territory, and Rain didn’t do chummy territory. There were too many variables over there. 

Her eyelids sagged from lack of sleep-- his yawn was contagious (another thing she can blame him for). She rubbed her forehead with her left, non-metal hand. 

The headlock she put him in earlier was seeming more and more like a mistake-- if only for attracting his attention. “Well, if I didn’t say sorry for earlier let me rectify that now: sorry for putting you in a headlock. You don’t seem like someone who deserves to be put in one.” She pointed at him. “Don’t go around changing that. Still don’t trust you.” Sure, that last part seemed juvenile-- but who was keeping score?

[violarainhackett-blog]

zachbastiaans‌:

Zach nodded, although if keeping your head down would result in getting a lower security class he was still waiting on the results of that. As far as anyone would be able to see, Zach was being a model citizen, not creating a single protest in over a month. Personal record. “Why would people want to hurt you?” He dared to ask, not knowing if it was a good point in their conversation for him to start asking questions. 

Rain continued on her quest of trying to figure him out, while he was left to silent ideas of who she was supposed to be. He couldn’t help it that he was smirking when she said “hot-headed revolutionary”, closer to the truth than he had expected her to guess at. But he didn’t respond, she didn’t stay for the answer, so he didn’t think it was something she expected to know. She moved around the library as if she were still in sneak-mode, and from the other side of the room she balked orders at him. Where he could and could not go, that her work was sensitive and she didn’t want to get ideas. Zach hated people like that, especially since he hated orders, he could follow the law and he respected the law, but the law was something created by a collection of people to respect society, community, and individual worth, it wasn’t what some woman managed to spit out in the middle of the night in a library that she did not own. 

He didn’t respond, not even to tell her he had heard her. He simply took a book from the pile of books hanging around the tables, and with as much noise as he could muster settled himself in cross-legged position on the middle table he wasn’t supposed to be crossing, and opened the book in front of him. Not even having a clue what it was all about. “So your midnight-walk isn’t about freedom after all, you’re doing some sort of secretive research nobody is supposed to know about,” Zach stated, because it was obvious. That or she was using the Echo to download porn and was rather ashamed of it. Was that still a thing that could be done? Downloading porn? He had been out of the game for too long. 

Whenever she would look up, he would pretend to be reading his book again, his mind couldn’t settle on the words however. He was too curious. “Also, explain to me why this conversation is of such value that it cannot be discussed outside of this room.” It wasn’t a question, if she wanted him to pretend he hadn’t seen her - which truthfully he had no reason for spreading around because Zach wasn’t the kind of person to have friends to tell random stuff to  - she better have a good reason for it. 

The words in the book were easy, which made him guess that the age group was a lot lower than he was aiming for. He would pretend to be reading while his eyes barely registered the words, not to mention the light within the library was sort of faded, making it hard to read at all. The door to the library was still open, but they had been making a lot of noise already and nobody had come to collect them, so for now he guessed they were save. 

Rain's nose twitched as she tried really hard not grin at the (extremely annoying) display Zach had set himself up with. What was he, twelve?

She shook her head, eyes flicking up discreetly to gaze at the man who sat criss-cross on the border of her personal space. He averted looking at her, outwardly pretending to read...was that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland? It looked like it. Goddamnit, he wasn't even reading a book that wasn't for twelve-year-olds.

She flinched at his questions, not so much out of surprise that he asked them but because she had a low tolerance for questions in general.

“Why would anyone want to hurt anything? And--I’m crazy, remember? Maybe you shouldn’t take everything I say to heart-- since it might as well be all in my head.” She paused, grieving over all the work she knew she probably wasn't going to get done that night. “Let’s just say some people don’t care about the lives of others if they get in the way of their agenda.”

“And as for the work you’re distracting me from, it’s...” 

Well, what was it exactly? How does ‘I’m trying to figure out why my father planted a chip in my brain that people have tried and will kill her for’ translate into human speech? “I’m...trying to find out what my family history is.” She looked up at him. “My dad worked for the government. I want to know what he was doing before he died.”She had only told one lie, in a way-- he didn’t die; he was murdered, but that was a conversation for another day. Or never.

“So.” Her shoulders finally slumped. Zach wasn’t an immediate danger, and she didn’t entirely trust him, but she was beginning to learn he was more of a nuisance than anything else. “Have you always been this stubborn, love?” She looked up from the computer and leaned her chin on her hand. “Or did you develop that trait over your life of digging into other people’s business?” She didn’t say it with hostility; she let her voice drawl the words out boredly, letting her tiredness seep into the floorboards.

Rain couldn’t think of a reason why he’d use her activities against her, it's not like he seemed chummy with the Colony’s government and rules anyhow. He didn’t seem to take orders well period. Was he simply curious? She didn’t know how to categorize him besides annoying and nosey in the like. Hell, this was the longest conversations she had with anyone in a long time, not since everyone from her past probably didn’t survive D-day. Even if their voices were entwined without trust, she was in new territory-- connecting with another, without the possibility of them killing her. It was...well, she needed to get back to work.

“I did apologize for putting you in that headlock, didn’t I?”

[violarainhackett-blog]

zachbastiaans‌:

Zach had no clue who the “x-men” were, probably some of those characters from tv-shows and movies that had super powers. He had really only liked dinosaurs, cowboys, and those cars that turned into robots as a kid. His father had never owned a tellie, so it wasn’t as if he had deliberately missed anything. He looked at her slightly surprised, wondering if the x-men were that team with the one green guy and the guy clad in metal, who talked to a robot in his head. Really, he had only ever seen a couple of commercials, so he couldn’t say much about it. But he had never liked superheroes. The thing about them was that they never actually saved the world from existing problems, just new ones the writers made up for the amusement of others. If anyone had asked him when he was a kid what kind of superpower he would wish to have, Zach might’ve answered: Something that can actual change and save the world. 

But he wondered as well why he sounded so eager to become infected as well. He knew the reasons, but they were very unlike him. He had fought for women’s right in all different kinds of layers of society, but never had he wanted to be a woman. A lot of times there were two sides to something, But Zach believed you needed people who did face the same problem to support the solution. People who were cis had to support trans people, people who were straight had to support the LGBTQ+ community. If everyone watched out for everyone, people would live much happier lives. So maybe he didn’t want to become infected, maybe he just hoped that it wouldn’t be what divided them. 

She was curious however, she tried to hide it, but he easily caught on people who were sort of similar to him in that sense. People who wanted information, who asked questions in order to figure things out, not because they wanted to make idle conversation. And to be truthful, he would do the same thing in her situation. And in his. 

“Not really,” Zach admitted. “I’m just a tiny bit annoyed by the terminology,” which wasn’t the truth, truth was he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be infected or not, it would help with gathering information, but it would also make a lot of things more difficult, if they weren’t already so because of his security level. He smiled slightly. 

He couldn’t help but tense at the question. He should’ve had the nerve to ask her something, now he was pushed into a corner. Thanks Clove.

“I guess I have. Though, it is not because I’m much of a fighter or anything,” he said, because he knew she was still wondering about that, whether he would be a threat to her, natural suspicion. She might mention freedom to him as a reason to leave her bed at night, but he wondered if she truly knew what she was looking for. “Not in the traditional sense, anyway.” Because despite the fact that he still wasn’t certain about the reason for his place, he had to believe it was his disorderly manner before D-day. 

“You aren’t, strangely enough, given the situation we’re in, you might think the roles should be reversed.” 

“My lower security class is solely due to the fact that I’ve kept my head down-- I’ll give you that.” Rain said. “And as for my apparent affinity for physical fighting, I’ll say that it comes from years of people going out of their way to hurt me, not me intentionally seeking out the danger.” She left it at that.

“As for you-- you seem to be an intellectual fighter. Not liking certain terminology...security risks and whatnot.” Rain had made a ruling based off of Zach. “Either that or you committed some kind of Colony taboo-- trying to leave the area, maybe? A hot-headed revolutionary?”

She shook her head, not really waiting for an answer anymore. “Well, whatever you are,” She turned to walk away, skirting through the library until she settled herself at the opposite end of the room. She moved lithely, being accustomed to sneaking around, as quick as a car’s shadow. She pulled up a chair and sat down. “As long as you keep your distance, I don’t care about the way you roll.”

She flicked on one of the old computers. Not looking up at him, she said: “I don’t mind you being in here if that suits your fancy-- but only if you don’t cross that middle table over there. You stay on that side of the room, I’ll stay on this one-- any closer and I’ll have to assume you're up to something, and you don’t want that. I have research to do, so try not to make me assume things about you. Understand?”

It was forward of her to assume she had any authority over him-- enough to boss him around like that, but the rules of the Colony during the day didn't seem to apply there in the dark, late hours of the library. Besides...she had always been a little bossy, when she hadn't been on the run. Now that she had a chance to talk to another human being without the immediate threat of being killed, that facet of her personality reared its ugly head once again.

It was a small risk, not leaving due to Zack’s presence-- it's not like her research wasn’t sensitive. He wasn't one of those weirdos that could see into people's minds and crap, though. He would have used that to his advantage by now, and it would be hard to lie about not being infected since that info is more or less public record.

She felt the files she stuffed into her undershirt crinkle under the denim button up.

Rain had forgotten she had snatched one of her father's files to use as a reference. She wasn't about to pull that out in front of Zach.

She'd risked her life smuggling her dad's work out of his old office, bringing it into the colony-- not to mention she'd have to try to discreetly unbutton her shirt in front of the strange man in order to get a hold of it now. She'd have to deal with the hicup in her her already slow-going investigation for tonight. One of her dark eyebrows twitched in annoyance.

"By the way, you didn't find me in here-- this conversation is strictly confidential. You and me did not see each other, if you catch my drift..."

[violarainhackett-blog]

It’s Raining | Self Para

Rain’s small face slumped against the kitchen table. The holoscreen next to her was muted, Haily and the Kite Girls a silent movie with colorful faces, hair eyes. She wanted to be outside with the ladybugs, but even with her homework done that wasn’t a feasible option as thunder tremored throughout the boiling, chaotic sky.

Third-grade math homework and its big sharp jaws. The windows looked like someone had put a thick, grey sheet over them. Veins of water sloshing its way down the window panes. 

She had two hands back then, neither one made out of metal. That was neither here nor there. 

Crack!

With a blinding flash and deafening thunder, the electricity blinked out-- a static murmuring to leave Rain behind. She was plunged into a visual void, even the holoscreen winked out.

Rain making Rain scared. 

The darkness was surprising-- they had state of the art generators in the backyard, dad taking her by the hand, pointing out how the proud technology worked. 

That was neither here nor there.

“Mom?” She called into the void. Nine years old, embarrassed that she needed her mom in the dark.

“I’m right here, sweetheart.” There was a thump in the hallway as her mom fumbled toward the kitchen area, a hand brushing against the wall. Rain could hear her footsteps on the shag carpet.

“Okay.” Rain muttered, feeling some of the weight from the darkness lift from her shoulders.

There was a gravily moan of thunder, making the girl’s arms tense.

“I’m scared,” She said, face heating as she lost some of her big kid composure. She wasn’t eight anymore. She was in the third grade for Pete's sakes. No more night lights and baby crap for her.

Her mom didn’t sense her daughter’s regressions in behavior though, and she heard her get closer. “It’s okay honey. I’m here.”

To regain some of her pride, Rain said: “I don’t think I can do my homework in these conditions.” Conditions. That was the word she had used; an adult word, not just a big kid word. The one the weatherman used: for today, expect cloudy conditions with a fifty percent chance of rain. The one the detectives used in the drama holoshows she wasn’t allowed to watch, throwing papers in the air yelling, I can’t work in these conditions! In Rain’s mind, she was both of these characters: a levelheaded weatherman and a befuddled detective, trying to find a way out of a mystery.

To her surprise, mom laughed. Maybe it was the wild use of the word conditions. “What homework were you doing, love?” she asked, Rain recognized the tone she used: the let’s-get-down-to-business-voice. The defeating the Huns voice. The light sound was getting closer to the kitchen.

Rain sagged at the voice, sensing even darkness wasn’t an excuse for undid homework. “Math.” She resigned to the topic. “I was multiplying by nines on the number table.” She scratched the back of her neck slowly, trying to broach the sensitive subject. “I’m not really good at nines for some reason.”

“Okay.” Her mom sighed, finding a way next to her. She put her hand on one of Rain’s braids with affection. Mom was white, and her dad always had a crew cut, so she had spent quite a lot of time trying to find out the right ways to take care of her daughter's mixed hair, taking it to get it braided and making sure to learn from the other moms on the subject. She wasn’t the kind of woman to let her daughter have a bunch of dry, messed of up coils on her hands. “We start with nine, then we double it with a times two, what do we get?”

That was relatively easy. “Eighteen.”

“Now we got three nines. Nine times three-- what do we have then?”

“Twenty...seven”

“Right. Twenty-seven. Now nine times four?”

“Thirty...um...”

“Thirty six.”

“Thirty-six.” Rain repeated.

“Here’s something to help you remember: for a while in the one's place, the number will be one smaller than the last number in the ones place, like the eight in eighteen is smaller than nine, and the seven in twenty-seven is smaller than eighteen. Do you understand?”

“I think so.”

“Whats nine times four?”

“...Forty-five?”

“You got it!”

Rain smiled, feeling stronger than even the weatherman, and just like that-- the lights turned back on.

Nine. Eighteen. Twenty-seven. Thirty-six. Forty-five.

...

“Dad, why’s the doctor putting me to sleep? Why am I getting surgery? Am I sick?” Rain was panicking.

“It’s okay love.” Her mom had told her, smiling down at her hospital bed. “Take deep breaths. Remember what we do when we’re scared?”

“Nine...eighteen...”

Her father ran a hand across her cheek, “The doctor is going to take a look at you to make sure your healthy.”

“Am I not healthy?” I can’t work in these conditions. Expect cloudy conditions with a fifty percent chance of rain.

Her dad’s eyes looked sad through his smile. “We wouldn’t put you in a doctor’s hands without knowing you’d be okay. You’re going to be okay, Rain Drop. He closed his eyes for a second. “Rain...I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you...”

The medicine was starting to pull her away from his strong voice.

-

Rain’s eyes snapped open, looking at the ceiling of the Colony dorm room. 

Light pouring through the cracks in the blinds. The rickety floorboards. The crisp fall morning.

Why did dreams have to mix with memories? Memories mixing with memories wasn't necessary, either-- she already knew how to be somber about the past without her subconscious trying to rewind itself so she could make sense of it.

She shook her head, feeling the pillow grate against her dry hair. She couldn’t quite get the dead out of her eyes. A sad pair of eyes through a smile, her mom's hands touching one of her long-gone braids. The colony was now in her morning routine, waiting for her to get up, forget about that, and do her daily chores. That was neither here nor there.

She ran a right metal hand through her fizzy, dark hair.

Nine. Eighteen. Twenty-seven. Thirty-six. Forty...

[violarainhackett-blog]

“Can’t say I have it easy, making friends like I do...”

[violarainhackett-blog]

zachbastiaans‌:

Talking helped, he had said only a few words, an introduction, some left over information, but at least she seemed at ease enough to respond. Although she was clearly keeping her distance. He couldn’t blame her, he didn’t feel like putting a step closer either, very well aware of how quickly she could put him in a headlock. That was a situation best avoided. 

The name didn’t ring a bell, which meant two things: she wasn’t security level three, because Zach had spend hours in a day remembering everyone who was in Reflection Hour with him, and she wasn’t from Torren, because he was sure he hadn’t seen her pass by. That was simply all he could uncover at the moment, and it felt sort of liberating to pass people who probably had an interesting story to tell and whom he didn’t know the first thing about. Even if the announcement system hadn’t been in place for more than a week, Zach already felt like he was going insane. 

Her accent made it clear she wasn’t from England, probably overseas from America, the United States like any country was the host of many accents, but it was still easy to distinguish one country from an other. “Right, sure,” he replied. Women’s rights were one of the most sensitive cases among protesters, because no matter the amount of prove that the inequality between men and women existed, people didn’t act in a way to make it better. The fact that people still feared to be attacked by strangers on the streets because of their genders was something had always had Zach feeling nauseous. 

He noticed her movements, she was hoping to find a way out, or probably had already found it, in case he would pose a threat. So Zach hung his arms at his side, calmed himself to feel as relaxed as possible, and didn’t move. One move and she might fly off like an arrowhead, or a scared mouse. “All of that would suggest I even tried,” Zach said with a tiny smile. “I haven’t seen the inside of my dorm room since this morning.” 

Zach could feel how she was studying him, probably trying to figure out who he was, like he was trying to figure out if she was trying to hide something, or if she was naturally paranoid. Could be both, people who were paranoid often had good reason to be scared of every new person. They didn’t trust people, and they figured everyone had wrong intentions. He had intensions, most of the time, but he couldn’t call them wrong. She might figure he was either trying to use her or hurt her. He could sense some hostility coming off of her, and was trying his hardest to show the opposite; as if shouting at a room full of ants that he wasn’t going to hurt any of them. 

His eyebrow shot up when she made an assumption, probably to take a risk, to see if he would agree or disagree. Crazy, like me. Meaning they had branded her Deluded. Zach hated the term, it spoke of so many prejudices. The NWRF thought they had the right to label people, believing it would protect the rest of the population from these individuals, while obviously those people too should be protected, helped, feel understood. They took the easy way out, and he could feel anger boiling inside him at the thought of it. But he kept it from reaching his features. “I’m sorry, I think you might’ve heard that wrong,” was all he said. He didn’t want her to feel invalid because she was labeled deluded and he was not, but he also didn’t want to make her feel like he might be. It was harder to deal in the truth than to make someone comfortable with a lie. “I’m not infected.” Which was exactly what those speakers would say about him, and he felt a slight cringe now he used it as well. 

There was a strange curl downward in his tone as he said the word infected-- what emotion did the notes create? Was that the sound of shame, disappointment? She remembered the homebodies at her high school many, many years ago, their eyes would pour over colorful pages filled with masks and underwear worn on the wrong side of vibrant spandex. Maybe he had been one of them in his pre-D-day, an idealistic set of glasses that wanted to change the world with an extraordinary, inhuman spark-- one he seemed truthful about being denied of. 

Despite the discriminatory-level cons of being a part of the knockoff mutants that were the infected, there had to be those who felt their fingers curl toward the idea of superpowers. Even the tame abilities-- what even was empathiea, by the way? 

And there were, lucky or not, those who didn’t get any, like her and-- allegedly him.

Of course, unlike him, she didn’t mind not being “gifted” with such things, she had enough to worry about without having to learn how to mentally bend spoons for people who barely gave a damn about her wellbeing. She had a top-secret brain chip that could be world-bending enough-- people had been killed over it, after all, some of her loved ones included in the body count. Her calendar was already filled with stress-inducing changes to the human race as she knew it, please-and-thank-you.

Maybe she was getting ahead of herself.

“Not infected huh?” she said lightly, so as to keep the curiousness from her voice. “Well, I must have been thinking of someone else then. By the way, you say that as if its a bad thing-- eager to be a part of the X-men if it's not too blunt to presume?” 

There was a twitch in her lips, a barely-there-then gone grin. She liked security risks, they were always funny to talk to in the way they never seemed to stop spilling their guts here to there about every belief they had that would make a higher-up’s skin crawl. Very excitable creatures. It comforted her that she wasn’t alone in believing the whole strict system wasn’t total BS...

Of course, she would never say that out loud. Or much of anything out loud-- she was a good listener (eavesdropper) though.

Perhaps she was encroaching on sensitive territory, but the more she figured out, the better cards she was given to play. He didn’t seem to be a danger to her yet-- that prospect was edging to the boundary of the table, ready to shatter on the floor like a toppled piece of fine china. But trustworthy? No. There were still things like contraband hidden knives that could be snuck into the pockets of the aggravated.

“I remember your name, you have a peculiar security class for your circumstances if that’s the case. Am I mistaken that you’re labeled a ‘security risk’?”

Her shoulders weren’t tense, but she didn’t move out the range of the doorway. Every pending response she had from this stranger stressed her nerves out.

[violarainhackett-blog]

zachbastiaans‌:

It took a little time before she finally let him out of the headlock. He was considering what could happen next, weighing the options. He knew people were able to kill someone in this position, and he really wasn’t sure if he was ready to die yet. Not that he would have much of a choice if it did happen. Then again, this was the worst place to get rid of someone, and she really had no reason to. He was as defenseless as a puppy, which described him pretty well. He had never been a fighter, and he considered himself as harmless as a fly, unless when it came to words. Part of him however was still afraid that if placed in a stressful situation, a situation where human rights weren’t followed, he might jump out of skin again and do things he would never think himself able of doing. 

In this case, Zach wasn’t stressed, or even afraid, he was mostly just in a very uncomfortable, somewhat awkward, situation that he wished to get out of so he could explain himself, and also so he could ask what she was doing there as well. He was convinced that she either had something to hide, or was just like him trying to avoid tuck-in-time. 

The release came with somewhat of a surprise, when he heard her moving away from him at a quick pace, probably thinking now it was his turn to retaliate. Zach simply turned, rubbed his neck, and watched her, slightly disappointed that she would think he was going to fight her, or charge at her, or anything else ridiculously unlike him. Some part of him wondered if he was being too much at ease, if he was just trying to keep himself calm, knowing what else he could do if he did get angry. 

Seeing as there was no machine to yell out his name and sensitive information for him, Zach guessed he could give whatever answer he wanted. “Zach Bastiaans,” he responded, easy enough. The second question? A bit harder. “As for what I’m doing here, avoiding having to go to bed, and enjoying a bit of freedom. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be attacked.” He was no closer to the door to the library than she was. “And you?” Some suspicion was hard to keep from his voice. He wanted to think the best of her, but curiosity and suspicion worked really well together. 

Given how quickly she had put him in a headlock, Zach did feel like he should be careful. Half of the people in the Colony were trained to participate in the Games, to fight, to be violent. But he never got into a situation where that might be used outside of restricted areas. 

Then again, not saying anything, just giving in, wasn’t his sort of play. He was the victim here, although it might seem like he was stalking, he knew he wasn’t, but she was the one who had clearly used violence. Who misread the situation. Even if Zach apologized, he remained careful to think himself the bad guy. 

At his response Rain felt a flicker of heat cross her face, but as for her expression: her frown only deepened. She considered her recent actions a mistake, but in a way, it was one of those mistakes that could roll off the back of her ethos like water. She was better safe than sorry, after all. 

Her short, coily hair ruffled as she ran a hand through it like she was sending away the annoyances of her own mind. “Sorry about that, love. Thought you were...someone else-- can never be too careful, a sole lady like me at night, right?” She smiled with her teeth, a gleam of white in the dark. “Name’s Rain. Here for a little midnight reading, glad to enjoy a bit of freedom as well.” 

Rain’s eyelids lowered as she reviewed his appearance: no weapons as far as she could tell. Zach wasn’t strictly strength-bound, either-- not so much as an outline of muscle on his shoulders or arms. His body language showed little signs of aggression considering she had put him in a headlock, but she made no move to approach him further. Her guard simmered outwardly.

“Hard time sleeping, huh?” She walked along the circumference of her personal space between them, setting herself at an angle where she could easily book for the exit if she so chose to. “It could’ve easily of been something you ate. Food here isn’t very good.” Her red sneakers were aimed at the little cast of moonlight that came in from the hallway window, right through the library doorframe.

“Or it could’ve been the simple side effects of the world, crashing down on your tiny human brain. The apocalypse thing hasn’t really helped with my sleeping habits, I’ve found.”

That name-- Zach Bastiaans. Where had she heard it before? She was sure she had heard it spoken over the unholy Colony speakers, but she’s rarely paid too close attention to that, only focusing on ones that might affect her directly.

Rain could conjure up a few key principals of how the higher-ups viewed him then. Something about a security risk? He didn’t seem like a fighter... appearances can be deceiving though, as she’d learned the hard way in her previous life. He must be some sort of troublemaker. Let's see... was he infected? Had to be. No, that can’t be right...

“You said your name is Zach Basinaans? I’ve heard that before, on the loudspeakers. Seems like your just another crazy, like me.”

It was a small risk, revealing her own unjust label, but maybe she could get him to connect with her-- at least then he won’t go around telling people she attacked him at night, wandering the grounds. With her being deluded, it would be easy for him to get others to believe just about anything about her or her actions. It’s not like she had made a habit of making friends around the area, preferring to keep her head down during chores and the like and then her private work whenever she got the chance. 

[claytonboyd]

Open Starter//

[He’d never had the neatest handwriting, for he was always in a rush; dragging pen to paper with quick flicks of his wrist as if even sentences were above him. 

But today, it looked especially bad and the fountain pen he’d somehow found amongst the mass of half used biros in one of the classrooms (chosen for it was the only one that worked), kept getting caught under his left arm and smudging sideways in long, angry looking strokes. 

It was frustrating him and in his own, mildly angry whale song, he sat there clicking and huffing at every expanded sentence that quite soon after bled into conjoined letters and illegible smudges. 

If classwork wasn’t already stupid enough. 

So he huffed; one loud, large puff of annoyed air before he bought up his palm and with vigour, pushed the various sheets of badly written prose into the air – scattering them into a less than neat pile on the floor below him] And with that, I am fucking done. 

[violarainhackett-blog]

[Rain’s mind felt scattered that day like someone had taken a bazooka and spread her bloody pink brain all over the wall. 

Normally, the whole deluded label didn’t bother her-- in some cases, it actually seemed to help her, as it kept others away from her presence-- people that might pose a threat to her for all she knew. She accepted the fact that people didn’t want to get chummy with miss Straightjacket with vigor in that respect.

But god, did her head hurt today-- it usually did, around changes in the season, with a deep electric throbbing in her temples. She wasn’t infected, but she had an inkling it had something to do with the mysterious chip in her brain. Of course, she couldn’t outright say it, since the whole chip thing seemed to make the higher-ups...uneasy about her. Like she’s dangerously unhinged.

Maybe she was unhinged. She didn’t like doubting herself-- she’s had plenty enough of that-- but the headache was splitting, and she could never be sure about whether or not it was all a smoky work of her faulty imagination.

All these things made her want to do something she didn’t normally make a habit of: complain. Right now she would kill to have someone listen to her -- maybe not about her past, but it would at least make her headache seem like less of her mind falsely acting against her body.

She was surprised out of her thoughts when she heard a piece of paper slide under her foot. She reached down to examine it--]

What, did you try to reenact the effects of a tornado on a bunch of scrap paper or something kid? [She examined the one in her hands.] Jesus, looks like someone’s also left-handed-- looks like you just about smudged half the paper. Not every day I find someone like me. When I write it looks like I was trying to erase everything with my bare hands. [She gave a tight smile.]

[violarainhackett-blog]

zachbastiaans‌:

The library door was open, no introduction system yelled when the individual walked in, making Zach feel even more terrible. A guard? Could they stop it from running, or was it just the fact that it was this late - he had no clue how late, but late it was - that the system had stopped working. Because who would visit the library after midnight. 

He kept to the shadows, he wasn’t naturally frightful, rather the opposite. Zach never backed down, never had much of a problem with confrontation. He was stubborn to a fault as well, so confrontation wasn’t something he could avoid. Not that he wanted to, conversation, discussion, they were all necessary means that ensured people had to open up and think. At least those who were open enough to it. 

Fear of course, didn’t work well together with his curiosity. He was always looking out for new information, went into confrontations because he figured he could learn something from it, stayed there in the shadows because he wanted to know who the individual was, and why they were in the hallway. Even if it was a guard, Zach still didn’t feel the need to stagger back, to flee to safety. No, he would gladly stay and see what was going to happen. Sitting it out wasn’t really something Zach did, something he had tried to do the first few weeks here, but pretty much failed at completely. As soon as word reached him that something was wrong in the colony, inequality was pushed by the leaders without a second thought, he could no longer pretend he could stand by and watch silently. He needed to act. 

In this case, he wasn’t acting, he was just waiting in the shadows, studying the individual, only a small space of maybe five meters between them. Enough to make out clearly that they had a slim frame, and hovered in the doorway. Was he caught? Their hesitation spoke of recognition, knowing there was someone watching, that feeling that went up your spine to your neck, you couldn’t shake that someone was looking at you. And Zach couldn’t shake that he was found.

Suddenly the person moved, quickly, intently. They turned and lunged straight for Zach, who, in any fight or flight situation, often had no idea what to do with himself. Despite knowing he might as well have been stalking his prey, and should’ve been aware or retaliation, he was not at all ready to be under attack. 

The headlock was new, really hadn’t been expecting that much. So either she was well trained, or she had been training well. Either way, he seemed to have been caught in a rather awkward situation. This wasn’t a guard, by the time she was close to him, he could clearly make that out. Just an other colony member, going to the library to… study? Play a game? Do something that didn’t include sleeping back in their dorm room. He wasn’t the only one dismissing sleep. 

“Okay, okay! Sorry, I wasn’t spying on you, just happened to be in the same hallway. Can you please let me go!” 

Rain’s eyebrows raised upon hearing the man talk. Considering that her instincts had told her that an immediate danger was hiding in the shadows-- she had been expecting a far stronger advisory, not...the one apologizing before her.

She weighed her options with a tilt of her head. After a split second of hearing the stranger grovel in her headlock, she decided that it was better to risk getting into a fight than getting moved up the security classes for hurting a harmless Colony member.

She could handle fights-- not bureaucracy.

“Fine.” She admonished under her breath.

Rain loosened her arms from him, taking a few paces back quickly so he couldn’t use his newfound freedom to gain an upper hand on her.

She raised up her chin to make herself seem taller than what her five-foot-three stature seemed to suggest about her and lowered her voice sharply so she could sound like a better-fitting member of authority. Her voice was also something she always tried to work around-- it was a little on the lighter side and had too much of a British accent. Then again, danger did always come from the higher notes on a cord from her experience.

“Who are you?” Rain demanded, keeping her arms ready at her side. “What are you doing around here?”

Of course, it was hypocritical of her to be asking that of him when she herself was obviously up to shady business, but she figured as long as she acted like she belonged where she was and he didn’t then that confidence would start to bleed into what he believed, too. Fake it till she made it, and whatever or wherever “it” was, she could figure out later. As far as she could tell that’s how the politics around the colony worked, anyway.

When her father was in the CIA, he once talked about the small differences appearances could make, for better or worse. He said that in order for others to work with you you have to act like what they believe a leader might act, whether those actions were a product of your personality or not-- something like that. She took some of that to heart and molded the advice so it would better suit her situation.

If she was dressed up like a damsel, people would protect her-- if her costume was bulletproof, then so was she.

He had told her this advice on one of the small instances where her family was on vacation. The Hacketts had a country home, far from the city-- with chickens and horses and rolling fields like ripples in green seafoam and a shiny lake that reflected the blue sky.

Rain remembered his clear voice in the warm summer air. Sunshine would make his tall figure look like a great, dark statue-- like an old president or a soldier. At the end of the day, he wasn’t the one that needed to wear a costume, almost every part of him fit his role as a leader. Maybe a little too much. Maybe that’s why he was murdered-- his intelligence led him to know more than he should’ve known.

Her lips tightened at the memory-- the past was so sticky and she had to tear away pieces of it from her mind so she didn’t get glued to it. “Well?” She said.

[violarainhackett-blog]

zachbastiaans‌:

Zach liked to call it tuck-in-time, the time after dinner when he was no longer allowed to roam the hallways. Being a security three, Zach had sort of accepted there were restrictions to his freedom, although he loathed not being able to go places without being checked. With the new announcement system in check, it was also very hard to stay unnoticed. Where he used to be a semi-tall, little chubby, dark-haired individual, he was now Zachariah Bastiaans, Torren, Level three, and not Infected. Great way to make friends. Also he hated someone saying his full name time and time again on speakers that he almost wished he could roam the hallways forever and never enter a single room. 

The scary thing about it was that it reminded him too much of corrupt governments, of prison cells, of places that shouldn’t exist in this world anymore. The thought of running away from the Colony hadn’t yet passed his mind until the day his name first came through those speakers, followed by all that information that made Zach want to drop through the floor. 

Level three, not to be trusted, to be feared, caution. 

His whole plan of talking with the Infected and convincing them to fight for their rights was out of the window. Not only was the security clearance haunting him, but being uninfected, something he could keep people from finding out at first, made it even less easy to convince people of his support. He wasn’t one of them. Thank you, Miss Modius, for pointing that out so mercilessly. 

This night however, Zach had been careful about avoiding tuck-in-time, and was still roaming the hallways when pitch-blackness had claimed the world around him. Safe for a few lights shining overhead, the halls seemed deserted. He walked slowly, hoping to push sleep away for the next couple of hours because he really didn’t feel like waking up his whole dorm when he entered.

He wasn’t sure what he was doing out of bed, why he didn’t want to return to his dorm, but his gut told him he was trying to reclaim just a tiny fraction of that freedom. He used to live out on the streets, sleep in squats, crash on couches; living a life that meant he could go absolutely anywhere. Except for a few obvious places. Maybe he had taken that freedom for granted back then, but he certainly missed it now. He missed being able to go outside in the middle of the night and just stare at the stars, he missed waking up on someone’s couch and planning to make them breakfast just to say thanks. He missed speaking his mind and protesting about everything that bothered him. He even missed, badly missed, standing outside in the rain in front of a bar after a successful protest and reminiscing their next move. And now part of him believed his cause being even less likely to succeed because he couldn’t use that animosity anymore that he had lived on back in the day. So here he was tiptoeing his way through the halls of the Colony in order to hold himself steady with the meager thought of having a bit of freedom. 

Near the library, Zach picked up on some new sounds, footsteps, one pair, quiet. He saw a person somewhere in front of him, and quickly moved away into the shadow, hoping they hadn’t seen him. If it was a guard, he was in serious problems, if not, he might still be in serious problems. 

—

Rain’s cheap sneakers hushed against the library carpet, feeling the stiff fibers sag with dust. Monoliths of bookshelves were set in soldier formation throughout the large room. Some of the shelves gaped where looting had taken its toll on the room many years prior.

Chipped mahogany tables sat with tucked in chairs, occasionally scarred from dead kids’ graffiti. A heart adding two letters together in its center. The word fuck and shit and ass. A name, Brooke Salazar. The eggplant of the human body. Boarding schools for rich minors couldn’t even rid themselves of the human equalizer that was a bored brat’s immaturity. She wondered which pencil scratching or permanent marker-scrawl was the last before D-Day hit. A child’s final magnum opus: a pair of poorly drawn boobs on public property.

Which ones are from the survivors and which ones aren’t?

Rain’s been to unnerving, abandoned husks of society before. Scavenging through hospitals and convenience stores before the Colony. Skirting through weather-cracked streets.

But there was something about the little normal things that managed to wig her out, not the colossal landmarks piled under the sands of time. Things like table graffiti felt all so immediate… like the dead were merely out for lunch, and she was only waiting for the gears of normalcy to start working again, light filling the dark room. One ring of a bell and a parade of young people in crisp, itchy uniforms would come back into the library at any moment. Their stomachs content and their hands ready to return their overdue books.

Every silence felt like a pregnant pause, waiting for the apocalypse to be rectified.

Rain shook her head, not knowing if those thoughts were healthy.

Then, that slight paranoid feeling that she always had filed somewhere in her senses blossomed into an urgent uneasiness. Something in the room didn’t settle right in her spacial awareness.

Her neck prickled and the hair on her arms rose. Her amber-brown eyes scanned the shadows, searching for any flicker of movement.

Perhaps an intruder? Her thoughts were already escalating in nines: eighteen, twenty-seven, thirty-six, forty-five, fifty-four…

She hovered in the doorway– instincts and mind trying to produce the safest outcome. She’d been in the library religiously while dealing with life in the Colony. Her nights filled with Echonet reading and the slow, tedious process of pouring over her father’s files. That and being at odds with hired killers in her younger days had made her accustomed to the feeling of a nearby hidden presence.

Of course, she could be crazy– the tightwads that ran the damned Colony seemed to think so.  They labeled her diluted, after all. Turns out telling elite that you’ve had various hits put on you in the past for a classified chip in your brain doesn’t go over well.

And then Rain saw an outline of a person’s figure in the shadows. She felt her muscles moving before she could comprehend what she was doing– first, she lunged, then she tried to put the stranger in a headlock.

—

[violarainhackett-blog]

Before Daybreak | Open Para

Rain’s hands trembled as she buttoned up her loose denim shirt, subtracting numbers in her head by nine.

As in, one-hundred-and-seventeen, one-hundred-and-eight, ninety-nine, ninety, eighty-one, and so on, until there was nothing left to divide.

Third button from the bottom. Seventy-two.

Her scar in the middle of her fawn-colored belly became covered as she buttoned up the fourth section of her shirt. Sixty-three.

The shaking in her bronze fingers diminished to a slight tremor as she fumbled with the fifth button. The mirror in front of her was foggy and turned her image into the vague report of colors from its muggy reflection. A blue shirt, her warm tawny skin, and a curly dark wave of hair that reached down to her denim shoulders. The contours of her face were lost in this clouded reflection-- no eyes, nose or mouth.

Rain’s hands moved to the top button, forty-five, thirty-six, twenty-seven.

Twenty-seven. She let out a breath that felt too warm in the cramped, post-shower bathroom. Twenty-seven. She shook her head--- why did that number always seem to stick with her, even on this November day? Deathday. His death. July 27. 

Keep subtracting. 

Eighteen. The age she was when the bad people started to follow her. Nine. The age she was when her father took her on that trip to the-- what was it called again? Orange, desert alps that were layered in reds and yellows like cake...valleys that seemed to go on forever until the sun winked out of the sky and the world was plunged into crisp, starry darkness. She and him watched from the steep edge as the sunset turned the sky pink. The Grand Cannon! That’s what it was, decades ago. Of course, that was all gone now.

Twenty-seven. Eighteen. Nine. Zero. Nothing, no more. 

Rain paused, her metal hand clicking into a fist on the porcelain sink. She couldn’t quiet her mind using nines today. She saw shapes and color around her only in theory-- as her mind took her eyes away. Water leaked from the faucet, dripping rhythmically into the drain.

Drip.

“Father in heaven.” She whispered.

Drip.

“If you really are out there. If you can hear me.”

Drip.

“Please just make sure I learn what I need to know. Give me a sign that I’ve been doing what I'm supposed to do-- that I’m not crazy.”

With that, she made sure the files stuck under her shirt were securely in place before heading out the door into the world-- notably towards the Library, where she could get on the Echo Net, the computer-like tech a goldmine for her sensitive research. It was the tender hours of the night, barely early morning-- between lights out and wake up. 

She wasn't supposed to be out-- she checked behind the side of her shoulder as she crept quietly through the halls. But hell, sleeping was a nightmare. The dead seemed to wake her, prompting her to continue trying to find out the monster in her head-- the chip that was implanted in her brain. 

She had to find out what the chip meant, and why her father put it there. So why sleep, in a dorm room anyone with a strong shoulder can break into, or godly abilities she had yet to fully comprehend?  Rain shuddered, library and research close to her grasp.

She checked over her shoulder again.

[the-colony-roleplay]

VIOLA RAIN HACKETT | THIRTY THREE;  SURVIVOR

House: Delma Security Class: 2 Status: Deluded

HISTORY

Viola Rain was a girl who didn’t realize she was running. She grew up with a loving mother who worked as a veterinarian and a father in the CIA. They were a happy family, leading relatively normal lives in their suburbia bungalow home with their two cats.

Viola, who’d never loved the stuffy air about her first name, had begun to more commonly go by Rain as she got older, and she was sixteen when her father was killed on the job. The loss left her and her mother to fend for themselves, but despite the expected grief, her life stayed more or less the same. 

That is, until her eighteenth birthday. From nearly the minute she came of age, Rain started to notice oddities about her day to day life. It started small at first, but she started to feel like she was being watched. In the beginning, the feeling walked the line between occasional and somewhat frequent, and though she tried to write it off as perhaps some kind of psychosomatic paranoia (she even talked to a therapist about it), later it evolved to nearly all the time. Though professionals had suggested that it could have been to do with the trauma from her father’s death and the nature of his line of work, it was an excuse that was becoming increasingly trying to have faith in. She was convinced something was going on—it couldn’t all be in her head. 

In the space of maybe eight to twelve weeks, it only got worse. In fact, Rain had suspicions she wasn’t just being watched, but rather followed—stalked even—and it only took a couple incidents of being chased down dark alleys to confirm them.

Though Rain knew nothing of who these men in suits were, men who carried guns and often spoke in foreign tongues, she wasn’t about to slow down long enough to find out. So she ran. More than that, she trained: in techniques of survival and self defence, knowing only one thing—that she had to survive her pursuers long enough to find out the truth. 

Even still, it didn’t feel like enough; it seemed no matter what she did, they were gaining on her, each assassination attempt closer and more accurate than the last. Rain began to fear not only for her own life, but for her mother’s. She’d not told her mother about anything that was going on, hoping to protect her and thinking the less she knew, the better.

But soon her mother’s ignorance alone didn’t seem as though it would be enough, and so at nineteen Rain moved out in an effort to keep her safe. That’s when Rain was contacted by an old friend of her father’s calling himself Seymour, who confirmed that no, Rain hadn’t lost her marbles, but neither was what she doing going to be enough; these men were trying to kill her and would inevitably succeed unless she accepted Seymour’s help. All this, Seymour claimed to know; he also claimed to know the reasons behind why Rain was being chased, only he wouldn’t tell her why. And though Rain was hesitant to trust a man who kept so many secrets, whose entire nature was so unclear, what other choice did she have?

So Rain agreed, and in the space of a year, she was a woman on the run, skill enough with a gun, and with her fists and wits, to do it properly—but she also still had hundreds of unanswered questions. By the time she was twenty two, three years had passed since Seymour’s appearance and she was starting to piece together information, little hints she’d stumble upon from Seymour’s drunken slurs, from her pursuers, from her father’s old files. By the time she was twenty six, Rain knew her pursuers were hired by some corrupt thread of government, and that they were after a chip that her father had had implanted in his daughter’s head for “protection” when she was only eight years old—what Rain didn’t know was protection for what exactly, her own, or the chip’s? What she also didn’t know, was why.

RAIN TODAY

Rain was still missing answers by the time D-Day hit, and with most of the planet wiped out, she hoped that at least her running days were over. With no proof of Seymour’s survival, but neither proof of his death, Rain still buries herself in some of her father’s old files she’d salvaged. Nearly six dozen dusty cases of Echo chips that Rain had found stashed in the attack just a few weeks shy of D-Day. She’d only just started sorting through them all and digging through their contents on her senior’s private office Echo system, by the time the apocalypse had come around. Rain had fled the crumbling city and found shelter, taking nothing but a back pack with each of the roughly 6” by 3” cases shoved inside, and whatever provisions she could manage.

Rain survived on her own for about twelve weeks after D-Day, sleeping at the edge of a shrivelling forest and traveling about an hour’s walk every few days to raid a half-collapsed supermarket that she and whatever other possible survivors in the area were using for food. The contents quickly waned, though Rain never allowed herself to be seen or to approach other survivors. In fact she avoided every other infrequent soul, purely for the fact that in her shock, she couldn’t trust anybody.

When she was found by Colony 22 about three months later, she was thin and growing bony, and having lost the will to be paranoid, she went with relief. Since then, Rain’s returned to what anyone can consider ‘normal’ in circumstances like this, though she’s quite scarce with her trust; even when fond of someone, she will second guess their every move. 

When it eventually came out, the truth of what she believed to be in her head, and that she’d been mysteriously an assassination target since the day of her eighteenth birthday, she was classified as Deluded. With no record of her on-the-run life in the Echo system, and no means to properly check the validity of a supposed ‘chip’ in her brain (not to mention no real will to, as it was easy to write her off as another delusional victim of D-Day’s infection) she never had a shot at being taken seriously. 

Though it’s been years, she can’t shake the habit of being on the lookout, always on the watch for a knife at her back, a gun to her head. But at least with the Echo System once again at her disposal, she can continue with her private research on finding out what exactly is in her head and why. However, this is something she has resigned to doing in complete secrecy, sneaking around at night to go through the files, and stowing away the ripped and tattered rucksack of cases under a floorboard under her bed during the daylight hours. It’s therefore, a very slow process, and she has yet to get through even half of her father’s salvaged files. 

TAKEN

[violarainhackett-blog]

(Mr Little Jeans)

[jules420kickflip-blog]

Visit Original Link

Black Bear - Black Bear

And when he stared across the river

in to my eyes it made me shiver

And I knew that it was lovely

to have a black bear thinking of me

And when he thinks, he is thoughtful

and when he rests, he is restful

And when he runs, he runs the fastest

spins the earth right on its axis

[violarainhackett-blog]

“I’ve been on the run for longer than my legs can take me.”

[violarainhackett-blog]

<3 The Rain Hackett Aesthetic <3

[violarainhackett-blog]

Bio + Game Link

Bio: http://the-colony-roleplay.tumblr.com/post/173569068480/viola-rain-hackett-thirty-three-survivor

Game : http://the-colony-roleplay.tumblr.com/