PHD #197: Tears for a Friend
PHD #197: Tears for a Friend
Summary: After hearing the news about Lauren Coll, Rose finally has her breakdown regarding the holocaust.
Date: 11 Sep 2041 AE
Related Logs: None
Players:
Bannik Rose 
Hangar Deck - Starboard - Midship - Battlestar Cerberus
This Hangar Bay is filled with boxes, crates and other various supplies that are needed throughout the ship. Most have been moved to one end and lashed with tarps to keep them out of the way. The place has gone from extra ship storage on one end and the ability to house over 450 people on the other end. Whatever could be made into cots has been set up like a huge barracks. Some areas have been made more presentable with a few items that belong to the person holding onto their small area in this world.
Marines guard this area 24/7 and food is brought in cafeteria style, feeding people out of vats and buckets as they line up with their plates. One area has been tarped off to the side, that holds canvas showers and sinks. The 'Head' in this area has to be cleaned daily since it is a temporary military bathroom setup, due to there is no way to flush it out through pipes.
Post-Holocaust Day: #197

The starboard hangar has the usual din of hundreds of souls milling about, conversing, playing cards, and otherwise trying to occupy their collective existance. For right now, this is home, and there isn't a whole lot to do -at- home. The mixture of hundreds of warm bodies, some pleasant but mostly not, mixed with the scent of chemical latrine and whatever disinfectants are spread around as a fascimile of soap and water… it's not a pleasant place.

Rose Ibbhanas, though, for over a week now, has managed to learn names and converse with many. Many come to her, but in her sight-impaired exploration of the hangar, she's bumped into many herself. Today, however, she sits on a bench made out of old cargo containers, whitestick folded at her side. In her hands is a small wrought figurine, which gets turned over and over, slowly, as her cloudy eyes stare off into nothingness. Clearly her mind is elsewhere.

Bannik is in his greens, but he's in the off-duty version of his greens, which is to say the top button of the shirt is undone and it's untucked from his matching trousers. While Tyr is a semi-frequent visitor around here, sometimes poking around the pipes to see if he can figure out how to get plumbing into the latrines, he seems to be looking for someone in particular today. He stops by one of the Marines that keep order. "Rose — uh." He pauses on the last name. "Ibbhanas?" A point over at the woman and Tyr is on his way over there.

What they say about those with an impaired sense is true, even if it's patronizing. There's a slight indication that Rose overhears her name spoken, as her head tilts slightly in the direction of Bannik and the marine, but she doesn't do much beyond that. She doesn't even react much to Tyr's approach. The figurine in her hand is clearly one of Poseidon.

Bannik places his hand lightly on Rose's shoulder when he approaches, a friendly gesture, but also one to let her know he's there. "Ms. Ibbhanas?" he asks. "I'm Tyr Bannik. I — well. I mean. I work on the Deck, but." He pauses again. "I heard you might want someone to pray with, I guess is the best way to put it." 'Lay clergy' still seems to be a label he is hesitant to ascribe to himself.

Rose shirks away a few inches from Bannik's well-meant hand. "Please don't touch me," she mutters, eyes still fixed on the idol in her hands. "I know you mean well, it's just that… I'm not very good company right now. I appreciate the gesture." Visible now is a folded wad of tissues jutting out of one of her pants pockets; with red underneath her eyes it's clear she's been rather upset today.

The hand is quickly removed. "Do you mind if I sit with you?" Tyr asks, gently, trying to figure out just where the boundaries lay right now. Despite his hands being that of a deckhand, his voice is soft, almost, well, pastoral. "You have to be better company than a fried Raptor circuit board."

Rose shrugs a shoulder as her left hand fumbles briefly to take up her folded whitestick and places it on the other side of her. "It's not as if I own the bench," she states petulantly. At least that's not an outright, flat denial. "Circuit boards can be replaced, can't they? I mean, they're machines. Unplug a defective part, plug a new one in. It's probably not that simple, but in practice…" She trails off.

Bannik takes that as invitation enough and settles onto the make-shift bench next to the scientist, folding his hands in front of him. "Well, they can," he agrees. "Sometimes, at least, if you have it. But we're all making due with less now, so we're fixing up stuff we'd have replaced before." He chooses his words carefully, as if aware this isn't really about circuit boards, but not knowing quite what it is about.

The figurine in her is slowly turned over, clockwise, no longer being twisted along its vertical axis. "The reason why we're all having to 'make do' is because of machines, you know," Rose murmurs, her eyes trailing down towards the deck. "The Cylons have killed mostly everyone anyone of us ever cared about. All because someone forgot to 'change a circuit board', probably," she says with a dry, half-hearted chuckle. But it's not mirthful by any stretch.

"No one knows why it happened, Rose. We might never know. Maybe only the gods know. All we know is what's written in the Scrolls: that this all happened before and that it'll all happen again." Bannik sighs and looks down, shaking his head. "Sometimes, I don't know if that's going to make me feel any better. It's sort of hollow, you know? But I've just got to place my faith in Them and figure they know what they're doing, even if we can't ever know."

"That's reassuring," comes her droll response, smirking sarcastically. It's like the Poseidon figurine gets very heavy in Rose's hands, as it begins to just slip through her fingers. It lands on the deck with a thud and a metallic tang. Her hands remain as they are, apart and limp. She sniffles. "And they say Miss Coll was a Cylon."

Bannik reaches down to scoop up the figurine, to take it into his hands, even though it slipped out of hers. "No one knows why that guy said that, Rose. It could have just been one crazy guy." He does his best to be reassuring, even though some sadness slips into his own voice, too.

Rose chokes back whatever emotions are desperately clamoring to be released. "Besides the rescue team, she was the first person to visit me in sickbay," she explains, voice shaky and uncertain. "Even if she was a Cylon, she was kind to me. It was like she really cared about me. A nobody. Just one of hundreds that they scooped off of the nuclear wasteland that used to be our homes."

"That's got to be really tough, Rose. I mean, I bet you feel kind of lost here, like you're just some cattle shoved into a hangar deck to languish. And Lauren saw — you know. You." Bannik tries his best to put some words to feelings, to try to empathize. "But you know Lauren's not gone. She's just on the other side of the river, waiting for us."

The dam bursts. "Oh, cut the frakking crap," Rose blurts out, looking straight at Bannik. It's as if, for a moment, her emotional outburst empowers her to pierce through her radiation-caused cataracts. Her eyes aren't full of hate, but clearly she has tremendous anger and sadness clashing all at once. Naturally, a few folks turn their heads to look. "The Cylons are going to come and kill us all, don't you understand? They don't care about the things that make us human. The bonds, the feelings, our families…" Tears well up in her eyes like fountains, and her lips curl into a grimace of sorrow. "They're just frakking circuit boards, and they've won. They… destroyed Aquaria's oceans. Poseidon's oceans! If they can kill a god, they can kill us!!" Clearly emotionally off-center, the young woman stands up, and clumsily attempts to unfold her whitestick, perhaps to beat a hasty retreat. But she drops that, too. She crouches down, tears striking the deck before her hands do, searching for the tool.

When Rose drops to her knees, so does Bannik, gingerly taking the walking stick and placing it into her hand, so that she can feel it once again. "They can, Rose. They have. I can't deny that. But they can't kill Posiedon. He's in the Oceans, but the Oceans aren't /Him/. And what makes /us/ different than /them/ is that when we die, that's not the end for us. We get to join our friends and our family and our loved ones, and they don't get to do that. They just go away."

"That's what the scrolls say, but… but…" Rose manages to unfold the whitestick, but the energy to stand back up is sapped away by the miserable sobs that begin to escape her chest. Instead of standing, she falls forward, grabbing a fistfull of Bannik's shirt near the collar. She loses it now, bawling her eyes out like… well, someone who's finally let the realization set in that everything she had, is gone. Coll's death might've just been the trigger point. She buries her face in Bannik's chest, wailing, pounding feebly against his shoulder with her other hand. She's a mess.

Even so, Bannik places his arm lightly around her shoulders, holding her, letting her cry her eyes out for just about as long as she wants. He doesn't try any of the patronizing gestures. No 'ssh' or 'it'll be okay,' because, well, it won't. Instead, he just lets her get it all out.

It takes her a few minutes, but finally, Rose disengages from poor Bannik and falls backwards onto her bum. Sniffling pitifully, she wipes her face. "I'm… I'm so sorry," she whimpers. "That was terribly forward of me. I didn't mean to… I mean your shirt, and…" Her face is a splotchy wreck. "Miss Coll's death just… broke me." She offers a tearful smile. "Thank you for, well… letting me cry on you." A small laugh.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License