2023-01-14: Cultivating
- Cast: Alouette Pommier, Liam 7-020
- Where: Tsutsujidai - Community Garden
- Date: U.C. 0097 01 14
- Summary: Alouette and Liam shares pieces of their pasts, both outlined by BioNet's hand. She tries to convince him - and herself, to some extent, that the future is waiting.
<Pose Tracker> Alouette Pommier has posed.
It's been about a week, give or take, since Julia Ampere shocked the city of Tsutsujidai with an elaborate scheme. Though Julia emerged the game's victor, she saw to it that no harm befell her surroundings nor to those who fought back against her.
But even if Liam wasn't injured, Alouette saw the pain he felt inside when she escorted him off the battlefield. A pain that she can recognise.
Because of that, Alouette thought it might be a good idea for them to talk through those feelings. Without a way to schedule such a meeting however, she simply heads to the community garden - Liam's project, expecting it's most likely to find him there.
The garden appears to be coming along nicely, as those seedlings they just planted not long ago already begin to grow and mature. "/Bonjour, Liam. Anything I can help with?" Practically, Alouette starts, eyeing at the tools around the garden.
"And, ah... are you holding up okay?" Her voice drops just a pitch. "Honestly, there's some things I wouldn't mind getting off my chest, either." She tugs at a curl, smiling ruefully. "Didn't know how to articulate it at the time."
<Pose Tracker> Liam 7-020 has posed.
It's raining when Alouette arrives at the garden, because it hasn't stopped raining since the collapse. Water drums out a soothing rhythm on the metal roof, and trickles down the plastic sheeting that serves as temporary greenhouse walls. Inside, the garden is clean and relatively dry. Rows of soil-filled planters occupy most of the space--some are empty, while others hold seedlings. As Alouette would certainly know, the setup is more sophisticated than it looks. There are chemosensors and hygrometers in each basin, tuned to monitor the soil conditions and report anything out of the ordinary. The grow lights are linked to timers, which provide just the right amount of illumination for the crop in question.
As Alouette approaches, she finds Liam looking over the readout next to a row of tomato seedlings. The calcium in the soil is a little low; tomatoes are hardy, but there's a risk of blossom end rot if this keeps up as they develop. They need the right kind of fertilizer.
Liam turns around and looks down as Alouette approaches. He's wearing his usual civilian outfit: the hoodie Lucine got him, jeans, boots. The hood is up, and the shadow it casts brings out the leanness in his face. He hasn't been eating well. "...This batch is developing nutritional deficiencies," he says. "They need calcium. I..."
There's no use beating around the bush. They both know exactly why Alouette is here. "...No," Liam admits, looking down at the ground.
<Pose Tracker> Alouette Pommier has posed.
Entering the greenhouse proper, Alouette snaps the royal blue umbrella closed with a click. She studies the readouts Liam is looking at with a short nod.
"Calcium deficiencies... I suppose they wouldn't be getting much of sunlight at all." She sighs, hearing the rain continue to drum and tap against the garden roof, through the gloomy Tsutsujidai sky.
"I'll help you figure it out," she replies. "You don't have to do all this work by yourself. It's a community garden, right?" She's not a botanist, and she hasn't tried her hand at gardening a day in her life. But she hopes she can be of some help in the technological aspects.
And then Liam answers what she really came here for. He is not holding up okay. Neither is she, really, but it's Ikumi's words that keep her going. Maybe she can pass some of that advice to Liam...
"I didn't expect you to be," Alouette follows him up softly. "You're not the only one, and even if you were, you still wouldn't be alone." The tapping of the rain continues to accompany the two in their conversation.
"I tried to sound all cool and calm and collected during that battle, but you know, something Ampere said actually set me off a lot." She admits, touching her cheek. "It was the way she treated it all like a game. That's how BioNet taught me to think."
"So hearing it again, like that... it's why I went straight to attacking." To be fair, she didn't get the first hit in, but deploying in a mechanoid and drawing a sword towards one's base is almost definitely some kind of declaration of war.
She remembers her feelings changed, just a little bit, when she noticed Julia Ampere avoiding the city buildings in her attack. "I guess it ended up okay... no one got seriously hurt, and all the damage was quickly fixed by the carpenters. In a sense it really was just like a game." She looks up at the roof, watching the rain again. "But I'll never blame you for not trusting it."
<Pose Tracker> Liam 7-020 has posed.
"The grow lights are running," Liam says, "but soil chemistry... we'd need to get the chemicals from somewhere." Like most space installations, Tsutsujidai has robust systems that process and sanitize organic waste, turning it into useful, exportable products like fertilizer. Some of those are still up and running, which is why the garden was able to do so well at all.
"I know it is. The Horticulture Club has been here every day. Mrs. Sakai has been coordinating. She knows more than I do." He could never claim sole credit. He was just in the right place at the right time, with a bunch of seeds he'd had tucked in a shipment trunk for his girlfriend.
But this isn't about that. Liam sucks in a breath. His shoulders sag--at first with relief, that Alouette was a lot less composed than she seemed. Then, as Alouette finishes, exhaustion starts to creep into his eyes. "She's BioNet," Liam says. "She's... less awful than some, but..." His hands clench into fists as he remembers the frustration he felt--the fear of reprisal, despite Julia's own avoidance of collateral damage, as he bailed out and ran to the Guardienne. "I hate them." It's a soft, quiet admission, barely louder than Liam's breath.
<Pose Tracker> Alouette Pommier has posed.
Alouette carefully nods, as Liam explains the mechanics behind keeping the garden running, with systems that can usefully create fertilizer. But they're missing a good source of calcium for the tomatoes...
"Well, that's good." Alouette replies, on how this isn't a lone effort on Liam's part... but still, she carefully studies his demeanour, his expression, his posture. "You just looked tired, that's all, so I assumed..." Another nervous tug at the curls. "Just make sure you're getting rest, okay?" She concludes, polite yet somehow kind of forceful.
Alouette places her hand over her heart, which is just under her cravat, as she listens to Liam. "I won't ever forgive BioNet, either." She almost whispers.
She's aware most members of BioNet have nothing to do with each other. Julia Ampere is probably some energy kleptomaniac who never so much as stumbled upon Alouette nor Liam's projects. In her time with them, Alouette never really interacted outside her "school", except when some scientists came to check on her sometimes, anyways. But... "She's not awful. I suppose I even respect her a little... but can't help but not trust." The words just kind of fall out of her mouth, unorganized.
She pauses for about thirty long seconds, taking the time to organize her thoughts and words more clearly. "I think, it's okay to be scared, even upset. I'd be completely dishonest if I told you that you shouldn't be feeling that way." She relays. "But I can't let you face it alone, either. Letting people catch you when you fall is what it means to be Brave, you know." Those were Kaidou's words, paraphrased. But she'll live by them and stand by them always.
She lets that hang, seeing how Liam responds to it. She wonders if he feels like he doesn't have anyone to "catch" him, right now. That there's something missing.
<Pose Tracker> Liam 7-020 has posed.
"I am tired," Liam says. His voice is still tiny--like he's confessing to a crime, instead of admitting something that is wholly understandable. Half the city is tired. This is a horrible situation.
The big cyborg lets Alouette articulate her thoughts, even if they're a little scattered. That instinctive resistance to help starts to well up inside him. He doesn't deserve it. He was trained to hurt people, and wanting to hurt different people doesn't make that okay. His eyes drift closed, and his shoulders bunch. "I know," he says. His voice is still weak.
"But all of this... Lucine isn't here. It's like I'm back in the camp. No one's coming to help us."
<Pose Tracker> Alouette Pommier has posed.
"...Me too." Alouette responds, a hint of exhaustion in her own voice. The Wadatsumi's fine, but for once, she misses her own bed over at her old home. She wishes she could visit, like she promised. "It's okay."
The tiredness in Liam's voice, the way he tenses up at the possibility of receiving help... he's heard Alouette's words before. He just can't accept them. "Ikumi taught me that. We've all been made for a specific purpose, taught to act and treat things a certain way." Alouette, an architect of weapons. Liam and Kaidou, weapons themselves. "It doesn't mean we're below help. And if you get the urge to hurt, you have to trust someone will stay your hand." If they didn't have these things, they'd already descend into chaos - that's what Ikumi thought."
Lucine... "She's waiting for you, Liam." Alouette says intensely. "If help isn't coming, we just need to turn the situation around ourselves. We're already working on a way." Liam might already know this, if he's eyed the posters around the NERV camp.
"And more than that, you need to trust Lucine. From everything you've told me, she sounds like an amazing woman." Alouette smiles. "And I'm sure she's trusting you to come home safe."
<Pose Tracker> Liam 7-020 has posed.
'It's okay.'
Liam's frame sags a little more, like Alouette gave him permission to stay at ease. 'At ease', in this case, means 'express some of the soul-deep exhaustion weighing on him.'
"I wasn't always like this," Liam says. "I'm from Dublin." Three quiet little words, delivered from a place of utmost grief. "My parents put me on one ship, a fast one, but there wasn't room for them. Other people needed it more. They died because they saved me. When the Crucible found me, I was in one of the camps near Ulster. I went to sleep, and when I woke up, I was..."
He can't finish the sentence. The memory of waking up buckled down in another transport, to the screams and sobs of other children, hasn't lost its horrible power.
"You're... a Coordinator, right? I wasn't. They made me like this. I remember when my hands were so small, and the controls were so big." He pauses. "Lucine... thinks I'm handsome, and some days I don't know why." All he sees are the scars.
<Pose Tracker> Alouette Pommier has posed.
Dublin... Alouette always noticed a bit of an accent slip out of his voice at times. "Dublin was the victim of a colony drop, wasn't it...? That's horrible." And his parents died to save him, only to be taken away by the Crucible... by BioNet.
He doesn't finish his sentence, and Alouette patiently lets it hang there as he regains his composure. She almost wants to reach in for a hug, but she settles for placing her gloved hand on a hand that was once much smaller, should Liam allow it.
"A Coordinator, yes. It just happened the hospital I was born in was run by BioNet behind the scenes." She answers Liam honestly. "They performed the enhancements without my mother's knowledge, took me away when I was born, and told her I was a stillbirth." The after, the way she was raised, she doesn't go into that.. she listens to what Liam says instead.
What happened to Liam was after, so he's more like Renais then... Alouette gives him a not quite empathetic, but deeply sympathetic look. "She likely thinks you're handsome because she loves who you are," Alouette explains. She doesn't quite feel socially equipped to discuss body image issues like this, and worries what she says might come off as strange.
"It's your body, not the Crucible's, and not BioNet's. I think.. that's why she, ah... likes it." On the physical sense, it was never a struggle Alouette had to face, but she watched Renais gradually learn to accept the same thing about herself.
<Pose Tracker> Liam 7-020 has posed.
"Neo-Zeon," Liam whispers. Tears prickle at his eyes. "We didn't do anything to hurt them. Haman Karn decided we had to suffer, anyway." As Alouette has likely noted, Liam does not react well to touch. Beyond the memories of warm hugs and parental comfort, there's far too many memories of needles and drip ports and sedation. They only touched him to put drugs and editing compounds into his body, or to cut him open.
He takes Alouette's hand slowly, tentatively. It's so small and fragile, like Lucine's, and it makes his hand feel that much more monstrous in comparison.
"Monsters," Liam hisses. He gives Alouette's hand a squeeze. "You were just a baby. They took a baby from her mother." It's a logical extension fo what they did to him, but he feels the bile rising as he thinks about it. Anger settles into his eyes, and then he realizes what it's doing and strangles it.
Monsters get that angry. He can't, especially not when he's holding Alouette's hand.
"...They never let me think of loving someone like that," Liam says. "People don't like weapons that way."
<Pose Tracker> Alouette Pommier has posed.
Neo-Zeon... Alouette met several people who were from Zeon, and being a Coordinator she could never hate someone just because of that. But she can't deny the horrible crimes Neo-Zeon perpetuated as a political state. She shakes her head, vehemently. "It's pure evil, involving innocents like that."
Alouette recognizes the difficulty in touch, and she lets Liam take his time with it. It's something that's relatively new for her, as well. Which is why she offered the partially gloved hand, instead.
Alouette's blue eyes waver momentarily, as Liam's anger rises when she discusses her own situation. It's something that's always been hard for her to reconcile, with her memory situation being what it is.
But as sad as it is, she feels lucky she was able to reunite...even if she wishes she could see her mama right now.
"Honestly... I'm grateful to Guy and Mikoto. Not only did they rescue me, they were the first to show me what 'love' is." Her eyes shine in Liam's direction again.
She turns the conversation back to the person who Liam loves. "Like that?" She asks, puzzled for a moment. To her, love is one big emotion. "Still, I don't think it matters what they think anymore," Alouette smiles. "You're not a weapon to her, and that's what's important, right?"
<Pose Tracker> Liam 7-020 has posed.
Liam nods, and his hand tightens around Alouette's. "I wish I could be half as brave as Guy is," he says, his voice still tiny. "Even when he's beaten, he... doesn't ever stop."
And then Alouette asks a question Liam's not sure he can answer. "Like... holding someone. Kissing them. Being... attracted to them like that."
<Pose Tracker> Alouette Pommier has posed.
"I'm pretty sure I told him the exact sentiment before," Alouette begins. "He said there's nothing about his courage that's special. That anyone can be as brave as him." It's hard to imagine Guy as just the ordinary astronaut he once was, having seen him as the Superhuman Evoluder ever since she was small.
"Just by taking my hand, reaching out like that... I think it's brave enough. I know it's- it's difficult."
She nods at Liam's answer, it's like what she thought she felt for Ikumi, before their relationship changed. "Understood. Well, I don't think it changes my answer, anyways." Alouette's never done any of those things before. But she wishes Liam and Lucine luck regardless.
The rain taps with all the intensity of before. "I'm glad we could talk," Alouette interrupts the rain once again. "And I don't take back what I said: try to get some rest, okay?"