#now though...... it's time for VEREINSAMT !!!!!!!

[cheriafreya]

done with E lucevan le stelle's story... what a ride

[lothiriel84]

Vereinsamt

The world a gate To thousand deserts mute and cold Someone who lost, what you lost Stops nowhere

A MarsCorp AU post-series ficlet. Sequel to Ill.

Ten years, that was how long since the last time he’d heard of Colin Denham. Now that David had been released from prison, and Hob had taken Martin’s place as the Base Manager, he felt like he was finally allowed to let go of everything that was wrong about his past, and make a brand new start.

The advent of Titan Coffee had been a massive blow to his plans, but he was confident he would find a way to come back on top, sooner or later. He was nothing but determined to succeed, show everyone on the base what he was capable of, regardless of the colour he’d been arbitrarily assigned by the system; he was, after all, his father’s son, and if there was one trait they shared that was a deeply rooted contempt for conformism, and the general propensity to play by their own rules.

All was fair when competing with your business rivals. Hob might call it spying on them, and trying to steal their secrets; he preferred to call it creating a level playing field, and paving the way for a better future for Resources – as well as his humble self, of course.

What he was most definitely not counting on as he came back from one of his little expeditions was spotting a furtive figure sneaking along the corridors, being faced with the sinking feeling he knew exactly who it was, no matter how impossible that sounded.

He had been through that portal thing, once; he vaguely understood it to be a door to a different world, though he wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, exactly. The fact that all of them had come back from there alive – wherever ‘there’ was – heavily implied that it was entirely possible for Colin to do the exact same thing.

Whatever the truth was, he should probably inform Hob, let her deal with the potential threat of a mad scientist lurking in the recesses of the base. Unless – he stopped dead in his tracks, his lips curling in a self-satisfied smirk.

He could take down the madman himself, show them all what Dave Price was capable of. They would regard him as a hero if he did, finally let him take his rightful place in society. All he needed was a plan of action, and a bit of luck for a change.

The universe owed him that much, after everything he’d been through.

.

David Knight. He should have thought of him sooner, really. The man was always so eager to please everyone, and while he wasn’t entirely sure where he stood when it came to his former mentor and – if he wasn’t much mistaken – lover, it was blindingly obvious just how desperate he was to fit in with his fellow Martians. Dave wasn’t so much hoping to turn him against Colin, as to use him as a reliable source of information, and maybe a potential ally, should the need arise.

It didn’t take him a lot of effort to get David drunk, and extract the truth from him. How Colin had waltzed back into his life all of a sudden, tried to lure him into helping him for old times’ sake. What he hadn’t expected was ending up with a maudlin David clinging onto his neck, crying into his shirt and begging him to get him out of this mess. He might be a lot of things, but he’d sooner be damned rather than let Daddy dearest destroy someone else’s life without as much as batting an eyelid.

“I need you to do something for me, David,” he told him as smoothly as he could, all the while trying to free himself from his grasp. “Do you think you could do that? I bet everyone would be very pleased if you do – especially Miss Hob.”

David sobbed into his neck, which he decided to take as a yes. They said that fortune favoured the bold, and he really hoped that that was the case, at least for this once.

.

“That’s very – inventive of you, Dave,” Colin smirked, somewhat sarcastically. “I’ll give you that. Shall we give each other a little more credit though? We both know you don’t have it in you to see it through. Just walk away now, and I’ll pretend that this little incident never happened.”

Dave threw a quick look at David, took another step towards the blasted thing and the man that was currently standing before it. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that, if I were you – Dad. Inheritance has to count for something, after all.”

He felt more than saw David flinch at his side, kept his eyes firmly on Colin’s face. “I won’t repeat myself again. Either you step through that machine of yours, and never come back – or I’ll just blow up the entire lab, and everyone in it. Your choice.”

“Colin, please,” David cut in, his voice trembling a little. “That’s nitroglycerin he’s holding in his hand. It will tear us to pieces, you know that.”

“Chill out, buddy. He’s just a pathetic little Orange. Of course he’s not going to blow himself up.”

Dave slowly started opening his fingers, saw David brace himself out of the corner of his eye. “Never underestimate an Orange,” he hissed, his voice barely recognisable to his own ears. “If anything, we’re the ones who’ve got nothing to lose.”

Colin inched closer to the portal, his eyes now glued to Dave’s hand. “Let’s go, David. Leave this fool to play with things he doesn’t understand. We’ll find a way back, I promise.”

“I – don’t think I will,” David uttered, painfully. “I’m sorry, Colin. I’m so sorry.”

“Ten,” Dave started to count, as slowly and calmly as he knew how. “Nine. Eight.”

“You’re a stubborn idiot, just like your mother,” Colin threw at him, his hand now resting on the switch button.

“Seven. Six. Five.”

The air was starting to burn in his lungs. David was still rooted to the spot, apparently unable to step away from their impeding death. “Four. Three.”

Colin suddenly jumped through the portal, with a final curse which was probably directed at Dave. It was if a spell was broken, and David launched himself towards the machine. For a split second Dave wondered if he was going to follow Colin after all; he grabbed one of the fire extinguishers instead, and started smashing it against what he assumed was the control panel. The vortex-y thing at the centre of the structure immediately disappeared, leaving only electric sparks and cracks in its wake.

In the end David slumped to his knees, silent tears streaming down his cheeks. “It’s gone, he’s gone. It’s – over.”

Dave took a deep breath, carefully placed the explosive back into its stabiliser the way David had taught him to do. Then he closed the distance between the two of them, awkwardly placed his hands on David’s shoulders. David hid his face against his stomach, and proceeded to cry out a decade’s worth of pain and misery.

That was how Hob found them half an hour later, threatened to let them rot in the same cell if they ever attempted to do anything so incredibly stupid again. He could still see the relief in her eyes, how she stared at the broken machine for a long moment before she ordered them out of the lab, and back to their respective quarters.

David offered him a small, tentative smile as they parted ways. Dave merely nodded back, then slowly made his way to the liftbot.    

[lothiriel84]

Hey You

Hey you, with you ear against the wall Waiting for someone to call out Would you touch me?

A MarsCorp AU post-series ficlet. Sequel to Vereinsamt.

They were both sitting cross-legged on David’s makeshift bed – which was nothing more than a mattress laid out on the floor – staring into their bottles of caffeinated beer, all the while enjoying each other’s presence as an antidote to the darkness of their own thoughts. They weren’t exactly friends as such, though they had become much closer after the showdown with Colin, and Dave honestly couldn’t say he minded at all.

He noticed David giving him sidelong glances, patiently waited for him to make eye contact. David cleared his throat, absently tracing his finger over the mouth of the bottle.

“So, you’re, um – you’re really Colin’s son, right?” he found the courage to ask at length, his voice only shaking a little. “I – guess that makes sense, in a way?”

“Yeah, well,” he smirked, somewhat ruefully. “The apple never falls far from the tree, whatever all that Earth nonsense is about. Though I really can’t tell if it was more a case of Colin taking a leaf out of my mother’s book, or the other way round. But I guess you already know that.”

“I knew you’d seen us that night,” David sighed, the lines on his face doing a complicate dance in a mixture of embarrassment, and plain sadness. “Colin kept saying it was too dark for anyone to actually recognise us, but – well, that’s Colin for you.”

Dave looked at the dark shadows under his eyes, the haunted look that was his most prominent feature these days. “I don’t mean to be rude, but why did you – with Colin, of all people? You were a smart kid from what I’ve heard, and a True Blue. You could have had anyone you wanted, so why go for a man nearly twenty years your senior?”

“Ah, actually, there weren’t that many people who wanted to date me, back then. Not that it’s much different now – but I’m fine with it, honestly. As for Colin, well, he was just so brilliant, and clever, and so incredibly beautiful. I could hardly believe my luck when he decided he might want me after all.”

They both sighed, and Dave reached for another bottle. David handed him the fancy bottle opener he’d bought from his store, took another swig of beer as if he was tasting some fine Earth whisky Dave had sometimes heard posh people natter on about.

“Why did you help me then, if you cared so much about Colin?” he asked after a rather long pause, genuinely curious about what was going on in that mad genius head.

David looked at him for a long moment, before seemingly making up his mind. “You remember that time they sent you in to swipe the floor of my cell, back when the Technology Department was upgrading the servicebots?”

“I think I do, yeah. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“You – well, I know this is kind of silly, but you – you looked at me. Properly. You know, like I was a person; a fellow human being.”

“You do realise you are in fact a person, right?”

David shook his head, offered him an unexpectedly authentic smile. “None of the other Martians thought of me as a person, Dave. I was just a traitor, a scourge – a threat to the mission, if you like. I had even started hoping they might sentence me to death, anything would have been preferable to solitary confinement with my own thoughts as the only company.”

Something cold and heavy settled at the bottom of Dave’s stomach, a distant echo of David’s loneliness and misery. He thought back to all the time he’d spent hating his family, his own status as an Orange; he didn’t know what to make of any of it, so he went back to his beer instead.

“Why don’t you join Resources? With your science skills, and my talent for marketing, we could team up, and really make something out of ourselves.”

David glanced down, considering. “I – I’ll bear that in mind. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, mate. Cheers,” he grinned, clinking their bottles together. David smiled again, his gaze just a tiny less haunted, then downed the rest of his beer in one go.