—MENTAL LINK.

[iuno]

DESPAIR you can't save everything	STUBBORN i just have to think it's all for something
BITTER no one has ever been happy forever	GUILT but all of this was my fault!

( CODE BY WHAMBAM )

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[iuno]

( Unfortunately, yeah. ) [ his resentment is a sharp taste, acidic and sour. ] ( Darlene and I woke up together; Richard came looking for me when we made it planetside. )

[ he'd like to be able to call them both by surname for that little bit of extra distance, but they both have siblings; it'd be too confusing to be worth it, in such a small and close-knit group as the Nest. and now it seems his third ball-and-chain either doesn't have a surname or isn't going to provide it. there's something about the name, other than it just sounding completely fake. something about November. he's a little like — not Peter Nureyev, but Rex Glass, maybe. ]

( You should know I'm not much of a fan of the whole telepathy shtick, so I'm gonna ask again before I just hang up — what do you want, November. )

[ talking about telepathy, Juno's mind takes a sharp turn for something else, this sensation like plummeting to the bottom of a cold black lake. little shards of things he's deliberately dragged up: days of torture to extract something from him as someone would pull a tooth without anaesthetic, painstaking, slow, cruel. the moment his eye burst in its socket and he hadn't even noticed through the pain in his head. a woman's voice, the thin hiss of it that makes him nauseous.

those are his associations with telepathy, whether he likes it or not, and he holds onto that fact so that it's clear. but he's exaggerating them at the same time, knows those things are there close by and pulls on them. shaking November's hand with a palm full of broken glass. ]

[justttkidding]

[ Darlene, the other piece in their particular puzzle. The odd close but not close feeling they all have now that the puzzle is completed. No longer are there phantom limbs or minds lingering at the edge of his mind. He feels relief– fabricated by the symbiote, something he's gotten better at distinguishing in these past couple weeks.

Still, it feels the same. As if it came from him, even though it could never. ]

( Richard? Did he honestly introduce himself that way? )

[ Something tells him no. So it's kind of funny. ]

( Would you prefer I find you outside of our heads, then? We're all stuck together, like it or not– I see you're in the latter category. I'd like to know who I'm connected to. )

[ He doesn't flinch at the cold or the dark or even the broken glass. Instead he offers his own brand; nothingness. The deep of a river, frosted over so one can't see the bottom, can't tell what the pull of the current would be. Juno can push and push him away if he wants November doesn't see the point in it, not when they're here, not when their past can't follow them to this planet so outside of their own universes.

But he's an unfeeling monster on Earth, so perhaps he's not the gauge to go by. ]

[iuno]

( Richard, Richie. ) [ a sort of mental shrug. he's used to people whose names he got from a file, the cold demeanour of a professional. ] ( I'd call him Gecko but I've tried that with families and it's more trouble than it's worth. )

[ it's strange, trying to get a grasp on a person through the impressions that the connection gives you. very much not the way a detective should be approaching something. the this is, Juno knows he's a black hole, he's always known that about himself. but that sort of void is destructive; he's a grave dug into the earth, the weight of a tar pit pressing down. always a brand of emptiness that's made in violence. and November, tracing out the shape of him with the tentative touch of the symbiote, is just... blank. smooth as glass. the space between burning stars that isn't really black.

he doesn't know what to do with that, even though he's dealt with people who are made like voids before. Miasma was a suffocating vacuum; Nureyev is silk and velvet. November is similar and not at once, and Juno has always preferred something that he can run up against, the kind of surface he could find purchase on.

deciding that he's prodded with the symbiote too much, he reels back, like he's strangling it with its own leash. snaps himself back into place. ]

( Do whatever you want. I'd go powder my nose to make a good first impression, if I'd had the time to take anything with me when I got grabbed. Since I don't, there's nothing for you to interrupt. Come find me or don't. )