2023-12-16: Faulting
- Cutscene: Faulting
- Cast: Loren Voss
- Where: Assyria Base
- Date: December 16th 2023
- Summary: Loren reaches a breaking point.
BGM: (J.S. Bach ~ Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus XI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPmGnh1TGuA
The message is waiting for him on the console when he returns to his office on Assyria Base.
There had been a point where the fact of having his own office -- not sharing one with another similarly-ranked lieutenant and certainly not making do with a corner of the clinic (not that this doesn't still happen, sometimes) had been a welcome perk of the rank: Captain Loren Voss doesn't have to see anyone else while he's doing administrative work, and Emperor knows that his reward for progressing up the ranks had been... a lot of that.
Even the Holy Empire of Solaris requires all sorts of digital forms to be filled out and 'thumbprinted'. He had been a little bit bemused by the equivalent phrase in the surface-dweller tongues when learning them back in Jugend, since paper and books and the like had long since been relegated in Etrenank as oddities and antiques.
But there are exceptions, even for Solaris. One of the traditions on the surface involves physical woven sheets -- 'paper', if in a different form than that of the surface people -- used for important correspondence and filing. Something about unreliable connections in certain outposts was one of the reasons, he'd heard, but he's always suspected it has more to do with the... realness of paper. The formality and finality that it evokes, especially when electronic data is so fleeting. Signing something by hand, with ink, has a different feeling.
Maybe that's why they do it with these sorts of documents in particular. Still, three at once? The message on his device hadn't given him any insight into the particulars, just that they were to be reviewed, signed, and returned to Major Sadalbari. It must be a group attached to Assyria, or...
'Sumer Base', reads the assignment location on the first when he picks it up.
Loren stares at it as if willing the ink to change. Sumer Base, the one they'd sacrificed to try to stop Siegfried. Second Class, says the form, detailing in spite of his blurring vision things like the soldier's name, enlistment date...
He sets it aside in a hurry, picking up the next of the forms.
Sumer Base.
And the last.
Sumer Base.
It's getting harder to take a full breath.This wasn't supposed to happen. --When did it happen? He'd thought they'd-- The whole point of using the Wels had been to prevent losing people! ...Their people.
They were people once, Lan had said.
He tries very hard to not think about the arguments that Lan had made to him and almost immediately fails. Setting the last of the death certificates down as if it were made of glass, he stares at the small and pathetic pile before him.
So like everything else, that promise had been a lie, too. What, exactly, had been the point then of any part of this? What did they actually achieve? Loren has begun to white-knuckle the armrests of his desk chair. Everything he'd hoped to come out of that operation had failed. Siegfried's still alive. They lost soldiers. And, for what?
It resonates with too-recent memories.
Such acts are necessary for our plans to come to fruition.
I just - you keep doing stuff you know is wrong, following orders you know are pretty much just evil, for what?
Surging to his feet suddenly, a near-bestial shout slips from from him as he turns upon his desk. With one fierce swipe of his right forearm, he sends everything to the floor with a terrible crash.
Loren's chest rises and falls as he takes breath after breath. Legs suddenly weak, he falls rather than sits back into his desk chair, his gaze tilted up towards the ceiling. He sits there like that for a while, or so it feels, his earlier fire banked under a numbing front.
For what? Because it's easier like this. Because he's just trying to get by. Because...
Lan had called him a coward.
Slowly, Loren stands, surveying the wreckage scattered across the floor around his desk. With deliberate care, he kneels to begin to pick up the pieces of the damage he's wrought. First retrieved are the death certificates. Smoothing out the faint wrinkles in the paper and unfolding the corners, he stacks them neatly once they're almost as good as the state he'd received them in and puts them back on his desk.
Going back isn't an option. But it hadn't been an option even before Leah had told him the whole truth.
His shoulders slouch as he picks up his tablet. It couldn't be more broken if smoke were streaming out of the crack splintering the glass. He drops it heavily onto his desk: it's beyond caring about as more than a nuisance.
There had been no reason to try from the start. Lan yelled at him, and asked him how he intended to save his country. But it's pointless. Solaris... has always been broken.
Skill isn't what you lack, Leah had said.
He knows what he's missing now.
He reaches for the picture frame lying on the floor: it had been the sole point of ornamentation atop his desk. But he jerks his hand away as if he'd been stung. Grabbing it in the next moment, he flips it over to inspect it more carefully. Just as he'd feared, the frame's broken. And the glass is cracked. Gingerly, he traces the meat of his thumb over that crack and in so doing, over the image of his parents.
What would happen if he left-- he already knows the answer. One son's error was bad enough. There won't be any grace afforded the parents of a traitor in such circumstances.
His hands, holding the frame, begin to tremble. ...If he's a coward for following orders, then let him be a coward.
He stands. As if the frame were, even broken, somehow more fragile than the wood and glass construct it is, Loren stands to return it to his desk. It won't stand up anymore. It probably would be better off thrown away. But...
Lan wanted him to do the right thing. She wanted him to try to do something. She wanted him to stop following orders.
Don't disappoint me, Leah had said.
What does he want?
He turns away, stooping to pick up first the case for his medical supplies and then the scattered supplies themselves, repackaging them with care.
When he picks up the vial of Drive, though, he pauses. gazing at it for a too-long moment in his hand. Slowly, his fingers close around it.
Drive had never been enough in the past, but...
He knows what he's missing. And he knows how to get it.