futilecycle: (Many Lives)
Dr. S. Klim ([personal profile] futilecycle) wrote in [community profile] thearena 2014-06-18 06:37 pm (UTC)

Sigma nods almost imperceptibly and closes his eyes, appearing to anyone watching as no more than an exhausted, narcoleptic old man. He prepares himself for the Initiate's grip on him, for fear he won't be able to escape once it begins. Knowing well it may break him in this state, the Doctor has no choice: this may be their only chance. Sigma takes a deep breath and plunges headlong into a waking nightmare.

It isn't difficult to summon every last one of his anxieties - they wait for him barely suppressed beneath the surface of his consciousness. There is unavoidable risk in his plan, and what Initiate would find first is not necessarily the fear of death but the overwhelming fear of failure that Sigma always carried with him to some degree, stronger now than ever before. To have died and to have accomplished nothing - that is what Sigma focuses on first. He hopes the Initiate will come to understand the rest, parsed through that frame.

He transitions to a secret that Sigma kept even from the Initiate, and while it may be too late to tell him now, he is acutely aware that all will be revealed in time. Terrified of the shame and the stigma, he summons up the darkest of his memories: what it was like to kill, though he hates every moment of it - the long nights spent making weapons and contraptions that would be used to spill blood. The fear of loss, knowing that to carry out his plans is to send good people to their death. He pulls that thought to the forefront, continuing to recall his past... the despair to have actively sent his own son to the grave so that others might live. That what he is about to do might do the same to the Initiate, and how he does not do it out of hate but so that their mutual goals might be realized.

Then he stops, pulling away from their connection (though it is less to seek relief and more like thrashing while drowning) for a moment. The fear is so overwhelming that Sigma trembles and has to steel himself. He does not know if he can handle another person cut out of his life.

Forcing that thought down, he focuses instead on the fact that he is seeking the truth. He is terrified of what he might find, and hands this vulnerability over to the Initiate. When the other had come to his room that day, he'd sworn to himself that he would find out what had happened to their families, and if he discovered the worst, that he would get them back. But the only way to seek the truth without sacrificing himself(and he had promised the Initiate he would not be lost) was to live a facade, to plant himself in the den of the enemy willingly... Sigma remembers when he returned to his garden, revealed as a "gamemaker", how every person that had once called themselves his friend turned their back on him. He knows that fate awaits him once more, and the Doctor feels ill with regret.

He ends the stream of consciousness with the fear of being caught by an omnipotent authority... of being under careful watch every single day, found over a single mistake, and then tortured and executed as a traitor, endangering the lives of other rebels in the wake of his death. He hopes desperately that even if the Initiate understood little of what had come before, that this particular fear is visceral enough for him catch an impression. Over time, Sigma would join forces with the Capitol. He would claim his allegiance. And, if he must, he would fight for them... all to leak their secrets to the Rebellion, and for the promise of finding Diana. Of finding Initiate's lusus, his alter, Gamzee, and keeping them safe or returning them once peace had been won...

Lost to his despair, Sigma has grown pale; his knees buckle and he sways in the Initiate's grasp.

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