Ziggy Berman (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shadysided) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ximilialog2024-02-28 10:53 pm
shadysided) wrote in ximilialog2024-02-28 10:53 pm
[Open] in the wink of a young girl's eye
CHARACTERS: Canon Updated Ziggy and You!
LOCATION: See each prompt.
DATE: Just after the mission.
CONTENT: Ziggy canon updates... like... 2 decades. Shit has happened.
WARNINGS: Conversations/narration about mental health issues, addiction, and PTSD.
(Feel free to wildcard!)
I. Local Ohio Woman Threatens Civilians | Hallway
[C. Berman — no, Ziggy, her nickname is Ziggy — wakes up with a jolt.
Wakes up with a jolt somewhere she has not seen since she was 18 years old: the Ximilia.
She's in her thirties now, having drank maybe a little too much after a small, unfortunate backslide in the months following the breaking of a curse and the quitting of alcohol. Two fucking decades. It's been two decades of really bad choices and mental health as flimsy as wafer paper, and so... she doesn't quite remember things clearly yet. It'll come, with time: those memories of her coupla' years aboard the ship, which will no doubt be eerily clear, despite the distance.
But for now, she is dazed, confused, and mildly hungover when she stumbles out into the hallways of the Ximilia. She has a knife clutched in one hand, poised and ready to lash out if she needs to. In fact, someone who is tiredly walking the halls mere hours after their return from the mission will suddenly find a knife held up to their neck from behind. The voice that speaks is a little rough from a disuse and two decades of on-again-off-again smoking habits.]
Instead of trying to move, how about you tell me where the hell I've been carted off to?
[And why it feels so goddamn familiar?]
I don't know what creepy Sunnyvale mental hospital this is, but I'm out of here.
II. Far Away Thoughts | Kitchen
[So. Anyway.
She's gotten her memories back. Mostly, and with some unpleasant blurriness that still needs time to fade. She's in her thirties, and so much time has passed — time that includes becoming a PTSD-infested alcoholic with agoraphobia (lots of watching the same VHS movies every night after a fifth of Jack Daniels, or tail-spinning into guilt over Camp Nightwing and paranoia that the curse is coming to reclaim her). She's improved a lot since breaking the curse, for the record.
It's why she can sit in the kitchen to stare at a bottle of wine, instead of hoarding herself in a room decorated for a teenager who is into high School Musical. It's not easy, but she can do it. She just happens to stare at the bottle for an uncomfortably long time, unaware that she's even doing it. Force of habit, really; time passes just fine when you're zoning out into another world.
It also helps you not drink the thing you really want to drink, if you zone out.
One epiphany, belated, finally hits her:]
... Holy shit. I'm really here. Again.
... I can't believe this is really happening. Again.
III. Memories of a Different Life | Ziggy's Room
[It's funny. Back home, she still feels her skin crawl when she takes those daunting steps out of her home. It had once been a mental sort of prison, one she erected herself. And she had swore to herself and to her sister that she would start really living again. If only it weren't so fucking scary to do something as simple as meeting someone at a cafe, or walking your dog down a sidewalk.
But the Ximilia doesn't make her feel like that. Not really. Not with the memories she has here, still bleeding in so effortlessly and filling the cracks that she had only started mending back home. It makes her realize that perhaps her healing had started a long time ago, in a place she couldn't remember anymore: this station.
She stands in the middle of her room, taking embarrassing posters off her wall and grimacing at teenaged Zac Efron's face. Not just him, either. Somewhere along the way, young her had started really getting into the Jonas Brothers while staying here. How many Disney Channel original movies can one girl hoard?]
... Ugh. So glad I'm over this chapter of my life, suddenly.
[She rolls up a poster and throws it in a box.
Redecorating a little, is all. She stops to look at some little polaroid images and tiny letters on a corkboard — there's some lovey-dovey messages from what she can see is Finn's handwriting and unerring drawing skills. It's amazing how clearly she's suddenly remembering some of these moments in time; it's also a relief to know that at least she had some kind of teenaged childhood here, in a way. Especially when she thinks about the parallel childhood that happened the moment she returned home.
The door to her room is open, anyway; feel free to pop your head in.]
LOCATION: See each prompt.
DATE: Just after the mission.
CONTENT: Ziggy canon updates... like... 2 decades. Shit has happened.
WARNINGS: Conversations/narration about mental health issues, addiction, and PTSD.
(Feel free to wildcard!)
I. Local Ohio Woman Threatens Civilians | Hallway
[C. Berman — no, Ziggy, her nickname is Ziggy — wakes up with a jolt.
Wakes up with a jolt somewhere she has not seen since she was 18 years old: the Ximilia.
She's in her thirties now, having drank maybe a little too much after a small, unfortunate backslide in the months following the breaking of a curse and the quitting of alcohol. Two fucking decades. It's been two decades of really bad choices and mental health as flimsy as wafer paper, and so... she doesn't quite remember things clearly yet. It'll come, with time: those memories of her coupla' years aboard the ship, which will no doubt be eerily clear, despite the distance.
But for now, she is dazed, confused, and mildly hungover when she stumbles out into the hallways of the Ximilia. She has a knife clutched in one hand, poised and ready to lash out if she needs to. In fact, someone who is tiredly walking the halls mere hours after their return from the mission will suddenly find a knife held up to their neck from behind. The voice that speaks is a little rough from a disuse and two decades of on-again-off-again smoking habits.]
Instead of trying to move, how about you tell me where the hell I've been carted off to?
[And why it feels so goddamn familiar?]
I don't know what creepy Sunnyvale mental hospital this is, but I'm out of here.
II. Far Away Thoughts | Kitchen
[So. Anyway.
She's gotten her memories back. Mostly, and with some unpleasant blurriness that still needs time to fade. She's in her thirties, and so much time has passed — time that includes becoming a PTSD-infested alcoholic with agoraphobia (lots of watching the same VHS movies every night after a fifth of Jack Daniels, or tail-spinning into guilt over Camp Nightwing and paranoia that the curse is coming to reclaim her). She's improved a lot since breaking the curse, for the record.
It's why she can sit in the kitchen to stare at a bottle of wine, instead of hoarding herself in a room decorated for a teenager who is into high School Musical. It's not easy, but she can do it. She just happens to stare at the bottle for an uncomfortably long time, unaware that she's even doing it. Force of habit, really; time passes just fine when you're zoning out into another world.
It also helps you not drink the thing you really want to drink, if you zone out.
One epiphany, belated, finally hits her:]
... Holy shit. I'm really here. Again.
... I can't believe this is really happening. Again.
III. Memories of a Different Life | Ziggy's Room
[It's funny. Back home, she still feels her skin crawl when she takes those daunting steps out of her home. It had once been a mental sort of prison, one she erected herself. And she had swore to herself and to her sister that she would start really living again. If only it weren't so fucking scary to do something as simple as meeting someone at a cafe, or walking your dog down a sidewalk.
But the Ximilia doesn't make her feel like that. Not really. Not with the memories she has here, still bleeding in so effortlessly and filling the cracks that she had only started mending back home. It makes her realize that perhaps her healing had started a long time ago, in a place she couldn't remember anymore: this station.
She stands in the middle of her room, taking embarrassing posters off her wall and grimacing at teenaged Zac Efron's face. Not just him, either. Somewhere along the way, young her had started really getting into the Jonas Brothers while staying here. How many Disney Channel original movies can one girl hoard?]
... Ugh. So glad I'm over this chapter of my life, suddenly.
[She rolls up a poster and throws it in a box.
Redecorating a little, is all. She stops to look at some little polaroid images and tiny letters on a corkboard — there's some lovey-dovey messages from what she can see is Finn's handwriting and unerring drawing skills. It's amazing how clearly she's suddenly remembering some of these moments in time; it's also a relief to know that at least she had some kind of teenaged childhood here, in a way. Especially when she thinks about the parallel childhood that happened the moment she returned home.
The door to her room is open, anyway; feel free to pop your head in.]
no subject
Ooh, yes.
The wine used to tell me lots of things. Then it was the stronger stuff that did the talking.
[She leans on her knuckle, elbow on the table as she turns to look at the new kitchen visitor. With her memories now much sharper, it takes her absolutely no time to recognize a fellow ginger from mission after mission. In some weird way, it feels really nice. Revisiting an old friend, after so many years apart. It's just weird that their faces are so crystal clear now, when she still struggles to remember her mother or sister's face in her mind's eye.]
Hey, Natasha. How's it going?
no subject
Then it comes. It's the hair, that does it.
No, it's something else. Something troubled that she knows.]
That's a hell of a growth spurt.
no subject
Not that 'coded' is used much in the 1990's. C. Berman is not so hip with the times, being shut in her home for an uncomfortably long time.]
...You're telling me. You haven't aged a day.
Got any tips to stay that youthful?
no subject
[Mostly that last part. Natasha tries to play it cool, like this is normal, but Ziggy has managed to make things at least a little weird.
Even for a superhero.
Not that it's her fault.]
Just how long has it been for you?
no subject
[She could supply the amount of days that converts to, even, but she's trying to leave that unhelpfully anxious pastime behind her. No reason to be so specific about the day now, anyway, right? She's free from the curse sinking its claws into her or the people she loves ever again.
... Not that she had many people left to love.
The Ximilia, however, is a very big exception now.]
Got resuscitated back to life. Only it turns out, that person was the one who caused me and the others to die in the first place. Figures.
... But still. I'm alive. That's some kind of achievement.
no subject
[Natasha smiles as she says it, making it sound light, but even her skills at deception can't entirely hide how tired she looks and the slight brittleness to her words.]
It's good to see you again. Even if it hasn't been all that long.
[It's good to see she grew up?]
no subject
[She leans back, though, taking in the sight of her fellow teammate. It's easy to see the exhaustion, a veil that a lot of them would have worn, especially after a particularly hard mission; for Natasha, though, she isn't quite sure if it's weariness from the last big job, or some recollection of some distant, exhausting event beyond the Ximilia.]
And the orbs had the gall to send me back, just before our job was finally done here.
... What now? Do people click their heels together and go home?
no subject
[Not Natasha, but she can't rule out others.
All things considered, Natasha imagines most orbers are still planning to go home, get back to their lives.]