sail_ooc | TEST DRIVE MEME #1

1. now it's fun to wake up in a strange chateau

[you wake up.

it doesn't matter where you were before. going to bed? dying? opening the door to face a great evil? same result. you wake up in a soft bed with starched sheets in a cool, darkened room, sunlight peeking out from behind thick curtains. maybe you're alone; maybe you aren't. maybe you immediately notice the folded paper on the bedside table near your head. if you don't, you better fix that real quick: you won't be able to even open the door before you read it.

the note itself is written in a neat hand on white card stock; there is a stylized logo of a ship with the words SERENA ETERNA printed underneath. the note reads as follows:

Dear Passenger(s),

As your cruise director, it is my great honor to welcome you aboard the Serena Eterna, your destination for fun and adventure! We know you could have chosen any cruise line for your vacation, and we're very grateful you chose ours! On behalf of the Captain, I would like to assure each and every passenger that will we do whatever it takes to fulfill all your needs and desires during your journey with us.

At your earliest possible convenience, please attend the mandatory lifeboat drill by the end of the day. I'm sure everyone is very eager to get started on all the fun and sun, but safety always comes first! You can find your life jacket in your cabin's closet; carry it to your assigned muster station on deck one, where I will take you through the drill. If you can't find me in the crowd, just look for the gal with the winning smile!

See You Real Soon!

Sincerely,
Gal Friday

you walk to deck one. you have no other choice: every time you try to step in a direction some unseen being considers "not towards deck one," you find your legs no longer move, staying stock still, frozen. whether compelled quickly by curiosity, or delayed by pure stubbornness, the result is the same, and you are left milling around with other similarly curious or stubborn people.

you see someone in uniform near the front of the crowd. she seems to be a gal, but is missing the winning smile, along with most of her other features. she seems to see you, though, rushing to your side and placing a lei around your neck with great formality. a voice, cheery but artificial, sees to come from nowhere and everywhere.]

Welcome aboard! We're so glad to have you!

[you touch the lei. rooster feathers, lotus seeds, and a carved circle of something white and hard, linked onto a silk string.]

2. messing with my mind was fun at the time

[freshly lei'd, your legs are forced to lead out onto the deck and towards your muster station. the same woman is there, carrying a clipboard. this time, she introduces herself as Gal Friday, the cruise director, before immediately going into the muster drill spiel. it is very boring, and you are not allowed to move, except when you are required to show you know how to put your life vest on. you could try to not do this, but Friday will move to stand in front of you very closely and just. look in your direction until such a time that you decide to do it. and I'm sure your fellow passengers want you to just get on with it, too.

but, once it ends? she reiterates her desire to welcome you aboard. and, then, you're free.

well, free to move about the ship at your own leisure, of course. which is a kind of free, and probably the best one you can hope for. you could try to escape, maybe, if you have the means to; Friday certainly won't be one to stop you. that's what the barrier is for, after all.

but, wouldn't you much rather have fun?

the buffet is full. the pool is open. the casino jingles and chimes.

welcome aboard.]

3. lots of mystery in the history of the devils I knew

[you were never alone.

a few days have passed since you first arrived on the Serena Eterna. perhaps you've made yourself a little routine, and settled in a bit. or maybe you haven't done that at all. either way, you're here, and it looks like somebody is pretty pissed off about it.

it starts small. sometimes nearby plates skid off tables, or a pool chair upends while you're walking next to it. and sometimes that chair is aimed right at your head. objects are moving with quickly increasing frequency, and a wide variety of styles: some are dropped, or pushed, and others and others are tossed, but a few of the items are thrown, with great force and odd accuracy. if Friday is around during the lighter moments, she simply titters and cleans up whatever mess is made. if a pot of soup sails off the buffet line and nearly drenches you in boiling minestrone, she simply walks away.

and then there's the voices. hundreds, maybe thousands, calling out. not all are intelligible English, but you seem to understand them anyway. some sound scared, or angry. some are screams, others whispers. some sound entirely strange, while others are achingly familiar. and they're all saying the same exact thing:

Get Out.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

While she has been known, on occasion, to bring back small presents from her travels for her favourite analyst, or for Clint's children, Natasha has never really been the souvenir type. It's one part temperament and one part practicality - that apparently innocent piece of branded plastic is a visible tie to time and place, potentially damning and always revealing.

Which is, of course, the entire reason she's in Bric A Brac - the souvenir shop is, at least in theory, a small map of where and when this strange and haunted ship has been.

She hears the door chime and lifts her head, a small smile on her lips and a greeting of, "Do you think anyone actually wears these?" on her tongue.

The smile doesn't slip when she sees Bucky, but her eyes do widen a fraction, and there's maybe something like regret in the faint tightening at the corners of eyes and mouth. She'd last glimpsed him five years ago and several years in the future, and if he's here in that strange, floating purgatory...

It doesn't mean they failed, but it's certainly a piece of evidence in the exact wrong direction.

Oh shit. Oh shit when did the Black Widow show up here.

There's a gun in his hand before he's even registered he probably shouldn't fire it. He's told himself he doesn't do that anymore.

But it's the Black Widow. She tried to shoot him in the face and garotte him five minutes later. ... justifiably. But still. He'll probably put it down in a second. Probably. Provided she doesn't do anything rash.

It isn't that she never does anything rash. For all her training and self-control, Natasha Romanoff is still a human being, and the one thing that unites all human beings is their capacity to occasionally make spectacularly stupid mistakes.

But having a gun pointed at her? That's not new ground. That's Tuesday, differing only in that she hadn't arranged or expected it.

She has a split second to decide how to react, to recognize that the gun's pointed, but she's not bleeding, and given what she knows his reaction time is like, that means that whatever this is, it's not like D.C. or Berlin. He may be willing to do her violence, but the outcome hasn't been decided yet.

So: room to de-escalate.

She sets down the shirt she'd been inspecting, and raises her hands, palms turned outward to show they're empty. It doesn't make her harmless, not with her Widow's Bite at her wrists, not with her training. It's still a declaration of intent.

"It's the hair, isn't it?" she says, conversational. "I didn't think it was that bad."

The hair. The hair is different. Did she decide to dye it right after the fight...?

She looks a little older. Thinner. What the hell.

The gun comes down and he stares at her, not with eye contact, but definitely at her face, brows coming together like he's trying to work something out. "What happened to you," he finally asks, voice hoarse and low.

I died sticks in her throat. It isn't something she's come to terms with quite yet. It was one thing to make the decision to sacrifice herself knowing it would mean Clint's survival, would mean that her family, her friends might be brought back from oblivion. It's an entirely different thing to have woken up with the memory of impact and the sound of bones breaking ringing in her ears.

That's going to take a while to process.

"It's been a rough couple of years," she says instead.

And not just for her. It didn't register immediately, not when it's been five years since his death and less than five hours since her own, but he doesn't look like he did when she'd glimpsed him on the battlefield in Wakanda. Less put together, less assured. Raw.

"For both of us, looks like. How long have you been here?"

He shouldn't know her. His memories of their fight are... hazy. He hadn't remembered until seeing her standing there, hearing her voice, that she'd shot him. He hadn't thought about her at all. But here she is, and now he knows, and she's acting like they ought to be allies not enemies--

--and he doesn't know what to do about it. So in the meantime, he answers her question. "Two days." Long enough to know the layout of the place, and to start to feel restless in it. Nervous about it. (Not that he's ever not nervous, honestly.)

A pause. "You?"

"A few hours."

She edges out from behind the table of t-shirts, careful to keep her movements non-threatening. It shouldn't be necessary - she wouldn't call herself and Barnes friends, exactly, but they were on the same side the last time she'd seen him - but every instinct is screaming at her to tread cautiously.

There's something wrong here, more than simply the fact that they've both been consigned to this ghost ship in the middle of nowhere.

"Is this the first place you came after the battle of Wakanda?"

His vague expression of confusion deepens. "Where?" Isn't that... a tiny country of sheep herders or something? He remembers it on a map, but HYDRA never sent him there. HYDRA didn't care about tiny isolationist African countries. "No. I was running from HYDRA. After he fell."

And that's when it hits. The answer that should have been obvious from the moment he pulled the gun. That would have been obvious if it hadn't been years since she'd seen him, if she hadn't been reeling from being catapulted from alien planet to floating purgatory.

Time travel is, apparently, the gift that keeps on giving.

"Shit," she says. "After you pulled Steve from the Potomac?"

There's a clear hesitation, most likely at Steve's name being spoken out loud when all he's called him in his head is the stupid former target because anything else makes his brain hurt, but then he nods. "Did he."

A pause. She's his... companion. Back-up. On his team. She'll know. He has to steel himself to ask, but he does: "Is he okay."

TEST DRIVE MEME #1

Devils I Knew

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