THE DRIFT FLEET

Who: Sam Winchester
Broadcast: Fleetwide
Action: Red Fish / Iskaulit Bar
When: November 2nd (or somewhere abouts, if you need a different day)

Warnings: post might deal with mental illness-related talk, potential darker themes like conversations regarding non-consensual icky hallucinations, memory/mention of torture, etc. It's possible that it'll be a pretty light post and none of this comes up depending on how threads go, but I wanted to put out a blanket warning in case I forget. This is a heavier post from Sam! No happy augment glitches today or alien chicks with pancakes, sorry buddies. :(

[ACTION]

Sometimes augment updates happen in pretty unextraordinary ways. Sam laid down to sleep on the 30th, and woke up the 31st to find that he had a vast array of new memories and scars — but not quite so simple. He remembers being bound by his ankles and wrists to the chair in a sodden, dark basement. He remembers the hallucinations, vivid and painful. He remembers the knife cutting skin, the smell of his own flesh seared by a blowtorch. When he wakes up on the ship, he does so disoriented and pale with shock, sweat drenching his pillow.

It almost all feels like a dream.

Almost.

The image of Toni Bevell feels impossible to scrub from his mind. But this... This place — the fleet... he hasn't seen it in many months. It's as he remembers, but with the augment update, there's a sensation of falseness. Is this even real? How is he supposed to know? Not too long ago, he had wholeheartedly believed that he and Toni were lovers, confidants, not at all strangers, and certainly not one being a torturer. He had put so much faith in that hallucination — and it had felt so vivid — that there was a horrible shame and disgust and emptiness when he realizes he'd been played like a golden fiddle.

Toni had just smiled, proud of her savagery.

And here lies Sam's great dilemma: he doesn't trust any of this.

Sure, his foot is scarred, and he's got freshly pink and shiny marks where he'd been shot, sliced. But there's a strange emptiness he feels when he gets out of bed, showers, and redresses for the day. It's Halloween. Strange. He checks the roster on the ship. There's someone named Carl. He remembers noting their arrival before and making a note to meet with them properly; a kid, right? Right. He puts on a smile and goes to work at the bar aboard the Iskaulit, but everything feels robotic in gesture, like he's just going through the motions. He's a decent actor, but this augment shift is really making him misstep. 

Dean's dead, Sam's alone, he's in a basement, she wants information.

Is he even really here?

Would he even remember the basement, if this were just another hallucination? His mind is working in circles, trying to figure it out. What's he told her? What does he not remember? What has she tricked out of him? He has to be careful. He has to keep his mouth shut about anything she'd want to know. Just... go through the motions. She'd said his brain'd melt, if she did the mind tricks too often. Maybe it will. Or maybe it already is. He sure has a headache.

It doesn't help that the echoes that plagued him before his update persist even still. Images full of glamour, wrapped around many people he's come to know. He hasn't felt this uneasy from his own mind since the expulsion of Gadreel. Swallowing hard, he turns on anonymity and tries to make sense of it all at last, days later, on the 2nd of November.

The day Mom and Jessica had died. Go figure, right?



[ANONYMOUS TEXT | ENCRYPTED 60%]



Has anyone woken up here and felt like — nothing's really... real?

Like you're going to wake up and find yourself somewhere worst, and that it's all just a cruel trick someone's playing on you?

I've just been having a hard time... accepting, I guess.

And if this is another trick and the person doing it is listening —

Go fuck yourself.