Historye

[pendraeg]

Who: Uther and Chase
What: blemishes
When: backdated to after Chase meets Clarice
Where: out for a walk in the wood
Rating: A for good clean angst
Status: private, complete

Comments

[chaseandoldlace]

Winter in the country was different than the city--the color, even the smell was different. Gone were hints of rust and dark concrete peaking through snow plowed into dirty, steep hills on curbs. Gone was the tepid smell of exhaust that would hang, like pockets of poisonous gas in the freezing air; in it's place only the clouds of their breath as they spoke.

Well, as Chase spoke, anyway. Uther had barely gotten a word in edgewise because the other blond was too busy talking about Clarice, and the flood of things her introduction into his life had brought on. She was part of his world, and there was so much about that that Uther didn't know. Like In and Out Burger and shock-jock radio. He was in the middle of recounting the unfortunate incident with the radio announcer zombifying half of LA when he it finally hit Chase that Uther hadn't said anything not because he couldn't, but he had apparently no desire to

[pendraeg]

But it was difficult, pretending that all was well, when someone constantly paid attention to him, and not an attendant or a guard, but a companion. Uther had been trying not to think about the dead rising from murky water, drowned children, skin like that of grey, bloated pigs. They had been staring at him, baleful and passive. Silent against their deaths, for it had been the command of their King.

He turned to look slowly at Chase, not really present. "Did that make them more difficult to defeat, or easier?" he asked, having followed the tale well enough thus far, though he could not summon any interest in it.

[chaseandoldlace]

For as much as Gert had accused him of being totally oblivious, the truth was that Chase just got distracted easily, and it happened so often, it was simple to assume he didn't notice anything.

Living with a bunch of girls had changed that though--girls who sighed and sulked on couches or took forever in the bath as ways to disguise their melancholy. He'd even devised a pruniness-to-depressiveness scale for Nico--when he needed to see what sort of day she'd had, all he needed to do was look at her fingers.

Uther, though they were nowhere near a bath had a sort of pruny look him: brows furrowed in a sad attempt at interest.

"Harder. Look are you...okay? You kinda look like you need a drink." Because that was the answer to everything.

[pendraeg]

It was a great temptation, but drink didn't help. Uther had tried, late at night when the entire household was abed, and the more drunk he had become the more vivid the phantasms had been. Where the tableaus had been soundless, all the noises he had only imagined had "turned on".

Uther shook his head. "I'm fine," he said, dismissing Chase's suggestion. "So how did you fight it then?"

[chaseandoldlace]

From experience with the girls, Chase knew that pressing for answers never helped, but as a guy, he knew that the refusal of alcohol was a significant indicator of having ventured into serious shit territory.

"Bullshit you're fine, but, since this story actually has a happy ending, I'll finish it anyway. We try everything--my Fistigons, Vic's electro-magnatism, Karolina's alien rainbow powers, nothing works. Until Nico gets the bright idea to point the Staff of One at the thing and say 'oily.' It was like pouring boiling oil on it, only, without the boiling. I could not eat fried food for a month. The smell of cooking oil made me hork." He shook his head. "Long story short, we track Mr. Shock Jock to some amphitheater in central LA, undo the zombie spell, and watch his sorry ass get carted off by the fuzz. Now seriously dude what is wrong? There are only so many reasons a guy turns down drink." Chase should know. After Gert's death he was scared to touch the stuff because he was already suicidal and the last thing he needed was to

[pendraeg]

Uther shifted uncomfortably, the capitulation working its way through him but yet to emerge. He looked down at the surface of the pond, glad that he could not see into its depths. But he wondered what it would be like to step onto that layer of ice, and perhaps to shatter it and to fall into the frigid grip, to breathe in cold water, instead of air.

It would be terrifying, but after the initial struggle, it would be so quiet and so still. Would there be a moment, between the acceptance of death and its occurrence, when fear would leave him?

"It is foolishness. I am visited by dreams, and they distress me, but they are only dreams."

And they were, even if in a place inadmissible even to himself he knew them to be true.

[chaseandoldlace]

Dreams. Chase dreamed in fire, as opposed to water. The choking, acrid smell of burning plastic and chemicals--who even knows what they kept in observatories?-- shattering glass as air pressures shifted radically in too short a time, and the taste of blood on cooling lips.

He knew the way Uther looked at the frozen water and shivered, remembered heat and the chill of their surroundings washing over him, reminding him where he was.

They weren't just dreams, of course, they were memories, and they were anything but foolish. Trying very, very hard to be discreet, Chase put a hand on Uther's shoulder, fingers squeezing through heavy gloves. He didn't relish the idea of dragging Uther home in case he got a little too curious about the water.

"Just dreams. Right. And my parents weren't nutjobs. Try again."

[pendraeg]

Uther did not feel easy about the conversation to come. But Chase, though he had only had the opportunity to stand at Uther's side in battle against a van demon was undoubtedly not only a brother in arms but in their souls as well, and an almost immediately trusted confidante. In a way that could only be truly understood by such men, Uther owed it to Chase to unburden himself on his friend.

"At first it was only sensory...flashes, which I could not put into order. Feelings, smells. And even now that it is more clear it is those emotions that trouble me. Horror, loss, rage. Guilt. And the bewilderment of a man who has had a net thrown over him in the dark, that he must escape but cannot escape, and he succeeds only in tearing and tangling the ropes and rending his own flesh."

[chaseandoldlace]

"Sounds harsh." Inadequate words, he knew, but the important thing was to listen and gently encourage Uther to speak by opening up himself. He'd had more than one Long Talk with Karolina after his unhinged episode where he tried to bring Gert back. Having to book it to New York right after had helped in pushing aside the darker thoughts that cropped up but they still came every now and again. And when they did, Karolina was always there. She was his personal hope spot. Chase took a deep breath and let his hand fall away from Uther's shoulder

[pendraeg]

Uther shook his head again, finding himself physically backing away a step in something that was not exactly panic. Chase was being empathetic, he was being kind. But the thing that had so tormented Uther through his dreams was monstrous, and it was this very earnest, naive caring that suddenly propelled Uther through the reluctance to spell the thing out even for himself that had kept him reticent.

"You were right," he said harshly. "They are not just dreams. They are memories of the future that is past, the deeds of a man I cannot remember becoming. And I think his nature was plain for all to see."

[chaseandoldlace]

The sudden rasp in Uther's voice made Chase blink, and the way he moved away from him made him twitch it was so sudden, as though his attempt at empathy were being physically rebuked.

"If it's past, there's not much use sulking about it." 'Yeah, sure.'

But they'd been over this before, briefly. Uther Pendragon had been old once, a man who had lived through wars, seen histories made, watched most of his biological family be killed... though now most of that was muddled into some weird Butterfly Effect sort of maze. Nothing but fragments. This was something Chase had no idea how to empathize with, though he often felt older than he was, he had never lived any of those phantom years.

"Look I know it's...not that easy, but I mean...for how you are now, I have a really hard time believing you were all that bad as an old man. Maybe it just feels worse than it is because you don't know the whole story." That was a very Karolina sort of response, and at that point, it was all he had.

[pendraeg]

Uther stared down hard at the pristine snow, seeing it stained with blood and bile and excrement and that black, oily tint like molten obsidian, floating over the muddy slush melted by the fires. How could that stain ever be effaced? How could he stand here now, in contrast as pure as a child despite his actions in battle, looking at something so impossibly clean and unsullied

[chaseandoldlace]

He let Uther speak, but it was hard, because Chase was having a hard time understanding at first, like it was some seriously sick and twisted joke, because there was no way the Uther he knew could be responsible for what his ravaged subconscious had been showing him.

Regardless, Chase was beginning to wonder if this was what Vic felt like when he'd logic-bombed him--overloaded that smug cybernetic brain of his until all he could do was spout some very creative, in useless binary.

Suddenly the cold seemed to rip through Chase's jacket as if it were nothing; he felt oddly brittle with cold and confusion, and stood rooted to his place next to Uther, his head till turned to look at the blond, expression flickering between a million different emotions.

'He sound just like our par--

Don't you even say it, dude. Don't even.

"Why?" It was the only question Chase was capable of, and it wavered as it left his lips. "Why did you did it?"

'Maybe it's wrong, maybe he's just confused. PTSD or something like that? He's been in a war, maybe he'

[pendraeg]

The change in Chase, though anticipated, nevertheless hurt Uther even through the mess of self-loathing and plain, visceral horror that accompanied his recounting of, of what he had done. He was glad that he had moved away from the reassuring hand. His gaze alone seared, and Uther could not bring himself to meet Chase's eyes.

The bewilderment in his voice, anyway, so suddenly childlike, was enough to tell him what he didn't need--nay, didn't want to see.

But this was a difficult question for Uther to answer, for though he knew the reason (his dreams had held enough detail for him to piece together this much), he did not know why it should be the reason.

"They" --he felt an irritated frustration, completely independent of all the weightier emotions trying to crush him, that here he could not really explain himself, could not subject himself to the same unsparing honesty-- "practiced magic."

[chaseandoldlace]

"You're fucking me." The words were heavy, angry, demanding. His thoughts went immediately to Nico, to Klara, whose turn of the century parents had sent her away, a ten year old girl to be married to a man who bear her, daily because she was different.

Then there were more recent things, like the Mutant Registration Act and the violence that erupted because of it, hell, even long, long before it. Back when Alex was still alive, he'd translated The Abstract and told the story of how it all began, but more specifically, how the Hayes' (who Chase always remembered as the kindest of The Pride parents) had become the tyrants they did.

Prejudice. Mutants being abused and killed because people were afraid of what they didn't understand.

And Uther was just the same. That he didn't remember how or why this was true ceased to matter.

"So let me get this straight. If I met you back then, you would have killed my best friend and two baby girls because to you it would seem like they were using magicOne strong fist balled at his and a low,

[pendraeg]

What could he say? It was true. Uther had spent weeks trying to deny that his dreams were memories, but their grisly insistence had proven too great.

"I do not think," he said after a long moment, ignoring Chase's lie about the cold, "that I ever thought it was right."