A Quiet Part of the Park, Sunday Evening
Sometimes, you just had to go walking in the rain.
Maybe it was because of a week spent cooped up in one place. Maybe it was because of whispers and murmurs that had taken to following you around no matter where you went. Maybe it was just a whim.
Tonight, it was all of those things at once. The island appeared to be hell-bent on re-playing the greatest hits of Jonothon's horrible life choices for him tonight, and while he knew, logically, that the visions of Neverland that usually only haunted him in his sleep weren't real, watching himself change sides, watching the grim, businesslike set to his own jaw as he rounded up the innocent and weeded out the useful for the Program...
Sometimes, walking in the rain was the only way to stay a step ahead of your own demons.
And it worked, at least for a few blocks. Before too long the terrified eyes started to fade, and the lines of people marching to their end remained behind him, in his past, where they belonged. The crying and pleading and screaming that was usually reserved for his nightmares faded too, until all that Jono could hear was the sound of his feet splashing through slush puddles, and the otherwise usual, quiet sounds of small town life all around him.
Somewhere around the park, it all came back again. Murmurs at first, little snippets of conversation, of orders he'd been given during his time in the Program. But the murmurs grew louder, became full voices, became -
He stopped dead in his tracks as the air in front of him shifted, seemed for a moment to grow red hot, and then tore itself open, giving a view like a window to something all too familiar, and alien all the same. He knew a Weapon X facility when he saw it, knew the all-too-sterile hallways and the deceptively pleasant set of the mind-wiped mutants that served the program, even if the faces themselves didn't ring any bells.
Not that he had any time to contemplate the view or the faces that came with it as the rift shifted, pulsed, and knocked his feet out from underneath him, ripping at his senses and overloading his psionic powers until that was all that was left were psychic echoes in a world that had suddenly and inexplicably gone very silent and very dark. A stone's throw away, the rift shifted and twisted into itself again, and then with a red-hot crackle it was gone, leaving Jonothon there on the wet ground while the world writhed around in echoes in his brain.
His eyesight wasn't working, though he tried his damnedest to open his eyes and look around.
His ears weren't working, either, and a few minutes of sitting in an overwhelmed daze didn't seem to be helping that, either. His physical senses seemed to be set to mute, his sight and hearing gone the way of his sense of taste and smell. Just... gone.
And it wasn't until he lifted a hand to try to rub at his eyes that he began to realize just how wrong things were. His fingers brushed cold metal where the remains of his face should have been, a mask with a pair of eyeholes blocked by small bars, like a prison cage. Tentatively venturing beyond those bars with one finger left him with a whole lot of nothing. No eyelids shut tight. No face at all. Just the sensation of psionic flame licking against his fingertips.
Right about then, that was when Jonothon found himself clutching to the helmet that covered the flames where his head was meant to go, and all he could do was scream as rain shifted to sleet, and wish that he could sob as sleet shifted to snow.
[OOC: Because I can't throw Jono at horrible canon-AU body horror and not have him aware of how wrong everything is, I went the Rift route. Stuck in Jono's journal because of content, but open if anyone wants to be unfortunate enough to catch a complete psionic meltdown from a headless guy in a Xorn helmet sitting in the snow in the park.]
Maybe it was because of a week spent cooped up in one place. Maybe it was because of whispers and murmurs that had taken to following you around no matter where you went. Maybe it was just a whim.
Tonight, it was all of those things at once. The island appeared to be hell-bent on re-playing the greatest hits of Jonothon's horrible life choices for him tonight, and while he knew, logically, that the visions of Neverland that usually only haunted him in his sleep weren't real, watching himself change sides, watching the grim, businesslike set to his own jaw as he rounded up the innocent and weeded out the useful for the Program...
Sometimes, walking in the rain was the only way to stay a step ahead of your own demons.
And it worked, at least for a few blocks. Before too long the terrified eyes started to fade, and the lines of people marching to their end remained behind him, in his past, where they belonged. The crying and pleading and screaming that was usually reserved for his nightmares faded too, until all that Jono could hear was the sound of his feet splashing through slush puddles, and the otherwise usual, quiet sounds of small town life all around him.
Somewhere around the park, it all came back again. Murmurs at first, little snippets of conversation, of orders he'd been given during his time in the Program. But the murmurs grew louder, became full voices, became -
He stopped dead in his tracks as the air in front of him shifted, seemed for a moment to grow red hot, and then tore itself open, giving a view like a window to something all too familiar, and alien all the same. He knew a Weapon X facility when he saw it, knew the all-too-sterile hallways and the deceptively pleasant set of the mind-wiped mutants that served the program, even if the faces themselves didn't ring any bells.
Not that he had any time to contemplate the view or the faces that came with it as the rift shifted, pulsed, and knocked his feet out from underneath him, ripping at his senses and overloading his psionic powers until that was all that was left were psychic echoes in a world that had suddenly and inexplicably gone very silent and very dark. A stone's throw away, the rift shifted and twisted into itself again, and then with a red-hot crackle it was gone, leaving Jonothon there on the wet ground while the world writhed around in echoes in his brain.
His eyesight wasn't working, though he tried his damnedest to open his eyes and look around.
His ears weren't working, either, and a few minutes of sitting in an overwhelmed daze didn't seem to be helping that, either. His physical senses seemed to be set to mute, his sight and hearing gone the way of his sense of taste and smell. Just... gone.
And it wasn't until he lifted a hand to try to rub at his eyes that he began to realize just how wrong things were. His fingers brushed cold metal where the remains of his face should have been, a mask with a pair of eyeholes blocked by small bars, like a prison cage. Tentatively venturing beyond those bars with one finger left him with a whole lot of nothing. No eyelids shut tight. No face at all. Just the sensation of psionic flame licking against his fingertips.
Right about then, that was when Jonothon found himself clutching to the helmet that covered the flames where his head was meant to go, and all he could do was scream as rain shifted to sleet, and wish that he could sob as sleet shifted to snow.
[OOC: Because I can't throw Jono at horrible canon-AU body horror and not have him aware of how wrong everything is, I went the Rift route. Stuck in Jono's journal because of content, but open if anyone wants to be unfortunate enough to catch a complete psionic meltdown from a headless guy in a Xorn helmet sitting in the snow in the park.]