(no subject)
10/23/2007
=NYC= Hidden Cell - Lower Levels - Hellfire Clubhouse
This tiny room lies under heavy guard and constant monitoring, within thickly reinforced stone walls and a locked and barred door. A window gives one-way blankness high up in one wall, but the only light comes from the iron-caged light bulbs in the ceiling. A cot and other sparse furniture can take their place in the box as needed, and a drain in one corner offers helpful removal of any unfortunate spills or messes.
If there's one thing the Inner Circle is good at, it is vengeance. If there are two things, the other would be dramatics. The room is tiny and cool, and the blanket on the bed is an ugly shade of scratchy blue. That is the first sensation Trevor is aware of. Wool against his cheek and a calming sense of detachment from his surroundings. Calming at first. Something sharp pulls out of his arm and a dark blur moves away from his side. A door opens, a whispered conversation, and the door closes again. Gradually light filters through to pin the blurred edges of his vision down, and a crossed leg comes into view. "Hello, darling," a pleasantly edged voice purrs. "I have your mind in my control, and if you should even so much as try to pull your little parlor trick, I will make you defecate yourself and you will spend the rest of your life laying in it."
Trevor's eyes fling open at the chillingly saccharine voice, his hands slowly sliding along the sheet until they are in position to wearily push him upright with a tired groan. "I...beg your pardon?" He manages to stutter lethargically, sliding up a palm to rub at the back of his sore neck. "Where am I?"
"You will beg for more than my pardon soon enough dear. Don't disgrace yourself by starting already." Emma sits upright in a tall-backed chair brought in from other areas. A pointed-toe peeks out from underneath the hem of the pleated pant leg, bouncing slightly. "Where you are is not important. What is, is that you cooperate fully and completely with us."
"I am in a cell." Trevor murmurs to himself, reaching a hand out to rub his fingertips against the solid stone with a frown and flicking his eyes onto Frost; swirling thoughts sharpening into a more calculated train. "What is it you want?"
Emma dips her telepathic fingers into the surgical gel of his thoughts and gathers up the strands of control. His arm collapses, shorn from his conscious control. "I want Zoe McMillan unharmed. But you can't give me what I want, can you? So I will have to take what I will settle for."
The face of reason Trevor struggles to maintain wavers in the face of the telepathic prod. "I would have been /ever/ so happy to oblige, Emma. It was your /treachery/ that harmed her. Her injury is /your/ fault." He says through a scowl, shaking his arm to wrestle control once again.
The cell door opens to admit Erik Lensherr. He paces to Emma's side, where he stands tall and grim (and stylish, in a light, ashen grey three piece suit) and the cell door closes again behind him. "Hello."
"Wrong answer, Fitzroy." Emma stands at the door opening and turns her back on Trevor, careful to maintain her control on his mind, searching for clues to intentions and plans. She nods to Erik and flicks a glance at the mirrored wall behind them, behind which more of the Inner Circle's forces wait. "He doesn't wish to deal with me," she announces pleasantly, if somewhat sadly.
Trevor's chin lifts defiantly, eyes lighting with understanding as his mind seems to calm with acceptance. "There is no correct answer, Frost." He remarks, canting a curious eye towards Magneto and, what he presumes, is to be the introduction of physical torture. "Hello, Magneto."
"Who does?" Erik inquires with exaggerated courtesy, brows knit and voice quiet while he looks Emma over. When his glare turns over onto Trevor, there is no change in the distant chill of it. Nor is there any change in his expression. "I apologize for my tardiness. Important terrorist things to do."
That dampens a bit of her artificial cheerfulness. She gives him a glare shielded from Trevor by the turn of her shoulder and back. "I'm sure Mr. Fitzroy is quite apologetic about the inconvenience to your busy schedule," she simpers back, then looks back over her shoulder at the man on the bed.
Percy stands quite still just beyond the confines of the cell, watching through the one-way window as he listens to their voices piped through the intercom. There is a tension in his posture, and his gaze is steady, chin slightly lowered.
Adel stands next to Percy with hand and forearm braced against the wall, supporting his lean. He frames one side of the mirrored window, looking in on the proceedings at an oblique angle. He is quiet, but the indolence of his posture belies an active mind. Empathy continually monitors emotions of King and Queen, while he listens to Trevor in a lesser manner.
"Of course." Trevor replies flatly, gaze sliding past Emma's shoulders as he, in the shadow of an instant, imagines draining the life from her graceful neck. It passes. "You are a mutant." He states, turning a distasteful glance towards Magneto. You are too.
Her power ripples in that shadow, digging nails across his mind painfully, reminding him of her warning from earlier. "As are you. Among other things." Portioned off from her control on Trevor, a thin strand of telepathy feeds back to Adel, easy under the monitoring.
Magneto's temperament is chilly, with rumblings of more volatile activity rippling beneath the reflective surface, after the manner of a snowcapped volcanic crater. He stands, and he watches, meeting Emma's look with a lifted brow, and Trevor's with an impassive lack of emotion.
The free hand Trevor still manages to maintain control over combs through his messy hair and tries in vain to squeeze the pain out of his psyche. Teeth grind together as he struggles to glare at Emma through the pain, swirling flashes of red sparking at the back of his head.
A slow pair of footfalls take Erik from Emma's side to Trevor's, and he draws in a deep breath prior to speaking that ensures that his tone remains cool and unruffled. Mostly. "Is there any particular reason why we shouldn't allow you to rot down here? Other than the smell."
The smell is a fairly good reason, Emma's expression says.
"Professional courtesy." Trevor replies, straightening his collar and shuffling back as he regains his composure. "What inconvenience I have visited upon you all is but a trifle when placed next to your own sins."
"Are we discussing our sins? I don't believe that we were discussing our sins. Were we, Erik?" Emma turns and steps up to just behind Magneto's shoulder. She folds her arms in front of her like a blond Morticia Addams.
"It's...really more a matter of you abusing a young woman whose life we are invested in to retrieve information necessary in order to blackmail us," says Erik. After a thoughtful, trailing pause, he punctuates with a fist thrown spontaniously into Trevor's face.
Spittle splatters the wall behind Trevor as he gets hit in the face and stumbles backwards. Kind of. His head tilts aside to rub the back of a knuckle gingerly against the blow. "...is she a young woman?" He asks, mouth cracking into satisfaction at the display of aggression. "I thought her a tool the way Emma used her. I found her unsatisfactory."
Emma steps from behind Erik and leans forward, hands propped against knees as she brings herself to the seated mans level. "She /is/ a tool. But the thing that you seem to be rather dangerously ignorant of is that she is /our/ tool. Just as you do not vandalize a piece of machinery that does not belong to you, you do not vandalize what belongs to us. Now..." Emma's sweet reasonableness hardens and turns edged, and she leans farther forward and drops her voice. "You wanted our attention. You now have it. Be very careful, Mr. Fitzroy. You are not so important that we cannot dispose of you. After all..." She smiles and wipes a trail of blood from the corner of his mouth with her fingertip. "Look what happened to your father."
Injured right fist clenched and curled into the clench of his left, Erik chuckles to himself and paces away for the few short steps available to him to sort of fade into the background while he waits for endorphins. Ow.
"From what I have gathered, Shaw had the habit of twisting the wrong people." Trevor remarks, raising his hand to rub the rest of the blood away himself as he shoves himself away from the wall"...or, perhaps, he twisted the wrong people improperly." He corrects, gaze shifting between the woman and the more distant Magneto. "What is it you want to hear, Emma?"
"The truth darling. Stripped of all your posturing and bravado. Why did you beat a woman, tool or not, unconscious? Why should we not retaliate in full force for the information you forced from her?" Emma doesn't look away from Trevor's face.
Frustrated and irritable, Erik remains in the background, right hand returned reluctantly back to his side. It is probably broken, but he is too distracted to bother with it overmuch. "Were you simply curious? Trying to impress someone, perhaps?"
"You have what should be /mine/." Trevor replies simply, locking his own unyielding eyes with Emma's and lifting his chin as regally as his pathetic situation can allow. "I am /better/ than that beast could /ever/ hope to be." He snarls, inhaling deeply as he considers Shaw with absolute disdain.
"Oh, really?" Emma murmurs, eyes narrowing as she skims Trevor's battered face and form with a look at lascivious and sneering as any ever bestowed by the father. "Yours? Then you worked with him to get it and hold it? You mined it from the competitors minds and served it up on the silver platter of your own body to him? /You/ learned the steps of the dance underneath his feet?" She rises to look down the length of her nose at him in cold, indifferent contempt.
This is evidently not the answer that Erik was anticipating. It gives him pause, anyway, amidst everything. "So far, you seem remarkably similar."
"You expect me to be sympathetic to your whoring?" Trevor asks, his voice rising with genuine curiosity as he turns a startled stare askance towards the Master of Magnetism. "No. What you have come to expect is somebody to bow to you. Somebody to snivel beneath your will and shrink beneath your gaze. Why should you not leave me to rot here?" Trevor asks of them both, hooking a thumb towards his face and grinding his teeth. "I hold more uses to you alive. I...can be more useful alive."
"As sympathetic as you expect me to be to the entitlement whinings of a spoiled child." Emma turns away and moves past Erik toward the door. << Adel. Take over his control. >> "I've heard enough."
Wordless confirmation answers Emma's directive, and Adel shifts once from his position to straighten and turn to more directly watch through the window. He plucks the strings of control from Emma's hand. It is slightly jarring, that transfer. It comes with a full-bodied twitch through the length of Trevor's limbs. Adel's touch is not as not as heavy, and not as sure, but it suffices quite nicely with a close eye kept on Trevor's intentions. Movement is possible; escape, by any means, will be tricky.
"Well," says Erik to that, brows lowered, and then lifted. "I am Magneto. Murderer, terrorist, omega mutant. I think I am well within my rights to expect some grovelling from prisoners in compromising positions, if they value their lives over their pride." A glance is cast up at his own reflection in the mirrored wall, and Erik turns to follow ambiguously in Emma's footsteps.
10.23.07 - Trevor was a very naughty boy. He deserves to be spanked.