Adventures of Matt Parkman, Chapter 16: Beatings
Matt looked past his father to Ryan, who was still sitting there blankly, calmly. Usually he showed more reaction to shouting and excitement. No longer though did he have a portion of Matt's mind within his, no longer did he have that guidance telling him what to make of the world. Matt realized just how much of the man's reactions were merely extensions of Matt's own emotions - they weren't Ryan's at all. He woke when Matt woke, slept when he slept. Matt had been fooling himself, seeing what he wanted to see.
He knew that now. He could have told Maury to leave. He could have refused, but on some level he felt he deserved punishment. Like his father had said, it was the only revenge Ryan would ever get for what had been done to him. He wondered how much else of his life recently had become self-delusion.
He shut his eyes and turned around. This was going to hurt like a mother-fucker - and it did. Maury hit him nearly twenty times, unfurling the belt and giving him the whole length of it across his bare back, holding it by the buckle end. He only stopped because his shoulder began to give out and his arm hurt, but he had to admit Matt had at least taken his stripes like a man.
He staggered away and collapsed onto the far end of the couch, thinking he was getting far too old for this sort of stupidity. He panted and looked at Ryan, who was still gazing off, unmoved by events.
Matt turned around, straightening up and wincing, grimacing in pain. He already had welts; angry, painful ridges across his back. A few were wet, not with blood, for Maury wasn't strong enough for that and the belt wasn't shaped for it, but the intense pressure still made the fluid rise from the flesh.
Maury looked at his son in disgust and shook his head. "I don't know why I even care. You're right. It doesn't matter. He's just a hunk of meat. Meat!" He levered himself to his feet and took the belt in his other hand, hitting Ryan full across the face with it. Matt jumped to see him strike a defenseless man, made all the worse by Ryan not even flinching, just swaying a bit at the blow.
"See that? Nothing. He probably wasn't worth anything before, either. What was he? An orphan? High school drop out? Special ed crack baby?" He hit him again and Matt took a step closer.
"Don't!" Matt said.
His father looked up at him. "Why not? He doesn't matter. He didn't matter to you. Look what you did to him!" He raised the belt again and Matt jumped forward, stopping when his father didn't complete the swing. Very quietly, Maury said, "Why do you care, Matthew? Why do you care now what happens to him?"
Matt stepped back, realizing he was close enough his father could just as easily hit him as Ryan… even if it looked like he wasn't going to finish the swing at either of them at the moment. "I… I don't know. Just… I don't know." He looked away. It shouldn't matter. It really shouldn't. Ryan was practically a vegetable. His head came up with a snap as Maury hit the hapless man anyway.
"Stop it!" Matt surged towards him, reaching for the belt but Maury held it away from him and put his shoulder into Matt's chest. They struggled for a moment, though it was clear that Matt would overpower him soon.
Maury said loudly, quickly, "Do you care now, Matt? Do you?" Matt stopped reaching for the belt and backed up. "Does he matter yet?" his father asked him more softly.
Matt looked at Ryan, marks across his face, snot running down his lip now. He stood between his father and the man Matt had ruined. "I'm sorry." It was almost as if he was saying it to Ryan.
"Are you really?" Maury wasn't being sarcastic. He was honestly asking.
"I shouldn't have done it," Matt said dully. He thought back to Janice - the person he really shouldn't have done it to. Even there at the end, he suspected he could have salvaged things, if he'd been honest, if he'd been willing to compromise, to work with her, to try. She'd put up with so much from him. She hadn't hated him at the end - she'd hated that he'd destroyed their relationship.
She'd been trying to work with him, trying to love him and he threw that all away because it wasn't as easy as he wanted it to be. It wasn't as easy as the woman he was now with, the one he took his pleasure with and gave her nothing in return - at least, nothing that really mattered. He didn't share himself with her, he didn't care about her. He didn't love her, even though he made love to her and was in love with the idea of having her. He'd loved Janice.
"Are you sorry enough you won't do it again, the next time it's convenient?"
Matt looked back at his father with narrowed eyes. "I'm- I'm not going to do that again. I didn't mean to do it to start with."
"Oh?" his father said dryly, obviously not believing him. When Matt didn't answer, he said, "Am I to believe you just accidentally projected into his head and crushed out his personality, his entire conscious mind? I know you're strong, Matt, unbelievably strong, but…" He shook his head. "That's ridiculous. You can't do that sort of thing by accident. Maybe you didn't know it would turn out like that, but you meant it."
"I didn't… Okay, fine! Yes, I didn't know it would turn out that way. All I wanted to do was…" He huffed, exasperated, looking at Ryan. "I just wanted to make him act right."
Maury hit him across the back with the belt.
"Ow! God-dammit!" Matt fled across the room in surprise and pain at the agony of that lash on top of all the others. "What the fuck was that for?"
"I just wanted to make you act right, Matt." He cocked his head at him, entirely serious. "Is it working?"
"No, God-dammit." Matt glared at that belt, thinking he should have cold-cocked his father and taken it away from him while he had the chance.
"Do you think it would if I hit you… oh, I don't know, five or six more times? Or fifty? Maybe if I hit you so hard it started stripping away skin like you stripped away this man's identity?" He stepped up next to Ryan and patted him on the head - a strangely gentle gesture, given that he'd been hitting him just a few minutes earlier.
Matt breathed hard out his nose, his lips set in a line. "I get the point, Pops."
The elder Parkman wondered at his son calling him that without the usual sarcasm, but said nothing about it for now. "Do you? My point is that you can't make people act right by forcing them to. Are you telling me you've figured that out? That your power only makes people do what you want them to, not the right thing?"
Matt looked down.
Maury added, patting Ryan's head again. "You don't have any moral high ground here, son. You're as human as the rest of us."
Matt's lips moved, but at first nothing came out. Then he said, audibly, "Yes. I see that now."
"Here's another choice for you. Let me prevent you from using your power unbridled on anyone ever again."
Matt's head came up. His eyes didn't narrow. He didn't look suspicious. He was unsure. "You can do that? You can… stop my ability?"
"No, not really, but I can keep you from abusing it. Do you want that? Or do you want to run the risk of 'accidentally' doing this again?" He dropped the end of the belt and the tip hit the floor next to Ryan's foot.
Matt breathed a little harder. "Don't hit him," he whispered. If his father hit Ryan again, he didn't know what he was going to do, but his chest was tight with tension. Maury's hand still rested on the young man's head, stroking absently with his thumb. He was too close to swing at him and that was the only thing keeping Matt from launching himself at him again.
"How long have you had him?" he asked conversationally.
Matt looked between Maury and Ryan for a moment, then answered, "A few months."
"That's quite a while." He looked down at him, tilting the man's head around like a handler might do with a dog. "You've kept him fed, clean, dressed. Of course, if you're using him like you implied earlier, I suppose that's a given." He looked up at Matt with a smoldering, barely restrained expression. He looked away and blew out air, trying to calm himself and stay on target. "That's why they're called zombies. They're the living dead. Don't take good care of them and they look like it too. What are you going to do when this one dies? Do you already have a few lined up as replacements? I can't imagine you don't."
Matt pursed his lips. There were a number of people he'd ridden hard enough to damage. Brandon was in the worst shape. Patricia had sought him out and drug Matt along once she understood the full range of his ability. She wanted to see Brandon dance. Knowing how casually the man had used her, Matt didn't see any harm in doing the same back to him. Maybe he'd done it a bit too much. No, he thought now, he had done it a bit too much. The man wasn't whole anymore.
Maury said, "So that's it, huh?"
Matt looked up at his father, thinking he couldn't be reading his mind. It wasn't possible. Matt extended himself to Maury's mind, receiving the expected feedback. His father's head pulled back and he resisted, but nothing else. Matt pushed him hard, but he didn't actually hit him or apply himself seriously to getting inside of him. He couldn't be reading his mind if his defenses were that tight. Matt pulled himself back in.
Maury asked, "Is that the life you want to lead?", carrying on as if there had been no mental contest.
Matt shook his head wordlessly.
"Do you want me to fix it so you can't do it by accident?"
Matt nodded, still looking down.
"You'll drop all your defenses and let me do that?"
Matt looked up at him, thinking that if he agreed, he wouldn't be able to stop Maury if the man decided to do something else. At least, not unless whatever else he did took long enough for Matt to realize it and try to stop him. The alternative was living as he had been living. He looked at Ryan's vacant eyes and he nodded.
Maury tilted his head and raised one finger to Matt, then pointed down. Matt laughed. "You want me to kneel, is that it?"
The older man smiled. "Well… that would be funny, but no, it wasn't what I meant. Drop your defenses. I'll do it now."
Matt grunted and shifted. His back hurt. A drop of moisture ran down it. He lowered his defenses, thinking he should at least ask for a better explanation of what his father was going to do, but he was too upset, too off-balance to really think about it. The last thing he thought of was the coffee was probably finished making.