Equilibrium fic: Riots
Title: “Riots”
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: PG
Summary: Emotions are overwhelming when you’ve only just discovered them. John is not sure he can cope. R&R!
Disclaimer: Equilibrium belongs to Kurt Wimmer and Dimension Films.
A/N: The idea of Jurgen being the head of post-Prozium Libria is inspired by Taking Sides by Judas Austin.
RIOTS
It is eleven fifty-nine when he wakes up in sweat, panting, his heart leaping up to his mouth. He lies on the unmade bed, the blanket halfway on the floor (one of the kids must have covered him), and fixes the electronic alarm clock with his gaze, trying to regain focus. He watches the glowing numbers change.
Midnight.
Back when people knew what the fear of supernatural was, they used to think of midnight as a threshold: between the worlds as much as between the old day and the new day. People never truly forgot what fear was, even under the suppressants; yet nowadays they have been taught to fear other things. Living things. Grey-uniformed things, lethal, handling firearms and acting with cold, level-headed, emotionless precision.
John, who was once one of them, wonders briefly if they have become the new ghosts.
Feelings and sensations are irrational. He still hasn’t got them under his complete control (he’s not even sure he wants to); and there is still that intoxicating sense of novelty. Whenever he experiences something that he cannot quite place, he is both frightened and exhilarated.
Feelings, he can handle. Sometimes he compares himself to a boat tearing through the storm at the open sea. The spontaneity and groundlessness worry him, but that is something he has had the time to prepare himself for. Nightmares, on the other hand, not so much. Nobody told him they would come to haunt him at night. Nobody warned him that, with enviable perseverance, Partridge’s white, dead face would flash in the darkness of an abandoned church; that Mary would burst in flames over and over again, and he would watch it happen, so powerless, so full of poisonous emotions he could neither explain nor keep in check; that Viviana would ask him to remember her, and he would… but was she ever more than a case file in the Tetragrammaton card index?
He turns on his back, away from the alarm clock, and stares at the ceiling. Gets up slowly and walks to the kitchen. The light is on. Robbie turns to look at him, greets him with a curt nod and places a cup of steaming tea on the table in front of him.
“Chamomile,” he says. “It helps.”
John reaches out automatically and takes a sip. The mouthful washes down his throat, and his lips make a late reaction to the temperature of the liquid. Hot, he thinks in detachment. It feels like being on Prozium all over again.
“How did you-?” John asks.
Just please, please don’t give me all that it’s-my-job-to-know-what-you’re-thinking bullshit!
Robbie looks past him for a moment, as though he considers the options he has, and says quietly:
“You always wake up at about the same time if you’re home. I hear you. Bad dreams.”
The latter doesn’t sound like a question at all. Robbie knows, John thinks. He has always been a smart boy, one of the most gifted acolytes in the Monastery. Before the revolutions, John never had the opportunity to appreciate his son’s capabilities to full extent. There was a wall between them, which neither of them had any particular desire to jump over.
He downs his tea, and Robbie takes the empty cup away from him. Opens the tap; the water swooshes down into the sink. The boy rinses the cup and puts it on the plate rack. Everything must remain in order.
Robbie finds it hard to drop the act. His smiles are precious few; his composure is impeccable; his voice is low; and his manner is wary. You should listen to Robbie more often, Jurgen recommends when Preston turns to him seeking advice on the matter of his emotions.
“Do you have them?” John asks before Robbie has left the room. “Dreams.”
The boy lingers on the doorstep. A memory flashes in Preston’s mind. I saw Robbie Taylor crying today. Do you think I should report him? It is now that John knows his son was never asking what to do; it was an act to convince his father the boy was growing up ‘without incident’. But right now, when the roles are reversed, John is the one who desperately needs to ask: Should I?..
What should he do? His adolescent son seems to know more about the world now than he does. It isn’t supposed to be this way. But then again, Libria right now is one screwed-up world. Big time.
“Everyone has them, John,” Robbie sighs. “All you have to do is learn to live with them.”
A siren screeches nearby. Close, very close. Perhaps just outside their sector.
“Riots,” Robbie says, sounding bored.
People have gone crazy these days. Just like Preston feared they would. They don’t kill each other - yet - just loot the deserted Cleric apartments, set their cars on fire and do all sorts of crazy things. Him, they don’t touch. No, he is a national hero, he killed Father. It frightens him to imagine that he could have done otherwise.
“Sometimes I ask myself whether we did the right thing,” Preston murmurs. Robbie eyes him in slight puzzlement. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m in no way pro-DuPont’s regime, particularly considering the fallacy that it was. But maybe we have rushed into things. So much aggression… One country can hardly contain it. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been taking people off the dose at once.”
“Once Father was dead, there was no telling who, when and how would cease the interval,” Robbie says. “You did the right thing, Dad. The right way isn’t always the painless one.”
He wishes Preston sweet dreams and vanishes into the shady corridor. A moment later, the bedroom door slides shut behind him.
John feels trapped. In the brightly lit, cold, featureless kitchen or within his own troubled mind, he cannot say. He looks around, searching for any sign of this being real and not a part of his nightmares; but the sound of Robbie’s voice has died down, and the cup is clean, and the taste of chamomile in his mouth is but a memory. The wailing outside augments, and he thinks that the windows, were they made of ordinary glass, could shatter.
John remembers a fragment of one of Father’s speeches. Something about emotions, impressions, ideas driving people into the void of insanity. He cannot silence it. It is as if someone turned the radio on and it keeps playing. His lips move silently, repeating the words every Librian considered nearly sacred not so long ago.
If anyone set a vial of Prozium before him this very minute, he…
Soft electronic trill ripples through the hallway. Preston glances at the watch. Half-past twelve. Apprehensive, he plods on his way to the door before the sound has roused the children. He activated the new doorbell system himself, a week ago, upon smashing the microchip of the old one because the standard programming irritated him.
“Night, Preston,” Jurgen greets him, a characteristic nervous smile flickering momentarily upon his lips. “Did I wake you?”
“No.”
He steps back to let Jurgen in. The man shakes his head. Business, Preston understands.
“Someone has to do something about those crowds of psychos.” Jurgen’s smile broadens for a split second, and then he is serious again. “These people just need a little guidance, Preston.”
“What do you want me to do? I was trained to put rebels down, not reason with them.”
“They’re not rebels, John.” Jurgen narrows his eyes. He rarely addresses Preston by his first name; right now it comes off a bit like chiding. “Not any more than us. They feel so much, and they’re scared of what they feel. Can’t you say you’re the same?”
Preston fastens his black Senior Cleric overcoat, which he staunchly refuses to discard even though Clerics are not exactly welcome in Libria right now. As they go down the dim hallway towards the parking lot, he ponders Jurgen’s words. He replays them in his head in hopes of finding some hidden meaning.
“If you don’t intend to shoot, what is your plan?” he asks.
“Talk to people. Address them directly. Tell them how you feel, how you began to feel. Tell them you’re not any different from them. And then we’ll do some anger management programme.”
John has no idea what that means, but he refrains from asking. Too much is on his mind now. He muses about Jurgen who was the leader of the Resistance and is now the leader of the country, yet he walks in the open, so unlike Father. He wonders if doing what Jurgen wants him to do might help.
They drive through the city, through its strict, geometrical mazes coloured black by thick darkness. The streets are empty. Little by little the sound of siren quiets down. Preston raises his eyebrows inquisitively.
“I thought we were heading for the scene of riots.”
“Change of plans,” Jurgen shrugs. It is when they arrive in the citadel that Preston plucks up the courage to ask what exactly has changed.
“We have enough people to restrain the rioters,” Jurgen explains. “But not nearly enough to talk. Then again, why talk to a small group when you can make a public announcement that will be broadcast all over Libria?”
“You want to make a holo-record out of me? Like those of Father?”
Their steps echo loudly through the empty halls. Preston knows Jurgen doesn’t like living here. He never wanted to move in in the first place, but he is Libria’s official now, the new head of the headless serpent.
“You are not Father, Preston,” smiles Jurgen. “And I don’t want any records. I want you live. That’s why we’re going to pull an all-nighter and write a speech for you.”
Jurgen’s behavioural pattern is erratic. One might think he is losing circumspection; but Preston knows by now that this is how impassioned people function. Spontaneous. Inspired. He realizes, and not for the first time, that Jurgen is in his own way a genius.
He phones home and dictates a message for the children, telling them he might not be back for breakfast. He wonders if he should add something like: ‘I love you,’ at the end of the message. Probably not. He still feels awkward operating with verbal expressions of endearment.
What a long night!.. By sunrise, he can barely recall the nightmare that woke him up at midnight, and tea with Robbie, and anything at all but the speech he is supposed to say. It resounds through his mind; terrible anxiety consumes him. He has never done public announcements before. He wants to do it. He wants to tell the people of Libria that being afraid and confused is natural, and while it’s terrifying, it is still better than the numbness of Prozium intoxication. He wants to ease their pain.
He wants to make Robbie and Lisa proud.
Roll. Camera. Go.
He stands on the platform where, doubtless, Father stood during the recordings of his numerous speeches. The signal is running. The eyes of Libria are on him, and he can all but feel them burn into his flesh. He feels exposed, vulnerable. A lump comes up to his mouth, and beads of sweat trickle down his temples.
“You all know me,” he says. “I am John Preston, Grammaton Cleric First Class, Father’s killer. Yes, you know me, while I don’t know you. But I know more than you think.” He pauses. His palate feels dry. “A month, a day, an hour ago I was like you. Angry, afraid. Lonely. I still am. But it is not quite the matter I want to address now. I want to tell you how I was before I ceased my interval. How we all were. Incapacitated. Unalive.”
He takes a deep breath and continues speaking. He tells them about the first day off Prozium; about the first sunrise he saw; about the beauty and the desolation upon the faces of his fellow Librians, which he suddenly noticed; about the value of creation over destruction, and how he came to see it in the new light; about music, and art, and books, and animals. I have a dog, he says. It doesn’t really have a name yet, but sometimes I call it Ludwig. And he tells them about that long-dead guy with an unpronounceable name who wrote such heartwrenching music that it still makes him cry like that first time.
“I know sometimes it seems like too much at once,” he concludes. “Emotions are overflowing, and you are afraid that now that they are free, they will control you. Fear not. For it is not only chaos and aggression that you have set free. There are many different shades of emotion. You will learn that you can cry when you are happy and laugh when you are sad. And remember: every single person in Libria who has just come off Prozium feels the same as you do.”
Once the last word falls, there is silence. Low buzzing rises in the square outside the government building. Preston steps off of the platform. The sound he hears is the sound of applause and cheering. Not so long ago the people took seats in that square to watch Father speak. Today they watched him. Jurgen smiles faintly at him.
“You look like hell,” he observes a while later when they retire to his office. It is not nearly as pompous as DuPont’s was, but it is just as erratic as Jurgen himself.
“No sleep,” Preston remarks with an almost sarcastic twist of his mouth.
“Sleep now.”
“I dream.”
Jurgen dismisses the statement with a wave of his hand.
“Don’t we all? Sleep here, Preston. When you wake up, I’m sure the world will change once more.”
John lowers himself on the settee; turns his head and spots a Polaroid photo of a painting. The woman with dark hair and an alluring smile.
“Who is she?”
Jurgen glances at the photo.
“Her name was Gioconda, I believe.”
“I watched her burn on my command.”
“I very much doubt it,” Jurgen chuckles. “The woman who sat for this portrait died hundreds of years ago.”
John shuts his eyes. It doesn’t stop her from staring at him from the low-quality picture with a hint of reproach.
John sleeps. He thinks he has done a good job. Maybe things will be better now.
The riots in the street are much easier to reduce than the riots in his heart.
April 6-7, 2009
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: PG
Summary: Emotions are overwhelming when you’ve only just discovered them. John is not sure he can cope. R&R!
Disclaimer: Equilibrium belongs to Kurt Wimmer and Dimension Films.
A/N: The idea of Jurgen being the head of post-Prozium Libria is inspired by Taking Sides by Judas Austin.
RIOTS
It is eleven fifty-nine when he wakes up in sweat, panting, his heart leaping up to his mouth. He lies on the unmade bed, the blanket halfway on the floor (one of the kids must have covered him), and fixes the electronic alarm clock with his gaze, trying to regain focus. He watches the glowing numbers change.
Midnight.
Back when people knew what the fear of supernatural was, they used to think of midnight as a threshold: between the worlds as much as between the old day and the new day. People never truly forgot what fear was, even under the suppressants; yet nowadays they have been taught to fear other things. Living things. Grey-uniformed things, lethal, handling firearms and acting with cold, level-headed, emotionless precision.
John, who was once one of them, wonders briefly if they have become the new ghosts.
Feelings and sensations are irrational. He still hasn’t got them under his complete control (he’s not even sure he wants to); and there is still that intoxicating sense of novelty. Whenever he experiences something that he cannot quite place, he is both frightened and exhilarated.
Feelings, he can handle. Sometimes he compares himself to a boat tearing through the storm at the open sea. The spontaneity and groundlessness worry him, but that is something he has had the time to prepare himself for. Nightmares, on the other hand, not so much. Nobody told him they would come to haunt him at night. Nobody warned him that, with enviable perseverance, Partridge’s white, dead face would flash in the darkness of an abandoned church; that Mary would burst in flames over and over again, and he would watch it happen, so powerless, so full of poisonous emotions he could neither explain nor keep in check; that Viviana would ask him to remember her, and he would… but was she ever more than a case file in the Tetragrammaton card index?
He turns on his back, away from the alarm clock, and stares at the ceiling. Gets up slowly and walks to the kitchen. The light is on. Robbie turns to look at him, greets him with a curt nod and places a cup of steaming tea on the table in front of him.
“Chamomile,” he says. “It helps.”
John reaches out automatically and takes a sip. The mouthful washes down his throat, and his lips make a late reaction to the temperature of the liquid. Hot, he thinks in detachment. It feels like being on Prozium all over again.
“How did you-?” John asks.
Just please, please don’t give me all that it’s-my-job-to-know-what-you’re-thinking bullshit!
Robbie looks past him for a moment, as though he considers the options he has, and says quietly:
“You always wake up at about the same time if you’re home. I hear you. Bad dreams.”
The latter doesn’t sound like a question at all. Robbie knows, John thinks. He has always been a smart boy, one of the most gifted acolytes in the Monastery. Before the revolutions, John never had the opportunity to appreciate his son’s capabilities to full extent. There was a wall between them, which neither of them had any particular desire to jump over.
He downs his tea, and Robbie takes the empty cup away from him. Opens the tap; the water swooshes down into the sink. The boy rinses the cup and puts it on the plate rack. Everything must remain in order.
Robbie finds it hard to drop the act. His smiles are precious few; his composure is impeccable; his voice is low; and his manner is wary. You should listen to Robbie more often, Jurgen recommends when Preston turns to him seeking advice on the matter of his emotions.
“Do you have them?” John asks before Robbie has left the room. “Dreams.”
The boy lingers on the doorstep. A memory flashes in Preston’s mind. I saw Robbie Taylor crying today. Do you think I should report him? It is now that John knows his son was never asking what to do; it was an act to convince his father the boy was growing up ‘without incident’. But right now, when the roles are reversed, John is the one who desperately needs to ask: Should I?..
What should he do? His adolescent son seems to know more about the world now than he does. It isn’t supposed to be this way. But then again, Libria right now is one screwed-up world. Big time.
“Everyone has them, John,” Robbie sighs. “All you have to do is learn to live with them.”
A siren screeches nearby. Close, very close. Perhaps just outside their sector.
“Riots,” Robbie says, sounding bored.
People have gone crazy these days. Just like Preston feared they would. They don’t kill each other - yet - just loot the deserted Cleric apartments, set their cars on fire and do all sorts of crazy things. Him, they don’t touch. No, he is a national hero, he killed Father. It frightens him to imagine that he could have done otherwise.
“Sometimes I ask myself whether we did the right thing,” Preston murmurs. Robbie eyes him in slight puzzlement. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m in no way pro-DuPont’s regime, particularly considering the fallacy that it was. But maybe we have rushed into things. So much aggression… One country can hardly contain it. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been taking people off the dose at once.”
“Once Father was dead, there was no telling who, when and how would cease the interval,” Robbie says. “You did the right thing, Dad. The right way isn’t always the painless one.”
He wishes Preston sweet dreams and vanishes into the shady corridor. A moment later, the bedroom door slides shut behind him.
John feels trapped. In the brightly lit, cold, featureless kitchen or within his own troubled mind, he cannot say. He looks around, searching for any sign of this being real and not a part of his nightmares; but the sound of Robbie’s voice has died down, and the cup is clean, and the taste of chamomile in his mouth is but a memory. The wailing outside augments, and he thinks that the windows, were they made of ordinary glass, could shatter.
John remembers a fragment of one of Father’s speeches. Something about emotions, impressions, ideas driving people into the void of insanity. He cannot silence it. It is as if someone turned the radio on and it keeps playing. His lips move silently, repeating the words every Librian considered nearly sacred not so long ago.
If anyone set a vial of Prozium before him this very minute, he…
Soft electronic trill ripples through the hallway. Preston glances at the watch. Half-past twelve. Apprehensive, he plods on his way to the door before the sound has roused the children. He activated the new doorbell system himself, a week ago, upon smashing the microchip of the old one because the standard programming irritated him.
“Night, Preston,” Jurgen greets him, a characteristic nervous smile flickering momentarily upon his lips. “Did I wake you?”
“No.”
He steps back to let Jurgen in. The man shakes his head. Business, Preston understands.
“Someone has to do something about those crowds of psychos.” Jurgen’s smile broadens for a split second, and then he is serious again. “These people just need a little guidance, Preston.”
“What do you want me to do? I was trained to put rebels down, not reason with them.”
“They’re not rebels, John.” Jurgen narrows his eyes. He rarely addresses Preston by his first name; right now it comes off a bit like chiding. “Not any more than us. They feel so much, and they’re scared of what they feel. Can’t you say you’re the same?”
Preston fastens his black Senior Cleric overcoat, which he staunchly refuses to discard even though Clerics are not exactly welcome in Libria right now. As they go down the dim hallway towards the parking lot, he ponders Jurgen’s words. He replays them in his head in hopes of finding some hidden meaning.
“If you don’t intend to shoot, what is your plan?” he asks.
“Talk to people. Address them directly. Tell them how you feel, how you began to feel. Tell them you’re not any different from them. And then we’ll do some anger management programme.”
John has no idea what that means, but he refrains from asking. Too much is on his mind now. He muses about Jurgen who was the leader of the Resistance and is now the leader of the country, yet he walks in the open, so unlike Father. He wonders if doing what Jurgen wants him to do might help.
They drive through the city, through its strict, geometrical mazes coloured black by thick darkness. The streets are empty. Little by little the sound of siren quiets down. Preston raises his eyebrows inquisitively.
“I thought we were heading for the scene of riots.”
“Change of plans,” Jurgen shrugs. It is when they arrive in the citadel that Preston plucks up the courage to ask what exactly has changed.
“We have enough people to restrain the rioters,” Jurgen explains. “But not nearly enough to talk. Then again, why talk to a small group when you can make a public announcement that will be broadcast all over Libria?”
“You want to make a holo-record out of me? Like those of Father?”
Their steps echo loudly through the empty halls. Preston knows Jurgen doesn’t like living here. He never wanted to move in in the first place, but he is Libria’s official now, the new head of the headless serpent.
“You are not Father, Preston,” smiles Jurgen. “And I don’t want any records. I want you live. That’s why we’re going to pull an all-nighter and write a speech for you.”
Jurgen’s behavioural pattern is erratic. One might think he is losing circumspection; but Preston knows by now that this is how impassioned people function. Spontaneous. Inspired. He realizes, and not for the first time, that Jurgen is in his own way a genius.
He phones home and dictates a message for the children, telling them he might not be back for breakfast. He wonders if he should add something like: ‘I love you,’ at the end of the message. Probably not. He still feels awkward operating with verbal expressions of endearment.
What a long night!.. By sunrise, he can barely recall the nightmare that woke him up at midnight, and tea with Robbie, and anything at all but the speech he is supposed to say. It resounds through his mind; terrible anxiety consumes him. He has never done public announcements before. He wants to do it. He wants to tell the people of Libria that being afraid and confused is natural, and while it’s terrifying, it is still better than the numbness of Prozium intoxication. He wants to ease their pain.
He wants to make Robbie and Lisa proud.
Roll. Camera. Go.
He stands on the platform where, doubtless, Father stood during the recordings of his numerous speeches. The signal is running. The eyes of Libria are on him, and he can all but feel them burn into his flesh. He feels exposed, vulnerable. A lump comes up to his mouth, and beads of sweat trickle down his temples.
“You all know me,” he says. “I am John Preston, Grammaton Cleric First Class, Father’s killer. Yes, you know me, while I don’t know you. But I know more than you think.” He pauses. His palate feels dry. “A month, a day, an hour ago I was like you. Angry, afraid. Lonely. I still am. But it is not quite the matter I want to address now. I want to tell you how I was before I ceased my interval. How we all were. Incapacitated. Unalive.”
He takes a deep breath and continues speaking. He tells them about the first day off Prozium; about the first sunrise he saw; about the beauty and the desolation upon the faces of his fellow Librians, which he suddenly noticed; about the value of creation over destruction, and how he came to see it in the new light; about music, and art, and books, and animals. I have a dog, he says. It doesn’t really have a name yet, but sometimes I call it Ludwig. And he tells them about that long-dead guy with an unpronounceable name who wrote such heartwrenching music that it still makes him cry like that first time.
“I know sometimes it seems like too much at once,” he concludes. “Emotions are overflowing, and you are afraid that now that they are free, they will control you. Fear not. For it is not only chaos and aggression that you have set free. There are many different shades of emotion. You will learn that you can cry when you are happy and laugh when you are sad. And remember: every single person in Libria who has just come off Prozium feels the same as you do.”
Once the last word falls, there is silence. Low buzzing rises in the square outside the government building. Preston steps off of the platform. The sound he hears is the sound of applause and cheering. Not so long ago the people took seats in that square to watch Father speak. Today they watched him. Jurgen smiles faintly at him.
“You look like hell,” he observes a while later when they retire to his office. It is not nearly as pompous as DuPont’s was, but it is just as erratic as Jurgen himself.
“No sleep,” Preston remarks with an almost sarcastic twist of his mouth.
“Sleep now.”
“I dream.”
Jurgen dismisses the statement with a wave of his hand.
“Don’t we all? Sleep here, Preston. When you wake up, I’m sure the world will change once more.”
John lowers himself on the settee; turns his head and spots a Polaroid photo of a painting. The woman with dark hair and an alluring smile.
“Who is she?”
Jurgen glances at the photo.
“Her name was Gioconda, I believe.”
“I watched her burn on my command.”
“I very much doubt it,” Jurgen chuckles. “The woman who sat for this portrait died hundreds of years ago.”
John shuts his eyes. It doesn’t stop her from staring at him from the low-quality picture with a hint of reproach.
John sleeps. He thinks he has done a good job. Maybe things will be better now.
The riots in the street are much easier to reduce than the riots in his heart.
April 6-7, 2009