OOC: commentary on Dark Phoenix scene (Part 2 of 2)
[Continued from Part 1.]
Women, mares, death... Jean surveys the meadow for a time, attention caught by the crow's feasting with a detached and clinical fascination, puzzling out what she's looking at. But her answer is not here. With a whirl of thought, she turns away, but not before reanimating the horses, bringing skeletons out of the closet in the form of literal nightmares. Down the hallway she roves, rattling at the handles, peeping at the locks. "What's behind door number two?"
Jean breaks the loop, that careful balance of emotional energy that is locked in on itself to keep it under control and out of conscious awareness. Well, so much for that. Shaw will indeed have literal nightmares (although probably not about horses) until this violation heals, and his misogyny will be more overt, unfiltered, unshielded because the constraint is broken and the defense mechanism is gone. Look out, girls.
Muffled screaming. Groaning. Shivering agony/rage/helplessness. The output swathes another door (the first one hanging open, weeping bruised blood, sunshine spilling out with a crow's insulted and angry caws) that stands halfway down the hall, bearing the mark of a caduceus. It was gold once, but age and pain have stained the raised symbol black so that the underlying metal gleams through only fitfully, past flakes that flutter to the floor like raven feathers.
I forgot to indicate this door's color, which is gold like the symbol upon it. Gold and black are the colors of eternity; whatever's inside must be held to be immortal and endless. I carried over the raven motif to tie the rooms together, less because of symbology (there isn't a significant connection between the rooms that way) than because of narrative flow. Jean is still on a journey; must write to that purpose.
About the caduceus: it's an ancient symbol most often associated with the Greek god Hermes, who governs commerce, healing, and communication. He is also the protector of thieves and the conductor of the souls of the dead. The staff has his wings on it (it used to be a herald's staff, in fact) and two serpents wrapped around it in a double helix, which echoes the structure of DNA. Thus, we have a whole slew of symbols tied with Shaw's life. He's a businessman who has done shady deals in his past, and he's suffering - dying - from a genetic disorder. The other animal motif I use for him is serpentine because snakes symbolize wisdom (especially hidden), poison, treachery, and sexuality. The caduceus is blackened, not shining brightly. There's badness inside this door, too.
Jean smiles as she surveys this particular door. It's not a happy smile. It is, however, a smile of familiarity. The Caduceus figures largely in her own mental hallways, and it's with well-practised fingers that she traces the lines of this one, restoring the gold where her fingers make contact. And if it freshens the pain associated with it, well, Jean's not particularly caring about that right now. Her garb shifts to hospital scrubs and lab coat as she wills -this- portal to let her through.
There is a turret gun over this door, too, but it isn't doing anything. His defense mechanisms have learned the lesson: better to let her inside these rooms than to get turned into peonies. His id will protect itself.
The darkness of the womb greets her, scorched by infrequent spats of fire that rises from a bottomless pit under the floor's metal grillwork. The walls stand close, and the ceiling hangs low, to the human figure pinioned to the rusted grid. It's Shaw, and he's nude, and he's on fire, and he's melting. Flesh bubbles and runs off his bones to drip down into the hellish flame that stretches so hungrily to reach him. He arches to get away from it, mad and dead-eyed from the torment; animal noises wrench out of his throat and chest with sawing staggers. He can't get up and get away, however, because the dribbling flesh forms chains around wrists and ankles, holding him down. When they melt under the fire, more flesh replaces them, and the source is unending, Promethean renewal of his body's mass, melting and reforming and chaining and melting again, again, again, endlessly again.
Welcome to Shaw's neverending hell, in which he fears being trapped because of his flawed mutation. His mother gave him that mutation; here is womb imagery to suggest her, with a close, small, dark room.
The fire is life and passion (again, some more), destruction and cleansing, hellish torment and welcome illumination and warmth. It's a double-edged symbol, as is fire itself. Fire can warm us and light our lives, or it can burn us and all we hold dear to dead ash. Thus is Shaw's mutation to him. On the one hand, it launched him into undreamt-of wealth and power, but on the other, it's going to kill him before he sees his sixty-fifth summer. The fire is also hellfire, as in the club by that name, his home and his hell; and hellfire as in the real, literal stuff about which he absorbed endless sermons when he was a kid accompanying his fanatically devout mother to her brimstone-thundering Baptist church. Shaw is an atheist who believes without the scintilla of a doubt that he will be in hell when he dies, for all the sins he's perpetuated on the world (and himself, although usually he doesn't think of that part of it).
There's something of the medieval torture chamber to this room, in a fantastical way. It isn't iron chains holding Shaw to the fire; it's his own melting and reforming flesh. His body binds him here as it binds him on the physical plane: he can't escape his body, either its numerous strengths or its fatal weakness. I make reference to Prometheus, the Greek Titan who brought fire to humanity and for that crime was chained to a mountainside for eternity while an eagle ate his liver every day. The liver regenerated every night, just as Shaw's flesh is regenerating in this unconscious construction of his fear of always dying but never truly escaping life, of being trapped and tormented by failing physicality. He fears death greatly. Greatly. His mother killed herself (he and his father found her body), his father spent years dying horribly of cancer (he sat by his bedside and watched) . . . oh, greatly, indeed. He loves his body. He hates it. He fears what it's doing. He can't control it. Can't escape it. It's his personal, private, most intimate hell on earth.
"Mortality..." Jean muses, inspecting Shaw's mind's grasp of skeletomuscular anatomy and finding it workable. "Rage, rage against the dying of the light, you poor, foolish bastard?" she questions, before turning away with an unpleasant look. Again, not before meddling, tweaking the scene to suit herself does she leave. The fires leap higher, growing in intensity. The more he fights, the faster the cycle runs, a mental parody of the skewed mutation killing him as he draws strength from it. And off she goes again, with a last flutter of her lab coat, black instead of white.
She didn't destroy the defense mechanisms; she didn't even kick open the door, only willed it to open for her. Thus, the changes she effects with this construct won't affect Shaw as consciously, profoundly, or for as long as will what happened in the first room. He'll be avoiding any use of his mutation, the thought of which will cause fresh if vague horror and disgust deep inside him. She didn't do anything to the mutation itself, so there aren't any actual physical effects, but the psychological ones are enough.
Beyond aversion to the mutation, he'll be psychogenically impotent for a good long while and, indeed, physically tentative, even clumsy. The fear of the physical will impede him, and more and more as he fights with or ignores it (the flames burning higher the more he fights!). He won't trust his body on this basic, unconscious level, and it will betray him again and again until he resolves this violation, too.
Click, click, click as she passes more doors: more guns training on her but not firing, only following with restrained laser guides, a blizzard of baleful red and white and green dots on her back. (At her back, the second door, still open to howls of freshened pain amid fire's chuckling purr.) The hallway dims, shrinks, grows tight with emotional cobwebs strung from wall to wall. The doors crouch lower, too, until, around one last corner, stands a small door of blank and shining white wood. It glows through the dank darkness, and has no lock or knob.
Yay, turret guns! They hold back, only watch and track her resentfully. I don't know where I got the colors from; they just seemed right, so I went with it. I trust my unconscious, too! Red for anger and hatred, white for purity and emptiness, green for growth and healing - his unconscious isn't all monsters. There's great beauty in it, too, but she didn't open any of those doors. Beauty isn't what she's looking for. (And gosh, that fire is happy to be chewing on his body, isn't it, in the second room? "Chuckling purr," indeed.)
The last door I wanted opened lies at the end of the hallway where no one ever goes. Cobwebs and shadows protect it instead of guns. However, its light shines through the darkness and the slightly fetid smell (place needs a good scrubbing!) and thus negates the hiding. This is a door of unself-conscious innocence. I thought about putting the Fool from the tarot deck on its surface as a marking symbol, but decided the blankness was just as good. It's a white door, an innocent door, a door that doesn't hide itself (despite the unconscious mind's attempts to do so for it), and it's a child-sized door. It can't be opened from the outside, only from within - or from without by violence.
And now, at the heart of things, Jean approaches this final door. Surely here, -here- is where she'll find it, the evidence of Shaw's betrayal, of his ever-so-intricate plans with Emma, with Jason, with the dozens of other unknown faces and grasping, dragging hands that make up the Hellfire Club. The plans to drive her out by driving her mad... With a sudden rage, an axe materializes in her hands, and she begins to swing at the wooden door.
Ow. I sadface on behalf of Shaw and his unconscious, not to mention this room's inhabitant.
It shudders and it cries under the blows (somewhere, far and far away, a paralyzed body tries to echo those protests), but it yields at last, the wood thicker than apparent yet not thick enough. And inside is a room. And the room is a white sphere, illuminated by its singular glowing wall/ceiling/floor. And at the bottom of the sphere is a small stool, and on the stool is a boy, who looks up at his broken door and at the woman who broke it. And he is crying.
Meet Shaw's inner child, the piece of his psyche that contains all his youthful experiences, feelings, and impulses, unintegrated with his adult self. It doesn't have to be integrated for healthy functioning, but it shouldn't be shut away like this, either. His unconscious has packed into this room the boy he used to be, closed the door, and hid it away. The inner child can get out, since he's on the inside (where there's a knob, and anyway, it's his door as it is his room), but he's afraid to. He doesn't trust the adult Shaw not to hurt him as his parents (and, indeed, his whole life) hurt him. Occasionally he peeks out in emotional outbursts, which have been pent up for years, unexpressed when Shaw was a child - was this child, point of fact - and need to be fully expressed for better integration with the rest of his psyche.
I'm not holding my breath on that happening. Don't you be, either.
This is the final room, the most important one, and so I used the repetition of conjunctions to heighten, with every occurrence, weight and tension and drama. The sphere signifies wholeness, something unbroken and entire (like a circle, like the number zero that is the Fool's number), and white is more of that purity. The stool is just a stool, because I thought it'd be cute (like a kid sitting in the corner of a classroom with a dunce cap on his head - which is kinda how adult!Shaw treats child!Shaw, isn't it?), and the boy is himself. It's not a memory. It is him. A piece of him. A vital, locked-away piece of him. This is Sebastian. Who is crying.
To say that Jean is startled would be an understatement. The axe vanishes from being in a small puff of smoke, and for a time she simply stares at the crying boy. "Do you know what he's done?" she asks him, this personality disinclined to coddle and comfort when there's something it wants.
Knuckling away tears, the boy shakes his head. His hair's a thick and glossy black, in need of a trim over ears and nape; his eyes are wide and startlingly -- wetly -- dark in his pale face. "No," he says quietly, but the young treble carries effortlessly, even as he hunches up knobby knees to concave chest and hugs them. "I didn't do anything, but you hurt me anyway." More tears; his voice wavers and cracks, although he looks still a few years shy of puberty. "I trusted you, and I even kinda liked you, and you hurt me! Everybody always hurts me, no matter what I do. Go away. Go away!" He buries his head in his knees and starts sobbing.
And there's his child self speaking pure, unself-conscious truth. Jean hurt him, after he trusted her all this time, when he doesn't trust hardly anybody. This is why he doesn't! Because they hurt him! His inner child doesn't understand why and doesn't trust his adult self to ask for and receive an explanation. (They don't talk. They really, really don't talk. Ever. The inner child views his adult self pretty much the way young Sebastian viewed his violent, abusive father.) All he knows is that he reaches out to people and they hurt him, again and again and again. He's so tired, is child!Shaw (who's visualized as about ten or eleven years old here, but it fluctuates). Tired, lonely, sad. There aren't even any toys in the big round white room for him to play with, or pictures to look at or windows to look through. All he has is his stool and his door, and Jean just smashed up his door.
Child!Shaw's existence really kinda sucks.
"Oh, -stop- that," orders this distant, absent Jean. "You grow up into -him-. And -he's- betrayed -me- first, set his dogs on me..." Trailing off into subvocalized swearing, she turns and leaves. Even in this state, however, the door is repaired, if left ajar and hanging carelessly crooked on its hinges. She pelts a teddy bear at the child and abruptly, dizzyingly, leaves Shaw's mind to return to the physical plane. << "You had her hide it, didn't you? Clever, clever Sebastian." >>
But he got a teddy bear! I told xmm_jeangrey that he appreciated that, as well as the way she kinda sorta fixed his door. He has a new toy now, something to play with in his lonely isolation, and the door will right itself over time, back into its frame, just as the peonies will turn back into a turret gun and the flesh-melting flames will die back down to normal intensity. The mind heals itself; patterns reassert themselves.
This would be a splendid time for him to get some actual therapy, to deal with this trauma and what it's stirred up. Are you holding your breath on that? Why? Didn't I tell you not to be?
The lasting effects from Jean's violation of this room will be quieter and probably not last as long. Emotional lability: mood swings, outbursts for good and for ill, oversensitivity. The sensation of wearing every feeling on his sleeve and having no skin at all between his inner self and the outer world. Discomfort from that. Defensiveness. Overcompensation. And so on. But his inner child does have his toy and his half-fixed door, so it won't be too bad for too long. Probably.
Phoenix is suspicious. Thinks Emma did to Shaw what Jean did to Warren: telepathically hide information away, even from himself. She doesn't know Shaw that well. He'd sooner stick an awl in his eye before he let any telepath, let alone Emma Frost, do that to his mind. Yikes.
Shaw stares up at her through tear-blurred eyes; the moisture leaking down his cheeks shakes refractions of fiery light with his ceaseless shuddering. His mind is a froth of churned mud (conscious anger and indignation) and deeper flood (unconscious terror and confusion). But he hangs onto her words, and his throat works until words croak back at her, hoarse but clear. "Didn't hide anything. Didn't /do/ anything. You're looking at a fellow victim, Grey. Congratulations on a spectacularly bad leap to conclusions. Going to torture my body next?"
Shaw is crying physically because of that last room. Jean broke through the barrier surrounding his inner child, who is free to express himself now a little, and does so. Shaw himself wants to cry, oh, believe me, how he does, and here he can do so, because of that freed child. He can't stop shaking because of reaction. He wasn't aware exactly of what Jean was doing, but he knows she did something. He was held down and raped from the outside in (the muscle paralysis) and the inside out (the unconscious mind's violations). There is reaction. You bet there is.
And yet he's strong enough to fight back, if only verbally since she hasn't released anything except his speech mechanisms from her mental control. He's figured that someone has done something to her, since she keeps accusing him for that, and he knows it wasn't him, so he tries to appeal to that fellow-feeling of victimhood. Also a touch of appeal to her Hippocratic Oath: "first, do no harm," huh? Yeah. Right.
He doesn't try to charm or sweet-talk her, though. He could have, if his wits were together enough for the attempt. They aren't, and anyway - he wants the punishment. He's goading her into it, not only out of unconscious desire for expatiation of his guilt (and something of a death wish, too, because he doesn't want to live with this rape she's performed on him) but also out of a subconscious hope that she might lose her temper and make a mistake. Give him an opening. He'll try anything at this point. He's hurt, he's angry, he's terrified, he's guilty, he's grieving, he's craving death and destruction of anything and everything around him, including himself. It's not dissimilar to the state he was in after Emma's coup, when she had him drugged, kidnapped, and shipped away so that she and Warren could take control of the Inner Circle.
Damn these women. Damn them to hell.
<< "Get up." >> Jean commands, releasing her hold on his body with a snap of her fingers once she's a few paces away. The Phoenix flames are leaping again. << "Go see Emma, get her to give back what you had hidden. Then you can stop lying to me. I should congratulate you," >> she states, a sudden turn matched by a sudde curved smile as she alights atop the desk and crouches, chin on her knee. "Game -very- well played, Sebastian." she concludes, switching solely to her speaking voice alone. "You're right, I'm not made for this club, you've demonstrated your point nicely. I'll be taking my leave now."
"Fuck off," snarls Shaw as his body creaks right out of the chair and at her in full flight, led by grasping hands (to punish and hurt and rend and destroy!) and the wavefront of absorbed energy's psychic trail and intention's black clouds.
She's taunting him. She's motherfucking taunting him, and he can't believe it. All the muddy mess of his emotions flash-fire into fury, and he attacks her. How dare she be so flippant with her powers, her conversation, her affect? The fact that she has not once shown any real emotion drives him right out of his mind because it mocks the very real emotions he's been dumping out all over the place, some of them because of her intrusion and her leaping to conclusions. She doesn't even do him the honor of being angry at supposedly being betrayed? She sing-songs and purrs and smiles? This isn't a child's game. Does she think this is a game? Does she think he is her toy?
Well, fuck her. He's going to rip her goddamned head off for that insult to his pride. She's the monster, the horror, the betrayer, the evil - not him.
He's never liked her blunted affect. He's never trusted it. Someone who doesn't show much emotion is not someone to be trusted because it isn't someone he can easily manipulate. S/he must be repressed, and that is dangerous in and of itself: repression has a way of bursting its bonds and making a right mess of things at very bad times. Jean is too locked-down and controlled for him to feel comfortable around or with - makes his teeth itch! - and now . . . now she is expressionless, heartless, emotionless. It's psychopathic (in the lay sense of the term). Even beyond the insult he feels at her playing around with him, he feels the thrill of visceral threat from a more powerful opponent he cannot predict, manipulate, or control in any real way.
And so, like the bloody great blockhead that he is, he attacks her instead of prudently running away. Sigh.
"Mmm, -no-," Jean replies, mouth forming a nearly-coquettish moue as she watches him hurl himself forward. She raises a hand. Shaw stops in midair. She eyes him consideringly. She circles with the hand. Shaw is thrown at the outer wall this time, with enough force to knock half the drywall off the hallway side.
Shaw writhes (shockpainRAGE) against the impact (<< bitchcuntwhore >>), and his limbs fly out in helpless hope of bracing, catching, absorbing, /some/thing (RAGERAGERAGE). He scrambles to his feet, breathing deep and hard but not yet fast. His hands hook bleeding fists at his sides; another few shallow cuts from the wall score his cheek and neck. Blood webs thinner around his eyes and across one sclera's glistening white. "Can't even fight fair," he breathes, he rages, he growls. "Using powers--" he circles, his mind feints half a dozen quick brawling moves "--keeping your lily-white hands clean, and after all I've done, after all I've /done/ for you--" And he leaps again. His mind has settled on a shoulder-duck and lightning-fast reach-around . . . but his body veers away from the second move, under the false decision, to lash his fist straight towards her kidneys.
Her moue is further insult. Not a game! Not a fucking game! His mind explodes with furious outrage and then just plain rage. Now he would like to leave her head where it is, but tear off her arm and beat her to death with it. Yes, that would be satisfying. I won't say what else he'd do to her body after that, but you can probably imagine. (Some doors really should remain closed, and some badgers should not be poked with a stick.)
Now his mutation is starting to falter. He's in contact with too much kinetic energy for his body to absorb properly. The energy goes instead to attacking his tissues' structural integrity, producing petechiae (burst capillaries) around his eyes and on the white of one of them. He's bleeding from lacerations because his mutation can't protect him from skin that's torn, only skin that's pounded, and even that protection is breaking down as he approaches the absorption peak. (He is still absorbing, just not very well; more and more of the energy leeches into tissue damage and excess heat.)
He taunts her back, and finally we have unvarnished truth, straight out of his torn-open unconscious, about how he feels about her. That primal part of him scorns her for hiding behind her powers instead of meeting him in a fair fight (his intellect readily and willingly acknowledges that such tactics are, in fact, wiser, but try telling that to a pissed-off id). Not to mention her betrayal of him! He brought her into the Inner Circle, he gave her access to power and influence she'd never have otherwise even whiffed, he protected and defended her against their enemies - and she taunts him, rapes his mind, and throws him into walls. He finds this turn of events a bit unbelievable and really, quite, quite unfair.
He has enough presence of mind, in this bestial brawling state, to try low cunning: focusing on one plan and executing another. He's done it before in fights, to hide the physical tells that an opponent would look for (twitches of eyes, limbs, balance, etc.), and now he's trying to do it against a telepathic opponent. Well, it's worth a try, right?
And the fist connects... but against nothing. Jean sits on the desk within a telekinetic bubble, regarding Shaw with a regal look, lady caesar up close and personal with a gladiator. "No," she sighs, looking abruptly bored. "Using my powers makes this a fair fight. What -you- want," she points out, lecturing like she's teaching a junior bilogy class "Isn't a fair fight, it's to dominate me. Control me. Throw me away now that I'm not needed. I'm sorry, Sebastian, but that's just not going to happen. Go back to conspiring against me with your ice queen." And, again, telekinesis strives to suit his actions to her words, throwing him back at the wall again, in the same spot as last time. "I wonder how many blows it will take to get you into the hallway...?"
Oh, boredom, too. And lecturing, as if he doesn't know very well what he wants (her, dead at his hands). Insult upon insult. She might as well take out a knife and castrate him. It's messier, but quicker and cleaner.
<< I didn't do anything with her! >> Shaw's mind howls when his body can't form the words for the thunder shaking him this second time. Into the wall again, deeper into it, and splinters blow out across the hallway and, inside, around his painfully sprawled body. He falls to the floor in a heap and needs a second longer to regain his feet, now with a limp of strained tendons at knee (flaring gouty knee!) and hunched shoulder. The petechiae have spread around both eyes, and he's still bleeding from face, throat, and palms. "I don't," he heaves, staring at her in pure fury. "I don't want that. Don't want /any/thing. Leave. Just leave. Fine. Never show your face around here, not while I'm King. Get out, you worthless, faithless -- not so saintly now, are you? Not so noble." He lunges at the desk, but grabs the chair instead of going for her, and temper hurls it at the bubble and the bitch within with all his amplified strength.
Still protesting his innocence as he gets smashed into the growing hole in the wall. More absorbed energy (if not for his mutation, he'd be dead by now) and more physical damage. His brain is soaked with endorphins by now, so he's not feeling as much pain as he could (that will, alas, come in a few hours, when the endorphins are metabolized), but he's not feeling much of that giddy high, either. He's able to stay upright and converse, think and plan, but have fun, as he usually does with violence? Not really, no. This situation deeply, deeply sucks, and he would like it to be over, please.
He can't quite let her go without more spewing from his nightmare room, however. He commands her, and he insults her. He accuses her of being on that pedestal he placed her on, which he fully believes that she has placed herself on, too. It is, perhaps, a different pedestal, because his is the mother-worship/abhorrence one and hers, as he envisions it, is the Saint Stick-Up-My-Noble-Ass one. Nobility, whether self-proclaimed or not, rolls his eyes and can drive him nuts for the sheer wastefulness of such a pursuit. (He's absolutely in Emma's corner on this.) What good is sacrificing yourself for the good of the community if you, well, sacrifice your self? He is ready, willing, and able to lay down his life for what he believes in, the Inner Circle, but you can bet that he'll enjoy his humanity to the fullest before he does so. He'll smoke, drink, fuck, fight, feel - he'll live, and none of this demure, controlled, emotionless crap, oh, no. He is all extroverted and doesn't understand (or like) introverts. He scorns Jean for all the reasons I've described already, but also for this one: she's wasting her life, her gifts, her self, and she's doing so willingly. She's chosen to be the saint, the martyr, and he recoils at such an alien, horrific idea, especially held by a fellow mutant (who should be helping him take over the world, darn it, and advance their superior race!). It offends his id (which wants to enjoy itself), ego (which wants to rule), and superego (which wants to better his race) all at once.
He can't let her go without more violence, either. Throw the chair! Welcome to The Jerry Springer Show! On today's episode: Black Queens and the Black Kings who want to kill them D-E-D dead.
The chair shatters, sending shards of sharp plastic flying in all directions but inside the protective bubble. A bubble now made visible with ripples of the earlier fire, returned. "If you haven't done anything with her, why am I hearing her phrases in your mouth?" Jean wonders, eyes blazing literally and figuratively. "Saint Grey, noble?" She shakes her head and waves her hand a final time. "Goodbye, Sebastian. Enjoy the Court. I've kept -my- end of the bargain." And, one final time, that invisible fist wraps itself around the battered, bleeding, bruising Black King, and tosses him at the wall. Jean doesn't wait to see the impact. Instead, she rises from the desk, and collects her purse. Boxes and bags begin to rise to follow her.
The wall shatters, too, and patters down around the still, stunned huddle of man on the hallway floor. Clouds of pulverized drywall, thickets of splintered timbers -- platters of astonished Black Pawn eyes, down by the staircase, the two men still standing on guard. With a groan, Shaw stirs, shaking off debris and blankness together, and climbs to standing, too. He keeps shaking -- with reaction, with too much energy. More capillaries flare bruised around his mouth, the fine skin of his hands, angry red streaks down his neck and across shoulders bared by rents in his coat and shirt. He draws a hand across his smeared, stained face. He looks into the hole he made in the wall, into the room he so precipitously left. His thoughts . . . stumble. Catch a tentative foothold in, << Go. Go away. Never come back. /Go/. >> Below it, deep within, a boy's worn, faded, abused << Please. >>
Well, he knows when he's beaten. Garov and the first pawn (I think I will say it's Marcus Johnson, because I like him and have used him in scenes and entries as Shaw's personal, loyal guard) get to see that. Joy for them. Joy for him. I shifted to short, simple sentences to declare his exhaustion and surrender: no more elaboration, no more trickery, just . . . surrender. He's ready to drop where he is and sleep for two days. His inner child speaks up for him, far below conscious awareness, with that final plea.
"Already on my way out, my dear former King," Jean states, ever so lightly, ever so close to the edge and on the wrong side of it. "Tell the White Bishop that we really have to talk some time..." A procession of her things, all neatly packed, follow the woman still in her dressing gown and seemingly unaware of this out into the hall. She pauses to pat a pawn on the shoulder, and suggest to him that "You need to go get your King some water."
The pawn startles away from her as if burned, and his partner has to grab him to keep him from falling right over in that harsh and horrified recoil. "Ma--ma'am," the first man stammers, clutching his silent, sweating support. "Yyyyyes, ma'am. Right away. Will do. Goo--good night?"
White Bishop? Oh, Jason. Run far, run fast, but it won't be enough. Let us hope you will at least go to your destiny with dignity. I have faith!
Shaw needs water desperately. His mutation is nearly overloaded, and his metabolism is running too hot and too high. He's dehydrating, inching towards a diabetic coma that would (if he reaches that point, which he doesn't) knock him out until the absorbed energy dissipated during unconsciousness. It's very nice of Jean to think of that and tell the pawn, who doesn't really appreciate it - mostly he wants not to piss off this crazy, kindly, powerful lady who just threw Sebastian Shaw through a thick Hellfire wall - but okay! Water it is! And have a nice night, crazy lady!
"Good night. Goodbye." And with that, Jean sweeps the rest of the way down the stairs and out to where her car waits, obediant procession of her things following her without a care for the fact that one of the boxes bumps into Shaw on the way out. The sound of footsteps grows more faint, and, a few moments after it's disappeared, the great doors of the Club swing shut.
Shaw fetches up against the wall on the box's bump, and he leans there, eyes half-closed, while he tries to catch his breath. Hungry, ravenous, devouring, desperate for oxygen for tormented tissues-- Savage headshake. "Send me Holland," he grates at the pawns and pushes off, unsteadily, towards his quarters. "See about repairs in the morning, and keep your fucking mouths shut until the day you die -- but send me Holland. In a . . . half-hour. I don't know." He starts to finish it, to decide the dazed ramble more fully, but just shoves through the open doorway and closes it behind him. Locks it. Leans against it, that sturdy barrier between publicity and privacy -- sinks down it. To the floor. To a shaking, bleeding, bruised huddle. And he hugs his knees to his chest, puts his head down on them, and starts sobbing.
His metabolism also needs oxygen because his tissues, especially his muscles, have been burning through it like a forest fire, to maintain the bioenergetic load he's carrying. He's exhausted, he's dehydrated, and he can't catch his breath. He needs help, and he asks for it: Sandra Holland, the EMT-trained Black Pawn medic who appeared in Jason's breaking log. She isn't a mutant herself (given their scarcity, Shaw has only four or five in his pawns' ranks), but is fanatically loyal to him and to the Inner Circle's dream. She believes in mutant supremacy, too. She's in her early thirties, a New York native, gay and living with a partner (they have been arguing about getting married or not in Massachusetts; it's not a happy time in the relationship) and a dog, and just kinda fell into the whole HFC thing. One day, I will tell her story. Today is not that day because I'm tired of writing this fucking thing and I want to lie on my couch and watch TV instead.
Shaw picked Garov and Johnson because they are also pawns he trusts implicitly. Garov isn't a mutant; Johnson is. Both have served as personal guards; both will keep their mouths shut. No way to hide that hole in the wall, however, and he can only hope that no one else saw Jean traipse merrily out of the house with all her belongings following her. He's going to keep to his quarters, claiming to have the flu, until his bruises and cuts have healed a little and his abused mutation has recovered. He can hide the former pretty easily after the first few days, with only the marks on his face likely to cause notice (and he'll think of an excuse for them; he's very good, from his childhood, of thinking of excuses for mysterious injuries). The latter just needs a lot of rest and water. His metabolism will fluctuate for a while - dropping weight, gaining weight - but it's been doing that anyway, and this night will just push the swing a little further out. The gout in his knee will be very bad. He will have to think about what he wants to do about it, lacking Jean's glucocorticoid shots on call.
All that plotting and planning can wait, however. He goes into his suite and shuts the door. He shuts out the world and waits for Holland to arrive to take care of him. He's alone, he's battered, he's terrified and enraged and desperate - his inner child comes out again and offers him the physical and emotional release he needs. In a deliberate echo of child!Shaw's closing pose, adult!Shaw hugs his knees, puts his head on them, and cries out all the anguish, all the agony, for a little while.
Then he gets up, gets out of his clothes (cast aside for the trash), drinks about a quart of water straight from the tap, takes a very hot and intensely scrubbing shower, and puts on his robe to sit in the office and wait for the medic. After she's done with him, he empties his bladder (his overcharged metabolism is pushing out waste products like you wouldn't believe), drinks another quart of water, and goes to bed. He sleeps well into Monday evening. He has dinner sent up from the kitchen. More drinking and urinating, and another shower. Then more sleep into Tuesday.
And the first of the nightmares.
And then Emma comes to see him.
And I am done.
[Commentary for X-Men MUCK. Please see the full list for more.]
Women, mares, death... Jean surveys the meadow for a time, attention caught by the crow's feasting with a detached and clinical fascination, puzzling out what she's looking at. But her answer is not here. With a whirl of thought, she turns away, but not before reanimating the horses, bringing skeletons out of the closet in the form of literal nightmares. Down the hallway she roves, rattling at the handles, peeping at the locks. "What's behind door number two?"
Jean breaks the loop, that careful balance of emotional energy that is locked in on itself to keep it under control and out of conscious awareness. Well, so much for that. Shaw will indeed have literal nightmares (although probably not about horses) until this violation heals, and his misogyny will be more overt, unfiltered, unshielded because the constraint is broken and the defense mechanism is gone. Look out, girls.
Muffled screaming. Groaning. Shivering agony/rage/helplessness. The output swathes another door (the first one hanging open, weeping bruised blood, sunshine spilling out with a crow's insulted and angry caws) that stands halfway down the hall, bearing the mark of a caduceus. It was gold once, but age and pain have stained the raised symbol black so that the underlying metal gleams through only fitfully, past flakes that flutter to the floor like raven feathers.
I forgot to indicate this door's color, which is gold like the symbol upon it. Gold and black are the colors of eternity; whatever's inside must be held to be immortal and endless. I carried over the raven motif to tie the rooms together, less because of symbology (there isn't a significant connection between the rooms that way) than because of narrative flow. Jean is still on a journey; must write to that purpose.
About the caduceus: it's an ancient symbol most often associated with the Greek god Hermes, who governs commerce, healing, and communication. He is also the protector of thieves and the conductor of the souls of the dead. The staff has his wings on it (it used to be a herald's staff, in fact) and two serpents wrapped around it in a double helix, which echoes the structure of DNA. Thus, we have a whole slew of symbols tied with Shaw's life. He's a businessman who has done shady deals in his past, and he's suffering - dying - from a genetic disorder. The other animal motif I use for him is serpentine because snakes symbolize wisdom (especially hidden), poison, treachery, and sexuality. The caduceus is blackened, not shining brightly. There's badness inside this door, too.
Jean smiles as she surveys this particular door. It's not a happy smile. It is, however, a smile of familiarity. The Caduceus figures largely in her own mental hallways, and it's with well-practised fingers that she traces the lines of this one, restoring the gold where her fingers make contact. And if it freshens the pain associated with it, well, Jean's not particularly caring about that right now. Her garb shifts to hospital scrubs and lab coat as she wills -this- portal to let her through.
There is a turret gun over this door, too, but it isn't doing anything. His defense mechanisms have learned the lesson: better to let her inside these rooms than to get turned into peonies. His id will protect itself.
The darkness of the womb greets her, scorched by infrequent spats of fire that rises from a bottomless pit under the floor's metal grillwork. The walls stand close, and the ceiling hangs low, to the human figure pinioned to the rusted grid. It's Shaw, and he's nude, and he's on fire, and he's melting. Flesh bubbles and runs off his bones to drip down into the hellish flame that stretches so hungrily to reach him. He arches to get away from it, mad and dead-eyed from the torment; animal noises wrench out of his throat and chest with sawing staggers. He can't get up and get away, however, because the dribbling flesh forms chains around wrists and ankles, holding him down. When they melt under the fire, more flesh replaces them, and the source is unending, Promethean renewal of his body's mass, melting and reforming and chaining and melting again, again, again, endlessly again.
Welcome to Shaw's neverending hell, in which he fears being trapped because of his flawed mutation. His mother gave him that mutation; here is womb imagery to suggest her, with a close, small, dark room.
The fire is life and passion (again, some more), destruction and cleansing, hellish torment and welcome illumination and warmth. It's a double-edged symbol, as is fire itself. Fire can warm us and light our lives, or it can burn us and all we hold dear to dead ash. Thus is Shaw's mutation to him. On the one hand, it launched him into undreamt-of wealth and power, but on the other, it's going to kill him before he sees his sixty-fifth summer. The fire is also hellfire, as in the club by that name, his home and his hell; and hellfire as in the real, literal stuff about which he absorbed endless sermons when he was a kid accompanying his fanatically devout mother to her brimstone-thundering Baptist church. Shaw is an atheist who believes without the scintilla of a doubt that he will be in hell when he dies, for all the sins he's perpetuated on the world (and himself, although usually he doesn't think of that part of it).
There's something of the medieval torture chamber to this room, in a fantastical way. It isn't iron chains holding Shaw to the fire; it's his own melting and reforming flesh. His body binds him here as it binds him on the physical plane: he can't escape his body, either its numerous strengths or its fatal weakness. I make reference to Prometheus, the Greek Titan who brought fire to humanity and for that crime was chained to a mountainside for eternity while an eagle ate his liver every day. The liver regenerated every night, just as Shaw's flesh is regenerating in this unconscious construction of his fear of always dying but never truly escaping life, of being trapped and tormented by failing physicality. He fears death greatly. Greatly. His mother killed herself (he and his father found her body), his father spent years dying horribly of cancer (he sat by his bedside and watched) . . . oh, greatly, indeed. He loves his body. He hates it. He fears what it's doing. He can't control it. Can't escape it. It's his personal, private, most intimate hell on earth.
"Mortality..." Jean muses, inspecting Shaw's mind's grasp of skeletomuscular anatomy and finding it workable. "Rage, rage against the dying of the light, you poor, foolish bastard?" she questions, before turning away with an unpleasant look. Again, not before meddling, tweaking the scene to suit herself does she leave. The fires leap higher, growing in intensity. The more he fights, the faster the cycle runs, a mental parody of the skewed mutation killing him as he draws strength from it. And off she goes again, with a last flutter of her lab coat, black instead of white.
She didn't destroy the defense mechanisms; she didn't even kick open the door, only willed it to open for her. Thus, the changes she effects with this construct won't affect Shaw as consciously, profoundly, or for as long as will what happened in the first room. He'll be avoiding any use of his mutation, the thought of which will cause fresh if vague horror and disgust deep inside him. She didn't do anything to the mutation itself, so there aren't any actual physical effects, but the psychological ones are enough.
Beyond aversion to the mutation, he'll be psychogenically impotent for a good long while and, indeed, physically tentative, even clumsy. The fear of the physical will impede him, and more and more as he fights with or ignores it (the flames burning higher the more he fights!). He won't trust his body on this basic, unconscious level, and it will betray him again and again until he resolves this violation, too.
Click, click, click as she passes more doors: more guns training on her but not firing, only following with restrained laser guides, a blizzard of baleful red and white and green dots on her back. (At her back, the second door, still open to howls of freshened pain amid fire's chuckling purr.) The hallway dims, shrinks, grows tight with emotional cobwebs strung from wall to wall. The doors crouch lower, too, until, around one last corner, stands a small door of blank and shining white wood. It glows through the dank darkness, and has no lock or knob.
Yay, turret guns! They hold back, only watch and track her resentfully. I don't know where I got the colors from; they just seemed right, so I went with it. I trust my unconscious, too! Red for anger and hatred, white for purity and emptiness, green for growth and healing - his unconscious isn't all monsters. There's great beauty in it, too, but she didn't open any of those doors. Beauty isn't what she's looking for. (And gosh, that fire is happy to be chewing on his body, isn't it, in the second room? "Chuckling purr," indeed.)
The last door I wanted opened lies at the end of the hallway where no one ever goes. Cobwebs and shadows protect it instead of guns. However, its light shines through the darkness and the slightly fetid smell (place needs a good scrubbing!) and thus negates the hiding. This is a door of unself-conscious innocence. I thought about putting the Fool from the tarot deck on its surface as a marking symbol, but decided the blankness was just as good. It's a white door, an innocent door, a door that doesn't hide itself (despite the unconscious mind's attempts to do so for it), and it's a child-sized door. It can't be opened from the outside, only from within - or from without by violence.
And now, at the heart of things, Jean approaches this final door. Surely here, -here- is where she'll find it, the evidence of Shaw's betrayal, of his ever-so-intricate plans with Emma, with Jason, with the dozens of other unknown faces and grasping, dragging hands that make up the Hellfire Club. The plans to drive her out by driving her mad... With a sudden rage, an axe materializes in her hands, and she begins to swing at the wooden door.
Ow. I sadface on behalf of Shaw and his unconscious, not to mention this room's inhabitant.
It shudders and it cries under the blows (somewhere, far and far away, a paralyzed body tries to echo those protests), but it yields at last, the wood thicker than apparent yet not thick enough. And inside is a room. And the room is a white sphere, illuminated by its singular glowing wall/ceiling/floor. And at the bottom of the sphere is a small stool, and on the stool is a boy, who looks up at his broken door and at the woman who broke it. And he is crying.
Meet Shaw's inner child, the piece of his psyche that contains all his youthful experiences, feelings, and impulses, unintegrated with his adult self. It doesn't have to be integrated for healthy functioning, but it shouldn't be shut away like this, either. His unconscious has packed into this room the boy he used to be, closed the door, and hid it away. The inner child can get out, since he's on the inside (where there's a knob, and anyway, it's his door as it is his room), but he's afraid to. He doesn't trust the adult Shaw not to hurt him as his parents (and, indeed, his whole life) hurt him. Occasionally he peeks out in emotional outbursts, which have been pent up for years, unexpressed when Shaw was a child - was this child, point of fact - and need to be fully expressed for better integration with the rest of his psyche.
I'm not holding my breath on that happening. Don't you be, either.
This is the final room, the most important one, and so I used the repetition of conjunctions to heighten, with every occurrence, weight and tension and drama. The sphere signifies wholeness, something unbroken and entire (like a circle, like the number zero that is the Fool's number), and white is more of that purity. The stool is just a stool, because I thought it'd be cute (like a kid sitting in the corner of a classroom with a dunce cap on his head - which is kinda how adult!Shaw treats child!Shaw, isn't it?), and the boy is himself. It's not a memory. It is him. A piece of him. A vital, locked-away piece of him. This is Sebastian. Who is crying.
To say that Jean is startled would be an understatement. The axe vanishes from being in a small puff of smoke, and for a time she simply stares at the crying boy. "Do you know what he's done?" she asks him, this personality disinclined to coddle and comfort when there's something it wants.
Knuckling away tears, the boy shakes his head. His hair's a thick and glossy black, in need of a trim over ears and nape; his eyes are wide and startlingly -- wetly -- dark in his pale face. "No," he says quietly, but the young treble carries effortlessly, even as he hunches up knobby knees to concave chest and hugs them. "I didn't do anything, but you hurt me anyway." More tears; his voice wavers and cracks, although he looks still a few years shy of puberty. "I trusted you, and I even kinda liked you, and you hurt me! Everybody always hurts me, no matter what I do. Go away. Go away!" He buries his head in his knees and starts sobbing.
And there's his child self speaking pure, unself-conscious truth. Jean hurt him, after he trusted her all this time, when he doesn't trust hardly anybody. This is why he doesn't! Because they hurt him! His inner child doesn't understand why and doesn't trust his adult self to ask for and receive an explanation. (They don't talk. They really, really don't talk. Ever. The inner child views his adult self pretty much the way young Sebastian viewed his violent, abusive father.) All he knows is that he reaches out to people and they hurt him, again and again and again. He's so tired, is child!Shaw (who's visualized as about ten or eleven years old here, but it fluctuates). Tired, lonely, sad. There aren't even any toys in the big round white room for him to play with, or pictures to look at or windows to look through. All he has is his stool and his door, and Jean just smashed up his door.
Child!Shaw's existence really kinda sucks.
"Oh, -stop- that," orders this distant, absent Jean. "You grow up into -him-. And -he's- betrayed -me- first, set his dogs on me..." Trailing off into subvocalized swearing, she turns and leaves. Even in this state, however, the door is repaired, if left ajar and hanging carelessly crooked on its hinges. She pelts a teddy bear at the child and abruptly, dizzyingly, leaves Shaw's mind to return to the physical plane. << "You had her hide it, didn't you? Clever, clever Sebastian." >>
But he got a teddy bear! I told xmm_jeangrey that he appreciated that, as well as the way she kinda sorta fixed his door. He has a new toy now, something to play with in his lonely isolation, and the door will right itself over time, back into its frame, just as the peonies will turn back into a turret gun and the flesh-melting flames will die back down to normal intensity. The mind heals itself; patterns reassert themselves.
This would be a splendid time for him to get some actual therapy, to deal with this trauma and what it's stirred up. Are you holding your breath on that? Why? Didn't I tell you not to be?
The lasting effects from Jean's violation of this room will be quieter and probably not last as long. Emotional lability: mood swings, outbursts for good and for ill, oversensitivity. The sensation of wearing every feeling on his sleeve and having no skin at all between his inner self and the outer world. Discomfort from that. Defensiveness. Overcompensation. And so on. But his inner child does have his toy and his half-fixed door, so it won't be too bad for too long. Probably.
Phoenix is suspicious. Thinks Emma did to Shaw what Jean did to Warren: telepathically hide information away, even from himself. She doesn't know Shaw that well. He'd sooner stick an awl in his eye before he let any telepath, let alone Emma Frost, do that to his mind. Yikes.
Shaw stares up at her through tear-blurred eyes; the moisture leaking down his cheeks shakes refractions of fiery light with his ceaseless shuddering. His mind is a froth of churned mud (conscious anger and indignation) and deeper flood (unconscious terror and confusion). But he hangs onto her words, and his throat works until words croak back at her, hoarse but clear. "Didn't hide anything. Didn't /do/ anything. You're looking at a fellow victim, Grey. Congratulations on a spectacularly bad leap to conclusions. Going to torture my body next?"
Shaw is crying physically because of that last room. Jean broke through the barrier surrounding his inner child, who is free to express himself now a little, and does so. Shaw himself wants to cry, oh, believe me, how he does, and here he can do so, because of that freed child. He can't stop shaking because of reaction. He wasn't aware exactly of what Jean was doing, but he knows she did something. He was held down and raped from the outside in (the muscle paralysis) and the inside out (the unconscious mind's violations). There is reaction. You bet there is.
And yet he's strong enough to fight back, if only verbally since she hasn't released anything except his speech mechanisms from her mental control. He's figured that someone has done something to her, since she keeps accusing him for that, and he knows it wasn't him, so he tries to appeal to that fellow-feeling of victimhood. Also a touch of appeal to her Hippocratic Oath: "first, do no harm," huh? Yeah. Right.
He doesn't try to charm or sweet-talk her, though. He could have, if his wits were together enough for the attempt. They aren't, and anyway - he wants the punishment. He's goading her into it, not only out of unconscious desire for expatiation of his guilt (and something of a death wish, too, because he doesn't want to live with this rape she's performed on him) but also out of a subconscious hope that she might lose her temper and make a mistake. Give him an opening. He'll try anything at this point. He's hurt, he's angry, he's terrified, he's guilty, he's grieving, he's craving death and destruction of anything and everything around him, including himself. It's not dissimilar to the state he was in after Emma's coup, when she had him drugged, kidnapped, and shipped away so that she and Warren could take control of the Inner Circle.
Damn these women. Damn them to hell.
<< "Get up." >> Jean commands, releasing her hold on his body with a snap of her fingers once she's a few paces away. The Phoenix flames are leaping again. << "Go see Emma, get her to give back what you had hidden. Then you can stop lying to me. I should congratulate you," >> she states, a sudden turn matched by a sudde curved smile as she alights atop the desk and crouches, chin on her knee. "Game -very- well played, Sebastian." she concludes, switching solely to her speaking voice alone. "You're right, I'm not made for this club, you've demonstrated your point nicely. I'll be taking my leave now."
"Fuck off," snarls Shaw as his body creaks right out of the chair and at her in full flight, led by grasping hands (to punish and hurt and rend and destroy!) and the wavefront of absorbed energy's psychic trail and intention's black clouds.
She's taunting him. She's motherfucking taunting him, and he can't believe it. All the muddy mess of his emotions flash-fire into fury, and he attacks her. How dare she be so flippant with her powers, her conversation, her affect? The fact that she has not once shown any real emotion drives him right out of his mind because it mocks the very real emotions he's been dumping out all over the place, some of them because of her intrusion and her leaping to conclusions. She doesn't even do him the honor of being angry at supposedly being betrayed? She sing-songs and purrs and smiles? This isn't a child's game. Does she think this is a game? Does she think he is her toy?
Well, fuck her. He's going to rip her goddamned head off for that insult to his pride. She's the monster, the horror, the betrayer, the evil - not him.
He's never liked her blunted affect. He's never trusted it. Someone who doesn't show much emotion is not someone to be trusted because it isn't someone he can easily manipulate. S/he must be repressed, and that is dangerous in and of itself: repression has a way of bursting its bonds and making a right mess of things at very bad times. Jean is too locked-down and controlled for him to feel comfortable around or with - makes his teeth itch! - and now . . . now she is expressionless, heartless, emotionless. It's psychopathic (in the lay sense of the term). Even beyond the insult he feels at her playing around with him, he feels the thrill of visceral threat from a more powerful opponent he cannot predict, manipulate, or control in any real way.
And so, like the bloody great blockhead that he is, he attacks her instead of prudently running away. Sigh.
"Mmm, -no-," Jean replies, mouth forming a nearly-coquettish moue as she watches him hurl himself forward. She raises a hand. Shaw stops in midair. She eyes him consideringly. She circles with the hand. Shaw is thrown at the outer wall this time, with enough force to knock half the drywall off the hallway side.
Shaw writhes (shockpainRAGE) against the impact (<< bitchcuntwhore >>), and his limbs fly out in helpless hope of bracing, catching, absorbing, /some/thing (RAGERAGERAGE). He scrambles to his feet, breathing deep and hard but not yet fast. His hands hook bleeding fists at his sides; another few shallow cuts from the wall score his cheek and neck. Blood webs thinner around his eyes and across one sclera's glistening white. "Can't even fight fair," he breathes, he rages, he growls. "Using powers--" he circles, his mind feints half a dozen quick brawling moves "--keeping your lily-white hands clean, and after all I've done, after all I've /done/ for you--" And he leaps again. His mind has settled on a shoulder-duck and lightning-fast reach-around . . . but his body veers away from the second move, under the false decision, to lash his fist straight towards her kidneys.
Her moue is further insult. Not a game! Not a fucking game! His mind explodes with furious outrage and then just plain rage. Now he would like to leave her head where it is, but tear off her arm and beat her to death with it. Yes, that would be satisfying. I won't say what else he'd do to her body after that, but you can probably imagine. (Some doors really should remain closed, and some badgers should not be poked with a stick.)
Now his mutation is starting to falter. He's in contact with too much kinetic energy for his body to absorb properly. The energy goes instead to attacking his tissues' structural integrity, producing petechiae (burst capillaries) around his eyes and on the white of one of them. He's bleeding from lacerations because his mutation can't protect him from skin that's torn, only skin that's pounded, and even that protection is breaking down as he approaches the absorption peak. (He is still absorbing, just not very well; more and more of the energy leeches into tissue damage and excess heat.)
He taunts her back, and finally we have unvarnished truth, straight out of his torn-open unconscious, about how he feels about her. That primal part of him scorns her for hiding behind her powers instead of meeting him in a fair fight (his intellect readily and willingly acknowledges that such tactics are, in fact, wiser, but try telling that to a pissed-off id). Not to mention her betrayal of him! He brought her into the Inner Circle, he gave her access to power and influence she'd never have otherwise even whiffed, he protected and defended her against their enemies - and she taunts him, rapes his mind, and throws him into walls. He finds this turn of events a bit unbelievable and really, quite, quite unfair.
He has enough presence of mind, in this bestial brawling state, to try low cunning: focusing on one plan and executing another. He's done it before in fights, to hide the physical tells that an opponent would look for (twitches of eyes, limbs, balance, etc.), and now he's trying to do it against a telepathic opponent. Well, it's worth a try, right?
And the fist connects... but against nothing. Jean sits on the desk within a telekinetic bubble, regarding Shaw with a regal look, lady caesar up close and personal with a gladiator. "No," she sighs, looking abruptly bored. "Using my powers makes this a fair fight. What -you- want," she points out, lecturing like she's teaching a junior bilogy class "Isn't a fair fight, it's to dominate me. Control me. Throw me away now that I'm not needed. I'm sorry, Sebastian, but that's just not going to happen. Go back to conspiring against me with your ice queen." And, again, telekinesis strives to suit his actions to her words, throwing him back at the wall again, in the same spot as last time. "I wonder how many blows it will take to get you into the hallway...?"
Oh, boredom, too. And lecturing, as if he doesn't know very well what he wants (her, dead at his hands). Insult upon insult. She might as well take out a knife and castrate him. It's messier, but quicker and cleaner.
<< I didn't do anything with her! >> Shaw's mind howls when his body can't form the words for the thunder shaking him this second time. Into the wall again, deeper into it, and splinters blow out across the hallway and, inside, around his painfully sprawled body. He falls to the floor in a heap and needs a second longer to regain his feet, now with a limp of strained tendons at knee (flaring gouty knee!) and hunched shoulder. The petechiae have spread around both eyes, and he's still bleeding from face, throat, and palms. "I don't," he heaves, staring at her in pure fury. "I don't want that. Don't want /any/thing. Leave. Just leave. Fine. Never show your face around here, not while I'm King. Get out, you worthless, faithless -- not so saintly now, are you? Not so noble." He lunges at the desk, but grabs the chair instead of going for her, and temper hurls it at the bubble and the bitch within with all his amplified strength.
Still protesting his innocence as he gets smashed into the growing hole in the wall. More absorbed energy (if not for his mutation, he'd be dead by now) and more physical damage. His brain is soaked with endorphins by now, so he's not feeling as much pain as he could (that will, alas, come in a few hours, when the endorphins are metabolized), but he's not feeling much of that giddy high, either. He's able to stay upright and converse, think and plan, but have fun, as he usually does with violence? Not really, no. This situation deeply, deeply sucks, and he would like it to be over, please.
He can't quite let her go without more spewing from his nightmare room, however. He commands her, and he insults her. He accuses her of being on that pedestal he placed her on, which he fully believes that she has placed herself on, too. It is, perhaps, a different pedestal, because his is the mother-worship/abhorrence one and hers, as he envisions it, is the Saint Stick-Up-My-Noble-Ass one. Nobility, whether self-proclaimed or not, rolls his eyes and can drive him nuts for the sheer wastefulness of such a pursuit. (He's absolutely in Emma's corner on this.) What good is sacrificing yourself for the good of the community if you, well, sacrifice your self? He is ready, willing, and able to lay down his life for what he believes in, the Inner Circle, but you can bet that he'll enjoy his humanity to the fullest before he does so. He'll smoke, drink, fuck, fight, feel - he'll live, and none of this demure, controlled, emotionless crap, oh, no. He is all extroverted and doesn't understand (or like) introverts. He scorns Jean for all the reasons I've described already, but also for this one: she's wasting her life, her gifts, her self, and she's doing so willingly. She's chosen to be the saint, the martyr, and he recoils at such an alien, horrific idea, especially held by a fellow mutant (who should be helping him take over the world, darn it, and advance their superior race!). It offends his id (which wants to enjoy itself), ego (which wants to rule), and superego (which wants to better his race) all at once.
He can't let her go without more violence, either. Throw the chair! Welcome to The Jerry Springer Show! On today's episode: Black Queens and the Black Kings who want to kill them D-E-D dead.
The chair shatters, sending shards of sharp plastic flying in all directions but inside the protective bubble. A bubble now made visible with ripples of the earlier fire, returned. "If you haven't done anything with her, why am I hearing her phrases in your mouth?" Jean wonders, eyes blazing literally and figuratively. "Saint Grey, noble?" She shakes her head and waves her hand a final time. "Goodbye, Sebastian. Enjoy the Court. I've kept -my- end of the bargain." And, one final time, that invisible fist wraps itself around the battered, bleeding, bruising Black King, and tosses him at the wall. Jean doesn't wait to see the impact. Instead, she rises from the desk, and collects her purse. Boxes and bags begin to rise to follow her.
The wall shatters, too, and patters down around the still, stunned huddle of man on the hallway floor. Clouds of pulverized drywall, thickets of splintered timbers -- platters of astonished Black Pawn eyes, down by the staircase, the two men still standing on guard. With a groan, Shaw stirs, shaking off debris and blankness together, and climbs to standing, too. He keeps shaking -- with reaction, with too much energy. More capillaries flare bruised around his mouth, the fine skin of his hands, angry red streaks down his neck and across shoulders bared by rents in his coat and shirt. He draws a hand across his smeared, stained face. He looks into the hole he made in the wall, into the room he so precipitously left. His thoughts . . . stumble. Catch a tentative foothold in, << Go. Go away. Never come back. /Go/. >> Below it, deep within, a boy's worn, faded, abused << Please. >>
Well, he knows when he's beaten. Garov and the first pawn (I think I will say it's Marcus Johnson, because I like him and have used him in scenes and entries as Shaw's personal, loyal guard) get to see that. Joy for them. Joy for him. I shifted to short, simple sentences to declare his exhaustion and surrender: no more elaboration, no more trickery, just . . . surrender. He's ready to drop where he is and sleep for two days. His inner child speaks up for him, far below conscious awareness, with that final plea.
"Already on my way out, my dear former King," Jean states, ever so lightly, ever so close to the edge and on the wrong side of it. "Tell the White Bishop that we really have to talk some time..." A procession of her things, all neatly packed, follow the woman still in her dressing gown and seemingly unaware of this out into the hall. She pauses to pat a pawn on the shoulder, and suggest to him that "You need to go get your King some water."
The pawn startles away from her as if burned, and his partner has to grab him to keep him from falling right over in that harsh and horrified recoil. "Ma--ma'am," the first man stammers, clutching his silent, sweating support. "Yyyyyes, ma'am. Right away. Will do. Goo--good night?"
White Bishop? Oh, Jason. Run far, run fast, but it won't be enough. Let us hope you will at least go to your destiny with dignity. I have faith!
Shaw needs water desperately. His mutation is nearly overloaded, and his metabolism is running too hot and too high. He's dehydrating, inching towards a diabetic coma that would (if he reaches that point, which he doesn't) knock him out until the absorbed energy dissipated during unconsciousness. It's very nice of Jean to think of that and tell the pawn, who doesn't really appreciate it - mostly he wants not to piss off this crazy, kindly, powerful lady who just threw Sebastian Shaw through a thick Hellfire wall - but okay! Water it is! And have a nice night, crazy lady!
"Good night. Goodbye." And with that, Jean sweeps the rest of the way down the stairs and out to where her car waits, obediant procession of her things following her without a care for the fact that one of the boxes bumps into Shaw on the way out. The sound of footsteps grows more faint, and, a few moments after it's disappeared, the great doors of the Club swing shut.
Shaw fetches up against the wall on the box's bump, and he leans there, eyes half-closed, while he tries to catch his breath. Hungry, ravenous, devouring, desperate for oxygen for tormented tissues-- Savage headshake. "Send me Holland," he grates at the pawns and pushes off, unsteadily, towards his quarters. "See about repairs in the morning, and keep your fucking mouths shut until the day you die -- but send me Holland. In a . . . half-hour. I don't know." He starts to finish it, to decide the dazed ramble more fully, but just shoves through the open doorway and closes it behind him. Locks it. Leans against it, that sturdy barrier between publicity and privacy -- sinks down it. To the floor. To a shaking, bleeding, bruised huddle. And he hugs his knees to his chest, puts his head down on them, and starts sobbing.
His metabolism also needs oxygen because his tissues, especially his muscles, have been burning through it like a forest fire, to maintain the bioenergetic load he's carrying. He's exhausted, he's dehydrated, and he can't catch his breath. He needs help, and he asks for it: Sandra Holland, the EMT-trained Black Pawn medic who appeared in Jason's breaking log. She isn't a mutant herself (given their scarcity, Shaw has only four or five in his pawns' ranks), but is fanatically loyal to him and to the Inner Circle's dream. She believes in mutant supremacy, too. She's in her early thirties, a New York native, gay and living with a partner (they have been arguing about getting married or not in Massachusetts; it's not a happy time in the relationship) and a dog, and just kinda fell into the whole HFC thing. One day, I will tell her story. Today is not that day because I'm tired of writing this fucking thing and I want to lie on my couch and watch TV instead.
Shaw picked Garov and Johnson because they are also pawns he trusts implicitly. Garov isn't a mutant; Johnson is. Both have served as personal guards; both will keep their mouths shut. No way to hide that hole in the wall, however, and he can only hope that no one else saw Jean traipse merrily out of the house with all her belongings following her. He's going to keep to his quarters, claiming to have the flu, until his bruises and cuts have healed a little and his abused mutation has recovered. He can hide the former pretty easily after the first few days, with only the marks on his face likely to cause notice (and he'll think of an excuse for them; he's very good, from his childhood, of thinking of excuses for mysterious injuries). The latter just needs a lot of rest and water. His metabolism will fluctuate for a while - dropping weight, gaining weight - but it's been doing that anyway, and this night will just push the swing a little further out. The gout in his knee will be very bad. He will have to think about what he wants to do about it, lacking Jean's glucocorticoid shots on call.
All that plotting and planning can wait, however. He goes into his suite and shuts the door. He shuts out the world and waits for Holland to arrive to take care of him. He's alone, he's battered, he's terrified and enraged and desperate - his inner child comes out again and offers him the physical and emotional release he needs. In a deliberate echo of child!Shaw's closing pose, adult!Shaw hugs his knees, puts his head on them, and cries out all the anguish, all the agony, for a little while.
Then he gets up, gets out of his clothes (cast aside for the trash), drinks about a quart of water straight from the tap, takes a very hot and intensely scrubbing shower, and puts on his robe to sit in the office and wait for the medic. After she's done with him, he empties his bladder (his overcharged metabolism is pushing out waste products like you wouldn't believe), drinks another quart of water, and goes to bed. He sleeps well into Monday evening. He has dinner sent up from the kitchen. More drinking and urinating, and another shower. Then more sleep into Tuesday.
And the first of the nightmares.
And then Emma comes to see him.
And I am done.
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