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The difference between me and the rest of the horrible club is, I can't draw. FIC TIME.
*
He came to strapped to a table. Not that this was different - that familiar feeling and a faded memory or two told him this had happened before.
Of course, he couldn't call it a feeling anymore, now could he.
Details.
The blindfold over his face told him he might still have use of his eyes and therefore his powers, but for now he would have to rely on something else. He turned his attention to the noise, noting variations in pitch and frequency. Per usual, he couldn't make anything of them. It was just noise.
The hushed, hurried voices were something different. He heard a few words too important to be tossed aside - things like rehabilitation and mind control and mesmer - and what could have been names. He memorized them, set them aside for a later report - there would be one when he reported to his superior officer - and had turned his mind to a plan of escape when someone shook his shoulder. "Hey. J. You awake?"
He didn't respond. He had a number, not a name.
The noise changed, and the voice shook when it tried again. "Well, if you are...I'm sorry, but we have to do this. It's...it'll help."
It meant nothing to him. He pushed the words aside, returning to his plan, ignoring a new voice that entered the mix and changed the noise yet again. That was nothing new.
But the noise continued to change and grow, pushing against his skull, trying to force its way in. Escape plans abandoned, it was all he could do to grit his teeth and push back, trying to hold his ground against something he'd long since stopped understanding, but the girl's voice kept getting louder and the music pressed harder and harder against him until his mind burned, unable to get past the wave of sound and fury that rolled over him and threatened to wipe him out completely-
Something snapped.
His body spasmed, back arching sharply in a flash of white-hot pain. He gasped for breath.
And in that second, the force that he had so long believed to be his self-control crumbled before the noise, letting it and everything it carried flood his mind.
Memories flashed by, almost too quickly to comprehend: people he'd known, places he'd been, laughing and dancing and loving and standing by his newfound family as the world burned around them, fleeting glimpses of the hell that world had become as that same family had been torn apart, Spin captured, Starr killed-
The grief hit him first. His family - his home in Alabama, his home in Salem, either which way - gone.
As memories of his own capture arose, anger was next. This world, this pain, everything that had gone wrong, everyone hurt and missing and dead - it was their fault. They'd made it hell for everyone not like them!
But his memories did not lie, and the anger deflated as he saw himself, blank and obedient, overpowering the people who had been his classmates and his friends and even closer than that, rolling their minds with his power and delivering them to the army, to science, to whomever his superior officer commanded. He'd handed them over to torture and to murder. Their screams had meant nothing to him - just added to the noise in his head.
That same noise swelled expectantly around him, as if awaiting the results of its barrage, and it wasn't until then that he really listened, remembering what he'd forgotten - what had been forced from his mind - so long ago. It wasn't noise.
It was Music.
It was life in tone and pitch and chord. When he'd lost the ability to feel, he'd lost the understanding of what he and precious few others could hear. It had become nothing more than a racket that kept him awake at night, pained and wondering.
He understood it now. He heard the changes in tune and tone, the slow dirge where life had once sung and danced, the pain and sorrow weighing heavily on the songs in the air and in his head and on his chest, pressing down with the weight of this world, the hellish symphony that life had become.
He'd been caught. He'd been taken. He'd helped to make life like this, caused and contributed to the pain that hung thick in the air, making it hard to breathe even in the presence of those he could call his friends, those who had risked their lives to help him even after he'd betrayed them all.
The last emotion to hit him was guilt. It rolled over him in a wave, pulled him down, smothered him in the knowledge that this wasn't just their fault - it was his too.
He fell against the table, took his first breath as a free man, and screamed.
*
He came to strapped to a table. Not that this was different - that familiar feeling and a faded memory or two told him this had happened before.
Of course, he couldn't call it a feeling anymore, now could he.
Details.
The blindfold over his face told him he might still have use of his eyes and therefore his powers, but for now he would have to rely on something else. He turned his attention to the noise, noting variations in pitch and frequency. Per usual, he couldn't make anything of them. It was just noise.
The hushed, hurried voices were something different. He heard a few words too important to be tossed aside - things like rehabilitation and mind control and mesmer - and what could have been names. He memorized them, set them aside for a later report - there would be one when he reported to his superior officer - and had turned his mind to a plan of escape when someone shook his shoulder. "Hey. J. You awake?"
He didn't respond. He had a number, not a name.
The noise changed, and the voice shook when it tried again. "Well, if you are...I'm sorry, but we have to do this. It's...it'll help."
It meant nothing to him. He pushed the words aside, returning to his plan, ignoring a new voice that entered the mix and changed the noise yet again. That was nothing new.
But the noise continued to change and grow, pushing against his skull, trying to force its way in. Escape plans abandoned, it was all he could do to grit his teeth and push back, trying to hold his ground against something he'd long since stopped understanding, but the girl's voice kept getting louder and the music pressed harder and harder against him until his mind burned, unable to get past the wave of sound and fury that rolled over him and threatened to wipe him out completely-
Something snapped.
His body spasmed, back arching sharply in a flash of white-hot pain. He gasped for breath.
And in that second, the force that he had so long believed to be his self-control crumbled before the noise, letting it and everything it carried flood his mind.
Memories flashed by, almost too quickly to comprehend: people he'd known, places he'd been, laughing and dancing and loving and standing by his newfound family as the world burned around them, fleeting glimpses of the hell that world had become as that same family had been torn apart, Spin captured, Starr killed-
The grief hit him first. His family - his home in Alabama, his home in Salem, either which way - gone.
As memories of his own capture arose, anger was next. This world, this pain, everything that had gone wrong, everyone hurt and missing and dead - it was their fault. They'd made it hell for everyone not like them!
But his memories did not lie, and the anger deflated as he saw himself, blank and obedient, overpowering the people who had been his classmates and his friends and even closer than that, rolling their minds with his power and delivering them to the army, to science, to whomever his superior officer commanded. He'd handed them over to torture and to murder. Their screams had meant nothing to him - just added to the noise in his head.
That same noise swelled expectantly around him, as if awaiting the results of its barrage, and it wasn't until then that he really listened, remembering what he'd forgotten - what had been forced from his mind - so long ago. It wasn't noise.
It was Music.
It was life in tone and pitch and chord. When he'd lost the ability to feel, he'd lost the understanding of what he and precious few others could hear. It had become nothing more than a racket that kept him awake at night, pained and wondering.
He understood it now. He heard the changes in tune and tone, the slow dirge where life had once sung and danced, the pain and sorrow weighing heavily on the songs in the air and in his head and on his chest, pressing down with the weight of this world, the hellish symphony that life had become.
He'd been caught. He'd been taken. He'd helped to make life like this, caused and contributed to the pain that hung thick in the air, making it hard to breathe even in the presence of those he could call his friends, those who had risked their lives to help him even after he'd betrayed them all.
The last emotion to hit him was guilt. It rolled over him in a wave, pulled him down, smothered him in the knowledge that this wasn't just their fault - it was his too.
He fell against the table, took his first breath as a free man, and screamed.
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