Log: Fear Itself - Dani/Marius

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Making Chorba is not difficult, but power-related feebback loops don't help anything. Needless to say, Dani does not make a best friend for life (or chorba).



The pot of chorba simmered on the stove burburling happily while Dani went about making a salad and preparing for dinner. She pulled vegetables out of the crisper, getting ready to wash them. Checking the chorba, she stirred it, making sure nothing was sticking to the pot and would cook evenly.

"Now there's a familiar smell."

Dani looked up to see Marius standing in the kitchen doorway. His curly hair was still damp from a shower; he'd likely been out running again. Smiling as he saw her notice him, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "I'm no expert," he said, "but from where I'm standin' you're not doin' bad for a first off."

"It's a just a recipe," Dani shrugged modestly and hoped he didn't notice the cooking glossary she also had open to explain some of the terms used. It was a relatively simple recipe as these things go, but it was filled with cooking terms not found in western dishes. "You'll have to tell me if it is actually authentic."

Taking this as an invitation and seeing no signs of an impending row, Marius sauntered over to the stove to regard the covered pot with interest. "Like I said, I'm no expert, so no worries on gettin' it just right." He glanced back at where she was washing vegetables. "What did you use as a meat base?"

"Lamb, it's what the recipe called for," it was a good thing she was using the school's budget because lamb was expensive. Checking the pot one more time, she set Marius to cleaning the vegetables at the sink. "So where're you from? I mean, I ain't heard of chorba before."

"Brisbane, but mum's from Morocco. National dish. We're not so much what you'd call traditional, but the food's still good by us. You?" Marius set a few washed tomatos aside with a thankful thought to whoever had created nylon. It dried fast, and while he wore the gloves he didn't need to worry about little things like piercing the skin of the tomatos with the teeth on his palms. He was fairly sure that would be considered unhygenic.

"I'm Cheyenne. From Oklahoma," she waited for the usual question what what exactly that meant. It had been a surprising lesson to find out that most people, even in America, had no idea what a 'cheyenne' was. She hadn't come up with a quick, easy explaination yet either.

Marius recalled the interplay between Forge and Dani on his journal a few days ago and grinned. "Right, I knew that. You'll have to forgive me, most of what I know about Indians is from American Westerns. I think the only reason that sounds familiar is because of 'Little Big Man', and considerin' the source I think I'll just toss everythin' I learned there but the name." Though now that he looked at Dani he could see a certain resemblence in Forge. High cheekbones, dark hair . . . assuming those things were an ethnic resemblence rather than a coincidence. When he was younger Marius had been amused to learn that a fair chunk of the Indian people in older Westerns stood a fair chance of being Italians in buckskin.

"'Little Big Man?'" Dani laughed, "That movie is so wrong! And Dustin Hoffman is about as far from native as you can get! There is a website for white men who played indians in movies. William Shatner is on it."

Marius pictured this, reached a conclusion, and shook his head. "Americans are insane," he sighed, and availed himself of a nearby knife to peel a few potatos. They were now side-by-side. Marius glanced over at her and grinned before returning his attention to the potatos. "Now I see you standin', you've got a fair bit of height, don't you? Between you and Cats I'd wonder if that's a mutant thing, but I've met Forge." Marius didn't meet many women he came eye-to-eye with. It was strangely intimate.

"I guess it's all the milk Neške'eehe made me drink, but Forge would rather have those caffiene drinks. Claims he can't be a proper genius without them, but I think he's addicted," Danielle turned to get something out of the refrigerator and slipped, artlessly flailing as she tried to grab the counter. The one time she didn't wear her no-skid kitchen shoes. It figured.

"Oi, watch it!" Marius was already moving for her as he threw down the knife and potato. He managed to catch her under the arms just before her head hit the tiles, and spent a moment just supporting the fallen girl to give his brain time to catch up with his reflexes.

The realization that the mouths on his hands were reacting arrived as an afterthought. The gloves prevented any actual biting, but it still struck him as a bad idea to hang on for long. Unfortunately, he didn't have the chance to turn thought into action.

Dani and the kitchen were gone, replaced by the grimy flourescent lighting of a hospital room. Disoriented, Marius tried to focus on the weight on his arms, but they held nothing -- and his confusion was immediately replaced by an ice-cold rush of terror, because his outstretched arms were horrifically contorted. Stretched and twisted, almost fleshless -- raw panic flushed away the dim memory of waking up and finding himself changed by powers he had no idea how to use, and as he stumbled backwards onto a floor filthy with unnameable stains he didn't even register the sudden absence of that weight he had been supporting. All he knew was that he was in a ward that reeked of apathy and chronic illness, his twisted body eating away at itself once again with no hope of recovery . . .

Yet even as Marius' capacity for conscious thought surrendered to the illusion, something else happened. The same power that had returned the passive psionics of Rachel's telepathic projection and Manuel's instinctual empathic questing in kind now registered an attack. The manifestation of Marius' fears, the illusion which had imposed its own reality upon him in less than a second, skewed violently as he instinctively lashed out to strike at his attacker with her own power.

Dani screamed as she stood on a field surrounded by dead Cheyenne warriors. As she turned around she could see the blue backs of riders on horseback as they left their carnage and destruction. Everywhere she looked were the dead although as she looked closer she realized that they were emaciated skeletons, mere husks of real people, although they were clad in battle dress and many still held their weapons. Vultures circled overhead.

"Namshim!" she cried, recognizing one of the men as her grandfather. Slowly, each corpse became recognizable as her tribe, every Cheyenne man, woman and child laying on the battlefield. "Tsêhe'êsta'éhe Tséhvonanêse" she whispered, recognizing the land. Little Bighorn battlefield.

Her cry pierced the numb haze of dislocation like a knife, and for a moment Marius could understand how wrong this was, could see the insanity of patches of tile in the dirt of the killing field, register the incongruity of a patient's smock over skin leggings, stitched with beads and bone -- but the nightmare settled again and he could not call out, could not force his limbs to move. The sense of dissonance faded as the two realities fused into one, and now the inconsistant muddle of clothing on a corpse was forgotten, any uncertainty drowned by the horror of staring into a dead face with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, the deathmask of starvation.

Marius' movement caught her attention as a vulture swept down and began picking at Sheldon's body. "Get away!" she ran towards the bird, but was unable to get there. The bird paid her no heed as he began his feast.

Dani wretched, throwing up whatever was in her stomach and trying to mutter a prayer for the dead at the same time, "They're all gone," She whimpered, kneeling on the ground heedless of the blood soaking her pants. "Gone."

Finished with what remained of Dani's former husband, the vulture hopped onto Marius' chest, cocking its bald, gore-smeared head this way and that. Marius looked into its yellow eye and knew with the immediate conviction of dreams what it intended. He struggled to dislodge it, but nothing about his body was working right and so all he could do as the blood-slick beak closed on his right eye was to turn his head and in his own mind scream and scream--

shree shree shree shree shree shree

The electronic shriek of the smoke detector tore through the illusion like a rock through paper. The field of dead evaporated, stranding the two mutants on the tiles of the kitchen. The air was full of smoke; the chorba had boiled over and was burning black to the pot and burner.

The brutal reassertion of reality was almost as bad as the attack. Marius barely had time to register the shift before a wave of nausea threw him to one side, heaving. There was nothing in his stomach, so he brought up only bile, his head throbbing with each retch. His mind was roiling with jumbled after-images, destroying all chance for coherent thought, but he didn't need it; the instinct that had attempted a defense by turning Danielle's power back on itself now screamed for escape, and in his panic Marius knew no reason to disagree. He stumbled to his feet lunged for the door.

Dani sat on the floor of the kitchen heaving as the kitchen came into nauseatingly clear focus. She couldn't make a coherant thought if she had had the energy to try, much less move. This was too much. Her powers when tied to Manuel were bad enough, but this was a whole new level of perception, one she hadn't wished on her worst enemy much less herself.

"Namshim Éhetóho ma'heono...oha Heávohe*," she whispered, unmoving.

*grandfather said I have sacred powers, but I am the devil.