Loglet: Aftermath
Jul. 9th, 2006 08:30 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsAfter the events of July 5th, Haller has finally regained consciousness. It is not a pleasant awakening.
Back and forth. Back and forth.
Jim squeezed Davey's rabbit to his chest, his eyes clenched almost as tight. David's old self-soothing mechanism, the stereotyped rocking that had developed when he was first institutionalized, had taken over; a total reversion to baseline. Jim didn't have the ability or the will to stop it. Nothing else even came close to helping. He sat in rumpled white sheets huddled in a rumpled white smock and let the motion carry him, just like old times.
Pathetic shitpile of defects. The reassuring murmur of Charles' mind in his couldn't touch the words, hissed by the presence he now knew had never left him. Masked. Only masked. Barbed wire under fallen snow, just waiting to be found by a careless foot. Look at you, it snarled. One good stomp and you cave like rotten wood. Grab your little stuffed animal and rock like a fucking mental patient. Having fun being Haller yet?
Self-loathing and humiliation tore at his chest like broken glass. Stop it. Please, stop. Please. A sob choked out in the silence of the room. The comforting hand on his back moved slow, soothing. Against the razor-edges in his mind the familiar gesture had almost no weight at all. Jim clutched Patch harder as the rocking increased. Please don't do this.
And we make it in record-time to the begging. "Please, please." Like a fucking infant. Didn't you use to have a spine? Figures the gimp would stick you with the worst of both worlds. Too bad for you this time there's no running away. You heard the man.
You let us out, and now we're here to stay.
Back and forth. Back and forth.
Stopped.
No. Oh, god, please, no. The surge of blind panic locked his muscles in mid-sway. Not again. Not again. No, no. It was happening all over again. The madness, the regression, the horror of every inescapable crime, every unforgivable sin, all his existence coming back on him, feeling everything warp beneath the weight of it and knowing it was his fault, his, his, his--
"I hate you," Jim whispered, and this time he wasn't talking to Jack. "I hate you." The telepath dropped the stuffed rabbit to the floor and seized his head in shaking hands, almost blind from a sudden agony that had nothing to do with powers-burnout. "I HATE YOU! LET ME GO, LET ME GO, LET ME OUT OF HERE! CHARLES!" It was a shriek of hate, a wail of grief, and he tore into himself, rejecting every hard-won shred of integration and balance he'd worked for all these years, fighting to be away, to be free--
The facets of his mind flashed and shifted from wildly-fracturing white to hues of red and gold. Cold shutdown. The alter pushed to the fore blinked up, momentarily disoriented by the switch. Then, snorting at the dampness on her face, Cyndi uncurled and settled back onto the bed to regard the professor with an air of exasperated disgust.
"Well, so much for Jimmy."
Back and forth. Back and forth.
Jim squeezed Davey's rabbit to his chest, his eyes clenched almost as tight. David's old self-soothing mechanism, the stereotyped rocking that had developed when he was first institutionalized, had taken over; a total reversion to baseline. Jim didn't have the ability or the will to stop it. Nothing else even came close to helping. He sat in rumpled white sheets huddled in a rumpled white smock and let the motion carry him, just like old times.
Pathetic shitpile of defects. The reassuring murmur of Charles' mind in his couldn't touch the words, hissed by the presence he now knew had never left him. Masked. Only masked. Barbed wire under fallen snow, just waiting to be found by a careless foot. Look at you, it snarled. One good stomp and you cave like rotten wood. Grab your little stuffed animal and rock like a fucking mental patient. Having fun being Haller yet?
Self-loathing and humiliation tore at his chest like broken glass. Stop it. Please, stop. Please. A sob choked out in the silence of the room. The comforting hand on his back moved slow, soothing. Against the razor-edges in his mind the familiar gesture had almost no weight at all. Jim clutched Patch harder as the rocking increased. Please don't do this.
And we make it in record-time to the begging. "Please, please." Like a fucking infant. Didn't you use to have a spine? Figures the gimp would stick you with the worst of both worlds. Too bad for you this time there's no running away. You heard the man.
You let us out, and now we're here to stay.
Back and forth. Back and forth.
Stopped.
No. Oh, god, please, no. The surge of blind panic locked his muscles in mid-sway. Not again. Not again. No, no. It was happening all over again. The madness, the regression, the horror of every inescapable crime, every unforgivable sin, all his existence coming back on him, feeling everything warp beneath the weight of it and knowing it was his fault, his, his, his--
"I hate you," Jim whispered, and this time he wasn't talking to Jack. "I hate you." The telepath dropped the stuffed rabbit to the floor and seized his head in shaking hands, almost blind from a sudden agony that had nothing to do with powers-burnout. "I HATE YOU! LET ME GO, LET ME GO, LET ME OUT OF HERE! CHARLES!" It was a shriek of hate, a wail of grief, and he tore into himself, rejecting every hard-won shred of integration and balance he'd worked for all these years, fighting to be away, to be free--
The facets of his mind flashed and shifted from wildly-fracturing white to hues of red and gold. Cold shutdown. The alter pushed to the fore blinked up, momentarily disoriented by the switch. Then, snorting at the dampness on her face, Cyndi uncurled and settled back onto the bed to regard the professor with an air of exasperated disgust.
"Well, so much for Jimmy."
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