xp_logs | Fiddler's Green: Angry Ghosts

As the Taygetos telempath continues to burrow into Nathan's mind, she finds something surprising.

"For pity's sake!" That once-clear voice was hoarse with fatigue, almost ragged. Nathan sucked in an equally ragged breath as the telempath released him, leaving him limp and exhausted in his restraints, wracked by shudders as he sagged against the wall. His hands were bound above his head, bearing nearly all his weight at this point. The strain on his shoulders had gone beyond pain a while ago.

He wasn't sure when they'd taken him off the gurney. Sometime after the last time he'd passed out, and dear God, had she been piqued about that. It had been enough to make her give up on the subtle approach completely. And it was breaking his grip on reality. He knew it was. The mental images she was created were immersive, complete down to emotions and physical sensations.

He was slipping. He knew was slipping. And he knew she knew it too.

"I will not be thwarted by a grown-up version of the children whose mind I rewrite on a regular basis," she hissed, turning back to him. She reached up and grabbed his head between her hands, and Nathan's whole body convulsed as she plunged him into whiteness, into total sensory deprivation.

The White Room. Nathan tried to run through nursery rhymes, song lyrics, poetry in his mind. Anything that had structure, a shape he could cling to in the whiteness. He knew how to handle this. He'd known for a long time. He...

And it changed. He wasn't in the White Room, he was underwater, trapped beneath that helicopter, drowning. Then he was kneeling on the floor of that hotel room in San Francisco, pulling Tyler's still body into his arms. Then he was being thrown across a table in the prison in North Korea, and he could hear Dom screaming on the other side of the room, but he couldn't even turn his head towards her, they had him pinned down, and...

Small, delicate knives slicing into his mind. Tiny, neat cuts, and patterns lost their shape. Unraveled. Recognizing the sensation for what it was, Nathan pulled away from her grip, his head hitting the wall behind him hard. The shock of impact was enough to break the illusion, although the sensations lingered, like phantom pain.

A wheezing laugh escaped him and he lifted his head, blinking at her. "Been there," he rasped, "done that. All of that. Fucking amateur. Mistra's conditioning staff... made you look like a dil-dilettante."

Those bug-eyes focused on him with deadly intensity. "Where was that last memory from?" she asked, sounding perfectly calm again. "China? You didn't like being helpless, did you? Not when they were working on her. Not when they were working on you. Wait... no." She leaned in, put a hand against his throat. A touch of her mind, and it was a chokehold instead. "It was a relief when they started with you," she murmured, and the images reached up for him again. "You goaded them. To get them to focus on you. And they did, my goodness..."

"Fucking voyeur," he choked out, and shockingly, seemed to score a hit with that. Her nostrils flared, and the images faded all at once.

"I'm getting tired of this, Nathan," she said, sounding perfectly calm. It was very much at odds with the look in her eyes. "You know, I believe I'll give brute force a try. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't. Either way, I'm in the mood to hurt you for a while." And she leaned on his pain center, with all her mental weight.

Every nerve in his body caught fire, and he screamed, convulsing in his restraints. "Better," he thought he heard her say, but no sooner had he sucked in a breath than she increased the pressure. It was like he was being burned alive. Like the skin was being flayed off his bones, and she wasn't letting him pass out, how was she staying in contact with his mind and staying conscious?

And then the pain vanished, all at once. He collapsed in his restraints, knees buckling completely. Something popped in his shoulder, and he didn't have the breathe to curse.

She was still watching him, he realized as his vision cleared. Trembling, he bared his teeth at her. "Lay it... on me, bitch," he wheezed. "Only fair. S-Should have been me, in Romania..."

Her eyes widened abruptly, then narrowed again, and she took a step towards him. "Guilt," she said wonderingly. "I can taste it. Oh, this is far more promising... yes." She pushed into his mind again, so very casually, and he was somewhere else, the mansion grounds, staring down at Jean-Paul's broken body.

He fell from a great height, said Amelia tranquilly, looking up at him from where she was kneeling beside the body. He stood there frozen, his throat closing. No words. No air. No air left in the world. Weren't you supposed to be watching him, Nathan? Wasn't that your job?

"FUCK YOU!" he shouted hoarsely, fighting the illusion, the racking, anguished guilt. Goddamn her. Malicious fucking bitch... "Not dead - he's not, I know-" He tried to pull away from the wall, the instinctive lurch towards her provoking a fiery, tearing pain in his shoulder. There was the sound of a man's voice raised in concern, then the telempath answering him, briskly.

"-perfectly fine, Masterson, stay outside." Heels, clicking on the concrete floor, and then she was right in front of him. Another push to his pain center, brief this time, almost like a warning, and he hung there, shaking. "Maybe he's not dead," she said quite calmly as Nathan fought for air, his breath coming almost in sobs. "But he'll never be the same. And every single scar is your doing, Nathan. He bled for you. How does that feel?" She reached out and touched the side of his face, the physical contact intensifying the emotions she was forcing on him - or stirring up and amplifying, he didn't know which. Couldn't tell. "Suffered, for you. Was violated, over and over, because of you. They stripped away your friend in bloody pieces, and he'll feel it for the rest of his life. He'll remember it, every time he looks at you."

Nathan was crying unashamedly, pain stabbing through his chest with every sob. Too close. It was too close. It was now, not in the past, and he couldn't push the emotional reaction away by telling himself that Jean-Paul had made it through. Because he hadn't. Not yet. And if she was right... it was his fault. His fault, whether Trask was involved or not...

The telempath hushed him, stroking his face. "Don't cry. It doesn't change anything. You can never make up for it, never make it better. Once he's strong enough, he'll realize it's all your fault. Maybe he'll make you pay for it. You'd like that, wouldn't it? It would feel right." Another jolt of pain, stealing his breath away. Like the bones of his arm, snapping under a blow...

--bastard, Jean-Paul hissed, and came at him in a blur, the blows falling too fast for Nathan to block. Not that he would have anyway. Only fair. Only-

"-get out - fucking bitch!" He heard himself snarl the words, as if from an impossible distance. Saw her step back, raising both eyebrows as an look of real surprise crossed her features. And his voice went on, raw with pain but somehow unutterably cold. "Play your... goddamned games with the weak-minded! I'm out of your league!"

The telempath leaned forward, eyes widening. "And what," she breathed, almost bewildered-sounding, "are you?" She leaned in closer, taking his face between her hands again, gazing deeply into his eyes. "Nathan? Can you hear me? Tell me what this is."

"Nathan's not home right now." And she walked right into that, didn't she? that cold voice at the back of his mind observed, even as Nathan's head jolted forward. His forehead smashed into the telempath's face, breaking both her glasses and her nose.

And he laughed, laughed with what little breath he had left as she staggered backwards and fell to the floor, holding her face and making a keening noise like a wounded animal, incredulous at its own pain. "Something to remember me by," he gasped out, the wheezing laugh verging on hysteria. "Every t-time you look in the mirror. Face needed rearranging. So the outside matches the inside-"

The two guards were in the room almost immediately. They bent over the rocking telempath, one of them talking rapidly. But her keening was changing, turning into incoherent noises of rage. He saw the force of her mind hit them. One of the men jerked upright, like an automaton with fury-glazed eyes.

Moving awkwardly, he yanked the collapsible baton off his belt, extending it with a jerky swing. The first hit struck Nathan across the hip.

"Limp--wristed motherfucker," Nathan spat at him. "... jerk off with that hand? Must t-take a while."

The telempath was still rocking, still emanating those short, sharp shrieks. The other guard lurched to his feet as well, advancing on Nathan even as his colleague took another swing with his baton. This one landed in Nathan's ribcage, and something cracked, sending a wash of pain through his chest.

"... fuck you," Nathan wheezed with the first breath he managed. "Low-rent... piece of shit-"

The guard with the baton swung again, like he was chopping wood, until his colleague shouldered him aside and wrapped his hands around Nathan's throat, slamming his head back into the wall, then squeezing. It was almost enough. Darkness pushed in from the edges of his vision, and he could almost let go, almost...

"Stop!"

The telempath was looking up at them from the floor, blinking rapidly, tears and blood mingled on her face. The guard choking Nathan blinked and then let him go, taking a step back. "He wants this," she choked out, touching her face with a trembling hand. "If you knock him out, it gives us less time to work on him and Xavier more time to find him."

The other guard dropped his baton and went to her side, helping her up. "What do you want us to do, ma'am?" he asked, looking dazed.

"I don't know." She spat blood, pulling the remains of her glasses away from one ear, her hands still shaking. Her voice was thick. "It seems impossible that he's still strategizing." She wiped away the blood from her nose, whimpering in pain, her eyes watering as she focused on Nathan again.

"Ma'am, you need to see the medic."

"Obviously!" It was close to a shriek and both guards flinched. "I'll be back," she hissed, and it was a threat to Nathan, as much as a statement to her guards. "I think we've got to try something more concrete. Make the outside match the inside," she spat viciously, her eyes boring into him over her broken nose. "Work on him while I'm gone. He doesn't like to be helpless, find a way to work with that. Use the operatives if you want, I don't care how."

"Yes, ma'am."

"And keep him awake and alert!" she said violently. "Use whatever you need from the cabinet. It's not as if he has to survive this."