Don't Close Your Eyes: Après moi le déluge (Part II)

[x-jeangrey.livejournal.com]

The battle in Jean's mind comes to a painful conclusion.




Jean glanced back toward Matthews as she picked herself up off the ground. Water flowed off of her like rain as her attention locked upon him.

She was afraid, yes. She had been. But he had hurt her family. He had killed her student, and a co-worker, and took control of her mind. She could feel it, the closer she peered past the depths.. They were tethered, like roots around a stone. It was a link, a very old one, by the looks of it. He had used her to do this, like a leech.

But she was stronger than him. He needed her. All she had to do was take back control. Garrison and Vanessa weren't there to be used by him as pawns. It was just the two of them.

"Been dead before. Didn't take."

"Well, second time will have to be the charm, won't it?" Matthews said, rattled by her ability to manipulate his other two hostages out of her mind. Their deaths should have opened the last cracks in her resistance, rendering her broken and ready to be picked apart. Obviously the Grey bitch had more fight left in her than he thought.

Jean wiped the blood away from her face, cocking her head to the side. Her anger was palpable, and showed by how the fire had started to reappear. The water started to recede, leaving only the steel floor.

"I'm not afraid anymore."

"You should be. And you will be." Matthews said, as the room began to shift; flicker quick images of children and adults on the walls; people she'd worked with, known, and lost. The pushed at the walls like they were rubber, hands and faces and screaming mouths pressing through towards her, at her.

If Jean was surprised she did not show it, instead focusing her attention on Matthews.

"Stop, " she said.

The moment the word left her lips the lights went out and when they turned back on they were in a familiar room. The walls were a calming white and the floor a teal. There was a window but the view was obscured by blinds, allowing on the light to filter through. It smelled like cleaning solvents with the cloying smell of air freshener to mask the scent. A steady rhythmic beeping was heard, coupled with the whirr of machinery that sounded like the rushing of air in and out.

There was a bed in the middle of this room, a single chair beside it. A TV that was never turned on. And man lay in bed, engulfed by tubes and wires with a head of dark hair barely peeking out.

"You like to cause fear? And pain? How about your fears?" Jean said, walking over to the man's bedside.

"Unable to wake up, screaming. Driven mad. Trapped in his own body. I've got a new one to add to your list."

He found himself paralyzed standing there at the foot of his own bed, unable to move.

"A link can go both ways."

The wires coming in and out of him seemed to glow then, the color purple. Some of the wires cascaded outward, through the walls and the windows, but one wire, a thick, heavy one, mingled with golden light, led straight to Jean.

She looked up Matthews, the wires that came out of him, leading out of the walls and windows seemed to snap. He felt his telepathic connection to the outside world severed, save for the one to her.

"You've never fought another telepath on the astral plane, have you? I have. More than one."

And, like steel cables snapping beneath strain, the severed wires lashed back at Matthews.

"One I killed," she said.

Cold scalpel separating muscle from skin. Gut splitting beneath a blade. Flesh shredding under claws and teeth. The throb of venom spreading through face, shoulder, neck. Skin and fat bubbling with heat.

The sensation of a body as it ripped apart along with its mind.

The piercing agony of death, and the psychic void it left behind.

Every pain he had inflicted upon the dreamers came back upon him now, his carefully strung web in total disarray -- no longer a web to ensnare others, but a net for the puppetmaster. A net that held every brutality pressed to his psychic body, feeding the sensation directly into his nerves.

Forever.

"But not this time. You'll live. You'll live to regret what you've done," she said as the man started to scream, both from the bed and his bedside, his faces twisted in agony.

Jean looked down to the cord between them, intermingled purple and gold, woven so tightly that to pull the strands apart would probably take months. In her hand appeared a blade, intricately carved out of flame. A gift borrowed from someone else's memory.

She didn't want to feel him for months, knowing he'd been there for years, watching, and waiting for the chance to hurt all she held dear, giving him the opportunity to try again the longer they stayed connected.

But she could fix that.

Lifting her hand high, she brought down the blade against the cord with a quick motion.

And once again, the lights went out, leaving Parker Matthews screaming in the dark.