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Jan. 11th, 2012 10:34 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsGlorian has been brought to the office, and now it's Emma's job - untrained, sixteen year old Emma Frost - to fix everything.
Warning: disturbing content
Emma was not finding it difficult to wait patiently. The seats around the conference table were comfortable, the tea she was drinking had been well-made and the minds around her were – around her. Not inside her head. Somehow that made the fact that a number of the people at the table were decidedly worse for wear, there was a terrified looking man sitting near her, Remy had stepped outside for some reason and a girl of her own age was now standing at the head of the table and apparently about to take on the role of chair, all okay.
Emma still wasn’t sure what the hell they had done to the drugs they had given her, but she had to admit that this decidedly long and extremely complicated hallucination was remarkably entertaining as well as informative.
This was all sorts of not okay for Nico. She had been looking at all those adults she had kind of grown used to think as complete badasses acting like teens without even looking like such, each of them trapped in their own messes of those times. It had been stressing enough for her to deal with Amanda, but seeing the usually cool and slightly intimidating Ms. Frost being completely...not Ms. Frost-like was a bit of a shock nonetheless. If she had ever wished to be the most mature person around, she held no longer those ambitions.
"Okay...Emma. I'm Nico, and yes I know you think you don't know me, everybody has already made it clear they can't remember me or a good chunk of their lives. I need you to cooperate with me, can you do that? I guess you would like Remy to handle this, but trust me, I'm following his orders over here." She was going to demand all the work benefits once this was done; no more picking up coffee every ten minutes, not after she had babysat them all like that. "This should be actually pretty simple. So we can be done with this mess in no time."
"Really?" said Emma. "Please tell me that Remy's going to let you teach me how to kill someone with my brain, because I really would like that very much." If this hallucination was going to be over with soon, Emma wanted to make sure that she had got every piece of information from it that she could.
"Uh...I'm pretty sure that once we solve this all you will be capable of doing that without anybody's help, trust me." Nice, now she had something else to keep her mind out of next time she saw the woman.
"Also, Glorian? You just...well, sit there and get ready. And, you know, be quiet." Given the situation it was hard for Nico to be harsh on people, even if she wanted to yell at everyone for making her lose a year or two of life, surely.
Glorian's eyes darted from the teenaged girl to the blonde in the chair. He didn't like the sound of "get ready", and for a moment he considered trying to run. Neither were as terrifying as the man who had just left -- maybe he could make it. Then again, Glorian had recently seen that man defenstrate someone. Giving him any sort of reason to return was right the fuck out.
Having already been captured and beaten today, the man decided to try following his father's advice and keep his damn mouth shut for once.
“So what would you like me to do? Or would Remy like me to do?” asked Emma. “I’m willing to try but,” she waggled her hand at her head in a vaguely illustrative way, “I’m not exactly well-trained here.” Though she had to admit, even with just a couple of day’s peace inside her head, her ability to pick out individual thoughts and people had sharpened considerably. With a little longer, Emma was fairly certain she’d be able to start following them back to the source and changing them. Changing them to suit her. The taste of that thought in her mind actually made her shift in her chair, caught in a wave of desire so strong that she almost moaned, only stopping the sound escaping by clamping her lips shut.
Right, not awkward at all. Nope. Nico couldn't help but make a face though.
"Okay, here's the deal. You get in his head, and you make him believe that this is all a big, utterly realistic trip, which might be very nice and all, but it's not real. At all." Nico thought it should be easy since that was what Emma thought anyway. "And hopefully that will make him snap and turn things back to normal. Normal is good, trust me. It involves power and making me get you all coffee at ridiculous times of the day." Which she would try to fight against now, but Nico wasn't hopeful.
"So let's get down to to. And Glorian? I might look like a sweet innocent and totally cute teenager, but make this difficult and I'll make your life a living hell." She even let her eyes go all black with cracks on the sides for a second before delivering a sweet smile. "Okay then! Enough talking."
Emma made a face at the mention of coffee, never having developed a taste for it, but her expression changed to fascination as Nico’s eyes went black. Trying to convince someone else this whole scenario wasn’t real? When things like that happened? Should not be hard, she decided.
Emma turned to the man next to her and inclined her head slightly. “Hello Glorian. I’m Emma Frost. Apparently I have to convince you that you’re not real. Or I’m not real. Or something. Which is nice, because you’re not. If that helps. Also, I think I mostly should be able to do it without making your head explode. Or mine. I hope. Though I hope someone here has tissues, because someone’s nose always ends up bleeding. Mostly not their ears, though. That’s only happened – twice.
And they deserved it.”
"Look, I haven't done nothing," Glorian said automatically. He didn't feel like he was on a trip, but the look in the blonde's eyes made him suspect she might be. He allowed heat to enter his voice. "In fact, all I got today is a beat-down I'm almost sure I didn't have coming and proof I'm never gonna grow into my teeth no matter what Ma said. So why don't you just do whatever you're going ta do and stop trying ta make me piss myself, because you're too late anyway."
Emma made a small moue with her mouth. “At least that explains the smell,” she said and shrugged. “Remy introduced me to this fascinating thing called Google and I found out all sorts of things about telepathy that should prove fairly helpful. Apparently, sometimes it’s easier for a telepath to... make a link, maybe, or just concentrate on someone, if they touch them. Do you mind if I touch you?” Emma was scrupulous about asking that question; she knew how it felt to be touched by people who had not asked permission and she was not going to force that feeling on anyone else.
Glorian briefly considered asking the younger girl for help, but then remembered those coal-black eyes. He gulped. "Whatever you want," he replied. While under normal circumstances he would have been happy to rent any movie with the line "Do you mind if I touch you?" coming from a woman of Emma's appearance, for the first time ever Glorian found himself praying an attractive woman kept her hands above the waist.
“Skin-to-skin is probably best,” Emma murmured to herself and then reached out and cupped her hand softly around Glorian’s cheek, a strangely intimate gesture. She closed her eyes for a moment, concentrating on touching the minds that murmured around her without letting her shields slip too much. She could feel the buzz of numerous, surly teenage minds near her, but there was one that was decidedly sharper and closer, almost humming down the physical connection.
Thinking about some of the things she had read on Google, Emma gathered together her own thoughts and concentrated on parting her shields exactly where the mind of Glorian brushed against them. Fortunately for her, her ability to hold her shields together and open them selectively had improved considerably over the last day or so. Unfortunately for both her and everyone else in the room, her understanding of her level of telepathic power at sixteen had almost nothing in common with what it had become since then. Instead of slicing neatly into his mind and world view, Emma’s telepathic blow shattered every defence Glorian had, opening his mind up with a splattering crash and reaching out further to smash into the mind of everyone at the table.
Flailing at the sudden in-rush of thoughts and a chorus of moans, Emma hung on fiercely to her own mind, concentrating hard to hold it together and to find Glorian again in the jumble. Drawing on what she had read about the Astral Plane and astral images, Emma made herself a psychic body, pulling her self-image together so fiercely that, when she did manifest the image, she appeared as almost a sixteen-year old avenging angel in Glorian’s mind, her hospital whites glowing brightly. The office around them vanished, to be replaced by a sketchy view of a white-walled cell, bare except for a hospital bed.
“Are you there?” asked Emma, peering into a landscape fractured by the strength of her telepathic blow.
"Am I where?" Glorian mumbled. He was still seated, but on the ground instead of a chair. He gingerly touched his forehead in an attempt to determine whether the front of his skull was still attached. It was, but somehow it still felt like his brain was exposed to open air.
Glorian staggered to his feet, his astral form fuzzing before it resolved itself into a small, gangly, similarly sixteen year old figure. It was shorter than Emma, wearing slightly oversized clothing, and in dire need of a haircut. Around his feet browning grass began to grow through the hospital tiles, and one bare wall began to bulge and warp into the semblence of a stall and awning. Cheap stuffed toys began to push themselves from the wall and began to gather in a polyester pile. Dazedly, Glorian bent to pick up a stuffed snail.
"Thought we stopped stocking these after that kid choked on an eyestalk," he muttered.
“No,” said Emma, crossly, and plucked the snail out of Glorian’s hand. “No snails. No grass. Don’t you understand?” She waved her hand at the surroundings and the pile of toys began to melt away as she concentrated on them. “None of this is real. None of the last few days have been real. You are not real. There is only the asylum and only my cell and I am not allowed out. No offices. No toys. Just this.” With a supreme effort, Emma switched Glorian’s landscape off for a moment, so the asylum cell seemed utterly real. For a second, Emma’s concentration wavered and the light changed, as if the cell door was opened and someone stood there. Fear and disdain ripped through Emma and she shook them off fiercely, scattering them outwards in a telepathic burst, so a further chorus of moans intruded on the Astral Plane.
Glorian stepped back at the noise and the wash of fear it brought, his hand seeking the wall for support. The surface rippled, wavering between trailer-siding and bare wall.
"Sure," he said, licking his lips nervously. "The bruises and missing tooth, all totally imaginary." The trailer-siding grew more pronounced, developing scraped paint and the beginnings of a wheel.
Emma’s image frowned. This was not going as easily as she had thought; surely, at the point where you pointed out to a hallucination what it was, it should have the courtesy to take itself away? She hadn’t really considered what one did with a stubborn hallucination. With a slightly more hesitant feeling, she stabbed her telepathy out again, aiming mainly at Glorian’s astral head, intending to fix the bruises and his missing tooth to help convince him. It didn’t work quite as she intended – the image in front of her distorted wildly and then settled back into a grown man with the muscles and smooth porcelain skin of a Greek god and entirely too many teeth. She was pleased to note, however, that behind him, the room converted back into a view of the asylum.
“If you were real,” said Emma, “then do you think I could do that to you? You’re mine. To play with. I made you and now I want you to go away.”
"What are you-FUCK!" Glorian looked down and slapped at his newly existant pectorals like a man who'd woken up covered in ants. Aesthetic improvement though it was, it also felt like someone had twisted his brain about thirty degrees to the right. He took another step back, now pressed firmly against the wall.
"No," he gibbered, "no way. This is just some of that -- that telepathy crap you people were talking about. This is just some hallucination. Something you're doing with your brain." The man's hair did regain a sort of greasy sheen, and the porcelain skin became darker, grubbier. Glorian's self-image wasn't quite able to reassert itself, but it was making a noble effort.
“Of course it is,” said Emma. “It all is. I’m doing all of this with my brain. Why,” she said, and hammered outwards with her telepathy again, trying now to erase Glorian’s image completely, “don’t... you... understand... that.” With each word, she hammered again, breaking parts of Glorian’s image away, swallowing them into nothingness.
"No!" Glorian shoved himself away from the wall, forcing himself towards Emma. Every fiber in his body seemed to be burning, his head was pounding like a jackhammer, but this wasn't how it was going to end. In desperation, he grabbed at his neck and found the rope he always wore there. He tore it off, feeling the weight at the end begin to form as he did. His father had taught him to tie all kinds of knots while working at the carnival, including a monkey's fist. It was ideal for securing round objects -- or, if one were a skinny kid with gap-teeth and bug-eyes, easily wrapped around a steel core and worn as a weapon of last resort.
With an arm now missing from elbow to shoulder, Glorian hurled the slingshot and struck Emma in the side of the face.
"This is real!" he screamed hysterically. "I'm real! Why are you doing this? I didn't do nothing to you!"
Emma, shocked, touched the side of her face, at the gaping wound that Glorian's weapon had opened there. Then she scrubbed at it for an instant and the wound healed in a blaze of light. "Someone," she hissed. "Someone did this to me." The cell, the re-appearing trailer, Glorian's astral image all shimmered for an instant and then images began to flicker between them. Emma Frost, as she looked now, on the front of business magazines, the front of fashion magazines, articles about awards and patents, the Forbes Rich List - pictures Emma had taken from the internet in the last few days, pictures whose reality she rejected, utterly and viscerally. "Why would anyone do this to me?" she said, and it was almost a cry. "Making me think this is possible? Making me think I can be something? I live in a cell, my brother is dead, my sisters hate me, daddy dearest... daddy dearest..." Emma couldn't finish that one. "They fill me with drugs and they fill up my head with thoughts and all the people are mad and it's like razor blades in my head and I can't even stop him coming to my room at night and fucking me until I bleed and someone wants to make me think that none of that is real? That I have control? That I have power? That I can make people do what I want? It's all real and I have to believe in it, because when this wears off I have to live in it and I have to survive it and I can't do that if I believe in this."
The pictures whirled away and disappeared and the cell came back. "So," added Emma, implacably. "You are not real." And she reached out again and hammered another blow at Glorian's image.
This time there was no defense. Memories tore at him: father's words cutting into her while her brother and sisters watched, mother's voice deafening in its absence. Actions never good enough for a father, but a body good enough for his eyes -- and the slimy film inside of his skull as he looked at her. The institution, with its shocks and injections and pills and that man, that man she always lay awake listening for in the night, all the while thinking how grand it would be to watch him bleed for once. Mother visiting her, but not to take her away, no, just to tell her that Christian was dead while she lolled in a fog of drugs, the ache between her legs still fresh.
The diamond-sharp shards of Emma's will tore into him, and Glorian's personality crumbled like a shore in the face of a hurricane.
When the onslaught was finally over, Emma's sixteen-year old visage raised her head and met herself in the eyes.
They didn’t let her have mirrors in the asylum, unwilling to let anything that could be broken into lethal shards within reach of any of the inmates. For the first time since she had been committed, Emma Frost looked herself in the eyes, standing in a room that had now stabilised into the cell she had spent so much of her time in.
“This is reality,” whispered Emma to herself. “This is what we are.” Her astral self reached out a hand, touched her own cheek gently. “There’s no escape.” She lowered her hand back to her side, closing her eyes for a moment.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” she whispered and opened her eyes again. “I don’t want you to be anymore.”
What tore from Emma’s mind and into every mind around her was a telepathic howl of rage, every ounce of her short lifetime’s loathing and pain concentrated into a shattering wave aimed at the image in front of her, intent on obliterating herself from the world as it stood. And that reality formed the centre of that telepathic wave, a reality wrapped around a core of emotional pain so intense that Emma’s sixteen-year old mind could no longer hold it in check. Instead, she let it out, accepting reality completely and trying hard to cut herself out of the heart of it.
The mind that had once been Glorian's reached out to embrace the promise of that un-being, the relief of finally finding an end. But as the oblivion began to overtake him, some tiny splinter that was still Glorian stood fast. The resistance was born of neither will nor bravery, but from a single base desire: to live.
Unaware even as he did, Glorian struck out with his only defense -- the ploy that had served him well for all those unremembered years. He reached for Emma's mind, into all those images of fame and success rejected by a wounded girl in the depths of misery, and made them real.
Them, and the reality they carried.
Cypher:
Doug staggered a single step, a muted grunt the only sound that came from him, and that only because the pain was almost too overwhelming for him to actually give full voice to it. He almost completely ignored the blood dripping down from his nose onto his shirt. He was too busy reliving the past seven years in approximately seven seconds - every last mistake, every last physical and emotional hurt. He remembered again. He remembered it all, and he remembered who was responsible, and who he blamed, despite the tentative promise to Marie-Ange. He could see his other teammates clutching at their heads in pain, but his own internal pain was too much to be around anyone else. He staggered to the door of his server room, and there was the click of the door opening, the click of it closing, and the click of a lock engaging, followed by a metallic ringing like the sound of a spinning coin hitting a table, then silence.
Daytripper:
The first headache wasn't bad, in the sense that Amanda had been getting magic-related headaches for years. But the second one... With a muffled cry she grabbed at her head, blood dripping from her nose as she grabbed for the back of a chair to balance herself. Her grab missed and she staggered, going down onto her knees.
Deadpool:
Wade's shoulder blades hit the wall behind him as the first wave of pain hit and he thought he'd be alright, but then the second blindsided him and the room tilted to the left. Raising one hand, he pressed his palm against his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut in an effort to make the vertigo-induced nausea subside. It didn't really help - and neither did the realization that, for the last three days, he'd thought he was sixteen.
Jubilee:
Jubilee had been thrown about before, had broken arms and been clawed by a demon. It was due to these various experiences that she could say with complete and utter honesty that the pain that hit her head was the worst experience she'd had in her life so far. If she'd been any younger or less experienced, she totally would've hurled up her cookies at the rolling, twisting and pulling sensation that seemed to send her thoughts in a hundred different directions at once.
She reached up to feel a wetness at her nose, pulling away fingers coated in a thin film of crimson blood. 'What the holy hell am I wearing?' was her last coherent thought before the void of unconsciousness took her down to the ground in a heap.
Scarlet Witch:
It happened so quickly that Wanda's powers had no ability to counteract the sudden intrusion and kick out the telepathic sledgehammer. She found herself coughing up blood and phlegm as the pain exploded into a thousand stars behind her eyes.
It made it a thousand times worse that at the same time she was riding the pain out, everything from the last few days started to click. The fear and confusion from then interlaced with the now and it left her panting on her hands and knees as she spat out mouthful after mouthful of blood.
And underneath it, the only thing she could think was "Oh fuck, Stephen".
Storm:
The sensation hit Ororo like a thunderclap. One moment she was on her feet, the next she was bent over the nearest potted plant, retching into the dirt. Up came the bad tacos, the sludgy soda she had drunk, the bitter coffee. Head throbbing, neck aching, she clung to the leafy green decoration as she emptied her stomach and rode out the waves of pain.
Tarot:
In her office, that she still didn't think was really hers, Marie-Ange's descent to the floor was quiet except for the soft thud as she slid down the wall. She crumpled and wrapped her arms around her head in a useless effort to shield herself from the pain that had gone from dull headache to migraine. The lights were too bright, even the sound of her own breathing was far far too loud and it was just too much. She knew there were pills in the desk, it was just so very far away, all the way on the other side of her legs.
She managed to pull one leg up to her chest, and then the pain got worse, past migraine, and if her limbs hadn't been made of rubber and jelly, she'd have done her best to try to knock herself out, or crawl under the desk. As it was, all she could do was whimper and let her tears soak through the material of her shirt.
Maverick:
When the pain hit, it hit him like a sledgehammer swung at full force at his head. David clenched his teeth and locked his throat against the scream that wanted so badly to be let loose even as he forced his body to take the last two steps towards the bed. He barely made it, torso hitting its surface with a loud thump. As the sledgehammer swung around for round two, the pain intensified and he curled in on himself as he best could in the awkward position. Lids squeezed shut over darkened blue as he let out a pained hiss -- the only sound that was allowed to escape before he shoved a mouthful of shirt in his mouth and bit down hard on it. Pain was a close acquaintance of his. He could remember that now. So he rode the waves of pain like a champion, while consciousness watched on.
Emma:
A side-effect of an instantaneous download of more than twenty years of telepathic skills was that Emma was able to catch the telepathic backlash as she cut off the destructive wave she had aimed at Glorian’s/her own astral image and dissipate it around her reconstructed shields without a single conscious thought. Still without thinking about it, she stepped off the Astral Plane and back into the office, reaching out to each of the moaning inhabitants with a swift tendril, assessing the level of pain and determining that none, even Glorian, were likely to suffer any permanent damage from what she had done.
She had forgotten.
Oh, it was still in her head, those memories, that time. But it was – lessened. By time, by other memories, by a great deal of delicate telepathic work.
But now she could feel it again, sharp and bright, so fresh that she could still feel the ache between her legs, the razor-blades in her head, the fear that was always there, the fog of uncontrol.
She had tried to kill herself.
She had forgotten how hard it had been not to want to die.
She had never given in. She had never let herself feel that way. She had held on, beneath everything, with iron will and she had never let herself want to die. Until now. Until this time. Until she had poured every ounce of her energy into making herself not be.
Until she had failed at every teenage vow she had made to herself to never let them break her and she had broken.
Blindly, Emma stepped around the moaning, bleeding people on the floor and made her way to her office, closing and locking the door behind herself, carefully and softly, then drew down the blinds.
It was only when she knew that no-one could see her or hear her or, worst of all, seek to offer her comfort that she allowed the tears to flow and wondered only if she would ever be able to make them end.
Warning: disturbing content
Emma was not finding it difficult to wait patiently. The seats around the conference table were comfortable, the tea she was drinking had been well-made and the minds around her were – around her. Not inside her head. Somehow that made the fact that a number of the people at the table were decidedly worse for wear, there was a terrified looking man sitting near her, Remy had stepped outside for some reason and a girl of her own age was now standing at the head of the table and apparently about to take on the role of chair, all okay.
Emma still wasn’t sure what the hell they had done to the drugs they had given her, but she had to admit that this decidedly long and extremely complicated hallucination was remarkably entertaining as well as informative.
This was all sorts of not okay for Nico. She had been looking at all those adults she had kind of grown used to think as complete badasses acting like teens without even looking like such, each of them trapped in their own messes of those times. It had been stressing enough for her to deal with Amanda, but seeing the usually cool and slightly intimidating Ms. Frost being completely...not Ms. Frost-like was a bit of a shock nonetheless. If she had ever wished to be the most mature person around, she held no longer those ambitions.
"Okay...Emma. I'm Nico, and yes I know you think you don't know me, everybody has already made it clear they can't remember me or a good chunk of their lives. I need you to cooperate with me, can you do that? I guess you would like Remy to handle this, but trust me, I'm following his orders over here." She was going to demand all the work benefits once this was done; no more picking up coffee every ten minutes, not after she had babysat them all like that. "This should be actually pretty simple. So we can be done with this mess in no time."
"Really?" said Emma. "Please tell me that Remy's going to let you teach me how to kill someone with my brain, because I really would like that very much." If this hallucination was going to be over with soon, Emma wanted to make sure that she had got every piece of information from it that she could.
"Uh...I'm pretty sure that once we solve this all you will be capable of doing that without anybody's help, trust me." Nice, now she had something else to keep her mind out of next time she saw the woman.
"Also, Glorian? You just...well, sit there and get ready. And, you know, be quiet." Given the situation it was hard for Nico to be harsh on people, even if she wanted to yell at everyone for making her lose a year or two of life, surely.
Glorian's eyes darted from the teenaged girl to the blonde in the chair. He didn't like the sound of "get ready", and for a moment he considered trying to run. Neither were as terrifying as the man who had just left -- maybe he could make it. Then again, Glorian had recently seen that man defenstrate someone. Giving him any sort of reason to return was right the fuck out.
Having already been captured and beaten today, the man decided to try following his father's advice and keep his damn mouth shut for once.
“So what would you like me to do? Or would Remy like me to do?” asked Emma. “I’m willing to try but,” she waggled her hand at her head in a vaguely illustrative way, “I’m not exactly well-trained here.” Though she had to admit, even with just a couple of day’s peace inside her head, her ability to pick out individual thoughts and people had sharpened considerably. With a little longer, Emma was fairly certain she’d be able to start following them back to the source and changing them. Changing them to suit her. The taste of that thought in her mind actually made her shift in her chair, caught in a wave of desire so strong that she almost moaned, only stopping the sound escaping by clamping her lips shut.
Right, not awkward at all. Nope. Nico couldn't help but make a face though.
"Okay, here's the deal. You get in his head, and you make him believe that this is all a big, utterly realistic trip, which might be very nice and all, but it's not real. At all." Nico thought it should be easy since that was what Emma thought anyway. "And hopefully that will make him snap and turn things back to normal. Normal is good, trust me. It involves power and making me get you all coffee at ridiculous times of the day." Which she would try to fight against now, but Nico wasn't hopeful.
"So let's get down to to. And Glorian? I might look like a sweet innocent and totally cute teenager, but make this difficult and I'll make your life a living hell." She even let her eyes go all black with cracks on the sides for a second before delivering a sweet smile. "Okay then! Enough talking."
Emma made a face at the mention of coffee, never having developed a taste for it, but her expression changed to fascination as Nico’s eyes went black. Trying to convince someone else this whole scenario wasn’t real? When things like that happened? Should not be hard, she decided.
Emma turned to the man next to her and inclined her head slightly. “Hello Glorian. I’m Emma Frost. Apparently I have to convince you that you’re not real. Or I’m not real. Or something. Which is nice, because you’re not. If that helps. Also, I think I mostly should be able to do it without making your head explode. Or mine. I hope. Though I hope someone here has tissues, because someone’s nose always ends up bleeding. Mostly not their ears, though. That’s only happened – twice.
And they deserved it.”
"Look, I haven't done nothing," Glorian said automatically. He didn't feel like he was on a trip, but the look in the blonde's eyes made him suspect she might be. He allowed heat to enter his voice. "In fact, all I got today is a beat-down I'm almost sure I didn't have coming and proof I'm never gonna grow into my teeth no matter what Ma said. So why don't you just do whatever you're going ta do and stop trying ta make me piss myself, because you're too late anyway."
Emma made a small moue with her mouth. “At least that explains the smell,” she said and shrugged. “Remy introduced me to this fascinating thing called Google and I found out all sorts of things about telepathy that should prove fairly helpful. Apparently, sometimes it’s easier for a telepath to... make a link, maybe, or just concentrate on someone, if they touch them. Do you mind if I touch you?” Emma was scrupulous about asking that question; she knew how it felt to be touched by people who had not asked permission and she was not going to force that feeling on anyone else.
Glorian briefly considered asking the younger girl for help, but then remembered those coal-black eyes. He gulped. "Whatever you want," he replied. While under normal circumstances he would have been happy to rent any movie with the line "Do you mind if I touch you?" coming from a woman of Emma's appearance, for the first time ever Glorian found himself praying an attractive woman kept her hands above the waist.
“Skin-to-skin is probably best,” Emma murmured to herself and then reached out and cupped her hand softly around Glorian’s cheek, a strangely intimate gesture. She closed her eyes for a moment, concentrating on touching the minds that murmured around her without letting her shields slip too much. She could feel the buzz of numerous, surly teenage minds near her, but there was one that was decidedly sharper and closer, almost humming down the physical connection.
Thinking about some of the things she had read on Google, Emma gathered together her own thoughts and concentrated on parting her shields exactly where the mind of Glorian brushed against them. Fortunately for her, her ability to hold her shields together and open them selectively had improved considerably over the last day or so. Unfortunately for both her and everyone else in the room, her understanding of her level of telepathic power at sixteen had almost nothing in common with what it had become since then. Instead of slicing neatly into his mind and world view, Emma’s telepathic blow shattered every defence Glorian had, opening his mind up with a splattering crash and reaching out further to smash into the mind of everyone at the table.
Flailing at the sudden in-rush of thoughts and a chorus of moans, Emma hung on fiercely to her own mind, concentrating hard to hold it together and to find Glorian again in the jumble. Drawing on what she had read about the Astral Plane and astral images, Emma made herself a psychic body, pulling her self-image together so fiercely that, when she did manifest the image, she appeared as almost a sixteen-year old avenging angel in Glorian’s mind, her hospital whites glowing brightly. The office around them vanished, to be replaced by a sketchy view of a white-walled cell, bare except for a hospital bed.
“Are you there?” asked Emma, peering into a landscape fractured by the strength of her telepathic blow.
"Am I where?" Glorian mumbled. He was still seated, but on the ground instead of a chair. He gingerly touched his forehead in an attempt to determine whether the front of his skull was still attached. It was, but somehow it still felt like his brain was exposed to open air.
Glorian staggered to his feet, his astral form fuzzing before it resolved itself into a small, gangly, similarly sixteen year old figure. It was shorter than Emma, wearing slightly oversized clothing, and in dire need of a haircut. Around his feet browning grass began to grow through the hospital tiles, and one bare wall began to bulge and warp into the semblence of a stall and awning. Cheap stuffed toys began to push themselves from the wall and began to gather in a polyester pile. Dazedly, Glorian bent to pick up a stuffed snail.
"Thought we stopped stocking these after that kid choked on an eyestalk," he muttered.
“No,” said Emma, crossly, and plucked the snail out of Glorian’s hand. “No snails. No grass. Don’t you understand?” She waved her hand at the surroundings and the pile of toys began to melt away as she concentrated on them. “None of this is real. None of the last few days have been real. You are not real. There is only the asylum and only my cell and I am not allowed out. No offices. No toys. Just this.” With a supreme effort, Emma switched Glorian’s landscape off for a moment, so the asylum cell seemed utterly real. For a second, Emma’s concentration wavered and the light changed, as if the cell door was opened and someone stood there. Fear and disdain ripped through Emma and she shook them off fiercely, scattering them outwards in a telepathic burst, so a further chorus of moans intruded on the Astral Plane.
Glorian stepped back at the noise and the wash of fear it brought, his hand seeking the wall for support. The surface rippled, wavering between trailer-siding and bare wall.
"Sure," he said, licking his lips nervously. "The bruises and missing tooth, all totally imaginary." The trailer-siding grew more pronounced, developing scraped paint and the beginnings of a wheel.
Emma’s image frowned. This was not going as easily as she had thought; surely, at the point where you pointed out to a hallucination what it was, it should have the courtesy to take itself away? She hadn’t really considered what one did with a stubborn hallucination. With a slightly more hesitant feeling, she stabbed her telepathy out again, aiming mainly at Glorian’s astral head, intending to fix the bruises and his missing tooth to help convince him. It didn’t work quite as she intended – the image in front of her distorted wildly and then settled back into a grown man with the muscles and smooth porcelain skin of a Greek god and entirely too many teeth. She was pleased to note, however, that behind him, the room converted back into a view of the asylum.
“If you were real,” said Emma, “then do you think I could do that to you? You’re mine. To play with. I made you and now I want you to go away.”
"What are you-FUCK!" Glorian looked down and slapped at his newly existant pectorals like a man who'd woken up covered in ants. Aesthetic improvement though it was, it also felt like someone had twisted his brain about thirty degrees to the right. He took another step back, now pressed firmly against the wall.
"No," he gibbered, "no way. This is just some of that -- that telepathy crap you people were talking about. This is just some hallucination. Something you're doing with your brain." The man's hair did regain a sort of greasy sheen, and the porcelain skin became darker, grubbier. Glorian's self-image wasn't quite able to reassert itself, but it was making a noble effort.
“Of course it is,” said Emma. “It all is. I’m doing all of this with my brain. Why,” she said, and hammered outwards with her telepathy again, trying now to erase Glorian’s image completely, “don’t... you... understand... that.” With each word, she hammered again, breaking parts of Glorian’s image away, swallowing them into nothingness.
"No!" Glorian shoved himself away from the wall, forcing himself towards Emma. Every fiber in his body seemed to be burning, his head was pounding like a jackhammer, but this wasn't how it was going to end. In desperation, he grabbed at his neck and found the rope he always wore there. He tore it off, feeling the weight at the end begin to form as he did. His father had taught him to tie all kinds of knots while working at the carnival, including a monkey's fist. It was ideal for securing round objects -- or, if one were a skinny kid with gap-teeth and bug-eyes, easily wrapped around a steel core and worn as a weapon of last resort.
With an arm now missing from elbow to shoulder, Glorian hurled the slingshot and struck Emma in the side of the face.
"This is real!" he screamed hysterically. "I'm real! Why are you doing this? I didn't do nothing to you!"
Emma, shocked, touched the side of her face, at the gaping wound that Glorian's weapon had opened there. Then she scrubbed at it for an instant and the wound healed in a blaze of light. "Someone," she hissed. "Someone did this to me." The cell, the re-appearing trailer, Glorian's astral image all shimmered for an instant and then images began to flicker between them. Emma Frost, as she looked now, on the front of business magazines, the front of fashion magazines, articles about awards and patents, the Forbes Rich List - pictures Emma had taken from the internet in the last few days, pictures whose reality she rejected, utterly and viscerally. "Why would anyone do this to me?" she said, and it was almost a cry. "Making me think this is possible? Making me think I can be something? I live in a cell, my brother is dead, my sisters hate me, daddy dearest... daddy dearest..." Emma couldn't finish that one. "They fill me with drugs and they fill up my head with thoughts and all the people are mad and it's like razor blades in my head and I can't even stop him coming to my room at night and fucking me until I bleed and someone wants to make me think that none of that is real? That I have control? That I have power? That I can make people do what I want? It's all real and I have to believe in it, because when this wears off I have to live in it and I have to survive it and I can't do that if I believe in this."
The pictures whirled away and disappeared and the cell came back. "So," added Emma, implacably. "You are not real." And she reached out again and hammered another blow at Glorian's image.
This time there was no defense. Memories tore at him: father's words cutting into her while her brother and sisters watched, mother's voice deafening in its absence. Actions never good enough for a father, but a body good enough for his eyes -- and the slimy film inside of his skull as he looked at her. The institution, with its shocks and injections and pills and that man, that man she always lay awake listening for in the night, all the while thinking how grand it would be to watch him bleed for once. Mother visiting her, but not to take her away, no, just to tell her that Christian was dead while she lolled in a fog of drugs, the ache between her legs still fresh.
The diamond-sharp shards of Emma's will tore into him, and Glorian's personality crumbled like a shore in the face of a hurricane.
When the onslaught was finally over, Emma's sixteen-year old visage raised her head and met herself in the eyes.
They didn’t let her have mirrors in the asylum, unwilling to let anything that could be broken into lethal shards within reach of any of the inmates. For the first time since she had been committed, Emma Frost looked herself in the eyes, standing in a room that had now stabilised into the cell she had spent so much of her time in.
“This is reality,” whispered Emma to herself. “This is what we are.” Her astral self reached out a hand, touched her own cheek gently. “There’s no escape.” She lowered her hand back to her side, closing her eyes for a moment.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” she whispered and opened her eyes again. “I don’t want you to be anymore.”
What tore from Emma’s mind and into every mind around her was a telepathic howl of rage, every ounce of her short lifetime’s loathing and pain concentrated into a shattering wave aimed at the image in front of her, intent on obliterating herself from the world as it stood. And that reality formed the centre of that telepathic wave, a reality wrapped around a core of emotional pain so intense that Emma’s sixteen-year old mind could no longer hold it in check. Instead, she let it out, accepting reality completely and trying hard to cut herself out of the heart of it.
The mind that had once been Glorian's reached out to embrace the promise of that un-being, the relief of finally finding an end. But as the oblivion began to overtake him, some tiny splinter that was still Glorian stood fast. The resistance was born of neither will nor bravery, but from a single base desire: to live.
Unaware even as he did, Glorian struck out with his only defense -- the ploy that had served him well for all those unremembered years. He reached for Emma's mind, into all those images of fame and success rejected by a wounded girl in the depths of misery, and made them real.
Them, and the reality they carried.
Cypher:
Doug staggered a single step, a muted grunt the only sound that came from him, and that only because the pain was almost too overwhelming for him to actually give full voice to it. He almost completely ignored the blood dripping down from his nose onto his shirt. He was too busy reliving the past seven years in approximately seven seconds - every last mistake, every last physical and emotional hurt. He remembered again. He remembered it all, and he remembered who was responsible, and who he blamed, despite the tentative promise to Marie-Ange. He could see his other teammates clutching at their heads in pain, but his own internal pain was too much to be around anyone else. He staggered to the door of his server room, and there was the click of the door opening, the click of it closing, and the click of a lock engaging, followed by a metallic ringing like the sound of a spinning coin hitting a table, then silence.
Daytripper:
The first headache wasn't bad, in the sense that Amanda had been getting magic-related headaches for years. But the second one... With a muffled cry she grabbed at her head, blood dripping from her nose as she grabbed for the back of a chair to balance herself. Her grab missed and she staggered, going down onto her knees.
Deadpool:
Wade's shoulder blades hit the wall behind him as the first wave of pain hit and he thought he'd be alright, but then the second blindsided him and the room tilted to the left. Raising one hand, he pressed his palm against his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut in an effort to make the vertigo-induced nausea subside. It didn't really help - and neither did the realization that, for the last three days, he'd thought he was sixteen.
Jubilee:
Jubilee had been thrown about before, had broken arms and been clawed by a demon. It was due to these various experiences that she could say with complete and utter honesty that the pain that hit her head was the worst experience she'd had in her life so far. If she'd been any younger or less experienced, she totally would've hurled up her cookies at the rolling, twisting and pulling sensation that seemed to send her thoughts in a hundred different directions at once.
She reached up to feel a wetness at her nose, pulling away fingers coated in a thin film of crimson blood. 'What the holy hell am I wearing?' was her last coherent thought before the void of unconsciousness took her down to the ground in a heap.
Scarlet Witch:
It happened so quickly that Wanda's powers had no ability to counteract the sudden intrusion and kick out the telepathic sledgehammer. She found herself coughing up blood and phlegm as the pain exploded into a thousand stars behind her eyes.
It made it a thousand times worse that at the same time she was riding the pain out, everything from the last few days started to click. The fear and confusion from then interlaced with the now and it left her panting on her hands and knees as she spat out mouthful after mouthful of blood.
And underneath it, the only thing she could think was "Oh fuck, Stephen".
Storm:
The sensation hit Ororo like a thunderclap. One moment she was on her feet, the next she was bent over the nearest potted plant, retching into the dirt. Up came the bad tacos, the sludgy soda she had drunk, the bitter coffee. Head throbbing, neck aching, she clung to the leafy green decoration as she emptied her stomach and rode out the waves of pain.
Tarot:
In her office, that she still didn't think was really hers, Marie-Ange's descent to the floor was quiet except for the soft thud as she slid down the wall. She crumpled and wrapped her arms around her head in a useless effort to shield herself from the pain that had gone from dull headache to migraine. The lights were too bright, even the sound of her own breathing was far far too loud and it was just too much. She knew there were pills in the desk, it was just so very far away, all the way on the other side of her legs.
She managed to pull one leg up to her chest, and then the pain got worse, past migraine, and if her limbs hadn't been made of rubber and jelly, she'd have done her best to try to knock herself out, or crawl under the desk. As it was, all she could do was whimper and let her tears soak through the material of her shirt.
Maverick:
When the pain hit, it hit him like a sledgehammer swung at full force at his head. David clenched his teeth and locked his throat against the scream that wanted so badly to be let loose even as he forced his body to take the last two steps towards the bed. He barely made it, torso hitting its surface with a loud thump. As the sledgehammer swung around for round two, the pain intensified and he curled in on himself as he best could in the awkward position. Lids squeezed shut over darkened blue as he let out a pained hiss -- the only sound that was allowed to escape before he shoved a mouthful of shirt in his mouth and bit down hard on it. Pain was a close acquaintance of his. He could remember that now. So he rode the waves of pain like a champion, while consciousness watched on.
Emma:
A side-effect of an instantaneous download of more than twenty years of telepathic skills was that Emma was able to catch the telepathic backlash as she cut off the destructive wave she had aimed at Glorian’s/her own astral image and dissipate it around her reconstructed shields without a single conscious thought. Still without thinking about it, she stepped off the Astral Plane and back into the office, reaching out to each of the moaning inhabitants with a swift tendril, assessing the level of pain and determining that none, even Glorian, were likely to suffer any permanent damage from what she had done.
She had forgotten.
Oh, it was still in her head, those memories, that time. But it was – lessened. By time, by other memories, by a great deal of delicate telepathic work.
But now she could feel it again, sharp and bright, so fresh that she could still feel the ache between her legs, the razor-blades in her head, the fear that was always there, the fog of uncontrol.
She had tried to kill herself.
She had forgotten how hard it had been not to want to die.
She had never given in. She had never let herself feel that way. She had held on, beneath everything, with iron will and she had never let herself want to die. Until now. Until this time. Until she had poured every ounce of her energy into making herself not be.
Until she had failed at every teenage vow she had made to herself to never let them break her and she had broken.
Blindly, Emma stepped around the moaning, bleeding people on the floor and made her way to her office, closing and locking the door behind herself, carefully and softly, then drew down the blinds.
It was only when she knew that no-one could see her or hear her or, worst of all, seek to offer her comfort that she allowed the tears to flow and wondered only if she would ever be able to make them end.
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Date: 2012-01-12 10:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-12 03:30 pm (UTC)