Breakdown - Logs 11-12
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xp_logsJean and Maya try to get information about their plans from the captured Purifier.
There was something a little satisfying about seeing a Purifier tied and struggling in a chair. They had to keep him conscious so Jean could work, especially since they were running out of time. The longer Esme remained out of the Purifiers' grasp, the more incentive they had to blow up the building on their own.
A bead of sweat rolled down Jean's face as she locked eyes with the Purifier, who swallowed uneasily.
"What are you doing? This is some mind mojo, isn't it? Don't even think about it. You're an abomination. Devil. Spawn of Satan," he said, pulling up against the ties fruitlessly.
Jean tilted her head, her breathing quick and erratic. "Didn't..the Lord say...' thou shalt...not kill.'But you're...you're...going to kill innocent people. Who's....the abomination?" she said. She grimaced, eyes fluttering.
The man laughed. "Innocent? Any who give those touched by Beezlebub refuge or care are not innocent. They are just as guilty. And they will be made examples to those who dare stand against the purification of the unclean from this world."
Maya had been attempting to follow the conversation, at least from Jean's side but frankly, she didn't particularly care what the bad guy had to say, so didn't feel any need to truly keep an eye on his lips in order to understand his ravings.
"Can we be done talking to crazy now? The guy obviously doesn't know anything or he'd be blabbing it to us by now to save his own skin."
"He thinks he's prepared to die for what he believes in," Jean said, studying him. "A righteous cause."
“Wait. Isn’t that white God all about loving one another or something?” Maya asked, keeping a close eye on Jean’s mouth to make sure she missed nothing. “How is killing sick people and babies righteous?”
"Sometimes the only way to stop the rot is to burn it out so deep it can never come back. Salted, blessed, purified." His smile was wide, eyes bright. "Ready for God to build anew."
"Right," Jean said. Narrowed her eyes. "You won't be doing that much witnessing of this new world if you're dead. Know what it's like to burn, Thomas?" She met his eyes.
"Do you want to know? You can tell me where the bomb is...or you can find out early just what it feels like."
Thomas spat at her face. "A cleansing fire, filthy witch. Trying to poison my brain with your tricks and lies. You don't have the conviction."
Jean gave him a light smile, keeping her gaze with his. The spit mixed with the blood and sweat already on her ashen face. She wiped it away. "Do you?"
Leaning in closer, she tilted her head, an unnerving look on Jean's face. The air around them started to fill with smoke. Then the room exploded, the sound of shattering glass and concrete erupting around them. His body caught on fire, skin bubbling and splitting.
"Do you think God smiles upon you?"
“Jean? Um….Hello?”
Maya didn’t want to interrupt whatever was going on but standing there like a bump on a log while they stared at each other was getting just a teeny bit creepy.
Thomas struggled not to scream as he felt his body burning, refusing to give the abomination smiling down at him the satisfaction. "Perhaps... a clue," he gasped out, coughing from the sensation of smoke filling the room. "Tested... failed..." A scream wrenched from him as he felt the fire running up his legs. "EAST, you loathsome thing."
“Ahh,” Maya responded, figuring Jean must be doing something but unsure what. Only, she had no idea what the guy was referring to right now. “East what?”
"East side of the building," Jean said, opening her eyes. "Radiology lab."
She looked back at the man but spoke to Maya instead. "You can knock him out now. We're done."
Maya didn’t need to be told twice, twitching her left hand toward the Pacifier’s neck before reversing and hitting him on the other. It was done in seconds, the man slumping into the chair where they’d tied him.
“Is it smart to leave him here?”
"I'll be staying here with him. I can't move. I'm dead weight. You'll need to find the bomb maker. Do you think you can do that?" Jean said.
“I can do that.”
Maya stood up straighter, trying to give the look of someone who knew what they were getting themselves into even as uneasiness coiled in her gut. She couldn’t turn herself into light like Nica, a bullet would end her quickly in the right spot.
“Will I be able to hear you if I’m far away?”
"Not sure," Jean admitted. "I'll try but...I don't know what else to do."
“I should fix your leg before I go.”
Maya had noticed the pain Jean was in, despite her efforts to appear unaffected. If she was going to leave them here, she wanted to make sure Jean was as good as she could make her.
Jean let out a breath. "Okay," she said. "The supplies Quentin grabbed should still be out in the hallway."
Maya nodded and ran to grab them, giving the unconscious Purifier a wary glance as she moved past them.
She wheeled the hospital cart with the supplies into the room and gave Jean an uncertain glance.
“Um, I’ve never actually done this before but if you could show me what to do, I can do it.”
Licking her lips, Jean nodded. "It's okay. We'll do it together," she said. She reached out a bloody, trembling hand, pointing toward some gauze.
"F-First I need you to get the tree branch out. It's going to hurt me so you'll have to put something in my mouth."
“Okay.”
Maya clamped down on the brief panic in her mind, giving herself a pep talk she was sure Jean could hear. She needed to do this to make sure Jean didn’t die, so she’d do it. She was a bad bitch, time to prove that shit.
They’d already managed to take off most of the tree branch to make it easier for Jean to move, so she needed to take off the bandages they’d packed around it and the brace they’d used. She looked around and noticed a set of sheets and pillowcases. Making a quick calculation she pulled several off the shelf and folded them into a pad to give to Jean before winding off the bandages as gently as she could.
“Can you keep awake for this? I don’t really know anything outside of first aid if you go unconscious.”
Jean smiled weakly. "I'll try my best," she said.
"Okay. Coolcoolcool."
One the third repetition, an almost involuntary Jake Peralta impersonation, Maya pulled at the tree branch, trying to get it out of Jean's leg in one calculated, smooth movement but she knew even as she pulled, there'd be wood left over, and the spurt of blood that came with it almost had her seeing stars it was such a bright and shocking red. Even brighter and darker than the colour of Jean's hair.
Jean had part of her shirt in her mouth as Maya pulled. Her focus was on the veins in her leg, keeping a telekinetic barrier around the area of the wound so that she wouldn't bleed out. The force of the pull caused her to shriek, but her shirt muffled some of the sound, her body convulsing from the pain. Her breathing was quick as she dug her fingernails into the sides of the chair she was sitting in.
After it was out her head slammed against the chair and rolled to the side, her eyes fluttering.
"F---" She let out a groan.
"Stay with me!" Maya looked up at her in panic, her hands she'd slipped latex gloves onto slippery around the tree branch as she dropped it to the side and straightened out Jean's leg from where she'd tried to draw it into her body. "You need to show me how to fix this. What do I do next?"
It felt like Jean's blood was roaring in her ears. Her stomach twisted, and the answer to Maya was dry-heaving onto the floor. Biting back another couple of moans, she brushed some of her tears away before sucking in a breath. "Stitches...internal ones. Dissolvable. I can...I can walk you through it if I..." she tapped her own temple, then extended a shaky hand to her forehead.
“Okay, okay. Um. Just send me a memory of what you need me to do, I’ll be able to copy that.”
Maya’s power had been able to copy from videos before, so a memory sent telepathically should be good enough. She hoped.
She pulled down the packet that had a fresh needle and another that had what she hoped was the right type of thread. You had to use the stuff that dissolved when you were sewing internal stuff right?
She looked at the wound, controlling the roll her stomach did at the sight of Jean’s blood and then pulled down another packet that held tweezers. She was going to have to clean the wound.
Jean focused on her breathing as she focused on remembering one of the incidents she'd seen previously while working for the Mutant Underground. It was a teenage boy who had fallen climbing a fence. "How many times do you need...to see it?" she said.
“Once is enough.” Maya had looked up in time to read Jean’s lips but tapped her head. “As long as it’s clear and you can feed me the whole thing, I can copy it.”
Nodding, Jean closed her eyes and entered Maya's mind, feeding her the memory of her sewing up the hole in the boy's leg. It was a hot, humid night, and he was on the run, trying to cross the border from one country to another for the sake of asylum. When the boy and his family had gotten to their small tent camp in the South American jungle it'd been about 20 minutes since it happened.
Jean worked by lamp light, moths fluttering to it as the nurse with her cleaned the wound with water and antiseptic. The boy's screams pierced her ears, his blood darkening the stretcher he lay on as Jean worked to mend his wounds with careful, delicate stitches, pulling the broken tendons and muscles back together after numbing the wound as best she could with local anesthetic. His mother held the boy's shoulders down, reassuring him that everything would be okay. He pleaded for his mother, gripping her hand tightly with one hand, while the other arm was being used for an IV to give him blood, followed by a decent amount of painkillers.
After what seemed like forever, she finished the internal stitches then worked on the external ones with stronger stitches before covering the patched up wound with gauze. By then the boy had quieted down, and his mother laid a kiss on his forehead, thanking Jean for her work. Jean spared the nurse a look before going behind a curtain to wash her hands.
The memory ended.
Maya’s eyes had started to glow as she lost herself in the memory Jean shared. She let her power kick in as it shoved her back slightly, almost like an observer as her hands took up the work.
She worked silently, the control to do this sort of work still new to her and completely unlike when she used her power for fighting.
She hoped Jean was okay but she didn’t have the concentration to check on that either.
Watching Maya was much like watching a robot that happened to mirror Jean's own memory, though it was odd to see it from her perspective. Or at least she would have thought that had she not been trying to keep the blood inside while remaining calm. But she was just so goddamn tired that it was a chore in and of itself. Charles made it seem so easy, but he'd never really experienced anything like this.
Still, before they knew it Maya had finished, and Jean put her hand on her arm. The trick with some of these things was not all bodies were the same. It was entirely possible she'd be fine but she'd lost a lot of blood. This just made sure she wouldn't lose anymore.
"Thank you," she said.
Maya hadn’t heard her, still ensconced in her power as her hands moved to secure a bandage and then shuddered slightly as there was nowhere to complete the mirror of cleaning them.
She snapped back to herself, wincing softly at the throb that had kicked in behind her eyes. She was going to need some Tylenol at the end of all of this.
She smiled up at Jean, pulling the gloves off and chucking them in the bio-waste bin that had accompanied the trolley.
“I gotta go find that bomb maker now. Um, stay in my head if you can? I’d feel better if you can see what I’m seeing.”
A lucky break turns out to be far more damaging than anything.
Nica watched Maya head off with trepidation, wishing she could go with her to watch her back. But with Jean injured, someone needed to be there to protect Esme. "What now?" she asked aloud, not really sure who she was directing it towards.
Jean fell silent for a moment or two. She wasn't sure what to tell the young woman. It'd all gone to hell. She just hoped they could crawl back from it. As she started to speak, she spotted something sticking out of one of the Purifiers' vests.
"Is...is that a phone?"
Nica pounced on the flat rectangle, making a gleeful noise as it revealed itself to be a phone indeed. "It works!" she exclaimed as the screen lit up and showed a strong connection. "I guess they were able to exempt certain cell signals from the shielding."
"Probably a...sat phone," Jean said, trying to focus on her breathing. "Okay...call Garrison...see how much time we have." She gave her Garrison's number.
"I do not need duct cleaning. I rent." Kane said into the anonymous number on his phone.
“What? No! Mr Kane it’s Nica here. We talked before? When you said you’d bring the team? You did bring the team, didn’t you? To get the little girl back?”
"Nica? I'm just about to go in to get Maria. Team is ready to move." His voice began to crackled on the line. "We've got--- a fixed--- if they--- ambergris--" The last was lost in a wash of static.
"Garrison?" Jean blinked. "Nica...can you try him back?"
"I'm trying." Nica was holding the phone up, trying to get a better signal, but was rewarded only by the busy signal. "Fuck!" She looked at the two other women with an expression of almost despair. "I lost them."
Esme had been ignoring them until this moment. It didn't matter who they were talking to on the phone but when she heard "i lost them", it snapped her back. "Lost them? Lost who? What happened? Oh my god, my Maria." Her hands flew to her mouth in shock, her eyes welling with an almost inexhaustable supply of tears. "Que paso? What is going on? Oh god, my girl...." More sobs escaped from the woman who could no longer try to calm down.
"Hey, don't worry, these guys know what they're doing. I'm sure it's just a technical glitch, dropped signal, you know..." Nica wasn't really aware of what she was saying as she kept poking at the phone. "Come on..."
It made no sense. The sadder and more frustrated Esme was getting, the angerier and hotter she was feeling inside. How could they even understand what she was going through? The pain and turmoil she had inside? And this ... kid was trying to calm her down? Impossible. "No one can do anything!" There was a heat to her fists, a building up welling deep within. "No one! It may as well be me, I need to do something."
There was something a little satisfying about seeing a Purifier tied and struggling in a chair. They had to keep him conscious so Jean could work, especially since they were running out of time. The longer Esme remained out of the Purifiers' grasp, the more incentive they had to blow up the building on their own.
A bead of sweat rolled down Jean's face as she locked eyes with the Purifier, who swallowed uneasily.
"What are you doing? This is some mind mojo, isn't it? Don't even think about it. You're an abomination. Devil. Spawn of Satan," he said, pulling up against the ties fruitlessly.
Jean tilted her head, her breathing quick and erratic. "Didn't..the Lord say...' thou shalt...not kill.'But you're...you're...going to kill innocent people. Who's....the abomination?" she said. She grimaced, eyes fluttering.
The man laughed. "Innocent? Any who give those touched by Beezlebub refuge or care are not innocent. They are just as guilty. And they will be made examples to those who dare stand against the purification of the unclean from this world."
Maya had been attempting to follow the conversation, at least from Jean's side but frankly, she didn't particularly care what the bad guy had to say, so didn't feel any need to truly keep an eye on his lips in order to understand his ravings.
"Can we be done talking to crazy now? The guy obviously doesn't know anything or he'd be blabbing it to us by now to save his own skin."
"He thinks he's prepared to die for what he believes in," Jean said, studying him. "A righteous cause."
“Wait. Isn’t that white God all about loving one another or something?” Maya asked, keeping a close eye on Jean’s mouth to make sure she missed nothing. “How is killing sick people and babies righteous?”
"Sometimes the only way to stop the rot is to burn it out so deep it can never come back. Salted, blessed, purified." His smile was wide, eyes bright. "Ready for God to build anew."
"Right," Jean said. Narrowed her eyes. "You won't be doing that much witnessing of this new world if you're dead. Know what it's like to burn, Thomas?" She met his eyes.
"Do you want to know? You can tell me where the bomb is...or you can find out early just what it feels like."
Thomas spat at her face. "A cleansing fire, filthy witch. Trying to poison my brain with your tricks and lies. You don't have the conviction."
Jean gave him a light smile, keeping her gaze with his. The spit mixed with the blood and sweat already on her ashen face. She wiped it away. "Do you?"
Leaning in closer, she tilted her head, an unnerving look on Jean's face. The air around them started to fill with smoke. Then the room exploded, the sound of shattering glass and concrete erupting around them. His body caught on fire, skin bubbling and splitting.
"Do you think God smiles upon you?"
“Jean? Um….Hello?”
Maya didn’t want to interrupt whatever was going on but standing there like a bump on a log while they stared at each other was getting just a teeny bit creepy.
Thomas struggled not to scream as he felt his body burning, refusing to give the abomination smiling down at him the satisfaction. "Perhaps... a clue," he gasped out, coughing from the sensation of smoke filling the room. "Tested... failed..." A scream wrenched from him as he felt the fire running up his legs. "EAST, you loathsome thing."
“Ahh,” Maya responded, figuring Jean must be doing something but unsure what. Only, she had no idea what the guy was referring to right now. “East what?”
"East side of the building," Jean said, opening her eyes. "Radiology lab."
She looked back at the man but spoke to Maya instead. "You can knock him out now. We're done."
Maya didn’t need to be told twice, twitching her left hand toward the Pacifier’s neck before reversing and hitting him on the other. It was done in seconds, the man slumping into the chair where they’d tied him.
“Is it smart to leave him here?”
"I'll be staying here with him. I can't move. I'm dead weight. You'll need to find the bomb maker. Do you think you can do that?" Jean said.
“I can do that.”
Maya stood up straighter, trying to give the look of someone who knew what they were getting themselves into even as uneasiness coiled in her gut. She couldn’t turn herself into light like Nica, a bullet would end her quickly in the right spot.
“Will I be able to hear you if I’m far away?”
"Not sure," Jean admitted. "I'll try but...I don't know what else to do."
“I should fix your leg before I go.”
Maya had noticed the pain Jean was in, despite her efforts to appear unaffected. If she was going to leave them here, she wanted to make sure Jean was as good as she could make her.
Jean let out a breath. "Okay," she said. "The supplies Quentin grabbed should still be out in the hallway."
Maya nodded and ran to grab them, giving the unconscious Purifier a wary glance as she moved past them.
She wheeled the hospital cart with the supplies into the room and gave Jean an uncertain glance.
“Um, I’ve never actually done this before but if you could show me what to do, I can do it.”
Licking her lips, Jean nodded. "It's okay. We'll do it together," she said. She reached out a bloody, trembling hand, pointing toward some gauze.
"F-First I need you to get the tree branch out. It's going to hurt me so you'll have to put something in my mouth."
“Okay.”
Maya clamped down on the brief panic in her mind, giving herself a pep talk she was sure Jean could hear. She needed to do this to make sure Jean didn’t die, so she’d do it. She was a bad bitch, time to prove that shit.
They’d already managed to take off most of the tree branch to make it easier for Jean to move, so she needed to take off the bandages they’d packed around it and the brace they’d used. She looked around and noticed a set of sheets and pillowcases. Making a quick calculation she pulled several off the shelf and folded them into a pad to give to Jean before winding off the bandages as gently as she could.
“Can you keep awake for this? I don’t really know anything outside of first aid if you go unconscious.”
Jean smiled weakly. "I'll try my best," she said.
"Okay. Coolcoolcool."
One the third repetition, an almost involuntary Jake Peralta impersonation, Maya pulled at the tree branch, trying to get it out of Jean's leg in one calculated, smooth movement but she knew even as she pulled, there'd be wood left over, and the spurt of blood that came with it almost had her seeing stars it was such a bright and shocking red. Even brighter and darker than the colour of Jean's hair.
Jean had part of her shirt in her mouth as Maya pulled. Her focus was on the veins in her leg, keeping a telekinetic barrier around the area of the wound so that she wouldn't bleed out. The force of the pull caused her to shriek, but her shirt muffled some of the sound, her body convulsing from the pain. Her breathing was quick as she dug her fingernails into the sides of the chair she was sitting in.
After it was out her head slammed against the chair and rolled to the side, her eyes fluttering.
"F---" She let out a groan.
"Stay with me!" Maya looked up at her in panic, her hands she'd slipped latex gloves onto slippery around the tree branch as she dropped it to the side and straightened out Jean's leg from where she'd tried to draw it into her body. "You need to show me how to fix this. What do I do next?"
It felt like Jean's blood was roaring in her ears. Her stomach twisted, and the answer to Maya was dry-heaving onto the floor. Biting back another couple of moans, she brushed some of her tears away before sucking in a breath. "Stitches...internal ones. Dissolvable. I can...I can walk you through it if I..." she tapped her own temple, then extended a shaky hand to her forehead.
“Okay, okay. Um. Just send me a memory of what you need me to do, I’ll be able to copy that.”
Maya’s power had been able to copy from videos before, so a memory sent telepathically should be good enough. She hoped.
She pulled down the packet that had a fresh needle and another that had what she hoped was the right type of thread. You had to use the stuff that dissolved when you were sewing internal stuff right?
She looked at the wound, controlling the roll her stomach did at the sight of Jean’s blood and then pulled down another packet that held tweezers. She was going to have to clean the wound.
Jean focused on her breathing as she focused on remembering one of the incidents she'd seen previously while working for the Mutant Underground. It was a teenage boy who had fallen climbing a fence. "How many times do you need...to see it?" she said.
“Once is enough.” Maya had looked up in time to read Jean’s lips but tapped her head. “As long as it’s clear and you can feed me the whole thing, I can copy it.”
Nodding, Jean closed her eyes and entered Maya's mind, feeding her the memory of her sewing up the hole in the boy's leg. It was a hot, humid night, and he was on the run, trying to cross the border from one country to another for the sake of asylum. When the boy and his family had gotten to their small tent camp in the South American jungle it'd been about 20 minutes since it happened.
Jean worked by lamp light, moths fluttering to it as the nurse with her cleaned the wound with water and antiseptic. The boy's screams pierced her ears, his blood darkening the stretcher he lay on as Jean worked to mend his wounds with careful, delicate stitches, pulling the broken tendons and muscles back together after numbing the wound as best she could with local anesthetic. His mother held the boy's shoulders down, reassuring him that everything would be okay. He pleaded for his mother, gripping her hand tightly with one hand, while the other arm was being used for an IV to give him blood, followed by a decent amount of painkillers.
After what seemed like forever, she finished the internal stitches then worked on the external ones with stronger stitches before covering the patched up wound with gauze. By then the boy had quieted down, and his mother laid a kiss on his forehead, thanking Jean for her work. Jean spared the nurse a look before going behind a curtain to wash her hands.
The memory ended.
Maya’s eyes had started to glow as she lost herself in the memory Jean shared. She let her power kick in as it shoved her back slightly, almost like an observer as her hands took up the work.
She worked silently, the control to do this sort of work still new to her and completely unlike when she used her power for fighting.
She hoped Jean was okay but she didn’t have the concentration to check on that either.
Watching Maya was much like watching a robot that happened to mirror Jean's own memory, though it was odd to see it from her perspective. Or at least she would have thought that had she not been trying to keep the blood inside while remaining calm. But she was just so goddamn tired that it was a chore in and of itself. Charles made it seem so easy, but he'd never really experienced anything like this.
Still, before they knew it Maya had finished, and Jean put her hand on her arm. The trick with some of these things was not all bodies were the same. It was entirely possible she'd be fine but she'd lost a lot of blood. This just made sure she wouldn't lose anymore.
"Thank you," she said.
Maya hadn’t heard her, still ensconced in her power as her hands moved to secure a bandage and then shuddered slightly as there was nowhere to complete the mirror of cleaning them.
She snapped back to herself, wincing softly at the throb that had kicked in behind her eyes. She was going to need some Tylenol at the end of all of this.
She smiled up at Jean, pulling the gloves off and chucking them in the bio-waste bin that had accompanied the trolley.
“I gotta go find that bomb maker now. Um, stay in my head if you can? I’d feel better if you can see what I’m seeing.”
A lucky break turns out to be far more damaging than anything.
Nica watched Maya head off with trepidation, wishing she could go with her to watch her back. But with Jean injured, someone needed to be there to protect Esme. "What now?" she asked aloud, not really sure who she was directing it towards.
Jean fell silent for a moment or two. She wasn't sure what to tell the young woman. It'd all gone to hell. She just hoped they could crawl back from it. As she started to speak, she spotted something sticking out of one of the Purifiers' vests.
"Is...is that a phone?"
Nica pounced on the flat rectangle, making a gleeful noise as it revealed itself to be a phone indeed. "It works!" she exclaimed as the screen lit up and showed a strong connection. "I guess they were able to exempt certain cell signals from the shielding."
"Probably a...sat phone," Jean said, trying to focus on her breathing. "Okay...call Garrison...see how much time we have." She gave her Garrison's number.
"I do not need duct cleaning. I rent." Kane said into the anonymous number on his phone.
“What? No! Mr Kane it’s Nica here. We talked before? When you said you’d bring the team? You did bring the team, didn’t you? To get the little girl back?”
"Nica? I'm just about to go in to get Maria. Team is ready to move." His voice began to crackled on the line. "We've got--- a fixed--- if they--- ambergris--" The last was lost in a wash of static.
"Garrison?" Jean blinked. "Nica...can you try him back?"
"I'm trying." Nica was holding the phone up, trying to get a better signal, but was rewarded only by the busy signal. "Fuck!" She looked at the two other women with an expression of almost despair. "I lost them."
Esme had been ignoring them until this moment. It didn't matter who they were talking to on the phone but when she heard "i lost them", it snapped her back. "Lost them? Lost who? What happened? Oh my god, my Maria." Her hands flew to her mouth in shock, her eyes welling with an almost inexhaustable supply of tears. "Que paso? What is going on? Oh god, my girl...." More sobs escaped from the woman who could no longer try to calm down.
"Hey, don't worry, these guys know what they're doing. I'm sure it's just a technical glitch, dropped signal, you know..." Nica wasn't really aware of what she was saying as she kept poking at the phone. "Come on..."
It made no sense. The sadder and more frustrated Esme was getting, the angerier and hotter she was feeling inside. How could they even understand what she was going through? The pain and turmoil she had inside? And this ... kid was trying to calm her down? Impossible. "No one can do anything!" There was a heat to her fists, a building up welling deep within. "No one! It may as well be me, I need to do something."
