Amanda & Arthur | Debrief

[xp_longshot]

Amanda debriefs Arthur on what he saw in District X with Death. He defaults to old habits at first, but eventually drops the act.



He knew it was coming.

Arthur shut his eyes against the light. The world was coming back and holding together lately instead of fuzzy at the edges. A benefit of the gift of super healing blood, if anything.

The inhibitor on him itched. The cast itched. The captivity itched. He itched to share the full truth of what lurked in his head.

There had been more changes in the room around him, but each addition felt less like a puzzle and more like a sign of how long he'd been stuck. There was now a pile of cozy mysteries, a lot like the one he'd once gotten someone as a gift, scattered around like presents. A Shot in the Bark. Paw Enforcement. There were even more images scattered on the walls. Pictures of him, asleep. Felix everywhere. It made the room surreal. Like mirrors.

He was drifting again.

"I'm sorry," and he was really starting to feel the weight of it, "I lost myself."

A hand was placed over his, patting soothingly. "Hey," Amanda said softly. "No need to apologise. Just breathe."

Arthur didn't need his gloves with the power inhibitor, but the act of touch still made him wince. His act of trying to hide it behind a smile left his expression stuck somewhere between. "Amanda Sefton," came out clear and pleasant. "I guess my luck has come back."

He tugged on the corners of the grimace at the obvious joke.

Her hand withdrew immediately with the wince/smile/grimace. "Flattery will get you . . . well, Not much different than no flattery, to be honest," she replied with a smile. "Angie asked me to come talk to you. Well, debrief you, really. You up for it?"

A sharper tug, and his full smile appeared like a man putting on discarded armor. "I was born ready."

Arthur scooted himself up as far as possible to better set himself at eye level with his visitor. His eyes had a steel to them behind the cliché, and it was clear that he had been waiting. "Marie-Ange trusts you, and that's enough for me.” Best to start with the easiest truth. “This thing — what I saw — I can't get it out of my head. Is this just a monologue from my side? A one man show? I've never done this before." Next, go with what he knew.

"Let's get the monologue first. What you remember from the reading, no interruptions. I'll record you, and make notes of anything I need to go back to." She illustrated the point by pulling her phone and a small battered notepad from the inside pocket of her jacket. "If you need a break, we can take one, but I'd like to get it from you raw, as it were."

He took the deepest breath he could manage. Four seconds in, four seconds held, four seconds out.

"Alright," Arthur said. "Showtime."

Amanda set her phone on the bedside table and opened the recording function. Holding his gaze, she nodded briefly. "When you're ready," she said, and hit "record".

His smile was practiced, and his tone was professional.

"My name is Arthur Centino, and I can see the past of objects I touch. It isn't always useful, sure, since I only get one person's perspective. It helps sometimes.”

There was a slight pause as Arthur looked over to make sure he was doing this correctly.

"I read a fragment of armor that fell from the Horseman in DX." He did not name Marius. "I did not see it fall off, but it was the same grey-green as the rest of him. It had the cult symbol on it. I . . . "

Arthur shut his eyes. The practiced tone drained from his words like his little preamble had been rehearsed. The memory was creeping in. He’d gotten better at shutting it out by twisting it into a scene from a movie; by removing the personal stakes.

"I wanted to help. The vision was old. Not classic Hollywood, but like some ancient periodic pieces mixed with Bela Lugosi. Vintage. I was in a maze, and there was chanting. I was taken to an altar. I —"

He shook his head in an attempt to clear the memory. "Wouldn't this be easier with a telepath?"

"Maybe. But they also wouldn't know what they were seeing. And I don't think anyone wants in my brain at the moment — I'm still pretty tangled up with New York." Amanda tapped her pen on her notepad. "Keep going."

"The hooded figures in the vision. They," and Arthur's mask was cracking, "had a black knife, and carved into me as part of a ritual. Again and again, and they wouldn't stop chanting. It was too much, and I had to pull back out of the vision." That was technically true.

"What was too much? The pain? Or were you feeling something else?"

He put on his most practiced smile. "Oh. That's just a scene direction, a parenthetical. I just also feel everything in what I see. As if I'm th —," but there he caught himself and put that thought away. "David calls it 'empathic mirroring'."

"Oh, I know. But with magic rituals, there's a lot of energy being passed around. Pain too, but that isn't all it is. And for this one, I would have thought there'd be something more, something powerful." Her expression was shrewd as she looked up at him, giving him a chance to be honest without her actually calling him out.

"Oh?" Obfuscation was a favorite tool, but Arthur had been learning quite painfully how too many half truths added up. He tested carefully, "There were unfamiliar symbols on the walls and the floors. Nothing I had seen before? Usually there's some 'oh, like hieroglyphs' moment when it comes to sets. Lots of incense. We had to walk a long, winding path, but I don't know all that much about magic."

Amanda leaned over and stopped the recording. When she sat back in the chair again, her expression was stern. "All right, Arthur. I know this is traumatic, but you have to stop giving me the runaround. It's not a movie, so stop giving me this bollocks about set design. You felt more with that empathic mirroring of yours and I need to know all of it. The emotions, the energy, the presence. And I won't leave until you start being straight with me."

"Ah," Arthur winced. He raised his good hand, letting the active power inhibitor shine in the light. The man's expression flattened into a mask. "I keep forgetting about this," and he let the bracelet jangle some more. "You have to know, Amanda, I can't stop seeing and feeling what I saw. But . . . I'm free. There are usually so many rules I make for myself." His voice tipped up a little at the end, giddy at the prospect.

He lowered the hand, crossing it with his other. "Let's roll it back."

Amanda nodded and pressed the record button again. "Let's have it, then."

"My name is Arthur Centino," and this time there was neither the ease of practice or blocker of hesitation in his voice, "and I can see through time. I experience what I see like I'm there. I feel everything, and I saw a part of what it was like being turned into one of those Horseman twice. I also . . . I saw a future in which Marius Laverne lived." He gestured toward Amanda's notebook with a flourish, "And I'm going to need some paper."

Some time later, the space between the two had been filled with a portable writing surface, water, and an assorted mixture of sketches. The images were far from art or anything a more experienced hand might have produced, but they were the strange marriage of investigative detective with years of stage experience: the placement of key actors in scenes, notes on choreography, and, more than all the rest, a draftsman's take on the symbols witnessed in recesses of time and far more recently. The most abstract of these were a set of notes that branched like a flowchart, the progression of chance — the view from above. All were drawn surely with the confidence of someone who had been there only recently. Someone who couldn't forget.

Arthur himself was worse for wear at the end of it all. Sweaty and tired from the effort of being only able to use his non-dominant hand, he was short of breath and visibly flagging.

"And they only used the odd kris deep enough to carve. Not like a piece of wood, but enough to keep the pain going. Very rarely past the soft tissue. The presence, like you called it, was a crushing weight against all of that. I could feel them," but it was clear he deliberately avoided using 'me,' "losing themselves. Until that was all that was left. Until there weren't any more choices."

He sighed, shuddering against the memory.

"Pain can be used to break down mental resistance," Amanda noted, jotting down some more notes in what was left of her notebook. But her voice trembled with a memory of her own — Sweetie, it's perfectly alright to scream — and she used the end of her pen to push one of the water bottles towards Arthur without touching it herself. "Here, drink some more water. I've got plenty to work on, we can stop there."

Arthur drank like a drowning man.

"Amanda," he said with haunted eyes, "I saw him. It. The end. But, worse, I think he saw me."

She bit her lip, dropping her eyes from his for a moment. Then she raised them again and nodded. "If he did, he'll probably be looking for you." Not exactly reassuring, but she wasn't going to lie to him. And she had been involved in the occult world a very long time. "He'll want to know who fucked with his avatar, at the very least."

"Will he? He was a giant, Amanda. Impossible. Alien. Can something like that even care? But . . . something kicked me out of that place. That has never happened before." The man sighed. The lines around his eyes, lines that had nothing to do with age, hardened. His eyes went down to the power inhibitor and he sounded resigned. "I suppose I'm going to need to be lucky, aren't I?"

Amanda wasn't completely insensitive. And she knew something about a power you didn't always want to live with, that demanded a price higher than she felt she could pay. "I'm afraid so," she replied softly. "I'll do what I can to help, but for safety's sake..." She sighed wishing she could offer comfort but not sure if it would be helpful. So she dropped back to the familiar. "I'll get Stephen and Clea to work on protection charms for you and Marius. And juice up the wards. And... if there's anything you want to talk about, what you saw, how to cope with it... well, I might have some experience in that line."

"I appreciate the thought," Arthur replied flatly while making very meaningful eye contact with the wall. He chose his words deliberately. "I only have experience forgetting things, so this'll be character building. Right now, though, I just want to sleep." Back to the bollocks.

"Fair enough." Amanda's words were an acknowledgement of many things. "I'll let you rest. And thank you, for all that. It wasn't easy and it will help keep this place safe." It was all she could offer in the way of comfort. She scooped up the various sketches and bits of paper and her phone and gave him a nod. "Take care."

The man didn’t watch her go, but when Arthur was sure Amanda was gone, he let the breakdown come.

Comments

[xp_catseye]

Arthur reverting to stock-phrases as a way of emotionally distancing himself from the situation is a nice detail here. Amanda, of course, can see his trauma and implicitly raises him her own.