LOG: Manuel, Amanda, others. Skippy Aftermath - Empath Mollari

[x-empath.livejournal.com]

Who: Manuel de la Rocha, Amanda Sefton, others
Where: Manuel's bedroom, and in his dreams
When: Aftermath of Skippy. Sunday evening.
What Happens: Bad dreams, and a foretelling of What Might Be




Manuel lay in his bed, occasionally muttering something incomprehensible in Castillian as he thrashed from side to side. The dampener on his right wrist's LEDs glowed a solid red, indicating maximum effort. The lights were turned down low in his room, and for once the room was silent, devoid of any music.

Wrapped in Manuel's robe, Amanda came out of the bathroom, her hair still damp. She'd finally managed to wash the smell of Evil Clone Goo off, and her clothes were in a plastic bag in the corner of the bathroom, awaiting washing and/or disposal later, along with Manuel's. It had taken some effort to get him cleaned up and into bed, but she'd managed with the help of her telekinetic spell, even though the effort had made her head pound again. Now she curled up in a chair she'd dragged over to the side of the bed, sipping her willowbark mixture and reaching out to stroke his forearm, sending as much reassurance as she could down the link despite her bone-crushing tiredness. She didn't need the link to tell her Manuel was in a bad place.

Inside Manuel's mind, the dream began as it always did. He was an old man, much older than he was now. He sat on a chair, upholstered and gilded and decked in a dazzling array of gems. The room was dark, the privacy-screens had been drawn to shield him from the outside world.

And, as always, inside his mind he heard _the_ voice and felt _the_ presence. An ancient voice, with a sound like rotting leather and a smell of something long-dead and unclean.

Despite the disturbing sensations coming down the link and Manuel's thrashing, Amanda found herself sliding into sleep. Too much magic, too much stress, the effort of staying calm in the face of Mnauel's collapse... it was all too much for the girl's over-worked mind and body, and she pillowed her head on the arm of the chair and closed her eyes, just for a minute...

Almost immediately she slid into dreams, dark, disturbing images of blood and fire and pain that always accompanied heavy magic use. Subconsciously she did as Strange had taught her, envisaging a door in that dark place, an escape from the things she didn't want to
see right then. Her dreaming self opened it and passed through, and into something else entirely. A throne room, of sorts, richly appointed and hushed, as if the very room was holding its breath. She took a few steps forward, unsure of what it meant.

Manuel took a deep breath, as he always did in this dream, and rang a small bell that was on the arm of the throne. When the doors beyond the gauzy privacy screens opened, Manuel spoke, and as always his voice was rougher, older, firmer. "I am going to need another bottle. Make that another _two_ bottles. Then wait one hour, and bring them to me here." he told the liveried servant, who merely bowed and closed the doors before turning to attend to the errand.

The ringing of the bell startled Amanda, but not as much as the servant who scurried behind the gauzy screens at one end of the room and then scurried back out again - both times passing straight through her, as if she was a ghost. Experimentally she reached out to touch the wall, only to have her fingers pass through it like smoke, but it wasn't the wall that was incorporeal, it was _her_. Almost like she didn't belong here. Then she heard that low mumbled voice again, sounding oh-so-vaguely familiar, and curiosity drew her towards those screens.

The liveried servant returned a few moments later, with two cut-crystal decanters full of an amber liquid on a silver plate, and a single crystal glass. The servant drew the privacy screen aside to hand the tray inside, and a hand clad in white reached out to snag the bottles and the glass from the tray.

"Good. Now go." the man on the throne said, with a Spanish accent.

This time she caught the accent, and suddenly things made a lot more sense. Ignoring the servant as he hurried through her _again_, Amanda stepped through the screens, a smile on her lips, ready to tease Manuel about his elaborate fantasy life. But what she saw stopped her dead.

The glowing red eyes were the first giveaway, followed by the salt-and-pepper hair, and the near-skeletal emaciation of the Manuel sitting on the throne. But worst of all, beyond the physical changes, was the haunted, trapped look that lived behind his eyes. He ignored Amanda's ghost, preferring instead to drain nearly a quarter of the contents of one crystal decanter in a mighty swallow.

"Ahhh, that's better." he said in Castillian, then looked over to Amanda's spectral form. "Hello, Amanda. It has been a long time indeed since I've seen any part of you. They hid you from me well, but not even Romany could hide you from me forever."

"I don't understand," Amanda said, taking another half-step forward, but reluctantly, the expression in his eyes chilling her. "You look so old, an' this place... What is this, Manny?"

"This? This is my future. My world. They love me, here. Everyone does. I am worshipped as a living _God_, my every whim catered to. It is everything I thought I ever wanted." he told Amanda's spectral form, but more to himself than anything else. He took another deep swallow from the bottle, then put it carefully on the arm of his throne.

"The power - it cannot hold its liquor any more. It is why I can talk to you like this. I plan on being good and roaring drunk when my servants bring you before me. There should be one person in the world who is not my thrall." he said with a bitter smile, then washed it away with another deep drink, and a coughing fit that sounded like his lungs were trying to rip themselves free of his chest. "But the power disagrees."

"Yer future? You can't do that, 's not yer power, 's just a dream, a bad dream." Amanda did take another step forward, tried to reach out to him, but her hand passed through his arm like smoke. "'S not like yer've got Frenchie's power..." She stopped, something niggling at the back of her memory. Something involving Marie-Ange.

Manuel took another deep drink, draining the first bottle down to the dregs. He then coughed explosively, spraying droplets of alcohol everywhere. "Ahh, I can feel it going to sleep." he mused as he unstoppered the second bottle. "Do you think I will let you live?"

"You promised me you'd never hurt me," she reminded him, backing away a little. This was more than a dream, she was becoming sure of it. And she was powerless in it - she tried a shielding spell, and nothing happened.

Manuel shrugged his shoulders as he took a pull from his fresh bottle. "The first of many broken promises, I assure you." he said casually. "And _I_ didn't hurt you. For that I had my Hound, the sweetest of all my slaves."

"Hound?" Amanda whispered, not sure she wanted the answer, but she had to ask, had to know.

Manuel nodded. "Yes. My Red Death. She's most useful in carrying out my unpleasant tasks. And she loves me - she doesn't have any choice, really. She quite literally cannot conceive of a time when she didn't belong to me body and soul. She was the first, you know." he said, then took another deep pull from the bottle. "But my time is drawing short. Do you want to see, when they bring you before me? I've spent _years_ hunting you down - you were the last one, the only one left who didn't love me."

No. The word caught in her throat, refused to be spoken, but what she was denying wasn't clear. Instead, she nodded mutely, unable to move from her spot next to the throne, even though every fibre of her being was telling her this was wrong, all wrong, that she had to get out.

Manuel smiled thinly. "Good. Ah, I can feel my courtiers coming now. That means that the prisoner will be arriving soon. Excellent." With a trembling hand and an unsteady posture, he stood slowly to draw back the screens from around his throne. "Come in, my pretties. Come in and play, for our amusement." Then the doors to the throne room opened.

In her first summer in Brighton, Amanda had worked briefly for a carnival, on the pony rides. One of the attractions had been the funhouse mirrors, that warped and twisted what the person saw. But always there was something, a remnant, a hint, of the original form, without the distortion.

What she saw now was the same thing.

It was bad enough that the intervening years - how many? she couldn't tell from Manuel's appearance - had touched familiar faces. But worse were the changes wrought by Manuel's power, personalities altered and twisted by his desires, his needs, until she looked into faces she knew and saw only the desire to please him. She wanted to turn away, to hide her face, but there was no escape.

"You don't like my pets?" Manuel said to Amanda's ghostly form as the room filled with those they both knew, all of them aglow with the possibility of, somehow, pleasing their jaded master. "They'll be very disappointed to know that they've failed to amuse me. Don't hide your face from them. See them, see what I have wrought here!" he commanded, his eyeglow kicking up a notch or two. Power enough to force total obedience, power enough to overwrite personalities, touch primal emotions and mold them like clay.

There was a tug on the link as Manuel increased his power, but that was all - she was as immune to it as he was safe from hers. Still, she did as he commanded, not because he compelled her to, but because she couldn't look away, something in herself demanded she watch. A huge red wolf padded up the hall, paws silent on the thick carpet, and lay at Manuel's feet, tongue lolling in adoration. Amanda's non-existent hands clenched into fists as she remembered a shy, quiet Scottish girl with a liking for oatmeal cookery, and saw nothing of her in this fawning creature.

"How could you?" she whispered, appalled. "Is _this_ what you really want? People grovellin' at yer feet 'cause you make 'em?"

"I tried it the other way, I really did." Manuel said quietly. "I tried to learn to adapt, to learn to deal with people on their own merits. That died a long, long time ago. When I misread something important, and people died because of it. I had a realization that day. That if I was going to make our people safe, if I was going to make _myself_ safe, that I needed to take control, to take an active role in making this a world I wanted to live in." There was clearly more he wanted to say, but he closed his eyes and winced instead. "I will speak no more of it - he is listening, and if I mention his name, he will wake up, alcohol or no." He then smiled, shifting into the expression instantly. "You are coming. I can feel it. Excellent."

"No-one's ever really safe," Amanda said quietly, but she was interrupted by a disturbance at the other end of the hall. Skimming her glance past vaguely-familiar faces - there was a faded red-head, her face made up vampishly and her body barely covered by scraps of filmy lingerie - she caught sight of dark hair streaked with white, and a pair of eyes that were horribly dead-looking under Manuel's induced adoration. "The Red Death," was the name whispered among the gathered courtiers, although no-one's lips were seen to move.

"Marie..." Amanda choked, knowing that if Romany had faced Marie, then not only was she dead, but her powers, her personality, would be locked within the other woman, a more effective torture than any hell could provide. Then she caught sight of the figure Marie dragged behind her, and the breath caught in her throat.

Manuel learned forward with a seemingly-genuine smile. "Ahhh, my Red Death. You dressed so nicely for me, and you've brought me a present! You're too kind. Once I have finished with you here, you may go play with your puppy for an hour. Because I love you, and I want you to be happy."

The Red Death smiled vapidly at the praise, with a hungry look about her eyes.

"Now, show me your present. What have you brought Us today, hrm?" Manuel asked with another dazzling smile. The Red Death yanked on the choke-chain she was holding, and into the room stumbled a figure in a black cloak and leathers.

"Got me on a collar, I see," the woman said, her voice rough and edged with loathing. "You always were into the bondage stuff, 'Manny'." The Red Death - Amanda couldn't think of her as Marie, not with that look in her eyes - yanked back the hood of the cloak, revealing the person's face.

'At least I don't get fat,' Amanda thought wildly, smothering a hysterical giggle. Despite the blonde hair roughly braided back, the reduction in the facial piercings to one stud in the nose and a couple of rings in the left eyebrow (the right was marked by three parallel scars, claw marks, that had obviously torn out the rest), and most of all, the hardness of the face, it was her, 'all grown up' and looking like she'd seen the other side of hell. The adult Amanda's hands were bound in front of her, but she still managed to convey a fearlessness, a contempt, for those around her, and particularly the man on the throne. "Yer a sad bastard, Manny. Always were. You think _this_," and here she gestured with her bound hands at the room, the courtiers, the silent guards at various strategic points: "You think any of this is a good substitute for real emotion?"

"In the absence of anything better, than yes, it will do." Manuel retorted mildly, but his tone changed as he went on. "You cannot argue with the good that I have done. There is no dissension, no struggle. We are _one people_, united in a common bond of _love_! All colors, all species, all nationalities! We are ONE!" he ranted, veins bulging out.

"And you are the last. Whatever am I to do with you? Shall I break you, like I have broken so many others? Or do I let you believe what you wish, the only one left who can?"

"What do _you_ think, Amanda? Should I leave you be, or should I make you mine for all eternity, the way that we used to be? The way we swore, once?"

"I was a kid. Kids're stupid." The adult Amanda kept her head high, looked Manuel in the eye while around her his sycophants cowered. She was gathering her power, Dream-Amanda could sense it, feel her building up her psychic shields the way Doctor Strange had spent so long in instructing her... them. "I thought there was somethin' good in you, somethin' worthwhile. Turned out I was wrong. I weren't the only one - Nate, Emma, yer lackey here..." She cast a contemptuous look at the Red Death, and was rewarded by a savage jerk on the chain that cut her air for a second. "Best you kill me, like you did Ange," she rasped, when she could speak again. "I'll never be yours, and all the while I'll be looking for a way to put a knife in your back."

Manuel smirked, and then looked directly at Dream-Amanda. "Now do you see? Do you understand? This is my fate. My future." And then he turned back to Future Amanda, and his eyes flashed red. "I don't think so. You will find a much better use for that knife of yours…"

Manuel awoke with a shuddering gasp, drenched in sweat and clawing at the air.

For a second Amanda remained in Manuel's mind, the dream shattering around her. But without the dream there was nothing to hold her there, and she woke with a start, the link flaring with Manuel's terror and panic. Without thinking she left the chair and reached for him, murmuring soothing words without realising what she was saying. "Hush, love, 's all right, it was a dream, a horrible dream. I'm here..."

Manuel twisted his face away, so he wasn't facing Amanda. "That was no dream, and you know it. That was my future. That is what I am destined to become. Marie-Ange's final gift to me, for all that I have done to her. To everyone. I will become that _thing_."

"Only if you choose to." Sitting back on the bed a little so she could look at him properly, Amanda firmly turned his face back towards her. "Marie-Ange's visions ain't set in stone, an' you should know that better 'n anyone. Didn't she see you die? She saw it, but it didn't happen, because she did something to stop it. Same as you can with this." She pushed her own fear away, shoving it deep down in the back of her mind where Manuel wouldn't feel it. "It doesn't have t' be that way, not if you don't let it."

Manuel blinked hard. "I don't see how I have much of a choice. People hate and fear me. And they probably should. I am not like them. I don't understand them, they could care less about me. I don't fit in, so they laugh at me when I worry, or mock me when I try to help. Or they take advantage of me." he said with a sniffle. Inside of his mind, his alienation and confusion at America and the other students welled to the forefront, dimming all other feelings that it came into contact with.

"You ain't like them. Neither am I. But it doesn't mean you have t' let them push you into bein' somethin' you don't want t' be. An' you don't want t' be that bastard, otherwise you wouldn't be havin' nightmares 'bout it." Amanda smoothed his hair back, gave him a wry smile. "America's one fucked-up place, an' most of the time I don't even _try_ t' understand it, just concentrate on the stuff that's important. An' once summer hols start, you can take me back t' Spain, show me the clubs an' stuff, yeah?" He nodded, and she went on. "No-one was mockin' you today. An' you did help. Sure we nearly got our arses handed t' us, but if we weren't there, distractin' those fuckers, Ange an' Sarah an' Clarice wouldn't have stood a chance of gettin' the munchkins out without somethin' happenin' to 'em."

Manuel stopped to think for a second, then smiled slowly. "Yeah, the munchkins did get out OK, didn't they. But why the _FUCK_ was I in there _fencing_? If I just had my power, I could have solved the entire fucking problem in about thirty seconds."

"For the same reason it was us kids in there an' not the bloody fetish brigade - no grownups and none of us kids have the key t' that thing, remember?" A wicked smile crossed her face. "An' the fencin' thing is so much more sexy than you standin' there with yer eyes glowin'. Cut yerself a right dashin' figure."

Manuel leered at Amanda, then frowned as a thought hit him. "You'd think I'd learn one of these days. I want my power back so bad, yet in my dreams I use it to dominate everyone I ever thought about caring about, let alone those I actually _do_."

"An' as long as that thought makes yer feel bad, you _will_ learn," Amanda said earnestly. "Yer stronger than it is, you've already proved that the other week. After Boston." Then she sighed and rubbed her aching head. "You think it's too much t' ask for no emergencies for another week? I can't keep doin' this."

Manuel heaved a sigh and snuggled a little deeper into the blankets, to stay warm. "I can't promise anything, but I will do my best to not be a bother." He then patted the space next to him on the bed that had, with disturbing speed, become Her Place in his bed. "Shit. I don't want to fall asleep again. I might dream."

"I wasn't meanin' tonight, more the whole Evil Clone thing." Ditching his robe, Amanda slid into the bed, grateful for his warmth against her chilled skin. "I could teach you what Strange showed me, t' stop me havin' nightmares when I use too much magic," she added, snuggling up against him in a way no-one would have believed of the punk witch if they'd seen it. Amanda tended to be a cuddler when she was tired. "I was doin' it tonight..." The rest was lost as she yawned.

The yawn was contagious, as Manuel nearly cracked his jaw with the strength of his yawn. "I'm too tired to learn." he whined, snuggling into Amanda's cuddle in a most unManuel-like needy manner. "Don't wanna sleep. Don't wanna..." and he was out before he could finish the sentence.