sixthiterationlogs | [MINGLE] One-Man Show

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[MINGLE] One-Man Show

WHERE: Inari Shrine and elsewhere
WHEN: 25 January 2019 through ?
OPEN TO: All opted in characters
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The scene opens on a half-empty warehouse; the sound of something heavy being slammed with force into something soft echoes against the walls. A man with green hair and a purple suit and what looks like clown makeup but isn't stands, grinning, over a dark-haired boy, sixteen years old, hands bound behind his back, barefoot but dressed in a caped uniform of red and black with a yellow circled R over his heart. A tattered black domino mask sits over the boy's eyes, obscuring part of his face, but if you look closely and know what you're looking for, it's not hard to make out that this boy is Jason. The man holds a crowbar in his hand, and when he swings it at the boy's face, knocking the boy to the ground, you'll recognize it as the same sound from before, metal impacting against flesh and bone, and you might guess that this lunatic has been beating the boy to a bloody pulp for a while now.

"Wow," he says, entirely too jovial, "that looked like it really hurt." The boy is in obvious pain, struggling to breathe, coughing up blood, but somehow, he manages not to scream or cry out every time he takes a blow, and despite the assault, he keeps trying to climb to his feet, to fight back. The crowbar comes down on him a few more times, and he falls to the ground again, teeth clenched in pain and determination and defiance.

"Whoa, now, hang on! That looked like it hurt a lot more." The man stands menacingly over the boy, nonchalantly bouncing the crowbar in his open hand. "So, let's try to clear this up, OK, pumpkin? What hurts more? A?" He swings downward, driving the crowbar into the boy's body. "Or B?" Another swing, another hit, another quiet grunt of pain from the boy on the ground. "Forehand?" - another hit - "Or backhand?" - and another, and another, until he pauses, doubled over in a fit of deranged laughter.

The boy turns his head up to his attacker and whispers a few words, too quiet to be heard. The clown-faced man crouches close to the ground, over the boy's beaten body, and holds a hand up to his ear. "A little louder, lamb chop," he stage-whispers, "I think you may have a collapsed lung - that always impedes the oratory." He ruffles a gloved hand through the boy's hair, and the boy spits a mouthful of blood in his face, which he doesn't expect, and slams the boy's head into the concrete before standing up to produce a handkerchief from inside his suit jacket and wipe the blood away.

"Now that was rude. The first Boy Blunder had some manners." The boy on the ground turns his face up and flashes the man a snarky smile, pleased with what little resistance he's been able to offer. "I suppose I'm going to have to teach you a lesson so you can better follow in his footsteps." The man pauses, making a show of thinking over his options, then continues, grinning wickedly: "Nah. I'm just gonna keep beating you with this crowbar!" He slams his foot into the back of the boy's head, erupting into a long fit of maniacal laughter while he resumes brutally beating the boy with the crowbar.

This goes on for some time. Eventually, the boy goes still, face down on the floor, eyes closed. It's difficult to tell if he's still breathing, but his assailant seems either satisfied with the result of his handiwork or bored with the lack of continued response, and he tosses the crowbar aside, heading toward the exit, grabbing a heavy winter coat as he makes his way to the door.

"OK, kiddo, I gotta go. It's been fun, though, right?" He turns to glance over his shoulder at the motionless boy on the floor, who doesn't answer. "Well, maybe a smidge more fun for me than you - I'm just guessing, since you're being awful quiet." He pulls the coat on, tugs it into place, and continues his mocking, one-sided conversation with the boy. "Anyway, be a good boy, finish your homework, and be in bed by nine. And hey! Please tell the big man I said ... hello." He pulls the fur-trimmed hood over his head and laughs again, the same broken, gleeful sound as before, and slams the door shut behind him.

Maybe that should be the end of it, but it's not - once the door is shut and the danger gone, the boy rolls onto his back and kicks his legs up over his head, slipping his bound hands underneath his feet to bring them from behind him to the front. He pushes himself back up to his feet, breathing labored, swaying unsteadily, and takes a step toward the door, but falls straight to the ground again. Unflinching, he pulls his head up and eyes the door, then begins to pull himself along the floor, trailing blood after him as he goes. It's not a terribly long distance to go, but his injuries make every inch painful beyond words, and he doesn't rest until he reaches the door, raises his hands up to tug at the handle ...

... and it doesn't budge. Locked.

Dismayed, the boy still doesn't give up. He pulls himself up to sit with his back against the door, strategizing his next move. A soft ticking sound draws his attention to a counter on one side of the warehouse, red digital numbers ticking down from 10. In those few seconds, the expression on the boy's bruised face shifts from shock to acceptance, because he knows when that timer switches to all zeroes, he will die. There is no one to save him, and despite his best efforts, he cannot save himself.

A few short seconds later, the warehouse explodes, a storm of fire and debris. You don't need to see what remains of the boy to know he could not have survived the blast.

~*~

The scene fades to black. Jason has been standing silently this entire time, eyes fixed on the scene as it unfolds, one hand clapped over his mouth to keep from screaming in horror at the replay of the single worst day of his life. He lived this - died, too - and seeing it again from an outside perspective doesn't make that revistation any less painful. He's standing in open air, and yet Jason feels like he can't breathe, like he's suffocating in a cloud of smoke and ash, and the only thought left in his traumatized mind is to run.

Without a word to his companions, he turns to leave.

Something like that? Far more able to drive Nida's own pain from his mind. Beatings? Yeah, he just takes that in stride, ignores the echoes it calls up in him, the memories of pain in that one instance of a job gone wrong in Deling after the war. Pain and that he can understand and compartmentalize. But the death? The second it ends his attention is on Jason, and that look in his eyes, that hand over his mouth.

Gotta be just a touch faster than that, Jason, to get away from him. As he turned Nida's hand flashes out, grabs him by the arm. Clearly the guy is trained somehow, he doesn't know how, if he had ended up in the situation he was in, looking as ridiculous as that. But he had more training, and shock really doesn't always help. There's a chance the guy's training will get him lashed out at, get him hit, and as Nida pulls the man toward him he lets the flow of energy from his power out, letting the durability slide over his skin. Nice to be briefly impervious as he twists his body, using the additional strength of the rotational motion to pull Jason close, drags the taller, heavier man into his arms. If Jason wasn't in a state like he was, there was no way Nida would probably be able to manage that. But right now?

Right now, Jason, you're getting a hug.

"You're here right now. You're here and you're safe. There is no one here who can hurt you, and if they try, I will break them."

Doesn't hold him too tight, Jason needs to be able to get away, because after that having more control of himself is probably important. What? Nida knows this from experience.

"You held up to something that would break a lot of people. Guy just wasn't working from the same playbook."

If Jason were any less emotionally compromised, his training would kick in when Nida takes him by the arm and pulls him in close. He knows a dozen ways to break a hold, and his instinct, always, is to fight back - as demonstrated in the scene this group was shown. Even brutally beaten, he didn’t stop fighting until the very end, when it became clear there would be no escaping his death.

But Jason uses none of that training, doesn’t even struggle against the hold of Nida’s arms. He manages a halfhearted “let go of me,” because that is the instinct drilled down into the marrow of his bones, but really, this is all he wanted when he was sixteen and newly resurrected - for someone to hold him, comfort him, tell him he would be protected.

It’s six years too late for any of that, or so he thinks. Jason laughs, weak and bitter, a noise that hardly qualifies as a laugh. “You really think any of us are safe? Here? There’s no such thing.” His voice begins to crack. “Weren’t you paying attention just now? I died!”

And it did break him. You can’t get any more broken than dead.

Well, if it's halfhearted, there is no way at all that Nida is actually going to let go of him. He's learned that there is clearly some power to hugs. Of course the comment that he had died has Nida scoff a little and twists his hand just enough to get some skin between his fingers and gives him a strong pinch. No doubt enough to make most people wince, though he doesn't assume it will have as much weight here.

"I don't know, you seem pretty alive here right now," Nida countered. More than... no, he isn't thinking about his parents and kneeling in a pool of blood. That's not what he wants to think about. At all. "You're alive now, and older than you are then, which definitely gives me some serious questions that I'm going to put aside for right now."

At last he releases his grip of Jason and looks up at him, a haunted look on his face. "I got to admit, your death was definitely a bit more brutal than my own, but you're here now, you're alive, and you're moving. I don't know who that maniac who did that to you was, but staying in that moment lets him have power over you. Lets him keep having power over you. Yes, what happened was traumatic and I can't imagine anything worse than that, to be forced to confront your own death, again, but I do know what I saw in that young man he was beating. Strength, defiance, refusal to lose. Have you gotten less strong with age? Have you decided the maniac gets to win when you're alive, you're strong, and there are people who need you?"

Because Nida isn't buying that, isn't buying that Jason is that weak. Sure, trauma and PTSD (PTDD?), but for right now, he needs this guy able to move, able to work himself back to the village from wherever they are. It's cruel, it's using him, and Nida doesn't care. His first priority is to protect these young man and get them back to where they belong. Trauma can be processed when they are safe. And speaking of safe...

"So long as I have strength in my arm, you're as safe as you can be," he says, taking a step back. A hand comes up to touch the bo tied to his back, and he can't help the confident look that comes with it. "I mean, this thing isn't up to dragon killing standards, but the worst I've heard about out there are either cave wolves or wendigos, and to be honest with you? The forest I was raised in was full of those. I'm still going, so clearly that's not a threat."

It's confident, it's possibly arrogant, and maybe just a tiny bit of a bluff. Mostly because from what Nida's read Wendigos here and back home aren't even on par with each other, but he's going to use every bit of his training to exude confidence right now. He will get Jason and Billy home safely. Get them home so they can decide whether they went the shadow of the men who hurt them controlling their lives. And frankly? He's stubborn enough to make sure that those shadows don't.

The video is brutal. It isn't just what they're watching, what he can see--he can't look away, how can he, fixed in place with horror and the knowledge that if he does, it isn't fair, that Jason had to live this and he just has to watch--it's what he hears. The sickening thump of metal against flesh, that monster's laughter, Jason's struggling breathing, the gurgle of blood in his lungs. Billy is frozen for a moment afterwards, stomach roiling with nausea, fear, sorrow, and while Nida moves instantly to follow Jason as he walks away it takes him a second to follow suit. He comes up just as Nida takes that step back, moving into the space left, a hand on Jason's arm as he looks up, fresh tears still in his eyes and streaking his cheeks.

He has never died, but he knows that every time he goes out there, every time any of them go out, it's a very real possibility. Cassie still haunts him. And still, they make that choice. Teddy was right about one thing. Billy is a hero. He knows what's out there and what's waiting, and still. His voice is soft, quiet, but there's an intensity to his words that speaks to sympathy if not perfect understanding.

"I know. None of us are ever really safe. Not when we do things like this. And not in places like this, where we don't even know the rules. But Jason--I don't want you to go. You shouldn't be alone. And we're stronger together. Please stay." They need to stay together. Billy can't even express how strongly he feels about that, just wills Jason to understand as he looks up into his face, that hand closing around Jason's.

There’s so much Jason wants to say, so many arguments he wants to offer in response to everything Nida says: that the Joker has unshakeable power over him anyway, turned him into the Red Hood; that he doesn’t need Nida’s protection, because he can handle himself; that nobody needs him, or even wants him, for that matter. And yet none of those words come out with his usual snark and snappiness, the path between mind and mouth paralyzed with the shock of revisiting this trauma, all of the energy and focus he can summon up funneled into holding the pieces of himself together.

What finally breaks him is Billy - his words and the compassion Jason can clearly read in his expression, the gentler touch, the I don’t want you to go, please stay. All things he wanted from Bruce when he came back to Gotham yet knew, instinctively, he would never obtain. Jason looks into Billy’s tearful eyes, and the thin threads keeping him composed unravel in an instant. Jason can feel it coming, an avalanche of the feelings he’s worked so hard to keep buried over the last six years, and he buries his face behind his free hand. Only a single strangled sob tears out of his throat, stifled behind his fingers, before Jason course corrects, gasping in deep, panicked breaths in an attempt to bring himself back. A few long moments pass before he’s composed enough to show his face again, rubbing tears away from his reddened eyes with the heel of his palm.

“You know that dying like that wasn’t even the worst part?” He inhales another deep, shaky breath, rubbing his tearstained hand against his jeans. “I was brought back - came to underwater, something called a Lazarus Pit.” Disoriented, screaming at the memory of being murdered. “And I thought - I knew what I was getting into when I put on that cape and mask. I knew I’d prob’ly end up dead sooner instead of later. But I’d worked with a partner, and I thought surely he would’ve cared enough to do something about me bein’ dead, when that time came.” Jason’s eyes squeeze shut, spilling new tears down his face, which he hastily wipes away while shaking his head.

“But he didn’t. He didn’t care. That maniac? He’s called the Joker, and he’s killed enough people to fill entire graveyards, and he’s still alive.”

See, here Nida thought the worst part to not being dead anymore was the aching hole in your heart when you thought about dying, and knowing you'd have to do it again? But clearly he's mistaken, because this partner of Jason's? Nida ever meets him, he'll break the guy's jaw. No questions asked.

"And he shouldn't be. Some people forfeit the right," Nida admits with a shrug. "I assure you, he ever appears here, you will have to race me to seeing he doesn't last the day."

Yeah, he doesn't think he's going to get approval from Billy for that, the guy is too nice. Too good. But at least he's got Jason opening up, even as Nida is taking a further step back. Billy's got this. He... he needs to find a way to get them somewhere safe. Has to get them moving.

It's that raw, choked sob that makes the tears spill over all over again, and Billy reaches up without hesitation, hugging Jason. His own powers don't kick in, and maybe that's silly, but right now, all of that conflict Jason's turned inwards, struggling against himself. It's a struggle Billy understands. He can wait.

When Jason pulls himself together finally, dragging that hand down his face and wiping it on his jeans, Billy steps back just a touch, enough to give him space to compose himself, one hand still resting lightly on Jason's forearm in sympathy as he wipes his own tears away with the other. It's horrible, what's happened, to Jason, to Nida. All of this. It's horrible. And Nida might be surprised, but Billy doesn't disagree with him at all. "I'm sorry," he says softly. "You deserved better." A better partner, a proper end to all of that. Not...coming back to find out that you were never even avenged. Coming back to find out you were just another death in a long list that someone just kept letting get longer.

Jason isn't used to being on the receiving end of affectionate touch - he's never had enough of it to find it familiar, but even though he doesn't know Billy well, Jason doesn't shy away from the hug. It's exactly what he needs, exactly what he's spent so much of his life convincing himself he doesn't need, and he returns the gesture without hesitation.

He's not sure he'd agree with the assessment that he deserved better - he wanted better, he wanted to mean as much to Bruce as Bruce meant to him, and that clearly is never going to happen. Jason knows this, but can't seem to move past it.

"'SOK," he says, even though they all know it's not. "I mean - I can't do anything about it here. I can't do anything until I get back home." He shakes his head, mouth pressed into an unhappy, thin line. "I'm sorry you guys had to see that. I hate these assholes so much."

Edited 2019-01-31 13:03 (UTC)

"What's a little death between colleagues?" Nida shrugs off. He's not trying to make light of it, not really, it's just... Well, after everything he saw, it's not like he cares so much. Better to focus on someone else. On his new team, because clearly these two aren't going to get back on their own very well.

At least, Nida notes mostly to himself, he once had people who cared about him. This guy clearly lacked even that.

"I don't suppose there is any chance that asshole was still in the building when it exploded?"

Small cosmic favors maybe?

"You don't have anything to apologize for," Billy assures him, an echo of Nida's words. "I'm sorry you had to watch it. I don't know what the Observers are trying to get out of this, but it's really messed up." To say the least.

Once he's sure Jason's at least got himself mostly composed, Billy takes his hand away, wrapping his arms around himself. At least he's wearing his coat, but wherever they are, it's cold. "I don't know how we're gonna get home, but we should at least try and get back to the village. Do you guys have any idea where we are?"

"No," he says to Nida's question, "unless I got really lucky with the last thing I did in Gotham before I got dragged to Wonderland, the Joker's still alive." Jason frowns. Why is it that this one piece of human trash is so indestructible? Why does he keep being allowed to hurt and kill people who don't deserve it while he never pays a real price for it? "Prob'ly too much to hope for."

Jason rubs a hand over his face, takes a deep breath, and sighs it out. "I should've expected something like this. Something similar happened at the last place I was in - somehow I got turned into a sixteen-year-old again, thought I'd just come back from being dead. Didn't remember anything about my life after that happened." He folds his arms over his chest and shakes his head. "Must just be one of those things that sadists find entertaining."

As for the question of where they are ... Jason shakes his head again. "I've never been out this far from the village," he says, though now he wishes he had ventured out more. He glances at his wrist device for the time, shades his eyes with his hand as he scans the area, checking the direction of the sun. "Unless I'm real turned around," he says, pointing, "north is that way."

"You're probably better oriented than me. Time's passed enough that I can't figure it out from the sun alone," Nida sighs, but mostly his attention is on Jason. He's... he's still too fucked up to not want to focus on someone else and their problems.

"This isn't the first strange place like this you've been? Fuck. Maybe the universe just hates us. A lot."

More than he would really appreciate doing the math on actually.

"Is north the way we're supposed to go? I'm not even sure where we've ended up. Hang on, I'm gonna call Tommy back, he's been leaving me a ton of messages that didn't get through," Billy answers, stepping away from both of them just a few feet. "Don't go anywhere yet."

He doesn't want to leave Jason or Billy entirely, not sure what either of them will do, but they need more information. They need to figure out how to get home, and he...really needs to hear his brother's voice, right about now. He'll talk to Tommy, see if he can get some info on where exactly they've ended up and how to get back to the village, and then...no, there's no and then. One step at a time. That's all they can do. That's all he can focus on, just now.

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[MINGLE] One-Man Show

jason } cw blood, fire, teen death

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