sixthiterationlogs | Lightning Can, in Fact, Strike Twice

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Lightning Can, in Fact, Strike Twice

WHO: Kylo Ren~~'s Force Ghost~~
WHERE: House 40
WHEN: February 6th, Forward dated so people can play it over the weekend.
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: Graphic Character Death & Body discovery; possible some tears from his tiny ~~adopted family~~ group of acquaintances
STATUS: Open
Important OOC Notes: Jean Grey will be discovering Ren's body, though others are welcome to discover the tree and the symbol. Kira will be burying the body with the shovel he got from Ren in a different post. Otherwise, this post is like other event posts. OTAs and Threadjacks and such where threads are not closed. Have at it.

The static in the air has only grown worse with the passage of time. Electricity is everywhere, shocking hands that reach for door handles and raising the hairs off skin. It's a charged atmosphere that has flooded the village and surrounding canyon, and it seems to be growing rather than dissipating.

Occasional orbs of electricity burst into life in the sky, lightning lancing out from the energize centers in various directions, sometimes striking houses or trees. It's at the least a concern, and one that unsettles Ren for the frequency of it, and the dry quality of the air.

Lightning strikes a tree near the house, and the crack of the trunk is loud enough to draw at least one of its inhabitants out to take a look when the initial sound changes into a cacophony of cracking and snapping that ends in a crash. The tree, smoldering in an arc down its split and splintered trunk had landed against the corner edge of the roof and smashed a small cave-in into the covering.

It was nothing to worry about as far as the integrity of the building's structure, but the potential for a growing fire was. Ren slid his coat off and tossed it over the fallen part of the broken tree, smothering the embers as quickly as he could. One house going up was a problem, but in the weather they had been having, it wouldn't take much to spread.

The second strike comes as he's putting out the flames, striking the house itself this time. He manages to see it, watches the arc of it slam into the roof like a weapon more than a feat of nature. And the strike unnaturally coils and burns into the roof with the hiss of a new fire. Grabbing the coat as quickly as he could, Ren jumps onto the broken tree, scaling the angled log as quickly as he can in a race against flames. He slips, splinters his hands and knocks his knees a few times on the way up, but he makes it, and throws himself toward the fire.

For all he internally might have wished the village would burn, the house was a shelter to Jean and himself, and he didn't want to watch that so easily destroyed by an angry storm of lightning. He throws the singed coat down over the flames, barely catching a glimpse of the symbol burned clear as day into the roof itself. His priorities elsewhere.

Another fire smothered, Ren allows himself a moment to catch his breath, tugging a shard of bark from his palm and pulling the now ruined coat off the symbol to take a look. He never gets the chance to see it clearly, as a second bolt attempts to strike exactly where the first has hit, and meets a softer, more conductive barrier in its path.

Warning: Graphic Character Death follows

It takes milliseconds to travel through him. The metal curtain rod still at his back, held by a cord of rope looped around his chest, only makes matters worse. The heat from the strike burns, and the discharge itself lances tree like Lichtenberg figures across his skin. For a moment he stays where he is, crouched on the roof, his heart struggling arrhythmic and his skin bruising from the burst vessels underneath. It doesn't last. His heart fails to catch back up, his body goes slack when muscles locked tight from the electricity are suddenly released. He loses consciousness and drops from the roof, dead before he hits the ground.

[Important OOC Notes: Jean Grey will be discovering Ren's body, though others are welcome to discover the tree and the symbol. Kira will be burying the body with the shovel he got from Ren in a different post. Otherwise, this post is like other event posts. OTAs and Threadjacks and such where threads are not closed. Have at it.]

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The lightning was frightening beyond belief. Jean had never seen storms like this before and she thought it had to be because of a mutant, a powerful one, and one that was yet unseen. She had busied herself with trying to put out the fire in the house when she saw the lightning arc and strike Ren's body, sending him toppling from the roof.

Jean let out a scream, the most primal release of power she'd had since coming to this place. It was audible, yes, but even more so it was inside her mind and she feared she'd broadcast it to the village at large.

[Feel free to have your character have heard Jean screaming either out loud or in their head.]

It hadn't been Ren's voice that pulled him out of the relative safety of the inn, but the quality of it--the way it prickled all over his extra senses, invaded past his already flimsy separation of self and others--it reminded him of the the force Ren had spoken of, and tried to use to ferret out his intentions with the stuffed doll.

He'd only been by the house a couple of times, meeting the man in passing, following him on walks around the perimeter of the place to trade barbs and get him to take a cup of hot tea without inviting him in, but he knew it enough to follow the sense of the scream out toward it.

It wasn't immediately that he came upon her, but his hurry doubled when he saw the flames, and the woman silhouetted by them, standing instead of fleeing. Surely the fire, the state of the house, was her cause for concern?

"What's happened," he asks in a hoarse, worn rush, coming up behind her and leaning down with his hands on his knees to catch his breath; "Are you hurt? We should move back."

"I'm okay," Jean said. She didn't move, though, stuck to the spot and staring at Ren's body. He had been the person to find her, the one who helped her out of the fountain and had been able to talk to her inside her mind and calm her when nobody else could. He had been the person most like her and now he was gone.

"It was the lightning," she murmured, looking to Kira. She hadn't ever met him but she did recognize him and a friendly face was comforting even if it wasn't her friend.

"It struck him. It killed him just like this. I could hear him and then I couldn't."

"Who did it--" but his concern is short-lived, his nausea blooming out from the effort of running to the flames. For a moment, he's as frozen as she, looking to where her gaze had been held.

There is no kind of death or level of decomposition that is easy to look at. In Manhattan he had seen people blue and chapped, black at the tips, gone to sleep in the snow from cold or hunger or a wound they hadn't known how to deal with. He'd seen bloat-faced bodies with hands at the collars, choked on the sores in their throats. He'd seen people shot and starved and asleep in their beds. Maybe at some point it's supposed to stop being so bad, but this is bad.

This is someone he knows, burned out and half-buried, bruises over his bones, lightning veins of blue and purple running between, a hand flung out with fingers that look like they've been dipped in dark ink.

Neither of them has to check for a pulse, though neither of them knows it about the other: the feeling of Ren is so completely gone, Kira is struck with the irrational sense that it isn't even his body. It isn't anyone at all, it's a lump of bruises and skin that could be anything, anyone. It's not even human, just a trick, while the flames lick closer to them, and the rush of the fire fills their ears.

"We need to get back," he says, still hoarse.

But it isn't no one. It's Ren. It's Ren. When his joints unlock, when that rush of energy returns to him, he's moving forward into the debris, not away: "We have to get him out of there, he'll burn."

"We have to get his body. I can try to move it," Jean said, not wanting the guy to walk into danger if she could possibly help it. It took every ounce of strength and concentration that she had but she closed her eyes and managed to tug the body toward them a few inches. She took a breath, sweat beading on her brow, and tried again.

"I can move it. I just need...I need a little more time," she said, eyes squeezing shut. She was angry and anger always resulted in a power manifest, didn't it? Anger and fear and rage always caused strength in ways that were unexpected and her anger and fear tugged the body a little further, a little closer to them and out of danger.

"I think it might be safe to try and get it now."

The place never ceased to surprise him: Kira realizes it must have been her own voice, touching something in his mind rather than his ears. This must be the woman Ren lived with, the pair of them something like Kira on paper, but in reality nothing like him at all. It's grotesque, watching the corpse lift and drag like a thing on strings, a puppet pulled in a way that made it obvious it needed strings, that parts of it were broken. That there was no life in it at all.

It's grotesque, but he holds back the whispered curses, the slip of air between his teeth that wants to reject it. She's doing what she knows how, he thinks. She's doing what she can. Kira meets the lifted hand in a kind of middle, circling out from the fire and unsteady, charred beams to--

to put his hand around the bruised wrist and--

He drops it at first, sparked away in disgust and stumbling several feet back to vomit. Everything is sour and sore, tears in his eyes, and he chokes twice before he can wipe his mouth and try again. He can do this. He'd stomached it when Ty pulled the armor off the man he'd killed.

"You don't," he says, spitting and swallowing, looking away as he gingerly fits both hands around Ren's and makes himself hold on. "You don't have to touch him, but, if you can keep doing what you just did, I don't think I can move him on my own."

"I can do it as long as we don't have to move him very far," Jean said. Exerting herself this way helped to keep her mind off grief and she would push herself to exhaustion in order to keep feeling or thinking. That was the only thing she could do.

This felt so much like the attack on the school. Now, like then, Jean was helpless to stop things from happening to people she cared about and she felt like she was completely back at square one; Ren had been teaching her about this place and now she was without the one person who seemed to know what the hell was going on.

"I can't believe...I thought it was pretty safe here. I guess I was wrong about that."

Fingers shaking where they touch Ren's cooling skin, he digs his grip in a bit, tight and desperate as he looks at her over his shoulder. The pair of them are very probably in shock, and he shouldn't vent an ounce of it at her--but everything in him is the crunch of glass crushing in a vacuumed kind of pressure.

"You guess," he asks, voice pitched on a downward arc of disbelief, "After two earthquakes and two deaths and no one being able to get out--"

But it's useless, it's air he can't spare for getting riled, that he needs to get Ren out of the wreck of his house and to do something about the flames, and it's just distracting them both from it. "I'm sorry, no, just--let's just pull him out and deal with it."

"I didn't know about the other death and there's only been one earthquake," Jean pointed out. Still, it was useless to argue semantics when they both had a job to do in order to get Ren's body out so that they could bury it properly.

"At least nobody is trying to kill me here just because of what I am. That reads safer to me than home."

It was more information than she'd normally reveal but, again, she was under duress. It came with the territory.

The words travel the distance between them, then past him: Ren's dead wrists are heavy in his hands, dry and not as warm as a body should be. There isn't a point to argue, there's a man to be moved, to be laid out with any kind of dignity--and the realization, that the rod is moving with the body because it is fused to it turns his stomach again--and ideas of safety or a lack have nothing to do with that.

"Can you do what you did again," he asks, leaning away from the body in an attempt to drag it further from the fallen beams: "I won't make you touch him, but I just, I really can't do this myself."

Jean hated that she had to do this but it was better to actually move his body than to leave him there. She couldn't expect Kira to do it alone, either, and she focused all the concentration and strength she had on moving Ren's body out of the wreckage and back toward the woods where they could do something about burying him.

"It's hard but I'm trying," she said, propelling the body forward a few more feet. It came in starts and stops but eventually she got it moved to the edge of the treeline.

"Is this far enough?"

Is it? He hasn't done this before, a body seared from the inside and broken on the ground, bent by the weight of a broken home. There's no worry of disease, only further damage to the body itself, and the problem of the house still waiting when they finish.

"I think," but he can't really, with those hands in his, with the face he had looked at only days before, alive and full of feeling, now empty in every way. Putting his own weight into it, he gets part of Ren's body behind a tree, where he can look back and only see the legs, imagine for moments at time that this is not happening. "I think this is fine, for now," he answers, forcing his hands open to drop Ren's wrists.

He backs away slowly, staring at Ren's face as he rounds the tree, until his view is cut. Until he is bereft, somehow, of the reality of it. His voice doesn't sound like it belongs to him, asking her: "Do you live here? Can we do anything to get into the house?"

"I can try to see what I can move out of the way. It is...was my house. I shared it with him."

Ren had been the first person to meet her at the fountain and the person who also had the same gifts she had. He called it something different, sure, but he was a telekinetic and a telepath just like she was. Without him, Jean felt impossibly alone.

"He was like me," she said, half to herself. "He had the same mutation I do."

It's plenty to file away for later--the fact of her scream in his mind, the idea of someone like Ren still existing in this place, lacking his focus but in possession of similar gifts. Mutation sounds like something out of a comic book, but Kira would be one to talk--

Except there's no time for talk, nothing crowding his tongue to say. Nothing smart, nothing soothing. Ren is dead and his house is a smoldering wreck.

He needs to focus. He needs her to focus. "What's your name," he asks: it might bother him later, to feel this shaken by Ren's death, and not even have known the name of the woman he lived with.

"Jean. Jean Grey," she offered. It was strange to have so intimate a conversation with someone she didn't have a name for but they had the bond of knowing who Ren was and, presumably, having both been friends with him.

"I haven't been here very long. Two months, maybe? It's hard to keep track of all the days without a calendar or anything. When I got here, it was still snowy."

"Jean," he repeats, watching her mouth move and hearing, but not really processing, what follows. She must be in shock, loosing and tying threads that wind away from the moment at hand--and he must be as well, viewing each piece at a distance, trying to hear her voice over a rush of blood in his ears that is somehow keeping him calm.

"I'm Kira," he can do that much on autopilot, searching past her for the entrance to the house. "Is there anything inside that you need? Can you try to get the door open without touching it, like what you did just now? There might be something behind it, I don't know where exactly the source of the smoke is."

"Yeah, I can probably open it with just my mind." Jean knew it would take a little concentration to make it work but she was rattled enough about Ren that she had the drive she needed to force her power to bend to her will. It was always easier when she was emotional - whether those emotions were good or bad.

She pulled at the door, concentrating on twisting and pushing it inward so that they wouldn't have to touch it to go inside the house. "Um, that should do it."

It was different when he was moving the body: he could pretend at least that the body was being properly dragged. It was different even from the pressure Ren had put around his throat--the door makes it visual, real. Fire doesn't immediately rush out of it at them, but a new plume of smoke finds the opening and rises into the sky. It was lighter than he expected, cleaner materials than anything that burned in New York.

He keeps his gaze on the house, telling himself that he can do plenty people would call crazy, would call him crazy for believing possible. She didn't deserve gawking when her house was on fire.

"Do you want to go in together, or do you want to go get someone to help," he asks, walking closer with his arm in front of his mouth, breathing through his sleeve. It doesn't look like the fire is burning through anything but the roof, but he has no idea how long it will hold. Considering some of the supplies they'd gotten in the gifts, the contents of the house could decide if she ate more than the inn's one meal a day.

"We can do it. I can carry things in my hands and with my mind," Jean said. She didn't want to risk running off to find someone else and miss a chance to get things out of the house that might burn in the interim. They needed to work now and work fast.

"We'll try to get his things out first. My stuff is less of a priority. I just...I don't want to lose anything that belonged to him."

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Lightning Can, in Fact, Strike Twice

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