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something i can never have; [closed]
Topic Started: May 9 2011, 10:22 PM (282 Views)
Primal
Unregistered

Place in Timeline: May 20th, following on from the end where i begin




Never get complacent. It’s a little disease, a creeping sickness that grows slow and steady like a withering cancer until one day you catch yourself gaunt and crippled wondering how you let life hang you upside down by the ankles. Complacency had killed all the high rollers and the big shots and it had taken down a whole generation of fat stupid fucks with their eyes in the TV. Primal’s complacency was in his beliefs: they had staled and soured until he couldn’t tell whose exactly he was fighting for. Long time back he’d borrowed Magneto’s supremacy agenda, following the big man’s lead like some hapless pack animal, given a name and a goal and a reason, sucked in like a lost kid at a cult gathering. Those beliefs had become his and he’d accepted them and carried them forward on a hard line until they had overstretched and snapped, rolling back to reveal just how far he’d let himself go.

Jesse was at the centre of that complacency, and she was lying broken in a prison cell.

Indecision had Primal by the throat. Insomnia turned reality to gibberish. He went seventy-hour periods at a time without sleep, unable to switch off, wired into ugly thoughts and all the brutality of which he’d been the cause. When he slept it was like an infection. Half an hour after he’d drifted unconscious he’d shudder awake, his mouth dry and his muscles aching, tension pressing a constant knot behind eyes rimmed red and heavy.

Three weeks ago he’d had her arrested. Magneto wanted for her the same treatment they’d afforded the Cajun, because it seemed appropriate she received what she had spared Gambit. Primal couldn’t do it. He’d walked in on her at home and she had stopped, startled, sensing something savage in emotions he couldn’t feel, and he’d had to look away as security had poured around him like eels and grappled her to the kitchen floor and barked official crap about why she was being taken in, and his breath had caught like broken glass in his chest, and he had done nothing to stop it.

And because he couldn’t do to her what he’d done to the Cajun he had left her to the dogs. It wasn’t mercy to let Brotherhood vermin pick her apart in his place. Primal didn’t want to know what they were doing to her and didn’t want to think about what he was allowing but couldn’t think about anything else, walking the city over and over until he didn’t recognise it. He felt held up by string, whatever it was that currently kept him stuck together.

He was about to do something nasty and drastic.

He’d thought about going into the prison block and pulling her out of her cell and ploughing through security until he fought his way to the transport rooms and there break Bernie’s bony fingers until the ‘porter opened up a doorway to somewhere remote and obscure like Lhasa or Nepal, and if they weren’t cornered by terrified locals or harassed by furious Asian authorities, somehow manage to escape the prying rootlets of roving Brotherhood telepaths. And they would survive there like strays or die starving in the gnarled tundra of the Himalayan plateau, vagrant figures without a home. He’d been down that road before; it wasn’t an option.

Primal didn’t know his body count. Sometime after the fifth the nausea had disappeared. Not long after that he’d stopped keeping score. He could only remember three: two of those had been kids, and the first… well. You never forget your first.

This, though…

It crawled in him.

What else was there? Months of torture culminating in a public execution? His avoidance was little more than self-saturated cowardice. Was it crueler to stop it quick, or to let it continue out of sight while he trudged on alone through the shit? The kindest option was the hardest.

Entering her cell was like walking into a separate reality, the universe outside collapsing into a void. They’d got her strapped up in the same way he’d had LeBeau, arms wrenched far back enough that they started to stretch out of the sockets, preventing her from sinking to her knees unless she wanted to hang herself Palestinian style. When it had been Gambit in her place he had felt nothing at seeing the bastard strung up and struggling to stay awake, head bowed, made to submit. Now it made him sick. All the hypocrisy in the world didn’t account for this mass of gristly emotion.

He approached stiff-legged and she sensed him, tensing and trying to straighten and struggling to rise an inch only to slump, whining at the tug of the stirrups straining her overtight tendons. Primal severed the bonds with a quick slash, thin legs taking her full weight for the first time in days. She buckled and he caught her before she hit the ground, but she whimpered and cringed from his touch, shoving a weak hand against his chest, trying to push him back or herself away. He could feel her trembling with exhaustion or fear and her clothes were wet and her hair was matted with blood and spit and vomit dried to a crust. Head sagging and lolling like a top-heavy marionette, her eyes rolled and met his and through the thick stink of grime he smelt accusation.

“Look at you,” she murmured, acerbic, and that was all she said. Her voice sounded like gravel.

“Christ, Jess…”

Jesse stared at him and mouthed What?, waxy features crumpling and her shoulders shuddering. She moaned a raw Let go of me and tried to shuffle out of his arms but couldn’t and slouched, and Primal tried to let her slither from his grip but couldn’t and sunk into a crouch, hunching over her, his fingers in her hair and his face in her neck and her hair in his mouth and scratchy against his cheek.

“Jesse, I gotta…”

He was about to kill the last warm part of him.

Primal’s lungs solidified into a block of ice. He forced himself to drop her, backing up and turning and pacing across to the other side of the cell, fingers scraping through his hair. His claws dug into his scalp and he heard himself say something like, “Jesus Christ, shit…” and then he was out of the door, leaving her sprawling and limp and small and somehow still alive.
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Primal
Unregistered

Outside he turned a tight circle and scrubbed at his face, dragging hands over the haggard peaks of his cheekbones, five-day beard coarse and abrasive, muscles bunched so tight they shook. Fuck his damn conscience. He only had one when it didn’t suit him, when he couldn’t make it fit, when it was selfish. He’d brought this on himself. He had done this to her, and he couldn’t fix it. There had to be another option, something he hadn’t yet thought of, a choice he couldn’t make out through the murk of being stuck in the middle of this clusterfuck.

Movement in his peripherals: one of the dogs approached, a spiteful, skinny sadist with a face like a rat. He meandered towards the Acolyte with meaty leer, lips like bacon, the smell of Jesse lingering rotten on him. He pressed his palm flat against the wall and cocked his head. Primal recalled with vague disinterest that his mutation had something to do with psychometry and making people talk, and images loomed up through his distress of Jesse and this mangy prick manhandling her into doing things she didn’t want, hurting her for the sake of it.

“She’s easier when she’s all greased up.” Pawing at an oily curl on the back of his neck, the mutant withered a simper. “You want I can work on her a little, get her t--“

Primal slammed the ratty cunt into the corridor wall, clamping a metal hand around his throat and squeezing until his cheeks bloated purple, until vertebrae knuckled under the saurian’s grip, shoving him upwards one-handed ‘til he was eye level, Primal looming close enough to feel the heat of his own breath wash back over his skin.

He snarled: “Put a fucking toe in that cell and I’ll rip off your dick and shove it so far down your throat you’ll think you fucked yourself in the goddamn ass. Let anyone else in and I’ll do the same shit to you but with theirs, then so help me God I’ll find every single person you’ve ever loved in your whole damn life and force you to watch as I chop them up into tiny fucking pieces, turn them into a goddamn burger and make you choke it down with ketchup and a motherfucking side of French fries.”

Ratty scrabbled, clawing at Primal’s prosthesis, gaping noiseless for air, body jerking and arching as if trying to find another source of oxygen. Red stained Primal’s senses, simmering hot and dangerous-- just a few more pounds of pressure and that spongy ball of cartilage would collapse. But something in the saurian’s resolve slackened, and before he could completely crush the young mutant’s windpipe his lip curled and his fingers loosened. Mr skinny slithered to the floor and gasped huge gulping breaths, neck already mottled and bruised and swollen, fine crimson rivulets dribbling from angry red gouge marks, and he goggled up at Primal’s disdainful sneer and shuffled away on his ass, gargling, “I don’t, I don’t, I didn’t mean nothing-- it’s just orders…”

Orders. Just like his. Primal didn’t want to believe he was the same as this kid, this kid with his broomstick legs and his rodent eyes and his acute sociopathy.

He spat, “Get out of here,” and didn’t watch as the terrified recruit skittered back the way he’d come, flapping his arms and vomiting apologies. Primal ground his fingers into his eyes until stars erupted through the black, digging in hard enough to replace his grinding headache with something sharp and vivid.

This undersea paradise, this tiny Atlantis would be remembered as the stopping point for mutants shrivelled by persecution, one of those monuments built on the backs of dumb fucks like his. Maybe when he was dead he’d get his name inscribed on a bronze plaque next to a long list of all the other idiots who had given their lives in service of mutant supremacy, and in a few hundred years his legacy would be a string of letters sitting ignored on a tarnished memorial underneath a giant statue of Magneto.

This was unhealthy. He couldn’t stop here-- but he couldn’t leave. He wasn’t sure he could go through with it but he couldn’t leave her like this any longer and the space between his ears filled up with mental suds, dirty run off, grimy shit that only made as much sense as the next mangled thought. Primal straightened and rolled his shoulders, breathing out slow. Sanctuary towered above him, an imposing and permanent bulk he couldn’t ignore.

Robotic, he re-entered her cell and gazed at her, curled foetal where he’d left her, and the door gusted shut too loud behind him.

She’d fallen asleep.

He didn’t want to wake her. He wanted to let her sleep, let her lie there in dumb ignorance for hours, let her pretend in some subconscious place that she was still in his bed and that he’d soon join her and steal some of the warmth she’d spread into the sheets. And when her eyes flickered they’d fight morning light and she’d mumble and make a stupid comment about his hair or his face or his scales and he wouldn’t care because she didn’t.

His throat was tight. It reminded him of the dryheave of Chicago, feeling too young and wanting to scream.

If he’d met her years ago maybe she could have steered the both of them in another direction. Maybe they wouldn’t have become defined by death and cold mimicry. Now it was too late.

He picked her up and she muttered something groggy and unintelligible.

Pain crumpled his features. Primal cradled her sleepy head in his hands and screwed his eyes shut (and tried not to remember skin on skin and the smell of her smile and sitting on stairs spitting insults and laughing about it after and for a few brief moments being little more than the lonely child of a lesser species but being wholly and truly alive) --- and twisted hard to the right.
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