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| A Toast of Poison To the Monsters That I've Been; [Cyclops] | |
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| Topic Started: Aug 3 2012, 06:54 AM (365 Views) | |
| Marrow | Aug 3 2012, 06:54 AM Post #1 |
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May 27th 7:30 AM It was early. She'd liked it early. It hadn't used to be that way. In the tunnels, where for many a year she dwelt and lived, where the sun didn't matter, a far off myth experienced only in the shortest spans of time, time of day didn't matter. In the tunnels beneath that grand old city, day could be night and night could be day and you'd be none the wiser. Since her arrival up here though? Since those first blinding steps out of the old Mansion's subterranean levels into the sun of the outside world that she'd never known as anything but a dream to chase, she'd found very much that she liked being up early. It was the smell, mostly. Dew on grass. Coffee brewing, breakfast cooking. The cool of it. Wet but cool in the shade. It was welcoming, inviting. It helped to level the head. Aside from that, she just liked it. Marrow, who'd been once a little girl named Sarah and, perhaps only in her head, a little girl called Elise, sat in quiet contemplation on the banks of the river that ran through the grounds of the Utopian temple, rolling the silk of some odd Savage Lands vegetable up into a bit of thin paper, licking it to seal it and plopping it into her mouth before lighting it ablaze with a match from a book she'd scrounged out of emergency supplies. It was bitter and harsh and it made her cough, but she didn't mind. It was a symbol of mortality and an indicator that she wasn't still trapped inside a cage built from her own insecurities. She looked over as the Sun slowly crawled its way away from the horizon, the heather-gray of morning still thick in the world, orange-pink skies mingling with the greens of the earth as far as the eye could see. The River had, of course, seen better days. It was however beginning to fill and flow again, the damage dealt now undone. As all things, time would see it turn again and be fine. It was getting close to morning. McCoy would be busy with people that were far worse off than she was. He'd not approve of this, straying off now, just after so much trauma. But if there was anything Marrow could do, it was heal. That was what worried her the most. She felt fine, physically. After a few hours of waking life she felt as fit as ever, but there was a burning conflict in her mind. She'd come so close to killing that thing in the Infirmary. A little to the left and she'd have cut his throat, and everyone had been there to see it. She'd stopped herself, caught hold of her perspective before she could go through with it, but it was there all the same. It hadn't left. Something in the back of her mind was nagging at her to do it, to lay waste to those little gray men, the ones that had been lying to them all for so long. The ones who had taken away her little brother. The ones who had done this to her and everyone else. A flat of bone cut through vein and muscle and skin through the bottom of her wrist and she caught it in her hand, watching the hole seal behind it as if nothing had happened. Looking ahead to the river, she gave it a spinning launch, watching as it skipped across the water as she blew a stream of smoke off to the side. Everything moved through her head now at sixty miles a minute. Everyone had seen it. They saw it on her face when those Nuwali things were close. There was a silent rage about her. One that she'd thought she'd pushed back a long time ago. Turned out that maybe she wasn't feeling half so good as she thought. She stood up, watched the river for a few more moments, and started back for the temple before she started to worry people with her unannounced absence. |
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| Cyclops | Aug 3 2012, 07:43 AM Post #2 |
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Punches from the Punch Dimension
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"No need to go back so soon," Scott said, as he stepped from the shadows, beneath the canopy of trees, some of the highest ones starting to recover the leaves lost to frost. The biosphere of Pangea recovered quickly, so quickly. They did not give up their scars so easy. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, tossing them to her. "Leftover from Ruby, so they might be a little stale, but I imagine they're better than whatever you're rolling yourself. I carry them in my pocket, sometimes, when things are particularly stressful, because Ruby left me with a taste for them... them, and the good scotch, too much of it. But I don't smoke and I don't like to drink to blackout, so these things are reminders that I'm in charge of myself, not base urges, not addictions, not remnants of another man inside my skull. It's a test and to be honest, I hate tests, ironic considering how I thrive on them." Scott thrust his hands in his pockets, and gave a shrug, "We're being tested now, danger ridiculously high, and we don't know what waits us when we step outside the biosphere. I've honestly never wanted a cigarette or a drink more than right now. Don't tell Jean, or Rachel. I'm sure they already know, telepaths right, but they've had the grace to ignore it." He stepped close to Marrow, not so close that it was uncomfortable, but close enough, "You're not the only one raging, you're not the only one that still feels the need to fight, to hurt, to kill. I've never allowed myself to do what I did as part of the swarm, ever. I've never given in so much to the sheer pleasure of being out of control. Maybe it helped not having my powers. All my life, all my mutant life, I've resented my powers, thinking they made me less human, made me a monster. But I think this experience has shown me that the only way I can be anything else, is to have them to force me to control myself. The uncontrollable nature of my powers means I have to remember, consciously remember, that I am a man and am more than just a conduit for destructive force." Nodding to Marrow, he said, "What are you? Are you a monster? Are you a girl? Your choice. No one else's. Not anymore. You're alone in your skull even if urges were left behind. You going to let them keep you chained?" |
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| Marrow | Aug 3 2012, 04:37 PM Post #3 |
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She started at the sudden words that seemed to shoot from nowhere, turning to face the emerging leader of the X-Men as he made his presence known, chucking something her way, which she caught in a fumbling grab, pinning it to her chest to avoid dropping it before inspecting it, eyes looking up to him, puzzled at first before returning to the small package as he explained its origins and its significance. She looked it over in her hands as he spoke, splitting her attentions evenly between the two. He was right of course. She may have been A Queen among the brood, but here, now, as a mutant, if indeed she still was a mutant, she was just another victim of outward control, an issue that seemed to plague their entire species. And that leant to it. She felt as if she should be entitled, as if she should be exalted, and that disgusted her. That meant that on some subliminal level she still wasn’t herself. That she wasn’t in control of her own priorities. But as Scott continued, and she cast aside the cigarette in exchange for one of the ones he’d just given her she began to wonder. “I want to be a person Scott, I don’t wanna be a monster. But I got this nagging feeling in the back of me that pushes me one way while the rest of me pulls the other. I donno if that’s some sort of thing with me or with everybody but I ain’t like you, I can’t just not do it, I break everything I get close to, it’s just a matter of time, and I feel like it’s just nature doin’ it’s thing. And what scares me the most is I don’t know if I’d rather fix it or just crawl into a hole somewhere and let everyone else move on.” “I… feel like a monster.” She said. “I feel like a creature, I’ve felt like that for a very long time. Knowing that ten people somewhere go to sleep wondering if the next time they open their eyes you’re gonna be there to finish what you started with them.” She looked to the ground. “I don’t know if that’s me overblowin’ my own credibility but I’ve been thinking about that train an awful lot lately. About Sack and what we did. The Queen tried to lull me into complacency by showing me that, by showing me everything I’ve done and screwing it into my head that it’s what I exist for. To be a monster for people to fear and to get respect through fear and I…” She shook her head. “I’m sick of being bloody, and there ain’t no way to wash the past off and now here I am not even myself. I’m not even me anymore. I look like her, man. I’m gonna see her every time I see a mirror and I don’t know that I can deal with that.” She tossed the cigarette aside and shoved the pack into the pocket of her pants, adjusting the strap of her tank top and looking back to the temple. “I don’t feel like me anymore, I just feel like a replica of me. Rahne hates me, I can feel it, I can see it on her face, and I can’t do nothin’ about it. I feel like there should be a song in my head and it isn’t there. I feel like I should be someone else and I’m not and I don’t know if that means that its still in me or if I’m just finally well and good off the deep end. And that has me more afraid than I’ve ever been in my life.” She blinked hard. She wasn’t going to let tears slip by. That was a copout. She’d gone damn near ten years without it and she’d done more of it with the X-Men than she’d ever care to admit. But she was frightened, she was afraid and she was close to picking a direction and just taking a long walk. “I don’t wanna be a victim to myself but I don’t know what to do. I always had the Morlocks or Artie or the kids to look out for and right now I don’t even know if I trust myself to do that.” She looked back down to the pack of cigarettes in her hand. "I just don't know how to deal. I've never been good at dealin'. Pushin' stuff aside like you do. When I do that I end up blowin' up sooner or later." |
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| Cyclops | Aug 3 2012, 07:51 PM Post #4 |
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Punches from the Punch Dimension
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"If you want to be a person, Sarah, then be one," Scott said, "No one is asking you to not be who you are, and frankly, who you are is not as bad as you think, or you wouldn't be down here at what to most of the people in this place is an ungodly hour fretting about it." Listening to her explain what was going on in her head, Scott nodded when she was finished and then he said, "I came back from this whole thing disgusted that I'm small, and soft, that I can't fly, that as I am now, I can't bite and claw. I came back feeling as if I was taking a step down, backwards and I resisted, for that moment, I resisted. I don't know how much you remember about what was happening, but when we fought, the Brood Queen told me that I could keep the broodform, that I could form a swarm of my own, and spread these gifts. Was I tempted? Absolutely, absolutely I was. I'm still dreaming of it, of surrendering to instinct and feral power." He listened to her as she finished her cigarette, and shifted awkwardly, explaining that she didn't know how to push things aside like he did. "Whoa, hold on there, Sarah," Scott said, "I don't push things aside, ever. When something bad happens to me, when I make something bad happen to someone else, I hold on to that moment, and I learn from it. How did this happen? How can I prevent it from happening again? How can I change what happened? I wasn't taught to shuffle things to the side. The men who used their manipulations, their powers, their strengths to try and mold me into what they wanted me to be? What I took from them was the ability to use those skills to force myself into the shape I wanted, and it left marks on me, not as obvious as your new appearance but marks nonetheless." He indicated the strands of silver at his temples, "This isn't much, I know, but you have to look deeper to see what scars I hold. Every 'Scottism' that I have, my lack of warmth, my inability to 'loosen up,' how I don't like physical displays of affection, how hard it is for someone to earn my friendship. These are all very real bruises left on my psyche, and I only know that because I have been pried open by a series of telepaths, most welcome but not all." Scott looked at her, meeting her changed eyes as best as he could from behind the ruby quartz lenses of his sunglasses. "We're mutants, not monsters. That's why we're standing here, right now, in mostly human forms, fighting back from what felt like superior bodies, because as strong and powerful as the Broodforms were, they tried to take away what makes us human. You hear a lot of 'human this, mutant that' but none of that matters. You're a person, and if you let this break you, you'll be less than that. I want you beside me in this fight. I need you to trust me. I need you to trust yourself." |
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| Marrow | Aug 5 2012, 05:36 AM Post #5 |
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She looked over again to the river, feeling on one hand that she should be looking to Cyclops, but on the other, unable to do that. His own issues echoed in her. In the day since she'd come back to conscious thought, she'd had so much to take in, so much to process, but above it all and still there even now was a sense of wrongness. A sense of lost control. Control over others, almost full sway over minds of hundreds, a constant chorus of love of and life beamed into her mind from all across the universe. And now that it ceased to be there, even though she didn't remember a lick of what was said, its absence was felt. The absence of power was felt, of control and high born regal whim that she simply no longer possessed. When she had woken up that had been the first thing she missed. Not her friends. Not her family (what little she had that could be called such). She missed the power. And that made her feel dirty. But he was right. Scott, who numbered among the very few people in this world she ever counted as someone to trust (most of whom were in the same circle of people), was very much right. Still, it was both strange and sobering to her, seeing him with all this outward expression. If he, who she looked at as a paragon by this point was able to move on, then she most certainly could. She was a Morlock. The Morlocks didn't give into adversity. They didn't bend to the will of man. There was a reason they shirked the forty-acres-and-a-mule that was Mutant Town to live below the earth in darkness. There was a symbolism in it that defied the understanding of many. The hardiest things lived in the dark, away from the sun. There were times when she'd thought that coming up here, to the world under the sun, that she'd believed that she'd become a soft person. And in some ways perhaps that was true. But it had taken a great many people- Scott Summers, Jean Grey, Logan, Rahne-to make her see that humanity, even for all its prejudice and hate, had a bright side. She had come to appreciate that far more now than ever before, and here, after all this fighting and struggle and turmoil, in a body that was for all intents and purposes no longer her own, she feared more than anything losing that to feral urge, a stupid and wholly lizard-brained force of kill or be killed that she'd truly believed herself over and done with. Scott was right, though. She knew that, somewhere in the back of her mind, what was left of it, and though it would take much more than an early morning conversation for her to come to terms with that, she felt like she had a beacon in the storm now. "I can't stay here, Scott. If I just sit here in the jungle and try to ignore what this place did to me, I'll go batty." She hunched down, picking at a flat stone, pulling it up from it's position in the river's dried banks, knocking a pillbug from it into her hand and tossing the rock aside. Marrow watched as it curled up, went inert in the palm of her hand. To the little creature it was as safe as safe could be. But were she to close her fist, it'd all be over. The mercy lay in letting it believe in its own safety, but by the same token that mercy was a disservice. She'd been put in the unique position of having a glaring, outside look at her own weaknesses, at her own reservations and the cracks in her own defenses. She slanted her palm and let the little bug roll back into the dirt, where it quickly burrowed away into the mud and sandy river soil. "If you're serious about needing me by you in whatever is happening next, then you got me. All of me." |
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| Cyclops | Aug 9 2012, 04:25 AM Post #6 |
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Punches from the Punch Dimension
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"I can't stay here, Scott. If I just sit here in the jungle and try to ignore what this place did to me, I'll go batty." Marrow said, following it quickly with "If you're serious about needing me by you in whatever is happening next, then you got me. All of me." Scott looked at her for a long moment, before scooping a flat stone out of the dirt, brushing it off and squinting out at the river. "The physics of skipping a stone," he said, seemingly going off on some lecturing tangent, "say that the conditions depend on a stone's diameter, velocity, mass, tilt, angle of attack, and the density of the water. Part of my mutation is an understanding of spatial geometrics, that I can't actually explain. I look at this stone in my hand, I look at the river, and I know, just know how much spin to put on the rock, what angle I need to release it at, and, so..." He snapped his wrist and the stone skipped out of his hand and across the river, one-two-five-seven-ten times exactly, to land on the other bank perfectly. "But if I analyze how it happens, if I spend every moment of every day concentrating on the whys of things, I don't experience what's around me," Scott said, "I don't need to understand why I can see the angles and distances. I just need to trust that I can, and use that trust to get done what needs to be done. I've spent so many years working to make what I can do second nature, so that control is automatic, that I don't hesitate, and I don't doubt. We just pulled off something that those who knew better said was impossible, and we did it, not just because we had to, but because we believed that we could." Glancing up at the shield above their head, Scott said, "We need to go out into the world beyond this place, now, back to where we belong because what's happening out there needs to stop. People like us, Marrow, don't need to stop an analyze why we have to stand against what's wrong in the world, why we have to be the ones to fight. We just do it, because we can. The people who are with me when I go back to New York to find out exactly what is happening and what can be done to stop it, are going to be people I trust, and more importantly, they are going to be people who trust me. I will never give an order that I don't believe is the exact right one, and I will never ask anyone to do something they can't do." He turned and started heading back to the temple, "If you want to be with me when I do this thing, then you'll be with me. If you have any doubts whatsoever, you'll find an excuse not to go. You're not an X-Man yet, and even if you weren't, I'm not a tyrant, I'm not a King, I'm not a dictator. You believe you can't stand strong, I don't want you with me because the stakes are too high." Then, he gave her a glance over his shoulder, "But I never misjudge an angle." |
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| Marrow | Aug 10 2012, 05:40 AM Post #7 |
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She gave him a look as he gave his side of things, as he spoke in the realisms and cold cut facts he normally did, and then she turned back to look on into nature, to look at the river and the banks beyond and the trees beyond that, still trying to grow back leaves lost to frost and battle and she pursed her face up, considering, in that moment, pretty much everything. Scott looked over his shoulder, offered some parting words, and headed back for the temple. Moving to the edge of the water, Marrow crouched down and fingered through the pebbles and stones, picking one up out of the muck, turning it around in her hand. Two days ago she'd been dead, maybe not physically so, not entirely. This she knew, because she was pretty sure barring certain extreme circumstances, that she'd find death itself to be very elusive. She'd survived much in her time, and she was sure that, hanging around these people, she'd survive much more to come, but did she want to? In the tunnels, it was fear that got you respect. Here, it was so much more complicated, and the secrets of it had eluded her. But it wasn't about respect. Not the kind of respect she'd been looking for, anyhow. Artie was missing, maybe worse. And he wasn't the only one. Dontae, Tyrone, that Collins girl. Who knew how many elsewhere. All missing. All sitting somewhere, needing a rescue. He hand gripped around the stone in her hand and her eyes moved across the surface of the water. "We skip the rock across cause we know its up ta us to do it, huh?" The stone clattered back amongst its brethren and she was off like a bolt. "Scott! Scott!" She said, catching back up to him, stumbling to a stop. "I want in... I want in." She said, hands going to her knees for a second. "If you're goin' outside, I want in. I done enough of this mopin' and whinin'. I spent a week with genocide pumpin' into my brain like a sermon and if the things that took Artie wanna mess with us then I'm gonna mess right back. I got a sniffer for 'em now and I got a bone ta pick with em to boot." She looked him in the eyes as best she could. "I'm in... and I'm done doubtin'. ...Thanks." |
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2:20 PM Jul 11