By Chya
Don't leave me Jess. I know you're in there, but it's getting harder and harder to feel you. Please don't give up hope, please, I beg you, stay here with me because I need you.
I need you to hold me and tell me everything's going to be okay, that we're going to get out of this.
I'm scared Jess, really scared. I'm scared for you and I'm scared for me, and I'm scared that things won't be alright ever again and I need you to tell me I'm wrong. The secrets of the mind hold little fear for me, and I've always been the one to protect you, protect you all, against that form of attack.
But this one attacked through your heart and that's the one area of the mind that's a stranger to me, one that, the more you learn about it, the harder it is to figure out. She went in through there, had your heart from the beginning, took over your mind, then your soul. Now, you're almost an empty shell lying crumpled on the floor.
I can't protect you, I can't rescue you from her hold.
And you, defender and white knight to me, to Shalimar, to anyone defenseless, you can no longer protect me.
It's dark in here, and cold. It smells of mildew and rotting wood, air damp against my skin, makes yours clammy beneath my fingertips. She's going to come for me soon, then she'll have you all to herself. I don't want to die, Jesse. I don't want to be left here alone.
I'd only let you go if you could take me with you.
But since you can't, then I won't let you go.
Damn it, Jess, you can't leave!
It's not like you to leave a damsel in distress behind. And to hell with pride, if I'm not a damsel in distress right now, then I soon will be. I know she has you entangled in her web, but is there not one tiny part of you that cares for me still? That cares what happens to me? To all of us?
What about Shal? Don't you care what this will do to her? She loves you. She loves me too, I guess. What do you think losing us both will do to her? Adam will beat himself up, and Brennan… do you think a shattered Shalimar and a guilt torn Adam will be enough for him to stick around?
I don't understand how you could abandon me, abandon us so easily.
Stay with me Jess, please.
*****
The Black Rose watches with cold dark eyes, a woman whose thorns are as
long, sharp and deadly as her beauty is mesmerizing.
*****
It's gone quiet. There was gunfire a short while ago, and no one's come to get either of us yet. Maybe the plan worked.
Maybe your computer virus did the trick.
Maybe Adam and the others came to rescue us.
But I don't hear anything. That means nothing though.
Nothing means anything here.
This place, these people. Their hatred is so strong, it almost hurts. They want all mutants to die, yet they don't realize that their leader and figurehead, the Black Rose, was a powerful mutant herself.
When they brought your almost lifeless body in here they said you'd killed her. I guess no one will ever know how much it cost you to do that.
But while I don't doubt that's the truth, she's still here.
She's so powerful that, while her body may be gone, her mind lives on. It's rooted in you, and wants to take you with her.
But I won't let you go. I want you stay here with me.
The irony is that, while I hold you, willing you stay here with me, that while you're still alive, there's every chance she'll come for me, take me down through you. She's already told me she's coming for me soon.
Periodically I open myself up to you, get some sense of what's going on inside. Each time is harder, your thoughts becoming echoes then whispers as you fade. The darkness as she weaves her silent web consuming you.
And that's just one more thing that scares me.
Every time I open myself up I tend to a seed I've planted in your mind, a tiny point begging you to think of me, to concentrate on my thoughts (growing ever more random), my voice (drying up to a cracked whisper) and the memories we share (fading and elusive).
We have to be strong, Jess. You have to be strong. You can have her, or you can have us, and we believe you deserve us more than you deserve the black widow that she is. But you have to choose and you have to fight for that choice.
Her web has tightened as much as she's able to make it, yet you're still here and that can only mean that she's about ready to come for me.
You're drifting in between. An improvement of sorts from my point of view, but not enough. To drift away is to suffer the same fate as if you'd willingly gone with her, but slower, more painfully, and if I'm strong enough to not let go, then maybe you'll take me with you. Which could be a blessing for me. Or simply the end.
You sacrificed yourself, Jess. You've
done more than anyone had any right to expect of you, yet you still condemn
yourself. I want you back here and I can't deny that I'm being selfish, but I
also want you back here because I don't believe you'd ever find the way back by
yourself.
I don't know everything that you've had to do to get this mission accomplished but, even before the end, I'd been able to sense the guilt and disappointment in yourself at what you've done. But I do know that you did it for what you believed in, you did it for Adam and Shalimar and Brennan and me, and all those mutants who were on the Black Rose's hit list. But remember, Jess, she knew how you felt. Every time you did something that made you go against your principles, she made you do something else a little worse. She took away your pride and dignity, she took away everything you held important, broke and spat on it in front of you and then made you throw the broken pieces away yourself.
She doesn't deserve you. We do.
I don't know how to get through to you, Jesse. You don't move a muscle, just
lie here in my arms, hopeless eyes looking vaguely at nothing, hard strong
muscles useless in limbs with no will to move them. Until she's strong enough
to do it, anyway.
I need for you to want to come back, Jess. I need for you to fight, to thrash and scream even if only in your mind. Only then can I help you directly.
But you just drift on.
And I see my little seed still planted there. But it doesn't grow.
Stay with me, Jess, I need you.
*****
She watches with the hatred that has been hers since she can remember. A hatred so deep and ingrained that she could never put a name to it, a hatred of herself that had begun so powerful and so young that she'd only ever had the choices of destroying herself, or those around her. The first had never been an option so the latter became her life, and now that's all she was.
A destroyer.
It had taking time and mind games to bring this girl to her knees. Not much more than a child, yet stronger than any encountered previously. But the child was losing now, and the destroyer reveled in it. She would reach out and take the girl, but patience always reaped a sweeter reward than the swift felling of clean execution.
Then there was the boy. Such a sweet, naïve boy, one she'd found a great deal of pleasure in breaking. She's known from the beginning why he'd infiltrated her group, had known he was one of those detested mutants from the start.
He was not unpleasing to look at, and it was no hardship for her to weave a spell on him that he'd never had any chance to evade, use his body and his mind for her own pleasure until she finally had his soul. Yet, even burdened by all the careful chains she'd placed around his psyche, he'd still outsmarted her, still found it within himself to betray her, to plunge the knife into her organization and into her physical body.
Her dying act had been to grip him tight, his hand still on the knife. Made sure he felt every last second of her death throes, her blood flowing over his fingers, her final breath where she turned her head at his throat.
She'd virtually heard his heart and mind shatter, leaving him open for her to throw a psychic line and leave her dying, dying, dead, body behind.
Her use of his body was limited at best, astral projection never being a part of her power. Even what she'd done had been done in the trauma of her death throes, and she didn't know if she could repeat it. But, she was determined to take her murderer with her.
He was in limbo right now, cocooned in her web yet not quite hers, the pull of the girl too strong for him to come to her willingly. But she could be patient, knowing he would be forced to drift towards her sooner or later. She just had to make certain that he would never return to his own world.
Closing her eyes, she listened to the workings inside the mind she inhabited and wondered if the girl could hear what she heard, the beautiful pure agony of his cries, faint and hopeless, from the deepest, farthest recesses. She knew instinctively, though, that the pain and fear of his bleeding soul could not be heard in his own world.
She smiled to herself knowingly and, calling upon her immense patience, she sat back and waited for time to do its work, sure that her spell would only grow stronger, soon never to be broken.
*****
The battle when it comes, is devastating.
I've never felt a force so strong and malevolent in my entire life. Perhaps if I were as pure she is evil, my victory would be more decisive. As it is, I have to fight every inch of the way, ever aware that the prize over which we are fighting is also the battleground that we lay to waste with each psionic blast fired, bomb dropped, or spell cast.
If you were able to fight, the damage might not be so great, but you're drifting in the limbo still, accepting the punishment we mete out, and I suddenly realize that she is not fighting to win. Only to keep her prize. She doesn't need to win this battle, only needs to ensure that I do not, for then you will go to her.
I change my strategy, trusting to my own faith and my faith in you, and assault her with one long painful barrage that I don't quit until I've spent every last molecule of energy within me.
And she's gone.
And so are you.
And so am I.
*****
She curls up and licks her wounds, swears revenge as she fades into the background.
Her patience is surpassed by none.
*****
….
Time has passed
….
And you've changed.
And it seems like I'm the only one that still sees it. But then again, maybe that's only to be expected.
By the time Shalimar opened the door to our freedom with her Cheshire cat grin through manic black-circled eyes you were back with me, and it was almost like nothing had happened. Only I seemed shocked and bruised after the encounter, you reassuring and solicitous, taking care of me all the way home, insisting that you remembered little or nothing of what had passed.
Oh, we all knew something wasn't quite right with you when we came back, but it simply wasn't significant with everything else going on. Not that there was anything dramatically wrong, but you were just a little quieter than your usual self, your eyes and smile a little sad.
I knew why, of course, know that having a hole in your memories can change and disorient a person. And that's what I put it down to.
It had been a long and dangerous mission, but I hadn't realized how close we'd come to not coming home, all of us. But we did in the end, although Brennan was horribly hurt and they'd played with Shalimar's head cruelly. And me, they'd messed me up too before they shut me up in that place, before they threw your body in with me . You, who'd been in deep cover, gone from us for weeks going on months.
You debriefed alone with Adam afterwards and you've never told any of the others what happened while you were away. Said it wasn't important, that the mission had been a success and that was all that mattered. That we had to focus on getting us all well again. You didn't tell Adam everything either. He knows there's something you missed out in your report, but only I know the truth.
I wish you could have told him then, before things got this bad.
But because you were unharmed and always there to help us, they forgot that you carried some deep hurt too. And I, the one person who should have seen, mistook your quiet moods for something else. My only excuse is that I have dark times when I'm overwhelmed by what I saw whilst in their care.
But all of you were, are, there to help me, as we all are for each other. But you never asked, either directly or indirectly, for help in any way, just slowly grew more distant, detached and cold.
Slowly we healed together and moved on. But by that time, we'd all gotten used to the new you. Took it for granted and didn't even think about it. The dynamic between us all changed so slowly and subtly that no one misses what was there before.
It's become normal for you to nurse a single melancholy beer when we go out. You don't touch us anymore, and I can't remember the last time I saw you hug anyone, can't remember the last time you hugged me. And you're positively glacial with the women who chat you up. Shoot them down with a soft smile and a precise harpoon of words straight through the heart.
It always used to be a bone of contention between you and Brennan who was in charge, the pair of you squabbling until Shal came and kicked both your asses. Now, you lead. But not for the same reasons I would have liked to see you lead. The old Jesse would have led with compassion and consideration. Now, you lead with cold clinical detachment.
No one questions your place, though they might question your methods. Brennan did a couple of times, and you hit him with a considering gaze, stepped back and let him take the fall. Let him set himself up for it, while being there to pick him up, brush him down and take back what he tried to take away.
Shalimar, for the longest time, couldn't see beyond herself and by the time she did rejoin the rest of us, she too had accepted you for how you've become.
I too might've forgotten who you were in time, but while the rest of us are healed, I can sense you still hurting, reminding me of the time we shared, where I was not the only one damaged. A fact that has been lost amidst the long chaos of self-pity and introspection. You hide it well where no one can see it, right there in the open.
I worry about you so much now. Since I first became aware of the pain that's been slowly building inside you all this time. I can't feel it, but I sense it in a way that's foreign to me. Perhaps a new aspect of my powers, but I'm very much afraid that this sense is a far more sinister product of our captivity.
You've always felt so deeply and passionately that I used to have problems shielding myself from you. But now you've locked it all away, and I miss your warm, reassuring presence always there at the edges of my consciousness.
I tried talking to you, but you've become adept at diversionary tactics or, when push comes to shove, a straightforward cold shoulder, turning your back and walking away. I've tried talking to the others, but they don't see the problem I have with you. Brennan's of the opinion that we all change, and the more sheltered our past the more we change. Adam's proud of you, of all things, proud of how you've grown into the strong man you are, but he only sees the outside.
Shalimar, I think sees more. She seemed uncertain when I spoke with her, projecting worry but also denial. You're in a place far beyond her comprehension or control and, because you're outside her territory, while a part of her worries and waits for you to return, until then her majority refuses to see anything wrong.
I don't know what to do and feel so alone.
*****
Slowly she grows and entices her lover back to her. Her world is reduced and limited to him, and she's determined that she will have him. She doesn't love him; this is all about possession and destruction, not feelings. Such fragile and mercurial things are only there to be used and manipulated.
And she is equally determined to destroy the Other.
He fights her though, cuts himself off, cuts her off from those around him. Ever the protector, the damned knight in tainted armor, keeping those he loves safe the only way he knows how. It takes everything she has to make the smallest dent in that armor and hope it's enough to bring the Other into this world too.
For now though, she draws him inch by inch into her embrace, thereby destroying him from the inside out.
Something distracts her, a tiny, tiny glimpse of reflected light and she finds the seed planted there so long ago by the Other, just starting to generate the tiniest sliver of green.
With ruthless decisiveness she crushes it between rock hard fingers and drops it back to the barren earth before returning to her self-imposed tasks.
*****
Last night I did something I rarely do. I tiptoed inside your head when you were asleep.
I don't think I have ever been so shocked in my entire life. The realization that what I was sensing was the merest echo of the deeply intense agony you're living with every minute of the day and night. The agony that in minute steps gets worse day by day. So deep and bad enough that all I saw, all I can still see, is the rotten death and decay inside you.
And I'm frightened for you.
For all of us, for what it'll do to us if that decay is allowed to draw to its dreadful conclusion.
I'm at a loss as to what to do, so I consult anonymously with others.
I promised myself a long time ago, after I'd meddled once already with your mind, and meddled almost fatally with Adam's, that I'd never meddle without consent again. But I don't see any other way to help you when you don't want to be helped. And call me selfish, but I don't want to lose you. You're my brother and my friend, the one I can rely on to stick up for me when Shalimar or Brennan pulls their 'grown up' act, try and out-rank me with age. Always there for me, one of the precious few I can trust. Even those times when you're such a, a boy, letting your hormones take over in response to a low cut top. (Why do you think Shal and I wear them such a lot?)
So you see, I refuse to let you go and I refuse to stand by and watch you destroy yourself. And no, I don't really care what you want right now, which is what gives me the courage to do what I believe must be done. What I believe you need.
Sifting through the advice I've been given, throwing out what doesn't apply and moulding what does to my own specifications, in the darkest hours I begin my little horticultural project.
Gently, so gently as to avoid detection, I strip away the outer layers of your self-imposed exile, dig through the deadwood and rot, expecting to find inside the wounded seed of your soul. But your hopelessness becomes mine when all I find at your center is a vast frozen wasteland.
One shock too many and I spend the rest of the night lying awake in misery.
*****
She holds him tight and smiles as she feels the Other enter. She's not strong enough yet, so she lets the Other roam as she will, pleased at the revulsion she feels from the intruder.
For now, the knowledge of his destruction will be enough to begin the process in the Other that will ultimately lead to destruction and revenge.
*****
As I watch you go about your business, ever increasingly like an automaton, I wish I were a telepath. I wish I could read your mind and know what's going on to make you so desolate. But I'm not, I'm only an empath, and I can only read and influence your feelings in terms of imagery.
Determined to find the root cause, I hit the computer. I'm no tecchie so I spend a long time muddling through, but eventually I find Adam's notes on the Black Rose. I'm flicking through the personnel files when I feel you behind me, and the chaos of emotions pouring out of you almost drowns me with its shocking suddenness, making me cry out and fall to the floor, my lungs filling up, choking me with the chaotic deluge.
And then it's gone.
Blurred faces swimming above me, Brennan looking down with concern as I cough up imaginary water, but no sign of you.
I tentatively reach out for you, but you've closeted yourself in the Helix. You don't sleep this night, the walls firmly back in place.
But when I'm this determined I'm very, very patient. I bide my time until a day later you can't help but sleep. I enter the frozen wastes and find the river that nearly drowned me slicing through the jagged whiteness like a dark wound. Far from being the rushing white water rapids I'd envisaged, it's black and poisoned, clogged with sewerage and stagnation. Yet, while I watch, its flow ceases altogether, freezes over and blizzard snow falls until everything is once again white and devoid of anything at all.
Retreating from the cold, I see that the decay surrounding the desolation has spread and I truly fear for you.
You don't deserve this; of us all, you least of all deserve this. Brennan is proud of the fact that he's seen things the rest of us can only imagine, I don't want to think about Adam's convoluted history, and I think Shalimar had a hard childhood. Mine, while mine wasn't so much hard as just different, in many ways I am naïve. I know that, but in other ways I'm probably the most mature person in Sanctuary - and yes, I do include Adam in that statement. He can be too obsessed with his toys sometimes, too much the spoilt child, wanting his way and throwing a tantrum when he doesn't get it.
When I finally sleep, your nightmares are mine. The frozen heart becomes the emptiness of a soul sliced open with a razor and allowed to bleed dry, the decay surrounding it the dark congealed mess of what once belonged inside.
Light dawning, I need to find that razor.
I find you with the blade when you think you're alone. We've all gone shopping, so you thought, but I stay and watch, and I can feel a trace of hunger and need and a deep, deep ache. You disappear into the kitchen and I slide in to look at your monitor - and there she is, the Black Rose herself.
Long black hair, olive skinned, with dark sultry eyes, the kind of seductive beauty any woman would hate on sight, strictly on jealous principle. I certainly do, and I never met her even when her people held me captive.
It's clear to me now that she held you prisoner as much as she held me. But in the end she let me go. You, contrary to what we thought, and despite my apparent victory, have not been so lucky.
But how do I make the dead let go?
I can't erase everything inside you, and wouldn't if I could. You're trying to do that yourself, and it's killing you. If I tried and succeeded, I may as well put a bullet to your brain myself. She hurt you and hurt you again and, I think, hurts you still. You, who has always let hurt wash over you, idealistic enough to want to believe that no one truly meant you harm.
Now you're frightened, terrified, of being hurt again. You've realized that everyone you've ever let close to you has the power to gut you. The Black Rose cut deep enough to kill, but I will fight her every inch of the way. I will show you that the risk of that hurt is worth taking.
Because I am that determined. Even though I've always been the one who's guarded against the hurt, who's always had the power that most mortals don't get, to be able to predict who will care and who will hurt.
Your heart and soul have been shattered, but in your dreams I'll put them back together piece by piece. Yet, how do I still the terror of shattering all over again? How do I ensure that you're never too afraid to take that chance again?
Tonight I project peace to accompany my intrusion. And in the snowscape I find the faintest vision of what was.
The Black Rose looks directly at me as her ghostly form dances with yours, and the challenge is made. He will never again dance with anyone but me, she says. And much to my sadness, this vision of you seems happier than you are in the waking world, almost alive. And enthralled in the embrace of a deadly Siren.
I will not let her take you. I have never given before, never given anything of myself. Shalimar and Adam and you do that. Brennan and I, we're too selfish, we never give unless higher returns are guaranteed, and I never take a risk without reading the truth before hand. But I'm the only one who has the power to win this battle.
And I will not lose. Not a second time.
If I have to give everything I have, I will not lose you. I'm not afraid of dying if it will teach your soul to live again.
She isn't strong enough yet, so I begin my assault, hard and ruthless, hoping the collateral damage isn't too bad, but knowing that to be too careful of that a second time round will spell defeat.
*****
Damn the stubborn little child!
The Black Rose doesn't expect the Other to attack so soon. She gives her best cruelly knowing smile, implying that it is she who has control, rather than the jumped up little freak who tries to pry her away from her lover.
She lashes out, hitting the Other with everything she has, cold laughter inferring that this is just the beginning. But the Other patiently weathers the storm, her determination to drive her out stronger than the Black Rose could ever have imagined. So when the child is ready and throws her tantrum the Black Rose has to fall, and she does, aiming for survival over victory, plunging into and under the snow to hibernate once more.
But the Other is determined to eradicate and follows her into the smallest crevasses and she's forced to draw herself out ever thinner until, with one touch, the Other forces her demise, fuse lit and fast burned. But, with no dynamite on the end, fated to fizzle and die.
*****
The battle is hard but short and I am devastated but victorious. Her strength lay in her hidden shadows but, once exposed, she had nothing to give.
You, however, are left lost and alone in your barren wasteland, exhausted and cold. So many times you've held me as I've mourned a love lost or some mistake that's taken away some of my own innocence. So now it's my turn to hold you while you collapse and grieve and work through the shock.
I don't honestly remember how I came to be huddled next to your sleeping body, both of us curled up in the Helix's gloomy hold. I try to leave, but you won't let me, your existence having been too dark too long and, despite her presence, too lonely
Half awake, half asleep, you hold me tight, trembling a little, needing my reassurance. But eventually you let go, whisper your thanks and turn away.
To the world at large nothing has changed, and no one but we two know about our battles fought and won. They worry about my sudden lethargy, stop worrying as with plenty of sleep I recover. And you're still the same.
I know what's wrong, I know what will make it all right, but it's something that has to come from you. Until you let go, you'll carry on this façade of life, growing increasingly lonely on a long road to purgatory, looking in on the rest of us, but forever apart.
I wish you could cry.
Because only then will the healing process begin.
In your dreams I spend hours searching for that seed I planted so long ago, and when I find it, it's crushed, hidden beneath the snow. I'm stuck, I'm lost and I don't know what to do. If only the seed was still whole, for I can't make another.
Breaking yet another self-imposed taboo, I show Shalimar what I see, let her share in my walks through your dreams, enable her understanding. You're still way outside her territory, but she has enough feel for you to extend her boundaries out to the cold place you're in and suffuse it with her natural warmth.
It takes time and patience, and it takes reassurances to both Brennan and Adam that it's all okay, but they should just keep out until it's time to welcome you back into Sanctuary. I back off while Shalimar works her magic, merely taking a periodic wander through your dreamscape, taking note of the soft thaw at the edges, enough to assure Shalimar that she's getting through.
Too slowly, too frustratingly, I'm walking through your cold heart again, fending off the hopelessness, trying to find some good in the miniscule thaw here and there and hating what I've done to you. Up until now I've tried to rationalize my interference as being for your own good. But maybe I've meddled too much. Perhaps I should just have let her take you the first time.
Your nightmares have whispered your hatred of me for taking her away from you, though I'm sure that they're just her dark echoes. But maybe I'm wrong.
And then I see it, and maybe what I've done is still wrong, but I know now that I wouldn't have done a single thing differently. Because peeking through the snow where the crushed seed had been buried, is the bright green bud of a baby rose.
FINIS