Sing to Life

By JadeRabbyt

Chapter 17: Interview with a Psychopath

A good many things would have made Jazz feel more comfortable than she did sitting down in that chair. Triggering a bear trap with her right arm would have been one of them. She gulped, the sour taste of fear seeping up the back of her dry throat.

Alex sat back on a cot in the shadows of the cage, away from the misty glow of the overhead lights, his features highlighted in soft blue by the crackling bars. His wide-open eyes gleamed out at her, and he hunched forward slightly, hands resting on the cot on either side of him, legs bent forward, one foot an inch or two of the other. The stance belied the attitude. He sat on the cot but he wasn't resting on it; he didn't seem to feel either the mattress under his hands or the floor under his feet. Still as stone but as alert and powerful nonetheless. Jazz didn't know what the bars were made of, but she hoped they were strong.

She gulped again, the tip of one finger picking erratically at the paper on her clipboard. She didn't know what to say, and she didn't feel it wise to ask him directly about himself. Alex clearly wasn't delirious like the last time she'd met him, and he didn't seem as sinister as the first time she'd met him. Jazz cursed her perfectionism. She had to stop second-guessing herself and say something. As she scrounged for a good ice-breaker her attention wandered, out of curiosity and desperation, to his eyes. Those eyes... not black, but mesmerizing...

Mentally, Jazz slapped herself. Think. He didn't have the blackness junk anymore. What did that leave? It left whatever had been there before he caught his incredibly inconvenient little disease. What had been there before, exactly? Who knew. Alex could have been a closet serial killer in his human years for all Jazz could tell. The way he was staring at her, not blinking, just watching—she wouldn't put it past him. She doubted he even had a mind left to analyze. McKinley had wasted her time.

"Jazz."

She jumped at the mention of her name. Alex stared at her; one eyebrow went up. "Jazz, right?"

Jazz gripped her clipboard. "Yes."

Alex almost smiled at that. "Good. What are you doing here?"

"McKinley wanted me to--" Jazz stopped herself. Good grief, she'd nearly told him.

"To see what could be sucked out of me?" Embarrassed, Jazz nodded. "Tough luck." Alex tapped his head, smirking in an extremely unsettling way. "Not a whole lot left upstairs, you see."

"Why?"

Alex frowned. "Why what?"

"Why is there nothing left?" She hoped she didn't sound as pathetic as she felt. It was frustrating. Usually she was so much more tactful than this. "What happened? What did you do at the crater?"

Alex harrumphed and resettled himself on the cot. His eyes moved slowly over Jazz, but his attention had clearly gone elsewhere. At length he sat up again, apparently coming to some kind of decision. "Tell me. What do you hate most about the blackness?"

"What is there to like about it? It basically kills people."

"Yes, that's what it does. This new stuff is particularly irritating, slinking around like raw sewage. I don't even like it, if you can believe that. But I didn't ask about it, I asked about you." He half-smiled at her, watching her squirm.

"Why should I tell you how I feel about anything?"

Alex shrugged. "I don't know. I can always start swearing at you."

Jazz ran a hand through her hair. She had no idea what she was going to tell him, what bone she was going to throw so that he would lock her out. Alex waited, patiently, watching as she collected her thoughts. "I don't like what it's doing to the school, first of all." Jazz frowned at the floor. "I don't... oh..." She racked her brain, coming up with a grand total of zilch, when suddenly something hit her like a freight train. She didn't know if it was the answer, but it was definitely, surely, her answer.

"I don't like what it's doing to the smart kids," she began. "A lot of the normal students are having trouble, too, and that's horrible—because nobody deserves what that stuff is doing—but kids with perfect grades are staining their permanent records under the influence of this stuff." She bit her lip. "Too many of the clever ones are already mentally unstable for the student body to afford any more losses. This is... this is just making things worse for them." She sighed, grimacing at the tiled floor. If Alex could understand any of that, she'd consider it a miracle.

"And why should you be concerned about this?" hissed Alex softly. Suggestively.

"Because I don't want to see smart kids fail. It's a waste and a crime, and it's not right." She looked up. Her inquisitor seemed very, very interested. Alex was intensely focused on something over her shoulder, his poise similar to when she'd first walked in. He caught her watching him and snapped out of it.

He took a breath and relaxed. "Now I'll answer your question."

"Thanks."

"I don't know quite what caused the crater, but I know how the portal was made."

Jazz looked up. "You mean you didn't make it?"

"No," he grumbled. "I didn't even know I was capable of it until that blackness... intervened."

"What do you mean?" Jazz got her clipboard ready.

Alex thought for a moment. "Have you ever noticed, say when you get too little sleep, or get knocked on the head, how you start to feel a little dumber than usual?"

"Kind of. What about it?"

"I've been that way ever since I can remember. In my... less lucid days, that thing took up a lot of space in my head, and I think it was building something." He checked her for a sign of ridicule, but Jazz motioned for him to continue. "It used my natural intelligence and built something with it. It must have taken some time, but I was never aware of it until my sentient blackness used it to open that portal. Oh, and the portal is going to let in something else that will kill everything, then destroy the universe, by the way." Alex tossed the last part in as an afterthought, running his tongue over his teeth. "That, really and truly, is the extent of my knowledge."

Jazz rested her chin on her fist, supporting her elbow on the clipboard. "You know, that is honestly the weirdest thing anybody has ever said to me."

Alex chuckled. "Try living it."

"Do you know when that stuff is supposed to happen?"

"Soon," he replied, tasting the word.

"And you don't regret it?"

"What a stupid question. Of course I don't."

"Mm." Jazz shuffled through her papers, looking at the notes she'd taken. She could believe him, but all this was definitely testing the limits of her open-mindedness. "Well, thanks for talking with me, I guess."

Alex smirked. "No problem at all. See you later."

Jazz couldn't help feeling a little disconcerted at that. But as McKinley's men let her out through the heavy steel door, she knew it was probably true, if only because McKinley would want her to go back. And Jazz had to admit that she was also more than a little curious about Alex.

XXX

McKinley gripped the shoulder of the surveillance technician, the two of them watching Jazz leave the room through several security monitors. "Did you see that?"

"Yessir."

"He didn't swear at her. Not once. He didn't swear at her."

"No sir."

"When was the last time he even looked at us without exercising his filthy mouth?"

"Never, sir."

McKinley stepped away, feeling much better about things than he had been ten minutes ago.

A/N: Not too sure about the style of this, but I'm definitely happy with the content. I hope to have the next chap up sometime next week. Thanks to all reviewers!