i won't be held down by who i used to be, she's nothing to me, [au & rw].
It always seemed to be late when she finished up in the studio these days. Luce supposed she was just falling into bad habits, not that they were really so terrible, since she had decided to postpone enrolling in university until after the New Year and didn't have too busy a schedule to keep to. Everyone else had left and before she knew it she was yawning and working the knuckle of one of her hands against her eye, swinging her visor off and dropping it to the work surface. Most definitely time to hit the hay. It took her a few minutes to clean up, wiping down the area she'd been using, washing her hands and putting everything back in its place before she was ready to go. At the door she paused, pulling the keys from her belt to lock up and reaching out to flick the lights off. They sputtered out overhead and she passed through the door, turning to slide the key into the lock. Through the glass she saw someone sitting on the far side of the room, their back to her and stopped what she was doing to watch them. Weird, she hadn't seen anyone in there besides her. Though maybe they'd been in the supply room or something.

Frowning lightly, she pushed the door open again and leant her head inside. "I'm closing up now," she called to the figure across the room, shrouded in darkness. Maybe it was a student who had fallen asleep, Luce had done that plenty of times. They didn't respond to her. Sighing, she started towards them, jangling her set of keys as the door swung shut behind her. "Sorry, but I need to lock up behind me. Last time I forgot Kevin roasted me." A light smile of camaraderie in the face of a terrifying teacher gained no response and it was as if a switch was flicked by the silence; Luce felt her senses prickle. Something was off here.

Moving to the wall again she flicked the light switches. Nothing happened. "Hey. Can you hear me? It's like," she paused to squint at her watch, "three in the morning and I need to lock up."

When she tried to use her mutation to get the lights to come on they didn't respond, the darkness seemed to swell and expand. Lucille reached out with her mind to query the lights for their lack of operation but there was only silence. Something was wrong with her mutation, she realised. It made her feel exposed, naked without that intangible control she usually held over any environment she occupied. Dark eyes slide back to the stool where silhouette had been perched. They were gone. She cursed softly under her breath, confused and worried, one of her hands reached around to her back pocket for her cell phone, the lump of plastic was reassuring and she thumbed the ‘On' button but was met with a blank screen. The battery was dead. Less reassuring. That was when the laughing started; it was low and taunting, fizzling with mordant amusement, bouncing off the walls without direction. Chasing the laughter Lucille's mother lurched out of the shadows with a sloppy grin and a bottle.

"What--" Dumbfounded, Lucille gaped and caught herself. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Don't you dare cuss at me, girl," Delphine Moltisanti slurred gracelessly

Lucille snorted, a wholly unladylike sound as she marched over to her mother, grabbing her by the upper arm and yanking her a step towards the exit, "Christ, you stink." Not that she was surprised.

"I said don't you cuss at me!"

"As if you don't swear all the fucking time--" Luce leant on the swear on purpose, her mouth twisted into a sneer of anger but the sentence was left hanging.

Instead of responding verbally, Delphine shoved her hard in the ribs and Lucille stumbled over her feet breathlessly, falling backwards she tried to catch herself before she hit the floor but instead cracked the back of her head against a worktable with a resounding thud, ending up in a sitting position, cradling the back of her skull. Sudden rage burned through her, "Fucking hell-- that hurt!"

"Hurt? That hurt? Like it hurt when you strangled your brother half to death? Maybe I should do the same to you," A crack of thunder punctuated the tirade as her mother's palm struck her cheek sharply. Blood bloomed on Luce's lower lip; it was split down the centre. Gaping, she scrambled to her feet, using the table to help herself up but only getting halfway when a bottle came crashing down over her head, showering her in glass and liquor, the former sliced her scalp, the latter stung like all hell in the wounds, it ran into her eyes and her newly split lip, making her cough with pain, her eyes watering. In her chest her heart was thundering erratically and she looked up, bracing herself on the table. Delphine grabbed fistfuls of her hair, Lucille couldn't believe what was happening but the pain racing through her told her it was real all right and she had to fight back but her mother suddenly seemed so strong, abnormally strong, she wrapped her sinewy hands around the warm pulse of the younger woman 's neck, giving her head a shake and a squeeze. Luce cried out, wasting her last breath of air. "How does it feel, sweetheart?" Her mother was roaring in Acadian, earning a whine of protest. "I curse the day I ever gave birth to you, ungrateful, spiteful little slut! Almost murdering your own brother, running away to be with freaks like you. All you know how to do is run away when things get hard." The grip started to slacken as Delphine pulled back, grinning crazily. "So run, run run, Lulu. Run away."

A hard shove sent Lucille almost completely prone, but she snatched herself on a stool and straightened up. Turning around she was ready to spit some form of insult only to have a bottle cartwheel through the air over her shoulder. Fear tightened her guts, fight or flight seized hold of her and propelled her in the opposite direction to her obviously drunk and crazy mother, away from all those childhood memories that she usually buried and ignored. It wasn't that her mother had ever been violent to her as a child, not really, she had grabbed her arm too tightly, accidentally pulled her hair or knocked her over, but her words had always been so much worse anyway. That sticks and stones stuff was bullshit. Sticks and stones left bruises and they healed. Words burrowed into the psyche and stayed there. Poisoning everything. At the end of the row of tables Luce ducked down into the shadows. There wasn't an ounce of sense in what was happening, and logic was clawing at her brain, trying to tell her that this couldn't be real only to be quashed by blind panic and childlike fear.

A bottle smashed somewhere in the darkness. Delphine cackled joyfully. "Come out come out wherever you are," she sang.

Another bottle whizzed over head and exploded into a thousand glass diamonds. They washed under the table and over Lucille's hands, she pulled them up, her palms a bloody mess. This issn't working, she thought as she gripped the table leg, clamping her lips together to force her breathing in and out through her nose instead of panting past her teeth hoarsely. She closed her eyes, squeezed them shut and concentrated on her mutation, she needed help here, she needed to figure out a way to--

"Peek-a-boo!" Skidding in shards of broken glass Delphine loomed from the shadows, Lucille jumped to her feet as the older woman waved a bottle drunkenly, smashing the hefty bottom off of it on the edge of a table before lunging at her daughter.

Beneath her feet the world seemed to turn to soup, Lucille couldn't react in time, she couldn't react at all. This was all wrong, she was better than this, she had trained harder, pushed herself further, she should be able to restrain her mother singlehandedly. One drunk woman against a member of X-Factor, it was ridiculous that she was being tossed around like a sack of sand, heavy on her feet, clumsy and sloppy. Delphine slammed into her like a freight train, sending them both crumpling to the floor in a tangled mess, mother pinning daughter to the floor with her knees and elbows. Struggling gave her no slack, Lucille writhed angrily but it was as though all the strength was just leaking out of her. From the darkness the stinging scent o alcohol washed over her in a powerful wave, biting her with the sharp hint of bile beneath it, Delphine leant in closer, stringy black lengths of hair curling on the floor around Lucille's head. "Poor baby can't even fight back," she hissed, spittle grazing Luce's cheek. "You are so pathetic. Your father know it too. Your brothers know it. Adrien knows it, they all do."

"Get-- get off me," Lucille grabbed her mother's upper arm, tried to push against her shoulder, her ribs, but she wouldn't shift.

Another dead laugh, "Useless, pointless, helpless little Lulu." Glass bit into her jugular and Luce gargled a weak protest. There was no pain at first, only shock and a warm wet feeling sliding down her neck, up to her ears and down between her breasts. It seemed to last a slow lifetime but in reality perhaps one beat of her heart marked time before the agony hit and her nerves squealed. Delphine pushed the bottle deeper, laughing the whole time as if it was the funniest joke she had ever told, twisting the bottle this way and that. Blood gushed up over Lucille's tongue, staining her teeth crimson. She choked on it when she tried to suck in a breath of air, breathing in her own spittle and the watery mix of blood and gin. It burned the back of her throat and she was helpless. Just like her mother had said. Completely helpless. That same feeling she remembered from hiding under her bed or in the back of the closet, pulling old shoes and sports jackets around her like a fortress in the dark that no one could penetrate. In those times though, it was always one of her older brothers that came to rescue her and pull her out, dust her down and tell her it was okay. It's okay, Mom's asleep. You can come out now. Not this time though. They weren't going to save her this time; she'd have to do it herself. Lucille would be damned if she was going to bleed to death on the floor like an animal.

"Get. The fuck. OFF ME!" She screamed, reaching out across the floor to find the leg of a stool, she dragged it towards her to get a better grip and then mustering every ounce of everything she had brought it slamming into the side of her mother's head. When she let go with a shrill cry of pain, Luce twisted around against the floor. Crawl. Fuck it she had to crawl away. Pride be damned. Bloody hands left streak marks all over the ground as dazedly the brunette wobbled to her knees and started to scramble away across the floor. Delphine caught her ankle and yanked her back. Lucille kicked, separating them again. She took hold of the next stool along, wrenching herself up off the floor with its struts acting as rungs for her. Turning on a dime she hoisted it into her hands and swung it like a golf club into her mother's face. When Delphine went down to the floor from the impact she hit her again. When she protested with an animalistic whine Luce hit her again, covering the noise with a scream of her own.

It was only when her arms were too tired to swing anymore, sweat tracing hot rivers down her neck and the curved length of her spine that she stopped. On the floor, Delphine had stopped moving. Bits of skull scattered, mixing with the clear, cold alcohol as it washed over everything, thinning the blood, swallowing the glass shards. Luce looked down at her unmoving mother the splintered stool still in her bloody hands, sliced to ribbons from crawling through the glass and she didn't feel anything. Not horror or disgust, just an empty kind of clarity and something more. Relief. With a clatter the stool dropped to the floor, splashing in a puddle at the young woman's feet. Lucille crumpled after it, shoulders shaking back and forth as a dry, hard sob racked up her throat and echoed around the studio. Around her the walls bent and started to melt, the shadows seemed to be closing in on her, the darkness coming to get her. Let it fucking come, she thought viciously, her fingers curling into fists against her thighs. Let the darkness fucking come and try to get me; her last thought before her dark eyes rolled back in their sockets, eyelids fluttering as she pitched backwards. Only she never hit the floor.

In the common room she woke up with a rough start. For a moment she was half hunched into a sitting position, panting erratically and clutching her fingers into claws, the material of the furniture underneath her bunching up in her clammy palms. Nausea rolled through her and a hand went to the side of her head that must have struck the worktop in the studio when she'd passed out, though she couldn't really recall that happening presently. Everything in her head was a foggy, mushy blur but she remembered the blood and the alcohol, she remembered the darkness. It took her a few minutes of stillness to get her breath back and feel like she could move her head without hurling. Looking around she saw a few people apparently asleep and she struggled off the cushions, stumbling towards them as if she'd just rolled out of bed after days of lying around, all the blood rushing through her sickeningly. They were definitely asleep, breathing slowly and deeply and nothing she said or did had any effect on them. No one even raised a hand to smack her away.

As she straightened up she fished her cell phone out of her pocket. Adrien didn't answer his cell, not that she was terribly shocked by that one, but neither did Abby or Gemma. That was when she saw the message from Johnny on the network. Knowing that there were at least a couple of more people awake and that one of them was King was something of a relief to say the least and she resolved to find them as fast as she could. White as sheet, clammy and still shaking -- things that she knew would pass and that she could push through -- Lucille turned to leave the room.

[ooc: italic passages = french! i'm sure you can work out the non-french emphasis]

[ NARRATIVE ]