adarkflash (adarkflash) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-10-18 22:47:00 |
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Entry tags: | door: marvel comics, flash thompson, mary jane watson |
Who: Flash and MJ
Where: Outside of the warehouse
When: After the party
What: Reveals~
Warnings: Talk of violence. lots of swears.
Flash found himself outside of the warehouse in the outfit he showed up in. To be fair, it wasn’t that different from the one he was wearing while spray painting the golden floor upstairs. He had no intention of dressing up in the first place and took the Loser’s attempt at trashing a perfectly sophisticated party as his own personality shining through. Yeah, he was pretty awesome. “Hey doc?” He asked, just to make sure. Present. Adam murmured in the back of his brain as if he had just been hit by a train. Another grin crossed the teenager’s face. Mission accomplished. The doc wasn’t dead, he successfully crashed a party and didn’t manage to get torn apart by all the weirdos from inside.
There was only one thing missing from an otherwise epic party: Mary Jane. He hadn’t seen her all night and while he planned on making up stories of all the hot ladies he made out with over the past couple hours, he only really wanted to spend time with her. So, dressed in black with two tallcans hanging from their plastic rings, he set out a search for her. Finally, after lapping around the now emptying warehouse, he caught sight of the flash of red he knew so well. “HEY.” He shouted, jogging towards her. “Hey MJ. Shit that party was NUTS!” He wrapped his arm around her shoulders as he always did, holding the beer out for her to take.
MJ, too, found herself outside of the warehouse when reality came crashing back in. It was a slow roll, at first, like waking from a deep slumber, but suddenly she remembered everything. She looked around quickly, head snapping back and forth, to try to spot anyone around her, but no one seemed to be around at the moment. That, of course, wasn’t the case throughout the night, she knew that. She knew the warehouse was packed with...bizarre people and creatures. She didn’t know why, unless someone spiked her drink with something. Maybe she dropped some acid without remembering. She’d done that before. That had to be it, right?
Frowning, she rubbed her arms to warm herself up, dressed in something far less demure than what she wore as the siren. Why the hell would she have been a siren? Okay, yeah, she was dressed as a slutty Ariel -- it had been one of the many costumes she had lined up for the night -- but a siren? Whatever. Her body ached, and she felt weak, and she kinda just wanted to go home. She suspected, however, that there was going to be some crazy fucking damage control to deal with. Just as she was going to turn back into the warehouse to see if any of the nutjobs were still hanging around, she heard a familiar shout and felt an arm slink around her shoulders. “Heya, handsome,” she said, trying to push the exhaustion out of her voice. The bruise still blossomed across her cheek, and there were big purple bags underneath her bright eyes, and she looked as exhausted as she felt. Still, she took the beer and popped it open without question. Clearly she had had a lot -- what else would explain it -- but one more wouldn’t hurt. “Told you it’d be the best party ever.”
“Wooooah there.” He pointed at the shiner across her cheek and whistled. “Did you get in a cat fight and forget to text me before hand? We had a deal about that.” He popped the lid open to his own beer (rings still attached) and guzzled it. When he looked back down his expression changed, noting not only the size of the damn thing but the worn look across her face. Honestly, it sort of seemed like she switched places with the doc’s girlfriend for the night. That girl found some low, depressed places to dig herself into.
“You okay, little red?” His tone changed and suddenly he didn’t sound like Flash Thompson Bad Ass Extraordinaire, but sometimes that was a good thing. That didn’t mean he was going to pull out this sympathetic shit for just anyone, but MJ deserved a good friend. She always had. “I thought you know if we didn’t meet up for this party it wouldn’t turn out like last time. Though I guess I did end up in a pool for both.”
Though she could feel the throbbing soreness across her jaw, she had brushed it off as part of the general achiness in her body. Until, of course, Flash tactfully pointed it out to her. Her tiny pale fingers darted up to press the area, which was tender to the touch. “Ow, ow, ow, fuck,” she said. The bruise hurt more as she danced her fingers over it, and she dropped her hand down quickly, all the while more acutely aware of all the aches and pains in her body. “Hooooly shit,” she mumbled, remembering exactly how she had gotten the black and blue on her cheek. The man in the stairwell with his gun.
She avoided Flash’s gaze, instead looking at the warehouse where people seemed to be stumbling out in various states of disarray. No one looked happy, at least to her. “I’m fine,” she snapped quietly before chugging more of the beer. It was warm, which made her nauseous, but it was a good change from the pit dropping in her stomach. She scoffed at his joke, but really didn’t pay much attention as she was far too intent on trying to recount the events of the night. After a moment of quiet, she looked up at Flash. “Something weird happen to you?”
Flash didn’t understand why people always snapped at him when he was trying to be nice, but let it roll off his back as always. He was a natural douchebag and if he was to act like any sort of coldness got to him, then he lost that first outer shell of confidence like that. “Yeah, I guess.” The night didn’t seem that weird to him. Adam walked through the door and Flash found himself underwater with a duffle bag of stuff to cause a little bit of chaos. Honestly, it seemed like an average night in the life of Flash, but he did admit that something was off. It was like all his feelings, all his hate towards people who had more than him was concentrated into one sweet force for awesome. After a quick look around to the other party guests stumbling around, it seemed like he got all the awesome for the night. Well, him and Bad Sign. But, that dude got stabbed didn’t he?
Somewhere in trying to remember how badly his bro was beat up, Adam started to talk to him. Demanding attention in that doctor voice he liked to use all the time. “Okay, okay jesus I get it.” Flash said after a while, eyes up as if he were talking to a spot behind his forehead. “Adam says this is like the last party he went to. Apparently the doc is into anonymous sex cause that’s how he hooked up with your girl.” Flash sounded so judgemental, even for a teenager that would have probably jumped at the chance himself if he could.
Unlike others at the party, MJ had meant to be there that night in the warehouse. She was the hostess, after all; of course she would be there. But that didn’t mean she had planned on all the weird shit happening, and she wished that she had an explanation for any of this. MK had told her about the weird parties before, the one where she met Adam (because, okay, she had been totally curious how a hot-ass, but crazy model hooked up with a seriously grumpy-face doctor), but she didn’t quite figure that it would happen here. Yeah, huge lizards ran around the city like it was no big deal, but freaky parties where people transform into other people didn’t quite seem right.
“She told me about that,” MJ said finally, very aware of how quiet MK was being. She had a sense something happened that the older redhead didn’t want to talk about, or at least something she didn’t want Flash and Adam to know. “That’s kind of what happened to me--and don’t you get fucking judgey on me,” she rambled out quickly. It worried her, the feeling of need that ripped through her body the entire night. “It was like I needed it. Like I couldn’t live without it. But everyone was weird, Flash. I bumped into this guy--well, not me. It wasn’t me. It was this weird non-me. Whatever--non-me ran into this guy, and after non-me tried to fuck him or whatever, he pistol-whipped me.” Her hand flew unconsciously to the bruise against her cheek. While she spoke, more black and blues were beginning to darken across her body like a smattering of paint against a blank canvas. Deep finger marks bruised her neck, and other bruises came to fruition on her neck and her arms and her stomach. “I mean, not-me. Not-me got pistol-whipped.”
It took a mammoth amount of concentration and resolve not to laugh at her being pistol-whipped. What? It was just a funny image and he was pretty sure that if he had been pistol-whipped by some chick after he tried to sleep with her, he’d have a good laugh about it later. Luckily, it was dark out, so the stone-cold serious look on his face to fight back any smiling could be, for the most part, hidden. He stopped walking when it occurred to him that “not her” had tried to sleep with some guy. “Wait, hold up.” He turned to look at her, examining the bruise and then trying his best (but failing) to not sound jealous. “So, you met some guy and he hit you for you coming onto him? That’s like-” Flash was at a visible loss. Even if whoever she turned into at the party wasn’t the Mary Jane, there was still something genuine in her, right? That’s how he felt at the party. Like even though his deepest, most bitter feelings were doing all the driving, he was still there. “He must have been gay.” Only possible answer to that.
Flash finally got a good look at MJ while they were standing there. No Adam buzzing in his ear, no distraction of how good it felt to spray paint a bunch of gold. She had his full attention. Which meant, of course, that he started to notice all the little bumps and bruises on the rest of her. It looked like she had tried to play high school football without any clothes on. “Shit.” He tossed his empty beer can behind him and lifted up her arm with his hands. “Shit, okay. We’re walking to the drug store and I’m icing you. I’m going to ice you so hard.” He turned her arm around and inspected her neck and other arm while muttering little curse words. “How the fuck did this happen?”
Mary Jane shrugged, her self-esteem knocked to the ground after the party, despite (or, perhaps, in spite) of Flash’s rave reviews. While she didn’t have the worst night, it wasn’t particularly anything to write home about. “He wasn’t the only one,” she said, remembering the creature of green in the basement. She had practically thrown herself at both these guys, she had been a creature that drew men into her web, ensnared them, but she couldn’t help but be rejected again and again by whatever inhabited the party. She laughed quietly at Flash’s observation and his genuine shock, but couldn’t help but feel like total crap about it. “Maybe people are catching onto my shit.”
But, that wasn’t the worst of it. She attributed the aching to her fatigue -- god, she felt tired -- but when Flash began to inspect her arms and neck, she furrowed her brows and looked down herself. “Fuck,” she breathed without thought. Bruises all over her body from head to toe. She couldn’t remember how this had happened. Did she blackout and fall down a flight of fucking stairs or something? “Jesus. What the fuck. I don’t--what the hell happened, Flash?” she asked in a panic, eyes searching for his face. All the while, MJ pleaded with Maddie Kate in her mind to tell her if she should know anything, but the older redhead seemed frightened, more so than usual. “I don’t remember how I got these.” She was seriously freaking out now. What if someone roofied her or some other twisted shit happened that she couldn’t even remember?
“Okay. Okay.” Flash knew panic was infectious, so he tried to stay as chill about this whole his friend might have been roofied and beat up thing and wrapped his arms around her. His heart was nearly beating out of his chest at that point, making him energized and ready to hunt down and fuck up whoever could have hurt her. But, he knew where that was going to go and the last thing he wanted was to unleash Venom to avenge her. Mary Jane would never even speak to him again after that.
He touched her chin with his thumb and made her look up at him. “I’m going to take care of you, I promise.” It might have been an overly macho thing for him to say, but it came from somewhere honest and she knew him well enough to understand that. He leaned in to kiss a place under her bruise on her cheek. “Either you let me fix you up, or we go to the hospital. Whatever you want.” Flash had taken care of girls after parties before, but usually he’d just get them home safely to let their parents figure it out. And, it wasn’t that he didn’t actually trust Peter’s aunt, it was more about how he knew there’d be a level of shame attached to showing up in such shitty condition. With him there wasn’t anything to be ashamed of, not after he had called her that night he nearly killed his own drunkass dad.
MJ was too panicked to fight his embrace, even though she probably wouldn’t have anyway. She felt safe, suddenly, as he wrapped his big arms around her tiny frame, but it didn’t quell too much of the panic. She still shook, even while she put her arms around him, too, and she couldn’t help the choked sob that escaped her. All the possibilities ran through her head, each becoming more violent and frightening and scarring. What else could have done this? Someone drugged her and beat her up and -- oh god. She vaguely remembered a boy named Tate and what he did to her in that creepy house. What if someone did something like that?
Her eyes fluttered shut for a moment when she felt Flash’s lips brush against her cheek. Biting down on her own lip, she shook her head violently. “No, no, no, no,” she said quickly, bloodshot and watery eyes opening. “No hospitals. None.” She seemed distracted, though, thinking about the myriad of possibilities of what could have happened to her or to others. “Oh my god, Flash, what if I’m not the only one? Oh god, oh god, what if all this weird shit happened to everyone there?” She looked up at him desperately, hands resting against his chest. “It’s my fault.”
His arms wrapped around her again, head tilted down so he could look at her in the dim light outside of the warehouse. “Don’t you fucking dare.” He warned softly. “Whatever happened in there wasn’t your fault. If it’s been something that happened even before I was around, then it probably would have found another way to do that weird magic shit. It’s going to be okay. You didn’t die in there.” Flash had asked for Adam once he got out, but he assumed everything went (practically) back to normal after the party ended. “I vandalized the place with this guy who looked like he had been stabbed to death. It’s fucking smoke and mirrors.”
His words of reassurance fell on deaf ears. She zoned out for a moment, as if in another world, but MK was finally speaking up. I died, she whispered in the back of Mary Jane’s mind, and the young redhead balked visibly. “What?” she asked aloud, eyes flying up to her forehead. MK rattled off the details of the night in that nervous way she did when she felt cornered or caught. “Oh my god, are you fucking--Flash,” she addressed him as she lowered her wide-eyed gaze back on him. “MK was there. At the party, how was she there? I mean, like, how was she here, in our place, while I was here too?” She hadn’t thought of MK, or how this would have affected her, because she couldn’t see how it was a possibility of mattering at all. MK was on one side of the door, and she was on the other. When one was in action, the other wasn’t. Those were just the rules.
She pulled away a little from Flash to look down at the bruises and marks smeared across her arms and chest. “She got killed, too. She remembers it all. Her throat got ripped out, Flash.” In her panic, she didn’t think of what Adam would hear or wouldn’t hear, or necessarily care. The good doctor was the last thought in her mind. “This is all from her. All these bruises.”
Since Flash let Adam take over when Venom got out of control, he accidentally let through the doc’s expressions. It was a natural synergy between the two. In this case it was a sort of alarming lack of expression that wasn’t the high school student at all. Finally, his eyebrows raised in a poorly feigned surprise and Flash took control again. “Uh- oh shit.” He tried to recover from the absolute lack of response or even empathy from Adam. The doc knew if MK was out there at the party she’d get herself in trouble. She’d probably ask for it. “That’s fucked.” Flash told the doctor quietly, but it wasn’t completely clear who or what he was talking about. Disturbed, he let MJ free, turning away from her to cross his arms and kick some dirt.
“So uh.” Flash was more curious than Adam at this point, but he felt like he needed to ask. “Do- do you know if she cheated on him?”
MJ sighed in frustration. “Yeah, it’s fucked.” She assumed he was talking to her and rolled her eyes at the total underplaying of what happened. MK was vague on details, probably because Flash was there, but the older redhead recognized the blank look that hung over the teenager’s expression almost as well as she would recognize her own face. Adam. Mary Jane, for her part, felt a bubble of rage -- that was her own. The lack of empathy for a woman he apparently loved? Gross. Her frown conveyed the disappointment, and she hoped Adam caught the glare she shot before Flash turned away from her.
“Flash,” she said before she could help herself when he asked about MK’s infidelity. “I don’t know.” It wasn’t a total lie, right? MK was hoarding details about her first encounter, and while the younger redhead suspected her counterpart might have totally hooked up with someone, she wasn’t going to blow up her spot. Solidarity in women, or whatever. “And it wasn’t her, right, was it? Either way. I couldn’t like, control what I was doing. Maybe it was the same with her.”
“He’s not mad.” Flash said, a little bit of puzzlement in his voice. Damn, he would have been at least a little jealous if his woman cheated on him at a wizard magic party. “Whatever.” He looked back over at her. “Okay, shit. I’m not dragging you all the way to the drug store. Listen, I’ll go run and get you some ice and I’ll be back, okay?” He started to trot off and then circled back, grabbing her in another tight hug. “Flash is going to make this all cool. Promise.” The teenager smiled brightly at her and then took off in a sprint towards the street.