Jason Todd is (thelazarus) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-05-27 21:26:00 |
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Entry tags: | red hood |
Who: Jack
What: Post-hotel reaction.
Where: The suite at Turnberry.
When: Sunrise.
Warnings: Possibly triggery sexual assault stuff. Some blood.
Threads: Affected + Top of roof stairwell and Affected + Library.
It was a nightmare. One moment, he'd been been ready to make reply to the woman he'd been attempting to subjugate. The next, he was out in the hall, alone.
First, he could see. Light had begun to filter through the windows, giving the world a dim gray glow. Second, he could think.
He wished he couldn't think.
Stumbling back to Turnberry proved more difficult than anticipated. He'd walked to the hotel when the compulsion struck, and now he was in no state to catch a cab. He'd lost his shirt somewhere in the night, which left him in the leather jacket over bare skin. It clung stickily to him with the drying blood around the furrows carved the woman from the stair, one of the unfortunate two.
But he wasn't going to think about that, not yet. Instead, he focused on the dull ache of his broken rib, and putting one exhausted foot in front of the other before the day grew so hot that he couldn't make the walk. It was a trek. He was lucky to have managed to keep his key to the private elevator, zipped securely into an inside pocket oh his jacket. If he'd needed to rely on the now extremely jumpy man at the front desk, he likely never would have made it upstairs.
When the elevator finally came to rest on his floor, and he walked into his section of the sprawling apartment, then, finally, it was acceptable to think. There was nowhere else to go. Frankly, he wasn't sure he ever wanted to go anywhere again.
He locked the door, mechanically, and walked into the bathroom.
He didn't reach for the bottle of generic ibuprofen in the medicine cabinet. Instead, he felt the ache in his chest with each draw of breath, and reached for a wash cloth to clean out the cuts. He turned the faucet on, and leaned over the spotless, expensive porcelain, looking at the mirror over the sink.
He looked like he'd been in a war. There was a long smear of blood along his jaw, and his eyes were hollowed and gaunt. The jacket came loose with a painful crackling as he separated the lining from his skin. The blood wasn't excessive, the wounds ragged, but not too deep. Just a few more scars to add to the collection. His scalp stung from dragging nails, and there were bruises and bite marks besides. The rib was the most pressing issue, but there was nothing really to be done for it.
What sort of a man was he? He used to think he knew. He thought that he'd done some terrible things and seen some horrors, but that he had moved past them, that his damage was under control. He'd thought that the moment that had pulled the thread from the seams of his life had left him stronger despite nearly destroying him. He thought it had left him with a fear, yes, a fear of terrible things happening to women, and a burning need to protect them along with everyone else. It had certainly left him with a sore spot whenever he saw a woman mistreated or hurt, and a paranoid, deep-set reluctance to push on anything sexual.
That's what he'd thought.
He gripped the tile tightly. Under his white nails was black and red, grease and blood. His eyes moved, unseeing, over the porcelain, reading nothing, watching instead the things he had done. Every second was burned into his mind, viciously vivid, stronger than his best memories. He swallowed thickly, as drops of pink hit the floor, dripping from the washcloth held motionless in his hand. The things he'd said to that girl. And worse, how much he'd liked it. How good it had felt, every second of it, being the thing he hated, the thing he'd spent years of his life trying to crush under his heel. He'd been wrong, so wrong. That horrible thing in his past, it wasn't dead. It was alive, and it had dug in a place inside him, and it was never going away. It had twined in with everything else, and it had made him a horror.
He sank down to the floor, leaning back against the wall, breathing shallowly against his broken rib. He leaned forward - he was shaking - and retched hollowly against the clean tile. Nothing came up. He had nothing in him, just blood still rolling through his mouth every once in a while from where he'd bit at the inside.
If he could have blamed someone else, it would have been a blessing. If the blue light's fine net around his thoughts was responsible for what he'd done, he could have shuddered and simply moved past. But it wasn't. Those things he'd done had been in him, and not only had he enjoyed them, the ugly truth of it was that he would have taken pleasure in all he'd done and said to that girl even if the light hadn't been there.
It was the final joke, the last realization. Just when he thought he had figured himself out and begun to mend, something else always came along. This was all there was left. For years, nothing had scared him, enraged him, cut him to the quick more than to see a woman assaulted. He'd killed men for raping and beating their wives. He'd tortured the men who killed Helen for hours, forcing them to endure unspeakable agony before letting them, finally, die. In all that time, he'd always been too worried about consent, too paranoid about even making the smallest advance a woman wouldn't want, to fall into bed with anyone. Now, just now, it came back around. All that hate and fear had woven in with desire and made something new, an appetite he hadn't known existed, hadn't even thought to imagine was there. In the moment, with no guilt and no shame, only his own selfish desires to appease, he'd felt satisfaction like he hadn't known in years.
Perhaps he had been hunting the wrong men.