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Tweak says, "It's only time."

Madeline Pryor (

razer) wrote in

mutanthaven,
@ 2009-03-02 23:25:00

It's a heart that you made; it's a heart and the both of you made it.
Who: Madeline Pryor
What: Narrative: Mad has some issues with her powers; Mad bothers Wade in New Orleans.
When: Friday night, continuing what she's been doing since Mardi Gras [Backdated].
Where: Room 1107
Rating: Uhh--PG-13/R?

I won't rest until I don't care; I won't rest until I forget about it.

Since Madeline had searched for Tessa, and gained a better idea of the things she could do, it had been getting harder to shut things out. It was like some cosmic joke about balance, as though with the drastic increase in her powers, her weaknesses had grown in kind to accommodate the universe's needs--as though the nation full of brains she'd touched on didn't feel like leaving the skull that had invaded their privacy any measure of peace. Sometimes the screams of a mind in fear two states away would shake her out of sleep. Sometimes the voices in her head were louder than the ones across the room. It was, perhaps, an appropriate fate for a girl that had worked at honing her powers since the day they'd arrived, a Be Careful What You Wish For sort of cautionary tale, because when you inherit the world, you inherit its problems as well. Lately, her moods had been swiveling from up to down like a marble on the deck of a storm-tossed boat, and where she could ordinarily be depended upon for a near-sociopathic level of cool disaffection and sardonic dismissal, now she wavered between intense concern for the people around her, and disproportionate anger. Fear was there, too. Impulses were raw, and without much filter between the imagining and the doing left to protect people that incited her ire. Perhaps she'd made the threat on multiple occasions, but up until a month ago, she'd never had any real interest in killing Manuel.

Madeline grasped a fistful of blanket in one hand, but was otherwise preternaturally still on the hotel bed. Her blue eyes were both somewhere far away and all too conscious of her surroundings. It was as though she was sinking through the sheets, through the floors, and all the way into the earth to get away from everyone. She bit her lip, and tried to direct her mind elsewhere, to the vacuum of space, to the center of the earth, but everything was shrouded in a veil of mundane thoughts, desperate prayers, murderous plans, and secrets, all growing louder by the moment. She didn't want it, she'd never--but here she was, being reminded of the reason she'd started hating humanity in the first place, even after her mother had killed her twin and left her gasping for drugs the moment she was born.

Downtown, a man who worked as a plumber was running over his appeal to the county lawyers.

I really didn’t know Karen was insane until she stole that baby. I mean, sure. She had all those kooky emotional problems going for her, but in my experience, that’s par for the course when you’re dealing with the female brain. You know, garden variety schizoid woman stuff like trapping you into saying she really does look fat in that dress, or insisting that you promised to go to dinner with her and her sister Monday night (yes this Monday night, Robert), or managing to ask you to fix the lawn mower or the garbage disposal or to shovel up the dog shit out of the back yard just as you sit down in front of the tube with a beer. And, sure, sometimes she’d talk seriously about the merits of song lyrics as poetry or try to convince me that we should run through the sprinklers at midnight, but I pretty much chalked that up to a weird childhood. For serious, though, she’s a good person. Better than you. Better than me. I never saw this whole kidnapping thing coming.

And there were boys and their girls--

and her face is so bright I think she might start leaking tears and sunshine, and she’s so beautiful I can hardly see the way her hair is sticking out at strange angles and the lipstick on her teeth but there's nothing I wouldn't d

Or the piano player hopped up so high he was narrating his own life.

He had ten fingers, just ten: all splayed around the edge of the porcelain bowl. Gripping it, man, like it was a podium and his soul was coming out through his teeth. Something needed to come out, god damn, but there wasn’t nothing left: my mouth is so dry I couldn’t even spit. Thin shoulders, but he never trembled. Not often, anyway, and never because I was scared. Which medicines, which medicines fix it, which

And there was no ignoring the surgeon reading over the chart of the patient he had just lost.

Massive trauma to frontal (primary contusion from steering column) and occipital (secondary) lobes resulted in general neural edema. Swelling, in addition to hemorrhage in the right frontal lobe caused abrupt rise in intracranial blood pressure. Respiratory arrest commences, indicating likely brain stem hernia. Administered diuretics and elevated cranium to encourage blood drain. Pressure continued to rise. Opened a five centimeter flap on scalp and drilled into a parietal subdural hematoma to drain off collected blood and excess cerebrospinal fluid shown in initial CT scan. Ventriculostomy unsuccessful. ICP remained above feasible levels. Hernia advanced into the spinal column. Complex partial seizure. Cardiac arrest. Time of death, 14:00, and I can't even believe i didn't, she didn't, who does th--

Madeline put her fist in her mouth to stop herself screaming, but still there is a man on fourteenth street that is getting close to killing someone:

can't walk down the street without being touched. There are so many people on the street that it is impossible to avoid them all. would give the benefit of the doubt and assume that these people—these people that jostle me, that push with their shoulders—do not mean to bump into me, specifically. But really, why bother? It would be a kind, stupid lie. All any of them want is a little friction. Haven’t they whined about only wanting to be touched? About the miracle of human contact? About spooning in bed with their phantom lover?

I don’t like to be touched. I don't like to be touched.

Why anyone likes to be touched, I don’t know.

There were six people getting ready to kill themselves, twenty-one people preparing to die, sixty-seven people lowering bodies into the ground, but the worst ones were the ones that wanted to kill and didn't, and just screamed in their heads all day, every day, forever and--

And in a sudden decrescendo, a spin of the dial, the voices fell away into the ether. Madeline sucked in breath like someone saved from drowning, and she realized she'd bit her lip open. There was blood all down the corners of her mouth, like a phantom Chelsea grin. Energy was humming around her head, and she was whiter than the sheets surrounding her, like life itself had fallen away from her skin, but she could breathe again; she had done it. There was no way of knowing how long it would last, but she had done it. Without wasting another moment, she reached out, stretching all the way to New Orleans, to the heart of a mercenary that she'd kept at arm's length since she day she'd literally crucified him. It was strange, really--the one she'd feared losing herself to was now the only reason she wasn't lost. An anchor in a strong river.

__________

The repayment didn't seem exactly in-line with the service he'd done her. When Wade came home, plastic beads sounding a kitschy jangle around his neck, she was shivering in his hotel's bathtub, her knees drawn up against her chest, and her hair down her back in wet ropes. The next day, when he looked in the mirror, she was on the bed behind him. When he glanced up from the television, she would be perched in the window, reading a book. There were none of the usual greetings in his head, and whenever he would go to her, or look away, the ghost would disappear. If she appeared in mixed company, it seemed as though no one could see her save for the hired killer. It was a full-blown haunting, unacknowledged and unprovable, but there nonetheless.

If you looked at it through a twisted lens, a shifting kaleidoscope--through her eyes--this was just her way of saying thank you.

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