Elliot Peabody; Jekyll/Hyde (goseek) wrote in thereincarnates, @ 2010-11-17 22:22:00 |
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Entry tags: | elliot peabody |
Who: Elliot Peabody
Where: Outside Resistance HQ
When: Wednesday, November 17
What: Elliot's having a breakdown.
Rating: PGish?
Elliot had been twelve when Jekyll and his dark side had moved in; since then, he hadn't gone a day without his shoulder-devil egging him on while his shoulder-doctor quietly wrung his hands in the background. The young age at which he'd picked up his reincarnate explained a lot - perhaps everything - about the man he'd become. Cerebral, calculating, in turns brutal and remote; like the split-personality with whom he'd coexisted for decades, Elliot was a complicated man, but he'd grown comfortable with the mood swings and the darkness within. Evil was like breathing, the lack of conscience so comfortable and freeing that he'd honestly forgotten what restraint felt like.
And then on Sunday, for the first time in nineteen years, Elliot Peabody woke up alone.
He felt strangely hollow, like a jack o'lantern after Halloween. His vacant eyes served as a window into the shell that had been left behind. For a day or two, he went through the motions; get up, go to the lab, work on a project. He felt listless. He felt wrong - not guilty, persay, but off-kilter and confused. No one was telling him to do anything in particular, and without the constant urges towards virtue or sin? Elliot found that he didn't have any drive to keep on with his experiments. He'd gone from feeling too much, from rage to sorrow to pity to hate and greed, to feeling almost nothing in comparison.
Nothing became a new sort of 'too much.' On Wednesday afternoon, Elliot took one of his favorite experiments (a clockwork bird that he'd been putting together to send to Ana) and a pocket toolkit and snuck out to the beach. He found an outcropping of rock and sat down, intending to get back to work on the complicated gear system that moved the bird's wings and legs. Once comfortable, he settled his glasses onto his nose and pulled out a tiny screwdriver.
In the broad daylight, Elliot admired his work. The bird was a remarkable replica of a canary, life-sized and detailed down to the feathers. He turned the toy over in his hand so that its tiny iron feet stuck up in the air, like a dead bird in a child's cartoon. A memory came forth unbidden; a baby bird fallen from the nest. They'd found it at recess, a group of elementary school children out in the yard on a hot Texas afternoon. The animal was fragile, all hollow bones and fluff, and Elliot had tried to warn the other students as they'd gone in to pick it up.
He could still remember the look on the little girl's face as the bird had panicked and, in her attempts to grip on, she'd accidentally broken its wing. He'd never seen genuine regret like that before or after; people were horrible to each other with callous ease, even as children in the schoolyard, but that little girl had mourned the bird in a way that she'd never mourned taunting him.
Elliot cupped his hand around his iron canary, drew his legs up to his chest, and buried his face in his knees. For no reason that he could readily identify, he cried for the first time in over twenty years.