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Sidney "Onyxx" Green (_onyxx) wrote in utr_logs, @ 2008-10-22 21:52:00

Who: Onyxx and a bunch of unfortunate NPCs. It’s a moody narrative.
What: A hero’s journey is never easy…and if not careful, dreadfully easily to lose oneself on…
When: The past three days.
Where: New York, Las Vegas, and then Philadelphia.
Warnings: None really. At least I don’t think so.

Onyxx had been in the states for the past three days. He’d been in New York on Monday, Vegas on Tuesday, and today he was in Philadelphia. He was staying relatively off the grid, not wanting to attract attention or let anyone know he was back. He felt a little bad about not alerting Cable, Domino, and his team. They’d been great about this whole thing, and there was a tiny part of him that felt like a heel for not letting them know that he was back in the good ol’ US of A.

But it was only a tiny part. He didn’t want people offering him pity or asking him of he was okay. He wasn’t okay. He wouldn’t be okay, not for a while yet. He’d done everything he could in Tibet, and he’d discovered one part of the problem. Everything that he remembered from his alternate life, he’d tried to stuff in a little box in the back of his mind and forget. All that pain, all that rage, all the terrible things he’d done and that had been done to the people he cared about. That wasn’t something you could box up and forget about. No matter how hard you tried to hide it, there was no corner dark enough to keep it hidden for long, and the longer it was hidden, the darker and more terrible it got.

Up there in the snowy mountains of Tibet, he’d finally come to accept that the boy he was before that week was dead. Perhaps there were some things left, memories and tokens and a few little characteristics, but whether anyone else remembered that terrible future or not, it had happened for him. He still remembered the warnings the funeral people had given him about opening up her coffin. He remembered the feeling of his common sense draining away as he made his way up to pay his final respects, remembered his wild yelp of pain as he threw open the lid and his horrified wail when he saw what had happened. He remembered every bruise, every stitched-up crack in her skull, every little piece of irreparable damage that had been done to her face. You don’t just forget that, no matter how hard you cry and beg for it in the darkest, most silent part of the night.

He remembered the blood and brain matter on his hands in the oval office. Remembered the terrible raids he’d led on relatively innocent towns with the goal of demoralizing his enemy. He remembered the tortured screams of the military prisoners who’d had their tactical knowledge and wisdom ripped from their heads by his telepaths. He remembered the refuse his prisoners had been kept in, the mistreatment he’d allowed to go on and even participated in. He remembered standing side by side with, and across the battlefield from, people he’d once considered allies. He remembered the smell of sweat and torn flesh and death, and remembered basking in it.

He remembered very clearly the feeling of death. Though his body had still worked, though his mind still focused, he had nothing left. His soul had died the day she had. His body had been running purely on white hot rage and the blackest hatred. With these as his sustenance he went through every horror of war with unflinching brutality, both surviving and enacting. He’d become a hero to his people and a scourge to his enemies.

And then just like that he was a boy again. Every ounce of trauma, all of that horror, all of that terrible mess that he hadn’t been able to deal with as an adult was dumped on the mind of a not-so-well-adjusted boy and he’d done the only thing he could: Swept it under the bed and pretended it wasn’t there. That, it seemed, hadn’t worked out so well for him.

He’d spent the last three days just walking. Walking through cities, eating in little diners, really experiencing the cities. He still remembered what happened in New York, on his first night…

It was eleven thirty at night. He was walking past a sleazy club with no real direction or destination in mind. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of the hooded black coat he wore. The hood was up, just in case. He didn’t want to bump into anyone he knew on the street. As he neared an alley, he heard the telltale signs of a struggle, followed by a woman screaming. He glanced over, his face hidden completely in the shadows of the large hood of his coat. A young woman, blonde and dressed far too upscale to be slumming it in this neighborhood, was being held by two men. Each man held an arm, and one seemed to have just torn her purse away from her. The other was pressing a knife dangerously close to the hem of her shirt.

All three of them looked his way. The two thugs narrowed their eyes but didn’t move. The woman began struggling harder, her eyes widening. “Help me! Please!” Onyxx stared at the three of them for another moment…

…and turned his head and walked away. “Sorry lady,” he mumbled quietly. “I’m not a hero tonight.”

He’d read an article in the paper the next day, while he was eating breakfast at a diner in Vegas, about a blonde corpse found in a dumpster about three blocks from that alley. He folded the paper quietly and put it off to the side. He ate in silence and when he left, he tossed the paper into the trashcan outside the diner.

It was a scene that was repeated time and time again over the past three nights. Last night he’d ignored a cokehead mugging someone for drug money, a pimp beating one of his girls, and an armed robbery at a convenience store. The mugged victim got up, the girl got back to work, and the clerk at the store died of blood loss before anyone even knew about the robbery. Tonight…

He’d been eating at a McDonald’s along a back road when it happened. There was a loud, long screech of rubber squealing on the road and then a loud crash. His head snapped around and saw that two cars had collided head on, one going far too fast for this road. It had been head-on, and the driver of the car going too fast flew out of the front window like a ragdoll. Onyxx’s eyes followed the driver as he landed about fifteen feet away and then returned to the cars as the sound of metal-on-metal rang in his ears. The two cars had interlocked and were spinning, and then the first car broke off, toppling end over end until it came to rest on top of the lower half of its former driver. The workers and the one other customer in the McDonald’s all bolted out to see if they could help, rushing to check on the drivers. The customer already had his cell phone out.

Onyxx simply finished eating his cheeseburger, threw his trash away, and left.

He could have easily lifted the car off of the man’s legs. He could have easily ripped the warped driver’s side door from the other car and pulled the other driver to safety. Instead he just left, hunching his shoulders and dropping his head nearly to his chest. “Sorry buddy,” he’d said. “Still not a hero.”

Tomorrow…who knows? Maybe he’d be a hero then.

Or maybe not.

Maybe not for a long time.