fandomhigh | Office #2 at the school, Thursday mid-morning.

"Who?" Jack asked blankly. Shrugged. "I got Jack Two in my class. Maybe he wants to teach somethin' next. If I don't just camp out here and keep teaching the same sort of shit for awhile."

Until Balak and whoever his puppetmasters were had found themselves a nice damp grave to rot in.

"Island seems pretty damn quiet right now," she offered. Leaned back in her desk chair and kicked her feet up on it. "So what do you do for fun around here when it's this boring?"

//Fosse,// Jono repeated. //Janitor, maintenance, actual, literal Troll, I think.// And a shrug. //And me? All my favourite vices aren't exactly an option these days, but I keep busy. Write music, play music. Run. Train. Run more...//

He shrugged.

//I split enough time between here and New York, boredom isn't usually a concern.//

"Huh. Troll. New one on me," Jack mused. "Does the moose have an actual name or is he just 'The Moose' capital everyfuckingthing?"

Pulled a face at him. "You guys and your damn running. That ain't a hobby. That's some sort of masochism bein' expressed or some shit. My vices run out I just go down the list and find new ones. About the only one I haven't tried yet is smoking but that's because I don't need any more cancer risk than I already got."

Jack paused and then squinted at his flames. "Can you make smoke with those or is it just color and heat?" She didn't mean cigarettes, no.

//... You know, never asked the moose if he has a name.// Jono sounded faintly sheepish. //Ought to do that at some point.//

There was another pause, and then he added, //And I can make smoke, but smoke requires something to burn. The flames aren't actual physical fire, technically, but they've eaten away at me before.//

There had been a time, once, when he'd been certain they would gradually just burn the whole of him away.

She could have asked the Moose too but thought it might be something she should've known and didn't want to display the ignorance. Jack would just ask him the next time she saw him.

"No good if it hurts you," Jack mused, "but they make little packets of stuff for fires that makes sparks and colored flames and colored smoke and stuff."

A beat.

"Not that you need to be festive and sparkly. It was just a random thought."

Jack had a lot of those.

"Asshole pointed out I stuck my hands in, y'know, you, so sorry if I gave you a headache or whatever."

She wouldn't want to be a telepath anywhere near her.

Jono hiked a shoulder up a little.

//Wasn't anything I've never felt before,// he replied. //And I said you could.//

There had been a lot going on there.

"I know," Jack said with a hike of a shoulder, "Still. Telepathy must suck more often than it doesn't. People usually suck just with what they say. Hearing what they think?"

Jack sucked her teeth and clicked. "I can see why you like the quiet." A small pause. "Asshole also you reminded him of me if I was tired of all the shit."

She had no idea where she was going with that. It was going somewhere. Jack just wasn't real clear on where. It had caught her attention when Kaidan had said it. The way he said it.

"Which he probably meant as a compliment and not because I'm a bitch on wheels."

Well. That earned a thoughtful headtilt.

//Did he say how?// Because really, that was an interesting assessment. Not wrong, necessarily. But interesting.

"How you were tired or how you reminded him of me?" Jack asked but then shook her head because the answer was the same. "No. Didn't think to ask it."

Sure was gonna now though.

"Got a lot of shit," she admitted, "None of it I'd say I'm tired of yet. Think I'm still in shark mode."

//Shark mode,// Jono echoed, looking thoughtful. //I used to have my fair share of sharks. Mostly they'd just chew at the insides of my head.//

They liked it in there.

There was a lot of meat to gnaw on, most of it well-cooked by now.

"I meant more in the if I stop swimming I drown and die type of way," Jack explained. "The brain biteys I generally call brain weasels. Plenty of those fuckers of my own, too. They're assholes."

Well they were. Still, she preferred them to the whispers. The weasels hurt but at least they were quiet.

Usually.

Jono fell silent for a few moments.

//Nothing worse than stagnation, is there? Feels like you'll die or crawl out of your own skull if you don't just act?//

"Every fucking minute of every goddamn day," Jack agreed, "Part of it's physical. Biotics, we don't do 'sit still' so fucking good. Part of it's just me. If I sit still too long I might as well just slap blue mud on my belly for all the goddamn navel gazing I'll start doing and that's a road never leads anywhere but right straight into the fucking black. Not with what lives in my head. Gets like bugs under my skin, crawling around. Gotta get up and do something that takes all my everything so I can't think."

That earned a nod.

Yeah. Jono knew those bugs all too well.

//Too much ugly lives in the shadows, and it's better to let it out on your own terms than let it claw its own way out,// he noted. //At least when its on your own terms, odds are better it'll be you in control when you come back out the other end.//

She smiled but it wasn't from amusement. "I don't let it out. Sometimes it tries to claw out but then I just kick its ass right back into the fucking dark and tell it to stay there. I don't wanna spend too much time thinking about what lives in there. I sure as fuck never want it to see daylight."

//Well, then I'm glad you've got the means to keep it there.//

Jono had been stripped of too much of his own mind to always have that choice.

She shrugged a shoulder. "That's where they wanted me to live. Down there in the dark with all the fucking monsters in my head. I made a choice a long time ago to spite them. Fuck Cerberus and fuck everyone ever was like 'em. I'll never be right and I'll never be good and I'll always be broken but I control who I'm gonna be and it ain't gonna be fuckin' that."

A brief pause. "Anger's a helluva motivator and I am almost always angry."

//Anger's a helluva motivator,// Jono agreed, his own words gone hollow. There was a sort of distant quality to his voice, then, as his focus drifted away from forming words. //I cut mine clean out of my head, not long ago. The anger. The shadows are still there, but the anger is nothing, is a fragment in a cage, enough left burning to remind me of what they made me do.//

Tired. When you took away the anger, what was left was... tired. Which was almost ironic in its own way. The anger had been plenty exhausting all on its own.

"I had enough shit cut out of my head when I was a kid," Jack said quietly after a long stretch of minutes, "Burned out, chemically and a dozen other fucking ways. Anger's what I got left. All I had and mostly still all I fuckin' got. Working on it, though. I wouldn't give much of a shit but these other assholes I can't help myself caring about, it matters to them. If I cut the anger out I don't know if there'd be enough left for that."

And.. it mattered. Being able to care about her family. Being able to recognize they cared about her. It mattered and she didn't want it to stop mattering.

It would if there was nothing left.

She looked at him and said even more quietly, "That's what he meant, huh? By tired?" She could see it. She would have called it fatigue. Tired was when you slept. Fatigue was when you sat there and stared at the wall because there was no energy to even lie down and try to sleep.

//Must be what he meant,// Jono agreed, glancing back at her.

They'd tortured her to make her what they wanted her to be.

For that, he could still be angry.

There was still enough of him in his own head for that. Good to know.

//If it's what you have, you hold on,// he said, finally. //Empty's not a good place to be, either.//

Empty was almost as bad as too full to cope. He wasn't proud of who he'd been, when that had happened.

"Empty's a real bad place to be," Jack agreed. "Empty means I don't care and all that shit lives down in the dark gets out cuz not even anger's holding the door shut anymore. It runs free and I just don't give a single fuck what happens to anyone or what anyone thinks about it."

She looked at him. "That's what they wanted me to be. An empty little murder machine they could point at what they wanted dead. The pilot project for what they wanted to do to everyone like me. Subject Zero."

Took a breath and said calmly, "My name is Jack. I'll be angry because right now that's mostly all I got. Someday, maybe, I'll be more but fuck if I'll ever be what they tried to make me."

//Weapon X,// Jono said, after a long pause. //You had Cerberus. I suspect it's fairly equivalent to Weapon X. Took mutants. Twisted them. Used them to... to kill other mutants, mostly. I was like candy to them. Walked right through the front door looking for a way to take them down. Found what I was looking for, seconds before they found me.//

He reached up and tapped a finger to the side of his head.

//They emptied me out and filled me up again with something else. First job they ever had me do while I had no say in the matter was to hide all that living, breathing, sobbing evidence in the concentration camp I'd tracked those bastards down to.//

Neverland.

"Fuckheads with too much money, dodgey experimental science, rampant bigotry and xenophobia and a complete regard for people's lives?" Jack shrugged a shoulders, "Sounds similar. Cerberus took human biotics and fucked with them trying to make 'em better killing machines. Tried to turn regular humans into biotics with drugs and transplants and Reaper tech and shit. Didn't work, just killed 'em. Most everything they did to biotics to make 'em stronger just killed 'em faster."

Shrugged. Her voice was a little flat but she'd told this story before. It helped that she didn't remember the ending. Jack threw the tennis ball from one hand to the other. "Turns out, mess with someone's head enough, you can turn a scared little kid into an all-powerful bitch. Something.." She frowned slightly. Still couldn't remember that day. "Something happened and I saw my chance to get out of that lab."

She was very calm when she spoke. "I killed every single person in that building on my way out. Turned out later, I'd missed one other kid. I was nine years old when I slaughtered my way out of Teltin. The only ones I didn't kill were the ones who weren't there that day. I hunted them down later."

"They took your will away, took 'you' away you just said. Your hands, maybe, but not your will. That's not on you, man. You were just as much a victim as the dead." Jack looked at him. Not with pity. Possible it was understanding. She wouldn't recognize the compassion for what it was. "Somehow, you got back to you. You fought what they did to you. How'd you get back?"

//Wasn't me,// Jono replied, after a long moment just leaning against the door, working his way back around to it in his head. Acknowledging her words, her affirmation that it hadn't been him. Knowing, at least somewhere in that head of his, that they were true. Not denying them. Not acknowledging them, either. //Given long enough, I would've done. Would've cost me my actual head. Don't need that anyway.//

Thank you, Fandom, for that horrifying look at what could have been Jono's life instead.

//Didn't get that long. What happened wasn't much better. All it took was one person with enough power saying the right phrase. All it took was No More Mutants.//

There was a weight behind those three words that words alone couldn't convey. They came with a flash of red, of fire and smoke and screaming, of disaster, of millions of lives changed in an instant. Lights across the world going out, leaving only a rare few still burning.

Those three words were an extinction event unto themselves.

//Should've died. Woke up months later in a hospital bed. Wished I hadn't.//

Jack listened. She gave a low whistle between her teeth. The sense of what she was getting felt all too familiar. Not one person with the power. Not all at once. The Reaper War had taken months and ripped the galaxy to less than half of the population. Extinction events: any galaxy's worst party.

"Surviving's hard," she acknowledged. She knew what survivor guilt was. She'd seen it on the faces of everyone she cared about. Kaidan told her that she had her share but she didn't know which feeling that actually was. Feelings other than anger were still too new. "When you woke up, you were you again?" That had to be better. Right?

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