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

//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?

//More or less,// Jono agreed. //Me, with extra shadows in the corners. Loud ones. Stronger'n I was. Added more shadows since. A mad god. The survivor of another genocide. Never had any bloody say in any of 'em. Right bastard of a thing to start to actually get used to.//

Jack's face was blank when she looked at him. Not because she was feeling nothing but because she had no idea what she was feeling or what to do about it.

Everything floated down the river of feelings to anger anyway. She was angry on his behalf. All of that was brain-rape. Possibly possession. Neither was ok.

"I'd almost feel sorry for anything that wanted to move into my brainspace," Jack said after a long minute. "Isn't there any way to keep them out of yours?"

//Get better at resisting gods, I suppose,// Jono replied, lifting a shoulder. //For all that I'm a functionally immortal firestorm, there'll always be stronger.//

Never failed, really. He looked up at the ceiling for a moment.

//World's a mess. World'll always be a mess. Better me than somebody who doesn't know what to do with it.//

Edited 2019-01-18 00:43 (UTC)

"Is that like the thing where when you have a trauma you try and invalidate your own trauma by saying someone somewhere else has had it worse?" Jack asked slowly. "Because that's horseshit, Jon. 'Better' would be it happening to fuckin' nobody."

//Would be, wouldn't it? But that's not how anything works.// Jonothon looked at her quietly for a moment, considering his words carefully. //It's not entirely that, though. It's... better me than any of the students under my care. Better me than someone with less control over the shadows in his head. I've seen what happens when people with too much power can't keep their shadows in check. Hell, one of them put me through the whole bloody thing over again. Me, everyone at my other school. Most of them opted to have the experience wiped from their minds entirely. I couldn't afford to.//

He shook his head a little.

//We call shite like that 'Wednesday.'//

Jack nodded after she mulled that one over for a minute. "I could see that. Specific someones and not a general somebody-out-there like a damn Disney song," she said slowly. "I'm a control freak. Don't think I could fuckin' stand having something missing from my memory. Got one thing like that and some days it drives me goddamn insane."

She wasn't exaggerating.

"The only reason I don't go off the damn rails over that is because people I trust know. They know the truth of it and they've told me I don't have to carry that." Jack shrugged, "I could. I've carried worse. Knowing what it is, though, it hurts them. To know it'd be in my head. I wouldn't care. I almost never care. But they do. Some days, that's the fucking worst. To know that my shit's living in their heads. Not in mine. Not where it belongs."

That mattered. She wasn't even sure why. It just did.

Jonothon got it.

Goddamn, did he get it.

//For me, it would've taken out a link in my head that would've broken all the context for how my body had been fucked with, too,// Jono... complained, mostly. //Because that seems to be the running theme with all these bastards. New mind, new body. At least th'first one I agreed to, more or less.//

The body part, anyway. Having a face again had been nice, while it had lasted.

Jack frowned a little bit and looked him over. She puzzled over what that meant. "So the key to fixing your body is keeping everything that's 'you' contained somewhere? That's shitty. What an asshole thing to do. Even if you did agree to the first one more or less."

Jono tilted his head a little. Lifted a hand and made a so-so gesture with it.

//All for different reasons, from different means,// he noted. //The Weapon X thing... I'd gone in undercover. They pieced me back together, made me look human again. Left my mind alone so long as they were convinced they had my loyalty. It was just the moment they were given cause to question it that they stripped my head away. Second time...//

Hooboy. Where to even start with the second time?

He just shrugged, reached into his pocket, and pulled out his phone. Flipped through his camera reel. A long way back.

It was... a look.

He did kind of miss being huge, though.

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