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

//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.

Jack looked at the picture and then between the picture and Jon. Twice. She lifted a shoulder. "I like you better now. That guy looks like a real douche."

The sensation of 'amused snort' when broadcast telepathically was probably more like a mental tickle than any actual noise.

//That real douche once shattered th'bathroom mirror because he was angry at his own face,// he replied. //There was a bit of overcompensating for things that were out of my control, but overall, he was still me.//

A pause.

//Shame I don't have any photos of me being utterly bloody overwhelmed by hot chocolate.//

Taste. Taste was a thing. He missed having a sense of it of his own.

"I'd be angry at my face too if I had lips like that," Jack pointed out, "That takes 'trout pout' to a whole new level."

A beat.

"Hair wasn't bad."

She thought about the cocoa statement and nodded slowly. "Probably similar to someone peaked on E. Yeah, I can imagine it. Flavor, tactile sensation, heat.. I get it."

//Gets worse when you know how I got those lips and who else they belong to,// Jono muttered, shaking his head. //Hated those almost as much as that bloody tattoo. Almost happy to have my chest blown off again, thanks to that./

Stupid cults.

//... Was okay with the hair. Still not sure how I felt about auburn.// Being a ginger was weird. //But... yeah. This?// He waved at himself. //Not so much with being able to feel things, like this.//

What with being half there, a mess of ruined nerve endings or no body at all.

"The tattoo was pretty awful," Jack allowed, "I try not to judge other people's ink unless it's garbage scratch."

She judged other people's ink so hard. So hard. She was just very good about not saying anything unless she wanted to be insulting on a deep and personal level instead of the surface insults she threw about.

"It went well with the blue. The hair," Jack clarified so he didn't think she was still on about the tattoo, "Now? Nah."

Frowning with a small crease of her lips while she looked him over, she asked, "No feeling all over or just around the open part? I mean, there's still the rest of you. You're not all numb, are you?"

That was kind of a horrifying thought.

//Not completely without feeling,// Jono replied, lifting a shoulder slightly. //Not as much as I'd like, either. The open part, obviously not. But there's a lot of... damage.//

He shook his head.

//S'not the end of the world. I can feel. Just can't feel much.//

That resonated with her in a way she wasn't sure he meant it to. Wasn't a bad thing. Just strange to hear it said about physical parts. "You gotta feel a lot of something to feel it at all?" she asked.

She got that.

Jack tapped the side of her head. "Same with me in here. Or wherever the fuck emotions live."

Jono gave a small nod in confirmation at that. There was a reason he and Hannibal tended toward slightly less... ah... traditional ideas of intimacy.

Well. There were a few reasons. He wasn't about to get into those, here and now.

//Makes sense,// he said, finally. //Connections get carved away, things go numb, you make those connections with whatever else you've got left. Makes it hard to be certain if you're feeling pleasure or pain, sometimes?//

Worked well enough when talking in a physical or a mental sense, didn't it?

She gave the smallest shake of her head. "I don't feel pain as pain anymore. Not since I was a kid. It's always pleasure. First thing they did to me. The only way I know the difference is because regular pleasure doesn't leave me craving more. Shit that should hurt?" Lift of a shoulder.

"Real easy to forget I'm all fucked up inside because I been this way all my life I remember. Real easy to hurt other people when you think everyone feels shit the same way you do because pain doesn't really hurt."

//I've been so many things in my life, it's hard to tell what's wrong and what isn't, anymore,// Jono noted. //Even emotionally speaking, sometimes.//

He shrugged a little.

//Get a bit of that in a physical sense. Feel a sting to feel anything at all. When you don't get much, that alone can be intoxicating. Still... generally had enough experience before all this to be able to rationalize where other people's lines are drawn.//

For the most part. There was the fragment of his mind that had survived to Fortress X who didn't give a flying fuck what other people's lines were. And the ember of Weapon X would have pushed those lines just for fun.

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