charles xavier. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
forgodssake) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ataraxionlogs2014-07-12 03:04 pm
forgodssake) wrote in ataraxionlogs2014-07-12 03:04 pm
oo6. closedish.
CHARACTERS: Charles Xavier and Severus Snape; Remus Lupin; Emma Swan; Nuala; Rogue; Johanna Mason; Odessa Knutson; Erik Lehnsherr; Captain Hook (Killian Jones); Hank McCoy; Raven Darkholme; Cassandra Anderson, others as they happen.
LOCATION: Level fourteen, room one hundred; laundry facilities; bar on level fourteen; kitchen on level fourteen; the Gardens; media library; level twenty, room one-hundred and ninety two; others as they happen.
WARNINGS: TBA.
SUMMARY: Adjusting to being a different person is a struggle.
NOTES: This is only partially closed. I'm using this as a forum for people to poke him, as random run ins may happen as I tag out instead. Please let me know if you'd like to do anything, and I'll be happy to set up a thread (unless you're feel ambitious).
to ever spend my life sitting playing future games
LOCATION: Level fourteen, room one hundred; laundry facilities; bar on level fourteen; kitchen on level fourteen; the Gardens; media library; level twenty, room one-hundred and ninety two; others as they happen.
WARNINGS: TBA.
SUMMARY: Adjusting to being a different person is a struggle.
NOTES: This is only partially closed. I'm using this as a forum for people to poke him, as random run ins may happen as I tag out instead. Please let me know if you'd like to do anything, and I'll be happy to set up a thread (unless you're feel ambitious).
cassandra anderson. level 20, room 192.
Smoke is white, which is wrong, because smoke is black, but right now it's white, clogging her senses. Voices and faces, the fragmented past coming together to form a kaleidoscope of story without arc, or beginning, or ending. Abstraction. Her ankles are caught up in rope? Or metal? Or vines.
And they break as she stumbles, ground giving to sand, dust as fine as smoke, and black. Ashy. Paint. A bed, mattress soft under her small body. Is she awake?
Please wake up.
A voice from behind, which becomes a hand, closing on her wrist. Beneath her, her bed creaks -- but it isn't the cot in her room on board the Tranquility, but a larger, more luxurious thing, and there is soft light coming through windows she doesn't recognise. The air is soft and claustrophobic. That grasp on her wrist is dragging her out, but it feels as though it's just gravity doing the work, tumbling her over the side, delirious and off-balance, bracing herself for a hard landing--
Now. Now she's awake. Possibly she hasn't actually fallen out of bed. Charles hasn't knocked, since the first time he tried, now just leaning with his hands braced against her closed door. Telepathic again, but it feels wrong. ]
no subject
( white smoke and falling, falling again, into a bed and out of it, a hand dragging her )
— and distantly, as she wakes, she registers that this dream was not entirely her own, or that she was not alone in it. there aren't many people aboard the tranquility who can do this kind of thing.
(morgoth, melkor, he was one of them — but he is dead and this doesn't feel like his presence threatening to swallow her whole and drown her. )
she's awake, and charles is apologising. anderson sits up. ]
Charles?
[ what is going on?
no subject
Probably to onlookers, if there were any, there's a belligerent drunk hippie clawing at Anderson's door. Psychically speaking, it's easier to tell that he is sharply sober, relatively uninjured, even if behaviour and thought patterns are acting as if he is.
If he were inclined to be polite, if he felt like he could afford it, he might offer to come back later. But kicking her out of her sleep is probably already crossing that line. ]
no subject
( she's in an oversized t-shirt that hits her mid-thigh, but there is no sense of vulnerability from this; he's seen her naked legs before. any vulnerability she does feel comes from sleepiness, from being thrown off-balance.
she's always been good at finding her balance again, and so it doesn't last long, features smoothing out quick enough. )
stepping aside to let him in, ] What's going on? [ is repeated out loud. ]
no subject
Long hair is worried in tangles from his hands, and he looks as though he's thrown on clothing just for this venture.
His thoughts are jangled up in panic and stress, as if he's trying to find somewhere to hide in his own mind. From what only takes a few moments to listen; something like a hundred voices whisper and press into his mind, a ghost pressure at his temples, and while they aren't shouting, even a murmur becomes a cacophony en masse. ]
I couldn't sleep.
[ --has a trace of bitter humour. ]
Can you hear them?
no subject
You know I can.
[ she doesn't sit next to him; instead, she takes a chair and sits across from him.
it's easy to take his hands, nothing gentle or soft about the touch. ] Can you narrow it down to my mind? Focus.
no subject
There's a twitch of him shaking his head. No. But--
He tries anyway, lifting his attention up to meet her eyes. She can feel his presence like a sudden blind lash of telepathic power, sharing pain by sifting to the surface painful thoughts in turn. Immediately, there is psychic flinch back, even as his hands remain calm in hers.
Pain is echoed physically too. It sparks alone nerve ends, from the small of his back, aching warm. Lessening, off his feet, but there, as omnipresent as the voices. ]
no subject
it takes a moment for her to gather her thoughts again. ] Is this the drug wearing off?
no subject
[ Words are quiet, scratchy above a whisper, betraying a palpable fear of what he's meant to do without it that she could tap into even without being psychic. Information is easy to conduit to her; it's been gone for a little while, now. A different medication (magic nonsense, potions, his colleague in Xenogen) has been used to dull the physical pain, allowing him to escape, some, the pressures of psychic interference.
But that's gone too. And here he is. His hands grip hers tighter, and loosen. ]
I just need it quiet again, and-- I don't want to hurt you.
[ He also doesn't want to be hurt. Not by her own pain that could be brought to the surface. ]
no subject
I see.
[ her jaw doesn't clench, expression almost serene now that she's awake and prepared for the pain, now that she knows a little more of what is happening. ]
I can handle the pain.
[ his, and her own. she can handle keeping hers away from him, too. ]
no subject
He turns his focus on her again, an attempt to burrow away from the many minds that surround them. He'd once been subtle, but this is inept, as precise as a fire hose, more power than he wants to have to handle. It erodes defenses, sandblasting to expose the jagged shapes of darker psyche below.
There is the memory of when they'd last held hands, here, of the false-notions planted in her brain by an evil man who was barely a man. Of smoke and fire.
The want to just be silent inside his own head again is a fishhook in his heart. She can feel it too, in the form of request. Make it go away. ]
no subject
make it go away is there, but her grip on his fingers tightens. not enough to hurt, definitely enough to be felt.
it isn't going to go away isn't outright said, neither mentally nor out loud, but it's another certainty. this is what their mutation means, or part of it. instead: ] Look at me.
[ and, a moment later: ] Tell me what I'm thinking.
[ not because she doesn't know, but because he needs to focus. so she recalls a memory of her training, recalls concentrating on the gun in her hand, recalls concentrating on statistics, recalls memories that required focus, that will require focus in recounting. ]
no subject
Charles lifts his gaze up to meet hers, guardedness behind pale eyes, inclined to do as he's told. (He always used to have a problem, doing what he was told.) ]
Using a gun.
[ Focusing. He feels out of practice of doing simply that. Alcohol abuse, long hours, short bouts of reading, no challenges, nothing academic, no work. Before the serum, there had been ordinary painkillers, and how much he had hated what those did--
Focusing. ]
Training to be a Judge. Success rates at fifty yards. Seventy-five.
[ The pain, diminished now from previous flare up, isn't going away either, but he's thinking of her accuracy percentage during her first assessment instead of it. ]
no subject
[ she's nodding, thumb brushing over the back of his hand in a gesture that would be romantic if not for the intent to praise, and nothing else, that he can perceive.
the brief moment his mind wandered gives her inspiration as to how to keep going. ]
What was your PhD on? Explain it to me.
no subject
Human genetic mutation.
[ That feels like a long time ago, or-- it used to feel like a long time ago. Part of him still feels as though it were barely yesterday, a part crystallised by his time at the Tranquility prior to last jump. When he was still a scientist. ]
By and large, it was a reflection on mutation as a means of advancing the human race as a species. Genetic variation creating diversity. I theorised on the remote possibility that the dawn of a nuclear age may have already taken us a further step in the form of humans with extraordinary abilities, beyond imagining.
[ His tone is gently wry. Of course he'd already known that, when he'd penned it down. He thinks briefly on Erik, on how wrong he had taken it, but the thought isn't allowed to go beyond idle tangent, cut off like a snake decapitated. He thinks better of Raven, who thought she was a pet to him, but better identified as a muse. Long gone. ]
I wrote a companion piece of the effects of nuclear radiation on human biochemistry, and prior to that, focused study on behavioural neuroscience. You can't walk into Oxford and start talking about superpowers without a little groundwork convincing them you're not crazy.
[ There's an exhale that comes at a hiss, his hands twitching in her grasp in compulsion of putting his head back in between them (and will, if she lets him), but voices are only voices, less needling. Just unwelcome.
He remembers, too, being able to think clearly, to come up with all these brilliant things. ]
no subject
the laugh is a step in the right direction, she thinks.
( raven is here; not long gone now. bridges once burnt can be crossed again, especially since raven/mystique cares still. )
she doesn't let him put his head between his hands, her grip tightening as his hands twitch. ] Tell me about the study on behavioural neuroscience. What behaviour were you studying?
no subject
[ His hands grip back, reflexively. ]
Neuroscience is about the physical dictating the emotional. I wrote on the neural mechanisms of thought and feeling, its place in modern psychology. Much research is done on nonhuman animals, but you can extrapolate, based on those readings, patterns between all organisms. Hunger and sexual drive and--
[ A break in his train of thought. Shakily getting back on it. ]
Its an old school of academic thought. We've been slicing open brains since ancient Greece. Sometimes it all sounds like butchery to me, like breaking down a painting into its molecular components to find the beauty in it. I always thought I knew better, because of what I could do, I could see it when they couldn't.
no subject
[ her tone isn't sharp, but the question is insistent. there's a hint of a smile lurking behind her expression, too, because of his likening the mind to a painting like that. it appeals to her, and she can certainly understand the belief that he might be able to see something others can't.
and, a moment later: ] They're always there, but you can't let that control you.
[ that's gentle, soft. she'd gone through something similar as a child, but not since, not really. ]
no subject
[ Replying to tangential thought, entwined as if he's holding onto a life line. His head tips to the side, tentatively listening to both her thought and the background murmur of voices both. Panic subsiding. Breathing. ]
I didn't understand what was happening to me, or if it was happening at all. It took a few years, a little maturity, but after that it was always so easy.
Hunger and sexual drive and sensory perception. We don't passively receive the messages forced upon us, we sculpt them into lessons, memories, expectation. Ideally.
I just want to sleep.
no subject
My mother helped me a lot, through it. [ there's a memory, of her mother holding her close, her head tucked underneath her mother's chin, a steady voice of just focus on me, honey, listen to me breathe and my thoughts, okay, no one else and underneath it all worry and i love you so much, cassie and that had helped.
she doesn't know how to build walls, not really — morgoth helped with that, a little, in exchange for self defence lessons, before he went and tore it all down again — she pushes that thought down. it has no place here; it won't help. ]
Can you sleep with music playing?
[ it might seem like a nonsequitur; it isn't. ]
no subject
Yeah.
[ He can feel her shove one memory aside, and he reaches for the warmer one, of her own experiences. There isn't anything particularly voyeuristic or appropriative in it; it's kept separate, appreciation for what it is. ]
I had music to fill in the silence, when I was first on the serum. Which just makes me sound ridiculous, I know. You miss it when its gone, even if its turned on you.
no subject
test scores aren't everything. ]
Pretend the voices are music. They're there, but you can blend them out.
[ she doesn't shrug, but her mind gives the impression of it. ]
I think of it like a radio, sometimes.
no subject
There is a part of him that thinks he is genuinely broken, physically and mentally, and this belief is transmitted inarticulate between them. There had to be a reason, that he would bring himself to abusing the serum.
All the same-- ]
I can try.
[ The crisis is past, anyway. Telepathy is a dull murmur in the back of his mind, manageable, and even pain has been allowed to stay rather than fought, focusing on her hands, her thoughts.
That she is barely dressed, which only seems to register now. He should go. ]
no subject
there is a strong sense, though she doesn't articulate it ( doesn't need to ) of determination, of belief that broken things can be fixed with effort and that people are only ever truly broken if they give up. ]
You can stay, if you think it'll help.
[ it wouldn't be the first time she hasn't slept in a bed. he's already sitting on it, and she got some sleep. there's a general willingness to — watch over his sleep, so to speak.
the offer stands. ]
no subject
The alternative is to get sickeningly drunk, so. ]
Thank you.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)