tampered | (no subject)

(no subject)

When; Late evening, the 25th.
Rating; PG13 probably.
Characters; Nick & Remy
Summary; Interrogating the new telepath will obviously go much better if he's hammered first.
Log;

Nick's Christmas has been quiet, really; he and Ein meandered down to midnight mass behind the Pied Pipers of Merriment on the eve before, was startled to receive a book about chess from Jean Paul and otherwise largely ignored the holiday. (Except for the parts of a party upstairs that were hard to miss even when you weren't attending.)

When it's quieted down all around, he leaves the corgi to his own devices a while and makes his way to meet with Remy, as per previous arrangement.

(People that'll understand explanations he'd give if he were inclined to have been few and far between; his actually giving the explanation is even rarer. When any sort of ability of the sort is generally considered to definitely not exist and be the realm of hoaxers and the delusional, and on top of that half of yours is invasive by nature, one gets out of the habit of volunteering much. He's pretty sure this'll be interesting from either side of the conversation.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Suffering blows. People should knock that off." He pauses and takes a drink.

"...Well. You never know. If we say it too many times he might jus' appear."

(Like Beetlejuice!)

"And be trapped here like everyone else," Nick contributes, helpfully, "inconveniently." He considers this over the end of his cigarette. 'Bugger that' seems to be the sentiment at hand.

"If dimensions were meant to have doors they wouldn't be dimensions," he says with a shrug. At far as he's concerned, it's not Mojoverse and Apocalypse isn't in charge, so, whatever. Also, no in-timeline time travel. That's a plus. He hates that.

"Have another beer. I don' have room in de fridge for half of this."

"Happily." Nick will probably never turn down free drinks. He didn't turn down free drinks from a malevolent house at 7AM. (What is wrong with him.) "Though, Rose Red had doors. More of a pocket psychic phenomena than a proper dimension in and of."

...yes, that.

"I met somebody like that once."

...

Somehow, Nick doesn't think Remy is kidding. Probably because he's almost certainly not. "That's an unsettling thought."

"Mos' thoughts are, when you get right down to it."

He lights a cigarette - using a lighter this time. He's had too much booze over the past twenty-four hours to go dicking around with his powers.

"So, did Wanda explain mutants to you?"

"Not really," Nick shakes his head, sitting down with his (second, headed towards his third) beer and his cigarette. "I got a vague impression, but I couldn't say much on the subject."

Remy grabs a couple of shot glasses and the leftover bottle of tequila. The living room is clean enough to sit in - just uh, not that sofa.

"Homo sapiens superior," he says. "Mutants. Still human, but evolved. S'a variant on what we call de 'x gene'. There's no rules about what de x gene will go do you. Wanda manipulates reality an' probability. I have bio-kinetic energy generation. Blink teleports. An' she's purple. Some people are telepaths, some people can fly, some people control de weather."

As he speaks, he sits down and sets out the glasses, filling them.

"So. De government don't like this, 'cause people can do crazy things suddenly. De people don't like this 'cause they're scared. De church don't like this 'cause evolution ain't supposed to be real. But there ain't no hidin', 'cause kids are wakin' up and settin' their homes on fire by accident and screamin' an they don't understand what's happenin' to them, babies are bein' born wit blue skin. I was born wit my eyes like this."

He does a shot.

"You can imagine how well this all went over."

If anything deserves tequila shots, it's probably this conversation. "Tragically I can." Telepath psychiatrist. He's pretty familiar with the human mind, and the sort of things the frightened and judgemental are capable of. And besides that, it takes neither a telepath or a psychiatrist to recognize this as a particularly explosive situation.

As it were.

He thinks of Joyce, and how determined she was to prove that psychics and psychic phenomena were real - he reflects briefly he'd probably knock out some of her teeth if she ever showed up here.

Remy nods, staring somewhat unfocused at the space above the bottle.

"...Government wanted to track us. Catalogue, study. It started small. But people panicked. Anti-mutant groups. Murders, lynch mobs. So mutants started to fight back. An' that's when de camps started. They made these... machines. Sentinels. To track all de mutants down an' take 'em to be processed."

It sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, but it's real. Remy watched it happen in his lifetime, watched the world go from something that made sense to madness and horror and genocide over and over again. But it gave him an identity, too.

"A man named Charles Xavier - a brilliant man an' a very powerful telepath - had a hope for de future. A dream. That we could co-exist. He had a school for kids, an' he hosted a team of combatants to control mutants who would use their powers for evil, and protect mutants from persecution. Called de X-Men. Superheroes, basically. I was one of 'em for a while."

'Explosive' seems like a mild assessment, then. Nick nods; his silence isn't awkward so much as it is attentive. He absorbs information when he listens, and he's doing it now - he'll remember this later, however far through that bottle they get.

"I know a little girl who could've benefited from a school like that," he says, mostly to himself - he hopes Annie's doing well now.

"So could a lot of us," he says, and he sounds a little wistful at that. Remy LeBeau never attended Xavier's School for Higher Learning as a student. He got put in a madman's lab. "It... was de only good thing in de world for a long, long time. Got destroyed totally twice. Under siege from.. well." He shakes his head. "Don't matter. Point is, world was bad. Still is. Politics hit us pretty literally day to day."

Remy exhales, looking at his shot glass. "Eventually anti-humanity, pro-mutant leaders came up. Violent, militant, an' usin' de same horrible force against de flatscans that they were usin' against us. De mos' prolific, de mos' damaging, was a man named Magneto. He's commonly assumed to be de antithesis of Xavier. He's done some good, but mostly, he stands for genocide an' murder. He's Wanda's father."

The timing of the shot could be accidental coincidence. Sure. In the face of such anti-mutant sentiment, anti-human sentiment seems inevitable; the unfortunate particulars make Nick wince slightly.

"I take it she favours her mother."

"Or somethin'."

Remy pours Nick another shot. Welcome to Marvel. "If we're superheroes he's a supervillain. He tried to make Wanda an' her brother like him. She defected an' joined a team called de Avengers. For justice an' all. Pietro... well, he does good things an' bad things. Neither of 'em helped, when she broke."

He fiddles with his own shot glass some more.

"Anyway, what I said 'bout dimensions - in every one there's different people. Sometimes... you meet different versions of yourself. You know. As if life wasn't weird enough to begin with."

"God forbid," Nick replies, dryly, knocking back the shot after. Conversations of this nature always go down a little easier (that's a word for it, sure) if you don't have to stay entirely sober for the duration. That's probably hell on the hangover, for those who get them.

This is going somewhere, he can tell, but he's not sure yet if he wants to prod or just see how it plays out on its own.

"A man named Magneto who's never heard de named Wanda Maximoff is here."

He's just going to let that one sink in for a bit.

Nick evidently lets it sink a while too - marinating, if you will, in a drawn out silence.

"Bastard's got a devil for timing."

"And!"

What a lead in! "De man 'round de city named Tony Stark, also called Iron Man, is an Avenger, and de Secretary of Defense in America. He pushed a bill in Congress to register all superhumans through de government. Originally it included all mutants regardless of status. One of our people got in there an' had it amended for only active vigilantes, but still. So things are tense lately now that she remembers some things. An' you can see why I'd just... like to make sure you two are gettin' along."

The name 'Tony Stark' gets filed away - he doesn't think he's heard of the man before now, and he'll keep this in mind if he does later. "I think I'm getting the idea," he says, grimacing.

"Also you're likely gon' be in some considerable amount of mortal peril jus' by assosciatin' with us, I'm not gon' lie about it. Magneto's liable to kill people 'cause it benefits him. An' you may already be dead but there's worse things, too."

Nick downs another tequila shot before he decides how he wants to respond to that. 'Honestly' turns out to be the way he goes- "Rose Red was a dormant psychic phenomena," he says - more conversational than lecturing, really, "built around the turn of the century for a woman named Ellen Rimbauer. A psychic told her she'd never die until the house was finished, and it's not finished 'til she says it is. She went missing in the fifties - 'round about when I was born, as a matter of fact, if I'm remembering rightly. I might not be."

He exhales, lights another cigarette and breathes out smoke again. "In Rose Red, women go missing and men die - horrifically, usually. It lay dormant 'til 2001, when a woman named Joyce Reardon paid a group of psychics five thou apiece to go with her. She wanted to make it twitch - get herself some proof. She'd all but destroyed her reputation academically trying to prove the existence of people like me and things like Rose Red - she'd completely destroyed her own mind by the end of it. Annie Wheaton's the little girl I mentioned - she was one of us. Me, young man named Emery, there was Pam, Cathy, and Victor. Annie's sister Rachel came with us, and Steve Rimbauer - his house. He's due to have it knocked down, but he hasn't done it yet."

...more alcohol? Yes. "One of the things about Rose Red is that it doesn't precisely kill you. It feeds off you - we were effectively battery-shaped sacrificial lambs. I don't think Joyce acknowledged what she was doing to us, but I do think she knew. It - she - wanted Annie, mostly - I'll borrow Joyce's metaphor, here; I'm a candle. Annie's a searchlight. It wanted Steve, because he's family. I'm meandering, here, sorry - when it does kill someone, they're not dead, they're part of it. Used to manipulate the others, kept to build the house - I shouldn't have let Cathy wander about on her bloody own. I didn't manage to get her back to the others before we got cornered. The place didn't like me very much, I figured that out...shoved Cathy through a door, slammed it behind her, and six months later here we are. I went to hell for a stranger, effectively, so it might be new and interesting to do it for a friend."

Story for a story?

Remy stays quiet through Nick's story, and listens. Everyone's got some screwed up story or another - plenty of people have a deck full of screwed up stories. You don't dismiss them. You can downplay them, though. Brush it off with a few words and take a drink. Sometimes that's all you can do.

After Nick finishes, Remy lets silence hang in the air for a bit.

"What a bitch."

Nick's made a life out of not telling anyone much about himself; the kind of guy who walks away two hours later knowing half your life story but you never got his surname and you don't know what he does for a living. He's good at incisive leading questions and deflecting attention. This wasn't really a conversation where that was an option, but the point remains that Remy's response is the best he could hope for - because he wouldn't have a blind clue what to do with anything else.

"Ironically," he says, mild, "I was in Seattle in the first place to rest." Sabbatical, remember. He shrugs it off. "Funny old world."

He likes that phrase. It works for just about everything.

"De world don' rest, you jus' get tricked," he says, chuckling around his cigarette. It's a dark humor, but oh well. He doesn't think Nick will mind.

"You take good care of her."