Logs:"Anger" "Management"

"Anger" "Management"
Dramatis Personae Avi, Emilia, Roscoe
In Absentia Jax	2024-12-19 "World ain't so bad, when you actually get to living in it, you know?"
Location <XAV> Athletic Center - Xs Grounds
Though fairly new and fully modern on the inside, the exterior of this building has a stately stone exterior that does not jar too much with the Victorian elegance of the mansion proper. Situated near the athletic fields on the grounds, the athletic center host a vast range of indoor sports and fitness endeavors. The most iconic facilities here include an Olympic size swimming pool, a basketball court, and a fully outfitted gymnasium. In addition to these and the boys' and girls' locker rooms, there are an array of smaller facilities upstairs: two studios for dance, martial arts, yoga, or fencing, a multipurpose space that can be configured for various team sports, and a fitness center with free weights and various exercise machines whose upper limits can bet set beyond what would be safe or useful to baseline humans with staff permission. There's music blaring from the corner of one of the upstairs martial arts sections, someone clearly expected to be alone and didn't intend to disturb anyone, but has some anger to get out, as the music is aggressive, if not necessarily the most 'hard' of music. Just wait in line for your rights and your privilege / Then follow the leader right off the cliff's edge / All your dreams are down below, buried under broken bones / The more you know, you know, you know nothing Setting the scene of destruction is Emilia, who's got wraps wrapped around her hands and feet in a kickboxing or Muay Thai style, and has probably accidentally in her anger broken the various punching bags scattered around, with many with claw marks and spilling sand from their interiors. Letting out a roar as she sets up a couple of jabs and a strong roundhouse, she puts all of her anger in the kick, sending the punching bag sliding across the room, or at least a few inches. She doesn't necessarily have super strength, at least she doesn't think she does. But then again, to carry around that Adamantium skeleton and move it... (Throw her in the Hole. Worthless animal. She does not know what benefits we have given her, how perfect of a weapon she is.) Placed in solitary for daring to fight back. Her body is covered in scars, a result of her less than perfect (at least at the time) healing factor. They litter her back, her arms, her legs, and one at the base of her neck. We walk like dead people who haven't died yet / We ride like passengers without a pilot / We be losing our minds but we all try to hide it / It's hard to keep fighting / When you're barely surviving The roar echoes a time she would rather forget, scratching at the walls of the solitary confinement cell, beating the door until exhaustion, driven by rage, primal anger, fury even, and having no healthier way to release it. So, she does the same thing she's always done. She's dressed in a rather standard workout outfit. Emilia's left to her own devices for some while, with the music and the roaring. Eventually the door does open, swinging wide and unsubtle. Avi is standing in the doorway, not actually entering the room far -- just a step or two in. He looks fresh off a workout, still kinda damp in his wicking blue and grey compression shirt, black shorts, quick-dry towel draped around his shoulders. He's using one end of the towel to pat at his locs; in his other hand there's a water bottle, slightly frosted around where his fingertips touch it. "Yo, 'milia," sounds casual enough, "You, uh, good in here?" Roscoe is here too; though nominally he is standing right next to Avi, his posture and wide eyes and tilted head all give off the impression that spiritually he's standing behind the taller boy and peering around him. He's wearing a pair of sidestripe trackpants over his Xavier's wrestling singlet, dangling his headgear from two fingers at his side, hair still tucked into its cap even if he's left the chin strap to dangle. He's not saying anything, maybe he thinks if he stays very still nobody will see him. Shit. She notes as she turns around, hands balled, still somewhat amped up on anger, that this must look utterly horrifying, like coming face to face with a bear that does not want you in their turf. There's destroyed punching bags everywhere, as if she just destroyed one and moved on to the next when it no longer fit her release of anger-- she'll have to pay for those-- oops. "I'm angry. And I don't know a healthy way to deal with it." She says, plainly, the venom leeched in her tone, though it's obvious, as she watches the sand leave the poor sandbags, that it isn't at them. "At life, at my circumstances, at the cops for...." She pauses. She didn't have to finish that, but didn't want to. "Recent events. Everything just... I don't know how to deal with this, this hollow anger in my chest that no matter what I do, I can't get rid of it." "And I know you're both not therapists but... I could use some advice until I find one." "Oh shit, what the cops done now?" Avi is instinctively reaching for his pocket, though his phone isn't in it, alas for compulsively checking the news. He has (perhaps obligingly) shifted just a tiny bit forward, like his taller bulk can Spiritually remain in front of Roscoe. "I mean, I sure ain't no therapist, but." But what? He does not say. His brows have hiked, though. In questioning? Prompting? Emilia can interpret this how she will. His tone is encouraging enough, anyway. Roscoe is breaking off his frozen-squirrel stance to glance over his shoulder like, are there cops here right now???, but when this doesn't seem to be the case he's glancing forward again, with a grimace. He switches the headgear to his other hand. "I'unno if I have advice, I don't think I'm ever this angry. Have you tried telling yourself it is what it is?" Have you ever tried telling yourself it is what it is? It gets a slightly perceptible smirk out of her, but it fades as quickly as it comes, too consumed by this torrent of rage to really find it truly funny. In any case, she notes the question and gives a sort of regretful look. "I'm sorry, I should have specified. Mr. Holland's arrest made me very angry as well. What have they done now? Same thing they do all the time, but that's not relevant to my anger right now. And yes, I have tried telling myself it is what it is, but it doesn't... really help. This helped a bit, but it's not sustainable. Eventually, they're going to get mad that I'm destroying all the punching bags that non metal skeleton kids are supposed to use. I just... I came from a lab, but not like Prometheus. My own mother of all people gave me up after we had a fight and my mutation... did what mutations do. I get bits and pieces of my own memory that I've had for years but whatever they did to me, I can't remember everything. I need like, telepathic therapy but I don't know if they can read my mind through my metal skeleton because it's some kind of special metal and just... пиздец." Although the curse is in Ukrainian, the meaning is easily understood. It's shit, by the way. Or fucked up, depending who you ask. "And a lot more shit that I won't go into because you don't deserve to bear it too." She uses a towel nearby to wipe the sweat off of her face, wrapping an ice pack in it and wrapping it around her neck to try and soothe herself. "I'm sorry that I interrupted whatever you guys were doing." And that you're being forced to deal with my problems, she wants to add. "Mr. -- did he get --" Avi is for a moment confused, brows creasing. "You not talking 'bout October, are you?" He sounds just a little uncertain. "They ain't like, come for him again now because if they jam him up while he down there decorating for Winter Formal I'mm'a think these fascists just got it out for our dances." He lifts his water bottle for a slow swig, and one of his eyes squinches up. "I'onno if you need a telepath for giving no therapy, but we got mad telepaths round here, I'm sure they could just, like, tell you if their brain thing works. School therapists be happy to talk to you any time, too, you know." Roscoe winces, almost imperceptibly, at the idea of telepathic therapy, though he doesn't respond to it aloud; he fidgets with the headgear in his hands. "I mean, do you want to remember everything?" he says, his nose wrinkled with maybe-unconscious confusion. "I don't..." once he's trailed off it seems beyond him to seize back at that conversational thread. He nods his head, the chinstraps of his hair cap bouncing wildly -- "And it's free too," he says, as though he has Ever In His Life taken advantage of this. "I am. I didn't really get to process it, I don't know... healthy isn't exactly my strong suit. I sort of just push the emotions down and deal with it later." She has absolutely no idea what Avi is saying for a moment, visibly mouthing jam him up? before realizing what he means. oh. Admittedly she took it literally, and wondered why they'd cover him in jam or shove him in a box, and then it clicked. "I don't... I don't know. But I feel like it'll make me feel better if I do. There's so many good memories mixed in with the bad, I'm sure, but I can't find them." Stopping the music so they can have a decent conversation, at least, a clear one, so there's no misconstruing anything further on her part, she pauses. "I know, but how equipped are they to deal with... all of this? Every kid here, though I'm a bit older than a kid, mind you, every kid here has their own issues, their own things they have to deal with. Hey, I set my classroom on fire, hey, I nearly sent us into an ice age, hey, I can blast lasers out of my eyes and nearly cut my school in half. Like, what therapist is equipped to deal with all of this?" "Plus, I'm worried I'd be the client to lash out, and I don't want to be that one, you know? The client that every therapist tells their horror stories about. And especially a telepathic therapist. If they saw the things I've been through... I worry for them more than myself." "I'on think the therapists here are telepathic, it probably ain't healthy or like, good boundaries. But -- I think they kinda specifically equipped to deal with alla that? And --" Avi hesitates here, for a second. He's exhaling a very small puff of frigid air, pausing with a gentling of his more cavalier tone before he continues. "I don't want to downplay what you going through, for real, but girl, you gotta get over yourself. Like, look around you, aiite? Half this school come out of some torture lab. You up here destroying everyone's shit like you gonna go down there and drop some bomb on the therapists they aint never heard? They been hearing it since longer than some us been alive, and I gotta say, if you paid attention to literally anyone here 'cept yourself, you'd know that. Mr. Jax'n'em come out those labs a lifetime ago and been bringing kids here ever since. Half your classmates been tortured in 'em. Folks rolled through here outta your stabby adamantium pools before any of us ever got here. I promise you, you ain't gonna be too much to handle. You really just gotta suck it up and work on yourself before the rest of us don't got no gym left to practice in, aight? This place here for weirdos, you ain't the weirdest." "This is you pushing the emotions down?" says Roscoe a little critically, glancing around the carnage of the studio, eyebrows pinched low over his nose. "The school therapists work here, I think they..." he's trailing off a lot of his sentences here, lowering his chin to rub uncomfortably at his head; his hair is starting to tuft out of the cap down into his face. Huffs out a sort of vaguely inappropriate short and breathy laugh right at the end of all of this. "Second weirdest, at best." She doesn't necessarily like their tone, but they're right. And she says as much. "I'm not sure I like the way you're saying it, but you're right. I'm sorry you have to deal with..." A vague gesture to herself. "No, this is me not understanding that there's other ways to solve my emotions other than destruction like a dog with a chew toy. But you're both right. Also, stabby adamantium pools? That's not exactly the way I would've described... whatever it is you're describing, but it's not exactly wrong either. Thank you for the reality check, Avi. I think I needed that. Someone to tell me to just... shut the fuck up and get over it, you know? My problems are not the only problems, and it's time I realized that. For better or for worse. I think I always knew that, but I was so absorbed in my woe is me party that I never stopped to consider I'm not the only one with problems." She makes an effort to later, at some point in the future, walk around and patch up what can be patched, and maybe see from one of the staff if she can refill the sand or buy new bags (albeit with her currently non-existent job) to make up for it. "Who's the first weirdest, if I'm the second weirdest?" "I don't think all this the kinda thing you just get past, but I just mean -- if you get so caught up thinking your problems too big to even try to address, that's how they never get addressed. Maybe try talking the therapists? And like, make some real friends, some time. World ain't so bad, when you actually get to living in it, you know?" Avi lifts his head up, a small uptip of chin. Then with a quick glance to catch Roscoe's eyes, he's starting to turn toward the exit. First, though, he's throwing a warmer smile over his shoulder: "Yo, you talk to a couple kids, I bet you find 'em yourself. Report back." That earlier timid laugh is supplanted by a snort -- "Avi was so nice, you should hear how my dad used to talk to me when I threw fits," says Roscoe, a little drolly, and though he's opening his mouth to answer (actually, more likely, to cryptically refuse to answer) he's just laughing again at Avi's answer, tripping backward for a few steps before he turns to go too. "Yeah, report back." "Report back. Right." World ain't so bad when you actually get to living in it, you know? He was right. She didn't necessarily like how true a lot of his criticism was, but those who need the criticism often don't want to hear it. All in all, this was a semi-productive conversation. Maybe she'll start looking into patching up hole materials, grab some tape or something, and start patching these bags up. Deal with her issues before they don't have a gym to use and all. Now instead of later, like she planned. She wants to ask them if they need any support too, but they seem well adjusted enough. And before she knows it, they're out the door, and she's alone with her destruction. Again.