Logs:Unenlightened

{{ Logs | cast = DJ, Hive, Matt | mentions = Charles, Lucien, Scott | summary = "Maybe you could use some fucking church." | gamedate = 2024-09-29 | gamedatename = | subtitle = CN: graphic violence (flashback), discussion of murder(s), mention of child abuse/trafficking | location = <NYC> The Refuge - Staten Island | categories = DJ, Hive, Matt, Mutants, The Refuge | log = The swath of destruction that the dimensional anomaly carved here in 2020 has been swept away and transformed into a large compound, practically a neighborhood in its own right. Much of the grounds are given over to meticulously landscaped parkland. Here are manicured gardens abutting half-wild groves, playgrounds and playing fields, a swimming pool as well as a fishing pond, and even a few acres of farmland. The residences, from the founder's house to the miniature arcologies and the slightly larger guesthouse, are styled like abstract beehives. So, for that matter, is the vertical hydroponic farm that produces far more food than the earthbound fields. In fact, there is a great deal of beehive imagery throughout, and even absent specific styling, hexagons are still more common than squares or rectangles in the construction of spaces and objects, all of which are thoughtfully designed with an eye toward community and comfort. At the heart of the Refuge is the meetinghouse that crowns the hill where the 121st Precinct once stood: architecturally distinct from most LDS houses of worship, this one looks from afar like an abstract sculpture of a conch shell in gleaming white quartzite. The floor plan is built on a Fibonacci spiral with a relatively gentle rise in elevation for the first four quarter-arcs before shooting up into a steep organic spire that can be seen for miles around.

Last night there was a concert here. By Mormon standards it was fairly wild party times, even, large crowd and boisterous music and exciting drinks like dirty sodas and sprite with sherbet and extra sharp ginger beer. Despite the show going on till Very Late (almost ten!), by church o'clock this morning there is very little sign left on the grounds of a large gathering, stage fully broken down and removed along with most of the chairs and tables and not a scrap of trash left to be seen anywhere.

The last remaining evidence of the previous night's Wild Times are a couple of the cheerful signs still posted near the entrance to the compound (very clearly, some of these were painted by The Youth themselves). At the moment, Hive is slouching along the sidewalk just outside the compound -- it isn't actually forbidden to smoke on the grounds but maybe, anyway, it feels just a little disrespectful, because he's come out here to light up and also evidently to scowl at the cheerful YOUTH CONCERT! JOIN US! ALL WELCOME! colourfully hand-painted on the wood. Though the grey day is mild enough and he is well bundled in a flannel-lined denim work jacket over his Theta Tau sweatshirt, he is still shivering noticeably as he flicks at his lighter.

Matt's thoughts are--'legible' is putting it a bit strong, but sensible, anyway, well before he turns the corner. His mind feels like the eye of a storm, still and clear and heavy--that's nothing new, but the sharp things that pressure usually keeps under the surface are far more prominent than when Hive felt him last. For all that he isn't actively angry, doesn't seem out of control, his actual thoughts calm and flat and meandering. << This is far more than just a congregation, now. How long before they grow their own Quorum? >> He looks to the spire again with a muted appreciation for its beauty. << Is he still waiting for his door? >>

When he does round the corner and sees Hive his mind cuts sharply back to some earlier brooding, << --haven't found them might never find-- >> He deliberately pushes the thought back down beneath the surface and quickens his steps, tucking his phone away--he hasn't needed navigation since the spire came into view, anyway. He's dressed disorientingly nice given he's not been working--at least not at Xavier's--a light seafoam dress shirt with a forest green paisley cravat and a vest to match, gray slacks, and polished black derbies. He comes up short, opens his mouth for a greeting but what comes out instead is "Are you Enlightened yet?"

<< Please. You've met the man. >> The mind that whispers through Matt's mind is immense, a vastness in which Hive's own voice is for once not even distinguishable. The rustle of wind through this vast and shifting canopy of leaves does pick out other minds here and there, though -- the fierce impassioned sermon one young man is in the middle of giving up in the meetinghouse; the roomful of congregants excited and engaged and feeling (some for the first time in A While) that Church is finally the home it is supposed to be; a cluster of not-quite-teens playing down by the pond, not actually members of the congregation here but spending so very much more time on the safe and welcoming grounds that it's been feeling more like home than the drunken yelling waiting for them across the neighborhood; quite a few people who had come out from across the country or across the globe to discuss some finer point of interdimensional cosmology and found themselves so captivated -- whether by DJ or his community here or both -- that they simply haven't yet left. << This fucking place feel like he's waiting for anything? >>

Hive is taking a drag of his cigarette, wriggling the wooden sign slowly out of the ground. Halfway out of the ground, at least; he gives up on this project as Matt approaches and straightens up to lean on his cane. "Fuck, I switched green years ago." He sounds much the same as ever when he's speaking, anyway. He shakes his hood slightly back from his head, squinting at Matt's outfit. "Don't tell me you want to get in on the churching."

Matt's attention stutters and fixes for a moment on the children taking refuge on the grounds before pulling forcibly away. << No, it does not. And it is beautiful. >> He looks up at the meetinghouse again, although he was not actually referring to it specifically. With Hive's answer his smile pulls askew and he's mentally overlaying the image of the--very green, in a vast field of green--Ingress portal on the physical structure on the hill. "And you've recruited every nerd in this compound, I imagine." Now he gathers Hive into a tight hug that feels at once desperate and careful. Probably he doesn't really need to worry about crushing Hive's bony frame, even at his most fit, but Matt has himself has lost a good deal of weight. It might have been more obvious at a glance if his clothes weren't so expertly tailored to disguise it and if he didn't otherwise look entirely healthy.

When he releases Hive he finishes pulling the "JOIN US!" sign out of the ground, to which he half-addresses his mildly indignant answer. "Absolutely not." He gives his vest a light tug to straighten it. His explanation does not come in words, just a surge of ironic amusement at the use to which he's putting his Sunday best and a quick flash to one of Hive's earlier achievements--the Hellfire Club. "I'm sure you've gathered there are many changes afoot, but I'm not that far gone." He methodically quashes his mind's reflexive attempt to spin out on the word "gone", and pinches Hive's cigarette for a shallow drag.

"No?" Hive relinquishes his cigarette without protest. His hand drops to rest on top of the other on his cane, weight leaning hard against it. He is looking out at the grounds and not at Matt. Somewhat disconcertingly, at his current vast size the shifts of his psionic attention feel only vaguely and barely sensible even to Matt's perception, just so much slight shift in the ocean around them. "I tell Chaz's kids what absolute dumbasses they are on the daily and he hasn't kicked me out of his home for mutant sadsacks yet, who the fuck you kill to manage that shit."

Matt takes another drag on the cigarette before returning it to Hive. "Home for mutant sadsacks" catches him by surprise and pulls something halfway between a guffaw and a cough from his smoke-filled lungs. The end of that sentence blindsides him in the middle of that surprise, and the claws or teeth or blades or whatever is rising razor sharp from the shallows of his mind open somehow into:

His fingers are twisted in Lucien's hair, its dirty blond streaked dark with sweat and blood. His own blood is pounding fast as he looks down at his brother, flush with heartbreak and wrath and exhilaration cataclysmically intense. His mother's voice is sweet and beguiling in his ear, his brother's hoarse and pleading. His grip slackens and he turns away matter-of-factly to fetch the heroin.

In the present, Matt watches the flashback dispassionately. He's wholly aware it is not a good idea to simply tell someone what happened without context, and he certainly hadn't intended to show Hive this. << But, so it goes. >> "It wasn't even Chaz," he adds, with a touch of irritated disdain. "Summers banned me."

Hive isn't in the middle of a drag of his smoke when this flashback comes -- thank goodness, because maybe he would also have choked on his inhale. He doesn't, though -- just freezes, calloused fingers squeezing hard against the slim cigarette and his eyes fixed steady into the distance. There's another ripple, quiet and flickering across the myriad tendrils of him that weave through the compound around them, and this one is more slippery still -- perceptible, if barely, but somewhere out of Matt's actual reach.

Hive grips his cane harder, and that other stirring quiets. He lifts his hand towards his mouth but drops it again without actually taking another pull; when his palm thuds back down against his cane the cigarette falls from his unsteady fingers to roll down against the sidewalk in a small sputter of ash. "Maybe you could use some fucking church."

Matt's blithe impassivity explodes into betrayed anger, though outwardly he only narrows his eyes. "You don't understand." He's trying and failing to stop the rage that creeps out tremulous into his voice. "He killed Mother. He gave us both to Prometheus. And now he's turning everyone against us. But you haven't even--" His hand lifts to his mouth. "--did he get to you somehow ostie de tabarnak..." He backs away one step and then another, as though Hive were the deranged murderer in this conversation. As if backing away would help, if he were. "{If you won't believe me, ask Charles.}"

Hive still isn't moving, though his eyes have ticked very briefly in the direction of the meetinghouse. "Lucien. {We're talking about Lucien. The fuck am I supposed to believe he'd even be capable of --}" His voice is oddly flat through this, his fingers slowly rotating at the head of the cane. He clenches his knuckles down again, arresting this motion like he's seizing on a sudden fierce burst of inspiration. "{Shit, did you get another Lucien.}"

"I was dying." Matt bites out these words, which ride another wave of anger that isn't so apoplectic as before, mixed with a deep grief. "{If he found out they could save me--you don't know him like I do, but there is nothing more believable.} I might well have cut the same deal if our positions were reversed, but I would have gotten him out. I would have told him tabarnak de criss de--{what do you mean another?} The other one is dead!" Uncomprehension rises in his mind, a thick leaden fog threatening to drown out even his fury. He runs a hand through his hair, his vision dimming and shaking with nystagmus. He lowers his voice to a bare hiss, "{And he confessed to killing Mother!}"

"Are you insane? {I'm starting to think you don't know who the fuck Lucien is. The mountains he moved, the blood and sweat he poured out entirely because those labs hurt his ungrateful fucking shit of a brother. He built up the Court that you're running into the ground and not because he wanted to swan around being admired or whatever the hell bullshit you all have been up to but because the second the United States fucking government touched his brother he decided he was going to become powerful enough to gut that program. Gotten him out, you wouldn't have had a fucking clue how to get in the door if you hadn't wedged it open on his bloody corpse.}" Through this Hive still hasn't much moved, but now he is slowly and stiffly unflexing his clenched arms, bending down to pick his smouldering half-finished cigarette off the sidewalk.

There are memories, now, fluttering up to the surface of Matt's mind -- many of them his own although many more are not; years of Elie's derisive dehumanizations mixed in freely with justifications of the trafficking of her second-born, the horrific aftermaths of cruelties etched stark across many iterations of Lucien through the years, from a young child turning to his brother for safety up through the adult bloodied and pleading for his life.

There are roots snaking in, curling tight and hard through Matt's mind, and where these bonds join them now these echoes of Lucien's pain are joined by hundreds (thousands) (millions) until it becomes hard to tell the familiar from the strangers (none of them strangers, really, all of them here), echoes upon echoes of abuses at once grotesque and nightmarish and utterly, utterly banal.

Probably, Hive should be doing something to compartmentalize here, to filter; other minds were not built for a flood like this, for the weight of so many thoughts let alone the clear and focused prism of so many pains. But the only token nod at any kind of filtering that Matt gets is that the weight of his memories, his brother's memories, Elie's abuses, sift carefully to the top. (Somewhere among it, near lost in the noise, a distant echo of a phone call years past, overheard at the Lofts like so very very very many others, and though the identity on the other end asking "You got an alibi, Lucien?" is obscured in this re-collecting the context is clear: Hive knew, has known, knew before she was dead, even, from the moment the hit was arranged.)

<< (do you know) (how much) (death/pain/murder/horror) (we see every day) >> whispers not in words but in bleak and matter-of-fact feel through each memory. Clearer, crisper, though it sounds more Matt's voice than Hive's, now, if there is a Hive still in here: << {At least that bitch deserved it.} >>

Matt had drawn a breath to--well, judging by the depth of it, either yell or monologue at Hive, but << I feel pretty godsdamned insane right now >> never actually makes it to his lips. His expression goes blank and the shrieking rage inside him comes up short just before he's hived. The memories draw a whirlwind of horror and grief and an altogether different kind of fury from him. In the next instant what he feels is all but irrelevant, lost in all his millions with anguish enough to share.

What sense of individual self remains to him is scrabbling in vain for purchase in the flood. He's lost track of subjective time--of most existential anchors, for that matter--but it does not take him long to realize Hive is not shielding him, is going to let him drown. She did deserve it. Maybe he does, too, but he can summon no words from the crushing torrent even if he cared to argue otherwise. His perception dims, and he can't really think << I am going to die >>, but his subconscious sense of melodrama rises to the occasion. << "So alright! Alright, I've had my time!" >> It's not Josh Groban's voice belting "Dust and Ashes" into the darkness but Lucien's. << "Close my eyes, let the death bells chime!" >>

"{It means 'light', and it goes like so,}" he's telling his brother as he painstakingly shapes the letters of Lucien's name with a stub of a pencil that sits awkwardly in his tiny hand. "{See how pretty? She must like you, to give you such a name.}"

The memories cutting through him glimmer against the gloom, and as they synchronize the pulsing brightness becomes painful in its own right. At least he knows what this is now. He's flailing harder again, trying to flex his own power, but he can't even figure out which body has it, anymore. Somewhere in the midst of all this, just before the brightness overwhelms him, he does finally dredge up some voluntary language. << Consider this your seize and desist-- >> is all he manages before his mind goes dark and his body crumples.

---

There are people starting to filter out of the meetinghouse -- in a leisurely kind of way, mostly, moreso than they might at Some Other Meetinghouse in Some Other Neighborhood, given how very many of them aren't actually going anywhere farther than across the compound or down the block. One of them peels off, has reappeared on the sidewalk outside in a faint flicker-blink. DJ is looking down at Matt's inert form with an oddly unruffled expression, head tilting slightly to the side to read the brightly colorful 'AL ---- OME' cheerfully framing the man's head where it's been sort-of-propped up off the cold sidewalk by the wooden planks.

He doesn't exactly glance over to his partner, but he is taking a quiet background stock of exactly what number cigarette they are on, by now -- somehow there's a faintly greater weight of judgment here than for any of the rest of this scene. "I was two seconds away, you could have --" His head shakes. He drops to a crouch so that he can slide an arm carefully beneath Matt's shoulders -- a little more slow and a little more awkward in situating his prosthetic arm securely next -- and then, before the first of his congregants come close enough to be in view, he and his unconscious cargo are gone.

Hive stays put where he is, leaning up against a lamppost and glowering up at the sky. He is slowly pulling at his umpteenth cigarette but, somehow, in their mind, it's just a little more aggressive than his last pull had been. Something is twinging distant and uncomfortable within them, riffling through this endless canopy in search of --

-- well, something, dimly connected to the cargo DJ is carting away and a vague and slippery feeling that in some other (self)(plane)(lifetime) perhaps they'd remember to care about the fragility of other human minds. When they exhale the cloud of smoke blows dark and grey across the gleaming white contour of the meetinghouse. << Figured some extra prayers couldn't hurt. >> }}