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lb_leeA/N: So, I've been writing a bunch of random IS/PIN scenes. Here are all the Infinity Smashed crew ones. I have more, but it's six AM. I need sleep. There will be more later.
Earth Music
(Note: the song mentioned here is Bunji Garlin's Put In the Thing, and it's from Trinidad and Tobago, not Jamaica. It is far filthier on the whole than what I transcribed.)
Raige, M.D., and Thomas are digging around in a scrapyard sale, where scavengers all over Freeport sell the multiverse's detritus, trash from a thousand worlds that's come clattering down the vortex of space-time over the years. They're just checking out all the fascinating, useless junk, and somewhere between scraps of otherworldly fabric and sparkly things made of something, Raige finds a handful of battered cassette tapes, and Thomas rescues a tape player from a creature who wants to use it as a lunchbox.
For a couple of minutes, the two of them congratulate each other on their good fortune, followed quickly by the realization that in a pre-electrical society, the music's useless--if the stuff even still works after being drop-kicked halfway down the multiverse.
Then M.D. shows up, grousing about how unfair it is, she couldn't find anything, and Raige and Thomas exchange thoughtful looks, then grin.
Then they shove the tapes and player into M.D.'s hands and say, "Make it work!"
She tries to shove them right back. "I am not your portable music player."
"Sure you are," Thomas encourages. "You're our WalkGirl."
She squints at one of the tapes doubtfully. "Guys, these things went through god only knows how many overlaps before crashing down here. There's no way they work."
"Please, M.D.," Raige begs, clasping his hands. "Please?"
Thomas and him give M.D. their best puppy faces. And M.D. rolls her eyes and whines and complains all the way home, but when she gets there, she takes off her bike gloves, sticks a tape in the player, and the lavender whorls on her hands begin to pulse.
It takes a lot of fiddling for her to get anything out of the tape player, never mind music. Despite her origins, she has little to no ability with electronics, and the tech is pretty battered, so she has to noodle around, coaxing electricity in varying doses to various areas. And the tapes have no labels, so it's unclear whether anything is even recorded on them.
Raige and Thomas's attention spans have about run their course when the player kicks up with a whir and a whine. As the boys watch, it starts playing a very quiet, very fuzzy Caribbean song that none of them have ever heard of.
After that, it's the work of a minute to get the volume up. The song is no less incomprehensible loud than soft, and they blink at it for a moment.
"Is that English?" M.D. asks, her arms fluorescing as if she's trying to make the sound clearer.
"I... think so?" Raige says, but he's not really sure. "And I don't think it's you making that tape fuzzy, kid. I think it's just old."
She frowns and presses the speaker to her ear, as though that'll help her make out the words. "What is this, it sounds Jamaican or something..."
Thomas has been quiet the whole time, but now his eyes light up and he grins. "Guys!" he breathes. "It's dirty!"
M.D. snorts and doesn't remove the speaker from her ear. "You think everything's dirty." She's fiddling with dials, still trying to get the sound clearer, with no success.
"Oh, I don't think, babe, I know. Just listen." He clears his throat and starts singing along, and his accent is all wrong but it works well enough, especially with the face he's making. "I say that ghetto gal they say she does cause hell, I she me does buss well so me just stack well--"
It still doesn't make much sense to Raige, and by the look on M.D.'s face, it doesn't to her either. Of course, Thomas makes it sound dirty, but he could probably recite a grocery list and make it sound like pornography. The little dance he's starting to do isn't helping.
Then Thomas reaches the chorus and they get it.
"When you cock back and rock back so, I will put in the thing where the thing must go, when I flip that so an' I rip that so, I will put in the thing where the thing must go..."
M.D. makes a sound like a parrot being run over and drops the tape player like it bit her. The music skips, then cuts out entirely, but it's too late; Thomas has a quick musical ear, and he's already taken the tune up in English and Spanish. Raige never knew it, but Thomas actually improvises really good dirty lyrics when he has to.
M.D. covers her ears and howls in pain. "Augh! No! Why! Stop!"
Of course, that just makes Thomas start really dancing, which looks every bit as dirty as the song sounds. Raige can't help but laugh even as he blushes, which of course just encourages Thomas further, and Raige's clapping quickly morphs into giving him a beat to keep time to.
M.D.'s howling hits a higher pitch, and for a moment, her and Thomas's voices battle for dominance. Unfortunately for M.D., Thomas has melody, rhythm, and a brilliant ability for tuning out any verbal data that doesn't suit him, and he has the greater lung capacity.
Raige doesn't dance. He's too conscious of his own gangly limbs and awkwardness to feel like it's worth scalding everyone's eyes. But Thomas is all big white grin and undulating hips, and heck, Raige's around so M.D. and Thomas can talk him into doing things he really shouldn't do, so he finally gets up and starts dancing too. Lindy Hop; he'd die if he tried Thomas's style.
"Judas," M.D. complains, but it sounds half-hearted, and Thomas just whoops.
"C'mon, stop pretending you're above it all and just join in," he says, before going back to the song.
M.D. looks at Raige as though hoping he'll dissuade her. Fat chance; she's the only person in the overlap who dances worse than he does. So he just grins, keeps clapping and stomping to the beat in his head, and says, "Peer pressure!"
And M.D. groans, and crosses her arms, and mutters about the downfall of adolescent society, but Thomas just sings louder and dances harder, and Raige follows his leader.
When M.D. turns the tape player back on and starts dancing, they're gracious about it and only rib her a little bit about contributing to cultural decay. Which makes M.D. crank the volume to drown them out, and then they're all dancing to the music they're making.
They laugh and dance to Earth music until the sun goes down and all they can see is the gleam of their grins, and the neon crackling fire of M.D.'s power-lines. And for a little while, it's like being home.
Shape
I watched as Biff finished the push-ups and moved on to sit-ups, pistoning up and down like a demented human oil pump. It was obvious this was a matter of long habit for him, but my abdominals burned just to watch him.
Up, down, up, down, up, down.
"How many of those do you do?" I asked after a minute or two.
He shrugged with his mouth and eyebrows and didn't break rhythm. "A lot."
I squatted on his windowsill. "You don't count?"
"I get bored." He jerked his chin stove-ward. "Sausage. I made too much."
I got off the sill to investigate. "Thanks."
Another shoulderless shrug. "Ain't like I made it for you."
I went and grabbed two and wolfed them over the frying pan. When I returned, licking the grease off my hands, Biff finished. He lay back for a moment, chest pumping.
"You do those every day?" I asked.
"Yeah."
I cocked my head. "Still got a bit of a gut."
He gave me a look of bored disinterest, as though nothing I said could possibly be of emotional significance to him. I wasn't fooled.
I raised my shirt and patted my concave tummy with a grin. "Senyan metabolism. Look upon my spine, ye mighty, and despair!"
Biff made a face like he'd swallowed lemon juice, got to his feet, and shoved me aside as he made for the kitchen. "Fuck you. You'll starve 'fore me."
"Not as long as you're cooking," I called after him.
Shower
Even in my shivering misery, I wasn't entirely beyond noticing the obvious. I eyed the gaping doorway doubtfully.
"Uh, Biff?"
He didn't look up from the sink. "What?"
"Your bathroom's missing a door."
He didn't face me. He didn't have to; his voice carried the weight of sarcasm just fine. "Naw, really? Was there yesterday; someone musta taken it off just for you..."
I glared at him, but it didn't do much good with his back to me.
As though he sensed me glowering at his back, he said with long-suffering impatience, "I won't turn around, all right? I don't care."
That I couldn't argue with. While he soaked my shirt with less than enthusiasm, I stripped out of the rest of my clothes.
The bathroom was a stark, bare little room half-covered in mildewy tile. There was a rusty sink, a toilet with the tank cover off to allow the user to stick their hand in to flush it, and the shower was a bare metal head sticking out of the wall over a drain set in the floor. In an unusual effort at DIY home improvement, Biff had attached a short, severed length of garden hose to it.
"I gotta give you kudos, Biff," I called out the bathroom. "You're like a monk. A violent, cantankerous monk."
"And I don't believe in God."
"Sure you don't." I eyed the shower head appraisingly, then reached for the rusty tap set in the wall. I couldn't make out a C or H on it, so I gave it a testing wiggle.
"Biff, which way--"
Apparently, the wiggle was enough. The hose blasted me with a burst of ice water. I screeched and flailed, trying to get a grip on the hose, but it was thrashing like a decapitated snake.
"Oh yeah, I forgot," Biff said cheerfully. "Don't got hot water."
The soap was hard as rock, and Biff apparently didn't believe in towels, but I somehow got myself clean, shook myself dry, and skulked back into the kitchen, shivering in my clothes.
"You are such a penis," I told him.
"Uh huh." He wasn't even trying to conceal the grin as he scrubbed the vomit out of my shirt.
Fixed
Biff and M.D. are showing off scars.
"That one?"
"Tentacle squid. Leaves very distinct sucker wounds, just so you know."
"When did you go to the ocean?" As though sure, squid attack, he can buy, but the ocean? Really?
"Ocean? Who said anything about the ocean? It was a land squid. That one?"
"Enh. Dunno. Knife?"
"Looks like it needed stitches."
He shrugs and waves a hand, as though such things are mere trivialities. "Don't keep track."
She rolls her eyes. "How about those, the ones on your forearm, there..."
A wry twist of his mouth. "Cooking. Like..." he gestures, miming bringing his arm down on the edge of a hot frying pan. She winces in sympathy.
He jerks chin at her. "How 'bout the one on your stomach?"
"Enh?"
He makes a broad slash across his abdomen, as though committing hara-kiri. A look of understanding spreads over her face.
"Oh! That one." She lifts her shirt and nudges her waistband down to expose it, a pale straight line just across her hips. "It's from when they fixed me."
The stare is blank and uncomprehending.
"You know? Fix? Dogs and cats?" She makes little stabby gestures at her stomach. "Castration?"
That word hits home. His eyes go wide. "So you--"
"Yeah. At birth."
He thinks that over for a bit, chewing his lower lip. "That why you don't fuck?"
She shrugs. "I dunno. I guess?"
He beats his thighs with his fists. "You lucky bitch," he accuses.
She beams and raises her hands to the ceiling, like she's just scored an anatomical touch-down. "Finally, someone gets it! Usually everyone's so sorry for me..."
Broken
When M.D. comes to Biff in her Jaunter's League jumpsuit, her shoulders are slumped and she won't look at him.
"I need some help," is all she says. Which means she needs a spotter.
So they take out all the furniture, and they bar the doors, and Biff puts on long sleeves and wraps his hands. They unscrew the light bulbs and Biff shuts off his power so she won't throw his circuit breaker again, and they shut all the breakable, throwable stuff in the bathroom.
Then they let her go.
The shadows around her writhe, and the room temperature plummets until Biff can see his breathing, even though it's July. She hits and claws and thrashes and screams, which nobody notices, because it's that kind of apartment complex. She beats on walls. She fights him like he's everyone who's ever hurt her, and pain doesn't register on her radar. He gives her the fight she needs, because even berserk, she's really not that good a fighter, just inexhaustible and impossible to reason with.
Which is fine. Biff needs his outlets too. His wind is getting short (damn him, he needs to stop smoking), but she's the only one who can keep up with his rage. Or maybe he's the only one who can keep up with her.
And so they beat on each other, until M.D. runs out of power and sunlight and blood sugar and mad, until she finally comes out the other side and the screaming turns to sobbing and she collapses in a bruised, battered heap on the floor.
This part, Biff isn't so good with, so he leaves her to it while he replaces the furniture, light bulbs, and breakable, throwable stuff. He turns the power back on. When she's still not done, he unwraps his hands, washes the bite she got in on his thumb, and starts frying bacon and eggs. As per her requests, he completely ignores the busted up alien kid on his floor until she gets up, drying her eyes.
"Hey." Her voice is raw from all the screaming.
"Hey."
"You need anything cleaned out?"
"Nah. You losing your touch; only bit me once."
She insists on disinfecting it anyway, with her crushed beetle larvae or whatever it is she carries, and he puts up only token resistance because the last time he didn't let her, he got a nasty infection that took a couple weeks to clear up. He just makes sure to keep cooking the bacon and eggs while she does it, to show his disinterest, and jerk his arm away the moment she's done. Then she gets to work fixing herself up.
Biff watches her out of the corner of his eye. She always comes out of it worse than him; he hits harder than she does, and it's easy to forget what injuries mean when you don't feel pain. Her hands are already starting to swell, though the bruises haven't started to show quite yet.
"Ice in the freezer," he says.
She uses it.
She washes the blood off her lips and chin and sits in a quiet, hollow-eyed ball as he cooks. When he grunts and points at the toaster, she gets up and fumbles the slices in by hand, too exhausted to do it any other way.
When the bacon is just the right balance of crispy and juicy, and when the egg whites are cooked but the yolks still runny, he takes the frying pan, sets it on a dishrag on the floor, and sees that M.D.'s remembered to grab the butter and jam for the bread, if not the honey and cinnamon. He grabs the rest, and M.D. wolfs the food like she hasn't eaten in a week.
"Why don't you ever have plant matter on the table?" She asks. She's looking him in the eye again.
Biff asks, in the most bored, detached way he can, "Feel better?"
She licks bacon grease off her swollen knuckles and says yes.
"That's why."
Rage
The worst part of the rage, for M.D., isn't the descent. That's easy, too easy, easy as rolling downhill. All she has to do, whenever it rises, is close her eyes and fall into oblivion, let it swallow her up. No memory, no will, no self, no pain. Total annihilation of the soul.
It's almost irresistible, that rage.
No, the hard part is coming out of it--naturally, that is. When she's knocked unconscious, like she was the first few times, it's different. The process gets cut off, and she escapes scot-free, relatively speaking. She wakes up unaware of what happened, amnesiac, and sane.
But coming out of it otherwise--through psychic interruption, or the rage just runs its course, oh, that's much worse. There's no awe, no sadistic glee. Only the numb horror of losing control, followed by overwhelming shame. She's not just a monster; she's an incompetent monster.
And then there are the shakes, the hysterical, unstoppable tears. And when she's done with that, she doesn't feel better. She's just exhausted, like she's been sick, and feels broken.
"I think that's what healing's usually like, M.D.," Raige says to her.
She pokes her lo mein with a fork, trying to want it. "I thought healing meant you felt better."
Raige shrugs. "You do. But it hurts first."
M.D. shoves the food away and puts her head on the table. "Great. Shizznick wootage. No wonder people love this whole healing jazz."
Raige is silent for a moment, twirling his fork through his fingers. Then he says quietly, "You know, it wasn't till a year after Mom died that I felt it."
M.D. raises her head from the table. Raige never talks about his mother. He's a little pale, but his voice is steady.
"I mean, I was only eight, you know? And Dad fell apart. I... I didn't feel like it was right for me to feel it too. Not then, when he was already so low.
"Then I was nine, and it got kind of bad for a while. No, really bad. I was sick a lot; I couldn't sleep. I cried a lot. It felt like she was gone all over again, only this time, it was like it never ended. Dad was still broken up about it too, so he couldn't really help me. I spent a lot of time with the guidance counselor."
M.D. punches him in the shoulder. "Ah, shut up, milquetoast. It is comparable, and you have no idea how sick I am of being the designated sad sack in the room, owner of all depressing things. Thank you for not treating me like a drowned kitten. Honestly. Now eat your frogging sweet-and-sour pork before it gets cold."
And they eat their Chinese take-out and watch B-movies the rest of the evening.
Earth Music
(Note: the song mentioned here is Bunji Garlin's Put In the Thing, and it's from Trinidad and Tobago, not Jamaica. It is far filthier on the whole than what I transcribed.)
Raige, M.D., and Thomas are digging around in a scrapyard sale, where scavengers all over Freeport sell the multiverse's detritus, trash from a thousand worlds that's come clattering down the vortex of space-time over the years. They're just checking out all the fascinating, useless junk, and somewhere between scraps of otherworldly fabric and sparkly things made of something, Raige finds a handful of battered cassette tapes, and Thomas rescues a tape player from a creature who wants to use it as a lunchbox.
For a couple of minutes, the two of them congratulate each other on their good fortune, followed quickly by the realization that in a pre-electrical society, the music's useless--if the stuff even still works after being drop-kicked halfway down the multiverse.
Then M.D. shows up, grousing about how unfair it is, she couldn't find anything, and Raige and Thomas exchange thoughtful looks, then grin.
Then they shove the tapes and player into M.D.'s hands and say, "Make it work!"
She tries to shove them right back. "I am not your portable music player."
"Sure you are," Thomas encourages. "You're our WalkGirl."
She squints at one of the tapes doubtfully. "Guys, these things went through god only knows how many overlaps before crashing down here. There's no way they work."
"Please, M.D.," Raige begs, clasping his hands. "Please?"
Thomas and him give M.D. their best puppy faces. And M.D. rolls her eyes and whines and complains all the way home, but when she gets there, she takes off her bike gloves, sticks a tape in the player, and the lavender whorls on her hands begin to pulse.
It takes a lot of fiddling for her to get anything out of the tape player, never mind music. Despite her origins, she has little to no ability with electronics, and the tech is pretty battered, so she has to noodle around, coaxing electricity in varying doses to various areas. And the tapes have no labels, so it's unclear whether anything is even recorded on them.
Raige and Thomas's attention spans have about run their course when the player kicks up with a whir and a whine. As the boys watch, it starts playing a very quiet, very fuzzy Caribbean song that none of them have ever heard of.
After that, it's the work of a minute to get the volume up. The song is no less incomprehensible loud than soft, and they blink at it for a moment.
"Is that English?" M.D. asks, her arms fluorescing as if she's trying to make the sound clearer.
"I... think so?" Raige says, but he's not really sure. "And I don't think it's you making that tape fuzzy, kid. I think it's just old."
She frowns and presses the speaker to her ear, as though that'll help her make out the words. "What is this, it sounds Jamaican or something..."
Thomas has been quiet the whole time, but now his eyes light up and he grins. "Guys!" he breathes. "It's dirty!"
M.D. snorts and doesn't remove the speaker from her ear. "You think everything's dirty." She's fiddling with dials, still trying to get the sound clearer, with no success.
"Oh, I don't think, babe, I know. Just listen." He clears his throat and starts singing along, and his accent is all wrong but it works well enough, especially with the face he's making. "I say that ghetto gal they say she does cause hell, I she me does buss well so me just stack well--"
It still doesn't make much sense to Raige, and by the look on M.D.'s face, it doesn't to her either. Of course, Thomas makes it sound dirty, but he could probably recite a grocery list and make it sound like pornography. The little dance he's starting to do isn't helping.
Then Thomas reaches the chorus and they get it.
"When you cock back and rock back so, I will put in the thing where the thing must go, when I flip that so an' I rip that so, I will put in the thing where the thing must go..."
M.D. makes a sound like a parrot being run over and drops the tape player like it bit her. The music skips, then cuts out entirely, but it's too late; Thomas has a quick musical ear, and he's already taken the tune up in English and Spanish. Raige never knew it, but Thomas actually improvises really good dirty lyrics when he has to.
M.D. covers her ears and howls in pain. "Augh! No! Why! Stop!"
Of course, that just makes Thomas start really dancing, which looks every bit as dirty as the song sounds. Raige can't help but laugh even as he blushes, which of course just encourages Thomas further, and Raige's clapping quickly morphs into giving him a beat to keep time to.
M.D.'s howling hits a higher pitch, and for a moment, her and Thomas's voices battle for dominance. Unfortunately for M.D., Thomas has melody, rhythm, and a brilliant ability for tuning out any verbal data that doesn't suit him, and he has the greater lung capacity.
Raige doesn't dance. He's too conscious of his own gangly limbs and awkwardness to feel like it's worth scalding everyone's eyes. But Thomas is all big white grin and undulating hips, and heck, Raige's around so M.D. and Thomas can talk him into doing things he really shouldn't do, so he finally gets up and starts dancing too. Lindy Hop; he'd die if he tried Thomas's style.
"Judas," M.D. complains, but it sounds half-hearted, and Thomas just whoops.
"C'mon, stop pretending you're above it all and just join in," he says, before going back to the song.
M.D. looks at Raige as though hoping he'll dissuade her. Fat chance; she's the only person in the overlap who dances worse than he does. So he just grins, keeps clapping and stomping to the beat in his head, and says, "Peer pressure!"
And M.D. groans, and crosses her arms, and mutters about the downfall of adolescent society, but Thomas just sings louder and dances harder, and Raige follows his leader.
When M.D. turns the tape player back on and starts dancing, they're gracious about it and only rib her a little bit about contributing to cultural decay. Which makes M.D. crank the volume to drown them out, and then they're all dancing to the music they're making.
They laugh and dance to Earth music until the sun goes down and all they can see is the gleam of their grins, and the neon crackling fire of M.D.'s power-lines. And for a little while, it's like being home.
Shape
I watched as Biff finished the push-ups and moved on to sit-ups, pistoning up and down like a demented human oil pump. It was obvious this was a matter of long habit for him, but my abdominals burned just to watch him.
Up, down, up, down, up, down.
"How many of those do you do?" I asked after a minute or two.
He shrugged with his mouth and eyebrows and didn't break rhythm. "A lot."
I squatted on his windowsill. "You don't count?"
"I get bored." He jerked his chin stove-ward. "Sausage. I made too much."
I got off the sill to investigate. "Thanks."
Another shoulderless shrug. "Ain't like I made it for you."
I went and grabbed two and wolfed them over the frying pan. When I returned, licking the grease off my hands, Biff finished. He lay back for a moment, chest pumping.
"You do those every day?" I asked.
"Yeah."
I cocked my head. "Still got a bit of a gut."
He gave me a look of bored disinterest, as though nothing I said could possibly be of emotional significance to him. I wasn't fooled.
I raised my shirt and patted my concave tummy with a grin. "Senyan metabolism. Look upon my spine, ye mighty, and despair!"
Biff made a face like he'd swallowed lemon juice, got to his feet, and shoved me aside as he made for the kitchen. "Fuck you. You'll starve 'fore me."
"Not as long as you're cooking," I called after him.
Shower
Even in my shivering misery, I wasn't entirely beyond noticing the obvious. I eyed the gaping doorway doubtfully.
"Uh, Biff?"
He didn't look up from the sink. "What?"
"Your bathroom's missing a door."
He didn't face me. He didn't have to; his voice carried the weight of sarcasm just fine. "Naw, really? Was there yesterday; someone musta taken it off just for you..."
I glared at him, but it didn't do much good with his back to me.
As though he sensed me glowering at his back, he said with long-suffering impatience, "I won't turn around, all right? I don't care."
That I couldn't argue with. While he soaked my shirt with less than enthusiasm, I stripped out of the rest of my clothes.
The bathroom was a stark, bare little room half-covered in mildewy tile. There was a rusty sink, a toilet with the tank cover off to allow the user to stick their hand in to flush it, and the shower was a bare metal head sticking out of the wall over a drain set in the floor. In an unusual effort at DIY home improvement, Biff had attached a short, severed length of garden hose to it.
"I gotta give you kudos, Biff," I called out the bathroom. "You're like a monk. A violent, cantankerous monk."
"And I don't believe in God."
"Sure you don't." I eyed the shower head appraisingly, then reached for the rusty tap set in the wall. I couldn't make out a C or H on it, so I gave it a testing wiggle.
"Biff, which way--"
Apparently, the wiggle was enough. The hose blasted me with a burst of ice water. I screeched and flailed, trying to get a grip on the hose, but it was thrashing like a decapitated snake.
"Oh yeah, I forgot," Biff said cheerfully. "Don't got hot water."
The soap was hard as rock, and Biff apparently didn't believe in towels, but I somehow got myself clean, shook myself dry, and skulked back into the kitchen, shivering in my clothes.
"You are such a penis," I told him.
"Uh huh." He wasn't even trying to conceal the grin as he scrubbed the vomit out of my shirt.
Fixed
Biff and M.D. are showing off scars.
"That one?"
"Tentacle squid. Leaves very distinct sucker wounds, just so you know."
"When did you go to the ocean?" As though sure, squid attack, he can buy, but the ocean? Really?
"Ocean? Who said anything about the ocean? It was a land squid. That one?"
"Enh. Dunno. Knife?"
"Looks like it needed stitches."
He shrugs and waves a hand, as though such things are mere trivialities. "Don't keep track."
She rolls her eyes. "How about those, the ones on your forearm, there..."
A wry twist of his mouth. "Cooking. Like..." he gestures, miming bringing his arm down on the edge of a hot frying pan. She winces in sympathy.
He jerks chin at her. "How 'bout the one on your stomach?"
"Enh?"
He makes a broad slash across his abdomen, as though committing hara-kiri. A look of understanding spreads over her face.
"Oh! That one." She lifts her shirt and nudges her waistband down to expose it, a pale straight line just across her hips. "It's from when they fixed me."
The stare is blank and uncomprehending.
"You know? Fix? Dogs and cats?" She makes little stabby gestures at her stomach. "Castration?"
That word hits home. His eyes go wide. "So you--"
"Yeah. At birth."
He thinks that over for a bit, chewing his lower lip. "That why you don't fuck?"
She shrugs. "I dunno. I guess?"
He beats his thighs with his fists. "You lucky bitch," he accuses.
She beams and raises her hands to the ceiling, like she's just scored an anatomical touch-down. "Finally, someone gets it! Usually everyone's so sorry for me..."
Broken
When M.D. comes to Biff in her Jaunter's League jumpsuit, her shoulders are slumped and she won't look at him.
"I need some help," is all she says. Which means she needs a spotter.
So they take out all the furniture, and they bar the doors, and Biff puts on long sleeves and wraps his hands. They unscrew the light bulbs and Biff shuts off his power so she won't throw his circuit breaker again, and they shut all the breakable, throwable stuff in the bathroom.
Then they let her go.
The shadows around her writhe, and the room temperature plummets until Biff can see his breathing, even though it's July. She hits and claws and thrashes and screams, which nobody notices, because it's that kind of apartment complex. She beats on walls. She fights him like he's everyone who's ever hurt her, and pain doesn't register on her radar. He gives her the fight she needs, because even berserk, she's really not that good a fighter, just inexhaustible and impossible to reason with.
Which is fine. Biff needs his outlets too. His wind is getting short (damn him, he needs to stop smoking), but she's the only one who can keep up with his rage. Or maybe he's the only one who can keep up with her.
And so they beat on each other, until M.D. runs out of power and sunlight and blood sugar and mad, until she finally comes out the other side and the screaming turns to sobbing and she collapses in a bruised, battered heap on the floor.
This part, Biff isn't so good with, so he leaves her to it while he replaces the furniture, light bulbs, and breakable, throwable stuff. He turns the power back on. When she's still not done, he unwraps his hands, washes the bite she got in on his thumb, and starts frying bacon and eggs. As per her requests, he completely ignores the busted up alien kid on his floor until she gets up, drying her eyes.
"Hey." Her voice is raw from all the screaming.
"Hey."
"You need anything cleaned out?"
"Nah. You losing your touch; only bit me once."
She insists on disinfecting it anyway, with her crushed beetle larvae or whatever it is she carries, and he puts up only token resistance because the last time he didn't let her, he got a nasty infection that took a couple weeks to clear up. He just makes sure to keep cooking the bacon and eggs while she does it, to show his disinterest, and jerk his arm away the moment she's done. Then she gets to work fixing herself up.
Biff watches her out of the corner of his eye. She always comes out of it worse than him; he hits harder than she does, and it's easy to forget what injuries mean when you don't feel pain. Her hands are already starting to swell, though the bruises haven't started to show quite yet.
"Ice in the freezer," he says.
She uses it.
She washes the blood off her lips and chin and sits in a quiet, hollow-eyed ball as he cooks. When he grunts and points at the toaster, she gets up and fumbles the slices in by hand, too exhausted to do it any other way.
When the bacon is just the right balance of crispy and juicy, and when the egg whites are cooked but the yolks still runny, he takes the frying pan, sets it on a dishrag on the floor, and sees that M.D.'s remembered to grab the butter and jam for the bread, if not the honey and cinnamon. He grabs the rest, and M.D. wolfs the food like she hasn't eaten in a week.
"Why don't you ever have plant matter on the table?" She asks. She's looking him in the eye again.
Biff asks, in the most bored, detached way he can, "Feel better?"
She licks bacon grease off her swollen knuckles and says yes.
"That's why."
Rage
The worst part of the rage, for M.D., isn't the descent. That's easy, too easy, easy as rolling downhill. All she has to do, whenever it rises, is close her eyes and fall into oblivion, let it swallow her up. No memory, no will, no self, no pain. Total annihilation of the soul.
It's almost irresistible, that rage.
No, the hard part is coming out of it--naturally, that is. When she's knocked unconscious, like she was the first few times, it's different. The process gets cut off, and she escapes scot-free, relatively speaking. She wakes up unaware of what happened, amnesiac, and sane.
But coming out of it otherwise--through psychic interruption, or the rage just runs its course, oh, that's much worse. There's no awe, no sadistic glee. Only the numb horror of losing control, followed by overwhelming shame. She's not just a monster; she's an incompetent monster.
And then there are the shakes, the hysterical, unstoppable tears. And when she's done with that, she doesn't feel better. She's just exhausted, like she's been sick, and feels broken.
"I think that's what healing's usually like, M.D.," Raige says to her.
She pokes her lo mein with a fork, trying to want it. "I thought healing meant you felt better."
Raige shrugs. "You do. But it hurts first."
M.D. shoves the food away and puts her head on the table. "Great. Shizznick wootage. No wonder people love this whole healing jazz."
Raige is silent for a moment, twirling his fork through his fingers. Then he says quietly, "You know, it wasn't till a year after Mom died that I felt it."
M.D. raises her head from the table. Raige never talks about his mother. He's a little pale, but his voice is steady.
"I mean, I was only eight, you know? And Dad fell apart. I... I didn't feel like it was right for me to feel it too. Not then, when he was already so low.
"Then I was nine, and it got kind of bad for a while. No, really bad. I was sick a lot; I couldn't sleep. I cried a lot. It felt like she was gone all over again, only this time, it was like it never ended. Dad was still broken up about it too, so he couldn't really help me. I spent a lot of time with the guidance counselor."
M.D. listens in silence. Raige's mouth quirks in a humorless smile.
"That's when people started calling me Raige. I know you thought I was just making it up, but I wasn't. I was a lot angrier then. Angry at Dad, angry at Mom, angry at the world, and angry at me. I think most of all, I was angry at me, for not being able to fix it, for not being able to get better, for feeling horrible all the time." He shrugs. "The name's just a joke now. But it wasn't always."
"So what changed?" M.D. asks. There's none of the usual sarcasm in her voice.
M.D. punches him in the shoulder. "Ah, shut up, milquetoast. It is comparable, and you have no idea how sick I am of being the designated sad sack in the room, owner of all depressing things. Thank you for not treating me like a drowned kitten. Honestly. Now eat your frogging sweet-and-sour pork before it gets cold."
And they eat their Chinese take-out and watch B-movies the rest of the evening.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-15 05:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-16 12:42 am (UTC)Glad you enjoyed it.