"This is the same, isn't it?" He sits, fusses the file into tidiness. "I'm giving you my word that you'll get a deal when you graduate. Malcolm always says the inmates are the ones doing the real work. So, you do the work and you get a deal."
It's hard to distrust him, but that just makes her anxious. Her hand drops to curl on the desk, and with a sharp shake of her head, "And then I'll owe you. Because that's how it works if you want to survive. If you think you can be the exception, you'll only be destroyed."
There's more than bitterness in her voice. Dread creeps around the edges, because she'll be damned if she watches that happen again and because - "I'll never be beholden to anyone, ever again, no matter how sincere they think they are. Reality always comes calling."
There's more than one thing playing in her mind as she says all of this, clashing in a dissonant chorus. Her voice and the man who betrayed her; her voice and the man who created her to be betrayed.
"For better or worse, in sickness and in health, 'til death do us part." "You used me!" "Child, that's why you were made."
Then, the most quiet and distant, her voice alone: "Where does it say that you have to be a mutant to believe what the X-Men stand for, to fight by their side?"
She doesn't mean to share any of that, but the door she opened in the common room was never actually closed.
It feels like a test, like his first real test as a warden. There's a conflicted mishmash panic of What would Hunter/John/Jedao/Arthur do? Then another voice, quiet but firm: No, what do I want to do?
Edwin takes a deep breath and nods. "Okay. But it's yours if you change your mind."
Hearing that gentler maelstrom makes her blood run cold and her nails dig into her desk, because she knows what it means - he heard her, he -
He's not calling her out on any of it. Just giving her another choice.
Madelyne closes her eyes, releases the breath building up before it explodes in her chest, and nods. "All right."
When she opens her eyes, they're locked onto her file. There's nothing in it she wants to hear, she's sure, but it's all something she knows. Something solid instead of treading uncharted waters. "So. Once upon a time..."
It starts where she thinks it will: in Nathaniel Essex's laboratory.
He opens up the file with a deep preparatory breath, then remembers one other thing.
"If there's anything you want to say more about, or you think the Admiral didn't cover things fairly, or anything, tell me and we can stop and talk about it. And-- I know you said you wanted to do it all at once, but it's okay if we start and that changes. If it's not true any more, we can stop."
He tentatively reaches out, doesn't touch her, but puts his fingertips very close to her hand. A friendly presence on offer.
Her postures eases as he speaks, though it never quite reaches 'relaxed'; she's so used to ripping her power back with bruised and bloody hands, and having it simply offered is deeply disconcerting.
Still, she lets her fingertips skim that last scrap of distance, accepts at least a fleeting touch as she meets his eyes and nods.
"It will - " Her grimace is bleak and weary and frustrated. "It'll start in Nebraska, probably. I don't remember any of that, but I suppose no one remembers being - born." Made is so easy to fall back on, but then Sinister never actually gave her life. "...Tell me if it says anything about what the Phoenix did first?"
It doesn't; just that it finds her, and grants her something vaster and stranger than a soul.
"Do you want me to read it out loud?" He's already skimmed part of the first page, and he's already decided that if Nathan "Mister Sinister" Essex ever shows up on the barge he's teleporting the guy down to zero and punching him into a cell.
She immediately grimaces at the thought, which - says a lot by itself, probably.
"A summary is fine. Woke up, got memories suppressed or altered or implanted, started being a pilot?" Her voice softens on that last word, just a little. Joy and pride that was never quite tainted, not entirely.
She had time to live something of a life, before meeting Scott. However hollow it feels now, it did happen, and she was damn good at her job; the file will note her skill and dedication, and a man she risked her life to pull from the smoking wreckage of a crash - the same flavour of catastrophe that seemed to haunt her nightmares.
"I bet the enclosure can make a plane for you to fly. It's not as good as the real thing, maybe, but it's something?"
He flashes a tentative smile and keeps reading, pausing every so often to sum up what he's just gone over as he gets deeper into it all. The marriage, the Loki-given temporary powers, the child, the Marauders. And the more he reads about Scott Summers the more he wants to punch the guy into a cell next to Sinister. By the time he gets to the part about the nightmare where Scott and Jean walk away with Madelyne's son while she's a faceless mannequin abandoned and tricked into choosing to become a demon--
"I think. I think I need a break."
He is trying very hard not to be furious with pretty much everyone but Madelyne. She can probably feel it, through that door she opened that he hasn't shut, the way there's a psychic storm gathering around him.
"...I - maybe." Not the same responsibility, the same trust, but - sitting in the cockpit again would be nice. Soaring over the countryside, even if it wasn't truly brimming with life. "I could teach you, if you want." She's not sure when he'd need to know how to fly a cargo plane, but the Barge puts you through all kinds of bullshit, and she has no idea what his native reality is like.
She keeps her composure through the downward spiral of her life, though a loose page or wisp of hair will flutter here and there - the lonely birth of her son, the attack by the Marauders that ripped him from her arms, the dream that doomed her.
Feeling someone else's righteous anger is almost like an anchor, one she's never quite felt the shape of.
"Yeah, I did too." It's flat and dry, but not truly hostile. She hasn't slammed that door, after all.
He does it slowly, tentatively, so he won't startle her and she can indicate if it's unwelcome--that's the sense she'll get first, the impression of psychic request. If and only if he feels consent, he'll wrap her in the protective warmth of a young god only half aware of its own power, a firm metaphysical hug, a shield.
"No one here will treat you that way, and if they try I'll--" He stops himself. Death threats are not a thing he does any more. "I'll scare the fucking shit out of them and throw them into the nets."
She shies away from the mental contact, at first, sullenly instinctive. But he isn't pushing, and he feels like - like the hearth that was Jean's soul, before it was snuffed out.
So, after a beat of strained hesitation where he doesn't push her, she closes her eyes and lets herself sink into it.
Still, she murmurs low and sharp, "Careful. I'll always encourage bloodshed on my behalf."
"I won't make them bleed a lot," he says, with pointed innocence. After a second he adds, "I'd like learning to fly. It's something my brother hasn't done yet, I think."
"Papercuts only, I can work with that." Despite herself, that darkly playful smirk broadens into something warmer as she nods.
"It's a lot to focus on all at once, it took - " The smile drops abruptly. Mostly to herself, she mutters, "Stupid."
And then, when she meets his eyes again, "I didn't really learn, did I. All that knowledge was pre-implanted."
She never tried to figure out which flight was actually her first. Which cargo she was actually responsible for, which people she actually ferried safely.
He studies her face, trying to sort through his thoughts as carefully as possible before he says anything. He doesn't want to mess this up, he doesn't want to upset her or hurt her or say something that will make her not want to talk to him.
"Why..." A pause, to see if he's phrasing it properly in his own head, which doesn't mean that it's phrased right, but he's trying. "If you love the memories, why can't they be yours, no matter who put them there? Someone else isn't the one who has them. They don't own those memories. They're yours now."
Her expression had gone flat again, but as he speaks the edges begin to soften; she can't help but think of other memories that weren't quite hers, that she was so desperate to reclaim, that she was given instead.
But there is a difference, and her gaze drops as she pulls her hands back and crosses her arms, trying to articulate it.
"He still designed them. He still chose them to make me the - the perfect bait. He chose what and who I would love." Her nails dig into her arms, hard enough to draw blood if not for the mystically resilient fabric of her sleeves.
He nods slowly, not wanting to contradict her, even if he has ideas about... that. It's early. He doesn't need to say everything right now, when he's just learning the details of the story he knows in broad strokes.
Still, he reaches out a tentacle to brush against her fingertips, to draw her attention to how tight her own grip is if she hasn't noticed already.
"Well, you can teach me about something you love, and those memories will be completely yours. You--"
He pauses, frowns at the table. Finally looks back at Madelyne. "When I was... made, I didn't have a body. I was trapped in the eyes of the person who summoned me, and it wasn't even me he was trying to summon. I didn't know anything about Earth, I didn't really know anything but how to survive in a place that... that was nothing but violence and chaos. A dumping ground for dead things, where I'd been so long I didn't remember who I was."
There, context provided. "The... person who su--"
He stops himself, because anyone who knows anything about him or John will be able to guess who it is. "Arthur Lester, one of the inmates, was the one who got me out of there. He didn't mean to get me out, though. He wanted my brother, who had been with him before. He didn't even know I was there. While we were together, he quoted poetry, sometimes. He recited one to me when I barely... I didn't even know what poetry was. All I knew was that it was beautiful, and I wanted to know more."
Edwin frowns down at the file again. "He wasn't kind. Arthur. I understand why now, way better than I did then. But I wasn't kind to him either. There's a reason my brother came here as a warden and I came as an inmate. But I still... liked poetry. I still wanted to know more. For a while I-- For a little while I wouldn't read any just because it was something Arthur loved and I didn't want to love it. Because the first poem I heard was one he recited."
He looks up again. "But I started reading poems anyway. A little bit here or there, when I was... feeling... resentful, or defiant. And I started to love it for myself. I know it's not... the same, really, it's not the same hardly at all, but I don't think it's wrong for you to love flying just because some fucking asshole thought it would be useful for you to know for his own reasons. Even if... you don't know which flight, which one was your first, which one was real first... One of those flights and all the ones after were yours. Whatever you knew because of him, you were still the one flying. We get whole new lives in the breaches. Learn how to do things we never have before. If we come back to ourselves and love doing what we learned..."
He shrugs. "Then it doesn't belong to the breach or the person we were there, any more. It belongs to us. You can make new memories. Beautiful flowers still use actual shit to grow, sometimes."
Her fingers do relax a fraction at the touch, but she doesn't look up at him. Not until he gets deeper into the story, and tells her -
Tells her that he only exists, is only alive, because someone desperate and lonely wanted someone else. It shatters all the determination to withdraw back into herself, and when she meets his gaze her expression is the most open it's ever been outside of the dreamscape.
It's easier to listen to people when you open yourself up, as it turns out. She doesn't realise it, but her hands ease entirely by the time he's finished, only gently clasping her arms. When he finishes she even snickers, low and soft, and there's a brightness back in her eyes.
"I - " It comes out rougher than she expected, and she swallows the sudden lump in her throat with a frustrated grimace. "I suppose. That all makes sense." The breaches are even fuzzier than the rest of her Barge memories, but she knows - she knows, somewhere deep in her gut, that she loved people in those too, and learned things, and carried both forward. She knows they made her more and not less.
"...I want you to keep reading. Just a bit further, I think, and you'll know why."
Just a bit further indeed. When he gets to everything with Nate, well. He's left staring at the page for several seconds before looking back up at Madelyne, eyes very wide.
"Oh." He looks at the file, then at her again. "I... Oh."
"Yeah." The rueful, crooked little smile looks strange on her face; it's the sort of expression she wore far more easily in the old days, when she didn't have anything to prove.
"Nate...he didn't really know what he was doing. He wasn't cruel on purpose." Looking back on it now, with all of her history intact and feeling truly whole - god, he was so young. "I don't even know where he is, these days."
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2024-07-04 04:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-04 04:53 am (UTC)There's more than bitterness in her voice. Dread creeps around the edges, because she'll be damned if she watches that happen again and because - "I'll never be beholden to anyone, ever again, no matter how sincere they think they are. Reality always comes calling."
There's more than one thing playing in her mind as she says all of this, clashing in a dissonant chorus. Her voice and the man who betrayed her; her voice and the man who created her to be betrayed.
"For better or worse, in sickness and in health, 'til death do us part."
"You used me!" "Child, that's why you were made."
Then, the most quiet and distant, her voice alone:
"Where does it say that you have to be a mutant to believe what the X-Men stand for, to fight by their side?"
She doesn't mean to share any of that, but the door she opened in the common room was never actually closed.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-04 08:59 am (UTC)Edwin takes a deep breath and nods. "Okay. But it's yours if you change your mind."
no subject
Date: 2024-07-04 09:10 am (UTC)He's not calling her out on any of it. Just giving her another choice.
Madelyne closes her eyes, releases the breath building up before it explodes in her chest, and nods. "All right."
When she opens her eyes, they're locked onto her file. There's nothing in it she wants to hear, she's sure, but it's all something she knows. Something solid instead of treading uncharted waters. "So. Once upon a time..."
It starts where she thinks it will: in Nathaniel Essex's laboratory.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-05 04:52 am (UTC)"If there's anything you want to say more about, or you think the Admiral didn't cover things fairly, or anything, tell me and we can stop and talk about it. And-- I know you said you wanted to do it all at once, but it's okay if we start and that changes. If it's not true any more, we can stop."
He tentatively reaches out, doesn't touch her, but puts his fingertips very close to her hand. A friendly presence on offer.
"It's your file. We'll read it how you want to."
no subject
Date: 2024-07-05 01:09 pm (UTC)Still, she lets her fingertips skim that last scrap of distance, accepts at least a fleeting touch as she meets his eyes and nods.
"It will - " Her grimace is bleak and weary and frustrated. "It'll start in Nebraska, probably. I don't remember any of that, but I suppose no one remembers being - born." Made is so easy to fall back on, but then Sinister never actually gave her life. "...Tell me if it says anything about what the Phoenix did first?"
It doesn't; just that it finds her, and grants her something vaster and stranger than a soul.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-08 12:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-08 01:04 am (UTC)"A summary is fine. Woke up, got memories suppressed or altered or implanted, started being a pilot?" Her voice softens on that last word, just a little. Joy and pride that was never quite tainted, not entirely.
She had time to live something of a life, before meeting Scott. However hollow it feels now, it did happen, and she was damn good at her job; the file will note her skill and dedication, and a man she risked her life to pull from the smoking wreckage of a crash - the same flavour of catastrophe that seemed to haunt her nightmares.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-08 01:11 am (UTC)He flashes a tentative smile and keeps reading, pausing every so often to sum up what he's just gone over as he gets deeper into it all. The marriage, the Loki-given temporary powers, the child, the Marauders. And the more he reads about Scott Summers the more he wants to punch the guy into a cell next to Sinister. By the time he gets to the part about the nightmare where Scott and Jean walk away with Madelyne's son while she's a faceless mannequin abandoned and tricked into choosing to become a demon--
"I think. I think I need a break."
He is trying very hard not to be furious with pretty much everyone but Madelyne. She can probably feel it, through that door she opened that he hasn't shut, the way there's a psychic storm gathering around him.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-08 01:44 am (UTC)She keeps her composure through the downward spiral of her life, though a loose page or wisp of hair will flutter here and there - the lonely birth of her son, the attack by the Marauders that ripped him from her arms, the dream that doomed her.
Feeling someone else's righteous anger is almost like an anchor, one she's never quite felt the shape of.
"Yeah, I did too." It's flat and dry, but not truly hostile. She hasn't slammed that door, after all.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-08 03:03 am (UTC)"No one here will treat you that way, and if they try I'll--" He stops himself. Death threats are not a thing he does any more. "I'll scare the fucking shit out of them and throw them into the nets."
no subject
Date: 2024-07-08 11:59 pm (UTC)So, after a beat of strained hesitation where he doesn't push her, she closes her eyes and lets herself sink into it.
Still, she murmurs low and sharp, "Careful. I'll always encourage bloodshed on my behalf."
no subject
Date: 2024-07-21 03:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-22 04:05 am (UTC)"It's a lot to focus on all at once, it took - " The smile drops abruptly. Mostly to herself, she mutters, "Stupid."
And then, when she meets his eyes again, "I didn't really learn, did I. All that knowledge was pre-implanted."
She never tried to figure out which flight was actually her first. Which cargo she was actually responsible for, which people she actually ferried safely.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-22 04:10 am (UTC)"Why..." A pause, to see if he's phrasing it properly in his own head, which doesn't mean that it's phrased right, but he's trying. "If you love the memories, why can't they be yours, no matter who put them there? Someone else isn't the one who has them. They don't own those memories. They're yours now."
no subject
Date: 2024-07-22 11:06 pm (UTC)But there is a difference, and her gaze drops as she pulls her hands back and crosses her arms, trying to articulate it.
"He still designed them. He still chose them to make me the - the perfect bait. He chose what and who I would love." Her nails dig into her arms, hard enough to draw blood if not for the mystically resilient fabric of her sleeves.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-23 12:26 am (UTC)Still, he reaches out a tentacle to brush against her fingertips, to draw her attention to how tight her own grip is if she hasn't noticed already.
"Well, you can teach me about something you love, and those memories will be completely yours. You--"
He pauses, frowns at the table. Finally looks back at Madelyne. "When I was... made, I didn't have a body. I was trapped in the eyes of the person who summoned me, and it wasn't even me he was trying to summon. I didn't know anything about Earth, I didn't really know anything but how to survive in a place that... that was nothing but violence and chaos. A dumping ground for dead things, where I'd been so long I didn't remember who I was."
There, context provided. "The... person who su--"
He stops himself, because anyone who knows anything about him or John will be able to guess who it is. "Arthur Lester, one of the inmates, was the one who got me out of there. He didn't mean to get me out, though. He wanted my brother, who had been with him before. He didn't even know I was there. While we were together, he quoted poetry, sometimes. He recited one to me when I barely... I didn't even know what poetry was. All I knew was that it was beautiful, and I wanted to know more."
Edwin frowns down at the file again. "He wasn't kind. Arthur. I understand why now, way better than I did then. But I wasn't kind to him either. There's a reason my brother came here as a warden and I came as an inmate. But I still... liked poetry. I still wanted to know more. For a while I-- For a little while I wouldn't read any just because it was something Arthur loved and I didn't want to love it. Because the first poem I heard was one he recited."
He looks up again. "But I started reading poems anyway. A little bit here or there, when I was... feeling... resentful, or defiant. And I started to love it for myself. I know it's not... the same, really, it's not the same hardly at all, but I don't think it's wrong for you to love flying just because some fucking asshole thought it would be useful for you to know for his own reasons. Even if... you don't know which flight, which one was your first, which one was real first... One of those flights and all the ones after were yours. Whatever you knew because of him, you were still the one flying. We get whole new lives in the breaches. Learn how to do things we never have before. If we come back to ourselves and love doing what we learned..."
He shrugs. "Then it doesn't belong to the breach or the person we were there, any more. It belongs to us. You can make new memories. Beautiful flowers still use actual shit to grow, sometimes."
no subject
Date: 2024-07-23 12:45 am (UTC)Tells her that he only exists, is only alive, because someone desperate and lonely wanted someone else. It shatters all the determination to withdraw back into herself, and when she meets his gaze her expression is the most open it's ever been outside of the dreamscape.
It's easier to listen to people when you open yourself up, as it turns out. She doesn't realise it, but her hands ease entirely by the time he's finished, only gently clasping her arms. When he finishes she even snickers, low and soft, and there's a brightness back in her eyes.
"I - " It comes out rougher than she expected, and she swallows the sudden lump in her throat with a frustrated grimace. "I suppose. That all makes sense." The breaches are even fuzzier than the rest of her Barge memories, but she knows - she knows, somewhere deep in her gut, that she loved people in those too, and learned things, and carried both forward. She knows they made her more and not less.
"...I want you to keep reading. Just a bit further, I think, and you'll know why."
no subject
Date: 2024-08-03 04:21 am (UTC)"Oh." He looks at the file, then at her again. "I... Oh."
no subject
Date: 2024-08-18 08:35 pm (UTC)"Nate...he didn't really know what he was doing. He wasn't cruel on purpose." Looking back on it now, with all of her history intact and feeling truly whole - god, he was so young. "I don't even know where he is, these days."
No one has told her, and she hasn't asked.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-30 06:10 am (UTC)He's distracted though, chest squeezed in a way that would make it hard to breathe if he needed to.
"D'you... d'you want to talk about it, any, the... the circumstances that brought you back?"
no subject
Date: 2024-08-30 08:01 pm (UTC)"It's - all a bit moot, now. I've died and come back twice since then."