capeandcowllogs | you're obviously not going to die

you're obviously not going to die

WHO: Katurian Katurian (

cry_andletloose)
WHERE: City streets
WHEN: Monday, Nov 16th, evening.
WARNINGS: Plane crashes in the past and all that entails, eventually destruction from the Joker's attack, which will get its own warning, if necessary.
SUMMARY: Katurian discovers his power for limited time travel and decides to give it a test run on whomever he can manage. When it comes to Havok's past, maybe it's not the smartest move.
FORMAT: Starting with paragraph, feel free to change that!

Three days, he had been living in the one bedroom apartment on the east end of Chinatown. It wasn't so bad. In fact, it was even better than the apartment in his old world, where none of the pipes worked regularly and all of the cockroaches collected on the kitchen counter at the start of each day, waving their antennae in the poorly circulated air. No, this place was much better. It was even comfortable in its own way, at least in those moments when he forgot he was on the run. In the day, he'd sit on the edge of his bed and write using the nightstand as a table (today the story was about a queen who lived on top of a mountain, who ordered the peasants to bring her buckets of water until they could make a lake to mourn her drowned son, and the peasants died of thirst moving up the mountain in the summer sun), and at night, he'd go to the City streets to pick up the newspaper to page through the classified ads.

He needed a job. Despite Nigel's and Cameron's insistence that they would take care of the rent, he had to eat. Still, he threw out the paper each evening, dissatisfied, because he never wanted to really do any of that, did he? He was alive for a second time. Shouldn't he only be doing what he wanted, which was writing? But he knew both consciously and unconsciously that life wasn't that fair (life was never fair) and there wasn't any way he'd catch a break. Even so, he hoped with a sort of optimism he'd never admit he had - the kind that made his head hurt with its sickening delusion - that he would find something that was right for him. Someday. Somehow.

Tonight, he left the way he always did, ducking out through one of the alleyways and moving down through the thin streets. There was a man he passed every day who liked to sit on his stoop and smoke, with a long scar down the side of his face and a way of wringing his hands that suggested a nervous energy Katurian was all too familiar with. He looked at the man a little longer today (and that was all that was different, really, everything else about this day was the same), and then he felt a tugging--

Suddenly, the world was slowing down. It was unmistakable, really, how it slowed down and he felt himself start to panic and his heart was pounding and nothing was in control and then--

He was in an unfamiliar room. He was in an unfamiliar room with unfamiliar smells, and for a second, he thought he was dreaming, and then a second later, he wondered if he was dead again and moving on to the next level. Then, a little boy appeared from the room next door with a long scar down the side of his face, and a way of wringing his hands that suggested a nervous energy that--

Reality skipped a beat, and he was in the street again. His heart pounded in his chest. In his throat. The man with the cigarette shook his head, perplexed, as though he had experienced a funny-turn. For a second, now that he was looking closer, Katurian could see the man's life laid out in front of him. Not guess. Not assume. He could see the ups and downs. He could see his life was fine until he was nine years old, and then he could see that everything moved downward sharply, a life like a precipice. Like his own life.

Slowly, Katurian moved away.

Less slowly, he realized what his power meant.

It would be a while before he went home.

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It was five months to the date his father had been killed. Alex knew this because he had been counting each day since it happened, despite not having seen any sunlight for half that time. As he climbed out of bed and made himself coffee, he could feel the pall descend over him again. The City had been host to a series of chaotic events lately, which had helped in driving that memory from his active mind, but it had slowed to a lull and it was much harder to ignore it now. Corsair had never deserved this ending, being struck down in cold blood by his son, Alex's brother-- but somehow Alex knew his father would never have gone in his sleep.

This was no good. He needed to get out of the house before he moped the entire day away.

Lost in thoughts of his father and his family, of his life before it had all been shot to pieces, Alex walked down street after street with hanging head, heavy heart and hands in his pockets.

Katurian visited three more pasts that night.

The first was a woman with glasses and a bright smile who he knew had never regretted a day in her life, and when he traveled to her childhood, she beamed and offered him a taste of her ice cream because he looked sad, the chocolate melting all over her tiny, eager figures. The second was an old man whose life dipped between the ages eighteen and twenty-five, and Katurian couldn't help but wonder if he had maybe been in a war. When he visited his past, he arrived in the living room and the boy called him a robber before kicking him in the shins, which even now were red and bruised. The third one was a man who was blind, who apparently once hadn't been blind, at least from the way his seven year old self drew chalk pictures all over the sidewalk in front of his house.

Katurian could move in these pasts. He could slip back years or forward minutes. As exciting as it was, this power that made him special, he still couldn't forget what it meant. He couldn't forget the story, the signs, the idea that maybe he should be a hero and then, with this power, what being that hero meant he would be.

'and sit with them, and gently hold them, and he'd say 'Hold on a minute,' and time would slow strangely--'

And yet he couldn't stop. He couldn't stop getting a taste of these pasts that didn't belong to him. It was as though if he did it enough times, he could forget why he was doing it and instead treat it like a game or an exercise.

With time, he wasn't even sure how far away from his apartment he walked. With time, he saw Havok.

He wasn't thinking very much when he started moving towards him. It was just a new person, a new challenge. What makes you tick? What can I do now? He kept his eyes on the other man's head. His heart was pounding.

Time slowed down.

Edited 2009-11-17 03:10 (UTC)

It felt like vertigo, but it wasn't. Alex remained upright and rooted to the ground as the ground beneath him felt as if it were spinning- then falling away.

Falling, or plummeting, much like the burning plane was through midair. A little blond-haired boy screams the most high-pitched scream he will ever utter in his life as the ground falls away from him and he loses his balance for a moment, sprawled on the ground in a terrified heap. But then his older brother-- Scott, Scott, he's crying out-- is at his side in an instance and helping him to his feet again.

Five-year-old Alex wants to be calm, but feels his little heart hammering a quick staccato as his brother asks their parents a dreaded question.

"Dad, Mom, are we all gonna die?"

It's the tense moment of silence from them that scares him the most. "No, Scott," says the lovely Katherine Anne Summers in the steadiest voice she can muster as her husband wrests desperately with the controls, "You boys have parachutes."

--This wasn't right. No.

No.

With the unsteady ground and the smoke and the flames, their fear became his fear. He felt his stomach dip with the plane. He felt his stomach dip because they were all going to die (not the blond boy, though, he would have to watch, oh god) and he was going to die with them, and there was no way this would ever turn out well, no, and the pressure hummed in his ears as he thought about how the papers probably wouldn't even report him missing tomorrow and maybe he should get out of there except his mind was frozen and he couldn't find the present anymore. He didn't notice that this time they couldn't see them. He only noticed the adrenaline.

Major Christopher Summers is fighting the hardest battle of his life, keeping the burning aircraft aloft despite two failed engines and a tail that's rapidly catching fire. The plane shudders and swerves to the side again and he swears. Alex half-turns to his mother, absurdly expecting her to scold him for language like she always does, but instead she's hurrying to the rack.

"There's only one parachute, Christopher."

Instantly, his insides turn icy cold and instinctively he huddles against his big brother. The fear in seven-year-old Scott's brown, brown eyes is nearly palpable, and though he puts on a brave front Alex can feel his thundering heartbeat as he speaks up courageously.

"Alex can have it, Mom."

But then their father lets go of the controls, and it's then Alex knows his family is doomed. He's given up and gotten out of the seat, intent on spending his last moments with his wife and sons.

"No, Kate, strap Scott into it. Scott, son, don't you ever let go of your brother, you hear?"

Little Alex, far too young for the tragedy that's about to befall him, wills himself not to cry as his mother straps the parachute tightly onto his brother, whose shoulders are stiff and pulled back but still trembling. Then they're hugging each other desperately, tightly, as their parents bring them to the edge of the now-open plane door.

He makes the mistake of peering over and sees only flame and a vast expanse of sky beneath them.

"Wait!" he yelled, but even though his mouth moved, his words went nowhere. They dissipated in the air. No one turned. Nothing changed. Though the smoke filled his lungs, he didn't cough.

It was then that he realized how disconnected he was from this world. He realized they couldn't see him, that they moved around him as though he were a ghost (as though he were already dead) and carried on. This past had already been determined and it was thundering onwards like a train.

He took deep breaths. You will get out of here. You will get out of here. But it was a truth he couldn't hide away from, a horrendous tragedy he was going to have to watch (again), an inescapable dread that--

His vision was consumed by darkness and he was suddenly in the present again, his chest rising and falling with uneven, panicked breaths. It wasn't very long before his knees buckled.

It shouldn't have hurt, but he snapped back to real-time so suddenly and swiftly that it felt like a really bad headache. Psychic backlash? The ground had felt pulled out from under his feet, then he'd just been suspended in time again, then...what the hell had happened? Confused, defensive and more than a little unnerved, Alex spun around and looked for the likeliest assailant-- right when the man he'd nearly walked to crumpled to his feet in front of him.

"Hey!"

Havok caught the man and hauled him up with both arms, dragging him to lean on a nearby window of a shop.

"What did you-- do you do that? Are you a telepath?"

"I'm sorry," he choked out. "I'm so sorry."

Struggling was automatic. His fingers were still numb from the hyperventilation, and getting dragged to his feet by a man who looked like he could easily tear his arms out of his sockets wasn't exactly a help.

Was he panicking? Alex frowned and pulled away after checking to make sure the man wasn't going to fall over again.

"Breathe," he all but ordered, silently glad there weren't too many pedestrians out today. It gave them some space, some air.

"What happened?" He had the eerie feeling something had gone on mentally, something to do with time or no time, but he hadn't the slightest clue what. And that made him very uneasy-- almost irritable.

He deflated when Alex let him go, but didn't collapse. Breathing. No, that would be good. He averted his eyes while he took in the breaths, trying for all the world not to associate the man in front of him with the child who was about to lose everything, who by now already did.

When he spoke, his words were fast enough they slurred.

"I, um, I-I--" He gulped in another breath. "--m sorry. I'm sorry. I really didn't mean to. If I knew. If I knew, I wouldn't have done it, and it was a fucking bad decision, and I'm sorry."

Alex sighed; the man in front of him was a mess. He didn't think he was a threat, or at least he couldn't be now-- whatever it was he was doing seemed to have backfired. But Alex hadn't actively done anything either, which made no sense to him. As he wondered what to do next he ran a few fingers through his hair-- hair that was still the exact shade of blond as it had been twenty years ago.

"Calm down," he said gruffly, backing off and voice softening just a little. "What'd you do?"

I have been given the power, he wanted to say, to find people with shitty lives and shitty childhoods and go back in time to when things were halfway decent and get them to off themselves. Your life doesn't look so bad, not really, but there are some horrific things in there and I walked right into one of them, are you sure you're emotionally stable?

Instead, he stared at him a beat, and then spoke in a quiet, trembling murmur:

"I travel through time."

Alex furrows his brow a little.

"To my future? Or to my past?"

There's an irrationally strong hope that it's his past this man has travelled to and not his future, because he's visibly shaken. If there's something bad that's going to happen in his future, he-- isn't sure if he wants to know.

"I don't think I can get to the future," he said. As he continued to rest against the wall and take nice, easy breaths, Katurian's words began to grow calmer and more steady, though they still caught in his throat occasionally. "I've tried. Not with you, but . . . others."

He swallowed.

"So yes, I was in your past. It wasn't something I should have been doing. I w-was just trying . . . I was trying it out. That's all."

Just his luck to be picked as a test subject by a random person trying out his powers. Alex frowns again, unhappy that the man's been to his past-- a perfect stranger, perfectly acquainted with memories that were and should've stayed private. He feels violated somehow, and wonders how his brother ever dated a telepath. Two telepaths in quick succession.

What had he seen anyway that was so traumatising? Nothing he hadn't lived through, but the first memory that sprang to mind was a more recent one-- being imprisoned and tortured by his brother.

"How far back? What'd you see?"

If someone had traveled to his past, Katurian probably would've-- ...well, it was hard to say, really, what he would or wouldn't have done, but he didn't think he'd be as calm about it as the man was in front of him. On this side, Katurian didn't feel violated, but he did feel shame, burning at cheeks and forehead, making it harder and harder to get out the words.

"You were very little," he said, voice dropping in volume. "Maybe five years old. Six years old. You were in an aeroplane with your brother and your parents, and it was going to crash."

Alex's surprise and grudging sympathy quickly turned into anger and he growled, unable to help himself.

"You went there? That was personal! What gives you any right to go looking in people's memories like that?! Of their childhoods!"

He was being irrational and he knew it, but Alex was tired of holding back. That memory had been intensely private-- it was all his nightmares consisted of for the months following it, and it had been his most cherished thought during his lonely days in the orphanage and in his adopted family's home. It was the last time he had seen and heard and touched his mother, and the last time they had all been together.

He'd been thinking of his father the whole day, and now this guy had the nerve to intrude and bring this up.

It wasn't a memory, he wanted to say, I was there. I was there. But nothing like that would help the situation. He flinched away and took another sharp breath before finally looking up at Alex, doing his best to keep his gaze steady, to meet the other man's eyes. If anything, he deserved that.

"It's all personal," he said, speaking slowly to keep his voice even, so that the words wouldn't slur again. "I have an entire outline of your life in my head, and I can go anywhere, and maybe that means I know you better than your friends. I have no right. I have no right."

He stares unblinkingly at Katurian as he speaks, then slowly and with visible effort relaxes his clenched fist, stepping further away from the man. Space, give yourself space, Alex thinks to himself. Don't be rash.

"None at all. You people with mental powers need to learn to respect the privacy of others." His words were rough-edged and brittle, but already a sign of his partial relenting.

And small wonder Katurian had been so visibly affected-- Alex knew that episode of his life too well, and he knew enough to avoid revisiting it as much as possible. It was stressful as hell just thinking about it, because the residual fear never really faded.

"I wouldn't go back there if I were you. Or to my recent experiences either. They aren't nice." And was that an understatement.

"I know," he said, automatic, and then, immediately regretting it: "I mean, I don't know. Not really. I'm sorry." It was the truth. Though there was an awful darkness looming over Alex's not-so-distant past, Katurian couldn't make out anything in it. Couldn't make out the torture, the death. Though hearing it wouldn't have surprised him, the kind of trauma he could feel radiating from that time.

"But I'm not going back," he said. "I promise you. I have no interest in invading your life any more than I already have, and that, that was wrong."

For a split second he hesitated, but the words spilled out of his mouth before he had a chance to stop them. "Your parents were very brave people."

"Not just mine, but anyone's," he said severely. Then came the briefest of pauses and-- Alex could barely believe his ears. What?

"They were," he agreed unthinkingly but wholeheartedly, despite being taken aback by Katurian's words. Alex could tell it wasn't an empty compliment either, but sincere due to the strange sham personal experience that he had had. He softened somewhat, appeased. This man seemed genuine enough, and if he really was only just discovering his powers-- that was an acceptable reason not to hold it for long against him. Encountering his own past, Alex hoped, ought to be warning and lesson enough not to try his trick again on others.

The expression on his face shifted slightly from one of mild belligerence to the faintest hint of wistfulness and sadness. "The parachute they gave us was why we survived."

Katurian wondered vaguely if his parents would have given up their only parachute, would have braved a painful and fiery end to save him and his older brother. He sincerely doubted it. He felt intense envy for Alex, but the envy was wrong, it was counterproductive, nothing was going to change, and so he channeled it into a sort of polite admiration instead.

"I'd be very proud." With everything else he wanted to say, something about the actual words felt empty to him. He ran his hand through his hair. "I'm glad that you... and your brother... were-- ...that you came out all right. And no more invading anyone else's lives, right, that's it for me. I'm done."

The way his stomach turned convinced him he was lying.

"Yeah," Alex said gruffly, but without the aggressive menace he had earlier behind it. Katurian had brought up the right subject to allay his anger as easily as he had struck the sore nerve. "We did. He's here too, actually. But you don't want to mention how you know some of his childhood-- he had it much worse than me."

And it was true. However much Alex resented Scott at times, he knew he loved him deep down anyway and would go anything for him. He knew it was reciprocal, and he also knew his brother had suffered through a much tougher life than he had.

He shifted his stance uneasily, unpleasantly surprised that he had opened up and revealed even that. Alex was unwilling just to let the man go like that though; he wanted to know his name and the more exact nature of his powers. In his mind he was entitled to, even.

"What's your name, anyway?"

He's here, too. How fortunate that was. Katurian had been here long enough that he recognized the Porter tended to drag loved ones - or not-so-loved ones, in his case - along with each of its new residents. It was particularly strange, though, the idea that the past he visited belonged to more than the man in front of him, that it was a piece of several lives that he had access to. That, sometimes, he had the ability to change.

"Obviously," he said, giving a nervous laugh. "No, I mean, why would I do that? If I ever see him - shit, if I recognize him, even, you won't hear me saying anything. Never."

He wavered for a moment, and then extended his hand. He wasn't sure if he should be doing this - do you shake hands when you meet under these circumstances? - and so he started to draw his hand back once, twice, before keeping it in place.

"Katurian," he said. "Hi."

"Alex Summers," he replied and gripped his hand in a firm shake-- more out of habit and courtesy than anything, because what was a name now if Katurian had already seen his defining, traumatic childhood event?

"So, I'm guessing you got ported in as well?" It was a logical conclusion for Alex, and now that he'd gotten over the unpleasant shock of a stranger knowing intimate parts of his personal history, he had begun to silently assess Katurian. Nervous. Easily frightened and intimidated, faint-hearted. A threat? Probably not. An everyday individual? Probably.

Alex wasn't very good at reading beneath the surface.

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you're obviously not going to die

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