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Thread: Ashes

  1. #21
    "Tell her we're alive, you mean."

    Jake skulked the limited periphery of the room, inspecting the dark corners, the empty bathroom, like a wary stray prowling the back streets at night. The air inside was close and quite rancid from the smell of damp wood and empty beer cans. On the bedside stand there was a small half-empty bottle of aspirin, Jake reached out then thought better of it, for in such an unsavoury place, and without the means to divine its true contents, it was better to be safe than sorry. He sat at the foot of the bed, the matress dipped with a groan of springs, and considered Aidan's proposal. Anna would have questions, hard questions, and, if they were going to call, they needed to have answers.

    It seemed so long ago, and so far removed from their present situation, when they first sat and discussed over beers their options for protecting the house and its inhabitants. Months later, they were once again faced with another important decision to make, except this time there was a notable shortage of options on the table. They had built a house of cards upon a foundation of lies and were holding their breath. And yet, despite the reality of being swamped up to his neck in such a moral quandry, Jake was inwardly, and silently, wrestling with another demon. It was a persistant needling menace, feeding fat his doubts, and unravelling what was beginning to feel like a very tentative grasp on his own sanity. He repeated Aidan's words in his head and snorted in amusement at his own absolute uncertainty. It was another hard question for which he looked to his enigmatic friend for the answers.

    "How are we doing again, Aidan?"

  2. #22
    "Alive's a good start."

    Aidan rubbed wearily at his forehead, then found his hand smeared with soot. If they were in decent places, he'd find a steaming shower head to stand under until the ashes washed away, until he no longer looked and smelled like the remnants of a tire fire, and then he'd collapse into a soft bed and sleep for ten hours of blissful oblivion. But the shower here would spit out gobs of stinking, rusty water if it gave anything at all, and this was not a neighborhood to be caught sleeping. Dozing, perhaps. Cat-napping. Surely he could steal a few minutes out of the small hours of the morning.

    His head lolled against his shoulder, and he began to snore.

  3. #23
    There was not an ounce of comfort to be wrung from Aidan's lean choice of words. Jake rose, and paced in frustration. Away from the fire and the sirens, the implications of his actions crashed around him in their dingy little hole. It stirred up in him a panic that parched his mouth and snatched his breath. He was haunted not by thoughts of the authorities, with their cruel shackles and cold prison bars, or the knives and bullets of gangbangers, but by the face of his sister, wilted and hard from his betrayal. Anna, whose dark beauty had in recent days turned pale, and whose youthful skin had in places dried up like old parchment, she worried like mother. And on each fresh line he saw his own story written; every fault, every failure; he was malignant, like a cancer on her life.

    "Before we call, we need to get our stories straight. I mean how much of this can we keep from her now, Aidan? Aidan?"

    At first statuesque in his disbelief, Jake watched his sleeping friend. In the silence and the gloom, fatigue seeped into his muscles and encroached like a drunken haze upon the mind, beckoning him to rest every aching limb. It was the toll of the evening's exertions, and he felt it as surely did Aidan. Yet he was awake, driven halfway to madness with uncertainty, with questions and self-doubt. Aidan had the answers, and when the first snore rattled in his throat, Jake descended on him like a falcon. Talon fingers clamped into his shoulders as he shook him awake, hissing with anger:

    "Don't you fucking zone out on me, Aidan! Not now! The clock is ticking, man, and I want answers!"

  4. #24
    "Gah!"

    Aidan came awake grappling and wild-eyed, as if he'd managed to sink into a nightmare in the few seconds since he'd drifted off. For a moment, he tried to throw Jake off of him, but he had no leverage, and his friend's grip was ironclad. He wasn't going anywhere.

    He took a few gasping breaths and sank back into the quilted surface of the armchair, eyes hooded, face drawn and defeated. "I'm out of answers, Jake," he said. "I'm fresh out of ideas. You don't want me talking to Anna now. I'm liable to slip up and tell the truth for once."

  5. #25
    "The truth?" Jake snorted with derision. He released Aidan and retreated to give himself a moment to calm down. The motel had walls like cardboard and there was no telling who inhabited the neighbouring rooms. On the spot he turned, stiff with agitation, shaking off a mirthless grin. Once he was facing Aidan again, he folded his arms, and fired him a look full of challenge.

    "Alright, then speak to me," he said, in an undertone, "Because I just saw you fight some sort of interdimensional monster and closed a portal to the... Astral Plane! How do you even know about this stuff, Aidan? And how did it get into the house? Look, I trust you, man, and I promised that I'd never pry. But after tonight? You're making it seriously fucking hard!"

  6. #26
    It wasn't as if Aidan didn't know this was coming. Honestly, he was amazed it had taken this long. It was one thing to put up with a man's secrets because he was useful, because the calculus of risks and benefits came out on the side of silence. But after slogging with him through the underbelly of Los Santos, after making a habit of risking his life and lying to the people he loved most, Jake had trusted him - still trusted him, just hours after Aidan's schemes had put Jim and Aimee in danger, blown up a whole factory, and dragged them both as close to literal hellfire as any living human being could come. That kind of faith was reserved for saints and heroes, and Aidan didn't feel worthy of it.

    "I don't know how that thing got into the House," he said in a quiet voice. That was the easy part - simple, unhelpful, and even true. But it wasn't enough by a long shot, and even without psychic abilities he could sense Jake's impatience boiling just underneath his skin.

    Aidan pushed his hand back through his dirty, ash-clogged hair and stared up at the ceiling so he wouldn't have to meet Jake's accusing eyes. "I don't think the creature in Jamie's room has anything to do with what we saw tonight. What happened tonight was my fault. Because I got careless. Because I know secrets nobody should know, and if I share them with you, you'll be in just as much danger as I am. Damn it, Jake, I don't know what to do!"

  7. #27
    "You can start by having some faith in me."

    Now a step ahead of Aidan, Jake lifted his hand to intercept the incoming objection. He didn't want to hear it. Also, a moment of silence was exactly what he needed to process Aidan's words. It was a startling revelation for two reasons: first, Aidan always knew what to do, and secondly, he'd never admit it if he didn't. He was that kind of guy; where Jake would bitch and rant and sulk about his problems, Aidan just found a way to sort them out. So that he made such a confession spoke volumes about both the severity of their circumstances and the great burden of his secrets. They had reached a precipice, Jake felt it as surely as the ground beneath his feet. On the periphery of his thoughts loomed Anna and the spectre of his guilt; there was a dead end up ahead, and no side streets or shady back alleys to slip away, but first, before all that, one final plunge into the rabbit hole.

    "It's not like I've never put my neck on the line with you before," he said, pinching at his charred shirt, "We're in this together, Aidan. The whole thing. And if we're going to figure a way out of this mess, you're going to have to level with me, man. You need to trust me."

  8. #28
    It made so much sense when you put it that way. Because they'd already made enemies of the Tres Onces, the Smoke Man, and possibly their contacts in the Jericho Network, and it was hard to see how a little extra information could make any of that worse. Knowledge couldn't hurt you. That's what Aidan thought, once, before he knew about the Astral Plane, a whole universe where thought was reality, where monsters lived that preyed on the mind. If only it was that simple. If only...

    Maybe it was. Jake may have been wrestling with his own demons, but he'd still found the strength to vanquish one of Aidan's. And it wasn't too hard to see who had come out of that encounter the stronger of the two.

    Aidan gripped the pommels of his armrests and launched himself to his feet, then went staggering past Jake into the dingy little bathroom. There he twisted open the faucet, which belched out a few spurts of water and sediment, then settled into a clear stream. Aidan splashed his face with it, then wiped away some of the grime on a paper towel square.

    He turned in the doorway to face Jake. "You could've looked for answers anytime you wanted," he said. "You respected my privacy. I can't thank you enough for that, Jake. But now I'm going to ask you to open up and read me. I need you to know that I'm telling you the truth, and, trust me, it's not going to be easy to believe."

  9. #29
    "Okay..."

    Jake stared, slack-jawed and stupefied. In his hesitation he bobbed, almost imperceptibly, on the spot, shifting his balance from foot to foot. Even though he'd been granted permission to go ahead and read Aidan's mind, after all that time and all that restraint, the thought of it struck him as rather perverse, not unlike the feeling of uncertainty which accompanied his first ever alcoholic beverage in the company of his parents. And in much the same way, he feared that, once the deed was done, Aidan was going to suddenly explode in a fit of outrage at such a monstrous betrayal. When it finally became clear, after an awkward elongated silence, that his friend had no caveats or conditions up his sleeve, Jake gave a stiff nod.

    "Okay," he said again, and returned to his seat at the foot of the bed, "I get the feeling I want to be sitting down for this."

  10. #30
    "Might not be a bad idea."

    Aidan leaned against the doorframe and turned his eyes across the room, wondering whether the brownish glow in the window shades was dawn or just the parking lot lamps. Now that he knew the walls of secrecy were coming down, he was calm, almost meditative. All he had to do now was remember how to tell the truth.

    "So, I used to... I was part of..."

    He frowned at the false start, backed up, and rearranged his thoughts.

    "Remember how I told you I've spent time with a lot of mutants over the years?" he said. "One of them was a psychic. One of the most phenomenally gifted psychics in the world. She mastered the Astral Plane in a way no one else could. Used it to see things happening all over the world. She could even use it to look through time."

    He managed to meet Jake's eyes, eyebrows crimped, face hard and guarded. "There's history being made in Los Santos, Jake. Registration. The Jericho Centers. Genetic warfare. It's happening around the world, but this is one of the flashpoints. And it's going to get worse, a lot worse, unless someone does something about it. And that's why she sent me here. To change history."

  11. #31
    While Aidan spoke, Jake made a deliberate effort not to so much as twitch or even breath too loudly for fear of spooking his friend, as if he was some sort of timid gazelle ready to dart off at the first sign of danger. It was not in his nature to be such a shameless busybody, in fact, few people interested him enough to actively care about their personal lives, but Aidan was different, he was a good friend, and he had the answers to questions which could no longer be ignored.

    First, there was mention of a psychic, which was surprising only in so far as her significance to his tale. Aidan used his previous experience with psychics to help Jake overcome his own psychic difficulties, although he'd neglected to mention his psychic friend had been quite so powerful. What was said of Los Santos and unfolding events, Jake found himself nodding in agreement. However, where he and his fellow mutants appeared to have drawn the short straws with their lot, it seemed that Aidan's presence wasn't entirely accidental, or anywhere near as unfortunate. No, it was more than that. Whoever this powerful psychic was, she'd sent him to Los Santos to make a difference. This was a mission to him. Jake frowned as he tried to parse the unspoken truths between Aidan's lofty claims. He shrugged.

    "So you're what... like a G-Man or something?"

  12. #32
    "You're not too far off, actually."

    A grin flickered at the corners of Aidan's mouth, and a series of memories flashed by too fast for Jake to follow, but they included images of men and women in uniform, and not any uniform he knew. Form-fitting, built to move, woven from some kind of high-tech materials. Some were flying. Some were performing superhuman feats of strength. One was blasting waves of luminous energy from her fingertips. Mutants.

    "We don't work for the government, though," he said. "We try to make the world a safer place. For mutants and humans. Sometimes it means standing up to bigots like the Tres Onces. Sometimes it means fighting other mutants."

    Aidan sobered again as his thoughts turned darker. "There's one group of mutants in particular we're trying to stop. They're worse than the government. Worse than the Brotherhood of Mutants. They don't see mutation as a gift, or as a birthright, they see it as a weapon, and they want to use it to wage war. And where I come from, they've already succeeded."

    His fingers clawed at the doorjamb behind him, like he was bracing for something, something that could bring the whole building down around them. "When I said I was trying to change history, I meant it. My history. The reason I've never told anyone about my past is that it hasn't happened yet.

    "I'm from the future, Jake."

  13. #33
    Under the deluge of information, Jake could barely hold Aidan's gaze. The mystery - which had, for as long as they'd known each other, been Aidan's second skin - it was peeled away, layer by layer, until his friend was gone, and in his place stood a stranger wearing the same face. What made it so difficult, much more so than the unfathomable science of it all, was the absolute deconstruction of his own concept of reality. It happened so suddenly, and because he'd been reading Aidan all along, there was no room for doubt. He hated that. No time to play the sceptic or hope for a punchline. It was the truth and, just like that, he knew it like Aidan knew it. What a terrible gift.

    "Jesus Christ! You're not kidding..." he said at last, it was barely an exhale. Perched as he was on the edge of the bed, Jake folded himself fetal, elbows on his knees, his face in his hands. In prayer, perhaps, at a glance. Beneath the surface, his insides rebelled, and there was a very real risk of them being emptied there on the floor. He took a long rasping breath, and uttered: "I really wish you were."

    What was most nauseating was the indisputable nature of what he'd experienced. The things he saw, of people, and places, and highly-questionable fashion, it was all real, or would be real, or at least, had once been real for Aidan. The technicalities were unimportant. He wondered what those revelations said of him, and his family, and his time. Where Aidan came from, this had already happened, he had happened. And while Jake had never given much thought to his own place in the grand scheme of things, or his own importance for that matter, to have his entire timeline reduced to a historical footnote like that was disorientating to say the least. In truth, it felt like someone had pulled the earth from under his feet. It was a strange time to have a crisis of identity, given everything he'd just been told, but at that moment, farthest from his mind were thoughts of Aidan's newly-revealed purpose and the overwhelming weight of things to come.

    When at last he surfaced, it was to fumble about in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes. One was plucked from the crumpled packet and extended to Aidan, who, understanding, lit the end with a touch of his finger. First, Jake took a long drag, then, when the bud was prized from his lips, there was a ghost of a smile.

    "You should've gone to the Sixties, man."

  14. #34
    Aidan laughed at that - probably more than he should have. In the wake of that revelation, he was feeling a little lightheaded himself.

    "The Sixties are next. I could use a vacation."

  15. #35
    Given his newly-endorsed psychic freedom, Jake found himself nodding in agreement, in sympathy even, with Aidan's words. It couldn't be easy, what he did; the responsibility, the risk, the loneliness, Jake understood, at least as well a person from his era could understand. It was a job deserving of some quality down-time. And he sensed the relief rolling off his friend in waves; relief, presumably, from being able to finally unload his solitary burden of secrecy. So he took his time, and smoked, granting his thoughts room to breathe and digest the revelation and the fresh light it shed upon... everything.

    It changed everything, and wasn't that the point of it? That's why Aidan was standing in the room with him at that very moment, he was an agent of change, and, even in the future, Jake imagined that wasn't the sort of role that popped up in job centers. This thing was a vocation for him then, a calling, and surely nothing short of that could convince a grown man to dress like that. Another smirk, he would have fun with that. How much his friend had changed before his eyes, and yet, somehow, he was still the same Aidan. Aidan, the grease monkey with a tin ear and gasoline for blood, who knew more than was healthy about football statistics, yet was incapable of naming two members of the cast of Friends - now a forgivable, if disheartening, oversight. And despite the fact that Aidan was proven to be a better liar than even him, he was nevertheless a good man, and that was what counted.

    "It's a hell of a gig," he said at last, with a shake of the head, "Are there more like you back home? The time-traveling vigilante sorts?"

  16. #36
    Aidan shook his head. "No. Not that I know of, anyway. Hell, I didn't even know it was possible until I took the trip myself."

    He knew Jake's head would be filling with questions of every description, and some that probably defied description. Part of him just wanted to let his friend explore - whether LA was getting another NFL team, what stocks he should invest in, even what mutant rights looked like over the next twenty-five years. He could imagine kicking back on a couch with a couple of beers and a Dodgers game droning in the background while they talked about the future's history. It would almost be normal. But they didn't have that luxury. Dawn was approaching, and Anna and the kids were waiting, and they still had the events of the past six hours, and more, to answer for.

    "There's a machine," Aidan explained, "that allows people to physically enter the Astral Plane. Yeah, seems like a contradiction, I don't know the first thing about how it works. Once I was in, my psychic friend was able to send me back into the past. But the Astral demons knew I didn't belong here, and they tried to stop us. Almost did. Those things can hold a grudge, and if they get half a chance, they'll destroy me and anyone else who knows what I know. That's one of the reasons I couldn't tell anyone. Not even you."

    His gaze dropped to the floor. "I swear to God I don't know how that demon got into Jamie's room. I don't know if it was trying to get to me through her, or if it was just tormenting her for the hell of it. I just hope they know better than to try again."
    Last edited by Aidan Fox; Oct 16th, 2013 at 11:28:02 AM.

  17. #37
    "Wait a minute," Jake said. It was a false start. In silence, he mulled over his words, and thoughts, in an attempt to engage Aidan on an equal footing. Then his eyes narrowed.

    "The demon in the factory - you said that was your fault. You said you got careless. How does that work?"

    In the moment Aidan's gaze met his, the answer stood out as clear as day. Not that it helped Jake's comprehension of events. And when he next spoke, he couldn't quite keep the distaste off his tongue:

    "Julio?"

  18. #38
    Aidan stepped over toward the window and pulled back the tattered edges of the curtains. The streetlight glare stung his eyes, but the sky, or what he could see of it, was still an opaque black shroud. There was no sign of life from the parking lot, and even the rumble of traffic was just barely audible through the motel's paper-thin walls. Even in the small hours of the morning, quiet like this was a rare thing in Los Santos. It meant that for the present, they still had time, and he had no excuse not to keep telling Jake the truth.

    "I thought killing Julio wouldn't have that big an impact," he said. "A middle-rung gangbanger, lives dangerously, just as easily could have died in a shootout or a drug overdose. But he's still a human being, and his life touched thousands of others, for better or for worse. I cut all those threads in an instant."

    He turned back to face Jake. "It's not about whether I made the world better or worse. Making a change that big all at once - it's like putting all your weight on one spot on a frozen pond. Something's going to crack. It tore open a rift straight to the Astral Plane, and if we hadn't closed it, those things could be all over Los Angeles by now. I've been trying to work indirectly, get other people involved, spread out the changes. It's one thing to change the borders in a gang war. It's another to take a life. Or to save one."

  19. #39
    It was out of courtesy, and a considerable dosage of humility, that Jake didn't question Aidan's logic. He was the time-traveller and, in his renewed estimation, the authority on the subject. All those quantum and theoretical physicists be damned, what with their roundabout debates over temporal paradoxes and other things he didn't understand. What stood before him was real, and, in that moment, he needed to hold onto something that was tangible and real. Then, at the mention of the portal, there was a spark of recognition. The frozen pond analogy was apt. He knew, first hand, of the tenuous veil which separated his world from the world of monsters. He had touched it with his own mind, manipulated it, the place of horrors and thoughts, and watched it vanish as if it had never existed in the first place. But Jake knew better. And for the first time, he considered that terrible knowledge, which he could never unlearn; a world overlapping with his own, divided by boundaries that only truly existed in the mind, with its nightmare creatures pressing, probing for a fracture, to bleed onto the other side.

    Jake hugged himself for warmth and rubbed feeling back into his arms. There was no ventilation inside their musty motel room, it was as if the air had solidified around them, frozen in the thick of the night. Aidan was talking about his cause - something about affecting change little by little, but he could make no real sense of it, the intricacies of manipulating a sanguineous turf war for future gain were beyond his realm of comprehension. It seemed so much simpler when they were just trying to protect the house. But it had never been about the house, or his family. The thought took root and coursed, quickly, like poison through his mind. And then, just as he found himself on the cusp of challenging his elusive friend, something happened. On the surface it was nothing, inconsequential, unworthy of a second thought from even the most veteran of interrogators. But to a telepath, like Jake, what Aidan had just done felt like a spooked horse rearing up from under him, then with that same tremendous power, bucking, as if to dislodge him from his very thoughts. And, in that, his efforts were a success. Aidan was once again a closed book.

    "What?" Jake looked up, and what were once the wavelengths of understanding shared in a glance between friends were now glaring elements of apprehension and alarm. He stood.

    "Aidan, what aren't you telling me?"

  20. #40
    There were ways to resist a telepath. You could throw up a barrier of competing images, nonsense words, music, focus your mind on anything but the topic you wanted to hide. But that was only really a smokescreen, and a gifted psychic could push his way through if he really wanted to, sometimes with painful and destructive results.

    For Aidan, it was reflex. Even after all the confessions, all the lines he'd crossed in the past five minutes, he huddled over this secret as if he were protecting a wound.

    "Jake... the more you know about the future, the more history is going to change because of you. I almost unleashed hell on south LA; if I tell you everything, I'm doubling the chances it'll happen again."

    Images of war flashed across Aidan's consciousness. Ruined buildings split into skeletons of concrete and rebar, smoking rubble sliding like avalanches into the streets, enormous machines rolling over the shattered remains of houses, parks, and people. And then, before he could stop it, a woman's voice repeating a phrase: The mother and child.

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