multiversallogs | it's three am in the mornin

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it's three am in the mornin

Who: Jae & Hilmi.
What: Confrontations.
Where: Anarchy 99.
When: Friday or Saturday night?? COUGH COUGH some time in between when Hilmi got back and the 15th, and after Jae and Ilde spoke.
Notes: Megan. :(
Warnings: Violence, disturbing imagery, discussion of rape and abuse. Will add more if needed.

There's no heroic, white knight desire fueling Jae's search for this other man, and as he leaves the coffee shop near the Valhalla, he wonders if he should wish there was. Maybe then, if he had those sorts of compulsions, he would be even halfway equipped to do this. Not for the first time, he weighs his options and thinks about handing this off to someone else - but he discards it. This isn't a fight. This isn't him going off like a cowboy in a terrible movie - Jae isn't going to go threaten him or intimidate him, he just needs to talk. He needs to see Megan but he can't just go to her when she's as screwed up as she is and ask her what's gone on, or try and - and what, put her in a tower? He needs to have answers, something tangible to work with, a starting point. Hilmi, Ilde said, is part of their resistance group, an assassin. He uses his powers to fight for them - surely, someone like that won't want to have accidentally used something that terrible against this innocent girl, especially one who isn't human. Surely he knows how to reverse it. He can't imagine someone in his position being heartless enough not to have some kind of failsafe for emergencies. Yeah, he rubs Jae the wrong way and no, Ilde doesn't like him, but Jae's biased over Six and Ilde shouldn't be expected to have to put up with anyone, anymore. Jae's got faith.

So it's with that in mind that he ends up all the way back at Anarchy 99, because of course this guy's old job was here, in a club Jae's already employed at. The bar manager is gruff but friendly and helpful, and Jae skirts through the club, eyes peeled. He should just be able to catch Hilmi on his way back out.

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Jae's a guy Hilmi only vaguely recognizes from the cohort, and it earns him a little better than polite disinterest, but not by much. He's not a stranger, he's not female. He doesn't warrant too much study, then. However, when he raises a hand and makes a bid for attention, Hilmi tosses him a 'Yeah, sure.'

At first, he writes it off as a word between coworkers about flirting with the clientele. It's when he counts out his till, collects what tips he earned, wipes his hands on his trousers, makes his way out, that he begins to think this might have something to do with the girls. Maybe Sonja's back, maybe she sent Jae to clean up this mess. Wishful thinking at its finest.

So out into the cold he goes, looking around for Jae while one hand searches his coat pocket for the last of a crumpled package of cigarettes. "What's up?"

Jae's out there, and despite being six feet tall and sounding not unlike DMX (shut up, peanut gallery), there's not much about him that's outwardly threatening. His body language says confident, not aggressive; calm, not imposing.

So when he says: "It's about Megan," there's no mistaking that he's serious.

Outside in the cold, back by the employee entrance, it's like the statement hangs accusingly in the chilled air before he continues, voice muted - as if for privacy, even though there's no one else out here with them. "She's sick," he asserts, tension in his brow. "And the last time I saw you and her in the same place, she was drunk. I know what you can do - she needs an antidote. Or a reversal."

For one brief moment, there's a spark of hope; this is Sonja sending Jae to help out. This mess is all just going to go away, and Hilmi can get on with his life. But then, of course, his expression goes flat. Sick. Drunk. Needs an antidote.

While Jae speaks, Hilmi brings a cigarette to his mouth, cups his hands around the end as he lights it. He inhales deeply, shakes the match out - for all the world looking as though he doesn't give the smallest shit for Megan's problem because at the moment - he doesn't.

"Sorry. Can't help you." Jae could be asking for spare change, the way Hilmi responds. Dismissive and unconcerned. He turns to leave, flicking the match away.

Silence meets that, at first.

In the span of time from leaving Ilde to walking outside to meet Hilmi, Jae had actually convinced himself that this was going to go all right - that he was being too harsh, thinking of him that way, that anyone, especially someone who's fought in such a horrible war, would want to rectify what they'd done; Hilmi is, whether Ilde likes him or not, a compatriot of hers. Why wouldn't he have some kind of integrity?

The shock only paralyses him for a moment.

"Bullshit," and it's not heated, but still angry, like he's got something tight held inside, steadying him. "She's nineteen. You raped her. You understand that, don't you? Drunk nineteen year old. And you left her with something that's going to kill her."

Jae understands that his is not how men behave towards each other; he also understands that it's a tragedy of life on Earth. 'Drunk nineteen year old' should make him laugh. It never has, it never will. The added layer of fucked up on this just makes it worse - Jae would be here even without it. That much he's sure of.

Edited (typos) 2012-01-14 13:41 (UTC)

It doesn't sink in at first, what Jae says - mostly because he's heard the rest before. Hilmi just glosses right over it, pulling a face at the rest as though he could repeat it all from rote. Word for word.

And he does repeat it back to himself, until he hits the second sentence, and suddenly he's not as nonchalant as he was by half. Spinning on his heel, hands spread defensively as though to ward off an impending blow, he's ready to defend himself because that is quite an accusation. "Woah. Hold the fucking phone, I didn't rape anyone."

Because clearly, Hilmi's innocence where consent is concerned is far more important than the aftermath of his actions.

Ahah. Well, if he doesn't have a heart, at least he doesn't want to get in legal trouble. (It's a bitter thought.)

"Then be man enough to help her," Jae bites back, gaze steely. If that's important to him, Jae just doesn't believe Hilmi would sleep with anyone without being able to reverse it. "Ilde said she's dying, because of you. You did this to her."

Jae hasn't advanced - not even when Hilmi walked away, but he does take a step forward now, not menacing, but almost challenging. (He shouldn't- emcee culture, this would work on a club floor in London, but-)

A few years back, Hilmi might have shown a flicker of guilt. Now, however, there's nothing but indignation - his manhood is being challenged, after all - and frustration with Ilde that he doesn't want to study too closely. He feels like the victim here, and so what if Megan dies? The fact that there was consent enables him to say she can lie in the bed she made for herself.

But when Jae advances, Hilmi draws himself up to his full height. Bartender, entitled college student, whatever else, he's still a trained fighter and just returned from a very nasty war. His fingers flex with palpable tension.

"Like I said: I can't help. Sonja has the antidote. Cure. Whatever. Tell Ilde to ask her."

Jae doesn't flinch or shrink away, he's too pissed off - and for a moment he doesn't say anything, just looks at him, eyes searching his face for - something, anything, some flicker of deception. Jae shakes his head, minute, his expression tightening into one that's crashed between loathing and disgust.

"Did you know?"

Did he know that this would happen to Megan, and did he do it anyway? Knowing full well there wasn't anything he could - or would - do? This can't - Jae fails to process it at first, and something boils in him like acid thinking about it; this isn't just some sick asshole taking advantage of a girl. How could he look at Ilde and and gasp her name with such desperation, pretend to have a heart at all, and still do this? How could he live in a world where superhumans were kept in laboratories for years and years and still do this, act like the horrible monsters everyone who hates them says they are?

He stands up, head angled back, like he's reeling to get away from something disgusting. His next words are almost hissed- "What is wrong with you?"

"Listen, it just happens -" he tried to interrupt, because maybe if he explains, Jae will understand just what he's going through here, but there's that look. Disgust? What did he do to warrant disgust? For a moment - just the barest moment - he does have a flicker of something. It's not the remorse expected, but it's clearly hurt. Unfortunately, it's less down to a feeling of guilt for Megan's predicament as it is a distinct sense of defensiveness. He didn't choose to be this way. It's not his fault. He can't control it.

It just. Happens.

So he advances on the other man, hostile and lashing out at the wrong person. Right down to sticking an emphatic forefinger in his face and announcing angrily, "This is not my fault."

And in a way, he doesn't think it is, which is precisely how he manages to make that sound so genuine. In Hilmi, he's an honest-to-god victim of circumstance.

"It just happens because you put your dick in nineteen year old girls!"

Hilmi can control who he hooks up with. It isn't a death sentence, having to keep it in your pants. The sheer stinking selfishness of it makes Jae see red, and the acid feeling inside of him crackles with a black-red-ozone-something that he doesn't have a name for, because he hasn't been this angry in years and years. He isn't completely naive, and he knows there are cruel, awful, fucked up people in the world - he's dealt with plenty of them, even in the mundane world of simple, human things like communist regimes and institutionalized racism. But this level of personal, face-to-face godawfulness even when Hilmi knows Megan, knows how wrong this is, and he can still stand there like he's being attacked-

"Who's fault it is if I call the cops? You know I can do that here, they've got - fucking Hellsing, for magical crime- get your hand out of my face."

Hilmi does react at the threat; he goes slightly pale for a moment because, for one thing, he's just realizing, if he hearkens back to the days before the world went to shit, that what he's doing might just be illegal, and for another, fucking Hellsing.

And so he backs off, a sneer firmly in place on his mouth. All he can ride out at the moment is bravado, because if Jae brings Hellsing into this, Hilmi suspects they won't be quite so sympathetic to his plight - and in admitting that, he might just have to admit that he is responsible for what happened in the first place.

"You do what you have to do." Flippant, with a shrug for emphasis. He needs to get away from this asshole and find Sonja. Sonja can fix this.

Something in Jae snaps.

(He shouldn't be surprised. The last time he was this angry, he was being dragged into a facility. The last time he thought, even subconsciously, about using magic in anger, he killed two dozen people.)

The emotion drains from his face in a heartbeat, and Jae looks cold. Frighteningly, disturbingly cold.

"You are not going to walk away. You are going to tell me everything that happened."

It would be a spell, if Jae knew how to cast spells that were anything past making the roots of his hair look bleached or keeping him from looking too drunk; little glamours, little pick-me-ups for club-goers. Everything past that is pure instinct, and his instincts are over-keen, prodigal leveled and raw. It's like a punch, except Jae doesn't move at all - if Hilmi has any senses for this kind of thing, Jae just popped up on the radar out of darkness, in a big way - and that it doesn't strike. It holds.

Edited (behold my lack of angry icons) 2012-01-15 12:13 (UTC)

Time back home had given Hilmi a firmer grasp of what he was and what he could do. Unfortunately, a novice was still a novice and this entire situation, from the moment Ilde threw him out (wasn't that where it started?) to the moment this dick started using magic, had him off-kilter. He didn't even see Jae for what he was. Easiest trick in the book and he didn't even try.

And when he felt the attack, he lashes out, himself, outraged, defensive, and far more emotional than Jae is. He may not have a firm grasp of his magical abilities, but he's been in enough half-drunk scuffles (and cold sober battles) to know how to throw a punch.

The punch connects, because Hilmi knows how to throw it and Jae doesn't know how to do fuck all in the fisticuffs department (a couple of right hooks in a couple of bars back when he was seventeen haven't done much for his prowess), and pain explodes over his face and he tastes blood - no broken bones, but his teeth cut the inside of his mouth and the skin over his cheekbone splits. Jae staggers back, stunned, too thrown to even grab at his face.

He reels - one heartbeat, then two, and even if Hilmi charges at him again, Jae isn't moving. He isn't really thinking anymore, either. Because even though Hilmi is too strong to succumb to his kneejerk attempts at compulsion, the spell connected, and the fingernails of Jae's influence are dug straight into his psyche.

Jae locks eyes with him. And then pulls.

That indescribable acid feeling in him is like an abyss of magic; creeping, flooding, burning through the brittle connection between them, seeking out every deepest and darkest emotion Hilmi has and pulling at them like peeling back skin way down in the core of him. It's like a psychic drowning, and Jae goes like a sledgehammer for confusion first, dragging up any barest breath of it and hauling it up to be slammed into Hilmi's head, disorienting him so he can't lash out and hurt Jae for the duration of the spell-that's-a-storm. Fear is next, and it's like rolling down a hill - if he was trained maybe he'd find specific things, but he's too furious, taking it too personally, and Jae's magic moves with a brutal, wide clawing grasp, picking up every spike of terror or guilt or dread that's in Hilmi and making it bigger, more brutal, overwhelming, overpowering, suffocating.

It all happens too quickly for Hilmi to even make the attempt to go in for a second swing had he the desire to do so. One minute he's feeling a satisfying connect of knuckles to Jae's self-righteous face, and the next he's grasping the sides of his own head and howling because the fucker is in his mind.

And then there's a wash of emotion: disorientation, not enough that he forgets where he is (though something in the back is starting to question that), but the world tilts crazily on him and he sinks to his knees. His own magic reacts, a weak and pitiable thing that hasn't been nurtured or trained properly, beating ineffectually against Jae's superior ability. Shields that crumple like paper.

Oh, god damn, the guilt. And it is suffocating: it leaves him gasping, because it isn't guilt for Megan, but for Ilde. A great big question mark in his brain: why do I give a shit what Ilde thinks? But if Jae can see the flashes of memory that accompany the shards of terror and guilt, Ilde is at the center. Resentment, hatred, guilt, and fear. Hilmi curls around himself, his hand lowering to his stomach, and if that sound is someone screaming, well, it's probably him.

Jae is somewhere else.

This was a terrible idea; noble in theory, someone stepping up to handle it, to confront it, to stop the buck, or whatever the hell you want to call it. That people stand up and say no, this is wrong when it comes to exploitation akin to what Hilmi's done is too rare and it needed to happen (he can't, cannot be allowed to think this is acceptable, he must be called on it). But it should not have been Jae. He is not ready for this, and all he feels is what he felt six years ago, a maelstrom of anger and quickly-slipping control - he hates Hilmi in this moment, and Jae doesn't hate anyone (except). Not the Chongryon teachers, not the Japanese, not even his uncle. Jae doesn't hate anyone -

- except the men at the facility.

It's the only emotional reference point he has. And it's somewhere far away.

When Hilmi is down, the real impact of what Jae's doing to him begins to come up through the coils of it like black gold sifting through dirt: empathy. Cloying, sharp-edged, inescapable empathy, filling everything it can find, every sense, every pore, every nerve. It rushes through Hilmi and sticks to every fleeting what if in his head about someone else - every time he's caught the shattered look on a girl's face as he's walked away, every time someone's sneered at him in disgust, every time someone's curled back in horror. No matter how small, every. Moment. Is found.

And Hilmi gets to feel them all, in the highest of definitions.

He can't do more than shudder. Had this gone differently, he would feel drained - unable to break through the lethargy to feel anything at all. Instead, he has an overabundance of emotion and it's stifling, like he's locked in an oven. Too hot, too much.

Hilmi stops fighting back, shudders, feels (everything) violated. Megan's face, perfectly rendered in his memory, inspires a tidal wave of guilt. Ilde - he tries to jerk away from that, but in the brief second his mind touches on that: grief.

"Oh, god, stop," he chokes out, his voice raw with emotions he doesn't want. "Stop. Please stop."

It should snap Jae out of it but it doesn't - he hears Hilmi, yes, but it only fuels how taken over he is by this. Hilmi wants him to stop? Well, fuck, Jae wants Megan to not be dying. He looks down at him, expression blank, emotionless, the perfect opposite of the lightning storm he's causing inside the other man's head.

"You're the only one who can make it stop."

Though he speaks in Korean, it doesn't matter: his words are like a brand, slicing through to him, more magic than anything verbal. Jae isn't fabricating anything that's happening to Hilmi. It isn't mind control. It's just taking what's already there and forcing him to recognize it. (Amplified past what a human could experience and not suffer a psychotic break over, true, but that's just another downside to being an escaped lab rat - not even Jae himself realizes how improperly overloaded his power is.)

Finally - and it feels like aeons practically, even though it's only been a few moments - thoughts of why he's really here are enough to capture the corner of Jae's attention, drawing his focus back from the dark chasm of sense-memory he's left himself drift into. Megan. He's wasting time. And he's got another errand, too - one Hilmi can help with.

Might as well get him to serve at least one purpose.

Still speaking in his mother tongue, words a living, demanding enchantment, Jae takes another step forward, shoes making a soft scuffing sound over the ground, and then: "What happened after Ilde died?"

She'll never ask him herself. Because she's never speaking to him again.

Though his tongue feels far too thick in his mouth and the air around him is too solid to breath, he manages to gasp in a breath. He doesn't know how to stop what's happening to Megan, and for the love of god, he doesn't want to talk about Ilde.

But he can't fight what's happening, doesn't even understand it, and the answer might as well be physically ripped from him. He sounds as weak as his magic, broken and miserable; he can't say more than a few words because he can't remember much else save, "I carried her."

And that's what happened. She died, he carried her out. And he doesn't know why, because he hates her. She's every horrible name he can think of, he wants to scream at her and fight her, but no matter what punishment Jae is serving up, knowing he had a second chance to see her again and threw it away on some stupid fling with Megan is a far worse punishment. All he can do is repeat himself: "I carried her."

It's not good enough, he knows that instinctively; Ilde doesn't care about herself (why?), she wants - that other woman, Sonja, her war, their everything -

"What happened to your army?" Fuck, cough it up. The very sound of Hilmi's voice makes Jae want to - want to -

Something like step on his throat flashes through his mind and he recoils inside, just a little, but it's still not enough to stop him. Not yet. Jae wants this out of him, even though talking about the apocalyptic world he's probably dead in fills him with such terror like he's never known - but of there's nothing in Hilmi that would ever want to say it, then he's just not going to, no matter how hard Jae magically twists his arm.

That's where his friends are: back in the fucked-up world. When Jae digs his fingers in just a little further for an answer Hilmi doesn't have, he sobs and shouts furiously, "I don't know!"

But he suspects: they're probably dead or dying without Sonja to lead them, they've probably suffered the same blow he did. He starts searching for a way to fight Jae off, not to hurt him back but to flee. He needs to get away from this and clear his head, not answer questions about home.

"They're probably dead, okay? What the fuck do you want from me?"

"I want you to go away."

That, at least, works for the both of them. It's spit out like a military order, hard, and Jae steps to the side, circling around him so Hilmi can scatter free.

"Stay away from the river."

And Ilde.

(The only way away from the river from where they are - that doesn't send him tumbling into Hellsing territory - is towards the Spatters. But what the fuck does Jae care?)

The moment Jae steps aside, Hilmi scrambles to his feet and takes off at a stumbling run; he doesn't need the warning to stay away from the river. He knows better.

And tomorrow (or maybe in a week), he'll look for work somewhere else. Because it's not the river he needs to stay away from: it's this bastard. Sometimes, there are worse beasties in the world than the ones you're fighting. So he runs for the Spatters, and he'll work his way north to Gallmarch, perhaps, but he's not crossing the river.

Should have asked Megan to teach him that teleportation trick before he screwed her.

Though Hilmi runs, Jae doesn't let go until he's far enough away that his untrained grasp can't hold on anymore - and even then, it's going to linger. Jae at his worst left people dead with that trick, and the survivors permanently speaking in gibberish and thinking in colors.

He'll be feeling his own torn up thoughts and memories for a good while - Jae only woke up what was already there.

Good luck getting them to go back to bed, Hilmi.

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it's three am in the mornin

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