Note: Yeah, the mood hit again. *sigh* Though, it should've been glaringly obvious to everyone I was gonna write this fluff. ;) Dedication: To Sandra, who sorta challenged me to write not-so-saintly image of Logan, and complained this wasn't evil enough. How did I ever start writing before meeting her?
***
Click. Click.
In a second, the world can be in slow-motion if he wants it to be. As he clicks a button on the familiar small rectangular piece of metal over and over, a second is stretched to be as long as eternity, with zoom-in and every other high-tech features aiding his continuous self-inflicted torture session. The click. The noise is rhythmic, subconscious, and automatic. It goes on.
Click. Click.
He falls and roles over, his hands tightly grabbing the girl he's supposed to protect. The hot pain. The cold numbness. The scent of gunpowder piercing his nose. The cry from Sophie knifes his heart, and she's no longer in his arms. He reaches out. Oh, he tries. But he can't. Why?
There's no sound, but a little girl's scream for her mom is loud and clear.
A part of him dies.
Click. Click.
There is always a shiver. He touches his back and fingers his spine, an organ most fragile and vulnerable in a human body. His fingers reach a point where he can't feel anything anymore. When he consoles himself with the fact that at least he's alive, there's always what-ifs that bring back worst-case scenarios. A little bullet fragment was removed before it could've done a lot of damage. There could be more, no one can really tell. Not even he can't. He doesn't know whether there're still pesky little things that could make him a vegetable inside his body. It's the helplessness he hates. It's the fear that he lives with.
There's always a shiver.
Click. Click.
Pain is something he's gotten used to. It becomes something ordinary, something that's always with him like a piece of normalcy, and he thinks he actually succeeds in deceiving himself to forget. A regularity in his too irregular life. But he can never get accustomed to their eyes. The eyes of people looking at him with pity, never able to get around their head to think about what it is like to be crippled and disabled, but having a strange notion that pretending to understand what he's going through, pretending as if they give a damn can be helpful to him.
No one understands. Just like he never had before. So can he blame them?
He swallows all that with a nonchalant expression and a stiff smile, his bruised ego tucked in one of the rooms deep inside his mind with a tough, unbreakable lock.
No one will open the door now.
Click. Click.
He thinks she's trying to nudge the door, playing with its lock. She slipped into his life all so fast and all so quickly, with her bullet-proof body and a six million dollar smile. With one sincere grin, she says it's okay, that his crippledness doesn't matter to her.
What makes her think that what she thinks is all that matters to him?
Sometimes he can drown in her false confidence. Sometimes he can forget.
But not now.
Click. Click.
The path he's chosen required him to repeatedly shatter his broken body against the stone wall that lies between him and the others--just a feeble attempt to change the things that people believe cannot be changed. There were times, he admits, when they tried to hear and hold onto his words as if they were the lifelines. They tried, he knows. But now, when the shiver becomes fear, and when fear becomes anger, it feels like he's screaming inside a small room packed with people, only no words come out from his mouth--he's muted. No one seems to listens--they become deaf from fear.
Not that he wants to try again. Not at this moment, anyway.
Not when he's shaking with anger and injustice of it all.
Click. Click.
One might even entertain the possibility of revenge, was it? He's only human, and yes, he does entertain the option of revenge. Quite many times, in fact.
At this second, he does indulge in his little revenge.
Because it is too easy to imagine that his hands are wrapping around Bruno's neck, and he can marvel at how fragile human's body could be, knowing a little more pressure on his hands can make the spinal code snap. Then, the crap about curing the origin of the disease will no longer be his cover. He snaps Bruno's neck out of pure joy of it, vengeance becoming his demon.
He's grateful for that little demon. It becomes a necessity, a device that crushes his superego when it questions his sanity. At this second, he doesn't give a damn about his righteousness either.
So he indulges in it a little more.
Click. Click.
The tape eventually starts to show the symptoms of being used abusively and the images slowly become hazy with white lines.
Sooner or later his demon also wears out, and he realizes how 'bad' he has been, how 'evil' he has been. And there's a voice lecturing about his righteousness again.
But the little click sound makes the voice go away.
So he's grateful, and the sound becomes more familiar to him, inseparable.
He clicks again, and watches himself getting shot repeatedly and fall.
Click. Click.
In a second, the world can be in slow-motion if he wants it to be.
As he clicks a button on the familiar small rectangular piece of metal over and over, a second is stretched to be as long as eternity, with zoom-in that magnifies everything to make sure he doesn't miss anything, and other high-tech features that brings him to remember, aiding his self-inflicted torture session.
It's a suiting punishment, after all.
The click. The noise is rhythmic, subconscious, and automatic. It goes on.
A second becomes eternity.
<END> 1/22/01
