It was the small hours of the night, the witching time when it was too early for even the fitness freaks and early risers to be awake but edging too late for those burning their midnight oil. Lawrence moved like an apparition through the velveteen darkness of the sleeping facility. The only illumination below the scattered starry sky was the unsleeping fluorescents of the Life labs, the scattered pinpricks that were the distant dormitories and the alien rectangle of light which was his destination. Tonight he was dressed not in a persona but in simple attire, draped in the long flowing cloak that was typically issued for off-island missions. It billowed behind him as he strode out onto the brightly lit training fields, a stark black figure flanked by the peculiar quadruple shadows typical of floodlit grounds. It was deserted tonight and the birdless silence weighed as heavy as the shadows which skulked at the edges of the searing light. There was no distant traffic on the island, no thrum of city life, simply a maze of untamed nature. Solitary out here he felt as if he might as well be the only individual in the entire world and revelled in it. If only that were the case, absolute perfection would have been attained, all the despicable chaos of the human race distilled down to a perfect nameless point of awareness and his shackled servant.
Solitude sometimes is best society.
Before heading out into the waiting night, he had been re-reading Milton’s Paradise Lost. He savoured the poem and always had, there was always something nestled in the pages which called to him in a way reminiscent of careful music. This copy was old and dog eared, procured from the island’s research library. The edition he’d possessed at home had been an expertly bound leather tome with gilt edges and high quality illustrations. He had favoured those by Gustave Doré, the man was meticulous in a way he could admire bringing a thousand tiny swipes of a blade into a swirling constellation of aesthetic delight. His personal library back then had been small, pared down and distilled by repeated reading, flawed works discarded by the wayside. He found himself drawn time and time again towards the perceived purity of classical literature whose asceticism sung to the simple understanding he sought. He bore nothing but distaste for modern works, emotion not strong enough to dislike them but enough to predominantly ignore them. The necessity to display versed knowledge in this literary tripe was the aspect of Chantelle which caused him most discomfort.
What hath night to do with sleep?
As he approached the dummies, he noted his body was weary, a slow and insidious sort of tiredness which had crept into his bones in place of the food he did not eat. The diet regime was a harsh one but simple for him. The fundamental disconnect between his sense of self and his body made self-alteration simple, he was aware of the fatigue as one might be aware of a warning light on a car, all it meant was that sensible accommodations were made for it - his spree of exercise would be brief.
He summoned Butch, still finding the process itself fascinating, the Rolex dissipating, twisting in defiance in natural laws around his hands, rendering them deadly weapons. They felt like a part of him, perfectly fitting and set with white runes. The attached claws were long, about a foot or more each, made of a translucent blue metal that was never dull, honed sharp and raw. One gauntlet was twisted up in a hanging chain, a dog’s choke collar with brutal looking backwards pointing prongs which he had identified immediately as something which could be unhooked into a makeshift garrotte at will. He did not deal in anticipation but he was fairly certain getting to use it in the fullness of time would be satisfying as much as these things could ever be.
He swung and the steel cut into the wood of the training dummy, a trail of raked gouges, like engravings etched on the grain. Devoid of emotion or even that spark of life his wide eyes were chill and intent and each blow was subtle and light, seeming hardly to damage the training aid more than superficially. His breathing stayed even and the iron calm of his demeanour seemed to radiate to the steady direction of his hand.
In his head Butch was silent for the first time, focused through him, with him, in him.
In the eye of the storm of focus he thought then of America. America. He found the very concept of her name alien and disparate from the concept of who she was. Names were unimportant and often erroneous, they were titles people clung to like feeble heirlooms foist on them by their parents, a title beneath which they strove to underline their ideal self. The red haired woman was no different; such a forceful name had no doubt brought with it all manner of expectations. People expected her to exemplify their ideals of their fallacies about freedom and independence, and superficially she seemed to. To him she was not America, she was simply a tangle of defiant emotions, a seething and simmering cacophony of noise and light. She was infinitely less and infinitely more. He wanted to organise her, take her apart thread by thread, unravelling each coiled snarled thread of her psyche. And when there was nothing left, he entertained going one step beyond even that, making her immortal, stripped down to component parts, skin bone and all the imperfections that housed humanity. Laid out then in that way, he would understand.
All things created have an order in themselves, and this begets the form that lets the universe resemble God.
He remembered the line, time and time again the writings, biblical or otherwise stated that God was order. Therefore it stood to reason that as a divine creature, his own answers would lie in the pursuit of order. Chaos held no appeal, it was the disorganisation of those too stupid to perceive the patterns and rhythms which coursed through the universe. He would possess the young woman, engage her in a war she could not possibly win and by distilling her psychologically and physically he would have the key to that vibrant and defiant spark of anger.
Her song would sear the pages of history.
Anger was the emotion he wished he could comprehend most of all. Love, hate and enormous swathes of the spectrum he suspected were merely by products of anger. Crimes of passion, great wars and tumultuous catastrophe all owed their roots to it. People spoke of it lending wings to purpose and intoxicating logic itself, it was a drug he felt it would be enlightening to try.
A rapid bolt will rend the clouds apart,
and every single White be seared by wounds.
I tell you this. I want it all to hurt.
The divine comedy where every man was measured against his greatest sin. His sins were many but he felt no remorse even Hell itself would never catch him.
She was beautiful and he would make her perfect and forever. It would be his gift for what she would teach him.
He walked grimly onwards to the next dummy and behind him, weakened right through with hundreds of tiny gouges, the previous focus of his attentions fell apart
Maebe was who he considered as he stepped up close to the intact equipment, as he drew his claws and raked them through the wood, wondering idly what the relative resistance of flesh would be under Butch's razor sharp attentions. The woman was so arrogant, so certain of her invincibility, convinced that she felt nothing and that no one could truly reach her. Even ravaging her body was a distant numbness to her, and he had, oh he had, testing her abilities to withstand bruises and far more besides. He had no desire to break her emotionally, he had no desire for her at all but he knew what he would like to do. He would like to sell her, line his pockets with the fruit of her dysfunction, time and time again, watching her as she gave away more and more of the self she didn't think she even still possessed. Then he would desecrate her in a way which would reach that calloused inner core the way only death could. His parting gift to her would be the insincere outpouring of sorrow her false friends would display at the crass horror of her departure. He would posthumously give her the reassurance of the social consensus that “Even someone like Maebe didn’t deserve to go like that.” A fate not even fitting for a two bit harlot. Pity as a final de-constructing imposition of everything that she was in life and every bit of independence she strove to cling to.
Unfortunately, It would be far too complicated to do for now, for now he would simply observe that blonde dying star and watch the collateral damage she wrought on others impassively from afar. And he would learn to whittle that fear shield she wore, piece by brutal piece, desensitise her to it and prepare her for the day when the graph he was mentally constructing in his mind of her endurance collided fatally with the axis.
The splinters fell, strangely white caught in the brief dazzling splendour of the floodlights.
Jerry too still had his uses, primarily financial and musical and a game to keep his charisma sharp. The man was an enigma and a disaster in motion, simply a chain reaction of terrible decisions and inadvertent selfishness. Destructive in his positivity, a weapon that he could learn and add to his arsenal, after all how could anyone blame someone who meant well? He too held a valuable answer to the emotional equation. It was tied up in who he was, some key to the root of awkwardness, embarrassment and just a facet of delusional innocence. But he was in no hurry to unravel him, he was Chantelle’s toy and he let the persona be his training ground for the ultimate and eventual destruction he would wreak, a sort of anticipation building in him at the possibility that this, like all the others had a possibility of being the path that would enlighten him and allow him to ascend.
With the constant striking his breathing had picked up and he felt his muscles slowly wane in their efficiency, drawing upon non-existent resources to fuel their barrage. He was not out to punish himself or harm his precious body, so he stopped, stepping back from the crumbling dummy and neatly desummoning his claws.
Turning on his heel he set off with soft footfalls back into the darkness and the dorm room he borrowed as Chantelle, it was not home. He had no concept of home, not in the way other people did. They lived in houses and made it their prison and their tomb. He inhabited his mind, a place where he had absolute calm and control. When he wore the personas, his other faces, that was where he waited still and calm as stone, the pale watcher behind eyes as blue as the furthest reaches of an Arctic sunset. This island was a place of trial and tribulation, where he watched the lesser inmates sink beneath a quagmire of sorrow and fear but where he remained unmoved. He was a predator of these wilds, more than that, he was as dangerous as nature itself, cold and indifferent to pleas for mercy, to despairing claws and fangs bared against him. He was his own mountain, his own peaceful sanctuary where neither the island, nor those on it could ever reach him should he wish it to be otherwise.
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.
And it was a time of feast and plenty.
