Hullo my dear and cherished Sparks!
I wasn’t sure whether to call this one kindling or not, but I decided it fits in too nicely to keep it separate.
You’ll see I’ve adapted my style a little. I hope you find it refreshing.
Just a bit here:
I chose a crow as sort of a symbol for Luke, if you’ve been following for a while you’ll have noticed a couple of hints, here, here and here.
Did you know that they are really clever birds? Beautiful, creative, affectionate. They can use tools, solve complex puzzles, and have extremely sharp color vision. Nowadays they are mostly associated with death and war and are considered all spooky or gross, but there was a time when they represented wisdom and learning, ingenuity… That’s the connotation I hope you keep in mind while reading this one.
INDEX | Chapter 6 | Scenes 1 & 2 | Scene 3 | Scene 4 | Scene 5 & 6 | Scene 7-9 | Scene 10 | Scene 11 | Next Scene →
Previously: Luke finally gets home after a month away and Logan confronts him about what exactly happened with the interrogation. After a heated argument, Luke agrees to share the details.
In the first few seconds Elle was frantic, which made Luke's job really easy. He soaked up her immediate thoughts like a sponge, her little girl’s voice resounded in his mind, rattling off questions that seemed to have oddly mature reasoning for the age of the child that was asking them. She was scared of a Hackers’ Formula and TTH, and her escape having been orchestrated. Luke accepted the thoughts without considering them, instead, reveling in the sounds she was making, mental sounds though they were, they were in her own voice, and the gentle melody of it, after all this time, was sweet as treacle.
While his subconscious absorbed relentlessly, he dug his conscious claws in deeply. For those few moments, Elle’s defenses were completely down, and her mind was just like anyone else’s, an open book. Had Luke had time to plan and prepare, rather than being forced to do this on the spur of the moment, he would have been able to set traps then. He could have insinuated subtle suggestions like little mental mines and snares, even created a back door that would allow him to get into her memories any time it pleased him. But doing those things haphazardly could muddle important aspects of her personality. Tweaking too much could cause harm, and he wanted to avoid that if possible.
Instead, he simply pushed along all the open pathways to her past as far as he could. With the drug coursing through Luke’s system, broadening his focus, and Elle’s panic distracting her, it was a veritable ocean of information, that he thought was flooding their collective consciousness to capacity, but after a moment or two, Elle seemed to rally.
“Get your thoughts under control!” She ordered herself harshly as if scolding a child. “Calm down, calm down, CALM DOWN!” She thought, and as Luke broke his concentration, wondering how much experience she had, to be able to think so clearly with such an overwhelming amount of information running through her mind, she thought, “Watch what he’s doing.” And there and then the flow was completely cut off.
Luke was confronted by a static image of the ceiling above him and try as he might to pivot, the lines and textures and the simple moldings filled their consciousness to the exclusion of all else.
For a few moments, he was at a loss for a viable course of action. He had never encountered this trick before and wasn’t sure how to get past it.
Stymied, Luke considered his position. It had only been a few seconds, a minute at most since they started. Luke could feel his personal cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs, working. The power and intensity of his telepathy under its influence, felt glorious to him. He would surely have been able to push past Elle’s image if he tried hard enough, but that carried the risk of permanent damage, to either of them. Since he had no starting point, no specific goal in mind, it was better to play it safe for now. Even though the drug wouldn’t be effective for more than an hour, he did have twenty-four to work with...
And so, Luke started to look through the cascade of information he had gleaned in those few unrestricted moments. He looked for the bright points, the strongest and most complete memories, and held them one by one in the front of his mind for Elle to see, taunting her with them while watching her reaction and soon enough he found one that worked.
The moment her concentration wavered she was drawn in and the thought bridge built by Luke under the drugs’ influence made him experience it as though he was her.
It was a little hard to make out in the low light, but there was a hole in the wall. The edges were narrow and clean, as if there had once been a pipe through there, connecting the two small rooms. Through the hole, Luke could see someone talking to Elle, smiling at her, begging a question. Elle wanted to ask. The word was in her head, “How? How? How?” but she couldn’t say it aloud. The moment she tried to make the sound it started to hurt, like a sharp stinging feeling in the back of her mind, the more she tried the worse it got.
One thing stood out. “Jenina.” The girl on the other side called Elle, Jenina.
Elle was irritated by it, until the girl moved to look through the hole herself, to explain something important. Elle’s irritation turned to anguish at the sight of bright green eyes framed by curling blonde locks. It evoked, what seemed to Luke, like disjointed images. Silver feathers falling. Blood on the snow. They flashed in between the blonde girl’s explanation of how to keep Hackers at bay, and then there was one more of the blonde girl’s staring green eyes, the pupils dilated and glazed over. “Chrystelle!” Elle thought and for an instant, Luke felt pain, then the ceiling was back.
Luke knew then that she was the key. Chrystelle. Luke might have taken time to consider the implications of that conversation but the drugs were insistent. Considering anything would have to wait.
Now he knew what to look for, it was easy enough to sift some more. There was so much there, it would surely take him weeks to make sense of it all. A lot of fragments, all mixed up and disjointed. It really was a mess.
Luke saw a lot of these two men, one tall with immaculate straight blonde hair and an imposing physique, like an older long-haired, Thomas. The other was imposing for a different reason. His greasy brown hair hung limply on his slouched shoulders. He wore a smirk and his violet eyes flashed with a penetrating gaze. He walked behind the big blonde one like a servant but his demeanor was anything but - smug and arrogant. Every memory of him was shrouded in hatred - and respect.
A little longer and Luke felt like he was getting the hang of this. He chose a nice bright one.
Elle was running. She barely even felt the cold anymore. She barely felt anything until she saw the bloody footprints going back as far as she could see. She thought about her lead, and if it was worth going back to cover some of them up, but opted instead to bind her feet with a strip of cloth off of her ragged dress, laughing inwardly about taking it off to run naked, then started off again. After a while she came to a clearing and leaned against a tree, to catch her breath.
Elle looked at the setting suns, too mesmerized by their beauty and too tired to care about running anymore and Luke recognized his own ship. Elle thought about how little energy she had left to accomplish the goal she was trying to reach something about a rendevous, how she had been brought so low and some link snapping and then she saw Logan coming out of the ship. No need to go there anymore…
Luke goes further back, walking quickly in reverse along the memory, pulling on the thread that got her to this point until he saw Elle with the brute again, then he saw Chrys, and she thought “It’s almost time.”
Straight lines. Lit walls. Metal, straight lines- The ceiling. Luke sighed. He had almost had her.
Her desperate focus was incredible. Her sight seemed to have sharpened somehow. She found every imperfection in the ceiling’s construction. She saw weak points in the walls, and irregularities in the quality of the light. One of the joints was a hundredth of a degree off, setting the whole line slightly askew. She picked out a few specks of dust clinging to the paint, a magnetic fragment that hadn’t been cleaned off... She went on and on, pointing out the flaws, making inebriated Luke feel extremely irritated. She really, really didn’t want him to see this one. He pushed harder.
Luke exerted his power more and more, applying pressure to Elle’s mind with sharp fingerlike probes. Elle frantically examined the ceiling. She picked out more flaws, then when that didn’t work anymore she turned to flattery instead. She marveled at the smoothness of the metal and the unusual color of the paint and then the imperfect joints spoiled it and Luke’s probes dug in deeper.
He pressed with all his prodigious strength toward that one goal. Had he pressed unscrupulously he could have ripped her mind to shreds, but this concentrated approach would only risk shredding that single memory, and once he was done with it, he would have her, he would have broken her will, and then he could do what needed to be done. And then…
The image shattered.
All of a sudden, there was no more resistance. Luke was applying so much pressure that without anything pushing back, his mind poured completely into hers. Had he won? He thought. No. That wasn’t it.
As Luke’s consciousness subsumed Elle’s, she fell away and the two of them together became someone else. A younger version, naive, but not quite innocent. Not yet Elle. Luke became Jenina.
Next Time: Luke experiences Chrystelle’s death, galvanizing him back into himself, now he must find a way to extricate his mind from Jenina’s lest the bond become permanent.
Thanks so much for reading! If you like, please:
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and as always, I love hearing what you think so, feel free to:
Did you ever mention the difference between a crow and a raven? Both smart birds and mate for life. Corvus the crow in the stars. Look up.
Very well done! I had a good chuckle at " began to Rally" :)