got demons in my head

dr. sebastian stryker - HYDE - he/him tier 3 ( points: 400 )

[jckylls]

jetxstreamx​:

There’s something that Jet has always loved about the Manor at night, the way it falls into an easy kind of quiet. The dark corners and the dim lighting that makes the place feel actually cozy. He’s learned to appreciate it more and more, given the absence that he’s maintained over the last few months. He never realised he would miss it so much, but that had been foolish of him. He should have known. Because it was his first real home, the longest he had ever been allowed to stay in one place. He had grown up here, become a man here, it had shaped him in ways that he could never escape. And it was still full of the people that he loved, the people that he adored. 

He couldn’t help but linger, tonight. Everyone was cozied up with their people, he thought. Danny and Cat had been dozing on a couch together, the last time that he saw them, and he didn’t have the heart to bother anyone. But the atmosphere was enough for him, no matter how much tension might be lingering under the surface, no matter how often he had to stop and wonder about White and the others, the people who he could never trust again no matter how hard he tried. Banshee had only cemented that instinct in him, confirming the gut feeling that had driven him away from the manor in the first place. e had given him nothing but more reasons to trust his gut instinct, the thing that had sent him running away from the Manor in the first place. That uncomfortable feeling, that half certainty that she wasn’t really looking out for their best interests. 

The kitchen has been a safe haven for him for what feels like forever. Jay always felt like what Jet imagined an older brother might. And he’s made cookies tonight, left them under Jet’s care, still warm and gooey and comforting. 

Even more comforting is the sound of Sebastian’s voice, greeting him again. And god, it’s been so long. So long that he aches for it. Sebastian has always been a good friend, always made the time for him, and never treated him like he was an annoyance. He throws himself into the hug that Sebastian offers him, squeezes him tightly, cherishes the feelings of being in his arms for a moment. He grins up at Sebastian’s face, checking him over in turn once they pull away from each other. “Well, I was very offended by the way you handled that bunsen burner the last time I was in your lab.” 

And then, a small laugh, and a bashful smile. “You know how it is. Things to be. People to do. The Guardian shit kept me busy for a while there.”

He lets out a laugh, at Jet’s joke, rolling his eyes fondly as he finally pulls away and moves to grab a cookie from the plate on the counter, taking a bite and taking a seat on one of the nearby stools. 

He’s not really sure why Jet decided he was going to be the one to be friends with him, but he’s always been glad that he did. He thinks it has something to do with the fact that he’s easy to find, and easy to be around: Jet likes company, doesn’t like to be alone, and Sebastian is a constant, basically always in his lab, basically never occupied with anything else that Jet can’t sit around and watch him with. He’d done his fair share of helping around the lab, providing an extra set of hands, or listening to Sebastian ramble his way towards various solutions. He’d more reliable and less annoying than your average lab assistant.

And Sebastian is stupidly fond of him. His loud personality, his bright clothes, his unwavering confidence—even when he can tell the last one is as much a mask sometimes as it is true at others. There’s a part of Jet that.s every part the man Sebastian wished he could be once upon a time, confident and bright and unafraid of embarrassing himself or taking risks. Maybe it’s the way he has a built in escape route from any possible awkward situation. 

And he’d chosen to be friends with Sebastian. Which was fucking wild, but boy was he glad of it. He really had missed Jet, the past few months. It’s good to see him around, and looking pretty good, for what it was worth. Tired, maybe, but happy in a way Sebastian hadn’t seen him in a long time. 

     “You look good,” he says. “Hardly fair, when the rest of us look like fucking shit after the whole Tower mess. Please tell me you had an easier time of all of that than I did. I’d hate to think anyone had to go through worse.”

[jckylls]

daydreamxrs​:

There’s a small swell of affection, of satisfaction, as he watches Sebastian take a sip of his tea. It’s the small flush of joy as he watches someone take a gift he’s given them, a happy flush that means he’s taking care of someone, someone that he could really care about if they had the time to grow together and get to know each other better. It’s something that soothes the ache in his chest, the ragged disappointment where he feels like he failed Sebastian over and over again. It battles against the feeling that swells in him the moment that he sees Sebastian start to frown.

Sebastian doesn’t take his apology, he fights against it instead and turns it down. He trips over himself as he tells Cas that he shouldn’t be sorry for it, and Cas can see the real earnest belief in him, the fact that he means what he says. He doesn’t think he’ll ever feel like he did enough, like he was good enough when they were in the tower. It had been Kaz after all, who made it possible for him to do anything but cower in the face of his own fears. Kaz had been the one with enough control of his power to make Cas listen to him. And that control had meant they both got through the rest of the mission relatively intact. He never would have been able to save anybody without them.

But Sebastian thinks he did enough. Sebastian thought that he was amazing. But he thought that Sebastian was amazing too, this man who had been stuck in a situation he never should have been, who had managed to get out of it. Cas had felt like his heart was breaking when he saw Sebastian there in the tower, hands covered in blood, doing his best to hold on to everything that was happening around him.

“I should have been able to do it faster.” He says, because he really thinks so. So many people would have and he knows it. If Dulce et Decorum had been there, or Zenith, or the Shadow Man. “And taken better care of you all, after.”

He should have checked in on Sebastian the second they got out of the tower, he should have found him and made sure that the other man was okay. That felt like his responsibility, as seemingly the only one of that team who had gotten out of the tower without completely falling apart, or being hurt. A few bruises seemed like nothing compared to everyone else’s real trauma be real damage. He swallows a little, and looks up at Sebastian with warm eyes, soft. “Are you okay?” He asks, finally, like he should have before. “After everything, it can’t have been easy.”

He shakes his head, again, as Daydreamer keeps making excuses—and he wishes that Daydreamer would accept that none of them had been perfect, but that at least Daydreamer had gotten them out of there, and that’s what mattered. Hell, Hyde had shot Mind Master somehow, the panic and disorientation from Fearmonger’s hallucination enough to make him do something truly stupid, though bringing live ammo into the Tower in the first place had been stupid enough all on his own. If anything, he should have been the one apologizing, on Hyde’s behalf, knowing that Hyde never would.

But it isn’t either of their faults, that the Tower had been a goddamn mess. Not his, not Daydreamer’s, not even Hyde’s. It was a fucked up situation that they’d all been thrown into. And Daydreamer had made the best he could of it, and that was enough.

He thinks about fighting him on that, but before he has the chance, Daydreamer is looking at him with big, earnest eyes and asking how he’s doing, and it seems kind of beside the point to backtrack now and try to argue, so he sights and gives up, taking another sip of his tea while he tries to come up with an answer.

     “I’m... okay, yeah,” he says with a little shrug. “I mean, probably better than I should be, all things considered. I was freaking out, before, about the serum not working, trying to figure out what happened. But Mimic’s been helping with that, and... I figure panicking about the whole thing isn’t really going to get me anywhere.”

     “Funny enough, I’ve always been pretty good at compartmentalizing,” he adds, laughing a little as he makes the joke—but it’s only partly a joke, because he has always been good at compartmentalizing, especially when it comes to not letting his feelings get in the way of getting his work done. 

[jckylls]

mcmic​:

Between the focus he gives to washing Sebastian’s hands, and the curiosity over this new revelation that he has, in fact, experienced what he did tonight before, there’s no room in his mind just now for his own troubles, which is a mercy, considering how full his mind had been before he’d run into Sebastian in the hallway. He would much rather focus on helping Sebastian get cleaned up, and sufficiently calmed down than put thought to that guilt just now. There is the hint of a different sort of guilt, perhaps, knowing that his own beliefs about why this likely happened are in direct conflict to what Sebastian wants to believe about himself, but he does silently hope that perhaps because of tonight, after the dust settles a bit more, it might make him consider the connection, and Mimic’s suggestions and offer again more deeply.

He possesses infinite patience, though, so there’s no rush to diving back into that with Sebastian. He’s content to wait until he feels comfortable enough to bring it up again, and tonight is certainly not going to be that night. In the meantime, he’ll have to find time with Hyde, to get his perspective on what happened tonight, assess things from the other side. 

Before Sebastian replies, though, he notices the goosebumps suddenly running up his arms, and Mimic can’t help but frown, curious, although he still doesn’t look up from his hands, washing the last of the blood off, not wanting to chase away whatever realization Sebastian perhaps just had. When he finally speaks again, he doesn’t give any indication as to what it was, though, instead agreeing it must have been unfortunate circumstances jarring enough to push past the serum. 

When he looks away, though, Mimic does look up, unable to stop the curiosity, and there’s something else there on Sebastian’s face, something beyond the panic and unsteadiness this night has brought. He doesn’t bother hiding the fact that he’s looking now, though, curiosity having won out, especially with the sigh that Sebastian lets out, as he shifts, suggesting that he’ll run tests on the serum anyway, even though Mimic thinks they both know that there’s nothing wrong with the batch, Sebastian having perfected it years ago. 

All he offers is a little hum, before finally putting the now-stained washcloth aside, and washing his own hands off, before turning off the water. He takes the hand towel and starts drying Sebastian’s hands. “Whatever it was, at least your hands are clean now,” Mimic says, looking back at him again, raising an eyebrow.

.

Mimic hums, the way he always does when he’s thinking but isn’t ready to say something yet, or the way he does when he knows exactly what he wants to say but knows he ought not to, and Sebastian can’t quite tell which of the two of those it is, as Mimic finally turns his attention away from Sebastian’s hands to wash his own. And Sebastian looks down at this hands so that he doesn’t have to look at Mimic, turns them over to see how clean they are, flexes his fingers a few times like he’s trying to remind himself that they are, in fact, his hands, no matter what they’ve done tonight. 

And then he can feel Mimic’s gaze on him, and so he looks back up from them, meets his eyes, and the feeling he’s just tried to shake is back again. A low ache of want, a warm thrum of longing. He doesn’t want Mimic to stop touching him. Doesn’t want him to, inevitably, step back and step away. He wants...

He wants... 

And it’s... okay, okay, so he’s wanted to kiss Mimic for almost as long as he’s known him. For what has somehow been almost six years, though it feels like a much, much shorter time—probably because there’s a decent percentage of it he wasn’t actually aware of. And so it’s not unusual, or surprising, that given this is closer to one another than they usually are, when they’re just talking in his lab, or the kitchen, or wherever, that he might be thinking about it. There’s nothing out of the ordinary, about the urge to lean in, when Mimic is standing so close to him, when Mimic has been so kind to him, when his system is still buzzing with adrenaline. It’s a perfectly normal reaction for him to be having to all of this.

He likes Mimic. It’s his choice, that he’s making. He tells himself all of this, in the beat before he does it, the split second before he follows the overwhelming impulse and leans in, bringing one of his still-damp hands up as he closes the scant distance left between the two of them and kisses Mimic.

His hand isn’t shaking, anymore, where it rests against Mimic’s face, but he only notices that distantly, with some remote piece of himself somewhere in the back of his mind. Because it’s impossible to focus on anything else except for the fact that he’s kissing Mimic. And he must have used all of his freaking out energy for the day up back at the Tower, and in the hallway, because despite the fact that this is something he’s thought about doing for almost six years and never thought he’d actually work up the guts to do, he’s... not freaking out, somehow. It feels instinctive. Feels familiar. Feels right, in more ways than he could have imagined before it happened. 

[jckylls]

     a week-ish after the Tower attack, late night, the kitchen, @jetxstreamx​

He’s spent the past week holed up in his lab, mostly, kind of obsessively working on the serum, trying to make himself feel a little better about the possibility that he won’t wake up halfway through whatever next job Hyde gets sent out on is and re-traumatize himself all over again. He’s been avoiding taking missions, or anything that will put Hyde back out in the field, or, honestly, anything that will make him have to succumb to the serum again in an uncontrolled environment, and he’s sure there will be hell to pay for it when he does, but at least Zenith hasn’t come calling again to demand he release Hyde like he’s committing some kind of crime against humanity by taking things slow. 

It means the only people he’s really seen are Mimic and Medusa, who has brought him food a few times to make sure that he eats, which he definitely wouldn’t be doing otherwise. And Medusa must have other things to take care of today, better things to occupy her time with than feeding her wayward best friend, because by the time his stomach begins to protest loudly enough that he can’t ignore it anymore, he looks at the clock and realizes that it’s almost midnight. 

So he heads up to the kitchen to grab a plate of whatever’s around an easy—maybe a muffin or two, maybe a sandwich. And is pleasantly surprised when the kitchen isn’t empty, not because he particularly wants to see other people, but because the person in it is someone has hasn’t actually seen in months. Because Hyde had been the one at the Tower, and because Daydreamer had rushed Sebastian out of there before half of the other teams had made it back to the meet up point safely. And because, the second Jetstream moved out of the Manor, his almost daily trips to keep Sebastian company in the lab had stopped rather abruptly, and had never started up again. 

     “And here I was thinking you’d died,” he jokes, pulling Jetstream into a hug for a second before stepping back so he can get a good look at him—no worse for wear, apparently, no terrible Tower-sustained injuries that Sebastian can see anywhere visible. “Or worse, that I’d somehow pissed you off and you decided to never forgive me. It’s been months, man, where have you been?”

[jckylls]

mcmic​:

Mimic takes Sebastian’s hands, guides them under the hot water, watching the water turn red with Mind Master’s blood, letting the easily washed off rise down the drain for a moment before picking up the wash cloth to scrub the tougher stains from his hands. There’s something a little bit peaceful about the act,  even if the anxiety is still wafting off of Sebastian, and his own worries are too deep to be rid of so easily. But the gentle, familiar motion is something of a comfort. It takes him back to those days a long, long time ago during the first years of his residency, the grunt work every resident had to put in, the way it had taught the sort of calm bedside manner he likes to think he still has now, the way it had taught the need for gentleness sometimes. It feels different here, doing something he used to do for patients for Sebastian. 

So he takes care with the task, as Sebastian agrees that it might be possible, although even he can hear the doubt in his voice. It’s a doubt that Mimic would agree with, if he wasn’t sure that’s the last thing he wants to hear just now. Because if something like that could happen so easily, it would be a wonder it hadn’t happened at least a few times over in the last decade of this arrangement. Yes, Hyde perhaps hasn’t met someone with Fearmonger’s powers, but Mimic is certain he’s been put into plenty of other highly stressful, highly chaotic situations before, and he thinks Sebastian would have mentioned it to him before now, if this wasn’t new.

Before he can say anything, though, Sebastian goes on, and it seems clear that he’s only just remembering something else. It has happened before, he has come to as Sebastian when he still should have been Hyde. It takes effort not to seem too interested when he explains it, the way that he had woken in almost the exact situation. 

“Hm,” is all that he says for a moment, frowning down at the sink, the water nearly running clear now, Sebastian’s hands much cleaner now than they were moments ago. He turns Sebastian’s hand over and scrubs the wash cloth gently over a stubborn spot between his fingers, concentrating on that for a moment, weighing his response, before finally looking up at him again. 

“That seems logical,” Mimic says carefully, in agreement. “Fearmonger must have called up that memory for Hyde––a lack of control, of course, that would be a nightmare to him, I think that’s something everyone feels to an extent––and it managed to make your body believe you were back in that moment truly. Which must also be why he shot Mind Master, the confusion and panic of losing control would be more than enough to mistake friend for foe. Fear powerful enough to override the serum.” He thinks it has something to do with the flexibility of boundaries, too, of course, but he isn’t very well going to say that plainly, when he knows Sebastian is smart enough to realize he’s thinking it.

Mimic washes his hands with a gentleness, a tenderness, that isn’t entirely unexpected from him but feels unexpected only because it’s been a long, long time since anyone touched Sebastian with such kindness. He knows Hyde gets around, but stuck down in his lab, relatively isolated from anything and anyone other than the occasional chat, the closest he gets to something like this is the occasional hand on his back from Medusa, the occasional hug from Jetstream. It’s... distracting, honestly, as he talks, and as Mimic replies, and he finds himself focusing on the feeling of it maybe a little too much. Mimic wiping the blood away, turning his hand over, skin warm from the hot water. There’s an attentiveness to it that feels utterly foreign, to him, a focus in Mimic’s eyes that makes something in his chest ache. 

And there’s a strange familiarity to it, too, to the feel of Mimic’s hands on his skin, that he can’t place, can’t make sense of. The shape of Mimic’s hand against his, the texture of his fingertips, the intense kind of focus that seems to come with it. It makes his stomach twist, a little, pleasant and warm. It raises goosebumps along his arms. He has to close his eyes, for a second, and swallow, trying to focus again, but all that seems to do is summon the phantom feeling of lips brushing against his throat. 

     “Yeah,” he manages to make himself say, opening his eyes again and nodding. Somehow even managing to keep his voice from sounding strained. “Yeah, that makes sense. That would explain it. An extremely unfortunate coincidence, but enough of a psychological mind-fuck to have its own biological effect.” 

And he has to turn his head away, for a moment, after he says it, because opening his eyes has just made him realize how close Mimic is standing, to him, and he can’t account for the sudden and overwhelming urge to lean forward and close the space between them, but at least he can stop himself from doing it, letting out a sigh and shifting his shoulders like he needs to stretch them out, willing himself to set the feeling aside, to not do something stupid he might regret just because he’s feeling a little shaken up, still. 

     “I think I’ll run some tests on this batch, anyway, see if it’s possible there was some mistake when I made it, some reason it might not have been strong enough to override what Fearmonger did...” 

[jckylls]

daydreamxrs​:

Daydreamer feels like he fumbles more often than not, when he’s talking to Sebastian. They have road blocks, and insecurities, and he hasn’t spent enough time with Seb to know when he’s about to put his foot fully in his mouth. He thinks hes done that now, because Sebastian is wincing and he sounds a little bit miserable, sounds like he’s still beating himself up over something that wasn’t even his fault. He hadn’t done anything wrong, in the Tower. He’d just been caught in a bad situation. But it makes Daydreamer ache a little bit, all of it, because he’s the one who should be beating himself up about it all, he was the one who should have been stronger and more competent and just better, strong enough to break out of his own mental blocks and not waste anybodies time, fucking around with dream visions and emotional quests of self discovery. 

He should have wiped Fearmonger out the second that he stepped foot in the building, the second he realised who was responsible for what was going to happen. 

“Easy and Hyde aren’t words that I usually pair together,” He says, his voice a little bit softer than normal. He likes Hyde, well enough. They have an easy banter they fall into, when they do see each other. Daydreamer is the kind of delusional person who wants everyone to be his friend, no matter how rarely they hang out. He wants to be adored, he wants to be cherished as a person. He wants to belong here, in this house of villains. But when it comes down to it, Sebastian is really more his kind of person. Softer, in the ways that Daydreamer is prone to adoring himself. So smart that it means that Daydreamer is in awe of him.

He swallows at the thought of it, cradles his own cup of tea in the palms of his hand. He lets the warmth seep into his body, and chases away any thoughts that might bring him down. He’s not here for his own selfish reasons. He’s here for Sebastian. Because he thinks Sebastian could use a friend right now, and that’s something that Daydreamer is able to offer him. He manages a smile, a real one, when Sebastian finishes what he’s doing and finally diverts his attention toward Daydreamer and the tea. Daydreamer watches his hands as he goes to take it, and tries not to remember them covered in blood, the handprints he had to warp out of his costume after three turns through the laundry. He should really have picked a different colour for his outfit.

“Oh, we’ve been plenty busy. The honeymoon period is pretty intense, you know. Way more intense than the casual fucking period.” He nods, as if he’s said something sage and wise. “I, um. I’d been wanting to track you down too, though. To say that I’m sorry for not getting us all out of the Tower faster. I got… A little overwhelmed, I guess. By it all.” Overwhelmed was putting it lightly, but he thinks its fair by itself as well. They all got a little overwhelmed, up there. And he’s grateful that he’ll never have to go up against Fearmonger again.

He takes a sip of the tea—still hot, despite the minutes he kept Daydreamer waiting there, and passively he wonders if Daydreamer has been keeping it hot, warping the universe quietly to keep the tea at a perfectly drinkable temperature until Sebastian was ready to take a sip, and he thinks it might be a little bit unbearable if that’s the case, if Daydreamer is expending any energy on something so small and thoughtful just for him—as he listens to Daydreamer talk, rolls his eyes a little at the over-sharing when it comes to his and Lazarus’ love life, and then frowns when Daydreamer starts to apologize.

       “No, no— Daydreamer, you have no reason to apologize,” he replies, tripping over his words a little bit in his rush to answer. Because it’s a stupid thing to apologize for. No one, he’s sure—and certainly not him—is blaming Daydreamer for having not stopped any of it before it happened. That would be like blaming him for Dr Judgement and Hourglass attacking the Tower in the first place. Kind of preposterous, and totally out of line. That Daydreamer had stopped Fearmonger at all, and not just dragged him and Mind Master out of the Tower and away from Fearmonger’s influence, had been above and beyond what anyone could have expected of him. That he managed to get access to his powers back, on top of all of that, and keep Mind Master from dying, and keep Sebastian from completely decompensating... it was nothing short of a miracle, and Sebastian isn’t someone who believes in miracles. 

He watches for a moment, at the way Daydreamer’s sitting, hands cupped around the mug of tea he’s holding, frowning a little himself, his posture having shifted, from the assumed confidence he came in with. And Sebastian thinks about Daydreamer’s confession, months ago, about how self-conscious he’d been, how desperate for approval. And he thinks it’s a shame; he knows he misjudged Daydreamer himself, at the start, but he didn’t realize just how thoroughly misjudged Daydreamer has clearly been by so many of the people he’s met in his life. It’s a shame that Daydreamer can work so hard, can do so much for the people around him, and still think so little of himself. 

     “You were amazing, you know that? I’m not exaggerating, I mean that. None of us stood a chance against Fearmonger, and sure, the whole thing was kind of a mess. But that’s not your fault. And you stopped it before it got a whole lot worse.” 

The moment he and Nightingale had shown up had been such a huge relief, after Fortune left Sebastian kneeling on the floor trying to stabilize a dying Mind Master while the whole world shifted in and out of nightmare mode around him. All he’d done was sit there like a useless chump and let the two of them take care of it all. He never would have made it out of there in time, if it hadn’t been for Daydreamer. 

[jckylls]

daydreamxrs​:

Sebastian seems a little bit frazzled, when he notices that Cas is there. And Cas can’t blame him for that, with everything that’s been going on lately. The general aura of the manor has been leaning toward frazzled for a long time now, and no one has escaped that, no one has really been able to pull away from the way that the world is falling apart around them. But that’s all the more reason for Cas to come and talk to him, all the more reason to make sure that Sebastian isn’t falling apart over what happened at the tower.

Cas would hate it, if Sebastian was blaming himself for anything that happened. He would hate it, because Sebastian hadn’t done anything wrong, Sebastian wasn’t even supposed to really be there. It should have been Hyde facing off against the monsters, Sebastian never should have had to face any of that. Cas greets him with a smile, even  as he’s looking up. Sebastian doesn’t come and help him with the door, but Cas doesn’t blame him for that either, not when his arms are literally full of probably very important science. 

He does arch and eyebrow, however, at the mixed answer that he gets from the man in front of him. Sebastian is busy, but Cas is releived that it doesn’t mean he needs to fuck off and leave him alone to do his work in peace. Carrying hot tea all the way to the lab and then back again would have actually been annoying to do. So he nods along, happily, and delicately walks in to the room. He finds some relatively clear space, near where he usually settles down to sit for their science classes, and places their mugs there. 

“Oh, don’t worry about it. You should take your time.” He says, and his voice is light and friendly. He feels like its important to be chill, when Sebastian might be feeling skittsh, when he himself feels like he was such an utter failure the last time that they saw each other.  “I probably should have given you some kind of warning, before I sprung tea time with Daydreamer on you. But I was bored, and kind of lonely, and I thought –– hey, haven’t seen Sebastian not covered in blood in a while, that might be nice.” 

And he sits down, folds his hands together. Ready to wait patiently for Sebastian to finish whatever science he was doing. 

He starts to reply, as Daydreamer explains his presence, excuses it, half ready to say no, don’t apologize or it’s good to see you or glad I was the better option than “bored and lonely,” because he really doesn’t mind the company, and he really has been meaning to seek out Daydreamer for the past few days. But then Daydreamer mentions him being covered in blood and Sebastian realizes, all of a sudden, what a pain in the ass he probably was, for Daydreamer, having to fix everything and drag him out of the Tower like a mother cat carrying a kitten by the scruff of its neck. And so the words that come out take on a different tone, apologetic and a little pathetic, and he winces a little at the sound of them,

     “Yeah, I... sorry, about that. I’m sure getting out of there would have been a lot easier with Hyde instead of having to deal with me. I don’t really know what happened.” 

That’s not entirely true, he thinks, as he finishes up setting the test he needs to run, moving swiftly through the last few steps so that he can be a little less rude and actually turn his full attention to the conversation at hand. He remembers bits of what happened before Daydreamer showed up, fits and starts of it, flickers of memory, fading in and out. A woman—Lynx—bleeding on the floor at his feet, and then nothing, and then Mind Master falling to the ground. Looking at his hands and seeing blood.

That’s not the part of the memory that matters, though. What he really remembers is the nightmare Fearmonger was clearly drawing on. The alleyway. Waking up there, with no idea how he got there, looking down to find blood on his hands. A gunfight going on around him that he had no part in, no way of handling. It had been the second time he woke up from Hyde taking over, the second time ever. After the first one, he hadn’t been sure he’d ever wake up again; the second time, he had no idea how much of the serum he needed to take, and no idea how long he needed to handle whatever shit Hyde had gotten them into. And he’d guessed wrong, realized for the first time the full extend of what Hyde was capable of—and how absolutely useless he was, in Hyde’s place. 

He finishes up what he’s doing, and then, finally, looks up at Daydreamer, the mug of tea he’s offering him, and he accepts it with a nod.

     “Thanks, though. For getting me out of there. Sorry, I should have come and found you earlier, but I figured you and Lazarus would be busy.” 

[jckylls]

mcmic​:

He is interested to hear that apparently Daydreamer had finally managed to get Mind Master to give him access to his full scope of powers again, making a mental note to check in with him at some point in the coming days, after their last conversation about that very blockage, but that’s a curiosity for another time, clearly. Leading them back towards the bathroom, he listens carefully, glad that it seems Sebastian is coming back down from some of the panic being able to explain that part of things more fully. It makes him grateful that he ended up there with someone who has such powerful abilities, or else he’s not quite sure how the night would have ended if Sebastian indeed couldn’t get back to Hyde during it all. 

“Well, it sounds like the cards fell just right, then, Daydreamer and Mind Master being around, too,” he says quietly, although he’s a little more than interested in the latter half of Sebastian’s explanation. He’s careful, though, not wanting to make Sebastian panic even more than he already is, no desire to exacerbate the trauma of the situation.

So he’s quiet for a moment, as he guides him into the bathroom, brings him over to the sink, and turns on the hot water, preparing to help clean up the blood, apparently Mind Master’s blood, from his hands. Hyde is an expert in situation such as the one they were all meant to face in the Tower, of course, there’s a reason he does the field work for Sebastian, but he is something of a wild card. He knows he can’t have been happy they were given stun ammunition, but he can’t exactly see him intentionally hurting someone they were meant to save, even if said person is an unpleasant is person who has traumatized a fellow Collective member before. 

Whatever he saw in his nightmare must have been strong enough to send him into a panic of his own. “I’ve heard of Fearmonger’s power before,” he says, taking a wash cloth and wetting it. “Perhaps Hyde was put back in an old situation from before, perhaps something at the start of things for you, when everything felt less certain, less clear. It’s no comfort, I know, but we both know how psychological attacks can affect even the biological, the chemical responses.”

.

He holds his hands out automatically, as Mimic starts to run the water, to wet a washcloth, and he’s aware that he’s perfectly capable of washing his own hands, as much as he thinks he might end up staging some fucked up version of Macbeth here if he tries, but still, it feels good to let Mimic take control a little bit, the one of the two of them here who seems balanced, and certain, and sure. He’s sure Mimic dealt with bullshit of his own in the Tower, but it’s easier to let him do this, while they stand and talk. He feels less scrutinized, with Mimic’s hands busy with something else, than if Mimic were just standing here watching him. 

     “It’s... possible the wrong combination of adrenaline and cortisol managed to flush the serum out of my system, or temporarily overpower it,” he reasons, thinking about it for a moment. But even as he says it, it rings untrue. It isn’t possible that in nearly a decade, Hyde hasn’t ones been scared before. Hyde might like being scared, or being in high-pressure situations, but that shouldn’t alter the actual chemical, hormonal affect of it on the body, which means this particular combination of adrenaline and cortisol shouldn’t be anything new or different, not enough to trigger the switch. 

He looks down, for a moment, at his hands, and then away, at the water swirling down the drain of the sink. He doesn’t want to look at his own hands covered in blood. He doesn’t like seeing it, knowing that his hands did whatever Hyde did to get them that way.

And—

It hits him all at once again. That this, looking at his hands, this is what had done it, what had caused it. The center of the nightmare. The memory... 

     “Actually,” he says. “There’s... I mean, it’s not the first time this has happened. It’s the second.” 

And maybe he shouldn’t be telling Mimic this—Mimic, who he knows still probably believes whatever lies Hyde had told him to get Mimic on his side. But at least the first time there had been a reason for it.

     “Early on. There was an incident where I didn’t measure the serum right. I woke up, kind of like at the Tower. I think he’d just killed someone, and then suddenly there I was. I guess that’s what the nightmare was. So maybe it was the memory, or something like it, that was enough to trick my body into thinking it needed to bring me back...” 

[jckylls]

mcmic​:

Sebastian doesn’t seem entirely aware of what he’s saying, which is only fair, considering the clear panic, the traumatic experience he must have gone through to end up here Sebastian with his hands covered in blood, and not Hyde, but that’s alright. What matters is doing what he can to help ground him, calm him down, and the touch seems to help do some of that, as he tries to wipe the blood off of his hands on his shirt, and finally gives him a better idea of what it is he faced tonight. 

It catches his attention, not just because of his concern for Sebastian, although that’s top of mind just now, but because Fearmonger only feels like a half explanation, a great deal of unknown right alongside it. He doesn’t know how those powers work, never having experienced them himself, but the fact that fear had been enough to bring Sebastian out in the middle of a situation he’s certain Hyde had adequate time planned for is something that makes him frown with curiosity. The fear had somehow caused the boundaries to blur in a way even Mimic hadn’t entirely realized might be possible as things are with Sebastian, but odder things have happened with powers under equally stressful circumstances and influence. 

It makes him all the more glad that Sebastian happened to find him, someone who understands and cares about how this all is for him, how he can face it.

How he follows that information up makes Mimic raise his eyebrows higher, unable to hide the reaction entirely for how very not Sebastian the whole moment is, enough so that he almost expected Hyde to suddenly be standing there in front of them. He’s aware how unideal the situation is, how traumatic it likely was for both halves of the whole, but he thinks perhaps it might not be the worst thing in the world for either of them, once they can find their way past the initial panic. 

“Well, you made it out alive, so it seems that’s a tick in favor of that fear being unfounded,” he says, matching his tone. He wonders vaguely how much longer the serum was intended to last tonight, but he doesn’t ask, not wanting to make the situation worse, just now. First, the basics. A hand moves to Sebastian’s back, and he starts leading him towards the bathroom to take care of the blood, at least. “We’ll clean that up, and then perhaps tea, and we can talk through what happened.”

.

He sees the look cross Mimic’s face, at the comment, and it takes a second for him to put together what that look means. And when he does, he almost wishes he hadn’t said anything at all. But he figures there must still be some trace leftovers of serum flowing through him, or something. All of this is stuff he’ll have to deal with over the next few days, when he’s gotten some sleep and he can get back to his lab and get to work on figuring out why and how this had happened. But for now, he’s just grateful that Mimic doesn’t linger on it openly. 

      “I don’t think I had anything to do with that. Daydreamer made Mind Master do something, and got the full suite of his powers back, or something like that,” he explains, as he lets Mimic lead him towards the bathroom. He’s already starting to feel a little more calm, letting himself focus on the facts, on the parts that hadn’t involved him. Things he had seen, and not really been a part of. It had felt a bit like watching a movie, and then Daydreamer had helped him up and dragged him out of there. “Just, like, willed Fearmonger’s powers to stop working, turned the whole nightmare labyrinth back into a regular old hallway.”

He has to admit, that despite how long he’d spent half-worried that Daydreamer was capable of breaking the entire world with one wrong daydream, he’d done an incredible job of fixing things the second he had his unrestrained powers back. Maybe Sebastian hadn’t given the kid enough credit, all this time. Maybe he’d been unfair. Another thing to deal with on another day, when he’s feeling more himself.

     “All I did was sit there. Well, and make sure Mind Master didn’t bleed out before Nightingale got there to heal him, though seeing as it was fucking Hyde who shot him in the first place, that seemed like the least I could do.” 

He remembers it so clearly, looking at Fortune trying to put pressure on the wounds and knowing that it was Hyde who had done it, somewhere in the stuttering flashes of lucidity he was experiencing. He doesn’t even know where Hyde got real bullets, or why he’d shot in the first place. It’s hard to imagine Hyde feeling frightened, by whatever Fearmonger had shown him, frightened enough to shoot blindly at footsteps coming around a corner and accidentally taking out the person he was supposed to save. 

[daydreamxrs]

( Sebastian’s lab, a few days after everything, @jckylls​ ) 

He’s clutching a cup of nice, calming tea in his hands, as he makes his way toward Sebastian’s special little corner of the world, the domain he rules over. He’s been a little worried about Sebastian, since that day at the Tower. He wishes he could have done more, to protect the man from everything that had been going on at the time. He wishes he had been able to put an end to everything faster, so that Sebastian wouldn’t have to be plagued by fear and self doubt, hands covered in blood. 

His heart ached for Sebastian since the moment he saw him there, slightly shaking. From what Cas can tell, he doesn’t usually have to handle that side of things. The side that meant people got shot, that people got hurt, that a scary monster might come around the corner and try to hurt you at any second. That was the stuff that Hyde delt with, the different side of him that he fought so hard against.

Cas knows that he shouldn’t really feel guilty for it all. He had done the best he could. All of them had. But he was someone who was probably prone to always blaming himself more than he should. So he wants to make it up to Sebastian, he wants to check on the man and make sure that he’s okay. After all, he’s been helping Cas, at least a little bit, over the last few months. He got a little distracted from his lessons, but he appreciated that Sebastain believed in him, even just a little. 

He nudges the door open, careful not to spill a drop of the drink. “Hey, I made you tea.” He greets, warm and easy. 

“I figured you might need a little break. Unless you’re too busy.” It’s fine, if Sebastian wants to focus, wants Cas to clear out so that he can work in peace. 

[jckylls]

He’s running tests, on the most recent batch of the serum, using up one of the few remaining vials he has of it to try to figure out what the fuck went wrong in the Tower. Despite Mimic’s conviction that what happened was purely psychological, he’s hoping that he just did something wrong, that there’s a human error element to what happened that he can fix, protect against, ensure it never happens again. That the batch of serum was bad, and that’s why he found himself waking up on the top floor of Guardian Tower with a gun in his hands.

It’s scientifically responsible, to test every possibility, instead of just accepting the answer that makes the most sense. That’s what he’s telling himself. That’s what he’ll tell Mimic, if Mimic asks. 

His hands are full, when Cas greets him from the door, and he can’t exactly put what he’s holding down immediately, seeing as he’s halfway through pouring a solution from one beaker into another, but he thinks Cas will understand. Instead of coming over and grabbing the door for him, Sebastian just looks up.

     “No, no, I’m not busy. I mean, I am busy. Sorry, my hands are full. But come in. I’ll put this down in a minute, and then I’ll have a few minutes.”

He’s surprised, to see Cas. They haven’t had one of their science lessons in months, and after he’d basically followed Cas around like a lost puppy dog mid-panic attack after they got out of the Tower, he was pretty sure that Cas would want nothing to do with him. And that would be fine. Cas had already been far too kind for him, taking on the burden of dealing with Fearmonger, Mind Master, and getting Sebastian out of the Tower when Hyde had suddenly been unable to do any of those things. 

[jckylls]

mcmic​:

He only bothers to stay at the meetup point long enough to check in with Catalyst very briefly, considering how much chaos is going on around them, and how many of the teams had run into much more trouble than they had, clearly, or perhaps hadn’t managed to handle their trouble as well, before he heads on his way back to the Manor, wanting nothing more than silence, and a hot shower. Escaping physical injury is a small consolation, all things considered, because his mind hasn’t felt as heavy in a very long time. 

Perhaps silence isn’t what he truly needs, for once, because the silence makes it so simple to think, to consider each and every moment, for his mind to replay images of Tempest, now and before. There’s something so oppressive about guilt that there’s no coming back from. Even if he found a way to forgive himself, absolve himself of his past sins––and in a way, hasn’t that been exactly what he’s managed over the past eight years, long buried guilt only just dug back up just as Tempest was––there would never be anything of that sort from the people he’s hurt, and those who care about them. And with good reason. He deals in logic, he understands their anger at him, knows the blame rests solely on his selfishness, even if it’s always been difficult for him to empathize with others.

It doesn’t make any of it any easier to swallow, though. 

The long, hot shower he takes as soon as he makes it back to the manor does little to change things. He was hardly even dirty, compared to most of the others who came from the Tower, and water and soap doesn’t wash away anything deeper than the surface level grime, of course. Making his way back to his room, he highly doubts that there will be any sort of rest tonight, even as tired as his mind is. And that only feels fair, in a way. If he can’t change any of his past choices, at least he can reflect on the pain he caused with them seriously for the first time in too long.

He’s lost in those thoughts, when he notices someone else in the hall. It’s a surprise to see Sebastian standing there, but perhaps not as much of a surprise as it should be, considering what he’s been considering about his dual sides lately. And he’s glad for something else to focus on, someone else to focus on, Sebastian’s difficult night instead of his own, especially as he can feel the panic wafting off of him, something he wants to do his best to calm if he can.

“Sebastian, I wasn’t expecting to see you tonight. It seems like a safe assumption that your part of things wasn’t so simple, either,” Mimic says, crosses to him, and immediately putting his hands on his upper arms, trying to offer support, trying to ground him. It’s only then that he notices the blood on his hands. “It’s alright. You’re here, and you’re safe. Let’s go take care of this mess, yes?”

.

Mimic’s actual words wash over him in a sort of indistinct hum—at least, until Mimic’s hands are on his arms, pulling him back out of the haze of panic for long enough to focus on the feeling, on the here and now. The past several hours have felt like an irregular pendulum swinging wildly between two opposing poles, Sebastian fading in and out of control and awareness and Hyde filling in the gaps—or maybe the other way around, he can’t tell which version of himself is the one dissociating and which version is the one picking up the slack. But it feels like his earliest days on the run, when he was only half-aware of when he was one and when he was the other, when he would wake up after long periods of nothingness, somewhere entirely different, blood on his hands and no sense of how he’d gotten where he was, or what he’d done to get there.

But Mimic’s touch helps him to focus on where he is right now, and not the missing gaps and lapses that lead to it. And it takes him a minute, to slow his breathing back to a normal, reasonable speed, to look back up at Mimic and actually see him, where he’s standing. And he immediately wants to reach out and touch him, some assurance that he’s real, except his hands are covered in blood, and Mimic has already changed into clean clothes, so instead he just wipes his hands again on his own shirt, trying not to think about how much of the remaining blood feels like it’s just going to be a permanent feature of his skin after this awful fucking night. 

      “It was... Fearmonger,” he breathes, shaking his head. “In the tower, we ran into Fearmonger.” It’s as close to an explanation as he’s got, for what he’s been through in the past few hours, though he isn’t entirely sure it makes sense, because a psychological power, even one as strong as that, shouldn’t have actually had a biological effect, shouldn’t have been able to overrule the serum like that.

He takes another few slow breaths, trying to calm himself down, before he looks back up at Mimic and, with an uncharacteristic wryness and composure that he can’t really account for where it comes from, adds:

     “I guess Hyde’s worst fear is being me, huh?” 

[jckylls]

     a hallway in the Manor, right after the Tower attack, @mcmic​

He and Daydreamer are some of the last to make it out of the Tower, which he knows is almost entirely his own fault—stopping once every ten steps to have an entirely new panic attack about whatever the fuck had caused him to wake up in the middle of the mission when that shouldn’t have even been possible had really halted their progress. But it’s not his fault that they’re some of the last people back to the Manor. Daydreamer had been waiting for Lazarus to finish sapping the life from the group of zombies everyone had managed to round up, and he’d been waiting for Daydreamer who, for some reason, his panic-addled brain had decided to latch onto for the moment like a baby duckling.

He’s still freaking out, all things considered, by the time they do make it back to the Manor, and he heads for his room. The waves of abject panic have ceased, for the time being, but his heart is still pounding in his ears. He feels frayed, brimming with a weird frenetic energy he can’t account for or explain. And maybe, he thinks, it’s a physical symptom of the fact that the serum hasn’t yet worked itself fully out of his system, but he’ll have to test that theory another time to see if that’s the case or not. 

Right now, he doesn’t want to think all that hard about what it means. He just wants to wash the blood off of his hands. Take a shower. Find out, from someone, if Mind Master is okay, because he’s pieced together that it was Hyde’s fucking fault that the Guardian they were there to rescue had, instead, ended up in the hospital with a bullet or two in his lung. 

But, as he heads for his room to do all three of those things, in hopefully that order, he spots Mimic down the hallway, and rapidly readjusts his priorities in terms of things that need to be done, talk to Mimic swiftly moving up to the very top of the list.

He’s already had a half a dozen people act surprised to see him, rather than Hyde, coming out of the Tower, arriving at the meet-up point, coming back to the Manor. But he thinks Mimic will probably be less surprised than anyone else has been, when he raises a hand to get his attention, his voice faltering weakly as he attempts to call out to him.

     “Mimic. Mimic— I...” he starts, and trails off as another wave of panic threatens to rise up and overwhelm him again, like something in his chest trying to reach up out of him, but he lets out a long, slow breath and tries his best to push it back down. 

[jckylls]

fortunexfinder​:

His mouth drops when Hyde speaks, because he honestly can’t believe he’s somehow blaming him for this. Sure, him getting wrapped up in the dream-half of his nightmare was his fault, but that certainly had nothing to do with the series of event that led Hyde to shoot fucking Mind Master- and doing precisely the one thing they weren’t supposed to do. 

“You call this trying to deal with this shit??” He exclaims, and looking back down to the absolute mess that was the Guardian in his lap. And fuck he doesn’t look good, sure he was breathing and managing to talk, but the amount of blood that was pooling around the wound he was pressing, not to mention how white he was getting, couldn’t have been good. 

He simply rolls his eyes when Hyde kicks at his leg, fighting off the urge to kick him back, because arguing with him any longer wasn’t going to do Mind Master any good. And it’s just as he’s about to slip Mind Master’s head out of his lap, and go figure out what fresh hell is waiting for him on the roof when suddenly it’s no longer Hyde he’s looking at, but Sebastian. 

“Oh my god, are you actually fucking kidding me right now?” He groans, because of course Hyde and Sebastian would be falling into an identity crisis now of all times. Once this shit was over he had half a mind to go find Catalyst and ask her what in the hell she was thinking teaming him up with the trigger happy mercenary with the dweeb of a scientist living alongside him. 

Mind Master grabs his attention once more, his bloodied hand gripping onto his arm. “Hourglass… has Dimitri… they’re going to the roof,” he grits out, wincing as Sebastian presses down on his still bleeding wound. “You need… to get… Dimitri….” 

Fortune’s eyes grow wide for a second, as the reality begins to settle in just what really was waiting for him on that roof. He should have assumed it was Hourglass already, what with the very reason he was up there was to track him down, but hearing it- and realizing he was going to have to face him down alone, was another matter entirely. 

“God damn fucking luck,” he groans before looking up to Sebastian. “You stay here with him, Daydreamer and Firebrand shouldn’t be that far away. I guess I’ll go to the fucking roof and try to rescue the monkey.” 

Once the plan seems set, he slips out from under Mind Master, letting Sebastian take over, and immediately begins heading down the hallway, in the direction of the glowing red EXIT sign he could see at the very end of it. He forces himself just to focus on the sign as he drawls closer to it, and not what- or more who was going to be waiting for him up the stairs that lay behind it. 

It’s just as he’s about to reach the door that was illuminated by the sign when he hears a set of voices from an adjoining hallway, and he feels his pulse pick up at the realization just who the voices belonged to. 

Quickly walking past the door, he turns down the next hallway and nearly runs smack into Cas and Kaz- who also just so happened to have Nightingale with them. “Oh thank fucking god,” he sighs, never thinking he’d be so damn happy to see Nightingale in his life. His gaze quickly darts between the three of them for a moment before he speaks, taking in the state of them before his eyes return to Kaz’s and stay there. 

“Mind Master’s been shot,” he tells him, and raises his arm that was covered in the hero’s blood and points it in the direction of where he left him and Sebastian. He opts not to tell them just who shot him, figuring that whole story was better left for another less pressing time. “He’s not looking good. I’m heading to the roof, he said Hourglass took Dimitri up there.” 

[jckylls]

fortunexfinder​:

With no light source other than the few scattered emergency lights, he tries his best to get back to the stretch of hallway the security cameras last showed Hyde. It’s hard though, in the dark, to tell if he’s not just making circles or actually getting somewhere until suddenly he hears another shot ring out. He begins running then, in the direction the shot seemed to have come from, hoping that whoever fired it it was Hyde and he’d finally managed to subdue Fearmonger or whoever else he seemed to be firing at earlier. 

It’s just as he’s about to turn a corner though, when suddenly his foot lands on something hard and slick, and his weight is quickly thrown forward, as his foot slides back underneath him and he looses all traction with the ground. Throwing out his hands in front of him to catch his fall, he lands hard into what he quickly discovers is a whole window pane’s worth of broken glass shards. He doesn’t even have the wherewithal at first to curse his bad luck, as the pain stabbing through his hands and knees consumes all of his attention. 

“Fuck, motherfucking, fuck, motherfucking, fuck….” he groans as he makes an attempt to stand, only for his foot to slip on yet another one of the larger shards, sending him forward and shoving the shards already lodged into his hand deeper as he falls hard on the ground again. And its then when he yells, his mouth pressed tightly into his shoulder to muffle the sound, not so much in pain even though it was coursing through him blindingly, but more so out of rage- mad at not only his luck, but at the whole damn world- from Mimic, to White, to Zander, and even himself… for throwing him into this situation in the first place. 

He yells until his voice grows coarse, letting out the anger and anguish that had been clinging to him like a leech for the last month, until finally he grows exhausted with it. Once he finally drops his head from where he’d buried it into his shoulder, he looks around him at what glass he can see, and tries for a second time to pull himself from out of the hazard. This time, thankfully, he manages to get back on his feet, without injuring himself further, although the damage had been done. The knees of his trousers were ripped wide open, the skin below it raw and crimson from both falls. Even in the little light he was in, he could see the small flecks of glass lodged into the skin there, but the state of his hands, which were more worse for ware, left him in no such a position to even try to administer any kind of first aid to himself. 

“I’m going to get so fucking drunk after this,” he groans to himself as he moves forward, leaving a small trial of blood behind him as it drips from his fingertips. 

When the third round of shooting begins he’s just around the corner from it, in fact one bullet nearly clips his cheek as he turns into the hallway, just in time to see Mind Master crumple to the floor with Hyde standing on the other end of the hallway, gun lowering as he seems to realize just who in the hell he shot. 

He rushes forward, just in time to catch Mind Master’s head before it cracks into the floor, using his forearms as a cushion given the glass shards still in his palms would do little to help the hero. Lowering himself to the ground, he shifts Mind Master’s head in his lap, trying to keep him as upright as he can considering the amount of blood that was coming out of his mouth. 

“R-roof,” the hero sputters through a mouthful of blood as his shaking hands grab at his wound- and yeah Fortune probably should be applying pressure to that, but again he finds himself at a loss on how to administer first aid with hands that were literally covered in small sharp edges. He makes do with his forearm again, putting him and Mind Master awkwardly close to one another as he tries to stop some of the worst of the bleeding. 

“You fucking idiot!” Is all he can say at first once Hyde comes into view. “Why did you think they gave us stun rounds for? For shits and giggles?!” 

Mind Master groans underneath him, which he ignores at first, until he starts swatting at his arm. “R-roof…” he chokes out again, continuing to cough up blood as he does. 

Between one blink and the next, Fortune Finder has appeared at Mind Master’s side, seemingly out of nowhere, dragging Mind Master up into a slightly more upright position, trying to help him out with what appear to be hands covered in blood and the dull shimmer of broken glass, and god, that’s rich of him, to be nowhere to be found a second ago and suddenly to act like this is Hyde’ fault and not an unfortunate consequence of the extremely fucked up situation they’ve found themselves in.

     “You’re one to talk. Where the fuck have you been while I’ve been trying to deal with this shit?” he replies, holstering his gun and making it the rest of the way down the hallway to where Fortune and Mind Master are, taking a look down. It’s a bad hit, he’s got to admit, but it could have been worse. 

     “Here, get out of the way,” he says, nudging Fortune’s leg with the toe of his boot. As skilled as he is with weapons, he knows a thing or two about stabilizing someone who has been shot, and it’s significantly easier to do on someone else than it usually is to do on himself, so he imagines he’ll have a better time of it than Fortune, who seems to be unable to use his hands at all right now. What the fuck kind of nightmare had he been in this whole time? “He’s telling us to go to the fucking roof, so go to the fucking roof and let me deal with this.” 

He’s just getting down to kneel when it happens again, his vision starting to fade around the outside for a second, and this time he just rolls his eyes and doesn’t even bother trying to fight it. 

      “Oh my god,” Sebastian says, steadying himself on his feet so he doesn’t go reeling backwards again, caught halfway in Hyde’s attempt at crouching down, and he looks down and sees fucking Mind Master, who wasn’t here a second ago, bleeding out, and Fortune on the ground next to him. “Fuck. What the fuck happened?”

He looks down for a moment, eyes wide, taking it in, and he thinks he’s sick for a second, has to put his hand to his mouth to make sure he doesn’t vomit at the sight. 

And once he’s sure he’s not going to lose the contents of his stomach, he moves to kneel down beside Mind Master, gently pushing Fortune’s arm out of the way so that he can see what they’re even dealing with here. And, jesus, this is the first time he’s actually been face to face with a Guardian before, and he really isn’t sure how to deal with that, but all he can do is focus on ignoring the pain in his own bleeding arm and trying to stop the bleeding here so that he doesn’t, like, die. 

[jckylls]

mcmic​:

It’s clear that he’s inevitably hit a nerve without meaning to, and it does make him nearly regret the mention of talking about this another time, instead of just leaving things be for now, and bringing it up again without telling him he’d like to, once things have a chance to cool off. He feels rather horrible, clearly having upset Sebastian, imagining just how his thoughts must be running wild with the possibilities of what he might have spoken to Hyde about, knowing that at least part of the reality would likely be worse to him than anything his anxious, annoyed mind could conjure up on its own. 

But it is interesting to see just how clearly heated Sebastian grows, to see the upset clear on his face, to hear him talk like this, much angrier than he hears him get. It makes him curious, but he knows better than to let that show just now. Instead, he needs to make sure Sebastian knows that nothing’s changed for him, that he’s still here in the same way.

“I apologize, Sebastian, I didn’t mean to cross a line; I know it’s impossible for me to fully understand what that must feel like. I won’t mention it again unless you bring it up first,” he says seriously, and he does mean that. He thinks that Hyde will likely find a way to push him into having to bring it up with Mimic again, but even if he doesn’t, he can’t imagine someone as intelligent as Sebastian leaving this conversation unable to consider what it all means, that his mind won’t keep turning things over, even with such strong feelings against the hint of a suggestion Mimic offered. 

He’s counting on that, at least, because he’s not really certain how things continue from here if he can’t talk to Sebastian about the flexibility with Hyde. He has very little desire to sneak around behind Sebastian’s back with his other half, but he also doesn’t very well want to give either up. At least Hyde made it clear enough that he doesn’t want Sebastian gone. The same clearly can’t be said in the other direction. It’s something he can fathom easily, considering how horrifying it must be to consider this other part of yourself is actually another person entirely who steals time and memories and friends, but he wishes he could think of a way to help Sebastian consider that they might be two parts of a whole, that Hyde might be this anger, and bitterness, and jealousy of Sebastian’s rearing its head now. 

For now, though, the right choice is clearly to leave it be, but he wants Sebastian to at least know one more thing. 

“But I do want you to know that it would take much more than Hyde to turn me against you. I’m stronger than you’re giving me credit for. And I know you’re stronger than you might think I believe, too. I care about you, even if I’ve perhaps shown it in the wrong way this morning,” he says. He takes another bite of his pancakes, deciding it’s likely best to leave Sebastian be for now, given the way things turned. Picking up his cup to take with him back up to his room, he stands. “I’m sorry again, Sebastian. I hope the rest of your day is alright.”

[jckylls]

fortunexfinder​:

cw: death, stabbing

He gets swept up readily in the touch and kiss of the phantom of this dream soon to become nightmare. He’s not certain when it’ll distort and change or how, but he’s betting on the timing will heavily depend when his luck is drained so far that the invisible scales weighing him as either lucky or unlucky will make their unfavorable shift. But it’s hard to think long on any of that, or the battle that was still raging throughout the entire Tower, as Not-Kaz continued to give him everything he’d been longing for, despite the cruel words that echoed around them. 

A trio of gunfire erupts suddenly from somewhere not too far away from the room he was still in, and that paired with the screams of rage and pain that followed it, manage to pull his attention away from his phantom and towards the door. He needs to get out of there, he tells himself, he needs to go track down Hyde or whoever was the source of the gunfire and….. 

“Stay here… with me…. Don’t leave….,” Not-Kaz’s voice echoes through the room once more, as his free hand moves his to jaw, and gently turns Fortune’s head back to face him. Fortune nearly fights him off this time, almost managing to slip out a “Stop”, until the phantom’s hand that wasn’t holding his head in place, runs down the length of his torso and comes to a rest at the button of his trousers. And he’s a goner now… he knows he is, knows that the only way he was now getting out of this room was to let this play out and let Fearmonger’s powers end this however they best deem fit. 

It’s not much longer until he does feel the mood in the air shift, once the imaginary scales weighing his luck thud in the other direction. The phantom’s lips are at his neck, Fortune’s own hand still carded in his curls, his eyes had fallen shut by then, but he forces them to reopen and see what has caused the shift he can sense. Once he does he sees him, the third person that made up this partial love triangle that for so long he was the only one aware of. His hold on Not-Kaz tightens as Not-Zander looms closer, the glint of the large hunting knife in his hand reflecting the light off the monitors that were behind them.

There was no stopping this nightmare now that it’d finally made his shift. He knows there was no use trying to save Not-Kaz from the blade Not-Zander was gripping onto tightly, the rage in his eyes evident as he looks over at the two of them. So he closes his eyes again, right before the knife finds its mark, and keeps them shut as he grips onto Not-Kaz as the other phantom repeatedly stabs him in the back, trying his best not to listen too closely to the sickly sound of the blade coming into contact with muscle and flesh, or the muffled and blood-choked winces of pain that spill from Not-Kaz’s lips as his body slowly becomes limp in Fortune’s arms. 

When it seems like the attack is finally over, he opens his eyes again, to find Not-Zander glaring at him, his face and shirt speckled with the blood of the other phantom. 

“This will be your fault,” his voice echoes through the room, much like the other phantom’s had. And mercifully that’s all the pain this nightmare deems fit to deal him, as no sooner than both the phantoms arrived they were gone. He almost expects to still find his shirt blood soaked from Not-Kaz’s blood when he looks down to see if, after his weight leaves him, but there’s no sign of the violence that ensued, only the disheveled and unbottoned clothing that marked what happened before. 

Slipping off the desk, he tries to right himself again, tucking his mesh top back into his red trousers before zipping them back up. It’s hard not to cringe at the thought that if anyone would have walked in during any of that, likely all they would have seen was him groping himself, but he figures it’s better to think about that embarrassing aspect, instead of the much more painful side to it all. 

Once he’s put himself back together, he turns towards the monitors. Because he needs to find Hyde, and somehow get him out of his own nightmare long enough for them to find Fearmonger and put this shit to an end once and for all. It only takes him a moment for his eyes to spot Hyde out of the chaos that was ensuing on all the other monitors. His hands are stained with some kind of dark liquid, which he’s certain is blood, and he’s just as certain isn’t his- which is progress, he supposes. 

Figuring there was little else to do, but to go hunt him down, he leaves the room that housed his own nightmare behind, ready to not think about it again. Once he clicks the door shut though, and finds him back into the dimly lit hallway he quickly realizes two things- one, he’d forgotten to put his padded jacket back on. And two, he’d forgotten his gun on the desk. Quickly turning around, to head back into the room, he finds the handle frozen in place as he attempts to wiggle it. 

“Oh no… oh no, no, no….” he mumbles as he fidgets with the handle more, hoping that maybe he it was just stuck, and not locked. But of course it’s not - it was absolutely locked, because that was his luck now and would be, he reminds himself bitterly, for the rest of this damn battle he’s in. 

After one attempt of shouldering through the door, that leads him no where but yelping in pain once he comes into contact with it, he throws his hands up in surrender. He was going to be stuck with no armor and no gun, and absolutely no luck at all, and he was just going to have to damn well deal with it. 

“Hyde, if you shoot me, I’m going to kill you,” he grumbles again, as he marches in the direction he hoped the other villain was in, eyes squinting as he navigates through the dark. 

cw: a LOT of violence in this one, gendered slur, #justhydethings 

The split second that he’s distracted trying to take back over from Sebastian is apparently all Lynx needs, not to get back to her feet but to pull out a gun of her own, because he feels the bullet in his arm before he’s even processed that she’s still moving, down there, and all he can do is grit his teeth hard as it pierces his right bicep and pain burns through his arm—

What the fuck, what the fuck, holy fucking shit, what the fuck, Sebastian thinks, looking down at his arm, which feels like it’s on fucking fire, and his sleeve is soaked with blood that he can tell is his this time and not whoever is on the ground. He stumbles back a few more steps, away from her, away from the gun that she’s raising again and pointing at him—

And Hyde fires, again, this one hitting her in the wrist, and she drops the gun, and he moves to stand over her, gun aimed straight at her chest. 

     “I said stay the fuck down,” he spits, as he kicks the gun out of her reach, listening as it skitters across the floor, sliding to the other side of the... hallway— the street? His perception of things is blurring, between the nightmare and the reality, he can’t quite tell which one he’s in from one moment to the next, and—

And oh god, Sebastian thinks, looking at his own hands pointing a gun at her, his finger half-depressing the trigger already, and he steps back again, away from her, tries to drop the gun but his hands won’t let him, something is telling him to keep it, that he needs it, that things will get a lot fucking worse if he drops it, and he can’t imagine what’s worse than this, he doesn’t even know where he is, or how he got here. He’s disoriented, and he might be having a panic attack, and arm hurts so fucking bad he wants to scream, and suddenly there’s a noise, at the other end of the hall, footsteps behind him, and he wheels around to see who it is and—

Fires. Hyde fires, three more times in quick succession, blindly in the direction of the footsteps, heads a gasp that tells him at least one of them has hit its target.

And on the ground, Lynx begins to laugh.

     “I should be thanking you,” she says, and he doesn’t understand why until he looks up, squints through the darkness to make out the figure at the end of the hallway, dark costume, black greasepaint on his face, a hand over his abdomen as he falls to his knees. Fucking Mind Master. 

His own heart rate is elevated, because Sebastian’s is. His own breathing is ragged, his adrenaline spiking. None of it is good. He needs to be able to stay calm, to stay collected. But the fucking Guardian he’s reluctantly here to rescue has fallen to the ground at the other end of the hallway, and he can feel the panic attack starting to set in now, seeping through from Sebastian and into him, and he doesn’t have time for this, left arm coming up to put pressure on the bullet wound in his own arm, trying to use the pain to ground himself in the moment, to shake off Sebastian’s bullshit. 

     “He’s a tricky one,” Lynx continues. “But boy did you make quick work of him.” And Hyde turns back to her, fires one last shot in her direction, directly into her gut, before he starts down the hallway in the direction of Mind Master, who has fallen completely to the ground now.

     “Die slow, bitch,” he hisses, as he steps over her, the heel of his boot coming down on her injured wrist as he does, and then leaves her behind to get to Mind Master at the other end of the hallway. 

[jckylls]

fortunexfinder​:

cw: another flashing gif 

When he reaches the door Zander had disappeared behind, his hand pauses on its handle as he gives himself a moment to collect himself. For whatever reason, Hyde said Fearmonger’s name right before he disappeared, so the odds that who he saw wasn’t actually Zander- but some warped nightmare version of him, were incredibly high. Then again, he’s not quite sure how much more nightmarish the current version of Zander could really be….

Hoping the luck he’d managed to siphon for himself earlier that night hadn’t already been drained, he clicks open the door to quickly find himself in what appears to be some kind of mission control room. As with everywhere else in the tower, the room’s main overhead lights had been cut when the primary source of power went down. There’s a wall of monitors though, sat right in front of a child-size desk, whose screens were still illuminated. Displayed on them were shots of various security cameras situated throughout the Tower, stepping closer he could make out the fuzzy image of Hyde, seemingly wandering in circles along the same stretch of hallway, with Lynx beginning to stalk him. He could see Catalyst and Jetstream too, just heading into the building now, the last team to do so. 

Just like Black’s set up, there’s a microphone at this desk too, and he wonders briefly, if he might be able to use this room to his advantage- and warn the others somehow of the dangers only he could be able to see from his vantage point. Those thoughts are soon pushed to the side though, when he feels the presence of someone else in the room with him, standing somewhere behind him in the corners that weren’t illuminated by the blue light emitting from the monitors’ screens. 

Using his gun’s flashlight once more, he begins to scan the room behind him with it, waiting to see Zander’s face once again. But as the beam of his light falls on the figure he could feel staring at him, it’s not Zander whose form appears in front of his light- but someone else entirely. Someone who should also be on this same floor as well, but he’d been trying not to think about that fact, and instead on everything else he should be focusing on that night. 

“Kaz?” His voice cracks as he says his name. Even though Kaz was supposed to be somewhere on this floor, he knows that the figure in front of him now wasn’t actually him, no matter how much he looked like him. Not-Kaz simply smiles at him at first, a warm and knowing glint in his eyes, and he hates how his stomach flips even at the sight of this mere phantom. He stays frozen in place as Not-Kaz drawls closer, and even though this wasn’t the Kaz he knew, the body language was identical to his, enough so that he can recognize the intent in the phantom’s gaze as he continues to step closer to him. 

There’s little time to react once Not-Kaz steps within the space directly in front of him, and once he’s within reach, his lips come crashing into Fortune’s, the phantom’s hand reaching up to grasp onto the back of his neck as they meet. Even though he’s fully aware that this must be some element to the psychological attack Fearmonger had constructed- the dream before the nightmare unfolded, he can’t help but kiss the phantom back, matching the desperation in the kiss, with the own that’d been rattling inside him for weeks now. 

“I… shouldn’t….” he mumbles against Not-Kaz’s lips as he’s soon pushed back further on the desk, but does little else to stop the phantom.

“Why should you?” Kaz’s voice echoes in the room, seeming to come both from nowhere and everywhere as the phantom’s touch grows more desperate- and unbuttons the protective padding that’d covered Fortune’s chest. “Isn’t this what you wanted? ….Isn’t this what you think about when you look at your bedroom door, hoping I’ll be behind it?” 

“You’re not him…” Fortune sighs against his lips, letting Not-Kaz slip off his jacket, leaving him in his mesh top. And he can feel his luck draining as the phantom’s lips continue to move against his, which he knows has to be the point of all of this- to drain his luck during the dream half so that when the nightmare comes, he has nothing to protect himself from it. The irony that this nightmare is using Kaz as a method of draining his luck, isn’t missed by him either- but the damn thing smells and feels so much like him, he can’t find the strength to push it off. “This isn’t real…” he breathes weakly, his voice pleading as his hand slips into the head of curls that’d haunted him long before he stepped into the Tower. 

“Was it ever real?” 

cn: gunshots, broken bone, stabbing, normal Hyde shit, flashing gif 

     “There’s no point in hiding, I know you’re there,” the voice of the figure around the corner calls, and Hyde recognizes the voice, the accent, even if it’s been probably two years, maybe more, since he’d heard Lynx’s voice. So not one of the zombie villains they’re supposed to be herding back to Catalyst’s little house of death across the street, which means he doesn’t need stun ammo to deal with her. 

He slips a hand into one of his pockets, pulls out a clip of actual ammo he’d slipped in there, and makes quick work of swapping it out, and he has half a thought to put the stun ammo somewhere he can reach it quickly in case. he does come across Fearmonger, but honestly, he can’t be fucked to think that far ahead, or care that much what happens to a corpse from the 1950s who is making him live out an actual waking nightmare. 

     “Who is that, Hyde?” Lynx calls, and he steadies himself, back pressed against the brick of the building between them, keeping close to it until the moment he’s ready to turn and shoot. The mask will stop him aiming for the head, but Lynx is fast, and agile, and he needs to keep his distance if he’s going to stand a chance, get her down a leg or two before he closes range.

     “What,” he calls back. “You miss me that much?” 

And before she has a chance to respond, he leans around the corner again, fires two shots: the first goes wide, shattering a window in the wall behind her; the second is set to hit her left hip dead on, but she darts out of the way a split second before it hits her, enhanced senses cluing her in not a moment too soon. But he knew she would—knew if the first missed her to the left, when she dodged she’d dodge right, and that’s where the third shot comes in, just far enough to the right to intercept her mid-movement, straight through the right knee, and the sound she makes as she falls is furious, raw emotion and rage.

He slips Zenith’s blade from its sheath at his thigh as he sets off at a run to close the distance between himself and Lynx before she can get back up, and he slips the blade into her shoulder as he grabs her, hauls her back to her feet.

     “When I put you down, stay down,” he says, through gritted teeth from behind her. “Or I make this much worse than it needs to be. Which way is Fearmonger?”

     “It won’t help you if I tell you,” she says, and there’s a laugh in her voice even as it’s tight with pain. “The nightmare will only get worse the closer you get.”

He twists the blade slightly, and she gasps out a ragged breath. But he doesn’t think he’s getting any more from her than that, so he withdraws the blade and pushes her back to the ground, wiping her blood off the blade, looking down to make sure it’s clean—

And there’s blood on his hands. Lynx’s blood.

      “No,” he says. “Come on, not now, not fucking now...” 

His hand curls into a fist and he hits it against his thigh three, four times, trying to ground himself, trying to will away the next piece of the memory, trying to cut it off before the shift happens—

      “What the fuck,” Sebastian breathes out, as he takes stock of the world materializing around him, of the feeling of blood, sticky on his hands, drops the blade to the ground with a piercing clang. His hands are shaking, as he looks at the masked figure on the ground, gasping in pain and bleeding, her lower leg bending at a queasy angle. He tries to blink the image away. It’s a bad dream, it has to be a bad dream—

     “Not fucking now,” Hyde spits, as he flickers back into control, wiping the blood off his hands and stumbling back a few steps from Lynx, scrambling to pick the blade back up as he does.