cacophonish | APOCALYPSE HOW: IC INBOX

"Talk? Who's talking?" Now it's Jeff's turn to get fidgety. He fixes Malcolm with a look for a moment, grimaces, and looks down at his coffee. Suddenly, he's not really in the mood for pie.

"It's bullshit."

Malcolm watches him carefully.

“That’s a relief,” he says, taking that at face value for the moment. “How often are you using it?”

"It doesn't matter." Not exactly a promising answer. But, Jeff adds vehemently, "I'm still me."

“Nobody is disputing that. You’re one of my favourite people, as a matter of fact.”

He really is. Up there in Malcolm’s care with his roommates. With Neal.

“But that’s why I’m concerned. I’m concerned about how long you can hold on to you.”

"I'm fine. I can hold on. This isn't--" He stops himself, seeming to debate if he wants to continue where that sentence was going.

Jeff takes a breath. Tries again.

"This isn't the... first time something's tried to take me. And I managed to hold onto myself back home." Sort of. Barely. Not really. "I can still do it."

If anything, he's got an advantage, right?

“What do you mean?” Malcolm asks, intrigued. He leans forward. “What happened?” he asks quietly.

Jeff doesn't answer at first. He just stares at his coffee, expression going a bit distant. When he does speak up, his voice is soft, and not entirely certain. "Something heard my music. It... it found me, and..."

How can he describe possession to somebody who comes from a world that doesn't have magic? 'Demon' is such a clumsy, inaccurate word, and it only conjures up images of evil and little girls spewing split pea soup all over priests. Ziggy isn't-- wasn't-- evil. It wasn't good, either. It just was. It was so wholly divorced from humanity and the physical world that he can't find any appropriate words for it.

Ziggy was an abstraction, driven insane by getting trapped in a plane of existence where it didn't belong.

Jeff puts two fingers to his temple, less pointing, more mimicking a gun.

"Doesn't matter. It's gone now."

Edited 2022-02-03 17:57 (UTC)

“Something lived inside your head?” Malcolm hazards. “And did it feel the same as this feels when you use your power?” he asks.

Jeff tilts his head to one side and shrugs a shoulder-- which is to say: yeah, that's as much as a confirmation as he's willing to give, at the moment.

But when it comes to how it feels...

"No," he admits. "Nothing about magic feels the same here. I mean, it's all different, on this level that... I dunno how to explain it to you. Or... or anyone."

Maybe Abby. Maybe. But she doesn't seem as gung ho about being Gifted as him, so... Would she even get it?

He tries again. "If something's wrong with magic, then something's wrong with me. I don't get why you can't-- nobody fucking understands that it's me."

“No, I understand intimately how much your entire identity can be formed around something that you can do,” Malcolm tells him. “But this is going to literally consume you, and you can’t possibly want that either.”

"It's not something I can do, it's-- it's--" He slaps a hand on his heart, trying to indicate something deeper. "It's like a fucking light in my soul. And everyone here thinks I can just snuff it out and, what, be fine?"

This is what he wants to say: Do you know what it's like, to be noticed by something so strange and powerful. To be seen and heard and loved by it.

It's on the tip of his tongue: I should've let it consume me the first time.

What he means is: I'd die happy if it meant sharing my music with the world.

And then what he says, eyes going down as he slumps his cheek in his hand, his voice flat, like he's just reciting what a teacher wants to hear:

"No, of course I don't want that either."

Edited 2022-02-03 19:08 (UTC)

Malcolm's gaze in analytical.

"You're not sure you don't."

It's not a question; it's like he's reading words off a page.

"You feel like... you either don't know who you are or you don't like who you are and being subsumed into something else... that doesn't scare you much."

Has he ever been seen like this before? By another person, that is. Ziggy saw him, sure, because he could never escape its gaze. But his family, his friends... He knew how to hide from them, or drive them away, or let any love they felt atrophy from his own neglect.

That was Jeff back home: the rock star, the diva, the narcissistic junkie who couldn't give a shit about anyone but himself. It was a good, dependable mask, really. He'd drive away the ones who cared enough to look past it, and then it was just him and Ziggy.

Malcolm cuts right through all his dishonesty, and it takes the wind out of his sails. Jeff won't outright confirm the truth, but he may as well when he asks, his voice going a bit small: "Would that really be so bad?"

"For us, the people that love you? Yeah. Obviously. We'd lose you. For you? Only you know the answer to that," Malcolm tells him. "You're looking for a permanent escape like the temporary ones you find in the drugs and the music. I don't know if an Entity can give you that. Even if it can, I don't know whether that's worth more to you than we are."

He doesn't know what to say. He doesn't know what to think, really, because everything's so confusing. It's always confusing. Malcolm's right, he knows, on some level. But it leaves him in a pretty fucked up position, right? Snuff out the light in his spirit, or... break his friends' hearts.

Of course Jeff doesn't want to hurt them. But he can't live with himself if he turns his back on the Gift, either.

It's not fair. None of this shit is fair.

"You guys shouldn't, you know. You shouldn't love me."

All he does is hurt people. Better to cut their losses now, because even if he tries to course correct, he'll still fuck up. He knows it. There's nothing in him worth loving.

Edited 2022-02-03 19:59 (UTC)

"Well, we do. Can't change that." Malcolm considers him for a moment. "Does music still feel good if you play it without... doing the magic? The Gift isn't your only gift," he points out reasonably.

"I..."

He scrubs at his eyes, sniffs, and doesn't really know what to say.

"I can play without doing any magic, if that's what you're wondering." And it's... fine, as long as he sticks to busking and doesn't even attempt to get a foothold in the local music scene, such as it is. "But it's not... it's not something I can just separate. Music's how I communicate with it. It's always... there, when I perform."

Even if he doesn't cast anything at all, he can feel the Gift-- or whatever's replaced it here (the Cheshire Smile...), humming in tune with every melody. The temptation won't stop, and he knows he'll never be strong enough to resist it, and that's if he wants to resist it at all.

“Do you feel the Entity, even when you’re not performing?” Malcolm asks curiously.

He doesn't know if he felt it when he first arrived. Can't remember, really, if he ever lived a day in Gloucester without the sense of something twisting and tugging at him. He's pretty sure it's always been there.

Doesn't matter, really. He's been feeding it for so long, so steadily, that it's always there, in some capacity. Loudest and hungriest when he performs, but it's not like it goes away in in those moments where he's not singing or strumming away at his guitar. And it's always so hungry. His little pranks hardly seem to satisfy it anymore.

Jeff doesn't speak up, but he nods, not meeting Malcolm's eyes.

Edited 2022-02-04 17:11 (UTC)

"How do you go about... not succumbing to it? You said you knew how," Malcolm points out.

He blinks. "I dunno, there's no strategy, man, I just don't-- I don't... go as far as... it wants me to."

Though it's getting harder, for sure, to hold back from really doing damage to people. But at least for now, Jeff's inherent soft-hearted nature is holding the worst at bay.

"You don't think it can... nickel and dime you to death, as it were?" Malcolm asks.

He rubs the side of his neck and looks up at Malcolm, clearly a little confused. "What do you mean?"

Edited 2022-02-05 01:30 (UTC)

"I mean... are you sure that every time you feed it a little bit you're not just giving yourself to it... more slowly but just as completely?" he clarifies.

"Oh."

He hadn't given that much thought yet. Maybe he's considered it at some point, the whole possibility of death by a thousand cuts, but as with anything that gets too real for comfort, he promptly pushed it aside.

"I guess... maybe. It might. I don't know."

Though it still loops back to the problem at the root of this: Jeff doesn't really know if he'd rather die than give up this part of himself.

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