Post by Non Compos Mentis on Jun 5, 2017 18:47:04 GMT -5
And so goes the gospel according to Non Compos Mentis... at least that's what he'd have everyone believe.
That the righteous minority had been proven worthy with a single win against all the odds. It didn't matter how many of his opponents had surmounted insurmountable odds of their own. It didn't matter that he'd lost the un-losable match to Gabriel just weeks before. It didn't even matter that he'd forged alliances and broken them in with the ease of snuffling out a candle.
All that mattered were his odds, his victory, his real allies and the power he now controlled.
He had them all fooled by the pageantry of the Last Chance Battle Royal, the miracle-come-true that he could spin in whichever way he pleased. With the story fresh in their addled minds he could mould his flock and shape them into his desired form of frenzy.
”One more,” he proclaimed as the rasp of his palm across my cheek a week earlier felt fresh once again, ”and everything they hold dear will be within arms reach.”
The entire building seemed to be full to the filthy brim with kool-aid drinking, false idol worshipping ne'er-do-wells. St Jude's Shelter had become host to it's very own convention of insane desperation and I had an access-all-areas pass... whether I wanted it or not.
Mentis sat in all his demented pomp and livery; the black of his soul cloaked him from head to toe, the crimson trim oddly complemented him as if it knew his skin all too well, the paint glistened like oily ichor from his creepily solemn face. “I know I've failed you before, even when every last one of you turned out in Greenville to help me. I've made mistakes, times have been tough for us all, but I hope I have regained some of your faith.”
Like shades from the twilit corners of the room, suddenly his lieutenants were next to him, comforting his counterfeit melancholia. Tor, the wordless woman whose skin was a patchwork quilt of abuse, stroked his arm tenderly and my fingertips cried out in longing as they remembered the very feeling oh so long since gone. At knelt by his side, bowing in submission to his king, was the gangly Pike. “You never lost it, Sir. We're all by your side... most of us, anyway.”
I scoffed, perched on the edge of a table some way to the side of Mentis and his cohort of admirers. The mess hall was sweltering with the body heat of at least a hundred hobo's again, but someone they managed to bunch up even more to avoid the tainted ex lover of their leader. I didn't care. Let them have their petty distance, at least I avoided their stench.
Pike's crow-eyes regarded me with the highest suspicion as I struggled to take his blind devotion seriously. How could I? Someone so foolishly manipulated deserved the mockery. Mentis, for a was sure there wasn't much of Sean left to see me with his own eyes, eyed me with something closer to frustration and his slicked lips confirmed it. “Some of us still need some convincing, apparently. A win against every last man PCW could muster isn't enough? I thought a little time would bring you round, Ezra, yet still nothing but disdain.”
“You know what I think about this place, about what you're doing.” I'd made no secret about it. Every communion between the peers of the group, every gathering I'd been partial to, I'd jabbed at the obvious deceit clouding their minds. Too weak to run, too isolated to find any help, it was all I had to sow the seeds of distrust. Each time, though, I was pushed further from the group.... further from my lover and captor.
I didn't give a damn that he'd managed to beat Eira; another Guardian with The Order who had managed to keep her position in spite of so much strife caused. I didn't care that he'd overcome Whitey Ford; whose drunken violence was a reminder of so much suffering inflicted to so many. I didn't even care that he'd struck down the powers of magic and trickery of men like Nathan Saniti; a show of sorcery that spat in the face of any reasonable God.
I cared that after all of it, after he managed to claw himself in the final of the tournament by the very last thread available to him, he thought himself a leader among men. No man sat on a makeshift throne of cinder blocks, moth-eaten blankets and garbage-juice soaked newspaper and ordered around a bunch of shoddy vagrants and called him king of a damn thing.
“We're not the barbarians you think we are, Ezra, and I'm not just a psychopath in face paint. I've given these people a chance at redemption in their lives, I can give you the same if you just let me.” The entire mess hall rippled with regurgitated approval and I took a look around at all the sullen, sunken faces.
I wasn't one of those people. After all I'd been through I still couldn't take that comparison. My ribs poked from my skin, my face passed halfway between life and death daily, all the strength I'd once had had been sapped from my muscles. I was nothing but still more than what else inhabited that hall. “What redemption can you possibly give me? Are you going to give me back my place in The Order? Are you going to give me back my body or let me continue to starve? I don't just need some soup and a bed. I don't need to take out my anger at being a failure on anyone. I'm not just some hobo you can manipulate with promises of vengeance and salvation.”
Mentis' head seemed to hold in place for far too long, staring with vividly white eyes against the blackness all around them. For a moment in them, I thought I could see Sean's; with compassion and not this sickened obsession. Then he was gone. Non Compos Mentis was there in his place and his head drooped low between his knees. “Do you really think you're that much better than anyone else in this room? Do you, Ezra?”
The room had fallen silent and all eyes turned to face me. And in their gaze I saw myself through the eyes of a hundred cold, hungry, desperate homeless men and women. Suddenly, Mentis was off his throne and upon me, his vicious hands losing whatever patience they had and gripping my sweatshirt around the neck. “Look at yourself and fucking answer me!”
“Fuck you! Yes, I'm better! I'm better than all of them! I was raised all my life to be a warrior, to be a light in the dark when you were lost.” I found what little strength I had and threw his hands off me. Mentis looked shocked for a moment but steeled himself with his psychotic mania. Beneath it all I knew it was a different entity from the Seeker I'd known, a more sinister but weaker presence. “You were supposed to be able to fight even the darkest forces out there but you can't even fight what's in your own head!”
Anger simmered to the surface until Non Compos Mentis remembered where he was and the person he was supposed to be. He wasn't the paranoid schizophrenic who'd lost him mind and manipulated a group of pathetic mercenaries to join his cause. He wasn't the failed Seeker, tossed from The Order like trash. He was the one who had overcome the odds of the Last Chance Battle Royal. He was the one who promised to claim the great prize of the Icemann Invitational over the young pretenders.
“We were all supposed to be things, Ezra. I was supposed to be an accountant, following my controlling father into the family business. A fucking accountant!” The malevolent figure loomed in front of me, the most un-accountant-like figure I could have imagined. Mad, unhinged and shrouded in unearthly darkness. All of it a product of the ghosts in his mind. “That thing inside my head? Why would I fight it? It set me free.”
Nothing mattered anymore, whether it killed me or not I couldn't exist in the same space as this creature. What bond we'd held, the sacred connection between Seeker and Guardian, was all but dead. “Call it whatever you want. I can't sit here and watch you tear apart everything by being a manipulative monster. You're wasting yourself and you're dragging each and every one of these bastards along with you on some fucked up mission to find your demented white whale!”
A glance around the room revealed the entire hobo horde dumbfounded by the comment of an aquatic albino mammal. I gasped in exasperation, in one last huff of disappointment. “It's a waste of breath, isn't it? You've never even read Moby Dick, have you? Can you people even read at all?”
Mentis merely slumped backwards into his makeshift throne and made as if I was worthless to him. The door was to be opened for me, the malnourished legs beneath me allowed to walk out into the world. All it would take would be a single word.
What came was not the voice of Non Compos Mentis, though. It was a thicker, southern twang and unnatural words that accompanied it that filled the air.
“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die; to sleep.”
Pike found himself standing up by Mentis' side, Hamlet's words filling his mouth in perfect order. What's more, it was no moment of idiot savant genius. The wildman knew the soliloquy from one of Shakespeare's greatest creations and his eyes told me he knew far more than I'd ever expected of him.
“I ain't ever read Moby Dick, boy, but I know something about Shakespeare. I know all my life I've been taking them slings and arrows, I've been suffering and there ain't been a damn thing noble about it.” From his position next to his king, Pike took a step forward, whatever past he had compelling him to move forward, whoever had plucked him from that past giving him the confidence to do so. “And then a guy comes along. Maybe he's a bit wild, maybe he made a few mistakes, but that man gave me a fuckin' reason to stand up take arms against my troubles!”
It was my turn to be dumbstruck. In but a minute Pike had proved my air of superiority to be completely false. He'd justified every last word Mentis had said and placed me as the face of their repression. I looked first at Pike and then to Mentis who shook his head in deep disapproval.
“Ezra, what have you become? You're right; you were a warrior, you fought in The Order with so much passion and you gave that passion to me. But this...” His eyes probed my body but couldn't stay fixed upon me for more than a moment. “This is not the passionate, fierce, defiant man I fell in love with. You have became so very... disappointing.”
“You're just like everyone else. You look down on me, on us, and think you're so much better. Well you aren't. Look at yourself!” Before I'd felt anger at him, for keeping me weak and taking me away from everything I'd loved. Now I felt the shame of my form and shrunk even more from his sight. “You're pathetic! You're weak! You're broken! But I still cared for you. I nursed you back from the edge when The Order left you for dead. I washed you, clothed you, fed you even when the look in your eyes was nothing but anger! When I left PCW with a broken neck I had to watch as thousands, millions of people forgot about me in an instant!”
“They replaced me with false idols to their own superficial needs. People like Kyle Shane whose brash, obnoxious behaviour was so easy to turn on, and a peppy fan girl like Alexandra Tamora who they could all support like a good old-fashioned underdog.” The disappointment in his voice faded and was replaced by fury and spite. He'd devoted so much and been shown so little, the rage was what drove this part of Non Compos Mentis forward but even Sean would have been forgiven for wanting payback. “Don't you think I've seen it before? Before Shane there was always a Justin Michaels, a Mikey Wright, an Ace Anderson. Before Tamora there was always a Nacho Grande, a Justin Kaard, a Pegasus. I outlasted EVERY single one!”
“Fickle to the core, every last one of those ignorant fans. And you would cast me aside, cast us all aside, just like them? When we're so close to making a difference and getting a pound of flesh from those who have wronged us? Tamora and Shane are all that stand in the way and I've watched their ilk come and go for over a decade.” Mentis' entire body was seething now, the anger coursing through his veins and fuelling him from within. Then more than ever he seemed to be the puppet of whatever demons haunted his psyche.
I would choose to take the evils of his treatment as long as I could, to suffer those slings and arrows of whatever outrageous fortune he could present. Dead or alive, I couldn't fight but I would not be complicit in this monster's plans. “I can't be part of this, whatever it is you believe you're doing here. You have them all so wrapped up in your agenda that they can't see they're being used. I want to see what you used to be, I want to know the man I love is still behind all that paint... but he's gone, and I can't stand to be here anymore. I'm sorry.”
“Not as sorry as I am. Pike... grab him.” In the blink of an eye, the stilted form of Mentis' right hand man took both my arms and held he tight. I thrashed as hard as I could but the energy to break his grip just wasn't there.
“What're you... get the fuck off me!” Mentis glared at me and I knew it was helpless, such was the darkness in those eyes. The room was pulsing with the rampant calls of hobos who wanted blood. With nothing else left, I pleaded. “Sean, stop him!”
But there was no Sean. Only Mentis and the evil that lay within.
He climbed to his feet and stomped a path straight to me, grasping my face in his hand so that I was forced to watch him speak. I trembled in fear as the horde closed in around me and my love, the one person I should have been able to trust, barked out my fate. “I won't let you disappoint me like every one of those filthy fans, Ezra. I won't let you walk away from me and replace me with a hollow plastic idol for you to bow down before. You will watch as I take out every agonising moment of the last year on PCW and drag it into the dirt.”
“Put him in the cooler, bar the door. Leave men with him while we're away. We'll make him see the truth, our truth... there's nothing noble in suffering in silence. Everyone dies, so die taking something from the bastards!”
And so they took me, locked me away in the darkness where only the sprites and devils of your own mind keep you company. Before long I began to know what it felt like, before long I began to know how easily the shadows can reign when there is no light to be found. Sean was gone. Perhaps Ezra would join him while the rest waited in the dark.
That the righteous minority had been proven worthy with a single win against all the odds. It didn't matter how many of his opponents had surmounted insurmountable odds of their own. It didn't matter that he'd lost the un-losable match to Gabriel just weeks before. It didn't even matter that he'd forged alliances and broken them in with the ease of snuffling out a candle.
All that mattered were his odds, his victory, his real allies and the power he now controlled.
He had them all fooled by the pageantry of the Last Chance Battle Royal, the miracle-come-true that he could spin in whichever way he pleased. With the story fresh in their addled minds he could mould his flock and shape them into his desired form of frenzy.
”One more,” he proclaimed as the rasp of his palm across my cheek a week earlier felt fresh once again, ”and everything they hold dear will be within arms reach.”
The entire building seemed to be full to the filthy brim with kool-aid drinking, false idol worshipping ne'er-do-wells. St Jude's Shelter had become host to it's very own convention of insane desperation and I had an access-all-areas pass... whether I wanted it or not.
Mentis sat in all his demented pomp and livery; the black of his soul cloaked him from head to toe, the crimson trim oddly complemented him as if it knew his skin all too well, the paint glistened like oily ichor from his creepily solemn face. “I know I've failed you before, even when every last one of you turned out in Greenville to help me. I've made mistakes, times have been tough for us all, but I hope I have regained some of your faith.”
Like shades from the twilit corners of the room, suddenly his lieutenants were next to him, comforting his counterfeit melancholia. Tor, the wordless woman whose skin was a patchwork quilt of abuse, stroked his arm tenderly and my fingertips cried out in longing as they remembered the very feeling oh so long since gone. At knelt by his side, bowing in submission to his king, was the gangly Pike. “You never lost it, Sir. We're all by your side... most of us, anyway.”
I scoffed, perched on the edge of a table some way to the side of Mentis and his cohort of admirers. The mess hall was sweltering with the body heat of at least a hundred hobo's again, but someone they managed to bunch up even more to avoid the tainted ex lover of their leader. I didn't care. Let them have their petty distance, at least I avoided their stench.
Pike's crow-eyes regarded me with the highest suspicion as I struggled to take his blind devotion seriously. How could I? Someone so foolishly manipulated deserved the mockery. Mentis, for a was sure there wasn't much of Sean left to see me with his own eyes, eyed me with something closer to frustration and his slicked lips confirmed it. “Some of us still need some convincing, apparently. A win against every last man PCW could muster isn't enough? I thought a little time would bring you round, Ezra, yet still nothing but disdain.”
“You know what I think about this place, about what you're doing.” I'd made no secret about it. Every communion between the peers of the group, every gathering I'd been partial to, I'd jabbed at the obvious deceit clouding their minds. Too weak to run, too isolated to find any help, it was all I had to sow the seeds of distrust. Each time, though, I was pushed further from the group.... further from my lover and captor.
I didn't give a damn that he'd managed to beat Eira; another Guardian with The Order who had managed to keep her position in spite of so much strife caused. I didn't care that he'd overcome Whitey Ford; whose drunken violence was a reminder of so much suffering inflicted to so many. I didn't even care that he'd struck down the powers of magic and trickery of men like Nathan Saniti; a show of sorcery that spat in the face of any reasonable God.
I cared that after all of it, after he managed to claw himself in the final of the tournament by the very last thread available to him, he thought himself a leader among men. No man sat on a makeshift throne of cinder blocks, moth-eaten blankets and garbage-juice soaked newspaper and ordered around a bunch of shoddy vagrants and called him king of a damn thing.
“We're not the barbarians you think we are, Ezra, and I'm not just a psychopath in face paint. I've given these people a chance at redemption in their lives, I can give you the same if you just let me.” The entire mess hall rippled with regurgitated approval and I took a look around at all the sullen, sunken faces.
I wasn't one of those people. After all I'd been through I still couldn't take that comparison. My ribs poked from my skin, my face passed halfway between life and death daily, all the strength I'd once had had been sapped from my muscles. I was nothing but still more than what else inhabited that hall. “What redemption can you possibly give me? Are you going to give me back my place in The Order? Are you going to give me back my body or let me continue to starve? I don't just need some soup and a bed. I don't need to take out my anger at being a failure on anyone. I'm not just some hobo you can manipulate with promises of vengeance and salvation.”
Mentis' head seemed to hold in place for far too long, staring with vividly white eyes against the blackness all around them. For a moment in them, I thought I could see Sean's; with compassion and not this sickened obsession. Then he was gone. Non Compos Mentis was there in his place and his head drooped low between his knees. “Do you really think you're that much better than anyone else in this room? Do you, Ezra?”
The room had fallen silent and all eyes turned to face me. And in their gaze I saw myself through the eyes of a hundred cold, hungry, desperate homeless men and women. Suddenly, Mentis was off his throne and upon me, his vicious hands losing whatever patience they had and gripping my sweatshirt around the neck. “Look at yourself and fucking answer me!”
“Fuck you! Yes, I'm better! I'm better than all of them! I was raised all my life to be a warrior, to be a light in the dark when you were lost.” I found what little strength I had and threw his hands off me. Mentis looked shocked for a moment but steeled himself with his psychotic mania. Beneath it all I knew it was a different entity from the Seeker I'd known, a more sinister but weaker presence. “You were supposed to be able to fight even the darkest forces out there but you can't even fight what's in your own head!”
Anger simmered to the surface until Non Compos Mentis remembered where he was and the person he was supposed to be. He wasn't the paranoid schizophrenic who'd lost him mind and manipulated a group of pathetic mercenaries to join his cause. He wasn't the failed Seeker, tossed from The Order like trash. He was the one who had overcome the odds of the Last Chance Battle Royal. He was the one who promised to claim the great prize of the Icemann Invitational over the young pretenders.
“We were all supposed to be things, Ezra. I was supposed to be an accountant, following my controlling father into the family business. A fucking accountant!” The malevolent figure loomed in front of me, the most un-accountant-like figure I could have imagined. Mad, unhinged and shrouded in unearthly darkness. All of it a product of the ghosts in his mind. “That thing inside my head? Why would I fight it? It set me free.”
Nothing mattered anymore, whether it killed me or not I couldn't exist in the same space as this creature. What bond we'd held, the sacred connection between Seeker and Guardian, was all but dead. “Call it whatever you want. I can't sit here and watch you tear apart everything by being a manipulative monster. You're wasting yourself and you're dragging each and every one of these bastards along with you on some fucked up mission to find your demented white whale!”
A glance around the room revealed the entire hobo horde dumbfounded by the comment of an aquatic albino mammal. I gasped in exasperation, in one last huff of disappointment. “It's a waste of breath, isn't it? You've never even read Moby Dick, have you? Can you people even read at all?”
Mentis merely slumped backwards into his makeshift throne and made as if I was worthless to him. The door was to be opened for me, the malnourished legs beneath me allowed to walk out into the world. All it would take would be a single word.
What came was not the voice of Non Compos Mentis, though. It was a thicker, southern twang and unnatural words that accompanied it that filled the air.
“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die; to sleep.”
Pike found himself standing up by Mentis' side, Hamlet's words filling his mouth in perfect order. What's more, it was no moment of idiot savant genius. The wildman knew the soliloquy from one of Shakespeare's greatest creations and his eyes told me he knew far more than I'd ever expected of him.
“I ain't ever read Moby Dick, boy, but I know something about Shakespeare. I know all my life I've been taking them slings and arrows, I've been suffering and there ain't been a damn thing noble about it.” From his position next to his king, Pike took a step forward, whatever past he had compelling him to move forward, whoever had plucked him from that past giving him the confidence to do so. “And then a guy comes along. Maybe he's a bit wild, maybe he made a few mistakes, but that man gave me a fuckin' reason to stand up take arms against my troubles!”
It was my turn to be dumbstruck. In but a minute Pike had proved my air of superiority to be completely false. He'd justified every last word Mentis had said and placed me as the face of their repression. I looked first at Pike and then to Mentis who shook his head in deep disapproval.
“Ezra, what have you become? You're right; you were a warrior, you fought in The Order with so much passion and you gave that passion to me. But this...” His eyes probed my body but couldn't stay fixed upon me for more than a moment. “This is not the passionate, fierce, defiant man I fell in love with. You have became so very... disappointing.”
“You're just like everyone else. You look down on me, on us, and think you're so much better. Well you aren't. Look at yourself!” Before I'd felt anger at him, for keeping me weak and taking me away from everything I'd loved. Now I felt the shame of my form and shrunk even more from his sight. “You're pathetic! You're weak! You're broken! But I still cared for you. I nursed you back from the edge when The Order left you for dead. I washed you, clothed you, fed you even when the look in your eyes was nothing but anger! When I left PCW with a broken neck I had to watch as thousands, millions of people forgot about me in an instant!”
“They replaced me with false idols to their own superficial needs. People like Kyle Shane whose brash, obnoxious behaviour was so easy to turn on, and a peppy fan girl like Alexandra Tamora who they could all support like a good old-fashioned underdog.” The disappointment in his voice faded and was replaced by fury and spite. He'd devoted so much and been shown so little, the rage was what drove this part of Non Compos Mentis forward but even Sean would have been forgiven for wanting payback. “Don't you think I've seen it before? Before Shane there was always a Justin Michaels, a Mikey Wright, an Ace Anderson. Before Tamora there was always a Nacho Grande, a Justin Kaard, a Pegasus. I outlasted EVERY single one!”
“Fickle to the core, every last one of those ignorant fans. And you would cast me aside, cast us all aside, just like them? When we're so close to making a difference and getting a pound of flesh from those who have wronged us? Tamora and Shane are all that stand in the way and I've watched their ilk come and go for over a decade.” Mentis' entire body was seething now, the anger coursing through his veins and fuelling him from within. Then more than ever he seemed to be the puppet of whatever demons haunted his psyche.
I would choose to take the evils of his treatment as long as I could, to suffer those slings and arrows of whatever outrageous fortune he could present. Dead or alive, I couldn't fight but I would not be complicit in this monster's plans. “I can't be part of this, whatever it is you believe you're doing here. You have them all so wrapped up in your agenda that they can't see they're being used. I want to see what you used to be, I want to know the man I love is still behind all that paint... but he's gone, and I can't stand to be here anymore. I'm sorry.”
“Not as sorry as I am. Pike... grab him.” In the blink of an eye, the stilted form of Mentis' right hand man took both my arms and held he tight. I thrashed as hard as I could but the energy to break his grip just wasn't there.
“What're you... get the fuck off me!” Mentis glared at me and I knew it was helpless, such was the darkness in those eyes. The room was pulsing with the rampant calls of hobos who wanted blood. With nothing else left, I pleaded. “Sean, stop him!”
But there was no Sean. Only Mentis and the evil that lay within.
He climbed to his feet and stomped a path straight to me, grasping my face in his hand so that I was forced to watch him speak. I trembled in fear as the horde closed in around me and my love, the one person I should have been able to trust, barked out my fate. “I won't let you disappoint me like every one of those filthy fans, Ezra. I won't let you walk away from me and replace me with a hollow plastic idol for you to bow down before. You will watch as I take out every agonising moment of the last year on PCW and drag it into the dirt.”
“Put him in the cooler, bar the door. Leave men with him while we're away. We'll make him see the truth, our truth... there's nothing noble in suffering in silence. Everyone dies, so die taking something from the bastards!”
And so they took me, locked me away in the darkness where only the sprites and devils of your own mind keep you company. Before long I began to know what it felt like, before long I began to know how easily the shadows can reign when there is no light to be found. Sean was gone. Perhaps Ezra would join him while the rest waited in the dark.
