Post by Non Compos Mentis on Apr 5, 2014 15:55:05 GMT -5
He had need idea quite how long he had walked, only that he had been at least two sunrises since he had left the ramshackle town he had once called home. Buffalo was getting warmer but the nights had still been harsh and this night especially felt like a throwback to winter instead of the promising spring.
Through the city of growing dereliction Non Compos Mentis had stumbled with no aim or purpose. He could have bought a hotel room in some squalid corner of town but he continued on his shambling odyssey toward nothing. Finally, on what was the third (or perhaps fourth or fifth) night he found an unexplained direction to his wanderings.
Mentis found himself in one of the few verdant patches of green in the city, an oasis in the centre of a cement desert. Delaware Park, most likely filled with any number of desperate souls at this time of night too. He was sure he would feel right at home alongside them. He had been to the park only a handful of times in the past and only one memory of the place came to him now, one place that he would feel safe and at peace. A little walk (which didn’t bother him, not after an untold time on his feet already) into the oasis would bring him to a small bridge that extended over Hoyt Lake. There he would look out over the water and let the tranquil lapping sounds take his mind away.
Yet as he approached the bridge, with its three gentle arches barely visible in the moonlight, he noticed he would not be alone. A figure stood looking out over the lake idly, taking in the calming ebb and flow themselves perhaps, and seemed comfortable enough to stay a while. On any other night it would have discouraged Mentis from making his way there, but tonight it didn’t and he made his way closer.
At some point in that short walk the knowledge entered his mind that he knew who the figure was, occupying his chosen spot for contemplation. While he could not see her face it was a pure certainty that she was the woman who had followed him, the ghost that had followed him, for so very long. Why didn’t he turn away now? He had nothing left. No place to call home, no people to call friends, no cause but one hundreds of miles and several days away in Greenville. So he went to her, up the road and onto the bridge.
“It’s nice to see you again, Sean.” Her voice, unhindered in the stillness of the air, was unmistakable. The words betrayed their caring tones and stopped him dead in his tracks. It was a name that struck deep, but it wasn’t his.
“That’s not my name.” Mentis grunted, emitting a puff of white mist as he did. The cold night air choked his senses with its icy tendrils but he was focused more than enough on the woman in front of him.
“But it was once, and will be again.” She turned to him then, and even in the chilled depth of night, in this depressing place, her beauty shone like a light.
He had to squint as though trying to make out a fuzzy image, but instead he was trying to trick his own mind into giving up its trick. She was exactly as he remembered, her auburn hair hanging to her shoulders, framing her slightly angular features and startling eyes. The image of her was so familiar he needed to ask, as he had thought every time he had seen her before, “Are you real?”
Rebekah gave a shy smile and looked to the ground for a moment. In that second there was only the light shifting sound of water, then she looked up with a vague sadness in her those emerald eyes. “You can’t tell anymore, can you? Everything seems real, but you can’t trust that the ground won’t disappear beneath your feet one day.”
“You didn’t answer my question.” Mentis asked, looking around nervously at his surroundings to see if anyone was overhearing their conversation, or perhaps his conversation with himself if his suspicions proved correct.
“I’m as real as you need me to be. If you won’t listen to me and walk away deluding yourself, then I might as well be one of your hallucinations. But if you actually listen, if you change because of it, then I’m as real as you are.” Keeping that smile she turned back to the water and rested her soft hands on the cool stone of the bridge.
He joined her there, feeling the cold chill all the way up his arms and down his spine. Part of him wondered why he was talking with this woman, why when she had haunted him with her presence and been part of the reason he had lost his throne as the Mad King of the Hobos. Why when she would not speak to him properly. “That’s still not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’ll get.” Rebekah replied, and her demeanour was one of a woman who had come her for a different cause than the one he was pursuing.
Frustrated, Mentis took one of his scarred hands and reached out to take hold of her arm. If she wouldn’t answer he would take the answer for himself. He grasped for her arm, covered in a coat the colour of moss, and found this his hand stopped short. Nothing held him, nothing physical had stopped him, but he simply could not reach further. And in her eyes he saw a knowing look, almost satisfied. “I can’t… what are you doing?”
“Something inside you won’t let you touch me, not after the last time you tried.” Memories of the last day he had touched her came flooding back into his mind. The day he left her life and the place he had called home, he had taken her with all his repugnant strength and attempted to assault her in the most horrific of ways. He had tried, and she had fought back. “The day you became Non Compos Mentis you also became afraid of me. You may not admit it, you may not even understand it, but that day you lost control of me and ever since I’m the only person who you haven’t been able to control. Until now.”
She was untouchable to Non Compos Mentis now. In the deepest of ways she had defied him, shunned him and thrown him out into the darkness when he had embraced that same darkness into his soul. At his most vicious and vile she pushed him away and left him with a powerful psychological scar. It meant that the man once known as the Hobo King would never again place his hands on her.
“You weren’t worth the trouble…” He spoke in retort, but what escaped was a timid, childlike response laden with denial and hurt. He was desperate to fight her now when once before he had been beaten.
“Is that the best you can manage? You loved me once, and the part of you that was still Sean was the one that walked away so that you couldn’t hurt me anymore. He is the reason I’m untouchable to you now.” That smile had turned to one of expectant triumph. Rebekah knew, from the grasping-at-straws reply of the man she had once called her lover, that he was walking blindly into her trap.
“That person doesn’t exist anymore, Sean Rhodes died that day and I moved on to greater things.” And perhaps he had died, but ghosts sometimes came back to us didn’t they? The woman in front of his was proof enough of that, real or not.
“Yes…” She sounded disappointed and he eyes dropped to the water beneath, searching perhaps for where the soul of her once-partner had dropped. When they lifted, the words they carried were full of a cynicism that felt ugly coming from her. “… you moved on to debauchery, to insanity, to manipulating your way into leadership of a band of vulnerable outcasts. Greatness indeed.”
“Bitterness does not suit you, Rebekah.” The words coming from him sounded like a lecture now, words of a two-faced demon who could switch personality at any moment.
He’d drifted a long way from the PCW World Champion she had known, the man who had given up his life to earn that hallowed belt. She knew that man was inside this hollow husk of an imposter somewhere, and that he could be revived. “And lying to yourself never suited you, Sean. You haven’t ascended to greatness, you have fallen into despair. You sacrificed the prize you fought your entire career to gain. You threw away everything you’d worked to earn. You gave up the support and love of thousands of people… and for what?”
“It was a lie!” He shouts, desperately again to try and justify his course of evil over the life of hard work and success he had built before. But it was no use, the anger he showed now was a thin cover for the insecurity growing beneath.
“You are a lie! Non Compos Mentis is and always has been a lie!” Those emerald eyes are intense now, burning with a desire that he had witnessed before but a long time ago. That desire had been love, now it was anger at the constant denial from the man she had once cared for. “You have always been sick and that was the only constant you could rely on when your life came to a crossroads. So instead of choosing a happiness you had never experienced you embraced the madness. You embraced a person, a voice in your head, that was never real… and you threw away something that was.”
Without knowing, Mentis lifted his hands to his head as a great wave of emotion and memory rushed through his mind. His every thought was swimming with doubt and realisation, that the veil of identity was swiftly being pulled back to reveal what was actually there. “This is who I have always been. Non Compos Mentis is who I real am!”
“Were you Non Compos Mentis when thousands of people cheered for you? Were you that madman when you smiled at them and enjoyed that feeling?” She reached out to touch his cheek, but halted herself as she saw the shifting lunacy in his eyes. There was a desperation there as the monster clung to what little reassurance it had that it was the real owner of the body it inhabited. She did not touch him, but she said one more thing to break him as best she could. “Were you that person when you made love to me?”
His first reaction was to shout out, but something from behind that veil grasped him by the vocal chords and pulled hard. He could not speak, only listen and watch as Rebekah stared into his eyes. He could feel something change inside him, something like the shifting of furniture inside his soul as if something was growing and making room for itself in the darkness.
“I can see him inside you. Even after you’ve fallen so far, there’s still something of Sean Rhodes somewhere behind your eyes.” She still stared, and now he feels like little piece of himself growing into something more and more. It begins to come forward, pushing parts of his personality aside until it can peer out from the eerie darkness behind his eyes. And when it does she smiles beautifully, the anger gone in an instant. “There you are.”
The monster wants to cry out in fury, but he is no longer in control of his own voice. His own words betray him and the words of another come out in a voice lacking the harsh southern tones of the one that came before. “It’s been so long since I’ve been able to see through my own eyes...”
“There you are.” She repeats, that amazing smile showing relief now. She moves toward him but this time it is not she who stops the movement. The man who was Non Compos Mentis, now not, backs away from here with a hesitant, wary expression. “Sean, what’s wrong?”
“I can see now but I don’t know how long that will last. I’m sick, you said it yourself, and I can’t trust my eyes or my mind. I could do something horrible…” The tears begin to well up in his eyes as Sean Rhodes, the real owner of his heart and mind, speaks for the first time in so very long.
“I trust you. That darkness inside you is gone.” She reaches out again, hoping to touch his cheek and reassure him, but he only shakes his head and recoils further.
“It will never be gone, Rebekah. No matter how much control I have over it, there will always be the chance it will come back and take over. It’s a part of me, it always has been.”
“Not if you trust me. We can find help for you.” Doctors had tried to help him before and failed. It had always come back more powerful than before and he had been left helpless. But if he let it win this time there was every chance it would be the last. Either it would take control for good or, in the end, it would kill him. Perhaps it would be time to seek the light again, instead of languishing in the dark.
And yet the darkness pull back on his soul again and fought for something. It wasn’t control, it wanted something else. It knew that it’s job was not done, and neither was Sean’s. “Maybe I can try soon, but there’s something it… I need to do first.”
“It wants to fight, doesn’t it? It wants to fight Murdoc in that god-forsaken match.”
“I… I want to fight him. It’s a part of me, I told you, and that means it’s not just that part of me that wants to face him.” Sean sighs, as if wanting to deny that part of himself but not finding himself able to. The darkness had been in him all along and was never going to leave. He was reigned to that face now, and had been for a long time. “This isn’t about the violence anymore. It’s not about blood. It’s about leaving something in that ring. Maybe that’s why I chose Murdoc, maybe I knew he was my only chance of satisfying what’s inside me.”
“You think Murdoc’s going to beat the insanity out of you?”
“I think the thing inside my head wants to destroy something, whether it’s Murdoc, me or itself. It won’t stop until it does, so I’m going to give it what it wants, for better or worse. I’m going to meet Murdoc with every ounce of energy I have and if… if I walk out, I’ll hope to be strong enough to find myself again.”
She nods, and a single tear runs down her cheek. She knew her love may not walk out of the arena at all if the darkness in his was intent on destroying the only thing that mattered. The ultimate sacrifice was one she did not want to consider but had to. If that happened, so be it, but anything else would and she would be waiting. “You fight your fight, you always loved the competition and it would be stupid to expect you not to.”
She begins to walk away and he starts to follow, but this time she is the one to lift a hand and stop him dead. He wants to reach out, to take her hand and hold it, to hold her tight for the first time in so long and go away with her to a safe place where they can live… but she stops him. “When you’re ready, when you want help, you know where you can find me.”
Rebekah turns to walk away, the shadows circling her with the finality of the night. She was going to leave and he could not bear it now. Instinctively he reaches out and grabs her arm… actually grabs it, and the reality stuns him. He holds her and smiles happily and genuinely, his eyes welling up immediately. “You’re real!”
“As real as you need me to be.” She almost whispered and a thin veil of vapour escaped her lips. And it is her lips that he sees come closer as he holds her hand with a gentleness he can only vaguely remember. She does not see the tattered clothes he wears or the dirt caking his skin, only the face of the man she loved and could love again if he lives through the week. She sees her lover, she sees him very well, and she leans forward.
As the woman he loves shuts her eyes, Sean Rhodes closes his own and feels the softness of her pink lips press against his. Just as he remembers, her kiss was sweet and soft and perfect, and he lost himself in a moment of pure love. Then she withdrew from their intimate embrace, he no longer felt her breath on his skin and her warmth departed his hands and mouth.
Opening his eyes slowly, Sean saw only the lake ebbing to and fro. A cloud of mist rose in front of his face, but it was his own. She had lived by her word; she was as real as he needed her to be. The memory of her kiss was all he needed, and he knew he would live through the week to experience it again.
Through the city of growing dereliction Non Compos Mentis had stumbled with no aim or purpose. He could have bought a hotel room in some squalid corner of town but he continued on his shambling odyssey toward nothing. Finally, on what was the third (or perhaps fourth or fifth) night he found an unexplained direction to his wanderings.
Mentis found himself in one of the few verdant patches of green in the city, an oasis in the centre of a cement desert. Delaware Park, most likely filled with any number of desperate souls at this time of night too. He was sure he would feel right at home alongside them. He had been to the park only a handful of times in the past and only one memory of the place came to him now, one place that he would feel safe and at peace. A little walk (which didn’t bother him, not after an untold time on his feet already) into the oasis would bring him to a small bridge that extended over Hoyt Lake. There he would look out over the water and let the tranquil lapping sounds take his mind away.
Yet as he approached the bridge, with its three gentle arches barely visible in the moonlight, he noticed he would not be alone. A figure stood looking out over the lake idly, taking in the calming ebb and flow themselves perhaps, and seemed comfortable enough to stay a while. On any other night it would have discouraged Mentis from making his way there, but tonight it didn’t and he made his way closer.
At some point in that short walk the knowledge entered his mind that he knew who the figure was, occupying his chosen spot for contemplation. While he could not see her face it was a pure certainty that she was the woman who had followed him, the ghost that had followed him, for so very long. Why didn’t he turn away now? He had nothing left. No place to call home, no people to call friends, no cause but one hundreds of miles and several days away in Greenville. So he went to her, up the road and onto the bridge.
“It’s nice to see you again, Sean.” Her voice, unhindered in the stillness of the air, was unmistakable. The words betrayed their caring tones and stopped him dead in his tracks. It was a name that struck deep, but it wasn’t his.
“That’s not my name.” Mentis grunted, emitting a puff of white mist as he did. The cold night air choked his senses with its icy tendrils but he was focused more than enough on the woman in front of him.
“But it was once, and will be again.” She turned to him then, and even in the chilled depth of night, in this depressing place, her beauty shone like a light.
He had to squint as though trying to make out a fuzzy image, but instead he was trying to trick his own mind into giving up its trick. She was exactly as he remembered, her auburn hair hanging to her shoulders, framing her slightly angular features and startling eyes. The image of her was so familiar he needed to ask, as he had thought every time he had seen her before, “Are you real?”
Rebekah gave a shy smile and looked to the ground for a moment. In that second there was only the light shifting sound of water, then she looked up with a vague sadness in her those emerald eyes. “You can’t tell anymore, can you? Everything seems real, but you can’t trust that the ground won’t disappear beneath your feet one day.”
“You didn’t answer my question.” Mentis asked, looking around nervously at his surroundings to see if anyone was overhearing their conversation, or perhaps his conversation with himself if his suspicions proved correct.
“I’m as real as you need me to be. If you won’t listen to me and walk away deluding yourself, then I might as well be one of your hallucinations. But if you actually listen, if you change because of it, then I’m as real as you are.” Keeping that smile she turned back to the water and rested her soft hands on the cool stone of the bridge.
He joined her there, feeling the cold chill all the way up his arms and down his spine. Part of him wondered why he was talking with this woman, why when she had haunted him with her presence and been part of the reason he had lost his throne as the Mad King of the Hobos. Why when she would not speak to him properly. “That’s still not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’ll get.” Rebekah replied, and her demeanour was one of a woman who had come her for a different cause than the one he was pursuing.
Frustrated, Mentis took one of his scarred hands and reached out to take hold of her arm. If she wouldn’t answer he would take the answer for himself. He grasped for her arm, covered in a coat the colour of moss, and found this his hand stopped short. Nothing held him, nothing physical had stopped him, but he simply could not reach further. And in her eyes he saw a knowing look, almost satisfied. “I can’t… what are you doing?”
“Something inside you won’t let you touch me, not after the last time you tried.” Memories of the last day he had touched her came flooding back into his mind. The day he left her life and the place he had called home, he had taken her with all his repugnant strength and attempted to assault her in the most horrific of ways. He had tried, and she had fought back. “The day you became Non Compos Mentis you also became afraid of me. You may not admit it, you may not even understand it, but that day you lost control of me and ever since I’m the only person who you haven’t been able to control. Until now.”
She was untouchable to Non Compos Mentis now. In the deepest of ways she had defied him, shunned him and thrown him out into the darkness when he had embraced that same darkness into his soul. At his most vicious and vile she pushed him away and left him with a powerful psychological scar. It meant that the man once known as the Hobo King would never again place his hands on her.
“You weren’t worth the trouble…” He spoke in retort, but what escaped was a timid, childlike response laden with denial and hurt. He was desperate to fight her now when once before he had been beaten.
“Is that the best you can manage? You loved me once, and the part of you that was still Sean was the one that walked away so that you couldn’t hurt me anymore. He is the reason I’m untouchable to you now.” That smile had turned to one of expectant triumph. Rebekah knew, from the grasping-at-straws reply of the man she had once called her lover, that he was walking blindly into her trap.
“That person doesn’t exist anymore, Sean Rhodes died that day and I moved on to greater things.” And perhaps he had died, but ghosts sometimes came back to us didn’t they? The woman in front of his was proof enough of that, real or not.
“Yes…” She sounded disappointed and he eyes dropped to the water beneath, searching perhaps for where the soul of her once-partner had dropped. When they lifted, the words they carried were full of a cynicism that felt ugly coming from her. “… you moved on to debauchery, to insanity, to manipulating your way into leadership of a band of vulnerable outcasts. Greatness indeed.”
“Bitterness does not suit you, Rebekah.” The words coming from him sounded like a lecture now, words of a two-faced demon who could switch personality at any moment.
He’d drifted a long way from the PCW World Champion she had known, the man who had given up his life to earn that hallowed belt. She knew that man was inside this hollow husk of an imposter somewhere, and that he could be revived. “And lying to yourself never suited you, Sean. You haven’t ascended to greatness, you have fallen into despair. You sacrificed the prize you fought your entire career to gain. You threw away everything you’d worked to earn. You gave up the support and love of thousands of people… and for what?”
“It was a lie!” He shouts, desperately again to try and justify his course of evil over the life of hard work and success he had built before. But it was no use, the anger he showed now was a thin cover for the insecurity growing beneath.
“You are a lie! Non Compos Mentis is and always has been a lie!” Those emerald eyes are intense now, burning with a desire that he had witnessed before but a long time ago. That desire had been love, now it was anger at the constant denial from the man she had once cared for. “You have always been sick and that was the only constant you could rely on when your life came to a crossroads. So instead of choosing a happiness you had never experienced you embraced the madness. You embraced a person, a voice in your head, that was never real… and you threw away something that was.”
Without knowing, Mentis lifted his hands to his head as a great wave of emotion and memory rushed through his mind. His every thought was swimming with doubt and realisation, that the veil of identity was swiftly being pulled back to reveal what was actually there. “This is who I have always been. Non Compos Mentis is who I real am!”
“Were you Non Compos Mentis when thousands of people cheered for you? Were you that madman when you smiled at them and enjoyed that feeling?” She reached out to touch his cheek, but halted herself as she saw the shifting lunacy in his eyes. There was a desperation there as the monster clung to what little reassurance it had that it was the real owner of the body it inhabited. She did not touch him, but she said one more thing to break him as best she could. “Were you that person when you made love to me?”
His first reaction was to shout out, but something from behind that veil grasped him by the vocal chords and pulled hard. He could not speak, only listen and watch as Rebekah stared into his eyes. He could feel something change inside him, something like the shifting of furniture inside his soul as if something was growing and making room for itself in the darkness.
“I can see him inside you. Even after you’ve fallen so far, there’s still something of Sean Rhodes somewhere behind your eyes.” She still stared, and now he feels like little piece of himself growing into something more and more. It begins to come forward, pushing parts of his personality aside until it can peer out from the eerie darkness behind his eyes. And when it does she smiles beautifully, the anger gone in an instant. “There you are.”
The monster wants to cry out in fury, but he is no longer in control of his own voice. His own words betray him and the words of another come out in a voice lacking the harsh southern tones of the one that came before. “It’s been so long since I’ve been able to see through my own eyes...”
“There you are.” She repeats, that amazing smile showing relief now. She moves toward him but this time it is not she who stops the movement. The man who was Non Compos Mentis, now not, backs away from here with a hesitant, wary expression. “Sean, what’s wrong?”
“I can see now but I don’t know how long that will last. I’m sick, you said it yourself, and I can’t trust my eyes or my mind. I could do something horrible…” The tears begin to well up in his eyes as Sean Rhodes, the real owner of his heart and mind, speaks for the first time in so very long.
“I trust you. That darkness inside you is gone.” She reaches out again, hoping to touch his cheek and reassure him, but he only shakes his head and recoils further.
“It will never be gone, Rebekah. No matter how much control I have over it, there will always be the chance it will come back and take over. It’s a part of me, it always has been.”
“Not if you trust me. We can find help for you.” Doctors had tried to help him before and failed. It had always come back more powerful than before and he had been left helpless. But if he let it win this time there was every chance it would be the last. Either it would take control for good or, in the end, it would kill him. Perhaps it would be time to seek the light again, instead of languishing in the dark.
And yet the darkness pull back on his soul again and fought for something. It wasn’t control, it wanted something else. It knew that it’s job was not done, and neither was Sean’s. “Maybe I can try soon, but there’s something it… I need to do first.”
“It wants to fight, doesn’t it? It wants to fight Murdoc in that god-forsaken match.”
“I… I want to fight him. It’s a part of me, I told you, and that means it’s not just that part of me that wants to face him.” Sean sighs, as if wanting to deny that part of himself but not finding himself able to. The darkness had been in him all along and was never going to leave. He was reigned to that face now, and had been for a long time. “This isn’t about the violence anymore. It’s not about blood. It’s about leaving something in that ring. Maybe that’s why I chose Murdoc, maybe I knew he was my only chance of satisfying what’s inside me.”
“You think Murdoc’s going to beat the insanity out of you?”
“I think the thing inside my head wants to destroy something, whether it’s Murdoc, me or itself. It won’t stop until it does, so I’m going to give it what it wants, for better or worse. I’m going to meet Murdoc with every ounce of energy I have and if… if I walk out, I’ll hope to be strong enough to find myself again.”
She nods, and a single tear runs down her cheek. She knew her love may not walk out of the arena at all if the darkness in his was intent on destroying the only thing that mattered. The ultimate sacrifice was one she did not want to consider but had to. If that happened, so be it, but anything else would and she would be waiting. “You fight your fight, you always loved the competition and it would be stupid to expect you not to.”
She begins to walk away and he starts to follow, but this time she is the one to lift a hand and stop him dead. He wants to reach out, to take her hand and hold it, to hold her tight for the first time in so long and go away with her to a safe place where they can live… but she stops him. “When you’re ready, when you want help, you know where you can find me.”
Rebekah turns to walk away, the shadows circling her with the finality of the night. She was going to leave and he could not bear it now. Instinctively he reaches out and grabs her arm… actually grabs it, and the reality stuns him. He holds her and smiles happily and genuinely, his eyes welling up immediately. “You’re real!”
“As real as you need me to be.” She almost whispered and a thin veil of vapour escaped her lips. And it is her lips that he sees come closer as he holds her hand with a gentleness he can only vaguely remember. She does not see the tattered clothes he wears or the dirt caking his skin, only the face of the man she loved and could love again if he lives through the week. She sees her lover, she sees him very well, and she leans forward.
As the woman he loves shuts her eyes, Sean Rhodes closes his own and feels the softness of her pink lips press against his. Just as he remembers, her kiss was sweet and soft and perfect, and he lost himself in a moment of pure love. Then she withdrew from their intimate embrace, he no longer felt her breath on his skin and her warmth departed his hands and mouth.
Opening his eyes slowly, Sean saw only the lake ebbing to and fro. A cloud of mist rose in front of his face, but it was his own. She had lived by her word; she was as real as he needed her to be. The memory of her kiss was all he needed, and he knew he would live through the week to experience it again.
