Categories > Original > Drama > Separation
April 22, 1979
As if he could forget that. Ray had no desire to take part in an encore of that particular incident, but could see no way to break free.
“It’s not entirely your fault. You’re still suffering from an unclean spirit. I mean really, how can a guy with demons pretend to be even remotely normal?” Derrick continued to hold him at arm’s length, regarding him as one would a disobedient animal. “You do have a point; neither you nor Sophie can help acting the way you do. It’s not really your fault. Because you’re my brother, I’ll help you.”
Bad. This was bad. Derrick had a good six inches and 125lbs on him, and being held straight out at the end of his brother-in-law’s thick arm put him far out of reach. Or did it? Inwardly, Ray smiled. Only a rookie would leave himself wide open to the same attack twice. Knowing he’d have only one shot, Ray mustered strength and oxygen, tightened his grip on Derrick’s wide wrist and lashed out with one foot.
A sudden soprano squeak and Derrick’s fingers abruptly released their grip. Although he’d braced himself for the drop, the sudden connection with the front yard still knocked what little breath he had from his lungs. Taking a precious second to inhale, Ray scrambled to his feet and lunged for Sophie.
“Run!” he rasped while her father knelt doubled-over on the lawn, both hands pressed against his crotch. “Go inside!” He saw her safely enfolded in her mother’s arms before he felt a vice-like grip clamp around his neck. Derrick had grabbed him from behind and with the same hand shoved him against the pale yellow siding of the house, pinning Ray’s right arm behind his back with the other. The sudden pressure on the scar tissue that protected the Rainbow triggered a stomach-turning revulsion in Ray, causing acid to surge into this throat.
“RAY!” he heard Leah shriek off to his right. If not for the volume of her cry, he might not have heard her at all considering his good ear was currently pressed so hard against the weatherproof vinyl that it was almost suctioned fast.
“DERRICK!” she cried. “DERRICK YOU PUT HIM DOWN!”
Completely deaf to her cries, Derrick ignored his wife, instead leaning all 287lbs against the smaller man, crushing him against the house wall.
“Not so tough now are you?” the words sounded low and quiet in his damaged eardrum. Frantically, Ray tried to fight past the nausea rising in his throat. Derrick bore down harder, the vice-like grip of his hand restricting oxygen and further pressing into the Rainbow, making him gag. There had to be a way out of this.
“Let me make one thing clear,” Derrick rumbled dangerously. “I know it was Leah’s job to ‘take care’ of you when you were kids, but she’s my wife now so you’d better make damn sure you keep your distance.”
Ray gagged again as Derrick leaned harder still on the intersection of his scar, surely he could feel the little plastic strips of the Rainbow under his palm.
“I want you to get your shit and get the hell out. I don’t ever want to see you near this house or my family ever again. If I ever find out you laid a hand on my wife or my girls I will kill you.”
“DERRICK!” Leah screamed as Ray began to froth, foam dripping down his chin. “DERRICK STOP!!!”
“The demons want out, don’t they?” he asked, a sickeningly gentle note creeping into his tone. Oh God no. No, he liked his soul where it was, especially since he was still using it!
“Don’t worry,” Derrick was saying, “I’ll pull out any darkness left in your heart.”
The hand behind his neck did not budge, but the one pinning his right arm moved up another inch or two, twisting it painfully, until Ray could feel Derrick’s fingers digging into his back above his heart. The familiar sensation of claws slicing deep into his psyche pierced him and he would have screamed if he’d had sufficient air. As it was, Ray only managed to spatter the siding with pink-colored froth.
“RAY!!!”
Sudden extra weight told him Leah had tried to pry her husband off him, but to no avail. Derrick shoved her aside with no more thought than a horse flicking away a fly. Ray couldn’t spare much extra thought for her either, at the moment. The painful, prickly sensation of his psyche being picked apart like an old sweater was occupying too much of his attention. Black flecks were beginning to swarm his vision as Derrick slowly pulled his soul loose strand by strand. He had to do something and quick, but with his face being ground into the wall, there was no way he could successfully land another kick to Derrick’s crotch. Ray tried to gather his strength, to use his remaining free hand- oddly enough Derrick had left Ray’s dominant hand free, evidently completely forgetting that his brother-in-law was a lefty- to do…he wasn’t sure what.
Wait. What the…? The agony of a soul unraveling was fading, replacing it a strange, refreshing sensation. Behind the pain, the burning of his oxygen-starved lungs, the stomach-turning revulsion of a wound aggravated, he felt it. Energy. Power. Derrick’s power. The accident might have robbed Ray of his own gift, but it hadn’t robbed him of the many years of hard-earned control. Gritting his teeth, he forced past the discomfort and pulled for all he was worth. The energy was nothing like his own, tainted and colored as it was by the well of another soul, but he gulped it down like a man dying of thirst. Ray wasn’t a drinker, alcohol tended to muck with one’s abilities dreadfully, but his brother-in-law’s energy reminded him of the rankest sort of frat house beer dregs; pungent, bitter, no longer cold, but rendered warm and rancid by anger and the body that had held it. At any other time he would have been repulsed, but it was all there was and so he mentally held his nose and chugged.
It took Derrick a minute to figure out that something was wrong. In his perplexity he loosened his grip slightly.
“What the--?”
It was all he needed. Taking advantage of the faintly relaxed grip, Ray pushed off the wall with his free hand, wound up, and let go. The crunch of Derrick’s aquiline nose beneath his knuckles brought a deeply satisfied grin to Ray’s face as he paused to spit and clear his mouth of acid. The larger man reeled, stumbling a few steps back and putting a hand to his now profusely bleeding nose.
“Why you little--!”
He didn’t get any farther. Ray had leaped on him, ten years of barely placated rage and frustration adding force to more judicial brotherly and super instinct. This bastard was going down. Granted he was rusty and out of practice, but his body remembered the moves and his reflexes were still there if not as sharp as they had once been. That was all right, Derrick wasn’t exactly prime super villain material. His punches, though powerful, were slow and clumsy. Ray dodged them easily, landing kicks and punches of his own. This was almost too easy. After giant robots, twelve-foot-tall mutants, IEDs, runaway trains, busses, and gangs of a dozen or more X-acto-armed thugs, a fight with a guy only twice his weight and half again his height seemed laughable. In the back of his mind he realized he was enjoying this more than he probably should, that this wasn’t like him. Get the job done. No need to draw it out. And yet he wanted to pound Derrick into his perfectly manicured lawn, to teach him a lesson, to make him feel the burning shame and cold sear of rejection he’d lived with for over a decade. If nothing else, Derrick had to be made to understand what his decision would do to his daughter. Stolen power still coursing through his veins in surges of fire and ice, Ray slugged him one last time and marveled that he didn’t feel even mildly guilty as the big man stumbled to his knees.
“Now,” Ray panted, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, “I have a couple things to tell you.”
Stooping, he grabbed Derrick by the lapels and hauled him to his feet, untroubled that such a feat would ordinarily be impossible. However, as soon as he was upright once more, the larger man seized him around the neck with both hands.
“I should kill you,” he whispered.
“It’s my turn to talk,” Ray returned, grabbing Derrick’s bare wrists in his hands and rebounding the bigger man’s power back as a shield, knocking him to the ground. Goggle-eyed, Derrick sat there, trying not to shrink back into the lawn as Ray advanced on him.
“You have no idea what you’re doing, what you have! Your little girl isn’t cursed, she’s special! And you made her that way!”
“No!” Derrick shouted; voice amazingly shrill for a man so big. “No! It’s her fault!” He glanced at Leah who stood fearfully watching from the front porch. “It’s her family that’s full of freaks, not mine!”
“We both carry it, you moron!” Ray shot back, losing patience with his in-law. “And if you don’t soon get it through your thick head, you’re going to kill your little girl with medication and treatments she doesn’t need! I know better than anybody that power like hers can kill. It almost killed me! If I’d have had training earlier I could have avoided a lot of needless angst, but nobody knew and nobody wanted to know. God forbid I might actually be sane and super instead of just epileptic and mentally ill.” Okay, yeah, he was still pretty bitter about that. “If you think I’m going to stand by and watch history repeat itself with my niece, think again!”
Derrick’s insistence was stubborn. “She can’t be! She can’t! She’s no more super than I am!”
Ray rolled his eyes in frustration. “You are super, dumb-ass! You may as well acknowledge it and get over yourself. It’s not a crime; at least, it isn’t in the rest of the country.”
“I am not super! I’m not! I won’t be!” Derrick howled. Ray stared at him, caught between amazement and disgust.
“You don’t want to be super, huh? Think you’ve got an unclean spirit?”
Something cold and menacing was laughing in the back of his head, something that smiled at the panicked expression and cold sweat beading on Derrick’s face.
“You don’t want it? Fine. You know, they take power away from guys like you. I can’t do that, I don’t know how, but I’ll be happy to do to you what you all worked so hard to do to me.”
The fiery ice of Derrick’s power surged, practically drowning him as he sucked it down. He could feel his hair lift and his clothing ripple in a wind that did not exist. Sweat streamed down Derrick’s handsome olive-skinned face, his fingers plucking weakly at a hand clamped around his throat. It took a moment for Ray to realize that hand was his. Abruptly he let the connection and his brother-in-law drop. Derrick crumbled to his knees and stared up at him wide-eyed. Ray regarded him coldly, the reservoir of stolen energy whirling about him in a windless storm.
“Get out.”
He went. Scrambling to his feet, Derrick staggered to his car, started the engine, and sped away on screeching tires. Ray stood and watched as the sleek, black sedan raced down the street and out of view. Only then did he notice that he felt extremely ill.
“Ray…?” Leah asked, Sophie still locked protectively in her arms, taking a single hesitant step off the porch.
He didn’t answer. Like a college boy after a bar binge, he’d drunk too much and too deeply. The power wasn’t his. It was foreign, hostile, and there was too much of it to try to control himself. Suddenly, he didn’t want it. It smelled and tasted foul to him, stinging his nose with ammonia and souring his throat with acid. Head spinning with the effort of trying to either control or dispel the energy he’d taken from Derrick, Ray’s legs gave way and he fell to his knees. Remaining upright became too much of an effort and so he fell forward to lean on his hands. He had to do something with it, had to get it out of his head, out of his body. Falling back on old methods, Ray gave in, relaxed, and heaved into the grass.
“Mommy…!” Sophie’s repulsed and frightened cry went unnoticed as he retched into the golf-course-perfect turf of Leah’s front lawn. He hadn’t thought he’d eaten so much. It wasn’t the food that had made him sick, of course, but every regurgitated mouthful gave up a wave of Derrick’s power. It didn’t take him long to run out of lunch, but there was still foreign energy that no part of him wanted. Entire body on edge with revulsion, he felt himself heave again, bringing up mucous and bile. He couldn’t stop. When that ran out, red added itself to the mess already flooding the grass. Still there was more to be gotten rid of. How much had he drunk? Humiliation tinged panic as he felt his bladder get into the act.
“Ray,” Leah’s hand was on his shoulder. “Ray, say something!”
He would have liked to, but found no oxygen to spare as blood and acid surged into his throat yet again. Ray had never had a hangover, but imagined even the worst aftermath could not be as bad as this. Though every nerve trembled on edge, the worst of Derrick’s energy finally seemed to be gone. Panting hard, spraying blood with every breath, Ray allowed himself to give in and collapse.
“RAY!!!”
He never heard his sister’s panicked cry or her hasty instructions to her children. Lying on his back, breath fading with consciousness, his open eyes stared emptily up at the clear April sky.
As if he could forget that. Ray had no desire to take part in an encore of that particular incident, but could see no way to break free.
“It’s not entirely your fault. You’re still suffering from an unclean spirit. I mean really, how can a guy with demons pretend to be even remotely normal?” Derrick continued to hold him at arm’s length, regarding him as one would a disobedient animal. “You do have a point; neither you nor Sophie can help acting the way you do. It’s not really your fault. Because you’re my brother, I’ll help you.”
Bad. This was bad. Derrick had a good six inches and 125lbs on him, and being held straight out at the end of his brother-in-law’s thick arm put him far out of reach. Or did it? Inwardly, Ray smiled. Only a rookie would leave himself wide open to the same attack twice. Knowing he’d have only one shot, Ray mustered strength and oxygen, tightened his grip on Derrick’s wide wrist and lashed out with one foot.
A sudden soprano squeak and Derrick’s fingers abruptly released their grip. Although he’d braced himself for the drop, the sudden connection with the front yard still knocked what little breath he had from his lungs. Taking a precious second to inhale, Ray scrambled to his feet and lunged for Sophie.
“Run!” he rasped while her father knelt doubled-over on the lawn, both hands pressed against his crotch. “Go inside!” He saw her safely enfolded in her mother’s arms before he felt a vice-like grip clamp around his neck. Derrick had grabbed him from behind and with the same hand shoved him against the pale yellow siding of the house, pinning Ray’s right arm behind his back with the other. The sudden pressure on the scar tissue that protected the Rainbow triggered a stomach-turning revulsion in Ray, causing acid to surge into this throat.
“RAY!” he heard Leah shriek off to his right. If not for the volume of her cry, he might not have heard her at all considering his good ear was currently pressed so hard against the weatherproof vinyl that it was almost suctioned fast.
“DERRICK!” she cried. “DERRICK YOU PUT HIM DOWN!”
Completely deaf to her cries, Derrick ignored his wife, instead leaning all 287lbs against the smaller man, crushing him against the house wall.
“Not so tough now are you?” the words sounded low and quiet in his damaged eardrum. Frantically, Ray tried to fight past the nausea rising in his throat. Derrick bore down harder, the vice-like grip of his hand restricting oxygen and further pressing into the Rainbow, making him gag. There had to be a way out of this.
“Let me make one thing clear,” Derrick rumbled dangerously. “I know it was Leah’s job to ‘take care’ of you when you were kids, but she’s my wife now so you’d better make damn sure you keep your distance.”
Ray gagged again as Derrick leaned harder still on the intersection of his scar, surely he could feel the little plastic strips of the Rainbow under his palm.
“I want you to get your shit and get the hell out. I don’t ever want to see you near this house or my family ever again. If I ever find out you laid a hand on my wife or my girls I will kill you.”
“DERRICK!” Leah screamed as Ray began to froth, foam dripping down his chin. “DERRICK STOP!!!”
“The demons want out, don’t they?” he asked, a sickeningly gentle note creeping into his tone. Oh God no. No, he liked his soul where it was, especially since he was still using it!
“Don’t worry,” Derrick was saying, “I’ll pull out any darkness left in your heart.”
The hand behind his neck did not budge, but the one pinning his right arm moved up another inch or two, twisting it painfully, until Ray could feel Derrick’s fingers digging into his back above his heart. The familiar sensation of claws slicing deep into his psyche pierced him and he would have screamed if he’d had sufficient air. As it was, Ray only managed to spatter the siding with pink-colored froth.
“RAY!!!”
Sudden extra weight told him Leah had tried to pry her husband off him, but to no avail. Derrick shoved her aside with no more thought than a horse flicking away a fly. Ray couldn’t spare much extra thought for her either, at the moment. The painful, prickly sensation of his psyche being picked apart like an old sweater was occupying too much of his attention. Black flecks were beginning to swarm his vision as Derrick slowly pulled his soul loose strand by strand. He had to do something and quick, but with his face being ground into the wall, there was no way he could successfully land another kick to Derrick’s crotch. Ray tried to gather his strength, to use his remaining free hand- oddly enough Derrick had left Ray’s dominant hand free, evidently completely forgetting that his brother-in-law was a lefty- to do…he wasn’t sure what.
Wait. What the…? The agony of a soul unraveling was fading, replacing it a strange, refreshing sensation. Behind the pain, the burning of his oxygen-starved lungs, the stomach-turning revulsion of a wound aggravated, he felt it. Energy. Power. Derrick’s power. The accident might have robbed Ray of his own gift, but it hadn’t robbed him of the many years of hard-earned control. Gritting his teeth, he forced past the discomfort and pulled for all he was worth. The energy was nothing like his own, tainted and colored as it was by the well of another soul, but he gulped it down like a man dying of thirst. Ray wasn’t a drinker, alcohol tended to muck with one’s abilities dreadfully, but his brother-in-law’s energy reminded him of the rankest sort of frat house beer dregs; pungent, bitter, no longer cold, but rendered warm and rancid by anger and the body that had held it. At any other time he would have been repulsed, but it was all there was and so he mentally held his nose and chugged.
It took Derrick a minute to figure out that something was wrong. In his perplexity he loosened his grip slightly.
“What the--?”
It was all he needed. Taking advantage of the faintly relaxed grip, Ray pushed off the wall with his free hand, wound up, and let go. The crunch of Derrick’s aquiline nose beneath his knuckles brought a deeply satisfied grin to Ray’s face as he paused to spit and clear his mouth of acid. The larger man reeled, stumbling a few steps back and putting a hand to his now profusely bleeding nose.
“Why you little--!”
He didn’t get any farther. Ray had leaped on him, ten years of barely placated rage and frustration adding force to more judicial brotherly and super instinct. This bastard was going down. Granted he was rusty and out of practice, but his body remembered the moves and his reflexes were still there if not as sharp as they had once been. That was all right, Derrick wasn’t exactly prime super villain material. His punches, though powerful, were slow and clumsy. Ray dodged them easily, landing kicks and punches of his own. This was almost too easy. After giant robots, twelve-foot-tall mutants, IEDs, runaway trains, busses, and gangs of a dozen or more X-acto-armed thugs, a fight with a guy only twice his weight and half again his height seemed laughable. In the back of his mind he realized he was enjoying this more than he probably should, that this wasn’t like him. Get the job done. No need to draw it out. And yet he wanted to pound Derrick into his perfectly manicured lawn, to teach him a lesson, to make him feel the burning shame and cold sear of rejection he’d lived with for over a decade. If nothing else, Derrick had to be made to understand what his decision would do to his daughter. Stolen power still coursing through his veins in surges of fire and ice, Ray slugged him one last time and marveled that he didn’t feel even mildly guilty as the big man stumbled to his knees.
“Now,” Ray panted, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, “I have a couple things to tell you.”
Stooping, he grabbed Derrick by the lapels and hauled him to his feet, untroubled that such a feat would ordinarily be impossible. However, as soon as he was upright once more, the larger man seized him around the neck with both hands.
“I should kill you,” he whispered.
“It’s my turn to talk,” Ray returned, grabbing Derrick’s bare wrists in his hands and rebounding the bigger man’s power back as a shield, knocking him to the ground. Goggle-eyed, Derrick sat there, trying not to shrink back into the lawn as Ray advanced on him.
“You have no idea what you’re doing, what you have! Your little girl isn’t cursed, she’s special! And you made her that way!”
“No!” Derrick shouted; voice amazingly shrill for a man so big. “No! It’s her fault!” He glanced at Leah who stood fearfully watching from the front porch. “It’s her family that’s full of freaks, not mine!”
“We both carry it, you moron!” Ray shot back, losing patience with his in-law. “And if you don’t soon get it through your thick head, you’re going to kill your little girl with medication and treatments she doesn’t need! I know better than anybody that power like hers can kill. It almost killed me! If I’d have had training earlier I could have avoided a lot of needless angst, but nobody knew and nobody wanted to know. God forbid I might actually be sane and super instead of just epileptic and mentally ill.” Okay, yeah, he was still pretty bitter about that. “If you think I’m going to stand by and watch history repeat itself with my niece, think again!”
Derrick’s insistence was stubborn. “She can’t be! She can’t! She’s no more super than I am!”
Ray rolled his eyes in frustration. “You are super, dumb-ass! You may as well acknowledge it and get over yourself. It’s not a crime; at least, it isn’t in the rest of the country.”
“I am not super! I’m not! I won’t be!” Derrick howled. Ray stared at him, caught between amazement and disgust.
“You don’t want to be super, huh? Think you’ve got an unclean spirit?”
Something cold and menacing was laughing in the back of his head, something that smiled at the panicked expression and cold sweat beading on Derrick’s face.
“You don’t want it? Fine. You know, they take power away from guys like you. I can’t do that, I don’t know how, but I’ll be happy to do to you what you all worked so hard to do to me.”
The fiery ice of Derrick’s power surged, practically drowning him as he sucked it down. He could feel his hair lift and his clothing ripple in a wind that did not exist. Sweat streamed down Derrick’s handsome olive-skinned face, his fingers plucking weakly at a hand clamped around his throat. It took a moment for Ray to realize that hand was his. Abruptly he let the connection and his brother-in-law drop. Derrick crumbled to his knees and stared up at him wide-eyed. Ray regarded him coldly, the reservoir of stolen energy whirling about him in a windless storm.
“Get out.”
He went. Scrambling to his feet, Derrick staggered to his car, started the engine, and sped away on screeching tires. Ray stood and watched as the sleek, black sedan raced down the street and out of view. Only then did he notice that he felt extremely ill.
“Ray…?” Leah asked, Sophie still locked protectively in her arms, taking a single hesitant step off the porch.
He didn’t answer. Like a college boy after a bar binge, he’d drunk too much and too deeply. The power wasn’t his. It was foreign, hostile, and there was too much of it to try to control himself. Suddenly, he didn’t want it. It smelled and tasted foul to him, stinging his nose with ammonia and souring his throat with acid. Head spinning with the effort of trying to either control or dispel the energy he’d taken from Derrick, Ray’s legs gave way and he fell to his knees. Remaining upright became too much of an effort and so he fell forward to lean on his hands. He had to do something with it, had to get it out of his head, out of his body. Falling back on old methods, Ray gave in, relaxed, and heaved into the grass.
“Mommy…!” Sophie’s repulsed and frightened cry went unnoticed as he retched into the golf-course-perfect turf of Leah’s front lawn. He hadn’t thought he’d eaten so much. It wasn’t the food that had made him sick, of course, but every regurgitated mouthful gave up a wave of Derrick’s power. It didn’t take him long to run out of lunch, but there was still foreign energy that no part of him wanted. Entire body on edge with revulsion, he felt himself heave again, bringing up mucous and bile. He couldn’t stop. When that ran out, red added itself to the mess already flooding the grass. Still there was more to be gotten rid of. How much had he drunk? Humiliation tinged panic as he felt his bladder get into the act.
“Ray,” Leah’s hand was on his shoulder. “Ray, say something!”
He would have liked to, but found no oxygen to spare as blood and acid surged into his throat yet again. Ray had never had a hangover, but imagined even the worst aftermath could not be as bad as this. Though every nerve trembled on edge, the worst of Derrick’s energy finally seemed to be gone. Panting hard, spraying blood with every breath, Ray allowed himself to give in and collapse.
“RAY!!!”
He never heard his sister’s panicked cry or her hasty instructions to her children. Lying on his back, breath fading with consciousness, his open eyes stared emptily up at the clear April sky.
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