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Pleasure pricked at his skin, his real skin, and he shouldn’t be aware of that. He moaned into Caroline’s mouth and felt the soft silk of the blanket on his scorching skin. Don’t wake up, please don’t wake up, not now, he chanted to himself as Caroline’s ghostly touch enveloped him.
God, he could feel himself growing wet, and he rubbed his shapely thighs together, grinding against the sheets.
“Don’t go,” Caroline murmured against his lips.
Stephen buried his face in her neck, breathing heavily as he tried to disassociate from his body and ground himself in this dream world. She was soothingly stroking his hair and it was wonderful and he loved it and that felt more real than anything.
He did not understand why she was not repulsed by the barren ugliness of his mind, but he had no problem just going with it.
“Your mind is beautiful,” she insisted, and he realized that she must have picked up on that thought. She was getting better at that. He wondered just how deep she’d been probing to have caused such pain, and what she’d seen, but somehow he could not bring himself to care. Let her see what she wanted; considering he was a walking invasion of privacy, it would be hypocritical of him to be bothered by it. He leaned in to affectionately nuzzle her cheek as his form slowly grew more solid and the outside world receded.
“You have terrible taste,” he teased. “I’m okay with that.”
Caroline made a frustrated noise and twisted around to gaze at the gaping abyss right in the center of his mind. “Okay, yes, the rifts are bad, but… that. That is amazing.”
His brows furrowed. “…what is?”
“The tower.”
Huh?
He gazed at her blankly for a long moment.
“What tower?”
Caroline stared at him.
“The huge giant thing right in front of you?”
PsyKick tilted his head and looked over her shoulder. There was a gaping hole.
His eyes narrowed and he slowly straightened his back.
Something in his domain that he couldn’t see?
“Show me where it is.”
Her brows were furrowed as she gave him a long, searching look. Then she took his hand and led him closer to the cliff. “It’s right here.” She reached out and held up her hand, seemingly in thin air.
The ground shook and Psy almost doubled over in pain.
What…
There was a compulsion there. Something that was pushing against him, telling him he should not look there. His gaze just slid right over that void, no matter how often he tried looking directly at it.
How long had this been here?
This shouldn’t be possible. Broken as it was, this was still his sanctuary. Nobody had ever broken his walls, and many had tried – numerous villains when he’d still had his pride, and after that the heroes who’d endeavored to help him.
He felt concern emanating from Caroline, but he paid it no mind, stumbling toward that edge, reaching out to touch whatever it was.
His palm met with resistance.
And his vision went white.
The mindscape started shaking with the force of an earthquake.
***
“On your knees.”
The itch barely even pricked at him before his knees gave way. He made no sound as pure pleasure burned inside his veins like fire.
“Listen well, PsyKick. From now on you will desire nothing more than to serve me. To be a villain will be your purpose in life. You will not even want to subvert my orders.”
He whimpered, her voice echoing in his mind as the itch started burning again.
“Is that understood?”
He said nothing, his knuckles turning white as he desperately erected mental barrier after mental barrier, trying to compartmentalize his mind.
PsyKick’s mind split in two, and he severed one half completely from all sensory input. It was a technique he used a lot; it was very draining but had often proved to be the difference between his team’s defeat and triumph. One half of his mind would focus on fighting his opponent while the other half, cut off from pain and exhaustion, linked the Tenacious Teens together, and analyzed everyone’s field of vision. Then he calculated strategies around that, rapidly adapting to changing circumstances, sending each of them individual orders and coordinating their team to be an unstoppable force.
There was, after all, a reason that PsyKick was considered the de facto leader.
He shuddered as the horrific Itch fell away, and he could think again.
A tremor ran through his mindscape and he was faintly aware of his other half screaming in agony, but he had to ignore that. His time was extremely limited; considering the strain he was under, he would not be able to keep this up for long.
He had heard her orders, and he knew exactly what they would mean for him. Some forms of brainwashing, once removed, left the victim no worse for wear. This would not be one of them; her methods were simple yet devastating in their scope.
Ideally, PsyKick would find a way to escape. He split his mind once more, and left that part in charge of planning his resistance. Heroically breaking mindcontrol through sheer willpower alone was a grand tale heroes loved to brag about, but over in real world he knew it to be something that rarely happened. That didn’t mean PsyKick wouldn’t do everything in his power to save himself right now.
But if there was one thing his experience as a strategist had taught him, it was to have contingency plans.
PsyKick turned toward his core, pulling on his considerable power – and started duplicating it. He poured everything of himself into his creation, everything that he was, everything that he had once been, and everything that he hoped to be.
A perfect snapshot of the kind of person he was.
A backup.
He knew that his powers had an extremely defensive lean; he had yet to meet anyone who could breach his walls. Nonetheless, should the brainwashing take hold, he had to count on someone doing just that, and hope that they would ask themselves why he had two cores.
The white marble of his walls flowed from beneath, slowly encasing his secondary core in a protective shell. The ground shook again, a crack appearing in the pristine courtyard.
PsyKick shuddered as an echo of pain ran up his spine, heralding the fast-approaching merge.
And with the last strength he had left, to make sure his soon-to-be-brainwashed-self did not ruin his plan, he erased all knowledge of what he had done.
Of Heroes And Villains:
The Ties That Bind By Minikisa An assassin. A fallen hero. An unlikely meeting. The road to redemption is long and hard and filled with explosives. |
 |
Pleasure pricked at his skin, his real skin, and he shouldn’t be aware of that. He moaned into Caroline’s mouth and felt the soft silk of the blanket on his scorching skin. Don’t wake up, please don’t wake up, not now, he chanted to himself as Caroline’s ghostly touch enveloped him.
God, he could feel himself growing wet, and he rubbed his shapely thighs together, grinding against the sheets.
“Don’t go,” Caroline murmured against his lips.
Stephen buried his face in her neck, breathing heavily as he tried to disassociate from his body and ground himself in this dream world. She was soothingly stroking his hair and it was wonderful and he loved it and that felt more real than anything.
He did not understand why she was not repulsed by the barren ugliness of his mind, but he had no problem just going with it.
“Your mind is beautiful,” she insisted, and he realized that she must have picked up on that thought. She was getting better at that. He wondered just how deep she’d been probing to have caused such pain, and what she’d seen, but somehow he could not bring himself to care. Let her see what she wanted; considering he was a walking invasion of privacy, it would be hypocritical of him to be bothered by it. He leaned in to affectionately nuzzle her cheek as his form slowly grew more solid and the outside world receded.
“You have terrible taste,” he teased. “I’m okay with that.”
Caroline made a frustrated noise and twisted around to gaze at the gaping abyss right in the center of his mind. “Okay, yes, the rifts are bad, but… that. That is amazing.”
His brows furrowed. “…what is?”
“The tower.”
Huh?
He gazed at her blankly for a long moment.
“What tower?”
Caroline stared at him.
“The huge giant thing right in front of you?”
PsyKick tilted his head and looked over her shoulder. There was a gaping hole.
His eyes narrowed and he slowly straightened his back.
Something in his domain that he couldn’t see?
“Show me where it is.”
Her brows were furrowed as she gave him a long, searching look. Then she took his hand and led him closer to the cliff. “It’s right here.” She reached out and held up her hand, seemingly in thin air.
The ground shook and Psy almost doubled over in pain.
What…
There was a compulsion there. Something that was pushing against him, telling him he should not look there. His gaze just slid right over that void, no matter how often he tried looking directly at it.
How long had this been here?
This shouldn’t be possible. Broken as it was, this was still his sanctuary. Nobody had ever broken his walls, and many had tried – numerous villains when he’d still had his pride, and after that the heroes who’d endeavored to help him.
He felt concern emanating from Caroline, but he paid it no mind, stumbling toward that edge, reaching out to touch whatever it was.
His palm met with resistance.
And his vision went white.
The mindscape started shaking with the force of an earthquake.
“On your knees.”
The itch barely even pricked at him before his knees gave way. He made no sound as pure pleasure burned inside his veins like fire.
“Listen well, PsyKick. From now on you will desire nothing more than to serve me. To be a villain will be your purpose in life. You will not even want to subvert my orders.”
He whimpered, her voice echoing in his mind as the itch started burning again.
“Is that understood?”
He said nothing, his knuckles turning white as he desperately erected mental barrier after mental barrier, trying to compartmentalize his mind.
PsyKick’s mind split in two, and he severed one half completely from all sensory input. It was a technique he used a lot; it was very draining but had often proved to be the difference between his team’s defeat and triumph. One half of his mind would focus on fighting his opponent while the other half, cut off from pain and exhaustion, linked the Tenacious Teens together, and analyzed everyone’s field of vision. Then he calculated strategies around that, rapidly adapting to changing circumstances, sending each of them individual orders and coordinating their team to be an unstoppable force.
There was, after all, a reason that PsyKick was considered the de facto leader.
He shuddered as the horrific Itch fell away, and he could think again.
A tremor ran through his mindscape and he was faintly aware of his other half screaming in agony, but he had to ignore that. His time was extremely limited; considering the strain he was under, he would not be able to keep this up for long.
He had heard her orders, and he knew exactly what they would mean for him. Some forms of brainwashing, once removed, left the victim no worse for wear. This would not be one of them; her methods were simple yet devastating in their scope.
Ideally, PsyKick would find a way to escape. He split his mind once more, and left that part in charge of planning his resistance. Heroically breaking mindcontrol through sheer willpower alone was a grand tale heroes loved to brag about, but over in real world he knew it to be something that rarely happened. That didn’t mean PsyKick wouldn’t do everything in his power to save himself right now.
But if there was one thing his experience as a strategist had taught him, it was to have contingency plans.
PsyKick turned toward his core, pulling on his considerable power – and started duplicating it. He poured everything of himself into his creation, everything that he was, everything that he had once been, and everything that he hoped to be.
A perfect snapshot of the kind of person he was.
A backup.
He knew that his powers had an extremely defensive lean; he had yet to meet anyone who could breach his walls. Nonetheless, should the brainwashing take hold, he had to count on someone doing just that, and hope that they would ask themselves why he had two cores.
The white marble of his walls flowed from beneath, slowly encasing his secondary core in a protective shell. The ground shook again, a crack appearing in the pristine courtyard.
PsyKick shuddered as an echo of pain ran up his spine, heralding the fast-approaching merge.
And with the last strength he had left, to make sure his soon-to-be-brainwashed-self did not ruin his plan, he erased all knowledge of what he had done.
Comments
Smart move
Ah, so PsyKick left himself a backup disk to reboot his mind if the conditioning was ever broken. The only problem was that his defenses were so strong that no one would have ever found it if not for the lucky mistake he made of switching their minds.
Smart idea?
Yes, the idea of a backup psyche is smart, but...
What's the cost of rebooting and overriding the brainwashed part?
Can it be integrated with the memories that have been generated since the backup was created, or does it wipe everything and send him back to right before his mind was shattered by Cinder Snow?
I'm not sure which would be better, wiping everything and starting over, along with the difficulty of trying to convince him of everything that has happened since, or trying to reintegrate the two, which is no doubt going to probably the most painful thing that PsyKick's encountered since the Shattering.
Awesome chapter. Very serious topic to consider when you think about RL and people with MPD. Thank you
Cicero2K
'Otium cum dignitate'
Dun dun dunnnnn
Dun dun dunnnnn
a backup him?
interesting. But can he access it?
oh!, nicely done!
he just gave Cinder Snow one hell of a snow job.
great chapter, if short. thanks
sweet!
He has an amazing mind.
Thanks for sharing.
Caroline seems the key to both their recoveries now...
if she can overcome her instinct to assume the worst of others, to assume there is an ulterior motive.
BTW they are so in lust/love I fear they will be with *issue* in the minds ASAP.
Kara is going to be an Auntie!
-- grin --
Love his fallback plan of a backup copy of who he was so well hidden he could not find it once he erased his own memory of it. With Caroline's help Psi Kick should be able to integrate who he was with what he became. IE remember the pain, the degradation yet transcend it and become better for it.
And once they switch back she can be helped to be free of her demons and of that vile assassins cult.
My suspicions are many if not most want out if it but are prevented by that in for life, we will kill you and or yours if you try to leave pact.
John in Wauwatosa
John in Wauwatosa
Backup
As befitting a hero of Psykick's considerable experience and power, he managed to make a way out. Now hopefully he can take it with Caroline's help.
-Tas