As for Burnscar?  There would be no helping that girl.

I guess not. At least not from you. It’s not something you should focus on, given the effect it has on your own health and the fact that there doesn’t seem to be anything you can really do for her other than provide company.

“We had some good times,” Elle lied.  “Take care.”

You’re a good kid, Elle.

Burnscar pulled away, and Elle let the girl go.  She saw Burnscar find the door to the indoor balcony that overlooked the dance floor, heard her run down the stairs.

Elle sank down against the wall, pushing away the sharp things that would cut her with a use of her power.  She put her head in her hands and closed her eyes to the sights around her.  She’d wait a few minutes.  She’d take a few minutes wait until she could be sure Burnscar was gone, then she would leave to check on the others.

See ya, Mimi.

And yeah, waiting a couple minutes and checking on the others sounds good.

It would be weeks before she had made up for the ground she had just lost, in terms of her mental health, in pushing past the bad memories and the bad place.

Ouch.

She reassured herself with the thought that she would get better, in time.  She’d gotten there once, she could get there again.  If the others were okay.

That is a good thought to hold onto. 🙂

“Oh fuck.  Fuck me, I’m sorry,” Burnscar said.  She turned away, fumbled with the metal door.  Elle realized it had locked, adjusted things to allow it to open.  Burnscar pulled it open, then stopped in the doorway.  Her back turned, the girl said, “I’m sorry about your friends.  I really hope they’re okay.”

This… visit didn’t exactly go how anyone wanted, did it.

Seriously, I didn’t expect this to get sad of all emotions.

I kinda love it, though. It’s sad in so many ways, but it’s well-written, creative sadness.

“I do too.”

“I’m glad you’re doing well.  I hope I didn’t fuck everything up.”

Burnscar is my favorite Slaughterhouse member right now, I think. Jack is great personality-wise, and there’s no doubt I have a weak spot for the charismatic ones, but Burnscar has a fantastic story and an awesome power.

It took a bit of courage, but Elle hurried to cross the room and wrap her arms around Burnscar, hugging her from behind.

Hey, Mimi… Elle may not have seen you as a friend back then, you may bring up bad memories now, and Elle might have a couple disagreements with your way of going about life… but maybe you could still be friends now.

It’s not too late.

Then she turned and looked around.  Her face fell as she saw the padded walls, the bed that had become a cot, the shit stains, the blood, the needles in the corner, the broken glass and the razorblades that were embedded in every surface, waiting to catch anyone unsuspecting that put their hand or foot in the wrong place.

Yeeah. Welcome to the bad place.

“No,” Burnscar said.

Elle tensed.  “Sorry.”

Burnscar’s face fell.  “This… this isn’t beautiful.  I remember this.”

The asylum, right?

“Would show you the others… if I could.”

Burnscar’s voice was choked.  “But you can’t.  Because I remind you of the asylum.  I remind you of the bad times, the times you were most miserable.”

Now you’re getting it.

Jeez, this is sad.

Elle looked down at her feet, swallowed past the lump in her throat.

“I thought we were friends.  We had our moments, didn’t we?  Only a few times, when we were both allowed out of our cells, when we were having good days.  A few jokes, stories.  I mean, I know that some of the time I was coming off a bad spell, so maybe I snapped, or I called you names, or threatened you…”

The slow realization that it wasn’t always good times, at least not both ways…

Burnscar trailed off.  Elle stayed silent.

“It.  It wasn’t, um.” Burnscar stuttered.  Her eyes flashed orange.  “Did you see me as a friend?  Don’t you dare lie to me.”

And there it is. The big question.

And I don’t think she’s gonna like the answer.

Elle couldn’t come up with a reply.  They used me as an enticement to get you to cooperate.

Ouch.

“I saw you as a person I was being used as a tool to control.”

“Can’t keep hurting people, Mimi.”

Stopping that would be preferable, yes.

The problem is that this is a lot like telling an addict “Can’t keep using cocaine.”

“I have to.  I- I can just use my power.  Stay in that headspace where I don’t feel bad, where I act the way the Nine expect me to.”

Yeah, no, this argument ain’t gonna appease Elle. She brought this up as a thing she hated before you even got to mentioning it.

The bad place was intruding on the room further.  Elle spoke up, “Mimi…  Can I touch you?  Anchor you?  Don’t want my power to hurt you.”

Ahh, anchoring, that’s a good term for making someone immune to her ability. It’s like tethering them to reality, keeping them from truly being pulled into the liminal space created by Labyrinth’s power.

“So you want to keep me out of your world?”  Mimi smiled and shook her head.  “No way.  Half the reason I came here was because I heard you were making beautiful things these days.  I have to see it.  The things you can make, now.”

You don’t realize the effect you’re having on Elle at all, huh.

“Surrender?  Go to the birdcage?”

“They’d find me.  You don’t even know what these guys are capable of.

In the Birdcage?

I mean, sure, I’m guessing they’ve got people on the inside, but can they communicate with them in any way?

I guess if they got themselves caught too, that’d be one thing, but that’s not something I think they’d do on purpose.

Our newest member, she replaced Hatchet Face, though he’s still around… kind of.

…interesting. We’ve got a member replacement – meaning we can expect to meet someone in these Interludes who wasn’t on the list.

I should probably have seen that possibility coming, but I figured they’d fill the one spot before they got another.

So what happened to Hatchet Face, and does that mean we’re not going to meet him? Seriously, best name, I wanna know the character carrying it.

She can find people.  There’s no place secure enough to keep me safe until they took me to the Birdcage.

Ahh, right, the transitional period. I didn’t think of that.

I almost think they’d be able to get me in there, if they wanted to.  Siberian?  She’d be able to get me.   Even in the Birdcage.  She always gets her prey.”

Fair, but could she get out afterwards?

Burnscar shook her head.  “If you hadn’t put out most of the fire out there… I dunno what I would have done.”

Ohh… I didn’t think of that.

I wonder if that factored into why Labyrinth did it the way she did, on a subnarrative level.

I have a pretty good idea.

What did Burnscar do to you and/or people you loved, Labyrinth?

“So I burned the pimp to scare him, then I burned him to hurt him, for payback over his hounding me, and then I couldn’t really stop myself.  I burned him to death.  Fuck. That was the start of a bad few weeks.”

Whoops.

“Sorry.”

“I- before I knew it, the Slaughterhouse Nine had found me.  Shatterbird recruited me.  And now I’m stuck.  I’m trapped.

I see… I guess there’s no real quitting the Slaughterhouse, is there?

You know there’s a kill order out on me?  If I try to quit, either the Nine or the cops will off me.  So I keep going, I work for them, and it all just gets worse.”

Fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t… bit of a pickle, huh.

“Yeah.”  And you retreat into that state to avoid facing the guilt over things you’ve done.  You use it to hide from your own fears.  If I blame you for anything, it’s for that.

There’s clearly history here.

Before we got to Burnscar approaching Labyrinth, I characterized her as a confident woman who knows what she wants and takes it.

I think that’s true, but only when she’s high on fire.

Things are coming together: When not using her power, Burnscar is an apologetic, guilt-ridden girl who doesn’t want to be a bad person, but once fire gets involved, she turns into the kind of person the Slaughterhouse would want. She becomes a city blaze, a raging storm of fire that destroys anything in its path not because it cares about destroying those things, but simply so it can keep going.

High Burnscar is terrifying. Sober Burnscar has to deal with the guilt, the knowledge of what she did when high on fire, and apparently often becomes high Burnscar again to avoid that.

It’s a vicious cycle, and it’s actually pretty sad.

“Sorry.”

“I… I really wanted to be good.  I’d told myself I wouldn’t use my power.  But I had to protect myself, you understand?”

Yeah, but there’s a big difference between that and Slaughterhouse.

Elle nodded.  The cloth around the door had started to settle into a shape.  Padded walls, lined with barbed wire and jagged rows of glass.  There were stains of shit and blood on some of the cloth, now, growing and swelling.  She tried to will it to stop, to focus on her high temple.

So is this copy of the asylum “the bad place”?

Her safe place.  But looking at Burnscar, that place felt so far away.  It was out of her reach.

Yeeah, Burnscar’s feelings about this reunion are… kind of one-sided. I don’t think she realizes that.

Is she going to force Labyrinth to be her nominee?

Burnscar went on, “So I used it to scare him off… but you know how it works.  You know what happens with my power.”

It’s hard to restrain?

“I remember.”

“I… the doctors say that using my power, it adjusts the chemical balances and connections in my brain.

Ahhh.

It’s not hard to restrain, directly. It makes you want to not restrain it, or not want to restrain it.

It’s addictive.

This is super appropriate to the element. Fire wants to be free, to spread wildly and consume.

Empathy, impulse control, my emotions, they disappear as I use my power, and I can’t help using my power if there’s fire nearby.

I’ve speculated before on the idea of powers wanting to be used. This is an extreme variation on that, though one that is easily explained as being part of the specific power rather than a detail about powers in general.

Then again, there’s also the connection between fire and passion. It’s not out of the realm of plausibility that this power is especially passionate about some of the default features of powers. Maybe, for example, Burnscar’s trigger proximity power boosts are especially strong, too?

Incidentally, I wonder whether the TPPB applies to the addictive pull of the power, making it much harder to resist when she’s in a state of mind similar to during her trigger event.

Speaking of which, I wonder if she may have been trapped in a burning building or something? Giving total control over fire and the ability to teleport from fire to fire is one way the Dandelions could decide to help someone out of that situation. It’s almost reasonable, even.

It snowballs, because I use my power more when I don’t have that self-control, when I don’t care about the people I’m near, and when I’m in that headspace I don’t want to leave it.”

Yep. Textbook addictive power.