I finally found you.
It isn’t fair to say there are better telepaths, it isn’t that simple. It’s like sports, ironically. There are plenty of guys out there who are stronger than me, and I know most of them, or of them, rather. People with abilities in my area aren’t terribly common; it’s a small world. Folks with longer range, can do more at once, can do naturally what I have to figure out how to do, who can actually tap the powers of others, but there’s a technique to it beyond just competing with another mind. I’m not strong, but I’m a good player.
And I found you.
I had to look in ways I had never dream’d were possible to even come close. Find the holes in the defense systems you develop’d to keep your rotten kind safe from prying minds of guys like me so you can keep dreaming up new ways to hurt people. Walk through agents and lab techs and bureaucrats to locate you. I had to look beyond the edges of my vision to do what no telepath had done before. I closed in on the Transeuclidian.
Now you’re going to get what’s been coming to you since you step’d into a lab and put aside the decency that keeps the rest of us from being you. The difference between you and human is too big, and no amount of crime-stopping on your part will change that.
I come up behind him. As I touch his mind, my just vengeance turns to horror. Everything stops.
I feel so old now. Less than a second has pass’d in the world beyond me, but in here it’s been about seven years. Twelve if you consider the fact that I don’t sleep and thirty if you remove an average day’s empty-head’d idling.
In here. My body has long ago stop’d being a part of me. If this ever wears off, I might need to learn to walk again. I’m glad my eyes don’t itch or I’d have gone insane.
I base those figures from before on my internal monologue’s average speaking rate and my sense of time. I used to hate math, but what do you do with your time when you can’t move and have only yourself for company?
Therapy, as it turns out. Shrinks on tv always have you do all the talking and coming up with solutions on your own anyway, the leeches. Staring into the back of the head of the man who warp’d your sister into the mess she became and countless others for this long forced me to examine myself.
I think what happen’d is that when I touch’d his mind I got a power feedback. If he thinks this quickly all the time, it would explain alot. If he can control it, he’s lucky. I can’t. The feedback isn’t making me smarter, just fast. I say that in the present tense because despite the fact that I tried to disconnect immediately once I realized what was happening, apparently there’s a small time delay. If he can’t control it, then there’s nothing I could have ever done to him. I’m afraid that if I try to make contact with him or read his mind, it’ll make this situation worse. Out of my periphery I can see a woman mid blink. The man in front of me must be an abyss of time.
I’ve had lots to think about. I wonder’d for a while how my brain hasn’t burn’d up with all the electricity. It implies that there’s more to thinking that we don’t see, which makes sense considering no one can seem to explain how telepathy works. I took to thinking in narrative like this. It helps to feel like I’m talking to someone, like Richard from next door or God. Or Suzie. I miss you.
I feel like doing these reports every once in a while gives me direction. Or at least it gives me a feel for my progress.
I’ve come to forgive him, which I can accept now is what my sister would would want. Hate poisons you, and got me into this situation in the first place. All I want’d to do so many times is scream. At him. Myself. The sky. My luck. For help. Just to hear something other than the slow drone of the air pressure and roar of the street. Your senses keep feeding you information slowly, but it stays in your brain. I only notice it when I think about it, or if I’m silent for too long in here.
I don’t remember what my voice sounds like. I don’t remember my face. I wonder’d briefly if I was in hell, and I just made up the life I had before. Those kinds of thoughts aren’t worth thinking about other than to tell you. After this long, I can’t give in.
I’m sorry. I made my life about hurting this man because I kept hurting even after her suffering was over. I used her tragedy as an excuse to take away sons and fathers and wives and it broke the families that were left behind just as I had been. I imagine he was trying to accomplish something, however misguided. I was just consumed. I’m still haunt’d by the fact that I don’t remember all of their names. When someone comes looking for me some day they won’t have the time I’ve had to come to terms with myself. Before this happen’d I was every bit the monster I always call’d him.
Even now, after all this time, I don’t understand him. I barely ever knew anything about him. I want to.
Time suddenly starts to pass again and I’m overwhelm’d. I fall, feeling something for the first time in decades. There’s so much noise.
A hand. He’s helping me up? I steady myself on the bench. How did I get here? I’m crying. I look up at him. I actually turn my head and I look up at him. My face feels weird, no longer used to what an expression feels like. I try to put a voice to the words I’ve been planning to say to him for years, but the words are gone. A sound in my throat.
“I touch’d your mind.” Like riding a bike, apparently.
“I’m aware. You’re handling your time away well, but you also let go the quickest.” Someone else’s voice! His voice. He looks bored, right? Or is that no expression at all?
“You kill’d my sister.” This isn’t how it was supposed to go. It’s so fast.
“And?”
I take the prompt, even if that wasn’t what he meant. “And I forgive you.”
I hug him and wonder how he can bear to wait that long.
Written over the course of a productive afternoon in 2011. The Transeuclidean is one of several characters of mine from a long time ago that I’ll probably never do anything with, so I figured I might as well publish this and get it out of my personal archive. I’d hate to lose it. Might be part of a series if I decide to write a vignette for one of the other characters.
TheVeryMask 