[How can he answer that? He brought Walt there himself. Walt killed him there. Everyone was in danger - in constant danger - and Jesse knew it, even if he didn't predict his own murder. It's why Jesse's quitting Xavier's now: He was as much a danger to the school as he was the one person who could heal any injuries suffered by those kids.]
Emma - Emma knew about me. Straight from the beginning. And she wanted me there anyway, because she knew I'd protect those kids with my life.
I don't know if she made the right choice. But I wouldn'ta let anything happen to 'em. Not if I could help it.
[Emma....he remembers, suddenly, having that conversation with Jesse, ages ago. Kotetsu making that precise argument, that Emma wouldn't have let him into the school if she thought he was a danger. Back then, Jesse had argued that it wouldn't have bothered Emma even if he was. But maybe that was just Jesse's guilty conscience talking, because of the secrets he knew he was keeping?
He hates this. He really hates this. Reevaluating all those old conversations, wondering which things were truth and which were falsehood. He lets out a frustrated sigh.]
See, that's the part I don't get. You're saying you're this hundred-percent-asshole, done every felony in the book, but--you were always taking care of people. The kids, the innocents who got hurt every time something blew up, the sick and injured people in hospitals...
...It's not even like--I mean, you went through hell for those people. Nobody'd go that far just for an act.
[And this may be a level of morality too nuanced for people from societies with Official Heroes. Jesse has some patience for that. But he wants to be very clear on this.]
I can be more than one thing. I can be a drug dealer who'd never sell to a kid. I can be a murderer who'd never kill somebody without a good reason. I can hurt people and still hate hurting people. I can hurt somebody one day and heal 'em the next. One thing's got nothing to do with the other.
[There's a bit of a pause. Kotetsu, at least, is more malleable to this line of thinking than say, someone like Lunatic, considering his belief in the idea that everyone's life is valuable, no exceptions. It's still difficult for him, of course. He's gone so long believing it unthinkable that Jesse was even capable of harming anyone intentionally.
He still doesn't really believe in there being good reasons to kill someone--beyond heat-of-the-moment self-defense, of course--but the idea of what Jesse's saying doesn't go over his head completely.
Eventually:]
...Why, then? [Beat] Did you do the things you did, I mean. ...There and here.
[Because Jesse, for one, hates excuses. And he doesn't want to sound like he's giving any.]
I know there's other ways to do what I wanted to do. Every choice I ever made, I coulda done something different. A better person woulda done different. But me? I'm not smart. I don't have any skills. Before I got here, there wasn't a single thing I could do to actually help people. My whole life, the only thing I was good at was hurting 'em. I was only ever good at being a criminal. There was nothing else for me.
But I tried, you know? Tried to get out, tried to do other things. This life's got a way of dragging you back. The kinda people I worked for, you couldn't just walk away from 'em.
It's not about making it better. I just want to know.
[It's about understanding why, and more importantly, understanding Jesse. When Callaghan's past had come out, Kotetsu needed to know just who it was he was working for. Making horrible decisions you later regretted because of the trauma of losing a child wasn't the same as making those same decisions for personal gain, for money or power or something that would've made him resign from Xavier's and never speak to Callaghan again unless he did something to endanger others here.
And now, he wants to know the truth about this man, the one he's trusted and been close to for a very long time.]
You're wrong, by the way. There's not a single person in the world that's incapable of helping people. Hundreds of people or maybe more're alive here 'cause of you, and your powers were just the tool for that. They're alive 'cause you cared enough to literally torture yourself for their sake. You always had that.
[He knows a thing or two about feeling like you can only hurt people, after all.]
...And that doesn't explain why you took it back up here, either.
[And here's where everyone in the world is wrong about him, when they assume that he wants to suffer or that he's being selfless in his quest to heal the world's pain.]
And I don't mean superpowerless. I mean that feeling where you can't control anything that's going on. Being at somebody else's mercy. Other people, the government, God... I hate having to stand back and shut my mouth and just let things happen.
When I left my world, when I first came here and saw this fucking tattoo on my wrist and found out I had these nanites in my blood and read this whole goddamn file they were keeping on me... I don't know if you know the feeling, if you're used to all this shit from your world, but I wasn't. Everybody else might be ignoring it, but I knew from that second I was officially government property. And I wasn't about to have that.
You know what's more powerful than any government? Money. No matter what situation you're in, if you got the money, you can get out of it. So I did what I do best. I got to work on my own little security plan.
[...He's not sure why it is that he feels utterly disappointed by that answer.]
There's gotta be better ways of making money than all that. [He rubs at his face, unhappily.] Hell, you coulda sold your power, even. Nobody would'a blamed you for it, considering what you go through to do it.
[But he's pretty sure Jesse never did, except those times when the proceeds went to charity. It's another one of those little contradictions that he can't fit together, despite what Jesse said about being able to be more than than one thing. Why do such a selfless thing for free for years, if that's what he wanted? Why hurt people if he didn't want when that kind of thing was an option?]
...That's not what you meant when you talked about a good reason to kill people, right? For money?
[Jesse's glad that Kotetsu sounds disappointed. He should be disappointed. God, it makes so much sense to disappoint people. More sense than all the praise or even the criticism of his so-called martyr behavior.]
No. I don't kill people for money. And I do sell my power. Just not to the kinda people you'd see me healing in public.
It's not enough. Even all the stuff I'm doing isn't enough. Do you have any idea how much it's gonna cost? Us freeing ourselves. How much land, how much technology, how many weapons and body armor we're gonna need? How many allies we're gonna have to buy? I make over a million dollars a week and three-quarters of that gets sunk back into keeping it all running. Just keeping up the goddamn status quo.
[Jesse didn't mean just his own freedom. It suddenly clicks now, all those things he couldn't seem to make sense out of. The contradictions aren't quite so puzzling anymore, now that he sees the bigger picture. The disappointment that was coloring his features shifts, becomes something almost helpless as he rakes one hand in his hair.]
Dammit, Jesse--we never asked you to do anything like that for us.
[There's a tone of frustration in his voice, but it's not angry frustration. Because all this makes way too much sense, and he feels--upset? distressed? annoyed? he doesn't know--that Jesse's suffered so much for something like this. Something so stupid and noble and did he mention stupid.]
I don't--I don't want it, and I don't think I'd be the only one.
[He jerks up his arm, that REGISTERED tattoo just barely visible in the dimmer light of the bar.]
This--getting rid of these? It's not worth it, not if it costs the lives of people who won't come back. How could any of us accept that freedom, knowing what was sacrificed in the process?
Yeah, well, I don't really care how anybody else feels about it.
[Which, in a way, brings him back to his original point.]
None of you know what it's like. Real slavery. You think Registration's like paying taxes, and it's kinda shitty but it comes with benefits, and you get to walk around and live your life and go home to a cozy little house the government gave you. And maybe, yeah, if we're lucky, it's gonna stay like this. Maybe I'm just paranoid, like those guys who stock up on canned food 'cause they think doomsday is coming.
But I've lived it: Sleeping in a cage, shitting in a bucket, getting beaten, getting called "rat" or "pussy" or anything other than my name. You stop being human to the people who own you. That's inevitable. And that was my life, man. Not some "what-if".
And I can guarantee you, when that happens to you... You're gonna stop thinking about what's "right" or what's "wrong" or whether anything was "worth it". If that day never comes for us here, then thank god for that. But I'm not waiting 'til it's too late, and I'm sure as hell not worrying about how people who don't even know what it's like might think they feel about it.
[Kotetsu's stunned, for a long moment. It's clear that whatever he'd expected when Jesse told him something worse than dying had happened to him, it wasn't this.
Not that it makes him agree with this plan any more, and he's torn at first, whether or not he'd actually prefer Jesse to be doing this for himself rather than everyone after all, knowing this new piece of information.
He almost doesn't say anything about it at all, knowing anything he could come up with would be woefully inadequate. But in the end, he's not cold enough to leave such a thing unremarked upon.]
That sounds like hell, I'm so sorry.
[He finally reaches for his drink again, the one that's gone untouched since the conversation went suddenly down this road. He finishes the glass before speaking again.]
...Still, it's not--you can't make that call for all of us. I get wanting to protect yourself as much as you can, after all that, but...but if you say you're doing it for us, that sort of puts some of that blood and suffering on our hands too, you know? And we never asked for it.
This world's different from yours, too. We've all got powers, and there's hundreds of us. We've always taken care of each other when crap went down before--we could protect each other if the government tried to turn on us.
[Jesse's not looking for comfort. He brushes off those token words of sympathy. He didn't want them before his scars healed and he doesn't want them now, when the only evidence of what he went through is relegated to memory.]
Let's see how you feel when it's happening. When all those friends you're counting on realize it's every man for himself and start goose stepping just so they get a nicer cell.
[He's confident Kotetsu will be singing a different tune after a week or a month or a year of torture.]
That's never how it's been before. Even when the Hornets were literally hijacking people's brains and making them attack each other, or the time with the fear gas, we still looked out for each other, tried to protect each other. Why do you think it'd be different if it was the government we were up against, rather than Lunatic or Lucifer or Crane or the Hornets?
Anyway, aren't there imPorts who could just make all that stuff for you? Like the technopaths and the reality benders and such.
[Well, maybe they wouldn't be so willing to just mass-produce weapons, but the other stuff, right? Who could be opposed to a shelter and an emergency stockpile of food and water and medical supplies, and all that?]
Edited (ACCIDENTALLY REPEATED A THING ) 2016-05-10 05:09 (UTC)
This might be a shock to you, but imPorts still wanna get paid for their services.
[And that's as much as he'll say on that topic, lest he inadvertently cast suspicion on Elsa or any of his other employees.]
You're talking about Lucifer and Lunatic and Crane - They're imPorts, too, aren't they? That's exactly the point. There's always gonna be imPorts doing what's best for themselves. They're not protecting us, right? They're not looking out for everybody. When the government comes for us, it's gonna be the same damn thing: imPorts turning on each other.
You wanna stop that from happening, you gotta be the guy who can make the better offer. Not everybody does things outta the goodness of their hearts. Some people just want the best fucking deal they can get.
You can't just--talk like we're all like that. Like we're all just waiting for an excuse to screw each other over. We wouldn't all try so hard to fix it when one of us pulls crap if it was just every person for themselves.
It's not...a bad idea, having a shelter, and all that, but there's better ways. Have you even--asked anyone if they would help? I'd have helped, if you asked me. I bet Bunny would've, too.
Of course I asked people. But when you got guys like Tony Stark all oo-rah for the government, working on stuff like power nullifiers, you'd have to be a total idiot to put out a wide call for imPorts to get in on this. You gotta vet people before you recruit 'em for something like this, and once they're in, you gotta pay to keep their mouths shut and keep 'em loyal.
But what the hell do you know, anyway? You're a professional hero. You don't even think about this stuff, 'cause you never had to. You're happy to take orders and get the job done, and then you get to take off your mask and go home without a target on your back. You actually think the system's gonna protect you. You actually believe we're all gonna come outta this holding hands. You don't know what it's like to live for years with everybody around you trying to kill you.
And I'm done talking about this. I shoulda known you were drinking the Kool-Aid. Being straight with you was a mistake and you're gonna make me pay for it.
[The way Jesse steps back is more like a retreat, his hands up in mock surrender, as if he fully expects Kotetsu to make the arrest right now.]
I don't wanna make you pay for it, you idiot, I wanna help you!
[To save him from himself, maybe.]
You don't even want to keep living this life, do you, but you're convinced it's the only way, and it doesn't have to be.
[But Jesse's already retreating, isn't he? Nothing he can say will change his mind. Why does this keep happening? Damn it. Damn it. What the hell is he supposed to do now?]
If you really wanna help me, then stay outta my way.
[It's as much a plea as it is a threat. The last thing he wants is to hurt Kotetsu, but he won't go quietly into another cell - which is surely Kotetsu's idea of "help", since he's siding with the law on this one.
Jesse takes those last few steps more quickly, and then he's out the door.]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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Emma - Emma knew about me. Straight from the beginning. And she wanted me there anyway, because she knew I'd protect those kids with my life.
I don't know if she made the right choice. But I wouldn'ta let anything happen to 'em. Not if I could help it.
gently dusts this thread off
He hates this. He really hates this. Reevaluating all those old conversations, wondering which things were truth and which were falsehood. He lets out a frustrated sigh.]
See, that's the part I don't get. You're saying you're this hundred-percent-asshole, done every felony in the book, but--you were always taking care of people. The kids, the innocents who got hurt every time something blew up, the sick and injured people in hospitals...
...It's not even like--I mean, you went through hell for those people. Nobody'd go that far just for an act.
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[And this may be a level of morality too nuanced for people from societies with Official Heroes. Jesse has some patience for that. But he wants to be very clear on this.]
I can be more than one thing. I can be a drug dealer who'd never sell to a kid. I can be a murderer who'd never kill somebody without a good reason. I can hurt people and still hate hurting people. I can hurt somebody one day and heal 'em the next. One thing's got nothing to do with the other.
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He still doesn't really believe in there being good reasons to kill someone--beyond heat-of-the-moment self-defense, of course--but the idea of what Jesse's saying doesn't go over his head completely.
Eventually:]
...Why, then? [Beat] Did you do the things you did, I mean. ...There and here.
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[Because Jesse, for one, hates excuses. And he doesn't want to sound like he's giving any.]
I know there's other ways to do what I wanted to do. Every choice I ever made, I coulda done something different. A better person woulda done different. But me? I'm not smart. I don't have any skills. Before I got here, there wasn't a single thing I could do to actually help people. My whole life, the only thing I was good at was hurting 'em. I was only ever good at being a criminal. There was nothing else for me.
But I tried, you know? Tried to get out, tried to do other things. This life's got a way of dragging you back. The kinda people I worked for, you couldn't just walk away from 'em.
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[It's about understanding why, and more importantly, understanding Jesse. When Callaghan's past had come out, Kotetsu needed to know just who it was he was working for. Making horrible decisions you later regretted because of the trauma of losing a child wasn't the same as making those same decisions for personal gain, for money or power or something that would've made him resign from Xavier's and never speak to Callaghan again unless he did something to endanger others here.
And now, he wants to know the truth about this man, the one he's trusted and been close to for a very long time.]
You're wrong, by the way. There's not a single person in the world that's incapable of helping people. Hundreds of people or maybe more're alive here 'cause of you, and your powers were just the tool for that. They're alive 'cause you cared enough to literally torture yourself for their sake. You always had that.
[He knows a thing or two about feeling like you can only hurt people, after all.]
...And that doesn't explain why you took it back up here, either.
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[And here's where everyone in the world is wrong about him, when they assume that he wants to suffer or that he's being selfless in his quest to heal the world's pain.]
And I don't mean superpowerless. I mean that feeling where you can't control anything that's going on. Being at somebody else's mercy. Other people, the government, God... I hate having to stand back and shut my mouth and just let things happen.
When I left my world, when I first came here and saw this fucking tattoo on my wrist and found out I had these nanites in my blood and read this whole goddamn file they were keeping on me... I don't know if you know the feeling, if you're used to all this shit from your world, but I wasn't. Everybody else might be ignoring it, but I knew from that second I was officially government property. And I wasn't about to have that.
You know what's more powerful than any government? Money. No matter what situation you're in, if you got the money, you can get out of it. So I did what I do best. I got to work on my own little security plan.
It's as simple as that.
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There's gotta be better ways of making money than all that. [He rubs at his face, unhappily.] Hell, you coulda sold your power, even. Nobody would'a blamed you for it, considering what you go through to do it.
[But he's pretty sure Jesse never did, except those times when the proceeds went to charity. It's another one of those little contradictions that he can't fit together, despite what Jesse said about being able to be more than than one thing. Why do such a selfless thing for free for years, if that's what he wanted? Why hurt people if he didn't want when that kind of thing was an option?]
...That's not what you meant when you talked about a good reason to kill people, right? For money?
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No. I don't kill people for money. And I do sell my power. Just not to the kinda people you'd see me healing in public.
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[Jesse didn't mean just his own freedom. It suddenly clicks now, all those things he couldn't seem to make sense out of. The contradictions aren't quite so puzzling anymore, now that he sees the bigger picture. The disappointment that was coloring his features shifts, becomes something almost helpless as he rakes one hand in his hair.]
Dammit, Jesse--we never asked you to do anything like that for us.
[There's a tone of frustration in his voice, but it's not angry frustration. Because all this makes way too much sense, and he feels--upset? distressed? annoyed? he doesn't know--that Jesse's suffered so much for something like this. Something so stupid and noble and did he mention stupid.]
I don't--I don't want it, and I don't think I'd be the only one.
[He jerks up his arm, that REGISTERED tattoo just barely visible in the dimmer light of the bar.]
This--getting rid of these? It's not worth it, not if it costs the lives of people who won't come back. How could any of us accept that freedom, knowing what was sacrificed in the process?
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[Which, in a way, brings him back to his original point.]
None of you know what it's like. Real slavery. You think Registration's like paying taxes, and it's kinda shitty but it comes with benefits, and you get to walk around and live your life and go home to a cozy little house the government gave you. And maybe, yeah, if we're lucky, it's gonna stay like this. Maybe I'm just paranoid, like those guys who stock up on canned food 'cause they think doomsday is coming.
But I've lived it: Sleeping in a cage, shitting in a bucket, getting beaten, getting called "rat" or "pussy" or anything other than my name. You stop being human to the people who own you. That's inevitable. And that was my life, man. Not some "what-if".
And I can guarantee you, when that happens to you... You're gonna stop thinking about what's "right" or what's "wrong" or whether anything was "worth it". If that day never comes for us here, then thank god for that. But I'm not waiting 'til it's too late, and I'm sure as hell not worrying about how people who don't even know what it's like might think they feel about it.
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Not that it makes him agree with this plan any more, and he's torn at first, whether or not he'd actually prefer Jesse to be doing this for himself rather than everyone after all, knowing this new piece of information.
He almost doesn't say anything about it at all, knowing anything he could come up with would be woefully inadequate. But in the end, he's not cold enough to leave such a thing unremarked upon.]
That sounds like hell, I'm so sorry.
[He finally reaches for his drink again, the one that's gone untouched since the conversation went suddenly down this road. He finishes the glass before speaking again.]
...Still, it's not--you can't make that call for all of us. I get wanting to protect yourself as much as you can, after all that, but...but if you say you're doing it for us, that sort of puts some of that blood and suffering on our hands too, you know? And we never asked for it.
This world's different from yours, too. We've all got powers, and there's hundreds of us. We've always taken care of each other when crap went down before--we could protect each other if the government tried to turn on us.
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Let's see how you feel when it's happening. When all those friends you're counting on realize it's every man for himself and start goose stepping just so they get a nicer cell.
[He's confident Kotetsu will be singing a different tune after a week or a month or a year of torture.]
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That's never how it's been before. Even when the Hornets were literally hijacking people's brains and making them attack each other, or the time with the fear gas, we still looked out for each other, tried to protect each other. Why do you think it'd be different if it was the government we were up against, rather than Lunatic or Lucifer or Crane or the Hornets?
Anyway, aren't there imPorts who could just make all that stuff for you? Like the technopaths and the reality benders and such.
[Well, maybe they wouldn't be so willing to just mass-produce weapons, but the other stuff, right? Who could be opposed to a shelter and an emergency stockpile of food and water and medical supplies, and all that?]
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[And that's as much as he'll say on that topic, lest he inadvertently cast suspicion on Elsa or any of his other employees.]
You're talking about Lucifer and Lunatic and Crane - They're imPorts, too, aren't they? That's exactly the point. There's always gonna be imPorts doing what's best for themselves. They're not protecting us, right? They're not looking out for everybody. When the government comes for us, it's gonna be the same damn thing: imPorts turning on each other.
You wanna stop that from happening, you gotta be the guy who can make the better offer. Not everybody does things outta the goodness of their hearts. Some people just want the best fucking deal they can get.
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You can't just--talk like we're all like that. Like we're all just waiting for an excuse to screw each other over. We wouldn't all try so hard to fix it when one of us pulls crap if it was just every person for themselves.
It's not...a bad idea, having a shelter, and all that, but there's better ways. Have you even--asked anyone if they would help? I'd have helped, if you asked me. I bet Bunny would've, too.
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But what the hell do you know, anyway? You're a professional hero. You don't even think about this stuff, 'cause you never had to. You're happy to take orders and get the job done, and then you get to take off your mask and go home without a target on your back. You actually think the system's gonna protect you. You actually believe we're all gonna come outta this holding hands. You don't know what it's like to live for years with everybody around you trying to kill you.
And I'm done talking about this. I shoulda known you were drinking the Kool-Aid. Being straight with you was a mistake and you're gonna make me pay for it.
[The way Jesse steps back is more like a retreat, his hands up in mock surrender, as if he fully expects Kotetsu to make the arrest right now.]
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[To save him from himself, maybe.]
You don't even want to keep living this life, do you, but you're convinced it's the only way, and it doesn't have to be.
[But Jesse's already retreating, isn't he? Nothing he can say will change his mind. Why does this keep happening? Damn it. Damn it. What the hell is he supposed to do now?]
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[It's as much a plea as it is a threat. The last thing he wants is to hurt Kotetsu, but he won't go quietly into another cell - which is surely Kotetsu's idea of "help", since he's siding with the law on this one.
Jesse takes those last few steps more quickly, and then he's out the door.]