Post by mandi on Jul 30, 2017 0:35:43 GMT
I figured it was probably time to start exploring the pieces of the past that make Faith the little lunatic she is. First in a series.
There were some disadvantages to fame, among which is counted the inability to do much of anything in public in a prompt and timely fashion. The recognition is a big part of why she has the home gym, why she doesn't make a lot of appointments to meet people publicly. Someone always recognizes her and that starts the long chain of awkward questions. But tonight her husband insisted. She was brooding he said. Spending too much time second guessing herself and focusing on past mistakes. It was making her cranky...these are not invalid observations, and the fact that he was able to make them without getting punched in the face for it stands as something of a testament to their unlikely connection. He's there when she needs him to be, but he doesn't hover. He doesn't tell her that her feelings are foolish and invalid, but rather offers avenues of reprieve. Like these 'date nights', which are hilarious considering that their courtship had consisted of practically no actual 'dates' in public. But it's good for her, sometimes, to go through the notions of a 'normal' life, a movie and dinner. Casual. Because casual is about all she can manage to handle in public. And so, they are in fact, in the process of laughing over some occurrence in the film, Faith gesturing with her chopsticks over a plate of sushi when a large hand drops onto her shoulder and she freezes.
“Missed you at the funeral, Little Sister. But I guess you're too much of a bigshot these days to spare much time for your family.”
“Michael”
The name is hissed, spat out between clenched teeth. Her entire body tensed. Slowly, across the table, her husband places his fork carefully on the table before him, his eyes locked not on their unwelcome guest, but on his wife, waiting to take his cue from her. A heartbeat, and the blonde knocks the hand from her shoulder, half twisting in her chair.
“While I was deeply saddened to hear of Mary's passing, I have long since ceased to acknowledge you, your brothers, or that woman as members of my family. She might not have orchestrated the abuse that fell on my mother, but she turned a blind eye to it. She stood idly by while her husband, and her sons emotionally, physically, and sexually abused a girl she claimed as her own. Maybe it was out of fear, or complacency...either way it doesn't matter. It happened. How long would it have been, Michael, if she hadn't me and run, before the abuse you visited on me progressed from merely physical and emotional to sexual as well? How long before you decided my mother was just too old to satisfy your deprivations?”
Although her words are soft, they come sharp edged, laced with barely restrained animosity. There was a time in her life when she feared the man who stands before her. A time when his presence meant terror and pain. They say that when you experience a trauma you block it out, that your mind suppresses the memories...but she remembers. Every minute detail. She still wakes in the night, screaming and beating at things that aren't there....assuming that she sleeps anyway. He's not as imposing as one might expect a monster to be, the youngest of the three Skyler brothers, though not the smallest. At a little over six feet he still dwarfs her, broad through the shoulders like their father had been. The smile he pulls is empty, plastic.
“It's just so sad that Syn poisoned you against us the way she did. She came onto Dad. And we? We never touched you. Either of you. You were too little to-”
“You took my eyes when you locked me in that wooden fucking box, but you didn't take my ears. I heard everything. I remember everything. I remember you standing by and egging that monster on when he beat me so bad it put me in the hospital. I remember you jerking me around by the arm so much it dislocated my shoulder. I remember hiding in the closet every time I heard someone in the hallway, begging a God who wasn't listening that this time, this time you wouldn't come in our room. That this time you'd just leave us alone. You might have paid off a jury of your peers to acquit you Michael Daniel Skyler, but there will come a day of reckoning. Now. Go away. You've comple--”
She stops, in the middle of her dismissal when storm grey eyes fall on the pale, fearful little face that peers out from behind the man who would call her sister. The little girl can't be more than eight or nine. She stands timidly, not so much shy but more...with the slumped shoulders and downcast gaze of one accustomed to being told to shut up, and struck if she doesn't listen. For a moment, half a second, no longer than that, the blonde's vision swims and she sees herself, lost and beat down, afraid to speak, avoiding eye contact because it brought awkward questions, and no one believed her when she told the truth anyway. She blinks and the moment passes. This girl is older than she was. With strawberry blonde hair that would have been pretty if it didn't hang so lankly against her cheeks in a half hearted attempt to hide the yellowed, fading bruise that marks the right. Grey eyes dart back and forth between the girl and the man before she rises, none too gently pushing him out of the way. He protests. He starts to raise a hand to pull the blonde back but her husband's hand, a light touch, but firm on his arm catches his attention. The artist shakes his head silently, just once, but something in his stance suggests that further argument would not end well for him. Regardless, both men have ceased to exist to her. She has eyes only for the girl who shrinks away even as she crouches down to be on her level. At once, the young woman's voice softens.
“Hi there. What's your name?”
“Violet.”
“Violet...that's a very pretty name. Is Michael your dad?”
The little girl doesn't answer verbally, but darts a furtive look up, then nods.
“I see...well. That makes me your aunt. My name is Faith. Is your Mommy here too?”
“No. She...fell. Hit her head real bad. Didn't wake up.”
“I'm very sorry to hear that. I didn't know Michael had any kids, but I'm very, very happy to meet you. And I would really like to get to know you better. So this is what I'm going to do.”
Faith scribbles her phone number onto the back of a business card dug out of her pocket and presses it into the girl's hand.
“This is my phone number. Now, I want you to call me, any time you want, and we'll talk about whatever you want to talk about. I'm going to talk to your dad, just for a second, and while I do, why don't you talk to Seren? He's your uncle now. I bet you like to color, if you ask him nicely, I bet he'd draw you a picture.”
The little girl actually smiles, almost, and Seren turns all smiles as he welcomes the little girl. Satisfied that Violet will be distracted, the blonde rounds on her estranged brother, all pretenses of pleasantness gone.
“Couldn't even keep your hands off your own kid huh Mikey? It stops. It stops now.”
“I don't know what you're talking about Faith. Vi's just a very clumsy little girl. Like you were.”
“You have one chance Michael. One. You do right by her. She's young enough the damage might not be too deep. But if I think, for even a second, that you're doing to her, what you did to me. I will find you. And when I do, I will gut you and feed your entrails to the carrion with a smile on my lips and a song in my fucking heart.”
Maybe part of the problem is that he still sees the girl that was, rather than the woman that is. Or maybe it's just arrogance on his part. Either way, the only thing that stops her from stabbing him in the face with a chopstick when he chuckles and ruffles her hair is Seren's sudden, timely intervention, pulling her in close, an arm across her shoulders.
“We really should be getting home Blondie. Violet, it was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, I hope we see you more soon. If you'll excuse us...Michael was it? We really need to be going. We promised the staff we would stop by Elysium tonight to check on some of the new arrivals. Have a good evening.”
No time wasted, the 'brooding artist' guides his seething wife away. Sending her out to the car, he pays their bill and meets her outside where she waits, fuming, in the Aston Martin.
“You want to talk about it?”
“No. I want to punch his smarmy face in until he stops breathing. That's what I want to do.”
“Somehow, Blondie, I don't think that would be very conducive to that whole staying out of prison thing. So why don't we go with Option B?”
She doesn't answer, not right away anyway, but instead glares daggers at the dash. Silent and sullen, it prompts her long suffering husband to sigh, heavily.
“Look, Faith, I know there are things in your life you don't like to talk about. There are things in my life that I don't like to talk about. But those things aren't likely to come swimming back up to bite us in the ass. I can't help you, if I don't know what's going on. No secrets between us. Remember?”
“My mother was adopted. Mary Skyler couldn't have anymore children and Samuel had a problem keeping it in his pants. So when his secretary turned up pregnant, they adopted the baby. My mother. And I guess everything was fine. Normal. Happy whatever. Until around the time she turned thirteen. That's when Samuel got tired of his wife and decided to trade up for a younger, more convenient model. Mom got pregnant with me a year later, and they passed it off that she was like, I don't know, whoring around, a party girl, did this whole intervention thing. By the time she was sixteen, Samuel got his sons involved, a real family party. They were violent, and they were cruel. They used to lock me in this ceder linen chest at the foot of the bed, so Mom wouldn't fight them. It was dark. And it was close. I guess that's why I don't really like the dark or close spaces even now. I couldn't see them. But I could hear everything. Samuel put in the hospital when I was five. I was in a coma for two weeks. And that was when Mom had enough. She grabbed me, and she ran. She tried to press charges. The Skyler men got off scot free and I spent the next five years in foster care. Two years after the trial, Samuel turned up in a warehouse scattered in so many pieces they never did find all of him. Three years after that the oldest brother was found by a hiker, with every tendon his arms and legs cut, his chest carved open and his heart gone. They never did find it. Mom was a suspect of course, but no one could ever prove anything.”
“Do you think she did it?”
“Mom? No. She gets mad, but she doesn't have the same rage. It burns bright and hot, but fast. What was done to David and Samuel Skyler requires a special kind of viciousness. The kind of rage that burns for years. Anyway. We more or less cut them out of our lives after Mom got custody back. We moved on, and I assumed they did the same. I got a letter from Denny...that's the middle brother, about a year after I started making appearances for Phoenix. It was full of apologies and remorse so, at least maybe he turned out halfway decent. Michael though...you saw his little girl?”
“The bruises?”
“More than that. The way she stood, the way she wouldn't make eye contact. For a second, I thought I was looking at myself from way back when. That's more than just being shy. More than just being clumsy. And that thing about her mom “falling”?
“You don't buy it?”
“Let's just say I'd be a lot more inclined to believe BAD ASS suddenly swearing a vow of celibacy and becoming a priest or Cassius Reed suddenly becoming the very picture of humility.”
Silence descends between them as he starts the car, pulling out and heading for home. She spends a long moment fussing with her cell phone before punching in a number.
“Hey....I hate to ask. But I need a favor. Michael Daniel Skyler. I need an address, and a complete background check for the last...eight years, no, make it nine. He might have been married once, wife deceased, name unknown. One child, female, approximately age nine, maybe ten if she's small for her age. Violet. Thank you.”
“That wasn't...”
“Mischa? Gods no. The last thing I need is to owe that sadistic Russian bastard anything else. He likes to cash in at inopportune times, the interest is high, and the price is never worth the favor asked. No. Syn has always maintained that if I need something, I should call. I don't like asking because...well, reasons and all. But this is...It's important.”
“You really think he's abusing that little girl?”
“You know how, sometimes, you just...know a thing? You don't know how you know it, you just do. It's a certainty you can't explain, but you feel it all the way into your bones. That's how I feel about this.”
There is a plan forming already, spinning away in the back of her mind. She won't tell him, not yet, because as much as her brooding artist claims to accept her darkness, he hasn't seen her at her worst. And she's terrified of what happens when that day comes. So how can she tell him that already her mind is turning to the calls she needs to make, custody lawyer, tails, transportation. People who are discrete, people who know how to carry a secret to the grave. How can she tell him that she doesn't just want to save her niece from the clutches of the villain, but make that villain disappear, erase his entire existence until his name is just a fading bad memory? Although...maybe he already knows. Darkness calls to darkness after all, and while they don't discuss the lives that came before there is something there that calls to the monster.
"]