[ooc: folks are welcome to either see this from Victor's side and know that he's controlling other people's pain levels around him, or have no knowledge of what's going on at all and just see the effects of his powers without context.]

---

The memory starts in a library. Not a nice library with high, grand ceiling and varnished wooden shelves, but an austere grey and white set-up covering every inch of the room--a prison library.

Victor (a few years younger and comparatively healthier than he looks now) has a book in his hand, reading and musing aloud while another, much larger man, Mitch, is busy trying to short out a security camera with a gum wrapper, a cigarette, and a small piece of wire that probably had a former life as a paperclip.

“Did you know," Victor says, "that when you take away a person’s fear of pain, you take away their fear of death? You make them, in their own eyes, immortal. Which of course they’re not, but what’s the saying? We are all immortal until proven otherwise?”

"Something like that," is Mitch's distracted reply, then shortly followed by, "Got it!"

Victor has just reached the section in the book on nerves, which feels hilariously ironic, before he claps the book shut and starts to push his powers out into the surrounding air, feeling for the presence of guards heading down the aisle outside the library.

"Shall we?" Victor asks casually, starting to use his powers to turn up the sense of pain for anyone around who isn't him or Mitch.

With a nod, Mitch says, "After you.”

Guards drop in all directions, screaming and writhing in pain from some invisible agony, as Victor and Mitch effectively stroll out like they'd been visiting a museum, with `Wrighton Federal Penitentiary` emblazoned on the front of the building as they leave.

[CW: Brief reference to dog "death" but I swear the dog never stays dead, it's a rule that the dog is ALWAYS fine!]

---

It's a short memory, Victor (a few years younger and comparatively healthier than he looks now) stepping into a hotel room accompanied by a blonde girl, Sydney, wearing an over-sized red coat and rainbow tights and looking around twelve or thirteen, and even then is on the small side. A big black dog, probably a Great Dane, trots along behind them.

Adopting a casual sense of the dramatic, Victor drops a self-help book (the name VALE is printed on the spine and front cover in a Very Important-looking font) heavily onto the counter as he sweeps in.

"It’s time to send a message," he says to the large man, Mitch, who is already inside the room, "To Eli Ever."

Mitch looks up, frowns, then says, "Where the hell did that dog come from?"

"I get to keep him!" Sydney answers, helpfully.

"Is that blood?" Asks Mitch, and a back-and-forth between him and Victor while the latter is shuffling through through his papers, "I shot him,"

"Why would you do that?"

"Because he was dying."

"Then why isn’t he dead?"

"Because Sydney brought him back.”

Mitch turns to look at small blond girl in the middle of their hotel living room. "Excuse me?"

As her eyes go to the floor, she offers a quiet, "Victor named him Dol."

"It’s a measurement of pain," Victor clarifies.

Mitch frowns then says, "Well, that’s morbidly appropriate. Can we get back to the part where Sydney resurrected him? And what do you mean you’re going to send Eli a message?"

[CRAU Memory | cw: vague references to building destruction, terrorist imagery, illness, and dramatic super villain silliness]

---

All around, there is a low-level thrumming sensation, an unseen engine keeping the Samodiva--a massive aircraft--floating among the clouds. It's a view that can be seen from virtually any angle on the may deck of the ship, as well as many other levels.

Victor stands at the helm, bent forward slightly over the control panel, both hands braced against the console. From the back, he looks deeply engrossed in thought, but when approached, he actually has his eyes squeezed shut and is forcing his breathing into a level rhythm. He looks sick. Very sick.

"Boss?"

The voice is from Joseph "Joey" Kavinsky, a skinny kid in his early twenties and is enough to make Victor take a deep breath in without opening his eyes.

"What is it?"

"So they're playing your broadcast over and over, calling you--" Joey mock-scowls and pushes his lower lip forward to approximate a squaring of the jaw as he lowers his voice, J. Jonah Jameson style, "'The dangerous meta terrorist Victor Vale, once a reeeeessspected member of the medical community, now turned violent meta resistance leader--!'"

Victor snorts at the newscaster impression as he brings a hand up to rub his eyes, "So they didn't like our impromptu demolition of the government communications building? I think we were doing the city skyline a favour: it was ostentatious."

Joey simply shrugs. Then goes quiet a while. Then scuffs his foot against the floor. The noise is inoffensive to most, but it grates on Victor's every nerve and shows in the way his shoulders coil upward.

"Spit it out."

"I mean, you know it, right? You're coming up to mass time."

Victor sighs, pushing himself heavily away from the console.

"Critical mass... Don't shorten it like that, it sounds like I'm going to pray."

Joey beams, clapping a hand on Victor's lower back to help steady him, despite the wince he receives from Victor, as he tips his head back to cheerfully recite scripture.

"'But for you who fear My name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings! You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall!'"

Victor groans audibly, making some of the other metahumans on deck glance over, then shoves the younger man away from him to walk, shakily, by himself, "Fuck off, Joey!"

jesters

kralkatorrik

Pain/Nerve Manipulation
As a ExtraOrdinary, Victor gained the ability to control pain intensity, both his own and in others. He tends to use his powers with with very little hesitation and even less remorse.

While Victor can induce pain out of nothing, it is more effective when he is tapping into some pre-existing pain or wound that has been inflicted. He can both increase pain and entirely erase it, though Victor is often more inclined to inflict pain than take it away.

In extreme cases, Victor can turn this ability right up to such a level that it overloads a victim and can be lethal. He doesn’t necessarily need to be too close to people to maintain this ability either. He can maintain pain-numbness or pain-infliction over long distances, but when he is not nearby Victor can only turn off or sustain the level of pain (or numbness) he has already preset and to alter it he must be closer. This does stop if Victor is killed, however and he cannot control his pain output while sleeping.

In addition, Victor has taught himself to control nerves for things other than giving and taking pain away. He develops his abilities to enable him to stop people from moving or control their bodies like puppets. This is a fair more technical ability which takes a lot more concentration than pain alteration.

Healing
Victor is able to heal others' physical injuries, but is entirely unable to fix any part of himself. While this ability could and should be used in benevolent ways, Victor is not a kind person, preferring to use this ability as either a means to bargain with others, or torture and torment through means of over-healing. And just because he can heal people doesn't necessarily mean he will heal them. Victor is, in effect, the worst person to have healer capabilities.

Emotional Intensification
By making physical contact with others (which he hates to do), Victor can forcibly enhance whatever the most prominent emotion someone is feeling at that particular moment. He has no control over what that emotion is and can't pick or choose one particular emotion to enhance over another.

Warnings: None

---
Sydney readjusted the shovel on her shoulder.

The air was cold but the night was clear, the moon overhead illuminating the broken gravestones and the dips in the grass as she wove through the cemetery, Dol trotting along beside her. It had been harder to bring him back the second time, but he flanked her now, as if his life were truly tied to hers.

Mitch followed close behind, carrying two more shovels. He’d offered to carry hers, too, but Sydney felt it was important she hold her own. Dominic lagged several yards behind them, buzzed on painkillers and whiskey and tripping every few steps on a clump of weeds or a bit of dislodged rock. She didn’t like him this way—useless from all the liquor and mean from all the pain—but she tried not to think of that. She tried not to think of her own pain, either, of the gunshot still burning a hole in her arm as the muscle and skin slowly healed. She hoped it left a scar, the kind she could see, the kind that would remind her of the moment when everything changed.

Not that Sydney thought she’d ever forget.

She readjusted the shovel on her shoulder, and wondered if Eli would live forever, and how much of forever someone could reasonably remember, especially when nothing left a mark.

Eli, incidentally, had been a press field day.

She and Mitch had seen it on the news. The madman who’d murdered two people at the Falcon Price building, all the while claiming to be some monster-slayer, some hero. The press said he’d killed a young woman in the construction lot, and burned her body before torturing and then murdering an ex-con on the ground floor. The woman’s identity hadn’t been made public— they’d have to go by dental records—but Sydney knew it was Serena. She knew even before she made Mitch hack the coroner’s reports. She could feel the absence of her sister, the place in her where the threads had been. What she didn’t know was why Eli would have done it. But she meant to find out.

The members of the press weren’t nearly as interested in Serena as they were in Eli.

Apparently Eli had stood there over Victor’s body, covered in blood, still holding the knife and shouting that he was a hero. That he’d saved them all. When no one bought the hero line, he tried to claim it had been a fight. But since his opponent was shredded and he didn’t have a scratch on him, that line hadn’t worked so well, either. Add that to the papers found in the satchel in Eli’s hotel room—he clearly didn’t have Victor’s foresight to burn anything that could be construed as evidence—and the profiles on his computer, and Eli’s body count quickly jumped into double digits. The news never touched on the Merit Police Department’s own involvement in a good number of the recent killings, but Eli was now awaiting trial and a psych evaluation.

There was no mention of him being an EO, of course, but then again, why would there be? All it meant for Eli was that if someone shanked him in prison, he’d live to have it happen again. If he were lucky they’d put him in isolation, like Victor. Sydney hoped they didn’t put him in isolation. She thought that maybe if they found out he could heal himself, hurting him would become the most popular game in the facility.
Sydney made a mental note to leak that detail wherever he ended up.

It was too quiet in the cemetery, what with only the sounds of grass-muffled steps in the dark, so Sydney tried to hum the way Victor had when they’d gone to dig up Barry. But it sounded wrong in her mouth, eerie and sad, so she stopped and focused on finding her way by the map drawn in Sharpie on the back of her hand. She’d drawn it in daylight, but the Merit Cemetery, like most things, looked different at night.

Finally she caught sight of the fresh grave, and quickened her pace. The grave was unmarked except for Victor’s book, which Sydney had set like a stone at the top of the patch of dirt that morning, waiting in the shadow of a stone angel for the diggers to finish and go away. That detective, Stell, had been there, too. He’d stayed long enough to watch the simple wood coffin get lowered down into the hole and covered with dirt.

Mitch caught up to her, and the two looked down at the grave for a moment before Sydney drove her shovel into the ground, and set to work. Dol wandered the plots nearby, but never let Sydney out of his sight, and Dominic eventually wandered over, and sat on a gravestone, keeping an eye out for trouble as the other two dug.

Thud.
Thud.
Thud.

They drove their shovels in the ground until the air seemed warmer and the night seemed thinner, and light grazed the far edges of the sky where it met the buildings of Merit. Sometime before dawn, Sydney’s shovel hit wood, and they scraped the last dirt from the top of the coffin, and heaved the lid up.

Sydney looked down at Victor’s body. Then she perched on the edge of the coffin, and pressed her hands against his chest, reaching as far as she could. A moment later, the cold ran up her arms, and caught her breath, and beneath her hands a heartbeat fluttered, as Victor Vale opened his eyes, and smiled.

Warnings: Violence, torture, zealous conviction, murderous homoerotica

---

Eli emptied the gun into the air, but all signs of them were gone. He growled and ejected the magazine. It clattered to the ground as he dug in his coat for a full one.

“I watch you, and it’s like watching two people.”

He spun at the sound of the voice and found Victor leaning back against a concrete pillar.

“Vic—”

Victor didn’t hesitate. He fired three times into Eli’s chest, mimicking the pattern of the scars on his own body, the way he had imagined he would for the last ten years.

And it felt good. He had been worried that after so much waiting and so much wanting the actuality of shooting Eli wouldn’t live up to the dream, but it did. The air buzzed around them and Eli groaned and braced himself against the chair as the pain multiplied.

“It’s why I let you stay,” said Victor. “Why I liked you. All that charm outside, all that evil inside. There was a monster under there, long before you died.”

“I’m not a monster,” growled Eli as he dug one of the bullets out of his shoulder, and dropped the bloodied metal to the floor. “I am God’s—” But Victor was already there, burying a switchblade in Eli’s chest. He punctured a lung, he could tell by the gasp. Victor’s mouth twitched, face patient but knuckles white around the blade’s grip.

“Enough,” said Victor. Behind his eyes, the dial turned up. Eli screamed. “You aren’t some avenging angel, Eli,” he said. “You’re not blessed, or divine, or burdened. You’re a science experiment.”

Victor pulled the knife out. Eli went down on one knee.

“You don’t understand,” gasped Eli. “No one understands.”

“When no one understands, that’s usually a good sign that you’re wrong.”

Eli struggled up to his knees, reaching for the makeshift table as his skin knit together.

Victor’s gaze shifted to it, taking in the row of knives. Just like that day. “How nostalgic of you.” He put a foot on the table and knocked it over, sending the weapons scattering across the concrete. The dog’s body, he noticed, was gone.

“You can’t kill me, Victor,” said Eli. “You know that.”

Victor’s smile widened as he buried his knife between Eli’s ribs.

“I know,” he said loudly. He had to speak up over the screams. “But you’ll have to indulge me. I’ve waited so long to try.”

Warning: Blood, violence, dog "death" (the dog is fine, I promise)

---

It was after lunch and the people had almost all slunk back into their offices, leaving the streets strangely bare. Victor seemed to be leading them farther and farther away from the crowds, onto narrower streets. Quieter streets.

“Sydney,” Victor said some time later, “you don’t have to tell me your power if you don’t want, but I need you to understand something. I’m going to do everything I can to beat Eli, but he’s not an easy opponent. His power alone makes him nearly invincible, and he may be crazy, but he’s cunning. Every advantage he has makes it harder for me to win. The fact that he knows your power, and the fact that I don’t, puts me at a disadvantage. Do you understand?”

Sydney’s steps had slowed, and she nodded, but said nothing. It took all of Victor’s patience not to force her hand, but a moment later, that patience was rewarded. The two of them passed an alley, and heard a low whine. Sydney broke away and turned back, and when Victor followed, he saw what she had seen.

A large black shape stretched on the damp concrete, panting. It was a dog. Victor knelt just long enough to run a finger down its back, and the whining faded. Now the only sounds it made were shuddering breaths. At least it wouldn’t be in pain. He stood again, frowning the way he did whenever he was thinking. The dog looked mangled, as if it had been hit by a car and staggered the few feet into the alley before crumpling.

Sydney crouched down by the dog, stroking its short black fur.

“After Eli shot me,” she said in a soft, cooing voice, as if speaking to the dying dog instead of Victor, “I swore I’d never use my power again. Not in front of anyone.” She swallowed hard, and looked up at Victor. “Kill it.”

Victor arched an eyebrow. “With what, Syd?”

She gave him a long, hard look.

“Please kill the dog, Victor,” she said again.

He looked around. The alley was empty. He sighed and pulled a handgun from its place against his back. Digging in his pocket he retrieved a silencer, and screwed it on, glancing over it at the wheezing dog.

“Scoot back,” he said, and Sydney did. Victor took aim, and pulled the trigger once, a clean shot. The dog stopped moving, and Victor turned away, already dismantling his gun. When Sydney didn’t follow, he glanced back to find her crouching over the dog again, running her hands back and forth along its bloody coat and its crushed ribs in small, soothing motions. And then, as he watched, she went still. Her breath hovered in a cloud in front of her lips, and her face tightened in pain.

“Sydney—” he started, but the rest of the sentence died in his throat as the dog’s tail moved. One slight swoosh across the dirty pavement. And then again, right before the body tensed. The bones cracked back into place, the chest inflated, the rib cage reformed, and the legs stretched. And then, the beast sat up. Sydney backed away as the dog pushed itself to its four feet, and looked at them, tail wagging tentatively. The dog was... huge. And very much alive.

Victor watched, speechless. Up until now he’d had factors, thoughts, ideas about how to find Eli. But as he watched the dog blink and yawn and breathe, a plan began to take shape. Sydney looked cautiously his way, and he smiled.

“Now that,” he said, “is a gift.”

She petted the dog between the ears, both of which stood roughly eye level with her.

“Can we keep him?”

* * *

Victor tossed his coat onto the couch as Sydney and the dog wandered in behind him.

“It’s time to send a message,” he announced, dropping the Vale self-help book he’d bought onto the counter with a flourish and a thud.

“To Eli Ever.”

“Where the hell did that dog come from?” asked Mitch.

“I get to keep him,” said Sydney.

“Is that blood?”

“I shot him,” said Victor, searching through his papers.

“Why would you do that?” asked Mitch, closing the laptop.

“Because he was dying.”

“Then why isn’t he dead?”

“Because Sydney brought him back.”

Mitch turned to consider the small blond girl in the middle of their hotel living room. “Excuse me?”

Her eyes went to the floor. “Victor named him Dol,” she said.

“It’s a measurement of pain,” explained Victor.

“Well, that’s morbidly appropriate,” said Mitch. “Can we get back to the part where Sydney resurrected him? And what do you mean you’re going to send Eli a message?”