Flagpole Sitta

((ooc: Titled after Flagpole Sitta.. Guest staring the lyrics of Flagpole Sitta.. Recommended listening: Flagpole Sitta.. And for those of you who don’t know the song, here’s a YouTube vid that uses Flagpole Sitta.

Continued from “Search Party”.))


...This was not Rupert’s music.

“I had visions, I was in them,
I was looking into the mirror
To see a little bit clearer
The rottenness and evil in me

...But he was listening to it anyway. Lying on his couch with his shoed feet up on the arm, his hands interlocked over his chest, and his head leaned back. Because he didn’t have a damn finer thing to do with his evening. The ceiling was white, and needed new paint. Spider webs of off-color cracks tracked from its edges like a spreading illness. Last night, he had helped to raid Xavier’s Sister School, the home for mutie freaks seeking education surrounded by their own. Tonight, he could have been going to a nice quiet Italian restaurant with the beautiful woman he’d fallen hard and fast for.

“Fingertips have memories,
Mine can't forget the curves of your body”

Too damn bad that she was a damn lying mutie freak herself. Nice of her to mention that to him, during all of his anti-mutant speeches. Rupert swung his legs to the floor, and found the rest of his body following them into the bathroom. He turned on the facet. Cold water gurgled out, splashing full-force against the porcelain bowl. Cold. Raina’s lips had been cold. Her hands, the side of her neck as he’d brushed her hair back—

“And when I feel a bit naughty
I run it up the flagpole and see who salutes
But no one ever does”

...Rupert wasn’t sure when he started vomiting, or when he stopped. He remembered leaning his head against the rim of the toilet. It was cold against his skin. He’d left the seat up. Who f***ing cared. He picked himself up, washed off his face, and swilled luke-warm water until the taste of bile was not so bitter in the back of his throat. Flipsy was standing in the doorway. Her tail wagged with slow uncertainty as he looked down at her.

“I'm not sick, but I'm not well
and I'm so hot 'cause I'm in hell”

Rupert picked up his coat from the back of his kitchen chair, and locked the door behind him. Flispy went to her pink doggy bed, to dream doggy dreams and forget about her human’s odd behavior. Rupert went down three stories, and started walking under the yellowed New York streetlights. He unapologetically walked through more than one late night stroller’s shoulder. No one made an issue of it.

“Been around the world and found
That only stupid people are breeding
The cretins cloning and feeding
And I don't even own a TV”

Rupert’s world was small. Three blocks from his apartment was Central Park; four blocks was the Central Park Precinct. Two was his favorite coffee shop. Five was his church. He looked up at the old gray-stoned structure. Light still came through the rose window above its doors. He took his hands out of his pockets, and pushed them open. There was a night sermon in progress. “Swing Low, Sweet chariot” drowned in the blare of foreign sounds that that rushed out of Rupert’s ear buds. He nodded politely to an elderly couple in the back row, and seated himself next to them. His eyes gravitated towards the choir. After the darkness outside, he was blinded by the warm lights in the building—for a moment, it seemed that their lips moved in sync to the words he was hearing.

“Put me in the hospital for nerves
And then they had to commit me
You told them all I was crazy
They cut off my legs now I'm an amputee, Goddamn you”

The illusion faded. He was left with a cold hardwood pew at his back. Cold. He’d shot Raina. He’d shot Raina, and then he’d walked away. He couldn’t even remember what he did after that. She’d fallen to the floor. Had she been okay? He’d heard reports that a few of the muties they’d caught that night had been overdosed by the amount of tranqs put in their system. It was the reason tranq guns weren’t cleared for use on the general population: the chance of OD was too high. She’d just been on the ground, lying there. He thought she’d been watching him as he walked away. Honestly, he couldn’t remember.

“I'm not sick, but I'm not well
And I'm so hot cause I'm in hell
I'm not sick, but I'm not well
And it's a sin, to live so well”

Captain Cynthia Myers had approached him at work today. Most of the guards at the camps where either Stalkers bots or hardened mercenary-types. The Chief of Police wanted an actual cop in there, supervising that things were done by the book. Rupert, the pet zealot Detective of the Central Park Precinct, was an easy choice. He had his assignment: he was a supervisor for New York’s camps, on behalf of the NYPD. The camps. It was pretty much guaranteed that everyone who’d been taken at the Mansion was going to the camps. They were for the ones that fought. They were for people like Raina.

“I wanna publish 'zines
And rage against machines
I wanna pierce my tongue
It doesn't hurt, it feels fine
The trivial sublime
I'd like to turn off time
And kill my mind
You kill my mind
Mind...”

She was a lying mutant bitch. He took out his cell phone, and vindictively scrolled down to delete her number. Not that she’d have a cell phone at the camps. Or much of anything else. He’d heard mutant rights organizations comparing the plans for the camps to concentration camps, like those in World War II. He stood with the Church of Humanity on this one: it was what they needed to keep the mutants restrained. It wasn’t excessive. The ones who were sent to the camps were dangerous. He’d seen Raina destroy that Stalker bot. That hadn’t been anyone else—that had been Raina, acting alone.

“Paranoia, paranoia
Everybody's comin' to get me
Just say you never met me
I'm runnin' underground with the moles
Diggin' big holes
Hear the voices in my head
I swear to God it sounds like they're snoring
But if you're bored then you're boring
The agony and the irony, they're killing me, whoa!”

...Rupert flicked the ipod off. That was enough of that. The words of the choir bathed over him. As the preacher stood, Rupert cradled his head in his hands. He’d shot Raina. And he was going to be seeing her every damn day, with a collar around her throat. The last words of the choir hung in his ears like honey-sweet poison.

“The brightest day that I can say,
Coming for to carry me home,
When Jesus washed my sins away,
Coming for to carry me home.

Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home,
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.”