[Tony moans and hunches over, curling up on the ground as if making his body smaller can somehow diminish the turmoil in his mind. He's shaking inside his armor, still reeling from that high-definition director's cut of a lifetime's worth of suffering.
He feels like a piece of Gene's soul has been shoved inside him, like a shard of jagged glass. He's seen Gene's torment through Gene's own eyes, and part of him wants desperately to hold Gene and tell him that he's sorry, he's so sorry that the world has been so cruel; that no human being should ever have to go through what he did.
And another part of him is still furious. If he had the breath, he'd be tempted to turn to Gene and scream, "this, this is exactly what I was talking about! This is why you don't have any friends!" What the hell kind of person thinks an appropriate reaction to a misunderstanding with someone is to drop the psychic equivalent of a nuclear bomb on them, without warning or consent? Gene has a really bad habit of taking his own legitimate pain, and inflicting it on people who had nothing to do with hurting him in the first place. No freakin' wonder no one wants to try to help you, Tony thinks, with practically incandescent exasperation.
He can't speak; he doesn't know what to say. Anger and empathy and sorrow and frustration are all tangled in his mind, and he can't decide which to give voice to first. He doesn't even know where to start.]
USE YOUR WORDS, GENE, NOT YOUR FREAKY COSMIC MIND CONTROL POWERS. GO TO TIME-OUT RIGHT NOW.
He feels like a piece of Gene's soul has been shoved inside him, like a shard of jagged glass. He's seen Gene's torment through Gene's own eyes, and part of him wants desperately to hold Gene and tell him that he's sorry, he's so sorry that the world has been so cruel; that no human being should ever have to go through what he did.
And another part of him is still furious. If he had the breath, he'd be tempted to turn to Gene and scream, "this, this is exactly what I was talking about! This is why you don't have any friends!" What the hell kind of person thinks an appropriate reaction to a misunderstanding with someone is to drop the psychic equivalent of a nuclear bomb on them, without warning or consent? Gene has a really bad habit of taking his own legitimate pain, and inflicting it on people who had nothing to do with hurting him in the first place. No freakin' wonder no one wants to try to help you, Tony thinks, with practically incandescent exasperation.
He can't speak; he doesn't know what to say. Anger and empathy and sorrow and frustration are all tangled in his mind, and he can't decide which to give voice to first. He doesn't even know where to start.]