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There are days when you can take your anger out in healthy ways. Some sport, perhaps. A hot shower. A cold shower. Singing or screaming to loud music. A punch bag.
There are also days for the less healthy, more self-destructive alternatives. Getting so drunk you can’t remember why you were angry, or if you can, you’re too uncoordinated or just plain unconscious to do anything about it.
And then there are days like today, when the only answer is to tear everything around you the fuck apart.
He’s alone in his quarters, and this is a good thing, because the only living thing he’s going to hurt is himself. Not that he would care. If he’d been thinking clearly, maybe it would have been better to take himself off to one of Sledge’s monster cells, locked himself in. But he hasn’t been thinking clearly for some time. It’s been like a building headache, one of the really vicious ones that starts as a twinge behind one eye and becomes a huge, unnatural pressure between the temples, until it explodes into pure, incapacitating pain.
Heckyl’s rage explodes out through his hands first. The regular bright turquoise of his power is flaring almost white with the force of his emotion, and as it snaps between his palms and the walls it spits sparks like a welding torch. The whole room starts to fill with the reek of burning and is flash-lit by strobing, harsh blue. Curved scorch marks lick over the furniture, leaving dark trails: he doesn’t usually burn this hot, but he’s barely conscious as a reasoning being right now - all there is in there is limitless, mindless fury.
He’s always had a temper. Ask anyone. Known for it. Can flip from jovial and almost childish to vicious homicidal maniac within seconds, and without apparent difficulty. But his usual flares of temper are minor tantrums, short fits of pique, compared to this. This is older, more visceral, more dangerous.
By the time his more esoteric power begins to ebb, his clothes are charred and smoking from the fallout. He is dizzy from the effort of that much discharge in such a concentrated burst. But he doesn’t stop there. There’s more in him than just electricity. He attacks the bulkheads, the furnishings, his possessions. He’s much stronger than his unassuming humanoid body suggests at a glance. Things break under his hands. The metals dent. And, inevitably, blood flows. He’s strong, not invulnerable.
But, blood or not, once again he doesn’t stop there. His fancy clothes, already scorched, rip at the seams as his frenzied motion puts them under unlooked-for strain. The last fleeting sparks of his power, almost spent now, scatter from his hands as he tears the room apart, ripping at anything and everything his already broken fingernails can get purchase on. The path of his anger is mapped clearly: long scrapes torn into the metal, the burnt scars on the fabrics, the heaps and fragments of smashed belongings.
And finally he screams as he moves, and in that last, that sound, it is impossible to mistake him for anything other than what he is - ancient, alien, and almost irretrievably mad.
It’s the “almost” that drives him to this. If he were totally crazy, utterly irredeemable, he would not react in this way. It’s always worse when somewhere, hidden at the core, there’s a tiny piece of knowledge and sanity and feeling. It’s that tiny piece that fuels the rage.
It takes him almost twenty minutes to exhaust himself so much that he drops, shuddering and gasping, to his knees amongst the wreckage of his anger. His muscles are close to useless - like his powers, he’s drained them to the point of breaking. So he hunches there on the floor, the tiny flickers of feedback from his nerves finally kicking in and starting to make him aware of his injuries: a stinging from his knuckles, a deep-seated ache in his arms. He rests his forehead on his knees, curled almost double, unable or unwilling now to move. Silence falls, heavy after all the destruction.
It’s at this point that maybe you’d expect someone to come. A knock at the door, a querulous enquiry as to the health or the (hopefully improved) mood of the boss. But today has been so bad that not even Wrench can be persuaded (or be stupid enough) to interrupt. The sounds and evidence of Heckyl’s outburst must have been obvious to the whole ship, and they’re all quite sensibly keeping their distance. Nobody comes, and nobody enquires.
And of course, the rage hasn’t gone away. It never does.
Heckyl huddles alone on the floor of his quarters, feeling the hurts in his body grow and flower as the numbness of exhaustion fades, and waits.
When his strength returns, he can start all over again.
And he’s stubborn. He will.