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"Come on Jack, you gotta give a little." It wasn't as if she wasn't intending to tell him what had happened on the mission, she was just curious about his.

But if it was a game of give and take, than she could play fairly. "The town we arrived in was eerily quiet, and everyone was rushing around, like something had everyone spooked. Not just a handful of people, but whole neighborhoods." It have been creepy as ********, and their first hint that what they were dealing with might have something to do with the red-eye.

"We ended up at this warehouse just outside of town. You couldn't see anything from outside, not on the ground level, but you could hear it. People shouting, yelling at each other. Fighting."

Here she paused, wetting dry lips. "Were you supposed to kill this Chinese dragon?"

"Didn't say you had killed it. Asked if you were supposed to kill it," she countered with a huff, but left it there. Jack didn't seem all that eager to share, at least not at the moment, but maybe he would after she'd finished giving him her report.

Probably not.

There was a moment then, as pale eyes ticked down to his arm, to the bruises she could see peeking around his cast, where the temptation to ******** with him rose up. He was hurt, and she was already stronger than him, it would have been so easy...

"We climbed up the fire escape to have a look. Inside there was a large group of civilians, they were fighting each other." She frowned, drawing her gaze back up to his battered face. "Think Fight Club, brutal s**t. Rowdy as hell. And there, in the crowd, overseeing it all, was Sinagra."

"That's how it seemed. Not that we could confirm it from where we were. So America went down, so she could sneak in through the front, and I went through the window, taking the high ground." Her hands came up, fingers lacing so she could rest her chin on them. "They were perceptive as ********. Hyper alert. As she was coming in from a side office they spotted her." Which was where s**t hit the fan.

Delicate features drained of any lingering humor, and a familiar wariness took it's place. "I jumped down when they all turned on her, and every ******** eye was bright red." She saw it when she slept, the mass of bodies, the crimson eyes boring into them as the mob advanced. "They rushed us, attacking, like they were feral."

Tired eyes followed his fingers as they scratched over his collarbone, distracted for a moment, before she continued. "There had to be thirty people there, and they all moved as one, but they were civilians." Small hands shifted, fingers separating, and a turn of her head rested chin and mouth against one palm, attention turning out into the room. "So I didn't summon my weapon, I didn't want to seriously hurt any of them. And it worked, for a while. But then Sinagra did something, and they started turning on each other, as well as us. Like a pack of rabid dogs..."

There was a certain noticeable tension creeping into thin shoulders and she recounted it. As much as she wanted to make sense of the red-eye, of the effects it had on her, it was clear she didn't relive her encounters with it with any fondness. "She kept...like, turning up the aggression. I don't know how to explain it, but it was like she had a dial, and she just kept turning it higher, and ever time she did, the civilians got more wild, and this heavy weight seemed to settle on America and I. We felt it, not to the point of infection, but as temptation."

Her eyes flicked back to him, but she didn't turn to face him again. "Aware, as far as we could tell." Which, wasn't exactly saying much. They still knew next to nothing about what caused the red-eye, or where it came from. It was all just a big guessing game.

"But that's just it, the more you're exposed, the more lucid you become. The aggression is still there, the urge to kill, but you can think, you can function, you can act normally, but it's still there." She gave a small shudder, eyes closing briefly. "Until something breaks you out of it."

"I don't think resistance is quite right." Not from what she'd heard. As of yet Peyton hadn't experienced much beyond the blind rage. "Its like...the blinders come off, but the violence, the rage, everything else is there, coloring your thoughts, influencing. You're aware, but you aren't reasoning like a normal human anymore." And this was without Peyton knowing the full and awful truth of it.

"But we have experience with it. We've encountered it before, we know what to look for. That probably counts for something. I don't know." She ducked her head against her hand, rubbing over her eyes. "At the earliest stages damage will break it. A broken shield snapped America out of it enough for her to port us back, and once I was away from it, I came back to myself."

Fingertips now resting on her temple and brow, the Sun let her head hang down, bangs falling forward into her face. "I'm trying not to think too hard about how many civilians walked away. We tried to save them all, but..." In the chaos, she just wasn't sure. There had been a lot of blood, a lot of bodies on the ground, some moving, some not. She hadn't wanted to know which were which. They'd done their best, damnit.

"But when they were all neutralized, one way or another, we went after Sinagra. I'm honestly shocked neither of us ended up infected. I don't know if it was because she couldn't, or because she was cocky, and didn't think she would loose to us." It was obvious now, if it hadn't been already, that this topic was one that Peyton found emotionally exhausting. Safe on the island, it still effected her, plagued her dreams, rooted into her consciousness. There was no escaping it. "It was so tempting to just let go. I want to."