in the woods dark and deep I offer you eternal sleep

[aarnethompson]

Who: Alba, Alexia Swiftdawn, Anna Demirovna, Bruce Wayne, Cliona Donovan, Data, Don Draper, Ilde Decima, Irene Adler, Jae-hyun Kim, Jaime Lannister, Kalinda Sharma, Marie-Sixtine St. Vincent, Martel, Nuray Amedi, Penelope Lane, Odessa Wander, Pepper Potts, Rex Lewis, Seoraj, Shrieky, Sunny, Wolfgang Einhorn, Xas
What: Something bad is afoot, and you must help.
Where: Abrogate Green, Badside, Barrackham, Chnum, Echomire, Flag Hill, Gallmarch, Ketch Heath, Pelorus Fields, Raven's Gate, Sangwine, Serpolet, Sobek Croix, Stoneshell, and the northern woods
When: July 22nd to the 30th
Notes: People are slow right now and a few are on hiatus, so slow-tagging and back-tagging are totally fine. Please check the accompanying OOC post for info and to coordinate.
Warnings: Disturbing content, will include violence, choking, drowning, body horror, and animal death.

Strange events tend to go unnoticed in Baedal, compared to the much stranger things happening around them. People don't tend to be noticed when they go missing, either. The city takes these things in stride. After all, people get called back to their homeworld all the time, or they die. Everyone knows this.

Still, rumors start cropping up around the city about the sudden appearance of twelve identical towers positioned around the city like the face of a clock...

ALBA ♞ Cliona Donovan
DON DRAPER ♞ Pepper Potts, Kalinda Sharma
ILDE DECIMA ♞ Irene Adler, Marie-Sixtine St. Vincent
JAE-HYUN KIM ♞ Sunny
MARTEL ♞ Data, Jaime Lannister
NURAY AMEDI ♞ Alexia Swiftdawn, Anna Demirovna
ODESSA WANDER ♞ Rex Lewis
SEORAJ ♞ Bruce Wayne
SHRIEKY ♞ Xas
WOLFGANG EINHORN ♞ Penelope Lane

Comments

[caballero]

Bruce understands rage, all forms of it, but he's calm here because Seoraj isn't (because he doesn't want him to see that monster anyway).

He does kick somebody off the stairs, though.

The last few meters are a hellish experience through the crush of bodies, smoke, screaming, clawing hands - the contrast of being outside all at once, stumbling, unstable, is jarring like slamming into a wall and finding it pulled out from under you the second later. Before Bruce has even found his footing there's a roaring BANG!, and the doors have slammed shut behind them. He turns, still slowing to a staggering halt, jacket in hand and stealth wards disengaged. He starts to wonder what the hell just happened before he abandons it and immediately turns to Seoraj. "That thing--" on his face--

[serjeant]

There's a sound like the grating of bone- a sick, wet pop- he staggers, breathes in so fast and so hard that it's ragged and startled and he's still bleeding, sluggishly, but the mask is in his hand, the way it had looked in the other man's hand, like...a helmet, bloody and ostentatious and ordinary, if no more harmless than any other piece of armor. He almost drops it - his hand flexes, his muscles tense, he wants it far, far away from him--

His fingers curl around it.

[caballero]

Bruce doesn't - really know what he feels, watching that, hearing that, and when he approaches his hand goes over Seoraj's over the mask; he's not trying to get it to drop the thing, just - being there. He doesn't really know.

He doesn't look at it though, instead he looks at the other man's face, expression somewhere in between a great many feelings but settling mostly on concern edged in indignant anger at everything. He just needs to know Seoraj is all right, and in the process he's completely forgotten to cover up the fact that even under the jacket he threw on, it's completely obvious that he's wearing the sort of gear only that invisible asshole the Militia is after would have on. His other hand comes up to his shoulder - searching.

[aarnethompson]

The old woman's there again, sudden as a breath. She's watching the tower burn down, smoke pouring out of the top, some fierce satisfaction on her face. Of course - those two chests. Her children.

It's not just them, of course, but he had to go and make it personal. Daring her to get involved. So she did, and here they are, renewing her faith in the goodness of Baedal's citizens.

"Thank you," she says to the two of them, mostly to Bruce; when she turns to look at Seoraj her expression is as close to apologetic as she seems able to get. It is not her place, after all, to apologise for someone else's evil. Still, she cares. She shakes her head, unfocused and vague, then reaches into one of her voluminous sleeves and pulls out an object - a human skull covered in jewels, it's worth either of their weight in gold. "I'm sorry. This is all I have to offer. Please take it." For your time, for your help, either, both.

[caballero]

Yes.

Her children.

That thought - bodies cut into pieces put in boxes - is the only thing that keeps Bruce from being outwardly hostile, and is instead silent in the old woman's presence. He looks as harmlessly stone-faced as ever, but Seoraj can probably tell he's furious.

The idea of being rewarded for having to save his - friend, his lover - while there are screaming people (not people, constructs, he has to believe that, he has to believe in the cruel absurdity if magic and his investigations into the area, where no real people that numerous had turned up missing) burning behind them is beyond anything he can stomach. Maybe he's not mad at her, but at everything - regardless, he doesn't think he can take the damn thing.

He just nods, curtly, once.

[serjeant]

Seoraj can - will - does; his anger is a roiling, unsteady thing that seems fit to spill out of the edges of him at any moment, something far less refined than the silence that Bruce is alarmingly, unhealthily good at, and there are certain things that he falls back on in moments like these. To hell with it, he is getting paid for this, this- whatever it is.

(He'll take the helmet and the skull both to Integra, to be sure, but that's the kind of clarity and care that will come later, when he's burned out the anger the same as the tower, when all this is just smoke in him that won't linger the way the scars will, six small, ugly and uniform wounds on his face.)

“I suppose you don't have an explanation in your sleeve as well.”

Well, she might; but Seoraj is accustomed to people not explaining things to him that might get him killed.

[aarnethompson]

"He wants to burn this city to the ground. Or maybe own it; who knows what goes on in that mind." Where he is - presumably whoever's responsible for this. The young man Seoraj saw, only wearing the wrong face - probably someone else's, he could have stolen it. The woman (she does not think of herself as "the good witch," but in this story, she supposes she is) sighs not like she's exasperated or bored but like she is very tired.

"There are others that must be stopped. If he gets twelve - " The pause is ominous and they can fill in the blanks. "But he won't, and that's thanks to people like you. As long as his towers are up, I can't touch them."

And some people need a little nudge to get involved. Their anger offends her less than it pleases her.

But she looks anxiously to the east, knowing this is one out of - how many are there now, ten? Ten towers, ten missing people she has to take care of. "I'm sorry, I must go. I do thank you - farewell." And then she's just - gone, just like that, no flash or blink or smoke where she stood.

[caballero]

After she vanishes, Bruce just stands there for a moment, as if he's almost going to succumb to the impulse to want to punch something, or scream - but he doesn't, he just suppresses it with the disturbing skill he always does, before he turns back to Seoraj. Where he promptly doesn't know what to say. So he goes about being efficient instead, and fusses a bit with his equipment so he looks less conspicuous, take a microfiber pressed bag out of his belt and opens it so that Seoraj can stick the skull and mask in it, and once that's done he starts to look at his face in earnest with that faint mom-gleam in his eyes everyone - everyone - gets when they're considering making somebody sit down and put a band-aid on.

[serjeant]

The look he gets in response is almost comical in the obviousness of Seoraj's blank What? - he'd been calm until he could afford to be angry (until he had a way out and someone - Bruce - watching his back), and now his mind is on that and not the wounds on his face, the burn of smoke in his throat and the raw red patches where he got too close to the fire he'd started. To his credit, he doesn't actually say it; he palms Bruce's ribs, instead, like he's checking for a particular injury.

(Start worrying when he can't find a way to sass you.)

“Let's go,” he says - start moving again before stillness reminds him how tired he is, how much he aches. He can remember that when he's got something on which to fall.

[caballero]

"Thank you for tracking me down and going on a magical quest that involved reanimating two corpses to get the keys to get me out of there, Tom."

(He's not worried.)

(Anymore.)

But he does reach out and wipe some of the more visible blood off Seoraj's face as they walk. They're going to have to take the train, and he'd rather minimize the number of rubberneckers.

[serjeant]

Heading for the train now - Seoraj isn't even sure where they are, at first, he'd been disoriented and half-blind when he was brought here - he tugs his hair loose from where he'd pulled it out of his way in the morning, running a sooty hand through it once to pull it back down around the sides of his face. It won't completely hide the wounds, but it's something.

After a moment, he says, “Thank you,” not grudgingly.

[caballero]

Bruce makes a soft noise like I know, it's fine, and leads the way to the train station. Fortunately the fire (which doesn't seem to be spreading) is attracting a lot of attention, so they manage to slip by. (Still, Bruce hops the turnstile.)

They get off at Bonetown, and he doesn't offer an explanation - but apparently he's not going to make (let?) Seoraj trudge clear to the other side of the city when he can crash nearby.

[serjeant]

It should come as no surprise that Seoraj would, left to his own devices, trudge precisely that far; it should further not surprise anyone that he doesn't question not having to. That he's so disinterested in the people around him, this once...unusual for him, but maybe not for the situation they're in, his blood up and his mind elsewhere.

(He thinks briefly that the skull would cover any loss of business - more than - if he felt the need to sell it. He took it for the principle of the thing, though; he's not hurting for money.)

Eventually, he says, “Magic,” like it's a dirty word.

[caballero]

"Yeah."

Their entrance into his nearly-immaculate apartment (furniture, mis-matched but clean, occasional bits of half-finished engineered devices) is noisy in contrast to its quietness, even though Bruce's footsteps are still eerily quiet. He pulls off his gloves as they head upstairs.

"Fuck magic." The unusual vulgarity, and his exhausted tone, is kind of hilarious. He hasn't slept either, not since he realized Seoraj was missing. "I locked up." At the forge, at his house. So there's nothing to worry about on that front. And now he does usher the other man into sitting so he can make sure his cuts and bruises and burns are cleaned and safe from infection, tolerating no protests about it, making sure they both have water... methodical, and Bruce doesn't have the gentle touch of a doctor, but it's efficient.

After that, the shower's open, or just sleep. (Bruce sticks himself with an antibiotic shot that looks unpleasant, but he was handling corpses, so.) Mother-henning really isn't in his nature, so it's maybe awkward, maybe funny. If he thought consciously about it he'd doubt either of them would admit to it being touching.

[serjeant]

Efficient is what Seoraj is used to, and he tolerates the sting and pressure with good grace (all things considered) - this will scar, he can tell, but that's not a first for him and he'll live with it. He's got bigger, uglier scars, just--

This is outside of his experience, or it was; his anger is half-indignant, irritated and offended by the sheer indignity of the thing. Helplessness like that is foreign to him and the sour taste of it lingers in his mouth. The studied fuss here would probably bother him more if he couldn't see himself mirrored in it, knocking his knuckles under someone's chin and making them look up and drink this and reassure him they were well by being well.

He should shower, he thinks, but he's bone-tired; he strips to the waist and does a pass over with a wash-cloth instead, splashing cold water on his face and thinking about taking a day, maybe, before he goes back to the forge to deal with the mess he'd made of it himself.

“I'll get Sir Hellsing take a look at those trinkets,” he says, when he comes back, his hair damp where he'd rinsed and combed the blood out with his fingers. “Better safe than sorry.”

[caballero]

For all his great care for humanity and life, Bruce doesn't know how to show it in ways that aren't beating the shit out of people who'd trespass on those things. It took him ages to be able to navigate his whatever-it-is between he and Seoraj to begin with, and now they have this - thing, this incident, and Bruce isn't sure if he should be offering hugs or sutures.

Ultimately, he decides that if Seoraj wants a hug, he'll just say so.

Bruce is out of the gear they don't speak of by the time Seoraj is out of the washroom, carrying two mugs of tea. He hands one to the taller man.

"If they're anything beyond what they look like now, at least they won't be able to do anything here." Bonetown has its uses.

[serjeant]

The face Seoraj pulls has more to do with why don't I live in Bonetown, what is wrong with me than anything else, but the answer is-- because he likes living out near the farmlands, because he doesn't want to get closer into the city, because his work and the house he's been working on are all there and he will go back, and it'll be fine, inasmuch as things here are. Here there's tea, which is getting closer to 'all right', and he salutes Bruce's observation with his mug.

“Won't be the first time I take something strange her way.” A beat later, reflectively, “Won't be the last, either.”

Funny place to find something like normalcy. He grimaces, drinks his tea.

[caballero]

A monosyllabic noise of agreement with the consistent state of crazy in Baedal, then: "Do you want a sandwich?"

He's also herding Seoraj towards his bedroom, because he needs to take a damn nap. (They both do, really, but Bruce is going to do some long-range investigation into the towers over his CiD for a while anyway.)