multiversallogs | the hands of those monsters, ever cutting and scraping

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the hands of those monsters, ever cutting and scraping

Who: Adam Monroe and Benevenuta Crispo
What: The first attempt. (If at first you don't succeed--)
Where: A few blocks away from Thames, in Flyside
When: Newdi evening
Notes: The polyvores never end. (Also, for clarity, this particular attack is not driven by Vicious' influence - he hasn't been in the city long enough - but will provide helpful context for later conflicts.)
Warnings: Blood, violence, temporary death (immortals just walk it off, yo). Self-injury to demonstrate healing properties.

Eccentric but sleepy, Flyside doesn't see quite so much excitement ordinarily - it must have seemed like an ideal opportunity to catch her leaving Thames, unprepared and undefended. Even on her own, she wouldn't have been either of those things, but Adam had shoved her into the doorway after the first blow (there's blood at her temple, and when one of the concerned onlookers gathering glances there she rubs her hand back into her hair to push it out of the way, smearing Adam's blood and providing an obvious explanation for her unbroken skin), and it had been a mess, violent and quick and tangling a confused and frightened group of bystanders in the ensuing mess.

The knife is still in his thigh, where it caught the artery - she's doing her best, but there's only so much she can do here on the side of the street, trying to simultaneously keep him conscious and force back the unhelpfully concerned members of the public who at least don't offer to call the Militia, avoiding the inconvenient position of being forced to either accept or say no. She's maintaining pressure on the wound with one hand and trying to dial her CiD with the other, but there's blood spurting through her fingers and his pulse is slowing and there's no time, which has always struck her as the stupidest complaint for her to make and that still doesn't change the fact that there isn't anything she can do. Well; palm the knife when he's dead, because even in moments like these she's a creature of forethought and she has no illusions about who the intended target was.

--and then she's swearing under her breath and improvising in a hurry, tearing strips from the bottom of her already-bloodstained blouse and binding them around his thigh in an effort to disguise the suddenly unmarked skin under his torn trousers. (She doesn't need to pull that tight, but her first instinctive response to his heroics was 'irritation' and now she's been blindsided twice over, as irked protests go it's a mild one.) “Act concussed,” she hisses in his ear, on the pretext of checking him over again.

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Which raises the question of how; Adam has never been concussed and he gathers that it's not exactly a condition where one remembers how one acted.

But if it's momentary confusion and quiet on his part she's after, she gets it. He may not die from large, grave wounds such as these, but the sudden and copious blood loss does still send him into shock until his body can close the wound and replace the lost blood.

Replacing his lost cover, however, is going to be a more pressing problem. She's seen too much. Hopefully he won't have to make his efforts go to waste and kill her himself. "I can explain," he says, weak, breathless, one hand grasping her arm. "Later."

The look she shoots him briefly is - odd, possibly, it doesn't seem as if she's surprised so much as she's surprised that he is in this position. She leaves it at that, though, at least for now, and concentrates instead on keeping the both of them upright and getting back into the Thames building where she can get him upstairs into her office and can deal with this in some semblance of privacy.

Going past the volunteers in the office - she takes a circuitous route to keep him out of the eyeline of anyone they're trying to help and not panic right now - she requests a first aid kit and any spare clean clothes they have, treating Adam matter of factly as if his injuries are...still there, but manageable with a first aid kit and her own office. It's not only a neat bit of sleight of hand, the way she makes sure Adam's still putting pressure on a wound that isn't there as they go past, it also seems interestingly habitual. As if she's been here before, done this before, knows how to play it and does so without needing to think about it terribly hard.

He gathers, quickly, that she has medical training from the way she treats him, deals with him and the others, isn't fazed by his blood everywhere. And that comes with a certain steel to one's nerves, he knows, a certain reserve and detachment.

But this is a little... too detached and businesslike. He considers this as they step into her office. Either she is a remarkably hardy person in the face of surprising circumstance, or she knows something.

He's still weighing potential responses.

"Thank you," he says, and he doesn't just mean for getting him into her office.

“Of course,” she says, with a faint smile - she's waiting for something before she reacts beyond this neat bit of damage control, although not something terribly complex. Once the first aid kit is brought in, and she's assured them that everything is all right, that she's taking care of it, then she closes the door and sits down opposite him.

The way that she handles the knife she produces doesn't bring to mind, first, medicine. It's the same knife that she pulled from his thigh; she draws it neatly across her her skin - her forearm, not her wrist - without flinching, and that is clinical, the way that she does it.

“You did not know,” she says, meaning the way her own wound seals, leaving behind blood and smooth, unbroken skin. “And I did not know for you. This is a very unusual thing, to me.”

The expression on his face shifts through several emotions, for once all genuine: confusion, as she pulls out the knife; surprise, first for her cutting herself with it and then for the way the wound knits back together; and then--and worst of all for Adam--uncertainty at what she says.

"You didn't know, for me," he echoes. "You couldn't have; there was no way to tell until I was wounded, I'm careful to hide it."

In spite of everything she's seen in Baedal, she knows that had he told her - her reflex would have been to doubt him. To assume that he lied, because immortals have always known one another...but this isn't her world. It doesn't play by her rules, and he sits in front of her as empirical evidence - he hadn't told her, after all, he hadn't needed to. She expects that he wouldn't have, and she supposes she can hardly begrudge a man his secrets.

She has so many of her own, after all.

“Unusual,” she repeats, and then wipes the blood from her arm and takes a hold of the first aid kit. “You will have to let me clean you up and bandage it all the same. Let's us have a conversation, while I do. Yes? We will compare notes.”

--not every note, mind, on either side. She assumes this goes without saying, if only because he can't possibly take her for naive enough to anticipate or offer full honesty. (Or perhaps he can. Men often see what they like in her smile, and while they're watching her smile they aren't paying attention to what she's doing with her hands.)

"All right."

And no, not full honesty; she's right that men are often beguiled by that smile, and Adam allows himself that indulgence, but only so far. He made the mistake of trusting, once. Yaeko and Hiro, and look what that got him.

And he's under no illusion that she would disclose all herself. Everyone has their secrets, their reasons, and a secret of this magnitude means there are many more, layered beneath the surface. It becomes habit, willfully or not, to hold them close.

"From what I know," he offers, opening the note-comparison, "in my world, at my time, there was only one other person like me. And I'm not certain her regenerative ability was a precise match to mine. I never met her in person."

“As long as there have been men, there've been immortals,” she says, as counterpoint, pursing her lips for a moment and then gesturing for him to remove his pants - he's lost too much blood for those to be salvageable, she can find something else for him to wear once she's given him a bandage he doesn't really need. “It's believed by some that we're born into mortal combat with one another.”

Her tone doesn't suggest that this is a school of thought she thinks much of.

“We sense one another in proximity,” she adds, by way of explaining why he'd surprised her the way he did.

He does as she bids, standing to shed his pants. "I'm not part of any such bonded group," he tells her, so she understands why he was confused. "There are others like me, many others, and I imagine there have been for all of time. But we are not all alike in being immortal. What we have in common is a genetic mutation that expresses in superhuman traits."

He settles again, pants cast aside. He's neither modest nor inappropriate; he's not bothered by sitting there clad only in a pair of boxer shorts from the waist down but neither does he draw any attention to that fact.

"I am not an Immortal in the sense that it is some portion of humanity or some select group. I am functionally immortal in that the mutation in my genetic code expresses itself as rapid cellular regeneration. When cells in my body are damaged or die off due to age or any damage, my body replaces them at once. I've reached a state of equilibrium. But I cannot sense when another has the same genetic mutation, and the mutations that manifest are as varied as the people who possess them." Which is sensible; it's rooted in DNA, and each person's is unique, so their abilities tend to follow suit.

“Ah- mutants and similar. I am familiar.” Professionally, mostly; she works for Charles Xavier, she works specifically to provide care to Baedal's xenian population, it'd be hard for her to have missed them. This is the first she's encountered this kind of ability, though, and it interests her even as she finds it sort of unsettling. “I wonder what similarities, if any, we share between us.” Besides the really, really obvious one; how does it work? She can't help but wonder.

There's no inappropriate glancing or touching - she'd flirted with him when they met, and she might have again if they'd made it to that cafe, but other immortals have always been off-limits and not just because of the possibility they might decide her head is worth more to them without the rest of her body. The dynamic has shifted, abruptly and irreversibly, but they hadn't known each other well enough in the first place for that to come with any real regret; they can still get to know each other, just not that way.

"Yes. I gather in other worlds they are more open about their abilities, and the subject is more widely known." He watches her work, idle curiosity since the result is all for show.

"In my own, however, the idea has merely been suggested in a public manner, and only then, within the last handful of years. We've always known, of course, and some of us have been fortunate enough to be able to band together with others like us. But we're still more or less a secret."

“There is nothing comparable, in my own world. I've been about long enough to be confident that I would know.” And she draws on not only her own experience but the collective history of the Nahashi - another one of those secrets upon secrets that she doesn't share even with her own kind. (Privately, she thinks of most of them as lazy at best; but the cult she's been a part of since earliest childhood isn't evangelical. They can make their own mistakes as they like, and they are only her concern if the council makes them so.)

"Different worlds, different histories, different causes... and yet, the end result is the same. It's rather fascinating. I suppose that alternate universes must vary as widely as individual people from one another, and yet there are interesting overlaps, from time to time."

One never asks a lady her age. So he offers, "I discovered my gift when I was twenty-seven. I haven't aged a day since, and that was nearly three hundred forty years ago, now."

Edited (lol what is arithmetic) 2012-09-12 03:28 (UTC)

“I was twenty-two at my first death,” she says, and it's an experience that she thinks of with more warmth than most of her kind; she'd always known it was coming. It had been ritualized - a coming of age, with her mother's hand wielding the knife. She still has, somewhere, the white dress that she wore. As she ties off the bandage, she adds, “In France. I fled my homeland as a child, on the cusp of Ottoman occupation. If I could do it again, then I might have liked to be a little older, I think, before I gave up the years.”

It's wry; her perceived youth counts against her, professionally. She's been able to sidestep some of that in Baedal, where unusual is the norm, but rebuilding her reputation every time she starts again has always been...interesting.

"It's funny," he muses, shifting position slightly, testing the bandage, "I've often thought the same thing. It's not been entirely terrible for me, as I'm that indeterminate, about-thirty age, but I've wondered if just a few more years, a bit more outward maturity, would've served me better. Alas."

He couldn't choose his death, after all. "I left England to make my fortune, find my way. I first died in Japan, felled by an arrow from a criminal I'd crossed."

Once she's satisfied with the bandage - even something done for show isn't going to get half-assed, it's just the way that she is - Benevenuta straightens, finding the hand sanitizer she keeps in the office and using a bit.

(She'll get him some clean pants in a minute.)

“I never spent very much time in England- with Englishmen, sometimes,” a little wryly. “A little time in Scotland, when I was married the time before last. You can tell, perhaps, I do not spend much of my life in English-speaking places.”

He shrugs; he honestly hadn't given it much thought. "I'd guessed you were well-traveled," he admits. "I left England when I was twenty-five and I haven't set foot there since. Some of her colonies, later, after Japan--Canada, then what became the United States. I was most recently in Texas," incarcerated by the Company but he won't get into that, "and a bit of time in New York before I found myself here."

Adam seems untroubled by the lack of pants, but not in any sort of sexual way, he's just not self-conscious. "Have you always been a doctor?"

“I had an interest in medicine,” she acknowledges, “but I studied in earnest - received my first qualifications - in the 1980s. Germany.” Her 'interest', as it were, was born largely out of an interest in poison and its antidotes; then maternal health. It wasn't until her father encouraged her that she considered it in the professional sense... and that hadn't worked out exactly the way Matej had in mind. “I've been in and out of the field since then.”

Her faint smile was almost whimsical. “I am a novelist, also.”

Adam laughs, softly. "Anything I might've heard of?" He does like to read; when you needn't sleep there are so many hours in the day to fill.

He shifts forward slightly, one shoulder rolling in a half-hearted shrug. "If only I were so creative. Alas, no. I spent most of my life being a soldier of one stripe or another. But when medical technology caught up to me and made it harder and harder to hide what I was, I tried my hand at business." And here, he makes a face, because, if you can believe this: "While I was in Texas, I sold paper."

“If you were ever an avid reader of French historical romances--” with a quiet laugh. She'd also worked briefly as a historical consultant for film and television, which had been...interesting; her employment history taken in full would probably make for an odd afternoon's reading.

“I've wondered at that inevitability,” she notes, thoughtfully. “Technology advances every day- and there are many of us, through history.” And she can't help but think it'd be a fucking blood-bath if they were ever outed en masse - the nature of what they are, the game that even people like Benevenuta can't entirely avoid. Enough of them believe in that prize; the arrogance and entitlement that goes so often hand in hand with immortality isn't always so benevolently applied as it is where the Serpents are concerned.

(And it's funny, that an assassins' death cult can be considered the benevolent option.)

“I think it would not be much like Baedal.” At least not much like it is now; she wonders at its history.

Adam shakes his head, wry. "I'm afraid not. Romances in general have never really been my thing--"

And not just in literature.

"--so I missed out."

He nods, a bit grave, at her observation. Things were different in his world; he wasn't one of many immortals but one of many people whose mutations, whose special powers were beginning to emerge and be questioned by science. "I was concerned about discovery," he admits, getting to his feet. "I worried what might become of me if what I could do got out. That I would be studied, examined, in the name of knowledge and understanding."

Edited 2012-09-26 05:11 (UTC)

“I have long suspected, for my own world, that it would mean war.” It'd be a clusterfuck, is what it would be - Immortals are by their very definition not team players, and although they might work together long enough to react brutally to any intrusion into their world and their business, it would never hold together. There'd be disagreement on how to react, there'd be factions-

It would be a mess. It wouldn't be Baedal.

“We are prone to that,” a little more wryly. “To fight is considered- our nature.” Does she consider it that way? Her tone doesn't suggest anything either way.

"Dear me," Adam murmurs. He's equal parts fascinated and horrified by that detail; it's interesting to him that there's an entire culture around his counterparts in her world, but he doesn't see the use if it would just lead to open hostilities.

"We--meaning those of us with the requisite genetic mutation--do not fight, but I can't say we wouldn't. I suspect it's a matter of us simply not knowing about each other. I do believe, were the larger world made aware of us, there might be conflict with them."

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the hands of those monsters, ever cutting and scraping

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