[complete] I'm home again, I won the war, and now I am behind your door.

[amberdrake]

Who: Amberdrake and Sanzo
What: Drake's been out Healing people since the riots began, and is finally hitting the bottom of his resources when a familiar face shows up. Sanzo always had a particular timing...
Where: Ludmead.
When: Very late on the night of the arena riots.
Warnings: A little gore and violence at the start.

Amberdrake's vision is finally starting to gray out, inkblots of darkness spreading at the corners and sometimes blocking the middle, making his balance skew way to the left, or way to the right. He doesn't have to see with his eyes to Heal, so here he is somewhere between Ava's place and his own little rental house, patching some poor sod up who couldn't quite make it out of the line of fire quickly enough.

There's a gunshot, and Drake barely has the presence of mind to flinch at the sound or at the burning line of white-hot fire slashed across the outside of his arm. He's too distracted by the fact that the man his Gift was threaded into just died. Bullet to the skull, his Gift informs him as it happens in such excruciating detail, millisecond by millisecond, that even the seasoned war-Healer feels supremely nauseated.

Just as when he was Healing Wolfgang earlier today -- when there was still light and his eyes still worked properly -- he can feel a gun aimed at his own head. And just as then, he doesn't really react. Later, he'll tell himself that he was too distracted by withdrawing his Gift from the dead meat beneath his hands, but right then...

He doesn't really have a reason to care, now does he? For one tiny moment of loneliness-fueled self destruction, he can't be bothered to so much as duck.

Get it over with.

Comments

[sanzo]

There's another gunshot, but it comes from somewhere behind Drake, and the scream when the bullet hits cuts through the air like a ragged wet slash.

The sound of the shot, too, is oddly echoing, hollow, a distorted facsimile of the usual whipcrack sound. But its target might not have been killed; there's no telltale sickening thump of a body to the ground.

"Oi."

Low, rough, and yet measured, just one syllable, and yet the familiarity is unmistakable.

[amberdrake]

Drake finally pries his hands off the cooling body before him and sits back on his shins. The ping of a familiar presence against his raw, battered shields, and the sound of that voice...

But it's been ten years. He's probably hallucinated this presence before.

And I must be hallucinating now, Amberdrake thinks, because it's reasonable, isn't it? His Gift is blacking his vision out and making his hands shake, he's so drained, and when he raises a hand to the line of fire on the side of his arm he feels hot blood.

"Hello?" Surely it isn't as dark here as he thinks it is. Even though it's late, late at night, there should be lights of some sort, shouldn't there?

[sanzo]

"There was this calling," continues that voice. Even if it's dark, it's hard to see precisely whom it might be, since they're backlit-- by a streetlight? The moons?

"A voice, calling. Screaming. I've been looking for it. I was going to silence it, but now I don't feel like it."

The words are almost dispassionate, but the heart and mind behind it are not. The tumble of emotions there are as violently intense as any raging mob's.

[amberdrake]

That's an awful lot of words for a hallucination. Amberdrake blinks his eyes, hard, forcing them to work again for just a moment--

And stares at that backlit figure.

"K-ke'chara?" Drake's own voice isn't all that controlled, at this point. There's a lot of painful hope there, even if he's internally bracing against the crushing disappointment that he's pretty sure is about to hit.

[sanzo]

A long, pale, thin hand extends out of the light. Followed by an arm, and then the rest of whatever's behind it: a blond young man in cream robes, standing over Amberdrake like a headstone over a grave.

"This isn't where we're supposed to be. Let's go."

[amberdrake]

Drake braces himself, and then reaches up to grab onto that hand. It's real. Holy crap. It's real. The Healing Gift is still active, and immediately registers its own work. There, where Sanzo's right hand was cut off, once, and Amberdrake had fused it back on...

"If this is a hallucination, I don't want it to end," the kestra'chern says shakily, "Is it really you? I--" he tries to get up, and fails.

[sanzo]

Sanzo shifts his grip, and moves to get his shoulder under Amberdrake's arm. Grunt! He takes the bigger man's weight, though he almost stumbles himself--

For he isn't in great shape, either. There's blood on his robes, though not all of it is his.

"You pick the place. Jeep's not here, nor the others, so we're on our own."

[amberdrake]

"I-I..." Hear that sound? It's like the needle on a record screeching off its track. And it's all mental.

Hallucinations do not haul you up off the ground. They don't feel this solid, and they certainly don't smell like Marlboro cigarettes and sandalwood.

For his own part, Drake is markedly... heavier than he was before. Just a bit, but it's noticeable. His frame is denser, as though he's aged since Haven, although he's in just as good of condition as back then.

Maybe even a little better.

"...I'm renting a small house that way," he manages, pointing feebly, because even he knows they shouldn't linger out here.

[sanzo]

Sanzo wastes no time on maudlin emotion... not yet, anyway. Not here. He just grunts again, and lurches that way, manhandling them both in that general direction through sheer force of will.

Amberdrake had not seen him from across the street; had not seen his eyes widen, his breath hitch. Had not seen him lunge when the gunman fired. And Sanzo would not tell him of these things later, because it just isn't his way.

"You weren't," he does say laconically, "Where you were supposed to be."

[amberdrake]

Drake helps as much as he can, which isn't a whole hell of a lot. But it's at least better than dragging dead weight, because he is trying. And he's so screwed up that he's not even nervous about having his arm pressed down across the sutra. In fact, Amberdrake is barely even aware of it, except as one more detail that says that Sanzo is actually here.

In the face of that realization, the sutra could fire up -- as incredibly powerful magical artifacts are wont to do, in Drake's experience -- and take his arm off, and it still wouldn't diminish the relief he feels spreading through him right now.

"The amulet, when I broke it..." he murmurs, dizzy, "it didn't work. I carried it... I'm still carrying it." It's in his backpack, since his blood-drenched scrubs lack much in the way of pockets.

"How long have you been here?" he has to ask, because if Sanzo's been here the whole time he has been and they've just managed to not find one another, he may laugh. And it will definitely be hysterical.

[sanzo]

"A day. You didn't... they lost you, Haven got attacked and they couldn't get everyone back. They sent me to get you, but you weren't where you were supposed to be. Here, I guess."

Sanzo doesn't shrug, but Amberdrake can hear it in his tone anyway.

"And then I wasn't where I was supposed to be, either." He's repeating himself, but he's probably been saying it in his own head for a while, too.

[amberdrake]

"They sent you to Velgarth?" Amberdrake doesn't glance at him, since he can't see more than blurs and smears and inkblots right now anyway, and the world he can see is strangely grey. "I was there for... this place took me on the tenth anniversary of when I saw--" you last, he doesn't say it, although the fact that he's still wearing that lotus ring on his bloodied hand says it all, "from when I was left back on Velgarth."

Is it any wonder he's having such a hard time processing Sanzo's sudden presence? He'd hoped, when he'd shown up on another melting pot of a world, that Sanzo was here. When he wasn't, he'd been nearly crushed by the realization that he no longer had Winterhart, Windsong, Skandranon, Gesten, Aubri... anyone from his own world. And he had thought he wouldn't even get to see Sanzo again, either.

It had made it easy to burn through his Gift during all this chaos, and to not flinch whenever a gun was aimed at his head.

Dead people weren't alone.

[sanzo]

"This wasn't intended to happen, it seems." Sanzo's tone is as matter-or-fact as it always was, blunt but bracing in its own way. "But that's always how it goes."

Whatever he's thinking, he doesn't share it aloud with Drake, but his concern can be felt. He isn't made of stone, as much as he tries to be. This is one of his companions-- his lover, once, ten years ago by Drake's time, a few weeks by his.

What might have changed in all these years? Even the feel of the kestra'chern is different!

"And here?"

[amberdrake]

"A little under two weeks," Drake says, quietly, "I was sure I'd never see you again."

The lighting out here isn't so good, but ten years doesn't seem to have added any grey to Amberdrake's black hair. He has a few new marks on his face, both from worrying and from smiling, but it's easy enough to look at him and think that he's still thirty years old and not forty.

Especially if you don't know him.

But Sanzo, of course, does.

"That house," he murmurs, shaking slightly with the effort of hauling himself along as best as he can. "Hopefully there's no militia waiting inside. I may or may not be on their radar, now. I can't believe they'd hunt down Healers in the street."

He can believe it, of course. There's no shock in him over that little revelation, not after his childhood in the midst of Ma'ar's conquered lands. But he is a bit disgusted by the whole idea.

[sanzo]

"You always attract trouble," Sanzo grumbles. But he shakes his arm out, and blood splatters, but his gun is ready.

"Hope there aren't more than four." Because that's all the bullest he has left in his gun, and he doesn't have enough hands to reload.

Granted, there is a sword slung at his back, but their enemies have guns, too, and that changes a lot of things.

[amberdrake]

"You don't know the half of it," Amberdrake doesn't laugh, because it won't be the soft gentle thing he usually makes use of, and he doesn't feel like having a hysterical breakdown out here. Or anywhere, thank you very much.

But he doesn't remark further than that, 'listening' carefully with his battered Empathy as they approach the house. The lights are all off-- he left in the middle of the afternoon and hasn't been back since.

"It feels empty," he notes, carefully, "unless they're shielding..."

[sanzo]

"Unlock it," replies the monk. "I'll kick it in."

He's got his boots on, and they're itchin' for a good old-fashioned ass-kickin'.

It's almost like he's hoping someone's in there.

[amberdrake]

"Don't break it," Drake cautions gently, "rental."

Can you say 'we have a landlord', Sanzo?

So he unlocks the door and with a chirurgeon's dexterity, siiiilently turns the knob until the door is sitting there unlatched by a millimeter but still closed. Then he takes his hand away.