multiversallogs | 002 | CLOSED. join the children of hell.

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002 | CLOSED. join the children of hell.

Who: Hasibe Ozcelik, John Mitchell, possibly certain others
What: Hasi drags Mitchell to Gutters, pretending it is "for her protection".
Where: Gutters!
When: Evening, lateish.
Notes: Your log page is belong to Kays.
Warnings: Hahaha uhh. It's a vampire bar and Hasibe exists. Stay tuned.

Ending up at Gutters was always in the plan, for Hasibe. She had made a list of all the bars and clubs she absolutely needed to hit up ("needed" at least in the context of her own mind), and since this place came recommended, it was bumped up a few notches on the list. Cognizant of the danger inherent to the place, she'd even managed to wrangle a companion, though her motivations for persuading him to come along had less to do with her own need for protection--at least, that was how she saw it--and more to do with her desire to push him into interacting with his own kind. It was convenient for both of them...and, for the purposes of particular other activities of hers, gave her ample opportunity to observe the effect recent events had on the population.

There's always an ulterior motive with this one. She sees it as benevolent.

Mitchell probably didn't need the help, though. She'd even admit that, freely. But she has her ways of showing her interest in people, and arranging social situations for them with varying degrees of subtlety happens to be one of them. Once they make their way into the bar, buried as it is in the undercity of Mafaton, she abandons her coat, which means she is fully unveiled in her patently ridiculous white dress with its cut-out spaces, and accompanying towering black leather ankle boots. It's not exactly dressing to blend in down here.

(She gets a little bit of silly entertainment out of wearing pristine white to places where everyone is almost certainly dressed dark. It's a thing.)

"What do you think?" Hasi inquires, smiling at Mitchell. She loves the undercity, of course.

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Well, it's not like Mitchell is looking for Deacon's approval. In fact, the smell of blood, the distant sounds of the few heartbeats in the bar pumping and fading, are getting to the point where everything is coming secondary.

"I have to say, I'd be lying if I didn't say I was considering a change in lifestyle."

He smiles a little absently to himself. It's not a nice smile. It does, however, brighten a little into something more genuine when Hasibe rejoins the table. For the most part, he's been unable to see her out the corner of his vision, but now and then he listens out for trouble. So far, no news seems to have been good news.

"Enjoying yourself?"

And the girl returns unscathed. Deacon's mild surprise is communicated in an eyebrow raise, but it's mostly affect - no doubt either vampire sitting here would have paid some attention, but all the same. He glances back where she came from as if to see what happened, before he takes a last breath of smoke, casts it out into the air once its lingered in under-used lungs for a decent space of time, and ashes it out in the tray set centre of the table.

A split second after Hasibe is settled, Deacon draws himself up to stand in languid movements. "Well, chief, if you change your mind, this place is open every night. And if everyday citizenry doesn't appeal, we also got alternatives."

But he isn't going to spell out the details in front of a non-crurovore, sympathiser or not. "You two have a nice evening."

"Always."

This is to Mitchell, paired with a brief brightening of her ever-present Mona Lisa smile. She makes her own fun. The short encounter with someone who got a bit too forward for her own preferences--and really, she might have welcomed that if she didn't understand that among predators you had to establish yourself as able to hold your own before you could play the game--aside, she likes the music here.

She is not surprised when Deacon rises.

"See you," Hasibe offers (she will...probably make a point of it; species is never a factor in whether she decides she's going to repeatedly inflict her own brand of quicksand interest on someone), perfectly aware that she missed something interesting, but she was betting on that. Planned that, really.

Edited 2011-11-18 13:44 (UTC)

"Yeah. See you around." Whether or not it's the promise of a return visit remains to be seen.

Once Deacon is gone, Mitchell wipes a hand over his face and for a moment there is a flicker of black, inhuman eyes, but it passes almost as quickly as it came. Instead, his attention refocuses on Hasibe.

"So." The implication being 'what next?' Never mind that one hand is fidgeting a little too much with the edge of the table.

So that's what watching someone choke-chain themselves back into place looks like. Hasibe is still, watching him, her hair falling loose over one shoulder. Her gaze flickers to his hand, and then back up to make her form of very steady eye contact, smile slight. A bit knowing, which she is aware can be all kinds of maddening for some people, but she doesn't know if Mitchell is one of them.

"So." Now she moves, reaching to delicately curl manicured fingertips around his hand and helpfully rest it atop the table for him. Helpful, Hasibe. "We have options. We can stay, go somewhere new, or just go home, but you should know I don't ever end the night when it's quite this young, so I do have a healthy number of places in mind."

"I think I could do with a change of scenery." And smell, and the taste of it in the air, god. His breathing right now is very rhythmic and deep. "If you don't mind."

The knowing look doesn't go unnoticed amidst Mitchell's distraction. No doubt Hasibe will have questions at some point, although he's not entirely sure he knows what his answers are right now.

Hasibe rises to collect her coat, obliging. She understands he's uncomfortable, now, and she's hoping that whatever instincts he's fighting don't drive him to lose control with her--that's not something she always minds, per se (far from it), but she hasn't told him the nature of her physiology.

"Come on, then. I know a place we can go."

They will have to break into it, but Hasibe doesn't totally parse 'trespassing laws' as applying to her. She loves the night too much to listen to rules about what parts of it she can't have. Even the tunnels to the surface will be a change in atmosphere for Mitchell.

The further away he gets from the scent of blood, the more Mitchell returns to normal, or at least what he'd insist was the usual him. As soon as they're shot of Gutters, he resumes conversation.

"Well. That could have gone a lot worse." There's something slightly upbeat in his tone, as if to highlight the understatement. "Although please tell me there will be no more vampires for tonight."

...forgetting himself, obviously.

She inclines her head to confirm that, aside from Mitchell himself, there will probably be no more vampires, but there's something faintly bemused in her expression. Like she wants to laugh, but doesn't quite know why. Her heels on the concrete leading up to the surface are a steady staccato accompanying their path, mostly-rhythmic.

"So I take it we're just pretending those last few moments didn't happen."

He is more than a little absurd (not that he realises it).

Considering her statement for a moment or so, Mitchell replies, "We don't have to." Which means ideally he would like to ignore it, but he's not going to push away her enquiries. He's a little too mentally exhausted from the self-denial and it shows.

She lifts one shoulder in a vague approximation of a lazy shrug. Hasi tucks her coat more securely around herself in preparation for the cold waiting for them above. "Let's start with what our new acquaintance in there had to say," she suggests, "since I am going to assume you weren't being propositioned."

If he was, she'd just be sorry she missed it.

Mitchell gives her a side-long look before replying, "No, I was not." His mouth opens for a moment as he considers questioning if he comes off that way. Then he wonders why he's concerned if Hasibe thinks of him like that at all. Circles within circles of neuroses.

"He offered to buy me a round." Presumably not a beer by the way Mitchell says it. "I said no thank you. For now. I don't -I don't know."

He stops for a moment, looking up at the absence of sky. "I'm still not sure how I want to live here."

She merely playfully raises her eyebrows in response to that look--she was entirely kidding, but the crux of the issue he's having is more interesting to her than propositions in potential. Hasibe exhales thoughtfully as they walk.

"It's a new place," she says, "you can do anything you want. The difficulty with that is discerning what your wants really are. You don't take blood at all, then?"

"No." ...Mitchell. "Well, I mean. I've had a few relapses."

In the meantime, he resumes his pace and begins to wonder what exactly it is that he wants.

When they reach street-level, Hasibe stops, looking at Mitchell with the sort of intent, gently searching curiosity she shows a lot of people--but rarely with this level of focus. He reminds her, she thinks, of Henry after the binding, when she'd tried to fix him. Pulled apart at the edges, still denying his nature. A demon feeds off despair, hate, lust, sin. A vampire just feeds off blood; those other things are sometimes side effects.

"That makes it sound a little bit like a drug addiction," she comments. "Why did you let me bring you to the club, then? I mean, I can tell myself it's just my wiles all I want, but I don't think that's it."

"I don't know." He doesn't, and then again he does. There's a look of that same frenzied confusion about him as when they first met.

"You have to understand, I didn't want this," he says, with a too-wild gesture at the city around them, half between laughter and despair. "I thought it was going to be over, that I wouldn't have to worry about any of this again. That would be it. And now, now. There's blood bars and rights and a chance to live a normal life, but what's the point? But the other option--"

He falters, catching up with himself. "I know I should live life as a good man," should being the operative word, "but I'm not."

Edited 2011-11-18 17:14 (UTC)

She is calm while she listens, the slight widening of her eyes having more to do with empathy than concern--but she begins to understand that these moments are when the mask fractures slightly. What it yields remains to be seen. Hasibe just knows he's compartmentalizing, and maybe he knows it, maybe he doesn't, but she can see it.

"Nobody is really good," she says. It's not intended to be cynicism. "But what do you call normal? What do you call good? ...you can't be 'normal' like a human or good like a human. That's okay, though."

Hasibe isn't sure how this conversation took such a sudden turn (though really, she should know, she's trying to pull this out of him). She leans against the wall of the building nearby, watching Mitchell from under her eyelashes. "I'm sorry this isn't what you wanted. I really am."

And, like before, this is not a platitude; she knows what it's like to have your own nature disappoint you, and then the world twists and all your best attempts to fix things just lead to a new chapter in your own struggle.

"No, it's not okay." The sudden volatility subsides into something quieter, and he drifts over to where she stands.

"You have no idea what the alternative is. The things I've done, the things I can do. Things I still want to do, sometimes." Things that are becoming more and more difficult to suppress beneath the surface of whatever Mitchell claims normality to be.

And he realises then that, maybe, he's gotten slightly too close to a woman he barely knows, while holding her gaze and hinting at his depravity. He looks away, moves back a step, eyes closing as he tries to resolve himself once more.

"Let's leave it. And just... Go home, or continue on. Whichever you'd like." Despite himself, some part of him holds out and hopes she opts for the latter. He's not sure why.

This is sounding so familiar. Her mind says remember how this went last time, girl? but he's not Hyde, he couldn't be Hyde, he can be any kind of monster but not that one, the beast, the thing from hell, the thing Prometheus summoned and melded into Henry so his desires and the demon's became one twisted chimera. Once you've gone that far into the abyss it becomes very difficult to know when you should be properly afraid. She remembers spending every hour, every second, whipped, contorted, pulled at the seams, being taught to want it. The total loss of self-control, of even her own identity, playing games with other people's names on them, her as Ada, Hyde as Van. It doesn't make her as sick as it ought to, thinking of those games.

But she also remembers the time Hyde tried to make her kill a man to be like him. The body count. The papers. The way they couldn't identify some of the bodies.

"You'd be surprised," she says, simply and with certainty. And she locks eye contact, for a while. When she pushes away from the wall, it's toward Mitchell, brushing past him on the sidewalk. "Come with me."

There's something in the way Hasibe says it that makes Mitchell pause. This isn't Bristol, he thinks. He's not Big Bad John any more. It's interesting to be freed of that expectation, but at the same time he's lived with it for so long. And in some ways, it still is who he is.

He briefly muses on whether there could be anything worse than what he's done over the years. Possibly not. Probably not. But there is the possibility for it having been matched. And that's new.

While he thinks, he turns heel and, in an almost dutiful fashion, follows after.

She walks in silence for a while. It's obvious she knows where she's going, and it might not be terribly far in destination, though the neighborhood looks increasingly dilapidated. Hasibe seems strangely effortless in her high heels, when by now they should probably be beginning to hurt, but maybe after wearing them for so many years she just no longer notices.

It's not abrupt, precisely, but placed rather in the quiet between them:

"My blood is poisonous."

She waits only a half-beat for continuing.

"That's part of why I was so comfortable in there. Do they have the Sisterhood of the Oleander in your world, historically? Women who were supposed to be beautiful, but poisonous. Toxic. Named for the flower, although the effects are more like datura with no antidote."

That surprises him. Part of him idly wonders if it could be a ruse, but then it does explain why she was so confident about this entire venture.

"Not that I know of. Any poisonous or demonic women throughout history were usually one of ours. Rumours of their powers were usually exaggerated or plain made up." A smile slips around the corner of his mouth. "In some cases, we were the ones who created the stories. Put out the rumour that garlic wards off vampires so some poor fool will use that against you instead of something that actually works."

"It sounds very... I don't know. Poetic." He looks at her askance. "Are all witches in your world part of that Sisterhood?"

"By birth," she confirms, and then considers explaining the whys of her blood, the reasons for its toxicity. 'Divine ichor' is probably a little much. "Have you ever read the Book of Enoch? It's not exactly standard Biblical canon, and I don't know how religion affects you."

It's not like Hasibe is a Christian, anyway, so symbols of that kind wielded by her are probably ineffectual against any vampires.

"I don't feel a desire to recoil just yet," he says, with mild good humour. "Other than the basics, I can't remember much. I was raised Catholic, but the Bible got taught to us, we didn't really read it for ourselves. And that... Well, that was a long time ago."

He doesn't think much about his mortal life these days. It seems so odd when he's reminded of it, like something he once dreamt.

She remembers what he said about his age--and thinks most people's memories of childhood begin to fade a little by their twenties, so she can't quite imagine how it must be decades and decades later.

"The Book of Enoch talks about how before the Great Flood, a group of angels became obsessed with mortal women, after being exposed to their charms by Lilith; she mentored them and helped them find their way to sin. They fell to Earth and made what some people call the Nephilim with those women, although the preferred term is Bene Elohim--Nephilim sort of connotes something demonic." Which is not how she thinks of witches at all. As she explains, Hasibe heads for a tall building that appears to be under construction, a large part of its beams exposed.

"Those fallen angels taught their wives magic, and their children, too. When the Great Flood happened, people believed all the Bene Elohim, the first witches, had gone. But there's a little more to that claim that witches can float than people thought."

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