Participants:
| Scene Title | The Ghost and The Spectre |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Eve gets a birthday gift. |
| Date | February 5, 2019 |
Some Ruins
A full moon shines down upon the ruins of Queens, a place that Eve has ended up calling home. The Midtown Exclusion zone was painful, almost too painful with all the memories that surfaced when she was there. The Library, Phoenix, Mas Mechanics, the list grew and so she idles in the center of a ruined intersection, draped in a long, ratty, black trench coat, feet bare, hair a mess but slightly brushed from seeing Gillian. Eve snuck away in the night though, it was a special day and she should be with family but she's still afraid.
Hurting people you don't care about and hurting people you loved were two very different things and the former seer wasn't wanting to do the latter.
A raccoon walks slowly out of a nearby alley, beady eyed gaze slides over the pale woman that glitters with red lightning every now and then which give off a flash of red in the distance. Eve had never been very subtle and now she truly embodied that aspect of her life. A shudder runs through the tall woman as she bends over in pain clutching her stomach, her eyes snap open to reveal crimson glowing eyes.
In the distance, there's a mechanical sputter, a swoop of headlights through the monochrome darkness of the ruins. The Ghost's winter-whited face shows briefly over the dash before the backlight takes over, at the distance. He presses down on the accelerator, ramping up the car in that last three hundred feet or so, the all-season tires grinding chagrined over the snow and cracked asphalt, an urgent terror of metal parts and exhaust. He sees her waiting for him. He doesn't understand.
When he cuts the engine, he opens the door almost at the same time. The momentum nearly knocks him out of the vehicle. His boots are on the pavement four, five square of concrete away, and he's closing the distance rapidly.
"Eve," he calls out. His hands are out. There's something strange and iron about his face, neither as cold nor as hot as he usually runs when murdering or fucking a person. Beer on his breath, a little, but his pupils are huge from something other than mere drunky drunk. If she doesn't stop him, he's going to touch her arms, pull her right in.
The appearance of the vehicle and then Ghost's face surprises Eve but only for a moment because she remembers why she came here. A painting from the week before her change, the ruined intersection she now waits in. A car and the white almost invisible face of her lover. She had been coming to this very spot for the last week hoping to catch him. Hoping to let him know she was if not okay, she was alive. Her expression morphs slowly from shock to warmth to horror as he races in to grab her and draw her in.
She allows it.
Pulling her close brings heat, she's warmer than usual. Eve smells like lavender from plants she toys with and braids in her hair in the fields way out. Her eyes flare crimson as she settles into an embrace, "It's me," she says softly as her hands grip his arms. Lightning the color of her irises leaps from her hands to Ghost clothes burning tiny holes in them where they land. "No no il mio amore." Gently but firmly pushing herself away from him, the scent of him. "Non sono lo stesso."
Though she half expected him to show, seeing him again in person brings tears to her eyes just as it had with Gillian. "I exploded." Wrapping the long sleeves of the tattered trench coat around herself, a hiss between her teeth indicative of the pain she feels running through her. "Now I can't stop going boom." Her snort is cut short by a wince of pain and Eve clutches her side. "Over and over. Three. Three. I died a third time, il mietitore e io siamo amici."
He gets to hold her for a moment, which is better than not at all, but it's still— confusing. At least, it is for the Ghost, right up until he peels back far enough to see the tiny breaches bored into his clothing, seared through by— something. Her tears, he realizes in a moment, mapping the distance from his sleeve to her eyes. For all the nature of his power, and its remarkable dimension-jumping applications, he is still in many ways moored to his body.
He wouldn't be able to afford dying that many times. Maybe one or two.
Holding her felt like embracing a furnace with a small waist and fantastic legs. Strange. Letting her go feels like a mistake, but by now, the Ghost is old enough to know there's no poetry in fucking around where uncontrolled powers are concerned.
"Do you want to be nullified?" Ghost asks, finally. He is personally — not a big fan of that particular option-that-isn't, but it is, after all, her body. That keeps dying. "I could probably get you some. The Reaper can fuck off to a sweet vacation, Eve." He is the way that men like him are, when faced with an unsolveable problem: try to solve it anyway, with all of his considerable sources. He doesn't stop to think, or volunteer about how he found her. How any of it might have come to be.
"A dose or three wouldn't hurt in the case of a pinch." Knowing Eve there would be a multitude of situations where people would wish she was negated. "I don't want to relay on it. I have.. have to learn control." It sounds so simple, the word rolls so effortlessly off of Eve's tongue.
A devilish grin is flashed Ghost's way and she nods her head, "Reaper can't hold me down. Neither can Mother and Father! I saw it, I saw the whole thing. How It would cross over but Otter Eyes, my friends had to make it here. I had to make a choice. Not just for me." She feels no guilt helping Mateo and the others get here, not allowing anything to stop it if she could. "So much sacrifice, even myself. I didn't see it all, not as clearly. Wrong order, backwards. Shades of truth." Her ears ring but that's just her imagination.
As if it's just dawned on her, "Where have you been?"
"I was in Oregon for a minute," Ghost answers the last part first, because it's easy. "Don't go. It's a shithole." Hahahahaha. It's nominally funny, from a creature who has lived in and contributed to the deterioration of many a shithole in his life. For awhile because it was obedience, and then because it was practice, and finally because— it's easy. He's evening out now, listening to her talk. It comforts him, the way her train of thought jumps tracks, reverses direction, finds unexpected bodies to hit along the way. Well. It would, if he needed comforting.
He pinches her arm one more time. Not hard enough to hurt. Just his finger and his thumb on the round bone of her elbow, reminding himself that for all she's exploded and is wont to do it again, all of her bones are for now in their right place. Her skin. He crazy brain. The ghost wonders, if she had a try with slapping him now, if they would both go up in ball of iridescent plasma. Seems hot, but possibly in the wrong way. Temperature, pain, et cetera. The lethal kind that would mess up the ghost's pretty face, besides. And we can't have that, now, can we?
Ghost will get her the negation drugs, though he understands very, very well why she would rather not depend on them. He releases her bird bones, presses his forefinger and thumb together after, like he's memorizing the shape of it, differentiating it from a skeleton he probably shattered in Oregon, somewhere. Working. "Where should I look for you?"
His smile is belated, teeth disconcertingly white in the dark, but not quite bright enough to clear the unease from his face. "Piccola palla di fuoco." It's his best guess.
"I miss the West coast, so many good drugs." Eve rasps with a small hum rumbling in her chest. Good times, once upon a time. But it was apparently a shithole now so maybe she would skip the next girl's trip that way. The pinch makes her blood red eyes lift to stare into his blue. That pretty face. Her hand almost lifts but instead she curls it back to herself placing it on her left shoulder cradling herself as lightning the shade of her eyes leaps up her arms to her shoulder and through her hair trailing and popping off behind her.
"Here, Staten Island.. there's a lighthouse." That narrows it down, "Kids get drunk there. I haunt." That impish grin on display as Eve twists her wrists and flexes them with a soft pop anything to distract from the quiet but consistent pain of holding her molecules together, this was her body it made no sense. "I'm coming home, I have too. My babies," her bar and her car and Spike the drone that Teo gifted her. "They need me. Gilly. I need her." The others.. "BOOM my friends, you'd like them… so much to do. I have to not explode into a million pieces!"
Her smile deepens with teeth showing now, "Distruzione incarnata." There's a wicked sense of pleasure in claiming that, she who was resigned to mostly being a watcher. "Ma non per te, piccola palla di fuoco lo è." Eve would never hurt Ghost, except for in the ways he requested it. Her pale form shivers again from a jolt of pain in her back but she smiles still through it.
"I could show you." Leaping back a few steps as she says this, it's time for a dispersal anyway. She'll feel better. Eve was learning her new body already.
Actual babies were never Ghost's thing, or at least that's his story, and he's sticking to it. He manages to be broken in a completely different way than the one that produced the time-traveling redhead we all know and only some of us love. But bars?
Cars, the drones his counterpart has built. The Ghost can appreciate those things with considerably less use of imagination.
You see, the ghost's life is already full of strange, unwieldy, unlikely events, experiences he neither wants nor needs to share. If Eve were to destroy or mutilate this body by accident, he'd leave it behind with little care except for the inconvenience. She's about to do something unimaginable. He's going to stand here and watch her do it. When this is your life, there is neither room nor soul left for fantasy. In his personal opinion, that's where the other Teos get it wrong. They may claim to believe merely that things can get better, but in reality, they believe in good.
But here, Ghost knows that he only cheats death and inebriated poker players in order to win, and he also knows that you can't always win. Ten minutes ago, he carried with him something like grief.
Now the Ghost stands back and his smile reaches his pale eyes. He opens his arms like there's going to be a dawn to bask in creeping out of the ruins beneath her feet. "Show me."
It's lucky for Eve she still doesn't know all of Ghost and her alternate's past when it comes to the subject of babies.
When he stands back Eve mirrors his action putting further distance between them. Her skin begins to glow from veins that buzz and seem to tear apart, the woman's red eyes widen and squint in pain as she loses her grip on her physical form. "Don't scream baby."
Her body flickers and crimson lights runs over her m shining outwardly, briefly her whole form shifts into one of all crimson light her raven mane become a halo of crackling red energy before she flickers back to her human state and she screams, she can never really hold back the scream the pain was just too great. That scream elongates and distorts as an explosion rocks through Eve and the surrounding area kicking up dust and leaving smoke where she stood, the last thing Ghost seeing Eve's face turned up towards the sky.
In her place as the smoke clears hovers a large cloud of what seems like crimson mist, a cloud. A blood cloud that crackles with energy and lightning. A few loose bolts fire off near Ghost's feet smoke rising up afterwards. The metal filings within the cloud float and shudder in random sequences, in a constant state of movement. Her glow fills the space and she rises a few feet higher, the color was like the sun during a blood red sunset. That scream echoes out around them, losing power with the distance it gains until there's nothing left but the buzzing of Eve in the air.
Eve could always be who she truly was with the Ghost.
Wow. Is she telling herself not to scream? The ghost looks on. As a general rule, he doesn't scream. Not without at least a few minutes of serious torture, a truly exceptional movie, or a truly argument, okay, and how often does that occur? Rare events, to be sure. Up there with a full eclipse.
The ghost watches her scream. Come apart, glowing red as a dark room, or possibly Hell, depending on which of Ghost's strange, formative life experiences you want to be referring to. He watches her tear up what seems to be the substance of the air itself, expand, raise off the floor, suddenly defying gravity like no musical could ever fully render.
And in the end, Ghost stares at her. It would be exceptionally difficult and short-lived if they were to try to have sex or sleep in a bed together right now, wouldn't it? But that's fine. Sometimes who he really is is a disembodied terrifying specter in the dark, too. Hence the moniker.
"Can you speak?" Ghost asks.
The nimbus of crimson energy pops and jerks in a side to side motion. No. She's trying to convey.
Painless. Right. At home in her own skin.
That's how she feels in this current state. Eve stares through whatever low light, distorted vision she sees through peering at Ghost's face but not getting to close. She's aware or she's trying her fucking hardest to be. Slowly the cloud pulls in on itself the molecules within vibrating and shaking as they slam together piece by piece. Lightning spiders out into the sky from her from as it takes the shape of a woman, again she's in this sort of hybrid form before it flickers.
As it flickers back into focus pale flesh crawls over her glowing red limbs, the scream returns but this time it's in reverse as if Eve's transformation calls out to the previous soundwaves pulling them back.
With a snap Eve is crouching there with smoke and lightning coming off of her pale human form. It hurts again the pain slamming back into her and she winces. "No not hearing. Low seeing. When I sleep I'm a cloud." Sex and sleeping next to each other will be a hurdle that Eve will be determined to get over. "I'll control it, I'll make it mine. I need you to do something for me una missione segreta." Tapping her lips and making the motion of locking them and throwing away the key. "Ci sono pochi di cui fidarsi. Occhi dappertutto. Occhi d'oro." She's out of breath but this is good practice, staying together long enough to finish a conversation.
There's a moment as the ghost translates that in his head. "Occhi d'oro?" he repeats, after a beat. He studies her in unmistakable confusion, not disbelieving, and drawing some conclusions— for some reason, Evolved abilities, SLC gene expression, does tend to involve pigmenation or manipulative lightshows with the corneas. Bioluminescence, sparkles. Why not an entity with golden eyes? "Golden eyes."
Ghost considers the databases available to Wolfhound, and then how little he has been paying attention to mission reports and the goings-on of the operation. Maybe he should create less enemies to avoid.
"Tell me." Teo doesn't step closer to her in that moment, observing the pained racking of her breaths, the simmer of what seems to be unlikely shadows around her. If there were enough light, he suspects that they would be red, and capable of crumbling matter. While made of much more than matter, himself, he does prefer his 'matter' bits to stay intact. It's more expensive, or at least more costly, than the car that he drove here. He cocks his head. The distant light from his vehicle makes his face look skeletal, lofted cheekbones and deep-set eyes hollowed into shadows. "What do you want me to do?"
Frowning towards the man Eve nods her head, "Yes. Old. Powerful. Older than The Death Kazimir. Stronger." Trying to keep her description clipped as to not give more power to the being but using a good example of the last time they went up against something that was godlike. "It's mind," It, "Might not feel the same as others." And there's her request not yet laid out but with those words they give an inkling to what Eve will say next, "It and Adam Monroe. I've been chasing these last few years.." Ghost knows of the blonde. Eve has spoken about him once or fifty times.
"If you skip into any minds that seem to have them on the brain… or them even." Eve's nose scrunches up she doesn't like asking him but it's, "No seeking." Raising her finger to the level that his nose would be though he's too far for her to poke him in it. "Non voglio che tu ti faccia male…" Whispering now but the sound still carries.
"Just let me know? There are so many pieces still buried. If I'm going to make right by my mistake then we must have them all." Mistake in not stopping the Crossing, even now Eve felt conflicted at times and certain in other moments. The Other Otter was worth it. "This is the level of… apocalyptic standards. Expect more fire, more brimstone, more death. It's all coming. Pandora's Box opened right up." Clapping her hands together as that lightning continues to crawl over her skin. "Oh!" Looking up to the sky and squinting before looking back down at her hands, "Gilly reminded me."
Leaning forward while stretching her arms out in front of her with a now radiant smile across her lips, Eve's red eyes seem to glow in even brighter. "It's my birthday!"
The ghost turns this over in his head a few times. Golden eyes, golden eyes. Ancient power, ancient power. Brimstone? That's— great. Exactly what a former Catholic wants to hear from his paramour, who's now red-eyed, recently dead, etc. He doesn't know why shit had to get so fucking Biblical after he quit religion, a lifetime ago. It's really not his preferred set of motifs or genres. But what can you fucking do? Not get laid by crazy ever again? Fie.
"If I find this golden-eyed apocalyptic figure, are you going to start a new sect of Christianity with it?" he asks. "Or is it gonna help you get back to a fuckin' state of stability where we can get busy?"
That would be Ghost flirting with her, kind of. Grinning proper wide now, his teeth sharp and white contrast in the dark, pretending that grief is that easy. I mean, he has the code name for it. Of anyone, he would be good at this pretend. You move forward, inexorable as a shark through space and time, sinuous as if every medium he's ever met is all water, frictionless, and— yes. Easy. And today is her birthday, which he has never begrudged her before. He steps toward her again now, ill-advised at that is, after having seen her scream, to shred cell from cell. "Give you a kiss?" he suggests. "If I lose my lips, I know a healer."
Her laugh is the usual, high and raspy almost a cackle. "No no, no cults!" Eve respects It but she doesn't want to worship it, she doesn't think anyone should. A healthy respect could keep you alive but who is Eve kidding she risks her neck to ask what some would consider the strangest questions. "I have theories. I think it's the only thing that can help me understand it. She doesn't blush at the gettin busy if anything her eyes flash in excitement and she steps forward. "It has been farrrrrrrr too long," since she was with him. Since this whole mess of molecules ripping apart and slamming back together. Not the sort of slamming she was into.
But what can you do.
She's there now, hand curling around his shoulder. Drawing close Eve's heart pounds with excitement but there's a barbed net of fear for his safety. An eyebrow raises and she tosses her midnight mane over her shoulders, twinges of lightning trailing behind it. "You always know a guy."
Her lips are warm and they press against Ghost's lightly, her smaller body pressing against him as well. Eve doesn't want to think about her body exploding quire literally. This was a gift. A good birthday gift.
Ghost doesn't want to think about her body exploding literally either, because that would definitely involve his body also exploding, huge chunks of it missing, vaporized, probably. Painful screaming that's probably along the lines of what she just performed, decorporealizing then recorporealizing. But the ghost is as gifted as all the other Teos in thinking about what he wants to think about, and what he wants to think about is kissing Eve.
And he does. He remembers the feel of her mouth, and it's the same; her lips slightly dryer now, maybe, because she hasn't exactly been in the position to look after herself, but otherwise the same shape, the same way she parts them a little, the curve of her cheek and the puff of her breath, how small the fit of her shoulders against the breadth of his chest. Out of all the Teodoro Laudanis in the world— and there are surprisingly many, Ghost is the biggest, physically. You might not notice unless you were very close up, but he's kept his physique for killing, in a way that the others haven't.
But it does more than killing. And when he closes the circle of his arms around her, there's strength in them that wishes they had the time and place and, you know, molecular stability, to try something more than his tongue in her mouth and lashes touching her cheek.
And in the end, he lets her go.