Participants:
| Scene Title | Vitriol |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Behind locked doors and before blind cameras, Felix and Danko celebrate opposite ends of the same victory over torture and teacakes. Except without the teacakes. |
| Date | November 16, 2009 |
It's hard out there for a pimp.
It's also hard out there for a Human Supremacist. For a terrorist and a fugitive. For Emile Danko, who sits alone in a room with one chair and no tables, bruised wrists cuffed behind his back and feet shackled. His black fatiguewear has been exchanged for smarter orange stuff. It stands out lurid and industrial against the cadaverous pallor of his skin and washes the silver ringed around his pupils nearly white under the bleaching influence of florescent lights installed cold and overbright. They buzz and hum, the only sound in here save for the occasional rustle of canvasy fabric over crisp bandaging while Danko waits.
His reflection in the room's lone mirror has seen better days. He's battered and bruised, sickly and stitched. He breathes carefully and doesn't move much save to fidget — wincing unguardedly through the circles blacked into his sunken eye sockets whenever one leg happens to give a sharper twitch. Looks like he might be breaking out in a cold sweat, too. Easy pickings.
There's the creak of the door opening, and another chair is shoved through. Ooh, another prisoner? Another former prisoner. It's not NYPD that comes through the door, or Homeland Security. But one very damaged, in many senses of that phrase, Agent. Fel limps through, leaning on his cane. He doesn't take the chair - the door closes quietly behind him. And the Fed is left to stand and savor the sight of his tormentor bound and helpless before him. He doesn't speak. Not yet.
"Ivanov." Recognition with an underlying current of resignation threads coarse from the pit of Danko's throat, and wary of his own weakness on such prominant display, the older man sets to pulling himself together. His chest puffs flat across a steep breath; his shoulders draw back. The severe sheer of his burr tilts back when his head lifts out of his drowsy hang near his sternum, and he forces himself to swallow despite the desert dryness cottoned into his mouth. He's awake. Present. Whatever.
Still mute. His only reply is a smile that spreads, slow as a bloodstain, somehow obscene. Fel looks, though he'll never realize it, unnervingly like the grandfather who sent so many people to work themselves to death in the eastern wastes. "I'm sorry, Emile," he says, when he finally breaks the silence. "I don't have a whole month for you. Just a night. We'll have to work quickly." Like this is some great project they're going to embark on.
"In that case you better stop fucking around and stump on over here," drawled out with all the silken ease of the heavily inebriated or mildly insane, Danko huffs in another deep breath and blinks hard to clear the film out of his eyes. Or his head. Both, most likely.
There's a security camera, up in the corner of the room. To prevent exactly what is about to happen. Fel looks up at it, makes a little signal with one hand….and the crimson LED that indicates it's on and recording fades into darkness. He takes off his coat with the deliberation of a doctor preparing for surgery - it leaves him in that white Oxford and gray pants, leather shoulder rig now clearly exposed. He pulls the Sig from it, pops the magazine clear and checks the chamber. Empty now. With a flick of his hand, he reverses it in his hand - and cracks Danko across the face with that inhuman quickness.
In through the nose, out through the mouth. And again. And again. Danko looks smaller than he ever did before, forced down into a chair and an orange jumpsuit that makes a spectacle of his compact stature. No bulky assault rifles, no mysterious pockets. No black leather jacket. His eyes are the same. Clean, clear and colorless to the silty bed, never distorted by the hatred polished into glassy tranquility at the surface. All the way up to contact, he watches Felix go about his ritual without blinking, turning aside only with the audible snap of his skull sideways to mark the force of the blow. Within seconds, his left eye has taken on a thick red veneer, blood slow and deliberate as water eddying through a sinking ship. The leak at the corner of his mouth comes a little quicker, and for once, he's genuinely sluggish about the process of sitting back up straight again.
Hatred mirrored in Felix's own pallid blue, though his own expression is tight, restrained, mouth drawn into a nearly lipless gash, all the bones stark beneath his skin. There's again that magician's flicker of the hand, and the gun's back as it was - he's poised like a performer just come onstage. Not entirely inppropriate - though the camera's off, there's the sense of other eyes behind the mirror that takes up most of one wall. All his pious lectures about how you don't let the suspect push your buttons cast aside, apparently. But then, he's not here to have questions answered. This is purely recreation.
From his other pocket, he produces a little butane jet lighter - a miniscule block of silver metal, sleek and shining save for the initials engraved in Russian script on the side. With that surgical impatience, he opens the top of Danko's jumpsuit to expose the pallid flesh beneath. The blue jet of flame pops into life, and he washes it over the mouth of the gun. Which is in turn applied to the skin just under Emile's collarbone.
Bell rung and brows brooding down into a hood against pain in the company of a claggy kind of pressure ringing dull through the side of his bruise-smudged skull, Danko doesn't roll his tongue over to the tattered interior of his cheek until the metallic taste thick in his mouth registers as something more than ancient fillings. His jaw stretches open then, all the way until it pops under a brittle scuff of dusty white sandpaper growing in now that he's been in here a few days. Three? Four?
Stiffly he leans forward. Stiffly he spits a glistening red black wad of blood out onto the floor. Stiffly, he leans back again, this time to receive Felix's hand probing at his collar. There's a lapse in perception where things go a bit smudgy, and then pain spiked clear through to his spine and up the back of his neck into his sinuses, where he can smell acrid burning before there's anything to smell. Tension ropes through his neck like copper wire, and he curls in on himself with a gusty, strangled wheeze.
Good. But not good enough. Clearly, he's got to work on his technique. Still no questions…and Fel's expression hasn't flickered. There's that languid droop to his eyelids, almost as if he were bored. The treatment of the gun is repeated, the steel mouth of the muzzle kissing the skin under the other collarbone. Symmetry is always appealing, isn't it? And then, gently, he tips Danko's chin up, the better to consider his expression.
Where well-conditioned endorphins (and more likely the onset of a tender concussion) have already muddied the ache in Danko's head down into a near pleasant absence of feeling, there's nothing so easy about quashing the shock of electric white the gun muzzle's burn paints across the backs of his eyelids. This time there's a muffled tea kettle whistle that accompanies the air squeezed out of his lungs at a hunch. Blood dribbles unrestricted into a pattern across his lap, vivid as candle wax 'til Felix tips his head back and it's slicking warm into contact at his jaw instead.
When his skull finally rocks back enough for light to cast down and around all the right pits and hollows, the picture it paints isn't promising. There's hunger written into the grit of his teeth and the steel in his eyes (one cast red, both less focused than they should be.) He's getting worked up like he would for an execution, breathing quick — vindication and some macabre manifestation of victory written in feverish lines around his face on his way to coiling himself up for a second mess of spit — this one aimed for Felix's face and pretty clothes.
Which misses. With the tendons in his legs restored, something of his old viperish quickness is back. Felix laughs, softly. "You're hoping I'll kill you. Restore your faith in your own martyrdom. No. No." He holds the gun off to one side, lets it cool before reholstering it. No more of those little circular brands. This time it's the naked flame itself, drawn in a steadyhanded line down, from the suprasternal notch to just above his heart.
Plap. Spit and blood collapses across empty floor in a wide line and finer mist. Danko spends the few seconds of distance it earns him dribbling through red stained teeth fixed into a leer, crocodile confidence wavering only enough for him to sniff and grog his way through a congested chuckle. "I don't wanna die," is about as far as he gets before the lighter's back out and he shudders involuntarily, bitch to uneasy muscles and cold sweat. "Then I couldn't see what a mess I've made of all of you."
He's on his way to winding into another chuckle when the flame starts to lick around his neck and he nearly gags instead, teeth ground out and left foot stamped, scraped shriek rubber on concrete, and stamped again. Fuck if he ever gets out of this place, he's coming for the NYPD next.
"But you didn't," Felix whispers to him, almost tenderly, breath against his ear. "I'm alive. You tortured me, you maimed me, you tried to hang me, but here I am. Harrison's alive. You are going to die. We're going try and convict you, hold you and your pitiful little group of bigots up for the proper mockery…..then I'll be the one to throw the switch. Any one of us is worth a hundred of you. And you know it. It's fear of the inevitable. Your own coming extinction." His hand is light, brushing away away nonexistent dust from the wounds he's inflicted, until his fingers curve like claws, and dig into one of the gun brands.
Danko chuckles again at the voice in his ear, more raggedly than before with skin shining unhealthy pink over the sink in his neck. Blood's already greased down his throat to coat the worst of it, but by the time he rolls his tongue around through his molars again the flow seems to have stymied itself at least a little. He doesn't argue again this time, but whether or not that might be construed as progress is doubtful.
The main thing is that he's still feeling pain. It's evidenced pretty clearly in the way his back arches away from the chair when Felix's fingers claw in, even if he's quashed his reaction otherwise down into silence and hard closed eyes.
Hm. He's not screaming. This is….unsatisfactory. Later, later, Felix Ivanov won't be able to look himself in the eye. But now, well. One hand latches on to Danko's throat, slender fingers sinking in, as the other brings the little blue flame to bear on previously unburnt flesh. Got to be a steep learning curve, he doesn't have long.
It's hard to find purchase across the bob and lift of the Adam's apple — easier where blood's had time to dry tacky and cold on the fringes. Sssticks at the fingers, pulls and cracks under the pads when he swallows. He looks tired now that the initial adrenaline and elation has worn off, leaden eyes rolled red and white after the lighter's renewed approach. "There's always electricity if you're looking to make me dance," is the best he can offer before he's blacked into another hot flash of unwavering pain. He simpers, hitches, leaks snot.
Doesn't scream.