Blood and Sand

Participants:

deckard_icon.gif felix_icon.gif

Scene Title Blood and Sand
Synopsis In which Deckard is a victim to his own predictable habits…and a zombie feeb with a lead pipe.
Date May 27, 2009

Staten Island: Coast

The coast of Staten Island is as much of a presence as its inland, with rivers that invade right into its heart as well as cutting off the circulation of transport from the rest of New York City. The coastal regions reflect a lot of this borough's rural nature, with rough shores and plantlife, broken brick, and general abandonment. The harbors are left to the devices of those that freely come and go, a conspicuous lack of official presence - a number of them notably overrun by the developing crime syndicate, but there are still quite a few, particularly on the coasts nearest to Brooklyn and Manhattan, that are accessible to the lawful public.


It's late. It's dark. Deckard can't see past what the limited moonlight is willing to yield to him. And yet, here he is, walking the same stretch of seawall that he always is around this time of night, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his leather jacket, head down against the wind. The breeze is moving swiftly tonight, flinging mist up from the incoming tide to prickle cold at the side of Flint's face while he picks his way along the concrete edge into oblivion. At least, that's kind of what it looks like. The sand some ten feet below and to his left is dark. So are the buildings to his right, once rigid shapes already succumbing to the earliest stages of decay.

The same one where Felix died, though time and tide have long since washed away any traces of that. The crab has given up in disappointment and taken up residence in another of the little crannies between the blocks, though it still hopes for the day another convenient human corpse offers both food and shelter. Fel, god help him, is out on Staten -again. Lee would punch him bloody if he knew, surely. Out looking for a certain little cotton-candy pink sister of mercy. But….there's Flint. Strange how you come to know your enemies nearly as well as your friends. Or perhaps not so strange, considering how few close friends Felix actually has. He doesn't pull his pistol and simply try to gun Deckard down. Oh, no. That'd be too impersonal. He finds a convenient length of metal pipe - still fastened to the wall, until his new power convinces it to come away silently. Thus armed, he starts to creep up on the arms dealer.

Deckard has already been through at least one scuffle in the last couple of days, but that's par for the course. Rough scrapes marr the right side of his face, breaking up the pallor at his brow and across the ridge of his cheekbone where someone saw fit to introduce him to the pavement. Right before left, left before right, he watches the uneven progress of his boots tracking out over lighter concrete, occasionally crunching over pieces of glass or broken shell. He is, in a word, oblivious. The kind of oblivious you can only be after you are buzzing and have had a better night than you were hoping for. Guard down, head lifted to the path ahead, it's only when Flint tips his head down again that he notices something he wouldn't have if he had access to the heightened sense he's had a decade to get used to and only a few nights to miss: the murky mooncast shadow of someone creeping up behind him. …Huh. Brow knit, he starts to turn — automatic monkey, slightly inebriated curiosity preceding alarm by a few crucial milliseconds.

Fel is not a speedster, at the moment. But he's nervy little bastard high on adrenaline, with nothing worse in him than his meds. And the shakes lithium salts can give you might've thrown off a sniper's bullet, but they don't obscure his aim with a length of hollow lead at all. He lashes out at the older man with all his strength, trying to simply brain him.

Wonk. Deckard doesn't even manage to get all the way turned around before there is a strange kind of silence and absence of feeling fuzzing pleasantly behind the blast of white static that fills his vision. He executes the rest of his turn on gravity's whim in improbably slow motion, knees losing their ability to keep him upright about the same time he tips far enough over to fall clear off the edge of the sea wall. Thump. There's a little poof of unsettled sand, and one dead crab.

This is generally the part where they cue 'Singin' in the Rain'. Or 'Thus Spake Zarathustra'. Choose your Kubrick, either way there's ultraviolence incoming. Felix follows him as close as he can, leaping down to the packed sand, knees bending to take the shock….and then he's on Deckard, with a blow to the arm, and another to the head. Satisfied he's at least momentarily beaten the fight out of Flint, he crouches to frisk him, take any weapons he can find.

Flint has made it about halfway into a curl inward on himself against the pain biting through his skull like an ice pick when: Clank. Tonk. Blood slings and slaps black across the seawall in a fine arc along the pipe's outer path. Ungodly pain one second, none the next. It's almost like a blessing! As for weapons, there's the semi-automatic .45 snugged up warm in a broad holster at his belt next to a similarly robust hunting knife. A switchblade occupies some kind of improvised sock suspender arrangement at his right calf.

Good, good. The .45 gets tucked away at Fel's hip, through his own belt. The knives he takes also - the switch going into a jacket pocket, the sheath of the hunting knife comfortably stuck through his belt as well. Since a hand to hand beating generates much less noise than a gunfight, there's no reason to suppose that anyone will be along to rescue Flint any time soon. Plenty of time with which to cuff his hands behind his back, test for a pulse…..and then scoop up a mostly rusted out beercan, and use it to dump chill seawater in his face.

In the meanwhile, Deckard gets in a dreamless nap, wiry muscle bound slack at Felix's leisure while damp sand finds new surfaces to cling to and blood seeps forth into the greying scruff of his hair at a healthy trickle. Really, this is probably the deepest sleep he's gotten since —

Cold water to the face is enough to induce a sharp, wheezing gasp. One that can't seem to get enough oxygen back into his lungs on its own, because it's followed directly by another, and another, blue eyes dilated blacker than the blood mixing with the sand on his head.

From somewhere, he's produced a little gadget, somewhere between flashlight and lantern. The light the bulb casts is that icy-blue white of an LED bulb, pooling around it, picking out the stark bones in the younger man's cheek and jaw. Fel's settled down, knees drawn up, bloodied pipe held loosely in his hand, like this is going to be some campfire kaffeeklatsch. He doesn't speak, not yet, and his expression is unreadable. Not triumph or exaltation or anger, just a distant consideration.

"Ffff," is what Deckard has to say about this, blue, blue eyes all too human in the second or two before they squeeze off from the piercing white of Felix's light. More panting, more "Ffff," that can't quite resolve itself into a full-fledged, 'Fuck.' One boot pushes into a feeble dig at the sand its rooted in, but that's about all the movement he seems capable of forcing himself to make. Feels like a glass bottle has exploded inside his skull. And he's still calming down; catching his breath down into a haggard but regular rise and fall.

It's intensely frustrating that Fel can't come up with something witty to say. Bitter satisfaction dries up the words, and he contents himself with twining fingers in Deckard's wiry hair, and wrenching his head around so Flint's looking at him. "Familiar scenario, huh?" he says, finally, and his tone is conspiratorial rather than angry.

Deckard looks. Wild eyes hazy and unfocused, inebriate and potentially brain damaged, he still manages to muster something that looks a whole lot like hatred. Blood is sticky across the side of his face, thick in the socket of his eye and at the base of his nose, staining red at bared teeth and grizzled stubble. Familiar scenario.

He says nothing, either because he can't or because he can't think of anything witty to say either. Or…because he's distracted. Warmth borne of something more substantial than mere blood is creeping hot through the crack in his skull, its released forced half out of instinct, half out of deep, adrenaline-pulsing fear. Bone knits to bone. Blood loss slows to a more manageable, sludgy drip. He continues to breathe, ragged and rank with whiskey stink.

"Worthless faggot." Maybe it's not about being witty. Maybe it's just about communication.

Of your true feelings.

He's heard that taunt for years. Past the point where it's bothersome. It's a statement of fact, if a nasty way of putting it. The pipe lashes out again, though this time it's against the bone of Deckard's shin, rather than his skull. Wants him conscious for the rest of this, however long it takes. Fel glances up, gauging time by the position of the moon. "Talk to me, Deckard," he says, conversationally. "I want to know where a little whore called Bebe is. Buy yourself a little more time."

Deckard cries out there — not a scream so much as a yelping, howling escape of air at the crack and splinter of metal on bone. His breathing quickens, perhaps understandably, and there is a definite dampness in his eyes when he huffs out a desperate, "I dunno, I dunno."

"Not a good answer, Flint," It's at moments like this that he looks frighteningly like his namesake. The grandfather who sent scores to the gulag with graceful strokes of a pen. But what can you expect, considering whom they were ultimately named after? "Think," he urges, gently. "Or perhaps you have other information I might use."

"She worked for Logan before — she was — she was with Logan — " Whether or not this information is actually of any help is questionable, but it's hard to talk when you're busy simultaneously wanting very much to die and to not die at the same time. Deckard's back lifts weakly up off the sand in an arch that does little to ease the hot spike in his skull or shin. "I dunno where she is now."

He neatly reverses his grip on the pipe, strikes with the end, not the length, like he's trying to hammer it into his gut. "Why did you kill me?" he asks, suddenly switching threads. And now there's real anger in his tone.

Whump, Deckard's spine abruptly rejoins the sand skimming desperately after it, ragged gasping stopped while he's elevated neatly back to square one and forced to rectify that situation first: no oxygen in lungs. Another fish-mouthed gulp of air later, he's back to bared-teeth wheezing, and chuckling, and then wheezing some more. Brain damage for sure. At least, that's how it probably looks. The split in his scalp begins to pull back together next, blood already coagulating in the wiry curl of his hair where the wound dug deepest. He squeezes his eyes shut, forcing out only a fraction of the red sheen overtaking his right eye. Is this how a jellyfish stranded on a beach at the mercy of some asshole kid's plastic shovel feels? No answer.

Three quick lashes along the ribs and gut at that. And then Fel's stopped, staring at Deckard as if he'd never seen him before. His expression is no longer enraged, but puzzled. As if he weren't entirely sure what he were doing here, or why.

Pain is ever increasingly just one of those things that follows Flint around like his own personal thundercloud, always raining piss and blood and bile onto the sandy, bloodied matt of his scruffy head. He's stopped struggling, now, eyes closed until the blows stop and the moon blurs white across a bruised sky. No one particular place feels the worst. It's everywhere, sunk deep into muscle and bone, like any movement might strip the former clean from what's left of the latter. Even his breathing has faded weak and shallow.

It's as if beating Deckard into bloody rags might exorcise the memories that haunt him. Fel reaches down, yanks Deckard up by his collar with strength entirely disproportionate to his actual size. Fury will do that to you. "Give me one reason not to drown you right now," he says, between gritted teeth.

Deckard's a pretty big dude — 6'2" and sturdy at the torso, for all that all his long bones are strung together with wire and gristle. Up he goes all the same, unbroken leg forced to take whatever weight Felix can't support alone. A strained grunt filters hoarse through his red-stained teeth when various organs tilt out against cracked ribs and split muscle, chest hardly rising where it can get away without major movement. His eye are dark beneath the hood of his brow. No glow. No real will to live, either.

"Teo."

It is rage driving him. Because when that little word derails his fury, replacing sneering anger with puzzlement again, Fel's forced to lower Deckard ungently to the sand. "What does Laudani have to do with anything?" He's at least ready to give Deckard the benefit of -some- doubt on the subject.

Oohgod here comes the sand again ow ow ow — there's a little crackle and pop as something resettles the wrong way and Deckard coughs, spattering still more blood out onto a beach that's already pretty much a gory mess. To make matters worse, any cottony confusion that might have served to take the edge off of what's happening has cleared in gradual full, leaving him even less likely to move or speak. Something unintelligible is muffled out into brackish sand. He coughs again.

"You're failing to explain why Teo is sufficient reason to spare you," Fel notes, nudging Deckard impatiently with a toe. His tone is dry. Clearly, mention of that name was merely a ploy to buy time. A few more sand-filled breaths.

A sick, blood-clogged chuckle is about Deckard is likely to produce in the face of that prompt. God, he's tired. No argument, no justification. He doesn't even mutter anymore, eyes closed as if he's hoping he might get another nap in before bath time.

Speaking of. Well. Fel's expression turns considering, and he stoops to pick up Deckard, and drags him towards the surf. Tows him out into the water, where it'd be about waist deep if both were standing, and simply jams his head under water again.

Flint manages to black out from the pain and wake up again on the way out into the water. It ceases being funny in any capacity about the time his head is forced beneath the cold lap of waves between crests. His leather jacket has seen salt water before; it is resigned. Deckard is less so. He's still until it's about time to breathe. Then the struggling starts.

There you are, conscious again. Good morning, sunshine. "Teodoro," Felix prompts, as if Deckard were a reluctant schoolboy who's forgotten his lesson. "Time's running out, Deckard. Give me a reason to let you live."

The sad thing is, try as Felix might, this probably still isn't the worst morning he's ever had. He goes slack again once his head is above water, hair plastered black to his skull, eyes watering again against the sea's briny sting. The drizzling tracks of water that follow him back up and out are stained pink and red in the moonlight. Pretty. Also kind of horrific. Sagging weight drags down at Felix's grasp — he's even heavier soaking wet, and he's not doing much to support himself anymore. "I hh-have a cat."

Felix shakes him, hard enough to make teeth rattle. But, miracle of miracles, the drowning does not progress. Maybe Teo's name was the magic word. Deckard is dragged back to the beach, just at the line where the tide is at its highest. There's even the clink of the cuffs being undone, somehow, and then the crunch of feet departing across the sand.

Odds are, there are more than a couple of loose ones in there to rattle.

Back up the beach they go, Deckard sopping, bloody and broken. He lies still wherever he's dropped, bloody salt water dribbling thick from his sinuses.

Congratulations, Deckard. You live to drink another day. And now Felix has to find a way to dry off before Leland sees him, covered in blood and sea water, and hits him with a rolling pin.


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