Participants:
| Scene Title | Darkhole |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Teo wants Deckard to disappear down one. |
| Date | April 16, 2010 |
Situated at one end of the Arthur Kill, this small harbor has clearly seen days of better and more frequent use. Though it's little more than a network formed by a few creaky docks and causeways, it's still more than suitable to tie up for those who have business on the Island. Invariably, at least one of the ports is taken up by a houseboat covered in seagull shit. A thick, greenish layer of bilge scum floats on top of the water and clings to the hull of every passing vessel. Welcome to Staten Island. If you have baggage or cargo to unload, there are usually a few layabouts at the Angry Pelican, which is just a short walk away. Just be sure to ask for a clean glass and keep one hand on your wallet at all times.
Early evening monochromes Staten Island. Turns sea to textured pewter, boardwalk to decontrasted snow-static grain, clouds to silver and the sky to a porridge, everything in negative and inverse palette except, perhaps, for the car.
It's how Corbin's supposed to find them. The active high-beams burn two beams of positive color and clarity out into the night. Some cheap, shitty Saturn that's probably has had its guts totally renovated at least twice since the Ferrymen got their hands on it, or the 'beams would be casualty to whatever left walrus-tusked scars along its flank and a dent the size of a rugby ball in its front bumper.
Once upon a time, there would have used to been souvenir shops, places that sold beach balls and emergency swimsuits, towels, popcorn. Maybe a portable ferris wheel. Here, though, in the deadlock of winter in 2010, there's only two thin men looking only marginally better for wear than the car. Teo is opening the driver's side, taking the keys with him. "Want to stretch your legs?" he asks. It seems polite, the way his leaving Deckard's bony, navy-socked ankles uncuffed had been polite.
It would be rude to ask him to please not run away, so Teo doesn't. It is bitterly cold, and it seems to have taken its toll on the Sicilian in the week or so since they last spoke. His cheeks are hollower, his pupils furred by something that isn't health. Airways clear, though. All the liquids and mushy parts in Teo are where they should be, in the vivid blueprint of anatomy served up to the preternatural acuity of Deckard's gaze.
By comparison, the car that pulls up down the plowed street to park on the side looks brand new. It's not, but it definitely hasn't been gutted multiple times with parts replaced. Though it does look like it's seen better days. Hail and ice damage have dented the hood and doors, catching light and shadows in various ways. The ice has melted in some places on the car, and are caked on in others. Once upon a time it sat in a parking garage. Now it parks in a back lot of a bookstore. And in this weather, that's not good for it.
A few moments after pulling over, the car hums softer, as the gears are shifted to allow it to sit still, the parking break keeping it from threatening to slide around on the plowed ice-covered street. The light keeps shining, catching the air and the drifting snow in the wind, joining the two beams there before, cutting in from an opposite side. The driver's door opens. The rest of the car appears to be empty.
Corbin came alone. Perhaps against what would be normal better judgement, in this case. Wrapped in a heavy coat and scarf, he pulls gloves onto his hand as he stands with one foot out, watching the car, and catching the visible form. An examination would show, while he came alone, he's still armed, though under many laters of clothes. It would take time to get it out— and there's a metal key hanging around his neck, for some reason or another.
The car door closes, the car continuing to run, lest it get cold and possibly die, and he slowly moves closer, steps careful and measured, to avoid slipping.
Flint sits quietly for a moment before answering with a nod, cadaver pallor enhanced both by bloodloss and the absence of sunlight in The Garden's gloomy basement. He looks the part of a convicted criminal, from low-slung jaw thick with grizzled beard growth to the cromagnon hood of his brow, dusty grey-brown growing gradually out of a buzz that was probably tidy two or three weeks ago. The overall effect is one of rickety, rawboned homelessness, unsanded edges splintered hard through the length of his face, devoid of energy or interest in what they're here for.
His wrists are crossed in his lap, metal cuffs bit in close against bruised bone against the sleeves of a brown leather jacket that looks to be about as old and scuffed up as he is. It's the only real concession that's been made to the cold. No gloves. No hat.
No gun.
The arrival of another vehicle draws his glare up and forward before Teo can drag around to get his door open, eery blue irises cut cold at Corbin's approach through the inceasingly smudgy screen of the windshield. The fact that he's armed doesn't escape his notice. Most things don't, but there's no sudden effort to shamble out the passenger side door and into the cold like a panicked trout. He sits and stays and stares, caveman countenance inscrutible.
Teo plays at poker-face for a brief moment, before shutting his door, rocking the vehicle's rust-bitten springs faintly. He drags his shadow across the front, cutting through the lights. Ever the gentleman, as far as uncuffed ankles and related courtesies go, he lopes around to Deckard's side of the vehicle and cracks it open with an easy yank of the handle, and winter's breath blasts Deckard's other ear up close, this time, funnelling an ache into the old man's earlobe.
The Sicilian doesn't try to lever him out, or anything. Just stands there, hand on handle, his scarred face uncharacteristically white above the dark, stiff collar of his dust-elbowed pea-coat, looking out into the dark to track the car that just parked over there. He'd noticed it a moment prior, of course. No ceremony until Corbin's within earshot, though, and even then, all earshot consists of is:
"Buona sera, Americano. Here's your man."
From the visible steam in the air, Corbin must have been holding his breath for a bit as he approached closer. Though they're in earshot, by the time the other man's words are spoken, he keeps moving closer, rubbing gloved hands together and adjusting his scarf. The hands make no move to readjust layers to get to that sidearm, but, there's tension to his step. Tension that gets briefly broken when one of those slow steps ends in a slide, shoe catching on plowed ice, until he stops himself.
That slide nearly became falling on his ass. That would do nothing for his supposed image. Unless they know how most of his coworkers felt about him for the last ten years.
Once he stops, settles his feet in place, pale eyes meet Teo's in the dark, "I really debated not showing up at all," he says against the cold air, looking to the other door, the form still inside the car, obscured by the bright light, the dirt in the windshield. Each flicker of snow carried on the wind catches his eye for a second, as if he's expecting to see something else in the corner of his eye. Something that isn't there. "But here I am." And here's the man who killed his best friend, his former partner, and a woman he'd been in love with for longer than they'd been partners…
Two handed grip bound up around the handle for such things near the open door's fore, Flint sets into the process of levering himself carefully out into the cold on a rigid delay. He still hurts, sore through the middle and tentative about putting his weight down for his right calf to catch. The cold catches through the stiff bristle of his buzz and fogs his breath in a furl and skirt, more lively than the rest of his hobbled dismount without glazing over hard angles or spectral eyes.
Once he's out enough to brace his hands on the open door, he balances his weight there to sacrifice an awkward, scuffing step to the cause of cleaning his posture out into something a little less hunched. From there, he is what he is. Older, taller and rangier than Teo, if oddly, comfortably matched: the way the shape of a person's ass can eventually wear itself into the hard leather of a saddle.
He doesn't hold his breath, but he doesn't quicken it either, scuffily indifferent to his scrubby mesquite core while snow blots itself into still warm whiskers. He seems more interested in a nearby lamp post than he is participating in whatever this is, looking directly to Ayers only once he's fallen quiet again.
To one who's own him so long, 'fallen quiet' for Deckard doesn't necessarily have anything to do with speech. Teo notices the older man settling without using his ears or his eyes, exactly. He is too busy eyeing Corbin Ayers, checking his face, the bulges in his coat, the register of his voice and the size of his pupils in the saturated light from the front of the car. After a moment, he shuts the door beside Flint, blowing a thumb-sized fragment of compacted snow across the ground, and into the side of Deckard's shoe.
'I almost didn't come.' What can a baby ninja say to that? "You've read his file," is a pragmatic forward lurch. "Shit's been going downhill for him since his late teens. Took two decades of unremittant bullshit, from incarceration to— to what's happened in New York City since the Bomb to make him what he is.
"He doesn't want to be rehabilitated. I don't know how to make him better except through more… more— invasive means than that; except to make him someone else. But right now, jail seems like the best thing. No trial, no glorifying media circus or— investigations into the context of his mercenary work or why he was hired," it makes Teo's molars hurt to say that, but he does. Greases out the logic. Swallows against the dry membrane of his esaphogus. "There's a word Phoenix and the cattle-rustlers use.
"I'm sure you've heard it. 'Darkhole,' as a verb. I think it's either that or you kill him. Just—" my two cents is an idiotic way to end that sentence, so Teodoro doesn't. Closes his mouth, pulls his lips in through his front teeth a moment, clinching, before he straightens his shoulders. "What do you think?"
"Darkhole— good word for what could happen," Corbin says in a soft whisper, looking at the man who just stepped out, even if he's not making eye contact for long. A tightening of muscles along his hand shows the tension in his arm, that the weather doesn't cool, a heat that rises up deep down. The leather in the gloves creaks a bit, before he turns his eyes back to Teo.
"Cause it's dark even to me, now. If you'd spoken to Abigail, you'd know that the Company doesn't handle containment anymore. Another branch of the government handles it, and— I don't know what happens to them once they get shoved in black coffins and stuffed into a van, but me and my parteners disliked it enough that we pulled a conscription out when Abigail tried to turn a willing man over to us to keep them out of their hands. And unfortunately that's the only time we can use that trick."
There's a puff of air again, as his eyes settle on the taller man again, the man he would have shot if he'd had the opportunity weeks ago… Until he met Abigail and saw her expression, learned who he was to her. Things a file can't tell someone.
Would Hokuto have wanted this man to disappear down a hole, to some unknown place, to have whatever they do done to him? A few months ago, decisions were so much easier to make then they are now.
There's a shifting, and he begins to move forward, closing even more of the distance to get within arm's reach of the murderer. And it's obvious why before he gets to far. That gloved hand comes up and aims to punch him, much as he'd punched Logan— Teo's very familiar with that expression on his face from that one time.
In the dusky obscurity bled back grey and black along the Saturn's lightless flank, Flint's eyes stand out like brands, no more emotive than the kind of scraggle-crested osprey he occasionally takes after. Silence meanwhile might make him more intimidating or mysterious or defiant under circumstances where he actually has a modicum of control over his own fate. As things are, he's more blackly submissive than anything. And Teo is doing plenty of talking for the both of them.
Talk of death elicits no more of a response than talk of imprisonment temporary or final. After soaking in Corbin head to toe, unholy blue ticks mechanically back to Teo, reading familiar pulls of tension and tendon with an intensity that doesn't quite line up with the hollows hewn into his face or the shabby erosion of his posture while he stands and waits. His leg hurts. His side hurts. It's cold. It distantly occurs to him that now would be a bad time to make an off color comment about Teo and darkholes.
The more he tunes out the less he looks at either of them, long face turning gradually sideways to follow the trip and flop of something half buried in snow flagging with the wind. Maybe an old piece of foil packaging.
It's the crunch of Corbin's shoes through the show that draws Flint's haggard profile back around into hateful focus. He's been hit in the head a lot. Especially lately. With the bruises from his last contact with concrete (courtesy of Teo) having only just faded, he's probably past due, which might be why he doesn't back himself up until gloved knuckles have already plowed pain back up through the bridge of his nose and into his skull. How long ago did Logan hit him with a stick? Two weeks? Three? Not long enough, maybe. That or his leg buckles out from beneath him when he tries to stay standing. Whatever the case, he folds like a tent, all angles and lengths with strips of cloth providing the illusion of volume between once his back's hit the ground. Fortunately there's enough snow that the back of his skull doesn't ricochet off the concrete. He'll probably be conscious enough to appreciate such small mercies here in a minute or two.
To his credit or his detriment, Teodoro doesn't instantly fold like a house of cards to help the hold man up on his feet, or koala cling him and rock him back to some semblence of… if not better spirits, than the livelier and more sanguine stuff of radiating loathing? It's the best he can inspire in Deckard, these days, and it isn't much. He will survive without.
Many words to say that Teo just stands there. Tries not to make overmuch of the corded set of his jaw, fighting down the urge to grit his teeth or peg Corbin in the face right back. Though he's been inside for a week, hallucinating for most of that, he still has a certain predisposition toward solving his problems with violence. Especially the violent ones. No objection. He's done enough talking for both of them. Really, were he wearing Ayers' boots and mourning colors, there would be an elbow following up, then a knee, then whatever happens to be in reach, but—
He meets better men than he is, sometimes. Or if not qualitatively 'better,' then those of gentler spirit. "I know Level 5 is dust, but the Company has ways and means. Either Dalton owes me, or she she'd like the idea I'd owe her more. Enough to make it happen." Teo's brows sink slightly, and he roughs a palm over his bearded jaw. The headlights beside him have leeched the color out of his irises, driven his pupils back to tiny pinpricks. "Unless that was the sucker punch of a man with a better idea."
"Things are changing these days, Laudani," Corbin says, wincing as he holds his hand back against his chest, looking as pained as what he inflicted on someone else. Faces have lots of bone, and do tend to hurt when punched, which he's learning more and more from the two times he's done it in the last month. Should have paid more attention in unarmed combat lessons back in the day.
"I haven't reported who I suspect killed Hokuto. Only one other person in the Company even knows I think it's him…" And he leaves out that Sawyer hadn't thought he would have done it. "I think he should make up for what he's done, and sticking him in a hole to be forgotten and won't do that. Killing him won't do that."
Instead of aiming another fist, or an elbow, or a knee at the man, he actually kneels down closer, within range of retaliation, to try and look at the man, see if he's conscious. Cause the next words wait a few moments, to give the ringing in his skull time to clear.
"Abigail loved you, the same way I loved Hokuto. She tried to protect you, the same way I tried to protect her. Part of me really does want to just make you disappear, send you down whatever rabbit hole that those black vans would carry you off to, try and get Dalton to stuff you somewhere else— but I wouldn't have wanted that for Hokuto— " Again, for an instant, his eyes flicker away, as if he caught something in the corner. This time he looks at his shoulder a little longer, before he turns back and adds, "And I don't want that for you, either."
And strangely, it's all because someone loved him enough to protect him, even if what he did went against every fiber of her morals, just like he tried to protect Hokuto, hiding what she did from the Company, even when what she did went against everything he joined the Company to stop…
"Since no one in the Company knows for sure, and hopefully no one else outside the Company knows, there could be options. You can do what Hokuto was trying to do when you murdered her. Make up for everything that she'd done." Rehibilitation isn't possible, conventionally. "There can be a jails without you knowing it's a jail."
Flint's eyes flicker as if grazed by a sparking wire — spark, sizzle and quit, with lurid blue fading faster from his irises than the drifty rings of orange they leave behind. It takes him a good thirty or forty seconds to reset, the length of which he spends on his side like a downed animal, eyes open and nose welling blood through a split over the bone.
When his pupils finally constrict back into focus, Corbin is kneeling there next to him and he stays still after a vaguely unsettled lift of his head while he figures out what must have happened. Eyes dark, blood running warm to dribble and stain at the dirty grey snow crusting everywhere. Melting down his collar. His head back again.
"Everything worth anything in the past tense," muttered without any real strides made for coherence, he lifts his left hand enough to smear through sticky runoff and thickening coagulation, the right dragged along by the cuffs with with less intent. Blood dries quicker in the cold.
"I'm tired of talking. Il n'est pas mal." His voice is a croak, hard to understand and claggy with the cold even if it wasn't in French. "Êtes-vous lui enculer?"
The question in French sounds enough alike to a statement made by a similarly-shaped hallucination that Teo bristles despite knowing better. He's all the way up here and back slightly, though, so it's not like Deckard can see him do it. There's no real egotism involved, though. It matters slightly less to the Sicilian that the skinny old serial-killer doesn't get the satisfaction of seeing him squirm than that he wanted to make him flinch.
He takes the high-road. Outwardly, this consists of ignoring Deckard crumpled on the snow. Inwardly, this involves hoping obscurely that Corbin doesn't speak French. "I don't like the idea of putting him in a cage," Teo says, out loud. That's kind of like disagreement, and kind of like disagreement. "And I know the Company has a man who can erase memories, and a woman who can shift them between people. At the very least.
"If you're expecting him to agree with anything, lately, I think you're shit out of luck. He's trying nihilism on for size because giving a fuck was making him fat. I think we've all been there. Well—" A pale eye blinks at Corbin in the bleached-out light. "Maybe not you.
Would Dalton go for it?" And then Teodoro is stepping over, compacting crunchy snow under his boots, reaching to take Deckard by the arm. Tip his center of balance into a manageable angle, stack him back on his feet, as mechanically methodical as a pulley or a lever or some other brutally simple, man-made device for the exploitation of physics. Their friendship is strained. :(
"From the look of things he could use a little more fat on his bones," Corbin says with a shrug of his shoulders, watching the older man quietly for a time, before sighing and looking back at Teo. "I never did take other languages like I should have, so I don't have a clue what he just said." And from the way he begins to stand, brushing his gloved hands over his face, he doesn't really need a translation even if he doesn't know what it was.
"I don't know for sure. I'm not on the best of terms with Dalton, but I could talk to another Senior Agent and see what they have to say about it. If all else fails, I can at least try to get us to isolate him at one of our facilities, for a while." Unlike those of— the black vans.
"And then I can see about— making things different. It won't be like with Fulk, though. Abby deserves to have him remember her, even if…" he shakes his head.
In some ways, he may think this is a bad idea, but… "It's all I can really offer. Hokuto wouldn't want me to kill him— I think she'd want him to…" The gloved hand runs over his chest, touching the area where that metal key presses close to his heart, even if only the one with x-ray eyes can see it.
"She wouldn't want him to bring out the worst in me." Which would be him reaching for the gun under layers of clothes and unloading bullets into his skull, most likely.
A weird, simpery hyena cry of pain bitten off in blood and snow is the thanks Teo gets for his charity (in addition to however many pounds of dead weight) and Flint slouches more than he did before, cuffed wrists held too close to his middle, trying to physically smother the extra hole he still has somewhere down there. He's messier than he was before, grimy snow falling away in sloppy clumps from the stuff clotted in his beard and in the furrows in his coat; a shiver rattles from his shoulder on through to Teo's.
He's standing on his own. Mostly — enough of his weight leaned sideways into Laudani that the odds are pretty good he'll fall over if his BFF bounces before setting him up with something else to use as a crutch.
Scruffy head hunched down enough for blood to rope and drip sluggish from the end of his nose and the saliva mucked clamp of his teeth, he watches Corbin speak sideways, resentment eventually heating enough to take a blue flame. Abby, Abby, Abby. Like he knows.
Everyone knows. Everyone in their world knows. Deckard so uncomfortably not alone and selectively understood through no virtue of his own that it is evidently too embarrassing for his ego take, thinks Teo, with an unflattering cast to his face, and a little conscious effort necessary to push back the irritable tirade far enough to make room for sympathy and practical conversation. "Either way, I'll owe her. Both of you.
"But I'll appreciate knowing which for." So nice to be able to talk about identity reprogramming, jails, sociopaths like they're transactions as simple as taking money out of the fucking ATM. Teo is a pretty solid crutch, as far as crutches go. Behold: the far-reaching historical, quadruple-entendre analogy. "Where do you want me to put him?" His gloved hands tighten slightly on the old man's arm, and he turns his head to look at the sleeker shape of Corbin's car a dozen yards away. Turned like so, his profile has that heinous leer hewn and twisted ragged across it.
Not everyone knows, but— when someone directly asks, they might be directly told. Corbin doesn't shrink away from the flame blue eyes, and instead just looks right back, his own blue eyes cold and almost icy. The man killed the woman he loved, and he's trying to perserve the man's memories of the woman he may, or may not, have loved at one point. A woman who at least loved him.
"Passanger seat," he says simply, nodding toward the car and walking that way. "I'll keep you informed on everything that we end up doing, but there is the possibility that the outcome may not be welcome." They're putting a lot on faith in other people, people who are notoriously gray. Just like the man who he opens the passanger seat door for. The back seat may be standard, but Corbin would rather see the man if he decides to try to strange him with the handcuffs, or something…
"I will have to knock him out, though," he adds, quietly. "For anyone else, a blindfold would probably be enough." But he's not anyone else, is he?
Tell-tale tension pulls in twitches of piano wire and steel cabling through the crook of Flint's near arm in Teo's grip. Talk of brainwashing didn't go over his head. He is tall. Also, quicker in thought than he is on foot at the moment despite the shrill keen of tinnitus in the jut of his overlarge ears.
Still glaring through Corbin (and still dribbling a viscous mess of gelatin blood, mucous and meltwater) he leans back and tries to dig one heel in enough to…nearly slip.
No, check that. He slips.
If their luck pans out for the better for once, he may knock himself out before they can get him in the car. Until then, he struggles as only a thin, middle-aged, wounded, handcuffed hobo can: not very well at all. And all the while his eyes are a little too wide with fear for the effort to be purely for show.
Struggle is sudden and different enough that— Teo is caught off-guard. Enough to be surprised rathern than hurt, though eh does wind up feeling his arm hoisted at an uncomfortable angle in its joint, segments of bone and sockets of cartlidge and tendon not quite— operating with the proper architecture? He jostles backward an awkward step to compensate before Deckard is dragging him down, down, and he digs his heel in, braking before he fucks up a knee he's going to need for Seaview Hospital tonight.
His hand seems to move of its own accord. Fast like a snake in the grass, jumping the mast of Deckard's torso, dodging coat collar to constrict around his throat, forefinger and thumb vising down on the big veins of his neck. Cuts off the supply of oxygenated blood to the old man's brain as neatly as you'd turn off a faucet, while his other arm goes around, catches Deckard's around the bicep, pinning it there and trapping the other by the length of the cuffs' chain.
Teo's face is blank near the old man's head. Despite whatever the old man's head might smell like, this close up, or the discomfort of the snow's cold eating through his pant leg. Bristly-shaven hair the color of pepper squivers near his nose, and the snarled scar tissue in his cheek seems to fit, for once, spit-slick, the immobile sneer. "Fucking go to sleep," he grates out. "Ayers— could you bring your car around, please?"
"Son of a— " Corbin doesn't finish the curse, as he catches himself watching Teo quietly for a good while. The snow drifts by them, catching in the wind and swirling in white clouds, until he nods, slamming the passanger door shut and going around to the driver's side.
The inside is still warm, but it takes a while before he gets gears to shift over, and turned around, slowly moving on the packed snow and ice to get closer, door opening to let the heat out again. "Back seat will probably be best now," he says, opening those doors in the back with pointed pulls against sticking frozen doors.
"I'm sorry you had to go through all this," he says, genuine, as he reaches to help one man move the other into the back seat.
Not comfortable, but at least it's warm. Pretty good for a jail.
Unfortunately, opinions on the nature of any jail are subjective.
Deckard's sudden onset of reflexive resistance is short-lived and without hope. Even if he managed to escape, it's miserable out, he's run down and he's in handcuffs on Staten Island. Dragged back up by Teo's vice grip on his arm, he wrests the ball and socket of his shoulder in a suspended carcharadon build, seize and jerk. Twists his head around until the wires rolling under Laudani's callused fingers stand out as if he's rigged with twine from shoulder to jaw, the patchy stubble growth at his throat glossed slick with cold sweat and darker, stickier stuff.
The Company, The Company. What dark creatures dwell there, in white laboratories and sterile exam rooms? He knows enough to speculate.
As the world fades a dangerously graphite shade of grey, Flint wrests one last time, already slouching again as he goes into it. Defeated. He's not long to fade past that, lurid eyes lolled white from a last second look smeared dizzily around at what he can see of Teodoro, where his dubious focus holds until it doesn't matter.
His last unconscious show of resistance is the act of being difficult to fold into the back seat in one piece. Like trying to shove a broken umbrella into a desk drawer, skeleton skewed every wrong way. It takes both of them and creative use of a seatbelt to keep (all of) him hoisted inside enough for the door to close at his feet.
After that, all that's left is to hope The Company will cover the expense for a thorough car wash once the old man's been transferred to a more stain resistant environment.