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Scene Title | Deckard Ex Machina |
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Synopsis | After being discovered on Deckard and Teo's trail just outside of the safehouse, Dantes makes a run for it. One retarded chase scene later, Deckard has to shoot at everyone and out himself as a rat to keep Teo from caving the Fed's face in. THE THINGS HE DOES FOR PEOPLE. |
Date | December 9, 2008 |
This is….weirdly ironic. Because where they're headed is his old stomping ground, his childhood home. His parents are gone, back on a plane to the sunny climes and purling waves of the Florida coast, but the streets are familiar. No time for reminiscence, though, not with Father Frost doing his very best to etch-a-sketch away any traces of human passage and make the city a blank slate again. So Dantes moves at a swift pace, a lope a bit faster than a walk, but not quite a jog. He's skulking from sleeping doorway to shadowed alley, casting back and forth like a hound lest he obscure what's left of the trail.
There was some asshole following them from a strip club. Understandably, that was various sorts of fucked up. The course Teo weaves through the streets is different to the one they'd ordinarily plot, borrowing the seclusion of quieter, residential streets and playgrounds one moment before dribbling out into the cascade of human activity in the main ones.
He regrets having to do this to Deckard after watching the older man almost pass out on some of the least comfortable public transportation available to man, but Deckard's being kind of a secretive tool, so his complaints are as welcome as his silence. There are two stops. One for Teo to get his own bottle of water, and another for a box of Tic Tacs-cheerfully thrust into Deckard's jacket pocket, if not his hand, reasonably nonchalant stops to look at the locale and check how much of Deckard had turned blue.
Some forty-five minutes later, Teo's nose is about to fall off along with his fingers and the lot, when they reach it, is a pristine rectangle of white snow. The familiar snaggletooth of towers draws up and the Sicilian stops at the corner. "Be safe," he croaks.
Deckard does not complain. Granted, he doesn't do much of anything else, either. Well beyond ignorance in regard to the state of his toes and whether or not he still has any, he's pretty ghostly pale around the purple of his eye sockets once they finally make it back to camelot. He's gone a little blue around the mouth, but nowhere else, and he vomited again after his only attempt at Tic Tacs, rendering them effectively useless and slowing their progress to boot. Snow has crusted into the bristle of his hair and into the folds and wrinkles of a coat that isn't his anyway.
A shuddering, chattered breath is about as close as he's getting to an expression of relief at finally, finally being here. His eyes light up, literally and in paranoia rather than delight, and he's picking his way along the square's border, presumably for some kind of side entrance.
Suffering Christ. Who is this guy, and where is he hiding Deckard, outer Mongolia? Perhaps it's the legacy of nearly a dozen winters spent policing in this weather, or some little useful trait passed down from ancestors who had to survive Russian winters, but Fel is, if far from immune to the cold, mostly inured to it. It's snowing heavily now, though, and he's no longer able to trust tracks…..and getting close enough to track by eye on level streets would be the same as walking up and asking to shake hands, practically. So he's taken to the rooftops, hurrying along, feet scuffing in drifting snow, praying he's not gonna trip over some homeless person, or wake roosting pigeons. The snow gives the streetlights glowing haloes, and whirls deceptively…..the light of the city creates that odd, directionless purple-orange glow.
Aw: Flint is adorable. Annnd: Teo is late. Going to be. Knows it. Jesus fucking Christ, Helena's going to be either ballistic or worried sick. Muttering under his breath, he closes the hollow of his hand over his nose and lips and huffs white air out against his white skin. Turning on a heel, he begins to crunch along the sidewalk, his shoes peeling prints into the thickening snow.
Hates every fucking instant of it, naturally; the weightless white of it, the cloud source blotting moon and starlight out of the sky, the chill of meltwater creeping into his cuffs. He hangs a right around the towers, plowing his fingers into his pocket in search of a cellphone. Locates a tree, through some miracle of Providence, and tucks himself away before the snow can eat him.
Crunch, crunch. Crunch. Crunch crunch, whumpfh. Snow does not show up on x-rays.
Deckard falls. Not exactly on his face, but pretty close.
Damp, now, and even colder than he already was, he takes his sweet time in dragging himself back to his feet. The fact that he lacks the energy to curse everything within a ten mile radius says volumes.
Shit. You poor old wreck. Snow does not show up on X-rays. But humans do. And there's Teo, around the corner, on his phone. And there's that one on the roof, looking down, counting on the snow to conceal him. If only. And that little lead pellet shows up like a tiny star, a minuscule calling card only death or a miracle will erase.
Before Teo's two digits into the number, a call rings in. Prompts him to stare long enough for his corneas to start freezing over — or lending a convincing impression thereof, before he clacks it open and shoves the speaker against an ear he can barely feel on the side of his skull anymore. The conversation is pragmatically brief, characteristically rueful, curtailed abruptly when he notices the lump of geezer wriggling on the ground a little further than he can spit.
Frowning, the Sicilian steps into the shadow of the scraggly little swatch of trees, ducking under an eddy of falling flakes and squinting in the uneven darkness.
Snow breaks away from Deckard's righted form in uneven clumps where it had time to pack, and simply skivs off dustily where it didn't. Arms shaken once to facilitate this process, he tips a 'Why do you hate me so much?' look back at the bruised sky and…there is a guy on the roof of that building. From the snowed over lot, twin points of blue fix firmly upon Dantes out of Deckard's silhouette.
It's nearly impossible to tell at that distance - Dantes doesn't have x-ray vision, and normal vision is increasingly useless in the snow. But he'll see Deckard safely into the building, as if afraid to leave him out there, even with refuge in such easy reach. So the former Fed stands on the edge of the roof with Olympian detachment, secure that he can't be seen.
Incredulity characterizes the first few seconds Teo spends staring from the intermediate distance at the old man down on hands and knees that, he'd thought, had never learned to kneel. Slowly, he turns. Guesstimates. Looks at the skyline.
And sees that, against the dying gradient of Brooklyn past twilight, seconds before his phone chimes a revelation of sort less savory still than signorina Dean being out of sorts. Since Deckard went missing, the safehouse had been on alert. Which made a proportional amount of sense to the horror Teo entertains now. The lives of dozens of families harboring Evolved fugitives hang in the balance against compromised locations every damn day.
Possibly, Hana will leave some of him for the rats. Motions blurs the shape of the young man in Deckard's peripheral, a jumble of bones propelled by muscle into a sprint, jack-rabbit, out from under the tree and into the dingy alley nocked between one roof and the next.
Oh, god damn it. Teo is fast. Deckard is fast too, having made a career out of not getting caught to death, but holy fuck he's tired. The best he can manage is a staggering, skating half-sprint. Snow flying, shoes hard-pressed to find solid purchase, he lurches along in the younger man's wake.
What in the - ? They can't possibly have seen him. But Deckard's motion says otherwise. And the figure on the roof breaks and runs, heading for the fire escape on the opposite side of the building from where Deck's apparently going. There's not that superhuman speed, however - just the normal fleetness of foot one might anticipate. In enough of a hurry that he frankly vaults the low wall that edges the roof, praying he hasn't misjudged the leap. He has such terrible luck with fire escapes…..and this time is no exception. At least it doesn't collapse from underneath him like it did last time, but there's the terrible graveyard gate moan of the iron as a hundred plus pounds of Federal agent lands on it like a fox pouncing on a mouse. Followed by the banging of feet skidding down the iced iron stairs, nearly catching himself more than once in a rung. It's more of a barely controlled tumble than any sort of graceful flight, before he thuds into the snow covered garbage at the bottom, and bolts for the relative safety of the network of alleys.
What energy had refused to make itself available for Teo while he was getting a .40 shoved in his neck kindly manifests itself with the dozen new and far more edifying concerns that roll out in the back of his mind. Hearing the startling guttural protest of metal from the span of a dime store away, he ignores the rusted ladder ribboning up this side and rounds the back corner, cracking his elbow splendidly on a surface of frosted brick before he finds enough traction to beeline between gaping dumpsters and garbage sterilized by age.
Where Felix is served well by a long history of police pursuits and Deckard by the due processes of getting the fuck away from that shit, Teodoro's habit of hunting and being hunted by idiot hooligans through the bowels of Palermo have him middling between skill sets. Fewer firearms were involved back then, though, granted. And the .45 emerges even as he slides into a parallel alley, while self-generated wind knocks the hood off his head and the message sits Unread in his pocket.
The camera cuts back to the joint of alley to alley that Teo just rounded. And stays there. …Waiting. Seconds pass. Snow falls. …
…
A piece of unsettled garbage rolls over in the dumpster. And HEY — Deckard slides out and nearly into the wall, wheezing and working his right hand in hopes that it'll unstiffen enough for him to do something so complex as grab his gun.
There's no point in lingering, trying to explain. Especially when Dantes, lacking a badge with a photo that matches his actual face, doesn't dare pack heat. There's the crunch of boots on ice, the slither of frozen garbage bags sliding against each other, the resounding bang of Felix caroming off a dumpster left too far out in the alley way. He's reluctant to break even the dubious cover of the alleys, pounding along for a point that will let him out on to a main street, as if that might offer safety. The falling snow muffles the sounds, but only a little.
Fortunately, when you're a terrorist, you're used to daring to do lots of dumb shit. Following strange noises into dark places, coming titillatingly close to the bustle and light of ordinary society with a hideous weapon staring the world out of its single black eye. A brusque hand reaches back to yank his hood forward an eye's blink before Teo scatters out onto the street with a ringing rasp of shoe onto derelict subway grate, manages to wedge the edge of a boot between metal slats, and drags his dim reflection past weather-warped shop windows, all white down one shin with stale slush and new snow as he rounds into the concrete nook that seems to be funneling out the clatter of boots and moving waste equipment.
Muffled sounds, snow, misleading echoes. None of it makes any difference to Deckard. Still moving along at something that resembles a jog, he keeps Teo's trail mainly by virtue of being able to see the prowl of his skeleton ahead, even as his own fades into a labored walk.
Teo's treated to the flash of a pale, desperate face over a shoulder, as his prey comes skidding out into the main street that building's length ahead, arms windmilling momentarily as he tries to keep his balance on a patch of iced concrete. No protestations of innocence, when fleeing like that is confession enough. Ironic, that. He's used to being the hound, not the hare. No more attempts to dodge and weave - it's hard for even an expert marksman to hit a moving target, and so Dantes pelts down the street away from Teo.
If Teo thought about the actual, practical course of action that would follow should the possibility of actually catching this jackass actually see realization, he'd probably psyche himself right out. His eyes thin against the fretful patter of snowflakes; he glances up at the impending traffic light, the camera perched beside it, an instant before he ducks his head down, clicking the safety back on the .45 in his hand and drives forward with the indifferent awareness he's shredding himself for a cause that's probably already lost. The criss-cross of a liquor storefront flashes by, a grocer's gone dark with bankruptcy. A car slows, an astonished face in the driver's window an instant before it shrills away: they know better.
With a hand planted against the metal bite of the last dumpster before the alley opens up into the street, Deckard hunches and is sick again. With nothing really left to evacuate, he dry retches a few times and slides haltingly down to squat, and then sit while he tries to catch his breath.
They do indeed, especially in this neighborhood. And did Fel have a weapon of his own, there'd've no doubt been an impromptu carjacking, by now. On the straightaway of the swept pavement, the Fed pours on the speed, and it'd put an Olympic sprinter to shame. Only, there's one problem - the body is riding high on that weird variant adrenaline, but the brain….not so much. What starts as a near rounding of a corner goes entirely awry, and Fel hits black ice to go slip-sliding across the entirety of an intersection to smack full force into a parked car. There's immediately the whoop of a car alarm, and he bounces off to stagger away drunkenly.
Holy fuck. If Teo's face weren't numb to the roots of his molars, he would try to lever one eyebrow upward. Math has it, reasonably blatant, that he isn't going to be closing the gap between himself and his quarry anytime soon; enough seconds have transpired that he can safely determine that, despite that he was never arithmetically inclined and that there's less blood going through his brain than there otherwise ought to be. Click — the Para-Ordnance comes off safety again, swivels along a trajectory while his boots locate purchase three feet short of the ice patch that had just set Felix spinning and pulls the trigger twice just as he realizes that Felix is, you know, spinning. Bouncing off the nose of a parked Saturn.
Two shots fired. Deckard flinches, then thumps his head back against the side of the dumpster, not quite hard enough to leave a dent. Static dazzles around the fringes of blue and black, nearly impermeable at first. Eventually, less so. Ignorant of the painfully cold metal behind him, he grates up onto his feet, sags against the dumpster, and then onward. To the street! Most significantly, to Teo, who is about to blow the face off his ex-BFF Felix. "Don't." His voice is a rasp, and annoyed at his own weakness, Deckard rolls his eyes and tries again, this time with more volume, and hopefully more success. "Don't!" Enough to warrant an exclamation point, if not all caps.
One shot goes wild, smacking into the brick of a music store's front. The other….well, that punches into the muscle of the shoulder, right over the collar bone. Oh, it's a bad night. Bruised, battered, and bewildered, Felix slips on the ice, again. The wound really isn't that bad. Better than what Dina did to him the other night, but now that whole side is damn near useless. But the breath has been knocked out of him by the impact with the car, there's still that damned ice, and he skitters a few coltishly unsteady steps to put his weight wrong on the edge of a foot - all the better to go crashing down like a felled cedar. It doesn't stop him from trying to scrabble away, however, even though a fast walk will have Teo catching up.
Sweet. Teo has killed a car. A-plus. If he reduces pace to a fast walk, he's pretty sure all of his consummate parts will break apart and tumble to the ground; his body feels like it consists entirely of movement and adrenaline fused together at the joints by painless cold. If he hadn't stubbornly bent his head around stay conscious mode, his vision would probably be all over roving dots. So.
He runs. Hears Deckard bitching about something, but it seems monosyllabic, cantankerous, and completely void of helpful detail— like why this fucker's nosing around Ferrymen facilities and hunting down Phoenix's original sole source of lead on Volken's men. Not that Teo thinks of it in those terms, of course. Irritably, he thinks of it as: Don't what? the moment before he brings the butt of the .45 down on Dantes' wounded shoulder.
Well. Teo already fired two shots, and here comes the static again. He can't be bothered to stand up straight. Nevermind running over there and registering a formal complaint. Standing sideways, Deckard draws out his own firearm, aims, and fires. Two, three, four times, all around Teo's feet. Within six inches of his little toesies. LISTEN TO YOUR ELDERS, ASSHOLE.
Oh, brilliant. Between the blinding ignition of pain in his shoulder, and a stray bullet creasing him in the temple - Fel just collapses. It looks to all the world, at least in the whorls of snow, as if Deckard had just more or less executed the fallen man. The car alarm sputters and dies, as if in sheer horror, though more likely one of Deck's stray rounds cut the wire.
Understandably, Teo jumps in the air. Fortunately, he manages not to land on Felix's bloody corpus, although he comes terribly close, his shoes skidding in white stuff in some halfway physical state between liquid and solid, narrowly avoiding crushing Dantes' finger-bones. "Oh my fucking God!" his voice still sounds terrible. Worse now that it's been reamed by lungfuls of razor-edged winter air, rumbling at an avalanche register that seems to choke more power out of his lungs than he can honestly spare. "What the fuck is wrong with you you crazy old cunt? Figlio di…
"Di'— wh—" Recovering in a whirling tangle of limbs, he stares down at Dantes' prone form. Red oozes from the man's shoulder and new line has opened on his pointy white face. "Holy shit. Uomo. Did you fucking kill him?" he rasps as loud as he can, incredulous, as if he hadn't sort of mildly been entertaining this exact same course of action.
Tink tink. Clink. Tink. Spent casings skitter away across the slushy sidewalk, and Deckard keeps the gun up. Not at Dantes, but at Teo. "I didn't hit him." He has to blink hard to double check. The little low batt. light is blinking furiously behind his eyes, and even as he stands there staring down the barrel of his gun at Teo, he's having trouble focusing. There are cars, people running. "You did. He's with the FBI."
Yes, there are. At the moment, there's a little old woman on her stoop, paused in the middle of picking up her morning paper to stare aghast at what looks like bloody murder. She makes a small noise, as if clearing her throat. Dantes is sprawled in one of those terrible positions only the truly unconscious can manage. He's not dead, yet, though - he stirs faintly, one hand twitching as if in search of a gun.
That clears up one thing. Sends Teo's mind all over the Goddamn map into others. "What? You're protecting a fu—" unhelpfully, a battery of coughs takes Teo's throat then. Ow. Glimpsing old woman out of his peripheral, he startles and presents her stubbornly with his shoulder. "A fucking Fed? Brought them to the fucking Ferry?" He steps backward over Dantes' slithering arm, putting the bleeding man between himself and Deckard. While flat on his back, of course, the former Russian doesn't provide much of a meat shield, but that wasn't really the point; Teo's examining his prone corpus out of the bottom of his eyes while his own weapon remains in hand. "Deck— Mike," he swallows the last syllable and tastes blood. "Who the fuck is this?"
"I didn't bring him anywhere. He followed me." Frustration grates dry gravel deep into the rough of Deckard's haggard voice. No answer on who. He's forgetting questions again. Glare aglow despite the sag of his shoulders and the irregular fog of his breath, the old man lowers his gun. "I'm sorry." There's anger to the apology, but it lacks heat. Largely because he doesn't have the energy for heat. "He doesn't know anything. Just the where. Leave him alone."
The little old lady dives for the shelter of her front hall - the slam of the front door is nearly as loud as a report. And that quickly, the immediate road is clear of obvious observers. No one wants to step up and join the man apparently dead on the asphalt. The city is as still as it ever gets - there is not yet the wail of sirens in the distance.
Teo's baby blues go round with disbelief, then narrow with ill-temper, before evening out to a conspicuous stare. His theories locate themselves further away from betrayal. "Yeah, I guess I'll just t-ake," the verb is hacked out on a sharp report of air, "take your fucking word for that. No problem. Stronzo's with the fucking FBI and he followed you, all he knows is where." Normally, he'd realize it was super pointless to repeat all of Deckard's words back at himself but given the glaring gaps in Flint Deckard's conversational memory it probably has some practical value. "Children live in that fucking building. And this shithead looks like he's dying." Regrettably, he's forgetting questions too.
"He's not dying." That, Deckard can be reasonably certain of. Unfortunately, everything around the point of focus that is Dantes' heart beating in his idiot chest is getting hazier by the second. "I tried to tell them. I tried to tell them to move the kids." It'd be plaintive if not for the fact that he sounds to be on the verge of a chuckle. His life. Seriously.
He's just out and bleeding. Unaware that his possible executioners are dickering over his body like a pair of fishwives. Which is agood thing, really.
Distinctly alarmed, Teo cranes his head at the older man from the distance of one lane and Dantes' twitching body. "Mi— Deckard." He blows snowflakes away from his face. "What the fuck is his name?"
Deckard does not blow snowflakes. They settle on him as they would a corpse, which is about right given his body temperature. He opens his mouth. To answer honestly, or to lie, or to say he can't say. The world will never know, because his grip on the gun at his side slacks, barely there at all, and he he starts going over backwards. Timberrrr.
Man, there you go, Teo. Knockin' em down without even using your gun - watch the bodies hit the floor. Now, which one do you take? Shoot the Fed and carry away the old man like La Befana with her sack of Christmas gifts? Or….
"Deckard. Flint you prick," threateningly, Teo waves his firearm and raises his hoarse voice. "No, don't you dare fucking fa—" Whump. Teo stares blankly at the sprawled shape of his erstwhile strangler on the pavement, then lowers his head to peer at Dantes' face. He plants his gun to his head and thinks about something very seriously for a snowy moment, listening to the adrenal thunder in his head, before returning the .45 to safety. Shit.
Shit. "Shit." He can't murder a man in his sleep and, as the earlier day had demonstrated to uncomfortable length, he can't abandon Flint Deckard either. He is late. He is so late. God. Barely resisting the urge to stomp his feet, Teo digs up his cellphone and dials the text origin number without bothering to read it. "Tania. Yeah, Deckard's here. He passed out. Hungover. Curb across from McD's. Pick him up?
"He'll be on his face. For obvious reasons." 'Obvious reasons.' Gingerly, Teo hops over Dantes' body and bends low to grab the shoulder of Deckard's suit. Manages, somehow, not to buckle and join the other two facedown on the asphalt. Dragging the older man clears a ribbon of denuded asphalt approximately the width of Flint's back. "No," he croaks. "Yeah.
"No—oops," he nearly drops his phone, rescues it from a nasty patch of gravity and casts a hopeless stare at the speedster prone on the other side of the street, amid broken windshield glass and powder snow. "I caught him. No he's not dead. He's a Fed, actu— I know. I'm thinking, okay? I'm thinking."
Not spellchecked or anything. LATER, SORRY. ALSO I AM NOT AN EGOMANIAC I SWEAR THEY SAID TO USE THIS TITLE.
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