Familiar Territory

Participants:

abby_icon.gif danko3_icon.gif huruma_icon.gif

Scene Title Familiar Territory
Synopsis Abigail's escorted by Huruma to visit an old haunt. Unfortunately, there's more than mere memory to contend with within Guiding Light's walls.
Date March 11, 2010

Ruins of Guiding Light Baptist Church

The Guiding Light Baptist church is simply no more. Where once a church, with its arching glass windows and concrete cross fixed to the edge of the pointed roof once stood, now there is naught but crumbling stone, blackened wood and the stick of soot that clings to the air. Curving stone steps lead up from the pavement to an open archway where charred black doors have collapsed off of their hinges. Stained glass windows that shattered from immense heat are now gaping and open, charred black around the edges. Across the doorway yellow crime scene tape wards off visitors, and portions of the sidewalk are likewise cordoned off to avoid pedestrians getting too close to the unstable structure.

All that remains now, of the once illustrious building, is the concrete cross that lays crooked in the middle of the floor through that gaping doorway, cracked and broken into two pieces, laid skewed across a pair of burned pews that struggle to shoulder the weight of its burden.


Days off are precious and maybe Abigail's in need of grounding. Maybe some reminding of what can happen when you're not careful or maybe a need to visit Joseph's church. Nothing has been quite the same with regards to the church and with Joseph. She needs a way to vent the stress that's piling up on the blonde, and a walk in the dark beside her favourite motherly substitute seemed to be something in order.

Through the front steps the two had walked, Abby in her boots, jacket, hat and gloves, nosing her feet in the dark of the night with street lamps casting scary shadows across jagged entrails of what used to be a fully functioning church, waystation for the ferry and a haven for spiritual need. Now it's snow covered, a relic and not seeming any time soon to be rebuilt as much as a baptists heart begs for it.

She stoops to pick up a chunk of sooted stone that comprised a wall and heft it up and down in her hands as if to judge the weight. Somewhere, there's cops watching over. "how's Malagasy?"

This is not the first time that Huruma has found herself cavorting around in a fire-gutted building. Perhaps not the first time that she has been inside of this one. Even if it is not, she has not said a word edgewise. Huruma is not the winter type, and because of this she seems to take outside with a grain of salt; she hates snow, and she hates the cold, but for Abby she will toss on a heavy fur coat and skulk along with her. The woman paused when Abby went into the church, but she caught up quickly, the layer of snow crunching together under her boots.

While the girl is wandering quietly where she can, Huruma's pale eyes under the loose-hanging hood of her coat peer intently off into the shadows that melt into the back of the building already charred black along its walls. For a few moments it may seem as if Abby's question fell onto the hood instead of Huruma's ears.

"Madagascar is doing as well as can b'expected. It's people too."

The wind howls hoarse through rafters and support beams laid bare; blackened wood huddles and hunches all hard angles and rough breaks against snow that's lain largely undisturbed since it started settling here however many days or weeks ago. Occasionally the structure that remains standing creaks ominously under its own weight, especially where sooty icicles stress already beleaguered boards as much charcoal as wood.

Danko's upstairs. As much as the remains of this place could be said to have an upstairs. A hollowed out section of office stands at the top of a skeletal pair of stairs far off to the right, where shadows mire thick even against lamplight's orange reflection against otherwise bluish grey snow.

Lifeless grey eyes watch one female figure enter after the other, a cigarette tip sizzles like molten iron, and oh. So slowly, Danko raises a rifle stock square and solid to his shoulder.

Somewhere in the ambiance of the Guiding Light's undead moans, there is a single quiet click, significant mainly for the ears of someone who might know to be listening for it.

Abigail's oblivious to the sound of the rifle being cocked. Too intent on picking up a few chunks of palm sized church stone and slipping it into her pocket. A plan in her head for the things. "When this is all done, when Kozlow is not hunting me for his friday night entertainment or whatever he wants, I'll ask Elias to take us. We'll teleport in, spend a weekend, and then teleport out"

"Per'aps." Huruma is far too trained to be ignorant; to be ignorant is to be dead, and to be dead is- well, you're dead and you can't do much then at all. Her eyes are still searching out the air, while she moves over to Abby picking up bits and pieces of a place that once was. It makes a clear shot to the girl infinitely harder, but Huruma takes up far more space. The fur on her frame even lends this a porting quality- but it stops at her face when it seems to focus up to the second floor, pockmarked with the holes between planks and charred fire marks.

She knows that Danko is right there in the dark, and in testing this she sends out a warning in the form of trepidation, flicking it at the spot like a hand dashing water onto a mangy cat.

"You are so predictable, Emile." Oooooopsie~.

In the vague accumulation of lights and darks that constitutes a (retired?) terrorist elevated some ten or twelve feet in the air, there is a flinching recoil not entirely unlike that of a cuttlefish blanching away from contact. It's physical and emotional, tension and irritation stricken inward, where the sudden density of ~feeling~ flash freezes as brutally as anything delicate dispensed into liquid nitrogen tends to be.

Click. The safety ticks back on after a shiver, and irritable Emile swallows thickly past the clag of wintry mucous at the back of his throat before scuffing at his nose with the back of one gloved hand.

"And you, escorting lambs to slaughter."

Her hand closes around the rock, squinting up to where Huruma looks. Emile? Why is that….

Abigail stiffen, slipping to behind Huruma proper at the sound of the man so long ago on the phone. "Charlie" She murmurs to Huruma. Oh but what she would give for a panic button right now.

"Not quite the lamb anymore" She calls out from behind the tall black woman, sinking her hand to inside her jacket and the Caliban issue'd taser.

Charlie? Huruma isn't sure what that means, technically, but she doesn't say anything of the sort. She is still considering the shadows in the rafters at length, eyes half narrowed even after the click of the safety goes back on. Inwardly, there is a bit of relief. Likely because of most people, Huruma would somehow trust Danko to be the one to actually hit her. The last thing that she needs tonight is to be shot, however. What a bother.

"Going t'need a hot shower now, hm?" Huruma delights quietly in his writhing away, like what she did was the equivalent of taking a teenage girl's hand and putting it into a bucket of nightcrawlers. The dark woman purses her lips in the half shadows on her face, one corner pulling back.

"Not a lamb?" Danko's voice plays down from the shadows in a near perfect rendition of Abigail's accent, warm southern drawl and coonass emphasis in all the right places with just a hint of unpleasantness seething seamy and cool under the surface. "You sure? S'awful hard for me to see what with your dark compatriot sullyin' up the sanctity of my shot. Why don't you step on out here and give ol' Uncle Charlie a better look."

Even as he taunts, his nose rankles bluntly away from Huruma's delight, teeth bone white in a show of enamel that doesn't look like it's ever crossed paths with a smile. The safety may be off, but so far as either of them can tell, he hasn't made much of an effort to lose the gun.

"Fuck him over" Abigail whispers into the fur coat, a request from Abigail that she will feel guilty for later. What she means by that, likely is a request for the woman to screw with Danko emotions, screw with something.

"I understand th'need t'visit old victories, Emile-" Huruma stays on the most familiar basis when speaking to him; it's part mockery, and part actual familiarity, with a touch of irritation in her tone. "But, squatting here does you no justice." Doesn't he have bothersome muties to go hunt? Like the one he kicked in the face? Or the ones that break into his actual home? Well, maybe he finds all of them bothersome, in that case. Huruma's shoulders in the coat shift upwards in a slow see-saw of angles and hood, one gloved hand finding a place along the line of her hip. The shadows of her face are stark against what light filters over her visible skin.

"She wants me t'hurt you, you know." Huruma's deep voice betray's Abby's bitter request. For Abby, hiding behind her, it is intended as time to be stalled. Idle words to be said, offered up as a proper distraction for Danko.

Part of hunting is location, arguably. Depending on your particular approach. Sitting and waiting has always been a favored tactic of vipers and crocodilians, for instance, and odds are this isn't the first night Danko's spent hunched in a location like this one.

Watching.

"Hands where I can see them," sounds remarkably casual given the context, but even in so few words and saw-toothed with cold, his voice betrays that he doesn't anticipate argument on the matter. Then, with a sordid flush of warmth that's the focus of his interest more than even their initial appearance: "…Why don't you?"

What the hell Huruma. "I meant.. you know…" with your Ability. But Abby's taking the talking of the African woman to brace herself and then turn and flee, heading for the nearest opening that she can fit through even if it means taking a tumble over a wall and get out of sight. Pray that there's not an extra hole in her - or Huruma - that god did not make, put, or otherwise give blessing to.

If Huruma had to pick any one creature to compare Emile Danko to, a crocodile would be quite accurate on all sides.

She doesn't have her hands slipping inside her coat for anything, but the leather gloves on her hand give a sheen under the light when she flicks them up and then back down to her sides. All very glamorous, even in the mire that is a snow-filled, burnt-down church. "B'cause I am not in th'mood. Not t'get myself into a dust-up. It's no'tha'I wouldn't, though, if I felt it, You know that much." She purrs, lovingly.

"I only came outside in this terr'ble temperature b'cause of Abigail." Talkative! She does that sometimes. Otherwise it just sounds like a case of a woman being flaky about something- Danko has got to be just as familiar with those mysteries as any other man, gayer than a fruit basket or not.

"Mmm," says Danko, agreeably enough for all that Abby's scampering off in the background. There's a glitter about his eyes when they flick to follow the stir of her through damp debris, then he's plucking his cigarette back up for another drag and easing the rifle off a few idle degrees. His position's been compromised, but he's also learned something that makes him feel all fuzzy inside, like a lion's nose. Soft if not for the old blood caked and spined into fine hair.

His initial impression seems to have saturated even deeper than he might've hoped.

"Perpetuating weakness through charity doesn't suit you. One've these days I'm gonna pull the trigger."

"I coul'say th'very same t'you, Emile." Huruma just smiles lazily back, all dark lips over a sliver of white. She sidesteps into the tracks she had filed over the crunching snow. Though she is not leaving, it is clear that she is preparing, her drawl seeming to follow with her footsteps, careful and sparse. "You an'I both know tha'I am infinitely more useful alive…"

"As are you, hence why you are not dead either, by other's means. Neither of us shall eve'outlast our usefulness. T'anyone else or one another."

"She's poisoned. Sick with more than just the flu. They all are." Abigail, Joseph, Eileen. Magnes. All of them have found something in the world worth torturing in him, and Emile's content enough to let ripples touch where they will.

As for this, though…

He slings the rifle up across his back and drops down carelessly enough that he's probably already done it countless times before, knees taking the shock without complaint and balance stuck despite broken concrete and soft snow. "Do yourself a favor and don't overestimate your worth, and I'll try to do the same."

"I take tha't'mean you are not going t'be overestimating your own worth, not mine in tandem." She saw what you did there. Huruma can find meaning where there is little, where there is none, or where there is an ocean's full of it. She got that from her grandmother, most likely. An interesting gift, of many. Danko probably would not have liked Etana much. Huruma sees some strange context with his first words, and even though she knows very well what he meant to say, it came out as such that she can contort it enough that it brings a tiny, flattened smile. Her voice is low, and her eyes on him under the loose, large-rimmed hood go still.

"They. How touching."

"…Take it however you like," allowed with the kind of quicksilver arrogance only the exceptionally wealthy, important or ~badass~ tend to get away with without getting slapped for it, Danko draws himself up to all 5'7" of his underwhelming stature and starts off with or without her to make his own exit. Crunch, crunch, crunch. His boots cleave through snow and ice, and he is all around a lot less subtle going out than he was coming in.

His brows tip up for her catch on the they, and for a beat, he pauses to look starkly amused at her expense before he ducks sideways through a hole not unlike the one Abigail escaped through. Nothing more.


Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License