In The Absence Of Light

Participants:

colette_icon.gif danko3_icon.gif

Scene Title In The Absence of Light
Synopsis After having been interrogated by Magnes and pulverized by mercenaries, Emile Danko finds himself staring down the barrel of a gun.
Date October 22, 2009

Ruins of Midtown


Three mercenaries to start, all alive and armed, if not well. One of them was already dead by the time Magnes arrived to intervene, claggy cough silenced face down into the ashen mud and debris that's flooded into the streets in the wake of a week's worth of relentless rain. That was nearly fifteen minutes ago, now, and the Emile Danko that punched the back of his brains out with a .45 then looked a lot different from the one forcing a looted knife through the last of their corpse's now.

The word 'corpse,' might, of course, be slightly premature.

The guy's still trying to breathe, eyes wide at the sensation of his breath mingling with his blood, both of which have taken a wrong turn somewhere around the raggedy edged hole Danko's digging down through his throat and are spilling out into the cold and rain all in a steaming rush. To add insult to injury, all five foot seven of Danko is right there in the merc's bearded face, teeth dyed pinkish red and clamped jaw streaked with the bloody evidence of Magnes's interrigatory efforts, eyes as colorless and unfeeling as the mud cloying under the tramp of their boots. A jerk at his wire-bound shoulder sees another inch seized out of trachea and jugular alike, and the merc finally falls away from the knife with one last triple burst from the muzzle of his assault rifle on his way to splashing down into relative stillness.

Blood and black BDU alike spray back in tatty clods, contributing to the uneven mix of red that's already gained a pretty good foothold for itself in the mud and ash and muck. Danko hisses, staggers. Hunches. Already breathing fast and breathing faster against the clamp of a bloody hand at his perforated quad. Stupid mistake. His ribs ache, his jaw aches, his hands ache. Stupid mistake.

Three mercenaries to start, all alive and armed, if not well. One of them was already dead by the time Magnes arrived to intervene, claggy cough silenced face down into the ashen mud and debris that's flooded into the streets in the wake of a week's worth of relentless rain. That was nearly fifteen minutes ago, and the Emile Danko that punched the back of his brains out with a .45 then looked a lot different from the one forcing a looted knife through the last of their corpse's now.

The word 'corpse,' might, of course, be slightly premature.

The guy's still trying to breathe, eyes wide at the sensation of his breath mingling with the warmth of his blood, both of which have taken a wrong turn somewhere around the raggedy edged hole Danko's digging down through his throat and are spilling out into the cold and rain all in a steaming rush. To add insult to injury, all five foot seven of Danko is right there in the merc's bearded face, teeth dyed pinkish red and clamped jaw streaked with the bloody evidence of Magnes's interrigatory efforts, eyes as colorless and unfeeling as the mud cloying under the tramp of their boots. A jerk at his wire-bound shoulder sees another inch seized out of trachea and jugular alike, and the merc finally falls away from the knife with one last triple burst from the muzzle of his assault rifle on his way to splashing down into relative stillness.

Blood and black BDU alike spray back in tatty clods, contributing to the uneven mix of red that's already gained a pretty good foothold for itself in the mud and ash and muck. Danko hisses, staggers. Hunches. Already breathing fast and breathing faster against the clamp of a bloody hand at his perforated quad. Stupid mistake. His ribs ache, his jaw aches, his hands ache. Stupid mistake.

It's beena harrowing experience, watching all of this happen and not being able to do anything about it. It isn't so much Emile Danko that's having these reservations and regrets, but a stalker who has been fixed into the alley the entire time, something like a ghost, but not quite the same. Watching someone die in abstract paint-daub filter style is one of the most gruesome things Colette Nichols has had to suffer, and cloaked by the invisibility that bends light around her it is the only way she can perceive the world. In a way, it has the same effect as Schindler's List being in black and white — it serves as a detachment from the violence.

It's only now, when the fighting has stopped, when the hurting has begun to throb through his body, when the screams and gurgles have died down that Danko notices osmething amiss in the alley. Photokinetic light bending works wonders for hiding a person, but in something like rain it creates a disjointed distortion around her form, like water running over glass. As someone who has spent the latter years of his life hunting and killing things just like this, it comes to Emile as no surprise that this night just won't let up on him.

It's mainly chance that draws Smile's attention back to the alley long enough to catch that something's amiss, there. He straightens at a sideways, hunching slant, pressure kept off his injured leg while his crimped lung spritzes blood into the mix of unholy stuff drying in under his nose and across the side of his face, oddly still while he listens. And watches.

Even from afar there's a broken-glass glitter to the search of his eyes touching like cold feelers after anything that might be amiss. A tenative brush there, a cinch at the corner of his eyes there, and after three or four second spent squinting roughly at the smear and run of Colette's position in the rain, he starts to stoop after the felled mercenary's rifle.

Panic sets in the moment Danko moves to sprint, and that telltale distortion that was making his voyeur dispells not by any means of dramatic revelation but rather from lack of concentration. The invisibility peels away like strips of flaking paint, revealing the figure of not yet another mercenary, but a familiar teenage girl. The white leather jacket she's wearing is the same one she wore the day she was destined to take a bullet outside of Old Lucy's. Danko didn't get her then, and from the click of a 9mm pistol chambering a round as it's leveled up at him, he might not get to now.

"You son of a bitch!" It's a greeting Emile's familiar with by now. It's hard to tell if the puffy red eyes are from something other than crying, but it might not all be rain on her cheeks. Hair matted down to her head, clothing soaked thorugh to the bone, COlette holds out the pistol given to her by Brian Fulk, flicking that safety forward with a sweep of her thumb, followed by the ringing report of a gunshot .

The pavement in front of Danko is the only casualty.

Ok, so. Bad idea. Well-versed in the language of the fired weapon, Danko stops short of the rifle strap, the hand he had extended after its black loop retracted and lifted. Not very far, granted. Every banjo-string pull of lateral muscle along his sides sends a fresh wave of pain rolling up his spine and there's the sublest of tremors at his bare hand, bloodstained sticky and dark around the curl of his bony fingers.

Murky runoff drips slow off his nose and brows — faster off his chin and down his neck past his ash soaked collar, more grey than black. He's been out here for longer than just the night, and where he was tired and cold before, he has a small library of injuries to contend with down the barrel of Colette's gun, from the hole in his leg to the knife slash that exposes glimpses of fish-belly white around the red tarred up his side in a crusty line.

For the few seconds it takes details to sink in, he isn't doing much of anything, which probably means he's thinking. His second hand, knife still intact, lifts a short ways after the fashion of the first, promising no ill-intent even as cooling blood thins across the rain polished blade.

"You gonna shoot me?" is inquired in a voice that's weaker and wheezier than he might like, but beggars can't be choosers. His lungs are literally at half capacity. He hurts. "You should know…" the knife tips carefully back towards the twitchy lump of one of the mercs lying dead behind him, "I'm having a little deja vu about the start of this conversation."

Predators can always sense fear in their prey, in the way they tense up when meeting a hunter's stare. Despite one of them having a gun, it is the teenage girl and not the severely wounded ex-marine that is the prey. Even now, Danko has not lost his supremacy in this situation, and every shallow breath Colette takes is like the flight of a gazelle to a hungry lion. "Why did you do that to Joseph!?" She screams, voice cracking and throat raw, "He's a good person youhe— " The gun held fast in both of Colette's hands trembles and rattles, raindrops falling off of the barrel in what seems like slow motion.

In the area around the teenager, color is draining out of the ground, out of the air around her, out of here skin; it's like the rain is washing away everything, applying some moody desaturation to the world, turning everything into some film-noir reality.

Another gunshot, this time the bullet whizzes over Danko's shoulder close enough to sound like a buzzing bee. She should have hit him, it wasn't from a lack of trained iron sights that she missed, or the tremor in her hands. She jerked the muzzle away at the last minute.

Like a timid gazelle.

The resultant flinch is contained in a twitch of his brow and a hard blink against the sensation of lead streaking past faster than the pop that accompanies the kick of the gun in Colette's hands. Burr painted down flat against the bloody dome of his skull, he lifts his chin enough that the streaky runoff there slows to redirect itself down the pale line of his throat. Utterly exposed when he swallows once, and tries very, very hard to focus on being patient.

"You're gonna run out've bullets if you keep on at this rate, sweetheart." There's a sickness to the way he says it, terms of endearment employed with the same silty, longsuffering absence of feeling that's kept him standing as still as he has for even this long. "Pick your shot. Exhale on the trigger pull. Don't close your eyes; don't flinch." He shifts his weight, letting some of it settle carefully back onto the right leg from the left. The pulse of blood there increases in a coagulated bluh of loosened material before it slows again.

"When you're done, you'll wanna put it in your mouth 'nstead of at your sternum. Women like to shoot themselves in the heart so their face stays pretty but they don't tend to die as fast. Or as easy."

"Shut up!" Another shot, this one going to the other side of Danko's head, the buzz of the bullet past his ear a little further away than the last one. Sucking in a rattling sob, Colette's fingers squeeze the trigger, but not enough to get the gun to fire. She just stands there, sights trained right on Emile, reddened eyes staring down the barrel of the gun at him, shoulders rising and falling from the heavy breathing. Blood looks to run black with a lack of color, pools in inky swirls beneath Emile on the ground at his feet, mixes with all the other blood in the alley.

"Shut up…" She whispers to herself through clenched teeth, her grip on the gun white-knuckle tight, too tight. Her shoulders tense, finger squeezes down on that trigger again, but she just can't commit to it, not when he's standing right there in front of her, and not twenty minutes ago when Magnes was here. There's some people who are born to be killers, have it in their blood, and there ar epeople that no matter how hard they try to convince themselves they're killers… they can't ever quite make that step.

"Okay," says Danko. Okay. Not so much in answer to her request that he shut up so much as the start of some decisive conclusion on his end about the way this is gonna go. With a lazy kind of care not to move too quickly, hands still lifted away from his sides, he rocks himself into a stunted half step backwards. Harder than it sounds with his ears ringing and his thoughts swimming after the fog of too much blood lost already.

"There's a divide, in your kind. Those who don't want to wait for people to come around, who are willing to get violent now to make things happen for them. And those who want to earn their acceptance. Who want to deserve it. The cowards who don't resist, but preach patience and understanding. And hope. Knock one of those down and ten more find themselves in faith, but warp one — infect one…" he trails off and his brows tip up. "Your pastor's never gonna be the same again. And neither are you."

He's right, and Colette knows it. The way her hands shake as she's holding that gun, blood pooling from corpses at her feet in colorless display, the way her breathing comes in feverish gasps, the way she wants to shoot him so badly, it all makes him right in their own little ways. But she can't, not out of some misguided sense of wanting tp prove him wrong, not out of some sense of morality that killing is bad, but simply because she's too afraid. The lives she could save here with a single bullet don't matter a hill of shit to the teenager, all that she can hear is the sound of her own heartbeat thundering in her chest.

All she can imagine, is trying to come home to Judah with blood on her hands. All Colette can do is think of trying to live with herself having seen a man die at her hands. Some people can recouperate from the shock of murder, Delilah did, Cat did, so many people she knows are killers. But she can't join them, won't.

As Emile starts slinking back and away in the torrential rain, that desaturation begins to give way to muted colors of the ruins around them again, to the murky whorls of blood winding in the rain at their feet.

She watches as Emile Danko is lit from above by a still functioning streetlight, turning his countenance even more skeletal and cadaverous in that sharp illumination than normal. All she can see is Joseph swinging by his neck, all she can see if the burned out shell of the Guiding Light church, all she can see is Mage being murdered.

But as Danko sinks away into the shadows beyond that jaundiced street lamp's glow, all Colette can see are the shadows of something far more sinister than Danko in her periphery. Shadows of guilt, of could-haves and should-haves. The next time someone dies, it's her fault too.

There in the absence of light, guilt is her only company.


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