Participants:
| Scene Title | My Son |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | A chance meeting in Mexico in the 1970s reunites legacies of a darker time… |
| Date | November 18, 1975 |
Mexico City, Mexico
"Dianna, come on, let's just go back to the hotel and we can sleep off this jet-leg and do sightseeing tomorrow…" Tiredly shifting his his backpack hangs off of one shoulder, a tall and lanky young man in a messenger cap squints against the bright mid-day sun shining down hot and bright over Mexico City. The sound and smell of the city streets assails his senses as he slides out of the battered old cab. Following out behind him, a short, dark-haired woman offers up a teasing smile as one delicate hand comes to brush at his waist.
She shoulders her purse, watching the cab driver hustle out and circle around the back of the cab to pop open the trunk. "Mik," she says with a curl of her lips into a smile, "you are the laziest person I have ever had the pleasure of spending time with." Her dark brows raise slowly as she angles up onto her toes, pressing a kiss to his cheek. "Come, we'll bring the bags to the hotel, you can take yourself a lazy nap, and then— then we will go see the city, yes?"
Suitcases clunk and thump on the sidewalk as the cab driver lays them out, and Mik angles to look at him with the brow of his cap shielding his eyes from the bright sun. "How ah— much do I owe you for that?" A wallet is slid out from the back of his pants, folded open and flipped through. "Christ this money is— " he lets out a good-natured laugh, fingering a pair of bills and sliding them out to the driver. "Here you go, thanks for the help." It's actually a terrible tip, he doesn't quite understand the local culture.
The cab driver is too good-natured to berate him about the tip— in English anyway.
When Mik has turned his attention on the cab driver, Dianna has found her fascination in a small shop down the street, still up on the toes of her sandals, the wide brim of her dark hat shading her eyes from the heat with one hand flexing the rim down. "Look! Oh, they've wonderful little bracelets in that window." She turns and leans back, resting a shoulder against Mik as she waves one hand towards the storefront down the street. "Mik, Mik I am leaving you forever for those bracelets…" She says with tongue-in-cheek sarcasm, her dark eyes lifting up to his awkwardly smiling face.
"Mik take my bags upstairs, yes?" She turns, wrapping an arm around his waist. "I am going to go offend myself at how much they charge tourists for adorable jewelry and you can take your nap." She rises up just a little higher, nudging her nose to the side of his neck playfully. It's hard to say no to her, hard to deny someone so self-assured and confident.
"Alone?" Both of Mik's brows raise, his eyes tracking to the store before he settles that worried stare back on her. "This isn't home, not that it is much safer there. Come on, you can wait just a little bit, then we can…" Halfway through his pleading, Mik already knows that she's just smiling at him and not really listening. It never really was a question, more of a politely worded instruction. "Alright," he breathes out the reluctant agreement, "but please— don't stray too far?"
A kiss to his cheek is all that Mik gets, even if Dianna's smile and lips say more when silent than they often do in speech. Her cadence is brisk and skipping as she moves off on light, sandaled feet towards the shop that caught her eye down the crowded sidewalk, even as Mik shakes his head and reaches down to pick up her suitcases and his.
It is by no small miracle that Mik arrives in room 304 of Hotel Camino in under fifteen minutes. The excruciatingly long time it took to check his reservations in the busy lobby and get his bags upstairs weigh on his mind. Fatigue after so many hours of air travel out here, it will be a welcome respite to kick up his feet and settle in on a comfortable bed. Dragging one wheeled suitcase behind him, Mik eases into a halt near the lone bed, letting go of his suitcase to fall to the floor with a clunk, and his body to fall to the bed a moment after.
"Christ," he groans into the pillow his face is buried in, "Never… flying again." It doesn't take long for Mik to lose track of time on that bed, to drift off, to find himself lots to the eddies and currents of sleep. Dianna would wake him when she gets back from the shop, they'd have a beautiful dinner down in the restaurant, go sightseeing, enjoy the city sights. She never wakes him.
It's only the sound of a car honking outside that rouses Mik from his sleep, stirring from a spit-tacky pillow, one eye cracking open and fingers curling into the fabric of his comforter. Then, seeing that it is dark in the hotel room, he jerks himself up off of the bed, up onto a knee and then nearly twists his ankle when one foot hits the hardwood floor. Staggering, he catches himself on the wall and looks frantically about the hotel room.
"Diana!?" His voice rings hollow off of the walls; no one responds. "Diana!?" Again, his cry is rewarded with silence. Rushing to the windows of the hotel room, Mik throws them open, looking out into the street left and right, then with a sharply-spoken curse spat out, he rushes to the door of his room and out into the hall. Thundering footfalls carry him to the stairs and them down them with rapid-fire thunks, all the way to the front desk.
Slapping his hands down, he leans over and scans the back side for a clerk. The bell nearby comes into view, struck six times in rapid-fire dinging succession. No one emerges. "What— What the fuck." He's quick to depart from the counter, running out the front door of the hotel to the sidewalk, eyes darting up and down the street. "Diana!?" An old man seated on a bench across the street hears the call, but does not move.
The shop.
Remembering where Diana was last to head, Mik makes a hasty dash down the brick sidewalk, shouldering past a few young men as he does. By the time he reaches the store-front, he can already tell its closed; lights are off and the windows dark. Mik's gaze flicks around the windows, and he immediately rushes for the front door, hammering on it. "Hello! Hello is anyone there!?" A pause, followed by another bout of incessant hammering with the sie of his fist against the door. "Hello!?"
No one answers again, and it's becoming clearer and clearer that no one ever will. Stepping away from the front door, Mik cups his hands around his mouth as if he's about to shout out to the second floor, but something else catches his eye. A narrow alley between buildings, dark and wide enough for two people to walk shoulder to shoulder snugly. Moonlight plays on a dark shape on the ground, and fear lurches up in his throat. "Diana oh God— "
Running to the alley, Mik thrusts himself into the darkness, heedless of who may be there or what the shape that caught his eye truly is. Fears are grounded in reality, when in that moonlit alley he spies a woman's body sprawled out on her back, hair spread in a wild black mane and blood pooling from her midsection. "No!" Throwing himself down to his knees, Mik grabs the woman by the shoulder and rolls her over. "Di— "
It's not Diana.
Confusion sets in as he stares at the hispanic woman laying on her back, a knife wound in her abdomen. Nearby, something else catches his attention; jagged shapes in the dark, crumpled piles of cloth and mounds of what looks like sand or dust with— are those bones?
"Is that your beloved?" The voice is like sandpaper and stones trying to sing. It causes Mik to wheel around sharply, eyes wide and distrustful as he spies the shadowed form standing at the alley mouth behind him. A hand goes up, a warding gesture, fingers spread as if to keep him back. Fear grows, especially after he notices the alley darkening.
"What did you do!?" Mik scrambles back on his hands, then manages to pull himself to his feet as he clambors thorugh the ashen remains of human bodies. Little more than bones, clothing and soot lies behind of these victims. Horror sets in, eyes gone wild and wide, breathing arrested in fright.
The shadowed figure shakes his head slowly. "I did nothing to your beloved Diana…" A look goes down to the hispanic woman, then back up to Mik with a raised brow. "There were two women here, accosted by thugs, kidnappers. Men who run human trafficking from here to Buenos Aeries." Able to be seen more clearly now, he's a man of modest stature and coarse, dark hair. His thick moustache looks more like a thick comb placed over his top lip.
"Where is she?" Mik quickly pulls himself to his feet, "Where is she!?" Heedless of the stranger, Mik rushes towards him, reaching out to grab the darkly dressed man by the lapels of his suit, pulling him forward. "Where did they take her!?" Indignation spreads thorugh the stranger's features, even as a scowl descends upon his lips.
Mik feels it, a tingle building in his hands, even as a tendril of black smoke rises from the stranger to slither around his wrist. For a moment, nothing but white-hot searing pain accompanies the ephemeral caress, and he releases the older man's lapels, a scream rising from the back of his throat as he falls to his knees. "I thought it a kind service to let you know I tried to save the young woman. I have some lines to which I do not cross, but I will not be party to your hysteria or— "
Had this been anyone else, on any other day, Kaizmir Volken would have simply left them a pile of ashes on the ground. But as the bitter old man lurches away from the man Dianna had affectionately called Mik, Kazimir can feel a taut thread pull on the center of his being, a hook sunk into his heart that threatens to yank his very soul from his body, even as he sees those black tendrils of smoky unlife beginning to coil around Mik's hands. It is a horror he has seen only once before.
Mik looks down at his hands, seeing the corsucating shadows seeming to bend to his will. Eyes tainted a gray-blue peer up at Kazimir, and slowly he rises to look at the man with horror and apprehension. "What— what are you?" Mik asks in a whisper, staring down at his hands as he backpedals through the ashen remains of the men Kazimir had killed. But the immortal before him does not answer, only lowers his head and narrows his eyes.
"Mikhail." The name is spoken as a grave utterance of recognition, "how you have grown." Mik — Mikhail — stops in his tracks when he hears the stranger call his name. A swallow comes next, fingers flexing as he looks down at the shadows that sink and slither thorugh his skin harmlessly, feeling their connection intuitively to the old man standing before him.
"How do you— " he chokes on his words. "How do you know my name?" The young man tries to shake the darkness off of his hands, to no avail. Kazimir is frozen in his steps, looking at the thin line of darkness that is coiled harmlessly around Mikhail's hands, extending back like a tether into his chest.
"You are Mikhail Wagner, son of Heinrich Wagner." Mikhail's eyes peer intently at Kazimir when he speaks those words, hushed silence come over him. "I was a good friend of your father, and I saw you the day you were born." Which would be impossible, given how young the man before him looks. "You know who I am, if you kept your father's journals…" Stepping into the moonlight, Kazimir watches Mikhail carefully.
Dawning realization drops over Mikhail, and all the insane stories he had passed off as the ramblings of a deranged psychopath. Now, presented with a tether of shadow that he can feel as though it were a part of his body, Mikhail is left to question just how insane his father truly was. Swallowing anxiously, he releases that cord of darkness to slither its way back to Kazimir and into his body. "How— You aren't— You can't be— "
"People change." Kazimir intones, his slow gait affording him time to collect his thoughts as he considers this serendipity, bringing up a hand to rest on Mikhail's shoulder. "But there is always something tell-tale in their nature that stays the same. Your father was a brilliant man, Mikhail, brilliant beyond his years and you are the product of that brilliance." Eyes avert down to the young man's hands.
"You have been given a great burden." Blue eyes alight back to Mikhail intently. "A great curse, and a man long ago once told me that you must not be defined by your burdens, but use your burdens to find your own definition of self." There's a hint of a smile beneath that moustache. "Come…" Kazimir says to the shaken young man, squeezing his shoulder.
"Let us find your Dianna. Let me show you what we could be, together…"