Participants:
| Scene Title | Sub Rosa |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | When dealing with Danko on a personal level, Huruma finds it best to orchestrate a private meeting whether he wants to see her or not. |
| Date | March 15, 2010 |
Emile Danko's Apartment
An hour and one motorcycle ride ago, ten feet underground in the snow-entrenched bowels of Midtown, Danko received a message:
Front door open.
He hasn't received another one since.
It stands to reason then that whoever was here an hour ago is still here when the alarm announces his arrival with the second polite Front door open. that Huruma's heard this evening, followed by a quiet, punctual click. Two more clicks hunch back with the hammer of his sidearm; a fourth marks the door lock turning stiff in its socket.
The cold absence of emotion that accompanies his presence in the entranceway is not all that different from the matte black metal of his gun. A natural prickle of fear is underplayed by warier suspicion. Suspicion is partnered with speculation, tick tick tick, gear turn by gear turn in the seconds it takes for chilly paranoia to be reclassified as a logical exercise in hide and seek.
There are four rooms, not including two closets, a pantry and a single bathroom.
There is at least one person in one of them. He has thirteen rounds loaded, and the icy veneer of his lifeless glare flicks first to the living room just around the corner.
She could have been a total nuisance and have gone to catnap in his bed, but she didn't. At the very least, Huruma made very sure to go around the apartment and move things around at her leisure. Little things, like turning chairs and putting dishes into the freezer. Things that Danko won't know about until he looks. Thankfully, the raccoon in his garbage can is lounging there in the living room, laid out on some piece of furniture, all dangly limbs and cat-like boredom.
The dark woman is staring up at the ceiling, counting out the flecks in the paint. It looks like that, anyway. In truth she has just been waiting for him to get back.
"You could use a vase and flowers in here, you know." Huruma even says 'vase' with the long 'a'. It fits her. "No wonder you prowl so much."
Held breath vented through his sinuses at a wheezy hssss of decompressed air once his focus has sharpened itself enough to distinguish black skin from black leather couch amidst the many things subtly wrong with this picture, Danko relaxes out of a reflexive jolt only so far as is necessary to vanish back into the entrance hall. There are other rooms to check. Other parasites that could be hiding in the walls: like ants, once one of them's discovered the place, they invite themselves along at leisure and without enough reasonable fear to stay the fuck away.
He's gone for two or three minutes with much shuffling of displaced furniture and the opening and closing of several doors, but by the time he's shrugged his wool coat off onto the foot of his bed with a dusting of resilient snow and ice he doesn't have time to care about, he's (reasonably) sure there's no one else here.
The BDUs he has on underneath are familiar. The same breed of set he always wears when he's up to no good, and for a sullen beat he stands in the gloom of his bedroom alone and considers changing into something less damning. Easier in the end not to worry about it. A floorboard creaks and he's stalking out again, .45 still firmly in hand. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"
Considering he didn't chase her off when he saw her, Huruma takes it to mean that her lounging will go uninterrupted for now. When he skulks back into the room with the usual expression of displeasure, Huruma does swivel her eyes to take him in. After a tic, she smiles. "I'm sitting."
"Ohhh, you mean here?" The woman feigns a few seconds of revelation, eyebrows lifting in an attempt to be comic about it. "Not quite certain." Her head tilts towards him, eyes grazing up and down again. "Been making trouble again? Mmm?" Huruma angles her legs down off of the front of the leather couch, subtle stretching showing that she was sitting there for a while, possibly catnapping.
Displeasure is an expression that fits comfortably on Danko's hollow face, from the lines sketched in fine over his furrowed brow to the faint downturn at the corners of his flattened mouth. It's no so much that she's in his home — to call this a home would be a stretch of any imagination with its wall to wall monochromatic absence of anything more personable than the slack grey curtains. It's that she's here uninvited. Alone. And without fear of the consequences.
There's also the fact that he told Eileen he'd shoot the next piece of shit that trespassed to make trouble. He just wasn't expecting it to be Huruma.
Maybe that's the reason his gloved trigger finger stays flush with the guard rather than hooked neatly behind it, brow pushed down into a surly hood over grey, grey eyes and the stiff clamp of his jaw. He shakes his head slightly when she starts on with the implications. And the stretching. Not denying. Just not having it. "Oh, no. I'm not in the mood for cute deflections. I'm not in the mood," he plants a kick through his rolly desk chair (in the wrong place, too close to the kitchen) that sends it crashing into an (empty) bookshelf, "for bullshit, or the likes of your face in my apartment urequested and unannounced. What are you here for? A fight? To fuck?" Spite comes pretty naturally to him, these days. Also spittle. "For help? I don't owe you a goddamn thing."
"
Most people that find themselves in a situation like this would probably leave when he starts snarling. Well- actually- they'd have not come here in the first place. Huruma leans herself onto one arm of the couch, watching him essentially stamp his feet and exude totally natural dwarf rage. It is mostly because she expected it, not that she doesn't take it as a warning. Spite and spittle is all the same taken with an expressionless face, pale eyes studying him all through it.
"I am here t'give you some information, but if you are coming up wit'things you need from me-" There is a second where she is fighting the temptation to flash a smile, though it simmers under the surface.
For all that Danko has a way of raising his voice like he can't quite keep it in check, he doesn't yell. Much. Granted, he doesn't usually get pissed off this quickly either. The shelf jostles and the chair rolls dejectedly away from impact, spinning dimly as it goes, leaving him to stand alone with the austere kitchen at his back and Huruma at twelve o'clock.
He is 5'7", narrow through the shoulders even when they're squared, buzzed off the top at a severe burr — and he looks remarkably tired. Expression gone black with dislike and eyes pitched hollow in his head, he smothers his pulse down Chief Bromden style — for its own good — and measures her again. More carefully, this time.
"I don't need anything from you."
"Maybe not. Or maybe y'do." Huruma's presence has been nothing but idle so far; nothing as to hint any other purpose except for the single one where she has been waiting to let him know something. If she wanted to start something, she'd have started it by now. The woman shifts up into a sit, leaning her spine against the back of the couch instead of lying half sprawled on the arm. "You look exhausted, by th'way." Huruma notes this as she leans onto her knees to bring herself to her feet.
"I am supposed t'keep things mysterious, but I thought y'should know tha'prophets are speaking of you. I would suppose tha'y'do no'take much stock in precognition- but regardless of your feelings towards them, you are on those tongues an'minds. They say t'keep you alive. For what, I do no'know." Huruma just figures that knowing is half the battle- for his sake, anyway. She does not want to have to watch his back when he can do much of that on his own if she tells him that he needs to- you know- not die.
Idleness may be having the desired effect, if the desired effect is to get his hackles smoothed enough for words to penetrate his skull such that he's capable of actually remembering them later. It's hard to fight with dead air, and while he's certainly capable of getting himself there anyway, he either doesn't care quite enough or doesn't have the energy to spare. Meanwhile, his brows twinge defensively against simple observation.
Life is hard when you are a semi-deposed, semi-unemployed terrorist trying to do the work of fifteen. Also when you have an opioid addiction caused by someone else that will follow you to the grave. JOSEPH.
It will probably be a while before he stops looking haggard. If he ever does.
Then there's the truth, and his initial impulse takes the icy form of fear, as it should. It's visible to the outside world as a black push of pupil wide against fishbelly iris; a clench of his teeth before tension riding terse through his jaw. Beyond that, doubt and the musical rattle of his nerves like icicles in his iron-clad skull are tangible only to the woman standing calmly before him. "Not interested."
She isn't surprised. She didn't expect anything less, honestly. Huruma is paused, considering emotional reactions- even if sparse- against that of his words. She was not lacking one ounce in gravitas when she explained, and her presence in what he perceives as home was to get him to pay attention to her. Only her.
"Not interested in being kept alive, or not interested in why?" Because Huruma is. Very much so.
"All of the above," croaks out weaker (or at least more unevenly) than he probably intended. Sticks in his throat like cotton, forces him to blink hard and step back towards the entryway. He has plans. Plans of his own that mostly involve butchering specials with very little listening to them involved unless gurgling screams count.
Huruma's head cocks slightly at his response, having caught the stitch in his throat as easily as she might other changes on an inward level. "So there is nobody looking t'use you? Again?" Her words are from a bitter place, and have a bitter reasoning. He understands it perfectly, not not only because they hoisted him into Apollo. "I find tha'ard t'believe, for …a man of your skill set."
"I have options on the table." More defensive posturing; his voice raises a notch and creeping anxiety is displaced by coarser annoyance for her prying. He bows up again too, daring her to argue otherwise in the lines corded through his neck and sketched in between his brows. Even more notably in the step he takes forward rather than back, pitbull intimidation hard-wired into his system despite his underwhelming stature.
Also, he is still holding a gun.
He doesn't want to talk about it. Not surprising. He wants her to stop talking. Not surprising either. Even cold-burning hatred mingled with all manner of brainfucked misery and self-loathing and something at least vaguely like arousal cannot be unexpected considering the source. All through which, the order tempered into his glare is hard to mistake for anything more complex than a silent: Get out.
Options on the table. Let us hope for his own sake that none of them require him to die- or hope that one is exactly what he was meant to do. Huruma watches him carefully as he brandishes the doggish defensiveness that he has always had behind him, pale eyes blinking slowly back at him when he finally caves to it. Like Cats and Dogs.
"Sleep well, Emile." Huruma seems to sway like a reed in the breeze once she begins to move, teetering there for a passing breath before moving to walk past him. "We both know tha'you need it."
Danko watches her go in stubborn silence, eyes sweeping in a chilly line to follow her progress when it lulls and eventually continues on without him. The rest of him remains still, evidently trusting her to know the way out once he's resumed glaring balefully at the vast negative space of his own living room.