Participants:
| Scene Title | Unsettled Debt |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | In the ruins of Midtown, Felix tries to make a payment and Deckard feels him up spectacularly for his efforts. |
| Date | May 03, 2009 |
It's midnight, fifty-eight degrees, and Deckard feels fine. As fine as he ever feels these days. Architectural skeletons creak and groan overhead in an insecure breeze, gusty one second, dead soft the next. Braces and struts and rebar are black against grey in their twist out of ruptured concrete and displaced wreckage that nobody's gotten around to picking up yet. Deckard is currently seated on what is probably an overturned car if the tattered rake of a nearby tire qualifies as a hint. As dusty and windtorn as everything else that's a part of the surrounding desolation, he's blind to the fine stuff coated thick over the sheen of his sunglasses.
Apparently on some kind of smoke break, the sputter and drift of his lighter pricks yellow at the surrounding shadow once he's slung the weight of his backpack down at his feet. Long night.
Fel is wounded. Fel is burnt down and out. Fel has had enough electricity pumped through him to light whole strings of christmas lights. And thus he's creeping. Not even walking softly, but ghosting along on the very edge of the ruins, in the desolate seam at the edge of habitation, where it becomes the true No Man's Land. A different route than last time - there's still a stain of his blood under another wrecked car a few blocks away, courtesy of that chicken-sized phoenix, Eileen. He learns caution, but never enough.
"Mmm," nnnicotine.
Creating an easily soothed vacuum of need through addiction is probably not the healthiest way to find fulfillment in some capacity. But Deckard is Deckard and a good feeling is a good feeling, and he's just…getting to closing his eyes when something moves against the wind, rather than with it. Long face tipping forward again out of its backwards loll, he blinks hard, one eye after the other, and attempts to refocus on whatever it was. Maybe something that can wait until he's finished. …Maybe the federal agent he murdered a few weeks ago.
Creeping.
Unfortunately, one of Deckard's senses is more attuned to sneaking than most, and after an indulgent drag on his cigarette, he raises the rough of his voice to bellow out a flat, "MARCO."
Shit. Fel freezes like a jackrabbit caught in the hunter's lights, assuming that his observer is not the one man in the world with the magic x-ray vision, and thus someone whose sight he might conceivably fool. No glasses, this time, just the wet gleam of human eyes.
He could reach for his gun. Cock it. Point it, even. Not that he has much chance of hitting the asshole through part of a building. But Deckard doesn't move to do much of anything, really. He watches while all sign of movement drains from the faint trace of familiar fractures on the bare edges of his vision and smokes. Waiting to see.
The voice he doesn't recognize. Not yet. But he has no legit business here with anyone, and thus Fel's sneaking on, feet rasping soft over the rubble. Not running, not yet. But hastening, yes. He moves like he's hurt.
Oh no. Looks like someone's gone and left a wounded fed to fend for itself, all scared and cold and crippled and alone. The kind thing to do would be to put it out of its misery.
Now there is a brush of calloused thumb to nylon holster and the rustle of a revolver being tugged loose. The accompanying shotgun and backpack are left in their brace against the ruined vehicle at his back when Deckard pushes to his feet, overcoat dragging after him with a skittering trail of dust and ash. "You're supposed to say, 'Polo.'"
Save that it has a gun. That faithful and not always useful pistol, which it pulls. Fel's too sick to run at full speed, but he can start jogging away. Too many brushes with death, too recently.
Still no Polo. And now he's running off. That's cheating! Cheating!
If he'd just — walked off or faded away, Deckard might just have let it go, but the fact that he's actually hurrying away tips the scales of temptation. He's buzzed and relaxed and enjoying having an excuse to spend time in Midtown again. Aaand he's off, weaving neatly into the parallel cave in of an old alley way, boots scuffing and scraping over shattered brick and broken glass in pursuit.
Not again. Not again. This bears the stamp of nightmare. There's the crunch of booted feet on glass shards, the skitter of falling tile. Fel is not panicked, not overcome by fear. But it's begun to whisper in his ear, and he's in no shape for a battle. He dodges into an alley, away from the sound of pursuit.
A dragging, grating crunch and shifting of thicker glass plate along broken edges cede to silence when Felix turns off into an alley and effectively manages to drop off the radar in doing so. Too many walls. Too much iron and steel static between here and there, while Deckard is moving and the world is moving around him. It's his turn to stand stock still, chill eyes focused dead ahead behind the dusty screen of his glasses. Waiting for more movement. A sound. Anything. "You finally decide you've had enough of dying?"
That stops Felix as utterly cold as if Deckard had yanked a leash. "You," he says, tone utterly flat. It's not a question. And suddenly he's crouched and predatory.
Thhhere. Something. A downward flicker at the crouch. Deckard's trek resumes, this time in sideways through a fire door that's jammed halfway open. The hallway beyond is narrow and leaning at an angle that mirrors the overall sag of the building overhead. Fortunately, it's not far to the lobby, which opens out onto the shattered street that branches into Felix's hidey hole. Now it's his turn to creep.
Until Fel bolts into action. Not daring his inhuman speed, but fleeting for open space, room to run. This time he won't be gunned down in some rathole.
"What am I going to do? Shoot you again? Didn't work out so well last time!" Deckard's voice rings out after him, the inevitable echo ricocheting metallic and acrid off towering corpses alongside the garbage-strewn street, otherwise quiet as…well. Death. "We could play Russian Roulette! I bet we're both really good at it!"
There's the growl of a too-often cornered dog in Felix's voice. An edge of violence not often there. "I'll kill you," he says, simply.
"When you've finished running away?" Deckard's voice drifts coyly from the shattered glass doors and windows at the building's front face. Inside, he turns his eyes over onto the elevator shafts, and the stairwell beyond that. Looking a little perilous over there, stairwell.
The back of the building…..no. No light there, very much to Deckard's advantage. "Now," he says, stepping out from the room he's ended up in, pistol up.
…Oh. Is now a good time to die? Deckard actually has to think about it for a few seconds. Granted, given the current circumstances, those few seconds seem more like minutes.
At the far side of the lobby, he's as dusty and angular as any of the furniture that's survived long enough to still be here. The only thing to differentiate him from his surroundings is a fuzzy dot of orange when he takes one last drag. Then he's running and the cigarette is tumbling in his dusty wake. Through thhe door, up the stairs. There are a few missing here and there, entire stretches slabbed over with caved in drywall that came rushing down at some point or another. The only light is sourced through what manages to filter in through dust-coated windows or irregular holes in the outermost wall.
The muzzle flash momentarily lights things up like a summer thunderstorm, leaving afterimages dancing before his eyes. Fel waits a few moments for them to clear, before following. His tread is light, but he doesn't bother to conceal himself. Deckard can see, Deckard knows he's coming….but now he's forced to rely on his ears, stalking quietly and gingerly up through the ruins.
Ashen grey paints itself in harsh, long-limbed relief into the split second light provides for a snapshot of the fleeing crook. After that, Deckard isn't being quiet. He's in a hurry to put as many floors as he can between himself and his undead pursuit, ears ringing, boots bracing at debris caked like mudslides of dried plaster. He goes down on a knee when the angle gets awkward, stumbles, scrabbles back up again, quick and clever as a rat through the ruin for the most part. Something else he has in common with Rodentia is the way the scratching, adrenaline-fueled scamper of his escape falls abruptly to silence once he thinks he's found a good place to hide.
There's the slow, patient creak of Fel's stalking pace, clearing rooms one by one. He's almost fighting blind, save for the occasional distant glimmer of city light, or moonlight, pupils whorled out to black moons on their own. He should congratulate himself for running Deckard off, or flee himself. But….well, doesn't honor demand that one avenge one's own death?
There are a finite number of rooms to hide in, its true. The smart thing to do would be to close the door and shoot through it the second it opens to expose the fed's stupid skull. Nobody would find him here. Ever.
But truth be told, Deckard's already killed the son of a bitch once and got nothing more than a sore shoulder and an extra dose of crazy out of it. He didn't even stay dead. He never stays dead.
The room he's in has a single, potentially fatal flaw: the floor sags deep at its center under an open space in the roof where water has had months upon months to leak in and rot at the construction below. One wrong step, and whoever makes it is in for an express tour down through the next couple of stories. Flint's already picked his way to the far side successfully, gun at his side and sweat staining the dust and dirt at his temples dark while he waits.
Extra dose, indeed. Felix has his share. Felix has a lot of people's share, and the meds do control it. Mostly. It is very lucky for the future of his career that none of his friends can see the look on his face, because naked obsession is offputting, to say the least, and Fel's is on display. This is reminiscent of the battle with the Vanguard in the ruins of Seaview. He finds a corner out of immediate view, and waits. Waits for some sound to betray Flint.
Once the quiet has settled, the hissing whisper of a middle-aged smoker attempting to breathe quietly becomes distinct from the silence at the center of the room's rear wall. He's standing mostly in plain sight, not having bothered to hide save for the natural camoflauge afforded him by whatever dusty adventures he was having before he decided to poke the bear.
The problem with just shooting Deckard down like a dog is that the casing fingerprint from Felix's Sig is in the database. If he fires shots in here, he might as well spray paint his name on the wall. So he comes in a rush, bare-handed save for the pistol reversed in his hand to be used as a weapon.
“Damn it," is about all Deckard has time to get out at a mutter before Felix is on him. There's a thump at his heels, metal against carpet where his gun drops. He's reaching for the knife at his belt instead, twisting his free arm up quick to save his skull from imminent bashing in before he can get it out. At close range and in the dark, he's likely at a cold-blooded advantage. He'd gloat if he wasn't busy.
It's like being attacked by a rabid weasel. Felix is fighting like he knows he won't see tomorrow. Congratulations, you have a revenant all up in your grill. Fel's reflexes are dizzyingly fast, and he's doing his best to bash his killer's skull in with the butt of that pistol.
The swish and click of a switchblade locking out to its full length is a deceptively unthreatening sound at Deckard's side, especially when it's up against the dull thud and crack of a pistol butt against the bones in his forearm. The "Fffffffhh—" that follows is incomplete — he tries to twist the swing that brought the blow down into a grip on Felix's offending wrist and is too slow. Cloth and bone move too fast for his fingers to catch firm, and he's left to swipe the knife in his far hand in a close, clean arc for whatever tender federal flesh happens to be close and convenient and still there for steel to razor its way through.
It carves a swath through the drab canvas jacket he was wearing, crosses the old saber scar that was there. But it's a nick, and then Felix has that wrist in his hand, and is slamming it against the wall, other hand all but buried in the soft underside of Deckard's jaw. He doesn't demand that Flint surrender, there is no command that he freeze. This is entirely personal.
Brittle drywall cracks and craters from the impact, but Deckard's grip on the knife holds firm, knuckles bleached to the bone. The hand Felix has at his neck is more problematic, loose skin and dusty bristle there bunched up around the dead set plow of the younger man's fingers. Wiry muscle is corded like steel cable just underneath, infinitely less inclined to yield. The narrow cut of his jaw lifts away, turns and fails to escape — he manages about a fifth of a crackling inhale (chhkkh) and even less of a swallow. But Felix only has two hands, and they're both occupied.
Deckard's left is empty. It arcs down and around into an open-handed club of a swat at the feeb's temple.
And splits the tender skin there, staggering him for a second. But Felix doesn't yield either grip - instead, by the grip he has on Flint's trachea, more or less hauls him down, trying to wrestle him to the floor. He doesn't speak, doesn't rage or insult, but the set of his face is naked bloodlust. Something important has finally snapped, and before it binds itself up again, Deckard's blood will be all over something.
Jesus. Deckard'd probably say it out loud if he wasn't, you know, having all of the oxygen choked out of his system by Inspector Insanity here. He's not enthusiastic about going down, and he's not unconscious yet. Not by a long shot. When the blow to the asshole's head seems to have little effect, he bares his teeth out and takes the low road. In more ways than one. The same hand he swatted with dives south, and rather abruptly, five bony fingers are twisting themselves into Felix's ball sack like wet cheese.
Oh, god, how that hurts. Proof if ever there was any that man was not created by any kind of an intelligent designer. A malicious one, maybe. The blows that follow before Fel half collapses in on himself are brutal, though - rage goes a long way towards overcoming pain.
Desperate times.
Deckard pays for it, obviously. A few solid smashes to the face and he staggers back into the wall, leaving a person-sized smear of grey dust across moldy white. His glasses are broken, sharp-edged metal slicing deep across the bridge of his nose while blunt force rocks him back one more time. He's bleeding from somewhere. Multiple somewheres, likely, rapid breaths raking harsh at his crushed throat under the automatic curl of the hand he was twisting Felix's junk with a few seconds ago. He'd like to sit down. Curl up on the floor, catch his breath, but this office building is clearly only big enough for one crazy person. He stumbles for the door.
There's the Gollum crab-scramble of Felix coming for him on nearly all fours, breath whistling like a teakettle out of sheer pain. Now you can't be silent. Now there is no need to be. His hands are shaking too hard to try and use the gun….or perhaps honor and blind fury demand that he do this via bare hands.
More cursing might be implied in the shuddering wheeze Deckard manages at the sound of Felix shuffling after him again. He whips back around just in time, lambent eyes wild in the press of the dank and dark all around. Some calculated wresting of grasping hands and a blunt, shoving kick planted solid in the region of Felix's torso later, he's as free as he's going to get.
This time he doesn't make the mistake of walking, either. He's through the door in a limping, stiff knee'd rush, with all manner of crashing and discord through the stairs on his way back down. He can't breathe enough, can't see enough, can't focus enough. All shit he can worry about when he's back out in the chill night air and can find somewhere quiet to pass out for a little while.