Participants:
| Scene Title | Who's Afraid |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Deckard finds a dead man walking. |
| Date | March 30, 2009 |
This place is spooky enough all on its own, though once it was pleasant and airy, the sea breezes cooling the long tiled hallways. The grounds, once neatly tended and landscaped, are overgrown. Appropriate place to find a ghost. And there's one there now, scavenging along the outside of one of the long pavilions. Weirdly familiar, in the chill of the evening, quartering one of the overgrown lawns like he's looking for something. Fel's in drab clothes, a grey canvas jacket on over a black shirt, jeans. No glasses. He should be rotting in the depths of the Hudson, as so many have before him.
Deckard is scrounging around inside. Why not? It's dark. It's a hospital. He can see, and there's no way every single drawer and cabinet in this place has been cleared of every last pill. The fact that there's a sizable hole in the black of his overcoat behind his right shoulder doesn't slow him down much. The grey hoodie beneath it serves to help keep out the worst of the chilly wind, and his jeans are warmer than they look. Up on the second story, he's pawing through a mass of glass bottles to locate the source of a tell-tale rattle when he notices the skeleton outside. At first it only gets a glance. He finds the right bottle, stoops to tuck it down into his backpack, then looks again, undead eyes narrowed into a muddled slant. For a minute, the lean black shape of him is visible in the frame of a long-since blown out window while he watches. Then it's gone. So is the backpack.
He doesn't remember it. But that flicker of motion has Felix scampering for the relative cover of the next building. He's unarmed, the fool. Not that the attempt at concealment does him much good. The pattern of healed fractures is familiar….save that it's carrying breaks it couldn't have survived. Vertebrae shattered by bullets are whole, if starred with cracks. As are the ribs over the heart, so recently blown outward. There's no sound - the skeleton's head is cocked, listening.
Backpack slung up over his healed shoulder, Deckard takes the stairs down with quiet speed, down around one corner and through swinging doors that still manage to hang onto their hinges. There's a rusty squeak as they creak back to a gradual rest behind him, muffled from the other building's interior. Then silence again.
The front doors are long gone, safety glass the source of a pair of crunching foot steps while Deckard draws his latest gun out of the holster at his left side. Bone by bone his unholy glare picks Felix apart through the wall he's hidden behind. Fissure by fissure. Meanwhile the occasional muffle of dead grass or dry sand shifting underfoot indicates that he's getting close.
There's the sound of an attempt at stealth, Felix creeping further behind the building. What's pursuing him? He hasn't that advantage of piercing vision, but instincts are enough to tell him that he's being hunted. Whatever it is wearing that body, it's real enough to leave footprints in the sandy earth.
"I don't remember reading about any of God's messengers hiding from the recipient during delivery." Deckard's voice is harsh in the cold, rough on the wind that whisks it around corners and through empty corridors. The black weight of his gun is shifted to a more stable rest with help from his left hand, and on he creeps, frigid eyes narrowed after any indication of oncoming superhuman speed.
"I'm not an angel. I'm not looking for a fight," The voice is familiar, too. The fear in it….is not. None of Fel and his feline arrogance in evidence. Around the other corner of the building. Here we go round the prickly pear prickly pear prickly pear. "Whatever you found here, you can keep."
"Admittedly demonic counsel does seem more likely at this point." There is no fear in return. No real humor either. Deckard keeps up the pace, maintaining his advance for Felix's retreat with the angle of his scruffy head kept turned to track the rapid patter of the younger man's (intact) heart. The fear in his voice is somehow more difficult to interpret, possibly owing to the source. "So far the most intriguing thing I've found here is you."
He's paused for just a second, trying to gauge speed and direction by sound alone. And then takes off at a lope, trying to find one of the openings in the ruined fence to slip out of the grounds entirely. "I don't know what you want from me. Who are you?"
"Keep running and I'll shoot." Half warning half order, the bark of Deckard's voice carries a force that is as uncharacteristic as Felix's unease is for him. "If I was going to kill you I would have done it already," follows more evenly, not entirely devoid of irony in the knit of his brow and a tug at the corner of his mouth when he rounds the next corner in pursuit. "I'm just…curious."
This can't be Ivanov. Because the real Fed would have bolted off like a greyhound. This one….stops, up against one of the (annoyingly) intact sections of chain link fence. He lifts his hands, in that gesture of peaceable intent. "I didn't realize this was your territory, I'm sorry if I intruded. I….." Fel trails off, before it entirely becomes babble.
Deckard's gun is up when he rounds into sight, but not for long. He's tall and wiry, all angles in what little detail ambient light pollution and the moon's murky reflection has to offer overhead. Middle-aged, scruffy. Potentially in need of a shave, if he doesn't smell of anything more offensive then cigarette smoke. His gun has been reholstered entirely by the time he's close enough for that kind of detail to matter, the source of the blue glint around his head abundantly clear: his eyes are glowing. The ghostly light of his glare may be more or less creepy thanks to the conversation that came before it, but the rest of him seems human enough in its inspection of Ivanov's person. Head to toe, then back again just out of arm's reach, with particular focus given the region of his chest. "Why are you here?"
No gun. None of the little medal he habitually wore under his shirt, the one Teo plucked off his corpse. No wallet. No armaments of any kind It's Felix, to all appearances, the cracks visible in his skeleton. Even the traces of the blow Deckard landed on his head. "I don't know. I should….maybe….remember something here. I thought I knew…." He's barely coherent. He's also dressed in jeans a size or two too large, belted to keep from sagging down over his hips, a t-shirt, a hoodie. The body language is all wrong. Felix knew how to handle himself, moved like someone with training. This is just a frightened trespasser.
The rise and fall of Deckard's chest is slow and steady in return. Somehow he should be more surprised. Shocked, even. Worried, or angry, or afraid. He's quiet while Felix talks, if not exactly listening raptly. At one point he even takes another step forward to better twist a hand into the fabric at Felix's front, thumb passing coarse over the brace of his sternum, scar tissue, and ribs beneath. All there, all solid.
"I should kill you," muttered more to himself than it is offered up as a topic for group discussion, he lets go with an abruptness that insinuates disgust, or something like it. "Drag you back inside, cut off your head and burn the stump."
Felix freezes when he's grabbed, but doesn't fight. "What've I done to you?" he says, softly, gaze fixed on Deckard's lambent one. "Is that why I'm here, again? Something that happened here?" There is a scar there, right where it should be, over the heart. A wound that shouldn't be survivable to heal to keloid. "Who -are- you?"
"Lately, the big bad wolf." It's a conversational non-answer, soon followed by the lesser threat and correction of, "Coyote, maybe. Jackal. Fennec fox." On down the list. He'd get to rats eventually, given enough time, but he's already taking a step back in preparation to head off his own way, the weight of his pack adjusted over his shoulder.
"I dunno why you're here."
"Do you know me?" His voice is hesitant, hovers on the chill air. Almost hopeful. He makes a little twitch, as if he'd follow.
"No." Easy question, flat lie. The backpack is adjusted once more, and Deckard completes his turn away, scowl distracted and head dipped. If he'd spent this time getting drunk like originally planned to he wouldn't be having this problem.
No trailing Fed. Satisfied Deckard isn't going to kill him, he turns, trying to grope his way along to the opening in the fence he entered by, making the chain link clink and rattle with blind fingers.
Either Deckard's headed back into the hospital, or there's another way out. Either way it's not long before he's gone, quiet footfalls fading to silence once he's vanished back around the corner of the building.
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