Can't help that you're so good at it, Fringe. [Karlach grins, bright as the sun. The moon. She gestures to the entrance and her engine revs again. This time there's a smell to go with it, a fresh singe on old meat. Some of the skin showing through her top blackens.]
See you 'round after, all right? We'll both be quick.
I'm doing my part on a different end. We'll meet in the middle. [She taps her on the shoulder, friendly-like. Have her eyes always had that speck of silver in them? Must be the moon reflecting of them.] Don't get to missing me too much. I'll be right there soon.
[her eyes are famously gold. but it's all the same. it's pretty. she would simply just never doubt karlach. she's known her for about two weeks, but she'd never quite had friends like this before. someone who would be so easy with affection and care for her, but would also put her in her place when she's doing the wrong thing.
she doesn't have to think too hard about it.]
I'll see you soon.
[well, time to go kill some people! she will try to creep her way over there, staying in the shadows, the way she was taught.]
[And so Shadowheart enters the inn. Unseen and in silence, expertly committed. No footfall creaks in the halls or on the stairs as she stalks her way through.
[That it would. She can knock on the door. There's a muted sigh, like it's a pain in the ass, and the lights are clearly on if the shadows beneath the door are anything to go by.
Eventually, the door opens. The man's brows pop high as he surveys his late night visitor.]
[she opens the door and wonders what this fuck boy did to enrage karlach. definitely some shit. if karlach says this guy needs to die, that's for sure what's going to happen here.
...though she isn't tranquil, just in this odd, muted state, where she can't quite connect the dots she should be connecting to feel suspicious of all of this. she does feel that he's familiar, somehow. that's not an unfamiliar sensation to her, though always a disquieting one. maybe there's something about him that she finds a little sweet and funny, despite herself. the way he acts jaded and then feels so badly if he ever crosses a line, such a familiar trait.
she isn't going to relish killing him, but that doesn't mean there aren't reasons. sometimes, not everyone can be saved. she's never been good at trusting her own judgment on these things, on right and wrong, but that's why she's learned to lean on her friends. learned to let them guide her, help her find her way.]
No, no. Turn down service. There will be a mint on the pillow for you at the end of this, if you're good.
[...]
No, I do feel badly about this. Sorry.
[but you have to do what you have to do. she will just ram that spear through his gut.]
The guy makes a face of intrigue at the promise of a "mint" on the pillow for good behaviour.]
Oh? That's really forward of you. Who said I was...
[He trails off, eyes caught on the strange weapon in her hand.
The pupils turn to pinpricks. Her apology has him seizing up, realizing a second too late what's really happening. He starts to move back.
She catches him through the gut anyway. His feet lift a little off the floor and he folds forward with a low gulp, hands clutching around the bare length of the spear. He raises his head, paling fast as he looks her in the eyes.
Then he goes slack. Dying, not dead yet but dead soon. Still impaled.]
[her breath catches. she's killed a lot of people, and most of them she did not feel badly about. some of them were evil - murderers, cruel and vicious, planning to slaughter innocents by the dozen, and her sword, or spear, or mace prevented even more brutality from coming to pass. but others were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. the goblins who didn't know exactly why they were following the absolute, only hoped to gain at the end of it, but the amount of blood spilled across the halls and ramparts of that ruined temple was grisly. nothing compared to the githyanki creche, though. declared enemies of the queen, so they simply had to fight their way out against hordes of people who they had no quarrel with, but who would put them to the sword otherwise. she was grateful that the door to the training hall, the school, was so thick and heavy and had stayed closed, and they didn't have to slaughter the teenagers, the young green warriors, too. and many, many people who were infected with the parasite, lost control of themselves. lost all ability to resist.
but she didn't exactly feel bad about these things. it wasn't what the nightsong was. it wasn't a helpless prisoner. these were people who wanted her dead, and she needed to live.
that's why it hurts, to see herself on the other end. a person who wanted him dead, for reasons he doesn't know or understand, and moved first.
but she made her decision. she will grant him mercy, at least. she will twist the spear, pull it out and stab again, make sure his death is a quick one.]
[It is the merciful thing. Claude would have spent ages on the floor, crawling to a phone perhaps and gasping to a 911 operator. He would have waited longer than he thought for an ambulance. The attendant tonight has a funny feeling that she doesn't need to answer much for calls, and maybe it's time to catch up on her book? Or so a little voice tells her. The police are going to be busy, and the ambulance can stay parked for the night.
Instead he falls, knees slamming hard onto a close-cropped carpet, hands dragging over her spear. He curls up like an infant, blinking fast, and simply finishes moving. Blood pools, thick and hot, soaking into the hallway carpet in a shape that is, in a nearly comedic irony, a little like the shape of Faerghus.
[once he's dead, she'll move him. remove the spear, lie him out, close his eyes. she's sorry, sad for him even, but not regretful. there's some part of her that just feels like this was a complicated thing, a thing that she hates, but it had to happen.
she will go upstairs next. 217. but she's a little more unsettled now. this isn't exactly what she thought she was getting herself into, and she wishes karlach had warned her, or come with her. she wishes she didn't have to do this by herself.]
[he opens the door to see a woman holding a spear that is covered in blood so how's that hangover treating him.
this one is familiar, too. that happening once, thinking she feels some sort of connection with the man on the first floor, is disconcerting enough, but now that it has happened twice, she feels her sense of reality starting to cave in around her. the fog her mind is in wants to tell her that something is wrong, this isn't adding up.
but she has a long life practiced at avoiding those moments. she was almost specifically trained for it. this is not the first time she has looked at the face of a person she was told to hurt and thought, no, I know you, don't you? I care about you, don't I? it happened to her again and again, punished every time she hesitated, her mind reset until those moments of familiarity were so tied with the other general confusion, until she stopped hesitating and just did as she was told.
but this can't be the same thing. she's been trying to get away from the person the sharrans forced her to become for so long. she wouldn't have listened. but she can trust karlach.
If he had seen the damn spear from the peephole, you bet your ass he wouldn't have opened the door. Wouldn't matter how pretty she is or how stunned she looks. Richie's brow furrows as she catches on her words, eyes flicking down.
And then snapping wide, shoulders hitching up. He backs out of the entry at once, both hands up and mouth dropped open.]
Look — look just hold on now, I don't...
[He's not sure what to do. He'd been suspecting something might happen, one of the usual spooks. Moving pictures, monsters under your bed. Maybe a police officer with strangely glassy eyes, coming to inspect a bogus claim and getting a "funny feeling" he ought to shoot first, ask questions later. That's the Derry way.
What he couldn't have expected is a woman whose face turns a slow rotation in his mind's eye, who comes armed with a fucking spear of all things, and one that's gotten a warm up in at that.
What he doesn't expect is her. It clicks. Half gasp and half declaration, he blurts it out.]
[her mouth is still dry. that's right. she recognizes him from back then, doesn't she? that's what it is. that time she lived in a town and died and then came back to life as an adult but also elves and magic turned out to be real. that makes a lot more sense of things.
her hand holding the spear trembles, but - ]
I didn't expect you here. I'm - there's something very wrong happening, once again.
[it's happening again, but is it happening to her? or to him?]
[i relate to richie's shock at seeing a girl he knew from childhood die and come back to life years later as a fantasy elf but she is not appreciating the energy he's bringing to this mental breakdown she's having.]
You're right that I died. [but she came back as an elf and has all of these other additional memories, what part of this is hard to understand.] You ought to know. You knew what took Bax and you didn't say anything about it, did you?
That stumps him. You couldn't make it up if you tried, folks. Richie's brain is firing on all circuits but with a 53% success rate. Struggling to catch up to the logistics here. If she's not It, then how is she here?
How is she accosting him for a thing that made him sick, that cast a bitter cloud over the weeks to come? Even when they finally went down and took it on, beat it back for the first time in It's entire existence, there wasn't much to celebrate?
It'd been bad enough thinking about Georgie. For all seven of them to spend the whole day hunting and start to panic, realize too late what had happened and why — Beverly had burst into tears when Mike pulled up the shoe two days later. When they all piled in and followed the path that Del and Andy and Jen might have taken, but they'd never know. It wasn't their bodies they found down there.
Richie's face falls. He looks like he could wither. He looks like he could die. His mouth, so adept at flapping ad nauseum, can only drop one mournful, shameful vowel.]
[his reaction instantly makes her regret being cruel only for the sake of it.
but also who the fuck is she right now. who is he. this mess of pieces she was put back together with, all of these fragments of memory that don't fit at all, harder to reconcile into a single person than even her prior absence was.
is she that young girl, the one who faced down a monster alone in the sewers? if so, she has no reason to feel anger at him. isn't this what she wanted, for someone to at least fucking care what happened to her? and she can tell by the way he looks at her, by the way he says that name, that he did. he cared, all this time. all she ever wanted was to know that someone had missed her, someone was out there looking for her.
but her name isn't jen. oh, if she starts to think about it, if she starts to think about which name is hers, that doesn't lead to anywhere good. someone saying that name to her, in sorrow, in regret, while she looks down at them like an insect she means to pry the legs off of and peel open, wondering who they mean, who the person is who made them feel such things. no, no, no, no. it's almost an instinct in her by this point, trained into her like a dog with a shock collar, and even though the expected pain in the old wound does not come, she knows. when they start saying that, when the nameless faceless things she's meant to hurt start saying that name, she has to stop it in its tracks before it hurts too much, before it opens knowledge in her that she would rather do without.
she wants to know whether he looked for her, whether he thought of her, whether, when she didn't return to the diner, he was scared for her.
she also doesn't want to know any of this.
she holds her spear, and she doesn't look at him, and she tries to remember who she is and why she's here.]
[He stands uncertainly, miserably as she haunts his doorway and makes no further moves. The expression on her face is hard to untangle. He's having a hard enough time grappling with her face, period, much less what she might be wrestling through behind it. But he's feeling a high twist in his guts, and his feet push forward, almost as if of their own accord.
If he were watching the movie of his life right now, he'd join the audience heckling him for being so plum stupid. It's different when you're standing in the thick of it, and you want to understand, and you'd been a bit sweet on the mean girl with the dark hair in buns, and the first time she ever asked you for help was the last time you ever saw her.
On a day where he's been made to recall every detail of the summer of '58, with life or death urgency, he's placing a great deal of importance on any part of his childhood he finds.
Richie moves towards her, reaching for her shoulder. Look at me, girl.]
[she's gone somewhere dark, far away. which dark place is unclear, there's more than one now. trying to fit the pieces together, trying to make it make sense, but not too much sense, because some of those pieces fit together in a very nasty way. and some are the complete opposite. if she can't trust in herself, then trust in one of her friends, but which one?
she doesn't think she wants to hurt him after all, but then he reaches for her suddenly and she will slash blindly. maybe not enough to kill him or even grievously wound him, but maybe it is.]
[Yeah. Dumb move. Boo the screen and throw your popcorn, he's the world's worst written smartmouth sidekick.
The spear catches him high. It wouldn't have caught his neck if he hadn't leaned a little forward, but that's curiousity for you. It'll kill bone-headed men as quick as it'll kill a cat.
His neck looses a bright red spray, painting her across the face as he stumbles back. His glasses slip off and skitter on the floor, as his feet keep tripping back into the chest of drawers propping up the boxy television set. He droops against it, one hand to his neck and the other failing to find anything to hold onto. Blinded. Shocked. Losing blood too fast to count for.
It'll take a while to fully bleed out, but there's no fixing the damage. Richie sits hard on the carpet, propped against the stained wood as his unseeing eyes blink at the shape in his doorway.
Why?
Why this? Why now?
His head lolls forward after a time. His eyes never quite close.]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
holyspirits) wrote2025-03-09 04:46 pm
no subject
Can't help that you're so good at it, Fringe. [Karlach grins, bright as the sun. The moon. She gestures to the entrance and her engine revs again. This time there's a smell to go with it, a fresh singe on old meat. Some of the skin showing through her top blackens.]
See you 'round after, all right? We'll both be quick.
no subject
she pushes that thought away, something too sad in it.]
You're not coming with me?
[she'll do it alone, though she's not sure why.]
no subject
no subject
she doesn't have to think too hard about it.]
I'll see you soon.
[well, time to go kill some people! she will try to creep her way over there, staying in the shadows, the way she was taught.]
no subject
[And so Shadowheart enters the inn. Unseen and in silence, expertly committed. No footfall creaks in the halls or on the stairs as she stalks her way through.
Which room will she go to first?]
no subject
no subject
Eventually, the door opens. The man's brows pop high as he surveys his late night visitor.]
no subject
...though she isn't tranquil, just in this odd, muted state, where she can't quite connect the dots she should be connecting to feel suspicious of all of this. she does feel that he's familiar, somehow. that's not an unfamiliar sensation to her, though always a disquieting one. maybe there's something about him that she finds a little sweet and funny, despite herself. the way he acts jaded and then feels so badly if he ever crosses a line, such a familiar trait.
she isn't going to relish killing him, but that doesn't mean there aren't reasons. sometimes, not everyone can be saved. she's never been good at trusting her own judgment on these things, on right and wrong, but that's why she's learned to lean on her friends. learned to let them guide her, help her find her way.]
No, no. Turn down service. There will be a mint on the pillow for you at the end of this, if you're good.
[...]
No, I do feel badly about this. Sorry.
[but you have to do what you have to do. she will just ram that spear through his gut.]
no subject
The guy makes a face of intrigue at the promise of a "mint" on the pillow for good behaviour.]
Oh? That's really forward of you. Who said I was...
[He trails off, eyes caught on the strange weapon in her hand.
The pupils turn to pinpricks. Her apology has him seizing up, realizing a second too late what's really happening. He starts to move back.
She catches him through the gut anyway. His feet lift a little off the floor and he folds forward with a low gulp, hands clutching around the bare length of the spear. He raises his head, paling fast as he looks her in the eyes.
Then he goes slack. Dying, not dead yet but dead soon. Still impaled.]
no subject
but she didn't exactly feel bad about these things. it wasn't what the nightsong was. it wasn't a helpless prisoner. these were people who wanted her dead, and she needed to live.
that's why it hurts, to see herself on the other end. a person who wanted him dead, for reasons he doesn't know or understand, and moved first.
but she made her decision. she will grant him mercy, at least. she will twist the spear, pull it out and stab again, make sure his death is a quick one.]
no subject
Instead he falls, knees slamming hard onto a close-cropped carpet, hands dragging over her spear. He curls up like an infant, blinking fast, and simply finishes moving. Blood pools, thick and hot, soaking into the hallway carpet in a shape that is, in a nearly comedic irony, a little like the shape of Faerghus.
Not that either of them would know that, here.
Where to next?]
no subject
she will go upstairs next. 217. but she's a little more unsettled now. this isn't exactly what she thought she was getting herself into, and she wishes karlach had warned her, or come with her. she wishes she didn't have to do this by herself.]
no subject
Who is it?
[Male, a touch annoyed.]
no subject
no subject
Then it opens, and man in glasses and a t-shirt and flannel pant combo squints at his early morning visitor.]
no subject
this one is familiar, too. that happening once, thinking she feels some sort of connection with the man on the first floor, is disconcerting enough, but now that it has happened twice, she feels her sense of reality starting to cave in around her. the fog her mind is in wants to tell her that something is wrong, this isn't adding up.
but she has a long life practiced at avoiding those moments. she was almost specifically trained for it. this is not the first time she has looked at the face of a person she was told to hurt and thought, no, I know you, don't you? I care about you, don't I? it happened to her again and again, punished every time she hesitated, her mind reset until those moments of familiarity were so tied with the other general confusion, until she stopped hesitating and just did as she was told.
but this can't be the same thing. she's been trying to get away from the person the sharrans forced her to become for so long. she wouldn't have listened. but she can trust karlach.
her throat feels very dry.]
I'm.
no subject
If he had seen the damn spear from the peephole, you bet your ass he wouldn't have opened the door. Wouldn't matter how pretty she is or how stunned she looks. Richie's brow furrows as she catches on her words, eyes flicking down.
And then snapping wide, shoulders hitching up. He backs out of the entry at once, both hands up and mouth dropped open.]
Look — look just hold on now, I don't...
[He's not sure what to do. He'd been suspecting something might happen, one of the usual spooks. Moving pictures, monsters under your bed. Maybe a police officer with strangely glassy eyes, coming to inspect a bogus claim and getting a "funny feeling" he ought to shoot first, ask questions later. That's the Derry way.
What he couldn't have expected is a woman whose face turns a slow rotation in his mind's eye, who comes armed with a fucking spear of all things, and one that's gotten a warm up in at that.
What he doesn't expect is her. It clicks. Half gasp and half declaration, he blurts it out.]
Jen Hallow?
no subject
[her mouth is still dry. that's right. she recognizes him from back then, doesn't she? that's what it is. that time she lived in a town and died and then came back to life as an adult but also elves and magic turned out to be real. that makes a lot more sense of things.
her hand holding the spear trembles, but - ]
I didn't expect you here. I'm - there's something very wrong happening, once again.
[it's happening again, but is it happening to her? or to him?]
no subject
[Said incredulously, almost a little offended.]
What gave it away? You're dead. You died twenty-seven years ago. Where'd you get that pig-sticker? Was Macy's having a sale on barbecue gear?
no subject
You're right that I died. [but she came back as an elf and has all of these other additional memories, what part of this is hard to understand.] You ought to know. You knew what took Bax and you didn't say anything about it, did you?
no subject
That stumps him. You couldn't make it up if you tried, folks. Richie's brain is firing on all circuits but with a 53% success rate. Struggling to catch up to the logistics here. If she's not It, then how is she here?
How is she accosting him for a thing that made him sick, that cast a bitter cloud over the weeks to come? Even when they finally went down and took it on, beat it back for the first time in It's entire existence, there wasn't much to celebrate?
It'd been bad enough thinking about Georgie. For all seven of them to spend the whole day hunting and start to panic, realize too late what had happened and why — Beverly had burst into tears when Mike pulled up the shoe two days later. When they all piled in and followed the path that Del and Andy and Jen might have taken, but they'd never know. It wasn't their bodies they found down there.
Richie's face falls. He looks like he could wither. He looks like he could die. His mouth, so adept at flapping ad nauseum, can only drop one mournful, shameful vowel.]
Jen...
no subject
but also who the fuck is she right now. who is he. this mess of pieces she was put back together with, all of these fragments of memory that don't fit at all, harder to reconcile into a single person than even her prior absence was.
is she that young girl, the one who faced down a monster alone in the sewers? if so, she has no reason to feel anger at him. isn't this what she wanted, for someone to at least fucking care what happened to her? and she can tell by the way he looks at her, by the way he says that name, that he did. he cared, all this time. all she ever wanted was to know that someone had missed her, someone was out there looking for her.
but her name isn't jen. oh, if she starts to think about it, if she starts to think about which name is hers, that doesn't lead to anywhere good. someone saying that name to her, in sorrow, in regret, while she looks down at them like an insect she means to pry the legs off of and peel open, wondering who they mean, who the person is who made them feel such things. no, no, no, no. it's almost an instinct in her by this point, trained into her like a dog with a shock collar, and even though the expected pain in the old wound does not come, she knows. when they start saying that, when the nameless faceless things she's meant to hurt start saying that name, she has to stop it in its tracks before it hurts too much, before it opens knowledge in her that she would rather do without.
she wants to know whether he looked for her, whether he thought of her, whether, when she didn't return to the diner, he was scared for her.
she also doesn't want to know any of this.
she holds her spear, and she doesn't look at him, and she tries to remember who she is and why she's here.]
no subject
If he were watching the movie of his life right now, he'd join the audience heckling him for being so plum stupid. It's different when you're standing in the thick of it, and you want to understand, and you'd been a bit sweet on the mean girl with the dark hair in buns, and the first time she ever asked you for help was the last time you ever saw her.
On a day where he's been made to recall every detail of the summer of '58, with life or death urgency, he's placing a great deal of importance on any part of his childhood he finds.
Richie moves towards her, reaching for her shoulder. Look at me, girl.]
Jen? What's going on?
no subject
she doesn't think she wants to hurt him after all, but then he reaches for her suddenly and she will slash blindly. maybe not enough to kill him or even grievously wound him, but maybe it is.]
no subject
The spear catches him high. It wouldn't have caught his neck if he hadn't leaned a little forward, but that's curiousity for you. It'll kill bone-headed men as quick as it'll kill a cat.
His neck looses a bright red spray, painting her across the face as he stumbles back. His glasses slip off and skitter on the floor, as his feet keep tripping back into the chest of drawers propping up the boxy television set. He droops against it, one hand to his neck and the other failing to find anything to hold onto. Blinded. Shocked. Losing blood too fast to count for.
It'll take a while to fully bleed out, but there's no fixing the damage. Richie sits hard on the carpet, propped against the stained wood as his unseeing eyes blink at the shape in his doorway.
Why?
Why this? Why now?
His head lolls forward after a time. His eyes never quite close.]
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)