time after time (incomplete)
Nov. 10th, 2022 12:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sidewaysTitle: Time After Time
Rating: M
Series: The Feasting Years
Wordcount: 1,040
Summary: The Brighthounds' vigilante war against the anti-saint movement goes badly.
Remarks: u.u
There is nothing elegant or precise or divine about the filing cabinet. It's just there, absurdly, like someone drop-kicked it out of the 90s to skid unevenly into the present. A shower of yellow cardboard and paper scatters across the floor when Penny heaves the drawer one-handed out of the frame.
Less weight makes it easier to bring it down again on the head of the man trying to kill her, at least, rusty metal biting painfully into the hinges of her fingers on every swing. Like a Neanderthal with a rock, down in the dirt with her primitive weapon, operating mostly on feel and desperate instinct - craning away from his rough grasping at her throat, breathless around his knee in her gut, her other hand shoved forcefully into a cheek bloodily furrowed in the fight to get his protecting helmet off. A fight she'd won, and she wins this one just the same, blindly battering again and again until the drawer loses its shape, crumpling around the contours of his skull, and the hands are limp and splayed on the floor.
She drops the drawer, gasping and coughing. Her gut hurts, her neck hurts, her hands hurt - she's crushed her own fingers under half the blows, knuckles cut and bleeding. She has to lean against the faintly shuddering chest beneath her to catch her breath; feels again, disbelievingly, the rigid carapace wrapped securely from his neck to his hips.
Body armour. Body armour and riot helmets and the kind of guns that tear a line across a room before you can blink.
Makes no sense. It's Morpheus. Shitty dumb bigots scrapping in fucking Croydon. It's a warehouse turned theatre turned a dozen wanky heritage projects more, finally subsiding into a labyrinth of decrepit information storage. The fucking army nesting in the centre is not meant to be the deal.
In fury and fright and more than a little unfairness, she thinks, 360 vision, Ruben, and you couldn't see THIS?
Gunfire thunders in the next room, and Penny flinches down, bangs her chin on the kevlar. In the airless beat of silence that follows someone screams, and the ache in her gut coalesces like a kidney stone, some part of her soul recognising the voice even though she's never heard any of her friends make a noise like that before.
She's up in the next moment, slipping on the quilt of papers and plastics she's layered across the ground. The door is still ajar from where she'd slammed through it, tangled limb-in-limb with the soldier, and she slithers for it, sets her hand on either side of the gap and pushes through without bothering to force it any wider.
(The error in her thoughts she catches only distantly, flagged for later examination. It'd never been soldiers, before.)
Penny lands low and balanced on the balls of her feet, hunched down in a spread stance against the threat of the next vicious raking of ammunition. Gratifyingly, it could have saved her life - someone in black towards the centre of the room spots her, pivots with gun aimed over her head - but the one shot he gets off cracks wildly upwards into the ceiling because in a surge of neon and cold rage Chroma sacks him from behind like she's trying out for the rugby championships. And maybe Morpheus regrets the choice of armour in the end, because it covers all the quick, soft targets, and there is nothing mercifully short or sharp about his shriek.
The swell of action has further uses in making it easier to spot the contrasting ebbs, and they're what concern Penny, these spaces between where the energy has grown stagnant; she banks held momentum as quickly as she can in the time she allows to figure out just where to go, leaning forward on her toes, fingertips spread against cold concrete.
Fisher is down on knees and elbows, spine cat-arched in obvious pain, face buried in bloody hands. Hard to tell how much of it's his own - armour means nothing at all to one of them at least, and scarce feet away from him a Morpheus woman is stumbling back, sagging against a desk with arms wrapped desperately around her middle, trying to hold together the separating pieces of her vest and maybe something more.
On the other side of the room Arthur is blanched against the wall, a colourless stripe of slack-mouthed, staring saint sat quietly in a seething sea of red and black and bright. One hand clutches at his side, an obscene bloom of colour oozing between corpse-pale fingers, and this time there's no mistaking whose it is. Guilt punches in hilt-deep. Fuck but she'll owe him - doesn't matter that she'd been right in her wheedling, that they'd all be down and bleeding without that first velocity-killing burst of fog - but, just, shit. It has to be Arthur.
Except Rube's already on it, thank you, thank you - the punch he throws is wide and sloppy in its haste, but his target snaps back doubled over the blow, careening into another black-clad figure and stalling their advance. He steps into the space as smoothly as she could, broad shoulders set and squared, as good cover as could be hoped for. She's willing to retract all previous grievances and kiss him on his stupid mouth to boot.
Ruben turns his head back towards Arthur, lips moving - some reassurance no doubt, but she'll never know for sure, because in that moment the frustrated Morpheus soldier shoves away her retching comrade, squares up and braces her heavy black gun against her shoulder and puts two bullets into the back of Ruben's head.
Ridiculous. Ruben eats bullets - for dinner, trading the kids tricks for broccoli on Fish's gleeful goading. Sticks the empty shells between his molars and compresses, jaw creaking, until he can spit out the flat circle to hold up solemnly for review. Their sword and their shield, those two, undefeatable, and Ruben isn't folding himself small because he doesn't need to.
Ruben jerks and drops heavily. Doesn't even bounce. A lead bird from the nest, twisted just enough to turn his face to the room - a face bulging and misshapen, because his undefeatable skull has finally caught the bullets on the other side, thunk-thunk.
Rating: M
Series: The Feasting Years
Wordcount: 1,040
Summary: The Brighthounds' vigilante war against the anti-saint movement goes badly.
Remarks: u.u
There is nothing elegant or precise or divine about the filing cabinet. It's just there, absurdly, like someone drop-kicked it out of the 90s to skid unevenly into the present. A shower of yellow cardboard and paper scatters across the floor when Penny heaves the drawer one-handed out of the frame.
Less weight makes it easier to bring it down again on the head of the man trying to kill her, at least, rusty metal biting painfully into the hinges of her fingers on every swing. Like a Neanderthal with a rock, down in the dirt with her primitive weapon, operating mostly on feel and desperate instinct - craning away from his rough grasping at her throat, breathless around his knee in her gut, her other hand shoved forcefully into a cheek bloodily furrowed in the fight to get his protecting helmet off. A fight she'd won, and she wins this one just the same, blindly battering again and again until the drawer loses its shape, crumpling around the contours of his skull, and the hands are limp and splayed on the floor.
She drops the drawer, gasping and coughing. Her gut hurts, her neck hurts, her hands hurt - she's crushed her own fingers under half the blows, knuckles cut and bleeding. She has to lean against the faintly shuddering chest beneath her to catch her breath; feels again, disbelievingly, the rigid carapace wrapped securely from his neck to his hips.
Body armour. Body armour and riot helmets and the kind of guns that tear a line across a room before you can blink.
Makes no sense. It's Morpheus. Shitty dumb bigots scrapping in fucking Croydon. It's a warehouse turned theatre turned a dozen wanky heritage projects more, finally subsiding into a labyrinth of decrepit information storage. The fucking army nesting in the centre is not meant to be the deal.
In fury and fright and more than a little unfairness, she thinks, 360 vision, Ruben, and you couldn't see THIS?
Gunfire thunders in the next room, and Penny flinches down, bangs her chin on the kevlar. In the airless beat of silence that follows someone screams, and the ache in her gut coalesces like a kidney stone, some part of her soul recognising the voice even though she's never heard any of her friends make a noise like that before.
She's up in the next moment, slipping on the quilt of papers and plastics she's layered across the ground. The door is still ajar from where she'd slammed through it, tangled limb-in-limb with the soldier, and she slithers for it, sets her hand on either side of the gap and pushes through without bothering to force it any wider.
(The error in her thoughts she catches only distantly, flagged for later examination. It'd never been soldiers, before.)
Penny lands low and balanced on the balls of her feet, hunched down in a spread stance against the threat of the next vicious raking of ammunition. Gratifyingly, it could have saved her life - someone in black towards the centre of the room spots her, pivots with gun aimed over her head - but the one shot he gets off cracks wildly upwards into the ceiling because in a surge of neon and cold rage Chroma sacks him from behind like she's trying out for the rugby championships. And maybe Morpheus regrets the choice of armour in the end, because it covers all the quick, soft targets, and there is nothing mercifully short or sharp about his shriek.
The swell of action has further uses in making it easier to spot the contrasting ebbs, and they're what concern Penny, these spaces between where the energy has grown stagnant; she banks held momentum as quickly as she can in the time she allows to figure out just where to go, leaning forward on her toes, fingertips spread against cold concrete.
Fisher is down on knees and elbows, spine cat-arched in obvious pain, face buried in bloody hands. Hard to tell how much of it's his own - armour means nothing at all to one of them at least, and scarce feet away from him a Morpheus woman is stumbling back, sagging against a desk with arms wrapped desperately around her middle, trying to hold together the separating pieces of her vest and maybe something more.
On the other side of the room Arthur is blanched against the wall, a colourless stripe of slack-mouthed, staring saint sat quietly in a seething sea of red and black and bright. One hand clutches at his side, an obscene bloom of colour oozing between corpse-pale fingers, and this time there's no mistaking whose it is. Guilt punches in hilt-deep. Fuck but she'll owe him - doesn't matter that she'd been right in her wheedling, that they'd all be down and bleeding without that first velocity-killing burst of fog - but, just, shit. It has to be Arthur.
Except Rube's already on it, thank you, thank you - the punch he throws is wide and sloppy in its haste, but his target snaps back doubled over the blow, careening into another black-clad figure and stalling their advance. He steps into the space as smoothly as she could, broad shoulders set and squared, as good cover as could be hoped for. She's willing to retract all previous grievances and kiss him on his stupid mouth to boot.
Ruben turns his head back towards Arthur, lips moving - some reassurance no doubt, but she'll never know for sure, because in that moment the frustrated Morpheus soldier shoves away her retching comrade, squares up and braces her heavy black gun against her shoulder and puts two bullets into the back of Ruben's head.
Ridiculous. Ruben eats bullets - for dinner, trading the kids tricks for broccoli on Fish's gleeful goading. Sticks the empty shells between his molars and compresses, jaw creaking, until he can spit out the flat circle to hold up solemnly for review. Their sword and their shield, those two, undefeatable, and Ruben isn't folding himself small because he doesn't need to.
Ruben jerks and drops heavily. Doesn't even bounce. A lead bird from the nest, twisted just enough to turn his face to the room - a face bulging and misshapen, because his undefeatable skull has finally caught the bullets on the other side, thunk-thunk.
