ChasNicollette
Allons-y Means Let's Go.
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The Last Daughter of Krypton OOC
- Thread starter TearsoftheWorld
- Start date
ChasNicollette
Allons-y Means Let's Go.
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:: cuddles ohhhhsohappily :: You better believe it.
TearsoftheWorld
Radical Dreamer
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*places a few soft kisses along your neck*
I do so believe.
I do so believe.
Abraxas Winterlight
Slacktastic
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he hasn't called in a while
like he dropped off the face of the earth.........
(been trying to get that scene out, but I needed Rose moved forward a bit before I could & needed to turn off WoW for a bit & frikin concentrate!)
ChasNicollette
Allons-y Means Let's Go.
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he hasn't called in a while
like he dropped off the face of the earth.........
(been trying to get that scene out, but I needed Rose moved forward a bit before I could & needed to turn off WoW for a bit & frikin concentrate!)
That place on The Riverwalk sounds loverly. Much nicer than that Italian place behind Fordman's.
Abraxas Winterlight
Slacktastic
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depending on the time of year you go the Riverwalk is georgous!
but even in late Sept its nice
but even in late Sept its nice
Abraxas Winterlight
Slacktastic
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they are gonna change the sign coming into town from "home of the Fighting Crows" to "Home of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"
ChasNicollette
Allons-y Means Let's Go.
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D'you think I should go ahead and post that deleted scene I showed you awhile back?
:: ponders ::
Rose's "first" visit to The Riverwalk?
ChasNicollette
Allons-y Means Let's Go.
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Abraxas Winterlight
Slacktastic
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Hell yes!!! it was covered in awesomness!!!!!!!!!
ChasNicollette
Allons-y Means Let's Go.
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Abraxas Winterlight
Slacktastic
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you are most welcome my dear
ChasNicollette
Allons-y Means Let's Go.
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LDoK- DVD Extras: DELETED SCENE (now, w/ intro!)
OOC: I um, wrote this back in April. (I think it was April.)
And it was supposed to be a summation of Rose's first weekend in the thread. Her going to Texas for Chloe to verify and investigate the stuff from Kyle's file. Chase down some leads, tie up some loose ends. This was Chloe's idea for Rose to make herself "useful."
There are a number of elements here that have already cropped up organically in the thread, far earlier than I expected. So there might be a little deja vu. And there's already stuff that's been contradicted, so there might be a little continuity dissonance.
But I spent a lot of time on this ( :: she admits, sheepishly :: ) and there's some dialogue in there I just can't ignore.
(I am especially proud, perhaps unreasonably, of Rose's comeback line to The Infamous Recurring Question. You'll know it when you see it.)
Anyway. This is either a good read or the world's silliest fanwank, but either way I hope y'all don't hate it.
Love y'all.
IC:
-------
Saturday Afternoon.
Smallville, Kansas.
Awkward silence reigned.
Jamie sat at the kitchen table with a stack of job rejection letters. Overqualified for this, overqualified for that.
Overqualified to work at Fordman's. Overqualified to work at Mrs. Greer's antique shop.
Jamie had a throbbing headache, and he rubbed his temples. It sounded like drums...
Ceri stood at the sink, arms deep in soapy froth and dirty dishes, trying to keep her lip buttoned. Jamie's anguish and feelings of inadequacy were obvious in every inch of his bony body, and she couldn't risk adding to it.
They'd just come home from checking Jamie's P.O. box, and they'd found it full of those things. The ride home had been brittle agony, and she'd wanted desperately some noise to muffle the silence.
Which she was getting now from the clatter-clink of the dishes in the sink.
(She hadn't even bothered to take her big stompy high-heeled boots off; she'd just gone for the sink like her life had depended on it.)
At least he'd been trying. That was a positive, in the face of such negative.
Ceri pulled the stopper out of the sink and watched the water drain.
As the water slowed and quieted, Ceri raised her eyes to gaze out into the backyard through the window over the sink, and she thought she saw, by the door to the old storm cellar, a shadow take flight and dart away.
She paused.
Warning crawled through her blood. It moved slowly, as it had been quite awhile since she had felt something this... palpable... an awareness of danger this acute... she was rusty, and the sense of warning was like molasses where it should have been like quicksilver.
Her mother sense was tingling.
Ceri narrowed her eyes. She reached into the sink and tightly gripped a carving knife by the handle, without lifting it out of the sink and into view.
Jamie straightened slightly.
He frowned, nostrils flaring as he sniffed the air.
"D'you smell that?" he wondered, glancing over his shoulder at Ceri, absent-minded as usual. "Smells like. China. Blue flowers. Dunno which species... smelled that once before. Makes me skin crawl. Didn't your sister--?"
The sliding glass doors out to the rundown old back deck shattered inward into a thousand thousand jagged shards, and at the same instant Ceri whirled, she whirled and threw...
...the knife spun end-over-end-over-end...
The knife hit the wall and stuck, quivering.
By Jamie's white-knuckled hand on the table, a damaged shuriken sat shuddering, buried in the wood.
(Ceri's thrown knife had deflected it in mid-flight, saving Jamie's life.)
Jamie's big brown eyes grew bigger by far, disbelief, incredulity, What The Hell. "Bloody strewth--!"
Ceri didn't hesitate, she dove, rolling over the counter, landing beside Jamie's chair in a crouch...
Down there on the floor, she swept her leg around tight, knocking Jamie's chair out from under him and dumping him onto his back on the floor--
--just as five more shuriken flashed through the air where he had been a split-second previously, thudding into the wall across from the shattered sliding doors, right by the archway that led into the living room.
Jamie cried out as he hit the ground, his face twisted in bewilderment and fury.
"Agh!" he grunted, twisted to look at Ceri. "Who--?"
"Friends of Claire's," Ceri hissed, "I shouldn't wonder."
Metal clinked elsewhere in the bottom floor of the house, here and there and in corners and in alcoves, and clouds of smoke began cropping up wherever that metal clinked.
Here and there and everywhere.
Ceri grabbed Jamie by the front of his suit coat and dragged him up with her as she shot to her feet.
Her eyes were hard. Hard like stone.
Her frame was taut, lithe, her jaw grim.
"I need me wedding present," she declared, rapid-fire. "The one your brother gave me. It's in the cupboard under the stairs."
Jamie blinked warily, as the smoke clouds began to coalesce into men. "Right. Wedding present. Perfect time for nostalgia."
"Fetch it for me," Ceri growled, whirling away from Jamie, "I'll hold 'em off!"
The clouds of smoke became men dressed in darkness wielding weapons of silvery steel.
Jamie dove for the hallway to the front stairs, cursing bitterly, and one of the men dove for Jamie with a sword raised high... a ninja-to...
Ceri swept in like raven-haired Death and her boot swung up and high in an arc like a sledgehammer pounding steel. Her boot crashed into the man's face and he crumpled, his face half-caved.
"Go, James!" Ceri crowed, fists up in front of her as the dark-clad men switched priorities. The woman was the threat, not the man of the house.
That seemed to surprise them.
"Bloody chauvinists," she grimaced.
Jamie landed on his knees in the hallway and slid along the hardwood, halting his slide by grabbing the doorknob for the cupboard under the stairs...
It was locked.
"Tupping Liberty!" he snarled.
A cloud of smoke brooshed into place beside him, parting and becoming a man with ornate knives in hand...
...time slowed...
...Jamie's snarl turned into a mask of bitter disappointment...
Ceri's boot flashed over Jamie's crouching head and snapped into the masked man's jaw, fracturing it in multiple places and sending the shinobi's insensate form skidding.
"Wedding present!" she barked, whirling back to face the way she'd come.
Ninja poured into the hallway after her, bottlenecking but still insistently clamouring for her blood.
"Yes, of course," Jamie promised sarcastically at the top of his lungs, "wedding present! I don't have a blasted automatic lock opener, just give us a bloody minute!"
Ceri moved like a creature possessed, her fists and feet quadruplet blurs, switching from Xingyiquan to Tae Kwon Do to Keysi and back again, bones breaking everywhere she went. (Still they came. They were legion.)
"Give yeh a minute?" she demanded, seething, "Temple and Arch, James, what d'yeh think I'm bloody doing?"
"Right, right," Jamie nodded, rolling his eyes, "sorry!"
"Just like old times, ennit?" Ceri muttered, as she blew out one man's knee with a kick and backhanded another fellow sideways, causing his wakizashi to go spinning away.
Ceri had to give ground. One yard. Two.
There were so many of them.
Closer to Jamie. Any second now, one of them would get smart and go 'round the other way and then she'd be fighting them from two directions at once...
She needed a real advantage. Weapons littered the floor, but then she'd be using the same things they were and that really didn't confer an advantage, did it?
She needed Emil's present.
Jamie caught up the wakizashi and, holding it aloft, hammered its hilt down on the doorknob once, twice, three times. With a crack, the metal and wood gave way, and Jamie exulted with delight as he tore the door open and dove into the first box he saw.
Another exultant cry.
"Eureka!" he declared, holding aloft a small metal case. Very small.
For the life of him, he couldn't remember what Emil had given Ceri.
Rubbish at weddings, he chided himself distractedly, especially my own.
"Brilliant!" Ceri cried back at him, just as the pressure of the oncrushing ninja became just too much to bear...
She spun as katana and ninja-ken and ninja-to slashed down around her, she darted clear, grabbed Jamie by the wrist and hauled him with her, nearly dislocating his shoulder but getting him to move his silly arse as she ran for the living room.
Dutifully, Jamie followed, shuriken and throwing knives and poison darts spinning around them...
They found more ninja already waiting for them in the living room. And the ninja from the hallway followed them, enclosing them, encircling them.
They stood back to back in the middle of the living room.
Jamie shoved the metal case into Ceri's hand.
A moment later, the case clunked, empty, to the floor between Ceri's booted feet.
Ceri held a pair of scissors in each hand. Long and wicked-looking. Professional hair-cutting scissors.
"Anticlimactic," Jamie opined.
"Shut up," Ceri fired back. "Just you wait."
Light glinted and flashed from the scissors as she twirled them over her fingers. They twirled like gunslingers' pistols, they twirled like butterfly knives, dicing the air with whispering whicker-slashes.
A ninja sneered, and made for Ceri with his too-large ninja-ken screaming inward for her throat.
Ceri moved. Moved too fast to follow, far, far too fast to parry or dodge...
One hand moved at the sword. The other moved at the ninja.
The blade of the ninja-ken toppled away, lopped off at the hilt, and the ninja himself reeled, bellowing, from a massive gash across the chest.
Ceri's boot flashed up and crashed down and bludgeoned the killer to the floor.
Her scissors twirled on her fingers. "Titanium," she explained coolly, "coated in Lubrilon."
Jamie stared at the severed blade in shock, as did many of the ninja.
"Smart man, my brother," Jamie noted. "He should get a prize."
The crowd of ninja grumbled, and began moving inward once more. They liked this not at all.
"Pull up yehr socks, James," Ceri ordered, and, obediently, Jamie hit the floor, stayed as low as he could.
Ceri extended her arms to both sides, shears gleaming as she held one in each hand, pointing them like daggers. Her head darted left, right, her eyes impossibly awake in their sockets.
"Hir yw pob ymaros," she murmured, tightly. "C'mon, you lot. Dun waste me time."
The ninja roared in at her like a wave.
She whirled like a bladed dervish, teeth gritted, eyes dark with fire, and she drove them back, over and over again.
Weapons sundered and men bled.
Carotid arteries, jugular veins, wrists and arms and stomachs and legs...
She flashed and flickered and rose and fell and wove and slithered and kicked and stabbed and kicked and stabbed and cut and cut and cut.
One ninja wheezed as both his lungs were punctured.
Another died twitching, gurgling, as Ceri's heel drove the bones of the bridge of his nose into his waiting brain.
Another lamented his missing hand even as her next slice practically took his head off.
Jamie huddled on the floor, unable to do more than watch in mingled admiration and revulsion. He wanted to help he wanted to help he wanted to not be bloody useless but Lord would he ever only just be in the way...
She was beautiful, she was. A beautiful machine.
(She was protecting him...)
And then Time seemed to skip a beat, and the last of them fell to the floor, the last of the fierce deadly men in black, and Ceri stood there over him, panting. She bled from half-a-dozen cuts, shallow but lengthy.
Hard and soft all at the same time. Zen.
"'I only know a snowflake cannot exist in a storm of fire,'" Ceri murmured.
She bowed to the fallen.
She straightened, and took a deep breath.
Jamie stood, shakily, eyes ginormous in his head.
"Is it over?" he whispered. "It isn't, is it?"
Ceri shook her head quietly.
And that was when the men in red walked in. They came in through the front door, and stood at the front end of the living room.
Four ninja in red, normal-sized, two on each side of a fifth ninja in red... who stood eight feet tall, broad as a barn door, with hands more like ursine paws than anything human.
"It's not over," Ceri murmured.
The honour guard flanked the red mountain of a man, and they said nothing.
The red mountain cracked his knuckles. He carried no weapons. He didn't need them.
"I am Akaiyama," he intoned, a voice like stone shattering stone.
Ceri arched an eyebrow. "The League still hiring out the hard stuff to second-rate thugs, is it?"
"All are second-rate," Akaiyama growled, "save I."
"Good to know," Jamie nodded, hardly in a position to argue the point.
"I will give you each one boon," Akaiyama suggested, "as is my custom with those who have fought well. Within reason, of course."
Ceri didn't hesitate: "I get to go first."
Akaiyama inclined his head, and gestured magnanimously--
And Ceri blurred across the space between himself and her like an electrical arc, scissors streaking silversteel and flashing across, down, across...
She gave him The Mark of Zorro, expecting blood to fly.
Blood did not fly.
Sparks flew.
Ceri blinked. She stared at the slash marks on his chest... the cloth of his uniform was cleanly cut, but his skin remained unscathed. Which wasn't bloody possible.
Akaiyama's fist cracked into Ceri's jaw and sent her reeling.
Her head swam and drowned; she barely stayed conscious as she staggered back into Jamie's catching arms.
She hadn't been--
She hadn't been hit that hard since--
...she'd never been hit that hard.
Ceri sagged in Jamie's arms and he could barely support her. She dropped her scissors to the floor.
He managed to stay calm. (He wasn't sure how this was possible. Courage had never been his strong suit. But here he was, calm as ever.)
His mind was racing: he was thinking.
"Well," he commented. "That's disheartening."
"My skin is treated with chemicals that make it impossible to cut," Akaiyama explained, helpfully. "And my bones are laced with an alloy of the indestructible depleted Promethium."
"Not a bad set of optional extras," Jamie acknowledged, as Ceri stubbornly tried to stand on her own. "Where'd you get a thing like that? 'Made in Japan?'"
Akaiyama grimaced. "Santa Prisca."
"Ohhh," Jamie nodded, as if this were a revelation. "Santa Prisca! (I might've known.)"
Akaiyama seemed to arch an eyebrow beneath his ninja hood. "Your boon?" he asked, not impatiently.
Ceri leaned heavily on Jamie, managing, however, to get her booted feet under herself.
Jamie put his hands in his pockets and mused, unafraid: "No, no, that was it, I think. The Santa Prisca thing. Little bit of knowledge to tide me over."
"Very well," Akaiyama moved towards the two of them, raising his piledriver fist once more.
"Though, actually?" Jamie interrupted, holding up a finger, and Akaiyama paused, intrigued.
"Actually?" Jamie pondered. "On top of that, you kill me, you let the lady live, and you get away with your life."
Akaiyama arched both eyebrows. This actually seemed to give him pause.
"Second to last warning," Jamie cautioned, his eyes taking on an adamantine hardness that even Ceri hadn't yet matched.
Ceri took a deep breath.
She squeezed Jamie's shoulder. (She was okay.)
"That is not," Akaiyama ruled, "within reason."
"Right then," Jamie nodded.
And then clutched Ceri's hand in his. Wordless communication flowed between them like water along a vine.
And they ran not unlike the wind, sprinting towards the back of the house and the gaping jagged mess that was the sliding patio door...
Akaiyama roared, and he pounded after them, and his lieutenants followed as swift as crimson gales.
Jamie and Ceri sprinted across the deck and Ceri was quick as a flash and Jamie, somehow, impossibly, was as quick as Spring-Heeled Jack...
Adrenaline drove them like high-octane fuel, but Ceri had taken a terrible hit and one side of her face was starting to swell up and Jamie was trackstar-quick but these were assassins.
They made it to the middle of the yard before two of the lieutenants cut them off and they staggered to a halt.
The other two lieutenants blocked the way they'd come.
And Akaiyama stood, behemoth-massive, only two yards away.
The skies above were in torment, where only calm had reigned minutes before. They were raging, like a storm was coming. A tornado would not have been out of place.
There was a rumbling sound, a rumbling and a whistling.
It seemed that thunder was at play in the deeps of the sky.
Jamie panted, breathing hard, and he shook his head.
He held up that instructive, lecturing finger, and he turned to Akaiyama and grinned.
"You're my favourite, you are," he explained to the red mountain, apropos of nothing, "and d'you know why? Because you're so thick! You're Mister Thick-thick-thickety Thickface from Thicktown, Thickania."
He paused, and then added: "And so's your dad."
Akaiyama cracked his knuckles.
"You're so thick," Jamie continued, grinning that ingratiating/infuriating grin from ear to bloody ear, "you probably actually think you're going to get to kill us."
Akaiyama sneered. "No-one is coming to save you," he intoned as he reached out with that miles-long arm and grabbed Jamie by the front of his suit coat. "You are alone."
Jamie kept right on grinning.
Even when Ceri threw herself at the red mountain and he brushed her aside like a paper crane, ("Uuhf!") Jamie kept grinning. Puckish to the last.
He glanced skyward, ever-so-briefly.
"'These lines of lightning mean we're never alone,'" he declared.
Akaiyama clubbed Jamie with his forearm, and Jamie sprawled to the ground beside Ceri.
Jamie's head, too, swam and drowned...
But he stayed conscious. It seemed that he didn't know his own fortitude.
His lip was bleeding and he wiped it on the back of his sleeve as he gazed up at Akaiyama with a Look on his face. He was no longer grinning; he had a Look on his face.
A deadly Look. Ancient and Merciless.
High above, the clouds began to boil.
"Last warning," Jamie promised.
Saturday Morning.
San Antonio, Texas.
Rose awoke on the roof of The Hilton Palacio del Rio, and she was as stiff as blazes.
She groaned softly as she staggered to her feet.
Flying something like eight hundred miles in a night had been one thing; sleeping on a hotel roof had been another thing entirely. She had been so exhausted from the flight, she'd barely been able to stay aloft enough that she'd even reached that roof.
Rose stretched, and paced about a bit, rubbing herself down, dusting herself off.
The weather had been mild, thank God, and the city noises hadn't awoken her too much. For the most part, she'd slept like a rock.
The sun had risen, and the city was starting to awaken.
She retrieved the backpack Chloe had helped pack for her, and she stepped off the edge of the building, floating down to one of the balconies that lined the side of the building.
Cupping her hands around her face, she peered in through the sliding glass door until she was sure this was an unoccupied room. She then slid the door open and slithered inward.
She didn't waste any time; she showered quickly, brushed her teeth and her hair and changed her clothes. She had people to see today, and she couldn't show up looking like she'd flown eight hundred miles and slept on a roof.
As she exited the bathroom, though, she heard and saw the doorknob turning, heard laughter, and she dove for the balcony as though her sanity depended on it.
The room's newest occupants strolled in, a nice yuppie couple, and they were astonished to find that the floor was wet in the bathroom, the towels and shampoo and conditioner had been used, and the balcony was wide open to the San Antonio sky.
Rose was long gone.
After a few moments crouching on one of the sidewalks of the historic River Walk, composing herself, Rose decided to get down to it.
She could fly home tonight at this rate, she realised, and still have Sunday to recover.
First, navigating by the travel map included in her pack, she went to Kyle's old address.
She discovered, in a hurry, that she lacked both the intrepidity and the moral courage to approach the house. The place looked a little more like a fortress than a domicile, with fences and cameras and security guards at all points of the compass.
She held up one of the photos from the file folder, and found she could discern a little bit of where the old house remained within the new construction. Lots of renovations. Lots of renovations.
Rose pondered this for a long moment, long enough that one of the guards caught her staring and waved her away.
She nodded, glumly, and acquiesced. Hands in her jacket pockets, she walked off.
Can hardly blame them for being overly paranoid, she mused, after what happened to the family.
Still, she sighed, as she crossed the street and began to make her way to her next destination, it might have been interesting to see Kyle's old room. See what kind of boy he was before he became a Wraith.
She walked.
She tried not to think about what she'd have to do next.
She'd managed to avoid human interaction so far, but...
...but now, for the sake of journalism and The Truth, for Kyle's sake and Chloe's sake, she would have to turn in an Emmy-winning performance. If not Oscar-winning.
Rose stopped at a payphone, popped in some quarters, and dialed one of the numbers Chloe had scribbled in the blank pages of her father's Moleskine quotebook.
"May I please speak," she requested of the nice lady professional who picked up, "to Chief Medical Examiner Harold Godwinson?"
It turned out Godwinson was in meetings for most of the day at the Bexar County Courthouse, but Rose was able to catch him leaving the place for a lunch break.
"Excuse me," she called to him, jogging to catch up as he strolled briskly towards a hot dog stand across the street, "Doctor Godwinson?"
She recognised him from the portfolio of images Chloe had collated for her, though he was a bit rounder and greyer at present than he'd been in the older photos. He seemed tired, with dark rings below his faded green eyes.
Harold Godwinson was vaguely bulldog-shaped.
His silver-grey hair was close cropped, and his hairline was receding, and he was a little too large around the midsection for the grey suit and white button-down shirt he was wearing. He carried a briefcase and he had an as-yet unlit cigarette between his fingers.
He waited in line at the hot dog stand, seemingly lost in thought, and Rose reached up and gently tapped him on the shoulder.
Godwinson jumped like he'd been stung, and he whirled to face her with astonishment on his face.
Despite herself, Rose gasped too, and jumped a bit, staring at him with wide wide eyes.
Godwinson cleared his throat, and shook his head, and straightened his tie as he regained composure somewhat. The poor fellow seemed extremely high-strung, like a cat addicted to Ritalin.
"Can I help you, young miss?" he demanded, acting very much put-upon.
Biting down hard on her skyrocketing stage fright, Rose stuck her hand out like her dad always did, because Americans couldn't resist a handshake.
"Doctor Godwinson?" she smiled softly, trying again, hopefully placatingly. "I'm... I'm Wilhelmina Piper, from South San Antonio High? I was hoping I could interview you for an article intended for submission to my school's paper, The Blue Print."
Godwinson blinked. He made no effort to shake Rose's hand. "What sort of article?"
"An article discussing the effect," she explained, doing her best to describe the concept verbatim, exactly as Chloe had told her to say it, "of the various CSI television programmes on real-world law-enforcement and the judicial process."
Godwinson mulled this over, seemingly impressed. "That's an awfully big topic for a school newspaper, Wilhelmina."
"South San Bobcats rarely, if ever," Rose assured Godwinson, gamely smiling her best Chloe Sullivan smile, "shy away from a challenge."
Godwinson nodded. Nodded slowly, but surely.
"Very well then," Godwinson grunted, grudgingly intrigued. "I have a few minutes. Lunch?"
Godwinson bought Rose a hot dog, and they walked Main Plaza, pausing in front of San Fernando Cathedral. For lack of a better meeting ground, they sat there on the kerb to talk.
The old pathologist seemed intrigued by her little black lined notebook.
"Kids from Keystone get their own laptops now," he noted.
Rose stared at him blankly, pen motionless, eyes blue.
Harold grunted. "Keystone School? Private place, not so far from here? They issue kids laptops for the duration of their studies."
Rose blinked, and then chuckled. "Oh. Oh, geeze. I don't know where my brain is. I thought you meant. Different Keystone."
Godwinson's nostrils flared, and his faded sea-green eyes regarded Rose quietly. "Your brain's an awful long way from home, Wilhelmina, if you were thinking of Keystone up North."
Rose shook her head correctively. "Please. Call me 'Billie.' I don't think even my own mother calls me 'Wilhelmina.'"
And so it began.
Godwinson seemed uncomfortable, continually checking his watch, but he also seemed unwilling to embarrass himself before a burgeoning young member of the free press. They bandied back and forth for a few minutes, Rose asking him simple, direct questions about television-educated juries and micro-fibres and DNA tests and storytelling "time compression."
All the while, Rose took dutiful notes in her Moleskine.
Godwinson was actually quite eloquent once Rose got him going, recovering something of what Rose imagined must have been the vigour of his youth.
But before too long, before so much time had gone by that she lost her chance to enquire after her real purpose, Rose cleared her throat and interrupted him.
"And what, Doctor Godwinson," Rose asked, again careful to use the words that Chloe had recommended, "is your position on The Loch Ness Monster?"
"It's a fiction," Godwinson replied, a knee-jerk reaction...
...and then it sank in, her true meaning.
He stared at her like she'd just threatened to swallow his soul.
He looked stricken. His youthful vigour fled from him, and his colour went with it.
He lunged for his briefcase and staggered to his feet.
"Did they send you?" he whispered. "Did they send you to check up on me?"
Rose, by now on her own feet, took a step towards him.
Her face, quite understandably, was a mask of puzzlement. "Who? Did who send me?"
"They couldn't possibly--" Harold mumbled "--recruiting much too young!"
He turned to run, but somehow the redheaded teen got herself in front of him, quick as a rattlesnake striking.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Rose assured him. "I'm just a girl who wants to know more about the death of The Family Greystone. I'm no threat to anyone. Trust me, I'm more scared of you than you are of me, and judging by how scared you are, that's saying something."
Godwinson's hand shot out, and he grabbed the collar of her jacket, and he snarled in her face, though his eyes were filled with dread: "You don't understand," he pleaded. "There are scary monsters caught up in this. Scary, scary monsters."
Rose scrunched her face up at his breath, as it reeked of cigarettes and hot dogs, and her senses were sharp.
"You mean," she pressed, carefully, "like Carrion?"
Harold's eye twitched, and he shook his head slowly.
"Carrion was and is just the tip of the iceberg," he murmured. "In more ways than one."
"If there's one thing I'm not afraid of," Rose smirked faintly, "only one thing? It's icebergs."
Harold backpedaled a bit, releasing Rose's collar.
"I'm sorry, Billie," he murmured, the voice of a broken man, "it seems like it's already too late for you. I'm not going to let it be too late for me, too."
She reached for him again, tried to get him to stop, but all of a sudden, with surprising force, he took his briefcase in both hands and cracked her across the side of the head.
Rose staggered.
Her ear was ringing.
His briefcase was dented a little bit in the shape of her head.
He had the emergency speed and emergency strength of a man utterly, utterly possessed by fear.
Godwinson lashed out, snatched her Moleskine from her hand, and chucked it out into Main Plaza traffic.
Rose yelped, and lunged after it... dodging cars and bikes and pedestrians, and scooping up the all-important little book before a cab could crush it under its tyres.
Struggling back to the sidewalk-- tempted, sorely tempted to launch into the air to cross the short distance --Rose found that Godwinson had already sprinted off, hurried away with that selfsame emergency speed.
Rose tucked her Moleskine into the waistband at the back of her jeans as she ran after him, her backpack bouncing with the rhythm of her run.
She didn't know what was going on here, but at this point it didn't matter if she couldn't fly in front of people: there was no way on this Earth or any other that some tubby old guy with a weak bladder was going to outpace this niece of Uncle Dai McCrimmon.
Godwinson made it a surprising distance before she heard him talking, panting, ahead of her.
She rounded the corner of an alley and she found him standing there, talking on a cellphone.
Or. Well. Finishing talking on a cellphone.
He pressed the button, killed the convo.
He laughed faintly, sadly.
"It looks, Billie," he murmured softly, "like it's too late for both of us, after all."
A shadow moved behind him, there in the alley, and Godwinson jerked sharply as a bloody, curved blade emerged through the centre of his chest.
Rose took a step back, letting out a soft little wail.
Godwinson sank to his knees, as the man who had been shadow withdrew his wicked blade and ceremoniously wiped it on a black cloth.
Godwinson gazed sadly up at Rose as life left his eyes. He toppled and died.
Tears welled up in Rose's blue blues, and panic thrashed about in her heart. "I'm sorry," she whispered, trembling almost too much to see straight. "I'm so sorry."
The man in shadow stepped over Godwinson's fallen form.
Rose's hands bunched into fists, and her tears of agony turned to anger, and she made to lunge for the man in shadow, the shinobi in his darksome pajamas and his wicked blades...
The man in shadow held up the palm of his hand cupped in front of him, and a fine blue powder sat there atop his glove. He blew, blew threw the cloth of his mask, and the powder billowed and rushed into Rose's face.
Rose's lunge halted before it even started.
The world slid away from her, broke up into chunks and slid away from her, diagonal and down, down, down...
Her eyes burned, her nostrils seared, her voice choked out in a rasp.
Rose fell to the pavement and hit her head and remembered nothing more.
When she awoke, she awoke in a dark room.
She sat in a cold metal chair, her hands bound behind her with zip-ties, her ankles bound to the legs of the chair. The chair, in turn, was bolted to the floor.
The world wriggled around her in fits and in starts, oozed and shimmered, and everywhere she looked she saw frightening things.
Dark creatures she never quite believed weren't under the bed. Whispery, chittery things. Things from Lovecraft, things from the primordial dark before Time. In the corner of her eye, she glimpsed The Ogdru Jahad.
She shook and whimpered, unable to summon the breath for a good sob.
"Please," she croaked, "please don't eat me. Please don't carve out my heart and sit enthroned in its place. Please don't stretch my mind out and leave me tangled throughout history. I just.
"I just," she shuddered and pleaded. "I just want to go home."
Somewhere above her, a light turned on, and she reeled away from it.
The light scared her almost more than the dark did, and photons divided and scattered into whole new prisms of terror. Energy became matter became twisted knots and globules of dread.
The room looked not unlike an interrogation room, seen on police shows or in espionage films. There was a big wide pane of glass which, to Rose's eyes, showed only a reflection, but-- she knew this intuitively --would provide a fine view of her from the other side, a panoramic window.
There was a door next to this pane. The door opened, and a handsome young man in a suit wandered in.
His suit was black and his tie was red and he wore glasses with little round lenses. His cheekbones were very pronounced and elegant, and his eyes behind those glasses were studious and piercing. His hair was brown and thick, and even though it wasn't overly long there was quite a bit of it.
He seemed no older than Rose herself.
"You're awake," he purred coolly. "Sooner than expected. Good."
"Who. Who. Who're you?" Rose wondered, trying not to look at the foul beasts that swirled in the dust around his shoulders, beasts with elongated claws and clacking teeth.
"I'm called Crane," he told her.
"Frasier," Rose mumbled, bloodshot eyes darting about, panic stations screaming in her brain, "Niles, or Ichabod?"
"Jonathan," he clarified, a tiny tiny smirk dusting the corner of his lip. "I'm a student, just like you, Rose."
"My-my-my-my-my name's Wilhel-Wilhel-Billie," Rose managed.
Jonathan Crane arched an eyebrow. "Not according to the dedication scrawled in the front of the notebook we found shoved into your belt." He made a gesture, a cursive pantomime in the air, as if writing out the words: "'To my beloved daughter Rose. May these words always aid you in times of great fear and small fear. May these words bring you courage. Doctor James David Hamilton, your humble father.'"
Rose scrunched her eyes shut, and she shook her head, and while this time she had enough strength for a sob, she still struggled and choked it back.
"It seems your father wanted you to be a student of courage," Crane noted. "As it happens, I am a student of fear. So perhaps we shall see how well each of us has been learning our lessons, hmm?"
Rose keened softly, a ululating, wordless sound.
Crane sighed, and shook his head. "First, the obvious route: tell us what you know of the murders of The Family Greystone, and I will cause the scary monsters to cease in plaguing you."
Rose's eyes forced themselves back open, and she just stared at him.
Crane chuckled coolly. "No, I didn't think that would work," he confided. "But, as well you know, efficiency is always to be lauded, and it was worth a shot."
Rose whispered softly, sagging in her chair: "'Leaves me beaten on unholy ground again.'"
Crane sighed dismally. "Oh, please don't become incoherent already. That's so tiresome. You showed such promise when you awakened so quickly..."
Rose drew in a deep breath through her mouth, straightened a bit, and murmured: "'Might as well be walking on The Sun.'"
This gave Crane pause. "What's this?"
Rose grimaced. "'Building a mystery.'"
Darksome light danced in Crane's eyes. Fascination.
"Not incoherence," he mused. "Riddles. Speaking in lyrical metaphor as a defence mechanism. What an interesting way to keep secrets."
He smiled thinly. Ever so, ever so thinly. He hunched down, so he could gaze into her face.
"It won't keep yours, though," he assured her.
"'Fuck you,'" Rose hissed, "'and your untouchable face.'"
Crane frowned. "How bourgeois," he grunted, as he straightened.
Rose smiled up at him, a crazed and wavery smile.
"You can't tell me anything about fear," she told him, in words that were not lyrics, "that I don't already know."
Crane arched both eyebrows. "Oh, can't I?" he challenged her. "Fear is more than my hobby, little cool-eyed girl. Fear is my calling, fear is my meat and my drink, fear is my queen and my goddess, my wife and my mistress."
"I hate to be the one to tell you this," Rose giggled softly, her mind slipping and jaunting even as her dialogue struggled to steady itself, "but she's cheating on you, dude."
Crane's facade began to crack. Fury began to show on his face.
Rose cackled, eyes alight with self-amusement. Very, very crazy. "She's kind of a skank, too. Cheating on you with a pretty little thing like me. Because I know her... intimately. (She's been all over me.)"
Crane hauled off, utterly without preamble, and punched Rose hard in the face.
Rose's whole body spasmed with the impact, and she struggled against her bonds.
She struggled to find Fire...
But there was too much fear, and the Fire was too far away.
"You know fear 'intimately,' do you?" Crane hissed, his voice serpentine there in that murky place. "But I know secrets she has never once confided in you. I have a... a sixth sense about fear. An intuition. Your phobias are an open book to me."
Rose felt herself slipping further back into madness, felt more of the world slipping through her fingers like hourglass sand.
"While you do have an impressive list of minor fears," Crane whispered, his voice as the voice of the grave, "really, all those fears only boil down to one, triune fear. A fear that is three in one."
His lip quirked. Disdainful.
"Autophobia," he described, "takes three forms. Fear of egotism. Fear of being alone. And fear of self."
He turned, briskly, to gaze through that reflecting window pane, and he made a slashing gesture across his throat.
Crane returned his gaze to Rose. He seemed inordinately pleased with himself.
"You have all three, Rose," he murmured. "I can see it, writ large upon your expressive little face. All three autophobias. And I shall cause you to face those fears in a way that you have never dreamed possible."
The panic surged, fresh and new and immobilising in Rose's brain and soul and flesh, and her lower lip quivered as an iron fist clutched her heart. "What," she rasped, "have you done?"
Crane sneered. "It turns out that the name 'James David Hamilton' is not unknown to us. It is also not unknown to us that he lives now not in Keystone-Central, but in a tiny town called Smallville."
He chuckled faintly. "Our Lord's greatest lieutenant dwells in that selfsame tiny town, our Lord's mighty right hand, pursuing our Lord's heavy investments there," he hallelujahed, "but it does not take authourity such as his to carry out a task. It takes only my own, small authourity to dispatch a small murderous army-- and a powerhouse on retainer --to take your weak and beautiful parents and put them to very painful death."
Rose flinched even harder than when he'd punched her in the face. He'd just punched her in the soul.
"Oh God," she whispered, her voice not breaking but shattering. "Oh God. Nononononono!"
"You fear egotism?" Crane hissed. "Your arrogance has killed your parents."
Rose shuddered, and she slumped, and she closed her eyes.
She started to fall.
"You fear being alone?" Crane chittered. "Your parents are dead. You could not possibly be more alone."
She fell faster.
"You fear your own self?" Crane crowed. "Well, I've just given you a reason!"
Rose fell, and as she fell she looked tearfully fearfully about in her own mind. For a place to hide.
Like Bruce, she'd make shells out of the broken places of her mind and she'd layer herself within them like bulwarks like fortresses like Rocks of Ages cleft for her...
She just needed to find a place to hide, where Crane and his Lord and her folly and misdeeds couldn't find her.
She just needed to hide in a part of her that couldn't be touched by her fear.
But then a force not unlike gravity reached out and stopped her from falling.
Don't be stupid, girl, a voice chided her. Rose's own?
You don't need to hide.
You don't need another you, This Other Her declared, peremptory, unwavering, to hide from this.
You're all the you that you need.
Rose nodded. She was right.
Just this once, Rose told herself. Just this once. We can be Without Fear.
(It's not too late to save them.)
We Don't Need To Whisper.
Rose opened her eyes.
And the fear burned at her touch and it ran away, screaming.
Crane could not see this. His intuition dealt with unreasoning terror, not its unreasoning lack.
He drew a gun, and he pressed its tip to Rose's forehead.
He didn't notice that the gun began to feel warm in his hand.
Fire licked at the edges of Rose's eyes.
"Your knowledge of us," Crane snarled, "however infinitesimal, however minuscule, can simply perish with you."
His thumb drew back the hammer.
Rose breathed out through her nostrils, and tiny tiny flames danced on her exhalation.
"Tell me, Rose," Crane murmured, with all the air of a religious recitation, a benediction, "have you ever danced with The Devil in the pale moonlight?"
Rose laughed. The laugh was wrathful.
Her eyes burned, this time not from outside chemical attack but a deep and powerful burning from within...
Her eyes were aflame.
"You tell me, Jonathan," Rose growled, with all the air of a woman whose voice could end The World, "have you ever rocked out with The Buddha in The. Red. Hot. Sun?"
Crane faltered.
Rose looked at the gun, and it exploded in Crane's grasp, a molten-gold detonation that barely left his hand intact.
Crane staggered, staring in disbelieving agony at his smouldering fingers.
His eyes were filled with pain.
The zip-ties around Rose's wrists blazed and slagged. The zip-ties around her ankles crisped and fried.
She rose.
Fire roiled around her, growing out of her pores, spreading into her aura.
Fire crawled across her skin. A loving embrace.
She turned to the chair, bolted to the floor.
She tore it free with a growl and a bellow, and she hurled that heavy metal chair through the reflecting pane of the observation window with a clatterslash of broken glass...
The people in the room beyond clamoured and howled and panicked and drew weapons.
Crane stumbled, fell back, landed on his ass.
He stared at Rose McCrimmon with terror in his eyes.
"Metamorphosis," he whispered. "Apotheosis."
Rose's notebook sat on a table in the viewing room, itself right in plain view.
Rose vaulted through the gaping window and scooped up the notebook, bearing it neatly through her fire, keeping it unscathed. Reverently, she tucked it in an inside pocket of her jacket.
She ignored Crane.
Crane sat on the floor, scrabbled backwards to put his back against a wall.
Fearfully, he wet himself.
The five or so men who had been watching in the room stared at Rose with disbelief of five or so different kinds. They bore weapons, and they were considering their next moves.
Rose looked at them collectively.
"'You should be running,'" she quoted, and this was all the encouragement they needed.
They ran.
Rose turned her gaze upward. Infrared vision confirmed the way was clear.
She raised her hands and conflagration poured fourth, blazing upward in twin columns of destruction, blowing a hole clear through the ceiling, through the three floors above, right out through the roof.
Rose flew, soaring skyward and leaving that place below and behind her.
(Crane closed his eyes and began to softly sob.)
They had just ordered her parent's death.
Minutes had already gone by.
It wasn't too late. It couldn't be.
But Rose was in San Antonio (where they know what salsa should taste like), and her parents were in Smallville (meteor capital of the world).
Her top airspeed remained a paltry eighty miles an hour. Faster, if she used fire for thrust.
At best, she was hours away.
The wind billowed around her. She flew higher and higher and higher and she did The Math...
Sub-orbital parabolic manoeuvre.
She flew higher. Higher, faster, angling...
In this way did the future of commercial transport hope to shave hours and hours off of travel times.
In this way did Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles traverse the epic distances between continents in a mere fraction of the time it took conventional missiles.
By grazing the void of Space itself. By wandering outside the thin cushion of air that surrounded the small blue marble that is The Earth. And then coming crashing down.
Higher, faster, angling...
She climbed.
Fire roared, pushing her higher and higher and faster and faster.
She poured it on.
Space rushed towards her, and she began to see the stars gleam in The Black without twinkling.
She breathed in deep, saturating her bloodstream with oxygen.
And she breathed out again, breathed out again hard as the last of the whispering wind fell away around her. Forced all the air out of her lungs.
(A person can remain conscious in a vacuum for 9 to 12 seconds. They can survive for up to ninety seconds.
They can survive for that long provided they don't try to do something stupid, like hold their breath.
Explosive decompression is not an enviable way to die.)
She flew, there, on the fringes of air and of space, and the seconds ticked by. It was cold there, but cold was no enemy to her.
She did The Math.
Numbers blew through her head before she knew they were there. (She calculated her return velocity without even blinking or slowing down.)
Rose dove back down into The World with a vengeance, fire again leaping into place around her.
Not just her fire.
The air itself rebelled against her, friction and buffeting, trying to burn her out of the sky for the sheer temerity of leaving Earth, leaving The Natural Order, trying to scorch her alive for being so unnatural as to enter Space unprotected and then to try and come back...
She held a hand out before her, and she gathered the fire from around her, gathered it before it could devour her, and she gathered it tightly in that hand. In that palm. In that clenched fist.
Down, down, down, down, 'rockety ride,' 'we may experience some turbulence and then explode.'
'I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.'
She powered down towards Kansas, spread out impossibly wide and impossibly flat below her, like a life-size map of the world...
As she fell she flew, and as she flew and as she fell she reached out with another power.
There was fire burning in her left hand, fire that would have seared her clothes and her skin and her notebook but instead was waiting in her left hand.
With her right hand, she reached out and cast a tiny tendril of blue-white electricity. She snagged a thund'rous, blanketing bank of clouds and, tethering it, she dragged a piece of it with her as she dove.
She dove like a runaway blast furnace.
A mass of moisture so voluminous as to be immeasurable, and she tore off a chunk of it and she brought it along behind her like a pet on a long long leash.
She dove in through another mass of clouds, and at her passing, these clouds began to boil.
She blew down through the clouds and closed the gap between herself and the ground in a heartbeat and as she tore down from the sky she saw four men in red standing in her backyard, a man-mountain in red standing over her fallen mother and her fallen father, and the man-mountain in red was reaching for them...
Reaching...
Reaching...
No more time.
No more Time.
Her parents were still alive but they were going to kill them right before her eyes...
She landed on her feet with a boom that shook the ground for hundreds of yards, her own power of flight cushioning her landing just enough.
She stood between her fallen parents and the man-mountain in red.
The man-mountain in red grunted in soft, genuine surprise.
Rose held out her left hand, just as the man in shadow had held up his hand with the fear dust.
In her palm, quivering like Kyle's teardrop, was all the fire of her anger, all the fire of atmospheric re-entry, bottled up and fettered into a tiny ball trillions of times smaller than a certain Red Sun.
Rose held out her hand with her palm turned upward, a tiny red sun quivering there, and she whispered: "Lumos."
The fire unfettered an instant and expanded with a BOOM into a red sun far, far larger...
Akaiyama vanished in a spherical plume of flame and when it was gone, when the flame was gone, all that was left was his empty unbreakable skin and his gleaming invulnerable bones.
Not even ashes were left of the rest of him, and the empty skin and the gleaming bones collapsed in a pile in the middle of a small, glassy crater.
(Jamie nodded pensively. "Tried to warn you.")
Akaiyama's lieutenants hesitated, and rightly so.
They did not attack.
But neither did they run.
Rose raised her right hand, and the lightning crackled, and the chunk of cloud fell down around them like fog.
Seconds later, the lightning crackled through the fog, and all the little fractions of moisture that made the cloud balled up and balled up like the fire had been...
A hundred hundred hailstones the size of golf balls orbited Rose McCrimmon. Some spun in wide wide circles, others clung to her so tightly they were as armour, all of them moving at dizzying speeds.
"Force equals mass times acceleration," Rose reminded them. "Just one of these hits you going, oh, say, faster than a speeding bullet? I can't speak as to what it might do to your insides and your outs. And if you don't leave right now? I'll throw them at you. All of them."
Ceri and Jamie clambered to their feet, helping each other up, dusting each other off.
Ceri chuckled softly, delightedly, even though it was hard for her to talk. "She's got yeh put all to rights, doesn't she?"
Ceri raised her fists, game to raise more Hell.
"Go'wan, then," she suggested, "go'way. Ninja vanish."
Jamie agreed, wearily: "Cheerio, lads. Sayonara."
Rose flexed her hands into fists, whizzing spitting hailstones all up and down her arms.
She didn't say anything else. She didn't need to.
The Lieutenants of Akaiyama shared a pointed look. And for the first time in all of this, one of them spoke.
He spoke to Jamie: "You do well to surround yourself with such creatures."
Jamie nodded amiably, rubbing absently behind his left ear with his extended left index finger. "Could've done worse, yeah."
This lieutenant had a curious streak: "How did you know this one was coming?"
Jamie stared at him like he'd suddenly sprouted a second head, and this head was a little golden sidekick robot from The Future gone unexpectedly horribly wrong. Jamie stared at him like the whole thing was bleeding obvious.
"You have a lot of Faith," the lieutenant suggested. "Considering you are a man of Science."
Jamie put his hands in his pockets. He was perfectly calm.
Serene.
"Tell you what," Jamie suggested. "You believe in your Kwannon and your Amaterasu and your oni and your tengu and your kami, eh? This is what I believe in. I believe in The Women McCrimmon."
The lieutenant nodded as if this were fair enough.
And he and his compatriots vanished in pillars of crimson smoke.
The wind carried the clouds of smoke away, leaving Rose and Ceri and Jamie standing there in their wartorn backyard.
Jamie cast about for a moment.
"Is it over, then?" he wondered. "Are they gone?"
Ceri lowered her fists and nodded, gazing wearily at the house. "They're gone."
Jamie visibly relaxed. "Oh, thank Go--"
Rose collapsed with a groan and all her hail dropped like stones, rattattatting on the grass around her and around them.
"ROSE!" Ceri shrieked, her heart in her throat, as they ran to her side.
OOC: I um, wrote this back in April. (I think it was April.)
And it was supposed to be a summation of Rose's first weekend in the thread. Her going to Texas for Chloe to verify and investigate the stuff from Kyle's file. Chase down some leads, tie up some loose ends. This was Chloe's idea for Rose to make herself "useful."
There are a number of elements here that have already cropped up organically in the thread, far earlier than I expected. So there might be a little deja vu. And there's already stuff that's been contradicted, so there might be a little continuity dissonance.
But I spent a lot of time on this ( :: she admits, sheepishly :: ) and there's some dialogue in there I just can't ignore.
(I am especially proud, perhaps unreasonably, of Rose's comeback line to The Infamous Recurring Question. You'll know it when you see it.)
Anyway. This is either a good read or the world's silliest fanwank, but either way I hope y'all don't hate it.
Love y'all.
IC:
-------
Saturday Afternoon.
Smallville, Kansas.
Awkward silence reigned.
Jamie sat at the kitchen table with a stack of job rejection letters. Overqualified for this, overqualified for that.
Overqualified to work at Fordman's. Overqualified to work at Mrs. Greer's antique shop.
Jamie had a throbbing headache, and he rubbed his temples. It sounded like drums...
Ceri stood at the sink, arms deep in soapy froth and dirty dishes, trying to keep her lip buttoned. Jamie's anguish and feelings of inadequacy were obvious in every inch of his bony body, and she couldn't risk adding to it.
They'd just come home from checking Jamie's P.O. box, and they'd found it full of those things. The ride home had been brittle agony, and she'd wanted desperately some noise to muffle the silence.
Which she was getting now from the clatter-clink of the dishes in the sink.
(She hadn't even bothered to take her big stompy high-heeled boots off; she'd just gone for the sink like her life had depended on it.)
At least he'd been trying. That was a positive, in the face of such negative.
Ceri pulled the stopper out of the sink and watched the water drain.
As the water slowed and quieted, Ceri raised her eyes to gaze out into the backyard through the window over the sink, and she thought she saw, by the door to the old storm cellar, a shadow take flight and dart away.
She paused.
Warning crawled through her blood. It moved slowly, as it had been quite awhile since she had felt something this... palpable... an awareness of danger this acute... she was rusty, and the sense of warning was like molasses where it should have been like quicksilver.
Her mother sense was tingling.
Ceri narrowed her eyes. She reached into the sink and tightly gripped a carving knife by the handle, without lifting it out of the sink and into view.
Jamie straightened slightly.
He frowned, nostrils flaring as he sniffed the air.
"D'you smell that?" he wondered, glancing over his shoulder at Ceri, absent-minded as usual. "Smells like. China. Blue flowers. Dunno which species... smelled that once before. Makes me skin crawl. Didn't your sister--?"
The sliding glass doors out to the rundown old back deck shattered inward into a thousand thousand jagged shards, and at the same instant Ceri whirled, she whirled and threw...
...the knife spun end-over-end-over-end...
The knife hit the wall and stuck, quivering.
By Jamie's white-knuckled hand on the table, a damaged shuriken sat shuddering, buried in the wood.
(Ceri's thrown knife had deflected it in mid-flight, saving Jamie's life.)
Jamie's big brown eyes grew bigger by far, disbelief, incredulity, What The Hell. "Bloody strewth--!"
Ceri didn't hesitate, she dove, rolling over the counter, landing beside Jamie's chair in a crouch...
Down there on the floor, she swept her leg around tight, knocking Jamie's chair out from under him and dumping him onto his back on the floor--
--just as five more shuriken flashed through the air where he had been a split-second previously, thudding into the wall across from the shattered sliding doors, right by the archway that led into the living room.
Jamie cried out as he hit the ground, his face twisted in bewilderment and fury.
"Agh!" he grunted, twisted to look at Ceri. "Who--?"
"Friends of Claire's," Ceri hissed, "I shouldn't wonder."
Metal clinked elsewhere in the bottom floor of the house, here and there and in corners and in alcoves, and clouds of smoke began cropping up wherever that metal clinked.
Here and there and everywhere.
Ceri grabbed Jamie by the front of his suit coat and dragged him up with her as she shot to her feet.
Her eyes were hard. Hard like stone.
Her frame was taut, lithe, her jaw grim.
"I need me wedding present," she declared, rapid-fire. "The one your brother gave me. It's in the cupboard under the stairs."
Jamie blinked warily, as the smoke clouds began to coalesce into men. "Right. Wedding present. Perfect time for nostalgia."
"Fetch it for me," Ceri growled, whirling away from Jamie, "I'll hold 'em off!"
The clouds of smoke became men dressed in darkness wielding weapons of silvery steel.
Jamie dove for the hallway to the front stairs, cursing bitterly, and one of the men dove for Jamie with a sword raised high... a ninja-to...
Ceri swept in like raven-haired Death and her boot swung up and high in an arc like a sledgehammer pounding steel. Her boot crashed into the man's face and he crumpled, his face half-caved.
"Go, James!" Ceri crowed, fists up in front of her as the dark-clad men switched priorities. The woman was the threat, not the man of the house.
That seemed to surprise them.
"Bloody chauvinists," she grimaced.
Jamie landed on his knees in the hallway and slid along the hardwood, halting his slide by grabbing the doorknob for the cupboard under the stairs...
It was locked.
"Tupping Liberty!" he snarled.
A cloud of smoke brooshed into place beside him, parting and becoming a man with ornate knives in hand...
...time slowed...
...Jamie's snarl turned into a mask of bitter disappointment...
Ceri's boot flashed over Jamie's crouching head and snapped into the masked man's jaw, fracturing it in multiple places and sending the shinobi's insensate form skidding.
"Wedding present!" she barked, whirling back to face the way she'd come.
Ninja poured into the hallway after her, bottlenecking but still insistently clamouring for her blood.
"Yes, of course," Jamie promised sarcastically at the top of his lungs, "wedding present! I don't have a blasted automatic lock opener, just give us a bloody minute!"
Ceri moved like a creature possessed, her fists and feet quadruplet blurs, switching from Xingyiquan to Tae Kwon Do to Keysi and back again, bones breaking everywhere she went. (Still they came. They were legion.)
"Give yeh a minute?" she demanded, seething, "Temple and Arch, James, what d'yeh think I'm bloody doing?"
"Right, right," Jamie nodded, rolling his eyes, "sorry!"
"Just like old times, ennit?" Ceri muttered, as she blew out one man's knee with a kick and backhanded another fellow sideways, causing his wakizashi to go spinning away.
Ceri had to give ground. One yard. Two.
There were so many of them.
Closer to Jamie. Any second now, one of them would get smart and go 'round the other way and then she'd be fighting them from two directions at once...
She needed a real advantage. Weapons littered the floor, but then she'd be using the same things they were and that really didn't confer an advantage, did it?
She needed Emil's present.
Jamie caught up the wakizashi and, holding it aloft, hammered its hilt down on the doorknob once, twice, three times. With a crack, the metal and wood gave way, and Jamie exulted with delight as he tore the door open and dove into the first box he saw.
Another exultant cry.
"Eureka!" he declared, holding aloft a small metal case. Very small.
For the life of him, he couldn't remember what Emil had given Ceri.
Rubbish at weddings, he chided himself distractedly, especially my own.
"Brilliant!" Ceri cried back at him, just as the pressure of the oncrushing ninja became just too much to bear...
She spun as katana and ninja-ken and ninja-to slashed down around her, she darted clear, grabbed Jamie by the wrist and hauled him with her, nearly dislocating his shoulder but getting him to move his silly arse as she ran for the living room.
Dutifully, Jamie followed, shuriken and throwing knives and poison darts spinning around them...
They found more ninja already waiting for them in the living room. And the ninja from the hallway followed them, enclosing them, encircling them.
They stood back to back in the middle of the living room.
Jamie shoved the metal case into Ceri's hand.
A moment later, the case clunked, empty, to the floor between Ceri's booted feet.
Ceri held a pair of scissors in each hand. Long and wicked-looking. Professional hair-cutting scissors.
"Anticlimactic," Jamie opined.
"Shut up," Ceri fired back. "Just you wait."
Light glinted and flashed from the scissors as she twirled them over her fingers. They twirled like gunslingers' pistols, they twirled like butterfly knives, dicing the air with whispering whicker-slashes.
A ninja sneered, and made for Ceri with his too-large ninja-ken screaming inward for her throat.
Ceri moved. Moved too fast to follow, far, far too fast to parry or dodge...
One hand moved at the sword. The other moved at the ninja.
The blade of the ninja-ken toppled away, lopped off at the hilt, and the ninja himself reeled, bellowing, from a massive gash across the chest.
Ceri's boot flashed up and crashed down and bludgeoned the killer to the floor.
Her scissors twirled on her fingers. "Titanium," she explained coolly, "coated in Lubrilon."
Jamie stared at the severed blade in shock, as did many of the ninja.
"Smart man, my brother," Jamie noted. "He should get a prize."
The crowd of ninja grumbled, and began moving inward once more. They liked this not at all.
"Pull up yehr socks, James," Ceri ordered, and, obediently, Jamie hit the floor, stayed as low as he could.
Ceri extended her arms to both sides, shears gleaming as she held one in each hand, pointing them like daggers. Her head darted left, right, her eyes impossibly awake in their sockets.
"Hir yw pob ymaros," she murmured, tightly. "C'mon, you lot. Dun waste me time."
The ninja roared in at her like a wave.
She whirled like a bladed dervish, teeth gritted, eyes dark with fire, and she drove them back, over and over again.
Weapons sundered and men bled.
Carotid arteries, jugular veins, wrists and arms and stomachs and legs...
She flashed and flickered and rose and fell and wove and slithered and kicked and stabbed and kicked and stabbed and cut and cut and cut.
One ninja wheezed as both his lungs were punctured.
Another died twitching, gurgling, as Ceri's heel drove the bones of the bridge of his nose into his waiting brain.
Another lamented his missing hand even as her next slice practically took his head off.
Jamie huddled on the floor, unable to do more than watch in mingled admiration and revulsion. He wanted to help he wanted to help he wanted to not be bloody useless but Lord would he ever only just be in the way...
She was beautiful, she was. A beautiful machine.
(She was protecting him...)
And then Time seemed to skip a beat, and the last of them fell to the floor, the last of the fierce deadly men in black, and Ceri stood there over him, panting. She bled from half-a-dozen cuts, shallow but lengthy.
Hard and soft all at the same time. Zen.
"'I only know a snowflake cannot exist in a storm of fire,'" Ceri murmured.
She bowed to the fallen.
She straightened, and took a deep breath.
Jamie stood, shakily, eyes ginormous in his head.
"Is it over?" he whispered. "It isn't, is it?"
Ceri shook her head quietly.
And that was when the men in red walked in. They came in through the front door, and stood at the front end of the living room.
Four ninja in red, normal-sized, two on each side of a fifth ninja in red... who stood eight feet tall, broad as a barn door, with hands more like ursine paws than anything human.
"It's not over," Ceri murmured.
The honour guard flanked the red mountain of a man, and they said nothing.
The red mountain cracked his knuckles. He carried no weapons. He didn't need them.
"I am Akaiyama," he intoned, a voice like stone shattering stone.
Ceri arched an eyebrow. "The League still hiring out the hard stuff to second-rate thugs, is it?"
"All are second-rate," Akaiyama growled, "save I."
"Good to know," Jamie nodded, hardly in a position to argue the point.
"I will give you each one boon," Akaiyama suggested, "as is my custom with those who have fought well. Within reason, of course."
Ceri didn't hesitate: "I get to go first."
Akaiyama inclined his head, and gestured magnanimously--
And Ceri blurred across the space between himself and her like an electrical arc, scissors streaking silversteel and flashing across, down, across...
She gave him The Mark of Zorro, expecting blood to fly.
Blood did not fly.
Sparks flew.
Ceri blinked. She stared at the slash marks on his chest... the cloth of his uniform was cleanly cut, but his skin remained unscathed. Which wasn't bloody possible.
Akaiyama's fist cracked into Ceri's jaw and sent her reeling.
Her head swam and drowned; she barely stayed conscious as she staggered back into Jamie's catching arms.
She hadn't been--
She hadn't been hit that hard since--
...she'd never been hit that hard.
Ceri sagged in Jamie's arms and he could barely support her. She dropped her scissors to the floor.
He managed to stay calm. (He wasn't sure how this was possible. Courage had never been his strong suit. But here he was, calm as ever.)
His mind was racing: he was thinking.
"Well," he commented. "That's disheartening."
"My skin is treated with chemicals that make it impossible to cut," Akaiyama explained, helpfully. "And my bones are laced with an alloy of the indestructible depleted Promethium."
"Not a bad set of optional extras," Jamie acknowledged, as Ceri stubbornly tried to stand on her own. "Where'd you get a thing like that? 'Made in Japan?'"
Akaiyama grimaced. "Santa Prisca."
"Ohhh," Jamie nodded, as if this were a revelation. "Santa Prisca! (I might've known.)"
Akaiyama seemed to arch an eyebrow beneath his ninja hood. "Your boon?" he asked, not impatiently.
Ceri leaned heavily on Jamie, managing, however, to get her booted feet under herself.
Jamie put his hands in his pockets and mused, unafraid: "No, no, that was it, I think. The Santa Prisca thing. Little bit of knowledge to tide me over."
"Very well," Akaiyama moved towards the two of them, raising his piledriver fist once more.
"Though, actually?" Jamie interrupted, holding up a finger, and Akaiyama paused, intrigued.
"Actually?" Jamie pondered. "On top of that, you kill me, you let the lady live, and you get away with your life."
Akaiyama arched both eyebrows. This actually seemed to give him pause.
"Second to last warning," Jamie cautioned, his eyes taking on an adamantine hardness that even Ceri hadn't yet matched.
Ceri took a deep breath.
She squeezed Jamie's shoulder. (She was okay.)
"That is not," Akaiyama ruled, "within reason."
"Right then," Jamie nodded.
And then clutched Ceri's hand in his. Wordless communication flowed between them like water along a vine.
And they ran not unlike the wind, sprinting towards the back of the house and the gaping jagged mess that was the sliding patio door...
Akaiyama roared, and he pounded after them, and his lieutenants followed as swift as crimson gales.
Jamie and Ceri sprinted across the deck and Ceri was quick as a flash and Jamie, somehow, impossibly, was as quick as Spring-Heeled Jack...
Adrenaline drove them like high-octane fuel, but Ceri had taken a terrible hit and one side of her face was starting to swell up and Jamie was trackstar-quick but these were assassins.
They made it to the middle of the yard before two of the lieutenants cut them off and they staggered to a halt.
The other two lieutenants blocked the way they'd come.
And Akaiyama stood, behemoth-massive, only two yards away.
The skies above were in torment, where only calm had reigned minutes before. They were raging, like a storm was coming. A tornado would not have been out of place.
There was a rumbling sound, a rumbling and a whistling.
It seemed that thunder was at play in the deeps of the sky.
Jamie panted, breathing hard, and he shook his head.
He held up that instructive, lecturing finger, and he turned to Akaiyama and grinned.
"You're my favourite, you are," he explained to the red mountain, apropos of nothing, "and d'you know why? Because you're so thick! You're Mister Thick-thick-thickety Thickface from Thicktown, Thickania."
He paused, and then added: "And so's your dad."
Akaiyama cracked his knuckles.
"You're so thick," Jamie continued, grinning that ingratiating/infuriating grin from ear to bloody ear, "you probably actually think you're going to get to kill us."
Akaiyama sneered. "No-one is coming to save you," he intoned as he reached out with that miles-long arm and grabbed Jamie by the front of his suit coat. "You are alone."
Jamie kept right on grinning.
Even when Ceri threw herself at the red mountain and he brushed her aside like a paper crane, ("Uuhf!") Jamie kept grinning. Puckish to the last.
He glanced skyward, ever-so-briefly.
"'These lines of lightning mean we're never alone,'" he declared.
Akaiyama clubbed Jamie with his forearm, and Jamie sprawled to the ground beside Ceri.
Jamie's head, too, swam and drowned...
But he stayed conscious. It seemed that he didn't know his own fortitude.
His lip was bleeding and he wiped it on the back of his sleeve as he gazed up at Akaiyama with a Look on his face. He was no longer grinning; he had a Look on his face.
A deadly Look. Ancient and Merciless.
High above, the clouds began to boil.
"Last warning," Jamie promised.
**********
Saturday Morning.
San Antonio, Texas.
Rose awoke on the roof of The Hilton Palacio del Rio, and she was as stiff as blazes.
She groaned softly as she staggered to her feet.
Flying something like eight hundred miles in a night had been one thing; sleeping on a hotel roof had been another thing entirely. She had been so exhausted from the flight, she'd barely been able to stay aloft enough that she'd even reached that roof.
Rose stretched, and paced about a bit, rubbing herself down, dusting herself off.
The weather had been mild, thank God, and the city noises hadn't awoken her too much. For the most part, she'd slept like a rock.
The sun had risen, and the city was starting to awaken.
She retrieved the backpack Chloe had helped pack for her, and she stepped off the edge of the building, floating down to one of the balconies that lined the side of the building.
Cupping her hands around her face, she peered in through the sliding glass door until she was sure this was an unoccupied room. She then slid the door open and slithered inward.
She didn't waste any time; she showered quickly, brushed her teeth and her hair and changed her clothes. She had people to see today, and she couldn't show up looking like she'd flown eight hundred miles and slept on a roof.
As she exited the bathroom, though, she heard and saw the doorknob turning, heard laughter, and she dove for the balcony as though her sanity depended on it.
The room's newest occupants strolled in, a nice yuppie couple, and they were astonished to find that the floor was wet in the bathroom, the towels and shampoo and conditioner had been used, and the balcony was wide open to the San Antonio sky.
Rose was long gone.
After a few moments crouching on one of the sidewalks of the historic River Walk, composing herself, Rose decided to get down to it.
She could fly home tonight at this rate, she realised, and still have Sunday to recover.
First, navigating by the travel map included in her pack, she went to Kyle's old address.
She discovered, in a hurry, that she lacked both the intrepidity and the moral courage to approach the house. The place looked a little more like a fortress than a domicile, with fences and cameras and security guards at all points of the compass.
She held up one of the photos from the file folder, and found she could discern a little bit of where the old house remained within the new construction. Lots of renovations. Lots of renovations.
Rose pondered this for a long moment, long enough that one of the guards caught her staring and waved her away.
She nodded, glumly, and acquiesced. Hands in her jacket pockets, she walked off.
Can hardly blame them for being overly paranoid, she mused, after what happened to the family.
Still, she sighed, as she crossed the street and began to make her way to her next destination, it might have been interesting to see Kyle's old room. See what kind of boy he was before he became a Wraith.
She walked.
She tried not to think about what she'd have to do next.
She'd managed to avoid human interaction so far, but...
...but now, for the sake of journalism and The Truth, for Kyle's sake and Chloe's sake, she would have to turn in an Emmy-winning performance. If not Oscar-winning.
Rose stopped at a payphone, popped in some quarters, and dialed one of the numbers Chloe had scribbled in the blank pages of her father's Moleskine quotebook.
"May I please speak," she requested of the nice lady professional who picked up, "to Chief Medical Examiner Harold Godwinson?"
It turned out Godwinson was in meetings for most of the day at the Bexar County Courthouse, but Rose was able to catch him leaving the place for a lunch break.
"Excuse me," she called to him, jogging to catch up as he strolled briskly towards a hot dog stand across the street, "Doctor Godwinson?"
She recognised him from the portfolio of images Chloe had collated for her, though he was a bit rounder and greyer at present than he'd been in the older photos. He seemed tired, with dark rings below his faded green eyes.
Harold Godwinson was vaguely bulldog-shaped.
His silver-grey hair was close cropped, and his hairline was receding, and he was a little too large around the midsection for the grey suit and white button-down shirt he was wearing. He carried a briefcase and he had an as-yet unlit cigarette between his fingers.
He waited in line at the hot dog stand, seemingly lost in thought, and Rose reached up and gently tapped him on the shoulder.
Godwinson jumped like he'd been stung, and he whirled to face her with astonishment on his face.
Despite herself, Rose gasped too, and jumped a bit, staring at him with wide wide eyes.
Godwinson cleared his throat, and shook his head, and straightened his tie as he regained composure somewhat. The poor fellow seemed extremely high-strung, like a cat addicted to Ritalin.
"Can I help you, young miss?" he demanded, acting very much put-upon.
Biting down hard on her skyrocketing stage fright, Rose stuck her hand out like her dad always did, because Americans couldn't resist a handshake.
"Doctor Godwinson?" she smiled softly, trying again, hopefully placatingly. "I'm... I'm Wilhelmina Piper, from South San Antonio High? I was hoping I could interview you for an article intended for submission to my school's paper, The Blue Print."
Godwinson blinked. He made no effort to shake Rose's hand. "What sort of article?"
"An article discussing the effect," she explained, doing her best to describe the concept verbatim, exactly as Chloe had told her to say it, "of the various CSI television programmes on real-world law-enforcement and the judicial process."
Godwinson mulled this over, seemingly impressed. "That's an awfully big topic for a school newspaper, Wilhelmina."
"South San Bobcats rarely, if ever," Rose assured Godwinson, gamely smiling her best Chloe Sullivan smile, "shy away from a challenge."
Godwinson nodded. Nodded slowly, but surely.
"Very well then," Godwinson grunted, grudgingly intrigued. "I have a few minutes. Lunch?"
Godwinson bought Rose a hot dog, and they walked Main Plaza, pausing in front of San Fernando Cathedral. For lack of a better meeting ground, they sat there on the kerb to talk.
The old pathologist seemed intrigued by her little black lined notebook.
"Kids from Keystone get their own laptops now," he noted.
Rose stared at him blankly, pen motionless, eyes blue.
Harold grunted. "Keystone School? Private place, not so far from here? They issue kids laptops for the duration of their studies."
Rose blinked, and then chuckled. "Oh. Oh, geeze. I don't know where my brain is. I thought you meant. Different Keystone."
Godwinson's nostrils flared, and his faded sea-green eyes regarded Rose quietly. "Your brain's an awful long way from home, Wilhelmina, if you were thinking of Keystone up North."
Rose shook her head correctively. "Please. Call me 'Billie.' I don't think even my own mother calls me 'Wilhelmina.'"
And so it began.
Godwinson seemed uncomfortable, continually checking his watch, but he also seemed unwilling to embarrass himself before a burgeoning young member of the free press. They bandied back and forth for a few minutes, Rose asking him simple, direct questions about television-educated juries and micro-fibres and DNA tests and storytelling "time compression."
All the while, Rose took dutiful notes in her Moleskine.
Godwinson was actually quite eloquent once Rose got him going, recovering something of what Rose imagined must have been the vigour of his youth.
But before too long, before so much time had gone by that she lost her chance to enquire after her real purpose, Rose cleared her throat and interrupted him.
"And what, Doctor Godwinson," Rose asked, again careful to use the words that Chloe had recommended, "is your position on The Loch Ness Monster?"
"It's a fiction," Godwinson replied, a knee-jerk reaction...
...and then it sank in, her true meaning.
He stared at her like she'd just threatened to swallow his soul.
He looked stricken. His youthful vigour fled from him, and his colour went with it.
He lunged for his briefcase and staggered to his feet.
"Did they send you?" he whispered. "Did they send you to check up on me?"
Rose, by now on her own feet, took a step towards him.
Her face, quite understandably, was a mask of puzzlement. "Who? Did who send me?"
"They couldn't possibly--" Harold mumbled "--recruiting much too young!"
He turned to run, but somehow the redheaded teen got herself in front of him, quick as a rattlesnake striking.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Rose assured him. "I'm just a girl who wants to know more about the death of The Family Greystone. I'm no threat to anyone. Trust me, I'm more scared of you than you are of me, and judging by how scared you are, that's saying something."
Godwinson's hand shot out, and he grabbed the collar of her jacket, and he snarled in her face, though his eyes were filled with dread: "You don't understand," he pleaded. "There are scary monsters caught up in this. Scary, scary monsters."
Rose scrunched her face up at his breath, as it reeked of cigarettes and hot dogs, and her senses were sharp.
"You mean," she pressed, carefully, "like Carrion?"
Harold's eye twitched, and he shook his head slowly.
"Carrion was and is just the tip of the iceberg," he murmured. "In more ways than one."
"If there's one thing I'm not afraid of," Rose smirked faintly, "only one thing? It's icebergs."
Harold backpedaled a bit, releasing Rose's collar.
"I'm sorry, Billie," he murmured, the voice of a broken man, "it seems like it's already too late for you. I'm not going to let it be too late for me, too."
She reached for him again, tried to get him to stop, but all of a sudden, with surprising force, he took his briefcase in both hands and cracked her across the side of the head.
Rose staggered.
Her ear was ringing.
His briefcase was dented a little bit in the shape of her head.
He had the emergency speed and emergency strength of a man utterly, utterly possessed by fear.
Godwinson lashed out, snatched her Moleskine from her hand, and chucked it out into Main Plaza traffic.
Rose yelped, and lunged after it... dodging cars and bikes and pedestrians, and scooping up the all-important little book before a cab could crush it under its tyres.
Struggling back to the sidewalk-- tempted, sorely tempted to launch into the air to cross the short distance --Rose found that Godwinson had already sprinted off, hurried away with that selfsame emergency speed.
Rose tucked her Moleskine into the waistband at the back of her jeans as she ran after him, her backpack bouncing with the rhythm of her run.
She didn't know what was going on here, but at this point it didn't matter if she couldn't fly in front of people: there was no way on this Earth or any other that some tubby old guy with a weak bladder was going to outpace this niece of Uncle Dai McCrimmon.
Godwinson made it a surprising distance before she heard him talking, panting, ahead of her.
She rounded the corner of an alley and she found him standing there, talking on a cellphone.
Or. Well. Finishing talking on a cellphone.
He pressed the button, killed the convo.
He laughed faintly, sadly.
"It looks, Billie," he murmured softly, "like it's too late for both of us, after all."
A shadow moved behind him, there in the alley, and Godwinson jerked sharply as a bloody, curved blade emerged through the centre of his chest.
Rose took a step back, letting out a soft little wail.
Godwinson sank to his knees, as the man who had been shadow withdrew his wicked blade and ceremoniously wiped it on a black cloth.
Godwinson gazed sadly up at Rose as life left his eyes. He toppled and died.
Tears welled up in Rose's blue blues, and panic thrashed about in her heart. "I'm sorry," she whispered, trembling almost too much to see straight. "I'm so sorry."
The man in shadow stepped over Godwinson's fallen form.
Rose's hands bunched into fists, and her tears of agony turned to anger, and she made to lunge for the man in shadow, the shinobi in his darksome pajamas and his wicked blades...
The man in shadow held up the palm of his hand cupped in front of him, and a fine blue powder sat there atop his glove. He blew, blew threw the cloth of his mask, and the powder billowed and rushed into Rose's face.
Rose's lunge halted before it even started.
The world slid away from her, broke up into chunks and slid away from her, diagonal and down, down, down...
Her eyes burned, her nostrils seared, her voice choked out in a rasp.
Rose fell to the pavement and hit her head and remembered nothing more.
When she awoke, she awoke in a dark room.
She sat in a cold metal chair, her hands bound behind her with zip-ties, her ankles bound to the legs of the chair. The chair, in turn, was bolted to the floor.
The world wriggled around her in fits and in starts, oozed and shimmered, and everywhere she looked she saw frightening things.
Dark creatures she never quite believed weren't under the bed. Whispery, chittery things. Things from Lovecraft, things from the primordial dark before Time. In the corner of her eye, she glimpsed The Ogdru Jahad.
She shook and whimpered, unable to summon the breath for a good sob.
"Please," she croaked, "please don't eat me. Please don't carve out my heart and sit enthroned in its place. Please don't stretch my mind out and leave me tangled throughout history. I just.
"I just," she shuddered and pleaded. "I just want to go home."
Somewhere above her, a light turned on, and she reeled away from it.
The light scared her almost more than the dark did, and photons divided and scattered into whole new prisms of terror. Energy became matter became twisted knots and globules of dread.
The room looked not unlike an interrogation room, seen on police shows or in espionage films. There was a big wide pane of glass which, to Rose's eyes, showed only a reflection, but-- she knew this intuitively --would provide a fine view of her from the other side, a panoramic window.
There was a door next to this pane. The door opened, and a handsome young man in a suit wandered in.
His suit was black and his tie was red and he wore glasses with little round lenses. His cheekbones were very pronounced and elegant, and his eyes behind those glasses were studious and piercing. His hair was brown and thick, and even though it wasn't overly long there was quite a bit of it.
He seemed no older than Rose herself.
"You're awake," he purred coolly. "Sooner than expected. Good."
"Who. Who. Who're you?" Rose wondered, trying not to look at the foul beasts that swirled in the dust around his shoulders, beasts with elongated claws and clacking teeth.
"I'm called Crane," he told her.
"Frasier," Rose mumbled, bloodshot eyes darting about, panic stations screaming in her brain, "Niles, or Ichabod?"
"Jonathan," he clarified, a tiny tiny smirk dusting the corner of his lip. "I'm a student, just like you, Rose."
"My-my-my-my-my name's Wilhel-Wilhel-Billie," Rose managed.
Jonathan Crane arched an eyebrow. "Not according to the dedication scrawled in the front of the notebook we found shoved into your belt." He made a gesture, a cursive pantomime in the air, as if writing out the words: "'To my beloved daughter Rose. May these words always aid you in times of great fear and small fear. May these words bring you courage. Doctor James David Hamilton, your humble father.'"
Rose scrunched her eyes shut, and she shook her head, and while this time she had enough strength for a sob, she still struggled and choked it back.
"It seems your father wanted you to be a student of courage," Crane noted. "As it happens, I am a student of fear. So perhaps we shall see how well each of us has been learning our lessons, hmm?"
Rose keened softly, a ululating, wordless sound.
Crane sighed, and shook his head. "First, the obvious route: tell us what you know of the murders of The Family Greystone, and I will cause the scary monsters to cease in plaguing you."
Rose's eyes forced themselves back open, and she just stared at him.
Crane chuckled coolly. "No, I didn't think that would work," he confided. "But, as well you know, efficiency is always to be lauded, and it was worth a shot."
Rose whispered softly, sagging in her chair: "'Leaves me beaten on unholy ground again.'"
Crane sighed dismally. "Oh, please don't become incoherent already. That's so tiresome. You showed such promise when you awakened so quickly..."
Rose drew in a deep breath through her mouth, straightened a bit, and murmured: "'Might as well be walking on The Sun.'"
This gave Crane pause. "What's this?"
Rose grimaced. "'Building a mystery.'"
Darksome light danced in Crane's eyes. Fascination.
"Not incoherence," he mused. "Riddles. Speaking in lyrical metaphor as a defence mechanism. What an interesting way to keep secrets."
He smiled thinly. Ever so, ever so thinly. He hunched down, so he could gaze into her face.
"It won't keep yours, though," he assured her.
"'Fuck you,'" Rose hissed, "'and your untouchable face.'"
Crane frowned. "How bourgeois," he grunted, as he straightened.
Rose smiled up at him, a crazed and wavery smile.
"You can't tell me anything about fear," she told him, in words that were not lyrics, "that I don't already know."
Crane arched both eyebrows. "Oh, can't I?" he challenged her. "Fear is more than my hobby, little cool-eyed girl. Fear is my calling, fear is my meat and my drink, fear is my queen and my goddess, my wife and my mistress."
"I hate to be the one to tell you this," Rose giggled softly, her mind slipping and jaunting even as her dialogue struggled to steady itself, "but she's cheating on you, dude."
Crane's facade began to crack. Fury began to show on his face.
Rose cackled, eyes alight with self-amusement. Very, very crazy. "She's kind of a skank, too. Cheating on you with a pretty little thing like me. Because I know her... intimately. (She's been all over me.)"
Crane hauled off, utterly without preamble, and punched Rose hard in the face.
Rose's whole body spasmed with the impact, and she struggled against her bonds.
She struggled to find Fire...
But there was too much fear, and the Fire was too far away.
"You know fear 'intimately,' do you?" Crane hissed, his voice serpentine there in that murky place. "But I know secrets she has never once confided in you. I have a... a sixth sense about fear. An intuition. Your phobias are an open book to me."
Rose felt herself slipping further back into madness, felt more of the world slipping through her fingers like hourglass sand.
"While you do have an impressive list of minor fears," Crane whispered, his voice as the voice of the grave, "really, all those fears only boil down to one, triune fear. A fear that is three in one."
His lip quirked. Disdainful.
"Autophobia," he described, "takes three forms. Fear of egotism. Fear of being alone. And fear of self."
He turned, briskly, to gaze through that reflecting window pane, and he made a slashing gesture across his throat.
Crane returned his gaze to Rose. He seemed inordinately pleased with himself.
"You have all three, Rose," he murmured. "I can see it, writ large upon your expressive little face. All three autophobias. And I shall cause you to face those fears in a way that you have never dreamed possible."
The panic surged, fresh and new and immobilising in Rose's brain and soul and flesh, and her lower lip quivered as an iron fist clutched her heart. "What," she rasped, "have you done?"
Crane sneered. "It turns out that the name 'James David Hamilton' is not unknown to us. It is also not unknown to us that he lives now not in Keystone-Central, but in a tiny town called Smallville."
He chuckled faintly. "Our Lord's greatest lieutenant dwells in that selfsame tiny town, our Lord's mighty right hand, pursuing our Lord's heavy investments there," he hallelujahed, "but it does not take authourity such as his to carry out a task. It takes only my own, small authourity to dispatch a small murderous army-- and a powerhouse on retainer --to take your weak and beautiful parents and put them to very painful death."
Rose flinched even harder than when he'd punched her in the face. He'd just punched her in the soul.
"Oh God," she whispered, her voice not breaking but shattering. "Oh God. Nononononono!"
"You fear egotism?" Crane hissed. "Your arrogance has killed your parents."
Rose shuddered, and she slumped, and she closed her eyes.
She started to fall.
"You fear being alone?" Crane chittered. "Your parents are dead. You could not possibly be more alone."
She fell faster.
"You fear your own self?" Crane crowed. "Well, I've just given you a reason!"
Rose fell, and as she fell she looked tearfully fearfully about in her own mind. For a place to hide.
Like Bruce, she'd make shells out of the broken places of her mind and she'd layer herself within them like bulwarks like fortresses like Rocks of Ages cleft for her...
She just needed to find a place to hide, where Crane and his Lord and her folly and misdeeds couldn't find her.
She just needed to hide in a part of her that couldn't be touched by her fear.
But then a force not unlike gravity reached out and stopped her from falling.
Don't be stupid, girl, a voice chided her. Rose's own?
You don't need to hide.
You don't need another you, This Other Her declared, peremptory, unwavering, to hide from this.
You're all the you that you need.
Rose nodded. She was right.
Just this once, Rose told herself. Just this once. We can be Without Fear.
(It's not too late to save them.)
We Don't Need To Whisper.
Rose opened her eyes.
And the fear burned at her touch and it ran away, screaming.
Crane could not see this. His intuition dealt with unreasoning terror, not its unreasoning lack.
He drew a gun, and he pressed its tip to Rose's forehead.
He didn't notice that the gun began to feel warm in his hand.
Fire licked at the edges of Rose's eyes.
"Your knowledge of us," Crane snarled, "however infinitesimal, however minuscule, can simply perish with you."
His thumb drew back the hammer.
Rose breathed out through her nostrils, and tiny tiny flames danced on her exhalation.
"Tell me, Rose," Crane murmured, with all the air of a religious recitation, a benediction, "have you ever danced with The Devil in the pale moonlight?"
Rose laughed. The laugh was wrathful.
Her eyes burned, this time not from outside chemical attack but a deep and powerful burning from within...
Her eyes were aflame.
"You tell me, Jonathan," Rose growled, with all the air of a woman whose voice could end The World, "have you ever rocked out with The Buddha in The. Red. Hot. Sun?"
Crane faltered.
Rose looked at the gun, and it exploded in Crane's grasp, a molten-gold detonation that barely left his hand intact.
Crane staggered, staring in disbelieving agony at his smouldering fingers.
His eyes were filled with pain.
The zip-ties around Rose's wrists blazed and slagged. The zip-ties around her ankles crisped and fried.
She rose.
Fire roiled around her, growing out of her pores, spreading into her aura.
Fire crawled across her skin. A loving embrace.
She turned to the chair, bolted to the floor.
She tore it free with a growl and a bellow, and she hurled that heavy metal chair through the reflecting pane of the observation window with a clatterslash of broken glass...
The people in the room beyond clamoured and howled and panicked and drew weapons.
Crane stumbled, fell back, landed on his ass.
He stared at Rose McCrimmon with terror in his eyes.
"Metamorphosis," he whispered. "Apotheosis."
Rose's notebook sat on a table in the viewing room, itself right in plain view.
Rose vaulted through the gaping window and scooped up the notebook, bearing it neatly through her fire, keeping it unscathed. Reverently, she tucked it in an inside pocket of her jacket.
She ignored Crane.
Crane sat on the floor, scrabbled backwards to put his back against a wall.
Fearfully, he wet himself.
The five or so men who had been watching in the room stared at Rose with disbelief of five or so different kinds. They bore weapons, and they were considering their next moves.
Rose looked at them collectively.
"'You should be running,'" she quoted, and this was all the encouragement they needed.
They ran.
Rose turned her gaze upward. Infrared vision confirmed the way was clear.
She raised her hands and conflagration poured fourth, blazing upward in twin columns of destruction, blowing a hole clear through the ceiling, through the three floors above, right out through the roof.
Rose flew, soaring skyward and leaving that place below and behind her.
(Crane closed his eyes and began to softly sob.)
They had just ordered her parent's death.
Minutes had already gone by.
It wasn't too late. It couldn't be.
But Rose was in San Antonio (where they know what salsa should taste like), and her parents were in Smallville (meteor capital of the world).
Her top airspeed remained a paltry eighty miles an hour. Faster, if she used fire for thrust.
At best, she was hours away.
The wind billowed around her. She flew higher and higher and higher and she did The Math...
Sub-orbital parabolic manoeuvre.
She flew higher. Higher, faster, angling...
In this way did the future of commercial transport hope to shave hours and hours off of travel times.
In this way did Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles traverse the epic distances between continents in a mere fraction of the time it took conventional missiles.
By grazing the void of Space itself. By wandering outside the thin cushion of air that surrounded the small blue marble that is The Earth. And then coming crashing down.
Higher, faster, angling...
She climbed.
Fire roared, pushing her higher and higher and faster and faster.
She poured it on.
Space rushed towards her, and she began to see the stars gleam in The Black without twinkling.
She breathed in deep, saturating her bloodstream with oxygen.
And she breathed out again, breathed out again hard as the last of the whispering wind fell away around her. Forced all the air out of her lungs.
(A person can remain conscious in a vacuum for 9 to 12 seconds. They can survive for up to ninety seconds.
They can survive for that long provided they don't try to do something stupid, like hold their breath.
Explosive decompression is not an enviable way to die.)
She flew, there, on the fringes of air and of space, and the seconds ticked by. It was cold there, but cold was no enemy to her.
She did The Math.
Numbers blew through her head before she knew they were there. (She calculated her return velocity without even blinking or slowing down.)
Rose dove back down into The World with a vengeance, fire again leaping into place around her.
Not just her fire.
The air itself rebelled against her, friction and buffeting, trying to burn her out of the sky for the sheer temerity of leaving Earth, leaving The Natural Order, trying to scorch her alive for being so unnatural as to enter Space unprotected and then to try and come back...
She held a hand out before her, and she gathered the fire from around her, gathered it before it could devour her, and she gathered it tightly in that hand. In that palm. In that clenched fist.
Down, down, down, down, 'rockety ride,' 'we may experience some turbulence and then explode.'
'I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.'
She powered down towards Kansas, spread out impossibly wide and impossibly flat below her, like a life-size map of the world...
As she fell she flew, and as she flew and as she fell she reached out with another power.
There was fire burning in her left hand, fire that would have seared her clothes and her skin and her notebook but instead was waiting in her left hand.
With her right hand, she reached out and cast a tiny tendril of blue-white electricity. She snagged a thund'rous, blanketing bank of clouds and, tethering it, she dragged a piece of it with her as she dove.
She dove like a runaway blast furnace.
A mass of moisture so voluminous as to be immeasurable, and she tore off a chunk of it and she brought it along behind her like a pet on a long long leash.
She dove in through another mass of clouds, and at her passing, these clouds began to boil.
She blew down through the clouds and closed the gap between herself and the ground in a heartbeat and as she tore down from the sky she saw four men in red standing in her backyard, a man-mountain in red standing over her fallen mother and her fallen father, and the man-mountain in red was reaching for them...
Reaching...
Reaching...
No more time.
No more Time.
Her parents were still alive but they were going to kill them right before her eyes...
She landed on her feet with a boom that shook the ground for hundreds of yards, her own power of flight cushioning her landing just enough.
She stood between her fallen parents and the man-mountain in red.
The man-mountain in red grunted in soft, genuine surprise.
Rose held out her left hand, just as the man in shadow had held up his hand with the fear dust.
In her palm, quivering like Kyle's teardrop, was all the fire of her anger, all the fire of atmospheric re-entry, bottled up and fettered into a tiny ball trillions of times smaller than a certain Red Sun.
Rose held out her hand with her palm turned upward, a tiny red sun quivering there, and she whispered: "Lumos."
The fire unfettered an instant and expanded with a BOOM into a red sun far, far larger...
Akaiyama vanished in a spherical plume of flame and when it was gone, when the flame was gone, all that was left was his empty unbreakable skin and his gleaming invulnerable bones.
Not even ashes were left of the rest of him, and the empty skin and the gleaming bones collapsed in a pile in the middle of a small, glassy crater.
(Jamie nodded pensively. "Tried to warn you.")
Akaiyama's lieutenants hesitated, and rightly so.
They did not attack.
But neither did they run.
Rose raised her right hand, and the lightning crackled, and the chunk of cloud fell down around them like fog.
Seconds later, the lightning crackled through the fog, and all the little fractions of moisture that made the cloud balled up and balled up like the fire had been...
A hundred hundred hailstones the size of golf balls orbited Rose McCrimmon. Some spun in wide wide circles, others clung to her so tightly they were as armour, all of them moving at dizzying speeds.
"Force equals mass times acceleration," Rose reminded them. "Just one of these hits you going, oh, say, faster than a speeding bullet? I can't speak as to what it might do to your insides and your outs. And if you don't leave right now? I'll throw them at you. All of them."
Ceri and Jamie clambered to their feet, helping each other up, dusting each other off.
Ceri chuckled softly, delightedly, even though it was hard for her to talk. "She's got yeh put all to rights, doesn't she?"
Ceri raised her fists, game to raise more Hell.
"Go'wan, then," she suggested, "go'way. Ninja vanish."
Jamie agreed, wearily: "Cheerio, lads. Sayonara."
Rose flexed her hands into fists, whizzing spitting hailstones all up and down her arms.
She didn't say anything else. She didn't need to.
The Lieutenants of Akaiyama shared a pointed look. And for the first time in all of this, one of them spoke.
He spoke to Jamie: "You do well to surround yourself with such creatures."
Jamie nodded amiably, rubbing absently behind his left ear with his extended left index finger. "Could've done worse, yeah."
This lieutenant had a curious streak: "How did you know this one was coming?"
Jamie stared at him like he'd suddenly sprouted a second head, and this head was a little golden sidekick robot from The Future gone unexpectedly horribly wrong. Jamie stared at him like the whole thing was bleeding obvious.
"You have a lot of Faith," the lieutenant suggested. "Considering you are a man of Science."
Jamie put his hands in his pockets. He was perfectly calm.
Serene.
"Tell you what," Jamie suggested. "You believe in your Kwannon and your Amaterasu and your oni and your tengu and your kami, eh? This is what I believe in. I believe in The Women McCrimmon."
The lieutenant nodded as if this were fair enough.
And he and his compatriots vanished in pillars of crimson smoke.
The wind carried the clouds of smoke away, leaving Rose and Ceri and Jamie standing there in their wartorn backyard.
Jamie cast about for a moment.
"Is it over, then?" he wondered. "Are they gone?"
Ceri lowered her fists and nodded, gazing wearily at the house. "They're gone."
Jamie visibly relaxed. "Oh, thank Go--"
Rose collapsed with a groan and all her hail dropped like stones, rattattatting on the grass around her and around them.
"ROSE!" Ceri shrieked, her heart in her throat, as they ran to her side.
Last edited:
TearsoftheWorld
Radical Dreamer
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That was amazing
"Have you ever danced with The Devil in the pale moonlight?"
"Have you ever rocked out with The Buddha in The. Red. Hot. Sun?"
"Have you ever danced with The Devil in the pale moonlight?"
"Have you ever rocked out with The Buddha in The. Red. Hot. Sun?"
ChasNicollette
Allons-y Means Let's Go.
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That was amazing
"Have you ever danced with The Devil in the pale moonlight?"
"Have you ever rocked out with The Buddha in The. Red. Hot. Sun?"
:: quietly :: Thank you, dear.
It was. A lot of fun to write.
ChasNicollette
Allons-y Means Let's Go.
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God bless Gabriel The Cat. :: hugs the kitty ::
G'night everyone. Hope to see y'all tomorrow.
G'night everyone. Hope to see y'all tomorrow.
Lunaramblings
Literotica Guru
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Well, since Chas is posting her deleted scene... this was the original confrontation I had planned for Dale/Edmund. I wrote this before Honduras.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Merick, Marcy and Dale arrive in the backyard to a familiar swoosh.
Dale and Marcy holding hands. Having silently made their piece.
Merick dashing in ahead, enters the kitchen, via the back door. As soon as Merick opens the door he smells it. Ham, bacon, eggs. Then he sees.
"GRANDPA EDMUND!" Merick darts to the stove where his grandfather is standing. Flipping an omelet.
"Mornin champ. You got a gift on the table." Edmund smiles and nods to the large box he has carried all this way.
Merick darts to the table and sits down, reading the card before he begins to tear into the box.
Marcy, Dale. Sorry I let myself in... doors open and all, and us being family..." Edmund nods to the happy couple as they enter.
As Dale registers the visitor in his kitchen, something snaps. In an instant Dr. Dale Tennylson is gone. What is left in his place is something terrible indeed.
Dale makes a grab for the counter to his left. His hand finding the hilt of a knife in the butchers block. Dale closes the gap between him and Edmund in the blink of an eye. Knife whirling. Dale strikes.
Edmund was shocked. Ten years ago, Dale wouldn't have had the knife before Edmund had seen it and crushed his skull. But this is not ten years ago. Dale parries the slash with the frying pan.
But Dale is quick. The kinfe spins in his grip and he slashes at a new angle. catching Edmund on the shoulder. Edmund twists away at the last, evading serious damage. He catches hold of Dale's shirt as he does. Flipping Dale over his hip. Bringing the hot pan down on Dale's knife-wielding hand.
Dale growls in pain as the pan sears the flesh of his hand. Quickly he swings a leg up. Wrapping it around Edmunds head from behind. Locking it behind his other knee. He starts to squeeze and choke Edmund.
Merick looks on in shock... "My dad knows kung fu... wait... Grandpa knows Kung Fu?"
Edmund forces his free hand between his aching throat and Dale's calf. Forcing seperation. He spins into it. Bringing the pan down in a frightening overhead smash, directly into Dale's chest. Dale gasps. "That there is at least two ribs son, if not a busted sternum..."
Edmund rains down another blow, breaking free of Dale's guard. Dale, coughing up blood, tries in vain to reverse the mount, but Edmund doesn't strike.
From behind him, Marcy brings a very heavy wooden rolling pin to bear. She smashes with such force, the handle snaps. The pin flies across the room. Before it hits the ground Edmund is up to his feet and swinging a vicious back hand blow. A blow that has so much force it would stop a bull. Let alone a 125 lb woman.
"NO ONE HURTS MY MOTHER!" Suddenly, Edmund is blasted, front and center with a ball of force. Strong enough it sends him flying into the wall. The wall concaves with the impact, but Edmund does not fall. He is enveloped in force. Bands around his chest. Merick glaring. Flames of emeral dancing in his eyes. His body wreathed in writhing green flamelike energy. Merick raises his hand and starts to squeeze.
"Boy, ain't no one hit me that hard since old Solly! What they been feedin you out 'ere?
Edmund winces. His ribs shatter. His lungs on the brink of rupturing. Merick squeezes harder.
"Son... drop him. You can't... Dale coughs more blood, dark blood Dale reckons he has more than broken ribs. But this is more important. "Please, son... Dont do this. Put him down. Put him down and I will tell you the things you need to hear.
The flickering, dancing, angry energy subsides a bit. Merick looks at his father. Battered. Beaten. He looks at his grandfather, barely breathing. He drops the old man.
"Lucy, youse gots some esplainin to do." Merick sits at the table. Ignoring for the moment the partially opened box.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Merick, Marcy and Dale arrive in the backyard to a familiar swoosh.
Dale and Marcy holding hands. Having silently made their piece.
Merick dashing in ahead, enters the kitchen, via the back door. As soon as Merick opens the door he smells it. Ham, bacon, eggs. Then he sees.
"GRANDPA EDMUND!" Merick darts to the stove where his grandfather is standing. Flipping an omelet.
"Mornin champ. You got a gift on the table." Edmund smiles and nods to the large box he has carried all this way.
Merick darts to the table and sits down, reading the card before he begins to tear into the box.
Marcy, Dale. Sorry I let myself in... doors open and all, and us being family..." Edmund nods to the happy couple as they enter.
As Dale registers the visitor in his kitchen, something snaps. In an instant Dr. Dale Tennylson is gone. What is left in his place is something terrible indeed.
Dale makes a grab for the counter to his left. His hand finding the hilt of a knife in the butchers block. Dale closes the gap between him and Edmund in the blink of an eye. Knife whirling. Dale strikes.
Edmund was shocked. Ten years ago, Dale wouldn't have had the knife before Edmund had seen it and crushed his skull. But this is not ten years ago. Dale parries the slash with the frying pan.
But Dale is quick. The kinfe spins in his grip and he slashes at a new angle. catching Edmund on the shoulder. Edmund twists away at the last, evading serious damage. He catches hold of Dale's shirt as he does. Flipping Dale over his hip. Bringing the hot pan down on Dale's knife-wielding hand.
Dale growls in pain as the pan sears the flesh of his hand. Quickly he swings a leg up. Wrapping it around Edmunds head from behind. Locking it behind his other knee. He starts to squeeze and choke Edmund.
Merick looks on in shock... "My dad knows kung fu... wait... Grandpa knows Kung Fu?"
Edmund forces his free hand between his aching throat and Dale's calf. Forcing seperation. He spins into it. Bringing the pan down in a frightening overhead smash, directly into Dale's chest. Dale gasps. "That there is at least two ribs son, if not a busted sternum..."
Edmund rains down another blow, breaking free of Dale's guard. Dale, coughing up blood, tries in vain to reverse the mount, but Edmund doesn't strike.
From behind him, Marcy brings a very heavy wooden rolling pin to bear. She smashes with such force, the handle snaps. The pin flies across the room. Before it hits the ground Edmund is up to his feet and swinging a vicious back hand blow. A blow that has so much force it would stop a bull. Let alone a 125 lb woman.
"NO ONE HURTS MY MOTHER!" Suddenly, Edmund is blasted, front and center with a ball of force. Strong enough it sends him flying into the wall. The wall concaves with the impact, but Edmund does not fall. He is enveloped in force. Bands around his chest. Merick glaring. Flames of emeral dancing in his eyes. His body wreathed in writhing green flamelike energy. Merick raises his hand and starts to squeeze.
"Boy, ain't no one hit me that hard since old Solly! What they been feedin you out 'ere?
Edmund winces. His ribs shatter. His lungs on the brink of rupturing. Merick squeezes harder.
"Son... drop him. You can't... Dale coughs more blood, dark blood Dale reckons he has more than broken ribs. But this is more important. "Please, son... Dont do this. Put him down. Put him down and I will tell you the things you need to hear.
The flickering, dancing, angry energy subsides a bit. Merick looks at his father. Battered. Beaten. He looks at his grandfather, barely breathing. He drops the old man.
"Lucy, youse gots some esplainin to do." Merick sits at the table. Ignoring for the moment the partially opened box.
TearsoftheWorld
Radical Dreamer
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Let the revels begin
Let the fire be started
We're dancing for the restless and the broken-hearted
Let the revels begin
Let the fire be started
We're dancing for the desperate and the broken-hearted
Let the fire be started
We're dancing for the restless and the broken-hearted
Let the revels begin
Let the fire be started
We're dancing for the desperate and the broken-hearted
Tonight is what it means to be young
TearsoftheWorld
Radical Dreamer
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TearsoftheWorld
Radical Dreamer
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Var-Sen and Raya
Sitting in a tree
Rose and Kyle
Sitting in a tree
Chloe and Merick
Sitting in a tree
No love for Kara
Apparently
Sitting in a tree
Rose and Kyle
Sitting in a tree
Chloe and Merick
Sitting in a tree
No love for Kara
Apparently
ChasNicollette
Allons-y Means Let's Go.
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2007
- Posts
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Var-Sen and Raya
Sitting in a tree
Rose and Kyle
Sitting in a tree
Chloe and Merick
Sitting in a tree
No love for Kara
Apparently
Two words.
Just putting it out there.
This'll totally shift your paradigm.
(Watch your head. Stay indoors.)
Two words: "Pete Ross."
Just a thought, just a suggestion, NBD.
Abraxas Winterlight
Slacktastic
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awwwwwwwww
go grab Bruce
he needs to lighten up a bit anyway
go grab Bruce
he needs to lighten up a bit anyway
ChasNicollette
Allons-y Means Let's Go.
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Bruce does like him some Kara.
But just as Chloe suspects, he's not going to stay in town for long. Superman1496 had it in mind to remove him, and I intend to honour his wishes. (Ducard's influence, however, will not be departing Smallville anytime soon.)
He'll hang around long enough to tie up some loose ends. Long enough, at the very least, to introduce his old family friend Doctor Donald Blake to them what need to meet him.
Maybe Kara can kiss the poor tortured lad goodbye or something.
ChasNicollette
Allons-y Means Let's Go.
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'I... feel sick
I... feel scared
I... feel ready
And yet unprepared
The world is not enough
But it is such a perfect place to start, my love.'
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