pleasuretoburn (pleasuretoburn) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-11-11 18:46:00 |
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Entry tags: | noah restic, rhiannon lee |
Keepaway
Who: Rhiannon, Noah
What: Typical Shenanigans
Where: Las Vegas
When: Present
Ratings/Warnings: References to Violence
Commonwealth was billed as a modern-day speakeasy, just down the block from the Fremont Street Experience in downtown Las Vegas. It had a rooftop bar, a brick mural of Marlene Dietrich, and a members-only bar somewhere in its dark interior, which was inexplicably described as ‘secret’ right on its Google Maps listing, all of which fed Rhiannon’s opinion that it was trying too hard. That said, if she could bring herself to order an overpriced drink called ‘Like Your Melons’ with a straight face, she received access to that roof, which had a terrific view of the corner of 6th and Fremont.
The hunter posted up at the railing and sipped the too-sweet cocktail, a cigarette loose in her fingers. Rhiannon was looking out for a vampire she’d been following for weeks, one she caught sight of in a club, just as he was guiding a tourist through a side exit, but by the time she elbowed her way outside, the cute kid in a brand new, bought-for-vacation outfit was half-dead between the dumpsters. The vampire had a pattern of coming this way, but he was nowhere to be seen tonight.
Rhiannon checked the time on her phone, finished her drink, and left the glass on an empty table. She took one last look at the sidewalk below.
Noah didn’t usually accept jobs that entailed prolonged surveillance, but this one had been pitched to him as intriguing. Which was why he found himself now weaving his way through foot-traffic, following the obviously intoxicated subject.
The pyrokinetic couldn’t hide the annoyance that made its way to his face, and he was getting carelessly close to the drunken target.
Rhiannon found the black, metal staircase to the first floor and sped down it. Her boots vibrated on the stair treads, right hand holding her cigarette aloft as she cut past a throng of people on their way up as she came down. She cut through the tight crowd dancing near the bar and exited onto the sidewalk, her mind on ways to salvage the night if hunting that vampire wasn’t going to be it. A drunk person bounced off her shoulder, their feet getting caught up in an effort to save themselves from a nasty tumble. Rhiannon sacrificed her smoke to grab their elbow before they landed in the gutter, where they’d have probably gotten run over by an Uber, if left to their own devices. “Either watch where you’re going or sit the fuck down,” she said sharply and let go.
“Shit,” Noah muttered under his breath. He saw his target ping off of a woman, her grabbing his arm to keep him from falling. That’s when he recognized Rhiannon, narrowing his eyes and mentally calculating his next move. He hesitated for a moment, pausing, people passing him on the sidewalk.
Then he approached Rhiannon. “Oh good, you found my friend.” Noah reached into the drunk man’s pockets and removed his phone, grabbing his hand and using his index finger to unlock the device.
The drunk guy was too disoriented to do much but stand there blubbering. The hunter saw the slick move Noah pulled and grew curious what he was up to. With no particular agenda other than to annoy him after that stunt in the diner, Rhiannon’s arm snaked out and she popped the device out of his hand from underneath, sending it spinning into the air. She snatched it with her free hand and took two backward steps. “Oop. When’s the last time you played keepaway?” She kept the firestarter’s name off her tongue in case he didn’t want the other guy hearing it.
Noah was not quite quick enough to match her speed and reflexes, and he watched, visibly annoyed, as Rhiannon held the phone aloft. “I don’t play ‘keepaway’,” he told her wearily. The phone was the only thing he needed, and if she decided to take off with it, he was screwed.
“What do you want?” The pyrokinetic knew he was giving her leverage right off the bat, and he hated it.
“Your time.” Rhiannon raised her shoulders. “Oh, and an explanation for the trip down to Searchlight. That should do it.” The phone secure in her hand, she waited to see if Noah would take the offer or cut bait. “We can go for a walk. You need this guy or just his phone?” A look at the civilian told Rhiannon that he could probably be tied up like a dog on the street and he wouldn’t object much.
“He’ll be fine here,” Noah remarked with a cursory, backward glance at the other man. “Let’s walk.” The accidental Searchlight trip was an embarrassment. He had let his guard down too much.
“I didn’t know where we were going. I was...out of it.” The pyrokinetic clenched and unclenched his jaw. “I had no clue I was in Searchlight until I saw the fry cook.”
“Really.” Rhiannon started walking, keeping an eye on him as they began to cut through the crowd. “I don’t know what you were on, but I might need the name of your dealer.” She stepped around the legs of a couple of young tourists sitting outside, backs to the wall of a building, phones in hand, fresh off some kind of pub crawl. “Although if it’s me, I try not to do that where people I know can see me.” Safety was one thing; pride was another, more important one. God only knew what emotional dirt she might give out for free if she was caught drunk or high in public. She flashed back to the cell phone pic with Phanuel.
“The person I was with was my dealer,” he told her, one corner of his mouth turning up. “Ro.” Noah looked straight ahead again, keeping pace with her. “We’ve cut ties.”
What was she supposed to say, sorry to hear that? There, there, probable serial killer? The first and only time Rhiannon saw Noah with the short-haired woman named Ro, it looked like they needed to get a room. She had a hard time imagining Noah in his feelings, but she didn’t know much about him. “That either sucks or it doesn’t,” she said. To herself, she turned over the reasons why someone like Noah would have to cut ties with a person. Maybe knowing Ro was strategically disadvantageous. Maybe Ro figured out he liked to burn people alive and wasn’t into it.
“This for a contract?” she asked, holding up the cell phone.
His gaze fell on the phone, then drifted to her. “Yes,” he began, wondering where this particular conversation was going. If she would still insist on keeping the device away from him. “But it doesn’t involve killing anyone...this time. I just need information.”
Something occurred to Noah, then. “Surely you have better things to do than question me,” he said, tone curious. “Monsters to hunt, maybe?”
“I think my guy saw me coming and ducked out early,” Rhiannon admitted. “Lucky me, you’re here to take my mind off it.” From the looks of things, Noah was overjoyed about it. The hunter was on the verge of a smile as she waited for a crosswalk to clear and stepped into the empty intersection. “I wanted to get your take on something.” She offered him the phone in her right hand, a flash of pale skin with the open wings of a bird inked on top. “I’d ask Katherine, but vampire circuitry’s a little different than ours. You are still human.”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Noah agreed, accepting the phone and immediately storing it in a pocket, “I am still human.” At the mention of Katherine, his mind flashed back to the last time he had seen the vampire. Stealing the Batmobile had only been the beginning of that particular adventure, and a smile did come to his face thinking about it.
“What do you want to know?”
“I’m in an unfamiliar position,” Rhiannon said, gaining the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street and stepping around a busker. “I’m from a line of hunters. Knowing the little bit you do about me, you could probably guess I’ve been asked to kill something before and declined the offer. But that was a luxury. If I said no, my family might do a lot of fucked up things, but they weren’t going to knock me off. Hunters are precious.” She took out her pack of cigarettes and lighter, only belatedly realizing it was a strange thing to whip out in front of a guy who could make fire.
Rhiannon opened the lid of the pack. “I’m thinking about taking a job. One I can’t say no to, once I’m in. What’s that like?” She tucked the cigarette between her lips.
She was telling him things, personal things. Noah realized then how supremely confident she seemed. Rhiannon either didn’t see him as an immediate threat, or had some strange version of trust in their agreement. “I don’t know if I’m the right person to ask,” the pyrokinetic told her, honestly. “There isn’t much that I would say ‘no’ to.”
He contemplated her question for another moment, weaving his way through people crowding the sidewalk. “But I like to make sure that I have an ‘out’ for anything that I accept,” Noah admitted, somewhat begrudgingly. “Whether that’s leverage on the other person, or knowing that if things went south, there’s some kind of contingency.”
“Hm.” Rhiannon nodded, her lighter clacking shut. The tip of her cigarette burned red-orange. “Have you ever found yourself on the wrong side of it? Maybe it wasn’t for saying no, but for getting in the way of somebody else’s yes? Even unintentionally.” Their slow footsteps took them past the open door of a bar. Music and voices spilled outward.
“Well,” Noah replied, his smile growing at that question, “I guess you could say what happened with Katherine is an example of that.” Not only had he pissed off a formidable vampire, he’d done the same to the person who had hired him to capture her.
“But I like taking the risk. Makes things less boring. After a while, believe it or not, randomly killing people loses its...sheen. You need something to make it interesting.” He was talking a lot, he realized. It was slightly disturbing. Why was she so easy to talk to?
“That’s upsettingly relatable,” Rhiannon commented. She passed beneath the bright blue glow of a neon sign in the shape of a martini glass. She could still detect the fruity aftertaste of the drink she’d overpaid for at the speakeasy. “People aren’t my thing, but a predictable vampire is a letdown.” She didn’t say anything about weres; it was never boring hunting one of those because it could be outright gut wrenching, even if they deserved it. And it was a lot easier to stick silver in them in animal form than to look them in a pair of human-seeming eyes.
“Would you care if chasing risk meant you’d end up alone with it? Or if you died?” Rhiannon kept her eyes on the concrete.
Noah glanced over his shoulder at the glowing sign, then paused on the sidewalk to look at Rhiannon. “I try to avoid dying,” he told her, “as a general rule. But you can’t deny that cheating death is exciting. It’s good for the ego.”
He pointed to the martini glass. “Do you want a drink?”
Rhiannon looked up. “Sure. What the hell?” She extinguished her cigarette in an ashtray by the entrance and caught the door on an outward swing as a redheaded woman walked outside, jabbering on her cell phone. The interior of the bar was darker without the glare of streetlights and blinking signs, but her eyes adjusted quickly. “Are you a barstool or a table kind of guy?” The only place she’d seen him was Rabbit Hole and it was hardly the norm in terms of drinking establishments.
“Barstool,” he answered automatically, eyes alighting upon two empty seats near the end of the bar. Noah let Rhiannon choose first, before taking the other stool. Two bartenders were working simultaneously on each end, the one closest to them was currently in the middle of a transaction. The pyrokinetic waited patiently to get his attention.
“This hypothetical job offer,” Noah spoke up, glancing sideways at the hunter, “is it good money? What’s the biggest temptation?”
“It’s not about money,” she said, sliding onto a stool that allowed her to see the bulk of the room. “It’s about monsters. Any hunter who puts money first is questionable.” She placed her phone, cigarettes, and keys in front of her on the bar so she could sit comfortably. “You could say I like a target rich environment, and I don’t mind breaking a sweat for it. I think this person could do that for me. The drawback is answering to someone else. I lost my patience with that a while ago.”
Noah thought about that for a moment, his gaze falling on the small pile of her belongings as they sat on the bar. “Is there a way to make them only think you’re answering to them? That’s what I do.” He held up a hand to get the bartender’s attention.
“Like making them think something was their idea. Planting things in their heads. You can make it into a game.” The pyrokinetic straightened, looking up at the bartender. “Vodka, neat. And whatever she wants.”
She was chagrined to realize she was about to order the same drink and redirected herself to a bourbon. Rhiannon arched a brow and thought about Noah’s question. “Maybe. I don’t like playing games, but I’ve done it. Telling lies by omission.” She thought of the things she kept away from her uncle over the years, listening in on his plans and screwing them over when she thought they were fucked up. But her uncle wasn’t Elfleda, and he always assumed he had her word rather than asking for it.
“When you’re a hunter, you’re trained to think of everything as being for the common good, a sacrifice you were born to make. And they want all the choices to seem black and white, but everybody knows they’re gray.” Rhiannon picked up her pack of cigarettes and rotated it in her hand, a methodical tap of each corner of the box in turn. “My gray is different from someone else’s, but none of us are clean. But no matter what, I always knew which team I was playing for, and I believed in it. Now I can’t make up my mind if I’m considering this because I really want to save the world, or if I just want to tear it up better than anyone else, and the fact that it’s monsters gives me a pass.”
Rhiannon gave Noah an up and down. “These are things you don’t have to hide.” Her drink arrived along with a napkin. As soon as she said it, she turned her face towards the glass, remembering that he wasn’t born a contract killer.
“If all hunters want to do is save the world, what’s left for them if they manage to do it?” Noah asked curiously after his initial sip of vodka. “Retirement? Gold wristwatch?” He smirked, staring at his glass.
“If you’re worried that there’s a part of you that’s like me, I wouldn’t,” the pyrokinetic added, inspired by her last comment. “It’s probably what makes you good at what you do.”
Rhiannon was caught laughing mid-swallow of her drink. “Jesus Christ, was that a Speed reference?” She would never be able to separate gold watches from Dennis Hopper’s bus bomb. “If we saved the world, I think… we’d stop reproducing people like me, or it would turn into a vestigial organ. As for me, I’d lose my mind.”
She looked over at Noah’s drink. “And the part of me that’s like you might make me terrible at everything else I tried. I already kind of am. Do you have hobbies? Do you feel things?”
“Hobbies,” Noah repeated, obviously perplexed by such a term. “Like knitting?” He thought of the various ways he spent his free time, none of which he particularly wanted to share at the moment. “Does drinking count?” he asked, before downing the rest of his vodka and signalling for a refill.
“I recently discussed the topic of feelings with someone,” the pyrokinetic admitted, thinking briefly of Ro. “They were surprised to learn the truth about me.”
Okay, so no hobbies. It was alarming that the first thing to come to his mind wasn’t running or playing the guitar, but knitting. How out of touch with the human experience was this guy? “What’s the truth?” She went a little deeper into her glass, light from behind the bar reflecting off the wet contents.
He watched the clear liquid pour from the bottle as it filled his glass. “About what I do, but I think more importantly, that I don’t feel bad about doing it.” Noah glanced at Rhiannon, bringing the vodka closer to him.
Noah couldn’t explain why he felt the need to confess the next part. “I knew someone who could manipulate...she said the chemicals in someone’s brain. Mine.” The pyrokinetic brought the glass to his mouth. “And the more I let her do that, the closer I got to ‘feeling things’. Like happiness, I think. She said it was all a lie, it was like a drug, fake.”
Shit. She tried to imagine what it would be like to not know how happiness felt, then to glimpse it. Rhiannon gave him some space by staring at the display of bottles and taps. “But she can’t manipulate something that’s not there, can she? You’d have to have some capacity for it. Maybe she could access it or play around with the levels, but that’s not the same as creating it out of thin air. So how much of a lie can it be?”
Rhiannon stopped herself from asking anything further, like whether he liked feeling it, or whether it was addictive being around someone like that.
He took in a sharp breath, looking down into his glass. “I didn’t think it felt fake,” he said quietly, almost under his breath. Whether Rhiannon heard him or not, Noah wasn’t sure. “But that particular vein is now closed. I’m sure I’ll find someone else who can do the same...if I wanted.”
The pyrokinetic turned and looked at the hunter. “They’re called etheric vampires. Instead of blood, they feed on things more intangible.”
Listening to him, it clicked in her head. “Oh, yeah. Through sex, right?” She checked in for clarity. “I’m not sure I knew they could do more than feed on lust.” Rhiannon turned that over in her mind, never having considered that angle, but it made sense. If they wanted to draw someone to them or have a repeat customer, it wouldn’t hurt to dial the other chemicals up a few notches, too. Generally speaking, they weren’t the kind of vampires she had to worry about, so she hadn’t given it as much thought. “Is it addictive?”
“I think it might have been addictive,” Noah confirmed. He shook his head at what he was about to admit. “That’s what was going on when I found myself in Searchlight.” He looked at her profile next to him. “I literally had no idea where I was at first.” It was embarrassing to admit. The pyrokinetic had let his guard down. Vulnerability. That’s what it was, and he had thought it was worth it.
“Did you say earlier that your family wouldn’t kill you because hunters are in short supply?”
Rhiannon's eyes widened at the concept of looking around and having no clue how you’d gotten somewhere. She managed to keep the reaction mostly to herself. It was nothing being blackout drunk couldn’t accomplish, but that kind of trust in surroundings or people wasn’t something she could often afford.
“It’s more like… a hunter’s bloodline is important to their family.” She finished her drink and set the glass on the bar. “I don’t want to say it’s a pedigree, because that’s not exactly it. It’s not a caste system. It’s just sacred. So I don’t think they’d kill me, as long as I’m human anyway. But they have definitely made things hard for me sometimes. Ultimately they’d love it if I stepped back in line or had a kid.”
“Neither of those things sounds fun,” Noah commented. “You’re better off taking this mysterious job.” To him, the choice was simple, clear-cut. But strangely, he also understood her family’s logic. It was practical, it made sense. It was often the same reason why he chose not to kill people; they had some kind of value.
“Have you ever wanted to make life hard for them, too?” he asked her. “Beyond not ‘falling in line’, I mean.”
Rhiannon’s elbow was on the bar, and at that question and her immediate inner response, she found herself tucking her mouth behind her fist. She thought back to receiving a gloating text message from Sean and how her first instinct had been to keep driving, all the way to Chicago, to destroy the house they’d bought. Further back, she remembered the sabotage of several of their well-laid plans, but that was less revenge-motivated and more for the sake of saving lives. She had dreamed of beating the living shit out of him, too.
“Yeah.” She shrugged at Noah. “But I think when it’s personal, it’s harder to stop yourself from doing the worst possible thing. It should be easier, you should have mercy on people you loved, but it’s actually the other way around. You know?”
“Not really, no,” Noah answered, almost smiling. “For me, the difference comes down to whether I feel angry or not,” he went on, explaining. “Not angry means doing it efficiently, it’s more about the job. But when I’m angry, I want to make it hurt more.” Again, he wasn’t sure why he was telling her all this.
“Do you ever feel like that, when you’re hunting? Like if they make it harder, or piss you off?”
Rhiannon pivoted towards him. “Yeah, I think that’s what I mean. For me to ever hurt someone I know, I’d have to be royally pissed. And when I’m royally pissed, I don’t know if I want to hurt someone more, but it takes me longer to empty the chamber. Figuratively or literally speaking, take your pick. It feels endless. And there’s definitely times when I’m hunting that I get mad. Like when a vampire draws blood or actually gets their teeth in me. Or when a were snaps so close to my skin that I feel the heat coming from their mouth? Fuck.”
The bartender had refilled her. Just thinking about it made the brunette want to angry-slam the drink. She limited herself to two big swallows. “You said you get angry, by the way. So you do feel something.”
He glanced at her drink, then up at her. He wondered if every hunter kept up that pace. “When people ask me that, I think they’re really asking if I feel remorse or guilt. Anger is a lot easier.” Noah drained the contents of his own glass. He was tempted to ask the bartender to leave the bottle; it just seemed like one of those situations.
“You wondered earlier if you got a pass because you kill monsters,” the pyrokinetic remarked. “Would you think differently of me if that’s what I did?”
Remorse hadn’t been on Rhiannon’s mind. It was a matter of understanding how someone like Noah worked. It didn’t seem like he couldn’t feel; it seemed like he could only feel certain things, which lent itself to a psychological rationale for how he behaved.
“Probably,” she admitted. “But it would still weird me out that you’re running on such a narrow range of emotions. Mine is a deep well, so I can’t relate to that. But I’m sitting here talking to you, like I talk to Katherine. I’m not calling you an asshole, because that’s rude, but I’ve been known to hang out with assholes. You’re smart, you’ve made me laugh before, which is rare, and you’re a hunter, too. And it’s a plus that you don’t sit on a high horse. You seem to see the world for what it is.”
Rhiannon crossed one leg over the other. “Don’t get me wrong, if I saw you burning someone alive I’d be disgusted. I don’t even like burning vampires unless I stake them first. It takes forever.”
“Are these compliments, or just you rationalizing why you’re even spending time with me?” Noah couldn’t help but fully smile at that. “I wouldn’t change that about myself, by the way. There are a lot of pros to being like I am. I don’t agonize over things, I do what needs to be done. I sleep very well at night.” He shrugged.
“I suppose that means we understand each other.” He took out his wallet and threw down some cash.
Rhiannon said, “More like observations. I don’t really care what people think of who I spend time with.” Who she worked for might be another thing. She paid the bartender for her two drinks and remembered Cian would probably be waiting for her to text that she was alive after she dropped that pin, however long ago it had been. “That’s probably a thing we have in common, too.”
She gathered her belongings and slipped off the stool, pausing long enough to finish her drink. “Thanks for humoring me.”
Noah pushed his empty glass away. “I would say ‘any time’, but...why start lying to each other now?” He gave her a nod as he disembarked from the stool.