It's a Graves thing (soundofwings) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2014-01-13 22:31:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | death, door: dc comics, red hood |
Who: Death and Jason
What: Threatening Death
Where: Muerte's Funeral Home
When: Directly following this and as Kara begins her destruction.
Warnings/Rating: Threats of violence, some injury, talk of gruesome death
Being everywhere at once, at one time (since the beginning of time) so natural to her that she never thought of being anything else, had become a challenge. Whereas at one time she could simply will herself into a presence while still being spread over every corner of the universe, she now found herself exhausted by simply being spread across the city, and willing herself to be in a row of places, one after the other (and so soon after taking even a single person) took more out of her than she had ever anticipated. She may have wanted to laugh at Eddie's comment about her "god powers being turned up to eleven", but after taking herself from Wayne Manor back to her funeral home, she had to concede that he may have had a point. While not human, she was far, far less than what she once was.
Taking a soul, escorting it to its next place, had once happened at a staggering rate per second. But the taking of a single boy, the first one since she herself had died and returned, had sapped the warmth from her physical body, left her tired even before she tried putting herself in different places. And that, the trips across the city on top of everything else she'd done in a single day, had pushed her to the absolute end of what she could do. She'd made the journey from the Manor, but had ended up falling hard to the basement floor instead of appearing or landing lightly. She knew that she would have bruises along one side of her body (and apologized to Iris in advance), and she took a long, long time to push herself up. It took even longer to drag herself up the stairs, only getting her feet under herself a fraction of the time and crawling the rest of it. If Nicodemus hadn't have been waiting for her at the top of the stairs, she likely would have just stayed in the basement.
The basement stairs let out into the back foyer of the house, a mud room set-up that led into the kitchen there. She didn't have much call for the kitchen, even when she was through the door regularly, but it always held things to drink, a few things to eat if visitors to the funeral home needed something to sustain them, and now it held Nicodemus' food and water bowls. With him pacing nervously around her as she moved slowly, she finally worked her way through the room and to one of the small sitting rooms, aiming for a chair she considered one of her favorites. She could have stayed in the kitchen, sitting on the floor, but the cold that had settled on her skin (skin gone past pale and into sickly grey) had begun to sink in. While she didn't shiver, she was chilled, cold, and wanted the comfort of being off the floor. Making it to the chair was a feat, and she moved only just enough to sit. She didn't arrange her dress, didn't settle herself more than necessary, and reached out for the dog, ushering him up onto her lap, going very still once he settled as well.
Jason knew where he might find death. Well, that in and of itself wasn't weird, but in this case he knew where Death would be hiding out. If she wasn't at the funeral home, well, then he'd have to start from square one, but when he was in this mindset, single minded on a single goal of revenge, he tended to move from point A to point B without a lot of forethought. The funeral home was the obvious choice, so he would check it first. If she wasn't there, then he'd consider where else she might be hiding, who might shelter her now. Selina, maybe.
He hadn't spoken to anyone since he'd left the manor, and no one had tried to contact him, too wrapped up in their own grief. He didn't have time to grieve, or think about the practically headless corpse laid out on a table in the batcave where his old suit was kept in a glass case, still bearing the repair marks from the aftermath of the explosion. He couldn't think about it. If he thought about Damian for more than a second, he'd feel that feeling again, that sadness, and he'd learned a long time ago that you only escaped the loss by acknowledging it and moving straight to action. If you stopped moving, it would catch you and drag you down like an anchor, and then you were done. He was going to make this right, and he was going to make sure there was no chance to lose momentum.
It meant he wasn't feeling much, right now, not much, nothing really but the cold burn of old hate. He was very efficient when he was running on rage. He could keep a good handle on it, keep it from getting in the way of making plans and decisions. It drove him to an edge of madness where he could see his course of action laid out in front of him in careful detail. He'd never been the most intelligent of the Robins, nor the best detective, nor the best fighter, but he made up for what he lacked in anger, a stronger motivator than almost anything else. It gave him an edge in a fight, and it gave him an advantage in times like this one. While most were paralyzed by misery, anger was nothing but fuel for him.
He almost skidded his bike into the back door of the funeral home when he arrived. It had been a long time since he'd last met Death, but he'd walked over with the boys (the boys he'd sent to help her when she needed someone) and seen the place, but she hadn't ever been there when he'd come. He knew there was a door for trucks downstairs that would be locked, and a door in the back that would open.
So it did. It creaked a little, but he knew how to pull the weight up on a door handle to swing the door softly and silently. He'd done his fair share of break-ins in his teens. This was no different.
He was wearing his mask, and his uniform, all washed in rainwater and car exhaust. He was a black shape with a gleaming red death's head at the back door, and he shut it quietly behind him, opening the lock wide so it didn't click when he put it back into place.
He moved through the house, away from the sitting rooms, toward the living area. She would be down there somewhere, in one of the more private places. If not there, then upstairs. He would make rounds of the first floor first. He remembered creeping through a drug baron's house when he was 18 and freshly back to Gotham, knife at his side as it was now, muscles tight as metal springs as they were now, eyes behind the mask looking for earth to salt, as they were now. This was no different. Anyone who took good lives ought to see punishment. Anyone. No exceptions.
Death didn't sleep much on her side of the door, even when spending the majority of her time being as human as she could. Sleeping was wasting the time she received, and with so little of it available due to Iris' strange schedules, she tended to work with what she got and then went back through the door when she was done. It meant she didn't have much experience with drifting off, but every last bit of her existence was exhausted, and it meant that though her body felt only half physical in that moment, she ended up closing her eyes and slipping quickly into an uneasy half-sleep. It wasn't something she realized or could acknowledge until the awareness of touch on the handle of the back door pulled her back to consciousness with a jolt. The touch was filled with stealth and rage and the sort of crackling green electricity that only truly belonged to one person in Gotham. She knew it was Jason before he even slipped in the door.
Even with him being as careful as possible, moving through the house on stealthy feet, she could still track his presence through a building that was tied to her own awareness in a way that couldn't be broken without her extended absence from the door. Nicodemus knew that there was someone else in the house as well, though he didn't bark, his ears were perked and he looked toward the open archway to the next room, not needing to be told to stay quiet. With the sort of anger filling the house, she knew that Jason could be there for only a small handful of reasons, and if she could avoid that sort of confrontation until she was more herself, she would take the reprieve.
She didn't hold much hope when he appeared in the doorway, and sighed to herself, though there was no movement to betray it. Though the chair was dark and deep and nearly swallowed her, her body seeming thinner and more delicate than usual and hidden by the equally dark fabric of her dress, her limbs were still bare - pale arms, face, legs that she hadn't covered when she tucked them up onto the chair, the grey skin there covered with its tracery of silver scars. She was a chiaroscuro image of black and grey, points and planes human in shape, but more otherworldly than not. As she watched him move through the space, she debated between greeting him and simply staying still and quiet and hoping that he left.
Jason almost missed her. He almost walked right past her, and lost his chance entirely. But he saw a glimmer from the corner of his eye that arrested him in the doorway, and then there she was, like a ghost appearing out of mist, edges and corners bifurcating reality from blurry substance. It was so much like the way she'd appeared to him that first time that it pulled him up short, and he looked at her, looked where her face ought to be in the dim. He couldn't quite see it, not even with the enhanced lenses of the mask. But it was her.
He wondered if someone else would have missed her, someone who hadn't been in her domain twice already now. He clutched the knife at his side a little tighter, leather gloves creaking infinitesimally as he shifted his grip. The blade wasn't straight from hilt to tip, but a constant curvature, waves of metal on either side meeting at a vicious point. This sort of knife was not for an easy slitting of a throat, but for stabbing, for tearing, for causing pain and making absolutely sure there was too much tearing for the wound to ever heal. It was a knife made for nothing but killing. He'd stolen it from one of Ra's' men, before he lept into the ravine from the Lazarus Pit. He had killed two men with it in that wild, terrified frenzy, and...and why was he even thinking about that? Her. It had to be proximity to her.
"You know why I'm here," he said, from behind the mask. She had to. They both had to know.
For most, the sight of the mask, the man wearing it stalking like a predator through the house, would have been enough to terrify. But she knew the face beneath that mask, knew things about him, and so she didn't scream or cry or beg for mercy. She simply sighed and with a great effort, leaned forward to carefully place her dog on the ground. Nicodemus whined at her, but she simply gave him a little push (not in Jason's direction, but toward another door). She didn't say a thing, but she didn't need to. After just a moment, the tiny animal scampered away.
She heard the creak of his leather gloves as she sat back again, and glanced at the knife in his hand. She knew its history, the lives that it had taken, knew what sort of purpose that particular design held, made for pain from the first time a smith pounded those curves and polished them to a whisper edge. It was that, more than anything else, that told her why he was there. She shifted again in her chair, carefully, like the elderly did when when their bones ached them. And when she finally spoke, eyes focused on the seemingly opaque lenses of that mask like she could see past them, her voice was rough. It was the rasp of being too exhausted to clear her throat, the sand that gathered when a person screamed too loud for too long. It was a ravaged thing that barely carried to him, a tired regret lined through with pain.
"It won't bring him back."
At the statement Jason leaned forward, almost into her face. He rested his fist on the arm of the chair, the hand which clutched the knife at his side. The words seemed to spark something in him, and he was close enough that his breathing was audible inside the mask. Impassive as it was, whatever was behind it couldn’t be good.
“Tell me why you took him,” he said. The masked head tipped down a little. “I need to know that. There’s a corpse in Wayne Manor without a head right now. His head - there isn’t even anything left, just black bone."
He was too close. She knew the exact position of that knife, how sharp it was, how she felt trapped in the chair by it all. But she didn't flinch back, didn't move away, simply continued to look at those reflective lenses as if she could see through them. Her blinking, when she actually lowered her lids, was a slow drag to open them again.
"It was his time. He was going to be taken anyway. I only made certain it was done properly." She listened to the hollow rasp of his breath within his helmet and shook her head slightly. "I don't control how someone dies." Her hand shifted nearly imperceptibly and placed two frigid fingers on the back of the fist that rested on the arm of her chair. The chill seeped through the leather and she shook her head. "It's not like that."
He felt the cold through his flesh and into whatever it was that lay beyond that, the strange and ethereal substance of the soul. He had known that cold before, and he pulled his hand back from under her touch, sharply. "You didn't make sure of anything," Jason said, definite as fact. "You could have helped him. Done something for him. Left him alone. Aren't I owed that?"
His voice wasn't a strangled thing, wasn't shrill. It was the low tone of decisions that had already been made, of anger that ran down hard fought channels, lapping at the edges all the time. "Don't you owe me at least one death?"
The voice that filtered out to her caused an ache to start up somewhere behind her chest. She shook her head as he pulled his hand back, her own fingers hovering there for a hanging moment before she settled them slowly back down in her lap. "I couldn't," she whispered. "I don't…" She trailed off, and as she looked at him her eyes shadowed from their usual light color down to something dark and just as shadowed as the corners of the room. "Something else. There's something else." She paused and frowned as she looked for the words to make him understand. "He was the first I'd taken in months. Even when I've been here."
"There's nothing else," he said, and he lifted the knife without thinking, the point meeting the nape of her neck. He lifted her chin with the tip. She would meet his eyes, goddamn it. She wouldn't look away from him, not now, not after everything. "There's a dead teenager and I'm still fucking here. That's all there is." What did it matter? What did any of it fucking matter? He knew what she was trying to say, the kind of doubt she wanted to sew, the things she wanted him to think. She wanted him to think she hadn't been taking any souls since her little vacation, and that there was something else in the mix. But she was Death. She was the power over it, and the thing itself. She could have waved that touch away from Damian. He knew it. He would accept nothing less. There had to have been a way out of this, a way around it, and his grip tightened on the knife. He lifted his head, looking down at her. "You owed me," he repeated. There wasn't much order in the world, and there were many rules that people touted as gospel that bad men broke all the time. But Death was a rule he could no longer abide by. "If I kill you, it will stop," he said, with surety. "It's you, isn't it? You're what takes people? Whatever it is that takes them when you're gone, it's still really you, tied to you. Has to be." He pressed the knife in just a little more. If she didn't move her head, if she was human, it might have drawn a line of blood. "Has to be."
The tip of that knife, sharp as winter wind, dug into her skin as he used it to lift her chin. For a long moment, her skin went silver-pale around that point, lightening from grey with the pressure, and then a dark bead formed around it, heavy and slick against the metal. She paid it no mind, too focused on what Jason was saying, no thought of turning away. She knew there was no way to convince him of what had happened, of the way she fit into the world now. She felt vulnerable in a way that had nothing to do with the knife at her neck, though she knew that was just another thing she had to worry about. She didn't quite know what would happen if he pressed forward with that blade, and she didn't especially want to find out; she wasn't certain that her encounter with the Lazarus Pit hadn't changed her just enough to make her undoing on the edge of a blade a real possibility.
"It won't stop," she insisted, and though her body stayed motionless in the chair, conserving the energy she had left, her voice steeled just a bit. "This is the first time I've even been through the door in months, Jason. There was a time when I was unmade, and people still died. It doesn't stop. There is something else out there that takes, that I don't control." She held still with her words, eyes too-dark and intent on his face, gaze locked on his, past the barrier of the helmet. The edge of the blade was too sharp though, and it opened a line along her skin, spilling dark over grey and silver. The color of it was hard to determine in the strangely shadowed lighting - dark at first, seemingly black, but after a moment of it running along flesh and blade, it lightened to a deep red shot through with silver. Not quite human, not quite inhuman. "Do you really think I want to take any of you from this place? That I haven't done the very best I can to keep your family from it? There are more than just our lives at stake here, and I am very aware of it." And she hoped that reminder would keep him from doing anything in the moment that would have consequences on the other side of the door for either of them.
The curvature of that wavering blade had much in common with the wielder, and he held it to her even as impossible blood spilled over one of its curves and dripped in thick, flat drops onto her lap. The face behind the mask was invisible, with only the breathing to mark him a man, not a mannequin. All the steel in the world couldn't convince him that nothing could have been done. Nothing? There was always something. Whatever life might be lost in the process of killing the half-woman before him had somehow dropped beyond his limited line of sight, even as the man on the other side of the door scrabbled for purchase for that very reason. Wrong. He thought that would be wrong. Jason thought, so be it. Two for the price of billions on billions? Fair enough.
Then, far away, a boom went off like someone had started a fireworks display in the city, and he looked up sharply, out a crack in the curtains. Something was glowing in the night, down in midtown. The halo of light was visible even from here. Another boom - the furniture rattled on the floor. He knew what made that sound, and where, and he finally felt a bloom of the grief he'd strangled half to death, dripping through like a water stain. He knew who else was grieving, and that was all, that was what punched the hole.
He looked down at Death, then back up at the sky outside the window. This would take time, and he couldn't even know if it would work, and there might be people out there being hurt, and someone who needed him more than death did, or than Death did, just now. Death for Death, that could wait. He'd always have a knife, and no one was going to kill him before tomorrow, because she wouldn't dare to take him. Not any time soon. A calculated move - with the threat of a knife's edge and a secondary death, he could bring fear to death itself. There was a soft and leaden comfort in that.
He pulled the knife from her throat, and let its point hover near one silken eye, still slick and dark at its bulbous edges. "You find a way," he said, in echoing growl in the shape of a man, hollow and threatening. "You find a way to make this right."
He moved, then, out the door, into the street, onto his bike. He had to drive toward the light.
She didn't flinch in the face of that blade, even though the cold of her hands had traveled even farther within her and settled a frigid fear in her stomach. It was the unknown - what would happen to her, what would (in turn) happen to Iris. While the woman in Las Vegas may have (still) been alright with her own death, there was no reason for it to come at Jason's hands. She simply kept her gaze fixed on his, steady and even and with none of that internal worry showing on her face.
The boom was expected. She was still spread just thin enough over the city that she knew of Kara's activities. Even so, she startled just enough to jolt herself against the blade, catching herself on it even more, a greater seep of blood over the metal. She grit her teeth against the way it burned, keeping herself still through the next explosions. She read the grief on his face, knew the way that it was spreading toward those that knew Damian. It would continue through the city and beyond.
She only blinked slowly at the hovering point of wicket silver near her eye. She didn't move, held herself still, and merely looked up as Jason made his threats. And then he was gone, and she was shaking and pressing a hand to the bleeding line on her neck. She couldn't stop the trembling of her fingers, nor the way that her breath caught. She thought of leaving - leaving the house, the city, the door itself. But for the moment she only grasped for the strength that the last day had stolen from her.