Pallas (goatofwar) wrote in forgotten_gods, @ 2010-07-30 08:16:00 |
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Entry tags: | pallas, thanatos |
Who: Pallas (goatofwar), mentions of Perses (perses) and Thanatos (apeacefuldeath).
What: A little war, a little family time. A little inevitability.
Where: New York City, various boroughs.
When: July 18th-ish.
Warnings: Cheerfully vague violence.
Men were dead and it felt fine.
Pallas went in quick and quiet under the mafioso's radar, just another big lug with a past not worth repeating. Amidst men who dealt death and pain, the Titan could make himself invisible, untraceable. He'd been not Pallas, but Paul. ("Come ti chiami?" "Paul." "Paolo." "Sì.") No war god, him, just a mountain of a man with stony eyes and an unflappable countenance.
He'd been playing this game long before their ancestors dreamt it.
Perses wasn't whistled for 'til the mid-point, and whether that was was due to their strange fistfightfuck of a never-ending dance or because Pallas wanted to give little brother every possible second with the star-dusk woman, it didn't matter. It was what it was; the war dog came when called regardless of semantics. Pallas met his sword hand in the place they always met -- the one never discussed beforehand but naturally gravitated toward with inner true north -- dragging him into the same bone-crushing embrace as ever. A sunny smile which was gone before it could fully register, and they were off to work.
A few months of groundwork laid down, lifetimes of prior experience. The Titan brothers set Gambino against Martinelli in the time it took to finish a good bottle of wine.
Gunfire rang through their mortal halls, blood down their faces to their feet. Pallas breathed in cordite, exhaled conflict. Perses ran along the other side, nipped at their heels and circled 'round to herd both families into one big box canyon. Then both brothers went wild and for a precious second everything was the way it had once been.
It passed, as all inevitably did.
Surveying after-the-fact damage made Pallas breathe easy again, if only for now. Whatever old age poison still lingered in his big body shuddered its way out in a long, clean sigh of relief (or maybe it just lowered its shaggy head, put away those vicious teeth and went back to sleep; Pallas didn't -- wouldn't -- prod at it to find out, not yet). Gambino enforcers and money men crunched underfoot amidst broken glass, but the real prize was what they'd wrought upon the Martinelli family. Big brother clapped the war dog on his shoulder, a wordless "good work" ringing true from fever-bright eyes; the impetuous little family's head had been removed from its neck. Destruction made a clean sweep through the building, if you could call Swiss cheese walls and smiling knife-slit throats "clean".
The Titans disappeared without a trace. Packed up their gear -- holstered guns, cleaned and sheathed blades, wiped their filthy faces -- and vanished wholesale into the comfortable anonymity of New York. "Go home," Pallas told Perses from the tiny rat trap of a bolthole they awayed to. "Kiss your wife for me." He grinned when he said it, the same grin which never changed over the ages, the one which said 'you're my brother and I love you, but.' Astraios and Perses alike had been on the receiving end of that vague threat toward their women, the one Pallas deadpanned so well it was easy to forget family was sacred, brothers' happiness paramount.
So off went his brother of the tail-wagging, panting jeer. He stayed on awhile yet, an oversized hulk stretched across a too-small mattress in a too-small room with minuscule, doll-like sticks of furniture: tiny television blaring on indiscriminately about gangland shootings, adorable little refrigerator that kept his beer about two degrees below room temperature. The media picked up right away and ran with the unexplained killings. Pallas smiled reflexively -- a mere twitch of the lips -- before regaining his bare feet and padding across the room.
Outside the single, mostly opaque window stood a skeletal man staring back up. Several thousand years ago, he might have been considered handsome. At the war god's back news anchors prattled on and speculated with their fake tans and their Botoxed smiles. Pallas grimaced. No getting around it; Death wasn't fashionably attractive these days. They studied one another from across three stories, and while the world around them carried on, unimpressed as could be, something invisible held its breath. In the end it was Pallas who turned away, anxiety wrapping limbs around his heart and lungs, hot-cold fear scritch-scratch-stroking bony fingertips up his back and across his neck.
He wouldn't remember staggering back from the window or dropping back down to the mattress in an impossible attempt to put his shaggy head between his knees and breathe. It was his own mortality flirting with him from the sidewalk, Pallas coming to with both hands buried in his hair, pulling hard enough to sting.
A hollow victory was still victory. Had he said that once? To the kids, maybe?
The kids, the kids. (Zelus angry, Bia sick at heart, Nike unsure, Kratos undecided while others decided for him.) They calmed him and fanned the flames of his own stubbornness all at once. He'd go to them -- to make sure -- and decide from there. Little wars, after all, wouldn't tide him over forever.