Astra (separatethings) wrote in cambioncity, @ 2011-09-11 21:53:00 |
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Entry tags: | astra, solo |
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Who: Astra and Brian Jefferies (NPC)
What: Astra encounters a man suffering from some sort of unexplained madness - and she succumbs to a certain madness, herself.
When: Sunday evening, September 11
Where: Back alley
Warning: A violent and liver-eating good time! Fun for the whole family!
She had just been minding her own business. That was all.
She liked going out at night. She was careful about it, because Astra didn’t want to run into trouble – it seemed easier to play it safe. She stuck to lighted streets. She tried to dress in a way that made her seem less feminine or delicate or endangered, swapping skirts for tight-fitting jeans (the only pair she owned). She knew well the mannerisms and styles of both victim and attacker, having seen more than her fair share in the rough streets of Manila. When she hunted, of course, she played by different rules… or she took advantage of the plethora of rapists at her disposal.
She knew she could go that route if she needed to, but she hadn’t gotten hungry enough yet. Then again, Astra held off as long as she possibly could, and a convenient abortion tended to show up just as she was feeling the starvation. It was no way to live, not really, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t grow tired of how good it felt to be conscious, considerate, and in control.
She had gone to a café, where she had ordered a mocha and sipped it slowly. She had brought a book with her, Life of Pi, and had been reading it slowly, never having been very fast at it. It would be expected that a creature as old as her would know a handful of languages, but alas, Astra only had Tagalog (and therefore some Spanish, to a very small extent) and English at her disposal, much like any other young Philippine woman. But as it had neared eleven o’clock and the end of her second drink, she had gathered her things and got to her feet, and went for a stroll, deciding to take a scenic route and avoid the nearest bus stop. She could do with being outside for a bit.
From a block down he seemed like a nice enough man (and she knew not to be fooled by the appearances of men, but still). He stared at her as he had neared, intent and sharp. Men stared at her all the time, though, and while these days it made her wonder if something was wrong, back in the days of her smaller emotions such reactions she seemed to take as natural. So while she wondered at it, she also, internally, shrugged it off. It disturbed her somewhat, though, because he came too close to her as he passed, almost brushing her shoulder, though he did not slow. Once he was gone she stopped on the sidewalk and dug into her purse for the cell phone she had probably only used twice in the past four months, deciding it would be safest to pretend to be on the phone with someone, to discourage people from bothering her.
Then she felt his hand on her wrist and he was dragging her into the alleyway.
She tripped and stumbled, just in surprise, over an uneven part of the pavement, but his grip was strong enough that he kept her upright. For a normal human woman, she knew his hold on her would have been excruciating, but instead she just felt its strength. “Sir-“ she began, but he turned and snarled at her, and his expression struck her dumb for a moment.
No man had ever, ever looked at her like that. There was a wild and crazy light in his eyes, and the words he was spitting at her were drenched in venom. “You killed the dog,” he snarled, grabbing her now by the shoulders and shaking her so hard her teeth cracked together. But there was something more than hate in his eyes; it was a true vulnerability, cracking at the outer shell of his face. He was deep in grief, in fear, in rage. “I saw it. And then… in the basement–”
She tried to pull away but he grabbed a handful of her long, wavy hair, and began to bodily drag her further, far away, deep into the alleyways. Cambion City was not so rife with the unsavoury, such as gangsters and drug dealers and homeless people; they were there, but not always or everywhere. These alleys were empty, and silent save for the man’s ragged breathing.
She could have fought. Astra was much stronger than him, as she was with most men. But the fight in her was too closely tied to the animal in her, and she stubbornly bucked against that urge, wanting to be a human, a woman, through and through, to the last. A woman could get out of such a situation as this, could she not? If he had intended to rape her, he would have attempted to do so by now. But he clearly thought that she was someone else, and she would have to convince him otherwise.
“Sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she protested, trying to look up to see where they were going, but he was yanking too hard for her to get her head up. She saw only the backs of his shoes, well made and recently scuffed. “Please let me go.”
He ignored her. He was talking to himself the entire time, muttering in a fast, rapid speech. About dead dogs, strangled kittens found in the cellar, people tapping on the living room window at night – “Always, tapping,” he said – so many things that she didn’t want to keep track. He said terrible things to her that made her eyes water, and he breathed out soft curses and prayers for aid. Whenever she struggled he shook her, as if she were a rag.
But then he let go and Astra straightened up. She saw him standing there, shocked, looking down at himself, but mostly at his hands, holding them palm-upward and at chest level. There was such a stillness to him that it was frightening; a lack of movement tied to potential, a calm before a storm.
“They’re on me,” he whispered. And then he broke, he started to scream, really scream, “They’re on me, why did you put them on me?”
His shoulder struck her in the chest and brought her to the ground. Her skull hit the cement with a sharp, loud crack, hard enough that it even hurt her. His hands were around her throat. I’m scared, she thought. I’m scared, I’m hurting, I’m scared, I’m hungry, I’m hungry.
“I’m hungry,” she blurted out, only really it came out in a throaty, low voice, and she twisted around and reached up and crushed his neck in her hands. He flopped and twitched only for a few moments, or at least that was how it seemed to her. He was still alive when she let go, barely, but it didn’t matter. She had felt the pump of his pulse against the palm of her hand, and with an instinctive jerk and twitch she tore his shirt open at the waist, and dug her fingers inside.
Nails pierced and then fingers tore right through, opening him up swiftly, and the smell of his innards rising in a steam around her face drove her into a frenzy. She burrowed and tore and then she had it, his liver, rich with blood, and Astra devoured it. Her teeth cut through what would have otherwise been tough and stringy, her throat worked to swallow half-chewed chunks of meat. It was gone in moments. She took a gasp of air, and as the cold hit her bloody face, chilling the scarlet on her cheeks, she began to shudder, to twitch, to fight.
It was safe again. She got unsteadily to her feet, looking down. She had not been as messy an eater as she could have been. But she had to clean up. She could not afford to be caught, not now that she was actually living.
With one heave, she toppled him silently into the dumpster around the corner.
There was blood on her black t-shirt. It was on her hands as well. Shaking with the rush, and with the fear of discovery, she licked her hands and sucked her fingers clean, dislodging small slivers of skin and flesh from under her fingernails. She pressed the fragments between her tongue and the roof of her mouth, and her eyes drifted shut. She felt warm, wet tracks down her cold cheeks, and realized with a start that she was crying. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, licking up blood, hurriedly grooming, trying to set herself to order.
Don’t be suspicious, she told herself, but as she walked along she couldn’t help but feel that she was the most suspicious person in the world. How could anyone else not see that she was an animal? She could taste the blood in her mouth, rich and salty and warm. She took a deep breath. The animal within was momentarily sated, but Astra feared it. One liver, she knew, was not enough for it. There had been a veritable bouquet of organs to feast on, but she had only taken the liver. The wildcat, the wolf, the monster in her heart, tamped its paws, opened its maw, and warned her of the hunger to come.
She was so lost it took her two hours of walking back and forth and around to figure out where she was. She caught the last bus home. She sat in the back and rode in silence all the way, staring at her feet, and feeling the purr of her own blood rushing through her body.
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