Who: Jack and Lilith What: A chance meeting by romantic mistaken identity for assassination. Where: The warehouse When: A day or two ago Warnings: None
Jack was beginning to get truly restless. He had to wait for Oracle to get in contact with him again on when they could get in to rescue the people in quarantine, and until then there was nothing to do. He worked out (unnecessarily, really, since his ability held him in peak condition, but it felt, at least, like he was doing something). He read news articles about things happening in the city he could do nothing about. He ignored the vision of the woman with dark hair when it appeared, and the visions of other things that occasionally crowded the edges of his sight. He was used to them by now, though they felt that much more present in the empty, closed in place he lived now.
He’d explored every inch of the warehouse, but he hadn’t looked through the makeshift morgue too closely. Bad memories lingered there, but he found himself so bored eventually that he found himself in there too. The empty freezers had been left unplugged, but the refrigerator in the corner was still on, and he found himself wondering what the Bat had kept in there.
He stood by the table in the middle of the room, looking at it. He touched its surface, thought of blinding pain and re knitting bone coming up unbidden. He thought of bone, and of breaking, and of death, and of the faces of three men somewhere in the city. He knew where he could go to find them - not where they would be, but where he could begin looking. It would be an easy thing to get their addresses, an easy thing to find them where they slept and teach them about agony, teach them about grief.
He pulled his hand back from the table. No, this was a place best not lingered in.
Because he was in the second garage, he didn’t see the blinking lights in the office indicate that someone had approached the warehouse, nor did he hear them as they came.
Lilith was looking for a man named Martin Sands. He was a Creation championing the cause of Creation registration. Admittedly, the movement hadn’t gained a lot of steam, and if the people Lilith worked for had any say it wouldn’t even become a blip on the radar. She had tracked him here, to this warehouse facility, and she’d been crouched on a nearby roof for the better part of a day, waiting to see him leave. He hadn’t, and unless she wanted to freeze to death in the cold, she was going to have to go in.
She was dressed in black, a thin, kevlar top and bottom, thin enough to move in without looking like she was trying to be the Bat (oh, yes, she knew about the Bat), but bulletproof enough to survive something taking her by surprise. As she climbed down the side of the building, she tinted her skin deep, dark blue, to better blend with the night, and by the time she landed on the pavement outside the main door to the only warehouse that seemed occupied, she was only truly noticeable because of her fiery red hair.
She glanced at the door, the hinges and the lock, and she melted herself into liquid, dark blue and nothing, and slid beneath it, materializing on the other side. She didn’t pull her gun as she moved forward on black combat boots, listening as she crept closer, back close to the wall, senses alert. Oh, yes, there was someone here. The laptop glowing at the far end of the room said as much, and she continued her progress.
Jack was on his way out of the garage when he heard something like movement and backed inside again, staying close to the wall. He assumed it was the Bat come for a late night check-up, because he doubted Max would come this late, not without warning him. Still, the Bat would have likely announced his presence by now, and Jack felt his lack of a weapon keenly. Aside from a small light inside the morgue, the rest of the garage was dark. Anyone outside looking in wouldn't see him, pinned against the wall beside the door in the dark, listening.
Lilith could fight when she needed to, but she preferred to shoot things from a distance, and she didn’t put too much thought into why. She killed things, yes, but she spent an equal amount of time getting into places, places like this. While she’d stood there, listening, she’d taken not of the reinforcements, the ones meant to look harmless and innocuous, the security in the place. A phone rang somewhere, and she knew they’d have company soon. Shame, she felt a little like cat and mouse tonight.
She melted down again, became a puddle that was almost undetectable on the dark floor of the warehouse, and she slid toward the movement she’d seen out of the corner of her eye. She could smell him as she neared, like a hunter catching scent of her prey, and she stopped just short of materializing beside him. She could not defy gravity, and so a moment later, a mosquito buzzed annoyingly around Jack’s head, too fast to swat, and then gone. If he listened to gut instinct, she knew, he would realize he was not alone. She didn’t mind; if they had company coming she wouldn’t be killing him tonight anyway.
He heard the sound, but didn't really realize he'd heard it until after it was gone, and he moved a few inches away from the wall, seeking it again. Nothing. Then he caught movement in the rafters and looked up.
"I would rather meet company than have it sneak around me," he ventured. He had a razor sitting what felt like miles away in the bathroom, far beyond his reach at the moment. If the whatever-it-was above dropped down, bare hands would have to do. Hopefully it wouldn't aim for the head, or he'd be reliving the experience he'd just been thinking about in a few days.
She had buzzed up to the rafters. and she had rematerialized there, retain the blueness and hard to focus on at a distance as she crouched on one and looked down at him. He was not Martin Sands, a fact she’d realized while buzzing around him, but he was locked in a warehouse, which was interesting enough in its own right. “Why didn’t you run for the door, silly thing?” she asked, female and young, even at a distance.
"I'm terrible at knowing when it's time to run," he said. And there was the small fact that he couldn't leave, of course, but that was a whole different problem. He wondered how much of him the figure, which had now proved itself to be female, could see, and whether that would be a problem at some point in the future. No one knew this was the Bat's warehouse, so it was unlikely anyone would immediately see him and link him to the vigilantes, but he did have the thought all the same. "Why are you sneaking around warehouses in the middle of the night?"
She made a sound that was throaty, unimpressed. “I don’t sneak,” she assured him, “not hardly, handsome.” She could have pretended to be harmless, but that wasn’t her style. She didn’t know him for a Creation, didn’t have any idea who he was (if he wasn’t Martin Sands), but that didn’t mean she was without any valuable information. She leaned forward, blue skin coming better into view. “Why is there blood in your back room?” she asked, a return volley, because in her business, you knew the scent, even if someone tried to clean it up. In the distance, the phone rang again.
He was now unsure whether the sound he’d heard by his head had been his imagination or not, but he did know there was no way she got into a warehouse of the Bat’s, and then into the rafters of the room he was standing in, without help. His vote would be Creation, if not something else. He saw the blue skin and studied it closely - could be makeup, but it looked a little too real for that. “I’m not all that handsome,” he said, wry, though he wasn’t sure if she could see enough of him to see scarring.
He didn’t know exactly what she meant about the blood - he had caught something a little coppery and off when he’d been in there, but he’d never checked under the carpet. “You make it sound like I’m keeping it there in jars,” he said. “Why are you blue? It’s a lovely shade, but most women don’t ‘walk in beauty like the night’ quite so literally.”
“Are you?” she asked, not at all shocked by the suggestion. “I’d have to ask whose blood it was if you were. Make sure it doesn’t belong to someone I like,” there was a hint of danger there, an indication he wouldn’t still be breathing if the jars contained the blood of someone she liked. She moved slightly, tinting her hair darker, almost a blood red as she leaned forward, the dark locks sliding over her shoulder. “I’m not your average woman,” she assured him, voice silken. She couldn’t see his scar, not from her height, and the comment about him being handsome was thoughtless, a term of endearment often used. But now she wanted a better look, a closer look.
She was just close enough that he could see something of her clothes, now - they stood out starkly against her dark skin. “I don’t know how to feel to know you think I meant that seriously,” he said. “Why are you here? You don’t look dressed for a quick break in to sate your curiosity, and I don’t believe you to be average for a moment. No one comes to this part of town unless they have a good reason. So what are you here for?” He had heard the phone ringing in the next room, knew that if he didn’t answer it they might have company, but this woman, whoever she was, had caught his imagination. And he didn’t trust her enough to make a break for the phone, nor did he fear her that much.
“You can’t possibly think I’m going to answer. Better to let you think what you want; it’s bound to be more exciting,” she said, her mouth curving up in a grin. She glanced over toward the room where the phone was ringing, glancing back at him almost instantly. “Someone you’re avoiding?” she asked. “Someone who knows I’m here?” She didn’t sound bothered by that, either. “How are you going to explain me away, lover?” she asked, her mind processing options of why he could be here, in this space with only a bed and blood. “Sneaking out on the little wife?” she asked, glancing from the bed to his face, searching for the panic of discovery there.
Instead of panic, his expression darkened, if she could even read it in the half-light. His tone, however, sounded normal. “Someone knows you’re here, but I wouldn’t call us close, let alone husband and wife.”
“Pity,” she said, and it wasn’t clear if she was referring to the fact that the person was not his spouse, or to the fact that someone knew she was there. He had only a second of glint from the barrel of her gun before she fired - one shot between his feet, one above his head, one over his shoulder.
He moved immediately. Just because he could take the bullets didn’t mean he had any desire to, and a shot to the head would create all sorts of difficulties. He was out the door a few seconds later, pinned against the wall beside it and out of sight. “That was rude,” he called back into the room. The warehouse outside was better lit, but still nowhere near bright - he never bothered to turn all the lights on, since he didn’t mind the dark. If anyone was hiding beyond him, somewhere closer to the front doors, they would be difficult to see.
She smiled when he took the bait. Such an easy thing to throw off the scent, he was, and she buzzed her way down from the rafters and walked around the perimeter on very human feet - still shades of blue and fiery red, with no indication of how she’d gotten down. “My apologies,” she said, her voice far away, near the exit door, the one she had never felt the need to open.
"I don't think you mean that," he said. He moved away from the wall toward her, apparently unworried about any further gunfire. She'd gotten what she wanted, however she'd gotten it - he wondered if she could teleport or something like that, because that wasn't normal, and she would have a hard time convincing him that she wasn't a Creation. "Do you have a name? You've made me all kinds of curious about you."
“Mystique,” she said, using [Destiny]’s Americanization of her childhood nickname. It was who she was, after all, much more than Lilah. Her voice was on the other side of the locked door, now, with no explanation as to how she’d gotten there. “With whom do I have the pleasure?”
He paused a for a long moment, wondering for the first time if maybe she was a mask of some kind, new in town. He didn't think she'd seen him well, but it wouldn't do to give her his alias and let her tell everyone she knew where Corbinian was currently residing. "Jack," he said. "Drop by any time you feel like firing on a stranger."
“Jack,” she repeated, testing the name on her tongue. “How dull,” she added. A moment later, there was silence, and if he opened the door, he would find nothing at all. No sign she’d ever been there beyond the bullets inside the garage, and behind him the phone continued to ring.