Who: Daryl and Joseph (NPC) What: A rat investigates the rattlesnake’s den and gets what a rat deserves Where: Hamartia 301 When: 2/18 (Friday) around 2 o’clock Warnings: Toaster abuse
The Hamartia complex was run-down, little to Daryl’s surprise. It looked as if it were waiting to be destroyed, honestly. It surprised her greatly that Sophie actually lived there, and her surprise only grew with every time she saw the place. But it didn’t matter. What her cousin did with her life was no concern of hers, she had decided. Even if Sophie did seem to, on occasion, insert herself in Daryl’s life. But she wasn’t going to think about that now. Wednesday was far behind her, and she wasn’t going to think about what Mr. Morgenstern may or may not have told her horrid cousin. Because she had a case to solve now, and tunnel vision was a wonderful thing.
She walked quickly up the stairs to the third floor, pausing just outside. Like with Tim’s apartment, she removed a glove and pressed bare fingers to the door frame. The present collapsed into the past, collapsed into dead silence and a door opening. The man she recognized from Tim’s documents walked out of the apartment, locking the door behind him. She pulled back, letting out a small sigh of victory. He was gone. Smirking, she pulled out her set of lockpicks, settling on her knees as she quickly got to work. The lock yielded quite easily, granting her access to the apartment. She tucked the tools away, removing her other glove as she slipped inside.
The apartment was dark, though that was to be expected - its occupant was gone. However, it wasn’t the normal sort of darkness that one would expect. There were thick curtains over the windows, obscuring the natural light that would have otherwise brightened the interior. The entire place smelled musty, the dank smell that often followed zoos. She looked about slowly, taking careful steps across the floor. At first, she clutched her messenger bag close, fingers twisted in the strap as she picked her way across the living room. Slowly, she relaxed, keeping her footsteps light and silent.
She started with the couch, brushing her fingertips over its cushions. She saw the same man, always the same man, moving about the apartment. The floor was covered in webs of snakes that moved and shifted, a topographic map that never stayed the same for long. She pulled away from the couch, eyes wide, and glanced about. Nothing. Cautious, she moved into the next room, down a very short corridor into the bathroom. She peered inside, touching the sink. Hygiene habits, nothing interesting. She frowned, moving forward into the bedroom.
It was sparse and dark, much like the rest of the apartment. But at the far end, there was a desk. She vaguely recognized the area from the documents, noting the old wood of the desk. Taking a sharp breath of anticipation, she crossed the room, giving the bed a wide berth. As she approached the desk, nearly close enough to touch, she felt a stabbing pain in her ankle. It was so sudden and horrendous that she tripped, falling flat on her face with a thud.
Groaning in pain, she turned, looking at her left leg. Her leggings were torn, she could see, with wells of blood peering out over the ragged edges of the tear. Though the room was dark, she could see a dark, legless body slither under the bed. Her breath caught in her chest as her heart thudded loud enough to be heard. There wasn’t time to debate whether or not the bite was toxic - she had to get out of the apartment fast. She began to crawl forward, bare fingers on the floor, with months of memories flooding her mind. She tried to push them back, but it was difficult. She saw snakes where there were none, and missed snakes that were there. She hadn’t made it a few yards before a sharp pain in her left hand caused her to recoil.
The angry red bite stared back at her, two distinct fang marks visible against her pale skin. She took a sharp breath, pressing her lips together thinly. She had to move quickly. As she made to stand, leg wobbly, she felt a sharp pain in her calf. Again, she was down, gagging on her own strangled scream. Dark bodies slithered around her, scales sliding over her bare hands. She tried crawling slowly, moving to avoid detection. She made it a few more yards before a pair of fangs pierced her jacket, clamping down on her arm. Abandoning care, she dragged her messenger bag along as she crawled quickly on all fours.
Her heart raced as she reached the doorway of the bedroom after sustaining two more bites to her arms and legs. Breath growing shallow, she started to leave the bedroom when her hand landed on a knot of live bodies. Fangs sank into her wrist, cool body wrapping around her arm. She fell, eyes half-open to see a surge of snakes, past and present, move towards her. This wasn’t normal animal behavior. Something was very wrong. They were coordinated, moving as a unit. It was as if they had one purpose, one goal in mind, and worked together to achieve it.
Bites landed on her legs, the pain racing up and down her body. She dragged herself forward, finding this a harder task as time passed. Her messenger bag started to feel like a cement block, her muscles lethargic and slow to act. She had to try twice as hard to move half as much, and everything hurt. Clenching her jaw, determined, she dragged herself forward beneath the weight of her bag and the writhing, biting snakes surrounding her. Halfway across the living room - she was almost there. Joseph very rarely left his apartment, but when he did it was usually had something to do with Sara or getting groceries. This particular trip had to do with the latter, and he found himself moving rather quickly. Being outside of his apartment, away from his snakes, always felt wrong in ways Joseph was never comfortable describing.
With the paper bag held in one hand, he opened the door to his apartment in Hamartia. The apartment was just how he left it for the most part, dark and dingy with the particular smell of reptiles. He had grown used to it over the years and he had come to associate it with home. What he didn’t expect to find was a brunette lying on the floor, attempting to crawl toward the door as her muscles reacted to the poison no doubt flowing through her veins. Curious, he dropped the bag on the floor next to the closed door and flipped her over. “What do we have here?” he asked, voice hissing slightly as if it were a snake. The door slowly swung open, a creaking sound that resonated through her body and shook her bones. Fingers curled on the floor, she tried in vain to move, but her muscles were lethargic. The pain in her body, swollen skin and deep bite wounds, was enough to make her want to scream. But her throat was hard to command, saliva starting to flood her mouth when swallowing was too difficult.
Footsteps approached, and before she knew it, she was being turned on her back. The new position made her gag slightly, tilting her head as far as it would go to try and swallow. She finally managed to get her own saliva down, breaths growing ragged and shallow. Her gaze focused on his face, that hideous face she recognized from Tim’s documents. Gray eyes wide, she wore an expression of complete neutrality as she looked at him.
Speaking was difficult, but she managed, voice a bit thinner than usual. “I know what you’ve done to Timothy Pecker,” she said, trying to push herself to a sitting position with both hands. She was able to sit up a few inches before falling back, sucking in another breath as if she were breathing through a straw. Joseph observed her, eyes roaming her body in a completely rude manner. His eyes focused particularly on the bites he could see; one on the back of her hand looked particularly angry. His snakes knew how their poison affected humans, and they seemed to have used that to their advantage as he spotted at least two more on her leg. He smiled then, a particularly sadistic smile as she tried to sit up and speak of things she knew nothing of.
"You are a fighter," he commented standing up and moving through the room toward a ratty looking cabinet on the opposite side. "A brunette too, and small. I know a young woman quite similar to you," he added, his voice stressing the 's' sounds. He opened the cabinet door and withdrew a surprisingly sterile needle, thin like the doctors use for injections. He also took out two small clear bottles with a medical labels. With surprising ease that no doubt indicated how often he had needed to administer the anti-venom on himself, Joseph pulled the required dose into the needle and brought it over to Daryl.
He hovered above her as he decided what to do. “You look like her, you know. And you say you know Tim? Why, he and I go way back,” Joseph teased. He grasped her arm by the wrist, just an inch or so away from the bite on the back of her hand, and lifted it. He pushed her sleeve down her arm to expose the crook of her elbow. “For that, you’ll get a chance to help me,” he explained, as he prepared her vein and easily administered the injection. “It’ll counteract the poison, but I’m also going to give you something extra special,” he added with a gleeful grin on his face as he began to fill the needle again, this time from the second bottle. The way he looked at her made her feel suddenly ill, as if she were going to vomit if she thought of it too much. She clenched her jaw, marginally thankful - in a perverse way - for the fact that she wasn’t sure that she could vomit at the moment. As he walked away, she rolled onto her side, reaching out with one hand to try and drag herself forward. A thick, dark snake darted out ahead of her, scaly belly running over her knuckles. It wasn’t a blockade per say, but it froze her in her tracks, hesitant to move again.
When the man returned, she tightened her jaw, looking up at him with a dash of loathing in her otherwise blank stare. Her gaze fell on the needle, suspicious. “I know,” she finally said as he mentioned Tim, expression tainted by suspicion as he rolled up her sleeve. “You’re sloppy.” She made sure that she watched as he injected her, though the fact that she was watching semi-helplessly - she tried to move her arm away a few times, but he easily overpowered her attempts - made her stomach turn once again. Though she couldn’t trust that this was an antivenom, she knew that distrusting would do no good. For all intents and purposes, he had counteracted the toxins in her system. For now.
As he began to draw up a second injection, she balked, falling flat on her back. She was able to move her right thigh slightly, enough to send a powerful impulse into her leg. The limb was flung upwards, sloppy and poorly directed but still in motion. It was an attempt at a kick, some form of resistance, though it was terribly executed. It was something. Her words were ignored for the post part, though some part of them did register in Joseph’s mind. He had developed a talent for ignoring most of what people had to say, especially when it came to his plans and techniques. Sure, there had been some failures, but they weren’t his fault. It was always his lackeys. Those stupid humans who never knew what they needed to do or how to do it. That’s why he stuck to his snakes; they always knew what he needed and how to do what he asked. Without screwing up.
He was drawn out of his thoughts as her leg jolted up, in a weak, uncoordinated attempt at a kick that caught him off balance and knocked him on his butt. “Bitch!” It slipped out before he could hold the expletive back. Hissing angrily, Joseph got back to his feet, sticking the bottle in his pants pocket and taking the needle, which had been filled with a dose of a paralytic, and sticking it in the exposed skin of the leg she had knocked him off balance with. “None of that,” he chastised, tone sounding borderline fatherly. He grabbed her by the wrists again and hoisted her up, bringing one of her arms around his shoulder and his other arm wrapped around her waist to carry her to the couch. He plopped her down unceremoniously as he prepared to inject her other three limbs with the paralytic. The fact that her kick actually landed was a victory. She immediately rolled over, pushing her toes against the floor and trying to crawl for the door. Unfortunately, her limbs were fast disobeying her, and the fire-pain on her skin was enough to make her want to give up altogether. But the door was just yards away, so close, and she nearly made it. Nearly. A stabbing pain in her leg made her loose a sharp cry, though the sound was tempered by her breathlessness. It was more of a garbled whine, a pathetic attempt at mimicking human sounds.
As he pulled her to her feet, she lolled listlessly against his side. Her gaze locked on her messenger bag as it lay on the floor, a snake winding itself around the shoulder strap. As he dropped her on the couch, she suppressed a whimper, instead letting out a small cough as she fought to swallow. Joseph was immensely pleased by her determination to escape, something he had begrudgingly given Sara credit for during her own kidnapping. He had hardly gotten to see her that night too, which generally caused him a great amount of anger whenever he thought about it. He filled the needle a third time, injecting to dosage into her other leg. “There, now there wont be any more kicking,” he informed her triumphantly, as he filled the needle again. “These,” he explained, injecting the needle into her upper arm, “are to keep you from hitting or grabbing. Much more civilized this way, don’t you think?” He filled the needle up for the last time and injected her other arm.
As he waited for the paralytic to start to work, Joseph returned the two bottles to the cabinet and tossed the needle in his garbage bag. He walked back to the front door and picked up his groceries as well, dropping them off at the kitchen floor before returning his attentions to Daryl. He sat in front of her, on a coffee table that looked as ratty as the rest of the apartment. Joseph leaned forward, arms on his knees. “You are beautiful,” he commented, “and the hair color is quite similar. You’re just about the same height, though I think you’re a bit more top heavy than she is.” He reached out then, to brush some hair behind her ear. His hand was soft as it cupped her cheek for a moment before he pulled it back.
“Now, where do you keep your cell phone, little girl?” Joseph asked with a bit of condescension in his voice. He scooted forward on the table so that he was just barely sitting still. His hands went to her arms, ghosting over her chest and sides as he searched for her phone. He found it in her pants pocket and grinned. Leaning forward even more, he brushed his lips against her ear, murmuring, “You’ve walked into the snakes den unprepared little lion. You’ll be dead by morning,” as he reached into her pocket sharply, pulling out her phone in one smooth motion. Her entire life, Daryl had tried to separate her mind from her body. She’d done everything possible to leave that bag of flesh behind, to exist purely as a creature of consciousness. From bulky clothing to poisoning the people around her with cruel words, she had expended an unnerving amount of effort on this endeavor to separate herself from the physical realm and the human race as a whole. But now, as she felt slender needles puncture her skin and leave her stunned, she began to rethink the merit of being cut off from her body.
At first, she was still able to twitch her legs, dragging them from side to side just to remind herself that she could. But before long, those movements grew smaller and smaller until she was sitting like a doll, perfectly still. Her breaths were still labored, and though she tried to adjust herself more comfortably, she found herself incapable. At his too-casual comment about civility, she scowled as best she could. “A civil man needn’t employ restraints.”
She watched him leave, steel gray gaze following him closely. Her fingers twitched at her side, trying desperately to reach for her phone. But her arms were dead weight hanging from her shoulders, utterly useless. She grimaced, shifting her torso for little reason other than she still could. She didn’t have the dexterity necessary to retrieve her phone and call for help, and escape was - at this point - equally impossible.
As he returned, she glared at him, expression further souring as he began to discuss her appearance. Being watched never sat well with her, and the idea that she was beautiful made her stomach turn. As he brushed a lock of hair from her face, she clenched her jaw, frozen by horror as he cupped her cheek with unnerving tenderness. The tension didn’t release even when he pulled back, and grew as he reached forward.
The way his fingers brushed lightly over her chest and sides made her feel disgusting, unclean. She fixed him with an expression of horror mingled with disgust, not daring to look down to see what he would do next. Feeling his hand stop at her pocket, she looked up at the ceiling, trying to contain the nausea in her stomach as he leaned close. His words hissing in her ear made her stomach clench, but she refused to be intimidated. As he pulled back, she fixed him with a thoroughly unimpressed look. “When I die,” she said slowly, voice packed with steely conviction. “It will be at the hands of a man far greater than yourself.”
The sound of his laughter played a strange trick on her insides - they clenched, as if she had something to dread. She watched him open her phone, expression nonchalant, as he left the room - leaving her frozen, dead weight, on the couch. Her head fell back against the couch, gaze on the ceiling, as a horrible play began in her mind. She recalled the sensation of Mr. Morgenstern hitting her over and over with a soft pillow, a demonstration in her own fragility. He had been worried about her, once. Now, she couldn’t be so sure. The sound of a dial tone brought her into the present, and she felt something burn at the corners of her eyes. She took a deep breath to steady herself, though it did little good. She was too stubborn to kill, it was true. But was she too stubborn to die?