corvus, jack (corbinian) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-02-22 23:26:00 |
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Entry tags: | eric draven, mystique |
Who: Jack and Lilith
What: A fond chat
Where: Rainier
When: Recently
Warnings: None
Things continued to roll along, never quite improving enough for one week to be called better over the next, but this week, at least, there had been no kidnappings. Jack felt restless at the edges, but going out on patrol tended to bring his splintering pieces back into the whole.
He went out in uniform late into the night after Oracle had called him on the communicator. He was looking for trouble, as usual, and he had no issues finding it. Some men pulling a woman down the street, laughing while she screamed for help to deaf people who had shut their windows, found their night’s fun truncated. He couldn’t kill them, but no one had ever said anything about breaking their limbs.
It was easy enough to plow through five men when knives and bullets felt like nothing. He gained four holes in his shirt, four wounds that should have been mortal, and put them all into the ground in various states of brokenness and bruising and consciousness. A few moaned, and when he turned his head to look the girl was already running away, arms wrapped around herself to hold up her loose top, fleeing into the dark. “Safe travels,” he said.
There was a noise on the rooftop behind him, and he looked up, backing a few steps into the street.
Lilith wasn’t trying to save anyone; she never was. She was in the alley for a completely self-serving reason; she’d heard Dickens’ replacement would be coming that way, and though the source wasn’t the most credible, it was still worth the detour. She feared no one, feared nothing, and she did not worry it was any sort of trap. And it wasn’t. The man intended to replace Dickens as the head of the Brotherhood had, in fact, past in front of the alley. She had not killed him, even though she recognized him by the company he kept. But now she knew what he looked like, and knowledge was power as it had always been.
When the five men and the woman appeared, she almost turned and left. It was a hard world, and she’d had her own share of run-ins. She didn’t pity the woman below, didn’t feel sympathy for her; no one had done her that kindness, and she had no intention of setting that sort of precedent. The woman should be able to defend herself, just as she had learned to do. It would be a lesson hard learned, but all of life’s lessons were.
The man caught her attention, though, and she stopped and watched. She was at the corner of the rooftop above the scene, skin a blue that was almost the color of the night sky, her hair darkened to the deepest red, and she leaned over the edge of the roof and called down as he backed up. “Going to save everyone, mask?” she called.
He recognized her immediately, the woman with skin in tones of dark blue from the warehouse. He wondered if she recognized him. Likely not, from the height and the paint he wore now. He wondered what she was doing here, what her aim was. "As many as I can," he said, because even he wasn't foolish enough to think he could save everyone, no matter how hard he tried. "How long have you been up there?" In the question was a second question - why hadn't she helped, if she'd been sitting up there all along?
“Since before your heroics,” she admitted, not hiding the fact that she didn’t take action; not apologizing for it, either. She didn’t recognize him, actually, and though his voice was slightly familiar, she did not associate him with the man in the warehouse. She leaned further forward, her long red hair tumbling over the roof’s ledge as she looked down at the men. “You like hurting them,” she said. It was not a question.
Jack looked over at the men on the ground. One was trying to get up and get away, not particularly successfully. At some point he was going to need to contact the police, since no one living on the street seemed inclined to do it. He was in no serious rush. They would all live, and he begrudged that enough. He looked back up at her. “They get what they deserve. Or less.” He pulled a little further away, attempting to see her better. “You didn’t help her,” he said, the statement looking for an explanation. He didn’t understand it, people who saw things like that happen in front of them and turned a blind eye to them.
“You like hurting them,” she repeated, her voice warm and sensual despite her words. “Don’t lie to yourself. It isn’t about them, and it isn’t about her. It’s about you. You like hurting them.”
He circled around the edge of the building, still in sight, gauging how long it would take him to climb up there. "You don't know me," he said, not unkindly. He didn't sound like he believed what she said, or that he wanted to believe it, at the very least. "You don't seem to understand why anyone would want to do what I just did aside from that. I'm guessing that's why you didn't step in, or call the police."
“No, I can understand why people do it. I’m just telling you why you do it,” she said with a sort of smug certainty. “It shows on your face, the pleasure.”
Jack moved onto the fire escape, climbing up. He continued to talk as he went, assuming she could still hear him. "So what would that make me, then? A sadist using justice as an excuse?"
She leaned over more to watch him, and she made herself small and winged a moment, just long enough to situate herself on the edge of the opposite roof, where she could see him. “No, sadists hurt people for pleasure, not for vengeance. It’s not the same as you. You hurt people because you imagine them having other faces. I’m not criticizing, but it is what it is. Don’t pretend otherwise.”
He turned and looked over. He remembered her doing something similar in the warehouse, being here one moment and there the next. Teleportation? Possibly. It could easily be something more complicated, but he made note of it. He climbed a little higher, so that he was looking across at her and not up. “Pleasure doesn’t enter into it,” he said quietly, painted face a chiaroscuro mask in the shadows.
“What makes you so sure about everything you say? Familiarity, or confidence in a guess? We’ve only just met, but you seem to think you know me thoroughly.” He sounded curious, unwilling to linger too long on the things she was saying, unwilling to reveal that their sharpness and accuracy made him uncomfortable. They were things he knew, but he also knew that it wasn’t as simple as she’d made it sound - he could also tell she wouldn’t believe him if he told her so. And then there was the real question - what had she been doing at the warehouse, and what was she doing here now?
“I see when I look,” she said cryptically. “Most people just look.” His facepaint was more visible now, close like this, and she could see the lighter eye, and it sparked a memory, recognition. “Left your warehouse, have you? Or did someone let you out of your cage?” she asked, sitting on the building’s rooftop like she had no hurries, no worries and nothing but time. “Is this why the entire place smelled of blood? Injuries doing this?” she asked, as if she’d caught him doing something dirty and taboo.
He smiled faintly. He couldn’t bring himself to care too much that she’d identified him. He didn’t know who she was, not really, but he had the feeling that he was nowhere near the top of her list of concerns. “You have a real love of guessing,” he said. “My turn. You don’t strike me as a woman who does anything without good reason, so you were here for a purpose. Looking for someone, or waiting for them to arrive.” There weren’t many other reasons to come to an out of the way place like this. “So the question is - who makes you wait?”
“I make me wait,” she replied, even though she knew that wasn’t really what he was asking. But it was the truth, all the same. “Who let you out?” She asked the question with the quirk of a brow and a toss of hair over her shoulder, her posture an easy one. She wasn’t scared of him, and that was extremely evident.
He didn’t expect her to be. He climbed forward, standing on the railing edge, judging the gap. He might make it, but she might just dart away again. “People with a vested interest in the things I do. So you made yourself wait for no reason? That seems like a waste of time.”
“Coming to see me?” she asked, noticing the way his muscles shifted beneath his clothes. She made no move to retreat, not yet.
“Thinking about it,” he said. “But I expect you’ll just disappear on me again if I do.”
“I think I like you better without the facepaint, handsome,” she said watching him near, still not moving, but not promising she wouldn’t, either.
"You're too kind," he said, a little dry, doubting it. He wasn't handsome, certainly, unless she'd missed the scar somehow in the darkened warehouse and the shadows had softened all his sharp edges. "Why bother with seduction?" he asked, moving into place, muscles tensed and ready to jump. "Where does it get you? I can't give you anything you could possibly want, and everything I've seen you do has been motivated by something, Mystique, that is easy enough to tell. Something calculated. I'll admit, it's enough to make me curious what you're doing and what for."
“You think I’m seducing you?” she asked, entertainment in her voice and in the words. “If I was seducing you, you would know it. This isn’t seduction. This is me wanting to know why you dress up in paint and a clown’s smile to take out your anger on bad men.”
Jack jumped, easily making the gap and then rolling up to his feet again, turning to see if she was still there.
She was, and she was giving him what could only be called an entertained look. She turned on the ledge, just enough to be facing him, and she grinned up at him, completely unconcerned by having the less desirable position should this turn into a fight. “Planning on answering, now that you’re done with your calisthenics?”
"I don't like speaking on an uneven playing field, and you've spent a lot of time above me recently," he said, with a small smile. "If I told you why I did what I did, I expect you would be unsurprised by it in part and not believe the rest. If you see everyone as motivated by only a few possibilities, I am not going to be the person to dissuade you. I think the world is wider and greyer than that. But you don't."
She stood, then, and she climbed down the escape without use of abilities, watching him as she climbed down. When she was low enough to jump to the alley below, she did, the men he’d taken down groaning at her feet. “You still do it because you want to, whatever grand thing you say,” she told him, smiling up at him with certainty, and a moment later she was gone - out of sight entirely. Gone.
The woman was a mystery. He didn't understand her, or why she did the things she did. He didn't know any more about why she hadn't helped the woman on the street now than he had when he'd begun asking about it, and she'd gained all the information in the world about him. He had a feeling, however, that whatever she'd been doing in the warehouse, and whatever she'd been doing on this rooftop, were connected. And he had a hard time believing that they were anything good.