Eleanor Monarch-Sparke is the Black Canary (skree) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-06-06 21:49:00 |
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Entry tags: | arrowette, viola |
Who: Eleanor Rex-Wood ARCHER and Preston Rawlings RESCUE
What: Nell's midnight vigilante run goes awry. She gets rescued (see what I did there?)
Where: A Dark Alley.
When: June 5
Warnings: None, unless cuteness and Paul Newman count.
Nell tried to catch her breath as she crouched behind the dumpster, willing her hear to beat to the rhythm of her lungs. This was rapidly turning into what her mother would call a very bad situation. Nell’s lips quirked as she remembered Gina’s words. Always gifted with the obvious understatements, that one had been. Maybe she should have been the superhero after all.
Pushing wayward thoughts of her mother aside, Nell focused on the matter at hand. The men didn’t seem to know where she had disappeared too, but she could hear the footsteps migrating closer. There weren’t many places in this dark alley, and they’d reach the end she was hidden in sooner or later. She was going to have to fight her way out, and as a quick glance at her quiver showed her, she was going to have to do it the hard way.
Time to put those rusty muscles to practice. Nell crinkled her nose at the thought, thoroughly upsetting the position of the red mask strapped across it in the process. She was going to be extremely bruised in the morning.
“Hey, fellas!” Nell stepped out into the alley from the shadows she had been hidden in, her bow and empty quiver securely strapped to her back. “You looking for me?” Why again was she doing this?
Preston preferred to be distant from the vigilantes he helped for two reasons: one, he was horrible with physical confrontation, and he was about as intimidating as a mouse; two, he wanted to keep Rescue’s activities as far away from his personal life as possible. He had nightmares about the public pulling Anton out of the Iron Man robot whole--huge mobs coming after the both of them. Of course, Preston had a great many nightmares about everything these days. At least they weren’t being transmitted to everyone around him since the last Creation-wide effect turned off.
The mess with his brother and Eli, which seemed to hit like an avalanche all at once, weighed heavily on Preston as he tried to navigate back to his car, parked a couple blocks down from the hospital to avoid paid parking. He heard the noise, and his first (sane) impulse was to run. Seattle, sodden in melting snow, was not the safest place in America at the moment. He edged down the sidewalk and carefully peered down the alleyway to see what the men were doing.
There were three of them. Standing, that is. Nell’s arrows had taken care of the other three, in accordance to her plan. Being a vigilante had been rather easy up until now. She shot, she hit her mark, she moved on. Nell didn’t know what it was about this place that had made her shooting unusually good, but she hadn’t been complaining.
Unfortunately, even a perfect bulls-eye ratio couldn’t make up for a lack of arrows. Nell had had a healthy run tonight, using more arrows than she had anticipated. And that’s how she got where she was - in the middle of taking down a group of carjackers, and completely out of ammunition.
“There!” Nell couldn’t help but roll her eyes when one of the men finally located her. Had she been in any other place, she would have been long gone in the time it took them to start moving towards her. Alas, she was trapped in the dead-end of an alley, and there were no fire-escapes around for her to go up. I knew I should have brought my grippy boots with me.
Nell shook her shoulders and rolled her neck theatrically in preparation for the inevitable onslaught. She knew she was going to get beat in the end, but she wasn’t going to let them know that. Nope. After all, wasn’t half the game mental, or something to that effect?
The man on the left threw a punch that Nell easily avoided with a simple duck and turn. Well, if all of these thugs were going to project like that, she might get out of this unbruised after all. “Oh, come on!” Nell couldn’t help but goading them on. Three versus one (a 5’5”, 115 lbs one at that), and that was the best they could do? “Now this is just pathetic.”
Preston was disoriented by the proceedings. If he’d been the small girl (to him, tall, though not heavy, she seemed small) he would have been afraid. However, at her first dodge, the dim streetlight caught the edge of the mask, and he realized that she was a vigilante, which explained the taunting. However, when he waited a second longer for whatever her ability was to make an appearance, nothing happened. Alright, it wasn’t his imagination, or a need to feel effective (since he hadn’t in weeks)--this girl was in trouble.
“Hell,” Preston muttered to himself, and a few seconds later he was pulling himself up a fire escape. This wasn’t going to work, it wasn’t going to work, it wasn’t going to work.
A second later, the Bat appeared on the escape at the end of the alley, a good eight feet above the ground. The problem here was that Preston didn’t know precisely what the Bat looked like. His approximation was a man over ten feet tall cloaked in shadows that spread out over the escape and the building. His horns were that of Mephistopheles, reddish and curved, and his bulk equated him more to a mutant monster than a man. Preston’s voice didn’t quite match, but nobody was doing voice analysis at the moment. “Stop.”
Nell was ready go old school on the hulking lumps when the voice called out. Her eyes flicked up to to the fire escape at the other end of the alley, even as her kick landed squarely in the center of one of the men’s chests. What the hell was that? The giant, looming figure (because seriously, if Nell had seen anything that could be described as ‘looming’, this would be it) was dressed in black and overlaid with shadows, to the point where he looked around twice her height.
That can’t be right. She blinked twice. Nope, still there. Maybe the dude (or dudette with a voice box) was on stilts. Whatever the case, he or she looked like they meant serious business. Nell just hoped they were on her side.
Pulling her eyes away from the mysterious demon from the land of the too-tall, Nell turned her attention back to the three men at hand. She had to suppress a snort. As caught up as she had been, the three thugs had frozen in place, jaw dropped. Even the one she had kicked was too busy staring to drag himself off the ground. Had she walked into a cartoon without realizing it? What was going on? What was it about horn-head over there that froze the men as solid as a deer caught in headlights?
Preston waited nervously for the effect of this hastily constructed illusion. The most important aspect of this particular illusion was that it had been hasty, and he wasn’t exactly sure how it looked from the outside. However, from the frozen position of the men below, it must have looked quite horrifying. By now the Bat’s legend was far more than city-wide, and many people were under the impression that the only thing keeping him from ripping people apart with bare claws was a twisted sense of morality.
Still, the time was dragging on, and Preston was getting more and more nervous by the moment. “Get out,” he said, trying to sound deep and commanding, the way the Bat did on the comms.
Nell hated being new to town. Something about the caped man was scaring the hell out of the three thugs, and Nell felt like she should know what it was. As it was, she could only stand and watch as the three men high-tailed out of the alley. They didn’t even bother to pick up their injured pals; their only concern seemed to be getting away as fast as possible, putting as much distance between themselves and the shadow-clad figure as they possibly could.
“So much for that.” Nell shook her head, muttering to herself. She wasn’t used to being interrupted mid-action, and she definitely didn’t like it. What was she supposed to do with all this adrenaline now? “Hmph.” She crossed her arms and walked towards the end of the alley. “And... what the hell are you supposed to be?” Trying to think back to the horror movies she had seen, Nell searched for an appropriate name for the thing she was looking at. “Azazel?” She grimaced even as she said it. She must be getting really rusty if she couldn’t come up with something better than that.
The horned head turned, massive and horrible, and the Bat grinned a fanged grin in triumph. He sobered as he looked back down at the small blonde, however. She was tiny. He recognized the quiver, however, as very like Arrow’s. “...The Bat. You didn’t think it was similar?” After a moment’s consideration, the ominous rippling shadows began to fade, turning long and thin as they pulled in and evaporated around the cloak and cowl. Preston replaced one illusion with another, and his concealing default came through, gray and defined and far more normal-sized.
Paul Newman, circa classic film, smiled an eye-glinting smile down at her. He wore a thin shirt but seemed unaffected by the Seattle cold. He didn’t shiver, and he put his elbows down on the safety bar lining the escape. “And who are you?
There was nothing Nell could do in this situation, no reaction that would be considered ‘appropriate’. So she did what any hot-blooded 18 year-old would do when faced by a greek god in the flesh. She stared.
A few seconds paused in silence, as thoughts whirled together in a tropical blender in her head. Who was this guy? Were people actually that good looking? Who was the bat? How did he change out of costume that fast? “Umm.” She paused, biting down on her lip in an effort to not drool at the man. “How did you do that?” Her voice sounded faraway, but Nell had a feeling she had just squeaked. That couldn’t have been very attractive.
“It’s what I do.” He lifted one broad perfect palm and waved it in the air in front of his face. “You know. A Creation thing.” It was a test, of sorts, to see if she knew what a Creation was, to see if she was one. He shifted in very dangerous pale slacks without taking his elbows off the railing.
“Oh.” That made sense. He was like her then. Could that explain his looks? Last time she had checked, she hadn’t been that blessed simply because she was from Musings. No, unfortunately that talent of his must have been genetic. “Who’s this Bat guy you were pretending to be? And why was everyone so afraid of him?” Nell realized she was full of questions, and that she had better answer his if she was hoping to get any real answers. “I’m... Archer.” She didn’t know why she picked the name, but it fit her well enough. In fact, she was hard pressed to think of any name that described her better.
To his credit, Preston was under the mistaken impression that everyone knew what Paul Newman looked like, particularly in his youth. He wasn’t being intentionally deceptive, and it was part of his nature to want to protect himself without compromising a hard-won sense of self-identity. Eyebrows arched, visible even from the distance, and he looked shocked. “You don’t know who the Bat is?” To Preston, this seemed like an extraordinary thing, and after a moment to marvel, he said, “He’s a vigilante. A very well known one, around these parts.” He said ‘these parts,’ but he didn’t sound at all like Newman, but rather the phrase acquired a Bostonian cant which sounded quite strange indeed. “I assume you’re one as well?” He smiled indulgently at the name she offered. “If that’s the case I’ll have to let Arrow know he has competition.”
The beautiful man’s surprise was exactly why Nell hated being new to town. There was nothing like being out of the loop about something that seemed to be common knowledge to make one feel like a complete moron. “I’m new to town,” she shrugged by way of explanation. “Yeah, I guess I am.” The man’s smile was completely disarming, and Nell couldn’t help but blush. Thanking somebody somewhere for the cover of the dark, Nell forced to consider the implications of the man’s words, instead of his mesmerizing face. “Arrow’s another vigilante? Why would I be competition for him?” Nell’s blue eyes, which were rather large to begin with, bugged out as comprehension dawned on her. “I didn’t come here wanting to step on anyone’s toes!”
He was quick to reassure her. The teasing smile vanished and he held up a gray hand, giving it a reassuring little wave. “No, no. I just meant that you both use arrows. I told him it was outdated, and I can’t repeat what he told me.” He squinted down at her a moment longer, and then he said, “I’m Rescue, but I’d rather you didn’t let it get around. There’s a network of vigilantes around here that you can use to call for help the next time you get in a jam like this. Come back tomorrow night and I’ll leave a commlink right here for you. It’s like a little earpiece. If you’re interested, turn it on. Okay?” He pushed back and stood up from the railing, climbing down toward street level with the heavy clankclankclank of very real footsteps.
Nell forced herself not to react to the ‘outdated’ comment. The man had just rescued her, what kind of thank you would wrinkling her nose at him be? No, she’d let that one slide. “That’d be awesome!” A network of vigilantes? That was the best news she had heard yet. This meant Nell would possibly no longer have to do these midnight runs alone, and might be lucky enough to have someone to talk to! No more lonely nights on the rooftops, wishing for friends, wishing for anyone, including her mother. Man, she should really have left Musings earlier. “How big is this network? Are there a lot of... us out here?”
Preston was dismayed to find the girl only sounded more and more youthful by the moment. He was going to have to contact Monarch and ask him to take this one in hand, particularly concerning her weapon of choice. He wasn't sure how the Bat felt about arrows, but he was fairly sure the man on the other side of that grim voice wouldn't be the best welcome party for a young Creation newly arrived, especially if she didn't know who or what he was. (Preston sometimes wondered, but he thought it wiser and safer not to speculate too far.)
He took the last couple steps quickly and his last few steps into the middle of the alley opening were quiet leather scuffs, which fortunately suited Paul Newman's dapper Italian shoes at the end of his slacks. (They were very similar to Preston's, in point of fact, because for some reason the movies didn't find much occasion to show Newman's shoes.) "A good many, over a dozen, I should say. Oracle watches the network, and I'll request a commlink for you." He pointed up to indicate the place he'd been, where he would drop the device off. "Don't forget."
He took a preliminary step away, but raised an uncertain eyebrow at her. "And you'll not tell anyone about what I did...?"
A dozen? A DOZEN? Nell could barely contain her glee, as visions of teams and leagues and other romantic notions made their way through her teenage thoughts. With a dozen vigilantes out and about, there’d be no shortage of skills and techniques she could learn. She might actually have a chance of finding a place in this town. For once, both parts of her identity (and in actuality, both parts of her self) might find a place where they belonged. “Right here, tomorrow.” Nell nodded her confirmation. “Got it.” There was no way she was going to pass up the chance to be a part of a real community.
If it were possible, the beautiful man was even better looking when uncertain. Nell had blue eyes too, but this man was just something else. She remembered a description from some book one of her idiot friends had loaned her a long time ago, something about sinking and depths and eyes as pools. Classic young adult purple prose, but oh so appropriate right now. Nell sighed unconsciously. “Oh, I promise. Cross my heart and everything.” She was a little surprised he had to ask. Shouldn’t there have been a vigilante code or something? First rule of vigilantism: don’t talk about vigilantism? If there wasn’t, she might have to talk to somebody and see that one was made.
He smiled at her; Paul Newman had the most excellent smile, and it had melted a very young Preston (Ash, as he was called then) in just the same way. He was a little bit of an idiot not to see the same reflection in her eyes, but Preston didn’t habitually talk to young women very often, and despite his chosen codename, he tended to save people with the assistance of satellites and cell phones. “Good. We’ll be in touch.” He gave a little wave, turned the corner, and that was the last there was of him.