adrian march (caeteradesunt) wrote in repose, @ 2017-02-23 13:46:00 |
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Entry tags: | *narrative, adrian march |
narrative: making trouble
Who: Adrian's Nameless friend (narrative)
What: Letting off steam.
Where: The woods.
When: Just following this and sometime after this.
Warnings/Rating: Swear words!
Nameless wasn't a mystery, really, not at all, not a mystery wrapped in an enigma, not a fresh riddle, not a knot to be unpicked. He was what he had always been, and when he took the stairs down to the street from the newspaper office, he felt that more keenly than he had in awhile.
Repose was seriously the fucking worst. It bored him, and boredom made the slog of the day to day even harder. He didn't care in the least about what Adrian March did on the daily, his work at the facility, his fastidious care for his experiments. He didn't care about eliminating a genetic predisposition for cancer in mice. He also didn't care about the latest clandestine set of samples under a hood at the end of the counter at the lab, experiment #36 in Adrian's latest attempt to isolate the mystery component of his personal genome that made him defective. There would be nothing there, just like there was nothing in tests 1-35. If there was any respect or two-way communication in this relationship, he would fucking tell him so. It was all such a colossal waste of time that it made him want to drop his better half into a hole in the ground.
He also didn’t care what Adrian and Newt got up to together, except; it was Trouble. So he had to keep a close eye on it.
When he arrived at the newspaper office there was mud on his shoes, and he tracked it out to the edge of town again. He didn’t go out in the light of day too often. Today, Adrian was very tired, and he’d crashed out in early afternoon. If thought that he'd slept through the night, it was nothing but exhaustion from working so hard, wasn’t it? Nameless knew how to come in quietly and pretend he'd been nowhere.
Repose was a shithole, and Adrian would come around to it eventually. Driving through the gates of Area 52 every day made his fucking skin crawl. Every day, he had to resist the urge to grab Adrian by the scruff of his neck and drag him out. This was nowhere they ought to be, definitely nowhere they ought to be on purpose. Adrian didn’t have the faintest fucking idea how hard it was for him to be here. He thought it was all going so well, that he was adjusting nicely to being back at the scene of the crime. And Newt was here! And his family! Hooray! He thought all his shitty sad days were behind him now. He didn’t feel what Nameless felt. It was like being a postive magnet on a positive magnet, repelling him out of this place every single fucking day. He was hanging on by the tips of his fingernails.
Someone was going to remember, and then their cover would be blown, and then Adrian would understand that sharp, tugging, shivery feeling of dread he’d been pushing away since he accepted the position with AEGIS. Idiot.
It meant weeks of buildup that had to be dealt with, and that was what he went to do after some enlightening information-gathering with Newt’s big brother.
The thin crowds in downtown Repose thinned out even further as he reached the end of main street. He lit a cigarette, turned down Central. Step by step, street paving gave way to dirt and towering trees. The air still had some bite, and he shrugged his loose coat a little closer around himself. Flakes of ash sometimes caught on the lapel, and he thought about getting his own coat, something that fucking fit for once. He didn’t have many of his own things. Not like regular people had things, objects that gave you that belonging feeling in your gut when you looked at them or held them or put them on. He could get his own coat, sure, but the logistics of even basic shit like where to hide one was exasperating. Where would it go? Folded up at the back of the closet? Tucked into a hidey hole at the B&B?
He ashed his cigarette into the wind, annoyed. Dully, he recalled some childhood commercial about starting forest fires with cigarettes, something that had been in heavy rotation when he was small and stuck indoors for six months, when the TV became a window into learning about the world he was going to get his ass back into at any cost. His fingers were cold and white, and the smoke trailed out of his mouth and way, dissipating almost immediately.
It took half an hour of walked before he was deep enough in the woods to veer off the path. He’d scouted this walk already, scouted the house. He stopped when it was still a mile or so away. He’d be able to cut the distance a lot more quickly than by walking.
In a copse, under a low-hanging ledge, he ground his cigarette out, leaving a smear of black ash on mossy stone. “Only you can prevent forest fires,” he muttered, and spat on the cigarette end, just to be sure. Appealing as it sounded to him, if the whole fucking forest burned down, Adrian would never hear the end of the moaning from his pretty brother with the ears.
He cast pale eyes along the line of trees around him. Nothing moved. There weren't many birds in this part of the world at this time of year, not yet. The few living things that did scurry in the underbrush had gone utterly quiet. They stayed silent, burrowing and hidden, when the figure under the ledge faded around the edges. The cigarette was out, but there were wisps of smoke coming up from the tips of his fingers, tendrils of sandy black smoke encircling his legs and his arms, a sound like a storm whipping up from the forest floor. He bent forward, and the gale seemed to pick his body up, melting his form into a growing black nest that twisted and turned to the object of its attention like a head. A sound came from its center, a flickering scarlet light. It sounded like low thunder. Compressed for a moment, it expanded into a bulk as wide as the clearing.
Then it rocketed between the trees, coursing around them like water, a hissing, spitting, roiling mass of choke-black dust. The trees groaned, their bark splitting and peeling from the contact.
The mass moved fast. It roared through the forest like a live thing, propelled faster, faster, whipping rock and stone, blistering dead wood, screeching until it struck its target like a cannonball.
The house at the edge of the woods had been abandoned for years, one of the few that had yet to be adopted by an antisocial member of the community. Nameless had wandered through it, checking it for signs of life. There were none. Now, as the malevolent force flooded the building to the eaves, crawling up the walls and blacking out entire rooms, seeping through the cracks and yanking the walls from their foundations with a groan of splintering plaster, there was no one to see.
The force began to twist the house, whipping hard and fast, its weight shearing the structure from its foundation. Walls toppled, scuffed linoleum tiles went flying, and a cloud of dust and insulation coughed into the air as the building was sucked inward, into the glowing center of the thing. It whipped around the structure incredibly fast, fast as a windstorm, then stopped on a dime, circulating as slowly as dust in a shaft of sunlight, wending its serpentine way around what was left of the building. Then it all collapsed inward in a roar of smoke and noise. It left a pile of rubble and a welt on the forest's face of dead white grass.
By the time the smoke cleared, the dark thing had already drifted away, seeping down over the ground, into hollows and quiet places, back to the edge of the woods.