Re: Quicklog, Ocean's 11: Lin A, Louis D, Neil D, Zatanna Z
['Please don't.' It was polite. The timbre of his voice was burnished with a pleasant burr: he was probably pleasant, until Gotham had taken him in its hands and remade him like clay. Zatanna loved her home, it was dry air after being submerged for months, years in another city that was warm water, not awful, just not home. But Gotham, her world, it had a habit of finding the crevasses in normal, pleasant people and fissuring them open, splitting them apart like a vessel filled too full.
The man with the similar burr who watched the room as if he could not see where the lines of the trap were set, he disappeared for salt and Zatanna watched the humanity empty out of Louis, color leaching from his eyes, squeezed out by whatever else was in there. Something was home, but it was not the man who had been leaned against the shorter, who broke free of his reach as if the bond dissolved in the wake of something breathing through Louis's throat, emerging.
This was truth. It was old, and it was powerful and the heat shimmered as she worked fingers against the air, sigils drawn with a handful of powdered residue that fell, chalky to the carpet as the air glowed and hummed, electric. Protection, for the young man who shrank back and the man who stood with kitchen salt in his hand and did not know how far magic had carved his friend out from the inside.]
I am sorry, friend. [Zatanna's voice was warm, even sympathetic. She sounded apologetic.] But this isn't going to be easy. On marh ot meht. [Whether magic that needed to be spoken to strengthen it could bind something that had passed itself off as man was doubtful, what was in there would fight: but she stretched out a hand for the salt.]