Lem Collier (littlelem) wrote in shadows_rpg, @ 2018-07-07 08:36:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | #november 2017, lem, lem x vex, vex |
Who: Lem & Vex
Where: Ludlow Lane
When: Saturday 11/04, night
Status: Complete
Warning: Violence, language
They had caught a fucking werewolf. Vex was still reeling as he crouched over the large, furry creature yanking the last of the tranquilizer darts out of its body. They needed to move fast to get it inside the cage and then they'd rendezvous with the twins who'd done their part in luring the beast into Ludlow Lane. It was a combination of magic and meat, like most of life was if you asked Vex. He tossed the darts into the plastic bucket that had held a great deal of blood just an hour earlier, then stuck his hands under the creature's arms - legs? - and hoisted it up on their trolley with a loud groan. "Aight, firecracker," he grunted. "Let's get this critter locked up." He grinned over at Lem as he wiped sweat off his brow and started pulling the trolley inside the house. They didn't have much time, he was surprised the darts had worked at all and who knew how long they'd last.
Lem was exhilarated. Was this what hunting big game felt like? Only those richy-rich assholes hunted down beautiful creatures who were just trying to survive, and they’d hunted down a dangerous menace. Or lured it in to be captured, anyway. In any case, she was jazzed and bouncy and rushed to help Vex drag the huge thing onto the cart so they could take it inside. It was heavy and it stunk, but she was happy to help. She ran alongside Vex and then darted ahead to get the back door open. With a lot of cursing and straining, they got the trolly up the back steps and into the house finally. Panting lightly, Lem stopped with him at the open door to the basement steps. The cage was down there, but the stairs were a problem she hadn’t even thought about. Lem glanced at Vex. “So uh ... just dump him down there?” she asked.
Vex tapped the side of his nose. "I got us a hand truck," he said because he'd fucking thought of this shit and he was in no mood to carry a werewolf down a narrow set of stairs. It might have been easier if Lem wasn't five foot nothing and a half but even if they'd both been large and buff it would have been a pain in the ass. He darted off to get the hand truck and with some help from Lem got their conquest moved again. It... didn't quite work. Hand trucks were great for boxes and not so great for limp bodies. The wolf's limbs stuck out everywhere and Vex frowned as he reconsidered this plan. "Fuck," he said quietly and this was yet another moment where he could feel that itch for a cigarette overtake him. "Plan two, we get a fucking blanket and we slide-carry it down."
She grunted and strained and tried along with him, but the hand truck just didn’t work. Dammit. “On it!” Lem cried and ran off to get a comforter from one of the beds upstairs. She hurried back with it, and with some more straining, they got the huge beast onto the blanket. It wasn’t the easiest, and they kind of lost control at the end, but finally they got the werewolf down the steps. Panting with effort, Lem went to pull the door to the new cage open. “It’s just so fuckin’ heavy,” she complained as she came back to grab one corner of the comforter to start pulling their quarry toward the cage door.
"I know, almost there," Vex grunted and at least now that the massive wolf was down the stairs they could slide him along the floor on the blanket. Once Lem got the door open he ushered to her to change places, not wanting her to end up alone in that cage if the beast woke up, that just wouldn't do. It was a good cage if he said so himself, he'd gotten a lot of help from a fire-witch but he too had done a good job. There were blessings and all sorts of things going on that he knew nothing about but he thought he could feel them anyway, like this cage was powerful. "Goodbye blanket," he muttered once the wolf was inside. There was no way he wanted to try to pull that thing from underneath it just so they could keep it. "We barely knew ye." He stepped over the wolf and opened his mouth to speak when he felt a searing pain in his leg at the same time as the creature started growling and before he could even think about what was going on he'd tripped, instinctively turning as best he could to kick at the monster.
Lex was outside of the cage, but she was still paying attention to what was going on. They were dealing with a volatile monster, and losing Vex was not an option. The operation was almost home free, and then it struck. Lem saw the beast move just a bit before its massive paw lashed out and made contact with Vex’s leg. Lem let out an involuntary scream that was part too-late warning and part horror. She grabbed the gun out of the front of her pants where she’d stuck it, full of silver bullets she’d been hoping they wouldn’t have to use. Lem lunged to where she had a better shot at the werewolf’s head and squeezed the trigger over and over until it was just dry-clicking. The shots were deafening in the basement, and she didn’t realize she was still yelling until her voice broke. “Vex!” she shrieked, dropping the gun and grabbing for his arm to pull him further away from the cage.
"Motherfucking ow," Vex grumbled in an understatement of the century. His leg felt like it was on fire and his jeans were ripped and soaked with blood. He stumble-walked with Lem out of the cage, frustrated and confused. It had been going so well and then... suddenly it hadn't. They'd caught the wolf, now it was dead. At least Vex hoped it was dead, if werewolves didn't die after that many shots to the head then they were all pretty much fucked. His leg had all his attention right now but his ears hurt too from all the noise and he'd twisted something in his back when he fell. Motherfucking ow was the least he could say. "Fuck," he muttered, then again and again. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." What did this mean? Had the thing bitten him? He ended up sitting on the stairs, clutching his leg right above the wound. "Lock the cage," he grumbled just in case that thing was about to get up again like it had spawned from a bad horror movie. "Fuck."
Lem didn’t want to let go of him in the slightest, but he was right about the cage, so she dashed to do that, slamming the door shut and the lock into place. The werewolf might be dead, she couldn’t tell, but it had gotten Vex, Vex was bleeding, and it deserved to be locked up, even if it was just a corpse. She was right back at Vex’s side, tears streaming down her cheeks even as she tugged her tank top off and started hurriedly wrapping it tight around his leg. “Did it bite you?” she was asking. Everything still sounded muffled and ringing, but that didn’t matter. “Should I call an ambulance? Don’t you dare die on me, I’ll fucking kill you!”
"Fucking ow," Vex grumbled again and the pain had him going like a broken record as Lem put pressure on the wound. He'd need to go to the hospital and he really didn't want to. Clarity broke its way through the fog as he watched Lem cry and he reached down to cup her face, paying no heed to the fact that his hands were bloody and so now was her face. "I become the wolf we killed," he said solemnly. "We have knowledge on our side and a cage, it's better this way." He didn't know what the extent of the damage was but he knew he wasn't dying, he'd bled more than and seen people bleed far more and still survive. This was just a scratch or a bite and as long as they followed the rules it didn't need to be a death sentence. "See? It's left him." He nodded toward the cage, within it a naked human body lying in its puddle of blood.
The blood didn’t register with Lem either, she just looked up at Vex from where she was kneeling, her eyes still running. He was hurt, that was one thing, but then he pointed out that now he was going to be like that monster and that was even more scary at the moment. They’d just had to put one down. Lem glanced around behind her and saw that the wolf-monster had become a person, and she couldn’t even care that she’d filled his head full of bullets. He’d hurt her Vex, her Prophet, her North Star, and cursed him, just like that. Lem tightened the shirt around Vex’s leg, trying to staunch the bleeding, then wiped her own bloody hands against her bare chest, streaking more of his blood onto herself without thinking. “Fuck him,” she said raggedly. “I’ll get Zan, or -- or call 911 or, or --” Lem didn’t know any other options, just that someone needed to be healing Vex right now.
Lem was so full of emotion it made up for how little emotion Vex felt at times, like they balanced each other out. Still it made him smile a little through the pain to see how upset she really was. "Are those for me?" he asked as he wiped the tears off her cheeks with his thumbs, leaving her cheeks even more so smudged. "I'm not dead, firecracker. Not dying either. Just in fucking pain. I can get to the car but you gotta drive. Can you drive?" Maybe they should call their neighbors, hell maybe Lem was right and the witches could help better than any hospital.
“You’d better not,” was all Lem could really say to the first part. “Yeah, I can drive.” Vex knew things, so if he said he wasn’t dying, then she had to believe him, but it was still frightening to see him bleed that much. She desperately needed him. She tried to pull her shit together, sniffling as she stood up and got herself under his arm to help him up. There were a lot of stairs between them and the van, and it was going to suck getting up them. Those fucking stairs were really fucking up their night in more ways than one. She wanted to set them on fire. “C’mon,” she muttered. “On three.”
It took a while to get up those stairs and by the time they were half way up Vex was about ready to set them on fire too. The rest of the way was even harder because by then they were both even more so tired and Vex felt a little woozy. He wondered if he was going to die after all and the biggest bummer about it would be that it made him a liar. He'd decided to go to the witches instead of a hospital but by the end of the long climb the hospital seemed like a better idea. Aside from a werewolf curse, that monster could have been carrying something else and Vex would need antibiotics. Maybe even a rabies shot. He thought he'd feel better when he finally got to sit down but his leg still hurt like a bitch as Lem drove them to the hospital. She had grabbed her hoodie on the way out and she looked even tinier than usual all but drowning in the sheer size of it, her knuckles white as she grabbed the wheel. Vex watched her as she drove and fuck if he wasn't feeling a lot of things tonight. He couldn't leave his crazy conduit all by herself in this meat world so they'd better fix him up good at the hospital.
Lem was lucky to remember to grab her hoodie, but she was grateful that she had the instant they hobbled out into the night. It was cold, and she was half-naked. Or had been. Whatever. She tried to stay calm while Vex got in the van and she started driving, but it was difficult. Vex was her only rock in the world, her only reason to do anything at all, and she couldn’t lose him. She didn’t really want him to be a werewolf, either, but that was at least better than him being dead. So she drove a bit too fast, probably, but she got them to the hospital. Lem parked right in front of the ER doors with a tire-squeak, threw the van into park, and launched herself out of the vehicle. She ran into the hospital and yelled about needing help until one of the nurses came jogging up with a wheelchair. It didn’t take too long, considering Lem was streaked with blood and wild-eyed and loud, but it still felt like forever. It was at least good to have a stronger pair of hands helping Vex out of the van and into the chair. She grabbed his hand and didn’t let go as they all hurried back inside.
Vex found that hospitals weren't nearly as bad as he remembered, at least not when he had someone he gave a shit about right there with him. He growled at the nurse who asked Lem to wait outside and in the end Lem got to be right there with him as the wound got cleaned up and stitched together. He held her hand, idly rubbing it and he was pretty sure that right now she needed more comfort than he did. It hurt and not in the way Vex liked it but it was still strangely satisfying. Healing hurt tended to be. When asked he just told them it was an animal attack. A lot of those around lately, were the cops not doing a damn thing about it? "You'd think we lived in the wilds of Africa," he grumbled, resting his head on Lem's arm. "Fucking mad dogs."
Lem didn’t like hospitals in general, but they needed this one to make Vex better, so as long as nobody tried to slap a straightjacket on either of them, she was all right with it. She was glad the medical people didn’t try to separate them, Lem had been prepared to scream and kick and make a scene until they let her stay, but that ended up not being necessary. She stayed as close to Vex as she could, clinging to his hand and watching the stitches happen. A stupid laugh tried to bubble out of her throat at Vex’s comment about mad dogs, but Lem swallowed it down. She was feeling calmer now, less sure that he was going to die, but still vigilant. Lem wiped a bit of pain-sweat off of Vex’s forehead and then kissed it. “Somebody should hunt those assholes down,” she muttered.
Vex was calm enough now that he'd started thinking about how not fun it would be to get the hospital bill in the mail. Meat life was expensive, that was for damn sure, but it was worth it now that he had someone he clearly needed to live for. The nurse-doctor-person wasn't overly chatty, or maybe he was but he wasn't with them. Vex could sense apprehension from him, like he knew they were more than just average humans. That was okay, he was doing his job, getting Vex stitched up and getting him drugs. Vex really liked drugs right now, both the preventing kind and the painkiller kind. He wasn't going to need a blood transfusion but he could expect to be a little dizzy in the next day or two. "You hear that, firecracker?" he murmured. "Wasn't that much blood."
“Still too much,” Lem muttered almost sullenly, leaning over to tuck her face in against Vex’s neck for a moment. They were both still bloody and sweaty and gross, but she was relieved. If the doctors didn’t even want to give him more blood, he would be okay. The professional left them alone for a few minutes to get the drugs from the pharmacy and start the discharge paperwork. Lem took the opportunity to hug Vex’s head and press a kiss against his temple. “How do you feel? Werewolfy?” she whispered, nuzzling him.
"I always had a little wolf in me," Vex said. "I just didn't think it'd be literal one day." He didn't feel like he was capable of turning into a mindless beast and he supposed he wouldn't know for another few weeks. It had been a scratch, not a bite, he knew that now, but he didn't know if those were infectious. Maybe the bite thing was a myth too, maybe werewolves were cursed by spells, maybe maybe maybe. "I don't feel werewolfy. Maybe the pegasus will give us answers soon." If it was meant to be, it was meant to be. Their path had been decided.
At least he didn’t feel like he was about to wolf-hulk out right there in the hospital. Lem didn’t think that was how it worked, but who even knew. Things were crazy. She’d killed someone, and now that the panic was over, Lem’s thoughts kept sneaking back to the pale pile of dead man in the cage. He hadn’t had much of a head left. They were going to have to do something about that. “Hope so,” Lem agreed with a tired sigh. She sat up again, carding her fingers through Vex’s hair. “We’ve got a mess to clean up at home,” she murmured after a moment. “Wonder if the witches know about disposing of ... stuff.”
"Let's not involve them," Vex muttered. The more people who knew about the dead body the bigger the chance of others finding out. Vex trusted Nic and Zania more than the average people but they were still new in his life and not as close to his heart as Lem. If it came down to it he'd say he was the one who pulled the trigger and not her but if they could avoid being caught, that was better. "I know how to clean up a mess," he reassured her. "You did the right thing, but nobody can know about it."
There was no question in Lem’s mind that she’d done the right thing. She’d reacted fast -- not fast enough to keep Vex from getting hurt, but fast enough to save him. That thing would’ve killed him if it had gotten half a chance, and then her if she hadn’t filled its head full of silver. It was too bad that it had been a person underneath, but there was nothing they could do about that. Whoever it was hadn’t taken precautions, and had killed people, so she didn’t feel any guilt about it. Just worry that it would cause trouble for them. Lem nodded and butted her head against Vex’s again. She trusted him, he knew about these things, he was a cop once upon a time, so he could at least talk her through what to do. “We’ll take care of it,” she murmured. “And we’ll take care of you.”
Vex would absolutely let her take care of him, at least sometimes. When it came to the body in the basement he was determined to take care of it himself. Lem could help of course, it wouldn't hurt for her to know how to do some of those things but if she wanted nothing to do with any of it then that was okay with Vex. "I'll be just fine, firecracker," he murmured, reaching up to ruffle her hair before looking at her with a little grin. "You got a little warpaint on you." It was tempting to give her proper warpaint with purposeful lines and all but he was all out of fresh blood with his leg all sealed up.
Lem smirked a tiny bit, then glanced down at her chest. She could see down the opening of the hoodie, and she unzipped it a bit so Vex could see too. “More than a little,” she murmured back, then re-zipped. A second later the door opened and the nurse came back with a bag of pills for Vex and some paperwork. He told them some aftercare things to do, then said they could go when they were ready. He insisted on taking Vex out in a wheelchair, but he was able to get back in the van on his own, which Lem was grateful for. He would hobble around like the pain wasn’t anything, she was sure, but he would heal and that was the important thing. They would deal with anything else next month. And the problem in the basement ... soon. After some food and some rest.