ιѕαвєℓα (rivaini) wrote in valloic, @ 2020-06-18 14:26:00 |
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Entry tags: | !: action/thread/log, the umbrella academy: diego hargreeves, ₴ inactive: isabela |
Who: Isabela & "Diego"
What: Skeletons and Romantic Stuff
When: The 15th, I think?
Where: Forest by Skyhold
Warnings: Lots of bones and feels
Status: Complete
The moon was helping to guard the night, which made for a nice stroll on one of the forest’s walking paths. For Isabela, there really was no option but the forest anyway - she still hadn’t quite gotten herself accustomed to city life, and couldn’t bring herself to move into an apartment with all of its modern amenities (hot water and electricity were fantastic though, that she would admit). Instead she’d taken to living at Skyhold, especially if she was going to work there, tend the bar and organise all the parties - and when she needed fresh air, a minute or so to think, she would often come out here even if she knew she wasn’t alone; the forest at the stroke of the midnight hour, with the prominent scents of earth and water drifting up into the air, was a playground for many types of things. It was beautiful in a dark sort of way - whispering trees and their shadows making up the backbone of the forest, overhanging branches and the crunch of papery leaves into the soil. Right now she was patrolling, sort of, though she wouldn’t exactly call it that - it sounded too much like what she did back in Kirkwall, with her motley crew, and things had changed so much she didn’t want to get involved in something like that again. And yet here she was. Life was a circle, wasn’t it? Oh, well. At least she had a big grumpy manfriend to help her not-patrol and keep Skyhold safe. “It’s so lovely out here,” Bela sighed. “Doesn’t it just make you want to take your clothes off?” Maybe not, but she really didn’t need any particular excuse to do that around him. Diego never thought he’d be one that was comfortable with silence. To him, the quiet meant he was alone with his thoughts and feelings, which Diego never did well with. The Academy had always been bustling with activity and noise, even with its size relative to the number of people who lived there, because of their training and calls out to fight crime. After he left, it wasn’t like Diego was relying on anyone else to get by, so his ramshackle housing had been filled with the noise of people fighting in the halls at all hours of the night as well as the sound of the streets below. And then after the failure of the police academy, he moved into Al’s gym with people coming in and out for training or fights, and the constant hum of the boiler, not to mention his own nighttime vigilantism. But, just like everything, Diego was trying to be better. Their childhood had been shit, but Reginald Hargreeves was dead, and allowing himself to be fucked up and blame it all on a dead man seemed like too much of a copout for Diego. Growing as a person or whatever bullshit self-help books called it, which made him want to gag. He wrapped an arm around Bela’s shoulders not lazily or casually, because Diego rarely did anything that way, but at least with a familiarity. Spontaneous demonstrations of affection had also never come easily to him, but again, move on from the excuses and try. “Still can’t believe you live in a goddamn fortress,” he drawled. “On the one hand, absofucklinglutely, because, duh, on the other hand I still feel like there’s literally fifty billion places for something to hide in and I’m not totally one for exhibitionism for pegasus or unicorns or whatever else lives around here.” “How surprising,” Bela chuckled, arm sliding around Diego’s waist in turn, across his back; he was so different from Hawke (or at least, the Hawke she’d known and loved - different from the one here too, and that was a different story) but that wasn’t a bad thing at all. She liked that he was trying all sorts of new things - and liked that he’d even opened up a little bit to her at all. Baby steps, you see, and she just considered it uncovering something new and exciting everyday, the more he tried and the more she encouraged him. Isabela was trying too, in that she didn’t want to sit around here moping about specific aspects she couldn’t change - there was nothing wrong with letting the busted, creaky heart do a bit of healing. “Unicorns would run off anyway - they’re too pure for the likes of us.” She might have suggested finding a good tree to do it up against (and was half calculating the mechanics of it, considering she was wearing leather trousers) when the grim outline of something shadowy crept in on them - not just one outline, but several. Some were ambling along at a sloth’s pace, others were fanged and hungry - but they all had one thing in common. A jangle of bones, skeletons - they were illuminated by streaks of moonlight cutting through trees, hollow and empty. “Oh, come on,” Bela scoffed when she saw that her and Diego weren’t alone. “These things? Really?” “Oh fucking shitheaded assholes,” Diego muttered. Out of the harness Diego always wore (don’t at him, Klaus, or whatever the saying was, Diego didn’t care) he pulled two daggers that went over and under the fingers on each hand. “I take it back, I would have preferred pervy unicorns.” Alright, not really, and never let it be said that Diego turned down a fight, he didn’t, even with fantastical creatures. Or ones that were already dead, whatever, Diego would fight dead things. With a flick of his wrists, Diego sent two throwing knife slicing through the air, another two already in his hand as replacement. Knives were Diego’s bread and butter, but sometimes he wished for something irrational, like a daggered boomerang that he could just throw and have immediately come back. Actually. Not a terrible idea, he’d talk to Brigitte about it. Later, obviously. He watched as the daggers sliced through bone, the first hit a femur and the second a bone in the ribs. On someone with skin, it would have been an artery and a punctured lung. On a skeleton, it just broke off bone. Assholes. “Fuckers are wearing armor too, what the fuck!” “Keep hitting it,” Isabela advised. For her, daggers were unsheathed, held in those murderous hands, and she all of a sudden became a duel-weaponed tornado of death, a stab and hello, have another - literally in one spot in a moment, and another place entirely the next. Bela was quicker than a strike of lightning, far too fast for even the shutter of a camera lens to catch; she didn’t have magic but liked to think she made up for it in other ways. “Go for the eye sockets - or if there’s a heavy rock, bash it with that. The idea is to get them in pieces. They’re basically just Fade demons using skeletons as a host to move around in.” So yes, pieces would work - and not stop until they danced on a pile of bone rubbish. The skeleton horde screamed, puppet strings pulled, and they surrounded and attacked - their whole goal was to get hits in, however they could, but Bela was confident that she and her manfriend could fight them off. “It’s not even their same bodies? That’s shitty,” Diego commented, his lip curling a bit in dislike. If he died, he damn sure didn’t want some fucking demon driving around his body like a used car. At least these were just bones,, the person had been long gone. Like Ben, Diego thought, immediately angry with himself for thinking it. Better to go punch a skeleton in the face. His own method of fighting wasn’t anything as graceful as the arcs he threw knives or the way Isabela twirled in and out of sight. Diego was brutal, harsh, effective, and unrelenting. He fought like someone who didn’t care, fast and hard, one punch through a neck, a boot through the spine. “You need like, a priest or something to exorcise the place,” he said, after throwing another fist through an eye socket and oh boy, if he got skeleton bone and demon residue or whatever through his hand was he going to be pissed. “Or salt the lawn or something? Isn’t that a thing?” All the paranormal supernatural ghostly spooks had always been Klaus’s domain, for obvious reasons. But living in a place where there were goblins and minotaurs and whatever tended to give you a crash course in the fantastical. Punching a skeleton in the face was actually quite therapeutic. Isabela was almost enjoying herself - oh, alright, she was enjoying herself. Nothing like the thrill of the fight to really get the ol’ blood pumping, right? “They’re susceptible to fire attacks too,” she added, which made her think of Anders and his particular penchant for...flames. He’d used a lot of those, when they had all teamed up in Kirkwall. Skeletons were here and there, though they usually ran into more human-shaped scourges in, say, the slums of Lowtown that smelled like a pretty perfume with notes of sweat, wood smoke, and the delightful addition of ammonia, urine, something that was cloying. She remembered it fondy. “But I do like to watch you,” the pirate flashed her teeth in a grin, jamming her Heartbreaker into the space between back and neck bones - she’d disappeared and reappeared behind one skeleton; bones clanged and clattered, falling into a useless pile on the ground. “Bloody - “ Then one crept up on her, getting its hits in as she fought back - they were like Diego in their attacks, utterly relentless. They just wanted to claw at flesh until it was all gone, but she wasn’t about to let that happen. “Going to leave a bruise,” she huffed, rubbing her shoulder. “Shit, and here I left the blow torch in my other harness,” Diego quipped, much as he ever quipped, because his sense of humor was drier than the desert and because he was punching a skeleton so what even was his life right now? “And, you know, don’t exactly want to get suspected of arson or anything. I don’t even carry matches, damn.” Nope, the harness just had knives on knives on knives and maybe three zip ties to tie a douchebag’s hands together before he dumped them on the police station’s front door. You’re welcome. Planning had never exactly been his forte, Diego’s motto had always been ‘I’m fucking winging it’. Because really, who could plan for things like skeletons? Honestly. He threw an elbow and then grabbed a fallen bone and whipped it like a gothic dagger. Diego’s ability might be most commonly used with knives but it really applied to anything that could be thrown. His brow furrowed as he glanced over at Isabela, there and gone and back again. “Are you disappearing and coming back? That is so badass.” Diego absolutely did not understand magic, obviously, but badassery was a thing he knew. “Did you just use a bone as a dagger?” was Bela’s counter-response, cheeky and amused. But she was equally impressed - unerring accuracy was a thing for her too, but it wasn’t always a guarantee; she could have shady hands or what have you. But the fact that Diego could just pick up anything and use it as a weapon (if it wasn’t nailed down, it could be thrown, right?), well, yes. Sexy. There was another clash, a clang of bones, and Bela stopped to resheath her daggers, survey the scene - she was breathing harshly, skin blossoming with bruises, but it looked like a whole bone trash heap around them, which made her proud. She huffed out another breath, grabbing Diego for one of those ‘we just fought a horde of skeletons’ kiss, deep and dizzying. “I may have fallen in love with you a little,” she grinned, a bit delirious but not enough to take back her words. “Yeah, totally fucking gross, but I’m absolutely saving that idea in case the situation ever comes up again,” Diego said, rolling both shoulders in the joints and then his neck back and forth until it cracked. Granted the situation was pretty unique, so the odds of that happening again were...well, actually, not all that bad. He stumbled forward into the pirate’s embrace, huffing a laugh and using the closeness to not only cop a feel of dangerous curves ahead (because, hey, adrenaline was a heady thing) but to also give Isabela a quick look over, just in case. In case of--well, Diego didn’t know, but just in case. But that was enough to have him almost missing Isabela’s words. And words, emotions, all of that was so incredibly complicated for Diego, who had learned to convert anything negative: sadness, hurt, disappointment, fear, into anger. Diego’s formative years had been spent competing for scraps of attention from their father that was always focused on what they could do rather than who they were. Alison and Klaus liked to tease Diego about how he showed (or didn’t) affection, and ironically too much affection was like a too bright light to him, he pulled back, his skin felt too tight on his body. Even a few weeks ago he had had a difficult time expressing to Klaus what it was like when Ben died, and how much he wanted a better life for Klaus. It made him feel vulnerable, and instead of being okay with that, Diego buckled down and tried to protect himself. Words always caught in Diego’s throat when he was too emotional, and when he tried to get them out they came in chopped up, stuttered pieces. He did so much better with actions because they couldn’t be misinterpreted. He’d act like a guard dog for his siblings, bring coffee randomly, show up when it didn’t seem like anyone else would, leave a fight last, but damn if he couldn’t say anything. He pressed his lips to the top of Isabela’s head in acknowledgement. “Come on,” and that came out solidly, thankfully. “Let’s get some ice on those bruises, huh?” She knew she couldn’t - or shouldn’t - force him to talk about it, at least not right now. Diego would retreat, an animal backed into a corner - he reminded Isabela of poppy flowers, sailors sometimes wore them to commemorate the dead; they were hardy but closed up during storms, and took a lot of care and coaxing to open up again. Though likely he wouldn’t appreciate the comparison, but still. She couldn’t erase years of emotional abuse for him, just with magic words, but she wouldn’t take them back either because they’d at least agreed to be honest. “Aye, alright, suppose I could use some ice,” she huffed - amazing that she was the one in the relationship offering patience and understanding. In her last one, it was the other way around - and really, it took her years to tell Hawke she loved him. Waiting a little longer in this instance was not going to be a hardship. But she grabbed his bum playfully, meaning she wouldn’t push it. At the moment. “Let me just take my clothes off for you so you can see where to apply it?” Bela added cheekily. Skyhold was equipped with most modern amenities now, so she had ice at the bar at the Herald’s Rest, and she’d assess any more damages too. Didn’t feel like anything else was broken. They’d see when they got there, though. And she’d shelve the emotional talk for a time way past the skeletons. |