Eric Draven (tragedymask) wrote in wariscoming, @ 2010-04-07 03:27:00 |
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Entry tags: | eric draven |
Who: Crow!Eric.
When: Around 2am-ish.
Where: The shady side of town, Eric’s preferred hunting grounds.
What: There’s so few joys left for a dead man. Violence is one of them.
Rating: Yeah, let’s go with R. Eric can’t kill. Doesn’t mean he has to be gentle.
Status: Just a narrative.
Eric popped the tiny little phone closed and put it back into the pocket of his long coat. He’d taken it off a mugger he’d knocked out earlier in the night. He’d left the man in the park, where he’d found him, and placed an anonymous tip into the police on a nearby payphone with a quarter he had in his pocket. He already knew he’d been hurtled through space/time. Given that he’d lived the same day three times once, thanks to the Skull Cowboy, this wasn’t anything all that new or alarming, especially now that he’d transformed, and all that rage and pain and sheer joy of violence had come to the fore. He had better things to do than whine and mope, like he did when in his “right mind”.
One of those things had been to hound some moron on the internet while his spirit crow hunted for muggers, abusive spouses, and really any other violent crime he could intervene in. Strangely, he’d ended up actually liking two of the people commenting there. Oh, the boy was an idiot not worth paying attention to, but the two girls were interesting. One of them even had the kind of courage he respected. That was a shocker. While in his “right mind” Eric tended to be a lot more forgiving and generous towards people, when he transformed he was fairly sure that most people were at best lemmings. Cute little lemmings that he had to protect, sure, but still lemmings. Albrecht and Sarah were exceptions, but they were the exceptions that proved the rule, in his mind. He hadn’t expected to find people he could potentially grow to like here, especially not after how things panned out with the Lazarus Group and the price Shelly had paid to help him.
Then he heard the whispers and his head jerked up to gaze out at the west, in the direction they were coming from. His bird had found something, and a flash of a second later he was peering out through its eyes. Three tough-looking muggers had surrounded two clubgoers in an alley. One held a bat, the other swung a heavy chain in lazy circles, and the other didn’t seem to have a weapon, which likely meant he was carrying either a knife, a gun, knuckles, or that he thought himself a brawler. Neither the thugs or the weapons bothered Eric in the slightest. None of them could do anything serious enough with those weapons to merit any kind of caution.
Good. He liked to get showy. He enjoyed the fear in their eyes when they realized that the minute he entered the fray, they’d all become his bitches. Could he be blamed? His death hadn’t been an easy one, characterized by his murderers using the same kind of overpowering hopelessness and fear. It felt nice to turn that on those that actually deserved it. Too nice, sometimes. But that didn’t matter right now. He wouldn’t lose control this time. Not like that second fight with Top Dollar, even though the subhuman bastard had deserved worse than being impaled on a metal pipe.
They were two blocks away. Eric hopped up into a standing position on the edge of the roof, not worried about falling despite his precarious perch. He could be there instantaneously if he chose, since his bird was already perched on the left rooftop bordering the alley, but he needed a good run and he was fast enough that he could get there before things deteriorated into violence. With a smirk, he turned on his heel and took off, moving at an inhuman speed. He wasn’t quite a blur, but he was certainly faster than any human could run. Despite the apparently wanton recklessness as he ran, he never once fell, even as he vaulted from rooftop to rooftop.
He didn’t stop when he neared the final rooftop. Instead he just flipped off the roof, bringing his arms and legs in close as his coat whipped the air around him. He spun like a ball through the air, heading straight for the ground between the victims and their would-be muggers. As he neared, he turned his feet and set out a bracing hand, landing in a flawless crouch that forced the muggers to back up and put a little distance between them and their victims. There were surprised mutters as Eric landed, and then he rose, turning as he did. Both hands caught the trim of his long black trench coat and pushed them out, mimicking the spread wings of a bird. It also helped create a defensive shield in front of the victims. “Go,” he whispered harshly at them, and they didn’t waste a second. The mugger without an apparent weapon started to twitch toward the fleeing victims, but Eric kept pace with them, still facing the muggers, keeping himself between them. “Gentleman,” he called merrily and loudly to the muggers, as the victims cleared the entrance and disappeared around a corner, “isn’t it customary to buy someone dinner before you dick them over?”
“Who the fuck are you,” the one with the bat – Slugger, Eric decided to name him – demanded.
“I’m the Ghost of Christmas Future,” Eric returned, that vicious, madman’s grin on his face. “I’ve come to teach you the error of your ways, Ebenezer Scrooge.”
“What the fuck are you even talking about, man,” Chain demanded.
“No one understands me anymore,” Eric moaned, his voice sounding just a little too amused to match with the mock-sorrowful look on his face. “Who am I? I’m nobody.” He dropped his coat, sensing the tension rising in the air and knowing things were about to erupt into violence. The alley wasn’t wide enough for a brawler to maneuver while standing side-by-side with the home run derby challenger and Chain couldn’t use his weapon while Eric was in hand-to-hand range with one of the other two. Chances were chain would be first. Eric could handle that. “Just like you three.”
Just as he’d expected, Chain’s thick metal links lashed out. Eric, his arm flashing up and around with inhuman speed, caught the chain first against his forearm and then in his hand. Chain only had time for his eyes to widen before Eric had wrapped the chain around his forearm another few times by spinning it. “Heavy metal, huh? Not bad. But here. Try a little,” Eric spun suddenly, yanking the chain with him, and sent its wielder sailing into the old brick building on the right, “classic rock!” Eric heard Chain’s shoulder dislocate and heard him groan as consciousness left him.
One down.
Slugger was next. He came in swiftly, swinging the bat in a horizontal arc for Eric’s head. Eric flipped over it as if it were nothing. “Strike one!” Another swift swing came straight down, and Eric easily sidestepped. “Strike two!” Then Slugger tried a thrust, and Eric snapped one hand out, grabbing the bat on the lower end of the shaft, near the handle. “Stee-rike three! You’re out!” He flicked his wrist forward, easily overpowering the bat’s wielder with his inhuman strength, and smashed the bat into his face. The bat cracked, Slugger’s nose exploded in blood and bits of bone, and he went down, both eyes already blackening.
Eric glanced up at Unarmed. He’d drawn a butterfly knife from his pants pocket, and was already ducking in from the right for a slash. Eric discarded both the chain and the bat, making sure to give each a little throw so that they wouldn’t fall at his feet and tangle him up. “Oooh, a knife,” Eric mocked, dodging each quick slash and stab. “I’m so scared,” he continued, his tone clearly bored rather than scared. “Stabbing really is so passé,” he twitched his head to the side, letting a stab whiz harmlessly by his head, “you do know that, right?”
Then Unarmed pulled back, winding up for a big stab, and Eric just rolled his eyes. “Oh FINE! Let’s just get it OVER WITH!” Both hands flashed out as the thug’s hand started forward. The thug’s eyes widened as he felt Eric’s fingers close over his arms and then peeled back to nearly the size of saucers as Eric, instead of deflecting the stab, yanked hard on the thug’s arm, actually pulling the knife into his chest very near his heart, right up to the hilt. Shocked beyond reason, Unarmed, now truly unarmed, stumbled back, limp fingers pulling away from the blade still stuck in Eric’s chest. Eric saw the fear in the thug’s eyes and laughed loud and hard, throwing his head back and laughing a deep belly laugh, arms outstretched slightly. His eyes never let the rapidly paling mugger’s face, savoring the terror in his eyes.
Eric really loved his job.
“Something WRONG,” Eric bellowed, somehow still managing to sound amused. He stepped forward, his mirth falling, replaced with an icy glare. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost!” Unarmed opened his mouth to scream, but Eric rushed him, one hand coming up and slamming into his mouth. “Tsk, tsk,” he chided in a low growl. “You know the rules. No telling secrets!” He smirked viciously. “But since you’re so eager to share, let me see some of yours!” He kept the thug still with his other arm, and opened his senses. Suddenly Eric was hit with waves of helplessness, anger, and shame as memory after memory of mugging flooded in. There were even a few that had gotten violent and ended badly for the victims.
A spike of rage tore through his mind. He felt a sudden wave of disgust and hatred for this man. He was just like the ones that killed him, the ones that raped and murdered his fiancé in front of his eyes. He could kill him, he should kill him-
Eric forcibly tore his empathic sense away from the man’s mind, seeming to shake with the effort of not ending this poor pathetic excuse for a human right now. “Your friend asked me who I am. I am the avatar of justice, come to exact judgment for your sins,” he snarled. “Your sentence is life without mercy.” And in one moment, the thug received every last bit of pain, shame, helplessness, sorrow, and rage that his own victims had felt, all at once.
His body sharply went stiff, and then just as quickly became a limp noodle. Eric glanced at his chest, saw it was still rising and falling in a faint but steady rhythm, and dropped the pathetic waste in disgust. There was still a part of him that wanted to just gut the little bastard, but he didn’t. He forced himself to turn, stomp over to the chain, and then collect the bodies. He pulled each body into a seated position, pulled them back to back, and then wrapped the chain around them tightly. Once he’d secured them to a point that he didn’t think they could get free from, he broke three of the last links in the chain, hooked each of them into other links, and then used his strength to pinch each of the broken links closed, thus sealing it and locking the chain around the thugs. Once that was done, he glanced around for a moment. His eyes settled on something on the far right wall, near the dead end of the alley. “A dumpster. Hn. Fitting.” Grabbing the chain with one hand and hauling all three bodies up as if they were nothing, he carried them to the dumpster, opened the lid with his free hand, and chucked them in. Then he let the lid fall, vaulted his way back up to the roof he’d leapt from, and used the stolen phone to put in an anonymous call to the cops after calling up a map on the high-tech little device. He wanted to make sure he didn’t sound like a tourist. No reason to give the cops any clues to the vigilante in town, assuming they even believed any of the thugs, which would be unlikely given he’d used some of his inhuman abilities during the fight. “You’ll find some human filth in the dumpster, where it belongs, in an alley on Mass.” He hung up before any questions could be asked and then paced into the shadows of the rooftop, crouching near the lip. He wanted to wait and watch, just in case the police here were lazy and the muggers tried to escape. And he needed time to cool down before he started looking for more.