InsaneJournal

Who: Danny Ketch and Jacen Solo
What: Round one. FIGHT!
When: The middle of the afternoon, 1/06/2012
Where: A deserted part of town in the slums.
Warnings: Potentially brutal fight ahead. Here be the warning.

There were a lot of things on Dan Ketch’s bucket list. After his second death, he’d halved them, because the pure rate of deaths he was experiencing meant that he might not have enough time before the next one to do all of these things. One thing that hadn’t been on his bucket list was picking a fight with a Sith Lord, but that was exactly what he’d done. Dan was sick and tired of these people thinking they knew him just because they met the kid he used to be, over a decade ago for him. Whatever Jacen thought he was doing, whatever Jacen thought he knew about him, Dan intended to correct him. Violently, and with the Penance Stare.

The truth was, drinking and fighting were how Dan spent the time between having the Spirit exorcised and accepting Mr. Eleven’s proposal. The drinking let him forget how empty he felt inside, and the fighting made him feel like, for just a second, he had something close to the Spirit again. He knew that both were illusions, but they were the comforting variety. So after the Zadkiel problem was taken care of, and after Dan’s tenuous grip on hope shattered when he and his brother split up, those were the things he went after. Sure, he had the Spirit back now, and sure it felt damn good to give in and let the equivalent of a holy nuke off its leash, but he also hated it now more than ever before. He imagined a junkie might have similar feelings toward the needle, after the first time they do something horrible in order to get their fix. It wasn’t that he was afraid of losing himself to the Spirit, even though it had almost happened once, back when he’d stumbled on to Mary’s corpse. In truth, he didn’t really feel like he’d be losing much of anything anymore. He’d given up the last remaining vestiges of himself when he became Zadkiel’s lieutenant, the archangel twisting him into something dark and unrecognizable. He’d been able to stave off the aftermath while the archangel sat on God’s throne, but after he and Johnny sent the bastard to Hell, after they parted ways, there wasn’t really anything Dan could do to deny that he no longer recognized the face in the mirror.

He hadn’t been able to deal with that, not on his own, and with Johnny off doing his own thing and Sister Sara gone who knew where, Dan had no one to turn to. He hadn’t had anyone to turn to when the memories of his victims’ lives became so overwhelming that all he could do was curl up on the floor of his empty apartment and sob, hadn’t had anyone to turn to when the echoes of the Caretaker calling him an accident floated back to his recollections, or when he stumbled upon some memory of a simpler time, a time when he knew who he was and what he was doing. The only other friend he’d had, a techno-sorceress named Mary LeBow, had died a long time ago. She’d died protecting him from the monster he hadn’t cared enough to look for. So with little else to lean on, he fell back on the two things that had helped him in the past: Drinking and fighting. Slowly the drinking had become less of an escape and more of an addiction, to the point where he needed booze to even get out of bed. Dan knew the kind of man he became when he was drunk, the angry, cynical man that would fight just about anyone for just about any reason, and sometimes no reason at all. He knew that it likely wouldn’t win him any friends, but he’d long since given up on ever having more of those. Lately, it was just easier to be angry than to be honest with himself and deal with all the pain and guilt. Some small part of him knew what a train wreck his life had become, but that tiny little voice could never shout over all the booze, not with all the other voices clanging around in Dan’s head, ghost-voices echoing from the memories of the souls he’d devoured for Zadkiel. Their power was expended, but the memories of lives he never lived would be with him until he died.

Now wasn’t one of those times, though.

Oh, Dan was drunk. In fact, he was just a hairsbreadth under the legal limit, and if his bike didn’t take psychic commands such as “drive yourself” he’d have probably been pulled over already. He was drunk enough to think fighting a Sith was a good idea, even if he only vaguely remembered what it was that Jacen was actually capable of. His beard hadn’t grown much, but his overall physical condition was worse. His hair was matted with mud from a night sleeping in the rain and his face had acquired a layer of dirt that bordered on the archaeological. His coat, still stained with blood from his disastrous first attempt at a wish, was also stained with mud and other, less recognizable but more odorous stains. His shirt was gone, having been shredded to turn into the bandages for his ribs from when the truck clipped him under the overpass a few days ago, and his pants had been turned into makeshift shorts from the knees down when he’d needed to change the dressings on the wounds on his arms and legs. His fingernails were caked in dirt and blood, and a few of the dressings showed signs of fresh blood, when the wounds under them had torn open during the fight the night before.

His eyes, though. They were bright, as if this fight had somehow put a little life back into the otherwise glassy orbs. That wasn’t entirely untrue, but it wasn’t the best sign, either. Giving in to his anger could have serious consequences for Dan, but right now that’s exactly what he was doing. He’d passed into a less populated area of the city awhile ago, one he recognized from his first visit through Lawrence as the slummier section. Jacen was smart, going somewhere deserted, where their fight wouldn’t attract attention. Dan wouldn’t be able to admit that now, though, as that was the furthest thing from his mind. Right now all he cared about was his burning desire to shove the Sith Lord’s lightsaber down his throat and turn it on. It was a rage born in part of Dan’s human side and in part from the Spirit, reacting to the waves of sin he felt roiling off of Jacen just about all the time. That part of Dan that wasn’t human, that didn’t obey or even understand human rules or morality of laws, the holy nuke from God lashed to Dan’s human soul, wanted nothing more than to pass final bloody judgment on the murderous Sith.

Dan swung off the road to the shoulder when he felt like he was within half a mile of Jacen, slowing the bike to a stop and planting his feet firmly on either side of it to keep it upright. Contrary to what he’d told the Sith, he wasn’t that stupid. He wasn’t going to show up to this thing in his weak, frail little human form. Even with his booze-clouded judgment, Dan knew how quick that fight would end. His plan was to show up to this thing ready for a real fight, rather than just some little brawl. It took no more than a minor effort of will to summon up the change, and as Dan felt that power flood into him, his entire demeanor changed. The hellfire consuming his body sent its usual lance of pain through him, but where once that pain might have been horrible, Dan now shivered in anticipation as he felt it. A second later he felt the power of the Spirit flowing free, felt it coming to the forefront of his mind. Suddenly the cares, the doubts, the depression all went away, burned off by the pure fire of wrath. Dan stood up straighter, taller and prouder, as he let the full magnificence of the Spirit of Vengeance, God’s earthbound angel, flooded his senses.

Gone was the stained coat. In its place was a billowing greatcoat the color of night itself, overtop a black chest plate with a disturbingly familiar trident-sigil on the front in the color of blue flame. Dan knew it primarily as Zadkiel’s sigil, but Zadkiel got it from his former commander, Lucifer, and the similarities probably wouldn’t go unnoticed. There were also dark blue jeans with spikes jutting up from the knees, and black motorcycle boots that looked almost like they were made of steel themselves. Two bracers on his arms as well as both shoulders sported rows of vicious spikes as well. Around his neck, looped like a noose, was his iconic chain, making several passes around his neck before dropping down to the top of his chest plate and then disappearing into the sleeves of the coat. It was an ominous image, completed when his black gloved hands reached back and flipped up the voluminous black hood of the coat, somehow containing the sulfurous flames that roiled up out of the chest plate like skin. His bike, too, underwent a transformation, replacing both wheels with vortexes of the same sulfurous flame that covered his body. The front of his bike was replaced by a demon skull the size of a watermelon, with two fangs extending down to grip the spokes of the wheel. The horns tapered back into the handlebars for the bike, gripped in Dan’s black gloved hands. As a man he was a bum, but now he was wrath incarnate, and as he rocketed back out onto the road with a sound not unlike a thousand voices wailing, screaming along at several hundred miles per hour, he couldn’t help but let out an unearthly, hysterical cackle in absolute, reckless abandon. Jacen was about to meet power unrestrained by anything nearing self-control, and Dan had a sneaking suspicion that even the Sith Lord wouldn’t be able to stand against his power.