Chaos Theory (Part Two)
Who: Alexander Wolfgang, Crawford Sands, Avari.
Source: (Age 33) Trial By Fire (Log: Rev, Sara, Jen)
Summary: Still convincing himself that this isn’t much more than a dream or a bad trip, Alexander decides to test out a certain theory. Crawford comes along and helps out with that. The only way Crawford knows how.
Rating: R for language, an epic fail attempt at suicide, and graphic violence-Crawford and Alexander style.
PART ONE
“And the wild regrets and the bloody sweats. None knew so well as I
that he who lives more lives than one, more deaths than one shall die.”
Just die.
The command came out but the eyes of the dog said defiance. Then the plank edge came down from above like a vicious bolt of lightning, hammering down his shoulder. Pain screamed. He did not. Teeth just clamped. Grunt. Cough. Hack. Choke. Breathe.
Breathe. Inhale. Exhale. Now that ain’t so hard, now is it? Eye twitched. Cold and dead but somehow the dog was still alive. Still breathing even as the hammer blow sent him clean off his feet and onto his knees. His body delivered a clear message of PAIN from his nervous system to his brain. No matter. It didn’t matter. All that mattered were the cool whispers of the wicked wind and the stupid fuck that stood in his way.
Body domed forward. Weak. Dead. Still alive, though. He was alive. He swayed. Consciousness did not fade. He was still here. He was still very, very lucid, midst the raging haze and twist of reality itself to his perverted perception. The animal with a blood-smeared face and its green eyes rolled up at the one standing over him. Not a master. Not a killer. Could be. But not.
Hand. Seemed weak. Yet it swung over and grabbed the plank that plastered his shoulder. Fingers wrapped around its edge.
And with a powerful pull of the wood piece, the dog yanked downward.
This was a level of insanity Crawford had not quite been prepared to deal with. An idea dashed across his mind. What if he wasn’t human? A monster, perhaps. But this guy was certainly faster than those zombie things wandering around. No, not a monster, but maybe not human. The idea didn’t stick around long enough for him to puzzle it out. Any guy who could drive shards of old metal into themselves was more than he could handle. He’d laughed in the face of his opponents on many occasions, but he’d never harmed himself intentionally.
Yanking the wood back, he dropped it. He didn’t care if the metal gored at the man’s shoulder. He was through with the insanity of this place. He was sick of this ‘more than human’ crap. He just wanted to be back home. He wanted the worst part of his day to be the guy in the business suit screaming that his complicated coffee had one less shot of ameretto than he’d ordered. He wanted to go home to his stale, dark apartment and pass out. He wanted to have fifteen different bars to choose from, with out demons or angels or anything else lurking about. And right now, Alex was the embodiment of everything he hated about this place. The strangeness of it.
He wanted out. He wanted to be done. At such a close distance, it wouldn’t take much to overtake Alex-or so he felt. Both arms swinging forward to snare the man as he pushed forward. That same force he’d used in his initial charge. A tackle, with the ledge not far behind Alex. He’d rid himself of this place, if it meant going down with it. His insides churned in desperation. Frustration. An animal gnawing at the bars, anxious for escape. It all erupted as a wordless roar as he lunged for Alex.
If it was the one thing that Crawford could have been so utterly, completely, totally wrong about Alexander, it was the state of his mortality. The fucked up condition of his mutilated body, a walking corpse, the inability to heal from those wounds, was enough to tell him every day You are a man. Nothing more, nothing less. And in the end, you will die. And strangely? It was that comforting thought that pushed him forward. Each day leading onwards only to that road called death.
Death would have been a welcoming reassurance then. It really would have been. If Alexander was Alexander and not the thing that so ragingly possessed him; that animal desperation that refused to accept death as a final... It wouldn’t accept. It would not accept.
Unlike Crawford, the insanity of this place was familiar territory and, to him, that was the maddening part about it-he was all too used to said insanity. He had seen things, survived things, and in the end he somehow lived in the face of those things. He lived. He didn’t know how. He shouldn’t even be here. But it was not hate that overtook him then. He harbored no such feelings towards this guy. His actions, though. That he couldn’t stand. That outright pissed him right the fuck off.
With the bull’s ferocity lunging downward, Alexander’s legs sprung. One instant they were shaken; recovery seemed near impossible. Improbable. In that moment of frantic ire and anguish and the overall agony that finally registered through his thick brain, he launched. And in mid-hurdle met with an utter, agonizing, CLANG and CRACK when hard head collided with hard head that sent the world into a spinning mess.
Crawford had seen his fair share of insanity and strangeness. No where near on par with what Alex had seen, but it was enough. The club Dane worked for was a different freak show, every night of the week. And that kid’s boss was a piece of work. He often told his friend that Osiris was Hitler reincarnated. The thirst for power, the obsession with the occult and immortality. The things that mad did were far from legal. He wouldn’t be surprised if the club owner took nightly baths in the blood of virgins in an attempt to prolong his life. As much as the man made his skin crawl, he would trade anything to go back to it. Compared to the nightmares or this place, Osiris was as dangerous as a fangless viper.
And he was about to meet one of this world’s lesser nightmares, head on. He continued forward. Even as Alexander moved, there was no signal to evade. Only in extreme situations-life or death, really-did defense of any kind ever occur to him. It wasn’t until it was too late that he recalled that feeling in his hands after hitting Alexander in the head. That sound. That impossible hardness. The notion was just barely coalescing when everything exploded.
He heard the crunch more than the clang. He almost thought he heard a sickening squish, as well. A sound that came from behind the ear drums. Perhaps it was just imagination, or a side effect of the sudden trauma.
The force of their combined speed was not only enough to halt his charge, but send him in the other direction. He stumbled back, staggering. He didn’t stay up long, his boots catching on each other and he went down. The back of his head caught the edge of the low wall running around the roof in an aftershock of the initial blow. Blood trickled down his face, from the left side of his head. His scalp was split, rather severely from the impact. He sat dazed, not quite seeing, not quite feeling. Inside, he was still spinning, and couldn’t get a grip on his senses.
Things had altered from strange to confusing in that moment where clarity seemed to have been an illusion in and of itself. But those things he heard and the things he felt were certainly real, and Alexander blinked and he woke up from the dream.
Except that this was no dream. And this pain was no dream, either. He should have known better than to use that part of his head to that sort of advantage... couldn’t help it. This was very reminiscent to past rooftop, barroom, alleyway frays that wound up in situations like this. If only... If only Alexander could remember how he even got here at all. It was strange. Like waking up. All over again. To that pain. In that sudden, excruciating, agonizing, all-consuming pain that swept through him and he realized where it was coming from.
If this was a bad dream, he might as well be waking up. But he wasn’t. Yet he was still here. He yelled. His voice scraped against the chafed tunnel of his throat and he yelled. Hands came up and met with his face, bloody and burning. The blinding pain boiled in a sea of a hot white flash that swept away the vision before him. Now all there was, was the white, and the screaming, as he stumbled, backwards, farther back, barely sensing the ledge of the rooftop as it bumped against the back of his knees.
Steady now. Steady. Only equilibrium was not an matter of concern here. As it were, though, balance was not a priority as was the screaming and clutching agony. He could feel it. The blood, gored up in his shoulder, the flesh jutting out from the fabric and his shirt-goddammit, his shirt! That was his shirt and now it’s ruined as is the rest of him and goddammit! GODDAMMIT.
Goddamn everything as he fell. His arms with no steady shred of reality to grasp for something, take hold of anything, so instead he just fell. The ledge of the roof delivered him down, down into a fifty-foot drop that he had, just moments ago-and what felt like an eternity-had already contemplated on taking. Just to see. Just to see for himself. But now. Now he was suspended. Drawn into midair. With nothing to reach or hold onto except to be pulled to the inevitable.
And falling.
Until he did not scream anymore.
The world slowly came back into focus, somewhat. Sound was first. A distant muffle, like hearing things from under water. Vision dragged its feet, but came back sluggishly, like seeing through fogged glass. Scent came back sharp as a blade. Blood and sweat and the musty smell of old, decaying buildings. With it came taste. The sparks of copper over his tongue. He’d bitten something in his mouth, perhaps. Vision and hearing cleared a little more. Tactile sense remained distant. A dull throb, nothing more.
He saw shadows and smears that slowly became recognizable shapes. A thin man. Moving further away. His limbs felt heavy and numb. He moved with out thinking. Moving with all the grace of the once dead monsters that roamed the streets, he dragged his feet, going forward.
Alexander. That’s who it was ahead of him. It didn’t make sense to him. It wasn’t that he had forgotten the fight. It was that memory was not a concept he really understood. He was disconnected. Barely clinging to consciousness, only the primitive parts of his mind seemed to be working.
Before he could reach a hand forward, Alexander was gone. The sudden disappearance dragged him closer to clear consciousness. He could hear him screaming, now. And he was aware just enough to registered that disappearing like that was a bad thing. He tried to push himself faster, but his feet were clumsy. He fell to his knees. His legs were too heavy to lift again. He felt empty and heavy all at once. He was shaking.
Dragging himself on hands and knees, he found the edge. The screams had stopped by that point. “....fucker...” he tried to say, but it was barely articulate. Chest resting on the edge of the low wall, he tried to search the area below, but his vision was darkening. His hands hung down, limp and head. Blood dripped from his scalp, small dots chasing after the fallen man. He didn’t push himself up again.
While winded, neither oxygen nor gravity had decided to repay Alexander in kind. Every inch of his body screamed in agony. Maybe he even broke something. He couldn’t be too sure. The spinning dizziness and the lack of being able to cling to consciousness started to become a less and less promising optimism, and moreover just plain foolishness.
During the fall, he had made an attempt to grab for something. Anything that was within reach. He’d managed to slow down his fall by grasping for something that was jutting out from the building. Didn’t take. He hit the ground before he had a chance to realize where he even was to begin with. In the past Alexander had taken several falls. Some of the worst. He had once found himself suspended over two hundred feet. Kicked off cliffs, thrown off catwalks, and somehow managed to survive them all thanks to the weird ass company he had found himself in. Thank God for having friends in low places.
Who was the low one now, though? That thought came accompanied by a lazy laugh and then a cough. This time, blood came out. It dribbled out the corner of his mouth and down his chin. Cough. More blood. It just kept coming. Blood coming out his mouth, his nose; his arm seemed twisted. Legs wouldn’t move. He didn’t even want to think of how this must’ve looked to any sorry folk who just so happened to be strolling by at the time.
“...ow.”
very intelligible input there alexander would you like to buy a vowel
He groaned. He wanted to scream, oh Christ, the pain was so bad. Yet no more sounds summoned from the terrible ache that cursed with the fall. He was a pathetic heap in the middle of they alleyway. The sad, stick of a man, no doubt with broken bones here and there but who cared, really... His shoulder was probably worse off. He couldn’t even glance at it; the skin and meat torn up from it. Didn’t look pleasant. Not at all.
Turmoil. Chaos. Oh yes, you want total fuckin’ war. Even now he thought about it (a coping mechanism, to be perfectly honest), thumping his head back down over the concrete and shit. He was probably lying sprawled over some garbage again; that’s why it didn’t hurt so bad. That’s how things rolled around here. Taken out with the rest of the trash. If the monsters didn’t come by to pick him up, he’d at least bleed out long by then. He closed his eyes as the idea did cross his mind. The idea also crossed that if he were dreaming, if his dreams even worked that way at all, perchance now would have been the ideal time to wake up.
Now wouldn’t that be nice?
The elf had been out in the woods again, and had a rather hefty bundle of firewood slung over her back, an old belt keeping it together. And all though there had been a certain wariness about her ever since she had been victim to the lead pipe of that serial killer-it had been, after all, a reminder-she limped along with little enough concern. She kept watch, it was true. Her eyes found the shadows out first and were moving all the time, but there was a certain laziness to her movements. They were customary, things she had done time and again, as well worn as the leather of her boots. Her left hand touched the pommel of her sword, as well, but it was an easy limp weight. The kind that spoke of the same accustomed nature as her gait.
All of this changed, of course, when she heard yelling. And then there was the horrible impact of flesh and bone and something else on concrete, and it stopped.
The wood swung off her shoulder and clattered on the street, even as she took the first step in the direction of an alley that was just up ahead but veered slightly off course than the way she was heading. She’d heard the sounds coming from that way. Her bad knee throbbed but she forced past it into an unsteady sort of lope, only slowing enough to step more gingerly around the corner from street to alley.
Greeted with the sight of the young human who had taken it upon himself to kick a leprechaun into a fountain in front of her, she hesitated. Greeted by that same man tumbled from a roof and crumple on the ground, she hesitated further. But the low groan he managed forced her feet to move, and it wasn’t long before her boots were in the junk near his head and she crouch over him, lying there. The pop of her knee was audible, loud even, as she folded down to his level, but she ignored it. Instead, swatting her braid over her shoulder, she looked back up to the roof.
And there she saw Crawford, half dangling out over space and looking in little better shape. From the distance it was rather hard to tell, actually. He might have been worse off. However, he hadn’t fallen off so the elf wagered he was in slightly better shape. Still, she called out to him.
“You alright up there?” And her eyes lingered, before her attention shifted down to the other man-no more than a boy in her eyes. He was bleeding badly, that was sure. And though she couldn’t know for sure, she guessed he needed attention badly, first. And she tugged off both gloves and stuffed them in her belt before her fingers searched for his pulse. The other hand reached for his forehead so that she might peel his eyelids open if she had to, to look at his pupils. And at least her voice was softer when she spoke to him, though it spared none of its usual gravel.
“Hey. The fuck were you doing, jumping off a roof?”
Crawford had thought that darkness would have claimed him then. That unconsciousness would take over and when he came out on the other side, he would be home. Or in hell. Or perhaps he wouldn’t come out at all. His head swam and spun, filled with a murky fog. Images and ideas danced through it as clear and tangible as shadows. Dreams, thoughts, events, people. It all blurred together. World’s End and his home. As if everything in his head had been a fresh oil painting doused in turpentine. It ran together, making no sense at all. And as the moments passed, it spun faster and faster, and yet he remained ever so slightly aware, just on the edge of unconsciousness. He felt the warm blood that crept down his dangling arm. The blood that coated the side of his face. He felt little else. Everything was numb.
Below, he heard a noise. Distant, muffled. He opened his eyes. The dead weight of his eyelids was almost too much. And he wished he hadn’t done it, when the world around him seemed to take on that sickening twist and spin he felt. He couldn’t get his vision to focus. More shadows in blurs and streaks. The only thought he found was that he hoped it wasn’t Michael, down there in the alley. He tried to articulate this fact. To throw out some insult or warning. But it came out as nothing more than a weak groan, and something that could have been the word “Who....?”
His eyes fell shut again, and he knew he wasn’t going to be opening them for a while.
Oh boy. Now there were voices.
Delirious, Alexander choked out a pathetic, bloody, and gurgled laugh. Which inevitably had been a brutal punch to the chest, but what did he care. He was lying there with God knows how many broken bones in his sad sight of a body, could be dying in any moment and even then so fuckin’ what?
Then there was a woman. He heard her voice. Details were indistinct in the dark. Dark? Was it daylight? His mind couldn’t seem to decide if it was dark or light. He could hardly see the body of the guy who... What was his name? Crawfish? Crawsomethingortheotherthathadsomethingtodowithfish. Well. Not that it mattered anyway.
“...it’s Thursday, ain’t it?” He laughed again. The strangest sense of déjà vu was a bit much. This had happened before. Almost like this. He tilted his head back. Neck craned. And he laughed. Again. Which was a very strained, watery laugh. He had been here before. How hilarious, he had been here before!
As for her question, he had no real answer that was worth rationalizing with. Or the fact that he had fallen. Well, that much was obvious, wasn’t it?
His jaw made a weird clacking noise when he talked. Was that just him? “Decided to take express. Fuck, that’s a long way up.”
Or a long way down, depending on how you look at it. Probably a good thing that big guy didn’t tumble down with him. Fuckers his size had a tendency to fall hard. At least Alexander had survived worse drops, even if it was after several trips to the hospital.
Though she tossed a glance up at Crawford’s strained voice, most of her attention lingered with Alexander. Her mouth pulled into a frown, which a rather unpleasant sight taken against the straight but rough scar that clipped her mouth and froze that side of her face into a grimace. Setting finger and thumb on either side of one of his eyes she nudged it just a bit further open, afterward she did the same to the other, leaning close to stare into each of his eyes in turn while she felt out the beat of the blood in his veins. The elf grunted then.
While she had ignored his first comment, the watery laugh prompted a sharp look and her attention shifted more to that clacking noise than his words at the second comment. Her her hands adjusted to the base of his neck, feeling up along his spine and into his hair.
“Lie still,” she offered, firmer than her first words, and cold fingers crawled up into the base of his skull and tickled over the backside of his mind, where they warmed. The odd sensation poured down the line of his jaw next, then down his throat, lighting to a fire’s warmth around his lungs. It kept going until it had reached his toes, growing warm until it was vaguely uncomfortable. But the pain began to withdraw, sinking back like the tide on a beach.
There was a low whisper from the elf as she hunched forward, and those cold fingers were dancing over his lungs again, more one than the other. They slid over his ribs next, but the sensation warmed faster this time, in Alexander.
The elf shifted unsteadily back and the feeling withdrew as slowly as it had entered him, taking with it the heat even as the pain it had dulled began to throb back to life. Taking one deep breath in, Avari swiped a hand across the sweat that had beaded on her neck and sat back on her haunches for a moment. Her head turned and she looked distantly up at Crawford, and then back at Alexander.
“Stay put. Gotta go up, get him. Be right back.” Heavily, she pushed up off of the good leg. It took a few unsteady steps before she picked up momentum enough to walk more normally toward the fired escape. Climbing it didn’t seem half as bad, save for the usual limp.
By the time Avari reached the roof, Crawford had not moved. He no longer had the energy or the strength to move. Consciousness was a flickering light in the distance. If it weren’t for the blood, he would have seemed merely asleep, or drunk. He was propped up on his knees, slumped against the low wall around the roof, opposite the fire escape. His jeans were a grungy mess from the grime and grit that covered the roof, the right side streaked and saturated with blood. The source of blood was a tear in his sweatshirt, through his tee shirt, exposing a raw, mangled stretch of skin, along the bottom of his ribs. His hair was matted with blood, on the left side. There was a deep cut on his scalp, which had coated the entire side of his face. Under that, was an unseen fracture and a rather impressive concussion. One arm draped over the edge of the wall, his head rested against it. The other arm was twisted between his chest and the wall. He didn’t budge when Avari crested the wall.
Surprisingly, it hadn’t been the first time Alexander had been healed. Although the devices that they had in his time were much different. Far more painful. He could still remember the needles puncturing his skin as they stitched him together, piece by little piece. The tiny things that had gone in inside and started crackling and snapping together bone, muscle, and tissue, and no matter how much he screamed and cried they didn’t stop the ordeal because that would also mean leaving him in a halfway point between death and mutilation.
This, though, and thankfully so, was far different from what he was used to. Lie still, he was told, and whether he complied with it or just didn’t have a choice due to the poor, sad, sorry state he was in... Well, either way, it didn’t matter so much. He was too exhausted, too beat, too utterly broken to move and he suddenly felt sleepy. Very sleepy. His eyes closed and he wanted to sleep while the blood let out. His mind wanted to sleep. It did not.
He did not hear what the lady had said afterwards. Some kind of weird voodoo or what have you... pushed itself to the back of his mind when he no longer felt the cold sweeping death in him anymore but something entirely different.
Stay put, he was told. He groaned. Nodded wearily. No words came out just then. So tired. All he wanted to do was go home and sleep. Then he was alone again to no sleep, just his thoughts that sometimes, more often than most, led him to bad places.
Like splattered over some garbage in an alleyway.
“You throw him off or were you trying to catch him?” It was more mutter than question, and the elf found her knees a little more solidly this time. And for a moment she stilled, blinking the spinning world back to some semblance of stability before she leaned over Crawford now, checking his pulse, and edge out to look into both of his eyes as well. The grunt that followed was a little sharper. Considerably more distaste in that.
“Don’t move, eh? You move, I’ll fuck it all up.” But the fingers of one hand curved the back of his skull, and the others touched lightly against the oozing wounds in his side. And this time there was another thin sound in the back of her throat. The cold went into his head first, tracing over the dome of his skull, warming behind his eyes. And it lingered longer, as the pain in him subsided to a kind of numbness, brushed back the darkness and the fog of such an injury, before withdrawing.
That hand that had been on his head joined the other over the lacerations. And the same process repeated, only it was accompanied by an odd stretching and contracting as his wounds scabbed over, sealing together on their own. More notably, when he’d done, she didn’t take her hands away for a moment. And when she did, she didn’t try to get up. The elf even fell even plant both hands behind her hips and leaned wearily on them, staring blankly at Crawford for a moment.
She was aware that she needed to call Zelda, have her send someone to pick the two of them up, but right now? She just wanted to sit for a minute. A minute couldn’t hurt? Maybe have a lie down, rest her eyes. Sure. Her shoulders rolled uncomfortably.
That tiny glimmer of consciousness shivered and grew brighter at Avari’s touch. The only sign that he was even aware, was a faint movement of his eyes, blanketed under his eyelids. Had she waited any longer, he would have lost that tiny spark and been unconscious for a good long time. But that warmth she fed into him was just enough to breathe life into that light. Ever so slowly, it cut a swath through the darkness, and soon after chasing off some of the fog. It was still all dim and hazy, but like a winter sunrise, slowly illuminated just enough to grope his way along. He hadn’t heard her warning to him, but thankfully, it wasn’t until quite some time after she pulled away that he found the strength to open his eyes.
Sluggishly, he managed to not only lift his head, but turn over. He dropped heavily to his back as he shoved himself over. He peered at her with his blood smeared eye closed, trying to force his vision to focus. “.....elf?” He managed to slur, not able to think of her name.
He knew he should have hurt worse than he did. A distant throb in his head and his side. Why didn’t it hurt more? But he was too tired to think of it. He may have been awake, but he was still quite a bit low on blood. An unfortunate quirk of genetics would have left him to bleed to death if she had not come along.
“Nnh?” Was just about as eloquent as she could manage. And for a long, long moment all she was capable of seemed to be staring at him stupidly. Before she started digging into one of the pouches hanging off her belt for her communicator. It took a few tries to press the right buttons.
“Yeah, heard one of you yell,” her speech was slurred, as if drunk. Or maybe just exhausted. “Oi. Prince. Need you t’lug these idiots on down to your girly, eh? ... Am not drunk! Y’blasted ruffian. Just tired is all.” She listened to him for a few more moments, the man’s voice low and garbled. Then the elf grunted and after giving disconnected directions, pressed a button on the communicator and stuffed it back down into the pouch on her belt. Her full attention turned to Crawford.
“C’mon. Got the boy coming to drag you off to Zelda’s, but we might as well go on down, eh?” Once again she levered off the good leg, though it took longer this time, and she wobbled when she found her feet. That didn’t stop her-five foot tall and couldn’t possibly be much more than a hundred pounds-from shuffling over to offer him a hand up.
Seeing how much blood was on his clothes, and knowing that some of the gunk on the roof wasn’t water, he doubted he would be able to stand. He feared that if he attempted to make the shift to his feet, he would be floor by sudden pain. He didn’t take a single vicodin that day, and there was that distant dull ache across his scalp. Feeling it, distractedly, he found a rather severe gash, already scabbed over. This was not going to be fun. But there was no way he was going to tell Avari that he couldn’t get up.
His limbs trembled as he shifted, planting one hand on the wall, dragging the opposing foot forward to press the sole of his boot to the grit below him. Hand on his knee, he barely managed to get himself up off the ground. He was as steady as if he had consumed his weight in liquor, but he found his way to the fire escape. Gripping the hand rails until his knuckles were white, he tried so hard to not look down. The world was twisting and spinning enough, with the edges of his vision still choked by shadow.
He wanted to ask if Alex was alive, but his tongue felt heavy and swollen in his mouth. He was too weak, tired and disconnected to even remember that he was angry. He just plodded down the stairs, half falling, half stepping. That last part was not going to be fun, where the ladder fell several feet short of the ground. But he would jump off that bridge when he came to it. Right now, he just needed to worry about not falling off the damn thing from so high up.
Source: (Age 33) Trial By Fire (Log: Rev, Sara, Jen)
Summary: Still convincing himself that this isn’t much more than a dream or a bad trip, Alexander decides to test out a certain theory. Crawford comes along and helps out with that. The only way Crawford knows how.
Rating: R for language, an epic fail attempt at suicide, and graphic violence-Crawford and Alexander style.
PART ONE
“And the wild regrets and the bloody sweats. None knew so well as I
that he who lives more lives than one, more deaths than one shall die.”
Just die.
The command came out but the eyes of the dog said defiance. Then the plank edge came down from above like a vicious bolt of lightning, hammering down his shoulder. Pain screamed. He did not. Teeth just clamped. Grunt. Cough. Hack. Choke. Breathe.
Breathe. Inhale. Exhale. Now that ain’t so hard, now is it? Eye twitched. Cold and dead but somehow the dog was still alive. Still breathing even as the hammer blow sent him clean off his feet and onto his knees. His body delivered a clear message of PAIN from his nervous system to his brain. No matter. It didn’t matter. All that mattered were the cool whispers of the wicked wind and the stupid fuck that stood in his way.
Body domed forward. Weak. Dead. Still alive, though. He was alive. He swayed. Consciousness did not fade. He was still here. He was still very, very lucid, midst the raging haze and twist of reality itself to his perverted perception. The animal with a blood-smeared face and its green eyes rolled up at the one standing over him. Not a master. Not a killer. Could be. But not.
Hand. Seemed weak. Yet it swung over and grabbed the plank that plastered his shoulder. Fingers wrapped around its edge.
And with a powerful pull of the wood piece, the dog yanked downward.
This was a level of insanity Crawford had not quite been prepared to deal with. An idea dashed across his mind. What if he wasn’t human? A monster, perhaps. But this guy was certainly faster than those zombie things wandering around. No, not a monster, but maybe not human. The idea didn’t stick around long enough for him to puzzle it out. Any guy who could drive shards of old metal into themselves was more than he could handle. He’d laughed in the face of his opponents on many occasions, but he’d never harmed himself intentionally.
Yanking the wood back, he dropped it. He didn’t care if the metal gored at the man’s shoulder. He was through with the insanity of this place. He was sick of this ‘more than human’ crap. He just wanted to be back home. He wanted the worst part of his day to be the guy in the business suit screaming that his complicated coffee had one less shot of ameretto than he’d ordered. He wanted to go home to his stale, dark apartment and pass out. He wanted to have fifteen different bars to choose from, with out demons or angels or anything else lurking about. And right now, Alex was the embodiment of everything he hated about this place. The strangeness of it.
He wanted out. He wanted to be done. At such a close distance, it wouldn’t take much to overtake Alex-or so he felt. Both arms swinging forward to snare the man as he pushed forward. That same force he’d used in his initial charge. A tackle, with the ledge not far behind Alex. He’d rid himself of this place, if it meant going down with it. His insides churned in desperation. Frustration. An animal gnawing at the bars, anxious for escape. It all erupted as a wordless roar as he lunged for Alex.
If it was the one thing that Crawford could have been so utterly, completely, totally wrong about Alexander, it was the state of his mortality. The fucked up condition of his mutilated body, a walking corpse, the inability to heal from those wounds, was enough to tell him every day You are a man. Nothing more, nothing less. And in the end, you will die. And strangely? It was that comforting thought that pushed him forward. Each day leading onwards only to that road called death.
Death would have been a welcoming reassurance then. It really would have been. If Alexander was Alexander and not the thing that so ragingly possessed him; that animal desperation that refused to accept death as a final... It wouldn’t accept. It would not accept.
Unlike Crawford, the insanity of this place was familiar territory and, to him, that was the maddening part about it-he was all too used to said insanity. He had seen things, survived things, and in the end he somehow lived in the face of those things. He lived. He didn’t know how. He shouldn’t even be here. But it was not hate that overtook him then. He harbored no such feelings towards this guy. His actions, though. That he couldn’t stand. That outright pissed him right the fuck off.
With the bull’s ferocity lunging downward, Alexander’s legs sprung. One instant they were shaken; recovery seemed near impossible. Improbable. In that moment of frantic ire and anguish and the overall agony that finally registered through his thick brain, he launched. And in mid-hurdle met with an utter, agonizing, CLANG and CRACK when hard head collided with hard head that sent the world into a spinning mess.
Crawford had seen his fair share of insanity and strangeness. No where near on par with what Alex had seen, but it was enough. The club Dane worked for was a different freak show, every night of the week. And that kid’s boss was a piece of work. He often told his friend that Osiris was Hitler reincarnated. The thirst for power, the obsession with the occult and immortality. The things that mad did were far from legal. He wouldn’t be surprised if the club owner took nightly baths in the blood of virgins in an attempt to prolong his life. As much as the man made his skin crawl, he would trade anything to go back to it. Compared to the nightmares or this place, Osiris was as dangerous as a fangless viper.
And he was about to meet one of this world’s lesser nightmares, head on. He continued forward. Even as Alexander moved, there was no signal to evade. Only in extreme situations-life or death, really-did defense of any kind ever occur to him. It wasn’t until it was too late that he recalled that feeling in his hands after hitting Alexander in the head. That sound. That impossible hardness. The notion was just barely coalescing when everything exploded.
He heard the crunch more than the clang. He almost thought he heard a sickening squish, as well. A sound that came from behind the ear drums. Perhaps it was just imagination, or a side effect of the sudden trauma.
The force of their combined speed was not only enough to halt his charge, but send him in the other direction. He stumbled back, staggering. He didn’t stay up long, his boots catching on each other and he went down. The back of his head caught the edge of the low wall running around the roof in an aftershock of the initial blow. Blood trickled down his face, from the left side of his head. His scalp was split, rather severely from the impact. He sat dazed, not quite seeing, not quite feeling. Inside, he was still spinning, and couldn’t get a grip on his senses.
Things had altered from strange to confusing in that moment where clarity seemed to have been an illusion in and of itself. But those things he heard and the things he felt were certainly real, and Alexander blinked and he woke up from the dream.
Except that this was no dream. And this pain was no dream, either. He should have known better than to use that part of his head to that sort of advantage... couldn’t help it. This was very reminiscent to past rooftop, barroom, alleyway frays that wound up in situations like this. If only... If only Alexander could remember how he even got here at all. It was strange. Like waking up. All over again. To that pain. In that sudden, excruciating, agonizing, all-consuming pain that swept through him and he realized where it was coming from.
If this was a bad dream, he might as well be waking up. But he wasn’t. Yet he was still here. He yelled. His voice scraped against the chafed tunnel of his throat and he yelled. Hands came up and met with his face, bloody and burning. The blinding pain boiled in a sea of a hot white flash that swept away the vision before him. Now all there was, was the white, and the screaming, as he stumbled, backwards, farther back, barely sensing the ledge of the rooftop as it bumped against the back of his knees.
Steady now. Steady. Only equilibrium was not an matter of concern here. As it were, though, balance was not a priority as was the screaming and clutching agony. He could feel it. The blood, gored up in his shoulder, the flesh jutting out from the fabric and his shirt-goddammit, his shirt! That was his shirt and now it’s ruined as is the rest of him and goddammit! GODDAMMIT.
Goddamn everything as he fell. His arms with no steady shred of reality to grasp for something, take hold of anything, so instead he just fell. The ledge of the roof delivered him down, down into a fifty-foot drop that he had, just moments ago-and what felt like an eternity-had already contemplated on taking. Just to see. Just to see for himself. But now. Now he was suspended. Drawn into midair. With nothing to reach or hold onto except to be pulled to the inevitable.
And falling.
Until he did not scream anymore.
The world slowly came back into focus, somewhat. Sound was first. A distant muffle, like hearing things from under water. Vision dragged its feet, but came back sluggishly, like seeing through fogged glass. Scent came back sharp as a blade. Blood and sweat and the musty smell of old, decaying buildings. With it came taste. The sparks of copper over his tongue. He’d bitten something in his mouth, perhaps. Vision and hearing cleared a little more. Tactile sense remained distant. A dull throb, nothing more.
He saw shadows and smears that slowly became recognizable shapes. A thin man. Moving further away. His limbs felt heavy and numb. He moved with out thinking. Moving with all the grace of the once dead monsters that roamed the streets, he dragged his feet, going forward.
Alexander. That’s who it was ahead of him. It didn’t make sense to him. It wasn’t that he had forgotten the fight. It was that memory was not a concept he really understood. He was disconnected. Barely clinging to consciousness, only the primitive parts of his mind seemed to be working.
Before he could reach a hand forward, Alexander was gone. The sudden disappearance dragged him closer to clear consciousness. He could hear him screaming, now. And he was aware just enough to registered that disappearing like that was a bad thing. He tried to push himself faster, but his feet were clumsy. He fell to his knees. His legs were too heavy to lift again. He felt empty and heavy all at once. He was shaking.
Dragging himself on hands and knees, he found the edge. The screams had stopped by that point. “....fucker...” he tried to say, but it was barely articulate. Chest resting on the edge of the low wall, he tried to search the area below, but his vision was darkening. His hands hung down, limp and head. Blood dripped from his scalp, small dots chasing after the fallen man. He didn’t push himself up again.
While winded, neither oxygen nor gravity had decided to repay Alexander in kind. Every inch of his body screamed in agony. Maybe he even broke something. He couldn’t be too sure. The spinning dizziness and the lack of being able to cling to consciousness started to become a less and less promising optimism, and moreover just plain foolishness.
During the fall, he had made an attempt to grab for something. Anything that was within reach. He’d managed to slow down his fall by grasping for something that was jutting out from the building. Didn’t take. He hit the ground before he had a chance to realize where he even was to begin with. In the past Alexander had taken several falls. Some of the worst. He had once found himself suspended over two hundred feet. Kicked off cliffs, thrown off catwalks, and somehow managed to survive them all thanks to the weird ass company he had found himself in. Thank God for having friends in low places.
Who was the low one now, though? That thought came accompanied by a lazy laugh and then a cough. This time, blood came out. It dribbled out the corner of his mouth and down his chin. Cough. More blood. It just kept coming. Blood coming out his mouth, his nose; his arm seemed twisted. Legs wouldn’t move. He didn’t even want to think of how this must’ve looked to any sorry folk who just so happened to be strolling by at the time.
“...ow.”
very intelligible input there alexander would you like to buy a vowel
He groaned. He wanted to scream, oh Christ, the pain was so bad. Yet no more sounds summoned from the terrible ache that cursed with the fall. He was a pathetic heap in the middle of they alleyway. The sad, stick of a man, no doubt with broken bones here and there but who cared, really... His shoulder was probably worse off. He couldn’t even glance at it; the skin and meat torn up from it. Didn’t look pleasant. Not at all.
Turmoil. Chaos. Oh yes, you want total fuckin’ war. Even now he thought about it (a coping mechanism, to be perfectly honest), thumping his head back down over the concrete and shit. He was probably lying sprawled over some garbage again; that’s why it didn’t hurt so bad. That’s how things rolled around here. Taken out with the rest of the trash. If the monsters didn’t come by to pick him up, he’d at least bleed out long by then. He closed his eyes as the idea did cross his mind. The idea also crossed that if he were dreaming, if his dreams even worked that way at all, perchance now would have been the ideal time to wake up.
Now wouldn’t that be nice?
The elf had been out in the woods again, and had a rather hefty bundle of firewood slung over her back, an old belt keeping it together. And all though there had been a certain wariness about her ever since she had been victim to the lead pipe of that serial killer-it had been, after all, a reminder-she limped along with little enough concern. She kept watch, it was true. Her eyes found the shadows out first and were moving all the time, but there was a certain laziness to her movements. They were customary, things she had done time and again, as well worn as the leather of her boots. Her left hand touched the pommel of her sword, as well, but it was an easy limp weight. The kind that spoke of the same accustomed nature as her gait.
All of this changed, of course, when she heard yelling. And then there was the horrible impact of flesh and bone and something else on concrete, and it stopped.
The wood swung off her shoulder and clattered on the street, even as she took the first step in the direction of an alley that was just up ahead but veered slightly off course than the way she was heading. She’d heard the sounds coming from that way. Her bad knee throbbed but she forced past it into an unsteady sort of lope, only slowing enough to step more gingerly around the corner from street to alley.
Greeted with the sight of the young human who had taken it upon himself to kick a leprechaun into a fountain in front of her, she hesitated. Greeted by that same man tumbled from a roof and crumple on the ground, she hesitated further. But the low groan he managed forced her feet to move, and it wasn’t long before her boots were in the junk near his head and she crouch over him, lying there. The pop of her knee was audible, loud even, as she folded down to his level, but she ignored it. Instead, swatting her braid over her shoulder, she looked back up to the roof.
And there she saw Crawford, half dangling out over space and looking in little better shape. From the distance it was rather hard to tell, actually. He might have been worse off. However, he hadn’t fallen off so the elf wagered he was in slightly better shape. Still, she called out to him.
“You alright up there?” And her eyes lingered, before her attention shifted down to the other man-no more than a boy in her eyes. He was bleeding badly, that was sure. And though she couldn’t know for sure, she guessed he needed attention badly, first. And she tugged off both gloves and stuffed them in her belt before her fingers searched for his pulse. The other hand reached for his forehead so that she might peel his eyelids open if she had to, to look at his pupils. And at least her voice was softer when she spoke to him, though it spared none of its usual gravel.
“Hey. The fuck were you doing, jumping off a roof?”
Crawford had thought that darkness would have claimed him then. That unconsciousness would take over and when he came out on the other side, he would be home. Or in hell. Or perhaps he wouldn’t come out at all. His head swam and spun, filled with a murky fog. Images and ideas danced through it as clear and tangible as shadows. Dreams, thoughts, events, people. It all blurred together. World’s End and his home. As if everything in his head had been a fresh oil painting doused in turpentine. It ran together, making no sense at all. And as the moments passed, it spun faster and faster, and yet he remained ever so slightly aware, just on the edge of unconsciousness. He felt the warm blood that crept down his dangling arm. The blood that coated the side of his face. He felt little else. Everything was numb.
Below, he heard a noise. Distant, muffled. He opened his eyes. The dead weight of his eyelids was almost too much. And he wished he hadn’t done it, when the world around him seemed to take on that sickening twist and spin he felt. He couldn’t get his vision to focus. More shadows in blurs and streaks. The only thought he found was that he hoped it wasn’t Michael, down there in the alley. He tried to articulate this fact. To throw out some insult or warning. But it came out as nothing more than a weak groan, and something that could have been the word “Who....?”
His eyes fell shut again, and he knew he wasn’t going to be opening them for a while.
Oh boy. Now there were voices.
Delirious, Alexander choked out a pathetic, bloody, and gurgled laugh. Which inevitably had been a brutal punch to the chest, but what did he care. He was lying there with God knows how many broken bones in his sad sight of a body, could be dying in any moment and even then so fuckin’ what?
Then there was a woman. He heard her voice. Details were indistinct in the dark. Dark? Was it daylight? His mind couldn’t seem to decide if it was dark or light. He could hardly see the body of the guy who... What was his name? Crawfish? Crawsomethingortheotherthathadsomethingtodowithfish. Well. Not that it mattered anyway.
“...it’s Thursday, ain’t it?” He laughed again. The strangest sense of déjà vu was a bit much. This had happened before. Almost like this. He tilted his head back. Neck craned. And he laughed. Again. Which was a very strained, watery laugh. He had been here before. How hilarious, he had been here before!
As for her question, he had no real answer that was worth rationalizing with. Or the fact that he had fallen. Well, that much was obvious, wasn’t it?
His jaw made a weird clacking noise when he talked. Was that just him? “Decided to take express. Fuck, that’s a long way up.”
Or a long way down, depending on how you look at it. Probably a good thing that big guy didn’t tumble down with him. Fuckers his size had a tendency to fall hard. At least Alexander had survived worse drops, even if it was after several trips to the hospital.
Though she tossed a glance up at Crawford’s strained voice, most of her attention lingered with Alexander. Her mouth pulled into a frown, which a rather unpleasant sight taken against the straight but rough scar that clipped her mouth and froze that side of her face into a grimace. Setting finger and thumb on either side of one of his eyes she nudged it just a bit further open, afterward she did the same to the other, leaning close to stare into each of his eyes in turn while she felt out the beat of the blood in his veins. The elf grunted then.
While she had ignored his first comment, the watery laugh prompted a sharp look and her attention shifted more to that clacking noise than his words at the second comment. Her her hands adjusted to the base of his neck, feeling up along his spine and into his hair.
“Lie still,” she offered, firmer than her first words, and cold fingers crawled up into the base of his skull and tickled over the backside of his mind, where they warmed. The odd sensation poured down the line of his jaw next, then down his throat, lighting to a fire’s warmth around his lungs. It kept going until it had reached his toes, growing warm until it was vaguely uncomfortable. But the pain began to withdraw, sinking back like the tide on a beach.
There was a low whisper from the elf as she hunched forward, and those cold fingers were dancing over his lungs again, more one than the other. They slid over his ribs next, but the sensation warmed faster this time, in Alexander.
The elf shifted unsteadily back and the feeling withdrew as slowly as it had entered him, taking with it the heat even as the pain it had dulled began to throb back to life. Taking one deep breath in, Avari swiped a hand across the sweat that had beaded on her neck and sat back on her haunches for a moment. Her head turned and she looked distantly up at Crawford, and then back at Alexander.
“Stay put. Gotta go up, get him. Be right back.” Heavily, she pushed up off of the good leg. It took a few unsteady steps before she picked up momentum enough to walk more normally toward the fired escape. Climbing it didn’t seem half as bad, save for the usual limp.
By the time Avari reached the roof, Crawford had not moved. He no longer had the energy or the strength to move. Consciousness was a flickering light in the distance. If it weren’t for the blood, he would have seemed merely asleep, or drunk. He was propped up on his knees, slumped against the low wall around the roof, opposite the fire escape. His jeans were a grungy mess from the grime and grit that covered the roof, the right side streaked and saturated with blood. The source of blood was a tear in his sweatshirt, through his tee shirt, exposing a raw, mangled stretch of skin, along the bottom of his ribs. His hair was matted with blood, on the left side. There was a deep cut on his scalp, which had coated the entire side of his face. Under that, was an unseen fracture and a rather impressive concussion. One arm draped over the edge of the wall, his head rested against it. The other arm was twisted between his chest and the wall. He didn’t budge when Avari crested the wall.
Surprisingly, it hadn’t been the first time Alexander had been healed. Although the devices that they had in his time were much different. Far more painful. He could still remember the needles puncturing his skin as they stitched him together, piece by little piece. The tiny things that had gone in inside and started crackling and snapping together bone, muscle, and tissue, and no matter how much he screamed and cried they didn’t stop the ordeal because that would also mean leaving him in a halfway point between death and mutilation.
This, though, and thankfully so, was far different from what he was used to. Lie still, he was told, and whether he complied with it or just didn’t have a choice due to the poor, sad, sorry state he was in... Well, either way, it didn’t matter so much. He was too exhausted, too beat, too utterly broken to move and he suddenly felt sleepy. Very sleepy. His eyes closed and he wanted to sleep while the blood let out. His mind wanted to sleep. It did not.
He did not hear what the lady had said afterwards. Some kind of weird voodoo or what have you... pushed itself to the back of his mind when he no longer felt the cold sweeping death in him anymore but something entirely different.
Stay put, he was told. He groaned. Nodded wearily. No words came out just then. So tired. All he wanted to do was go home and sleep. Then he was alone again to no sleep, just his thoughts that sometimes, more often than most, led him to bad places.
Like splattered over some garbage in an alleyway.
“You throw him off or were you trying to catch him?” It was more mutter than question, and the elf found her knees a little more solidly this time. And for a moment she stilled, blinking the spinning world back to some semblance of stability before she leaned over Crawford now, checking his pulse, and edge out to look into both of his eyes as well. The grunt that followed was a little sharper. Considerably more distaste in that.
“Don’t move, eh? You move, I’ll fuck it all up.” But the fingers of one hand curved the back of his skull, and the others touched lightly against the oozing wounds in his side. And this time there was another thin sound in the back of her throat. The cold went into his head first, tracing over the dome of his skull, warming behind his eyes. And it lingered longer, as the pain in him subsided to a kind of numbness, brushed back the darkness and the fog of such an injury, before withdrawing.
That hand that had been on his head joined the other over the lacerations. And the same process repeated, only it was accompanied by an odd stretching and contracting as his wounds scabbed over, sealing together on their own. More notably, when he’d done, she didn’t take her hands away for a moment. And when she did, she didn’t try to get up. The elf even fell even plant both hands behind her hips and leaned wearily on them, staring blankly at Crawford for a moment.
She was aware that she needed to call Zelda, have her send someone to pick the two of them up, but right now? She just wanted to sit for a minute. A minute couldn’t hurt? Maybe have a lie down, rest her eyes. Sure. Her shoulders rolled uncomfortably.
That tiny glimmer of consciousness shivered and grew brighter at Avari’s touch. The only sign that he was even aware, was a faint movement of his eyes, blanketed under his eyelids. Had she waited any longer, he would have lost that tiny spark and been unconscious for a good long time. But that warmth she fed into him was just enough to breathe life into that light. Ever so slowly, it cut a swath through the darkness, and soon after chasing off some of the fog. It was still all dim and hazy, but like a winter sunrise, slowly illuminated just enough to grope his way along. He hadn’t heard her warning to him, but thankfully, it wasn’t until quite some time after she pulled away that he found the strength to open his eyes.
Sluggishly, he managed to not only lift his head, but turn over. He dropped heavily to his back as he shoved himself over. He peered at her with his blood smeared eye closed, trying to force his vision to focus. “.....elf?” He managed to slur, not able to think of her name.
He knew he should have hurt worse than he did. A distant throb in his head and his side. Why didn’t it hurt more? But he was too tired to think of it. He may have been awake, but he was still quite a bit low on blood. An unfortunate quirk of genetics would have left him to bleed to death if she had not come along.
“Nnh?” Was just about as eloquent as she could manage. And for a long, long moment all she was capable of seemed to be staring at him stupidly. Before she started digging into one of the pouches hanging off her belt for her communicator. It took a few tries to press the right buttons.
“Yeah, heard one of you yell,” her speech was slurred, as if drunk. Or maybe just exhausted. “Oi. Prince. Need you t’lug these idiots on down to your girly, eh? ... Am not drunk! Y’blasted ruffian. Just tired is all.” She listened to him for a few more moments, the man’s voice low and garbled. Then the elf grunted and after giving disconnected directions, pressed a button on the communicator and stuffed it back down into the pouch on her belt. Her full attention turned to Crawford.
“C’mon. Got the boy coming to drag you off to Zelda’s, but we might as well go on down, eh?” Once again she levered off the good leg, though it took longer this time, and she wobbled when she found her feet. That didn’t stop her-five foot tall and couldn’t possibly be much more than a hundred pounds-from shuffling over to offer him a hand up.
Seeing how much blood was on his clothes, and knowing that some of the gunk on the roof wasn’t water, he doubted he would be able to stand. He feared that if he attempted to make the shift to his feet, he would be floor by sudden pain. He didn’t take a single vicodin that day, and there was that distant dull ache across his scalp. Feeling it, distractedly, he found a rather severe gash, already scabbed over. This was not going to be fun. But there was no way he was going to tell Avari that he couldn’t get up.
His limbs trembled as he shifted, planting one hand on the wall, dragging the opposing foot forward to press the sole of his boot to the grit below him. Hand on his knee, he barely managed to get himself up off the ground. He was as steady as if he had consumed his weight in liquor, but he found his way to the fire escape. Gripping the hand rails until his knuckles were white, he tried so hard to not look down. The world was twisting and spinning enough, with the edges of his vision still choked by shadow.
He wanted to ask if Alex was alive, but his tongue felt heavy and swollen in his mouth. He was too weak, tired and disconnected to even remember that he was angry. He just plodded down the stairs, half falling, half stepping. That last part was not going to be fun, where the ladder fell several feet short of the ground. But he would jump off that bridge when he came to it. Right now, he just needed to worry about not falling off the damn thing from so high up.