01 / 11 / 11 - Harrison, Hermes (NPC), Jean-Paul, Terry
It's not every night that a girl, bounding perfectly ordinarily through the rooftops, finds herself snagged right out of the air in the close grasp of someone larger, stronger, faster, and /better at flying/. Her first frozen shock turned into a strangled squeal and some pretty nasty midair French cursing, she kicked; she flailed; she kicked some more; she tried to twist down far enough to bite his arms; she tried to twist up enough to bite at anywhere else. Her nails are short, blunted and bitten, honestly pretty ineffective weapons; she tried to scrape at his arms. By the time the flight is drawing to a close, though, she has largely stilled her squirming, kicking, snapping and cursing to as much sullen dead weight as one slim dark girl might manage.
Minimal reassurance not that reassuring all told, Jean-Paul deposits Hermes on the balcony with a twisty spit of French all his own. Dialect sources much farther north, they still share the same mother tongue. After admitting her to the shared suite, he stalks for the bathroom and calls, "I think she gave me rabies," as he goes to dab at bruises and bites. Harrison can take it from here. Someone is watching the sitting area, right? I sure hope so.
The noise is enough to pull some from their rooms. Terry is a quiet, read-eyed, raspy-voiced, snuffling mess in baggy pajamas who watches the exchange, then follows Jean-Paul to the bathroom and digs out a first aid kit to tear alcohol swab packages open and plaster bandaids all over.
That is very thoughtful of you, Terry. Jean-Paul appreciates it. Let's confine the bandaids to areas he is actually injured, shall we?
Rofl.
Spoilsport.
Now JP will mummy back out of the bathroom unable to speak.
Harrison will be happy.
Sure, Harrison is watching the sitting room. By sleeping in it. In the pull-out couch. The arrival of Jean-Paul plus company is enough to jerk him out of sleep and into an alert mode that has him pulling a gun from under a pillow as he drags out of bed in boxers and a wife beater. Oh, squirrel. She probably doesn't need a gun. She does, however, need to not have exits: he pulls himself over to the balcony door, which he seems to think is more of a possibility. "Where did you pick her up?" he snaps in the direction of the bathroom, gun not quite lifted at Hermes but there in a sort of, okay seriously don't go running about, kind of way. He sounds a little grumpy to be woken up.
"Mid-air," Jean-Paul shoots back.
Hermes fills her lungs and shouts in her Haitian-accented English, "I DON'T HAVE RABIES." It's what, one o'clock in the morning almost? Was somebody trying to sleep in here? She stands awkwardly hip-shot inside the suite, scanning its details with her arms folded across her chest. Her jeans are slashed down the sides, as is her denim jacket; up close, the close folds of her extraneous flaps of smooth brown skin make her mutation impossible to hide. She glares defiance at Harrison, or maybe just -- generally.
Terry ticks her head out of the bathroom and winces. "Can we not gag her or something?" she asks, then disappears again. Have another bandaid, JP.
"Jesus Christ shut the fuck--" Okay, maybe they don't /actually/ want her to shut up. Entirely. "She meet up with Boudreaux?" Harrison calls back to the bathroom, piecing together what he knows of Jean-Paul's assignment with some semblance of logical progression. Gaze steadying on the girl, he says in a voice somewhat resigned, "You've got yourself in a whole heap of trouble."
Jean-Paul crosses that bandaid over the first to hold together the gaping wound slashed into his his arm. He leans back out with a tousle of his hair as he straightens wind-blown strands. "Yeah. Lifted her on the way back. She was by mumblety and mumble, heading in xyz direction."
Inside the bathroom, Terry yawns sleepily as she picks up bandaid papers and swabs and tosses them at the garbage can. House keeping must love them.
"That's you, underpants," Hermes retorts, lifting her chin with a flare of her nostrils in her next intake of breath. Her eyes flick warily back towards Jean-Paul. "You /ain't/ no police cop!" she says accusatorily, although her /volume/ as at least thankfully decreased. "None of you is police cops. /Merde/."
"How do you know they don't have a flying unit? Helicopters are expensive," Jean-Paul says with upticked eyebrow and mild snark.
Let us say that there are wakeful agents who will keep an eye on the doors for Harrison. He jerks a chin from Hermes to a cushioned hotel chair. "I got a pretty little badge that says I'm an employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation," he drawls at her, Newark coming out thick in his sleep-grouched voice. "Now sit down, kid."
Terry snaps the lid shut on the kit (hope JP's done, if not he can get it out again) and pushes out of the bathroom with a mumbled "Excuse me," and goes to find a corner to fade away into.
The girl's eyes narrow and there is a beat's hesitation beefore she speaks. Again, her volume has dropped; the bold confidence seeps out a little, leaving her shoulders to a somewhat less defiant hunch. But her words stay bold as brass. "You got a pretty little piece of {shit off a whore's ass,}" Hermes says. She doesn't sit down. She plants her fists on both her hips and jerks up her chin. "You don't know what you stepping in, m'sieu."
"That wasn't polite," Jean-Paul translates in a murmured undertone.
"Thanks," Harrison tells Jean-Paul dryly for that expert translation. Clearly expecting others to handle the threat that is Hermes for a few moments, he steps back over to his duffel by the sofa and pulls out a pair of jeans so he at least doesn't have to interrogate without pants. He pulls them on and grabs his ttly legit badge next, which he moves over to offer her. "Now sit the fuck down," he says.
Hermes looks at Harrison's badge. She looks up at Harrison. Then she kicks him hard in the shin. It would probably hurt more if she owned shoes.
With a little choked noise, Jean-Paul turns back to the bathroom to get more gauze.
It would probably hurt more with shoes, but it probably still hurts a little. It's the surprise as much as the pain that has him cursing fluently, and he stuffs the gun in the back of his jeans so he can grab her arm -- not violently or painfully, but firmly -- to try and pull her over to the seat that she is so adamant about not sitting in. "You are going to sit down," he tells her, "and you are going to tell me what you're doing meeting up with Julien Boudreaux."
Hermes lets out a little squeak and raises her other hand in a defensive motion to slap its flat hard across Harrison's face. Then, as quickly, she folds down into the chair and looks chastened, cringing back with her spine pressed up against the squish of the armchair, twisting her arm in an attempt to lift both to shield her face beneath the hook of her arms. She /doesn't/, however, say anything.
When Jean-Paul emerges, he is appropriately stonefaced. He glances from Hermes to Harrison, but remains in the background, though attentive. Good luck running.
While Harrison does look rather annoyed to be slapped in the face, he also looks like he's had worse from stronger women. What he doesn't look like is about to hit her back. He scowls down at her, dropping her arm and watching her twist her limbs to protect herself, and there is something of an effort to keep himself from softening at the sight of it. He sits on the edge of his mussed sofa bed, a few feet across from her. "I'm not gonna hit you, kid," he says, low but still annoyed. "But you do have to talk to me."
Hermes peeks at him for a moment, dark eyes narrowed and scowlish as they peep between her elbows. She drops her arms, heels lifting and spreading beneath her in a stompy thunk-thunk against the floor. "{The Baron will find me,}" she says, her French low and fierce. "{If anything happens to Hermes he will turn you all inside out!}"
Jean-Paul translates. He lacks her fierceness. He detangles he words and delivers them simply, devoid of intonation, almost as though he were reading from a page. Isn't it convenient that we have the French speaker in here? He looks a little skeptical at the last.
Harrison snorts quietly at the end of Jean-Paul's translation. "Guess what," he tells Hermes. "I'm not scared of somebody pretending to throw voodoo magic around to get some criminals to do his bidding. What /you/ should be thinking of is how your future's gonna start looking if you don't start cooperating."
Hermes looks absolutely mutinous. Her glance skips from Harrison to Jean-Paul and she sets her teeth against her lower lip, silent for a long moment. "What future," she demands finally, scornfully.
Jean-Paul folds his arms, gets comfortable, and leaves it to Harrison so that when it all goes wrong, we know who to blame.
Harrison glances over at Jean-Paul, clearly thrilled by the buck passed squarely onto his shoulders. Looking back to Hermes, he says, "The future where you get locked up forever, yadda yadda yadda. So is that why you're working with him? He give you a place, a purpose, that sort of thing?"
Jean-Paul looks bland. He might even look innocent. Look, Harrison, he is being properly respectful of your authority as teamlead, that's all.
Hermes slowly leans back against the chair in which she sits and folds her arms across her stomach, her gaze narrowing. "You wouldn't understand," she says, like a 15-year-old girl.
Harrison exhales slowly through his nose in a cry for patience. It is kind of eerily fatherly. "Make me," he requests evenly.
Hermes answers with more crude French, frustration sharply edged, and rolls her eyes. LIKE A KID. A really foul-mouthed kid. Her gaze settles on Jean-Paul and briefly narrows there. She says, and we can assume she is tutoyerant all over the place, "{You can fly, like me.}" Well, actually -- /not/ like her, but anyway. "{You have parents?}"
"{Better than you,}" Jean-Paul says, and gosh is he ever a dick. The tutoyeranting does not seem to phase him. Joual is rude; I don't know if it is rude in that way. But it is rude. "Everyone has parents," he adds aloud in distancing English. He does not translate for Harrison.
Harrison glances at Jean-Paul a bit sharpish in his annoyance at the lack of translation, then looks back to impertiently-tutoyering Hermes. He waits, glowering settling into something more contained in its annoyance.
"/I/ don't," Hermes says, and her lip curls away from her teeth in a sneer. "Le Baron." Grudgingly, she continues in English, glancing narrowly back at Harrison. "That is my family."
"Right." Harrison scrubs a hand over his face. "I get it." He drops his hand, bracing his elbows on his knees, and watches her. "What happened to your family, kid?"
Jean-Paul acknowledges her sneer with the tip of his head. He does not correct her; there is a twist of sympathy in the low words as he goes on: "They are in danger. Help us to help you, to help them."
Some of the hostility goes out of Hermes's expression, replaced by uncertainty. She looks between them, expression plainly conflicted. "They are afraid of our power. In our blood. They want to steal our souls," she says. Then she asks, "You want to help us?"
Mouth twisting into a frown at the familiar sort of rhetoric, Harrison exhales another slow breath. "We want to help stop these murders, yeah," he says. "You know who's doing it?"
Jean-Paul says, "Yes," firmly, and is it really such a lie? NAH.
"Non," Hermes says, shaking her head. "Watching the police cops, see where they jump. Ouais?" She makes a little hop with the heel of her hand, from one thigh to the other in her lap. Her dark eyes flick toward Jean-Paul again, as though she is measuring his firmness, and then return to Harrison. She tilts her head. "Everyone is afraid of people like us, m'sieu. They call us mutants and they treat us like Martians. Together, we make a family, we protect ourselves. C'est tout."
"I get it," Harrison says, voice just a bit quieter. He looks at her a moment before saying, "But from what I hear, the Baron isn't just about making a family. Julien Boudreaux's no mutant."
Jean-Paul seems quite steady, sure enough even to hold up the wall at his back. Firmness quotient: high.
Hermes gives Harrison a sly look from beneath half-lidded eyes, her head canted at an angle. "Non?" she says.
Frustration is quick to flash across Harrison's expression before he reels it in. Watching her a little closer, he says, "Last I heard, he pretty much hated the sight of one. His mutant ability self-loathing?"
"Hermes is a messenger, m'sieu," Hermes says, spreading her hands out in an open-palmed gesture. "M'sieu Julien, he has sent no message to you." After a beat she adds, like more conspirator than captive: "These ears hear, he has much to live down from his old family. Very secret. But le Baron has helped him to see our way."
"Then what does he do, then?" Harrison wonders. "You know for sure he's a mutant?"
"Ouais," Hermes says with an impatient flick of her hand, but she doesn't spill on M. Julien's abilities.
Harrison leans forward, weight braced on the elbows resting on his knees. "You decide you don't want to talk to me, I may decide to put you away where you're not going to be playing messenger for any family, including the Baron's."
"You say yours first," Hermes challenges, "Eff Bee Aye Underpants."
"I fly," Jean-Paul says, repeating an already voided cover to allow Harrison to preserve his. "So do you. But that won't do a damn thing when people are killing. If you want to keep your family safe, you need to tell us what you know so that no one else has to get hurt."
"Or you could just wait around and hope that somebody stops whoever it is while you and your lot sit on valuable information," Harrison offers, voice bland.
Hermes looks stubborn for a moment, her scowl a dark flash across her young face. "{Strong,}" she says finally, crankily.
"Strong, huh?" Jean-Paul translate-questions as he peels away from the wall to take a non-threatening seat nearby. Maybe he picks up a notebook and a pen. FBI people do that. "It's going to take more than that to stop this. Do you know why the people being targeted were killed, or is that information that the Baron would have?"
Gaze steady on the girl, Harrison watches and waits for her response to Jean-Paul's question.
Hermes shakes her head. "Non," she says. "If le Baron knows, he does not say to Hermes." Her eyebrows sweep up over a slight narrowing of her eyes. "Somebody afraid of us."
"They usually are." His tone flattening, Jean-Paul slants a thin-lidded glance toward Harrison. He is not a telepath, but he does speak eloquent eyebrowish. With the lift of a brow and the cant of his head at Hermes, he gives Harrison a significant look. How is your eyebrowish?
Harrison's eyebrow is not really great. WHAT.
I guess you will never know. Brush up on your eyebrow-speak.
FINE. Harrison will just go back to failing at connecting with Hermes. "And what if we wanted to have a little chat with your Baron?"
Jean-Paul looks tolerably satisfied by the fluency of Harrison's eyebrow.
Hermes tips her head to one side, her gaze flicking between her captors with a dark gleam of humor starting in them. "He chat with you," she says. "You keep me here long, he find you and have a good damn long talk."
"We know the difference between a chat and a /chat/," Harrison says, dry in reply to her dark humor. "If we sent you off on your way, could you set up a meeting?"
Jean-Paul looks bland. He is good at it.
Hermes's mouth splits in the wide flash of a bright grin, teeth flashing in her dark skin. "A message, m'sieu? Ouais, ouais. I could."
"A message," Harrison agrees, not sounding so bright about it like she does. "Yeah. We just want to talk."
Hermes spreads her hands again, palm up. Then she glances significantly at the balcony through which she was so unceremoniously dragged.
Jean-Paul sidles on over to the door but waits for a sign from Harrison to fling it open.
Harrison glances over at Jean-Paul. He is not so good with significant eyebrows. It is kind of Lookish, but not really. Then he tips his head in acknowledgment. "Guess you know where to find us," he blands.""
"Mais bien sur," Hermes says, as she bounces up out of the chair. She glances around the room with a wary interest, as though looking for ... scraps.
Harrison stands when Hermes does, gaze narrowing on her as she looks around. "Get your own hotel room," he tells her sourly, moving around behind her to vaguely herd her in the direction of the balcony.
Jean-Paul opens the door. He is an overpaid doorman.
Hermes scowls at Harrison and throws off another crude French epithet. Then she strides toward the door with a hint of swagger in her step. "Ain't no police cops," she says, glancing from one to the other.
"FBI agents aren't police cops," Harrison says in a bland sort of agreement. He crosses his arms and waits for her to leave. (Gtfo, Hermes.)
Jean-Paul holds the door. He is an overpretty doorstop.
"Merde," Hermes tells Harrison. Then she narrows her gaze on Jean-Paul for a beat. "{Don't grab,}" she orders, and then breaks into a barefoot run, darting out onto the deck to launch herself off it.
Hands lifted with fingers splayed, Jean-Paul watches as Hermes flings herself out into the dark. After she leaves, he asks, "Should I follow her?"
Harrison is going to learn all sorts of French profanity. He considers Jean-Paul's question a moment, then tips his head. "If you can keep out of sight," he says. WEAR BLACK.
He always is. Psht. With a tip of his head, Jean-Paul waits a beat, tracking her movements, and then slides on out after her. DOOT-DOOT.
She is like to lead him quite the merry chase out there through the dark.
That's okay. He has stamina.
JP has a WAY with the LADIES. Hermes by Sao!