(Untitled)

[mechanicalswans]

[OOM: Long ago, Weyland tried to destroy the world in ice. Now he succeeds in fire... by accident. Warnings for, between the main OOM and those linked from it, violence, including torture, murder and abuse of the dead; loving depiction of self-injury; and a couple of tame but vaguely deviant sexual acts. You know, the usual for Weyland.Mercifully

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[ikissdhimbck]

It's a typical night in the bar. Loud, active, a hundred conversations happening all at once. Drinks are being poured, wait rats scurry from table to table. The entrance doesn't come with a loud boom or a great flash of light, and so by all accounts it's ordinary, usual, even understated.

And yet, there is a tickle at the back of Kate's neck.

She turns sharply, senses on alert (warmth around her ankle strange where the anklet lay), and then she sees him. And then she relaxes. And then

She's never seen him injured before.

"Weyland?"

She's already getting up, abandoning her drink. But she doesn't rush.

Not until she sees what he is holding.

[mechanicalswans]

He doesn't often get injured.

Well, not by other people. His blood is usually only shed in the process of crafting, which this is not.

He doesn't know how to fix it.

He doesn't even know where to begin.

But her voice is familiar, and there is the sense of his work approaching him--

He still can't form words, but instead of Mireille's hand he fixes Kate with his stare.

[ikissdhimbck]

She's wearing her guns, too -- she hardly goes anywhere without them. But they stay cool and solid at her hips, while the snake slithers around her ankle, a phantom crawl along the skin beneath her cowboy boot.

It barely registers.

Her face pales the closer she gets, and when at last she's able to rip her eyes from the feminine fingertips and the roughly severed wrist she sees the bracelet on the floor.

Azaleas.

And promptly feels sick. There's no doubt in her mind who this hand belongs to. Even the skin, which usually looks pliant and soft, gleams ever-so-slightly with a metallic sheen.

"What happened?"

[mechanicalswans]

At least one of them is armed.

He doesn't think that whatever that was that just happened could have followed him through time. There doesn't seem to be any trace of the dragon, or of the holes in reality--no strange forests that should not be there.

But somehow her presence reassures him all the same.

"I don't know," he says, in barely a whisper. "I don't know, but it's all gone."

[chronodisplaced]

Oh. It's another person that is evidently having a bad day.

(She is blaming the bar for it all.)

Alba pauses on her way to the bar (it's the millionth time she ordered coffee and forgets about drinking any of it until it's stone cold) and shifts the dragging steps of her path toward Weyland who is standing there in stunned shock with a hand in his.

She stops, bends to pick up the bracelet -- admires it -- and offers it up.

[mechanicalswans]

Bad days go in cycles.

But you can't get much worse than losing everything...

It's a very nice bracelet, beautifully made, somehow managing to be heavy and delicate at the same time. He always did his best work for his favorite woman--well, she was his best work.

Is his best work. He will not think of her in the past tense, not even if he has to rebuild her.

She can't be gone. She can't be. He will not accept a world where she is gone.

Not again.

So it takes him a moment to realize that Alba is holding up the bracelet, and even once that sinks in, he isn't sure what he's supposed to do about it, so he just stares at her.

[chronodisplaced]

"--Bad is an understatement. When it's all gone."

She's seen that look before in her mother's eyes.

"Billie Holiday was playing and someone turned off the music. And Mama was holding Daddy, and I was whispering in his ear that he couldn't go yet and his eyes were open--"

She pockets the bracelet and shrugs. It's an unapologetic statement:

"Nothing is forever."

[mechanicalswans]

Her words still don't quite register.

"Nothing is forever," he echoes quietly.

Nothing, except--

"Absence is forever, or at least as enduring as memory."

He remembers, and he cannot die, so for him the world is defined by the absence of what once was.

[7twistedwishes]

She knows he's there, without needing to look.

She knows because it hurts, the pain of anticipated loss, and the pain of regret about choices.

But that is for later. Now, he is there. And it feels like he needs her, so The Devil rises and crosses the room towards Weyland, moving up close and reaching to touch his wounds.

She does not ask, because he will tell if she needs to know.

[mechanicalswans]

He flinches at her touch, at first, like a wounded animal.

He keeps turning it over and over in his mind--what happened? What went wrong? Was it the fire? It shouldn't have--dragons are not nuclear. There should not have been an explosion. How--?

But he does need her. Even though he's not sure of anything else in the universe right now.

[7twistedwishes]

He's hurt.

He's hurt and it hurts her, but Lucifer does not move away: she's used to the pain.

Her touch is warm, soothing (or she at least tries to make it soothing), and her presence should be familiar.

How she wishes she could say the words filling her soul, but she's chained, trapped, until the end of her world.

"I'm here." This will have to do.

[mechanicalswans]

She is there.

She is there and familiar and quite possibly the one person he knows who could understand--

"We need to leave," he whispers, not looking at her. "Need to go somewhere--somewhere not here. Upstairs."

[riversinger]

River hadn't intended to stop by the bar today, but as usual, the universe had other plans for her. Something in the temporal vortex had glitched, and twisted her off course.

The device at her wrist was still smoking and sparking when she flickered into existence, mere feet away from the man holding the severed hand.

Blood, she's seen before. Even the detached limb, while distasteful, is not enough to make her flinch. The crackle of temporal energy and the faint whiff of smoke? That tells her immediately all she needs to know.

The device at her wrist gives one final POP and fizzles into silence.

"Bloody hell." That hurt.

"If this is another Time Agency stunt, colour me unimpressed."

She quirks an eyebrow at the hand, and his expression as he looks at it.

"Then again, if it's not --"

The sentence remains unfinished as she watches him with a wary eye and a hand that hovers near the blaster on her hip.

[mechanicalswans]

It's a very impressive mechanical hand, at least, the finest work of a forge god at the height of his skill. The skin is silver and made of tiny scales for the greatest flexibility, and the wrist looks to have been pulled apart from the arm, not neatly cut and not burned off in an explosion.

And the temporal energy is more specifically the energy of the destruction and rebirth happening outside the Window harnessed and channeled through--it hadn't occurred to him that the device wouldn't go along with him. It's still somewhere in the past.

Weyland himself is probably harmless without his devices and weapons. Probably.

He turns his stare to River, wary as well, thanks to her sudden appearance. He doesn't need any more danger today.

[riversinger]

It takes her a moment to cop to the fact that it's a mechanical hand, that's how impressive his work is. That and the lack of gore other than the blood on his clothes and his cheek. Her ire is short lived in the face of his wariness. It becomes readily apparent that the Vortex Manipulator's faults are clearly not his doing.

"You're injured," she tuts, closing the distance between them, taking a handkerchief out of her pocket and offering it to him. The adrenaline rush from the exploding gadget still hasn't dissipated, but she'll get there in a moment. "We seem to have -- I don't know -- crossed paths. And somewhat inauspiciously, I might add."

She does hope the bar can fix the device. She'd hate to have to beg a ride off the old man.

[mechanicalswans]

He looks down at the handkerchief, then back up to her, his injuries forgotten in the rush of--well, everything else that has happened. Anyway, he's had worse, and it's not like it can kill him.

The gears finally start turning. It isn't like the old days, where there would be a battle, and dangers made more sense than they do now. Things a man can see, he can fight against. But the end of the world?

"Did it pull you in too?" he asks quietly.

[beatoftheworld]

Jacob doesn't notice the blood or the staring or the fact that the man is holding a disembodied mechanical hand; he just hears the clatter of the bracelet to the floor, feels the faint impact on the wood planks through the thin soles of his boots.

He bends, slowly, to pick it up, the pad of his thumb sliding over one of the azalea links and knowing it's a flower, but unable to see what kind. He heard the intake of breath from Weyland before the clatter, and is zeroed in on that spot, holding the gold links in his palm.

[mechanicalswans]

The bracelet is satisfying to hold--smooth, polished, with a good weight to it; and no rough spots, not even on the rings that hold the links together. It's cool to the touch, as its most recent wearer had no body heat of her own, and carries a faint mingled scent of smoke and perfume.

As for Weyland himself, there is a very faint ticking sound, thanks to having a mechanical heart instead of a conventional one. Like any other heart, it beats more strongly when he is agitated, as he is now.

[beatoftheworld]

Jacob can feel the workmanship and the heavy metal dragging towards the ground, as if trying feebly to rejoin the floor. It's such an odd feeling when he thinks about it; he isn't supposed to be able to have an impact on the physical world. Still, the weight of the gold links and the shapes he's yet unable to narrow down make him curious. He has no idea what azaleas look like anymore.

"What are they? What are you?" The heartbeat, the incessant and insistent t-tick--t-tick--t-tick, is strange.

[mechanicalswans]

He realizes, after a moment, that he's being spoken to.

Usually he's much quicker to react, to understand what's happening around him, but today his senses are overloaded, his experience overwhelmed.

"...what are what?" he asks, trying to focus on the here and now.