Rashad Durant (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
omnomnom_feels) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
bigapplesauce2015-02-25 08:26 pm
omnomnom_feels) wrote in bigapplesauce2015-02-25 08:26 pm
Soup Kitchen
Rush is a good source of energy. Rush is a very good source of energy, or at least a very plentiful one. There has never been a time when Rashad has encountered him and not found him bursting with some form of emotional distress. At the party -- Rashad had not even meant to feed on something like panic and anger at the party; he had intended to find some form of joy so that he might stay and partake in the event itself. Temptation had struck, and once he is in his right mind again he will decide that it was right after all that he partook while he had the opportunity, even if it was not his first choice. It can be difficult to find sustenance; he will not turn his nose up at what is offered.
The downside to getting a rush from Rush is that the emotions in question strongly incline him to flee to his apartment and hide there in agitated solitude for some time. It is the next day before he recovers, and then he must go to work lest he call attention to himself. There is much work to catch up on, too much for him to take a long enough lunch break to obtain the kind of lunch he actually needs or to leave work on time. That evening is one of slim pickings; somewhere in the city there is sure to be someone going through an emotional state that would feed him, but Rashad is unable to find such a person and finally retreats home to conserve energy until the next day, when he must go to work again, this time running on reserves. It is unlikely that he will find what he needs by chance on his lunch hour, and unlikelier still that he will remain in prime control of himself if he does not feed before the afternoon. Manhattan is a neverending hubbub of emotions, but he needs more than happiness or sadness -- he needs extremes, the intensity of emotion most mortals feel only every now and then. The decision is a deliberate one, a calculated risk -- but it is not difficult to obtain the home address of someone he knows is all but sure to give him what he needs, perhaps with a little prompting if necessary. Then he will be able to think clearly again.
At lunch he makes an excuse and leaves, work undone, for home. It will be a simple operation, he thinks as he makes his way upstairs and stalks along the hall toward Rush's apartment. He will feed quickly, perhaps even through the wall if Rush is close enough and upset enough, and then he willhave a lengthy panic attack quietly return to work with no one the wiser.
The downside to getting a rush from Rush is that the emotions in question strongly incline him to flee to his apartment and hide there in agitated solitude for some time. It is the next day before he recovers, and then he must go to work lest he call attention to himself. There is much work to catch up on, too much for him to take a long enough lunch break to obtain the kind of lunch he actually needs or to leave work on time. That evening is one of slim pickings; somewhere in the city there is sure to be someone going through an emotional state that would feed him, but Rashad is unable to find such a person and finally retreats home to conserve energy until the next day, when he must go to work again, this time running on reserves. It is unlikely that he will find what he needs by chance on his lunch hour, and unlikelier still that he will remain in prime control of himself if he does not feed before the afternoon. Manhattan is a neverending hubbub of emotions, but he needs more than happiness or sadness -- he needs extremes, the intensity of emotion most mortals feel only every now and then. The decision is a deliberate one, a calculated risk -- but it is not difficult to obtain the home address of someone he knows is all but sure to give him what he needs, perhaps with a little prompting if necessary. Then he will be able to think clearly again.
At lunch he makes an excuse and leaves, work undone, for home. It will be a simple operation, he thinks as he makes his way upstairs and stalks along the hall toward Rush's apartment. He will feed quickly, perhaps even through the wall if Rush is close enough and upset enough, and then he will
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It is difficult to breathe while on his back. The nonselective surface to which he deposited himself upon apartment re-entry is doing its intended work of keeping him awake, as the grinding pain of muscle and bone laid out flat on an empty apartment floor will not permit him sleep even in this state of perpetual exhaustion. Sleep has been rapidly encroaching upon Rush’s brain activity for some time now but he is calculatively evasive, he knows how to stave off the inevitable. He does not know how long it has been but he has not been analyzing the orbital trajectory of the sun, and he has not cared to for some time. The floor contains relative coolness, even if Rush knows full well that such things are illusory on his body temperature’s part, how the floor is not truly a cool surface but a minimal decrease in heat compared to the torrid, hellish air that turns each contracture of his lungs into a specific brand of knifing agony.
There is a squeezing in his temples, the pressurized ache of nicotine-caffeine dependency, all of it exacerbated by the slats in the shades that allow the bombardment of his optic nerves with scintillating shafts of radiant energy. The persistence of the growing headache is nauseating, but bearable. For now. He can resist the luring pull of sleep, of hydration, of succumbing to the unthinkable offense of non-productivity, but he cannot escape his own body with the piercing ache nailed through his lateral sulcus.
He is tired.
And sleeping is unthinkable. He is on the precipice of some unknown revelation, if only he could pinpoint what it may be.
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Surely it will not be that hard, though. What would upset Rush? The presence of another, given past indications. Simple. Were he less hungry he might think better of this brazen approach, but he isn't and so he doesn't. Rashad steps forward and knocks firmly, loudly on the door.
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He weighs the potential costs and potential benefits of electing to ignore the knock and simply go on lying where he is, except that the first knock had stabbed rather viciously into his auricular function and effectively scattered all his thoughts into irrelevance, and in order to reduce the risk of this happening again, he will be required to move.
First he will need to open the door.
First he will need to stand to open the door.
It requires somewhat more effort than it should for Rush to battle physical exhaustion and air density and the insufferable heat to drag his body upright, then propel it to the door and open it, but he manages it and flinches sharply against both the irradiating glare of unfiltered sunlight that assaults him, then again at his unexpected, entirely unwanted visitor.
Rush assesses Durant with mild disgust, considers the elegance of their last, deeply suspicious encounter, and exhales sharply out his nose.
"No," he growls.
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Rashad had considered the possibility that Rush might fly into a rage merely at the sight of him. Such would have been ideal. Perhaps he is too tired? Rashad absently grasps at the disgust wafting his way, but it's as insubstantial as the general annoyance that preceded it.
"Yes," he says, lacking an excuse for his presence. He must fabricate one. "You are wanted at the office."
The ruse seems quite clever to him.
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"It's my day off, you prick," he counters irritably. "A day in which I do not do work. You understand that?"
He contemplates shutting the door, and the potential consequences of doing so. That would not be socially acceptable, but Rush finds no difficulty in compiling a list and deciding that he is:
(a) far removed from any observer who would care,
(b) debating this in front of someone to whom he has no inclination to be in any way civil outside of work, and
(c) too tired, simply, to in any way give a fuck.
"Go away," he grunts by way of farewell, grip tightening meaningfully on the door's edge.
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"No," he says flatly, making another earnest attempt to anger Rush before he must move on to other tactics. Rush resented the paperwork. Perhaps he still resents it now. "You filed your last report incorrectly. It cannot wait."
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"Yes, it fucking well can," he snaps back with a faint flare of his more characteristic exasperation. "Now kindly fuck off."
He swings the door with every intention of closing it in firm finality.
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With inhuman reflexes, he snaps a hand up to grab the door as it swings toward him, stopping it as surely as though it had closed on a rock. Not realizing yet in this moment that he is very likely crossing over the line from irritating to intimidating, he says
in a voice like distant thunder, "You used the incorrect form. You will have to type it all over again."no subject
Rush is having significant difficulty in ignoring the germ of anticipatory dread needling in his chest.
Durant is not - natural, not in the strictest sense of the term. Some indefinable aspect of him, about how he operates, is horribly askew and always has been. Whatever the man did to him the last time they interacted - Rush does not want to undergo that discomfort again. He won't.
"Get out," he says roughly, hand once again closing on the edge of the door and pressing, attempting to force it shut, but it does not move. It does not move. Durant does not appear to be exerting any effort to keep it open whatsoever, and the door is not moving, and a freezing wariness has begun to bleed over his former tired aggravation. Undeterred, Rush swallows and glares, shoulders settling into a tense line, and tries again. "Get out."
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Perhaps it might be written off as a hallucination. It is not likely that Rashad would be here, after all, and Rush is hardly a reliable witness. He smoothly pushes the door further open, giving no appearance of putting forth any special physical effort as he does so, and he steps forward, feet crossing the threshold. "And if I do not?"
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For fuck's sake.
He will not be intimidated here, in the empty square of an white-walled, impersonal apartment, in a space he has made no attempt to claim as his own other than to scribble dense, semi-legible calculations across the walls.
"You get back," snarls Rush, low and trembling. "Don't fuckin' come near me."
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"And if I do?"
A vague threat, he decides, is not enough. He will not hurt Rush, but Rush will hardly know that when Rashad abruptly puts on a burst of speed and comes right at him, meaning to grab him by the shirt because he assumes the mere contact will be enough to set off the reaction he desires.
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Fuck.
Rush's chin jolts, startled at the unexpected obstruction of movement, leaving him entirely unprepared when Durant charges him with a speed and reflex that simply cannot be natural, seizing him by the front of his shirt and effectively pinning him to the wall. His breath catches, and in his fragmenting, spiraling panic his thumb strikes the phone's screen in an uncontrolled spasmodic movement an instant before it slips away from nerveless, quivering fingers.
He twists against the wall, but Durant's grip is ironclad, and Rush cannot get away. He is trapped here. He is trapped. He is trapped and Durant is clearly the far more physically powerful of the two of them, and he cannot possibly escape. Immediately a constricting, piercing terror begins to strangle his airways as he grasps the wrist clutching at his shirt in a vain attempt to wrest it away, terrified eyes locking with Durant's horrifyingly unreadable ones.
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It's by some kind of bizarre providence that she's actually in Rush's neighborhood when this happens - she's already been given to wonder if there's some sort of Rift influence behind how often this kind of happenstance seems to occur, but now is definitely not the moment for that. She's just come from a visit to a little bakery she's been hearing about, something of a rifty hangout it seems, tucked away next to the world's worst bookshop, now heading back toward the green line to go home - that puts her about four short blocks from the ROMAC apartments.
Maybe it's nothing. Maybe Rush ass-dialed her and he was just breathing heavily because that's what he does. Maybe she'll get there and he'll berate her for being paranoid or something.
She is entirely willing to take that chance.
She breaks into a run without hesitation, swerving northward toward his building, alarming a series of weekday brunch-goers as she flits past them and across intersections like she doesn't give a fuck (she doesn't). She has to get there as fast as she fucking can, because he might not even be there, and if not then this is going to become a real fucking problem. Because if it's not nothing, there's too much else it could be. And Rush doesn't fucking know anyone else.
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It's overwhelming in a way that even the other emotions he has taken from Rush had not overwhelmed him, and he is hardly a second into the feeding before his hands lose their strength and he drops his
victimsource, gasping and choking and stumbling back without a hint of balance or grace, barely keeping his feet.tw: panic, flashbacking
No. No. No, fuck, please, no.
He can't have his physiology fucked about like this. This should not happen. He should not be able to allow it to happen, not with the infrequent nightmares of him reliving the very same, the intrinsic, painful violation that was the shifting of his thoughts and breaking of his emotional output to suit another's needs. He is attempting to torque this into something else, frantically restructure his thoughts into something less panicked, something less susceptible, something less obvious but it will not work and he knows it even as everything is torn from him.
Durant releases him in a swift movement that sends Rush impacting the ground in a protracted slide, vision fogging unbearably, lungs writhing and him gasping, trembling bonelessly on an empty floor. The weight of fatigue burrowing down his spine has made it impossible to move; it is no longer the dulled product of the Manhattan heat and humidity but a profound, crippling exhaustion of an unnatural source that fills him with a swelling, unshakeable disgust.
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She gets to his floor and jogs down the hall to his door, which is... ajar. Fuck.
"Rush?" She steps in and - oh fuck, of fucking course.
Durant.
Obviously he's already done whatever it is he does, judging by the way both of them are sort of writhing around in various states of panic, and her concern turns abruptly to fury. She reaches Rashad in two quick steps, grabs him by his collar, drags him halfway up and punches him as hard she can in the face with her left hand, her prosthetic, which packs greater power than the rest of her. She wants this to fucking hurt.
"I told you," she says, half-growling, "to stay away from him." She punches him again, releasing her grip as she connects and then stepping back. "What exactly is so fucking hard to understand about that?"
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His body hits the floor like a sack of potatoes, but his bloodied face is already starting to knit itself back together, slowly enough not to be visible to the naked eye but quickly enough that it's unfortunate that he's unlikely to remember to reset his broken nose in the correct configuration within the next half hour. Rashad lets out a wordless, garbled yowl as flames spring up from nowhere to lick along his skin. "Get away!" he shrieks, blindly flinging a fireball in her (very) general direction.
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There is a silhouette blazing across his vision.
And it is moving.
And it is shouting.
Rush quails beneath the noise, beneath the unmistakeable crunch of some surface striking bone, even if he heuristically can verify that it is not his bone being struck and his form of pain is nothing so physical or veridical or conceptual or real because it does not exist because it cannot exist because Rush is here, curled in one right-angled corner of his own apartment, trembling and swearing and gasping and breathing and not breathing and not panicking and it cannot be any perceptual error of his that the room temperature has abruptly increased, and it cannot either be any error on his part that when he looks up - when he looks up -
"Fuck -"
At some point Asadi entered this equation, which does not make sense from any teleological or rational standpoint, and at some point Durant set his arm on fire.
He cringes, uselessly. He wants to retreat with no means to retreat. Reality, at this point in time, is questionable, and there is nothing else he finds so terrifying.
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"Fuck!" Iman yelps when his arm lights up, and when he lobs a fucking fireball at her head, she pivots to evade it and throws up her left hand. She's never had to use ethertheft defensively before. There is certainly a precedent for it, underground alchemical boxing matches and whatnot, but this is ridiculous, the man just created fire from nothing. With a sharp jerk of her wrist she dissipates it, turning it back to air. It leaves behind some kind of unearthly stench. What the shit was that.
She can't afford to hesitate. She grabs his wrist with her prosthetic hand - can't put the fire out on his arm, but she can keep it from burning her, at least - and deals him a roundhouse kick to the head, knocking him down, jamming her foot down on his opposite shoulder to keep him on the floor.
"Neat trick," she says. "So tell me something, Durant. What do you do with his emotions, other than imitate them?"
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Her actual spoken question (which, coincidentally, also concerns the energies within him) will go similarly unanswered for now as he moves on into full hyperventilation, limbs shuddering and vision darkening. He makes a comvulsive effort to yank his arm out of her grasp so that he can draw in on himself and curl into the smallest space he can possibly occupy -- it will be a few minutes before the rush passes and he will be mentally equipped for any sort of coherent conversation.
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Witnessing Durant's reaction with the full knowledge of what has specifically just occurred is unbearable and fascinating in equal measure - Rush will have no other opportunity to observe his own incredibly accurate panic-stricken reactions stamped over the features of another, but the subsequent spike of revulsion soon drowns any potential scientific interest. This is too much. This is too similar. It is a part of him that has been harvested, torn out of his head and displaced into another. It was a deliberate invasion on Durant's part, Durant who knew exactly what he was doing and what sort of reaction he wanted to generate. He manipulated Rush into a state of heightened emotion specifically to employ that to his advantage, or necessity, or whatever Durant's reasoning for his fucking - emotional theft.
Staying even partially upright has become a trembling effort, and Rush nearly keels over again, halting his downward motion only with a strategically planted hand on the floor, and even then he knows the support will not last long. He pinions Durant's curled form with a look of utter hatred.
"What did you do to me?" he rasps, now possessing much more than an inkling of what the true answer may be, and dreading it.
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Rush's question draws her attention back to him. He's not passed out like before, so maybe this wasn't as aggressive an assault, but he's still obviously in a bad state. She can't approach him - even if she could help, which she doubts, she doesn't want to step away from Durant for one second.
Anyway, Rush's question is devoid of good interrogation tactics. She turns her attention back to Durant, nudges him with her foot, and says, "I think we can all respect each other's intelligences enough to strongly posit that you stole energy from him in the form of reactive emotions. I think you've done it before: when you spilled coffee on him and, more obviously, the other night in the TARDIS. I have a series of follow-up questions but seeing as you're moderately indisposed, through gratuitous fault of your own, I think we'll go at your pace. Feel free to start talking any time."
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He gulps air and shakes his head in an uneasy, repetitive motion. "No, no no," he moans. No, he cannot have been so obvious. No, he will not answer. No, he does not steal. No, she cannot demand things from him, he does not want to be here, he just wants to leave --
Slowly, the energies dissipate, absorbed into his system as he draws on what he took to fuel his healing and his fire -- fire he belatedly puts out as his sense start to come back to him. Rashad remains curled on the floor, trembling with aftershocks and the aftertaste of Rush's fear.
At last, he speaks, though he doesn't look up. "I did not harm him."
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The list of physical transgressions is already successfully working Rush from his state of agonized panic to one of furious accusation - a far more workable and preferable and navigable state - with impressive speed and alacrity, but by far the most salient and damaging point is the one Asadi has already helpfully touched upon.
"You - you fuckin' - drained me, you fuckin' - parasite."
It has become perfectly fucking obvious. There is not only correlation between Durant's sporadic flares of emotional output and Rush's resulting weariness, but direct causation. Durant has taken a part of him and assimilated it, consumed it, however the illogical fuck he decides to define it, and has the fucking audacity to make some absurd claim for innocence.
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