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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 will ~~have a lengthy panic attack~~ quietly return to work with no one the wiser.

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Iman practically skids to a halt outside the apartment building, performs a quick bit of etheric transmutation on the door to let herself in, and makes a hard left for the stairs. She can move faster than the elevator, and she feels like she needs to keep moving, in case there's something that needs to be actively dealt with in his apartment. She's having trouble not letting her imagination run frantic: has ROMAC decided to go after him? Has Lucifer taken an interest for some reason? She doesn't even know how many threats exist within the rifty pool but she'd be willing to bet there's plenty.

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?"

By the time Asadi arrives, Rashad has rammed into another wall and slid down it, gasping for air in exquisite terror and utterly forgetting that he meant to leave quickly and discreetly. He hears a voice through the pounding in his head but his brain is unable to match it with a memory until she's on him, dragging him upward despite his gibbering protests. The blow comes as a surprise and as a confirmation of his fears, and he raises trembling hands uselessly against her only to be struck again. There's a crunch that resounds inside his head as white-hot pain shoots from his nose and sparks fill his vision.

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.

Edited 2015-02-28 01:35 (UTC)

Rush's perception of the immediate space is little more than a mindless sequence of noises, words, things not detectable beneath the suffocating nature of his own blistering panic. He knows that he lies there, shaking, panting, and he knows Durant is scrabbling against the bare floors, and dimly he can register footsteps -

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.

Edited 2015-02-28 08:20 (UTC)

Well there's something you don't see every day.

"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?"

It wasn't from nothing -- in a more coherent state Rashad might someday be willing to inform her how he can draw and shape energy from the aether within him without having to route his efforts through something like her science. Right now, though, he's mostly just inclined to scream when he finds himself in pain and on the floor once again, the scream soon giving way to rasping, high-pitched little sounds as his breathing grows increasingly rapid.

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.

Rush has succeeded in flattening himself against the wall while Asadi proceeds to swiftly and competently render Durant inert and he experiences a wordless surge of gratitude for whatever series of coincidences were set in place to allow her to come to his aid despite the logistical question of how is it, exactly, she knew he was in desperate need of it.

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.

Edited 2015-03-01 17:57 (UTC)

She can't keep Durant from jerking away, and he unbalances her slightly when he curls over, but that's better than straight up defending himself. She's left standing over him, her hands on her hips. Such a pathetic, piteous display. Even though it's presumably not acted - it's Rush's real emotional energy, or whatever - it still isn't real. He's exhibiting it in a vacuum. He doesn't have Rush's myriad problems to cause this. It feels appallingly appropriative. Which it is, in a far more literal sense than she could have imagined.

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."

Rashad twitches away from the foot, arms curled defensively around his head even though the one closest to Iman is still on fire. Later he will recognize this as a waste of the precious energy he went to so much trouble to obtain, but for now he will grasp at anything that might prevent her from touching him.

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."

Edited 2015-03-01 20:02 (UTC)

"Get t'fuck," snarls Rush in furious disbelief, still fucking trembling and sinking dangerously close to the ground. He will not remain sprawled here but standing will not be achievable with his current significant lack of energy or physical strength. "You broke into my apartment. You pinned me to my fucking wall."

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.

"Excuse you," says Iman sharply as Rush interjects, and she hesitates to let Rush get his words in edgewise. "Right," she says when he's finished. "And if you don't think that's harming him then you have a shitload to learn, buddy. Now explain. Why do you do this? Why him?"

She doesn't touch him again but she folds her arms, doing her best to look both pissed off and imperious.

"I did not hurt you!" snaps Rashad, distantly noting that there must still be energy from Rush bleeding through into his behavior. That's unusual; if he's calm enough to talk the emotions should be leaving him altogether. Perhaps it was a mistake to feed from the same person so frequently.

He still does not look at either of them. Could he escape? He may very well be able to escape. But would there be repercussions for simply leaving at this juncture, worse than the repercussions of staying? "Every living thing must eat," he says, finally uncovering enough of his face to peer up at Asadi, and then at Rush.

Rush slips lower, bare inches from outright collapse. Fuck. Is he weakening continuously? Has Durant opened a constant link that neither of them can close? Is Rush having the whole of himself drawn from him?

He must remain coherent. He must remain fucking rational.

There are parts of him being pulled away, that already have been pulled away, and they are funneling into this fucking - thing in the corner of his apartment and this will not be a tenable mental state for Rush to maintain this is not a workable standpoint and this will not be a state of mind in which he can function optimally or at all and there must be a way for him to deescalate this growing fear that he is being steadily hollowed out by this thing this person that has invaded the boundaries of his mind and torn scraps of him out to feed on like some sick fuck how many times has this happened and Rush has not known and he must remain rational.

"Stay away from me."

The words are ragged and barely present; Rush is shivering against the floor and trying to glare at Durant and not be engulfed in the visceral terror Durant has unknowingly tapped into.

He's whimpering.

He is not whimpering.

He is furious and he is holding fast to that fury, that justified fury over what Durant has done to him in repeated violation.

"Eat?" echoes Iman, for the moment ignoring Durant's outburst and the subsequent mess that is Rush. She crouches down, aiming to catch Durant's eye. "You eat people's emotions?"

That sure seems to be the logical extension here. It is not, however, a practice she's ever run across, and she can't imagine Rush has either. Durant seems even to take steps to cover it, though he's done a real shit job of it these last couple times.

"And what happens if you take too much?" she says coldly. "Something like before? When you left him unconscious? Something worse?"

Rush's obvious distress is only fueling her anger. She reaches forward and seizes Durant's collar. "Tell me exactly how this works, fuckstick."

Rashad gives Asadi the eye contact she seeks for a moment, but his gaze slides over to the quaking Rush still nearby. He could...anger would have its uses in this moment, and he has expended a great deal of energy in the last few minutes. But then Rush has been all but depleted; he must not take again from that source before the mortal has had time to renew himself.

And somehow, Asadi seems to know this. Rashad turns his eyes on her again, letting her take hold of his clothing as his heart beats just a little too quickly for the post-feeding rest state in which he should find himself. "You have seen it now," he replies. "I do not take anything that cannot be regained with food and rest." Unless he takes too much at once. The death of the first person he encountered in Manhattan was unfortunate, if unavoidable.

Unbelievably, Durant is attempting to detail some sort of fucking justification for what he's done to him - what he's done to him regularly.

He entered Rush's apartment for this specific purpose.

How many other contrived interactions were initiated solely to siphon Rush's own fucking emotional reactions from him.

His eyes close.

No. God, fuck, no, he cannot think about this, he cannot devote thought to this, not now, not in this state.

"That's not your fuckin' call," Rush rasps. Maintaining any measure of eye contact and or steadiness of tone is not a feasible exercise. He is lucky to still be conscious and capable of relative movement. "It's my head."

His head that has been rearranged and dissected and torn from so often and so frequently that he can no longer allow himself to wonder how much of Dr. Nicholas Rush is truly left.

"What happens," she reiterates, her voice and eyes hard, "when you take too much?" No way in hell is she falling for this bullshit tale of innocuousness. To say nothing of Rush's point, which is valid as fuck. Durant clearly doesn't understand consent, and she's beginning to wonder if he's human at all, there's so much he doesn't seem to get, on a level that goes beyond ordinary obtuseness. But right now all of this is second to her question, which has not been answered.

"...Death," admits Rashad, meeting her gaze. It is becoming easier now to do so. "And that is why I do not take too much." Except for when he has. He would regret that if he were capable; as it is he merely views that memory as an example of an error to avoid making a second time lest he add to the entropy of the world with another mortal's death.

Rush he utterly ignores. It is nonsensical to suppose that he might know better than Rashad what he can give when Rashad is the one who can sense his every emotion, taste out the energy in him. He knows even now what Rush is feeling and how much he could still give before dying.

In a spike of fleeting, fearful energy Rush shoots upright, propelling himself sharply upward and coming up hard against the surface of the wall, nearly crashing into it, slamming into it with the frenzied dismay that immediately threatens his tenuous lack-of calm.

"Well thank fuck you know how to exercise fucking restraint," he counters hoarsely, bitterly, pinning Durant with a look full of something scathing and horrified. "One wouldn't want there to be any danger involved, would they."

Holy fucking shit. She releases her grip on his shirt, straightening up and taking a small step back. There's no fear in her eyes, only disbelief and disgust.

She can see him calming - whatever he stole from Rush is probably being absorbed, wearing off. She's not sure he'll be as easy to subdue when he's not suffering another man's panic. The time for dealing with this head-on has passed, now she has to think about it practically, and that's immediately a problem. She and Rush can't afford to expose him to ROMAC - Durant knows way too much about them, her in particular. And they aren't about to become snitches for an organization they already don't trust, she's fairly certain Rush will agree on that. But Durant cannot be allowed to just keep doing his thing. This has to be handled, somehow, even if it's just to spread awareness of him. There are other powerful beings here - the TARDIS, Gabe - who might be able to step in if need be.

For now she isn't sure what she can do, and it galls her to think of it, but letting him go is probably the most pragmatic course of action. Rush needs to calm down, needs the threat removed. They can talk about what's next after that. After she lets this fucker just walk away.

"You listen to me," she says coldly. "Listen well, since you didn't seem to catch it last time. You stay away from him. He is not your fucking meal ticket. I don't care how little you want to take, you don't take it from him. You find your fix somewhere else."

She nudges him with her foot again, more of a kick this time. "Now get the fuck out of my sight."

Rashad does look over at Rush, his gaze calculating. No. He is still hungry because after all his work to feed himself they forced him to expend it again defending and healing himself, but he must not take any more. Iman, for her part, is too calm...and too likely to become volatile should she understand that she has been fed upon.

He flinches at the kick and scrambles to his feet, removing himself from hitting range. Now that his head is clearer, it is evident that she hit him harder than should have been possible. "I will do what I deem most beneficial," he says stubbornly. It is neither a refusal nor agreement to abide by her new rule for him...though if he is to feed on Rush again, greater caution will be indicated.

"Get to fuck." The desire to stand, briefly, overtakes him but Rush knows he has only the requisite energy to stay where he is, partially hunched and partially sitting against his own wall, one hand curled protectively over his chest, fixing Durant with a glare of unremitting hatred. He struggles for a moment, the heel of one shoe scraping ineffectively against the ground in a search for purchase that does not exist as he straightens, shoulders quivering and rigid.

"You come near me again," he drags the words out of his hollowed core, cold and desolate, and tries and fails to mask how much his slight posture shift has left him trembling, "then I don't care," he hisses the word out with a venom, a savage and icy flash of teeth, "what you are."

He stills abruptly, seething in tranquility, locking eyes with Durant. "I will. Kill you."

All right, that's probably not helping anything. Iman blows air out her teeth but resists looking at or speaking to Rush. She feels the sentiment, though she's not entirely confident either of them can follow up on it. But that doesn't need to get hashed out now, not with Durant still looming.

"Go," she says, and advances a threatening step.

There would be no purpose to disabusing Rush of the notion that he is capable of causing even permanent injury to Rashad, let alone engineering his death...at least, not at the present moment. Even if he would somehow benefit from it, to do so would be inadvisable. It is not impossible that the little mortals before him might find a way to harm him, merely extremely improbable. He listens to Rush in silence, his own eyes locked with the man's, and feels the last of the fear seeping out of him.

He will have to feed again soon. He must turn his attention in that direction, as well as consider how he will explain his prolonged absence from the office. He does correctly interpret Iman's movement as a threat, and as a credible one -- permanent injury or no, he has no desire for her to hit him again and he takes a matching step backward without displaying the corresponding fear that should go hand in hand with caution. "As I said," he replies, then turns and walks quickly from the room.

Rush watches him leave, expression fixed.

Upon his exit, keeping his exhausted musculature locked in tension ceases to be sustainable. He shudders once, drawn and involuntary, unable to resist the slow, unrelenting slide back against his wall, the press and predetermination of gravity. He prevents it from metamorphosing into a complete collapse with an unsteady lurch and braces his back against the wall - an uneven curve against an even plane, unsuited for support. His head drops against the wall's warmed paint. His fingers trail limply.

He feels as he felt in those brief moments of ill-timed waking aboard an unknowable vessel, conscious to know the experimental stabs of foreign thought and helpless to counteract them. Here, the situation is evaluable now that Rush has been removed from the sphere of its context. Durant attacked him and encouraged an emotional response and drained him. He will, in all likelihood, attempt to do so again.

He will also, in all likelihood, succeed.

There is a certain unpreventable nature to certain things.

Rush slides his eyes closed and thinks of the monotony of shallow breath. When he opens them again he directs his attention to Asadi, though with considerably less precision or speed than would typically be acceptable.

"You have," he whispers, controlled and even, "excellent timing."

Iman watches Durant until he's gone, then turns immediately and crosses the room to where Rush has crumpled back down. She quirks a faint smile at his words, crouching down just outside arm's reach. "You're one lucky fuck, all things considered," she retorts. "I just happened to be in the neighborhood. Did you mean to call me or was that just panic?" She glances at his dropped phone, then back at him. She's not overly invested in an answer to that question, which is more conversational than curious, so she moves on promptly: "Are you all right? Is there any... permanent damage that you can detect?"

She doubts it. But it's hard to tell. He pretty much always looks like he's on the verge of a meltdown.

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