Iman Asadi (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
etherthief) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
bigapplesauce2015-04-17 02:59 pm
etherthief) wrote in bigapplesauce2015-04-17 02:59 pm
so enough about the backfires; this time we fire back
Rush's dream collapses and Iman lies awake, breathing too hard, staring at her ceiling. Her blood is up from his dumbshit attitude and his mottled, fucked up arm - she needs to break something. It's too early to go to Wilmot's but what the fuck is the point of sleeping, anyway.
She gets out of bed, paces for a few minutes, and ends up hurling an innocent coffee mug across the room, finding intense, relieving satisfaction in the sound of it shattering. That's better.
She'll clean that up later. She gets into the shower and turns it on cold. This is happening today. It'll just be her and Daine and Rush, who had better still fucking be alive.
There will be blood if he's not.
She brushes her teeth furiously, gets dressed and spends undue attention making herself look clean. There will be time aplenty for her to get wrecked today.
She checks the clock. Still at least an hour before even the stickiest barfly would be out and about. But if she stays here she'll end up breaking more things from the inactivity. She goes out.
She walks for a while. Wilmot's is close, so she ends up just circling that area, remembering vaguely better times when she fielded a weird meeting between Daniel and the Devil, and later when the Devil crashed through a wall. She'd take that shit over this, probably.
Finally, when time enough has passed, she walks into Wilmot's End, sits at the bar, orders "The tallest Tom Collins you can give me", and waits.
She gets out of bed, paces for a few minutes, and ends up hurling an innocent coffee mug across the room, finding intense, relieving satisfaction in the sound of it shattering. That's better.
She'll clean that up later. She gets into the shower and turns it on cold. This is happening today. It'll just be her and Daine and Rush, who had better still fucking be alive.
There will be blood if he's not.
She brushes her teeth furiously, gets dressed and spends undue attention making herself look clean. There will be time aplenty for her to get wrecked today.
She checks the clock. Still at least an hour before even the stickiest barfly would be out and about. But if she stays here she'll end up breaking more things from the inactivity. She goes out.
She walks for a while. Wilmot's is close, so she ends up just circling that area, remembering vaguely better times when she fielded a weird meeting between Daniel and the Devil, and later when the Devil crashed through a wall. She'd take that shit over this, probably.
Finally, when time enough has passed, she walks into Wilmot's End, sits at the bar, orders "The tallest Tom Collins you can give me", and waits.
no subject
She feels like smashing something by the time she walks through the door. She feels like smashing everything. Good thing she'll soon have the opportunity.
There aren't many people in this early, so Iman's easy enough to spot. Daine slides up onto the stool next to hers and settles her mostly empty bag onto her lap. "Hullo, Iman," she says. "I hope you have some smart ideas, elsewise I'll have to come up with a dumb one." Not that a dumb idea wouldn't necessarily work - not when you can cause the sort of ruction Daine's perfectly capable of causing. Her dumb idea certainly worked for Yuri.
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"Hey kiddo," she says. Probably too young to drink, and probably too serious for it at this hour anyway; that's Iman's purview, and she sips her extremely hard cocktail (her second) judiciously. "Dumb works for me. There's two of us and a fuckload of them, there's not really a way to be smart about it, is there?"
Sure, there's people they could ask for help - lots of people, actually, lots of people who are much, much more than people, but call it pride, call it stubborn anger, this is personal and she wants a little help as she can get by on.
"I have a few tricks up my literal sleeve," she says, waggling the fingers of her left hand, which won't mean much to Daine, but she'll figure it out sooner or later. "I can get us in and down to where he is without detection. I've done it before. I predict getting him and then ourselves out is going to be more your thing. We'll need to go big and hard. Buffalo, or whatever else you got." Wolf, buffalo, Daine's probably got a lot of things she can be, and that suits her just fine.
"I think we need to go today," she says. "Now, if you can. Kinda sudden, but I think sudden might be all we got. Especially if he's as close as he seems to think."
Her gut twists to even voice it in that roundabout way. She takes a heavy fortifying swig of gin.
What if they know he dreamed, what if that's enough for them to cut him loose? Hell, letting him sleep might have been a trap fucking designed to lure her in, but she doesn't care, it was bound to happen either way, this just made it happen faster.
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First things, first. "It doesn't have to be just us," she says, pausing to order a glass of water. After it's set before her, she continues, "The animals can help, if we give 'em a clear path in and out - break the windows and such. I won't have them getting trapped, but..." she takes a sip of water, mouth twisting into a rueful smile. "They'll want to get involved, if I am." It's already started. She's reining in her temper as well she can, but the People aren't stupid; they know something's up. It's certainly no coincidence that half of Quickbeak's flock is up on the roof even now.
Considering some of the new shapes she's gained since last time, Daine grins rather fiercely. Buffalo is nothing compared to what she could bring to them, now. "Big, I can do," she says. "And now - I'd figured it would have to be now." Patting her bag, she adds, "I can stuff my things in here once I'm in a shape. They never saw my face last time, and I'd rather they didn't this time around, either. I'll go in tiny, and then..." she makes an illustrative little blowing-up gesture with her hands. "They won't know what hit them."
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"Sounds fun," she says, and finishes off her drink. She leaves a handful of money that includes more tip than is appropriate - she's in a hurry, and she anticipates having to possibly bribe a cab driver on the way out - on the counter and gets up. "Shall we, then?"
She supposes it would have made more sense for them to meet each other properly, discuss ins and outs and whatever Daine learned last time, perhaps the whys of Daine's last time as well as what's happening to Rush now, but fuck that, Iman has no energy to waste on anything sensible or more than haphazardly organized. They have a plan, of a kind, and they're both ready. It's foolhardy as hell and luckily neither of them seems to mind.
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"Let's," she says, hopping off the stool and adjusting her bag. "All I need is somewhere not too far from the building where I can hide this," she adds, giving it a pointed pat. "We won't want to have to carry it with us." It might get in the way, and she doesn't much want ROMAC getting their hands on her things, either - though she was sensible enough to leave her ID back at the base.
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Ordinarily she makes a point of conversing with cab drivers but not today. She taps her fingers compulsively on her knees, staring mutely out the window. She keeps thinking about the way Rush was acting - desperate and pathetic, asking her, imploring her, to find a way out of the city. To leave him behind.
"Fucker," she mutters under her breath, and then rubs a hand over her face.
She glances at Daine. "How well do you know him?" seems like an innocuous enough question to a stranger's ears.
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But we'll make a path, Daine promises them. And we'll need your help. Just make sure you get yourselves out once we're gone, and wait for me to tell you when to move. It's once they have Rush that they'll most need the aid, and she doesn't want ROMAC's guards to be adapting to her friends' presence by then. Better for them to think they're only dealing with her and Iman until they very abruptly aren't.
Iman's question brings her back to herself, and Daine blinks a few times before looking over at the woman. "Not very," she says once the question's registered. "I only met him once before. It was... like last night." Which is as close as she can get to saying it was in a dream without the cabbie thinking they're mad. "He'd needed help then, too, so I did." Vaguer still, but she's not sure there's much point in getting into the details of his nightmare. It's enough that Rush knows she's the helping sort, and that Iman knows she's dealt with Rush before.
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"Well he's an asshole," she says, "and he's probably not going to thank us. But obviously who cares what he thinks."
She's not bitter, she's buzzed. There is a big difference.
Anyway it doesn't matter what his reaction is. It matters what they've done to him, what they might do to him.
The cab brings them to their corner, she pays and gets out. She scans the block.
"There," she says, pointing to a mailbox down the street. "No pickup on Sundays." She walks them over quickly, nods toward an alley. "You wanna do your thing, I'll stash your shit in here."
no subject
Daine ducks into the alley and sets down her bag. "I'd expect him to be on one of the lower levels," she says as she shucks off her shoes and tucks them into the bag atop her metro pass. "So if we want any outside help down there, the elevator won't do. We'll want to take the stairs, and prop the doors if we can." The outside doors won't be a problem; it'll only take a stray dog a moment to press the handicap entry button. Dogs could help with the interior doors as well, but she'd as soon keep any of her friends large enough to be easy targets out of the building when the real ruction starts.
After a moment's consideration, she steps into the bag itself, balancing a little precariously atop her own shoes. "I'm going to take mouse shape again. Just pick me up and put me in your pocket or something. I'll let you get us in, and just pop out when you need me."
There. That ought to cover it. To the growing number of starlings who just so happen to be winging their way to the block and settlings themselves in the trees and shrubs, she adds, Remember to wait. Then, she shuts her eyes and shrinks down into mouse shape, her clothes collapsing into the bag in an untidy heap. It takes her a few moments to find her way out of the pile, but then she squeaks as loudly as she can to get Iman's attention.
some brawlin', some blood, some semi-graphic description of torture
She will have to be.
She watches, fascination somewhat dulled by the oppressive urgency of the situation, as Daine shrinks down and disappears into her bag. She crouches forward, barely hearing the little squeaks, watching as Daine clambers out from under her clothes.
"Neat," she says under her breath, and holds out her right hand for Daine to clamber into; with the other she stuffs the clothes fully into the bag, then stands up and takes it to the mailbox. It's just a little trick to get it to open for her, and she sets the bag unceremoniously down atop the small pile of mail that has accumulated since yesterday's pickup time. She closes it again and turns toward the base.
"Okay," she says. She settles Daine as gently as possible into her jacket pocket. "Here goes."
It's not too hard to keep herself undetected. They'll notice the cameras going out, of course; that will leave them with only a short window to find Rush's cell, but she can't do anything stealthier than that because she needs all her energy to find him period.
She props the doors as she goes, they'll stay propped, that too requires only a little bit of energy. Rationing it. Gonna be plenty. Gonna be fine.
She remembers, from her stint wandering around with Rashad, where the cell blocks are - she gets them to that floor quickly with a trail of open doors in their wake, and from there, well, it's easy to spot his cell. It's the ones with two guards posted outside, an empty chair beside them. For the torturer, she imagines. When he needs a breather.
She grits her teeth. Slips her hand into her pocket, delicately nudging at her mouse-shaped comrade.
"Steady," she murmurs. "I'm going to set you on the floor. Stay outta sight for now."
The air around her is strange, thick, ignorable. That's a lot tougher than just switching off the cameras and she can't hold it for long. She strolls towards the guards and, once she's reasonably close, kneels down, sets Daine on the floor, straightens back up, and allows them to see her.
"Oh hey!" she says in the little moment it takes them to notice her and jump, tightening their grips on their guns, just a little too surprised, too slow. "I think you guys have something of mine."
They are a lot bigger than here, but that's fine. Back home she paid her Manhattan rent with underground bareknuckle boxing matches, and that was some years ago, but she's gone against bigger and faster and smarter than this.
She sucker-punches the closer one in the face, knocking his head back into the wall, reaches out and grabs the other's weapon, wrenches it out of his hand with smashes it into his head before dealing the other a sharp kick to the gut. The other one went down easy, this guy takes a bit more effort, but she has adrenaline to spare.
Finally they're both unconscious, her knuckles are bleeding, and she's out of breath already.
"More will be on the way by now," she says aloud. "Stay down until it's time. I'm going in to get him."
She grabs the door handle, subdues the electric lock with a brutal push of transferred neurological energy, and opens the door.
There's a body inside, crumpled on the floor.
She drops the gun, which is maybe not the smartest move in the world but fuck smart right now. She crosses the dark little room to him and drops down to her knees, hands hovering over him, afraid to touch. His face is cut up and bruising, his arm has been broken and hasn't fucking been tended to, of course, for all she knows they've left him here to die. There's a sudden burst of horrendous sound, a chaotic mix of layered feedback loops, coming from speakers up in the ceiling - noise torture, sleep deprivation. She leans over unsteadily, plants her hand against the wall and kills it, leaving them in ringing silence.
"Rush," she says, her voice surprisingly hoarse. She wants so badly to lay a hand on his shoulder but she resists. "Rush, can you hear me?"
tw: dissociation, misophonia, mild flashbacking
There is a voice in his ear. It's present in a more familiar sense but the familiarity is damaged somehow in the sense that it does not seem like it should exist for reasons that have quite escaped him for now, and in the shrieking and the rising of the ever-present pitch, it abruptly cuts out and into silence.
He tries twitching, an attempt that must not have been thought through very well at all, because movement equates to pain and he should have known that he should have known that, hair fanning out around him and his arm in shards. The fingers he has that are still uninjured curl into a fist, scraping painfully along cement until they press into the curve of his palm and he braces the hand against the floor and he tries again to rise but again that proves to be a rather unattainable objective at the moment, and he slides down again, breathing shallow and pained.
tw threat of gun violence
Gus has always been a quiet man and not for nothing. He arrives at the scene a few minutes before the security detail because this is an important encounter that he would like to have, thank you, it's a victory and an opportunity, so it's just him that steps on proverbial cat's paws into the room and places the barrel of a handgun at the base of Iman's skull.
"Stand up, Ms. Asadi," he says calmly. "Middle of the room, please. I'll ask you not to touch anything; I won't ask again."
Well this was fucking stupid.
She twitches, startled by the sudden cold metal on the back of her neck, and her breath comes out in an angry hiss, how could she have left herself so vulnerable, left the gun, allowed him to sneak up on her, it's goddamn shameful. Daine's still out there, of course, and Gus isn't about to actually shoot her, she isn't worried about that.
What bothers her is that this fucker sounds smug. He thinks he's won. She doesn't want him to think that, not for a second.
Of course it was Fring, of course it was, all along, hovering right over them, untrustworthy but with a gentlemanly way about him that belied this, that he could ever be capable of such ruthlessness.
She stands up, turns around slowly, hands up, look how cooperative. Her eyes on him are cold.
"You did this?" she says, it's not really a question. Obviously he's personally invested, if he'd come here by himself to fucking gloat.
"I played my part," he replies calmly. "You, of course, could have stopped it very easily, with the simple act of turning yourself in - you must have known that was all we wanted. You're an intelligent woman." He smiles thinly, and it's all she can do not to throw a reactionary punch with an aim to break some teeth. "And a bit arrogant, too, if your plan was really - what, to come in here by yourself?"
He sounds disappointed.
"Nobility, I've learned, will always get you killed," he says.
"You should know not to make declarative generalizations in front of scientists, Mr. Fring," she says coolly. "Or assumptions."
She didn't come here by herself.
She came here with a fucking bear.
Didn't you notice the bear?
tw BEAR
And then another two-legger appears, calmly picks up a discarded gun, and steps into the room. Idiot, Daine thinks furiously, though whether it's for Iman or this neatly-dressed gentleman who's about to get the surprise of his life, she couldn't say. Because she's done waiting for Iman's signal. It's taking too dratted long, and they have things to do.
She shifts in silence, her tiny mouse shape rippling up and out into the heavy, well-muscled body of a polar bear. Her lips curl into a contemptuous snarl as she pads into the room, but no sound escapes her. He has a gun, this two-legger, and it's pointed at Iman, and she's not giving him the luxury of one second's warning. She rears up behind him, her ears almost brushing the ceiling. Then, with an indignant huff, she slams a forepaw into the man's shoulder, sending him careening into the wall and the gun skittering across the cement floor.
Are we done dithering, now? She knows Iman won't understand her, but maybe the sentiment will still be expressed well enough in the way she drops back to all fours and gives her fur a settling shake. Rush looks a mess, and Daine lowers her head to rumble at him in ursine concern before shifting her focus back to what's-his-face.
no subject
The collision is literally stunning; hurtles him into the nearby wall, the gun flying from his hand with a clatter, winding him and leaving him in a sorely undignified heap. He stares up at the intruder with uncharacteristically unveiled alarm. How in god's name did a bear get in here?
Of course, he realizes belatedly, his senses dulled by the impact, it's probably not a bear at all, but some rifty inclined toward transformation. Possibly the same as the one associated with the much-discussed Buffalo Incident.
"Oh sorry, did I not mention that my friend was a bear?" Iman is saying, viciously gleeful. "Because my friend is a bear. How you like me now, fuckstick?" She flips him a pair of birds and turns away.
A little juvenile but she's hopped the hell up and that was awesome, actually awe-inspiring, the way Daine just clipped him like that. But she's rightly wanting to move things along, at least if Iman is reading that bear body language right, so she picks up the gun and crouches back down over Rush.
"Rush," she says. "If you can hear me right now just - I'm gonna pick you up. I'm sorry, I have to. We'll get you out."
No time to let him respond, if he even can. She eases her arms under his and pulls him up with her as gently as she can, taking all his weight. She's not gonna be able to move very fast like this, but there are voices in the hall now and they'll need Daine to keep their path clear. She gives a sharp jerk of a nod toward the door.
"After you," she says.
tw: dissociation, disorientation, obnoxious formatting
It's alarmingly difficult to establish his present temporal position between the shuddering and periodic fading of his own consciousness, but who -
Fring's voice is cold and triumphant and requires no recognition, and the second party has been identified and she did not run and he told her to, he must have, unless this is, again, a sequence of events that did not actually occur as his method of distinguishing reality from the disarray of hypotheticals and distracting tangents has never been very stable, but Fring's voice is keyed to a very specific sort of reaction and if he could stand and execute that reaction as it would be appropriately violent and possibly cathartic in some manner as he has thoughtfully not been restrained at the current time though it rapidly becomes clear as he flinches and growls and shifts his weight in a hopeless attempt to stand that there would be no reason to restrain someone so obviously decommissioned and so wholly mechanically useless, he -
- had not realized there was a bear in the facility, this -
- is somewhat unexpected, why -
- he is being lifted he -
- wishes the agonized sounds tearing over his sensory input would cease and the magnifying ache in his arm and his ribs and generally everything else would dull until he becomes aware that he is the source of both if only he could remember how to stop how to stop how to -
no subject
Planting a paw on his chest, she leans in close, teeth bared inches from the skull that she could crush like an egg, if she so chose. Stay put, she advises, her breath fogging his glasses (which have still remained on - she must not have hit him quite hard enough). Her jaw snaps shut with an audible clack, and then she shoves herself away from him and lumbers over to the doorway.
More guards are coming - a lot more, from the sounds of it. Daine casts out her magic to her friends outside - the birds that have gathered so thickly in the trees that their branches sag under the weight of them, and the stray dog that just so happens to be slinking by, perfectly positioned to rear up onto its hind legs and press a certain button - and calls, NOW!
Several stories up, the automatic doors swing open to admit a cyclone of chattering starlings, harshly calling crows, and even an assortment of falcons and hawks. They circle the lobby, sending people diving to the floor, then swarm down the stairwell.
The first wave of guards rounds a corner, all carrying guns, of course. Bear will no longer cut it. Daine lowers her head and grows again, fur receding, her skull broadening into a wide, bony frill as good as any armor, sprouting three horns as good as any spear. She barely fits in the hallway, now, but that's just as well. No one's getting past her.
Daine the triceratops trundles forward with a bellow that shakes the floor, heedless of the bullets that ricochet off her crest. They might as well be insect bites. As the guards falter in the face of her oncoming charge, they're struck from behind by her arriving friends. The birds' calls are deafening in the closed space of the hall, and their claws rake over scalps and faces. She can still pick out the guards' confused shouts in the general din - whatever stories they might have told about her, none of them were prepared for this - and she feels a rush of savage pleasure as she clears a path back to the stairwell.
attempted strangulation
Then it leaves him, and he stays slumped and breathing for a few moments.
Something is happening outside - gunshots, of course, but more than that, it isn't just a bear out there, it's birds, hundreds of them, and other creatures as well, he can see them swirling past the open door of the cell.
"What in the-" he breathes, and then his breath stops when he sees - that can't be - but it is definitively a dinosaur lumbering past.
What is happening?
He does manage to get to his feet, attention vaguely fixed back on the pair scientists who've given him so much trouble. Iman does not seem remotely interested in the mayhem going on outside, her attention is fixed solely on Rush, who appears to be drifting in and out of consciousness.
"Rush," she's saying, as she hauls him awkwardly toward the door, her voice edged with desperation. "Don't you dare fucking die on me, you fucker, you stupid asshole, you stay alive, you hear me?"
She would have been much easier to interrogate than Rush. She would have held just as strongly, of course, but she is passionate in ways Rush is not, lets her emotions overpower her. This is how he gets his arm around her throat.
"Fuck-!" She drops Rush, drops him, in his condition, as Fring pulls her back, grappling for the gun. She lets out a vicious growl and knocks her head back, hears a satisfying crack. She turns on him, gets her arms around him, punches him hard and unforgiving in the kidney, bringing him down to his knees.
The gun is on the floor again and she lunges for it.
She's stronger than she looks, and now on top of the pain from being hurtled into the wall his nose is broken. Still he lunges after her, seizing a handful of her headscarf, pulling hard with intent to choke. She cries out, thin and strained, twists her way out of the hijab, and while he's fumbling to get it back around her neck he feels the hard edge of the gun press up against his chest and hears the trigger click.
It fires. It definitely does fire.
He lurches back from the force of expulsion but not, strangely, from impact. His hands go automatically to his chest, his heart. She shot him point blank, right at his heart, he should be dying, should be dead.
There is no wound. She is staring at him like he's a ghost, then at the wall beside him. He turns slowly.
The bullet is embedded, impossibly, in the cement.
"What the-" she starts to say, interrupted by a roar from the triceratops, and then she apparently decides it's not worth it. She jumps up and at him, long black hair spilling over her shoulders, and smashes the gun across his face.
He drops down, and she leaves him there, collecting Rush again, dragging him out of the room. He lets them go. This situation is out of hand. They'll collect themselves. They'll find these people, all three of them. He is not worried. He does not worry.
no subject
He's falling.
The crack of a bullet rips him out of the inexorable blurring of his own surroundings and he jolts and attempts again to gather himself in an environment that does not truly permit that sort of thing, between the footsteps and the myriad sounds of an indiscernible etiology, and -
He is moving again, now able to correctly identify his rescuer unless he already has in which case he should have aborted such a wasteful deduction preemptively and that is not conducive to obtaining a finer understanding of what exactly -
"I wish you were actually here," he says miserably.
no subject
The guards are down; her friends have seen to that. Half have retreated; the rest can't do more than lie on the floor with their arms over their heads. Daine shrinks - but only so much. She needs to be strong enough not just to carry him, but to hold him. Horse or pony, and he'd fall right off - and if she's going to be occupied with carrying him, Iman needs to be free to fight, not busy keeping him steady. So she takes elephant shape, the cloud of birds parting for her as she walks back toward them on silent feet.
I've got him, she says, carefully insinuating her trunk around his back and beneath the crooks of his knees, his uninjured arm and shoulder fetching up against her broad forehead as she hoists him off the ground. He doesn't weigh as much as he should. The birds swirl around them like a living barrier as she turns back down the hall and walks toward the stairwell, taking care not to jostle him.
no subject
"I'm here," she says, soft and a little desperate, almost comical with the flurry of birds and general chaos that surrounds them. She can't make much progress with him weighing her down like this, he's so fucking heavy, god, he feels like he's getting heavier which is not a good sign. She shifts him to one arm, holding him up, no idea what to fucking do. She brings her other hand up to touch his bruised and bloodied cheek, gingerly, briefly, flinchingly, wishing like anything she could actually heal living things like Daine and Gabriel can, all that she can do feels fucking useless right now. "I'm here, Rush. It's okay. It's gonna be okay."
Yeah, but is it though? Can he even hear her? It doesn't matter in the next moment; Daine is an elephant now, and she's lifting Rush gently, holding him up to carry him out. Much better. Iman shakes herself and keeps moving, angled toward the stairs.
This is good, the amount of damage done, but it's not enough, and she didn't cause enough of it. All her rage and adrenaline and the failure to actually put Rush's torturer down needs somewhere to go, and she knows exactly where.
"Tell the animals to get out now," she calls up to Daine. "And stay in front of me."
She falls into step behind the elephant.
no subject
- there was meaning buried in the dismantling of a phone and the days and or nights in which he was asked the same questions in repetition, with mounting levels of frustration -
"Describe the whereabouts of Iman Asadi."
He cannot possibly sustain himself throughout this, however he chooses to quantify it, and so he does not resist the dissolution of consciousness.
no subject
The starlings and hawks swarm back up the stairwell, keeping the path clear, making sure no two-leggers will be waiting for them as Daine mounts the stairs. It's an awkward climb - not designed for elephant feet - but she manages. Crows perch on the railings above her, cawing out encouragement, though all but their mental voices are drowned out by a sudden, shuddering impact from the hall she's left behind.
Odd's bobs. What is Iman doing back there?
no subject
This is using up altogether too much energy, of course, and after her scuffle with Fring she doesn't have much left to give. There's a sudden pinch in the nerves around her shoulder joint and her arm snaps back, folds up automatically as she staggers against the railing, letting out an involuntary yell. Sparks are still flying behind her but she slumps momentarily, trying to catch her breath. Fuck. Fuck. Hold your shit together, Asadi, just long enough to get them outside, get Rush safe where are they even going to take him, she didn't think this through at all, she was emotional and stupid and now she's going to pay for it and it might already be too late.
She grunts and drags herself back up, forces herself to keep climbing the stairs. Nothing else to be done, nowhere else to go but forward, up and out.
no subject
The lobby, it seems, has been evacuated. There are guards, but much like the ones downstairs, they've been reduced to a sprawl. Most of her friends have left, but some have stayed to harry them. Daine pauses there, looking to Iman. She can't just carry a bloodied and beaten Rush out on the street like this. She won't even fit through the doors in this shape, and while she's not above breaking them, it's probably best they not continue the rampage out on the street.
no subject
Daine stops again, this time with better reason. Iman draws a fortifying breath and steps away, holding herself up on her own. "I'm fine," she says, holding her arms out. "Give him here. I'm going to take him somewhere safe, you meet me there. An apartment in Hell's Kitchen." She rattles off the address. There was no plan - it's not like she phoned Gabe ahead or anything. It's not like he has any idea what's about to be dropped on his doorstep. But he's the only person she can think of who can protect them right now - well, the only person she wants protecting them. With the mess they've made, the utterly unsubtle scope of it, they will be hunted, and neither she nor Rush will risk being in the TARDIS when that happens.
"The man who lives there, Gabriel, he'll take care of us, and he can heal Rush."
Is involving Gabriel any nobler? Not really. Especially not when they know for a fact that ROMAC is trying to build cages perhaps intended specifically for him. But there is no time for best case scenarios. Going to Gabriel is essentially a judgment call. From her limited list of people capable of protecting them, she had to pick who she was most willing to endanger, and the choice had to be quick. And that's all. Fring had her mischaracterized. She is not noble at all.
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"I know the place, and him." It's not her first choice - the TARDIS would be safer, surely - but she remembers from the dream that they'd both been weird about involving the TARDIS, and it's true that Gabriel's apartment would be easier for them to reach with Rush in this state. She swings her empty trunk uneasily. "Does he know about this?" There's no love lost between Gabriel and ROMAC, and Daine doesn't really think he wouldn't help... but for all any of them know, he's not even at his apartment right now. At least there's no question of the TARDIS being where you expect her to be.
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No time to discuss it further. She loops Rush's comparatively good arm around her shoulders and pulls him out of the building. She's about to launch right into the street and summon a cab before remembering the stupid mailbox, and she turns sharply, hauling Rush a little ways down the block. She busts the thing open, grabs the bag, slams it shut again, then twists toward the road and holds up a commanding arm.
A cab slides to a halt, the driver looking wide-eyed at the scene. It's probably a good thing, she thinks darkly, that Fring tore off her hijab, what cabbie is going to pick up an openly Muslim woman dragging a bloodied white man in this fucking city?
She opens the back door and hoists Rush up, settling him in as gently as she can, snapping, "I will pay you a hundred dollars to take me to Hell's Kitchen and not ask any fucking questions."
He drives off.
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What a happy chore.
She lets her friends continue to swirl through the lobby until Iman has bundled Rush into a cab. Then, with the help of the stray dog's cheerful button-pushing, she and the rest of the birds leave the place, crow wings pulling her up and away from the mess they've left behind them. With Quickbeak's flock around her, cawing in raucous triumph, she makes her way toward Gabriel's apartment.
By the time she lands on one of his windowsills, she's looking rather ragged. The scrapes left by ROMAC's bullets came with her when she shifted, now arranged over the crown of her head. While they're not bleeding overmuch, it's still enough to tack her feathers together and, to her annoyance, glue one eye shut. Scout is inside, at least - maybe that means Gabriel is in, too. Wings flapping to help keep her balance, she pecks insistently on the windowsill.
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"Hey, buddy..." he says to Scout, but he doesn't bother finishing his sentence once he sees Daine at the window. Instead he rushes around to slide it open and allow her in. He notices the injury immediately, but that's not his immediate concern. He's worried about why she came here when he knows that he's not exactly first on her list for anything- especially not personal help. So there has to be something else. The TARDIS is his first thought. If something went wrong with her, it's possible that Daine would come to him. If she thought he was the only option.
He grabs the blanket from the back of the couch and unfolds it, offering it out. "If you want to change." He doesn't wait to see if she will, just holds the blanket up while he asks what he needs to know. "What's going on? Did something happen to the TARDIS?"
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As Scout sniffs worriedly at her, she reshapes her mouth enough for speech. No sense in making Gabriel parse her best attempts to speak in her crow voice, either. "It's Rush. ROMAC captured him, but we got him out. Iman's bringing him here, now. They're in a cab." That last is said in the tone of someone fully aware that this is not the soundest plan in the world, but also unable to do anything about it.
She turns her head to look up at him with her good eye. "They near killed him. Will you help? Please?" Not that she anticipates having to beg him out of a 'no' - it's true that Gabriel isn't her first choice for this, but she doesn't really think he'd let someone else suffer just because he doesn't get on with her. Still, it doesn't hurt to be polite - and depending on what sort of mood Rush is in when he recovers, and considering the state Iman's in now... these might be the prettiest manners he's likely to get.
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"What about you?" He gestures to her injuries. "Can I help you too, or are you too proud for that?" He still doesn't entirely understand why Daine is upset with him in the first place. Everyone else finally came 'round to seeing the Godzilla thing his way.
He huffs out a breath. "What did you get into? I need to know that I'm not going to have ROMAC beating down my door the moment Iman and her friend show up." He's got people to protect here, and if helping means that he's putting them in danger then he can help somewhere else.
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More to the point, she knows Gabriel's power isn't limitless. If he has enough to heal her and Rush, fine, but she won't have him spending his energy on her to start with. Her injuries are obnoxious, but she doesn't need angelic help getting over them. "Rush first," she says firmly. "He needs it most; I'm hardly scratched."
Her feathery chest heaves in a rapid, avian sigh, exasperated enough that her grammar starts to slip. "He was in one of them underground cages. We got him out and flattened a few dozen guards, but I don't think we killed anyone." Well, there'd been a telltale gunshot from the cell after she left, but Daine didn't see any dead bodies. "Iman blew some stuff up, and we got out. They're not being followed, at least not so far." She turns her head sharply toward the window, then flies back up onto the sill and looks out. "They're just pulling up now."
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She breaks into the front door with a bit of alchemical interference, that barely takes any energy but even that stings a little with the rebound of what she did earlier. Sucking air through her teeth, she steps in and locks the door behind her. She lifts Rush carefully up the stairs, slower than she'd like, not wanting to jostle him anymore than he's already been. Almost there now. Just a bit further and then she can breathe.
Gabe's door is open, mercifully, and she shoulders her way in, seeing Gabe crouched next to Daine, who is still a bird. Gabe's dog yaps excitedly, running over to greet her, but she ignores it, carrying Rush toward the couch. Gabriel is already up and coming toward them. "He needs help now," she says urgently. "Careful, he - he doesn't like being touched."
Absurd thing to worry about right now, when he's unconscious and she's already dragging him, and it's probably a testament to her present state that that's what tumbled out.
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He's quick but gentle about setting Rush down, then he bends and reaches out to press two fingers to Rush's forehead. A moment later, Rush is healed and Gabriel straightens up with a groan. There was a lot to heal, but he hasn't hit a plateau yet. He could still heal Daine, and Iman if she needs it. "So is someone going to tell me what the fuck is going on?" He gestures to Rush with one hand. "And who the fuck this is?"
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The pain dissolves, wrenching out startled groan in congruence with Rush's reestablishment of some minimal sense of cognizance. This sensory input is inconsistent with the expected norm, given ROMAC's historic treatment of its commodities, and if he could only arrange the most recent sequence of events into a timeline that makes relative sense then possibly he could derive some meaning from this. Disorientation is, of course, to be expected, but a chronological timeline would be ideal if not entirely plausible.
The halation of lights is nothing like the hard-edged fluorescent blaze of ROMAC's cell, and when the shadows resolve into more apparent shapes a number of things become immediately, perplexingly obvious.
First - he is no longer in a great deal of pain. Second - this is not any part of ROMAC he is familiar with. Third - there are a number of unknown parties in this room who do not seem immediately intent on causing him further pain, leading him to believe that this may be some deviation from the standard routine, which does not typically involve item four - the fact that he is on a couch.
Rush attempts to rise in a spasm of movement that is probably ill-advised given his current condition, able to do little more than mumble, slurred and thickly accented and subtly terrified, "fuck."
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"They're not following us," she says somewhat curtly. "It was a dumb plan but it wasn't that dumb. No one's moving anywhere. Between the lot of us we can handle whatever backlash they try to dish out, for fuck's sake."
That she's reassuring an archangel is a little unnerving, but whatfuckingever. She treads back to the couch to watch Gabriel work, tight-lipped and scarcely able to even process her relief as she watches Rush's wounds fade away.
"He's with me," she says. "We've been working together for a while now, sort of floating under ROMAC's radar, and about a week ago they caught him and I escaped. They tortured him, Daine and I broke him out. We did what we fucking had to." She can't believe that is being even implicitly questioned. She huffs out a sigh and presses a hand to her forehead. "Look, I'm sorry we just crashed on you like this, I... I would have done it differently if I could do it again, but this is where we're at. I didn't know where else to go." Her voice cracks a little at that. She can't keep the faint edge of desperation out of it, like she's begging him to understand, and on some level she is. She meets his eyes for a moment, quietly imploring, just let us have this or something like that, and is pulled from that by a sharp spasm of pain in her left shoulder, making her flinch, wince, hiss in pain.
She's distracted from that, as is, hopefully, everyone else, by Rush's sluggish return to consciousness. She immediately crouches down beside the couch. "Rush?" she says softly. "It's okay. You're safe now."
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Scout darts up to lick her chin, and she spares the little dog a few moments of her full focus. This is quite an eventful day for him, too, what with injured folk showing up out of nowhere. Don't worry, she reassures him. We'll be fine. We just needed Gabriel to heal our friend, like the way I heal the People. But Rush - the two-legger on the couch - he can be a bit grumpy, so you'd best give him some distance.
Once she has Scout's somewhat disappointed agreement, she pads over to stand by Iman - not quite near enough to be offering obvious support, but close enough that the woman could rest a hand on her furry shoulder if she needed to. The audible, pained hiss has her glancing up at Iman worriedly - is she injured in some way Daine failed to notice? - but then her focus is pulled back to Rush as he starts to come round. Hopefully he won't find the sight of a wolf so close to be alarming. She pricks her ears forward and wags her tail slowly, so at least she'll look like a nice wolf. He knows what she can do; he should work it out quickly enough.
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He knows that he was probably their only option, but he definitely doesn't like that this mess is here in his apartment.
"Healed, at least," he says to Iman's statment, at the same time fidgeting with the sash on his robe. Despite reassurances, he doubts that ROMAC won't be keeping tabs on someone that they barely let out alive. It makes him think about what might have happened if Johnny hadn't been so lucky on his rescue mission. It's not a good thought.
He wants to ask Iman more questions, but with Rush coming back to, that will have to wait. He reaches out a hand and sets it first on Iman's shoulder, then lifts it up to brush his knuckles against her cheek. She seems hurt, and he's wondering just how hurt. If he can help her, he wants to. It's a brief touch, because she pulls away before he can assess the damage. He frowns and drops his hand back to his knee, then raises an eyebrow in Rush's direction. "Welcome back to the land of the living. You're in my apartment and alive, so a thank you might be in order."
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His brows knit together sharply in a glare that immediately hardens into an expression of outraged disbelief.
"You fucking -" he rasps, his voice ragged and wet from days of use for little else but screaming. He flinches, drawing back from Asadi in evident, swelling fury, eyes darting between her and the wolf that is, presumably, Daine, if the quite real dream is any fucking indication. "What the hell did you do."
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"What the hell do you think we did," she says, soft and a little dangerous, this better not fucking be going where I think it's going. She draws back a little as well, not yet getting up from her crouch. "Did you honestly think I was going to leave you there, after everything we've - I mean who the fuck do you think I am, Rush? Seriously?"
He's barely said anything yet but she can see, she can tell where this is headed and she's already livid and she can't stop it, not even in the presence of angelic fuckbuddy and relative stranger whose respect she'd pretty well like to have. Okay, okay, calm down. She straightens up abruptly, taking a short step away before wheeling on him again. "We saved your life, you ungrateful fuck!"
So much for that.
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Then Iman starts in, and it occurs to Daine that she might be more comfortable if she moved out of the line of fire. There's going to be shouting in a minute, if she's not mistaken, and--yes, there's the shouting, now. Huzzah.
Scout lets out a whine from his sorry little exile on the other side of the coffee table, which is as good an excuse as any for Daine to squeeze through the gap between Gabriel's knees and the couch and amble over to the little dog. It's all right, she reassures him. Iman's just in a pet because Rush is being silly. She flops down onto the floor with an exaggerated sigh, as if to say 'I'll be right here when you're all ready to use your inside voices.' Scout curls up next to her, his ears pressed back unhappily, and she gives him a little nuzzle.
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"I told you to get out," he spits, severing the 't' in a venomous snap of teeth. His tone seems to have torn itself, infuriatingly, between alarm and indignation, neither being in any way sufficient. "You had no reason not to - I gave you the opportunity." One hand hooks around the back of his neck in a swift pull of movement intended to be bracing, but leaves him feeling besieged.
"How well-conceived was this plan of yours, exactly?" he demands, smoothing the words with a fluid disdain. "Was there any sort of reasoning involved?"
okay one more rush after this and then let's get these two in separate rooms for the love of god
"There wasn't time to fucking 'conceive' a good plan, they were going to kill you, you told us that in your dream, was that supposed to make me want to dick around strategizing? What is wrong with you?!" She rakes a hand through her hair, startled to find her hijab missing, easy to forget it's not there, and it unbalances her all the more. "You were the reason! God damn, even if I could get out, do you really think I'd - do you think I'd ever be able to live with leaving you there? Would you have left me?"
She steps in toward him, leaning down to get into his hostile fucking face. "No one tells me what to do, not you, not anyone. I went back for you and I'd do it again and again. You can be a little shit about it if that's what you really want in your black fucking heart, but Daine didn't have to come, and Gabe didn't have to put you back together, and they both did it anyway, and you're gonna be nice to them, so help me god."
She's invaded his space and she knew the effect it would have on him; he's already coming back with some vitriol but she can't bear to listen to it. She reels back away. Can't deal with this, cannot. She's shaking and he can't see her like this, not if he's gonna be this way, not if he's going to betray her like this.
I wish you were actually here, he'd told her, and there was no contempt and no dumbshit pride, he'd meant that, and that's all she's gonna fucking get.
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"It was poorly implemented at best," he grinds back, a muscle in his jaw jumping. "You were a target and in the attempt to lessen that - I was the requisite collateral damage, and that was an outcome I was willing to accept." His hand slips down to curl around the opposite wrist, one thumb digging absently into the uneven cicatricial skin left from its violent treatment.
With a slight recovery of his more characteristic quiet contempt, he adds, muttered and scornful, "you really found it necessary to go and fucking make it worse, didn't you."
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He stands and blocks her view of Rush, then lifts his hand and gestures towards the bedroom. "Let's leave the grumpy man alone for a little while." He doesn't smile, just raises his eyebrows at her until she moves towards the bedroom.
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She doesn't look Gabe in the eyes, just stares mutely at the floor for a moment, tight-lipped and barely holding herself together, before rolling her eyes, nodding, stalking off toward the indicated bedroom.
Once inside, once he's in with her and closed the door behind him, it's like a switch flipping, her guard drops, her weight buckles, she collapses halfway with a hushed gasp. She's exhausted, she hurts all over, and now her blood is boiling as well.
"I'm sorry," she whispers, covering her face with both hands. "I didn't think he'd be such a fucking - I'm sorry."
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She turns her head back towards Rush, nose dipping towards the floor. She could shift her mouth enough for speech, but Scout is still quivering against her side, and she's rather enjoying the comparative stillness. Besides, reshaping herself would take effort, and she's not sure it'd be worth it if he's just going to spout more ungrateful nastiness.
Still, she feels as if all this ruction deserves some sort of response, so she thumps her tail against the floor a few times in a slow, exaggerated parody of a wag. That went well.
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He is not surprised Asadi committed herself to such a rash decision - she has never held herself to any set of rules he can discern, least of all ROMAC's. It had not been unprecedented but it had been completely unplanned, the act a microcosm of the woman herself - categorically defiant, and difficult to contain.
Difficult to address.
When silence descends, the hands drops away and Rush transfers his stare to the only other living creature in the vicinity - save for the dog, which he missed in his initial evaluation of the room for reasons he is not entirely clear on.
"That was extremely ill-advised," he says, but the words simply sound weary, lacking the same pointed outrage. He runs his thumb along the uneven line on his wrist, studying it but the faint, repetitive motion stills almost immediately. He shoots the wolf a puzzled, vaguely suspicious look. "Though I seem to recall there being a dinosaur involved."