[hrhr] everything

[omniavincit]

WHO? William and Mams
WHAT? A critical success, apparently. With reception to follow.
WHEN? The nick of time (i.e. before the other HRHRs)
ANYTHING ELSE? I'll be sure to warn if William starts eating hearts.

When he'd pulled the mask off the guard, it came back to him—Big Shu standing in front of him, how tall he'd seemed in the moment. He'd squeezed his son's bony shoulders, mentally holding him at attention. He searched himself for an ounce of wisdom and remembered only being told to wrap his fingers as though holding a roll of coins.

Shu turned his hands over. They were scraped raw.

Under the mask the man's eyes were wide. Blue. Empty. William had closed them, surprised at the look of his own hands. What boy did they belong to?

Almost. We'll have to take it from here.

The corridors get tighter as they go, stripped first of ornamentation then of markings of any kind. The signal isn't gone—just the opposite, what had once been a faint streak of color is a swollen, frantically pulsing blot obscuring the overlay. William closes the tracking app, blinks the spots from his eyes. Resists the temptation to rip off the mask, wipe the sweat from his face.

He moves with barely contained haste, one hand hovering at his gun. Passes another unconscious man, this one pudgy, his shoes gleaming. Will we have to kill them on the way out? he thinks, then, Why the fuck am I worrying about the way out? Neither of them have said it, but it's between them—more than understanding, wire-taut awareness occasionally electrified with intention.

Whatever they're about to face, he'll have to warn Mamoru, buy him time. It might be the only thing he does.

Something's changing—the air feels not warm but thick, his thoughts mushy. He remembers Matron Awai's smile right before she snapped his finger off, how after it was the same, unperturbed. His walk alters mid-stride into a clipped military step; he remembers remembering throwing a cop into a window, the sight of the sky through a mechanical eye, thousands of bright swirling particles, and Logan touching his shoulder, avoiding his eyes and saying, You can wait here.

William glances back at Mamoru, something crawling under his skin. He blurts out, “Do you feel—” Then, realizing his mistake, falls silent.

Comments

[prizeneck]

"'M used to it."

It had taken him a long while, to deal with his own thoughts in the darkness that he had brought in himself by carelessness and the fleeting, vague thought that maybe he could actually save someone.

It took him a long while to stop those thoughts from diminishing himself to what he considered a festering wound in the society he was in. His employer had mentioned tight reins on his mind, but could you really use reins when the beast itself can pick up on them and pull you closer to it?

Mamoru had learned when what is now scar tissue was still stinging, you don't enter the beast's cave to fight it in the dark. It was suicide and it would rip you to shreds. You breathe in the beast's air, wait for it to give you the remains of its feed, take its scent as your own. You bear the teeth and claws scraping along the underside of your ribs, ready to gut you, disable you. But then the beast realizes it needs you, you become symbiotic, and the beast would still live, but dependent on your own will to do so.

It's why he lets the silence fall between them, as dangerous as it is, rattlesnake coiled warm and tense and ready to snap, while underneath the mask he grimaces at the memory William brings forth. The gaudiness of the room, the gratuitous state of undress, it all looks too much like the many mobsters he brought down, so pitifully coitus-interrupted.

But the aggression bubbling under William's skin is what registers the most, especially at the casualty of it all. Undermining like he's nothing.

"My partner," he says, finally, moving his head to face towards the end of the hallway and casting his earing to the back. He knows who William was referring to. "Your guy didn't know what was coming to him, huh?"