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Entry tags:
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WHO: Richard Gecko, Loxley, Gwenaëlle Baudin, Seth Gecko, Richard Dickerson
WHAT: Richie and Loxley are trailing the same guy, shit goes sideways for both of them
WHEN: Time is a social construct
WHERE: Kirkwall -> Gallows
NOTES: Blood, violence
WHAT: Richie and Loxley are trailing the same guy, shit goes sideways for both of them
WHEN: Time is a social construct
WHERE: Kirkwall -> Gallows
NOTES: Blood, violence
It's a clinical pragmatism and cool acceptance of what he is that has Richard calling this hunting. He could easily pretend otherwise - it wasn't like tailing a mark was a practice he'd only learnt on being turned, after all. But it's the result that makes it different. A job would end with a score. A hunt ends with a kill. There's no hiding from the reality of that.
The skills are the same though. Recon first, hanging around the various taverns, blending in with the usual patrons while he watches and listens. Chooses the mark. Tails them for a couple of nights, learns their patterns and habits. Then, it's location.
He'd had it down to a fine art long before Kisa, and long before Kirkwall. Sure, it had needed some adaptation here, but now it's been three months. He's ironed out the kinks. Has it down smooth as silk. And Seth hasn't needed to get involved once.
So he'll argue it's confidence, not complacency that has him failing to notice this particular slaver has another tail. Quickening his pace to bear down on him as he takes a left into Richard's chosen alley, not seeing that there's another shadow following in both their wakes.
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This portion of Kirkwall was a mine, and once everything of value was extracted from its depth, everything (and everyone) considered worthless sloughed down into it instead. A warren of dark tunnels, larger chambers dug into the stone, cloaked in miasma that no one should be breathing for very long. The echoes of voices seem to come from every direction, shouts and whispers and sometimes just inarticulate wailing.
Loxley's business does not take him down here too often, but certainly not never, and more than he'd like it to. It takes him down here tonight, because that is where Quileni, the man he is tailing, has chosen to go.
It's warm down here, humid and feverish, and the cloak he is wearing doesn't help. The edge of his hood is generous enough to cover his head and sit over his horns without giving him away, the ratty drape of it hiding the fine rapier he has lashed to his belt. He curls his hand thoughtfully around the hilt as he—too late—notices that another figure is following along with more purpose than he realised.
Well—
He speeds up, footsteps near-silent.
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Which is why Richard knows his target will still hold some caution, regardless of how much he's had to drink or how confident he is in walking these streets. He never expects it to be easy. But there's a difference between fending off a mugger or attacker, and dealing with a culebra.
His fangs have already dropped by the time the slaver realises the footsteps behind him are too close, too fast. Eyes slit golden, thick ridges of diamond scales across his face. There's barely any light down here, but what the slaver does make out has him yelling in fright, dropping the knife he'd had gripped in his hand in favour of instead trying to run.
He's too slow.
With a snarl, Richard lunges. Fangs rip flesh, blood flooding hot and messy into his mouth. He bears the slaver up against the wall as his body begins to grow heavy and slack, mind filtering memories and images, hunger slowly being sated.
He doesn't even notice the first clumsy stab to his gut.
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Doesn't stop at the mouth of the alleyway, knowing better than to linger, so he barrels into the narrow space, only clocking that two figures are locked into a death-grapple and he recognises Quileni's face, gaping and shock-pale, upturned, past the shoulder of the stranger. Well, fuck.
He doesn't fuss with the rapier. It's a dagger he pulls smooth out of some hidden sheath, and launches forwards. Not an attack—he isn't about to knife someone for murdering some Vint slave-seller, for gods' sake—but not overly friendly. Slipping an arm up under the arm of the attacker to haul him backwards, and the flat of his knife pushing up against his throat.
"Let him go," half-hissed into Richard's ear. He also doesn't notice that gut stab. Not yet.
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But a knife to the throat is no real threat. He can survive worse, especially when he's just fed. He roars, outraged and guttural, bucks backwards to dislodge the weight of the body behind him. The slaver is let go, slumping, near lifeless, a lot cause for this attempted rescue.
But with what little energy he has left, he pulls the knife free from Richard's stomach and plunges it in again. Two, three, four more times, the snarls spilling from Richard's throat suddenly turning harsher in pain.
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the unmistakable sound of a quick shivving, the wet impact of it. Loxley bares his teeth and hauls this man back, pushing him aside.
"Gods," uttered, at the mess.
The slaver's friend, as Loxley has been cast, is wide-eyed and tense, a leanly built qunari with horns that curl like a ram's. Near-gold eyes catch the light in flat nocturnal discs as he looks this stranger over, brain going into overdrive as he tries to comprehend what he's seeing and what it means. Red blood like a half-mask. A mouth full of sharp teeth.
And meanwhile, Quileni is choking, dying, sliding to the alleyway floor.
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Qunari, a distant part of Richard's brain supplies. He'd read about them. And if he didn't get his shit together, this one was going to do him some serious damage, if not maybe get lucky on killing him.
He fumbles for the knife in his stomach, pulling it free with a pained grunt, but it seems like it might have been one effort too many. His head swims, and he staggers, falling hard to his knees. The scales melt back from his face, eyes sliding blue, teeth human. He clutches his belly, wet with too much blood, and for a second he's back at The Twister, gunshot blasting through his back. Dying.
"Fuck," is hissed out, knife clattering on the floor as it drops from his slackening hand. Seth is going to kill him.
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Eyes still locked on this man's face, watching it transform, knowing instinctively that this is a rifter on that basis alone, too strange and too out of place to be anything else. He tears off the glove on his left hand, palm raised in what is already a gesture of peace if not further communicated by the glimmer of green light nested in the meat below his thumb.
Even while doing so, a foot goes out to snag the dropped knife under his boot toe, and scrape it aside, out of reach. Quileni, now, is forgotten, left to sputter and choke and die on the ground.
Richard falls to his knees; Loxley crouches down, at a cautious distance, hands hovered, now empty. "My name's Loxley," he says, tentative. "And you're going to die, probably, unless you let me help. I'm a rifter too. I can get you somewhere—"
That's just so much blood.
"Somewhere safe."
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"The fuck are you doing helping him?" Accusative as much as questioning, pain lancing sharp edges through his words. He'd hunted the guy, checked and double checked what he was involved in before he went for the kill. He always did. Either this Loxley was working with slavers, or he'd followed Richard, and if the latter, offering him help now also didn't make any fucking sense.
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Better to just give answers than bicker about what they have time to talk about, and besides, if this rifter is lively enough to bitch—Loxley will take that as a positive sign. He keeps poised as is in his crouch, hands empty. A horned, gleaming-eyed figure in the dark, the flash of a pointed canine under his lip.
He knows how it looks. He rocks forward to rest a knee on the ground, hands still signalling surrender. "He's a shithead, but works for worse shitheads. I needed information. What were you doing to him? Just now, what the fuck was that."
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And, as the seconds ticked by and more blood spilt past his fingers, his certainty that it wouldn't kill him was slowly starting to fissure and crack.
"Eating," he says. Flat, blunt. No pride in it, just a basic necessity of life, like anyone. "I need blood, so I hunt shitheads."
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"What a terrible misunderstanding," has an edge of hysterical humour, fancy affect to his voice deliberately discordant with their surroundings of a corpse, several gut wounds, Darktown miasma, and really, Loxley's whole deal. He isn't panicked, however, only processing. Worried, now.
The more they delay, the more the prospect of this man getting out of this place alive slips away. "Come on," he says, now going so far as to reach out, gripping above the other man's elbow. "I can't help you, but I know people who can. Let me get you to them."
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Or maybe it's more the threads of real panic starting to leech into the back of Richard's mind that are making him tip into paranoia. There's too much blood under his hands, head starting to feel light, and he'd just fed. He should be healing.
He can't refuse help. But he doesn't know Loxley, and he doesn't know who Loxley knows, and he hasn't felt this for a long time: the sense of absolutely any control slipping completely out of his reach.
"Gallows," he says, a little blurted. "My brother, Seth. Seth Gecko. Just help me get to him."
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As far as Loxley knows, Seth Gecko could be a figment of this fully dying man's imagination, but at least they have a common direction. He is still thinking about eating, I need blood as his remaining eye flicks a last look over the countenance of Firstname Gecko, before—
Fuck it. In for a penny, and all that. Loxley pulls him to his feet with about as much mind for the mess of injury in the other man's midsection as he can afford to pay, which isn't very much, and wrangles an arm around his shoulders for him. They're mostly of a height, Loxley bending to make the ordeal a little easier as he begins to walk them out of the alleyway, into the tunnel-roads of Darktown, strange fogs whirling around their feet.
To the nearest exit, which will at least bring them not so far from the docks above. There isn't a lot of conversation until they find the narrow switchback stairs that lead up.
"Lean there," Loxley says, not actually removing Gecko from the grasp they share so much as keeping him upright between damp brick and his shoulder, freeing up one hand to get out his crystal. "What's your name, anyway?"
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He tries again: "Richard." Then, disbelieving, "Fuck." Ironic, downright stupid in the circumstances, but even this stranger who was carting his dying ass along had known his brother's name first.
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Something funny about all these men who only appear to be human called Dick, but not so much that Loxley pauses to ask Rich Richard if that really is his real name. His sending crystal twitched out from under his collar, twisted like so that it glows a dull gleam between greasily bloodied fingers—
Muttering his own name to activate, he more clearly states Gwenaëlle Baudin, before he says, "Change of plans. I've an injured rifter with me who needs healing.
"Catch your breath," is more to Richard, Loxley keeping him half-pinned to the wall with a hand clenching his collar, braced there.
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No, not helpful, she reorients before she can pester him for an explanation that presumably she'll get in more detail when no one's in danger of bleeding out.
“How bad is it? I can bring my bag and stabilise him,” and it sounds like she's moving, already. “At least a bit. Does he need a mage right now or—?”