Blessing Bruises
(?)Community Member
Offline
- Report Post
- Posted: Wed, 08 Aug 2007 03:30:01 +0000
The piano echoed softly in the shadowed interior. Her feet, propped up against the passenger-side dashboard so that her laptop could rest decently balanced in her lap, bobbed every now and then to the song as the bass surfaced in it. The keyboard in her laptop controlled when and where it surfaced, her fingers tapping with a practiced elegance through the commands to the editing software to change the tempo of the song as her mood shifted.
White light flashed through her windshield for several seconds, catching the translucency of the rain washing over it and throwing its blinding illumination through the jeep interior in ripples. Her eyes glanced up to catch the last seconds of it as the thunder followed its flamboyant counterpart, booming through the storm-clouded skies and rumbling through the adjacent alleyway walls and even through the vehicle itself with the volume of its complaint. Hearing the rain persist in its dull but heavy downpour against her windshield, she let her eyes fall back on the soft illumination radiating from her laptop screen and, after waiting a few seconds for the thunder to continue its complaint through the rest of the city, returned to her editing work.
The sound of something jiggling in the passenger side door lock didn’t even register with her until the time to do something about it had come and passed. For a second the door was open, the sound and scent and nightly chill of the autumn thunderstorm gusting into the jeep as an accompanist to the figure that had opened the door, and then it was closed again and the lock set back into place and the figure seated casually in the passenger seat before she had chance to do little more than blink.
His clothes were dripping; she noticed that first, because they made the only sound in the otherwise silent vehicle besides the piano strokes from her speakers. Water droplets collected and fell from his sleeves and pants to the rubber mat she had on the floor below his feet, and water dripped from strands of his soaked hair onto what sounded like a leather jacket.
Her eyes narrowed slightly. The fact that he had just picked her passenger door lock to break into her jeep wasn’t what was important to her at that second; it was the fact that his clothes were quite enthusiastically soaking their way into the seat that made her rather irate, and it prompted her voice into action, if only for the lowest, and most derogatory of whispers: “You’re wreckin’ my seats, dude.”
The backseat passenger side door opened. She caught only a glimpse of the second figure when her eyes flashed with irritation to the backseat before the door was closed again, shutting out the loud downpour and restless thunder and again leaving the now slightly uncomfortable interior to the piano score. For a couple seconds, nothing but silence passed between the three of them. Her eyes of course kept moving between them both, between the shadows were she thought their faces were (they were wearing hoods), but neither of them made any move to speak.
When the silence grew awkward enough to the point where even her own breathing was becoming too loud, she opened her mouth to speak and promptly had a gun shoved into it. The cold metal pressed against her lips with just enough brutality to make it sting, and only forcing her lips closed at the last second prevented the thing from pushing wholly into her mouth.
“Don’t scream.”
The one in the passenger seat beside her was the one that spoke. He had moved from his casual, nonchalant seated position to the console that rested between the seats before she even had a chance to react, his hand gripping the headrest above her while the other held that gun to her mouth, his body towering over her lower, half-reclined one with a size comparison that felt to her at the moment like that of lion to a mouse.
Disgust flickered through both her eyes and the frown at her lips. “I wasn’t gonna scream, a*****e.”
She could feel the barrel move along with her lips for each word, and seriously doubted her safety for those few seconds. She couldn’t remember seeing him move; one second he’d been sitting there, looking as harmless as one could look in a kind of break-and-enter situation like this, then the next second he had been all but practically on top of her, his one knee braced on the console between the seats while his other leg steadied his weight on the one foot still grounded to the passenger-side floor.
Her face tightened slightly with disgust. The stupid … b*****d … …
He tapped the gun warningly against her lips, softer this time, enough to make her shut her mouth before anything else she wanted to say had a chance to rampage loose. The guy in the backseat apparently took her silence as a cue, straightening up and rising slowly from the seat into a standing position (or at least as much of one as the jeep interior would allow) with his hand reaching back to pull out a pair of handcuffs from his overcoat pocket.
“Put your hands on the steering wheel; the right one beneath the top rung, the left one above it.”
The piano was still whispering softly through the background. Her body, which had been formerly slouched against the inside of her door to make use of it as a crude backrest, only now reluctantly straightened up, a darkened scowl twisting through the frown at her lips. Her hand lifted, pressing its index and middle finger down against the monitor of her laptop to slowly push it closed, her eyes never moving from the hooded shadows where she thought the first guy’s eyes would be.
“… Gonna kill me?”
His body remained completely still, the gun motionless against her lips. “It’s likely.”
“… … Tch … ******** you.” Her low, almost snarl-like tone held no trepidation, spitting from her lips with a bitter vengeance that seemed suddenly not at all fazed by the gun barrel at her mouth. The motions of the one in the back seat slowly ceased, the momentary pause enough of a reaction for her to know his surprise even if she couldn’t see the look on his face. Feeling the metal push suddenly harder against her lips, she jerked her head back instinctively with a displeasured hiss as a faint copper taste graced her mouth, the rough motion breaking the skin between her teeth and that gun and sending dull pain throbbing through her bottom lip.
“You annoy me.”
The first guy’s voice sounded lower than before, the same cold, harsh note of warning in his words as had been in her swearing. Her teeth gritted angrily together, more than just a little distemper now impairing her judgment. The second after her retaliation, when her knuckles throbbed from the fury she had thrown behind them into the side of his face, she almost regretted it; the second guy pulling a gun on her in that desperate moment when she wrestled for the one from the first was a plot twist she hadn’t expected.
“I’ll kill you.” His whisper was right up against the side of her ear, gloved fingers twisting through a handful of her long hair and yanking her head cruelly back to expose the front of her neck. The cold metal of his gun pressed up beneath her chin next, gouging roughly into the skin just above her trachea and half-obstructing her air pipe. “Drop it.”
Her fingers clenched bitterly around the gun she had wrested away. “Blow me.”
“Tch …” That emotionless tone muttered again from the mouth of that first guy as his own gun was shoved warningly against his temple, his eyes now staring dully up at her in complete lack of acknowledgement for the advantage she had over him. “Her reflexes—so annoying …”
“I’d really like to kill her,” said the voice calmly at her ear, holding absolutely no concern for the violence it spoke of. The barrel tip pressed more savagely into the underside of her chin, and though a soft, strangled sound of infuriation rose warningly in her throat, it was not to that guy that her darkened eyes paid attention. The chest of the first guy rose and fell gently beneath her knee, labored slightly from the presence of her weight on top of it, his breaths leaving his lips in shorter, almost strained gasps.
The hood over his head—it’d fallen down when she’d reversed their positions and tackled him violently back against the passenger-side door, grabbing the barrel of his gun and twisting it roughly sideways. His wrist had broken easily; the frail bone had snapped before he’d gotten his finger off the trigger, the rest of his hand forced along with the rough motion and his wrist unable to withstand the pressure and speed of the twist. When his body had hit the door, her hand had already spun the relinquished gun around to grip the handle, index finger pressed against the trigger and ready to empty it into his head.
But then that mild confusion had seemed to crease his brow, pale blue eyes staring up at her not in fear but in gentle curiosity. The strands of black hair that fell across his forehead just grazed the tops of his gaze, contrasting the icy azure and throwing the color of his irises into a fleeting, but inescapable allure. His young teenage face, void of emotion in its entirety, had held nothing as he looked back up at her; nothing, except for a chilling, enthralling curiosity that had stilled her finger on the trigger the instant she saw it, had stopped her body from reacting even as the shadow of his comrade had rose up behind her body in the reflective passenger-side window.
“… Your eyes are annoying, dude.” Her mutter was like both of theirs, uncaring of the threat on her body albeit a bit more breathless than either of theirs had been (they didn’t have a purpose-confused firearms trying to cut their way into their throats like she did).
His face made no physical recognition of her statement, the only bodily sign that he even heard her being the curious tilt of his head sideways that jarred the gun against his temple as he leaned into it rather than away from it. “… … Would you please get up?” he whispered a second later, no actual pleading lining the soft request.
“No.”
“But I don’t want to soil my clothes when I cut you.”
She felt the pocketknife press gently but firmly into the skin below her halter, and made no move to restrain the deepening anger working its way through her scowl. The way the second guy had her head yanked back meant she couldn’t look at it, but she could feel its location perfectly; it felt like ice against her fire-hot skin, biting into the yielding flesh right above her kidney in the preparation to stab directly into it if so provoked.
“… I’m gonna shoot you in the ********’ face,” she growled suddenly, the hand holding his gun to his head flashing from his temple to shove the barrel right between his eyes. The sharp, warning jerk from the fistful of hair didn’t faze her at all, only twisting her face through with a nice flush of pain to play with the anger already in it.
His expression only grew more curious, as though bemused by her small outburst. The blade did not move. “Why?”
“… … Your clothes are already freakin’ wet.”
“Rainwater dries; blood stains.”
“Well, I don’t want my clothes stained either, jackass.”
“Feel free to undress.”
“… … Tch.” Her hand remained unwavering on the gun, his doing the same on the knife. “… … You’ve some nerve, breakin’ in my jeep without even knowin’ who the hell I am.”
“What are you talking about?” His face retained its gentle, emotionless composure; the curiosity now only flickered through that intense vibrancy in his eyes. “Your name is Raelynn Leland. You’re the entrepreneur of the infamous fight club, ‘Scala Caeli,’ a Latin phrase meaning the “ladder of Heaven,” which is a contradiction in of itself due to the reputed hellish nature of your conduct and attack methods against your enemies.”
His eyes caught her own as she gave him a broodingly unimpressed stare, her fingers tightening around the gun with the only semi-subconscious intent for her finger to slip on the trigger in the action. “Yeah? Did you come here to read me freakin’ kingpin encyclopedia facts or to do your job?”
“Don’t be demeaning. They teach the universal rule that one, miss Raelynn Leland, aged nineteen, is a high-security felon approaching the end of her last lifeline. You’re known as the as the ‘Talon of Cataclysm,’ the great sword wielded by the dragon known as ‘Armageddon,’ the bringer of the end of the age of syndicates and all they stand for.”
“… … Oh yeah? Did they also teach you when you come to work to not be pissed out of your mind? Don’t talk to me about freakin’ prophecies with abstract s**t like that, idiot.”
“Pissed?” The murmur passed his lips in genuine bemusement, though that impassive expression of his remained unwavering. The gun beneath her chin pressed up even harder as the hand in her hair yanked back, forcing her head back enough so now even the angle of her neck was forcing her breaths out through hoarse, raggedly strained gasps.
“No chit-chat. You’re a serious thorn in our master’s sid—”
She felt the splash hit her cheek, slick and warm with human life as his now exposed throat strangled wordlessly behind her. The sounds bubbled up with his blood, the fingers of her free hand still aflame with hellfire as they dug mercilessly into the front of his neck behind her, her eyes narrowed and her expression darkened now not only with anger but with the sheer, demon-like concentration of her fire and the command of the dragon behind it.
The gun beneath her chin shook against her skin, faltering in its contact as his hand trembled violently, spasms of shock plaguing his fingers until their grip could no longer retain its strength on the handle of the gun. She felt it hit the exposed skin of her collarbone above her halter as his hand fell, and her eyes narrowed even further in disgust as his body began slowly sagging against her own.
“You freakin’ human assassins—” her mutter was oddly reverberant in the sudden silence that had overtaken the vehicle, the rhythmic sway of her windshield wipers back and forth across the glass being the only sound to fill the quiet besides the outside storm “—really … piss me off …”
Fingers closing together against the front of his throat, she scattered his body to ashes with a practiced, disinterested flick of her hand, her eyes never leaving the ones of the first guy beneath her. His face was still unchanged, staring up at her with the same emotional detachment he had possessed ever since first meeting her stare.
The only difference now was his curiosity; it looked gentler.
“You’re a dragon.”
“… Yeah.”
Her free hand caught his as he suddenly shoved it forwards, stopping the blade at a shallow cut just a centimeter or so into her skin before his fingers could thrust it any further. The fingers of her other hand tightened around the gun held to his head, her pale olive and unblinking eyes not breaking from his equally eerie, illumine blue ones. “I broke the wrist of the one hand,” she muttered broodingly, giving him a blatant, ‘are-you-asking-to-die’ stare of irritation. “I can start on these fingers next; they’ll break ten times easier than that freakin’ wrist, and there’s more of ‘em to play with.”
“He never told me you were a dragon.”
The first knuckle of his forefinger snapped under her expectant grip, her gazed hardened with lingering hostility as a flash of stiff self-restraint tightened through his face. Moving her own forefinger and thumb from the his first knuckle down to the second, she braced her thumb against the top of it and began to slowly push up with her index again, keeping her eyes focused disinterestedly on his face.
“Y’mean Seth?”
“You know him?” The second knuckle broke the same way as the first, and she heard his teeth crick as he bit down hard on what she assumed was human frailty. Watching him with a dark, moderately bored stare, she moved her two fingers again down to the third knuckle of his forefinger, pressing her thumb on top of it with the full readiness to crush the bone beneath it and her waiting index finger.
“Yeah. I’ve always been waitin’ for the day he was gonna get another dragon after me.”
“… I don’t understand … what you mean.”
She stared down at him, more than just slight disgust deepening her scowl. Those irises stared back up at her with that unflinching curiosity, still virginal to the cloud of human emotion as their color caught the lights glimmering softly from her stereo. “… It’s them freakin’ eyes of yours, dude. They ain’t so different from a human’s, but they got that glow to ‘em—a dragon’s glow. Just like mine.”
“… … That accusation is uncalled fo—gnnh—” the last of the soft statement choked off into silence, his eyes squeezing shut briefly as pain flashed with visible reluctance through his expression, the bone of his third knuckle cracking under the merciless strength of her thumb and forefinger.
“Just … shush.” Her teeth bit down against the freshly closed-over cut on her bottom lip, opening the tiny abrasion again and tearing it further apart with the rough motion of her bite. The copper taste ran onto her tongue, and she let it gather there for a few seconds before spitting it unceremoniously onto the side of his face the second his eyes dared to open again. “Ain’t nothing but a dragon that can break another dragon’s hide and spill its blood, dude. Why d’you think I cared about what your gun was doin’ and didn’t give a s**t about your buddy’s?”
“… You’re reputed to have an idiotic disregard for your well-being.”
She stared at him broodingly, her scowl only deepening when his eyes portrayed no acknowledgement of the fact that he had blatantly insulted her. “That’s ‘cuz Seth is only supposed to have one dragon in his arsenal, and it weren’t supposed to be no freakin’ kid.”
“So … you’re a high-class felon because no assassin but a dragon can lay a hand on you?”
“Yeah.”
“Well that’s not fair.”
“What’s your point?”
“… … Who’s the other dragon?”
The question was so soft and abrupt that she couldn’t get her head around for a second. “What?”
“The other dragon.” His voice was almost plaintive, slightly breathless from the effort of restraining himself from vocalizing his pain but still composed besides that. The deep crimson spattered across his cheek and nose contrasted oddly with his pale skin and opposed completely the deadened, but dangerously luminous azure in his irises. “… If it wasn’t supposed to be me and he has definite possession of—”
“He doesn’t ‘possess one,’ idiot—he is one.”
“… I … beg your pardon … ?”The impassive gentility on his face did not waver, though something else flitted across his expression with it that looked a little darker, a little more stricken than what she had come to expect from his soulless attitude. Her fingers remained perfectly still on the gun, keeping it pressed gently against his flesh just above his eyes in the center of his forehead, neither tightening her grip on the trigger nor allowing her finger to loosen itself in the slightest.
After giving him a long, pointedly demeaning look for a few seconds, a soft snort of derision passed her lips. “Your boss, Seth Rheese?” came her mutter, for that moment becoming just as emotionless as his had been all along, her eyes locking with his in a fleeting second of genuine, but coldly derogatory amusement:
“He’s a dragon, too.”
White light flashed through her windshield for several seconds, catching the translucency of the rain washing over it and throwing its blinding illumination through the jeep interior in ripples. Her eyes glanced up to catch the last seconds of it as the thunder followed its flamboyant counterpart, booming through the storm-clouded skies and rumbling through the adjacent alleyway walls and even through the vehicle itself with the volume of its complaint. Hearing the rain persist in its dull but heavy downpour against her windshield, she let her eyes fall back on the soft illumination radiating from her laptop screen and, after waiting a few seconds for the thunder to continue its complaint through the rest of the city, returned to her editing work.
The sound of something jiggling in the passenger side door lock didn’t even register with her until the time to do something about it had come and passed. For a second the door was open, the sound and scent and nightly chill of the autumn thunderstorm gusting into the jeep as an accompanist to the figure that had opened the door, and then it was closed again and the lock set back into place and the figure seated casually in the passenger seat before she had chance to do little more than blink.
His clothes were dripping; she noticed that first, because they made the only sound in the otherwise silent vehicle besides the piano strokes from her speakers. Water droplets collected and fell from his sleeves and pants to the rubber mat she had on the floor below his feet, and water dripped from strands of his soaked hair onto what sounded like a leather jacket.
Her eyes narrowed slightly. The fact that he had just picked her passenger door lock to break into her jeep wasn’t what was important to her at that second; it was the fact that his clothes were quite enthusiastically soaking their way into the seat that made her rather irate, and it prompted her voice into action, if only for the lowest, and most derogatory of whispers: “You’re wreckin’ my seats, dude.”
The backseat passenger side door opened. She caught only a glimpse of the second figure when her eyes flashed with irritation to the backseat before the door was closed again, shutting out the loud downpour and restless thunder and again leaving the now slightly uncomfortable interior to the piano score. For a couple seconds, nothing but silence passed between the three of them. Her eyes of course kept moving between them both, between the shadows were she thought their faces were (they were wearing hoods), but neither of them made any move to speak.
When the silence grew awkward enough to the point where even her own breathing was becoming too loud, she opened her mouth to speak and promptly had a gun shoved into it. The cold metal pressed against her lips with just enough brutality to make it sting, and only forcing her lips closed at the last second prevented the thing from pushing wholly into her mouth.
“Don’t scream.”
The one in the passenger seat beside her was the one that spoke. He had moved from his casual, nonchalant seated position to the console that rested between the seats before she even had a chance to react, his hand gripping the headrest above her while the other held that gun to her mouth, his body towering over her lower, half-reclined one with a size comparison that felt to her at the moment like that of lion to a mouse.
Disgust flickered through both her eyes and the frown at her lips. “I wasn’t gonna scream, a*****e.”
She could feel the barrel move along with her lips for each word, and seriously doubted her safety for those few seconds. She couldn’t remember seeing him move; one second he’d been sitting there, looking as harmless as one could look in a kind of break-and-enter situation like this, then the next second he had been all but practically on top of her, his one knee braced on the console between the seats while his other leg steadied his weight on the one foot still grounded to the passenger-side floor.
Her face tightened slightly with disgust. The stupid … b*****d … …
He tapped the gun warningly against her lips, softer this time, enough to make her shut her mouth before anything else she wanted to say had a chance to rampage loose. The guy in the backseat apparently took her silence as a cue, straightening up and rising slowly from the seat into a standing position (or at least as much of one as the jeep interior would allow) with his hand reaching back to pull out a pair of handcuffs from his overcoat pocket.
“Put your hands on the steering wheel; the right one beneath the top rung, the left one above it.”
The piano was still whispering softly through the background. Her body, which had been formerly slouched against the inside of her door to make use of it as a crude backrest, only now reluctantly straightened up, a darkened scowl twisting through the frown at her lips. Her hand lifted, pressing its index and middle finger down against the monitor of her laptop to slowly push it closed, her eyes never moving from the hooded shadows where she thought the first guy’s eyes would be.
“… Gonna kill me?”
His body remained completely still, the gun motionless against her lips. “It’s likely.”
“… … Tch … ******** you.” Her low, almost snarl-like tone held no trepidation, spitting from her lips with a bitter vengeance that seemed suddenly not at all fazed by the gun barrel at her mouth. The motions of the one in the back seat slowly ceased, the momentary pause enough of a reaction for her to know his surprise even if she couldn’t see the look on his face. Feeling the metal push suddenly harder against her lips, she jerked her head back instinctively with a displeasured hiss as a faint copper taste graced her mouth, the rough motion breaking the skin between her teeth and that gun and sending dull pain throbbing through her bottom lip.
“You annoy me.”
The first guy’s voice sounded lower than before, the same cold, harsh note of warning in his words as had been in her swearing. Her teeth gritted angrily together, more than just a little distemper now impairing her judgment. The second after her retaliation, when her knuckles throbbed from the fury she had thrown behind them into the side of his face, she almost regretted it; the second guy pulling a gun on her in that desperate moment when she wrestled for the one from the first was a plot twist she hadn’t expected.
“I’ll kill you.” His whisper was right up against the side of her ear, gloved fingers twisting through a handful of her long hair and yanking her head cruelly back to expose the front of her neck. The cold metal of his gun pressed up beneath her chin next, gouging roughly into the skin just above her trachea and half-obstructing her air pipe. “Drop it.”
Her fingers clenched bitterly around the gun she had wrested away. “Blow me.”
“Tch …” That emotionless tone muttered again from the mouth of that first guy as his own gun was shoved warningly against his temple, his eyes now staring dully up at her in complete lack of acknowledgement for the advantage she had over him. “Her reflexes—so annoying …”
“I’d really like to kill her,” said the voice calmly at her ear, holding absolutely no concern for the violence it spoke of. The barrel tip pressed more savagely into the underside of her chin, and though a soft, strangled sound of infuriation rose warningly in her throat, it was not to that guy that her darkened eyes paid attention. The chest of the first guy rose and fell gently beneath her knee, labored slightly from the presence of her weight on top of it, his breaths leaving his lips in shorter, almost strained gasps.
The hood over his head—it’d fallen down when she’d reversed their positions and tackled him violently back against the passenger-side door, grabbing the barrel of his gun and twisting it roughly sideways. His wrist had broken easily; the frail bone had snapped before he’d gotten his finger off the trigger, the rest of his hand forced along with the rough motion and his wrist unable to withstand the pressure and speed of the twist. When his body had hit the door, her hand had already spun the relinquished gun around to grip the handle, index finger pressed against the trigger and ready to empty it into his head.
But then that mild confusion had seemed to crease his brow, pale blue eyes staring up at her not in fear but in gentle curiosity. The strands of black hair that fell across his forehead just grazed the tops of his gaze, contrasting the icy azure and throwing the color of his irises into a fleeting, but inescapable allure. His young teenage face, void of emotion in its entirety, had held nothing as he looked back up at her; nothing, except for a chilling, enthralling curiosity that had stilled her finger on the trigger the instant she saw it, had stopped her body from reacting even as the shadow of his comrade had rose up behind her body in the reflective passenger-side window.
“… Your eyes are annoying, dude.” Her mutter was like both of theirs, uncaring of the threat on her body albeit a bit more breathless than either of theirs had been (they didn’t have a purpose-confused firearms trying to cut their way into their throats like she did).
His face made no physical recognition of her statement, the only bodily sign that he even heard her being the curious tilt of his head sideways that jarred the gun against his temple as he leaned into it rather than away from it. “… … Would you please get up?” he whispered a second later, no actual pleading lining the soft request.
“No.”
“But I don’t want to soil my clothes when I cut you.”
She felt the pocketknife press gently but firmly into the skin below her halter, and made no move to restrain the deepening anger working its way through her scowl. The way the second guy had her head yanked back meant she couldn’t look at it, but she could feel its location perfectly; it felt like ice against her fire-hot skin, biting into the yielding flesh right above her kidney in the preparation to stab directly into it if so provoked.
“… I’m gonna shoot you in the ********’ face,” she growled suddenly, the hand holding his gun to his head flashing from his temple to shove the barrel right between his eyes. The sharp, warning jerk from the fistful of hair didn’t faze her at all, only twisting her face through with a nice flush of pain to play with the anger already in it.
His expression only grew more curious, as though bemused by her small outburst. The blade did not move. “Why?”
“… … Your clothes are already freakin’ wet.”
“Rainwater dries; blood stains.”
“Well, I don’t want my clothes stained either, jackass.”
“Feel free to undress.”
“… … Tch.” Her hand remained unwavering on the gun, his doing the same on the knife. “… … You’ve some nerve, breakin’ in my jeep without even knowin’ who the hell I am.”
“What are you talking about?” His face retained its gentle, emotionless composure; the curiosity now only flickered through that intense vibrancy in his eyes. “Your name is Raelynn Leland. You’re the entrepreneur of the infamous fight club, ‘Scala Caeli,’ a Latin phrase meaning the “ladder of Heaven,” which is a contradiction in of itself due to the reputed hellish nature of your conduct and attack methods against your enemies.”
His eyes caught her own as she gave him a broodingly unimpressed stare, her fingers tightening around the gun with the only semi-subconscious intent for her finger to slip on the trigger in the action. “Yeah? Did you come here to read me freakin’ kingpin encyclopedia facts or to do your job?”
“Don’t be demeaning. They teach the universal rule that one, miss Raelynn Leland, aged nineteen, is a high-security felon approaching the end of her last lifeline. You’re known as the as the ‘Talon of Cataclysm,’ the great sword wielded by the dragon known as ‘Armageddon,’ the bringer of the end of the age of syndicates and all they stand for.”
“… … Oh yeah? Did they also teach you when you come to work to not be pissed out of your mind? Don’t talk to me about freakin’ prophecies with abstract s**t like that, idiot.”
“Pissed?” The murmur passed his lips in genuine bemusement, though that impassive expression of his remained unwavering. The gun beneath her chin pressed up even harder as the hand in her hair yanked back, forcing her head back enough so now even the angle of her neck was forcing her breaths out through hoarse, raggedly strained gasps.
“No chit-chat. You’re a serious thorn in our master’s sid—”
She felt the splash hit her cheek, slick and warm with human life as his now exposed throat strangled wordlessly behind her. The sounds bubbled up with his blood, the fingers of her free hand still aflame with hellfire as they dug mercilessly into the front of his neck behind her, her eyes narrowed and her expression darkened now not only with anger but with the sheer, demon-like concentration of her fire and the command of the dragon behind it.
The gun beneath her chin shook against her skin, faltering in its contact as his hand trembled violently, spasms of shock plaguing his fingers until their grip could no longer retain its strength on the handle of the gun. She felt it hit the exposed skin of her collarbone above her halter as his hand fell, and her eyes narrowed even further in disgust as his body began slowly sagging against her own.
“You freakin’ human assassins—” her mutter was oddly reverberant in the sudden silence that had overtaken the vehicle, the rhythmic sway of her windshield wipers back and forth across the glass being the only sound to fill the quiet besides the outside storm “—really … piss me off …”
Fingers closing together against the front of his throat, she scattered his body to ashes with a practiced, disinterested flick of her hand, her eyes never leaving the ones of the first guy beneath her. His face was still unchanged, staring up at her with the same emotional detachment he had possessed ever since first meeting her stare.
The only difference now was his curiosity; it looked gentler.
“You’re a dragon.”
“… Yeah.”
Her free hand caught his as he suddenly shoved it forwards, stopping the blade at a shallow cut just a centimeter or so into her skin before his fingers could thrust it any further. The fingers of her other hand tightened around the gun held to his head, her pale olive and unblinking eyes not breaking from his equally eerie, illumine blue ones. “I broke the wrist of the one hand,” she muttered broodingly, giving him a blatant, ‘are-you-asking-to-die’ stare of irritation. “I can start on these fingers next; they’ll break ten times easier than that freakin’ wrist, and there’s more of ‘em to play with.”
“He never told me you were a dragon.”
The first knuckle of his forefinger snapped under her expectant grip, her gazed hardened with lingering hostility as a flash of stiff self-restraint tightened through his face. Moving her own forefinger and thumb from the his first knuckle down to the second, she braced her thumb against the top of it and began to slowly push up with her index again, keeping her eyes focused disinterestedly on his face.
“Y’mean Seth?”
“You know him?” The second knuckle broke the same way as the first, and she heard his teeth crick as he bit down hard on what she assumed was human frailty. Watching him with a dark, moderately bored stare, she moved her two fingers again down to the third knuckle of his forefinger, pressing her thumb on top of it with the full readiness to crush the bone beneath it and her waiting index finger.
“Yeah. I’ve always been waitin’ for the day he was gonna get another dragon after me.”
“… I don’t understand … what you mean.”
She stared down at him, more than just slight disgust deepening her scowl. Those irises stared back up at her with that unflinching curiosity, still virginal to the cloud of human emotion as their color caught the lights glimmering softly from her stereo. “… It’s them freakin’ eyes of yours, dude. They ain’t so different from a human’s, but they got that glow to ‘em—a dragon’s glow. Just like mine.”
“… … That accusation is uncalled fo—gnnh—” the last of the soft statement choked off into silence, his eyes squeezing shut briefly as pain flashed with visible reluctance through his expression, the bone of his third knuckle cracking under the merciless strength of her thumb and forefinger.
“Just … shush.” Her teeth bit down against the freshly closed-over cut on her bottom lip, opening the tiny abrasion again and tearing it further apart with the rough motion of her bite. The copper taste ran onto her tongue, and she let it gather there for a few seconds before spitting it unceremoniously onto the side of his face the second his eyes dared to open again. “Ain’t nothing but a dragon that can break another dragon’s hide and spill its blood, dude. Why d’you think I cared about what your gun was doin’ and didn’t give a s**t about your buddy’s?”
“… You’re reputed to have an idiotic disregard for your well-being.”
She stared at him broodingly, her scowl only deepening when his eyes portrayed no acknowledgement of the fact that he had blatantly insulted her. “That’s ‘cuz Seth is only supposed to have one dragon in his arsenal, and it weren’t supposed to be no freakin’ kid.”
“So … you’re a high-class felon because no assassin but a dragon can lay a hand on you?”
“Yeah.”
“Well that’s not fair.”
“What’s your point?”
“… … Who’s the other dragon?”
The question was so soft and abrupt that she couldn’t get her head around for a second. “What?”
“The other dragon.” His voice was almost plaintive, slightly breathless from the effort of restraining himself from vocalizing his pain but still composed besides that. The deep crimson spattered across his cheek and nose contrasted oddly with his pale skin and opposed completely the deadened, but dangerously luminous azure in his irises. “… If it wasn’t supposed to be me and he has definite possession of—”
“He doesn’t ‘possess one,’ idiot—he is one.”
“… I … beg your pardon … ?”The impassive gentility on his face did not waver, though something else flitted across his expression with it that looked a little darker, a little more stricken than what she had come to expect from his soulless attitude. Her fingers remained perfectly still on the gun, keeping it pressed gently against his flesh just above his eyes in the center of his forehead, neither tightening her grip on the trigger nor allowing her finger to loosen itself in the slightest.
After giving him a long, pointedly demeaning look for a few seconds, a soft snort of derision passed her lips. “Your boss, Seth Rheese?” came her mutter, for that moment becoming just as emotionless as his had been all along, her eyes locking with his in a fleeting second of genuine, but coldly derogatory amusement:
“He’s a dragon, too.”
