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 Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2009 7:41 pm
His knuckles were cold, but the pain in his chest was colder. He still gripped her shirt, had her anchored close to him, and even though he raised his fist again, he didn't strike her. Her words tore at him, even though he didn't want them to. They twisted inside of him, made him ache even as they infuriated him, and he balled his hand into a fist, delivering another blow. This one was glancing, but it could have as much to do with distress as it did poor aim.
"You would have taken his starseed regardless." The accusation was flat, none of the rage and horror he felt expressed in his voice. Perhaps, by the lack of it, he showed it more clearly than if he'd screamed at her.
He drew his fist back again.
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Posted: Tue Dec 29, 2009 9:04 pm
Leo was a good half a foot or so taller than his current adversary, drawing her up so close would have lifted her heels off the ground if her shoes weren't already doing that for her. As it were the leverage kept her spine ramrod straight and his fist bunching into her coat kept her in place, so when she was hit again she barely moved at all.
"How can you be so sure?" Her voice had dropped to a low murmur from the closeness -- a raspy whisper, almost unnervingly intimate. "If you hadn't been so reckless you might have been able to do something else. Three minutes is an entire epoch in a crisis situation, you know--"
He hit her again. She kept talking.
"--but I guess his life didn't matter enough to you to be careful, now did it?"
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Posted: Wed Dec 30, 2009 11:09 am
He wasn't listening to her, couldn't. He knew the words would replay in his mind for hours, days, even weeks after this - they would surely haunt his dreams, along with everything else that kept him wide-eyed and restless in the night these days. Punching her seemed to do no good, and it wasn't like he was pulling them; he was strong enough, she just didn't seem to care. He wasn't going to stand there and beat on someone until they were unrecognizable, especially if they weren't hitting him back.
Even if it was a Negaverse lieutenant.
He threw her to the ground, not gentle in the least, and flexed the hand that had been punching her. He wasn't Jude strong, no, but he was an eighteen year-old boy. He was fit, if only because he had to be fit to dance. Maybe his punches wouldn't knock anyone to the ground, but he knew they had to hurt.
But she didn't seem to care.
"Three minutes of hell for that man," His voice was still low, but the effort to contain it was becoming more. "Three minutes of terror, of horror, in your arms."
Had he been merciful? He didn't think so. He thought he'd screwed up, that a man was dead because of him, because he hadn't known what to do and so he'd done the wrong thing.
But he couldn't say that out loud.
So even if he didn't believe a word of what he was saying, he would argue to the death - his or hers - that he had been right.
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Posted: Wed Dec 30, 2009 8:52 pm
"Three minutes of terror, but he could have come out of it alive." Her tone was making no effort to hide her smugness now, but the wind had been knocked out of her from the fall, so it had that strained quality to it as well.. "Of horror, but he could have gone home to his family."
Uranophane's body and arms shifted, in the slow process of working herself back into a standing position. Her face looked fairly battered; the tops of her cheeks were illuminated and showing the beginnings of ghostly-green dark blotches she would probably be wearing for a while.
"You wrecked a family, Zodiac."
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Posted: Sat Jan 02, 2010 8:45 pm
"No, Uranophane." It was a name that would be burned into his memory from this day forward. Grayson Graves was not a man who believed in revenge, but Sailor Leo was. "You destroyed this family, took this life."
It would be a lie to say he didn't feel responsible for it, didn't already despise himself for his inability to handle the situation. Though it was true that her hands had plunged into the man's chest, removed his starseed, the fact remained that he was the one who should have prevented it. It was his job to prevent it, and he had failed.
It didn't matter that Uranophane likely knew just what was coursing through his mind; he wouldn't say it. They were only words, but words had power, and he would keep them to himself. Quietly, quietly, he would struggle to accept what had happened.
But he would do it alone.
"I understand that I must take your guilt into myself." His hands curled loosely into fists, and there was contempt in his voice. "You are, after all, inhuman; so I will take your guilt and make it my own."
And it would tear at him, every day. Every day.
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Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2010 7:18 am
At those last words her eyebrow pitched, a corner of the mouth stretching even more to make her grin lopsided. Uranophane stood at her full height and pulled at her gloves, momentarily seeming more interested in watching her fingers stretch and bend than she was in regarding Sailor Leo. And she laughed, again; quietly, to herself.
"Such righteousness. How admirable." Her gaze traveled to met Leo's one last time, and with a similar contempt, she asked, "And who are you to judge who is and isn't human? Do you think your status allows you this-- that your power grants you some kind of higher awareness-- that you're meant to stand on that moral pedestal of yours?" Her hands were strained, half-clenched into wicked claws, and her voice a scratchy gust of air given shape -- "How dare you cheapen the value of humanity by assuming such authority... Such audacity..."
Her boots snaked her backwards and then she was turning around, standing at the roof's edge that overlooked the still-running car and the corpse that had been driving it. "I think we're done here, cowardly lion, it's not like you'll be able to preach me to death."
Nevermind that she'd been attempting the very same thing herself.
Uranophane leapt down, then to another roof -- she was bounding away.
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