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He had every intention to shoot if the man didn't talk, but fortunately for them all, Franklin did. He smelled animal fear all over him, this man reduced to little more than a child, and Kostya needed to get Taym's attention. But how could he, when there were assailants on their tail.

"Okay," Kostya said, assessing-- hopefully, not erroneously, although there was a large margin of error he was gambling with-- that Franklin was being truthful. "Ve vill. Need to get--"

And there he was, coming around the corner. Two steps and Kostya was there, supporting him with his right arm, pieces of a puzzle falling together. He had no idea, yet, what the bigger picture was, and he might not for some time yet, but these things-- these things made sense.

The last thing Kostya wanted to do was leave his rodstvennaya dusha behind. But she had asked. She had instructed. It was an order.

"Okay," he said, zeroing in on Franklin, Syntax pointing now at the corridor they'd come from instead of at him. "They sent us down elevator, vhile ve vere going back up. Vhere do ve run to."

He yanked Franklin back so that he could use both of the men as a crutch, and to take some of the weight off of Kostya's wrecked leg, and the look he gave the Lifer was dire as they started moving in the direction Franklin told them to.

"Then let's get to the elevator and get the ******** pendants back online," said Taym, and his voice was level and steady and calm and collected through a sudden surge of grief-stricken tears. "The three of us just saved your goddamned life so do us a favor and shut the ******** up with the value judgments and focus on what we need to do."

"Doesn't make her any less of a ******** monster than the rest of them. It just means she's on our side. F-for now." Franklin met Taym's look with his own, pale with terror and rising anger as he stomped forward, hurrying their pace. "She said there's something in here. Red glowing eyes that make people turn into whatever the rest did. Me and Boris were manning the base, neither of us were here when it happened."

He saw it, maybe, before the others did. Maybe he'd been looking for it.

(Twice in his life Taym had made an active effort to end everything. Both times had been before Deus. The second time he'd been in a car in an empty parking lot, a gun cradled in his hands, and the thing that had made him chicken out was the sight of truck pulling into the lot, pausing, and turning around. He wasn't even sure why. It had been the stupidest, most irrelevant distraction; he could have squeezed the trigger and likely the driver would still have never even realized he was there, what he'd been so close to. But he hadn't. Instead he'd put the gun down, the retreating tail lights filmed with frustrated tears, and he'd damn near wanted to shoot that a*****e, instead. That's what those eyes looked like: a weary, heavy, grim beacon, through tears, of the fact that it would never, ever be easy.)

He felt the leap of his heart, he felt Fionnghal's sudden tension, and he felt the old, familiar, almost comforting rage displacing all his grief and all his fear.

"Run if you can," he told Franklin, letting him go and attempting to drag Kostya to the floor with what little strength he had left, and in the same instant Fionnghal flickered out, and the silence (the sudden calm before the sudden storm) was broken by the sound of a ring clattering away into the shadows because here, now, even when it couldn't possibly matter, even when it was the end of the line, he would do whatever he could, whatever tiny insignificant stupid thing he could, to lessen the damage and to make himself the target.

The fury felt like coming home, the ghost of a dream touching down from above. It pulsated and filled in the cracks of his psyche, like red leaking into his vision from every corner of every room. Startled, in the space between the bad end they were living and the worse that had yet to come, Kostya allowed himself to be dragged along.

They were not going very fast.

The rage curled within him and put down roots into the fertile soil of his buried resentment, digging in and digging deep. Because she left you, it said, and wiped away his mind. He heard a clatter and could not tell, exactly, what it was, but Kostya knew the absence of light when he saw it, the golden-glow of Fiona snuffed out.

Syntax whirred, and whirred, and stopped, like a hard drive running at maximum speed before a stall,
and his weapon disappeared from around his arm, the gadget dropped against the stone and Kostya wrapped his arm around Taym to yank them along, faster, his knees weaker than they should have been only because of the damage to his calves, and.

They ran, but not far enough. Not fast enough.

"I," Kostya said, the singular syllable enunciated with a curled lip and a clenched fist, and there were no more words to share, only a wordless snarl. He was gone, personality wiped clean and replaced with little more than a cleansing fire that wanted to eradicate that which was weaker than he.

With a clenched fist, he aimed a punch at Franklin's face, determined to destroy.

Kostya snarled, again, his limbs moving of his own accord and oh, where was his tool? Where was his beautiful thing to excise the cancer that was weakness, to snip apart the malleable flesh and blood and bone. He wanted to see it, to see the bleached white that haunted his dreams and they were his dreams, no one else's, his own were now tainted with the shadows that had lurked after him for one month, two, six, a year.

Kostya brought his hands up around the man's neck and squeezed, mouth open and teeth bare, lip pulled back, and he saw a dream of nothing but ruin and he atop the wreckage, and he laughed, empty and husky and unnatural because this was not him but it controlled him, and he did not mind.

hp// 40/40
dmg// 3 to franklin

franklin// 27/30

Excise the cancer. Kostya threw him forcibly towards a wall, but Franklin recovered.

hp// 40/40
dmg// 1

franklin// 21/30

A slow advancement, methodical and determined. A snarl back in return, and a kick at Franklin's side.

hp// 40/40
dmg// 1

franklin// 17/30