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 Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 1:56 am
The night had turned stormy with surprising quickness, and but Babylon’s visor and coat meant the weather was of little concern to him. Since his conversation with Spinel the night prior, the knight had only become more and more unsettled as he thought about what the senshi had said with regards to Avalon. Was he really worth the contents of not one, but two ATMs? Well, he’d try to be flattered that he meant so much to her, but really - that s**t was terrifying.
He had yet to have anyone come after him about the money, but just knowing about the bounty made him apprehensive. Any reasonable person would just refuse to power up and wait for things to blow over… but Babylon was not exactly reasonable. Not where Avalon was concerned. If he went off the radar, this would only get worse: Tate had never been the sort to let matters drop unresolved, and Avalon, even in her twisted current form, would be no different.
No, he needed to deal with this at the source, even if that meant facing off against her and, apparently, her brand spanking new sword. His face had healed. It was long overdue that he faced her again.
What he didn’t know was how to find her, but given their last fight, standing on a roof in the rain, his lantern raised like a beacon seemed like a good place to start. He could only hope that Avalon found him before one of her lackeys did.
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Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 1:58 am
Avalon did find him before one of her lackeys. It was the lantern that did it, all bright blue and alluring and visible from three blocks away. She covered that space in the time it might take another person to sneeze--she just disappeared from where she was, and reappeared where he was.
Teleportation, it seemed, was the s**t.
“Hey, Babylon,” she said. “Have you put any more thought into my offer?”
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Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 1:58 am
Well, that had certainly done the trick, he thought when she appeared. It turned out he’d been right in guessing she was a general now, based on Spinel’s description; she was beautiful in all her power and glory, but it was a cruel beauty, breathtaking and horrifying to behold. This never should have happened, but it was, and he was just going to have to suck it up and deal with it. “Heard something interesting the other day,” he said, choosing to ignore her question because the answer was still obviously, no.
“Word on the street is you’re offering two whole ATMs worth of cold, hard cash to the first person who can bring me to you for corruption,” he said. “Is that true?” Not because he thought Spinel had lied - quite the opposite, actually - but because he wanted to hear Avalon’s reasoning. “So why do you have to go and do a thing like bribe your lieutenants?” he asked, and he was goading her in the worst way, he knew, but this was just - well, it was sort of equal parts ridiculous and terrifying, and if he didn’t play to one aspect then he was going to fall hard into the other.
“Do you just want to see which one will actually take you up on the challenge?” Babylon asked. His heart raced. This was an intensely stupid confrontation to have gone and gotten himself into, he realized. She had a ******** sword, and she’d probably gone and named it something absurd like Knighteater. Or, oh god, Excalibur. That was exactly her taste. Well, he’d already gotten this far. Might as well finish the boast. “Or do you think you can’t bring me in yourself?”
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Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 1:59 am
“Yes, it’s true,” said Avalon, who was well aware of how ridiculous an amount it sounded, but with Finn at home she couldn’t exactly keep ten thousand dollars under her bed. He might find it, and then how would she explain having ten thousand dollars in twenties, fifties, and hundreds? Uh, that’d be difficult to do, and she wasn’t going to pick that fight with her roommate, considering he had enough going on. His best friend was dead, and she didn’t want him to have any reason to stress about anything else.
She shrugged and ran a hand through her auburn hair, over the tiny fragments of Earth symbols woven into her hair, and smiled at him. “I don’t trust myself to not hurt you,” she said, pleasantly. “I’m faster than you. I’m stronger than you. I have a ******** sword, Babylon, and you have a lantern.” Did she need to spell it out any more clearly? “And if you ever did manage to put me in a corner, I don’t know that I could kill you to defend myself. But they wouldn’t have any such compunction. It’s just good business, you see?”
Of course, none of this would be necessary if he’d just never left her in the first place. Had he forgotten that? Probably. Babylon had never been that smart. She brought her sword to hand, a piece of obsidian-colored steel, and hefted it. “I have no doubt that if I want you to die, all I have to do is teleport behind you and run you through,” she said. “But I don’t want you to die. I want you to come back to me. Like you should have been brave enough to do in the first place, you utter and irredeemable coward.”
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Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 1:59 am
Well, oh, s**t. So much for playing to the absurdity - she’d come with her teeth out, and taken the hot air out of him pretty damn effectively. Babylon let out a shaky breath, watching her draw her sword. Running would do him no good: she’d been more than clear why, and after going through all the trouble to draw her out here, he’d better stick it out.
Not that he really had a choice at this point, but that was just his decision that he was going to have to live with for however long he had left to live. Which, given how things were going, might not be very long. He swallowed dryly. You got yourself into this, a*****e, he thought. Now get yourself out.
“If I’m an utter and irredeemable coward,” he challenged, “Then why go through so much effort? How does converting me benefit the Negaverse? What use have they got for someone who runs screaming at the first sign of trouble or responsibility?” Bold words, and as recently as a few months ago, he’d have been too stung by her insult to spin it back at her. But he’d done a lot of thinking since the last time they’d seen each other, and a lot of trying to accept things as they were. He had been cut, and he had bled, and then his flesh had knit and he was stronger for the scar.
Or that was the theory, anyway.
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Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 1:59 am
He was rattled. That was good, because she knew that Babylon made bad choices when flustered--did she know that? Well, she knew she made bad choices when flustered. She also knew that he held all the secrets to who she had been before, and if she had to needle him to get him to spill, then she would. He’d been close to her in her past life. They’d been close, she knew it from her limited memories, those memories that told her they’d known each other in their civilian lives, too. If she had to corrupt him to get him to love her again, then she would.
“Because I know Chaos will make you bold, and pure, and beautiful. You’ll be what you should have been, without judgmental ghosts following you around, and an empty city with lamps you couldn’t light.” She took a few steps forward, into the circle of light cast by his lantern. The blue glow threw the scar on his face into sharp relief and she shuddered, whether from disgust or pleasure she didn’t know. It was an appreciable mark that Babylon Knight of Mercury would be hers, one day. But it was also, in its own way, a corruption of who Babylon had been to her before she had become like this. Strong, and bold, and pure. Beautiful.
She smiled at him. “Because I love you. And I want you by my side. I want you to want to stand with me, and if this is what I have to do, then that’s what I have to do.”
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Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 2:00 am
“Chaos would destroy me,” said Babylon, and he told himself that it was only because she was brainwashed that she didn’t see it the same way. Chaos had robbed Avalon of every single thing that had made her Tate, made her herself, and he was certain it would do the same thing to Finn. Maybe she thought she loved him - but it wasn’t a kind of love that he wanted any part in. Admitting that hurt, but it was an important distinction to make: Chaos had changed Avalon, and he could mourn who she’d been while abhorring who she’d become.
“I lit the lamps,” he told her, straightening his spine. He would never match her for height, never look her eye-to-eye, but he could sure as well try. “Every one of them. My city blazes in the long night and I am the true knight of Babylon. I did it. Me. I didn’t need Chaos to do that.” In another life, he would have loved to stand atop the mountain beside her and shown her his city. She would have been proud of him. But that was never going to happen, so he’d might as well forget it.
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Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 2:00 am
She sneered. “That’s hardly true. I’m still me, aren’t I?” Either way, it didn’t matter what he thought, she told herself--even knowing it was a lie, and that she wanted him to agree with her. She wanted him to be swayed by the truth of that statement, by the recognition that she was who she had ever been. Just with open eyes now, where before they’d been shut, willfully ignoring the truth of Chaos’s purity…
Avalon didn’t intend to give him a reason to feel good about himself, and she was half annoyed that she had done that. She could see it in the way his spine straightened and the way his shoulders went back and how he met her gaze with his bright-bright blue eyes. The rest of her, what wasn’t annoyed, was stricken with self-doubt. She’d always thought that Babylon was the weaker of the pair of them, but she had abandoned her Wonder, too unsure of what she had to do to please her ancestor, and he had… he had lit the lamps.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, as much to herself as to him. “So you’ve pleased a ghost. What does that change? It doesn’t change anything. The city’s still empty. The city will never be full again. So it doesn’t matter. But you could help me cleanse this city. Take it back. For Earth.”
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Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 2:01 am
“You’re not you, though,” Babylon countered. She might have sneered, but he thought he’d caught uncertainty in her reflexiveness. Even if he hadn’t, her claim was a lie that he desperately wanted to correct. “You’re not you. Because the you I knew, the you I was friends with, the you I loved - she was kind, Avalon, and you’re not. There’s no kindness in you at all.”
He had lit those lamps for himself, because he could, and he wasn’t about to let her take that pride away from him. He’d lit the lamps for himself, and for his grandfather, who smuggled genealogical documents halfway around the world, and for the little baby who Virgo only ever saw once, and for every heir in between who’d never had the chance to awaken. “You would not mock me. You would not belittle me. You would not have hurt me the way you did, and you would not send other people to do the same. I don’t know who you think you are now, but Chaos changed you. You’re not-”
He cut off and shook his head, trying to word it right. After a moment, it came to him: “You don’t even remember her. So how can you possibly be her?”
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Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 2:01 am
There it was--the uncertainty that Avalon wanted to ignore. “I am her. The strong parts. The good parts. Who else could I be?” If she wasn’t--whoever Avalon Squire of Earth had been--then who was she? “You’re a liar. I’m Avalon.” Howlite had called her Avalon. She remembered awakening and knowing the name Avalon like her own, wearing it like a second skin. She remembered sparring with Babylon, remembered Valhalla teaching her to pitch an apple and hit her targets, remembered Camelot taking her home to create her wand and become a squire.
She remembered promising to never corrupt, too, but that had been before she was so, so alone.
But there was no good answer. She had no proof that she was the person he had called her on their first meeting, she had no proof she was Tate at heart except for a few books with a name in the cover, carefully whited out and then--and then Vanya had chipped the white out away, looked at the name, and--but Avalon couldn’t say that. She still had no proof, because Howlite could be lying. Howlite had a lot of reason to lie. Howlite cared, she believed that.
Avalon teleported the last few feet between herself and Babylon, her face so close to his that their noses nearly touched and she could see flecks of lighter blue in his eyes. “I am Avalon,” she said, her grip on the hilt of her sword so tight that she could feel every single rivet in the black-colored steel through the fabric of her gloves. How could she be sure? She didn’t remember. She never would, they told her memories never came back, she would never be sure unless he told her she was. “I have to be Avalon,” she mumbled, gaze slipping to the lantern in his raised hand. She stayed, until the moment that she realized that she was standing as if preparing to sweep her sword forward and slice him in two.
That moment horrified her, and she took two unsteady steps back, swept her gaze along the concrete roof as if the patterns of rain on the forming puddles would give her an answer. It didn’t. No handy justifications sprang to mind. She looked up at Babylon again, for a moment so consumed in mute hatred that even if she had had a rebuke, she wouldn’t have been able to say it. “Liar, you’re a liar,” she managed to choke out.
Then she vanished.
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