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 Posted: Sat Mar 16, 2019 10:40 am
He'd kept them moving until they'd gotten back to the car, not as quickly as he would have liked with one leg numb and her ankle still weak, but moving nonetheless consistently away from danger, even well after he stopped hearing the squelching crawl of the nightmare keeping pace. Even after the grating, wrongness had faded into something distant and less urgent, far on the edges of his senses instead of right on top of them. He was breathing hard as he pulled his betrothed gently in against him, hugging her to him as he scanned the darkness with wide eyes and nervous sweeps. The cold had started to settling in now that the danger was gone and the adrenaline was fading and goosebumps covered his arms, a slight, involuntary tremble beginning at her core and spreading out. When a full minute had passed with nothing stirring he finally seemed to relax. Broad shoulders loosening in inches as he released a heavy breath and drew back enough to look down at Ayesha's face. "Are you okay? I didn't want to make you run, but I couldn't carry you..." He was having a hard enough time staying on his feet as it was. The whole leg was numb now, from toes up to his thigh, and he was standing with all his weight resting on the opposite foot. Living in Destiny City, even when you traveled as much as Adel did, you still heard things. Murmurs and rumors and even sometimes full on reports; strange s**t happened in this city. Up to the point Adel had only encountered the most benign of oddities. Anomalies in the weather or unexplained floral or fauna, but nothing dangerous. This was his first brush with the darker side of the city, the war that raged unseen and unheard, and it showed.
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Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2019 9:20 am
The twinge in her leg grew to a soreness grew to a throbbing hurt. More like a chisel and hammer than something sharp like a knife wound. It was a gradual injury to the injury, she concluded, while her limp grew more pronounced. But she kept it in, kept moving, kept after the man that wasn't Adel anymore as they left their attacker quickly behind.
By now, she thought she couldn't take another step without her leg snapping in half or giving out completely. Both seemed equally likely by the feel of it. Realistically, she knew she could keep moving. She might squeeze another couple blocks out of her injury before she'd start doing some real damage. So while not-Adel took a moment to survey their surroundings, Ayesha wasted little time in finding an upturned trash can to sit on and rest. As she did so, she took stock of herself — largely unhurt, just tired and entirely too sober now.
She took stock of him, too — dressed like something out of a legend, like a pharaoh that history failed to chronicle, minus the silly-looking hat. That hat would at least humanize him, offset the way this outfit left him looking more like an ideal than a man. She missed Adel for that.
"I'm fine," she confirmed, and she thought her voice a little too steady to be convincing. Her hands a little too unshaken as they crossed over one another in her lap. "I've seen those before. Not that one, exactly, but others like it. Most of them are like raccoons that got dangerous.
"But what about you?" She gestured toward him, tip to toe, where an Adonis stood among a drippy trash heap. This part of the alley fared better, but it was narrow, claustrophobic for outdoor voices, and the smattering of black windows above them promised they needed to keep their voices down. Ayesha knew that discretion was of utmost importance, for a Negaverse agent could be living in any of the surrounding apartments, but Adel would know nothing of that by the look of it.
He had a weapon in hand, though; he might just be an agent himself.
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Posted: Sun Apr 07, 2019 1:05 pm
He didn't fight it as Ayesha drew out of his protective embrace to find something to sit on, he could only imagine how much her ankle hurt after having to abuse it like she had as they'd run, and it left him feeling a bit inadequate that whatever the that damn monster had done to him prevented him from being able to keep her from the pain she was in now. Adel wanted to save her from harm, not be the cause of it. He frowned as a familiar name slid through his thoughts, and had a moment to wonder what the pyramids had to do with what was going on or why his mind had led him down that direction. Ayesha's assurance that she was fine was met with a combination of doubt and confusion. He could see the fine tremor in her hands, knew how much effort she'd been going to to keep from putting weight on the ankle more than she needed to. Aside from that though was the mention of seeing more of those monsters. As far as he could remember Ayesha had not mentioned any such run-ins in the past. So then, when? "I'm fine," he started, then paused and sighed as he looked down at himself, hands out from his body. "I think. At least physically so. My leg is numb up to the thigh, but that should hopefully fade given time." He didn't know what to say about the fan in his hand or the strange attire he was wearing. Let alone how that thing had felt in his head. Letting his hands drop to his sides again he limped over to where she'd taken a seat and sank down to crouch in front of her with hands resting on her knees. "Aye, were you attacked by those things before?" Dark eyes were watching her face. "How come you didn't tell me?"
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Posted: Tue Apr 16, 2019 12:02 pm
Hands on her knees wasn't a bother. The questions, on the other hand — the demand to know, as if a right exited for it, as if being interested in her owned her in some way — set her on edge. Ayesha granted him no unimpeachable right to every experience she's had, even if his aggressive concern came from a place of care. But Adel was raised in a different home where gendered expectations existed — the sexes were not equal. They couldn't be. Perhaps what she saw now was a part of that history.
So she started slowly. "I was attacked before I knew you." A truth. "But those things — they show up so rarely. No one can explain them. I get attacked, I survive, I move on with my day.
"You saw what it looked like. What if you tried to describe it to a police officer? What would you say? A gelatinous blob wearing some small animal's skull tried to dissolve your leg in its juices? How do you think that officer would respond?" She waited, head cocked as she waited for her point to strike home.
"Everyone has those moments where they fight for their lives. Some of those moments are private, like when a child is hurt by their parent. But some of those moments don't matter enough to mention, like being attacked by something like that. Whatever it is, I can't explain it, so I'm not going to waste my day thinking about it. That's why I haven't told you.
"But if we're being honest with each other," she leaned in, laid her hands over his as his warm, coarse palms still sat on her knees, "what happened to you?"
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Posted: Fri Apr 19, 2019 6:02 pm
"...before I knew you..."His shoulders sagged a little as he realized he'd simply assumed it'd happened more recently, after they'd entered their arrangement, and he pressed ever so gently into the sides of her legs wit his thumbs as a silent apology for jumping to conclusions. After what'd happened to her at the Autumn, with nerves fraying around the edges and adrenaline draining...it still wasn't an excuse. She did have a good point though, what would he have thought if she'd come to him with stories of otherworldly monsters prowling the streets of the city at night to prey on unsuspecting citizens. Up to this point he probably would have doubted her, or at the very least doubted her perception of events, and that doubt would have been a rocky foundation to build a lasting relationship on top of. "My apologies," he offered up to her softly, rolling back on his heels carefully so he could look down her legs to her injured ankle. She said she was alright, but he had to imagine her ankle still hurt, and would continue to hurt throughout the rest of the night and into the next week. "You're right." Warm hands came down to rest over his own and he lifted his head again, dark eyes flicking up to rest on her beautiful face. He assumed she wasn't talking about his leg, since she'd seen the beast and the way the ooze had flowed over it. Logic dictated it was the shift in attire, the fan that'd appeared for him. The problem was he didn't know how to answer that because he didn't have a clue what had happened to him. "I'm not sure. We were in trouble and the fan just appeared in front of me and I grabbed it." He didn't even know why, it was as if he'd been compelled to. "Then my clothing was different, and I could feel..." He frowned, pausing as he thought back to the weight of wrongness that'd settled at the back of his mind when that monster had been on top of them. How it'd faded as they'd run away from it. "It sounds crazy, but I think I was feeling that thing in my head. It was so strong in the moment, and it's gone now."
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Posted: Sun Apr 21, 2019 6:08 pm
That ankle swelled. She felt it in each movement, as it grew stiffer and more troublesome, more sore, more painful. There was little to do for it now but ice it and elevate it, and lacking ice, she settled for scooting to the side and propping her leg up on the dashboard. It wasn't safe, she supposed, but a car accident seemed so distant a possibility now -- as distant as the stars were from them. But, seeing Adel now, perhaps they weren't so distant at all.
She still hadn't completely figured out what she was looking at. Lacking Pavo's form, she couldn't sense Adel's alignment, though she suspected magical origins. What most validated this hunch was the feeling of that creature in his head, like an aura for the suddenly awoken. But there were no talking cats, no pens, no sequence of flashing lights and moving ribbons to clothe Adel anew. He said he saw a fan, but Ayesha didn't recall one. He grabbed that fan, then suddenly he changed. One moment a man, now something else.
Not a senshi, but something else. What else was there if he wasn't an agent? A knight, by deduction. But Ayesha knew too little about knights; she knew only that they were counterpart to senshi as members of Order and nothing more. Did they still hold dominion over planets? Did they have magic? Did they have guardians to teach them all the necessary parts of the war, or were they granted some kind of instinct about it? Seeing Adel's confusion, Ayesha decided the latter wasn't the case.
But Adel wasn't Adel right now. He was someone else. Someone else who drew danger to himself the longer he stayed like this, in this house, with her. He was someone who endangered both of them unwittingly. Tragically.
Ayesha squeezed her fingers together. Her gaze found the floor runners between Adel's feet. She chewed her lip for nearly half a minute. Then when she spoke again, when she lifted her head to look at him and her hair draped over her shoulders, she tried to retain a measured nonchalance in her voice. "Is there any way you can… Change back? Get back into your old clothes?"
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Posted: Mon Apr 22, 2019 6:09 pm
He hovered as he helped her into the passenger seat of the car and closed the door behind her. They needed to get out of there, back to his apartment and out of the open night air. Although he wasn't entirely sure how they were going to manage that because he didn't seem to have access to his keys.... He was patting at his thighs where pockets should have been as she spoke again and it made him pause to look across the gear shift at her, momentarily distracted by the way her hair slid over her shoulder with the tip of her head. A soft smile pulled at his lips, dark eyes filling with warmth as he leaned closer so he could slid the tips of dark fingers through the softness of that fallen hair, tucking it back behind the curve of her ear. "In this moment I would love nothing more than to change back into the clothes I was wearing, the car keys are in the pocket of my jeans," he admitted almost sheepishly. "I just have no idea how." Subtly calloused fingertips brushed her cheek as he let his hand fall away, gaze falling down to his lap. Maybe if he imagined his other clothing, tried to visualize that instead of the thin linen he was wearing now. He settled his hands on his thighs, thought about the feel of denim under his palms, and closed his eyes.
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Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2019 4:10 pm
The touch of his hand against the shell of her ear drew her attention. She looked to him for a moment, for that moment, in that moment, and found the light crow's feet in his eyes from exhaustion. She saw how his stubble had grown a little further, how he looked more real and altogether less real as he was now. It must've been strange, wholly alienating, to wake up to powered life like this. How many incidents did he have to draw on to tell him that he wasn't alone? Even anthropologists had no statistical data on powered entities like senshi.
Ayesha blew a long sigh through pursed lips. Sitting there in the car, they were guaranteed to be stuck as-is. Ayesha knew nothing about hot-wiring cars, so unless they called AAA, they'd be waiting for some time yet. But those weren't their only dangers.
Waking up alone, Adel had no idea that simply existing like that was dangerous. No cat hung around to explain to him all the ins and outs of this life, how to stay safe, how to find others, how to begin to understand it. He likely hadn't a clue what would turn him back into this form, let alone how to let go of it and return to his normal self.
So perhaps it was better, for both of them, if she complicated their lives further. If she explained it all, then maybe she could stop him from doing something stupid that would end him prematurely. Maybe she'd make a difference in that way that all the other senshi dreamed of — not statistically, not through anonymous benefaction, but through a single personal connection. Where he might have greater job stability, better living arrangements, and more social clout, she could provide a level of support in a life that he couldn't begin to understand alone.
Besides, he was smart — smart enough to follow her clues to powering down. "You're going to have questions for me, but I need you to wait until I finish explaining something. That thing we escaped — it's called a youma. It's like a monster that used to be a person. And when you say you felt it in your head? That was its aura you sensed. And just like you could feel it, it could feel you. Every time you look like that, other things like it can feel you. So can other people like you. So can other people who want to hurt you.
"Adel, I need you to promise me that you won't power up again — that you won't try to look like that — until you learn more about it. You have to know what you're getting into."
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