lieutenantantichrist | [11] Video/Action for Route 39

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[11] Video/Action for Route 39 - "4 THE MARE"

[Carter doesn't know he's gotten used to it until he wakes up alone.]

[What's supposed to happen is they get up, bitch about the cold, make some coffee and breakfast, bitch about the cold some more, pack up, and hit the road.]

[Today there's just the sound of birds.]

[When Carter sits up, the other sleeping bag is flat. There's a fat, fuzzy teddy bear thing sitting on top of it, and a crab perched on the pillow, where a head full of messy blond hair should be.]

[Both of the animals look at Blake expectantly.]

[He fumbles for his phone and hits the key that dials Dirk. He sits very, very still while it connects.]

[The prerecorded voice tells him what he already knows.]

[He drops the phone and leaves it to chirp out its message to nobody. He pulls on the nearest clothes to hand and crawls out of the tent. The bright light makes him squint. He walks toward the edge of the clearing. They'd found a good place this time. Level ground, no tall grass, surrounded by pine trees. You couldn't even see it from the road. Honestly, Carter doesn't know how Dirk knew it was there.]

[Blake rests his head against a tree and breathes in deep. The bark is cool and rough on his forehead. The air smells like pine needles.]

[Dirk had a good eye for these things.]

[He slams his fist into the trunk as hard as he can.]

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

[Over and over, and when he finally stops his knuckles are stinging and it's all silence except for his panting.]

[He turns and goes back to the tent.]

[Inside, the fuzzy thing is trying to open up his backpack. Its claws are giving it much luck with the ties. Blake unties it and dumps everything out on the floor. Soap, pokeballs, clothespins, socks. Some oranges roll away, and the thing goes right after them and starts gnawing. Doesn't even take the peel off.]

[There's something thin and white in the pile. A piece of paper. Blake picks it up and reads it.]

[He reads it again.]

[He sits there for a while as the teddy bear thing munches, and there's a low thrum and a shadow through the tent's wall as one of those ladybugs passes by.]

[He digs the little sewing kit out of the pile. He turns his backpack inside-out and opens up the seam at the bottom. He tucks the note in and sews it closed again.]

[By the time he's done, it occurs to him he's pretty hungry. Usually they'd be having breakfast by now. The fuzzy thing's gone through a lot of what he has already. Carter doesn't really feel like fighting it. For the crab's part, it's just watching with wide, unblinking eyes. It has a pair of mushrooms stuck to its back.]

[Carter remembers hearing those are edible.]

[VIDEO]

[Blake is sitting on a stump. He looks contemplative, and somewhat withdrawn. His beard hasn't been trimmed yet this morning. His pupils are a little too wide.]

Hey. You out there.

After a while here you figure things come and go. There's no point in bitching. You just gotta keep moving forward and keep your hooves on the ground.

I figure I might as well ask. I kept putting it off, thinking maybe I'd get home. But that's not happening anytime soon, and it has to be past by now. So if anybody here is from 2013 or so, maybe a little later, I got a question for you.

And all of you. Talk to me. [He thinks, then nods, and taps on the phone's screen.] Tell me something you'd want to know about what's going on at home. Wherever you're from. If you could find out one thing that's happened while you've been gone, what'd you ask?

[He looks out at the trees, his eyes a little glassy. He seems to forget the Gear is on. A moment later, he abruptly cuts the feed.]

[ACTION]

[If you venture down Route 39 today, you might come upon Blake staring out at the horizon, contemplatively chewing on some hay.]

((ooc: Blake's in a bit of an odd place right now...He'll be mostly coherent, but anyone who talks to him may get hallucinated into something unique. The Paras has one mushroom left, so you could also come join him on a spirit journey.))

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[... okay, Yusuke's not sure if he knows who this "Norman" guy is, but he's gotta ask:]

How the hell'd he manage that?

[Seriously, of all the things to get to the face...

As for that last part, well, Yusuke guesses he got his answer to the question of whether or not Blake realizes who he's talking to. The compliment of sorts that comes along with it catches him a bit off-guard, though, and there's a brief pause before he finally responds. When he does, there's a wry sort of smile on his face.]

Psh. Yeah, well, when you've fought some of the guys that I... or, uh, that he, I guess, has fought, a cop isn't really all that scary. Neither are a bunch of stupid magical animals.

Chasing a suspect through a market. Let a whole flock of the bastards go just to slow him down. Course, the first thing the guy did was throw a cup of coffee in my face, then he went through and threw everything else they had. So I got to deal with the aftermath and shove past all the fish and feathers and the Portuguese guy yelling "Who pay for this?"

[Blake runs his hoof over his mane.]

[He knows he's seen the greaser before somewhere. There's something familiar about the idea of him leaning against a wall in a parking lot and blowing cigarette smoke in his face.]

Gotten in some brawls with the Sharks and Jets, huh.

These lil' guys aren't scary. [He tapped the crab's shell fondly.] Except maybe the balloon ones that look in your brain. And rhyme about rain.

[Yusuke snorts. Wow, that sure sounds like a clusterfuck. He's grins and says:]

Nice. So did you and Norman catch the guy in the end?

[Yusuke doesn't know who "the Sharks" or "the Jets" are, but fortunately, he's smart enough to figure out that Blake's probably talking about gangs of some sort. It's either that, or he's talking about actual sharks and jets, which... well, if it turns out that Blake's that fucking high, Yusuke'll just go ahead and stop the conversation so he can look up the closest Pokemon Center and have 'em run out and collect the old man before he hurts himself. 'til then, he's just gonna operate on the assumption that Blake isn't asking if his fighting career included punching a shark. Y'know. Not that he couldn't, of course. B)]

Sort of... I guess. Lots of gangsters. And demons, like I said.

[That last part gets a puzzled expression out of him. He can get behind the idea of something that reads your mind being freaky, but he doesn't quite understand how "rhymes about rain" could be frightening. Hell, if anything, it just sounds annoying.]

What's so scary about rain?

[You don't know the half of it.]

Yeah. Then after all that shit, you know what it turned out to be? The wrong guy. Fuckin' idiot. What kinda moron runs if he's innocent?

[A grasshopper in a top hat pauses in nibbling on a blade of grass long enough to tip its monocle and remark, It was Agent Jayden who caught him. Blake growls and flicks his tail at him.] You think I don't know that?!

[He looks back at the greaser.] Don't listen to him. The point is the idiot got caught, not who did it.

Demons, that's gotta be the oldest gang name in the book. Have some goddamn creativity at least.

[Blake leans back and feels the grass on his hooves. The grasshopper bounces away. He talks, but doesn't seem to hear himself.]

It's not the rain. It's the dead kids.

[Probably the kinda moron who's being chased by some asshole in a suit, is what Yusuke's about to suggest, but then Blake starts arguing with... something, and well, needless to say, the sight of him having it out with nothing in particular is enough to convince Yusuke that it probably isn't worth getting sassy with him right now. No use firing off a decent comeback if it's not gonna be appreciated.]

... right. Sure thing, old man.

[Whatever you say, old man.

As for the "demons" thing... maybe it's because he's already expended all of his energy getting pissy with him over that terrible joke earlier, but Yusuke isn't actually that surprised or annoyed when Blake thinks he's still talking about gang members - a little exasperated that he has to repeat what he said earlier about the apocalypse, maybe, but annoyed? Nah. And it's a good thing he isn't, too: had he been winding up for another zinger, that one would've been lost too, because as soon as Yusuke hears the words "dead kids" leave Blake's mouth, bam. Everything around him seems to come to a screeching halt, and whatever he'd been about to say - about demons, about his fights, whatever - vanishes from the tip of his tongue in an instant, leaving him speechless and... quite honestly a bit stunned for at least a solid minute or two.

Whoa.

Whoa.

That... was unexpected.]

What?

[The question tumbles out of Yusuke's mouth without him really noticing it. He hadn't exactly been taking their conversation very seriously up until now, for obvious reasons, but there's something intensely sobering about the mention of dead children, even when coming from a guy messed up on crab shrooms. Hell, especially when coming from a guy messed up on crab shrooms.]

[People always talk about the world ending. Go out with signs, like that'd help. Call him a demon. It hasn't happened yet, and he hasn't stolen any souls that he knows of.]

[He closes his eyes and tips his head up. A patter of rain falls down on his face from the clear sky.]

You must've seen it on TV, like everybody. Can't turn on the news without seeing it, even after it's all over. Goddamn vultures. They give the sick son of a bitch all the attention he wants, just because of all that flashy bullshit a serial killer does. Flowers and little paper animals. Mud on the kid's face... you know what Jayden said that was supposed to mean? That it wasn't personal. "No hard feelings."

[Maybe he shouldn't be telling him this, but everybody already knew. People followed it like a goddamn circus act, and everybody thought they could do it better. A butterfly landed on his shoulder, rubbed its little butterfly legs together, and murmured, Like Jayden, who was right.]

Funny thing is how quick you get used to it.

[Cold mud seeps up around him.]

All part of the job.

[Yusuke listens to what Blake says in silence, his expression gradually going from shocked to uncomfortable. By the time the old man's done, he's no longer making eye contact, instead focusing on a smudge of dirt on one of his sneakers. It's not that he's uneasy about what Blake's telling him - he's seen enough disturbing shit in his own line of work that listening to someone talk about a serial killer isn't really enough to turn his stomach, though the fact that the perp was apparently going after kids is, to say the least, pretty disgusting. No, the thing that's making him uncomfortable right now is the fact that he knows for sure that Blake wouldn't be telling him any of this stuff if he were in his right mind. Look, Blake might not necessarily be one of Yusuke's favorite people in the world, but that doesn't mean Yusuke has so little respect for him that he'd just let him blab all of his personal shit to him without any idea he's doing it. That's just low, and if it were Yusuke in Blake's shoes, he knows he'd feel pretty damn violated if he found out he'd told somebody stuff he wanted to keep private and they didn't do anything to shut him up.

So when Blake finishes talking, Yusuke doesn't press him on anything. He doesn't even do anything cheap like tell him that he understands how he feels, though to a certain extent, he kind of does. Instead, he gives Blake - and himself - a minute, and then he finally looks at him again and says, in an even, but somewhat subdued voice:]

Listen, uh... Lieutenant.

[It feels weird as hell to call Blake that, but somehow, it feels like the right thing to do, at least for right now. Yusuke shifts a little in his seat and continues.]

How about we change the subject, yeah? Uh...

[Crap. Yusuke quickly tries to think of something else they could talk about. He latches on to the first halfway decent idea that pops into his head and goes with it.]

Tell me about the person who left. Your friend. Were they cool?

Edited 2014-01-02 12:28 (UTC)

[It's always there, pressed up under the dome of his skull, and he knows it's the first thing people see when they look at him. It's no secret, though the media didn't get much about him. Never cared. He wasn't one of the big heroes. But his face was out here. And these days, whenever they saw a policeman, people grabbed their kids by the hand.

At the word Lieutenant, his eyes focus.]

My friend?

[For an instant he thinks the kid means the exact wrong thing, before the rest of the sentence comes together and the rage on his face dies before it's fully formed.

Turning away from the old hurt and anger is a good thing. You can never really forget it, but you can push it into another room for a while.

He snorts.] "Cool." Yeah, that's the word he'd say, and it'd be total bullshit. Always acting like some idiot teenager, posing with those fuckin' stupid-looking glasses like he was some kinda hot shit. But then, once he dropped the act, it turned out he wasn't so bad to be around. A lot more decent than he looked. Actually somebody you could trust.

He's the one who first pointed out I was a horse. Don't know why I never noticed it before.

[... ah, again with the horses. Yusuke can't quite contain the snort that slips out at that, but his actual response is... surprisingly not snide or mocking at all. He might have a difficult personality just in general, but he's got enough decency in him that he isn't about to shit all over somebody who was having a bit of a vulnerable moment less than a minute ago. Not even if that somebody is Blake.]

Right. Well, friends're good for that, I guess. Making you notice stuff about yourself that you didn't notice before.

... I'm kinda surprised you didn't notice the tail 'til now, though. I mean, c'mon, it's a tail.

[The greaser's not so bad to talk to, stupid hair or not.]

Yeah. The kinda stuff that you figure - well, you don't think about it too much, but you figure it'd get a real ugly reaction.

[He kinda laughs. The rain is there, in the back of his head, but it can't soak him again as long as he keeps his eyes away.]

You can ignore a lot of things. And you go to all the trouble of swatting flies by hand, just so you can keep pretending it's not there.

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[11] Video/Action for Route 39 - "4 THE MARE"

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