ArchivedLogs:Consequences

Consequences
Dramatis Personae Flicker, Kyinha
In Absentia	2017-07-28 "Yeah, I probably should. I don't have a history of making sound life choices, though."
Location <NYC> Williamsburg Bridge
One of the four bridges crossing the east river, this magnificent suspension bridge connects the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Williamsburg in Brooklyn. It carries eight lanes of roadway, two subway tracks, a bikeway, and a dedicated pedestrian deck. The long crossing affords travelers scenic views of the river, the lower Manhattan skyline, and the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges to the south. It's not actually quite rush hour yet, but the Manhattan-bound traffic on the bridge has stopped dead entirely. Motorists blare their horns and lean out the window to shout abuses at the dusty silver SUV that has stopped across two lanes, causing the gridlock. Meanwhile the J, M, and Z trains rattle past them at speed, while above them an endless cavalcade of bicycles zip by in both directions. The foot traffic is somewhat lighter, with some of the pedestrians pausing to rubberneck at the drama on the roadway below. Two police cruisers arrive in short succession, one from either direction on the bridge. The one from Manhattan, driving up the wrong way on an emptied roadway, arrives first. Its loudspeaker kicks in, but the officer behind it hardly has time to announce "This is the NYPD" before the entire vehicle is abruptly launched into the air by an explosion beneath its hood. The cruiser tumbles end over end, landing in a fiery wreck some distance up the road. The other patrol car doesn't even get a chance to stop, and gets flipped sidewise by a similar explosion out of the emergency lane it had been using. It gets less airtime than the first one, and lands squarely amidst traffic going the other direction, crashing down mostly between two sedans, crushing half one and overturning the other. The Brooklyn-bound traffic in those two lands grinds to a half, as well. A tall, gaunt man with strawberry blond hair finally emerges from the passenger seat of the van. He is overdressed for the heat in a red long-sleeve zip-up hoodie, blue jeans, and cowboy boots. Anyone standing close enough might sight the paler scars on the edges of his pale face, almost surgical in their regularity. He hops up onto the jersey barrier and turns his face to the sky, watching the approach of a distant helicopter impassively. Then he turns his gaze back to the immense suspension cable where it joins the bridge strutwork ahead of him. One of the support brackets explodes in a shower of sparks. The entire bridge shudders. Kyinha sticks his head out of the window of his limousine, swiping on his phone furiously with one hand. When the bridge shakes beneath them, he mutters something quiet but obscene in Nheengatu and, apologizing to the driver in Spanish, climbs out of the car. He's dressed in eveningwear, white tie with a white jacket and black lapels, custom made to set off his unnaturally black complexion. He jogs along the row of stopped cars toward the source of the commotion, glancing at his phone periodically as he goes. Kyinha's phone is chirping back, busy and rapid by now. Some time after the shuddering and chaos, a slightly less noticeable arrival, blurring ghostlike across the water from the Lower East Side. When Flicker touches down beside Kyinha's limousine, he's still attaching his serpentine arm, boots not yet fastened, dark jacket tied around his waist. "Well, you're dressed for this -- oh." His brows crease deeper as his eyes flick from his teammate to the young man farther down the bridge. "Charity ball," Kyinha explains off-handedly, straightening his tuxedo jacket where it had hitched up from sitting in the car. "Looks like I'll be late picking up my date." He does not sound particularly dismayed, nor particularly pleased. Philosophical. The fiery glow of his eyes narrow ever so slightly at Flicker, though the rest of his expression, hidden by the featureless black of his skin, is as hard to read as ever. "Do you know this person?" His head tips in the direction of the man at the center of all the chaos. The helicopter draws closer, describing a wide arc to survey the scene. Several more sirens can now be heard approaching either borough, but most of them stop at the landings, barring further traffic from entering the scene and somewhat ineffectually attempting to evacuate the vehicles that already have. Most of the pedestrians and cyclists have fled, but some have actually gathered above to film the spectacle. The blond man pays none of them any mind. His blue-gray eyes flit to another piece of hardware securing the massive cable to the bridge, and it, too, explodes. The bridge trembles again. "You've got a pretty solid --" Flicker's lips compress at the next juddering of the bridge. Eyes briefly closing. "-- excuse." He rests a foot up on the side of a nearby stalled car, pulling his boot lace tight and tying it quickly. "Yeah." Quieter. A small tensing of muscle in his scarred cheek. "One of ours." From one boot to the other; he straightens once he's properly settled into his clothing, tugging his jacket on last. His eyes scan one direction and then the other across the bridge. Eying the lines of cars, what people are still left inside them. Teeth worrying briefly at the inside of a cheek. "Well." Kind of flat, as he pulls in a breath. Skirts between the cars up closer towards the gaunt man on the barrier beyond. "Yo, man." A little less flat. Slightly strained when he calls out. "You, uh, got a minute?" "Ah." Kyinha's expression shifts to something different, but equally inscrutable. "Buena suerte." Also scanning the cars, now, he returns limousine and raps on his drivers window. "{Javier, it's not safe here. You should get off the bridge, or at least to the support towers. Get other people to come with you, if they will listen, but do not delay too much.}" He's already starting to move away to next car in the row , but calls back over his shoulder "{Hopefully you'll just have to turn around and come right back!}" The man standing on the barrier only spares Flicker a sideways glance as he approaches. "Not very many left." His tone is flat and calm. "It's Flicker, right? You should get out of here before they decide you're with me." He looks up at the police helicopter again. Follows it keenly with his gaze as it comes closer. "Or before I decide you're with /them./" "Yeah, I probably should. I don't have a history of making sound life choices, though." Flicker's head shakes as he follows the other man's glance up to the helicopter. "Do you really think I'd be with them? I had a friend stuck just back there. He can't teleport, so when he said there was terrible, I came to help. I just wasn't expecting..." He trails off, here. Teeth catching briefly at his lip. "I don't really know what I was expecting," admitted quieter. "What are you going to accomplish here?" Only a few motorists actually leave their vehicles at Kyinha's encouragement, but significantly more follow their example as they depart. The blond man emits a noise halfway between a laugh and a scoff. As the helicopter passes over the bridge at its nearest point to them in its course, explosion rips part of the stabilizer off of its tail. The blast is not nearly as precise or as devastating as the others had been, but still the chopper slide sideways in the air, losing control. Three human figures can be seen leaping from it seconds before it crashes into the East River. "What does it /look/ like I'm trying to accomplish?" he retorts. Another thick steel band holding the suspension cable explodes, and this time the bridge groans as it subsides a few centimeters, and the entire length of the cable hums with an ominous resonance. Here and there along The length of the cable where contact the bridge, smaller support structures are coming apart under the strain, bolts yanked loose pinging down into the support struts below. "You best grab your friend and go." When the bridge lurches down, a /lot/ more people are seeing fit to abandon their cars and flee. One middle-age white woman with short brown hair, however, is kneeling behind her open driver side door, taking aim at the blond man-- despite Flicker also standing more or less in her line of fire. Kyinha has turned back from his evacuation efforts just in time to see the gunwoman take aim. He cries out and, closing the distance in several long strides, tackles the woman. Kyinha's attack fouls the woman's shot, and the bullet skips off of the roadway a few paces from its mark. She does not give up easily, however. Despite being caught off-guard, she flips Kyinha over handily and brings the stock of the pistol down sharply at his forehead. "There's a whole lotta ways to die, man. Most of them don't take all these --" Flicker tenses -- less at the lurching of the bridge than at the sudden gunshot. "Lo siento." His face scrunches briefly. Pained. The expression is fleeting -- or at least only fleetingly visible. A heartbeat later Flicker is just a blur. Zipping off to grab Kyinha right out from under the butt of the gun. Both men are barely distinguishable as he skips them up over the cars, down and away from the unsteady bridge -- -- with a brief pause between to yoink the blond man along with them, up and away from the bridge out over the center of the water in a dizzying whirl of motion. Kyinha flinches, throwing up one arm to catch the blow that never falls. The arm wraps around Flicker instead. "Obrigado," he says, unfazed though the word gets split across three jumps. "N-n-no!" The blond man seems /very/ fazed by his unexpected Flicker-ing. He twists around in the grip of the tentacle arm and reaches back up at the bridge as though he could pull himself back up to it through the air. "Fu-fuck you, fuck y-you /fuck/--" He retches but manages not to actually throw up. "They l-locked us up, they sl-liced us open, they put hi-him down like a f-fucking /animal/! They all. Deserve. To die." His body goes still now, muscles tense with concentration. The bridge rapidly recedes into the distance, the grimy waters of the East River stretching away between them. Between them and, occasionally, splashing cold against their legs when Flicker skims too close to the surface. It is a minute before he settles them all down, finally -- somewhat precariously on a stranded half-broken paddleboard aimlessly adrift in the middle of the water. "They did." His face is pale, his posture a little unsteady where he stands. "And maybe they do. But when that bridge comes crashing down, not one of those people who killed him will feel it." The man slowly goes limp in Flicker's grasp, his body hitching every few jumps as he struggles to keep his gorge down. He slides down to the damp board beneath their feet and just collapses in on himself. Staring off across the river, his eyes fill but he does not weep. "I wanted them to know what they did to us has consequences." One hand lifts up to finger a scar winding out from behind his ear. "And you stopped me. Are their lives worth less than ours?" He lifts his eyes back to Flicker, vacant and glassy and vaguely menacing. "Was my brother's life worth less than that bitch who tried to shoot us?" "No." Kyinha kneels down across from the man they snatched from the bridge. His voice is soft, his tuxedo dusty from his tumble in the road and damp from skimming the water. "Not worth less. Yours, either." "No, it's not." Flicker sinks down more slowly, fetched up against the warped side of the boat. His eyes meet the other man's steadily. "Not his, not yours." His head shakes slowly. "And God help me, there's a part of me that didn't want to stop you. You're not wrong. They need to know." The rising fury in the man's gaze dies away now, and as it leaves him he seems to deflate yet further. "Yeah, they do. But they won't listen. Why should they? There's more of them, and they have all the money and power." Back by the bridge, boats have been sent out to pick up the people who jumped from the helicopter. Heavy rolls of the boats' wakes rock the paddleboat wreck upon which the three men float. "They won't listen," Kyinha agrees, settling back onto his heels, "unless we /make/ them. Yes, that's a lot easier with money and power. And yes, the humans have most of that." His weight shifts effortlessly to accommodate their makeshift raft's bobbing. "But not /all/ of it." Much less easy, Flicker wobbles jerkily with each new toss and bob of the precarious craft -- seeming all the more jerky, perhaps, for his rapid shifts of balance to catch himself. His claw hand braces against the side of the boat (which does little to help his tenuous stability). His other turns out, towards Kyinha on his (damp and dirty) tux. "You want to make them hear you, there's ways to fight. But dead, in prison? Humans aren't going to listen to that." His eyes skitter back across the water, towards the bridge and the flashing lights of emergency personnel. "We stay here much longer, I think we might not have much choice about how this ends. Will you come with us? I can't really make you any promises about what happens from here." He lets go of the rocking boat, mechanical limb extending partway toward the blond man. "But we're not going to stop fighting." "No matter how hard we fight, they'll always win. All we can do is make it hurt when they do." The blond man nods jerkily. "But yeah. Yeah, I'll go with you." He stretches out his hand, shakily, and grasps Flicker's prosthesis. And, a beat later, "Gracias."