Logs:Wordless

Wordless
cn: reference to physical assault
Dramatis Personae Hive, Isra
In Absentia	2021-10-14 << Where is he? >> (in the wake of Dusk's assault.)
Location <PRV> VL 403 {Geekhaus} - East Village
This is a small, two-bedroom apartment, the living room semi-open to the kitchen and dining area, a single bathroom situated between the doors to the bedrooms. The common areas are beautifully appointed with solid, matching handmade wooden furniture in intricate geometric mosaics. The kitchen table is ringed with coordinated but not identical chairs, two of them modular with low scooped backs, designed with winged bodies in mind. The wide, low coffee table fits neatly into the corner of a modular sectional couch, and the immense television is enthroned in an entertainment center that also houses various consoles and video games. The walls are lined with bookshelves laden with comics, roleplaying supplements, board games, speculative fiction, and a grab-bag of technical texts. The walls in between are adorned with some framed posters of classical science fiction and fantasy media along with a few pieces of gorgeous if unusual original art. It is a cool night, not unpleasantly so for those inured to New York autumns, but though the forecast suggests that will be changing in short order. It seems unlikely Isra would care much at this moment even if it were frigid out. Her flight from the Bronx has been as rapid as it is erratic, a far cry from her usual grace and efficiency. When she reaches the East Village she drops alarmingly fast, the air displaced by her passage ruffling the crowns of the trees in Tompkins Square Park before she backwings hard to land rather than crash on a fourth storey fire escape. Her thoughts are wild with emotions she cannot name and entirely without language, a jumble of movement and sky and teeth and claws. Oh, and blood. There is some of that on the outside, too, stark on her white himation and less so on her gray skin. It is hard to tell where she is wounded, but given her constitution it seems unlikely to do lasting harm. She scrabbles at the living room window and looses a high keening whimper and a simultaneous low growl when it will not open. In the next instant the glass shatters and she is climbing through, heedless of the glass still jutting from the frame like jagged teeth, leaving long bloody scrapes on her arms and tightly folded wings. The apartment is quiet, sleeping like much of the building. There's a THUMP that follows the crash, a scratching noise from inside Hive's nearly-closed bedroom door, a dark furred shape shooting out with a low mrowr to perch on the counter, fur ruffled big but only for a second before Cat recognizes the source of the intrusion and dismisses the break-in as unimportant. Hive's fluster is not so easily settled; he's slower to roll himself out of bed, stumbling to the bedroom door in only a pair of boxer shorts low on his bony hips, eyes bleary in the dim light streaming in through the jagged broken windowpane. "The fuck, woman, you have a key." For all the violence of her entry Isra is now rooted to the spot in front of the window, bloodied wings curling around her body, her angular frame hunched so tightly that Hive would be taller if he stood up straight. Her mouth opens, but all that comes out is an eerie rattling hiss in both of her voices, followed immediately by a frustrated snarl when her mind fails to produce words for those voices to shape. She's struggling, now, to sort her thoughts into some kind of narrative, a process not much aided by the terror roaring around and through the fragments of memories written in sensations and emotions which are all she can muster at the moment. Dusk (warmth and worry), Dawson (sharp lancing grief) -- no, DJ, Dusk (shock, confusion, then rage), DJ (resentment and relief), and then only blood and horror and pain. Her wings wrap tighter around her body. Hive does not stand up straight, shoulders hunched and skinny arms curled tight around himself as if this will protect against the draft from the shattered window. He's shivering all the same, though when he moves it isn't to get more clothes but to go to the bathroom, fetch a neatly-packed first aid kit from within. "C'mon," he's gesturing Isra toward the kitchen, "let's get that cleaned up, yeah?" His mind is pressing, with as much care as his typically heavy touch can manage, to the fractured memories that surface. "The fuck happened to Dusk?" A brief flutter of caution in his tone. "DJ didn't hurt him?" Hive's instruction brings Isra a sliver of calm, but in her ongoing panic it still takes effort to shuffle into the kitchen. For all their disorganization, her memories are even sharper than usual. On closer examination, the encounter seems to have begun as an innocuous conversation that, at something she said, turned abruptly and inexplicably violent. Her wings peel away from her body and start to fold back up, then droop to the floor as if she has not the strength to hold them up. She remembers then that she has hands, her mind pivoting far too slowly toward the idea of writing or signing. His last question cuts through this and she shakes her head vehemently as she looks down at the gash across her chest and upper arm, at the dark bruises blooming around it. This time the hyper-vivid memories form a coherent sequence of their own accord, if only a bare disorienting second's worth. Dusk's wing snaps down, the single effortless motion sweeping her aside. The force of the glancing blow (and the certain knowledge if it had caught her squarely she would be dead) knocks the air from her lungs. The sharp black talon only incidentally tears into her flesh, as easily as it had ripped through her clothing. Her wings thrash desperately as the ground falls toward her. Her breathing speeds again as her body gamely starts working her back into full-blown panic--not at the memory itself, as upsetting as it is. Somehow, that was not the part she needs Hive to know. Hive's eyes go wider. He gets quieter, fixating intently on cleaning Isra's wounds, carefully. Starting to bandage them. It takes some time before he speaks again and when they do it's soft, a layered whisper insinuating itself into Isra's mind. << Where is he? >> Something in Hive's quiet finally assures Isra that he understood, and while she does not calm down exactly, she does--with significant relief--stop trying to bend her thoughts into the unnatural shapes of words. The pain of her injury does not really fade beneath Hive's careful ministrations, but the frantic tension in her body does start to ease. At the question in her mind she does not even bother with language, but instantly layers the image of one particular Riverdale manor rooftop with its location on the map of New York in her mind, precise and real and alive in a way few land-dwellers could fully appreciate. She adds her last glimpse of Dusk carrying DJ away, retrieving the memory more fluently now and annotating it with her estimation of his most likely trajectory. But she also cautions Hive with a sense of the sheer breathtaking speed granted by the blood of all those--herself included--who gave to send their strength into battle with him. "Fuck." This comes soft, too, just a low breath as Hive secures Isra's bandaging. The massive web of his mind coils around hers, scoops it into the rush -- its subtle, almost impersonal, just a swoop in a continued steady widening that is casting tendrils out farther and farther north. "Fuck," this time it echoes through their mind, low and trying desperately to reconcile this with Dusk, strong but gentle, scooping his wriggly ferret so carefully into the fold of an arm, his soft wing-hugs, his endless conscientious care with his impossible strength. The immense web of their being is sifting itself into compartments, sloughing off unnecessary chaff here even as it pulls in more and more and more people there, desperately searching through all of them for one familiar mind who can maybe -- possibly -- answer the question surfacing: << -- but what the fuck happened to him? >>