Gary, Indiana--nWoD, ???
The cigarette was stuck in his mouth, unlit, as he looked upon the world.
The city was beautiful, he guessed, in the way every city in the world was beautiful. That's what it was, after all. Hunter wasn't used to cities, not really. When he wasn't dreaming, he lived about as far away from the cities as one could manage. Big was a town. Big was what he saw on television. And that's what this place was too.
Every city in the world, all stretched out beneath him. And above him, floating lazily, cities that never existed and never would. As long as someone somewhere thought of it. It was crazy, senseless, every kind of architecture jammed together. Here and there, he could see patterns, of course. This red light district blended into that, which was jammed up against a Tokyo nightclub--
But for every moment of logic, for every colorful building next to a colorful building, there were elements that just plain confused him. He wasn't a thoughtful man, he knew it, but this was how mankind saw its own cities, knew its own civilization. It
should make a man think.
Though what he was thinking of most, right now, was what he was going to do soon enough. A night, maybe two, to case the area, to get a feel for the city as it might be. Every city was here, and every imagined version of a city. Even cities that had died could be found here, if one was willing to look.
A whole lot stood in his way. Rules, laws, beings of great power here. But he'd gotten past them before, he'd do it again. His job was just to retrieve a single connection, to a single spun-off realm, and then, take this knowledge of how to get to it to someone who would...do as he willed.
The plan didn't make that much sense to him, the place didn't matter that much to him, and he shifted on his perch.
Hunter was sitting on the edge of a skyscraper, or perhaps The Skyscraper of human imagination, the wind whipping down below him, chilly and strange, and yet, once he'd stopped thinking about the city, all he could think of was the reward. He could use a good break, after the way the last few weeks had been.
Months. Last few months.
Maybe years. Maybe his whole life had been a series of fuckups that was still continuing forward, heedless of any attempt to stop it. That was the kind of thought that drove him to the bottle outside the dreams, but here there was a little...wist to it. If that was a word. And if it wasn't, why wasn't it?
This was a place where he wasn't himself, not quite. Or maybe he was himself but different.
"Gary, Indiana, huh?" a woman's voice said behind him.
He turned fast, going for the pistol at his side, only to see that it was her. Angel, her hair a pale blonde, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt for some splatterhouse movie. She was pretty, in a plain sort of way, except for her eyes. One eye was pure white, clear as a lake: the other eye was dark and inky. She was unarmed, for once, not that she needed it.
Not that she ever needed it.
He rose to his full height, almost six feet, appearing, as he had in the Dreams for over twenty years, in his early thirties. He moved his hand over his pistol, carefully. She was willing to be casual, but he? Hunter was always armed for a fight. He'd kicked too many people out, too many times, to expect anything else. Even killed plenty of them for real. Angel, though, she was special.
Especially annoying, actually.
"You working it?"
"Opposite end, it looks like. Right end, honestly. It's going to be fun, you know, like old times, like five years ago in gay Paris," she said, waving her arm a little, stepping closer. He tensed, keeping his eyes peeled for one of her minions, or perhaps a clever little Sin of hers, a magical trick that would leave him wondering what the number on the truck was. Damned if he was going to let her see the tension, though. "Relax," she said, showing that as soon as he'd thought it, he'd revealed it. Mind reading? "I'm not here to crash you, I'm here to talk. Try to negotiate. I don't know how much money you're being offered, but it isn't worth this."
He spat, "Fuck if it isn't."
"Your Psyche died, really died, just a few months ago."
"Three," he added, not needing to be reminded of his dead team.
"Not just kicked out of the Astral for a little, but actually killed with a true weakness, and what could you do? Doesn't it feel morbid, sometimes, hiding out in a base made of their minds? Don't you ever wonder if you're a washed up good-for-nothing?" Her voice dripped with tough love, a new tactic for her, really. "You need a new Psyche. Give up on this folly, on finding, what, a connection to a realm that never was and never will be?"
"I was paid up front," he said, fists clenching. "And don't you dare fucking talk about my Psyche. Someone betrayed me, betrayed them." How else did someone know all four weaknesses?
"Maybe it was you."
"You got careless, you got sloppy, someone went gunning for them. It happens all the time," Angel said. She glanced away, her tone softening a little. "I'm sorry it happened, but we could be partners."
Hunter laughed. It was a harsh laugh, he knew. The kind of laugh that would have sickened Saturn to hear from him. He let the even more bitter words tumble loose. "Partners? I have two fewer tits than I'd need to be an interesting partner for you, Angel. Why don't you just go and find some nice young newbie, barely Idealized, and sweet-talk her?"
Denial, Idealization, Actualization: the three stages of demon-spawn. Was she actually the sort of bitch that looked for inexperienced idiots and manipulated them? No. But it was the kind of thing that could make her angry. He knew it.
"Fuck you too," Angel said, her face twisting for a moment into fury, "You'd be too ugly even if you were a...stop this. Every time we meet like this, you want me to shit on you so you can shit on me, so that I can't help you, that I can't figure this...." She paused, "But this isn't--"
"Isn't what? It's whatever I want." He flicked his finger against the cigarette. It was better than alcohol, and this was an actual tool.
The smoke'd unfurl in his lungs, choke him to death, almost. It would fill him to the brim. And when his eyes were watering, he'd know he was safe: can't breathe in anything else when you're filled with smoke like that. Like water--or poison gas. Better a happy little curl of smoke than the shit out there. It'd saved him before.
"I was going to say something witty about pornography, but that'd be stooping." Angel looked at him, the white eye growing brighter for a moment. Judging him.
"There's room," he said, shrugging. "Now, you've given me your grand offer to go fuck myself and bend over to let you help me do it like I've not been doing this since before you finally accepted all of your hangups and let down your hair."
"You have. I respect that, but that doesn't mean…" she began.
"What if I have your true weakness? Then this fight might be our last, rather than just another chapter in the Hunter-Angel feud. Ever think of that?" He moved to push past her, and she held out a hand.
"Maybe...but I've also thought about what the Mayor has to say. Mayor of Gary? Multiple mayors, in fact, and I've gotten their approval for my own search. I know you know which Gary it's in, and I know that you're going to try, but if you do this will not go well for you. Just think about it. Take a break, try to--"
"What? Be a better person. Our kind aren't meant to be better people, or else why would demons have fucked our parents in the first place?"
"It's not like...you have a way of making everything an obscenity. But you aren't always like that. Just--lately."
"It's been a while," he said, and he felt it. Felt the way his hackles were lowering a little. The thought of Saturn, splayed out on the ground, blood soaking into the sharp grass, her form broken. Ring after ring strewn on the ground, each ring slowly dissolving into blood itself. It made a smear there that he wished never disappeared.
And other voices, other faces. Saturn's laugh when she went all out, the way she froze her enemies and warmed her friends. Her laugh. Her touch. She'd touched him as if he wasn't an alcoholic fuck up, and he'd been confident enough to pretend he wasn't, and accept that maybe he was angry sometimes, maybe things happened.
Maybe a lot of things happened. Maybe things happened and kept on happening and you controlled nothing and hated it and then you died. But along the way, you could taste, you could touch, you could make something of yourself. You could make money and power and joy, and if there was a hell, you could make it there as well.
Angel, Angel didn't get that. But she seemed happy despite that. Self-righteous, but--
"You shouldn't...well, of course you should." Angel paused, shaking her head like a wet dog, and then added, "Maybe you should take a break, reconnect with--"
He glared at her as he walked towards the stairwell. It was a long walk to get to the bottom, and he had places to be. "With who?" he asked, and he allowed the awkwardness, the weapon of kindness itself (and she was too kind, despite having killed him before, once) clear the way.
Because who could look on him, could watch him walk away, seemingly tall and proud, bomber jacket with Scavenger Guild pins in it, gun at his hip, and say, 'Oh, yeah, you have nothing and nobody.'
Everything was a weapon in the right hands.
*******
It wasn't the shakes that bothered him. It wasn't the way that he'd wake up and the world would seem too clear, or not clear enough, and the way he'd never been able to find out what the line between the two was. It wasn't the way he'd lost a few people here and there who didn't like the new him.
Not that he could blame them.
It was the way he'd wake up and he'd be absolutely and completely sure of who he was, and he'd realize that that wasn't a good thing. It was the way he'd get dressed up, as if that meant anything now, and then realize: oh, wait, he had nowhere to go.
Being sober was not that much of a blessing, but what other choice did he have?
******
He woke quickly, half-leaping out of bed. It was different in the waking world, though. Here his leap was slow, clumsy. He was not that fat, not by his own standards, but he had a gut, and his body was flabby, out of shape, and he was pushing at the edge of fifty, his body starting yet another rebellion, and this one not of his own making. Not like sobering up, not like becoming a drunk in the first place--poor were drunks, rich were alcoholics, he'd once heard it said, and he'd kinda felt like nodding--this was something that would keep on going forever.
A spring was loose in the stupid bed, and he banged his leg hard on the small plastic dresser, cursing as he fumbled for a light.
The cool hit of nicotine told him he was still alive. Not that this meant much. His own senses, dimmer here in the world but not gone, told him that this was morning.
He usually slept the day away.
After he'd gotten the first cigarette of the day, he moved to turn on the electric lights above. They were way too bright, bright enough that his eyes burned, bright enough that they burned the whole of the trailer into his eyes. He could see all of it in a single sweeping view. Just two rooms, and one of them the bathroom. That was off near the bed, closed at the moment.
The area around him was trashed, dark brown and black and grey clothes thrown all over, nothing on the walls, the only homely touch a wine bottle vase of bright blue flowers that he'd gotten a month or two ago.
They hadn't wilted, they'd never wilt, and that was that. Besides that one detail, like a dot of color in a sea of grey, it was just a room. Just a place for a man to sleep, and beyond that was the 'living room', which was to say a television and a soft chair pushed back up against the wall. It was barely possible to squeeze by, and the chair itself smelled of dust and must and snack food.
The television was old, with bunny ears and everything. It had several boxes of pizza lying on top of it, one of them open, a gaping mouth that seemed to ask him why the fuck he hadn't throw it out. But then a glance at his trash can told him why. It was so full that it was overflowing, junk food bags meals spilling onto the floor. It was sitting in the center of a kitchenette that included a small cooler, an overhead rack for dishes, a sink and a small burner. And a microwave, which was what he used the most nowadays.
It was a big, square microwave, the ugly kind of thing that'd take a sledgehammer to break, but that also couldn't be consistent in anything it did. The kind people threw out years ago, and yet it'd still served him well.
"Argh," he groaned.
Be alone long enough and suddenly random objects, random crappy objects, can be sources of weird pride and kinship. He stretched and looked out the only window in the trailer, and confirmed that it was morning.
Or rather, his eyes burned as he opened the door and stepped out to greet Mother Nature. He was far away from the rest of the trailer park, with only a gravel road to connect him, however tenuously, to the world.
He wasn't used to being up this early, and the sun made him cover his eyes as he glanced over at his truck. It'd been new four years ago, and expensive, bought using the money he'd gotten from a job, and he didn't use it much. The big, bright red truck was just for driving into town, now, to pick up supplies.
Not much of a town, either. It had rained last night, and so the whole area around his small, white trailer smelled of mud, dirt and grass as he circled around and around. Pacing outside, listening to bird song. "Fuck," he cursed, all but yelled, knowing that there was nobody around to hear or even comment.
"Sometimes I think you curse too much. But it's part of your charm," Saturn said, running a hand through his hair.
"Well, maybe," he shrugged. He looked at her, and she shifted her hand a little, rubbing against his cheek. She was above him. He orbited her. Fuck, he wasn't a poet. But he wanted to be at that moment.
He reached up...and touched air. Blinked, shook his head, cursing again, louder, and then he kept on walking. His fingers ran through his balding, wispy hair, imagining different fingers. Imagining other futures, other pasts.
But she was dead. He didn't need to think of dead lovers.
He was needed in the Metropolis, that dream city, in just a few hours, but wouldn't it be easy to just stop fucking trying. Every day of his life, try try try, and what had it gotten him, what had it gotten anyone? He had no idea where he'd be without what he got from his dream excursions. Even poorer than this, and this was shit. This was no life for anyone to ever live, and yet it was familiar. The trailer wasn't even his, he'd never cared all that much about how happy his life outside the dreams was, because...because he'd be out of as much as possible.
Sometimes he'd wake back up and it'd been days, and there were magics he'd learned to keep his body going through that. He'd met another one of his kind, back before he'd known Saturn, who had starved herself almost to death, and gained power over starvation in her dreams. One day, halfway through teaching him those Sins, a sin that was the very opposite of gluttony, she had disappeared.
He expected that that meant she was dead.
He'd cared at the time, but he didn't know if he'd care as much if it happened again. Despite his thoughts, he couldn't help but keep on running his hand through his thinning hair. Her touch, memories, these were more tempting than a fight. Though he was as good at killing people in the dream world as ever, he still considered just surrendering. Not trying.
The pickings had been slim ever since he'd lost his Psyche. Four other good men and women, far better people than him, and he was left with nothing. Saturn gone. Isaac, torn and tortured and then put down with a weakness even Hunter hadn't known. The people that had pulled him out of the gutter, out of self-destruction, were dead. He wasn't delusional enough to pretend that this was what they'd have wanted.
He'd done plenty of dirty things before, and compared to this? Compared to those, this was clean.
Someone's dream of a city that never existed. Gary, Indiana was probably a shitty city, just like he was from a shitty town. There were factories, but a long time ago. Not even in the memory of some of the people here, people that he didn't even talk to anymore.
Balding, tired, he still was sure he could beat Angel. He'd done it before. He'd killed her, crashed her, and that was before things changed. Before he figured a few things out.
Mumbling to himself, frustrated that he'd even thought about giving up, he went inside, filled a bowl with popcorn, and had his breakfast.
He barely tasted it, it wasn't like the food in his dreams.
Once that was done, he searched in his sock drawer for the item of his that seemed the most valuable, but was worth the least.
He picked it up, examining it in the light.
That would do, he supposed.
He groaned and threw himself on the chair after that, and watched grainy television, staring at it, wasting away the hours.
And then he went to bed.
There was nothing for him here. Everything there.
********
He wobbled a little, staring down at the glass. Glowering. It wasn't much of a fucking bar.
"You know what your problem is, Matt?" he asked the other man. He thought he did, but the other man looked at him confused and he tried to think, blurrily staring at the thin, gawky looking man at the bar next to him. "You know what?"
"No."
"Fuck if you don't know! Fuck if you don't? It's that you're too much of a...oh god."
His stomach roiled at that very moment and he stood up. He felt it stoking, annoyance building to rage, as he looked into the mocking blue eyes of his friend.
"Too much of a what. Do you need to step out, man, you've been...pretty off lately." Matt slurred some, but he was merely tipsy, and the rest of the bar ignored it. It wasn't like he was picking a fight or anything. But he was just angry because...because fuck if he wasn't grounded. Probably be weeks, maybe even a month, before he could go back into the real deep parts of the Dreams.
And all that left him was the fucking world and…
He threw up all over the cracked sidewalk, staring out up at the moon. He'd been on the moon before, the moon people imagined, with Moon Men and all that. He'd seen things they could only imagine and yet he saw his friend's eyes, and grunted. "Don't laugh."
Matt was chuckling.
"I said don't fucking laugh!"
He had a bottle in his hand, he'd dragged it out as if he was going to need another pull after throwing up everything on the ground. It stank. It stank and yet he stared at it, and then down at the bottle.
He took another sip.
"What the hell is wrong with you, man?"
"Hell?" He started laughing, and stood to his full height, "You ain't seen half of what hell is."
"I hate it when you get like that. Call me when you sober up."
"Don't you turn your back on me," he said. Not you too.
Matt turned.
Hunter swung the bottle with all his might. Mildly supernatural might at that, enhanced a little, the ghost of the Sins he could commit in his dreams.
Matt lived, that was the most that could be said. Hunter found a way to cover for it, or he'd still be…
He'd be in prison for even longer than he was after he'd worked to get himself off.
And he'd stopped drinking. How could he drink when...when that's what he'd done, when he'd gotten that angry, that red-hot, and then lashed out and hurt someone like that. It just wasn't right. He'd gotten help, and now the help was dead.
******
Down below, the chaos only increased. All of the cities of history, too, and myth and legend and Utopia. Paris in a dozen ages, each of them strange and yet evocative. Each city wasn't always the size of a city, not really. And the cities were chopped up, mixed, up, confused. Temple districts all clumped together while the business districts were elsewhere. Even the straightforward, even the simple, was hard to define in the land of dreams. In the place where all of the dreams and thoughts of humans bottomed out and made things.
And were made, as well.
Color and light and chaos in a riot, and riots too, and gangs that were not like real gangs. Real gangs were desperate poor fuckers with a little too much to drink, or a little too little to lose. Gangs in this place, people's imaginings of gangland urban shit, could be larger than life. Maybe the people there liked to imagine it that way as well.
Walking across all of it, guided by memory, was Hunter. He was wearing a heavier jacket now, with more cloth armoring, and his pistol had a silencer on it now. Then there was the hat he was wearing, and the odds and ends stuffed in the pockets of the jacket. He walked with purpose, proud and strong. At least, he liked to see himself that way, and he knew that nobody was going to try to pick a fight with him. Not after all of this time.
He was too dangerous for most of them, and the rest didn't want to exhaust themselves when he wasn't carrying all that much. A few dream props, good ones, but nothing special.
The lights and sights and sounds all drew him. Lured him. Lured him with the promise of something more. He loved the Metropolis, loved all of the realms in their own way, those that didn't remind him of the shit he lived with. This did, sometimes, but not always--
He glanced around at the crowded street, most of the people moving scenery, but a dozen Residents. Watching him, he saw, but shrugged. People could watch. He knew that Angel wasn't following him, because she had a head start, and she knew where it was.
He glanced at a blood-soaked alley, right at the edge of a small, run down street. Boarded up windows, brick buildings that seemed as if they'd been half-looted, grey and gloomy, with graffiti as the only hint of brightness. Gary was a fucking mess.
And the person hiring him had some bizarre dream that by connecting the idea of Gary to some optimistic song and dance version of what it was and what it could be, people would be more positive about it in the real world and then...what?
Hunter wasn't paid to interrogate the plans of his employers.
The city looked like it sucked. The Residents, the beings that lived in the Astral full-time, looked broken down, beaten down, angry. In the world of dreams it was all so fucking obvious: this was the kind of place where anger had a name and face. Where you could visit Fascism and find Hope. But it didn't really mean anything, most of the time. Just human imagination.
And so the strange black and red bloody birds that flew through the sky above no doubt had some deep symbolism to someone.
Or perhaps they were watching for him.
He walked down the alley, and found himself in a sort of maze. But he knew the way. He'd called in favors, he'd looked around the area before, and while he'd been driven off by the zombies--for if man could imagine all sorts of versions of the same city, then why not imagine that?--he had what he needed now to kill them.
Twist and turn and twist again, and then he was standing in front of what looked like actual hell. The buildings were decayed, more broken down than even a zombie attack should have caused, and it was silent. Not merely uncrowded, not merely dying, but entirely silent.
It smelled of blood and brains and something else, something hard to pin, and he'd walk cautiously, aware that there could be traps everywhere. Or scared survivors setting up insane colonies, or playing King of the World in the chaos. All things that were imagined, and so all things that were here. As few people as there were, it was useful if you wanted to just explore buildings. Get a feel for the layout of a place.
Once, he'd given a crook information about the layout of a bank vault by going into a version of the area he was going to rob that had been destroyed by a sudden plague. Empty, entirely empty, and he'd strolled in, immune to the dream diseases, and taken what he needed.
Here, he crept along, keeping low, listening. He had a goal in mind, but it'd take time to reach it, and in the meantime, he needed to not draw attention. A dozen minutes of walking and waiting and listening later, he ran across his first zombie, at the mouth of an alley he wanted to cut through to avoid the gang leader holed out in that street.
It was an ugly thing, flesh rotted, clothes ragged, her body torn to pieces, and yet it all looked almost fake. The smell, though, that was all too real. He drew his pistol, touching the plastic cap on it, and then he aimed his shot far more carefully than he normally did and fired.
A real silencer would have still made enough noise to wake the dead in every direction. He'd have survivors and zombies crawling all over his ass before he could get away, trying to drag him into their narratives, the way it was in most realms. He prolly wouldn't die, but it'd waste his time.
This was a dream silencer, this was what people imagined they were like, so it only made as much sound as if he'd clapped his hands. Single shot to the head, and the zombie went down in a disgusting spray of blood and brains. Typical.
He kept on going through, killing a few, here and there, ignoring the smells and trying not to kill too many, or he'd be the "Lone Hero saving the city." There were a lot of ways a realm could suck you in, if it tried, but it took work to change things forever, especially in fantasy realms like this.
Finally, he came to the outskirts of town.
And saw that it was already occupied. Three or four people were standing out in front, guarding the two-story house, which had seen far better days. They were all dressed in identical jackets, three men and one women, looking ragged, with knifes and guns on all of them. The men were dirty, filthy in fact, with hungry, angry, frustrated looks on their face, while the one woman was tall, imperious looking, as if she had stepped out of a casting call. All of them just Residents. Not really people, some said. Easier to kill. But there was a look in her eyes that froze Hunter.
He didn't want to kill them. Those eyes, they reminded him of Saturn, and so he tried to edge around, moving towards the next house and then looping around, leaping the fence easily and landing down on the dying grass. There, up on the second floor, there was an open window. He stepped forward, slowly, and then one of them turned.
He stared at Hunter for a moment as Hunter drew his gun and fired. He didn't hesitate, and he was too experienced to miss, even if he wanted to.
It caught the man in the chest.
It was always odd, watching someone else be shot. The Resident's wound wasn't big, but he shook, blood pouring, and the others leveled guns: a rifle and a shotgun, as he pulled out a cigarette and pulled on his need.
He pulled on and drew from the sins, the abuse that he put into his body, the way he destroyed who he was, the way he choked himself off with smoke, and then he blew a screen of that smoke out, just as they fired. He leapt away, and he heard the bullets go over his head as they coughed and choked.
A smokescreen protecting him.
He leapt up for the window, and managed to grab the edge of it, in a feat that would have been impossible to even imagine without his powers, or even in the waking world at all. He swung himself in, only to find himself facing down the point of a crossbow.
Angel stood there, glancing down at the songbook that was the key. He'd guessed it'd be something like that. The room was wrecked, but there were bookshelves on the wall, and the rug beneath his feet looked like it had once been expensive.
This was...some sort of artist's room, or something?
"So we meet," she said, "The composer here, he didn't write this...but there's symbolism." Angel shrugged, "I assume you aren't going to see reason?"
"Afraid not," he admitted. "My guy wants to revive Gary, whereas your guy--"
"Wants the same. But do you really think," Angel asked, tilting her head, stepping towards the door, "That making people optimistic about how great the city is would be the best way to make things better? Gary has to change in the real world, not just in people's dreams, not in the way they imagine things are." She said each word with a passion that told him the worst: it was a fucking moral project on her part. Again.
It made him feel even worse. Guilt and doubt, though not as strong as in the waking world, plagued him. He didn't want to hurt her. Yet, he'd killed plenty, and she'd all but dared him--
"Y'know, you're probably right," he admitted with a shrug.
Her eyes widened. "I
am, then why--"
"He's the one paying me, not whoever you're working for," Hunter admitted.
"Oh," Angel said, "you know, I'm--"
He fired, and she dodged, throwing herself at the ground and firing her crossbow. The bolt seemed to go faster and faster with each second, going straight through the wall when he slid around it by a matter of second. Damn, that was some sort of dream bow. He closed in, firing again, and by now he knew people were running. The door would throw itself open and the odds would get worse. He didn't have much time, but then again, she'd never been someone able to get close up.
So maybe he should just charge her, grow some claws, see what she said to that.
Combat, for him, was oddly controlled. At least when he was in his right mind. He knew what he was trying to do, his body obeyed, as he drew a knife from his jacket and came at her.
She fell up away from him, fast. Fell was the word, as she tumbled in midair, her gravity suddenly flipped around, as she went towards the ceiling. She tumbled in midair to land on her feet, throwing a knife that slashed across his neck, would have got him if he hadn't expected it.
She was using her Inversion ability already, that meant she was probably going to go all the way into the form, soon. He could see the outlines of wings, could see it starting.
Why wait?
He let go. Actualized. And he roared.
******
It was torn away, little by little. Doubts and regrets, but they were then picked up, refashioned. Rage bubbled and boiled his flesh, the taste of whiskey drowned out all others, he embraced what he'd always hated, and the fury there was enough to drown the whole world and regret it for not a second.
That's what it was. Declare that evil was thy good, declare that you didn't regret anything, and declare it in your heart of hearts.
And she was doing the same. Her thoughts on god, on her shitty bible-thumping parents, her pride and arrogance and self-righteousness, all of them were weapons, were things not to fight, not to hate, but to embrace, for better or worse.
He was water, and she was wind. Scales of blue and red rippled outward, as he was torn apart. The pain was not only bearable, it was sweet, it was the pain of a hangover that told him that he'd actually drunk the night before, and all that meant. His legs fell away, as his body stretched out, and his teeth filled and filled and filled with points and shards. Broken, shattered, cutting teeth, and eyes with doubled-lids, his form filling the room, water flowing from his scales, flowing off of it. Power too, as he roared and looked up at her. He thirsted for blood, each eye crazed and dark and without sense, looking up at his enemy.
She was an angel with golden-green wings, and a hundred arms, to grasp to feel to touch to be, she was shining and glorious and her eyes were pitiless pools that judged and hated him as much as he hated her. As much as he hated everyone.
She smirked, her teeth filed into points, and held out a single hand. Wind cut into his flesh as he leapt, and she tried to retreat, falling and rising at random, wings flapping to direct him.
His every movement tore into the house, dissolved it, the water scalding and dank and strange.
Her every movement tried to build the house again, tried to make it a temple of her power, tearing chunks of it to throw at him, shifting things to look golden, only for it to rot away.
He roared out his hatred, out the only thoughts he had now:
Die! Die! Die!
******
They battled, and all the zombies in the world couldn't have torn them apart. Couldn't have stopped them. They battled, two goliaths, strong enough to shake the very world of dreams. Angel and Hunter, experienced Scavengers, closer to demons than most of them, closer to hell if it existed.
She tore the scales from his body and pierced an eye with them. He ripped her arm off in his teeth, and then another and another, the blood flowing silvery on the ground, smearing and trailing over everything. Marking it as her own. As he marked her.
It was a dance they'd done before, and he knew her moves, he knew her tricks, and he knew that she wouldn't get away. He was too fast, and he pulled on every Sin he had to enhance it. Threw everything he had.
They spilled out into the streets. She tried to avoid killing people, Residents and survivors that they ran across as they battled across the city. Zombies that got in the way died, and so did anyone else. He roared and didn't care about the deaths. Would later. No time. The Angel tried to avoid killing people, and redoubled her fury each time she did, and finally the whole town was scattered before them, a trail of destruction winding its way across dying streets.
And then she was pinned. A wing torn, ugly, broken. A large piece of metal piercing straight through and then out the other side. She screeched, helpless and tired and desperate.
He didn't regret it. Not then. But as he fell out of his form, as his mouth opened wider and wider and his body began to fold in on itself, tearing itself from the beast he'd been, as he reclaimed his humanity, it returned. Every regret. Every fear. He didn't want to be a monster.
But he was the spawn of demons. He was a sinner by nature. He coughed, looking at her form.
"I...lose," Angel whispered, her voice like a choir, echoing and loud and strange. "Again."
"Always...fucking...fuck," he cursed, and said, "And now...now you die." He drew out the cross.
The cross of false gold, fools' gold. Religion, avarice, and righteous hypocrisy, all in one. It was a beautiful piece of fakery, and he held it out, allowed her to see it. He'd hidden it away, and taken it with him now. Her true weakness. The one way he could kill her and not have to ever deal with her again. Kill her not merely in a dream, but in reality.
You hid them as best you could, and you went on quests to change them, searched desperately for ways to hide it. But if it was found, that was that.
"You're a monster. You're everything about us that's wrong. And you could be so much more. I hate you, I hate you but I want to save you, save you so much." Her voice sounded reverent, sounded as if she was drunk on her own righteousness.
Of course. In that form, he thought, his headache mounting, his hands shaking with phantom DT, every flaw, every sin you blamed yourself for was holy, was true, was all that you could be. It was not a way that any sane or decent human being could live in for more than a few moments. Often, he wanted to stay there forever, drunk and angry and broken and proud of it.
"You're right. I'm not a nice person. Anybody else would realize that a long fucking time ago. But while your soul is torn, while you're healing, while you're crashed, think about this. You're a decent person. You can't save me. And if you come after me again, I will kill you for real. Forever."
He put the cross away and walked over to the crossbow. When some other being like you, some other child of damnation, died, but not for good, the body was just a shell. You stole from it what you could, and you never brought more than you were prepared to lose, if it came down to it.
There was little honor, among such beings. Among himself. "I...you're sparing me?"
He imagined Saturn, broken. Broken and yet Angel was allowed to live. The sick part of him that he hated most of all, that had enjoyed hurting Angel, wanted to do that to everyone, as it had been done to Saturn. She'd turned him around, made him think he could be almost decent. Almost.
"Yes. Last chance, though. I do need a Psyche. You're giving all sorts of great advice, but I'm not going to follow it, and the sooner you get that, the sooner you can go back to being happy."
He picked up the song book, the key to the spun off realm. 'Gary, Indiana, a Musical of Redemption' it read. It made him want to laugh. Still, what the client wanted…
"I...I'm sorry," Angel said. As if she were the guilty one. He pulled out his gun, aimed it at her head as she shifted, and moved back towards her more human body, falling to pieces. Falling away.
"Spend the time you're stuck on earth thinking about who to like." He said it so calmly, even though here was another former friend. Here was another bridge burned. And the worst part was that it was starting to not even hurt, anymore. Not like it should.
He pulled the trigger.
*******
He hated waking up, the way that he always wanted to sleep more. He leapt, trying to get out of bed, but this time he flopped down. Maybe he'd spend all day in bed.
Hunter reached for a light, and lit the first cigarette of a new day.
*****
A/N: Alright, this was a lot of work, and is a sort of...introduction of sorts? Like an opening fiction for a splatbook that will never be? But I also wanted it to be a self-contained story, one with a start, middle, and end, and definite themes, some of which would be shared by the splat, some just by this character.
It was a complicated process to get to this point. The creation of the story was something that took less than a week, including enough editing that I'd call this a somewhat rough second draft? Thanks to
@keios and
@NemoMarx for looking over it. But the impetus for the idea, which I modified quite a bit, but leapt off from, was an EarthScorpion post back in mid-January. I thought and turned it over, and began building something, which only came together even more after playing a game called We Know The Devil.
Other elements are possibly even older, especially the non-worldbuilding one.
Despite being largely original, this is also grounded in part in the Astral Realms book. Check it out, it's great.
I had to balance a lot of things in this work, and so I did try to only explain things that I had to, in order for it to stand on its own, rather than merely as an introduction to a splat whose name still isn't actually nailed down. Or at least, there's no easy "one word name" like with Orpheans.
Anyways, so, I hope you enjoyed reading it, and I am willing to take questions about the setting/etc.
Just throwing this out here.
