theresnodoor | (no subject)

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When you fight for three years, you get used to the aspects of it. The secret keeping. The sudden pounding rush of adrenaline. The constant thrum of fear under your skin. The exhaustion. The rage. The helplessness and the power.

There are different kinds of 'get used to,' though.

There's the kind where, free of those constraints, you can relax. It never leaves entirely, but it ebbs. You don't miss it exactly but you recognize that you could go back to it in a heartbeat, if you needed to - and you tell yourself you don't want to.

There's another kind. Less readily admitted to.

The kind where you relax immediately. And slowly, surely, the thrum under your skin comes back. But the fear has a different flavor this time around, more restless than anything else.

The nice thing is, the solution is obvious.

The bad thing is, it's a solution you can't admit to.

Rachel does a lot of things to channel that thrum. Waking at dawn. Gymnastics routines. Runs around the lake. Training with the punching bag. Reading with Tobias. Talking, talking, talking to people. Morphing for fun.

But they're only channels, and none of them for much purpose.

There's only one thing that's given her true relaxation, release, since Milliways.

An afternoon walk in Milliways' forest and Rachel finds herself standing before a tall rock face, more than a hill but not quite a mountain. An opening several feet taller than she is - a rock cave.

Carved into the stone, a symbol she won't readily forget.

"...Daedalus."

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The atheleticism may be great, but the technique is amateur at best. No one's ever tried to teach Mel gymnastics.

"Vampire Slayer, originally enough," Mel says. "I don't bother with it myself, but lurks get all excited about tradition."

The lack of technique gives Rachel mixed feelings. On one hand, she's obviously better trained than Mel. But on the other, Mel's flips and handstands don't seem to suffer for it.

Plus, she has to stop herself from adding a flip to her own stride. She has nothing to prove.

Surely.

"Lurks and vampires are the same thing?" she guesses, curious. "That's what you do, you go after them? Stop them from... what? Eating people?"

That's what vampires do, right?

Edited 2012-01-04 01:34 (UTC)

"Yep."

To all of the above.

Mel turns her head and grins cheerfully. "That's about the whole of it."

Easy answers are so much better than drawn-out details. Even Rachel can't stop herself from answering that grin with a small smile.

"TV got it right, for once. I'm surprised."

Edited 2012-01-08 16:11 (UTC)

"Yeah, sometimes the scopes are right," Mel confirms, supplying her own word.

"Spun the Hell out of me when I realised that."

Rachel doesn't have much to say to that. Television has yet to get aliens right, so far as she knows.

The hall they're walking down remains dark, lit only by the light Mel is holding. Rachel notices the change in texture beneath her feet several paces before the space changes visually.

Large stone blocks into smaller red brick. More like wandering the halls of an old, abandoned building than a drafty castle.

"A scenery change means something new is coming for us."

Edited 2012-01-08 18:08 (UTC)

"Oh." Dry, "good."

The dryness is directed at the fun of something new, not actually at Rachel, or that she said so. That's ctually useful information.

"They all going to be as boring as vampire dogs?"

Equally dry: "Probably not."

Based on her last trip. And the injuries she went back to the bar with.

A corner up ahead, once turned, leads to yet another long hall. Several nooks are built into the stone and each has a small, detailed statue resting inside.

Nearest to them is a child, hair in ringlets, small delicate hands over her eyes.

Edited 2012-01-12 00:41 (UTC)

Mel rocks her front foot back onto the heel as she slows and stills and assesses the new situation.

It involves tilting her head and giving the child an appraising look.

Probably wouldn't be worth anything in the markets she runs in.

So she shrugs and starts walking again. But she doesn't continue chatting.

Rachel stops when Mel does, movements sharp, gaze darting until she finds what's new.

Statue, rough grey stone, like the sort you'd find in a cemetery. Creepy small child.

Mel just keeps walking. Rachel frowns and follows, watching it as she moves on. The last time, there had been no decorations, nothing that hadn't served a direct purpose.

Edited 2012-01-22 23:04 (UTC)

"These s'posed to do anything?" Mel asks, as she finishes passing the small child. She turns back to look at the stone back of the child's stone head, then shoot a quizzical look at Rachel.

What exactly, she seems to be asking, is the point?

Rachel looks back at her and shrugs. "I don't know. But last time, there wasn't anything that was just there for no-"

She stops, takes a step away from the child and toward Mel. Then points over Mel's shoulder. "There's another one."

A boy this time, pure stone, hands covering his eyes.

Edited 2012-02-05 17:51 (UTC)

Mel turns her head and looks at the boy over her shoulder.

"Was he there a second ago?"

"I didn't think so." Frowning at it, Rachel glances back to see how far they are from the girl statue--

And finds it standing, frozen and cold, not six inches from her.

When she jumps back, she nearly bowls Mel over in the process.

Edited 2012-02-06 00:10 (UTC)

Mel leaps back from the sudden appearance of blonde girl right in her personal space.

She turns as she does so, and sees the cause of the reaction.

"Rutting hell."

"That was not there," Rachel snaps - probably unnecessarily. She twists sharply around to see where the other statue is.

She could swear it's closer. Not as much as the other, but definitely closer.

"...they don't have any weapons." Is guarded. Wary. No weapons she can see.

Edited 2012-02-06 02:15 (UTC)

"They're made of stone," Mel says, in a way that points out that they might not need to have weapons.

She picks up and swings her scythe at the neck of the girl, only to have it hit the stone with a ringing sound.

"I'm gonna vote for not sticking around to find out if they really do have weapons."

Rachel scowls at the little boy, all rough stone and delicate hands covering his face. "They don't move when we watch them," she says, in a way that sounds like an argument.

But then if they can move, human skulls are awfully vulnerable to heavy stone.

"...yeah, okay. Let's get out of here."

She doesn't look away from the stone boy. And as they start to move down the hall, she hopes Mel hasn't turned her gaze from the girl.

"Yeah," Mel agrees, staring hard at the girl as she takes a step backwards, her elbow knocking Rachel to acknowledge where she is. "Not waiting around."

She passes the boy statue slowly, staring at it hard. But it doesn't move - pure stone, doesn't twitch. It doesn't stop her from walking past it, it doesn't move at all when she keeps walking, peering over her shoulder at it.

Once they're several feet past, she looks forward, peering into the darkness of the hall for the next obstacle.

Edited 2012-02-06 02:44 (UTC)

Mel falls in behind Rachel, watching both girl and boy as she matches her step with the body in front of her, letting each step find its place by feel.

Except the only footsteps in the hall now are Mel's.

Edited 2012-02-06 02:56 (UTC)

"Rachel!"

Mel spins around when Rachel stops, and spins right back around, finding herself nose to nose with the girl statue.

She glares at the backs of the statue's shielding eyes, and angrily kicks it hard enough to topple it to the floor.

"RACHEL!"

By doing so, putting her back to the statue of the small, stone boy.

For a moment, a fraction of a second, so short it could have been imagined, there is nothing at all.

And then.

There is a strong earthenware pipe wide enough for Mel to move comfortably, tall enough for her to stand straight.

And a wave of some foul smelling liquid rushing toward her.

Mel's been in sewers enough that she knows where she is immediately and has no hesitation in grabbing the stone above her and swinging herself up, flat against the roof.

She rides out the wave of sewage and weathers the splash with her eyes and mouth closed.

When she does have room to breathe, she yells again, "RACHEL!"