(no subject)
Juilliard in action.
It’s astonishing, Juilliard thinks, almost cheerfully, how much he had expected Aneirin to be standing there smiling after the world swam back into focus.
He wasn’t.
He isn’t standing in any of the rooms Juilliard cleanly, systematically empties, and this, to Juilliard, is not a significant problem.
He isn’t in the corridors Juilliard is rushing through, he isn’t in the stairwells, he isn’t even outside the building, and he certainly isn’t in the room Juilliard recognizes all too clearly as a torture chamber.
That one is the hardest, actually, because there’s more than just a pirate with a knife in there; the clean, white room is occupied by someone hanging in chains, with an expression of bleak despair Juilliard does not particularly want to look at, not after wearing it for so long. He can’t let the man in chains get away, in case he’s a decoy-it’s an insanely obvious plan-but on the other hand he has no intention of passing up the opportunity of arresting the torturer. He hates computers too much to have any idea at all of how to modify the program so as to transport only the torturer away. It’s a dilemma, which he solves by shooting the torturer calmly through the heart.
He will worry about the ethics of this later, but he is rather certain it will not keep him up at nights.
Juilliard’s mind is becoming crystalline again, and he does enjoy the sensation-thoughts pinned like butterflies under glass, for slow observation, since everything else has slowed down, politely, around him.
He elects to request direct transport for the chained man to the medical wing, though he knocks him out first; it’s only a precaution. The walls are very white and Juilliard wipes up the little stain of blood the man’s body was hiding, delicately, with his shirt.
Then he returns to the maze of corridors and rooms, where Aneirin, still, is not.
This is beginning to get faintly tiresome, really.
Juilliard doesn’t, even, truly think about the fact that he has been doing something life-threatening until he manages to enter a room too slowly and receive a knife-wound to the hand, which, after they’re gone, he looks at with detachment. It isn’t that much pain, or that dangerous a slice-it hadn’t gone in-and he stops the bleeding by wrapping his regrettably well-made overshirt around it. He’ll miss this shirt. It strikes him, in the growing emptiness of these headquarters, that he might be suddenly killed somewhere in these corridors, and he smiles, a little. He had been worried that he was doing something inconsequential.
His mind always closes off when there is fighting like this, he knows, although he feels more coherent than he did last time. He supposes that’s a side effect of having to think while bleeding from a thousand different cuts. How lovely for him.
And Aneirin is not summoned by that thought, nor Juilliard’s perverse, “Well, he certainly can’t be coming now. He’d be unfashionably late.”
He gets as much of an idea as he is ever likely to get from another room he stumbles into, where there is a young girl in chains, very dead, in a recognizable way. There’s even a handy little symbol carved into her stomach, not too deep, that hadn’t quite finished healing when she died, and to Juilliard that symbol is very familiar.
She’s dead, though, with a knife calmly left stuck into her heart, and Juilliard imagines Aneirin didn’t have time for his usual niceties. After all, in general, Aneirin is not a man to allow any chance for a victim’s survival, even over the aesthetics of it all. Aneirin did say that himself to Juilliard, at some point, courteously, with a smile. That he, Juilliard, was certainly not going to escape-unfortunately, had been Aneirin’s wording-because Aneirin was not planning to leave Juilliard until Juilliard was dead. That if Aneirin was forced, by circumstances beyond his control, to leave Juilliard alone, he would be leaving Juilliard alone and dead.
But he had left Juilliard alone (to hold ten minute’s conversation with a young man who looked in some strange way familiar), and this introduces to Juilliard’s mind certain disturbing possibilities that he does not quite have time to think about before he faces his next full room, which he, again, empties, this time taking a gunshot that grazed his shoulder as they disappeared. The pain distracts him, briefly, but also adds to the eerie silence.
Not quite silence. Someone else’s voice is there, if he listens hard enough. He is thus far electing not to listen.
Juilliard had rather been hoping to hear that voice in a long, drawn-out death rattle, but he is not, at the heart of it, a petty man, and revenge thwarted only disconcerts him a little, does not destroy all his hopes and dreams, or some such Shakespearean madness.
Aneirin is not there. Has left, not precipitously, since it is, after all, Aneirin, who always has three plans in place, but swiftly. Will likely not return, unless Juilliard’s quiet, unnerving surmise is correct, and then it will probably only be Juilliard’s concern; he is fairly certain he knows Aneirin well enough to predict he would not attack THEY to get at the man who he may have, just possibly, allowed to escape, for reasons passing understanding. Or to reach the boy he scarred, so many years ago.
There are many rooms in the complex and Juilliard cannot possibly reach all of them, but he manages to find enough to keep him busy until he receives a message from the clean-up team that the building has been declared empty. He assists them briefly in the check, and then returns.
And Aneirin is not waiting for him at the dispatch location, though Mêlée is, not quite meeting his eyes, which is almost, Juilliard thinks, thoughts dissolving a bit, as bad.
Or in the medical wing, where he goes for his perfunctory check-up, and a re-bandaging of the hand, which really has very little wrong with it, the nurse says, acerbically, so he can stop whining.
Or in his room, where he goes, instead of Theirn’s, though he is quite sure the Frenchman is not well; Theirn does not want fixing, he has said, and so Juilliard will not make the attempt.
Just behind closed eyes, when Juilliard finally falls into a fitful sleep.
But that is expected, and can be, successfully, ignored.
It’s astonishing, Juilliard thinks, almost cheerfully, how much he had expected Aneirin to be standing there smiling after the world swam back into focus.
He wasn’t.
He isn’t standing in any of the rooms Juilliard cleanly, systematically empties, and this, to Juilliard, is not a significant problem.
He isn’t in the corridors Juilliard is rushing through, he isn’t in the stairwells, he isn’t even outside the building, and he certainly isn’t in the room Juilliard recognizes all too clearly as a torture chamber.
That one is the hardest, actually, because there’s more than just a pirate with a knife in there; the clean, white room is occupied by someone hanging in chains, with an expression of bleak despair Juilliard does not particularly want to look at, not after wearing it for so long. He can’t let the man in chains get away, in case he’s a decoy-it’s an insanely obvious plan-but on the other hand he has no intention of passing up the opportunity of arresting the torturer. He hates computers too much to have any idea at all of how to modify the program so as to transport only the torturer away. It’s a dilemma, which he solves by shooting the torturer calmly through the heart.
He will worry about the ethics of this later, but he is rather certain it will not keep him up at nights.
Juilliard’s mind is becoming crystalline again, and he does enjoy the sensation-thoughts pinned like butterflies under glass, for slow observation, since everything else has slowed down, politely, around him.
He elects to request direct transport for the chained man to the medical wing, though he knocks him out first; it’s only a precaution. The walls are very white and Juilliard wipes up the little stain of blood the man’s body was hiding, delicately, with his shirt.
Then he returns to the maze of corridors and rooms, where Aneirin, still, is not.
This is beginning to get faintly tiresome, really.
Juilliard doesn’t, even, truly think about the fact that he has been doing something life-threatening until he manages to enter a room too slowly and receive a knife-wound to the hand, which, after they’re gone, he looks at with detachment. It isn’t that much pain, or that dangerous a slice-it hadn’t gone in-and he stops the bleeding by wrapping his regrettably well-made overshirt around it. He’ll miss this shirt. It strikes him, in the growing emptiness of these headquarters, that he might be suddenly killed somewhere in these corridors, and he smiles, a little. He had been worried that he was doing something inconsequential.
His mind always closes off when there is fighting like this, he knows, although he feels more coherent than he did last time. He supposes that’s a side effect of having to think while bleeding from a thousand different cuts. How lovely for him.
And Aneirin is not summoned by that thought, nor Juilliard’s perverse, “Well, he certainly can’t be coming now. He’d be unfashionably late.”
He gets as much of an idea as he is ever likely to get from another room he stumbles into, where there is a young girl in chains, very dead, in a recognizable way. There’s even a handy little symbol carved into her stomach, not too deep, that hadn’t quite finished healing when she died, and to Juilliard that symbol is very familiar.
She’s dead, though, with a knife calmly left stuck into her heart, and Juilliard imagines Aneirin didn’t have time for his usual niceties. After all, in general, Aneirin is not a man to allow any chance for a victim’s survival, even over the aesthetics of it all. Aneirin did say that himself to Juilliard, at some point, courteously, with a smile. That he, Juilliard, was certainly not going to escape-unfortunately, had been Aneirin’s wording-because Aneirin was not planning to leave Juilliard until Juilliard was dead. That if Aneirin was forced, by circumstances beyond his control, to leave Juilliard alone, he would be leaving Juilliard alone and dead.
But he had left Juilliard alone (to hold ten minute’s conversation with a young man who looked in some strange way familiar), and this introduces to Juilliard’s mind certain disturbing possibilities that he does not quite have time to think about before he faces his next full room, which he, again, empties, this time taking a gunshot that grazed his shoulder as they disappeared. The pain distracts him, briefly, but also adds to the eerie silence.
Not quite silence. Someone else’s voice is there, if he listens hard enough. He is thus far electing not to listen.
Juilliard had rather been hoping to hear that voice in a long, drawn-out death rattle, but he is not, at the heart of it, a petty man, and revenge thwarted only disconcerts him a little, does not destroy all his hopes and dreams, or some such Shakespearean madness.
Aneirin is not there. Has left, not precipitously, since it is, after all, Aneirin, who always has three plans in place, but swiftly. Will likely not return, unless Juilliard’s quiet, unnerving surmise is correct, and then it will probably only be Juilliard’s concern; he is fairly certain he knows Aneirin well enough to predict he would not attack THEY to get at the man who he may have, just possibly, allowed to escape, for reasons passing understanding. Or to reach the boy he scarred, so many years ago.
There are many rooms in the complex and Juilliard cannot possibly reach all of them, but he manages to find enough to keep him busy until he receives a message from the clean-up team that the building has been declared empty. He assists them briefly in the check, and then returns.
And Aneirin is not waiting for him at the dispatch location, though Mêlée is, not quite meeting his eyes, which is almost, Juilliard thinks, thoughts dissolving a bit, as bad.
Or in the medical wing, where he goes for his perfunctory check-up, and a re-bandaging of the hand, which really has very little wrong with it, the nurse says, acerbically, so he can stop whining.
Or in his room, where he goes, instead of Theirn’s, though he is quite sure the Frenchman is not well; Theirn does not want fixing, he has said, and so Juilliard will not make the attempt.
Just behind closed eyes, when Juilliard finally falls into a fitful sleep.
But that is expected, and can be, successfully, ignored.