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impersonaMWAHAHA
MWA HA HA HA HA
Pixie I did it :D I wrote Dusty-being-broken fic for Gryle's Everyone Is A Sad Panda Future AU.
It kind of has more to do with Deon, but that's not really his fault. I couldn't imagine Dusty taking an active role in a story like this, or taking an active role in ANYTHING after what happened to him. I HOPE HIS MISERY PLEASES YOU.
Deon turned off the state road, ducked into an abandoned road and cruised forward, down winding cliffside until he saw the Sutro Baths laid out beneath him. He would have never guessed that a place like this actually existed, sort of like the ruins of old Greek baths just dumped onto the California coast. He found the place he had intended on getting to, but he didn't know if here hid the person he was looking for as well. As it was, Deon hadn't been entirely sure whether Colton was covering for his comrade by giving him misleading directions. The last three failed trips to the coast heightened Deon's suspicions...suspicions that now ebbed away as he wound closer and closer to the foundation of the ruins.
The roads felt long these days, and Deon had thought about a lot of things, including how things used to be like. How Dusty used to be like. Deon manuevered his bike through a crumbling little sidepass, and tried to leave his expectations behind him as he got closer and closer to the shoreline. He knew as he pulled up that he found Dusty, could just feel it in his gut in a way only years and years of knowing the guy could make natural.
An old bike was abandoned by a cluster of fallen pillars and debris, and a man sat with his back to a slab of marble, his eyes and bare feet towards the ocean. Deon cut the engine on his own bike and propped it up on its stand, and got to walking around the fallen pipes and marble towards Dusty. He approached the man slowly, deliberately kicking up dirt and trash as he went. Dropped his helmet to the sand. Coughed. Made noise. Made sure that Dusty would know he was coming, even if Dusty did absolutely nothing to acknowledge him in return.
Funny that his hair was the first thing to truly hit Deon as different, not just different but jarring and wrong. Cause they had always been the Herbal Essence twins, Dusty and Tasha. But now there wasn't anything crisp and clean about Dusty's white hair, yellowed and clumped together in places by dirt and crust, bound together loosely by twine. And Tasha simply wasn't there.
Crow's feet stamped at the corners of Dusty's eyes, his skin dry and pulled like worn sandpaper. God, Deon thought, staring at the one guy who shouldn't ever look this damn old and unwell. Catatonic, nearly like he blinked only once a minute. Deon guessed that the empty bottle of Jack at the ex-Marine's boots was supposed to make him think Dusty sat in a drunken stupor, but Deon was experienced enough to call that bluff. Weird though, Dusty had never pulled the Silent Geranamo Stoneface thing before. But now, Deon guessed, was as good a time as ever to start.
He paused to inspect the old motorcycle, cause it was a lot easier to do that than to make the final few steps towards Dusty himself. Deon put his hand on the once-smooth bridge of the bike. It grated at his fingers for the roughness of it. Salt and erosion and daemon ichor stripped off the nice paint job that used to be there, ate half of the rubber coating the handlebars, left the seat a vile discolored white and green. The sidecar was gone, and part of the bike seemed ripped off with it.
"Your bike is trashed," Deon said. Seeing the Indian like this said worse about Dusty's state than Dusty himself did. "Man. How'd you even get around on the road?"
He walked around the bike again, touched the engine and other pieces of the bike, extended some of his summoner ability to get a better idea of the damage. Dusty was a pro, sure, but this was bad. A lot of the metal was downright warped. Even if the bike could still run, it could fall to pieces at any time. Deon considered it for a minute, and scratched the back of his neck uneasily. There was only one way he could think of doing this.
"Damn. I'll have to go get my truck, lug you and your ride home." He stepped away from the bike and instead looked hard at Dusty, almost like he could demand an answer with the force of his stare. "Will you still be here when I get back?"
Perhaps the answer was in the cold, biting breeze passing through between them, and in the long silence that was Dusty's only answer.
Before long, Deon's lips pulled into a long grimace. Instinctively he pat the chest pocket where he used to keep a flask, like a ex-chain smoker looking for their old familiar pack. This'd be easier to deal with if he had some booze himself, but Deon had quit carrying it on him a few years ago, just as he had quit his binging. He had to. A man could only handle so many demons at a time.
He stood his ground a few moments, waiting in futility for Dusty to break somehow. But he couldn't wait for hours and days. The day was dragging into evening, and Deon had some long rides ahead of him. But maybe not before taking a break.
Deon shoved his hands in his pockets and sat down on an old iron pipe a few feet to the right of Dusty. He exhaled deeply, getting out some of the adrenline and stress from his bike ride up here out of his chest. Still, the weight of exhaustion stayed with him. He looked around again, at the debris in the dirt and the jagged pillars, a ruin maybe made worse by an attack at some point or another. Either way, this was a broken, lonely place. Not a place someone would go to recover, at least, not anymore.
"I wanted you to know something. We're getting married in two weeks, Mara and me." Deon could not help the small grin that announcement always put on his face, no matter how many times he said it, and not even now. "A god-damn miracle, right? And if you make it, I promise, you'll get the best seat in the house."
Non-committal was one of the many ways you could interpret Dusty's blank expression. So Deon quit looking for any meaning in that soulless stare, and instead leaned back until his back was stretched out over the pipe. He stared up at the passing clouds, which, thanks to the setting sun, were colored everything but white. His own smile faded off.
"Someone said it was too soon, with the funerals only a month ago and all. But we're going on eleven years now. That sure as hell doesn't feel like too soon to me."
"We've wanted it for a while, but it never seemed like the right time. We'd start to talk about it, but then there'd be a bad hunt, someone'd get hurt, and we'd put it off again. Go back to the same old routine." He sighed a little cloud of his own, up into the chilly beach air. "Then I said to her, a few days ago, we got to do it before something comes along and makes it impossible. I need to know that we at least tried to do it right."
Deon had more to say to about that, but stopped himself. He pressed his palms against his face and over his eyes. God knew that Dusty got what he meant by impossible.
He lay there on the pipe just like that for a good few minutes, listening to the waves and to the imposing silence that was Dusty. Deon only pulled himself upright when his back started feeling stiff. Beyond the decimated marble pools was the ocean, too large and overwhelming to be soothing, but an awe just the same. He couldn't remember actually admiring a view of the sea in years. And it'd probably been far, far longer since Dusty had been out there in the waves on his board. Probably spent years removed from the things that made him feel alive, and he wasn't the only one who had become empty like that.
"It's not your fault. It's just that, all of that fighting made us stupid, Dust. Every last one of us." A smile without cheer pulled at Deon's lips. "Cause somewhere in the last ten years, we all got stuck. Time was movin' on, but we got too caught up in the same old Hunter bullshit to realize it."
"God. We had it real bad, you know? You start to think that you kill this one last nest, you just get through this final batch of Jinn, and that's it, we're over. Finally can live how we want." He laughed, dryly and only somewhat bitterly. "And the crazy thing is, we kept on believing this, over and over again, waiting and thinking that soon, we'd get our free passes. Get to enjoy all the small stupid things that most people take for granted, but seem too much for us to have."
"Well, we got that pass, but Tasha paid part of the tab for us. Doc paid it. All of them did." The ocean spoke between Deon's words, the weight broken between the tempo of the crashing waves. His shoulders fell, and so did his gaze. "Now we're free, and don't know what the fuck to do with it."
The summoner pressed his palms to the rusted metal, stared down to the dirt under his feet. "Let me tell you something you already know, Dust. This freedom sucks. The price of it sucks, and not knowing for sure whether the fighting's all over or not really sucks. Are we going to try to build our houses and have our kids, only to watch all of it burn to the ground again? It scares the piss out of me so bad that I'm almost too afraid to move on at all."
"I think if it weren't for my promise to Doc, to watch his kid, I'dve flown. I'd grab Mara, whether she liked it or not, get as far away as I can think of and never, ever come back. Let everyone think I'm dead. Let them fight their battles without me. If I cut all ties to the place, then it's not my problem anymore, right?"
Deon stood up from his pipe, boots against the hard sand again. He kicked up his helmet, grabbed it in his hand and tucked it next to his hip. He forced his shoulders straight, and his chin lifted with every bit of justifiable pride still in him.
"But here's something else, Dust. You once told me that I was an asshole for trying to fly it solo when we need all of us together. No matter reason I had to leave." He stepped forward, until he was nearly hovering over the ex-Marine. Deon stared at the top of Dusty's head, one last time, even though he knew the power of his words wouldn't get the man to move an inch. Not now. And maybe not ever again.
"So I guess what I came here to say is, don't be an asshole."
With nothing else left to do, Deon pulled a thin box out of a jacket pocket. He put it on the rock next to the Jack, and then walked away.
--
The engine to Deon's Honda turned a minute later, and quick as that, he was gone. Nothing had been wrong with Dusty's ears, of course, and he heard the way that Honda was cut around the curves of the road. Deon had to be serious about coming back with the truck. But even speeding the entire way, it'd take at least three hours for him to return. Plenty of time for a man to get lost down the coast, busted bike or not.
What Deon left for him looked like a dark pillbox. He stared at it for a few minutes before deciding to pick it up. With chapped hands he cracked it open and turned it to the waning light, so he could see what was inside. Two simple golden bands, one thicker and one more delicate, sat in the felt-lined box. After a few moments, he realized what Deon had asked him to do. Best seat in the house, he'd said.
Dusty closed the lid, and set the box back down on the rock. He turned, and watched the blood-red sunset beyond the waves.
-----------
day 15: character you have the most in common with
Valentino. Moreso than any of my other characters, a lot of his deeper motivations mirror what I would do in his situation (which is still not a perfect mirror, but it is the closest). He also sort of reflects what I think about my own teenage years - that I was a flaily insecure mess (and still by-and-large am), and that I believed my life and future was going to be over at any second, with any single bad choice. He is afraid of people hating him and he is initially eager to morph himself around to suit others needs, though as he gets older he gets a more stable sense of self-identity. He also often is torn between the comfort of stability and the yearning to try out something risky and new - there is no way he will be able to stay in Sunset City forever, but he would want his friends to know that his roots are there, and that he'll never leave them behind forever, no matter how far around the world he goes.
Important: Everyone give birthday hugs to K :D :D :D
MWA HA HA HA HA
Pixie I did it :D I wrote Dusty-being-broken fic for Gryle's Everyone Is A Sad Panda Future AU.
It kind of has more to do with Deon, but that's not really his fault. I couldn't imagine Dusty taking an active role in a story like this, or taking an active role in ANYTHING after what happened to him. I HOPE HIS MISERY PLEASES YOU.
Deon turned off the state road, ducked into an abandoned road and cruised forward, down winding cliffside until he saw the Sutro Baths laid out beneath him. He would have never guessed that a place like this actually existed, sort of like the ruins of old Greek baths just dumped onto the California coast. He found the place he had intended on getting to, but he didn't know if here hid the person he was looking for as well. As it was, Deon hadn't been entirely sure whether Colton was covering for his comrade by giving him misleading directions. The last three failed trips to the coast heightened Deon's suspicions...suspicions that now ebbed away as he wound closer and closer to the foundation of the ruins.
The roads felt long these days, and Deon had thought about a lot of things, including how things used to be like. How Dusty used to be like. Deon manuevered his bike through a crumbling little sidepass, and tried to leave his expectations behind him as he got closer and closer to the shoreline. He knew as he pulled up that he found Dusty, could just feel it in his gut in a way only years and years of knowing the guy could make natural.
An old bike was abandoned by a cluster of fallen pillars and debris, and a man sat with his back to a slab of marble, his eyes and bare feet towards the ocean. Deon cut the engine on his own bike and propped it up on its stand, and got to walking around the fallen pipes and marble towards Dusty. He approached the man slowly, deliberately kicking up dirt and trash as he went. Dropped his helmet to the sand. Coughed. Made noise. Made sure that Dusty would know he was coming, even if Dusty did absolutely nothing to acknowledge him in return.
Funny that his hair was the first thing to truly hit Deon as different, not just different but jarring and wrong. Cause they had always been the Herbal Essence twins, Dusty and Tasha. But now there wasn't anything crisp and clean about Dusty's white hair, yellowed and clumped together in places by dirt and crust, bound together loosely by twine. And Tasha simply wasn't there.
Crow's feet stamped at the corners of Dusty's eyes, his skin dry and pulled like worn sandpaper. God, Deon thought, staring at the one guy who shouldn't ever look this damn old and unwell. Catatonic, nearly like he blinked only once a minute. Deon guessed that the empty bottle of Jack at the ex-Marine's boots was supposed to make him think Dusty sat in a drunken stupor, but Deon was experienced enough to call that bluff. Weird though, Dusty had never pulled the Silent Geranamo Stoneface thing before. But now, Deon guessed, was as good a time as ever to start.
He paused to inspect the old motorcycle, cause it was a lot easier to do that than to make the final few steps towards Dusty himself. Deon put his hand on the once-smooth bridge of the bike. It grated at his fingers for the roughness of it. Salt and erosion and daemon ichor stripped off the nice paint job that used to be there, ate half of the rubber coating the handlebars, left the seat a vile discolored white and green. The sidecar was gone, and part of the bike seemed ripped off with it.
"Your bike is trashed," Deon said. Seeing the Indian like this said worse about Dusty's state than Dusty himself did. "Man. How'd you even get around on the road?"
He walked around the bike again, touched the engine and other pieces of the bike, extended some of his summoner ability to get a better idea of the damage. Dusty was a pro, sure, but this was bad. A lot of the metal was downright warped. Even if the bike could still run, it could fall to pieces at any time. Deon considered it for a minute, and scratched the back of his neck uneasily. There was only one way he could think of doing this.
"Damn. I'll have to go get my truck, lug you and your ride home." He stepped away from the bike and instead looked hard at Dusty, almost like he could demand an answer with the force of his stare. "Will you still be here when I get back?"
Perhaps the answer was in the cold, biting breeze passing through between them, and in the long silence that was Dusty's only answer.
Before long, Deon's lips pulled into a long grimace. Instinctively he pat the chest pocket where he used to keep a flask, like a ex-chain smoker looking for their old familiar pack. This'd be easier to deal with if he had some booze himself, but Deon had quit carrying it on him a few years ago, just as he had quit his binging. He had to. A man could only handle so many demons at a time.
He stood his ground a few moments, waiting in futility for Dusty to break somehow. But he couldn't wait for hours and days. The day was dragging into evening, and Deon had some long rides ahead of him. But maybe not before taking a break.
Deon shoved his hands in his pockets and sat down on an old iron pipe a few feet to the right of Dusty. He exhaled deeply, getting out some of the adrenline and stress from his bike ride up here out of his chest. Still, the weight of exhaustion stayed with him. He looked around again, at the debris in the dirt and the jagged pillars, a ruin maybe made worse by an attack at some point or another. Either way, this was a broken, lonely place. Not a place someone would go to recover, at least, not anymore.
"I wanted you to know something. We're getting married in two weeks, Mara and me." Deon could not help the small grin that announcement always put on his face, no matter how many times he said it, and not even now. "A god-damn miracle, right? And if you make it, I promise, you'll get the best seat in the house."
Non-committal was one of the many ways you could interpret Dusty's blank expression. So Deon quit looking for any meaning in that soulless stare, and instead leaned back until his back was stretched out over the pipe. He stared up at the passing clouds, which, thanks to the setting sun, were colored everything but white. His own smile faded off.
"Someone said it was too soon, with the funerals only a month ago and all. But we're going on eleven years now. That sure as hell doesn't feel like too soon to me."
"We've wanted it for a while, but it never seemed like the right time. We'd start to talk about it, but then there'd be a bad hunt, someone'd get hurt, and we'd put it off again. Go back to the same old routine." He sighed a little cloud of his own, up into the chilly beach air. "Then I said to her, a few days ago, we got to do it before something comes along and makes it impossible. I need to know that we at least tried to do it right."
Deon had more to say to about that, but stopped himself. He pressed his palms against his face and over his eyes. God knew that Dusty got what he meant by impossible.
He lay there on the pipe just like that for a good few minutes, listening to the waves and to the imposing silence that was Dusty. Deon only pulled himself upright when his back started feeling stiff. Beyond the decimated marble pools was the ocean, too large and overwhelming to be soothing, but an awe just the same. He couldn't remember actually admiring a view of the sea in years. And it'd probably been far, far longer since Dusty had been out there in the waves on his board. Probably spent years removed from the things that made him feel alive, and he wasn't the only one who had become empty like that.
"It's not your fault. It's just that, all of that fighting made us stupid, Dust. Every last one of us." A smile without cheer pulled at Deon's lips. "Cause somewhere in the last ten years, we all got stuck. Time was movin' on, but we got too caught up in the same old Hunter bullshit to realize it."
"God. We had it real bad, you know? You start to think that you kill this one last nest, you just get through this final batch of Jinn, and that's it, we're over. Finally can live how we want." He laughed, dryly and only somewhat bitterly. "And the crazy thing is, we kept on believing this, over and over again, waiting and thinking that soon, we'd get our free passes. Get to enjoy all the small stupid things that most people take for granted, but seem too much for us to have."
"Well, we got that pass, but Tasha paid part of the tab for us. Doc paid it. All of them did." The ocean spoke between Deon's words, the weight broken between the tempo of the crashing waves. His shoulders fell, and so did his gaze. "Now we're free, and don't know what the fuck to do with it."
The summoner pressed his palms to the rusted metal, stared down to the dirt under his feet. "Let me tell you something you already know, Dust. This freedom sucks. The price of it sucks, and not knowing for sure whether the fighting's all over or not really sucks. Are we going to try to build our houses and have our kids, only to watch all of it burn to the ground again? It scares the piss out of me so bad that I'm almost too afraid to move on at all."
"I think if it weren't for my promise to Doc, to watch his kid, I'dve flown. I'd grab Mara, whether she liked it or not, get as far away as I can think of and never, ever come back. Let everyone think I'm dead. Let them fight their battles without me. If I cut all ties to the place, then it's not my problem anymore, right?"
Deon stood up from his pipe, boots against the hard sand again. He kicked up his helmet, grabbed it in his hand and tucked it next to his hip. He forced his shoulders straight, and his chin lifted with every bit of justifiable pride still in him.
"But here's something else, Dust. You once told me that I was an asshole for trying to fly it solo when we need all of us together. No matter reason I had to leave." He stepped forward, until he was nearly hovering over the ex-Marine. Deon stared at the top of Dusty's head, one last time, even though he knew the power of his words wouldn't get the man to move an inch. Not now. And maybe not ever again.
"So I guess what I came here to say is, don't be an asshole."
With nothing else left to do, Deon pulled a thin box out of a jacket pocket. He put it on the rock next to the Jack, and then walked away.
--
The engine to Deon's Honda turned a minute later, and quick as that, he was gone. Nothing had been wrong with Dusty's ears, of course, and he heard the way that Honda was cut around the curves of the road. Deon had to be serious about coming back with the truck. But even speeding the entire way, it'd take at least three hours for him to return. Plenty of time for a man to get lost down the coast, busted bike or not.
What Deon left for him looked like a dark pillbox. He stared at it for a few minutes before deciding to pick it up. With chapped hands he cracked it open and turned it to the waning light, so he could see what was inside. Two simple golden bands, one thicker and one more delicate, sat in the felt-lined box. After a few moments, he realized what Deon had asked him to do. Best seat in the house, he'd said.
Dusty closed the lid, and set the box back down on the rock. He turned, and watched the blood-red sunset beyond the waves.
-----------
day 15: character you have the most in common with
Valentino. Moreso than any of my other characters, a lot of his deeper motivations mirror what I would do in his situation (which is still not a perfect mirror, but it is the closest). He also sort of reflects what I think about my own teenage years - that I was a flaily insecure mess (and still by-and-large am), and that I believed my life and future was going to be over at any second, with any single bad choice. He is afraid of people hating him and he is initially eager to morph himself around to suit others needs, though as he gets older he gets a more stable sense of self-identity. He also often is torn between the comfort of stability and the yearning to try out something risky and new - there is no way he will be able to stay in Sunset City forever, but he would want his friends to know that his roots are there, and that he'll never leave them behind forever, no matter how far around the world he goes.
Important: Everyone give birthday hugs to K :D :D :D
no subject
Date: 2010-12-15 09:18 pm (UTC)Also, I adore Val. I really want to see more of him
SPEAKING OF WHICH we need to figure out who else should be in on the two Guardian logs we want to start!no subject
Date: 2010-12-15 11:48 pm (UTC)