( it rains that night — april 18th. he remembers because it had been a dry spring. the flowers and trees had not yet unfurled and bloomed with life and beauty, and the air still held the endless desolation of the long, dark winter. a crow cried mournfully as he walked along the dry riverbed, the earth cracking and splintering under his sneakers. then, on the morning of the 18th, the heavens open and the rain falls in buckets. the land drinks its fill, and the river overflows, but water continues to pour. weather alerts turn from drought and wildfire to flooding.
it continues to rain.
the car's wipers sweep away the rain that had been pouring down since that morning from the windshield. alexei is stuck at a stoplight at the intersection of pacific dunes and quinault avenue in gray gables, a town roughly two hours west of seattle. almost four minutes have passed, and the light remains red. no car is on the road tonight, except for his, so there's no reason why he couldn't just ignore the light and pull out. the heavy rain, however, makes it difficult to see oncoming traffic, and anyway, alexei doesn't want to break the law. he shouldn't be here.
drops of rain beat against the windshield, masking the loud sigh that escapes his lips. "i shouldn't be here," he reminds himself. he should've left a day ago, when he told the office that there was nothing to investigate and that he was leaving. he should leave now when there's still time before the storm, and the inevitable flooding comes and sweeps him and his car away.
and yet, he stays to wait for the light to turn.
stubbornness keeps him here. or delusion, or both. alexei was tricked into coming here. it's as simple as that. no use pretending or sugarcoating. after driving almost thirteen hours from san francisco to gray gables, under the assumption that something was happening (either supernatural or not), maybe he wants to prove that something is here. something worth his time, effort, and skill. even if it's a "natural" crime (and therefore not within the agency's purview or interest), alexei could concoct a reason to stay and solve it. make it a scooby-doo case, a term referring to something that appears supernatural on the surface when, in reality, it's just a guy in a rubber mask. that could've been something he took back to the agency.
but there is no mystery to solve, period. no assurance or satisfaction to be gained from providing help; not even a sliver of consolation that it was a scooby-doo case. all he has is eight hundred miles on the car's odometer and egg on his face.
the light turns green. finally.
the nose of his black bmw itches forward over the faded white lines of the crosswalk, and just as he's about to enter the intersection — a white van lurches around the corner and speeds through the light. alexei catches the headlights and stomps on the brakes, stopping mere feet from being sideswiped. the van skids and crashes into a lightpost, finally coming to a halt. for a moment, alexei does nothing except to wait for the driver or a passenger to spill out of the van. but nothing happens. it continues to rain.
he puts the car in park and gets out, pulling up the hood of his jacket. cautiously, he walks towards the van, his white sneakers swishing through the large puddles. the loud, piercing horn from the van is the only noise aside from the rain. it's an older van, at least twenty years old, with chipped white paint, a large dent on the back door, and no windows. it's a vehicle used by a tradesman or, if stereotypes are to be believed, a criminal, but alexei is more inclined to believe that the owner of this van painted, if the splotchy, aged green paint along the bumper was any clue. the windshield was busted, and he could see some streaks of blood on the driver's side window. the lightpost leans backward; a strong push would knock it completely down and into the window of the toy store just behind it.
this kind of situation demands urgency. action. this is a terrible car accident where one or both of the passengers are injured. but alexei has attended enough car accidents that he thinks — no, he feels and knows like an instinct that something.
something is not right.
he can't explain it. years of police training have sharpened his senses, but also deepened his paranoia. maybe he is being overly and needlessly cautious, which is always a possibility, and it's supplanting the compassion and urgency that he should feel in this moment to rush to someone's aid. but something...
stopping a few feet away from the driver's side door, alexei calls out over the thrum of rain hitting against the metal, ) Hello? Is everyone alright?
( katherine is not moved by tears. usually. she is not known for her compassion, suffering does not provoke sympathy, and tears are just saline. she had barely made it inside the witch’s home, messy with clutter and trash that should have been thrown out days ago when the woman had turned on the waterworks. large, shoulder-heaving sobs which bent her into a crone, and she had watched with her usual detachment. resisted the urge to turn on her heel and leave.
what she learns is this: the witch has a son. twelve years old. likes to watch jeopardy with her most weeknights after coming home from school, or nobly suffers through the thirty minutes for his mother’s sake. smarter than his peers, great at algebra, likes baseball but has a father-shaped outline instead of the real thing that would toss a ball around with him in the backyard. he was also dying. slow at first, and then quickly. an onset of a rare degenerative condition with no identified cause or cure, only a slew of mitigation methods to manage symptoms and leave behind debilitating side-effects. the doctors had started to say that his case would be a great tool of reference for patients sharing the diagnosis and that would be the value of his short life. the witch is a mother who reasonably could not bear her son not becoming a man, but a clinical case file.
the story had ended with a descent down a creaky, old set of stairs to an unfurnished basement. air damp and stale, the centerpiece a large cage with bent bars and an open door. the witch did not look at the cage directly, gaze off to one side and unfocused, hand coming up to cover the despair of her mouth. strange, considering she had to have hauled all the pieces of the thing down the steps and assembled it, maybe with shaking hands. she had been suddenly struck with the thought that she should have left when she had the chance.
there is a moral to this story, and that moral is not to play around with death when desperate. things tend to become messy. sometimes you get what you want, sometimes your innocent child turns into a monster, and sometimes you get both and need to call in backup. the witch wants her to track down her child and drag him back to the basement to be held as a prisoner, but a beloved one. she did not make any promises. what the two of them had failed to take into consideration is this: a monster, when left to its own devices, will make more monsters.
which is how katherine ends up in the passenger seat of a van that has seen better days, with a man who had been on the job coating an old shed with a new layer of paint when a beast had emerged from the tree line and attacked him. gray skin, long claws, pointed ears and fangs. it had regarded him with large, yellowed eyes before lunging. supposedly, he had survived the encounter armed only with a paint bucket. she doesn’t know how he managed that but he’s alive, only a little bit mauled, and quick to say unbitten. for a hardworking man with an honest trade, he sure turned out to be a liar. he sheds his human skin while behind the wheel; spinal alignment shifting, limbs elongating, clawed feet pressing down hard into the gas pedal.
the reason she does not hit the dash on impact is because she’s a law-abiding citizen who wears a seatbelt. the monster’s head had hit the driver’s side window and is now unconscious in an ungainly sprawl of too-long limbs on top of the horn. she tries the passenger side door but it’s firmly stuck, because of course it is, and she unbuckles herself before shoving her leg in the space made between the creature's protruding ribcage and the dash and kicks the driver’s side door open. then, she kicks the monster out of the swung open door. it rolls, and then flops on the wet ground. she then emerges from the vehicle herself, looks at the monster lying prone, and resists the urge to kick it again. )
I’m fine, thanks for asking. ( the dry cut of her voice carries through the downpour. there is the question of what she’s meant to do, now. the monster is a man who is a liar who is still alive and will come to soon. and in all likelihood violently. )
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
it continues to rain.
the car's wipers sweep away the rain that had been pouring down since that morning from the windshield. alexei is stuck at a stoplight at the intersection of pacific dunes and quinault avenue in gray gables, a town roughly two hours west of seattle. almost four minutes have passed, and the light remains red. no car is on the road tonight, except for his, so there's no reason why he couldn't just ignore the light and pull out. the heavy rain, however, makes it difficult to see oncoming traffic, and anyway, alexei doesn't want to break the law. he shouldn't be here.
drops of rain beat against the windshield, masking the loud sigh that escapes his lips. "i shouldn't be here," he reminds himself. he should've left a day ago, when he told the office that there was nothing to investigate and that he was leaving. he should leave now when there's still time before the storm, and the inevitable flooding comes and sweeps him and his car away.
and yet, he stays to wait for the light to turn.
stubbornness keeps him here. or delusion, or both. alexei was tricked into coming here. it's as simple as that. no use pretending or sugarcoating. after driving almost thirteen hours from san francisco to gray gables, under the assumption that something was happening (either supernatural or not), maybe he wants to prove that something is here. something worth his time, effort, and skill. even if it's a "natural" crime (and therefore not within the agency's purview or interest), alexei could concoct a reason to stay and solve it. make it a scooby-doo case, a term referring to something that appears supernatural on the surface when, in reality, it's just a guy in a rubber mask. that could've been something he took back to the agency.
but there is no mystery to solve, period. no assurance or satisfaction to be gained from providing help; not even a sliver of consolation that it was a scooby-doo case. all he has is eight hundred miles on the car's odometer and egg on his face.
the light turns green. finally.
the nose of his black bmw itches forward over the faded white lines of the crosswalk, and just as he's about to enter the intersection — a white van lurches around the corner and speeds through the light. alexei catches the headlights and stomps on the brakes, stopping mere feet from being sideswiped. the van skids and crashes into a lightpost, finally coming to a halt. for a moment, alexei does nothing except to wait for the driver or a passenger to spill out of the van. but nothing happens. it continues to rain.
he puts the car in park and gets out, pulling up the hood of his jacket. cautiously, he walks towards the van, his white sneakers swishing through the large puddles. the loud, piercing horn from the van is the only noise aside from the rain. it's an older van, at least twenty years old, with chipped white paint, a large dent on the back door, and no windows. it's a vehicle used by a tradesman or, if stereotypes are to be believed, a criminal, but alexei is more inclined to believe that the owner of this van painted, if the splotchy, aged green paint along the bumper was any clue. the windshield was busted, and he could see some streaks of blood on the driver's side window. the lightpost leans backward; a strong push would knock it completely down and into the window of the toy store just behind it.
this kind of situation demands urgency. action. this is a terrible car accident where one or both of the passengers are injured. but alexei has attended enough car accidents that he thinks — no, he feels and knows like an instinct that something.
something is not right.
he can't explain it. years of police training have sharpened his senses, but also deepened his paranoia. maybe he is being overly and needlessly cautious, which is always a possibility, and it's supplanting the compassion and urgency that he should feel in this moment to rush to someone's aid. but something...
stopping a few feet away from the driver's side door, alexei calls out over the thrum of rain hitting against the metal, ) Hello? Is everyone alright?
no subject
what she learns is this: the witch has a son. twelve years old. likes to watch jeopardy with her most weeknights after coming home from school, or nobly suffers through the thirty minutes for his mother’s sake. smarter than his peers, great at algebra, likes baseball but has a father-shaped outline instead of the real thing that would toss a ball around with him in the backyard. he was also dying. slow at first, and then quickly. an onset of a rare degenerative condition with no identified cause or cure, only a slew of mitigation methods to manage symptoms and leave behind debilitating side-effects. the doctors had started to say that his case would be a great tool of reference for patients sharing the diagnosis and that would be the value of his short life. the witch is a mother who reasonably could not bear her son not becoming a man, but a clinical case file.
the story had ended with a descent down a creaky, old set of stairs to an unfurnished basement. air damp and stale, the centerpiece a large cage with bent bars and an open door. the witch did not look at the cage directly, gaze off to one side and unfocused, hand coming up to cover the despair of her mouth. strange, considering she had to have hauled all the pieces of the thing down the steps and assembled it, maybe with shaking hands. she had been suddenly struck with the thought that she should have left when she had the chance.
there is a moral to this story, and that moral is not to play around with death when desperate. things tend to become messy. sometimes you get what you want, sometimes your innocent child turns into a monster, and sometimes you get both and need to call in backup. the witch wants her to track down her child and drag him back to the basement to be held as a prisoner, but a beloved one. she did not make any promises. what the two of them had failed to take into consideration is this: a monster, when left to its own devices, will make more monsters.
which is how katherine ends up in the passenger seat of a van that has seen better days, with a man who had been on the job coating an old shed with a new layer of paint when a beast had emerged from the tree line and attacked him. gray skin, long claws, pointed ears and fangs. it had regarded him with large, yellowed eyes before lunging. supposedly, he had survived the encounter armed only with a paint bucket. she doesn’t know how he managed that but he’s alive, only a little bit mauled, and quick to say unbitten. for a hardworking man with an honest trade, he sure turned out to be a liar. he sheds his human skin while behind the wheel; spinal alignment shifting, limbs elongating, clawed feet pressing down hard into the gas pedal.
the reason she does not hit the dash on impact is because she’s a law-abiding citizen who wears a seatbelt. the monster’s head had hit the driver’s side window and is now unconscious in an ungainly sprawl of too-long limbs on top of the horn. she tries the passenger side door but it’s firmly stuck, because of course it is, and she unbuckles herself before shoving her leg in the space made between the creature's protruding ribcage and the dash and kicks the driver’s side door open. then, she kicks the monster out of the swung open door. it rolls, and then flops on the wet ground. she then emerges from the vehicle herself, looks at the monster lying prone, and resists the urge to kick it again. )
I’m fine, thanks for asking. ( the dry cut of her voice carries through the downpour. there is the question of what she’s meant to do, now. the monster is a man who is a liar who is still alive and will come to soon. and in all likelihood violently. )