Chapter Sixteen:
Objects At Rest
A figure prowled the darkened corners of the city at night, keeping to the shadows and a minimum of noise; if one had been listening carefully, they might have heard an insistent clunking sound. However, most people in the city of Roanoke did not give a damn at two in the morning on a Tuesday night, even if the prowler was very much armed and dangerous.
Was it Batman? No. Was it an alligator that had crawled out of the sewers? No, that was only in New York, and this was much scarier; Sailor Hephaestos was on the prowl.
"You know, there's thing called, sleep," she muttered to herself, arms folded demurely because her senshi fuku was excessively revealing. Hephaestos prowled on, hugging closely to a building in some godforsaken nowhere where even the murderers and the rapists were too smart to go. "It's this thing like being knocked unconscious, only has the added benefits of you not waking up with a massive head injury. People usually undergo it before they go to school, not like Fleming fucking teaches me anything but how to pretend I'm awake during class anyway."
Eventually Hephaestos leant against a wall and sighed. She patrolled too many nights now. Why did she feel this insufferable sense of duty - to herself, to the Graikos, to Sophie and Perdix? She knew that it was like pulling teeth to get some of the other senshi to even think about patrolling. Persephone. Hecate. Aphrodite. Hyperion was okay, but was apparently prone to goofing off and never finished the job; Tyche was good too, but he was so damn annoying in his Graikos form that it made her want to hurl sometimes.
So she did it alone. Hephaestos had gotten very used to doing things alone.
Didn't mean she had to like it.
"I hate this," she said aloud. "I mean, hell, the power isn't so bad, and neither is the getting-to-beat-people-up war thing, but once you find yourself standing in the middle of a city in the middle of the night spouting soliloquies when you could be sitting at home playing a rousing game of Diablo II, you know you just have no life."
Luckily, the night could not answer, or it would have most likely claimed that staying at home pitting your level forty-two necromancer against the rest of Roanoke's geek population of barbarians and amazons wasn't exactly anybody's idea of a better life.
"And I'm not a computer nerd," Hephaestos spat again, just in case the night started getting ideas. "I'm just one of those people who goes on the internet to be obnoxious."
She paused.
"And now I'm talking to an intangible entity. Sweet jesus with a side serving of pesto! If there is a God, he deserves to let me kick him in the nuts."
Annoyed and generally irritated, Sailor Hephaestos stomped on.
There were quite a few senshi out patrolling that night - some of them grumpy, most of them tired, all of them wanting to be back home in their nice safe beds. One of these senshi was Zaza Grogan, alias Sailor Sextans, who was uncomfortable as well as dead tired; her mother had always told her not to go on the wrong side of town, and dressed as she was, well... squee!
"Zaza no waaaaanna do this," she pouted. "Gawain's just mean. In fact... he's a dirty great meanie!" Sextans, being naturally soft-hearted, was not usually in the habit of calling anybody a meanie, dirty or otherwise, but in this instance she was so entirely fed up that even if he WAS a wicked-cool big birdie with pretty red feathers, sending her out here in the cold and in the dark in the tiny little senshi uniform was just being... well, mean.
Morosely, an absolutely pitiful picture with her big pout and enormous dark eyes, Sextans skated on down the little back streets with her ODF in hand. Gawain and Timocharis - who was a smart as well as pretty mousie! - had advised her to keep to the back streets. To Sextans, this had sounded inane, since any self-respecting senshi would keep to the nice bright lights and warmth of the front streets instead of going to the nasty dirty back ones, wouldn't they? But apparently not, and not wanting her to attract undue attention, Sextans had been sent to the coldest darkest parts of Roanoke.
When it was very early in the morning, it was very very cold, in fact. And very very dark. Sextans didn't want to think about who might be lurking in the shadows, and not for the first time, she wished that he hadn't been sent out alone.
There were noises, too. The distant screams of cars and shouts of people, and noises she couldn't even identify, but could, really, turn out to be anything... or anybody.
"Zaza dun like this," she attempted to say sullenly into the still of the night, but nobody answered, and her voice ended up being a tiny, thin thing. "Well, er, Sextans dun like this," she tried again. "Because, eee, I'm Sextans right now! Otherwise I wouldn't be wearing this teeny-tiny wittle outfit. And I wouldn't have the funny pizza-cuttery-thingy! I'd just be Zaza. And I'm not. So I'm Sextans." Heartened by her logic, she glided on, one purty rollerskate after another.
Something was following her in the darkness. Something slow. Something watching.
Sailor Sextans turned around and looked frantically on all sides, into the shadows and the road. There was one streetlight burning, sending artificial light down onto the road; she cupped her hand over her eyes and tried to see if anyone was past it. The hand holding her ODF trembled, but she wouldn't back out. Not Sailor Sextans. Not with everybody depending on her.
Not with everybody wanting her to stay, no no no, she wouldn't run, she wouldn't, she wouldn't -
Sailor Hephaestos stepped out into the light of the tall pole like some deadly decoration, all bright red and shiny silver and menace in her eyes, the sort of cool easy vengeance that chilled Sextans to the bone.
"Hello there," she practically purred.
Fear gripped her, and before she could even think, she jumped like a jackrabbit and skimmed over the rough patchy concrete into a nearby alley, pressing herself to the wall before her mind could even turn rational once more. She had sworn to herself that she would not flee, but her fight or flight mechanism was too deeply ingrained. She was not experienced enough yet to stand her ground, but she would make up for it.
Hephaestos was there anyway, at the front of the narrow alleyway, an amused smirk touching her mouth. "C'mon. An alleyway. That's the stupidest place to go. No way out. It's like in those horror movies where the chick runs upstairs."
"I'm - I'm not afraid of you," she managed, voice wavering.
"No," the redhead agreed amiably. "Not yet."
She didn't like that smile. There was no goodness in it. "I won't be afraid of you!" she retorted back, gripping her ODF so tightly that her knuckles would be going white, not a very charming accompaniment to her cute mint-green nail varnish. "I - I - Sextans Perpetual Inertia!"
Whatever Hephaestos had not expected, it had not been for the creampuff to grab her weapon and start glowing blue, having the balls to actually attack her; she was so stunned that there was no time to avoid the blue beam lancing out and away from her, and it struck Hephaestos squarely in the chest. Both of the girls were flung backwards, although with Sextans who was standing against a wall, she only felt a little push; the Graikos senshi careered back into the alleyway until she hit a brick wall with a sickening smack.
Frightened and breathless and not a little gratified at her handwork, Sextans stared at the limp form of Hephaestos crumped up at the end of the alley, wringing her hands in despair. "Oh, nuuu," she whimpered softly. The girl was hurt - how bad? "What'd I - what'd I do?"
Hephaestos gave a low soft groan of pain. She was still alive, at least. Holding her ODF out in front of her like a shield, Sailor Sextans rolled forward tenatively, looking down at the redhead in pity. She hadn't meant it, really, but she had been afraid; fear made you do stupid things, like, like, hurt people, and get hurt -
The other senshi swept Sextan's feet out from underneath her, but the girl was too practiced a skater to fall; she wobbled backwards, one hand getting painfully scraped on the side of the alley in her efforts to stand up straight again.
The Graikos got to her feet with difficulty, her back feeling twisted and her metal legs heavy with the exertion, clumsy as she stood upright. Damnit! One hit and that creampuff had bloody floored her! What kind of senshi was she? What kind of soldier let a little girl push them to the floor? Hephaestos would not sentence herself to die in an alley to a girl with a weapon that was the bastard child of a can-opener and a fork!
It was short, and nasty, and for what seemed like a thousand million years all she knew was pain. Hephaestos came at her like a caged tiger, all fists and heat and crimson like blood, and although she fought back as best she could it just wasn't working well enough; the battle would have ended very quickly due to a nasty shot Sextans managed with her ODF next to Hephaestos' neck, but the redhead methodically disarmed her. And after that, it was not a fight, but a one-sided massacre.
Sextans eventually fell away from Hephaestos' fists with legs that would be black and blue all over, feet that felt broken from the hefty weight of the senshi's metal legs; the inside of her mouth felt heavy and the purple-haired girl quietly spat up a mouthful of blood. She propped herself up against the wall, shivering convulsively, pressing against it tight and somehow managing to stand.
"Please," she managed, but it came out all wrong; her lips felt like they were made out of cotton. It hurt them to move. "Oooh," Sextans moaned, then tried again; "Please... don't hurt me... any more... please?"
"You disgust me," Sailor Hephaestos said quietly, watching the cringing figure huddle against the wall, barely able to stand. She herself had an enormous gash down her chest where Sextan's weapon had snagged her, her knuckles torn from hitting her so many times. "It's people like you that make this war a farce... you don't understand it, don't understand any fucking part of it, treat it like it's a game... when you came out here tonight, did you expect to walk away?"
All Sextans could do was whimper. Her head was feeling dizzy, and there was something hot running down her eyelids, sticking together her eyebrows, and she was too frightened to think any more, or to pray, or to wish -
"Soulmetal Barrage!"
The earth screamed as it was torn open, an enormous piece of metal being drawn out of it, jagged and as long as Hephaestos' arm, thick and deadly. With almost no expression on her face, she drew herself around, and slammed her arm down, sending the metal careering down with a bright flash, almost pretty, of metal...
It slammed through Sextan's back like she was made out of nothing, like she was made out of cottonwool, with the aching splinter of bone and the giving way of flesh as the metal tore through her body, immediately staining her fuku bright red with her blood. Hephaestos drew up her hand once more and it exploded within into dozens of pieces of bright deadly shrapnel, eradicating what the shard itself had not wasted. A whimper tore from her throat like an animal, with Sextans dead before she hit the ground, leaving a bright smear on the alleyway wall. Sailor Hephaestos stared at the body for a long time. The fuku had faded with the senshi's death; the girl had been wearing a t-shirt with Pikachu on it and a little pair of jean shorts with frilly socks before she had been killed. The t-shirt had been pink. Pikachu, who had before had been painted cheery yellow, was growing red against the immense hole in the girl's chest. Her eyes were still open, the colour of dark cocoa, wide with horror. Blood dribbled from her lips.
The redhead dragged her by the legs, metalmaterial mittens grazing the still-warm skin as she pulled her beside a Dumpster, in the shadow. Hephaestos walked away from it and down the street, around the corner, where she pulled herself into a telephone booth and took off her gloves so that she would not get blood on the numbers. After muttering vaguely to the operator, the answering ring echoed heavy in her ears, and when somebody who sounded quite tired and not just a little damn annoyed answered, she got straight to the point.
"Sophie?" Hephaestos asked, voice husky in an effort not to tremble. "I've just killed someone."
There was a pause, then, "What, like axe murderer or enemy senshi?"
"Enemy senshi. I sort of managed to make her chest explode and I've got blood all over the alley and over myself and - " She took in a breath, starting again. "Sophie, what the hell do I do with the body?"
"I can come--" Sophie began, then stopped to listen as a familiar voice demanded to know who was on the phone. "Hang on a sec, the bird wants on."
There was a crackling noise as the phone switched to speaker mode. "Hi, Jace, it's Perdix. How are you?"
"Um, sort of bloodied, Perdix, but no fucking time to exchange pleasantries - what do I do?"
"Well, have you touched the body?"
"With my gloves on. Otherwise, no, nothing incriminating."
"Great! Just leave the thing where it is. Is there anything else? Oh-- tell me, who was it?"
She sighed over the phone. "An Astronomia. I'd met her before. Sextans, if my memory remains intact."
"Don't know her. One less enemy, at least." Perdix's smug tone was unmistakeable.
Sophie growled. "That's all you have to say about this?" she demanded.
"What? What am I supposed to say? This is a good thing!" Suddenly Perdix seemed to remember Jace was still on the line. "Do you want us to come down there or something, Jace?"
"I - I don't know." It was the first time either of them had heard her sound bewildered, and now she just sounded purely lost. "Can't think at the moment."
"Sit tight," Sophie assured her briskly. "We'll be there in ten."
Hephaestos hung up after she told Sophie the street name and walked out of the booth, surveying the night with trembling hands and blood still strong in her sinuses from the mangled body in the alley.
Then she quietly leant against the wall and threw up, threw up everything in her stomach and what felt like everything she had ever eaten, threw up until she felt like she was vomiting out her own blood and internal organs, kneeling against the wall and wiping her mouth and retching even after she couldn't give anything more, not the ball of pain in her chest, not the screaming inside her head, not the voices sickly-sweet and whispering if you could you would have taken the blood and waded in it, drank it deep -
When Sophie and Perdix came to get her, the blood and the vomit was hidden up with her calm smirk.