Night 59: Main Hallway, 1-West

[doneinthree]

[from here]

Kirk ran into the main hallway and found nothing there except more pink light coating everything. His gut feeling said that if something was happening, it should've happened already, but he was a loss to explain what was going on. The system (if he could call it that, vague as it was to describe the whole Landel's torture/experimentation assembly line) had broken down at least once already, on that night when I.R.I.S. had first(?) appeared, and the whole of the building flickered like a malfunctioning hologram. Was that what the glowing cover was for? To prevent... he didn't know. Something. Something bad enough to warrant a Code Red.

(What had killed that creature?)

Waiting around here was already bad enough on normal nights, what with it being an open space with high traffic, but he'd picked it because it was the quickest and most obvious meeting place for all of them. Now with the whole area lit up like the inside of a strip club, Kirk was starting to feel like a lone piece of meat wrapped in a gold ribbon and tossed out for the wolves. He made a face for a second as he considered the unfortunate implication of mixing those similes, then decided that the dumb thoughts which crossed his mind ranked considerably lower in priority than, you know, paying attention to his surroundings and not getting himself killed.

Kirk swung the lead pipe in his hand once, just to focus, and shook his head as pain rippled out from the still-healing gunshot wound on his right arm. Take it easy, Jim, he admonished himself silently. It was still early in the night. Someone would be along shortly. And if not... he was giving his crew one minute. One minute, and then screw it, he was tracking down everyone himself.

[KIRK TO ENTERPRISE]

Comments

[prodigalson]

"As normal as I can be," he said, shaking the last of the violence out of his fingertips, slipping away from Stefan's hand. An actual beating heart. That meant blood. A pulse. A flow. No venom.

Carlisle would never believe me.

He didn't believe it himself. Even with the evidence in front of him, even though he knew he had seen the vampire inside of Stefan, the way his face and eyes changed - it was all very much mired in the pop culture Edward had spent the last century wading through. And the speed. Stefan had lifted them with ease, moved with the speed that was thoughtless and entirely supernatural.

Edward couldn't help but wonder what he seemed like to Stefan, who was human in so many ways Edward was not. Soft skin, warmth, a pulse. While he was cold, dead, stone. He wasn't sure how to feel. He felt - power. Like they all did. The kind of power you only appreciated when it had been taken from you.

"This is like last night. I remember hearing I.R.I.S. before, but this is all... worrisome. Something's gone wrong for Aguilar, I think."

[sainted]

"Wrong?" A question was on the tip of his tongue — you mean this isn't on purpose? — except Stefan understood just then that Edward had to be right. Letting them loose during a guided mission was one thing, but within the prison itself? In this context, the pink glow clinging to every surface of the building now appeared to be some kind of protection. From them. The Code Red had been a warning about Landel's patients unchained.

Sobriety settled back on his shoulders, that brief delirious feeling of invincibility giving way to the realization that the first thing these soldiers would need to do was contain them. Stefan was less worried about dealing with what they might throw at him than he was about what might happen to Elena if she got caught in the middle of all this. She'd promised to stay in her room until he came, but... Elena being Elena...

More and more people were entering the hallway now, and with them, a rush of monstrous creatures. Stefan tensed, ready to fight or come to the aid someone under attack, but the few harried patients seemed perfectly capable of dispatching the creatures which came at them. They weren't the only ones to have their strength restored.

"We should go." He studied Edward, who seemed to have regained his composure, and noted again the almost luminous white of his skin and the red of his pupils, Stefan's eyes picking out each detail perfectly in the dark. It was hard to imagine how he could ever hide what he was from humans. "You should find Bella—"

A growl behind him. Stefan spun on the spot, one hand lancing out just in time to grab the neck of the animal which had lunged at him. A dog, its skin cracked and rotted, teeth snapping blindly at Stefan's face. He crushed its throat with one hand and tossed the dog's body on the tiled floor.

It wasn't alone. "Edward..."

[prodigalson]

Ah. Stefan answered his silent question without ever knowing it. He looked inhuman. Edward supposed he wasn't surprised. It was just a lot easier for humans to be distracted by his looks by than what the looks made him appear to be. He was, for all intents and purposes, just a corpse. A dolled up, prettied corpse, with shining skin and bright, colored eyes. The perfect amount of distraction, enough to get close to prey. Like he needed the help. The speed was all he required.

Bella. He clung to the thought immediately, already pushing the words to make his way to her to his lips. Stefan would understand; Edward was entirely sure he would also be on his way to find Elena, or to at least make sure his brother had found her. (Was his brother like this, too? Only natural. God, if Emmett was still here -)

They turned as a pair. The animals were a pack, surrounding them with the movements of one, larger organism. Growls, the movement of wet, exposed muscle and bone, and the click of claws on tile echoed around in his head. He bared his teeth at the dogs, and then changed it to a smile when he looked back to Stefan.

"No need to worry tonight, right?" Relish it while we can, he wanted to say, but he was afraid that sounded too much like a monster. He didn't mean the kill. He meant being them again.

Edward shot forward, sweeping the closest dog with enough force to send it slamming against the opposite wall, bones snapping with ease. Its pack mate leaped forward, jaws closing around Edward's arm until they slipped off, unable to find purchase in biting a hunk of what was relatively the equivalent to solid rock. It didn't even leave a mark besides tearing his sleeve.

He twisted its head a hundred and eighty degrees, letting it drop to the floor. It didn't move after.

[sainted]

At Edward's assured smile, Stefan heard himself laugh. He watched Edward in that next second, fascinated by the force and speed of his graceful movements, as deadly efficient as a vampire even two or three hundred years older than him. And the second was over, and Stefan was moving too, his face changing at the smell of blood in the air. He might not be as strong as any vampire fuelled by the normal diet, but a few rabid animals still posed no real threat.

They were, however, an unwelcome distraction. Even as Stefan fought off the dogs at Edward's back, dodging teeth and tearing limbs to make sure the beasts didn't rise again, he looked for an opening to escape. He had the sense that this wasn't random, that the animals were specifically targeting them, and each second they spent held up here meant another second they weren't protecting Elena and Bella.

The hunger drummed inside of him as Stefan turned to face the next animal, moving into kill before it could move against him, but the dog was unresisting when he grabbed it, and he was still too much of a ripper to not notice when his prey wasn't fighting back. Its mad red eyes drooped sleepily, and Stefan became aware of a girl's clear voice singing somewhere.

The pack now lay motionless around him and Edward, most of them dead, the rest asleep. Stefan wasn't going to question it. He touched Edward lightly on the shoulder — let's go — and ran before anything else decided to track them down.

[to here]