(no subject)

[gabriel_tam]

Everything about the opening ceremonies for the new Family and Life Support Center is tastefully coordinated in order to appeal to a wide variety of supporters and clientele both.

There's a large platform stage, of course, with tables for speakers and dignitaries set on either side of the center podium. Row upon row of chairs are arranged in gentle arcs between carefully-laid-out aisles, for the ease and convenience of the listening audience.

At the same time, the event planners had been wise enough to realize that the multitude of children expected would never be able to sit still for speeches, and as a result the Center's grassy courtyard holds a small-scale fair, complete with booths and prizes, food and games and all sorts of fun.

Adults and children wander freely back and forth, enjoying the event.

It's a beautiful day.

Comments

[regan_tam]

She doesn't -- she doesn't understand, Gabriel is dying and if nothing else she should be there, should be with Simon now, and River should too, and above all she should wake up from this horrible nightmare, she should wake up because this can't possibly be happening--

But River's tugging her arm.

And because it's River -- because it's her daughter -- she lets herself be pulled, and lets herself (makes herself) turn her head away.

"River--" Her voice shakes, and she clamps down hard on it. "River, what...?"

"Find the doorknob," River hisses, and pulls sharply enough that Regan takes a stumbling step after her, and then another.

They're halfway to the corridor behind the stage before she understands. When she does, she sucks in a sharp breath, and starts to run of her own accord.

[wolflord_andain]

"Simon."

Galadan's voice is only a little sharp.

"Move. You'll do him little good should I manage to trip over you."

With that said he lifts the mangled body into his arms, swift and seemingly effortless.

The makeshift pad falls to the ground as Gabriel emits a choked, strangled whimper and passes out.

Galadan takes little notice of that, focused on the chaos around them, and marking the path River and Regan take toward one of the side corridors.

Vanishing in plain sight is ever the fool's option. Galadan, it must be said, rarely plays the fool.

With one last narrowed look at Simon, he shifts Gabriel to a more comfortable position and strides across the room, avoiding the worst of the crowd as he does so.

He can, after all, see in the dark, and the flare's light reaches only so far.

[simon_doctor]

Simon's at Galadan's side, matching his stride.

Chest still rising and falling, but breathing is increasingly labored. There may be internal injuries; he'll need to run a scan as soon as they reach the infirmary.

[un_fallen]

The half-forgotten body on the far side of the stage looks whole from the feet up, right until ones's eyes reach the chest. Above that point there is only a soggy mess of blood and mangled flesh, and to look higher than the injury the sight is, by most accounts, worse.

But little by little, the wound is beginning to glow.

The light spreads slowly but steadily through the rest of the body, weaving torn flesh together into a red-tinted haze of blood and fire.

[aj_crawley]

It's not bright, yet - the reddish glow spreading through Raguel is still dim enough to be mistaken for any one of a dozen emergency lights that, in a darkness not born of any electrical failure, have not yet flickered to life.

But what barely registers to the eye sets another sort of sense jangling -

- and when Crowley looks back, and meets Galadan's narrowed eyes, he realises he isn't the only one who's noticed.

"Get them out," Crowley says, as the acrid tang of wrongness fills his mouth and nose.

A bullet whizzes past, and the demon falls away again into the dark.

[wolflord_andain]

Galadan bares his teeth in what might, in a room full of blind people, pass for a smile.

But now is not the time. Gabriel is dying, and Galadan is no healer. The Wolflord's steps carry him swiftly toward Regan and River, and to what may be relative safety.

But he knows well what he saw, glittering above the creature that attacked Gabriel.

And later--perhaps not all that much later, in fact--there will be answers.

There is always more blood to be spilled, after all.

[regan_tam]

Usually Regan only has to want to see her children to turn a door into a portal to Milliways. Her children are here with her, and River is running beside her hand in hand now (and she doesn't think of the blood beneath her daughter's fingernails, she can't), but if it's a question of wanting--

Then it's no question.

There's help there. There's safety there, and medical facilities, and the barest breath of hope, and she doesn't have to strive to want it; she needs it right now, more than she needs oxygen.

(That oxygen rasps in her lungs. She's not used to this kind of adrenaline, not used to sprinting; she's not as young as she once was. But she's only panicked, not decrepit, and right now she can pace her daughter even in her designer flats.)

There's the doorway. Open she shouts at it in savage silence, open, damn you, and River stumbles a step, and the door changes.

[wolflord_andain]

Galadan does not even have to spur them on before Regan is stepping through the door, River shifting to the side, eyes on the corridor behind them.

The Wolflord spares her a quick nod of cool approval as he passes through the doorway after Gabriel's wife, Simon a half-step behind him.

That, of course, does not last long at all as they hit the floor in Milliways. Simon is, after all, very good at his job, and the infirmary is not far away at all.

River, too, follows them a bare moment later, casting one searching glance at where Crowley would be, if he were coming.

But he isn't, and her father is dying.

There are, just this once, more important places for River to be.

When the door closes behind them, shutting with barely even a soft click--

The lights come back on.

[aj_crawley]

Crowley's jacket covers some of Raguel's light, but not enough - it's getting brighter. Bright enough that despite the chaos, and the gunfire, someone will soon start to take notice.



"Biàn shítou," Crowley whispers to himself, and fists his hands in Raguel's shirt.



They crash into a storage room, hidden in the wings, just as the light returns.

Crowley sits with one shoulder to the door, and watches Raguel lie amongst speakers' stands and wires and chairs, and burn.

[un_fallen]

The fire grows, engulfing the whole body in a pyre that would surely take down the entire structure if it spread, but nothing else in the room so much as smolders. Brighter, brighter, and it's a good thing no one's paying any attention to the storage just now or, crisis or not, there would be a lot of difficult questions about the painful-looking radiance erupting from the cracks around the door.

But the flames recede, as they do, and when they are low enough it's possible to make out the outline of the body, still whole. A little lower and the undamaged throat is visible. And just when they have extinguished themselves - almost just before - unnaturally blue eyes open on the ceiling, and without even turning to see Crowley by the door, Raguel attacks.

There's a gutteral snarl, fingers instantly at Crowley's throat, Raguel's eyes full of hate. Then he blinks, and an amiable recognition quickly sets in.

"Oh, hi, Crowley," he says, sounding pleased. "Here for backup?"

[aj_crawley]

Crowley barely manages a grunt, as his shoulders are shoved against the thick planking of the door. As a small, detached, part of his brain observes the white flashes obscuring his vision, he thinks for an absurd moment that Raguel is once again -



"Fuck you," Crowley replies with feeling, once his eyes refocus (visibly so; his sunglasses are long gone by now). He swallows, under Raguel's nails digging into his neck. "That really hurt, you know."

[un_fallen]

Demons don't apologize.

"Sorry," he says instantly, "I thought you were Tam's pet wolf. Honestly, and he lets that thing out around children."

He looks momentarily disgusted, an expression that quickly mutates into a businesslike grimace.

"Where is he?" he asks, voice low.

[aj_crawley]

"No," Crowley says flatly, arching his back to try and hold his shoulders away from the door. "No. Gone, and you're not going after them - look, could you let me go?"

[un_fallen]

Slowly, he eases his weight backward until his hands drop back to his sides.

"Why not?" he asks, still calm.

[aj_crawley]

"Because," Crowley says, hunching forward with a faint sigh of relief. "They're mine, and you can't have them. And," his eyes flick up to Raguel's face, "neither can Nic Rosse."

[un_fallen]

"Nic Rosse," he says, failing to keep the disdain out of his voice, "has very little to do with it."

"Anyway, I only want one of them. And you shouldn't hurt the others, they haven't done anything. Except the wolf, of course."

His eyes gleam alarmingly. It would be laughable to call it worthwhile, but whatever he's lost, Raguel is at least free now to take his own vengeance.

[aj_crawley]

"I have no intention of hurting the others," Crowley says stiffly. "Maybe you've forgotten that's not the only thing mine can mean."

He lays his hands down carefully in the cradle behind drawn-up knees.

"What I want to know is why you've come for Gabriel Tam. If you're not here on Rosse's orders - and I'm fairly sure I don't believe you on that count - then why? What's your reasoning, Raguel?"

[un_fallen]

"Oh, he pointed me in this direction," he says, shrugging.

"Loaded and cocked and pointed at his enemies. Fucking hypocrite. But I looked into Tam on my own. All kinds of fun stuff that he doesn't even bother to hide. Weapons, allies, shifting playmates. He stands to gain quite a bit. Own gain, own glory. Not fair to the rest."

"And I haven't forgotten," he adds, face strangely blank. "What it means."

[aj_crawley]

"You mean the IIGA?" Crowley says, though it's hardly a proper question. "Sure. He stands to gain a lot. I stand to gain a lot - that's why I'm a supporter. That's politics. But those weapons are also a slightly thicker red line between folks on the Rim and the Reavers, Browncoat idiocy or no. That's what the IIGA is about."

Pale and dishevelled and faintly clammy, Crowley's still visibly - tangibly - nervous.

He curls his lip.

"So if that's why you've come for Tam, now, then you're doing a pretty shoddy job at digging up justifications for barking when Rosse says bark."

[un_fallen]

"I am not Rosse's puppet," he says, with a certain amount of cold pride.

"You'll have to find a way to trust me on that one. And given that you've just claimed a man who Rosse clearly wants dead, I hope to hell that he doesn't imagine you are, either." Raguel's general confusion seems to have diminished somewhat; anger is keeping him focused. It's not an improvement.

"Yeah, IIGA. You can't seriously be sitting in here to defend your own hope of personal gain. And you know how I feel about unfair advantages," he adds, and the dreamy look returns.

"So. You seem pretty sure this one should be thrown back. Why?"

[aj_crawley]

"What I think of him doesn't matter," Crowley retorts, shifting on the cold floor and wincing slightly.


"You're here on account of the IIGA, and I'm telling you the IIGA is neutral, at worst. It gives the Rim some form of defence that might actually be halfway effective against what's out there - and whilst it might boost Tam's popularity around the fringes of the Alliance, yeah, it's a start on redressing the imbalance of power between Core and Rim."

"And we all know how you feel about unfair advantages."

[un_fallen]

He grins, apparently delighted.

"We do, don't we? What's 'out there' that the Rim needs defense against, save the Core? You wanna protect them from themselves, is that it? It's been tried. Tried and failed. From themselves." He snorts.

"People forget that selves can change."

[aj_crawley]

Crowley stares at Raguel, mouth hanging ever so slightly open, before giving a strangled, coughing laugh. Elbows on his knees, he presses his eyes to the back of his hands, and says;

"I can't believe I'm sitting here trying to have a rational political discussion with you."

"The Reavers, Raguel," he repeats, then, without looking up.

The palms of his hands are an angry, mottled red.

[un_fallen]

"I can't believe you're sitting here trying to have a rational discussion at all," he says, and shrugs.

"Reavers, huh." He looks thoughtful, as much as one can when sitting in a storage closet covered in blood.

"Like I said," almost to himself. "Selves can change."

[aj_crawley]

"Selves can change," Crowley echoes tiredly. "Gabriel Tam isn't worth your time. Not anymore."