Mercy
Civilization, for the longest time in this part of the world that word held meaning only so much as to talk about a place far distant from this one, of places out on the east coast or across the great Atlantic, people back then cared not for its trappings and lived free, and almost wild. In this day and age however, it seemed people couldn't get enough of it. They were drowning in 'civilization' and smiling all the while amidst their urban sprawl, their rampant consumerism, their mighty towers of steel and glass which threatened to tear the sky asunder with their effrontery.
Mercy loathed it all, yet still she hid amongst its people, dwelled in the shadows of their new icons and deities, learning, calculating...it was like trying to grasp the form of a river, ever changing, ever moving, yet you could almost swear after staring long enough that you had it...until it changed once again.
She had had her fill for the evening and was intent on retiring early, but rather then traipse across hill and dale till she escaped the confines of this urban prison she came to a place that was still and dark, a place barely lit, barely changed in all its years despite its place in the heart of Denver. Climbing the fence was an easy enough action, and as her booted feet touched the soft, manicured grass of the cemetery Mercy relaxed ever so slightly.
She let her feet carry her inward, drawn away from the light of the electric bulb, heading inward towards a patch of grass she knew was devoid of other residents, a place she could rest for the rest of the evening, and rise again to continue the struggle.
She pushed a strand of black hair away from her once pretty face, the patchwork of leather and hide clothing that adorned her frame whispering softly as she moved. Even here she was alert and wary, an animal always ready, even in a place it considered safe.
Such is the way of things.
Nobody
Jack wouldn't call Riverside Cemetery a regular haunt. He wouldn't call any location a regular haunt because c'mon you never know what ghosts're listening or what might be summoned by the name. Don't invoke the name. Don't do it. Today's Denver is a Denver that's emerging triumphant out've the desert a modern fuck-you finger to the sky a testimony and monument to can't keep us down bad times've come but they're gone now. The city: ascendent. Now, Jack.
He isn't here where the bones moulder and the sedge is withered because he's escaping the city. He's here because he's got his reasons and because tonight's a night for withered sedge and mouldering bones with the moon so large and the light so full of silver that it just drags this otherworld they're in that much closer and that much further away from the day. He's here, and at first he's just an unseen presence wandering through the graveyard, pausing at Jacob Schueler's monument and eyeing the earth and the doors to crypts, freezing when wings pass by overheard though they didn't see him no no why would they, and let's expedite things a little.
The feral gangrel blood-drinker beast-cursed creature who goes by Mercy with her wary eyes and her way posture almost isn't noticed but what kind of story would that be so the Jack of shadows (of Nobody and Nothings) freezes then still at a goodly distance away after maybe a moment of careful consideration with the moon all a-sing undoes the look away look away spell and instead wears this other one: a face she knows -- ugly, but good-natured, coarse-skin, eyes that aren't quite the same size, hair that isn't as lustrous as it should be or could be, groomed but somehow just not right, maybe too wild or too snarled or maybe it's just the strange hair-line, maybe it's the shape of the lips, the cheekbones. He borders on average, Jack, but he's ugly with this face, so he can say he didn't lie.
He holds himself careful and open the way you'd hold yourself with a beast you met by chance in a garden if you're a boy who has had some luck talking to beasts and he makes a little noise, sniffling, and then, low, "Is it Mercy?"
Mercy
This wasnt the first time that Nobody Jack had managed to catch her unawares. It likely wouldn't be the last time either, Nosferatu were like that, they were often the most cunning of prey items, not that Mercy ate vampire, but in theory they would be as they were all to familiar with the act of being unseen, of going where others did not. They were dangerous in this way.
Mercy reacts as one might expect an animal to react, even with the low noise, the soft, obvious declarations of their presence meant to allay any bad reactions she might have. Still she jerks, turning to face the man hands spread away and out, fingers spreading as if she were preparing to grow talons to flense skin from bone at the slightest provocation. Teeth are bared in the moonlit night, bright and savage as the dark pools of her eyes take in the face, her ears pin that voice and her nose twitches in search of a scent.
He knows her name...and that in of itself IS a mercy, it draws the human side of the woman more to the fore and the dark eyes widen in recognition and she rises slightly, her arms coming back to her side as she started to stalk towards Nobody in particular.
Her chin was down but her eyes were up as she came within fifteen feet of the man and she spoke. "What are you doing here?" She asks pointedly...ahh Mercy and her conversation skills.
Nobody
Not unexpected. Jack weathers the savagery, though not without an admiring alarum lifting itself in one of the cool chambers of his heart, a respect for the brutality the virago might be played by. There is some part of him wide-eyed and curious. But he is an intrepid creature, Jack of the Nosferatu, so he meets the splaying of fingers and the sharp promise of teeth that gleam (o, the teeth that bite) with calm assurance.
It's worth noting that Jack doesn't carry himself as if he knows he is a monstrous thing. He doesn't carry himself like someone who has been punished by his flesh might. He doesn't carry himself like someone who had beauty and lost it or like something that knows it's ugly or something that wields grotesquerie like a weapon and wallows in the powerplay of petty tyrants or bullyboys oh no. That's not how Jack carries himself. He's just got that certain calm brave assurance all internalized and self-directed and so he slides into the speech of those who've been taken by the wild who're being snarled into a beast-shape speaks simply when Mercy addresses him directly. And he doesn't seem too bothered - perhaps relieved. Yes, there might be a note of relief there.
"I'm looking around," he says. "Away from," and he gestures carefully toward the fence, "the busy city." He pauses. "Did you feel the earthquake? I'm also here because of that. Curiousity. What are you doing here?"
Mercy
A level of civility is attained, in the simple fact that voices are used to create words, that blood is not being spilt and lives are not rapidly approaching the end of their natural [or unnatural] spans. She rights herself almost fully now, her knee's bent only as much as they normally would, her hands mostly at her sides and relaxed, the coiled, lethal spring with fangs uncoils, the potential for danger and violence remains...but at least for the moment, it is not guaranteed.
She listens, but as she does see turns, and moves along a curved line before Jack, making ten paces before she turned back, and paced in the opposite direction, like some great animal in a cage of invisible bars she stalked, her eyes watching the shadows as her ears took in the words of one of the few men who had not offered her violence of late.....Jack was a rare man, regardless of the regularity of his name.
Her gaze flashes towards Jack for a heart stopping moment as he mentions the earthquake, but then she continues on her path in that semi circle about his posiiton. "I am here to avoid that." She said pointing with a finger towards the city lights. "It is too much." She spoke with derision and a low growling cadence which escaped her throat amidst the words.
"I have seen, felt, and killed many things in these nights, the ground moving as well. Did you see the moon?" She asks quickly, her gaze returning to him as her speed increased, as if demanding he answer swiftly, or at least hoping he would.
Nobody
It takes time to coax a lion into taking a man's head in its mouth and it takes a second to coax it to close its jaws; many more seconds are needed, before the head is inserted between teeth, to coax it into keeping its mouth open. Jack is understanding though understanding doesn't mean heedless and he heeds the telltale twitches as Mercy prowls closer, back and forth, forth and back, offering no sudden movements although he also does not sink or make himself smaller, though he shrugs at the growl and the derision as if to say it could be or it doesn't usually bother me or yeah I agree: "It can be."
She speaks. And:
"You're a hunter," he states, a flat acknowledgment and his tone fills in the word 'good.' "What things did you kill?" She can't mean kine. Can she? Is there something here? He's intrigued. He'd be intrigued even if there wasn't. There's always something in this shadow world.
You're a hunter. What things did you kill? he said. They're all hunters but some are better than others. Jack is more direct with Mercy than it might be with many other kindred or kine. He leaves words out, trusting the words that remain to carry his meaning, to be the precise dollop of honey needed for understanding on the edge of civil and wild. There are places where these two concepts meet in the underworld (this otherworld [the moon is bright and hides terrors but they're still there look here are two]).
His forehead crinkles quizzically, and Jack - keeping Mercy always in his sight - answers her: "I have not. My eyes have been," he points downward, "not up. Bright tonight. Loud, too."
Mercy
He says no to her own question and she shakes her head. Her nose scrunches up ever so slightly as if she smelled something foul, or was simply frustrated before she let it go, and shifted her conversation back to a previous statement.
"I have killed dreams." She says quizzically, anyone else it might be necessary to try and read into the words, to discipher the meaning, but Mercy is bold faced and her face held no hidden meaning, she was as plain as paper, and seemed to speak no lie....apparently she thought she had killed dreams.
"I have also killed men." Her voice is equally flat in this moment, but this declaration seems unproblematic for her, not as it would for many others of their ilk.
The topic is changed just as swiftly as that potential bomb had dropped and she speaks again of the earthquake. "The ground tells me nothing of what it wants, it has no mouth to do so."
Nobody
"Dreams? That's strange. How did you know they were dreams? What did they look like?" Jack asks. He still sounds quizzical. Mercy might only think that she has killed dreams; Jack has no reason to doubt her, per se. There are a lot of strange things in the shadow world, and some of them might be dreams; who knows what crawl out've the curse-brains when the day is dragging their spirit away and out?
The Riverside Cemetery is half-feral itself, with wide patches left neglected, and they're in one such patch; still, Jack leans against the edge of a monument that is choking in brittle-dry burn-me-now vines, considering that nose-scrunch look of hers. Don't discount anything, Jack-o. She declares that she's also killed men, and Jack is against killing. He really is, though he has done it. He did it when he was alive, and he's done it since.
He meets her callous declaration with: "Why?" It's the same why/should I be wary of something question he might give to a junkyard dog which told him that it killed a man.
No, scratch that. Mercy's changing the topic swiftly back to the earthquake. He begins to say why; gets to 'wh--' and maybe he'll return to that. He nods, and answers with feeling: "Wouldn't it be nice if it did."
Mercy
"They were my dreams." She says pausing at the farthest point of one her slow arches about Jacks body. Her eyes holding him as she tilted her head slowly to the side. "A moon with the face of a child, which goes out in a deluge of blood which threatened to destroy me...and the city....so I killed them."
She turns her gaze upward to the moon, her visage momentarily that of a wolf or a great cat staring up at that great silver disk in the sky. "Death was the only way." It is the most spoken words that Jack has gotten out of Mercy in any of their discussions and meetings, whole sentences flowed from the woman and might startle the man with their completeness.
"I killed them...because they deserved it." She said looking back to the Nosferatu once more, her course continuing once again, as if it had never been averted. "It was right."
Nobody
He's probably played the disappearing trick on her before. Look away, and then Nobody's there any longer. If he hasn't, she might expect him to just by virtue of his lineage, of his blood. Now is not a time when he disappears as soon as her eyes are off him; he watches the gangrel's profile, illumined, his eyebrows first rising in unfeigned surprise (...and the city...) and then drawn sharply together, his mouth twisting in a grimace.
To Jack, who's mind is nimble enough in certain respects, presented with certain aspects of the world, it sounds as if Mercy fought an omen or a vision or maybe just some contagion left over from winter or who knows. He's going to think about it later. He's going to react to her now, and if he's pleased to have coaxed the other kindred into more verbal conversation than heretofore (which he is), then he's not going to start taking it for granted. There's a reason she's talking now; people talk - even the dead ones - when they care about something or they want something, in his experience. Mercy cares about something in this, maybe. He doubts she wants something from him, but maybe she does.
"I've never seen anything like that. What happened to the dream when you killed it? Did it disappear?"
Mercy begins to prowl again; Jack turns so he's facing her, once again the patient, brave-boy faced with an animal, and adds, "The men? Why'd they deserve it?"
Mercy
"It unravelled, like the bark of a birch tree stripped from its trunk." She made motions with her hand, raking cutting motions as if she were doing the stripping herself.
Perhaps there was indeed something in all of this that mattered to her, something down deep that none but her were likely to ever know, or understand. One may well wonder as to the state of a mind like Mercy's what form it took, what pathways had been forged over the decades of her unlife...did it even resemble a human's anymore?
They are then back to the talk of men, of their hubris and their wicked ways. The Gangrels features pinch in to a visage of snarling displeasure as she turns her head towards him once more. "They hurt animals, used them for sport....I made sport of them in return." A smile spread across her lips, pleased at the fact of doing so....the smile might have been pleasant, if it weren't for the fangs she bore openly in that moment.
"Why?" She asks. "Will you tell your hunters, will they try to stop me...again?" She turned bodily towards him now, and took two steps towards him, her eyes intense like they might pin him to the spot with their raw power.
Nobody
"Was anything left behind? I would like to see the remains of a dream if it is safe and it is dead." He seems gripped by her story now; trying to figure it out - wary of what it might mean; wondering over the particulars. The rictus of a snarl on the gangrel's face causes Jack to stand up a little straighter. He is a certain kind of cautionary tale, understand. He's already learned others. He seems to understand her answer; there are rules, after all. And it always pays to be kind to animals, or the animals will pay you, and cruelty eventually finds its reward. He says, "Ah. Then I'm unsurprised."
Has he ever seen Mercy smile before? He rathers thinks he has not.If she were more human, he might laugh derisively at the thought of he, Jack, telling a why to someone; but she is not more human, and he treats her as if she belongs to the kingdom of owls and cats and birds, tohugh of course the dark blood lacery of that world, the foul underside they all belong to, those who've been dragged out of the day. "Mercy, you did what was right, answering one action with another.
"I do not tell and I do not tattle."
He makes another gesture, indicating a place beside him - cleared out, for another predator to hunker. Come, the gesture seems to say; take a moment, or a minute. There is no reason to fear. (For either of us.)
Wishes do make things so, sometimes, he'd tell you. He'd believe it, too.
Mercy
He assures her that he has no intention of telling anyone anything, apparently he was on her moral right in this case, the humans died as they should, and as far as Mercy had intimated, there was no reason to fear a breach. Her hackles seem to fall after that and her forward momentum lessens until she stops entirely, no more then five feet from Jacks feet. It is the closest she has come when not threatening violence.
"Nothing remains at the end of a dream." Is her answer to his question, she shakes her head to confirm it and reaches up with one hand, long fingers evident in the moonlight and pushed them into the mop of darkness that was her hair, she scratched absently at something as she watched him, her nostrils flaring as she forced air through them.
"Do you fear the Sabbat?" She asks suddenly, as her hand fell from her hair. "They are everywhere."
Nobody
She's closer than she's ever come before, sans violence, and this pleases him too. He feels fortunate; perhaps he shouldn't. But he does, and optimism leavens his masked gaze, the watchful and curious eyes.
"Yes." He rubs the side of his neck, scratches the underside of his jaw; there is a scratchy, raw sound as he does that; the roughness of stubble, perhaps. Unhappy, even if still intrepid, Jack. Frank: "I'd prefer they not know me."
He pauses. Mercy could be a convert; Mercy could be bound by blood now, she could be a victim or a willing soldier; he knows that. But his fear is not of the individuals, per se. There's a gentle question in Shrewd Dreamer Jack's his eyes as he looks at her, and says, "Did you not hear what change the winter brought?"
Mercy
She shook her head at his question, but there was a knowing look in her eyes, an understand that ran a rare parallel between her reality, and the reality of other kindred. She understood all to well, if your enemy is in your territory, you expel them, and if you have not expelled them...well, that means only one things.
"You are weak." She said flatly. "Wounded and running." She doesn't refer to Jack himself of course, he is seemingly at the pinacle of his physical unlife, that is to say, hes not hurt. No she refers to his 'side' as a whole, because it was certainly not the Sabbat who were running scared.
"Your war goes poorly, you must kill....or be killed." Her tone slammed home like a rock carried by gravity into the earth, there was no other way around it, it was a fact, written in stone and sealed in blood. The camarilla would kill its enemies or be killed by them, they had no other recourse in the woman's mind.
Nobody
He'd rubbed the side of his neck, his under-jaw; his fingers are curled against the edge of his jaw now, just resting there, his head half-tilted and reflective, his gaze watchful. He doesn't argue with her. He says, rueful perhaps, "It's true." He doesn't quite commit to the war, but he doesn't remove himself from her observation; doesn't decry it and doesn't say but they are too. He doesn't shudder, like you're supposed to when the shadow of a bogeyman passes you by. "Winter was rough." Beat. "For everybody." Beat. That same gentle questioning look as before: "Do you fear the Sabbat?"
Mercy
Another first is experienced by Jack in this graveyard, on this evening and with this...woman. She laughs, it is a mirthful thing, but twisted by the growling sound that accompanies it, which smooths out into a leonine purr before she shakes her head. "No." She says without hesitation, and it seems for the briefest of moments she might well leave it at that.
But it was a talkative night, and Mercy so rarely conversed with anyone for longer then a few moments of threat and counter threat. So she indulged the man, and herself in the process. "Do I fear the bear? Do I fear the mountain lion? No, I simply avoid them...or kill them if I must. Her gaze travels across the city scape to the mountains in the distance.
"The mountains are large, I would kill many before they could find me."
Nobody
He smiles in response to what he realizes - after what might be a moment of alarm - to be Mercy, laughing. He's ugly, (oh: you don't want to see) but it's easy to forgive when there's a smile like this. No teeth; easy, sending a host of wrinkles into play. This face is one he's used so often, he knows its moods. He doesn't carry himself like he knows he's a thing of disgust, remember, and he doesn't smile like somebody who was ever anything but a charming [Dreamer, head in the clouds, Fortunate] man. It's not forceful; it's behind the scenes.
"Very practical philosophy." He pauses, and then says, having briefly marked the direction of Mercy's gaze: "Will you go to the mountains or will you stay in the city?" Underlying: what keeps you here.
The question is simple.
Mercy
"I will go where I wish." She says with a shrug, as if the concept to her was meaningless. As if she had no reason to fear the coming flames of war, as if she could stride through them without being burned up with the rest. "Why should I go?" She asks. "There is so much left to see, and do before I slumber in the deep earth again." For once Mercy is cryptic, she does not veil her answers however, there is no deceit in her words, only omissions. Of course...the why was what the Nosferatu always craved..and the why was pointedly absent.
She turned her gaze upon Jack then, it having wandered about the cemetery in search of something. "Will you run?" She asks pointedly. "Will you flee the bear?" her head tilts ever so slightly to the side inquisitively as she waited for his answer, the look on her face seeming to say she would learn much of this man with his answer.
"So many are gone...most of them yours."
Nobody
Her answer may be one with a lie of omission (or, perhaps, simply an omission or three), but that is what creatures like they - who survive - do. They omit. They're omissions in a way, after all, Death having passed them by, pinched their candle off then thrown it into a cabinet where they keep flicking to half-life - glow without flame - the wax in this Death's secret cabinet doesn't melt. So that smile's still there, fading but not because he's suddenly angry or pissed or broody or any of those things. Because that's what natural expressions do. People who smile and smile and smile you can't trust and animals know that.
She says yours and he takes it to meet Nosferatu. They've been unlucky, it's true. Unluckiest of clans.
Jack is a lucky man. He thinks of himself as a man, still, in a way that is difficult to articulate, and would not necessarily match-up with the definition of a kine or a Cainite, and maybe it's this old luck that has him so willing to stay. Will you flee the bear?
He says, "If its claw is like this," and he makes a claw of his hand, brings it close to his face, sweeps down, "then I'll duck. Seems like the thing to do."
Mercy
Jack gives his answer, he speaks of dodging the bear, escaping its momentary violent and simply continuing to exist after that. It is a hard thing to believe, especially from this one, but then Mercy did not know this man, his skills were beyond her knowledge, and perhaps he could indeed do as he claimed.
"We will see." She says with a nod, one brow rising for a moment before she turned away, her body moving with her head as she looked into the darkness.
"It is time, I must go." She says looking back over her shoulder at the Nosferatu. "We will converse again." She says it like its a fact and not a proposition...she was certain it seemed, despite not knowing what exactly it was he was capable of.
Nobody
The smile returns briefly; grows in good natured glow - eyes crinkling.
"You remember how to contact me if you want anything from me, I hope," Jack replies, which at least seems to hint that he hasn't needed to completely change his unlife as of the Sabbat incursion of 12/13. "Or if you do not, I'm sure you'll find a way. Be wary of dreams!"
Then when she turns away again, Jack will - staying quite still - let himself fade from attention, take refuge in being Nobody. Jack of Nobody, Nobody of Jack. And Nobody of Jack'll watch the gangrel go, before going again himself among the mouldering bones.
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