Jack and Flood, Wilfred Owen and Old Horace

There were three. The three broke up. Maybe Flood walked Bonnie Bo to a cab, Jack choosing the better part of valor and to stay behind. More likely, perhaps, Bo talked and talked, talked and talked and talked, and somehow talked herself right out of the grasp of monsters who might do her will. Might, but probably won't -- not Jack, at least, though that charm doesn't work forever. The charm of liveliness, of being a warm thing in a cold world. That charm turns against you, sooner or later, or so Jack has observed. But the point isn't charms to ward off monsters, not just now. The point is this: There were three. Now there are two.

Two with an accompaniement of ghosts. A court of other names, and long cold years only in the dark, caught in the spell that keeps them forever, that limits them to this night's world, where the only way to touch the day is to use servants, to reach out, to remember. Two, right? 

Now there are two, Jack with his new (borrowed [false]) face, Niccolo excuse me Jack Spicer excuse me Daniel Flood unchanged. Jack and Flood, who maybe circled back to the same restaurant in order to talk due to an inobvious communication, thanks to that double-talk say this really mean that, they've already indulged in, or maybe they made it to somewhere else in a curious fit of trust. Or maybe they're outside, talking, instead of seated.

Jack gets right into it. 

"So," and his honey-voice, stronger now that it's not inflected with This Face's mannerisms, the kinda dreamy voice that'd still make knees knock, and as always: it's beside the point, "look at unexpected us. What in the Hell happened to you, Niccolo."

What in the Hell happened to you. The tone is far from belligerent; if anything, there is tarnished-up wondering beneath it. Even Alive!Jack could be dreamy, a meandering philosophe.

OOC: Note the vagueness in terms of actual setting. ;) Feel free to, you know, solidify if you desire, whenever you get around to posting a reply.

--

The Flood that returns is both the same and different. The same in appearance as the one Jack had known whilst they both lived. If a bit more pallid. If significantly more self-assured. Decades upon decades can do that. He no longer breathes unless it's to but that precious commodity to work making words. He no longer blinks unless it's for effect, to narrow his eyes, to craft his demeanor.

The same but different. And even different than the one that had walked off to put Bo in a taxi cab home, or at least walk her down the block if she insists on walking home. Maybe he had circled about just to make sure Jack was not following her. Not that he could help it if he wanted to. Not once he realized how he had first missed the Nobody sitting so close to them.

Maybe they had both circled around to do the same, to make sure neither had followed Bo somewhere else. Now that would be a hoot. A bloody and savage owls getting into a fight kind of hoot, over the same little mouse they have their eye on.

But back to the matter at hand: The Flood that returns is the same, but different, even from the one he had found in that restaurant. Even from the one that had found him, recognized his voice, begun naming names and nodded as more were named back. Names the conjure faces.

This Flood is now dripping with context. It is a rushing stream between them, like it has swept both their paths in a flashing torrent. The future of their respective journeys has been made uncertain. How the next page will read in Jack's fairy tale, how the dark scripture Flood's life has become will be written, how each will be shaken by fate and faith, all is no longer as sure as it had been only days (to those of their lifetime mere moments) before.

The again meet in a parking lot. One emptying as the night grows later. As daylight threatens to loom. This is their new No Man's Land. Where is the barbed wire? Crumpled garbage and rusted cans. Where are the trenches? The space between cars. What are their weapons? Each is armed and that armament unknown to the other. Where are their enemies?

Oh, that is the real question.

In the lane between lines of parking spaces is where Flood stands. He walks toward Jack, maybe Jack toward him, and one might assume that when one stops the other does.

"I wondered if I'd ever see your face again. Then I forgot it and you. And now, here I am, wondering again if I will ever see the face that goes with that voice. This one you wear and the last makes me think I won't. But I hear you, Konrad. I remember you singing over the fire. I remember you singing when the brass wouldn't let us light fires because of the mortar shelling," is his answer, delivered contemplatively to that face he does not recognize. That face that should be different.

It is his roundabout way of answering, The same thing that happened to you.

--

As Flood speaks, watchful Jack watches him with a pensive air and the shadow of trouble on his forehead. His expression isn't quite neutral and it isn't exactly considering. It isn't consciously hiding anything, or inscrutable, or feigning a version of Jack suitable to right now and this company. But it's complex, whatever is in his eyes as he listens to Flood. Even Jack himself wouldn't be able to look into them and separate the parts. He couldn't say that is for sorrow and that is for anger; that is for wariness and that is for hope; that is for mistrust and that is for memory; that is for loyalty, that is for hatred; this is for that, that is for this. He couldn't do that. 

This one you wear and the last makes me think I won't, Flood says, and a near imperceptible shiver touches This Mask. This silly-earred, grey-or-gray eyed man, and who knows where Jack saw this guy.

Because maybe Flood is right to think he'll never see Konrad's face again. Konrad: hale, hearty -- he'd come from the breweries, the grain-lands, from Miss Muddy's shores, All-American gold, his hair bleached by the sun like starlight and his eyes a tempestuous tarnish sorta blue, his Teutonic ancestry plain to see. He'd been such a good-looking boy; especially after the war gave his moods shadows. He'd been such a good-looking man, and it'd gotten him in trouble as often as it got him out've it. Maybe Flood is right to know he'll never see Konrad's (Connie's when they were in certain climes Connie being a good nickname without the sniff of kraut about it) face again: 

That kind've face takes altogether too much effort to maintain. It's practically a secret now. Two people know it. They're standing in a parking lot in Denver after warming themselves (perhaps) by the fire of a talkative little girl, circling back to who-knows-what.

Jack slowly rubs his chin, a crooked twist to his cold lips and a glint of appreciative humor bobs to the surface of his grey-or-gray borrowed eyes, then goes under again. 

"Had to, didn't I. The brass and I agreed, after much debate, that a piano just wouldn't suit the venue," Jack (Who Was Konrad) says, matter of factly. Will we be peddlars of curiousities? Will we display our memories here, like snakeoil salesman opening his trunk? Will we neatly cut open the body in order to give names to the bones? Pause. His inflection has grown gentle, musing. "Do you remember that? And then somebody spotted that old Schoenhut, who knows what kid it belonged to or how it came to be abandoned there. But it was too good to leave out for Fritz and Heinie." 

"You know what I remember. 

"I remember singing, and then my mouth, it was suddenly full of dirt. I remember being blind and buried and there weren't a chance to think about it. I remember you hauling me out. Telling me you had a request. I remember everything," he says, this last more to himself than to Niccolo who is Flood and who is standing on the opposite side of the current war. 

Reflective, slow: "Those trenches were good practice."

He blinks once to dispell it. "I wish I'd known you were here years ago," Jack says, with perfect honesty. And he wonders whether he would have known, if only he'd been less willing to turn his eyes from the life he'd had (it wasn't in the rules [he couldn't]) and the things that'd mattered in pursuit of this new impossible quest. He might mean Denver, but he doesn't.

--

Flood is faced with someone who knew the man (soldier then bootlegger then boss) before this well-dressed monster he has become. Someone who knew the boy before that, the one who had lasted a week before first thinking he'd become a man in some La Pallice brothel. Someone who had been there when he truly became a man, tempered in the Battle of Cantigny. There a less forgiving woman, Athena, Goddess of War, had baked an untrained and ill-equipped Doughboy into something harder. Someone able to dig a friend free with a bullet buried in his arm and a trench knife in the other hand. 

Let's not kid ourselves. The truth is far less romantic than that: Someone able to wade through guts and body parts and bloody soil to pull him out, and perhaps for a second consider curling up in a ball and weeping, and only finding the strength to again raise his weapon because of a singular urge. 

Not for honor. 

Not for glory. 

For Survival. 

It was a debt that had been repaid, indebted again, and repaid many times over the course of their time in the Great War. Maybe at some point, while breathing, they'd even argued over who had saved the others ass first.

And here is Connie, or what was him once, perhaps the last person who knew anything of that man before.

How do the dead think of such debts? How do the weigh their past? What is the weight of nostalgia? It seems heavy on Flood's shoulders. His features are sharp and severe, though there's a certain wariness to his face, a solemn steadfastness that is beginning to wear down (weathered) with time and under this pressure who knows if it will hold.

But for now it does. Maybe he is considering what weakness this is, someone who knows of his past, and considering if it might be best to simply erase this last vestige of his existence before. To let it finally rest, to let it Finally Die, and resign his past to the sun and a world he will never know again. Or at least try to. Who knows how that would end?

And then, I wish I'd known you were here years ago. Denver. But that voice sounds not much older. Not like he'd been embraced as a man, but made dead and not-dead at the same prime-of-his-life as he can tell Niccolo had.

As if suddenly thinking aloud, "We would've seen each other around camp," a euphemism, a word with double meaning, and intimation for what-he-does-not-know-is-called-Elyisum, for what-Jack-does-not-know-is-called-Temple, "if we were still on the same side."

The look he gives Jack, after that simple sentence, is that... That might be all that needs to be said between them. That if it were left at that Niccolo would understand. 

But the next part, the next action-that-is-inaction, speaks more than those words or that look. Because Niccolo doesn't move to attack. Doesn't withdraw. He remains right where he is standing across from Jack in that parking lot.

Waiting to see if there is more to be said. Almost like he's hoping there is.

--

We would've seen each other around camp if. Across from Niccolo, Jack is nodding before the sentence is pronounced. He nods as if he has already accepted and considered that particular thought. He has, though more the latter than the former, and now it seems time to gently lay to rest the idea that Niccolo might be unallied. The Independents do not speak of sides like that, nor do the Anarchs. He has tasted nothing but tarnishment and metal made sweet and addictive by dint of belonging to this other-world for years now, but if he did still taste, did still eat, no doubt the acceptance would make it all taste like ashes and mud, like rubber and glue, bounce off me, stick to you.

Jack has folded his arms across his chest and bowed his head. But he hasn't stopped looking at Flood, Niccolo, Nick. The whip-slender and precise devil-man who gives him that line and that look and then chooses to just stand there.

Jack just stands there, too.

Konrad just stands there, too, for the long moment before he finds the words for what he wants to say, choosing them carefully. 

"Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori." 

The vampire's intonation is bland and his Latin is atrocious, but context is everything; in this case, personal context is everything. He means, fuck that, and he certainly does mean it, simply (But it's not that simple--) and completely (But it's not that simple--). Fuck that. Fuck them. Because Konrad is at heart, at the core of who he always was and always will be, a thing possessed of a clarity of vision, and it is his vision before it is kingdoms rising and kingdoms falling, it is his vision before and within and without the confines of war: Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori. That old lie. He doesn't really care about building, about supporting, not really unless it serves his quest; those are means to an end.

He means for Flood to know what he means.

"I think that old chestnut still applies; don't you? Or doesn't it?" Quieter, pitched low -- low-as-pitch: "So I won't pretend right now that what you just said is necessarily true." He's a visionary, and an innocent: "Because," a shrug. 

Konrad, shrugging off some silly person trying to burden him with reason. 

Jack, sincere and pointed.

--

Many of their age still have Latin rattling around their skulls from boyhood. Perhaps even spent as altar boys. His, though, is significantly more practiced. He continues fluently, once Jack has posed his questions, as practiced as all the dead priests that had once taught him in school. "Sed dulcius pro patria vivere, et dulcissimum pro patria bibere," But it is sweeter still to live for the homeland, and sweetest to drink for it. 

"Bellum domesticum. Bellum fraternos. Bellum sanguinem. Bella horrida bella," War among family. War among brothers. War among the Blood. War, horrible war, the last from Virgil. Though the way it rolls off his tongue, the homage to the poet is not entirely genuine. No more than Jack's original Latin deliverance of sentiment. He has learned to not mind war. To accept it as an unavoidable truth of the night.

But not a truth he would like to elucidate upon here.

"Some might call this appeasement. Though with the three faces I've seen you wear, perhaps the Tripartite Pact would be more apt. But we missed that war," shaking his head, he does not relax, but he does seem to descend more easily into lower stakes (depending on who you ask) conversation.

"I've claimed the professor. The girl, Bo..." That next part not like he's made a decision. And like he's open to suggestions on how to handle their mutual acquaintance from Jack.

--

Here it is. Jack listens to Flood-Niccolo's much more fluid [fluent] Latin with an gravid air, bothering neither to blink or to breathe. But he isn't cold. Not Jack. He's cold, because he's spelled that way, but there's a certain warmth to his grey-gray eyes, something that's true even if it's a false face giving it shape. There's something rather terrible about the lack of a heart clamoring to let you know when you're nervous or you're frightened or you're happy or you're elated. There's something rather terrible about a lack of breath to tell you when you're in danger or you're winded or to give you some physical relief from just being in your head all the time. That's probably what gets the elders: no physical release, except for darker ones -- for decided ones. No wonder they give themselves up to habit.

But hey, Jack-Konrad has given himself up to habit too. His arms stay folded. His eyes stay on Niccolo-Flood, straying only once when a car goes by, the sound of it somehow making this parking lot seem lonely and distant and like a pocket in an other-otherworld.

"If you like," he says, inclining his head at that Tripartite Pact remark, his forehead wrinkled in consideration. "Can call a swan a goose, too, or jazz the blues, but it serves for an allusion."

Then Flood-Niccolo mentions the professor, and Jack looks terribly unsurprised, but not as if he'd like to argue. "Shall I still consider him available for legal advice, or pay respects to a more exclusive contract?" He'd never planned on drinking Grey: he doesn't plan to use him now. He's polite; politely seeking the boundaries of Daniel Flood's territorial instincts.

Then Niccolo-Flood mentions Bo, trails off, and Jack raises an eyebrow (this is a test [of your conscience], and one he passes, barely. Jack is kind, but it's often a remembered-thing, often an outside-of-his-mind sort-of thing, kindness for a purpose). 

The girl, Bo…

The raised eyebrow is coupled with a shake of his head. "Were you thinking about claiming her, too? I wouldn't." Two-meanings, as a lot of things in this conversation seem to have: He wasn't going to. He wasn't interested in her. Not like that, hm, because Jack-Konrad's a friendly, talkative gent, isn't he and that's all. He wouldn't. And he wouldn't if he were Flood, he'd rather if Flood did not (?). "She's still more interesting to watch where she goes uninfluenced." His conscience, right? His conscience. "And," a spare pause, "she talks a lot."

--

"Agreed." Meaning upon meeting. With everything his counterpart in this conversation said? Or simply with the ceaseless flow of verbiage, questions, comments, out of the woman's mouth? But then he says it again. 

"Agreed," and this time it's apparent his interest is piqued. The curl of his lips. The raising of an eyebrow. Hands coming together, out of the pockets of his vest, and fingers rubbing together, and then out. Palms out. Hands open. Unarmed. Though more like he's washed his hands of any intentions he'd had on claiming another of their mutual acquaintances.

"Make way and see how she develops. See where her soul and heart takes her. Uninfluenced, but in safe harbor. Perhaps even the one of us that survives all of this decides," and then, not as an afterthought, but as if he hopes to use these last words to illustrate a point, "and in that case, I hope she lives a long and prosperous life."

--

He could help it. Lies, to say he cannot help it. Because he is Nosferatu Jack. He can change his face and be a secret hidden in plain sight. He can vanish in front of someone's very eyes and take with him their memory of his presence. He could probably help it: That faint smile at the other's agreement. The tell-tale warmth in his grey-gray eyes. And that tell-tale note of wistfulness, of consideration in the same, when one's survival is posited, the other's not. 

But he doesn't help it. He lets it show. Is this how the story goes? Two men who once were brothers both separately were put under a spell (a curse [a malediction]) that gave them power. Eventually, by sheerest chance, they discovered one another again, but they discovered too that they'd been given to opposing sides. One of them was Light. One of them was Dark. They decided to play God/Devil, to watch the development of some Mayfly piece of brightness sparking in the long after-day, and when that Mayfly's light is snuffed? Another? Is this how the story goes now, and everyone to bed? Is this how such games start? 

But they're Mayfly themselves. From a certain slant.

"I hope so too. In that case." His arms have been folded across his chest. Now he lifts one hand: fore-finger at the side of his mouth, thumb at the edge of his chin. One moment. He removes his eyes from Daniel Flood Niccolo Nick and he sweeps the parking lot and its environs with a searching, questing sort of look so alert and so sharp that it's a wonder the air doesn't well with blood at being knicked, it's a wonder the Sangreal doesn't appear immediately before him, but it is best to be so sharp you'd spy the Needle-Amongst-Pins, the Hair-Amongst-Thread, when you're about to say something baldly. Treason, maybe. Maybe. Bad luck, anyway.

No war-pack about to descend.

No mice, nibbling near-by, skittering in the shade.

They're alone or they seem to be alone but doesn't Jack know. Doesn't he. He does and he gives Niccolo this side-long, careful, stay you there look, a taut line between This Face's brows, the briefest closing-of-eyes ever, and there is a car with an alarm just waiting for somebody to gently brush up against the car and set the alarm off. Those sensitive, drama-queen car alarms are not a Nosferatu's friend in general. But just now, it might be. He kicks it into life. The shrilling screams obnoxious car-obscenities into the night and nobody anywhere cares because it's a dark world and under the - unnecessary? - cover of this sound he steps close enough to Niccolo-Flood to offer his hand. They've shaken hands already of course. But not as this, and not as these.

"If you," (deliberate emphasis), "want me," (again, the underline), "your professor has my card." And so do you. "I hope," a slender pause, "that you will use it. It connects to a private line."

There's one more thing to ask; but that depends on Niccolo-Flood's hand and whether or not it clasps his.

ooc: Ugh, I'm sorry, I know this got LENGTHY. Just because I could, I had Howl witness a paranoid Percept + Alertness roll. Be-hold:

Denver @ 1:04AM

Dice, Dice, welcome to oubliette

Dice, Dice @ 1:06AM

[Okay, okay man. Just in case, a Percept + Alertness + Hidden Things (maybe) + WP 'cause now is the time.]

Roll: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 6, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 5 ) [WP] VALID

Howl-witnessing @ 1:08AM

[This roll has been witnessed.  *stamps*]

Denver @ 1:08AM

Howl-witnessing has left oubliette

--

If rats are waiting for crumbs of information to bring back to unseen masters they are hiding well. If worse readies itself past the trenches for a final assault, that sword does not fall to lop off either of their heads for this heresy.

No pinpoints of red sucking down the dim ambient light are visible. No rustling or skittering. No twitch of ears straining to hear. And now where, at least no where visible to Jack, does a van idle waiting for its door to slid open and spew forth a barbarian horde or screech by to unload automatic weapons in fists fulls of lead. No where does he see that faint phantasmal shade of another watching. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, to smell its malodorous stench, and go to spread the word of what had been scented out.

They are, for all intents and purposes, very much along in this pocket realm, this conflux where destinies split in twain for so long again finally rejoin one another. Where hands that had clasped decades ago, and mere minutes ago, finally do again, but this time with that weight of context. Weight that has made fingers stronger and more sure.

As the car alarm wails its ignored alert like the compact economy car who cried wolf too many times Flood does lean in, perhaps seeing that hint of pursed lips after the allusion to a slip of paper that would again connect them. And when he does so another hand reached up to clasp the outside of his shoulder, at the bicep and triceps, a familiar gesture as he listens between the blaring horn in the slow strobe of now-flashing hazard, head and fog lights.

--

Silence from Jack for a moment. After, and as, they clasp one another's hands, after the dark-haired devil-of-a-not-man has clasped the outside of his shoulder in that old familiar gesture, and muscle memory says this is when you clap him on the back of the neck and tug, you old-so-and-so, and hie you off for a drink, but muscle-memory is content to stay a memory, because these boys are dead now. 

Silence from Jack for a second, and it is meaningful to him that he ask this only after all the rest has been said, and without putting another no man's land between them.

"I think you've guessed correctly at my mother's branch." It's all Caine eventually, isn't it. Nosferatu, not Malkavian, with these different and generally unattractive faces. Besides. Jack, mad? Ha, Ha. Perish the thought, Final Death it and give it to Ashes. He doesn't seem mad-as-birds, not unusually so, not anymore than any vessel given conditional immortality recently cresting his first of who knows how many centuries. 

He might've made a good any number of other clans, but how many change their faces? Few. "Which cousinly line is yours?"

--

"I am a keeper of our brothers and sisters," saying it as if he insists on a closer familial tie between them than mere cousins, "in Caine," the name of the first sire said with even more vigor.

"The clan of the night," closer, and by this time, if it even needs to be said:

"Lasombra," with a pride like he must say it. Must invoke his clan's name, and not skirt around it with entendre.

And then he begins to unlatch from the Nosferatu. First releasing his shoulder. Then his hand. His own falling to his sides before again his curled fingers are straightened and sheathed in his vest pockets, pushing back the lapels and breast of his suit.

"It was a pleasure seeing my oldest surviving friend. What endless surprises the night has for us," and another curling of lips in a smile. "May we both see many more."

--

[OOC: Before I post what might well a wrap, or at least the wrap-before-the-wrap, we must have a "*searching look* but how do you REALLY feel about it, oldest surviving friend / proud Lasombra?" moment:

Dice, Dice
[Hmm. Let's have a Percept + Emp.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (6, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 6 )
Dice, Dice
[O_O]
Dice, Dice
[Then a Percept + Subt.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )
Howl-witnessing
[So it has been witnessed]
]

--

It's in Flood's eyes. And it's genuine. Distrust tempered by a glimpse of hope, one innate and bred into him, therefore so difficulty to shake loose, the other grasping at the stars and this glimmer of possibility. Like he'd never expected to be in this situation, though, as earlier and faced with someone who knows of his past, what rears up is caution.

Cautious optimism, might we say? That it won't simply be used as a weakness exploited. He seems... Well, he seems almost to regret that they found each other, as the same time, but such is the dichotomy and paradox of some emotions. Like maybe, if he truly wanted them boy to live long and endless nights, they should've never found each other. Never recognized one another and passed like ships in the night...

And at the same time, a usefulness. Searching for the practical in this swimming each of emotions so strange for an undead heart.

--

Jack is invested in not being heard or seen to offer anything, his hand or his friendship, to one of the Sabbat.

But Jack is, it would seem, more invested in trying to read his Old Friend's heart, or what remains of it. His Old Friend who's of all things a fucking Lasombra, reflectionless and silver-tongued and aren't they all fanatics aren't they aren't they.

So while Flood's talking, Jack's looking closely at him, and when Flood's done, he nods once and contemplatively. He can't say that it was a pleasure, so he won't.

But he does grin, some assured boyishness seeping up and out like water from the underground, and says while stepping back, "I'm a lucky bastard, you're a lucky devil, whatever the name -- I trust we'll see the happy end."

The car-alarm is chirruping petulantly now; Jack considers kicking it again, but before he's half-considered it, the alarm's remembered that it's a spoiled brat and wails louder again. Somewhere a dog has begun to howl. It's the who-turns-their-back-first moment. Is it Jack, who might then be consumed by a wall of Shadow; or is it Flood, who might wonder then if he is being followed by someone so Secret that he can't be seen? 

Jack waits a tic, not without a sense of humor (designation: gallow's) about the whole damned thing; then he'll turn, and wave, and walk away, with a thoughtful " - seeya 'round, Daniel."