crossmyheartandhope (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
crossmyheartandhope) wrote2020-07-01 07:08 pm
crossmyheartandhope) wrote2020-07-01 07:08 pm
Entry tags:
Memory 23: Just close your eyes
Black Whisper’s only two blocks over, and that’s the saving grace.
Hurricane catches sight of her suit right before it flickers into cloaking mode again, and he taps the wrist control to lock on just as it slips from view.
Target: acquired, his HUD reads, white crosshairs on what looks like empty space, but Hurricane knows better. When the crosshairs lift up into the air to relocate, Hurricane angles up to follow – and when a flash of light splashes his way, and then another, he darts first to the left and then to the right. The shots miss him by a hand’s breadth, no more, and he just has time to think how hard it is to dodge something you can’t see when he slams right into her.
Black Whisper’s cloaking flickers and goes, and for about a second Hurricane has vague recollections of pudgy, bespectacled Dr. Yoshioka nursing a cup of tea and talking about how they really needed to move the circuitry farther away from the surface.
Then Black Whisper tips head over feet in probably the least graceful thing Hurricane’s ever seen, and he’s got the presence of mind to wheel past her and circle back. He gets his arms around her suit as she tries to right herself; those lasers are mounted in the hands, so as long as he can keep them neutralized, everything’s going to be just fine.
Nothing’s ever fine. But if you neutralized her for good, she’d stay down.
He doesn’t want to fight her. But he also definitely doesn’t want to let her go, so that she can fix her cloaking device and slip away again.
So, door number three: he holds on tight while she thrashes, and he angles them down toward the ground.
Tokyo’s a big city. It’s got the good stuff, like all-night karaoke, and high-speed trains, and amazing ramen. Tokyo’s got everything, even now that most of the world’s in ruins. There’ll be something he can use to hold her, or pin her, or keep her in one spot so he can get off the ground and lend Xia a hand with that invader.
He flips his comms back to all teams. “Whisper, hey. Calm down. Look, why don’t we find someplace to take it easy? You can put your feet up and sit the rest of this one out.”
They’re close to street level now, and her struggles are slowing down. He’s starting to think she might be listening to reason, right up until she jets sideways, knocking both of them into a skyscraper that’s all bars of steel and sheets of glass, straight through the window.
The breath leaves him in a rush; Hurricane’s hands slip and scrabble, and he loses his grip with the right one.
Before he can regain his hold, she whips around, nimble as a cat, and – that’s not a laser. He’s not sure when Mami got a close-range upgrade, or what it even is, but the wrist-launcher coming at him erupts in a wave of explosive force, and for a moment, all Hurricane knows is pain.
Maybe he screams; he couldn’t say one way or another. But his throat’s suddenly raw, and he’s toppling to the floor of somebody’s office amidst piles of scattered papers and a metric ton of binders and the solid metal desk they knocked over on the way in.
And somehow, his left hand’s still holding on. Somehow, he’s still got her. He thinks through the pain for long enough to tell himself: move. Move now.
He dodges the second shot, and the third. Hurricane wants to grab hold of her so she’ll stop taking them, but the fingers in his right hand are numb, and everything from elbow to shoulder is a solid wall of agony.
He needs her to stay still, but before that can happen, he needs something else to help hold her. Frantic, he looks around the office – and gets his answer.
Tokyo, he thinks, when he sees it. Ask and it shall provide.
He lets her go then, just long enough to grab hold of the desk with his good hand. He braces himself and heaves – swings it out sideways until it connects with Mami’s back, then tips the desk on top of her when she goes down. Hell if he knows who could possibly need a desk that’s heavy-duty steel, but it’s sleek and modern, with just the kind of aesthetic some big-shot businessman might love.
Even better, it pins Black Whisper down. Hurricane slides out his left blade and jams it straight through the metal of the desk, bracketing it to the floor. He’s got to manual-eject the right one, clumsy and stiff, then pull it free and circle around to handle the other side left-handed.
Then he stands there, panting. Mission accomplished – even if the world's kind of fuzzy at the edges and Mami’s still thrashing on the floor, struggling to pull free.
It’d be pretty easy to make her stay still.
Hurricane leans on the desk, shaking, and shoves that little voice inside him to the back of his mind, behind a couple of doors set with padlocks. It's not him, no more than it was Mami's voice that told her to gun down the rest of her team.
“Hey,” he says into the comms, sort of slurred, like that one time he and Xia downed a whole bottle of gin between them. “You guys need a hand up there?”
His whole arm’s throbbing in time with his heartbeat, and Hurricane’s pretty sure that’s not a good thing. Come to think of it, the whole right side of him is hot and slick beneath the armor. He feels a little like he wants to puke.
He’s scared to look down.
Don’t be such a little kid, he tells himself, and looks.
Jesus Christ. He hasn’t seen that much blood in one place since San Francisco. Hasn’t seen that much blood come out of him since he lost his leg.
Hurricane closes his eyes, and fights down the wave of dizziness that threatens to drop him on the floor by Mami. He thinks: don’t you dare. You stay on your goddamn feet in case they need you.
And somehow, he does.
The voices of his team over the comms seem faint and distant. He still hasn't heard Xia, and that – that's a little terrifying.
“You’re in no fit state to fight," Ari's saying. "Just find some cover and stay there for now, okay?”
That answers his question, all right.
The invader’s not down. For all he knows, Xia's stuck in some flying lump of space trash, and here he is killing time in a fallout zone of scattered paper while the rest of his team’s still up there.
Hurricane's kind of dizzy, and kind of cold. He wants to close his eyes and maybe sit down for a bit.
Instead, he turns to Mami. “Stay put, kay?”
It’s a damn good thing he tries to lift off inside the room, instead of stepping off the ledge first, like he usually does. Cause his right arm won’t straighten out all the way, and the maglev tech that's supposed to get him up off the ground, the stuff lodged in the armor casing on that side, twists him sideways and dumps him on the floor instead.
If you’d shut her down for good when you had the chance, this wouldn’t be happening.
Hurricane bites down hard on the pained noise that tries to slip past his lips. “Gimme a sec guys,” he manages, and pushes himself back up to sitting. “I’ll be right there. Having – having some technical difficulties here.”
He angles his head to the side to try and get a better look at that arm. There’s a hell of a lot more blood on the floor than there was last time he checked – and now that he’s paying attention to mechanical damage, he can see the tears and the exposed wiring. Whatever Whisper’s upgrade was, it punched straight through the metal.
He kind of wants one.
Not the time, Hurricane tells himself, and tries to make his brain work enough to figure out what he’s going to do. It feels like everything’s wrapped in cotton; the world’s distant and cold, and everything keeps trying to spin away from him.
Why not just close your eyes for a little bit?
First things first: repair the damage.
He trips the manual release for the plating on his left arm – braces it against the floor with his foot and pushes until it comes off. His skin’s not usually that pale, and that’s all sorts of worrying, but hey. Small victories. He’s got some manual dexterity to work with, now that his hand’s free from the suit.
Up above, the fight’s still going on. He can’t see anything from down here, but he can hear plenty – a collision, and a rescue, and then Xia’s first unsteady, too-defensive words.
"You assholes get killed without me?"
“Hey, that Nemesis?” Hurricane says into the comms, voice a little rough around the edges. “Welcome back, dude. It was getting kinda boring without you.”
He’s smiling, but it feels shaky and strange. Was he doing something? He’s pretty sure he was doing something.
The sight of his own hand, too pale against Hurricane’s sleek green and grey metal, reminds him. Repair the damage. Get up there. Do something about that invader.
“Right,” he mumbles, in English, unaware that he’s spoken. “On it.”
About now, it’d be nice to have tech analysis on his HUD. He’s seen plenty of his ma’s schematics, sure. He’s spent days traipsing around Dr. Yoshioka’s lab while the doc was working on the next up-and-coming thing. But neither of those are real training, and a step-by-step tech overlay would be a hell of a lot more useful than his own vague notion of what’s meant to go where.
Put that upgrade on the wishlist and worry about now, Hurricane tells himself – and he blinks, and gives his head a shake, and tries to concentrate.
He’s pretty sure the black wire, the one with the blue stripes up the side, is what’s meant to power the maglev tech in his arm. And he’s also pretty sure that it’s not doing what it’s supposed to while it’s split in two and sparking.
So. He’s got to. He’s got to... something.
Just close your eyes. That’s all. No one will miss you.
He’s got to get at the wire. The plating’s still in the way, covering up the part closest to his wrist. He could probably reach if he felt like digging his fingers into his own arm, but his own arm looks a little like strawberry jam right now, so that’s right out.
So. Move the plating. Fix the wire. Profit?
He could really use a screwdriver. These suits should really come with some kind of portable repair kit – the Caeli equivalent to a fix-a-flat. He casts around the shambles of an office again, looking for a second miracle. The wreckage on the floor seems distant and out of place, like the artifacts in a fever dream: a glass paperweight, and a tape dispenser, and a staple remover. Hurricane stares at them blankly for a minute, willing his mind to work, willing the lightbulb to come on.
After a few seconds, sluggishly, he grabs for the staple remover. It’s not big, but it’ll clamp down, and he thinks if he braces it and pries, it might lift the metal plating of his suit the quarter of an inch he needs to reach the wire.
He sets it to Hurricane’s wrecked arm and puts the little teeth on the lip of metal. Then he braces the staple remover on the palm of his hand and pushes up.
The pain is so sudden, so all-consuming, that he blacks out for a second; everything goes dark, and when he comes back around, he’s on the floor, the edges of his vision wobbly and dim.
Oh, he thinks distantly. The metal from the suit’s caught in my arm. That’s nice.
Shh. Close your eyes. Just for a minute.
And that seems nice, too. That seems like the best idea he’s ever had – so Hurricane shuts his eyes again, just for a minute, and lets the world fade out to grey.
Hurricane catches sight of her suit right before it flickers into cloaking mode again, and he taps the wrist control to lock on just as it slips from view.
Target: acquired, his HUD reads, white crosshairs on what looks like empty space, but Hurricane knows better. When the crosshairs lift up into the air to relocate, Hurricane angles up to follow – and when a flash of light splashes his way, and then another, he darts first to the left and then to the right. The shots miss him by a hand’s breadth, no more, and he just has time to think how hard it is to dodge something you can’t see when he slams right into her.
Black Whisper’s cloaking flickers and goes, and for about a second Hurricane has vague recollections of pudgy, bespectacled Dr. Yoshioka nursing a cup of tea and talking about how they really needed to move the circuitry farther away from the surface.
Then Black Whisper tips head over feet in probably the least graceful thing Hurricane’s ever seen, and he’s got the presence of mind to wheel past her and circle back. He gets his arms around her suit as she tries to right herself; those lasers are mounted in the hands, so as long as he can keep them neutralized, everything’s going to be just fine.
Nothing’s ever fine. But if you neutralized her for good, she’d stay down.
He doesn’t want to fight her. But he also definitely doesn’t want to let her go, so that she can fix her cloaking device and slip away again.
So, door number three: he holds on tight while she thrashes, and he angles them down toward the ground.
Tokyo’s a big city. It’s got the good stuff, like all-night karaoke, and high-speed trains, and amazing ramen. Tokyo’s got everything, even now that most of the world’s in ruins. There’ll be something he can use to hold her, or pin her, or keep her in one spot so he can get off the ground and lend Xia a hand with that invader.
He flips his comms back to all teams. “Whisper, hey. Calm down. Look, why don’t we find someplace to take it easy? You can put your feet up and sit the rest of this one out.”
They’re close to street level now, and her struggles are slowing down. He’s starting to think she might be listening to reason, right up until she jets sideways, knocking both of them into a skyscraper that’s all bars of steel and sheets of glass, straight through the window.
The breath leaves him in a rush; Hurricane’s hands slip and scrabble, and he loses his grip with the right one.
Before he can regain his hold, she whips around, nimble as a cat, and – that’s not a laser. He’s not sure when Mami got a close-range upgrade, or what it even is, but the wrist-launcher coming at him erupts in a wave of explosive force, and for a moment, all Hurricane knows is pain.
Maybe he screams; he couldn’t say one way or another. But his throat’s suddenly raw, and he’s toppling to the floor of somebody’s office amidst piles of scattered papers and a metric ton of binders and the solid metal desk they knocked over on the way in.
And somehow, his left hand’s still holding on. Somehow, he’s still got her. He thinks through the pain for long enough to tell himself: move. Move now.
He dodges the second shot, and the third. Hurricane wants to grab hold of her so she’ll stop taking them, but the fingers in his right hand are numb, and everything from elbow to shoulder is a solid wall of agony.
He needs her to stay still, but before that can happen, he needs something else to help hold her. Frantic, he looks around the office – and gets his answer.
Tokyo, he thinks, when he sees it. Ask and it shall provide.
He lets her go then, just long enough to grab hold of the desk with his good hand. He braces himself and heaves – swings it out sideways until it connects with Mami’s back, then tips the desk on top of her when she goes down. Hell if he knows who could possibly need a desk that’s heavy-duty steel, but it’s sleek and modern, with just the kind of aesthetic some big-shot businessman might love.
Even better, it pins Black Whisper down. Hurricane slides out his left blade and jams it straight through the metal of the desk, bracketing it to the floor. He’s got to manual-eject the right one, clumsy and stiff, then pull it free and circle around to handle the other side left-handed.
Then he stands there, panting. Mission accomplished – even if the world's kind of fuzzy at the edges and Mami’s still thrashing on the floor, struggling to pull free.
It’d be pretty easy to make her stay still.
Hurricane leans on the desk, shaking, and shoves that little voice inside him to the back of his mind, behind a couple of doors set with padlocks. It's not him, no more than it was Mami's voice that told her to gun down the rest of her team.
“Hey,” he says into the comms, sort of slurred, like that one time he and Xia downed a whole bottle of gin between them. “You guys need a hand up there?”
His whole arm’s throbbing in time with his heartbeat, and Hurricane’s pretty sure that’s not a good thing. Come to think of it, the whole right side of him is hot and slick beneath the armor. He feels a little like he wants to puke.
He’s scared to look down.
Don’t be such a little kid, he tells himself, and looks.
Jesus Christ. He hasn’t seen that much blood in one place since San Francisco. Hasn’t seen that much blood come out of him since he lost his leg.
Hurricane closes his eyes, and fights down the wave of dizziness that threatens to drop him on the floor by Mami. He thinks: don’t you dare. You stay on your goddamn feet in case they need you.
And somehow, he does.
The voices of his team over the comms seem faint and distant. He still hasn't heard Xia, and that – that's a little terrifying.
“You’re in no fit state to fight," Ari's saying. "Just find some cover and stay there for now, okay?”
That answers his question, all right.
The invader’s not down. For all he knows, Xia's stuck in some flying lump of space trash, and here he is killing time in a fallout zone of scattered paper while the rest of his team’s still up there.
Hurricane's kind of dizzy, and kind of cold. He wants to close his eyes and maybe sit down for a bit.
Instead, he turns to Mami. “Stay put, kay?”
It’s a damn good thing he tries to lift off inside the room, instead of stepping off the ledge first, like he usually does. Cause his right arm won’t straighten out all the way, and the maglev tech that's supposed to get him up off the ground, the stuff lodged in the armor casing on that side, twists him sideways and dumps him on the floor instead.
If you’d shut her down for good when you had the chance, this wouldn’t be happening.
Hurricane bites down hard on the pained noise that tries to slip past his lips. “Gimme a sec guys,” he manages, and pushes himself back up to sitting. “I’ll be right there. Having – having some technical difficulties here.”
He angles his head to the side to try and get a better look at that arm. There’s a hell of a lot more blood on the floor than there was last time he checked – and now that he’s paying attention to mechanical damage, he can see the tears and the exposed wiring. Whatever Whisper’s upgrade was, it punched straight through the metal.
He kind of wants one.
Not the time, Hurricane tells himself, and tries to make his brain work enough to figure out what he’s going to do. It feels like everything’s wrapped in cotton; the world’s distant and cold, and everything keeps trying to spin away from him.
Why not just close your eyes for a little bit?
First things first: repair the damage.
He trips the manual release for the plating on his left arm – braces it against the floor with his foot and pushes until it comes off. His skin’s not usually that pale, and that’s all sorts of worrying, but hey. Small victories. He’s got some manual dexterity to work with, now that his hand’s free from the suit.
Up above, the fight’s still going on. He can’t see anything from down here, but he can hear plenty – a collision, and a rescue, and then Xia’s first unsteady, too-defensive words.
"You assholes get killed without me?"
“Hey, that Nemesis?” Hurricane says into the comms, voice a little rough around the edges. “Welcome back, dude. It was getting kinda boring without you.”
He’s smiling, but it feels shaky and strange. Was he doing something? He’s pretty sure he was doing something.
The sight of his own hand, too pale against Hurricane’s sleek green and grey metal, reminds him. Repair the damage. Get up there. Do something about that invader.
“Right,” he mumbles, in English, unaware that he’s spoken. “On it.”
About now, it’d be nice to have tech analysis on his HUD. He’s seen plenty of his ma’s schematics, sure. He’s spent days traipsing around Dr. Yoshioka’s lab while the doc was working on the next up-and-coming thing. But neither of those are real training, and a step-by-step tech overlay would be a hell of a lot more useful than his own vague notion of what’s meant to go where.
Put that upgrade on the wishlist and worry about now, Hurricane tells himself – and he blinks, and gives his head a shake, and tries to concentrate.
He’s pretty sure the black wire, the one with the blue stripes up the side, is what’s meant to power the maglev tech in his arm. And he’s also pretty sure that it’s not doing what it’s supposed to while it’s split in two and sparking.
So. He’s got to. He’s got to... something.
Just close your eyes. That’s all. No one will miss you.
He’s got to get at the wire. The plating’s still in the way, covering up the part closest to his wrist. He could probably reach if he felt like digging his fingers into his own arm, but his own arm looks a little like strawberry jam right now, so that’s right out.
So. Move the plating. Fix the wire. Profit?
He could really use a screwdriver. These suits should really come with some kind of portable repair kit – the Caeli equivalent to a fix-a-flat. He casts around the shambles of an office again, looking for a second miracle. The wreckage on the floor seems distant and out of place, like the artifacts in a fever dream: a glass paperweight, and a tape dispenser, and a staple remover. Hurricane stares at them blankly for a minute, willing his mind to work, willing the lightbulb to come on.
After a few seconds, sluggishly, he grabs for the staple remover. It’s not big, but it’ll clamp down, and he thinks if he braces it and pries, it might lift the metal plating of his suit the quarter of an inch he needs to reach the wire.
He sets it to Hurricane’s wrecked arm and puts the little teeth on the lip of metal. Then he braces the staple remover on the palm of his hand and pushes up.
The pain is so sudden, so all-consuming, that he blacks out for a second; everything goes dark, and when he comes back around, he’s on the floor, the edges of his vision wobbly and dim.
Oh, he thinks distantly. The metal from the suit’s caught in my arm. That’s nice.
Shh. Close your eyes. Just for a minute.
And that seems nice, too. That seems like the best idea he’s ever had – so Hurricane shuts his eyes again, just for a minute, and lets the world fade out to grey.