nexus_crossings | Cleaning up after chaos: A post Khan event question

Cleaning up after chaos: A post Khan event question

Not everyone who frequents the Nexus was unfortunate enough to be caught up in Khan's attack. Reynard had ended Winter in his own world and engaged in his usual annual seclusion that, as it always did, ended once he had run out of alcohol. The sight of an obliterated Nexus was not the pub crawling paradise he'd remembered it as. It seems that he's missed the action and stumbled into the aftermath. People are tired, disoriented, upset and in shock, or powering through their emotions by helping organise everyone else. Without much of a thought, Reynard falls into a group that is already working to set everything right again. Or as right as things can be set. As it turns out, an atmosphere of destruction and tragedy does wonders for a Spring-sick Winter spirit.

He looks as awful as he feels, and far more sober than he'd like to be. He's forgone his coat, but kept his gloves on and a makeshift mask for the work at hand. Reynard has volunteered for the grim task of working with the dead. In a shaded area he helps move bodies to rest side by side, covered in shrouds that have started to vary in colour as they run through their supplies. These are the ones who have not, or cannot, be identified.

It's been a long day, and it's been hard graft, and everything feels hotter than it is, especially with the cloth around his face. Reynard takes his gloves off, leans against the edge of a table, and pulls away the mask, revealing an unkempt beard. "What would you like to happen at your funeral?"

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Some people are in the business of burying bodies. Some people aren't. Today, someone who isn't is strolling past someone who is. The gravedigger catches Harrowheart's attention, though it's not so much the question the man asks that draws him but the voice in which he asks it.

"Reynard?" Harrowheart asks, pausing in his casual path past the bodies to inspect the man he's looking at. He hardly looks himself, unregal, bearded like a wild man, but there's something unmistakable about the winter spirit, and even looking like this he can't be confused for another.

Harrowheart himself has seen better days. Splashes of the plasma that Khan blasted him with have stripped his flesh to the bone in flecks across his face and neck, and he's still missing an eye, evidently, because he's wearing a new eyepatch. Still, the physical damage he's taken doesn't seem to bother him at all.

"My man," he says, putting a hand on Reynard's shoulder. "It looks like you're the one we're gonna be eulogizin' pretty soon. What's up with you? Dumped by a lover?"

"Harrowheart." Reynard's brow rises high to the sky when the other catches his attention. He'll take a minute to eye the other and take a deep breath, but the other's guess brings a wry grin to the spirit's face. "You could say that."

"You don't look so good either. You must have been in the thick of it. I don't envy you." He peers at the wounds, brow furrowed as he picks out familiar markings that allow him to very vividly imagine how that must have felt. "Will that heal up?"

"Of course," he says off-handedly. His wounds and the speed at which they'll heal is unimportant to him. Instead he nods to Reynard and, smirking, asks, "Will that shave off?"

But all joking aside, there's something on his mind that he can't help inquire after. His attention drifts toward some of the nearby bodies, unburied and still shrouded, before he brings his eyes back to Reynard. A few seconds' hesitation passes before he forces non-chalantness into his tone and asks, "There bodies you've been workin' with... You seen any of their faces? You think if I described one to you, you might be able to point me to her?"

The quick come back gets a chuckle and a grin. "Some of it."

Harrowheart's question, on the other hand, seems to come out of nowhere. Reynard turns his look of surprise into thoughtfulness as he follows the other's gaze to the shrouds. "I've seen a lot of their faces, where there were any." Turning back to Harrowheart he asks, "Who are you looking for?"

Harrowheart rubs at his chin as he tries to drum up the memory of the face he's about to describe. After some thoughtful hesitance he slowly begins. "Her hair was... parted down the middle, and flat to her head. She wore dark clothes, and..." Whoever he's looking for, she's not someone he knows intimately, that much is obvious. He sighs heavily and tosses his arms in a little 'fuck this' motion.

"How about this: She had a mangled-up arm, like it got tore off and put back on, maybe?" He taps his shoulder to show where the wound would be and on which side. "Ring any bells, or?..."

Reynard shifts his weight to one leg and sets his hands on his hips to give his weary limbs a steady stance while he listens to Harrowheart fumble through a description. At least he's calm as he talks. Most people looking for a body are distraught, inconsolable, and exceptionally difficult to understand.

The vague characteristics get no sign of recognition, but when Harrowheart mentions the arm, Reynard's brow goes up. He straightens, scans the rows of shrouds, and then beckons to Harrowheart as he starts walking away. "The dead here have a lot of burns that I've never seen before, battered or crushed bodies that I have seen before... but not many of them were 'mangled'."

They stop at a corpse that has been laid out a little distance away from the others. The cloth covering it has darkened in patches, but not with the same red as so many others. Usually Reynard would stop to check that a person is sure, or ready, to see a corpse of someone they know. Somehow that would seem particularly redundant to ask a walking, flayed corpse. So he kneels by the figure and pulls the makeshift shroud to reveal her face and shoulders.

"Recognise her?" His eyes are all on Harrowheart as he asks, ready to spot a lie if it shows itself.

Reynard's mentions of strange burns leaves Harrowheart nodding. As he follows him to the promised corpse he asks, "Were you in the fight, Reynard? Did you see what was goin' on? How folks got those burns?"

He stops his casual conversation when the sheet is peeled back. The face is finally revealed to him, and Harrowheart's eyes alight. He turns a proud grin to Reynard and pats him on the back for a corpse well found, then kneels down beside the body.

"There you are..." he says, sounding all too pleased. Not generally the sort of reaction of one seeing a dead body, but wouldn't it be normal for the dead to greet each other with the same excitement of the living? Perhaps...

Without looking to Reynard for any sort of permission Harrowheart presses his hand to the chest of the corpse. Sparks of violet magic arc around his hand and disappear into the body, and as he rises to his feet once more so too does the body of the woman. Her limp head lolls with her movements, her arms hang loose at her sides, and her milky eyes stare sightlessly in strange directions with no sense of thought behind them.

Harrowheart pats Reynard's shoulder again. "Thanks for findin' her for me, Rey. I thought I'd be lookin' all day."

"I was on my world at the time." Busy drowning his woes, and the result still clings to him as the smell of stale alcohol mixed with the sweat of a hard day's work. "I've heard what people saw."

While initially glad he was able to help Harrowheart find who he was looking for, Reynard didn't expect the sudden use of magic. He shifts away from the body as the violet light appears and scrambles to his feet in surprise as the body rises. Something in the pit of his stomach twists uncomfortably.

Harrowheart may be taking this all in his stride, but Reynard's eyes are fixed on the thrall. "What...?" There are so many questions, it takes him a minute to decide which is the most important. He turns to Harrowheart, almost putting himself between the death knight and the walking corpse. "What are you going to do with her?"

Harrowheart laughs in a way that suggests Reynard is being overly dramatic. He puts one hand on his hip and motions to his new ghoul with the other. "What's it matter what I do with her, Reynard? She's mine now – or, mine again. I tell her what to do, she does it."

He leans to the side to be sure he can see the undead around Reynard, but she doesn't return the look. "Like this," Harrowheart says, and once more waves his hand in the direction of the zombie.

Nothing is said between the death knight and his new minion, but nevertheless something is understood. She shifts then so that her body and her foggy eyes are both facing Reynard with an unspoken expectance.

"She's going to help you with your work," Harrowheart explains. "Tell her or show her what to do, and she'll do it for you – or with you, whatever. I'll whip up a cool breeze and we can chat a while."

He's just going to blow completely past any moral or ethical considerations of this situation, apparently...

Any uncertainty in Reynard's expression vanishes the instant Harrowheart demonstrates his ability. The Winter spirit waves his hands in large, rough, crossing motions and he steps away from the death knight and his minion. "No, no, no!"

He folds his arms tightly, adamantly disapproving and uncomfortable all at once. Any friendliness is gone, his tone and body language uptight and sharp. "I don't condone slavery. I don't accept it!" He glares at Harrowheart and growls, "And I don't like slavers."

Harrowheart scoffs at Reynard's show. People disapproving of what he does is nothing new to him, but calling him a 'slaver' is a new twist on the old classic.

"I'm not a slaver," he says, his tone bordering on contempt. "How can I be a slaver? A slaver is someone who keeps someone else against their will."

Then he motions to the zombie swaying tiredly in place, her slack jaw hung open dumbly. Harrowheart looks between her and Reynard before he, too, crosses his arms over his chest.

"She's just a body, Reynard. Meat. No free will. She ain't any more a slave than a horse in a stable. Unless you think that's slavery too?" Somehow he's not inclined to believe he does.

"You're using her body without her permission!" Both arms wave wildly at Harrowheart. Reynard jabs his index finger angrily at the death knight. "A slaver is someone who looks at people and sees meat, sees beasts of burden, sees property, an object, and then acts on it. The only difference is you have literally killed her will, not 'broken her in' the usual ways."

The zombie catches his eye again and he visibly flinches and looks away. "Seasons... Let her die, Harrowheart."

Harrowheart snorts dismissively at Reynard's first exclamation and half-listens to the rest of his passionate argument with his arms still crossed.

"Reynard," he says with a tilt of his head, "Y'know, sometimes shit happens to ya without your permission as a consequence of gettin' caught doin' somethin' bad. If you're so damn invested in thinkin' I'm keepin' her 'against her will,'" and he says that with heavy air quotes, "Then just pretend I'm a jailer, and she's a prisoner servin' for her crime. Ain't it fair to put criminals in the stocks where you come from?"

He looks to the ghoul, who nods her limp head in jerky, marionette motions.

"See? She knows that what she was doin' here in the Nexus was wrong. And you know what it was she was up to, Reynard? Killin' people. The minute I met her she was throwin' some civilian out of an office window. She came here with the rest of the people who did this, followin' their leader, that Khan, to kill anyone and everyone that got in their way. Who knows how many other folks she brutalized? What happened to their free will? Their justice?"

He shakes his head and reaffirms his crossed arms. "Far as I'm concerned, this is gonna be her punishment for a while. And sooner or later, when the summer heat melts her like it looks like it's meltin' you, I'll let her sleep."

All he wants is for Harrowheart to understand. To immediately, intrinsically understand, and for this to be put swiftly into the past. The fact that this is not what is happening infuriates him. Worse than that, it rattles him.

He locks eyes with him and steps close, lowering his voice to a growl that has a tremor, almost hidden, buried within it. There are certain things Reynard knows he and Harrowheart share, certain truths he trusts the other to understand whether he has a right to or not. His voice might waver, but it's strong when he asks, "And you haven't killed? You haven't followed orders? You haven't been a villain? Don't use 'justice' as your excuse for desecrating her body just so you can feel big and powerful and better than other people."

Reynard steps closer and Harrowheart leans away, though not likely intimidated as simply unwilling to be any closer to an opinionated Reynard smelling not-so-vaguely of stale alcohol and sweat. He watches with suspicious, narrowed eyes and a set jaw, and there's not a hint of levity in him as he stands trial before a weary-looking yet nevertheless emotionally powerful man.

When Reynard falls silent he doesn't immediately respond. His body is motionless like so many that lay covered around them. Eventually his nostrils flare, but no cool breath streams from them. His jaw grinds. His thoughts grind. What he's being presented with is an argument to which he has no good rebuttal. But nonetheless, to concede would be incredibly difficult...

In fact.

Impossible.

Harrowheart points a finger at Reynard as if his sharp argument were a blade to be parried. But blocking a blade has always been a simpler matter than rebutting an argument. "I have, I have, and I have," he says gruffly through gritted teeth. "And I don't need a lecture on morality from the guy who tried to turn a whole world into his own winter fuckin' wonderland. So how 'bout you just get back to buryin' bodies, and I'll get back to bossin' 'em around."

No matter how well-formed his argument, no matter how passionate, no matter how universally true... It seems Reynard's wish won't be granted today. Harrowheart doesn't see the intrinsic value in this woman's free will. Worse than that, he's invested in not seeing it. He'd rather turn and leave, as he is doing with the woman's body in stumbling tow, than see things Reynard's way.

Edited (spelling) 2017-05-30 12:49 (UTC)

What else did he expect? For a stubborn man to listen? No... No stubborn doesn't cover it. The kind of people who exert power and control over others for the sake of it, because they think they're entitled to... They can't be reasoned with. How can they, when they think they're better than you?

He can't stop Harrowheart. What could he do? The death knight is stronger than him, healthier than him (ironically). If he were to strike the man the response would be swift and potentially crippling if it wasn't lethal. Instead he stands and watches helplessly as the undead leads the undead.

"I'll remember that you think it's all right to punish people this way, Harrowheart," he calls out with as much spite and dry humour as he can muster. "I'll remember!"

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Cleaning up after chaos: A post Khan event question

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