It's been too long since Herc's fed. He tries to keep the kills minimal, finding an eager donor and making sure not to drain them completely but lately his regular haunts have been taken over by goth vampire-wannabe teens, stoned out of their minds. Their blood tastes foul.
He's gone so far as to kill one of their ruddy chooks but it's hardly enough. Not to mention there's something too... thin, about animal blood. Not filling enough.
Sitting at the kitchen table, he grimly looks over a few pamphlets for some blood donor facilities, wondering if he's going to have to break into one to steal a few bags. He'd rather not - he knows that blood is needed by the sick and injured, stealing goes against every moral fibre of his being - but he's quickly running out of options. He's growing sluggish, paler, and his eyeteeth refuse to recede, making him accidentally cut his lips frequently.
Chuck's sleeping, an arm flung over his face and his legs all twisted up in the sheets. He's fucking out like a light, but he doesn't sleep as hard as he wants - or as hard as he used to.
Eventually he gives up on it and pads out to the kitchen, rolling his eyes at Herc before leaning to rummage around in the fridge for a beer.
Herc glances up from the pamphlets to stare at Chuck's back. He'd heard the boy get up; no matter how weakened he might be from the lack of fresh blood, his senses are as keen as ever. "What're you doing up?" he asks tiredly, flinching as his fangs catch on his lip as he speaks and drawing specks of blood.
"You're not a quiet fucker," Chuck grumps, sitting across the table from
him and flopping into his chair, a hand scrubbing over his face. "Can
practically hear you thinkin' while I'm asleep."
Gross, Herc. Chuck rolls his eyes and takes a swig.
"Mm," is all he responds with, touching a thumb to his lip and staring down at the smear of red, nostrils flaring at the scent of blood which is just sad when it's his own damn blood and it's not going to give him any sustenance. He then glances up at his son and his eyes have darkened to brown, verging on red without him realising it. "Surprised you were in bed so early anyway."
Bruce keeps his head down as he walks home, regretting his decision to stay overtime to finish cataloguing what supplies he had left for his derelict basement clinic. He hasn't been in this city long and isn't as familiar with the streets as he'd like. He at least knows that this particular alley he's cutting through is rumored to have junkies and worse, but he's dressed shabbily enough that no one would mistake him for having any money at least.
Ignoring the few couples he comes across busily sucking at each others' necks (are they sharing lipstick as well? It's hard to tell in the street lights but he thinks both men and women have unnaturally red lips-) he just squares his shoulders and keeps walking.
Raleigh doesn't like this part of the town he's found himself in - it's seedy, it's dark and dangerous and not the kind of place he likes to deal with.
He does, however, recognize the necessity. Sometimes, you had to go deal with the nastier bits of humankind in order to get the sustenance you needed. He doesn't like falling back on people who get off on it, on the publicness of all...this.
He hates it.
He's leaning against the alley in irritation, arms folded when he catches the scent of someone decidedly different -- and apparently unaware of just what he's walking into.
Thank Christ he hadn't wandered into one of the clubs.
Raleigh falls into step with him as he passes, hands in his pockets, skin too pale and eyes too shiny in the dark.
Bruce freezes and stares up at the taller man, expression wary despite the slight smile he's automatically giving. "So it would seem. You're here too," he quips in response, shrugging.
And since he knows he's in a bad part of town, he's not exactly keen on lingering so he keeps walking, wondering if the blond's going to follow him, and if he does, what to do then.
[this isn't really the kind of place roy ever expected to find himself. biter clubs aren't exactly his scene, since he's not-- all that into the rush associated with a vampire bite (he's tried it, how could he not? he's tried everything, but this wasn't his deal). he's supposed to be meeting a guy, some new client named "chau" or whatever who has a project for him, but he has no fuckin' clue why he wanted to meet in this sketchy club.
the dude's already about forty-five minutes late, and roy's gone through four sodas waiting for him at a table in the back of the club. at the very least, he can't say he's bored -- not when he's pretty sure the couple a few tables over are fucking in their booth and there's some girl moaning her head off in a biter's lap at the table next to his. it sounds like she's coming just from the teeth sunk into her throat.
intense.
it's starting to push an hour, though, and roy's beginning to consider hitting the road and taking his ass home. so much for that shit; it's not worth continuing to sit by himself in this place.]
[ Just as Roy starts thinking about leaving, Raleigh shows up. He's looking for his contact - red hair, you'll know him when you see him - and the moment he spies him, he heads over.
He slides into the chair next to him and smiles, teeth a flash of white - sharp and deadly - but it's amicable enough. ]
[ He signals for a drink -- he finds humans...feel a little safer when he has something alcoholic in his hand, even if he isn't drinking it. Makes them feel like he's human, or whatever. ]
[ there may not be as many undead as there once were, but there are still more than enough. most of them are of an older generation; the old aren't stupid and the stupid never get old, and as a result most of them know each other. sometimes raleigh sits atop tall buildings, tall mountains, tall — anything, really, she loves heights — and dangles her feet off the edges while reliving exciting adventures she'd had in nepal with the father-daughter duo, herc and chuck hansen. or the time she and a cruel creature named naomi conspired to seduce a king and rip his kingdom and his family apart just because they were bored, or the time she'd gone on a cross country heist spree with a russian couple, who she couldn't tell if they were related or fucking.
(but really, at several centuries old, did it really matter?)
she remembered all those encounters fondly, and while she often thought about reaching out to her old friends, she never had. it'd been fifty four years since her elder brother had been caught in a carefully laid trap by a gang of hunters, and her ears had just stopped ringing with his death cries; seeking companionship wasn't high on her list of priorities, and in the end it's one of her connections that reaches out to her instead. stacker pentecost is older than sin, but can still strike fear in the hearts of mortal and immortal being alike. he knows everything about everyone. or tendo choi knows everything about everyone, and had infiltrated the hunters ranks with ease. he'd sat behind a computer screen and relayed every piece of information he'd gleaned over four years service, and stacker pentecost had filed who knew how much away to be used at a later date, but had slunk from the dark behind raleigh on a rocky outcrop in some peruvian ruins and spared no time in telling her the most interesting bit.
firstly, that they'd found the hunters. secondly, the hunters had found her. and thirdly —
the term descendants hasn't much meaning when she hadn't bled in centuries, despite retaining her youthful glow about her cheeks. and at first raleigh is confused. tilts her head and throws a few pebbles off the cliff just so she can hear them bounce off the rocks below; it's not like their hearts thud in their ears, and she needs something besides the silence between them. pentecost clarifies, but it still doesn't make much sense. direct descendants. your brother's line. and he offers to show her the intricate family tree he'd had drawn up to trace the lineage of her older brother's proverbial bastard children, sired before they turned, but something about that idea strikes home in her cold, dead heart. the idea manifests in her mind, twisting and darkening, and it's only her elder vampires that keep her in check when all she wants to do is rampage and kill her distant kin. they've many safe houses and compounds all over the globe, and stacker offers her a room in his gothic mansion in alaska, and all his findings on the hunters, location included.
it's the hansens that tell her the fourth bit of interesting news, and that's just that the youngest of the human order was also named raleigh, and had also had an older brother; that their human mother had heard the family lore, and thought it funny to propagate. raleigh laughs when herc tells her, but decides she's going to find the mother and rip her throat out as well.
and she's not smiling when she finds him. her teeth show through her lips, but it's a snarl like to a wild beast, all ill intent and fangs. oh, the fangs dropped to strike home to him just what he'd managed to piss off, and her eyes flash dangerous blue when she pins him against the brick wall in a frigid, dank alley. it's late, they're alone, and all she wants to do is dig into the soft skin of his jugular and leave him here to bleed out. but when she looks at him, she — is sick with loss, mournful, and compromised — only sees yancy. yancy's blue eyes in his, similar cheekbones, similar hair, similar build. so instead of snapping any part of his body right off the back, she shakes him by the firm hold she has of his clothing, threatening to lift him off his feet because, duh, vampire. fangs, glowing eyes, and superior everything, including strength. ]
Do you know who I am? [ she hisses, dangerously soft and terrifyingly composed. she hopes she strikes fear in his heart, he should become accustomed to living in fear, even if it's up in the air if he's going to continue to live. ]
[ There’s a lot of things in this world that can kill a man. Guns, knives, crowbars – hell, that’s just a few. Raleigh’s aware of a lot of different kinds of murderous pieces of equipment, he’s seen loads of movies and read tons of books and comics – seen enough shitty TV to know that there’s a thousand and one ways for someone to die.
And then, when he was old enough and Yancy was all he really had and decided to go into the Marines, Raleigh followed. He followed and he learned even more ways to kill a man – how to break bones, how to snap necks. He learned how to fight and fight hard, turned all of his leftover baby fat into hard muscle and threw himself into it with all the energy of a young man with something to prove.
And maybe he did, hell – Raleigh doesn’t fucking know. He just knows he wanted to be like Yancy – tall and strong with an indomitable will. He kept Yancy on a pedestal that he couldn’t even hope to reach and never in his mind did he ever once think that maybe – just maybe – that was a whole lot of pressure for his older brother. It never occurs to him that Raleigh set the standards so high that Yancy himself couldn’t even reach him but then again – that didn’t matter. Yancy could do no wrong. He was infallible, completely devoid of fault or bad decisions, so it didn’t really matter how high the bar was set, did it?
Maybe it did. In retrospect, Raleigh realizes what a little shithead he was. Maybe he would’ve done things differently, if he’d known. Maybe not. It’s hard to say when you just don’t care anymore.
So he followed Yancy into the Marines, into the darkness and into the light, into the very pits of Hell on earth over in Afghanistan and Iraq. He fought, he killed, he tried to do the right thing, in accordance with the notions of freedom and freedom of speech and religion and whatever else. He followed him to Hawaii, to Guam and Lima, to Tokyo and Cambodia. He followed him to Iceland and to Russia where he drank too much vodka and stumbled into the arms of two pretty Russian women. He followed him to Budapest where they took part in the public baths their mother had forbade them from when they were little, he followed him to Amsterdam and they laughed and smoke and drank and fell into the allure of the Red Light district, found themselves a pretty girl and a pretty boy and played all night.
When you live life like that, on the go, no family back home and all the time in the world, with nothing to tie you down – it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful and full of pleasure and pain of the highest degree, and Raleigh’s life was for lack of a better word – perfect. They requested deployments in other countries, traveled and saw the world as adults, and Raleigh wouldn’t have traded it for anything.
He should’ve known that wouldn’t last.
When you learn how to break a man, how to shoot someone in the face without flinching, something inside of you dies. He hadn’t realized it at the time but now - now - he realizes it more than ever, those thousand and one ways to kill a person – that knowledge will eat away at your soul and leave you as nothing but a shell, a fragment of who you used to be, a shard of a busted mirror that’s no longer of use to anyone.
He knows people die – he knows he will die just as he knew Yancy would someday die. He just never would’ve thought that it would’ve been because of him.
When they signed up for the Drift program to beta test the new tech – Raleigh was excited. It was supposed to put two Marines in perfect synch, the ultimate fighting machine. When in the Drift, they could communicate without words, little embedded chips relaying information to one another without having to speak and potentially giving away their position. It was incredible technology and Raleigh was enthralled with it and they jumped at the chance.
It was new tech, though and things went wrong – but not in the way Raleigh would expect. Instead of it outright shorting his brain and killing him, it connected them – permanently. They were only supposed to be in one anothers heads while the switch was on, but instead it remained, connecting two humans in the most intimate of ways. They saw all of each other, every secret, the barest, deepest parts of their soul.
It was the closest that Raleigh had ever been to his brother – and they were pretty close. Now, they’re inseparable. They fight like one person, knowledge from one bleeding into the other, until it’s impossible to differentiate between them. They’re a huge success, sent all over the world again and they’re rock stars, cocky and shining golden boys until—
until.
Until Raleigh makes a call, tries to save a few before the whole and Yancy pays the price, gets shot right in the stomach and bleeds before Raleigh can finish fighting the fucker that killed him and by the time Raleigh’s scooping his brother up in his arms he can already feel it, already feel a part of his soul is dead.
And then he leaves. He disappears off the map, goes AWOL, no one can find him. He’s discharged dishonorably but it doesn’t matter, they can’t find him anyway. He’s presumed dead after a year and after five, no one is looking.
He’s aware of vampires and their kind, of hunters but he’d been too busy with the military and terrorist threats to really be into it. There’s divisions dedicated to that ‘problem’, but it wasn’t his department. Wasn’t his problem, really.
It becomes his problem when one finds him, shoves him up against the wall but honestly - he doesn’t even care, he just looks at her with dull, dead eyes and shakes his head. ]
Chuck's been keeping an eye on dinner all night. He's the bartender of this dive, quiet and good at his job. Possibly not to be missed if Chuck fucks up and drinks too much.
He looks strong though, Chuck doesn't think he will.
Chuck's been in the corner fucking around on his phone, just waiting for this guy to leave so he can be properly stalked and consumed. He's fucking starving, and while he loved the invention of the smart phone, it does nothing to slake his thirst. He practically whines a 'finally' when he leaves and Chuck slips off his stool to follow him, keeping about half of a block between them until he can find a good time to descend.
It's a slow night, and Raleigh gently starts shooing people a little early so they can lock up and get the hell out. He's tired, and he's got a shot of bourbon and a comfy bed waiting on him at home, and he's ready to go.
"You can go on and go, Rals," the other girl behind the bar tells him. "Me and Dan got this. You look like you're ready to collapse."
He barks a laugh.
"You try working construction during the day then coming in here," he shoots back, but it lacks malice. "See ya, Tiff."
She waves a hand, and Raleigh collects his keys and heads out the back, pulling his coat on over his shoulders as the door shuts behind him. It's chilly enough to warrant more than a t-shirt, but not so much that he needs his winter parka. A light windbreaker does the trick, and a quick glance around tells him he's alone.
Still doesn't stop him from feeling a little uneasy, but he shakes it off. There's no one around. He's done this walk a hundred times.
He takes the short route, which in hindsight wasn't one of his better decisions, and cuts through the ally and McNair and O'Mally, ducking into the shadows and picking up his pace.
Chuck wants to burst into laughter when he sees the human cut through the dark alley in the middle of the night.
It's almost like he wants to get attacked by a monster.
not that Chuck identifies as such.
He uses the darkness as a cover to catch up with him using his supernatural speed, until he's a little ahead of him. "Hey," he calls out, voice rough and a touch desperate. "I'm a little lost, can you help me?"
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theshatterdome2014-02-20 08:50 pm
Chuck Hansen
Vampire daddy and yet-to-be-turned Chuck?
He's gone so far as to kill one of their ruddy chooks but it's hardly enough. Not to mention there's something too... thin, about animal blood. Not filling enough.
Sitting at the kitchen table, he grimly looks over a few pamphlets for some blood donor facilities, wondering if he's going to have to break into one to steal a few bags. He'd rather not - he knows that blood is needed by the sick and injured, stealing goes against every moral fibre of his being - but he's quickly running out of options. He's growing sluggish, paler, and his eyeteeth refuse to recede, making him accidentally cut his lips frequently.
awww yea
Eventually he gives up on it and pads out to the kitchen, rolling his eyes at Herc before leaning to rummage around in the fridge for a beer.
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"You're not a quiet fucker," Chuck grumps, sitting across the table from him and flopping into his chair, a hand scrubbing over his face. "Can practically hear you thinkin' while I'm asleep."
Gross, Herc. Chuck rolls his eyes and takes a swig.
"You out again?"
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Raleigh Becket
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Ignoring the few couples he comes across busily sucking at each others' necks (are they sharing lipstick as well? It's hard to tell in the street lights but he thinks both men and women have unnaturally red lips-) he just squares his shoulders and keeps walking.
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Raleigh doesn't like this part of the town he's found himself in - it's seedy, it's dark and dangerous and not the kind of place he likes to deal with.
He does, however, recognize the necessity. Sometimes, you had to go deal with the nastier bits of humankind in order to get the sustenance you needed. He doesn't like falling back on people who get off on it, on the publicness of all...this.
He hates it.
He's leaning against the alley in irritation, arms folded when he catches the scent of someone decidedly different -- and apparently unaware of just what he's walking into.
Thank Christ he hadn't wandered into one of the clubs.
Raleigh falls into step with him as he passes, hands in his pockets, skin too pale and eyes too shiny in the dark.
"You're in a bad part of town, sir."
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And since he knows he's in a bad part of town, he's not exactly keen on lingering so he keeps walking, wondering if the blond's going to follow him, and if he does, what to do then.
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"I am."
Raleigh's posture is straight, upright and tense. He doesn't look like it, but he's protecting the guy.
Why, he doesn't know- maybe because the guy seems clueless as to just where he's at.
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dum dee dummmmmm
the dude's already about forty-five minutes late, and roy's gone through four sodas waiting for him at a table in the back of the club. at the very least, he can't say he's bored -- not when he's pretty sure the couple a few tables over are fucking in their booth and there's some girl moaning her head off in a biter's lap at the table next to his. it sounds like she's coming just from the teeth sunk into her throat.
intense.
it's starting to push an hour, though, and roy's beginning to consider hitting the road and taking his ass home. so much for that shit; it's not worth continuing to sit by himself in this place.]
u are da best
He slides into the chair next to him and smiles, teeth a flash of white - sharp and deadly - but it's amicable enough. ]
Sorry I'm late. Got caught up.
bby i no it
--roy catches that flash of teeth, and suddenly the club makes a hell of a lot more sense.]
Pretty sure you're not Hannibal Chau.
[he lifts an eyebrow at raleigh, leaning back in his seat, but his usual grin is still in place.]
8]
[ He signals for a drink -- he finds humans...feel a little safer when he has something alcoholic in his hand, even if he isn't drinking it. Makes them feel like he's human, or whatever. ]
I'm working for him.
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(but really, at several centuries old, did it really matter?)
she remembered all those encounters fondly, and while she often thought about reaching out to her old friends, she never had. it'd been fifty four years since her elder brother had been caught in a carefully laid trap by a gang of hunters, and her ears had just stopped ringing with his death cries; seeking companionship wasn't high on her list of priorities, and in the end it's one of her connections that reaches out to her instead. stacker pentecost is older than sin, but can still strike fear in the hearts of mortal and immortal being alike. he knows everything about everyone. or tendo choi knows everything about everyone, and had infiltrated the hunters ranks with ease. he'd sat behind a computer screen and relayed every piece of information he'd gleaned over four years service, and stacker pentecost had filed who knew how much away to be used at a later date, but had slunk from the dark behind raleigh on a rocky outcrop in some peruvian ruins and spared no time in telling her the most interesting bit.
firstly, that they'd found the hunters. secondly, the hunters had found her. and thirdly —
the term descendants hasn't much meaning when she hadn't bled in centuries, despite retaining her youthful glow about her cheeks. and at first raleigh is confused. tilts her head and throws a few pebbles off the cliff just so she can hear them bounce off the rocks below; it's not like their hearts thud in their ears, and she needs something besides the silence between them. pentecost clarifies, but it still doesn't make much sense. direct descendants. your brother's line. and he offers to show her the intricate family tree he'd had drawn up to trace the lineage of her older brother's proverbial bastard children, sired before they turned, but something about that idea strikes home in her cold, dead heart. the idea manifests in her mind, twisting and darkening, and it's only her elder vampires that keep her in check when all she wants to do is rampage and kill her distant kin. they've many safe houses and compounds all over the globe, and stacker offers her a room in his gothic mansion in alaska, and all his findings on the hunters, location included.
it's the hansens that tell her the fourth bit of interesting news, and that's just that the youngest of the human order was also named raleigh, and had also had an older brother; that their human mother had heard the family lore, and thought it funny to propagate. raleigh laughs when herc tells her, but decides she's going to find the mother and rip her throat out as well.
and she's not smiling when she finds him. her teeth show through her lips, but it's a snarl like to a wild beast, all ill intent and fangs. oh, the fangs dropped to strike home to him just what he'd managed to piss off, and her eyes flash dangerous blue when she pins him against the brick wall in a frigid, dank alley. it's late, they're alone, and all she wants to do is dig into the soft skin of his jugular and leave him here to bleed out. but when she looks at him, she — is sick with loss, mournful, and compromised — only sees yancy. yancy's blue eyes in his, similar cheekbones, similar hair, similar build. so instead of snapping any part of his body right off the back, she shakes him by the firm hold she has of his clothing, threatening to lift him off his feet because, duh, vampire. fangs, glowing eyes, and superior everything, including strength. ]
Do you know who I am? [ she hisses, dangerously soft and terrifyingly composed. she hopes she strikes fear in his heart, he should become accustomed to living in fear, even if it's up in the air if he's going to continue to live. ]
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And then, when he was old enough and Yancy was all he really had and decided to go into the Marines, Raleigh followed. He followed and he learned even more ways to kill a man – how to break bones, how to snap necks. He learned how to fight and fight hard, turned all of his leftover baby fat into hard muscle and threw himself into it with all the energy of a young man with something to prove.
And maybe he did, hell – Raleigh doesn’t fucking know. He just knows he wanted to be like Yancy – tall and strong with an indomitable will. He kept Yancy on a pedestal that he couldn’t even hope to reach and never in his mind did he ever once think that maybe – just maybe – that was a whole lot of pressure for his older brother. It never occurs to him that Raleigh set the standards so high that Yancy himself couldn’t even reach him but then again – that didn’t matter. Yancy could do no wrong. He was infallible, completely devoid of fault or bad decisions, so it didn’t really matter how high the bar was set, did it?
Maybe it did. In retrospect, Raleigh realizes what a little shithead he was. Maybe he would’ve done things differently, if he’d known. Maybe not. It’s hard to say when you just don’t care anymore.
So he followed Yancy into the Marines, into the darkness and into the light, into the very pits of Hell on earth over in Afghanistan and Iraq. He fought, he killed, he tried to do the right thing, in accordance with the notions of freedom and freedom of speech and religion and whatever else. He followed him to Hawaii, to Guam and Lima, to Tokyo and Cambodia. He followed him to Iceland and to Russia where he drank too much vodka and stumbled into the arms of two pretty Russian women. He followed him to Budapest where they took part in the public baths their mother had forbade them from when they were little, he followed him to Amsterdam and they laughed and smoke and drank and fell into the allure of the Red Light district, found themselves a pretty girl and a pretty boy and played all night.
When you live life like that, on the go, no family back home and all the time in the world, with nothing to tie you down – it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful and full of pleasure and pain of the highest degree, and Raleigh’s life was for lack of a better word – perfect. They requested deployments in other countries, traveled and saw the world as adults, and Raleigh wouldn’t have traded it for anything.
He should’ve known that wouldn’t last.
When you learn how to break a man, how to shoot someone in the face without flinching, something inside of you dies. He hadn’t realized it at the time but now - now - he realizes it more than ever, those thousand and one ways to kill a person – that knowledge will eat away at your soul and leave you as nothing but a shell, a fragment of who you used to be, a shard of a busted mirror that’s no longer of use to anyone.
He knows people die – he knows he will die just as he knew Yancy would someday die. He just never would’ve thought that it would’ve been because of him.
When they signed up for the Drift program to beta test the new tech – Raleigh was excited. It was supposed to put two Marines in perfect synch, the ultimate fighting machine. When in the Drift, they could communicate without words, little embedded chips relaying information to one another without having to speak and potentially giving away their position. It was incredible technology and Raleigh was enthralled with it and they jumped at the chance.
It was new tech, though and things went wrong – but not in the way Raleigh would expect. Instead of it outright shorting his brain and killing him, it connected them – permanently. They were only supposed to be in one anothers heads while the switch was on, but instead it remained, connecting two humans in the most intimate of ways. They saw all of each other, every secret, the barest, deepest parts of their soul.
It was the closest that Raleigh had ever been to his brother – and they were pretty close. Now, they’re inseparable. They fight like one person, knowledge from one bleeding into the other, until it’s impossible to differentiate between them. They’re a huge success, sent all over the world again and they’re rock stars, cocky and shining golden boys until—
until.
Until Raleigh makes a call, tries to save a few before the whole and Yancy pays the price, gets shot right in the stomach and bleeds before Raleigh can finish fighting the fucker that killed him and by the time Raleigh’s scooping his brother up in his arms he can already feel it, already feel a part of his soul is dead.
And then he leaves. He disappears off the map, goes AWOL, no one can find him. He’s discharged dishonorably but it doesn’t matter, they can’t find him anyway. He’s presumed dead after a year and after five, no one is looking.
He’s aware of vampires and their kind, of hunters but he’d been too busy with the military and terrorist threats to really be into it. There’s divisions dedicated to that ‘problem’, but it wasn’t his department. Wasn’t his problem, really.
It becomes his problem when one finds him, shoves him up against the wall but honestly - he doesn’t even care, he just looks at her with dull, dead eyes and shakes his head. ]
No. Should I?
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He looks strong though, Chuck doesn't think he will.
Chuck's been in the corner fucking around on his phone, just waiting for this guy to leave so he can be properly stalked and consumed. He's fucking starving, and while he loved the invention of the smart phone, it does nothing to slake his thirst. He practically whines a 'finally' when he leaves and Chuck slips off his stool to follow him, keeping about half of a block between them until he can find a good time to descend.
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"You can go on and go, Rals," the other girl behind the bar tells him. "Me and Dan got this. You look like you're ready to collapse."
He barks a laugh.
"You try working construction during the day then coming in here," he shoots back, but it lacks malice. "See ya, Tiff."
She waves a hand, and Raleigh collects his keys and heads out the back, pulling his coat on over his shoulders as the door shuts behind him. It's chilly enough to warrant more than a t-shirt, but not so much that he needs his winter parka. A light windbreaker does the trick, and a quick glance around tells him he's alone.
Still doesn't stop him from feeling a little uneasy, but he shakes it off. There's no one around. He's done this walk a hundred times.
He takes the short route, which in hindsight wasn't one of his better decisions, and cuts through the ally and McNair and O'Mally, ducking into the shadows and picking up his pace.
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It's almost like he wants to get attacked by a monster.
not that Chuck identifies as such.
He uses the darkness as a cover to catch up with him using his supernatural speed, until he's a little ahead of him.
"Hey," he calls out, voice rough and a touch desperate. "I'm a little lost, can you help me?"
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Raleigh nearly jumps out of his skin at the voice - where the fuck did he come from?! - and almost swallows his fucking tongue.
"Uh..sure..?" He slows to a crawl, keeping distance. "Where are you trying to go?"
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63!Chuck Hansen
63!Raleigh Becket
Jane Foster
Herc Hansen