Her key turns too easily in the lock, and Neph pauses. None of them, not Will or Hannibal and definitely not her, leave the front door unlocked, not even when they’re home. They value their privacy, the novelty of a space they can control, too much for that.
The only time Neph can remember anybody failing to lock the door was when the boys had the ol’ homosuperior talk. There’d been some shouting and some snapping and Will stormed out in frigid silence. He hadn’t paused to lock up, and Hannibal immediately closed himself off in his room, leaving Neph to discover the security breach when she dared to stick her head out of her own room twenty minutes later.
(When she ragequits roommate conversations, she leaves by window. Not too many people are gonna breeze into their apartment if she doesn’t stop to lock it.)
“Ugh please no,” she mutters. It’s been a longass day already, spent walking Thoth’s new protégée through advanced Copper techniques. Her shields feel all crispy and a bone in her neck keeps popping. Those two better not be fighting. She briefly leans her forehead against the door, gathering her strength, and that’s when she sees them: scratches around the keyhole. Little scuffmarks.
Somebody’s picked the fucking lock, and it wasn’t her.
Neph straightens slowly, the column of her spine slotting into a rigid line. She thumbs the doorknob and comes away with fine metal shavings in the whorls of her fingerprint. Now, it’s possible that one of the guys forgot their key and had to force the lock to get in. They’re both stubborn and proud enough not to want to call for help, or to pay the super’s $15 lockout fee. But everybody in that apartment is as paranoid as they are private, and Neph might just be the worst of the bunch. She breathes out against the knot of ice in her gut and turns the knob.
“Hey, I’m home!” a flicker of Steel brings the hallway into focus but there’s nothing much to see; the studs in the walls make for a confusing net of leylines, and the kitchen’s crammed full of enough metal to blind any Allomancer. None of the threads overlapping her vision move like something carried by a person.
Inquisitors can shield against Steel or Ironsight. Her stomach churns with the thought, especially when nobody calls back to her. Neph pulls up Bronze just to be sure, but nothing glows that shouldn’t, and there’s none of the wild spattering of magic she’d expect if there were a—
A fight, like the one that looks to’ve wrecked the living room. She stops in the entryway, bag hanging off her shoulder like it’s any other day, like the coffee table isn’t cracked in half and her chair hasn’t been thrown against one of the walls. Glass glitters across the floor, catching light at odd angles from capsized lamps. Hannibal’s laptop sits wrenched open like a clam, screen spiderwebbed with cracks.
Even though she’d half-expected something like this, the sight locks her joints. This wasn’t just a robbery, they’d’ve taken the laptop and there oughta be more damage to the door and one of the guys should’ve been home and—
She ducks on instinct, rolling over the glass to come up behind the couch. A bat whistles through the air where her head had been – wood, no wonder she hadn’t seen it – followed by a soft ‘oof’ as the man wielding it overbalances and stumbles out of the darkened hall. He looks up, scowling, as Neph rises from her crouch.
“Come quiet, mutie,” he says, flat and annoyed. The lack of anger freaks her out more than snarling insults ever could, and the slur draws goosebumps down shoulders.
“Why? You literally just tried to bash my head in,” As usual, her mouth moves faster than her thoughts and does her no favors in the process. Bat-guy lunges and she burns Pewter, darting aside with blurring speed. She dodges around the coffee table, dancing backward, staying out of corners, trying to get the space to think, think, think.
Mutie. If that’s why he’s here…who is this? Who’s he with? He can’t be working alone; the boys could handle one asshole with a bat, no problem. She can handle one asshole with a bat, no problem. She has her knives, and even tapped out on Copper she’s still fresh enough on the other metals. Piece of cake.
But.
Neph swivels and reverses mid-step, diving for the guy, rolling between his legs and kicking out the back of his knee. He goes down with a grunt, bat pressed to the floor for support and she slams her foot squarely into his spine. “What’d you do with my friends? Where are they?!”
She jumps back as his hand twitches and a knife springs from an ankle sheath, swinging wide at her shins. It’s metal, she could take it away from him and plant it in his throat easy as breathing, but the lack of an answer keeps her magic in check.
Hannibal. Will. Where are you where are you? Not here. Who took you? His friends? And he stayed behind, why—waiting for me?
Knife-bat drives her back toward the hall, where a soft thunk from Hannibal’s room sets her nerves screaming. The footsteps that follow aren’t familiar, and it’s then that she realizes she’s been pinned. Or they think so, anyway, this guy and the partner coming up at her back. In a few seconds he’ll be in range to grab her, and she’ll have a choice:
Let him, and hope they take her wherever they’ve taken her friends. Or stop pretending she can’t feed them their own weapons, and waste time dumping their bodies. Waste time working contacts and combing Baltimore to find her boys.
“If you’re real good, they might still be alive when we get where we’re going,” the man behind her says, just before he grabs her upper arm and hauls it backward. Neph stomps at his feet, throws her head back into his mouth and pulls against him with an edge of Pewter, her frenzy only sorta feigned.
The bat whumphs into her middle, folding her over in his grip. The next hit cracks against her ear and cheek, force blunted by Pewter and the narrow windup space in the hall. Her vision goes leyline-blue anyway, and when it swims clear she’s folded over her knees on the floor. Curled up like that, they don’t notice the sleight-of-hand as she unclasps her wrist sheaths and shoves them further up her sleeves.
“—some kind of speedster,” the first man is saying to the other.
“Less of a fight than I expected,” he agrees as he pulls her other arm behind her back. Neph stays limp as he zipties her wrists together then shoves her over to do the same to her ankles. She means to fake unconsciousness, but they slip a bag over her head and she can’t help but thrash. Panic earns her a kick to the ribs and a rush of nausea as she’s picked up and thrown over someone’s shoulder.
Yes. This was a brilliant plan. She has no regrets about this at all.
How they get out of her building, she has no idea. There’s a bit where her ride gets really lurchy (she manages not to throw up inside her bag, but it’s close), which were probably the stairs. Before too long she’s unslung and dropped like a sack of potatoes on rough carpet. Then the trunk slams shut, leaving her cocooned in metal.
It’s not so bad at first. The car rumbles to life beneath her, a solid metal shell that blocks out all other anchor lines. Neph tries to take comfort in the knowledge that she could flip the whole thing if she wanted, but she can’t make out anything beyond that blue wall to know how fast they’re going, or in what direction. Eventually she drops Steel and just listens, taking in the sounds of traffic (heavy), how many times they roll to a stop (frequently at first, then not so much), and the conversation in the cab (limited).
Dampened by her breath and tacky with her blood, the bag starts to stick to her face. She puffs at it, wriggling her shoulders to test the zip ties. They bite into her wrists, but won’t last long once she applies a little Pewter. She could heal up her aching ribs and work on the split just above her ear, but it’s probably best to save her metals for later.
Then there’s nothing else to think about but her pains, her gnawing worry, and the fact that she’s tied up on her side in a lightless box.
The panic closes like a bear trap, piercing lungs and splintering bones. Her breath hitches against it, and all at once she’s buried under rubble, tied to a chair. A memory hammers home, not of the church but of her nightmare, of Hannibal crushed to death but still whispering. Take responsibility.
Neph thrashes, kicking out against the back of the seats. I am, I am, she sobs as someone shouts at her to shut the fuck up, I’m coming, I’ll find you, please don’t be dead, please be okay, I’m coming.
She’s terrible at marking time, but eventually her body wrings itself dry of panic and she lies still. Hours could pass for all she knows, and at some point the quality of the road under the car changes. It gets crunchy. Small rocks ping the undercarriage. She focuses on the random clunks to calm down, but has nothing to brace against when the car slams to a sudden stop. With a startled umph, she’s rolled against those seats, and there she huddles until the trunk cracks open.
Fresh air floods the compartment, bringing with it the nightsong of crickets and a total lack of anything else. The sound of her kidnappers’ boots crunching gravel is obscenely loud, as are their grunts as they heave her out of the car.
“On your feet,” one says, and there’s a flash of blue as he draws his knife and cuts the tie at her ankles. She’s been careful to flex her fingers and toes, but they still burn as blood rushes back where it belongs. Without a thought for numb feet or the fact that she’s still basicly blind, they haul her upright and frogmarch her away from the car.
Neph gets her first good breath in what feels like days and sweeps the area with Iron. Parallel lines of blue trail away into the distance, perpendicular to a huge rectangular shape. A building, mostly sheet metal if she doesn’t miss her guess. With…a couple other cars parked outside of it, and one lone streetlight. A few other squares might be outbuildings, but there’s nothing else in any direction. She can’t smell anything past the bag and her own breath, but there’s a sound like plants rustling together, like grass hissing in the wind. It reminds her of camping with Will, but even more hushed without the crackling of a fire.
They’ve driven for hours to get to the middle of nowhere, the perfect place to shoot somebody in the head and dump their body. For the first time Neph considers that her boys might already be dead. Her senses strain for the knife in the first man’s boot, for the gun tucked into the waistband of the second’s pants. Something bleak hooks behind her scapulae and pulls her upright.
Whatever happens next, she’s going to survive this. They won’t. It’s that simple.
A door swings open on grouchy hinges and the air changes, becomes much warmer, as she’s walked through. New anchor lines open up, some moving around, some not. It’s all a confusing tangle until one of her kidnappers kicks her knees out (like she’d done to Bat-knife. She bets that was him) so she drops awkwardly, then yanks the bag off her head.
“Got the last one,” he says, “We think she’s got enhanced speed, if you want to fill in that blank.”
Neph’s not listening. She’s blinking stars from her eyes as they adjust to the light of LED lanterns set up on crates and barrels in a rough circle. Men lounge beside them, cleaning weapons or swigging at bottles, playing cards or poking at their phones. One, two, three…eight of them, ten counting the two assholes behind her. Neph takes that in in a sweep before dismissing what looks like a militaristic anti-mutant hategroup clubhouse. They don’t matter yet. She needs to find—
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timeasmymeasure
AU2: Our Teenage Bullshit Has a Bodycount
Date: 2017-06-02 05:34 am (UTC)The only time Neph can remember anybody failing to lock the door was when the boys had the ol’ homosuperior talk. There’d been some shouting and some snapping and Will stormed out in frigid silence. He hadn’t paused to lock up, and Hannibal immediately closed himself off in his room, leaving Neph to discover the security breach when she dared to stick her head out of her own room twenty minutes later.
(When she ragequits roommate conversations, she leaves by window. Not too many people are gonna breeze into their apartment if she doesn’t stop to lock it.)
“Ugh please no,” she mutters. It’s been a longass day already, spent walking Thoth’s new protégée through advanced Copper techniques. Her shields feel all crispy and a bone in her neck keeps popping. Those two better not be fighting. She briefly leans her forehead against the door, gathering her strength, and that’s when she sees them: scratches around the keyhole. Little scuffmarks.
Somebody’s picked the fucking lock, and it wasn’t her.
Neph straightens slowly, the column of her spine slotting into a rigid line. She thumbs the doorknob and comes away with fine metal shavings in the whorls of her fingerprint.
Now, it’s possible that one of the guys forgot their key and had to force the lock to get in. They’re both stubborn and proud enough not to want to call for help, or to pay the super’s $15 lockout fee. But everybody in that apartment is as paranoid as they are private, and Neph might just be the worst of the bunch. She breathes out against the knot of ice in her gut and turns the knob.
“Hey, I’m home!” a flicker of Steel brings the hallway into focus but there’s nothing much to see; the studs in the walls make for a confusing net of leylines, and the kitchen’s crammed full of enough metal to blind any Allomancer. None of the threads overlapping her vision move like something carried by a person.
Inquisitors can shield against Steel or Ironsight. Her stomach churns with the thought, especially when nobody calls back to her. Neph pulls up Bronze just to be sure, but nothing glows that shouldn’t, and there’s none of the wild spattering of magic she’d expect if there were a—
A fight, like the one that looks to’ve wrecked the living room. She stops in the entryway, bag hanging off her shoulder like it’s any other day, like the coffee table isn’t cracked in half and her chair hasn’t been thrown against one of the walls. Glass glitters across the floor, catching light at odd angles from capsized lamps. Hannibal’s laptop sits wrenched open like a clam, screen spiderwebbed with cracks.
Even though she’d half-expected something like this, the sight locks her joints. This wasn’t just a robbery, they’d’ve taken the laptop and there oughta be more damage to the door and one of the guys should’ve been home and—
She ducks on instinct, rolling over the glass to come up behind the couch. A bat whistles through the air where her head had been – wood, no wonder she hadn’t seen it – followed by a soft ‘oof’ as the man wielding it overbalances and stumbles out of the darkened hall. He looks up, scowling, as Neph rises from her crouch.
“Come quiet, mutie,” he says, flat and annoyed. The lack of anger freaks her out more than snarling insults ever could, and the slur draws goosebumps down shoulders.
“Why? You literally just tried to bash my head in,” As usual, her mouth moves faster than her thoughts and does her no favors in the process. Bat-guy lunges and she burns Pewter, darting aside with blurring speed. She dodges around the coffee table, dancing backward, staying out of corners, trying to get the space to think, think, think.
Mutie. If that’s why he’s here…who is this? Who’s he with? He can’t be working alone; the boys could handle one asshole with a bat, no problem. She can handle one asshole with a bat, no problem. She has her knives, and even tapped out on Copper she’s still fresh enough on the other metals. Piece of cake.
But.
Neph swivels and reverses mid-step, diving for the guy, rolling between his legs and kicking out the back of his knee. He goes down with a grunt, bat pressed to the floor for support and she slams her foot squarely into his spine. “What’d you do with my friends? Where are they?!”
She jumps back as his hand twitches and a knife springs from an ankle sheath, swinging wide at her shins. It’s metal, she could take it away from him and plant it in his throat easy as breathing, but the lack of an answer keeps her magic in check.
Hannibal. Will. Where are you where are you? Not here. Who took you? His friends? And he stayed behind, why—waiting for me?
Knife-bat drives her back toward the hall, where a soft thunk from Hannibal’s room sets her nerves screaming. The footsteps that follow aren’t familiar, and it’s then that she realizes she’s been pinned. Or they think so, anyway, this guy and the partner coming up at her back. In a few seconds he’ll be in range to grab her, and she’ll have a choice:
Let him, and hope they take her wherever they’ve taken her friends. Or stop pretending she can’t feed them their own weapons, and waste time dumping their bodies. Waste time working contacts and combing Baltimore to find her boys.
“If you’re real good, they might still be alive when we get where we’re going,” the man behind her says, just before he grabs her upper arm and hauls it backward. Neph stomps at his feet, throws her head back into his mouth and pulls against him with an edge of Pewter, her frenzy only sorta feigned.
The bat whumphs into her middle, folding her over in his grip. The next hit cracks against her ear and cheek, force blunted by Pewter and the narrow windup space in the hall. Her vision goes leyline-blue anyway, and when it swims clear she’s folded over her knees on the floor.
Curled up like that, they don’t notice the sleight-of-hand as she unclasps her wrist sheaths and shoves them further up her sleeves.
“—some kind of speedster,” the first man is saying to the other.
“Less of a fight than I expected,” he agrees as he pulls her other arm behind her back. Neph stays limp as he zipties her wrists together then shoves her over to do the same to her ankles. She means to fake unconsciousness, but they slip a bag over her head and she can’t help but thrash. Panic earns her a kick to the ribs and a rush of nausea as she’s picked up and thrown over someone’s shoulder.
Yes. This was a brilliant plan. She has no regrets about this at all.
How they get out of her building, she has no idea. There’s a bit where her ride gets really lurchy (she manages not to throw up inside her bag, but it’s close), which were probably the stairs. Before too long she’s unslung and dropped like a sack of potatoes on rough carpet. Then the trunk slams shut, leaving her cocooned in metal.
It’s not so bad at first. The car rumbles to life beneath her, a solid metal shell that blocks out all other anchor lines. Neph tries to take comfort in the knowledge that she could flip the whole thing if she wanted, but she can’t make out anything beyond that blue wall to know how fast they’re going, or in what direction. Eventually she drops Steel and just listens, taking in the sounds of traffic (heavy), how many times they roll to a stop (frequently at first, then not so much), and the conversation in the cab (limited).
Dampened by her breath and tacky with her blood, the bag starts to stick to her face. She puffs at it, wriggling her shoulders to test the zip ties. They bite into her wrists, but won’t last long once she applies a little Pewter. She could heal up her aching ribs and work on the split just above her ear, but it’s probably best to save her metals for later.
Then there’s nothing else to think about but her pains, her gnawing worry, and the fact that she’s tied up on her side in a lightless box.
The panic closes like a bear trap, piercing lungs and splintering bones. Her breath hitches against it, and all at once she’s buried under rubble, tied to a chair. A memory hammers home, not of the church but of her nightmare, of Hannibal crushed to death but still whispering. Take responsibility.
Neph thrashes, kicking out against the back of the seats. I am, I am, she sobs as someone shouts at her to shut the fuck up, I’m coming, I’ll find you, please don’t be dead, please be okay, I’m coming.
She’s terrible at marking time, but eventually her body wrings itself dry of panic and she lies still. Hours could pass for all she knows, and at some point the quality of the road under the car changes. It gets crunchy. Small rocks ping the undercarriage. She focuses on the random clunks to calm down, but has nothing to brace against when the car slams to a sudden stop. With a startled umph, she’s rolled against those seats, and there she huddles until the trunk cracks open.
Fresh air floods the compartment, bringing with it the nightsong of crickets and a total lack of anything else. The sound of her kidnappers’ boots crunching gravel is obscenely loud, as are their grunts as they heave her out of the car.
“On your feet,” one says, and there’s a flash of blue as he draws his knife and cuts the tie at her ankles. She’s been careful to flex her fingers and toes, but they still burn as blood rushes back where it belongs. Without a thought for numb feet or the fact that she’s still basicly blind, they haul her upright and frogmarch her away from the car.
Neph gets her first good breath in what feels like days and sweeps the area with Iron. Parallel lines of blue trail away into the distance, perpendicular to a huge rectangular shape. A building, mostly sheet metal if she doesn’t miss her guess. With…a couple other cars parked outside of it, and one lone streetlight. A few other squares might be outbuildings, but there’s nothing else in any direction. She can’t smell anything past the bag and her own breath, but there’s a sound like plants rustling together, like grass hissing in the wind. It reminds her of camping with Will, but even more hushed without the crackling of a fire.
They’ve driven for hours to get to the middle of nowhere, the perfect place to shoot somebody in the head and dump their body. For the first time Neph considers that her boys might already be dead. Her senses strain for the knife in the first man’s boot, for the gun tucked into the waistband of the second’s pants. Something bleak hooks behind her scapulae and pulls her upright.
Whatever happens next, she’s going to survive this. They won’t. It’s that simple.
A door swings open on grouchy hinges and the air changes, becomes much warmer, as she’s walked through. New anchor lines open up, some moving around, some not. It’s all a confusing tangle until one of her kidnappers kicks her knees out (like she’d done to Bat-knife. She bets that was him) so she drops awkwardly, then yanks the bag off her head.
“Got the last one,” he says, “We think she’s got enhanced speed, if you want to fill in that blank.”
Neph’s not listening. She’s blinking stars from her eyes as they adjust to the light of LED lanterns set up on crates and barrels in a rough circle. Men lounge beside them, cleaning weapons or swigging at bottles, playing cards or poking at their phones. One, two, three…eight of them, ten counting the two assholes behind her. Neph takes that in in a sweep before dismissing what looks like a militaristic anti-mutant hategroup clubhouse. They don’t matter yet. She needs to find—
--oh. There. There you are.