Michael's skin was blistered and cracked, black where the sun had struck the cleanest, still smoking and smoldering. Blood oozed between the tectonic plates of flesh, thick and dead and foul. Pain danced electric across burnt neurons. The black t-shirt clung to his gore damp chest. The leather jacket was gray with ash. New cells ate the old ones. The Knight barely seemed to notice. Taking a step out into the Inn's back alley, he filled his nostrils with the smell of darkness and night and felt calmed, though the lingering warmth of day still clung to the stones and asphalt. Something -- or someone -- had managed to wake him from his daily dying, from the unnatural sleep that took him every morning and returned him every night. Some reason had further driven him out into the daylight, out of his home, his den of almost twenty years, to find Jessica. What had started as a mad buzzing whisper in his skull, loud enough to push him out where he was never allowed, was now just an echo. An echo and a pocket full of questions. Michael grunted and looked back for Jessica, forming one of them with fire split lips. "You know anyone we irked lately that can get inside a head?"
How does she answer such a question when she knows that she is more prone to catch things with acid and poison than with sugar and honey? Though he was seemingly in the process of waking up, Jessica still could not tell if he was slow to stir because of his cracking skin and smoldering flesh or if he was in need of a jolt of caffeine having been jarred from his normal routine. Her own mind was rapidly spinning with a few things, one being that she would need to work on some type of heavy sunscreen for him to use and test, another being a sarcastic response to his question: Would you like that list in alphabetical order and arranged by first name or species? Though in the end she didn't avoid a certain type of humor, but still held on to honesty. "No one that remains alive and intact."
Michael grunted in acknowledgement and turned, instantly walking, moving, putting himself into motion less he stay still too long. Doom was hanging over him, and though he had lived comfortably with the possibility of a violent death since birth, he was never happy when he couldn't see from where the danger was coming from. He needed to know what was happening, what had woke him, what had pushed him, was still pushing him, the why of it all, and until then he had no plans to stand still and wait. "Come on. I want to walk by my place and see if anyone's watching it. Keep your eyes open." As Michael walked, the breeze blew the death right off his corpse, leaving faint trails of ash to roll and coil on the wind.
He stuck to the hidden ways back, pausing often to look ahead but never being in one spot for long. It was not the usual way back. More than once, in the darkest corners, in the deepest portions of the sewers, he stopped to point out a trap he?d laid to Jessica. It was a planned escape route. Silence reigned until they made it within the last few blocks, above ground, between the space between two tall buildings, when Michael asked his second question. "Do you smell that?" He was standing tall, turning his head this way and that, smelling the air.
Annoyance rolled forward and bubbled forth as he spouted off what she took as an order and teeth bit back venom that was quick to spit out. The same happened with the trap he felt the need to point out before she moved around it and continued on with rolled eyes and gritted teeth. She didn't speak as they moved in the direction of his home, and it was only at his question that she stopped long enough to register that the only smell in her nose was no longer the scent of his charred flesh in the process of restitching itself. "It's smoke." But it was not a barbeque or grill being cooked on. "Wood and --clay, shale..." Trailing off at the clear notion that it was a building and not a meal going up in flames, her attention aimed at the nearest street to see if it was clear which way the smoke was stemming from.
"Yeahhh.." Michael's head ticked to the side, as though he were listening to something, or someone. "You don't think?" Nodding, then shaking his head. "No. It's a firehouse. You told me it -- what? No. No." A sharp sneer crossed his face and he spoke louder, straightening. "No, you can't talk to her. Now shut up, I need to think. Jessica? Do you smell any accelerants?" Before she could answer, Michael was already moving to the alley, hugging a wall and sticking to the shadows. He even hunched over to cut his height. He was adding, "I think I smell something but I don't know what. What's thermite?" The Voice had used the word but Michael was not familiar with it. In the street, a fire truck went by, loud and bright, and Michael hit the ground on pure reflex.
Jessica let him continue rattle on and argue with the Voice in his head, the madness had yet to detour her away from him as it was a condition that she could almost (but not quite) relate to. What was once rigid annoyance in her body language was quickly melting into eager excitement as they crept through the alley and closer to the billowing smoke leaking down the street. ?Yesssssss?.? Hissing as she continued forward, leaving Michael on the ground as flashing red and white lights blazed past them. Her smile spread like wildfire now and soon she peeked her head out of the alley to look out towards the fire in the distance. ?Glorious fun,? was her reply to his final question as her limbs shook with the same joyous elation of a small child discovering they were about to enter Disney World.
Her feet passed him before he looked up, peeking through a web of arms and hands that had gone up across his face to protect the vital parts. Old habits died hard. In his current state, every tiny noise, every passing car, every shadow, and every anything made him react, putting him further and further on edge. He got up with an unhappy grunt, almost jumping when he bumped into a trashcan. ?Nothing fun about fire.? With that, he forced himself to move towards the street, asking, ?Do you see what?s going on?? A bad feeling ran up his spine and again he twitched.
Fingers pressed against the brickwork of the alley soon twitched out the excessive energy building up within her. In a short amount of time she could have bolted from the alley and thrust herself down the street towards the flames in the distance as she almost desperately wished to get closer. But she was newly tethered, freshly anchored to the anxious giant of a man nearby and so she stayed put for now. Grrrunt. ?It?s beautiful. Consumes and takes. Crackles and creeps. Brighter it burns the more it pulls ---? Cutting herself off then, she caught his question and grunted second time while shaking her head and turning back to him. ?Just smoke from a blaze that?s taken down something large enough to cover a city block.?
?Brighter it burns?? To match her excitement, Michael showed her fear. Fire was a mortal enemy, one of the few things that could truly lay him low, transforming him from man to ash as easily as paper or gasoline. Every encounter with it since his transformation had been a brush with death. Next to sunlight, there was nothing worse.
Michael wondered if it was the fire that woke him. Maybe he?d sensed it starting down the street from his home, even through the death-sleep. A survival instinct -- get out, get away, in case it spreads. It was a thought.
But somehow he doubted it. He moved out onto the street and nodded in the direction of the smoke, ?Let?s check it out, then.?
Though Michael still smelled of peeling skin and scattered ashes when the wind kissed his healing flesh, he was still willing to go forward with her to see the flames take down and swallow up the building in the distance. His fear did not go unnoticed, but it was his perseverance on display that was the true cause of her smile spreading across her face and not the fire and smoke in the distance. The sacrifice, as she saw it, was noted and it settled and quieted some of the excitement thrumming through her.
Somehow Jessica managed to not dart out of the alleyway after him and down the street in front of him, but it was apparent that her restraint was limited. She was a dam with the levees creaking and ready to burst at any moment. ?Okay!? The cheer in her voice could not be masked, but she could keep her steps in time with his for a block or two.
A cheerful Jessica was an interesting thing; she lost none of the danger, none of the allure, her angles were still sharp and she continued to move like a living, breathing weapon, but in place of knife-edge smirks and monosyllabic grunts, there were smiles, cheerful retorts, even a happy bounce, as though someone had replaced his landmine with a poison filled party balloon. Still as deadly, but far more colorful. She was a welcome distraction to the mess that was his night.
None the less, Michael hugged the buildings and moved quickly, unable to shake off a sense of paranoia that waking up to daylight and being subconsciously driven to flee his home, even into the sunlight barely dulled by heavy cloud cover, had something more going with it than a simple fire on his block. The static charge buzzing in his head was more akin to the tuning fork-like hum when too many other Malkavians got into a city than some deep seated, primal drive. Maybe someone had meant to warn him, he considered, or maybe a kin was in town and had known something would happen. Or maybe someone sensitive to the gossamer network that tied his clan together had started the fire, and their sheer excitement had spiked his own, rousing him from sleep.
Or maybe he was just being stupid. After all, he was fine. The burns would heal. Jessica was here. He?d get home, they?d watch the fire from as close as they could, and then they?d go find somewhere to be alone. As he walked, he turned to look at her over a shoulder, watching her follow, recalling to mind a particularly animal moment or two, when they?d fallen into each other with the wild need of godless, violent beasts. His mouth twitched into a smile, skin splitting as it stretched, thin lines of red forming where the flesh had not grown back thick enough yet. Yes, maybe he was just being stupid. They would watch the fire and then he would take her and share in her light. It would be okay. She was here.
Then he rounded the corner to his street and it all went up in flame and smoke.