Officers Ortiz and Shelley of the Watch had the unenviable task of clearing out any dilapidated homes and alleys of any homeless who had yet to find shelter during the storm. In any city, this task tended to wear on the heart, the body, and the nerves, yet in a city where an overwhelming number of derelicts were former adventurers whose souls had been broken, valiant shaman-princes hollowed out by a succubus' charms, and mages who had lost their minds to the infinite warp and weft of their sorcery, the task was tantamount to a flogging on a galleon, often with a higher mortality rate.

Their current subject was Brant, a wiry old man with a competition between his gums and his scalp between who could hold onto their bounty, and both found at the edge of vacancy. Scars shaped like elder futhark runes ran around his arms, his shins, anywhere feasibly reachable by his own hand with a knife that could support fevered scrawling. "Getcher stinkin' hands offa me, ya fascists! Haaalp!! Easy Company come in! The Jerries got me!" He often mixed his metaphors while rambling, one moment muttering about frost giants, the other about Baron Zemo's eyes, space galleons, Padma Lakshmi's hair on Top Chef... he ran the gamut. In his moments of lucidity, he had been charitable, often excessively so. This was not one of those times.

Officer Ortiz's uniform was almost too neat, under the pretext of showing the Watch as a respectable institution to the disenfranchised. It had since been smeared with blood, spit, mucus and other substances best left unmentioned. that his hair remained too closely cropped to grab was one of the saving graces he had during this directive. He attempted, in vain, to subdue Brant with joint locks, arm bars, anything to bring the wild old man to bear. "Please, sir, we're trying to--" wad of spit, laced with red and yellow, narrowly avoided his cheek to splat against the wall behind him as Brant matched him, move for move, snarling through the checkerboard of his teeth while the ire rose in his eyes. A wide, dark hand landed on Ortiz's shoulder, giving a forlorn squeeze.

"Fabian... stop. Leddim go." Officer Shelley wasn't tall by any stretch of means, but he was well-built, muscle crafted for purpose beneath loam-dark skin. His eyes stood out, thanks to the contrast between his complexion and the snow behind him. They ran deep, sad, and curiously understanding when they watched Brant. "He don't wanna be saved, man. He don't gotta come with us. We got people that want help, that're prayin' for it. Let's go."

Fabian's elbow rose reflexively when the hand met his shoulder, but the grave tone behind Shelley's words, and the leaden, silent look between the officer and the old man took the vigor right out of him. He lifted his hands from Brant, giving the old man room to slump back down and push his way back into his cardboard condo situated next to a dumpster. "B-but... He..."

"Let's. Go!" Shelley shot his hand up and jerked his thumb over his shoulder, pointing to the odd chimera of a vehicle that crossed between a carriage, a van and a katydid, most likely fueled by some arcane process. "Now." He turned and sighed, shaking his head as he hopped into the driver's seat. "Ptchhh. Year's off to a great start!" Ortiz soon followed behind, his lips drawn in and brows low, seething internally as he moves far-too-carefully into the passenger's side. The wagon started with a low hum, like a held note on a massive horn, and drove off to scour the city.

Finally left to his lonesome, Brant readied his things around him, the bits of trash cobbled into little idols of the Aesir, the crinkled pinups from PlayElf that kept him company, the makeshift weapons from brooms and bottles, and all of his blankets, folded nice and neat and stacked next to him. He sat cross-legged in the middle of all of them, rocking back and forth and muttering softly to himself. He ran the gamut, crying in a lost Teutonic dialect to friends lost by time and distance, to the people made desperate by habit and by mistreatment who continued that cycle with he, to his Mum and Dad and all relations in between, and finally to the Howler, the vicious god of Wind and Hunt, of Battle and Poetry. He bemoaned his pledge, that he wouldn't join his fellow warriors in the Hall of the Slain, that he would fall under the half-dead and cold comfort of Hel. His crying ceased as he felt another presence enter his little slice of the world. Readying a dagger of metal shards, wadded up newspaper and old tape, he brought the weapon into an underhand grip and tucked it against his arm, eyes calm and fierce.

The figure that approached him bore a long, dark coat and angelic ringlets of hair. Its eyes glinted beautifully between the light reflected off of ice and snow, lambent and green as the fields in spring. In practiced, archaic German, it spoke, the voice high, as if warbling just at the edge of manhood before transitioning into cracking, honking awkwardness. "Be you ready, sir?"

"Yea, I be ready, boy... Fierce draugr ye may be." He stood slowly, holding his dagger low as he reached behind him. From beneath his blanket, he drew a beaten old short sword, spalling at the edges from exposure. "Wodan owes me that flagon of mead in Valhalla." The light came back into the milky pupils of Brants eyes as he held both weapons forth, preparing to meet his final battle with a wide, tearful smile and a shuddering, weeping sigh as his own blade cleaved and broke, wedged in his shoulder and slashed across his midsection. The had plunged in just so, blood seeping internally, and his neck finally punctured with twin, hungry points that offered a pale glimpse of the bliss that awaited him in the holy Mead Hall. "Generous beast you are... thank you..."

Brant's smile remained for as long as rigor mortis would allow, with all but the faintest trace of blood left in his body. His idols and belongings kept as they were when he left them, though his body had since gone missing.