2019-09-01 - Too Alike, But Too Different, But Too Alike

Despite the early summer morning, signs of the encroaching Autumn are evident already, especially in the beginning hours of the day. The air has a bladed edge, touched with frost blowing in from the North, digging into bare skin as the two of them find the location in which they always go shooting in the Firefly Forest, a thing that is rapidly becoming a tradition between the two of them. Dawn has yet to arrive in full, its scarlet and gold glory washing the horizon in stripes of dark blue and pink, winking off drops of dew that remain clinging on the leaves dangling above their heads. With its overall silence and the thin blanket of mist rolling over grass and earth, their spot looks almost otherworldly and eerie; a completely different and mystical location from what they often see in the late afternoon hours.

Glass shatters at each shot, bottlenecks swinging from the twine keeping them attached to the boughs of a sturdy oak a long ways away. Isabella Reede has no rifle this time, keeping Ruiz's words to heart from before; back to the basics, so she has a Sig Sauer clutched in her hand and lining her sights with a single green eye. She's dressed in her usual manner, whenever she comes up here with him - a tanktop, cargo pants and hiking boots, her jacket hanging nearby. The air is cold enough to keep her normally smooth, suntanned skin pebbled with goosebumps, her hair pulled back in an artfully messy twist. Her moonstone pendant rests against her clavicle, gleaming a pale blue under the light of the early morning.

She uses gun range rules, despite their rustic surroundings. The moment she is done shooting, she engages the safety and slips the gun back into her holster.

"Byron called me yesterday," she tells him. "About the necessity of a Plan B."

Captain de la Vega drove, of course. Because he wouldn't have had it any other way. The truck, not the Charger; he wouldn't bring that fine-tuned piece of machinery out here to get torn to shreds on this road.

He's dressed in a faded tee shirt, cargo pants and hiking boots. Ratty old baseball cap, jacket left in his truck. If he's cold, he's hiding it well under that grizzled ex-marine aplomb. He's presently standing a short way off to the right and behind Isabella, as he often does when they come out here to practice. One hand shoved into his pants pocket, the other occupied with checking messages on his phone. He's got his own sidearm holstered at his ribs in a shoulder rig, leather fitted snug across his body and between his shoulderblades, boots crunching the frost-tipped grass as he paces and reads and observes the bottles being shattered occasionally.

"Did he," murmurs the man while composing some sort of pointed reply, and then hitting send. His brows are creased slightly in thought, expression otherwise difficult to read.

"He did."

Isabella turns to look over at him, expression serious. "I understand the fact that there may not be any going around it if the body count continues to escalate," she tells him, sliding her hands in her pockets and moving towards where he is, standing directly within the line of his bigger, broader shadow - and one that only lengthens through the slow, gradual passage of the day. "And I agree that there might not be another choice, if it comes down to it. Whatever reckoning is waiting." Her lips press in a determined line. "I'm in it through the end, Captain. However much I can be, no matter what form that takes."

She exhales a breath, and moves back, leaning against the bole behind her, arms folded to rest somewhere at the small of her back. "If you intend to do anything, it's not in me to witness you do it without knowing what you need to know. So where do you want me to start?"

Ruiz's phone is tucked away, thumbed into his pants pocket, and his prowling arrested for a time as Isabella stands there staring him down. His eyes slide over the smaller woman from head to toe in a slow, assessing sweep. It's been weeks now, since the incident at Easton's bar. They've gone from convalescing together in a hospital room, to this. Hale and strong again, and girding themselves for.. what? A war? It's what he knows. Perhaps it's all he knows. How to fight, how to survive. How to win.

"I figured you might be." In it through the end. His dark eyes finally shift away so he can hunt down his pack of cigarettes, and tap one out as Isabella takes a lean against a tree. "And you can start at the beginning, I suppose." He lights up with a brief flare of flame, then drags and exhales, smoke funneling from his lips and nose.

They make a pair; a man who only knows of war, and a woman who doesn't know how to do anything else but get up and keep fighting no matter how many times she's been knocked down. But if there is a fight coming, as she had told Byron before, she would rather have Ruiz and Alexander in their corner than almost anyone else she knows - people who know how to fight, and how to win.

He'd find her as determined and ferocious as ever in spite of the last few weeks' almost insurmountable hurts, the maelstroms in those green-gold eyes nigh-near luminous under the shadows cast by the tree supporting her weight. Isabella has regained the weight she has lost, the fragility that encompassed her on the day they had their first real conversation wiped away, or at least buried underneath her numerous and complicated layers. She isn't without her scars, old ones and new, and unlike most young women who might hide them out of vanity, and while she can be vain herself, she has never tried to hide any of them - the surgical scar on her shoulder, thin and white, carving up from the edge of her collarbone and reaching over and down her shoulderblade, and the latest, the thin, small X glimpsed from the neckline of her tanktop, its edges crawling up the inner swell of her left breast and dangerously close to her heart. She isn't like him, not completely, and they certainly can't look any more different from one another, but much like in the highest places of the world where the air is thin and sound carries, there are echoes of his own experiences within and reflected from her - though the shapes of them remain as vague as the ones she senses from him.

"I don't know what the beginning is," she tells him. "I'm still trying to figure it out." There's a glance at his cigarette, though she manages to keep herself from the temptation - she had quit years ago, and smoking is especially bad for divers. "But I can tell you the point in which I came in. I was born here, but I left - for eleven years, until I came back here for work. There was a storm and since I had to pick up medication for my parents, I decided to wait it out in the hospital's pharmacy instead of risking the drive. I felt something strange, there, but that was the first time I came across Erin Addington in years. Someone fell down the stairs, but she was too scared to go down there - she said someone was calling for Billy - who we now know as William Gohl, but she couldn't move because she felt a very intense, murderous intent directed at her. It felt familiar to me, too, the shadow that pushed the man down the stairs. It felt related to me...like we shared something inherent. It ended up fleeing the hospital after it left a present behind."

She finds a stick of gum in her pockets, and slips it between her lips.

"Three days after that, I ran into Byron Thorne again at the park, one of my closest friends in my childhood. I told him about what happened in the hospital, and he told me that he knew someone who was researching my mother's family and the strangeness surrounding them. My mother was a Baxter. I don't know how familiar you are with this town's history, but the Baxters were here first and they supposedly sold the land and their position as founders to the Addingtons. But apparently ever since then, Baxters keep dying or...disappearing." Agony flashes there, briefly. He would know why. "And for some strange reason, they are never buried here. No graves, no markers."

Her eyes drop down to the ground. "That was how I met Alexander."

The captain's scars are mostly hidden from sight. The physical ones, and the metaphorical ones, too. Isabella has glimpsed a little of his power; enough, perhaps, to know that he is not unlike Byron or Alexander in terms of what he can do with his mind. It's a weapon, as much as his hands or his gun. And it hides a great deal, as well, behind a veneer of stalwart control.

"Isabella," he interrupts her, with a flicker of chagrin. "Stop patronising me. You seem to have this impression that I am going to go off half-cocked, not understanding what Gohl is about, and with a poorly formed plan. You are an intellectual. So is Alexander. You have a desire to disassemble things so you can understand how they tick. I want to stop more people from dying. We need to find a way." He takes three steps toward her, near enough to be able to reach for her jaw, and grasp it in rough fingers. And lift it, so as to direct her eyes to his. "Help me find a way. Stop fucking around and help me find a way." Anger broils just under the surface of him, flaring in the curl of his upper lip, then gone again.

He told her to start from the beginning and Isabella has been trying to deliver - has been, until he cuts her off.

But then his intimidating, ominous shadow crosses the distance and rough fingers find the defiant line of her jaw, grasped within and tilted upwards in an angle to glimpse darkened, furious eyes - digits so close to her throat that he'd be able to feel it pulse against his calluses the sudden ratcheting of her heart, attempting to bust through the cage of her ribs. Because he's tall and intimidating and she knows predators when she finds them, and there's nowhere else to go but against the tree or against him.

Heels dig into the dirt, reflective of her stubborn tenacity, to brace her in this scant, suffocating, hanging space. Forced to meet his eyes this way, he'd find her pupils shrinking, his furious expression reflected within fields of emerald green and their sunlit shards.

"...you're not the only one who feels under the gun," she breathes, the taste of his anger fueling her temper. "I'm trying, too, Javier." His first name sounds alien, but rolls off her tongue with the ease of a practiced linguist. "I'm trying and the only way I can help you find a way is if I disassemble what I find! Do you think I don't know how it feels?! Not being able to just curl my fingers around the throat of this and just end it?! I want it over just as much as you! I want it over just as much as anyone! It took from me!"

Her voices rises at the last, the last few words cutting through the forest like a scythe. Tremors spill down her spine, agony twisting her sun-touched features.

"If there was a simple solution, I would have been opening with that, but there isn't one! There isn't! And I know, I know you're way too pragmatic to start a fight you don't know how to finish! But there's so much we don't know about how this works, and the last thing I want is to lose Alexander, or you, or Byron, or anyone else involved because we don't have the pieces we need!"

Fury to fury, defiance to outright stubbornness. They are far, far too much alike. Two elemental forces of nature, held at bay for the most part. Sidestepping each other, backing off before things come to blows. Though when Isabella digs her heels in, when she retorts with those words that cut like a knife, it seems perhaps that a head-on collision is imminent. The maelstrom begins in his eyes; dark shifts to grey, blasted and washed out, like fury leached from them and tuned into a gathering storm focused at the core of him. His hand on her jaw tightens, like maybe he's considering wrapping them around her throat.

Instead, he gives her a single, hard shove against the tree. He's strong, but even now much of that strength is contained and constrained. A growl that's almost animal-like in its timbre issues from his throat, and he draws his hand back like he's going to hit her. It winds into a fist; ink slid across his knuckles, power crackling through the hard line of his body and glint of his eyes. And then he shifts slightly to slam it into the tree instead, discharging what sounds like electricity with a sharp crack as wood splinters and cooks off in a shower of char.

"Try harder." That, he leans in to snarl so close to Isabella's ear that she can practically feel his mouth on her skin. The roughness of his beard, the scent of his soap and the cigarette still burning between the fingers of his left hand.

While she is not a consummate fighter like he is, she has been around enough fighting men to know when violence is about to happen - and it all starts with the way his fingers clutch at her jaw.

What happens next is instinct - uncontrolled, reactionary, when the ground breaks underneath the roots of the tree they're both pressed up against, how the branches shake and split. Rocks shatter in warning across the landscape and cracks web from the ground - as if something had been slammed into it at full tilt, spiraling away from both their bodies. All around them, in the immediate space in which they occupy, the corporeal world reacts in readiness to protect her, the forest coming alive. Isabella might not even be conscious of it when she meets his eyes directly, seemingly unafraid despite the way he has shoved her against the tree and winds up with that punch, for she is not the sort of woman who takes being abused in any way lying down. But she is afraid - intimidated beyond measure, and she hates it and is too proud to succumb to it and that's the only reason why she can touch it without shaking. Fury heightens her color, but she doesn't look away, shadows crawling over her expression as it tightens, when lips part to bare the slightest hint of teeth. Underneath the canopy of leaves they share, she burns like a star on the verge of collapse, eyes looking more amber than emerald.

Normally, there would be terror - but anger has a way of pushing the young woman in his grip like nothing else.

Arcs of lightning split against the trunk next to her, filaments of white heat touched with ozone crackling along roughened bark and leaving trails of smoke at their wake. She can feel the heat of it - the cold kind, the icy kind, something opposite of fire, wash against her cheek, making her hairs stand on end.

Her chest rises and falls as if she had run a mile and it might not be evident to her that she is using, when this blazing birthright is so natural to her. At least, not just yet - but as he is facing her, he can see it, how the visible signs of his power start to bend around her head in a razor-edged crown. He would know it, even if he didn't know anything else about her; Isabella Reede would have taken that punch straight on while looking him in the eye, if he had been inclined to actually hit her.

The storm rising from this sudden and inevitable clash strings tension around their bodies and outward; poles of a magnet that are just as likely to attract one another as they are to repel each other. Too alike, but too different, but too alike. The trees react to it, rustling in an agitated manner.

When she speaks, finally, it is low and throaty with strain. Her breath rushes against his collar, sweeps against his skin like a torrent, across the top of his shoulder as he leans.

"Don't ever do that again."

None of it is meant for her. None of his rage, none of his power. Would he hurt her? Could he hurt her? He has so much raw ability, but his shine is nowhere near the blinding burn that others have. Alexander. Lilith. His fingers fan out against the blackened and charred bark in the wake of that collision of temperament and raw, harnessed glimmer. And he pants heavily, eyes dark and wild in the hazy morning light.

Minutes seem to pass in this way, and the air gradually settles; the charge and the scent of ozone fade, and his hand drags against the trunk of the tree, and that might be a growl in the base of his throat when she tells him Don't ever do that again. "I don't take my orders from you, Miss Reede," is what he says in reply. His voice is scratchy-warm, as if scraped raw by the violence of what just ripped through him, and at length he pushes away from the tree entirely, and out of Isabella's personal space. Like a knife ripped out of a still-fresh wound.

"I'll drive you home." He studies the broken bottles dangling from that far-off tree limb for a long moment, then angles away.

By the evocative expression on the young woman's face, it certainly feels like his power and rage are meant for her. She can still feel the trunk against her back where she had been shoved, feel the rasp of calluses against her jaw and the telltale scent of ozone wafting from the bark next to her cheek. Her heart is still wedged painfully somewhere in her throat, racing at a breakneck pace - a sure sign that she had just been mired in something absolutely dangerous, and had somehow survived it. And he would be able to taste her fear, as acutely as a shark scenting blood in the water, buried within the furious mask she wears, and how her chest rises and falls rapidly at every elevated breath; as if she had run a mile, as if he had pinned her down to tear right into the side of her throat. She can hear him do much of the same, but his face is so close that she can't gauge his expression, hovering somewhere on her blind side, leaving nothing but strands of his dark hair and the ink swirled into his skin in her periphery.

Could he hurt her? Yes, absolutely - at least Isabella clearly thinks he can given her reaction.

But would he?

She doesn't move, save for these ragged inhalations as the world slowly settles again, following the recognition that the hurricanes within themselves have abated and returned into their respective vaults. Adrenaline remains in her system, however, and the slow sinking realization that she had touched it, in this way, puts spasmodic ripples on her fingers - those that she tries to quell at tightening them into fists at her sides. Her knees feel like jelly; they lock to prevent her from sinking into the ground.

His growl has her green-gold eyes moving back to him, holding fast onto the reins of her temper. "I can't control it," she tells him bluntly, her syllables bladed and simmering with heat. At least, not to the extent that she should. "And I don't want to hurt anyone with it. Not if I don't have to." She doesn't want to use it at all, but it is part of her. It is natural, and tends to wake with the force and ferocity of a sleeping dragon when she's threatened.

He's looking away from her, now, watching the bottles swing by their necks; her teeth remain clenched into one another, before she reaches out to snap her jacket away from where it hangs, cutting through the grass in a quick clip as she jerks it on, her fiery temperament imbued on every movement. He might have scared her, she might have been willing to seriously fight him, and lose, if it had come to that, but it doesn't look like it's going to keep her from getting inside a cramped space with him.

The walk back to his truck feels like an eternity, weighted down by a heavy, stony silence and one that she breaks with quiet words that haven't lost their heat: "You make it absurdly difficult for anyone to help you, or even want to, even when you acknowledge that you need it."

He pauses at that. I can't control it. I don't want to hurt anyone with it. His eyes drag over her slow, nostrils flared like he's trying to scent something on her. The way her power tastes, perhaps. It's different from his. She builds fortresses, and he weakens the masonry enough to collapse it of its own accord. "I think you'll find I'm harder to kill than that," he offers with a brief, rueful smile. And isn't he? Even without the protections her abilities would have afforded, he took seven bullets to his body and survived.

"I'm not used to asking for help," is pointed out in his defense. The gun at his ribs is slid free of its holster before they climb into his truck, and shoved into the glove compartment once he's swung inside. Handcuffs, a radio and a small first aid kid are visible there, before it's banged shut. "I'm sorry if I frightened you." A beat, and then somewhat more awkwardly as he settles in, "How can I make it up to you?" He keeps his eyes forward, squinted slightly into the burgeoning daylight that melts the frost off the greenery and slants painterly through the dense canopy.

It is different from his - wildfires and hurricanes, the kind of kinetic forces that move the earth and render it unstoppable; active, restless and brimming with intensity. There is nothing calm about it - it even smells different, if such things can be detected with the mind alone, and it rages to the point of bursting from the seams, liable to destroy the fragile human vessel that contains it. Too much, too big, for her to handle. At least, not without help.

But his words are true - he is difficult to kill, and his ability to fight, and survive, and win has always been something that she has admired in him, and in much the same way as she is drawn to the same qualities in Alexander. It mollifies her, at least, that acknowledgment - that reminder that he is a hardy survivor. "It's not about the ability," Isabella tells him quietly after a pause, her own face solemn in the wake of his rueful smile. "It's the desire. I don't want to end up hurting you, even if it can't be helped." Humans are intensely gifted in hurting one another, no matter the intention, after all.

After a moment, she continues. "I never doubted that about you, you know," she says, green-gold eyes meeting his at his pause. "I think I told someone recently that the world could end tomorrow, and you'll still be here, with five cockroaches." The smile returns there, faint, but carrying with it her characteristic mischief.

She climbs into the truck easily, swinging herself in the passenger seat. The door shut and her seatbelt buckled in, she watches his profile and the awkward, stilted way that the words come from him. It renders her silent, stretching on in several long heartbeats. Too alike, but too different, but too alike. Slowly, her hand extends, tilted palm-up, for him to take if he should choose. Quick to anger, yes, but perhaps just as quick to forgive.

"We need to look for three people and someone who can build a box to contain the murderous ghost of William Gohl," she tells him, her gaze level and direct. "We'll be consulting with an expert on what a box like that requires, but since the situation is unique, I don't think we'll find all of the answers we need on this side. He was found through the Veil, the place where we slipped into when we both got shot together. But it's...I don't have to tell you that place is dangerous." Her expression tightens there. "Some of us will probably have to go back there and look for the original pine box that he was interred in, if not just to give the expert something to work with to try and figure out how a new one can be built. If an excursion like that is necessary, and it's likely that it is, you can make it up to me by going with, and looking out for the ones who are."

Regret, and frustration, and something else touches on her face. Those determined eyes fall away from his profile. "I might not be able to," she tells him quietly. "As much as I want to, I don't think I can."

He's never been terribly good with words, this man. Good with his hands, good with his gun. Good with his mind, even, when he applies himself to it. But talking does not come easily to him. The hand offered, once they're ensconced in the quiet and hazy-warm stillness of the truck's cab, is eventually glanced at, after a solid half a minute of gazing forward through the windshield. Then the face of the woman it belongs to, limned in mid-morning sun. His tongue drags across his lower lip like he's considering her offering. And then his nose is rubbed at with the sleeve of his tee shirt, and her hand is taken with a slow curl of his fingers. Inked and heavily tanned, against her fairer skin. If she's watching his face, she might spot a smear of blood against his nose, where he rubbed at it.

"Yes." Did she expect anything less? "I'll go." A twinge of curiosity, then. "Why would you not be able to?" He gives her hand a squeeze, and lets the contact linger for a few seconds more before his fingers drag away and reach for his keys to start the truck. A low thrum as the engine catches, and his hand moves to the gearshift.

She has seen way too much blood, recently - her own, Alexander's, and even Ruiz's, not to notice it and her lips press together, feeling something within her chest tighten. It's the same with Lilith, what she had seen in the hospital when she attempted to reach Alexander in the operating room. But she says nothing about it, not yet. Instead, her emerald-gold stare fall on the slow curling of his fingers into her own, and she tightens her grip on them. Here, under shafts of pale daylight, she can see the ink that decorates his knuckles, and can't help but wonder, again, their meaning.

She did not expect any less, and when her eyes lift to lock into his striking own, the incandescence of her open smile flares to life, liable to put distant stars to shame. She has always been expressive, and while she is able to hide her words, joy comes as easily to her as fury and stubbornness do, as uninhibited and relentless as the way she lives the rest of her life. There's gratitude there, and relief.

But it dims, when he asks, and she doesn't resist when he relinquishes his hold. Those released fingers hunt for a bandanna in her pockets, and it gives her an excuse not to look at him when she says: "The Veil doesn't agree with me." Or rather, she doesn't agree with it, and he would once more taste it - the fear. She had been lucky, so far, the times that she had been forced into the Veil in recent memory occurred in Dreams, or indoors if her physical body had been present. But the prospect of stepping out of secure confines and into the wider world of it, and the dangers she knows are there, can't help but seize up her insides. She has tried, recently, to swallow it. But she can't. Not yet. She isn't ready.

She is too proud, however, to admit her cowardice - especially in front of a man who she knows fears little, and if he does experience terror, he can control it. She is not so lucky.

"I'll only be a liability," she continues quietly. "And I know how that is. If someone panics underwater, he can kill himself, or his buddy, while diving. I think the same principles are apt, especially when it comes to that place." She lifts up the fabric she is holding. "May I, Captain? You're bleeding."

He's not explained that ink, and doesn't appear inclined to change that now. Her smile, brilliant as it is, draws him in for a time; he basks in its radiance like a man starved of warmth, and strokes his thumb once, slowly, along the outer edge of hers before releasing her hand entirely. They are, within moments, on the move, with a crunch of gravel beneath the truck's tires and a puff of dust lifted by the slight breeze. A skid, a rev of the engine, and the truck bumps off down the old access road that brought them out here.

"My last experience there was not what I would call pleasant. But I'll do what I must. I don't fault you for knowing your limits though, Miss Reede." He keeps his eyes on the road now, hands loose on the steering wheel when one of them isn't occupied with the gearbox. As to his bleeding nose, which already seems to have slowed considerably, "Go ahead." He isn't going to stop for it, though.

"I've been bitten severely by my recklessness before," Isabella confesses after a moment, glancing down at the hand he has touched, the line in which his thumb has left a lingering impression on her skin, though her effervescent look fades into a gentler and more muted one. "Admittedly that hasn't stopped me in kicking down doors when I feel inclined, but the two of us are in uncharted waters and I've been...it's been over a decade since I've lived here. I'm still..." She chews on her bottom lip, in a visible attempt to put her thoughts to words. "Still remembering. Some things I can remember clearly, but other things..."

Her voice softens. "But I know. You'll do what you must. If I didn't know anything else about you, I would know that well."

She reaches out then, once she has his permission, over the side of his face as she carefully presses the cloth against his nose where it bleeds, lashes lowering as she attends to the mild injury, to add a little bit of pressure in an effort to stay the small flow. "Does your head hurt when this happens?" she asks, quietly, dabbing at the blood, scenting the copper-tang of it in the air.

"I don't doubt that it hasn't. You are a force to be reckoned with, and I would not want to be on the wrong side of you if you.. felt inclined." He tries to hide his amusement at that, but it sneaks out anyway; a creasing at the corner of his mouth, and a fanning of fine crow's feet out from the edges of his eyes. He keeps his hands on the steering wheel as he navigates the rough road out of the forest. The truck and its passengers are jostled now and then, rocks pinging off the undercarriage occasionally.

He tries to hold still so Isabella can clean the blood off his face, but there's only so much he can do. "Yes. I'm aware.. it isn't typical." Nor something he particularly wants to talk about, if the look on his face is any indication. "You'll let me know if you need any more of my help. Si? With this Gohl business."

You're a force to be reckoned with.

She wishes that were true, more than anything, but that, too, is something that she is unable to confess. Part of her wants to, her jaw works in an attempt to do it...but at the moment, she can't, because she feels it. The way her heart batters at her bones at the idea of even talking about it, and whatever anticipated disappointments she would find on the man's face and his eyes if he becomes privy to the breadth of her sins, and the grave consequences of youthful stupidity.

Isabella concentrates, instead, on wiping the blood from the ex-marine's face. His skin relieved of the garish crimson streaks, she tucks her bandanna away and resettles on the passenger seat. "It's kind of you to say so," she tells him; he may not believe it himself, but that has never failed to be true, in spite of being on the receiving end of his temper just moments before. "But I think as far as that goes, I've a lot to learn." Good humor returns in her eyes, and her mischief also, inclining her head at him. "From you." In case he had any doubt.

She doesn't press the issue about the headache, though her attention does linger on his face when he says it. But concern creases her features, the weight of it almost a physical thing - just enough that she knows, and considering the fact that she is just as stubborn as he is, and how she has never failed to bring up her willingness to assist him over, and over, and over again, it's guaranteed that it will come up eventually, and whatever storms between them that will end up clashing in that eventuality is inevitable also.

"I will." She pauses. "Same with you also, Captain. I know it's difficult, and that you're not accustomed to being on the receiving end, but I told you before and I meant it - your secrets are safe with me."