2020-02-22 - Who Let the Dogs Out

It's a quiet day at Branch & Bole, as most winter days not around Valentine's tend to be. Easter is when things pick up again; everyone wants their Eastern bouquets and lilies and such, and accordingly August is sitting in the office, prepping the order. He looks better than he has more recently, though still somewhat tired and worn around the edges. He's in a dark red, waffle-knit Henley with a white and black flannel over it, dark denim jeans, and heavy hiking boots. Thoma is manning the store proper, helping the one entire customer who's come to place her Easter order early. Cy is busy among the allotments, helping out a couple of people who've come to plant their early spring seedlings.

Itzhak pushes the door open, comes inside on a gust of cold wet air. Winter in these parts is hell on arthritis, and he has a touch of it early from his years of violin (and, honestly, brawling isn't great for the knuckles either). Well. He had a touch of it, before people began laying hands on him in this town. People like August, who he's come to see.

"'Ey, Thomeleh, Cy," he says, quieter than his wont, upnodding to the two of them. "Boss in?" That nose of his slices through the air when he tips his head up.

The customer in question is Millie Vermullen, known town busybody and gossip, and mortal enemy of Thoma, who tolerates her presence in the store because Millie likes to throw parties with lots of flowers. Millie's average height but sparely built, her features severe and her skin sallow. Her black hair is tucked into a note-perfect bun. She sniffs at Itzhak in a 'who let this guy in' sort of way.

Thoma gives Itzhak a tired, apologetic look behind Millie's back, nods at the office. "Go on in, Mr. Rosencrantz."

Cy raises a hand in greeting and nods. "He's just doing the Easter order, he won't mind the interruption," he says on a smile. Then he's back to helping the allotment gardeners pick out what to plant.

August hears the shop door jingle jangle, peers past his tablet and gives Itzhak an up-nod, waves him towards the office.

Millie returns to flipping through a catalogue. "Special service, hm?" she says, tone arch.

Thoma gives her mild look. "Yes, we're nice to our friends."

Itzhak, asshole that he is, winks at Millie and flashes her a fingergun, complete with tongue click. "How's by ya, Mille, lookin' good girl." Jerk. He schelps his way into the office, nudges the door mostly closed with his heel, and slumps into a chair. It wasn't so long ago August took him into this very office to play 'I'll show you mine if you show me yours', but it feels like decades.

"He got away," he says, with a sigh that comes from the bottom of his soul.

Millie purses his lips at Itzhak. She doesn't Glimmer, thankfully, or she might be tempted to do more. As it is, her return fire is simply, "Mr. Rosencrantz. How's the shop." The smile she adds to that is downright poisonous. She knows the answer to that question; everyone does.

Thoma's mouth flattens in a suppressed reaction. Is she planning to infest Millie's Easter order with slugs? Yes. Yes, she is. Cy wisely stays out of all of this.

August smiles to see Itzhak, flops the tablet shut in a 'fuck office work' sort of manner. A far cry from the edgey way they'd circled one another clear back in June.

The smile can't last, though, not with that news. His own sigh is heavy and full of regret. "Christ," he mutters, rubbing at his eyes. "Isabella called. She said he'd...attacked her." He gives Itzhak an apologetic look. "I figured maybe it was just one of their constructs, but..." But if he's loose, it probably wasn't.

Really, Itzhak deserved that answer from Millie, and that's why he closed the door. So he could buffer it when it inevitably came. He may be a brawler and a reprobate, but he draws the line at slugging old women...but sometimes, Millie Vermullen tests his resolve.

He rubs his eyes, too, both unconsciously mirroring August and weary to the bone. "God. Poor Isabella. He's too fuckin' clever. You know what he did? He got Iris to bring him the key to the cuffs." He snorts, laughing unwillingly. "The schmuck."

In addition to being spiritually exhausted, he's bruised up and battered, to August's senses. His left arm in particular is chewed up, a dozen puncture wounds treated and glued shut, wrapped snugly in bandages under his coat.

It takes August a second to sort that out. "He--fuck. Really?" Goddamnit, de la Vega, says his tone, and it's written all over his face. He makes a frustrated noise, tosses down his tablet's stylus. "So now we have to lock him in a room animals can't get into. Fantastic."

Meanwhile, he's studiously ignoring those injuries. He's been so good, about the not healing thing. So good, Alexander should be proud.

Except he can't not ask. "What ah, did that number on your arm?" He deliberately doesn't look at said arm, keeps his eyes on Itzhak's face.

"No keepin' a good Marine down." Itzhak lifts a hand as if to suggest all the good Marineness about de la Vega, drops it into his lap. He looks at his wounded arm. "He did. In a Dream. He was...you ever," he touches his forehead, "with him, and seen he's like a wolf? A wolf on fire, like he's reentering the atmosphere? He was that, in the Dream." Dipping into his pocket, he brings out a stone, and sets it on August's desk. The stone is smooth and brown, just a river stone, but etched with a curious figure. A rose in bloom, the petals cupped around an eye that stares from its center. "A witch gave that to me."

August grimaces, nods. "Yeah, seen him like that before." He can't, it turns out, be surprised Ruiz would look like that in a Dream, and use the weapons such a shape gave him appropriately.

He leans over to peer at the rock, runs a finger over the etching. That distinct flavor of otherness, or not belong to this world, makes him shudder, and he pulls his hand back. The image doesn't seem familiar to him in any way, given his narrowed eyes and curious expression.

Now he does look at Itzhak's arm. "You want me to..." He arches an eyebrow.

"She gave us wishes. I wished," Itzhak shrugs, wryly resigned, "I wished to protect people. So she made him turn on us. Some girl I don't know, the witch sicced him on her. So I got in his way and fought him." A flicker of a smile tugs to one side of his mouth. "I love fightin' him. He chewed me up and zapped the hell out of me. Moral of the story is be careful what you wish for, I guess?" He stares at the rock, which stares back with its carved eye surrounded by petals. Then he glances up. "...wouldn't say no. If you're feelin' up to it."

August groans. "Wishes. Well, I guess it's not a surprise she was a monkey's paw, given Their nonsense." It occurs to him that said witch might have just been teaching them all a lesson, but here's Itzhak, chewed up by his lover driven mad by an asshole who's gunning to prove August wrong about his reluctance to kill people. He doesn't care what the witch was teaching anyone, he's cranky.

Sorry Alexander, August will take every opportunity to double backflip right off that wagon. He gives Itzhak a wry look of 'as if it would matter if I weren't', reaches out a hand for the injured arm. "Of course you did," he mutters, rolling his eyes. "I guess it'll be cold comfort, once we knock some sense into him, that you didn't mind too much."

Itzhak pops the buttons on his peacoat, shimmies out of it. His arm is bandaged from wrist to elbow, the sleeves of his shirts pushed up to allow the bandage room. Setting his arm on the desk, he quirks his eyebrows in fond resignation at August. "Of course I did. Hurt. Like. Fuck. But I'd do it again, every time." Because of course he would, this lighthouse of a man.

August makes a low sound, swallowing at the sight of the banages. Maybe he's getting a little better; he's able to look at them. Time was he wouldn't have wanted to. (He still remembers fleeing the room after healing Finch in December.)

He runs a hand along the top of Itzhak's arm, fingers not quite touching, mending as he goes. The work already done means it's a quick and easy process, and his nausea is accordingly minimal. Or he is getting better at this. He'll take it, either way. He leans back, clears his throat. "That's a good thing, because," he looks directly at Itzhak, now that the arm and other bruising is all healed up, "after we get him back," no if there for August, it's happening, Peregrine can eat a bag of dicks, "he's going to be a fucking mess."

The warmth of healing makes Itzhak sigh out a long shaky breath, eyes closing. Under the bandages, unseen but clear as daylight to August, the slashes and punctures mend from the bottom up, healthy flesh filling in the gaps. Pain and stiffness wash away as if they were nothing more than mud, sluiced off by soothing warm water. Itzhak sags over bonelessly with a whimper. "Gevalt, izt gut," he mumbles, forehead on his now-healed arm. "Thank you." He rolls his head to squint at August. "Yeah. I know. He'll be a mess." Then he pulls his arm off August's desk so he doesn't have to look at the bandages, even knowing there's no wounds under them. "You know we're gonna have to kill that guy," he says, and he is serious, his hazel eyes going hard as flint.

August relaxes as Itzhak does. In the end, Alexander was right; healing people was, for August, about regaining control. Removing their pain removed his. There was no two ways about it.

He watches Irzhak for a spell, then his gaze shifts to the small window that looks out onto the grotto at the side of the building. "When...Alexander told me, that Peregrine was the one who killed James. I broke most of Eleanor's dishes." He takes in a slow breath, lets it out. "I don't have a problem with...any of us, doing that. And I know if he does something to any of you in front of me, it might wind up being me." A pot on top of a filing cabinet that's home to a spider plant rattles precariously; August grits his teeth and it stills. He exhales sharply. He glances back at Itzhak, laughs bitterly. "I don't know if I want to be able to or not."

Itzhak reaches to grip August's arm, when the pot rattles like a diamondback. "Shhh. S'okay," he murmurs, like he'd murmur to a frightened reptile. "Yeah. I don't know either. I never killed anybody before. I hurt 'em real bad. Real real bad. But I never killed nobody." He pauses, thinking, and his eyes are no softer when he says, "I'd be okay with him bein' the first."

August's arm is rigid under Itzhak's hand, muscles taut in a physical response dictated by the metaphysical action of holding on to his shaping Art until it's done lashing out. Has it been like that this whole time, an unbroken Mustang fighting the bit, with a rider determined to keep it in check? Maybe it has. Except now the Mustang's twice as strong and the rider's weary from fighting it.

The touch, then, is a distraction from that. August's tension bleeds away when Itzhak admits that. It's not that he's surprised, per se; in some way he knew Itzhak wasn't a person to have ever killed someone, or at least, not lightly or without significant need. But that Itzhak's plainly willing to do it, when August continues to balk, makes something in him twinge.

"It shouldn't have to be," he says, eyes shifting to a spot on the desk.

"There's a whole lotta shit that shouldn't have to be, but is." Itzhak rubs August's arm, comforting him from the distress that Itzhak is willing to kill. "We both know that pretty fuckin' well, yeah?" He studies August's face, gathering data. Conclusion: Roen is unhappy. "He's no different from a Nazi. If it's moral to execute some guy who put Jews on trains, it's moral to execute him." And Itzhak? I will be your shield. He'll do it to spare August from doing it...though he doesn't say that. But August can probably tell.

"Yeah," August says, voice absent. A great many things: a prison, forcing Itzhak to become the worst version of himself; a war, forcing August to have a power he never would have wanted.

He coughs; it's not a laugh, because they're talking about Nazi's, and that's too bitter a topic for laughing. No, it's an angry, choked sound. "That was the real bitch of being over there," he says, licking his lips. He looks at Itzhak directly. "They were--it was happening again. And the fucking UN and the US government wanted to let them sort it out themselves. We weren't allowed to do anything about it." He shuts his eyes a second, nods. "Yeah. It's--if anyone's...given up their right to share the planet with us, it's him." Is he paraphrasing Arrendt on purpose? Of course he is.

"Sort. It. Out." Itzhak's lip curls. "Jesus. What's the fuckin' point of the UN then?" He's angry too, and genuinely so--who better than a Jew to know what happens when ethnic minorities are left to 'sort it out'? "Fuck that. Fuck them. And fuck this Peregrine guy, he's ruining the name of a perfectly good bird. We're getting rid of him."

"Exactly," August says, voice low and angry. "We didn't get told much going in, I had to piece it together from people we were working with." Hospitals they were guarding, civillians they were helping out from under sniper fire, collapsed buildings they were clearing. "'Never again' lasted a whole fifty fucking years, it turns out." Not even as long as Itzhak's mother and his parents' lifetimes.

He sets that aside with a tired shake of his head. "Yeah. Fuck him. No one has time for bullshit like his. I don't feel...good, about us having to do it this way." He's not just saying this because Ruiz is a cop and they lot of them are ostensibly law-abiding citizens, "But we'd never get any court to convict him, and no prison could even hold him. So." He reaches out not to grip Itzhak's hand. "It doesn't have to be you, though. Alexander, or...Ruiz, will be more than willing." And, unlike the two of them, have had to do it before.

"Maybe." Itzhak squeezes August's forearm, lets go. "Maybe they will be, but I got just as much a right as any of youse to his ass. I can hold him down, and they can take him apart." A certain dark relish is in his voice, an echo of that version of him who survived prison. "Anyway. I came to tell you. If you see de la Vega, don't hesitate to hurt him. Because brother, he will hurt you." And it hurts Itzhak to say that, but he does, a muscle tic in his jaw.

"You do," August says in gentle agreement. And of course, so does he, yet in the back of his mind, he knows instinctively that if he uses his Art to kill Peregrine he'll be changing something about himself at a fundamental level. Something he can't ever undo.

Which is, of course, why he doesn't necessarily want anyone else to have to do it either, particularly not Itzhak or Eleanor. Life was a real bitch sometimes.

He's looked away again while he thinks on that; now he regards Itzhak again, makes a face of mixed understanding and discomfort. "I know. And, I know I can stop him." Will he, though? That's harder to say. If it's hard for him to hurt random people, how hard is it to hurt people he's been with in a mindlink? He's not sure he'll be able to.

"I won't let him kill me," he says, because that, at least, is true.

"If you let him kill you I'm gonna be so fucking mad at you," Itzhak informs August, briskly. "So don't. Or you'll be in big trouble, mister." He sits back, raking fingers through his black curls. His hair really is getting a little long. Kinda manelike. Quieter, he says, "He told me he loves me," and a smile of pain and joy breaks out over his face. "Him. Out of all the people." His eyes close, and he takes a deep breath. Then he sniffles and opens them, looking at August. "I'll get outta your face. Only...only do you mind if I hang out in the garden some?"

August laughs, shakes his head. "It'd be a race between you and Eleanor to see who got to me first for the ass-kicking I'd get for that." Some of his good humor fades. "Ah--speaking of that. Alexander, and Isabella...they were in a Dream, and it was bad. Real bad. So, if you see him..." His expression says 'be patient' with a side of 'expect him to be incredibly maudlin' and a serving of 'self-loathing ahoy'.

He smiles, soft and small. "Well he'd better love you, after all we're going through right now," he says, gently teasing. "Or my ass isn't the only one getting kicked."

A nod for the request to hang out in the garden. "If you need to, you know, work off some energy," anxiety, he means, "Cy'll be happy to put you to work helping people on their allotments."

Itzhak listens to that, pulling a face as August tells him what's up with Alexander. "Okay. I oughta track him down. Her too. See how they're doing." Because...that's what he does, now. He tracks people down and inflicts his prickly, aggravated friendship on them. Then he smiles again in a helpless, brilliant flash, ducking his curly dark head.

"An awful lot sucks. But somehow I got him and I got Bex and I got Izeleh. And I got you and Fincheleh and de Santos, and Alexander and Easy and...shit, the list goes on." His hazel eyes tick up to meet August's again. "Means more'n anything to me." Then he brightens. "Hell yes put me to work. I need to do stuff."

August gives Itzhak a level look. "Don't forget that, okay? When They make it hard to find your way. When you're thinking you don't deserve any of this. Don't forget that you've got all of us." He lets that sit a minute, props his tablet back up. "The Munroe Sisters' mother, Veronica? She has one of the allotments, she's the older lady talking to Cy about what to plant. I bet she wouldn't turn down a strapping young man's help. Might even offer to cook you some bundt cake as a thank you." Is he warning Itzhak, or putting a challenge in front of him? Maybe both.

Itzhak pushes to his feet. "On it." He lingers just half a moment, looking down at August. "Thanks. Yeah?" Then he's out, striding purposefully towards the back. Mrs. Munroe is gonna get helped SO MUCH.