slayer_fray | (no subject)

The cell itself is not bigger than the one Carlisle had occupied previously, but it is certainly different.

He turns his black eyes to the guard, taking in her dress and everything about her that keeps shouting at Carlisle that he has finally lost what little control he had maintained thus far.

Carlisle hasn't figured out anything to say yet, so when he steps into the cell and spins on his heel to see no bars or door behind him, he reaches out and places one pale hand on the barricade silently, trying to figure it out.

There's nothing in Mel's demeanour or dress that could speak to Carlisle of anything resembling the world he left, that's for certain.

Recognising a lack of recognition, she leans on her hands and lets him explore the clear front of Baby before speaking.

"Where'd you come from just now?"

Might as well play along, Carlisle supposes.

"Lower tunnels behind the east gate. Volterra."

After a second, Carlisle explores another possibility: "Is this some new location Aro has decided to deposit me? I do not recognize it."

"No."

She doesn't want to know who Aro is, or where the Hell Volterra is or any of that.

"S'a tav. You're in cell for hitting two patrons. You get that, right?"

"The girl was in my mind and that boy," Carlisle spits, "was put here to mock me.

"I didn't kill them."

"So I didn't kill you," Mel says. "Consider that your cookie."

"Why are you speaking with me?"

None of the guards speak with me unless they have a goal.

"I'm sweet like that."

She smirks.

"And I can't let you out 'til I know you're gonna play nice."

"Are you going to let me hunt?"

The smirk vanishes. Completely.

"No," says the Slayer.

Not here, not ever.

Edited 2009-08-13 15:10 (UTC)

"Then there is nowhere for me to go. Here is the same as there."

Carlisle moves to the back of the cell, letting himself drop to the floor with a solid thud.

"Guess so," Mel says, leaning back against the wall and watching him.

She'll get him something to drink soon enough, but she's not letting him out right now.

After a few minutes, without any exchange of words, Mel does leave Carlisle, although reluctantly.

He's head fucked, or time displaced or AU-ified or something, but he's probably the vampire in the bar for whom she has the most respect right now, so she's distinctly not happy about leavin ghim in cell - for Mel, the worst punishment available.

She leans the heels of her palms on the barand rocks onto the balls of her feet. "You wanna give me some blood for our new occupant?"

It arrives in a thermos, so at least Mel doesn't have to smell it.

Edward stood in the infirmary, in wake of River's departure and near obliteration from focus, seeing only the surfeit of (his) Carlisle's choice reflected in this room.

He left the room without even grasping that he needed to, becoming a whisper of instinctive movement. But only getting two steps out the door before Mel's words to the Bar reached him. He appeared to the side of her, a few steps back.

"You shouldn't do that." His voice is tempered, almost impeccably smooth and even, which worked until one looked to his eyes.

Mel doesn't like Edward nearly as much as she does Carlisle, so his presence, while tolerated, isn't exactly a welcome one.

Until she meets his eyes, at which point her fighting edge blunts, just a little, and concern softens her brow.

"Why not?"

It's there, in the dark gold, that he's drowning. Standing perfectly still, without the need to breathe or shift, with impeccable grace in even the way his face tilts to look at hers; drowning.

"It won't help."

It doesn't matter what is in the canister. It doesn't matter if it human. Or synthetic. Or alien. Or anything that Bar could produce. All it will be to him is a new ploy to the always plot for how drive him to Their wants.

"He--" is in a game he can't win "--couldn't comprehend any charity in it now."

"It's not charity."

Mel doesn't like the word, which is a shame because it's a good word to decribe pretty much everything she ever does.

What she means to say is, it's not a gesture designed to be seen as charity. It's a want she saw as needing to be satisfied. The words are ready to be said, it's to keep him from hurting anyone.

Instead, and holding those golden eyes in blue ones that have seen too much for a mortal of her age, that, on some level, understand: "What's going on?"

He meant her kindness -- not pity.

Edward stared at her too long, too still.

The way nothing mortal did. Edges burning, but still.

It was a hallow ground, what she asked for. One whose secrets he'd kept for Carlisle even before and from his (their) own family members where it came the specifics. The absolutes. The images. The truths of certain lengths. Yet now it had contorted to life before his eyes.

He weighed Melaka Fray in the same balance of now twisted scales.

And looked down, away from that face and those eyes, the length of too many ephemeral things even as he clung to the thoughts of the man not too far away. "It's him, but it's not. From before now."

Edward looked to one side. "A very long time before."

So still him.

Mel places the flask back on the Bar, with her hand resting at the base - it stays there, for now, because she's not yet convinced he doesn't need it - and her gaze flickers for a second, to the office.

She doesn't need to be psychic to recognise the evidence of pain, a lot of it.

And again, she doesn't ask what she wants to, doesn't beg to be let in, doesn't strive to understand more than she needs to. Doesn't let herself indulge in compassion.

At least not in her business like poise.

"Is he dangerous?"

It's on his lips to say no.

But River's blood is still clinging to his clean fingertips, and he could still pinpoint the place Carlisle had hit him. (That boy was sent to mock me.) Maybe the press of his lips is enough of an answer.

Carlisle -- his Carlisle -- would never be considered a danger to people, even in keeping with being a capable and dangerous vampire.

But this is not his Carlisle.

Hey, you know what, that's very much the same reaction Mel would give if someone asked her if Harth was dangerous.

- well, except she'd say yes. But she'd like to be able to not say it.

"He wants to be allowed to hunt," she says. "S'why he's still in."

She can't let him out if he's dangerous, but she hates having him in.

"He didn't ask to hunt people." It's exacting. Sharply so. But the millisecond flash look he gives her after it is apologetic. It wasn't meant to be exacting at her. There's frustrated weariness, which leads to the next statement. "He's--"

And it is pulling teeth. It's a betrayal even if he's not.

"--it's not safe to let him hunt here."

It wasn't safe to let him near people here.

Mel reacts to the words, not the look, when she rolls her eyes and almost curses with why didn't he say so? - until Edward finishes.

It's not safe to have Carlisle hunt even so, which means there's something not safe about Carlisle that goes deeper then his intentions. Which is frustrating, to say the least.

The flask, at least, disappears.

Again, she glances at the door. The ma... the vampire in there cleared Harth's name, she owes him deep.

"What do we do?"

She doesn't want to leave him in cell, because she wouldn't wish cell on anyone.

Edward shook his head, reaching his hand up to furrow his fingers into always just too long copper hair and then draw the heel of his palm down against his cheek in hard drag.

(Sono in la mia testa, giovane.

It's in the linear threads. It's necessitated.)

Because his options aren't options.

"I'm still working on that part."

"Comfortable, I guess," Mel says, regarding the cell.

But it's still a rutting cell.

"What're the options?"

His nose flared, eyes up and narrowed to her face, and for a moment there's the snap coming at her. One that's obvious in the way it going to roar (in the necessity to snap somewhere in all of this) and the way it's caught and dismissed in the same breath, dismissed with her swearing thought follow up.

She doesn't mean harm by it, she even cares about his containment (he knows, he's not missed hearing it) -- but the idea that Carlisle, Carlisle is locked up, is biting at him.

That his own words just necessitated Carlisle staying there.

"He sits in a cell, or he goes back to hell."

Edward's tone is about as winning as Mel's about the comfortably.

Whether he meant that metaphorically or not, Mel has the experience to take it literally.

"Know which one I'd choose."

It flashes up, but she ignores it; red, unending desert in a dull, unending half-light. Hunting and fighting and eating and hunting.

She ignores it, and it goes away, because she never wants to think of that if she can help it. Still, that or confinement and she wouldn't think twice.

Although she'd fight against the choice itself, as if violence would solve anything - and it usually does, for her.

Edward hates both of them. And this place that dropped it and this and them on him. If he could, he'd convince himself he could just walk away and it would work out -- after all, he's alive and was made and time didn't end today or anytime before it.

But he can't -- convince himself; walk away.

Not from Carlisle. Not yet. (Not again.)

He nodded, simple and stuck in his thoughts. He knew which one he was supposed to choose, which one he was not supposed to find the way to come to terms with choosing but simply do.

"Can we..."

Figure out a way to cut through the choice? Mel has an Alexandrian approach to problems.

"What's out there?"

He say, "Volterra."

He means, The Volturi.

And this time his being cryptic is entirely unintentional.

It's the first time he's actually said the word himself tonight.

"Yeah, that's what he said."

It means nothing to her. At all.

What she means to ask is, and htis time she finds the words:

"Can it be killed?"

Edward blinked, golden eyes focusing on her. In any other moment, night, conversation, that might have caused him to smile. It does tug the edge of his lips on onside outward, thinning them.

"It's a city in Italy."

Which he adds, tucking one hand in pocket.

"Carlisle lived there for the better part of a century."

"Sure."

But Mel wasn't referring to that it, was she? She was referring to the 'it' that makes that place hell.

"Call that living."

Edward's expression didn't change.

"Volterra is home to-" He paused, lips pressed to look upward. "-what you might call the ruling political body of our kind."

He called them Carlisle's demons, and worse.

His life had been formed opposing that world, never touching it.

There was something malevolent in his following words, "We are not what they would consider good, loyal, sane subjects."

Despite all the darkness, all the seriousness, Mel's mouth twitches and spreads into a smile.

It's no less dark than the conversation, no less malevolent than Edward's tone, and under a cheeky rebellion, it's dangerous.

She's never approved of Edward more.

"If he gets out of the city?"

"He does-" Edward frowned. Even as an absolute it was not a pleasant one. But there was a thought there briefly, and gone, something -- something else.

"Did. Will. It's centuries ago now," Nearly two before Edward had been woken to never sleep again from it's start. "-but I can't tell where he is during all of it yet."

Eight decades was a large amount of time, and Carlisle's mind wasn't nearly as helpful to him at present as he was used to it being even in his most distressed.

"And it gets better?"

Mel once had a policy of 'don't interfere in the past'. She doesn't, now she's seen where that led.

"Can we accelerate it?"

Edward nodded to the first, a simple, smooth movement.

After nearly two centuries. After being desperate and selfish enough to make Edward, to put up with all his invasiveness and prying and not leaving. After Esme, and Rosalie, and Emmett. Alice and Jasper. After they managed to tear down the walls that Volterra cut all but indelibly into his center.

It got better.

"I don't know that we can," Edward said, thinking about the proofs that had poured from River's mind. The possibilities and potentialities. The facts that showed, on other faces and other minds, it could be twisted worse.

Especially since Mel had just reminded him of how much better now was compared. And now was in part due to all of this, this then period. It did not make it better...but it scorching burn changed its level of how much it was massacring his mind.

Edited 2009-08-14 14:27 (UTC)

"There's 'don't know we can'," Mel says and "'Know we can't.'

"Which is it?"

Because, essentially, the first is no way to stop Mel doing stuff.

"I'd have to ask Alice." There's an equal level contemplative evenness and quiet reverence in the simplicity of his words.

"Alright," Mel says.

She glances once at the office, and back at Edward.

"You know who I am?"

Not Melaka Fray, thief, sister, lover of barmen and insufferable cocksure. The Vampire Slayer. Made for fighting vampires.

Edward nodded. He knew. She'd made it very clear the second time they hadn't met.

"Yes, though our worlds are very different. The same with our physiology's, and the ways we can be killed."

Her vampires were.....much softer to begin with.

"I'm flexible."

Mel's not going to let a little thing like stronger, faster, less killable get in her way. If it's fighting vamps, it's what she does.

"I'll keep it in mind."

Edward said simply.

Both her and it.

Debi! *appears from writing* I just remember I was supposed to ask if

betagainstme could be added to this filter, since she's in on all plot things?

Done!