This isn't exactly a SOC, but while running through old short writing I came across it and decided to put it up caus I haven't posted in a while and I like it. This is a vignette from an RP between me and Devon at a pivotal point where, depending on the choices he makes, Scythe could get himself and everyone else he cares about killed- but the reward if it works out is the freedom he's been deprived his whole life. It's slightly confusing, but I don't think it's much more or less so than my actual SOCs. This would have been written while listening to a track I have on my computer just of the wind blowing sharply in a deserty place.
He'd been expecting this, more or less around now.
Death has a pattern to how he works. Given his mood and workload when Scythe last saw him he was part due at this point. There's a good deal of familiarity in the rhythm, in how the god talks and acts. It strikes him... how odd it would be if that were suddenly gone. Hells, he's been under him for the last three hundred fifty years, give or take a few decades. Creature of habit that he is, it's not exactly comforting. But how insanely unlikely that he'd ever live to see those changes makes it... well, it doesn't make it easier.
Trail of thought's cut short by the buffet of the wind from the south- he crouches down further behind the dune and shifts his back to keep the sand out of his eyes. The mask protects his breathing, but the damn wind's buffeting his hood about.
He allows himself a moment for a scowl shot back through said hood to the direction of the gusts. Doesn't need to actually look, there's nothing to see here.
Just... the land's sea laid out starkly in all directions, very little color to any of it in the low light that accompanies heavy cloud cover. No prayer of rain, not this time of year. Just enough to ease the worst of the direct heat.
He'll manage. Keeps his attention forward on the target. Some Bedouin or their ilk in this world who've offended the old god somehow. They're probably aware of it. The man outside the shelter stands tall, a grim look locked in a face worn ragged by years and years of sun and wind like this. Most don't see death coming. These men do.
Not that they know Scythe is there. He's very careful to assure that they don't.
Could they stop him? No. But the job calls for surprise. It's not his role to question why his master calls for one method or another.
The small camp- six men and camels- sits half a mile away from him. If the men in the tent are talking he can't hear it. The guard's silent. Keeps his hands close to his saber. Smart.
He has time to think after crouching back down into the trough of the dune. There isn't a timetable on this one, just before they leave back to the larger camp. He's needed the time to think anyway, and it's always been easier with his own blade in his hands
A hint of green is visible for a moment from between the black surrounding most of his face when he glances back behind him. Nothing's changed- just ashen gold and grey stretching out, miles and miles. He pulls a little further into the cloak down by the desert floor and the dune shielding him from the targets. Keeps just enough focus on the men to know if anything interesting is happening. Lets his thoughts wander with the familiar feeling of the shinigamiblade laid across his knees.
He knows the layout of the underworld. He knows where the pit is. Knows how to enter the living quarters- Love had told him, laughing, a century ago about how the god never bothered to lock his door because no one would dare go to the depths of his domain and they wouldn't be able to find the door anyway. She used it to her advantage to do little things to drive him furious- hide his favorite shirts, important documents, little trinkets he had for reasons only he probably remembered. Still did it on occasion. Scythe had known where the door was for the last two hundred years and how to open it. Never thought too deeply about it before now.
Love had also showed him her office once, during a less than pleasant incident where she had kept him in her domain for an extended period of time. It was suppose to be helpful, but it wasn't to make it short. But he had seen the sigils, the icons and the trinkets by which the gods could quickly communicate with one another, he knew that Death would have the same things and he knew what the blue skinned Lord's communicational object looked like, and the kind of place it would need to be kept.
He would be the most likely one to think quickly and give them any chance at all. The immaterial Lords were known to care very little for mortal affairs.
So all of that was set. The plan.
Leaving just the question of... when.
Movement- one of the men in the tent comes out, speaking in an old language Scythe doesn't know to the guard. He goes back in. Scythe turns away again.
When. When is it time? The others seem as ready as they can be. He just hasn't felt any real certainty himself. Doesn't know what the hell he's expecting- a sudden light, a dream? He doesn't godsdamned dream. It's more complicated.
Someone comes out to milk a camel. It complains, but they stay in the borders of camp. They hurry back inside with the bowl.
The chain was the last physical thing holding him down and it has gone to a new caretaker.
Satou.
Gods.
He had run into her, while Death stormed off to shout at the emissaries of some overworld god who didn't know anything about underworld politics and had brought him a ridiculous offering to try to coax him to lend assistance in some manner. He knew it was her before he saw her because of the chi. Apparently she still couldn't sense his- she started when she had walked halfway past him already.
They didn't speak. She didn't even glare at him with the requisite venom, just had this flabbergasted look on her face with touches of unease and confusion in the corners of the sapphires. It was the strangest thing.
In that moment he knew that she knew- she knew what they were planning.
But he was standing where he was, which meant that Death didn't know. The direction she went off in wasn't toward their shared master.
So she knew, and she hadn't told him.
It... wasn't what he would have wanted for them. But it was the most he had seen out of her since that last morning when the five year old stared at him with strange resolve in her little face watching them go from the mouth of the cave, assured that her mother would come back later, even if he wouldn't. It was the best he was likely to get.
That made it close. Very close. It would just be simpler if there was a sign, of some kind.
Afternoon changes to evening. The men go in and out at times, speaking in hushed tones. Serious. Always serious. The guard's eyes change direction for the first time, turning right toward him for a moment- but locked far past him. A grimace pulls, first other expression he's had all day. Scythe knows he hasn't been seen.
He shakes his head and turns back to the tent.
He doesn't take another step after that.
Once Scythe is inside it ends within a minute- the fifth man falls reaching for his saber. The sixth remains on the mat where he had been laid by him comrades when they brought him there in the first place.
Scythe can't reach his height inside the small space, but it isn't needed. The man isn't going anywhere, nor does he try. He looks him square in the eyes, spits over his left shoulder and mutters a word that Scythe recognizes. Devil. It's in contempt.
He barely needs to kill him. In his state he would die out here on his own without care. Scythe does it anyway, wiping his blade off on the skin wall of the tent as he exits.
He doesn't look at the sky, or back to the bodies, turning instead to cut the camels loose. They balk and groan anxiously, nostrils flaring, running as soon as their tethers are loosed in complete disregard for their previous caretakers.
If it had been him they were so concerned about they would have been stirred sooner. Something else has them spooked.
Scythe looks back finally so see what all the commotion was about.
He'd forgotten just how quick desert storms can be.
The wall of it is nearly solid, almost bowls him over as he stands but by grace of training he keeps on his feet- thrusting the staff of his weapon into the ground and locking his grip, blade twisted to protect his eyes until he can get some sort of chi shield over his face to allow him to look up again.
There's nothing that will come out of his thoughts for several minutes- eyes wide, staring up at the behemoth and feeling the winds rattle through his bones like the base when you're too close to large speakers, just more jarring and deadly. The screaming gales bluster past him, tossing the landscape and sculpting it madly, pulling tons of sand into the air and reworking all of it.
He actually doesn't make the comparison with how, many years ago, he found himself in a sandstorm, because he can't think that far. The world exists in moments, it changes, it changes again, and at some point in time which is completely beyond him it passes and goes on without him. He stares back at it, eyes still widened.
Some time the next afternoon Death arrives to pick him up. Various bureaucratic affairs keep Death too occupied to deposit him back into the living world until the next morning. He walks back from there.