CHAPTER TWO: THROUGH THE GLASS
The warm yellow glow of the overhanging lamps reflected golden quarter moons in the empty shot glasses on the table, as one more joined the group with a thud and a clink. The man holding the cone shaped container did not bounce the light back as the glasses did; his dark hair and eyes seemed to take the colour and make it part of their rich blackness.
He called loudly to the waitress to bring him some more as he downed the last vodka shot, relishing the heavy taste. Since he was a regular, the amber haired waitress responded immediately, and brought five clear glasses to his table.
It was a large corner booth, built like a square with one side missing, and the large seats had soft brown fabric laid over top the honey coloured wood. The table in the center of the booth was huge and the long bench- like seats could hold at least eight people, so it was obvious he was waiting for friends to arrive.
Observing this, the waitress said brightly, "I see you're waiting for your buddies to get here. Did you schedule the time differently this week? Or did ya just get here early?"
The man grinned widely, his white teeth faintly shining in the dull glow, and said slowly,
"Well, my car just got a little tune up and I was testing out the new wheels, so I got here a bit sooner than I usually do. The guys'll be here in a little while, and then we'll have some fun eh?" He grinned again, his dark eyes flashing and traveling around the room to something at her back.
The waitress finished setting the glasses down, and smiled off handedly as she turned to leave. Her mouth almost slipped sideways as she noticed his eyes on her again. She unsteadily met his dark gaze, its intensity causing her voice to tremor when she said,
"I'll be your waitress for the rest of this evening, so don't be afrai-" there was sudden pressure on her arm. She looked down at his fingers on her wrist, at the size of them, and at his bulging biceps beneath his shirt. He was grinning again. She continued haltingly, "-a--afraid to call on me," and slowly pulled back on her arm, trying to remove her wrist from his grip.
His fingers tightened. She froze, and raised her eyes to his face. The smile was gone as if it had never been, and his features were suddenly sharp and angular in the yellow light. The waitress's face was white, and she was thinking, "I'm going to scream if he doesn't let go, I will, and then the bouncer will come and kick him out and—" Then she was stepping back, free of his grasp, and breathing hard.
The grin was back in place on his face, and she was abruptly sickened. Under his stare, she felt like a deer in the headlights of a truck on an icy road, and she quickly turned on her heel to serve a young woman sitting at the bar counter.
The man watched her go, chuckling to himself at the look on her face. He saw her tray tremble as she moved to serve the other chick at the bar, and grinned. The young woman took a shot glass from the tray, and sipped it while exchanging some pleasantries with the waitress. During the short conversation, her face remained blank, betraying no emotion except at the end, when she tossed a glance his way. Then her expression darkened ever so slightly. Its subtle change sparked his interest.
He checked her over slowly, admiring her firm legs and ass. His black eyes rose, taking in her entire body as he gulped another shot of straight vodka. Her thick hair was caught up in a spiky twist of some sort, and her long bangs fell over her face, almost covering the dark blue of her large, slightly slanted eyes. The colour of her hair also intrigued him, for it was like the ocean at midnight, with a maroon tint that was very unusual. Overall, she was a babe, and young too, almost too young to be in the bar, but that was even better. She shifted on her stool, and the man paused. There was something about her, in the manner she carried herself, and the careless grace in the way she sat that made him think of cats. She was almost feline. Well, he thought, isn't that just…neat.
The chick had come in alone just after he had arrived and taken her place at the bar counter on one of the tall brown stools. She had remained there until now, and since it didn't seem like she was waiting for someone the man got up and moved to the stool next to her.
By this time, the waitress had gone away to serve other customers, and she was completely alone. Vulnerable.
The man had brought a glass from his table, and loudly asked the bartender to come over and give him a bottle. The bartender paused and looked him over warily, considering his alcohol level, then shrugged. Hey, if the guy was gonna pay for it, he was gonna get it. The bottle was put down, and cash was exchanged. The woman continued to ignore him.
"Hey. Are you new around here? I haven't noticed you before, because I know I would have." He smiled, the same smile he had given the waitress with amber hair. It was wide and warm and intense, glimmering with teeth.
"What's you name? If you'd like I'll share my bottle with you, and we can have a little party before the guys get here. They'll all be jealous that I got to you first." He leaned close to her as he said the last sentence, pitching his voice low as if they were fellow conspirators.
She glanced at him through her bangs, her eyes like glass, and said quietly,
"My name is Xiran." The sentence was clipped and short.
The man grinned anyway and passed her the bottle, making sure to put his arm where she could see the muscleclature. As if she hadn't seen the movement, Xiran downed the rest of her glass, setting it back on the counter. He filled it again from the bottle. Moving closer to her, he went to put his arm around her shoulders, saying, "Me and my pals, we'll show you the ropes of this joint, and then maybe after we can go and check out my car…" She shrugged him off, and moved her stool away, her eyes like dark chips of ice.
"Leave me be," she said quietly, and turned her face away from him.
He was suddenly irritated. Who did she think she was?
"Aw, come on, you don't really mean that. All the girls around here know that the only way to have a good time is with me." There was an underlying meaning to his words, and his too wide smile, but she offered no response. Her back remained turned to him.
Anger suddenly surged through him. He grasped her arms and turned her to face him, his nostrils flaring and blowing hot, alcohol-scented breath in her face. The stool made a harsh scraping sound as he leaned forward. Almost smirking, he said, "Oh, I know you're a party babe, Xiran. You're just asking for it, from every guy in this room, playing us with this cold shoulder act, but I know you want it. You want it bad. And I'm the one whose goin' to give it to you."
Xiran faced him squarely, her face as unchanged as ever, noticing how close he was to breaking. He was powerful, like a bull, contained in one instant then out of control in the next, depending on how his temper surged. The alcohol had loosened his power over his anger, which made him a ticking time bomb, ready to explode at any instant.
Raising her chin, she said evenly, "You're not very intelligent if you think you're going to get anywhere with this." She was perversely tempted to add on the term, "idiot", but figured it would drive him right over the edge. As it was, heat rose in his face, and his eyes became slitted with rage. His anger choked him, so that he could not speak, and he painfully gripped her arms, on the verge of exploding.
Xiran's gaze drove into him, daring him to make a move. He roughly shoved his face close to hers, trembling with anger and within a sliver of screaming obscenities. She stared him full in the face, and whispered, "Do you really need me to say 'no' out loud?"
The man's control broke like a volcano erupting, and flooded every cell and nerve with rage, as his overall body temperature rose like a reactive chemical, ready to burst into flames.
Simultaneously on the other side of the room, two people stood up, ready to intervene, as the man's rage gave sudden savage birth to violence.
Xiran read his intent before he could make a move, thought, oh don't try that with me, but realized that that just was what he was going to do.
As he drew back his huge hand to strike her, her eyes became as cold and hard as dark sapphires. She said, "Obviously you can't tell a housecat from a tiger," and swiftly ducked his oncoming blow. Her knee was buried in his stomach before he had time to think about a second punch, and her lighting fast kick pounded his brain inside his skull. He doubled over in pain, a shocked expression beginning to form on his features, before her knee exploded onto his face and rearranged it. He screamed like a little girl as blood spurted from his nose and spattered onto the floor, and had time to draw up his hand to staunch it before the rest of him joined it with a heavy thud.
"Bitch," he said thickly, as he choked on his own blood. He rose slowly to his feet, his muscled bulk seeming to fill the room, as he remained clutching his shattered nose which still gushed blood down his face and front. He looked down at the red on the floor, on his shirt and hand, thought disbelievingly-
my blood -
and half-raised his head, his eyes flat and clouded with a burning rage barely kept in check. It strained on its mental leash like a mad pit bull, growling and gibbering and snarling. He rounded on the insolent wench like an animal infected with rabies, as his hunger for violence rose like bubbles in the boiling tar pit of his eyes.
She couldn't defy him like that, the bitch, he'd make her scream and struggle and cry and watch the defiance drain from her eyes. He'd replace it with quivering fear. Yes, she'd see her mistake. In the end, she'd beg him for it, plead and grovel to him. Her soft mouth would form a trembling circle as she realized her defeat. And his triumph.
Yes.
He let a bloody grin split his lips. He could see it, smell it, feel her struggle beneath him as she felt his power. He lifted his head, let his hand fall away from his face and raised his eyes to where she stood, only a few strides away. Utterly confident now, he lifted his stare to her face.
He froze as he looked into her two shining blue eyes, as huge and cold as the reaches of interstellar space, beyond the reach of light from the nearest star, dark as death and consuming as twin black holes.
His smile slipped off his face and hit the bloodied ground between them.
In that brief instant of surprise, she moved. Suddenly he was in her grip with his arms locked behind him, her body pressed close to his. Then he felt the hard nudge of her gun in his back. His breath caught in a long, breathless moment of absolute terror.
"Give me an excuse to kill you," she said very, very softly. She suddenly released him, stepping back to the counter. She turned her burning blue gaze back to the bar and her drink.
The man exhaled a trembling sigh as he looked down at himself, half expecting to find a bullet hole torn out of his chest, and looked fearfully in her direction, the whites showing all around his eyes. As he watched she sat down at her bar stool and took a sip of vodka, totally relaxed and nonchalant, as if nothing had happened. Calmly she took the clear bottle sitting near her and poured herself some more, the liquid glugging as it filled her glass. Then she turned her head slightly to the side, and glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, her gaze glittering like that of a cat who knows that her prey is near.
The man broke his frozen posture and backed away, his nose still dripping and his reputation going down the drain. Some idiot snickered as he stumbled into a chair.
He didn't care. Fear thrummed through his entire frame, every instinct telling him to get as far away from her as possible.
"Demon!" he muttered to himself, and almost heard the dry rustle of feathers in his mind. Even though he was halfway across the room and still backing up, she heard him, and a shadow of a smile crossed her face. The sight of it filled him with fear, and he turned and stumbled quickly out of the bar into the night.
He moved through the dark like a person half awake as he shuffled awkwardly away from the glowing lights of the bar. His thoughts tumbled chaotically over each other. Fluttering fragments of past were tossed to the surface of his already confused thoughts, mixing and churning with the events of the past few minutes.
Her controlled, even voice filling his head.
"Leave me be."
"You're not very intelligent if you think you're going to get anywhere with this."
"Obviously you can't tell a housecat from a tiger."
And a voice thrown down a dark stairwell, "You little shit! Stay down there until you learn some respect for your elders!" A small thing crying in the bruised blackness, saying, "I'm sorry Daddy, so sorry just let me come back up…I'm scared of the dark." Sour breath in his face, whispering, yes you'll learn whelp, by God you will. There is no fear except that which you stir in others.
Rage always rage, so much of it…
Listen to me, brat! Never again let me hear you say you're scared. Never!
Then harsh, smacking sounds blending with the scent of salt tears in the darkness…
He swiftly turned away from those memories, forced them back hard, and tried to focus his dazed mind.
Who was she? How did she beat me like that? Then his anger filled him again, and he welcomed it, for its control and its burning assurance of who he was. A master. Yes, he would go back to the bar, and he would show her, the wench, he'd show her just how wrong she had been to refuse him.
I am Darus and no person--no woman-- will ever defy me.
Darus turned unthinkingly back in the direction of the bar, his mind dull and full of a slow burning rage. Dark bleary shapes passed in his vision and he faintly heard a sound of warning. Surprised, he turned, his mind still enclosed in a deep fog, and saw the bright hellish light of the stars, just in time to see it envelope him in a brief inferno. Dizzily he thought, how can light be so hard, as something slammed up against his body and threw him into the air. Light splintered across dark, shattering him like a mass of matchsticks, and in that instant the agony completely consumed his mind in darkness. Somewhere, someone was screaming.
Is that me?
Darus felt his broken shell impact the pavement, making a sound like steak slapping a butcher's board, and slowly trickled out of its crushing pain into the night. As his final link with the world stretched and strained, he thought vaguely, Xiran you got what you wanted, and heard once again the whisper of ebony feathers….
Snap.
Xiran turned her head slightly as she caught the scent of blood. Another quick taste of the air confirmed that it was the man who had tried to pick her up.
She shrugged. He had deserved his death; she had smelled the fear and destruction of many others on him. Besting him in single combat was merely his pride going before his fall. And besides, he was interfering. Xiran drank deeply and returned her gaze to where it had been resting before she had been so rudely interrupted.
Behind her, an employee bent to clean up the mess on the floor. And outside, several blocks away, a truck driver stood in shock over a bloody smear on the highway, as the wail of sirens grew louder in his ears. The man put a hand over his face, and said, "He just darted out into the road…it was like he didn't even hear the horn…"
The warm colour of the dirty wood of the bar counter was heavily worn with chips and dents from many years. Its erratic patterns kept her eyes occupied as she extended her hearing outwards, into the layers of softly muttered words and sentences that filled the atmosphere of the bar.
Conversation hesitantly started building up, in a quiet murmur, but her attention was focused entirely on the two young men in the corner booth. One of them was laughing hysterically.
Xiran grinned involuntarily as she watched the animated young man, and noticed with extreme interest that he wore his hair in long braid down his back. She moved her eyes to his face, which was almost covered by his spiky brown bangs, then shifted her stare to the other young man. He was Asian and had his jet black hair drawn back in a short ponytail, allowing her to see his piercing dark brown eyes. He seemed much more reserved than his companion, almost brooding, but his face was lit by a small smile.
Just then a smaller young man quietly entered the bar and stepped up to their table, his light blond hair catching the dim light of the bar fixtures. He was exuberantly greeted by the brown haired boy, who leaped up, braid flying, and embraced him. They started up an exited conversation, grinning as they turned and sat down again at the table.
They seemed to be waiting for something, but she didn't know what. She listened very closely as they talked, trying to discover if these young men were indeed the ones she had been looking for.
Xiran heard the names Duo, Quatre, and Wufei, turned her head back to the bar, and said to herself,
"I've found them."
END
This one was fun to write too, and didn't take me half as long as the first one. It's fun making 'bad' people. I've also been anticipating the appearance of the pilots, and now they're here! Yeah!
The warm yellow glow of the overhanging lamps reflected golden quarter moons in the empty shot glasses on the table, as one more joined the group with a thud and a clink. The man holding the cone shaped container did not bounce the light back as the glasses did; his dark hair and eyes seemed to take the colour and make it part of their rich blackness.
He called loudly to the waitress to bring him some more as he downed the last vodka shot, relishing the heavy taste. Since he was a regular, the amber haired waitress responded immediately, and brought five clear glasses to his table.
It was a large corner booth, built like a square with one side missing, and the large seats had soft brown fabric laid over top the honey coloured wood. The table in the center of the booth was huge and the long bench- like seats could hold at least eight people, so it was obvious he was waiting for friends to arrive.
Observing this, the waitress said brightly, "I see you're waiting for your buddies to get here. Did you schedule the time differently this week? Or did ya just get here early?"
The man grinned widely, his white teeth faintly shining in the dull glow, and said slowly,
"Well, my car just got a little tune up and I was testing out the new wheels, so I got here a bit sooner than I usually do. The guys'll be here in a little while, and then we'll have some fun eh?" He grinned again, his dark eyes flashing and traveling around the room to something at her back.
The waitress finished setting the glasses down, and smiled off handedly as she turned to leave. Her mouth almost slipped sideways as she noticed his eyes on her again. She unsteadily met his dark gaze, its intensity causing her voice to tremor when she said,
"I'll be your waitress for the rest of this evening, so don't be afrai-" there was sudden pressure on her arm. She looked down at his fingers on her wrist, at the size of them, and at his bulging biceps beneath his shirt. He was grinning again. She continued haltingly, "-a--afraid to call on me," and slowly pulled back on her arm, trying to remove her wrist from his grip.
His fingers tightened. She froze, and raised her eyes to his face. The smile was gone as if it had never been, and his features were suddenly sharp and angular in the yellow light. The waitress's face was white, and she was thinking, "I'm going to scream if he doesn't let go, I will, and then the bouncer will come and kick him out and—" Then she was stepping back, free of his grasp, and breathing hard.
The grin was back in place on his face, and she was abruptly sickened. Under his stare, she felt like a deer in the headlights of a truck on an icy road, and she quickly turned on her heel to serve a young woman sitting at the bar counter.
The man watched her go, chuckling to himself at the look on her face. He saw her tray tremble as she moved to serve the other chick at the bar, and grinned. The young woman took a shot glass from the tray, and sipped it while exchanging some pleasantries with the waitress. During the short conversation, her face remained blank, betraying no emotion except at the end, when she tossed a glance his way. Then her expression darkened ever so slightly. Its subtle change sparked his interest.
He checked her over slowly, admiring her firm legs and ass. His black eyes rose, taking in her entire body as he gulped another shot of straight vodka. Her thick hair was caught up in a spiky twist of some sort, and her long bangs fell over her face, almost covering the dark blue of her large, slightly slanted eyes. The colour of her hair also intrigued him, for it was like the ocean at midnight, with a maroon tint that was very unusual. Overall, she was a babe, and young too, almost too young to be in the bar, but that was even better. She shifted on her stool, and the man paused. There was something about her, in the manner she carried herself, and the careless grace in the way she sat that made him think of cats. She was almost feline. Well, he thought, isn't that just…neat.
The chick had come in alone just after he had arrived and taken her place at the bar counter on one of the tall brown stools. She had remained there until now, and since it didn't seem like she was waiting for someone the man got up and moved to the stool next to her.
By this time, the waitress had gone away to serve other customers, and she was completely alone. Vulnerable.
The man had brought a glass from his table, and loudly asked the bartender to come over and give him a bottle. The bartender paused and looked him over warily, considering his alcohol level, then shrugged. Hey, if the guy was gonna pay for it, he was gonna get it. The bottle was put down, and cash was exchanged. The woman continued to ignore him.
"Hey. Are you new around here? I haven't noticed you before, because I know I would have." He smiled, the same smile he had given the waitress with amber hair. It was wide and warm and intense, glimmering with teeth.
"What's you name? If you'd like I'll share my bottle with you, and we can have a little party before the guys get here. They'll all be jealous that I got to you first." He leaned close to her as he said the last sentence, pitching his voice low as if they were fellow conspirators.
She glanced at him through her bangs, her eyes like glass, and said quietly,
"My name is Xiran." The sentence was clipped and short.
The man grinned anyway and passed her the bottle, making sure to put his arm where she could see the muscleclature. As if she hadn't seen the movement, Xiran downed the rest of her glass, setting it back on the counter. He filled it again from the bottle. Moving closer to her, he went to put his arm around her shoulders, saying, "Me and my pals, we'll show you the ropes of this joint, and then maybe after we can go and check out my car…" She shrugged him off, and moved her stool away, her eyes like dark chips of ice.
"Leave me be," she said quietly, and turned her face away from him.
He was suddenly irritated. Who did she think she was?
"Aw, come on, you don't really mean that. All the girls around here know that the only way to have a good time is with me." There was an underlying meaning to his words, and his too wide smile, but she offered no response. Her back remained turned to him.
Anger suddenly surged through him. He grasped her arms and turned her to face him, his nostrils flaring and blowing hot, alcohol-scented breath in her face. The stool made a harsh scraping sound as he leaned forward. Almost smirking, he said, "Oh, I know you're a party babe, Xiran. You're just asking for it, from every guy in this room, playing us with this cold shoulder act, but I know you want it. You want it bad. And I'm the one whose goin' to give it to you."
Xiran faced him squarely, her face as unchanged as ever, noticing how close he was to breaking. He was powerful, like a bull, contained in one instant then out of control in the next, depending on how his temper surged. The alcohol had loosened his power over his anger, which made him a ticking time bomb, ready to explode at any instant.
Raising her chin, she said evenly, "You're not very intelligent if you think you're going to get anywhere with this." She was perversely tempted to add on the term, "idiot", but figured it would drive him right over the edge. As it was, heat rose in his face, and his eyes became slitted with rage. His anger choked him, so that he could not speak, and he painfully gripped her arms, on the verge of exploding.
Xiran's gaze drove into him, daring him to make a move. He roughly shoved his face close to hers, trembling with anger and within a sliver of screaming obscenities. She stared him full in the face, and whispered, "Do you really need me to say 'no' out loud?"
The man's control broke like a volcano erupting, and flooded every cell and nerve with rage, as his overall body temperature rose like a reactive chemical, ready to burst into flames.
Simultaneously on the other side of the room, two people stood up, ready to intervene, as the man's rage gave sudden savage birth to violence.
Xiran read his intent before he could make a move, thought, oh don't try that with me, but realized that that just was what he was going to do.
As he drew back his huge hand to strike her, her eyes became as cold and hard as dark sapphires. She said, "Obviously you can't tell a housecat from a tiger," and swiftly ducked his oncoming blow. Her knee was buried in his stomach before he had time to think about a second punch, and her lighting fast kick pounded his brain inside his skull. He doubled over in pain, a shocked expression beginning to form on his features, before her knee exploded onto his face and rearranged it. He screamed like a little girl as blood spurted from his nose and spattered onto the floor, and had time to draw up his hand to staunch it before the rest of him joined it with a heavy thud.
"Bitch," he said thickly, as he choked on his own blood. He rose slowly to his feet, his muscled bulk seeming to fill the room, as he remained clutching his shattered nose which still gushed blood down his face and front. He looked down at the red on the floor, on his shirt and hand, thought disbelievingly-
my blood -
and half-raised his head, his eyes flat and clouded with a burning rage barely kept in check. It strained on its mental leash like a mad pit bull, growling and gibbering and snarling. He rounded on the insolent wench like an animal infected with rabies, as his hunger for violence rose like bubbles in the boiling tar pit of his eyes.
She couldn't defy him like that, the bitch, he'd make her scream and struggle and cry and watch the defiance drain from her eyes. He'd replace it with quivering fear. Yes, she'd see her mistake. In the end, she'd beg him for it, plead and grovel to him. Her soft mouth would form a trembling circle as she realized her defeat. And his triumph.
Yes.
He let a bloody grin split his lips. He could see it, smell it, feel her struggle beneath him as she felt his power. He lifted his head, let his hand fall away from his face and raised his eyes to where she stood, only a few strides away. Utterly confident now, he lifted his stare to her face.
He froze as he looked into her two shining blue eyes, as huge and cold as the reaches of interstellar space, beyond the reach of light from the nearest star, dark as death and consuming as twin black holes.
His smile slipped off his face and hit the bloodied ground between them.
In that brief instant of surprise, she moved. Suddenly he was in her grip with his arms locked behind him, her body pressed close to his. Then he felt the hard nudge of her gun in his back. His breath caught in a long, breathless moment of absolute terror.
"Give me an excuse to kill you," she said very, very softly. She suddenly released him, stepping back to the counter. She turned her burning blue gaze back to the bar and her drink.
The man exhaled a trembling sigh as he looked down at himself, half expecting to find a bullet hole torn out of his chest, and looked fearfully in her direction, the whites showing all around his eyes. As he watched she sat down at her bar stool and took a sip of vodka, totally relaxed and nonchalant, as if nothing had happened. Calmly she took the clear bottle sitting near her and poured herself some more, the liquid glugging as it filled her glass. Then she turned her head slightly to the side, and glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, her gaze glittering like that of a cat who knows that her prey is near.
The man broke his frozen posture and backed away, his nose still dripping and his reputation going down the drain. Some idiot snickered as he stumbled into a chair.
He didn't care. Fear thrummed through his entire frame, every instinct telling him to get as far away from her as possible.
"Demon!" he muttered to himself, and almost heard the dry rustle of feathers in his mind. Even though he was halfway across the room and still backing up, she heard him, and a shadow of a smile crossed her face. The sight of it filled him with fear, and he turned and stumbled quickly out of the bar into the night.
He moved through the dark like a person half awake as he shuffled awkwardly away from the glowing lights of the bar. His thoughts tumbled chaotically over each other. Fluttering fragments of past were tossed to the surface of his already confused thoughts, mixing and churning with the events of the past few minutes.
Her controlled, even voice filling his head.
"Leave me be."
"You're not very intelligent if you think you're going to get anywhere with this."
"Obviously you can't tell a housecat from a tiger."
And a voice thrown down a dark stairwell, "You little shit! Stay down there until you learn some respect for your elders!" A small thing crying in the bruised blackness, saying, "I'm sorry Daddy, so sorry just let me come back up…I'm scared of the dark." Sour breath in his face, whispering, yes you'll learn whelp, by God you will. There is no fear except that which you stir in others.
Rage always rage, so much of it…
Listen to me, brat! Never again let me hear you say you're scared. Never!
Then harsh, smacking sounds blending with the scent of salt tears in the darkness…
He swiftly turned away from those memories, forced them back hard, and tried to focus his dazed mind.
Who was she? How did she beat me like that? Then his anger filled him again, and he welcomed it, for its control and its burning assurance of who he was. A master. Yes, he would go back to the bar, and he would show her, the wench, he'd show her just how wrong she had been to refuse him.
I am Darus and no person--no woman-- will ever defy me.
Darus turned unthinkingly back in the direction of the bar, his mind dull and full of a slow burning rage. Dark bleary shapes passed in his vision and he faintly heard a sound of warning. Surprised, he turned, his mind still enclosed in a deep fog, and saw the bright hellish light of the stars, just in time to see it envelope him in a brief inferno. Dizzily he thought, how can light be so hard, as something slammed up against his body and threw him into the air. Light splintered across dark, shattering him like a mass of matchsticks, and in that instant the agony completely consumed his mind in darkness. Somewhere, someone was screaming.
Is that me?
Darus felt his broken shell impact the pavement, making a sound like steak slapping a butcher's board, and slowly trickled out of its crushing pain into the night. As his final link with the world stretched and strained, he thought vaguely, Xiran you got what you wanted, and heard once again the whisper of ebony feathers….
Snap.
Xiran turned her head slightly as she caught the scent of blood. Another quick taste of the air confirmed that it was the man who had tried to pick her up.
She shrugged. He had deserved his death; she had smelled the fear and destruction of many others on him. Besting him in single combat was merely his pride going before his fall. And besides, he was interfering. Xiran drank deeply and returned her gaze to where it had been resting before she had been so rudely interrupted.
Behind her, an employee bent to clean up the mess on the floor. And outside, several blocks away, a truck driver stood in shock over a bloody smear on the highway, as the wail of sirens grew louder in his ears. The man put a hand over his face, and said, "He just darted out into the road…it was like he didn't even hear the horn…"
The warm colour of the dirty wood of the bar counter was heavily worn with chips and dents from many years. Its erratic patterns kept her eyes occupied as she extended her hearing outwards, into the layers of softly muttered words and sentences that filled the atmosphere of the bar.
Conversation hesitantly started building up, in a quiet murmur, but her attention was focused entirely on the two young men in the corner booth. One of them was laughing hysterically.
Xiran grinned involuntarily as she watched the animated young man, and noticed with extreme interest that he wore his hair in long braid down his back. She moved her eyes to his face, which was almost covered by his spiky brown bangs, then shifted her stare to the other young man. He was Asian and had his jet black hair drawn back in a short ponytail, allowing her to see his piercing dark brown eyes. He seemed much more reserved than his companion, almost brooding, but his face was lit by a small smile.
Just then a smaller young man quietly entered the bar and stepped up to their table, his light blond hair catching the dim light of the bar fixtures. He was exuberantly greeted by the brown haired boy, who leaped up, braid flying, and embraced him. They started up an exited conversation, grinning as they turned and sat down again at the table.
They seemed to be waiting for something, but she didn't know what. She listened very closely as they talked, trying to discover if these young men were indeed the ones she had been looking for.
Xiran heard the names Duo, Quatre, and Wufei, turned her head back to the bar, and said to herself,
"I've found them."
END
This one was fun to write too, and didn't take me half as long as the first one. It's fun making 'bad' people. I've also been anticipating the appearance of the pilots, and now they're here! Yeah!