Gargoyles: the Resurrection
Nightingale, Part I
Manhattan
1997 AD
"...eighteen dead, with a dozen more injured, including rescue workers and fire fighters. The blaze was deemed under control at shortly after dark this evening, but continues to defy the efforts of the men and women struggling to douse it entirely. The cause for the blaze is at this point in time undetermined, but investigators suspect a chemical explosion. This is Anita Larousse, Channel 3, Late Night News. Back to you Tom."
Footage of the explosion that had rocked the east side of the island played in the nine television screens in the front window of the electronics store. A small group of people had stopped to watch the images of flames gouting in sheets of angry orange-reds and violent blue-greens, the column of black smoke that rose like a stain against the late afternoon sky and the collapsing buildings as the warehouses burned. Most other people passed the window by, not interested in the media frenzy and sensational speculation that always seemed to follow an explosion these days.
Not of them saw reason to look to the building across the street. Not one of them saw the winged shadow rise from its crouch, eyes burning a startling, furious scarlet. None of them ever looked up, and saw no reason to now. As a result, they missed its leap into the sky.
oOoOoOo
He should be used to it by now. Buildings blowing up, subjects killed, irreplaceably critical research lost... It had happened so often that dealing with such things should be second nature. But it wasn't. And if after all this time if he hadn't developed that attitude, he never would.
Anton Sevarius sat at his desk, one hand idly tapping out an irritated staccato on the surface of the heavy oak desk. Papers lay neatly piled on the corner of the desk, waiting for his attention. He ignored them, knowing that the contents would only mock him. The pages contained what little data he'd managed to save from the fires. Not enough to constitute a launching point for his research, barely enough to begin anew from scratch.
Where others considered him a crackpot, Sevarius considered himself an artist and performed his research and experiments accordingly. Every gene was a color, every DNA strand a different hue to shade in the lines of his newest development. He was painter and sculptor both, and he took pride in what he did. He took the cracks and flaws inherent in nature's creations and smoothed them out, filled them in, filed them down. In his hands, it became perfect. And it was always a crushing letdown to admit that, once again, his work had been ruined by circumstances beyond his control.
Like this most recent occurrence.
He sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose between his right forefinger and thumb. His employer would be most unhappy to learn of this latest disaster, and while it wasn't likely to come out of his princely paycheck -- not if his employer wished to retain his services in future endeavors -- it just might come out of his hide. If he could get his hands on the technician in the chem labs that had mixed the wrong solutions together... Hopefully the idiot had died in the initial explosion and thusly removed himself from the gene pool. Stupidity often bred true, and the last thing the world needed was another moron child spawned by an incompetent imbecile.
The phone shrilled on the desk, jarring Sevarius out of his brooding, fuming thoughts. His shoulders tensed as it rang again, before they slumped and he slowly reached to answer it.
The moment the phone cleared the cradle, he could already hear the epithets and curses being thrown at him in several languages, with a good deal of heat behind them. He gingerly put the phone to his ear, and let the other side carry on for a bit, before interrupting the tirade. The sheer tiredness in his voice thickened his accent. "Ja, ja ... I know. Deafening me vill solve nothing."
The swearing ebbed and finally stopped, and there was only silence for a moment. A question was asked. "It's possible, yes. .... Of course I didn't wait around to make sure! ... Vhat do you take me for, a common lab assistant? .... I don't know what to suggest. No, I don't have my research vith me. They're still alive? They escaped. ... How could I...?" His eyebrows went up. "How do you expect me to do that?" He listened for another moment, before sighing. "Jawohl. It vill be done."
He hung up as a second tirade was starting and rubbed at both temples. That was all he needed. Research gone, his tinkering and recoloring half-finished, and the subjects roaming around weeks before they had been ready to be deemed fit for field testing. As if that hadn't been bad enough. Now he was expected to shoulder the blame for the incident, and find his errant experiments.
Wunderbar.
An already long day stretched out impossibly longer before him as he reached for the phone again, and placed a call.
oOoOoOo
Brooklyn caught the warm thermal rising from the street and climbed the sky, adjusting his wings and attitude until he was evenly gliding above the lower East side. He was supposed to be checking on the progress of the fire that had started there earlier, clandestinely aiding in the rescue attempts should the opportunity arise, but he couldn't shake the dream he'd had last night. It turned him inward, brooding, musing even, and he knew he was lucky he hadn't flown headfirst into a skyscraper.
He'd dreamed of her as he'd been slumbering in his stone sleep. Gargoyles didn't often dream, but when they did, or at least when he did, it was as vivid as if it had actually happened. Even when they *did* dream, they rarely dreamed of events that had happened. He wasn't sure why this particular memory had surfaced, but it had. And it disturbed him. He'd thought he'd put it aside, buried it deep, forgotten about it.
Apparently, he hadn't.
Just by thinking about it, the memory rose again, as vivid as if it had occurred five minutes ago.
She was looking elsewhere, not paying attention to him, held aloft by the labouring downstrokes of her wings. He took a moment to study her profile from a short distance. High cheekbones and a pert nose. Fair green skin the exact color of grass beneath a summer's full moon and brown hair that was both thick and luxuriant tied back in a pony tail. She wore a leather halter and a short belted loincloth which revealled a long stretch of trim and toned torso. On the ground she moved with grace, but in the air she was a true skydancer. Even hovering as she was, every line in her body was held with perfect balance and precision.
So of course, he couldn't resist.
He dove towards her, spun midair and bapped her on the back of the head with his tail. Startled, she fell from the sky, and there was a bad, heartstopping moment when he thought that she might plummet completely out of the air. He was in the process of adjusting his wings to dive after her in the hopes that he could catch her when her own wings snapped open and she called out something in a mock-threatening tone, something about him being lucky it was near dawn.
He grinned and curved his wings to allow the thermal to keep him aloft for a moment. "You couldn't catch a first-flight hatchling, greenskin!" he'd retorted, and tried to ignore the effect her smirking brown eyes were having on him. Or that return grin of hers, which caused his stomach to knot up. Or her scent, light and smelling faintly of heather, which filled his nose and set his thoughts whirling. He hoped she wasn't going to require him to come up with anything witty, because he didn't think he could out-retort a just-laid egg at the moment.
"We'll see," she said. "A race tonight, then. If the Vikings don't return, like Goliath's mate says they will." She glanced towards the castle, and smiled. He didn't know about a race after the sun had set once again, but his heart was racing right now. So fast it might explode. Idly, he wondered if he knew the effect she had on him, and figured she probably did. Females were sneaky like that.
She said something about their rookery brothers and trouble, and he glanced down briefly, in time to see his two usual partners-in-chaos landing neatly in the center of the courtyard. Still not sure what he was saying, he grinned and shot off something about joining them while there was still time to play. He had no idea of the end of the conversation - something about them all ending up in trouble, and something about them having to get caught first.
When he landed in the courtyard still with her warm smile in his mind's eye, her laughter in his ears and her scent in his nostrils, he got a pair of smug looks from his brothers. The smaller one grinned and nudged him with his elbow. "Got a token picked out yet?"
He flushed maroon, and spluttered as they laughed. Finally, he managed to draw himself up with some sense of dignity, though he could still feel the blood heating his cheeks. "Yes," he replied tartly. "For your information, I do."
There had been more good-natured ribbing before the humans had interrupted them, and everything had gone downhill from there. They'd been sent to the rookery, just as she had predicted he would be. The next night...
The next night, he'd stood where she roosted and with tears flowing unashamedly down his cheeks, he'd held the shattered remains of his beloved in his hands, and mingled his howl with the howl of his brothers and leader as they wept over the broken stone of their clan.
Brooklyn shook out of it for the hundredth time that night, and was somewhat startled to see that he'd already overflown the site of the fire by at least fifteen minutes. He cursed, turned on a wingtip and started to head back. This far from downtown, there weren't many buildings that rose above fifteen stories, but there were a couple scattered here and there. He was skimming the shadowed roof of one of them when he heard it.
A whispering voice drifted on the wind, sounding lost and alone and confused. Brooklyn tilted his head, and wheeled around again. Silently, his foot-talons touched down on the gravel of the roof, and he caped his wings around him. Padding quietly across the roof, he tracked the sound to its source.
"...live to protect... protect... we protect..." Like a mantra, the word protect kept cropping up in the rambling mutters his keen ears caught. He stalked through the shadows of the various protrusions, naught more than a shadow himself. He'd almost passed by the slim figure hunched into herself, shielded by darkness, before his nose caught the faint scent of heather and gargoyle. His head spun, and his senses reeled. I'm going crazy... she's dead. I dreamed of her, and that's the only reason I'm seeing and smelling things.
The green gargoyle sat up, and her eyes flashed white around the edges. In the backsplash of light, Brooklyn caught sight of silver jewelry at left wrist, right ankle, throat and upper right arm, dark leathers and green skin. High cheekbones and claw-tipped wings.
He reeled backwards, hands coming up and denials spilling from his mouth. "No," he breathed. "You're dead..."
She jumped and stumbled backwards, pressing herself against the brick wall in sheer terror. A high-pitched scream tore itself from her throat, and her eyes were reminiscent of deer-in-headlights. Brooklyn had never understood what that had meant until this moment.
He forced himself to take a step forward, though his nostrils were still flaring instinctively to catch as much of her scent as possible. It was her. It couldn't be her. She was dead. She was back. He had to try four times before he could get a word past the lump in his throat. Either he was going crazy, or by some insane miracle, she was back. "Easy greenskin," he said softly, bringing his arms down in a gesture that was supposed to be calming. "I'm not going to hurt you. Do you remember me?"
She froze and blinked owlishly, coming slightly away from the wall with all the grace and litheness he remembered her having. When she spoke, her voice was shaky and husky. It quavered on the syllables of a name he hadn't heard in over a thousand years.
"Ruadh?"
"My nightingale," he breathed, and he reached out to her with a quickness he couldn't stop. Neither could he help the joy that filled him to capacity, and that damned lump was back in his throat. Whatever thin, tenebrous connection he held to her snapped at the sudden movement, and the panic was back in her eyes.
"No! Leave me alone!" Holding her head in her hands, she ran straight for the edge of the roof, leapt onto it and pushed off with one foot, her wings snapping open to catch the winds from the water. With a shriek of pain, confusion and terror, she dropped out of sight.
Brooklyn cried out something wordless, and raced to the edge of the building. His talons slipped in the gravel, and he hit the low stone wall surrounding the roof, nearly pitching over into thin air. Only a desperate thrust of his talons through the side of the building kept him from plunging to the streets to splatter across the asphalt. His eyes blazed twin coronas of white light that flashed into the dark corners of the alleyway below him.
She was gone without a trace.
oOoOoOo
Author's Note: I had one message about this already, but I'd like to reassure any future readers that yes, this fic was posted a long time ago on Gargoyles-Fans (dot) Org. It was never finished, but rest assured, the original author myself are, in fact, one and the same person.
I'm finishing up this fic as and when I can, as the story has recently re-interested me, and I'm posting it here, instead of on GFO, as I much prefer the format of FFN.
Plus, I can't remember my password over there. -.-