tampered | Log; Complete

Current Mood: determined

Log; Complete

When; Thursday Night
Rating; R to NC-17, for excessive violence, extreme gore, and character death.
Characters; Henry Townshend,

wisdom_rcvr and Walter Sullivan,

holy_assumption
Summary; Henry decides it's time for things to stop.
Log;

He couldn't hold off any longer. He kissed Alessa and told her he was going to get some groceries. He wasn't sure if she believed him or not.

Henry walked up the stairs in building 11, carrying a pistol and his sword. They probably wouldn't be enough, but he didn't have problems finding weapons anymore. He wasn't worried about that.

He wasn't worried about anything now, to be honest. He wasn't going to live in fear of that goddamned man with the coat any longer. Henry was the one with the power now, after all. Why should he cower? Why should he leave his family open to be hurt by that horrible, childish thing?

When he reached the door, he didn't open it. It was sealed, but he could've gotten in if he wanted, and he knew it. Instead, he knocked on the door. Three slow knocks.

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Walter had been about to engage in a game of Twenty Questions with that man...Mulder, he believed his name was...when a knock at the door broke the relative silence.

Henry...

Walter's blood ran at high tide with anticipation at the thought of plunging to the wrists into Henry's abdomen. Yes, gloving his hands in the foaming mush of sundered viscera, digging past lumpy organs, burrowing his way deeper until at last his fingers grated against vertebrae.

If he did it right, Henry would still be alive until the moment when Walter closed his spinal column in his fists and crushed the bones and nerve cord together. Alive and howling in agony as his entrails leaked from the widening rip.

It would have been easier to use a gun, but there was something so delightfully personal about doing it this way. He’d be able to look into the pseudo-Conjurer's face as his life spilled onto the floor of 302.

His fingers curled in longing. A low guttural growl escaped his lips.

But ... control.

Henry had slain him before, and to add insult to injury, had usurped his power and title as Conjurer. While it was true that Henry would be more formidable this time around, Walter had something that the pseudo-Conjurer did not.

Experience.

And the blessing of Valtiel.

And now, it was Showtime.

"It's open..."

"Yes, it is." Henry was standing just inside the door suddenly, gun raised and pointed at Walter's head.

Of course, Henry wasn't expecting Walter to be surprised by the sudden movement. "Vincent told you what's happened here, hasn't he? What he helped me become?" He stared at the other man, expectant.

As much as Walter wanted to hurt him, Henry wanted to repay it. And all of the arguments he'd had in his head- how he was going to protect people he cared about, how he was going to get this threat out of the way- it was all washed away in a sea of cold rage.

"Does this even hurt you? Should I bother?" He pulled the trigger anyway. Might as well find out.

Walter sprang sideways when he saw Henry squeeze the trigger. The gunshot was flat and undramatic, and Walter had time to think that if Henry was putting a round in the wall to scare him, he needed something that made a more impressive noise.

Then the bullet pierced his back. It exited his chest in a gory spray. He even saw it fly into the opposite wall. The sensation was like being skewered on a gigantic hot needle.

He staggered forward, coughing blood. Breath seared in and out of his lungs, both through his throat and through a bubbling hole in his chest. The world was crowding in, muzzy and fogged around the edges.

Walter stood riveted in place, his face a mask of disbelief and incredulity. A numb, oddly empty feeling stole over him.

The fact that he, himself, was busy dying may have had something to do with it. The fact that his blood was pouring out of him by the pint and his lungs proved incapable of holding oxygen would account for that feeling of emptiness.

Had he been wrong? Had Valtiel finally forsaken him...?

Henry smiled, and it was the sort of smile people usually reserve for watching children play on the lawn, or for lazy summer afternoons. This...this was bliss.

"Does it hurt, Walter?" He stepped forward, towards the stumbling man. He let his gun arm down, not intending to shoot again. Wouldn't want to end this too early, would he? "After everything you caused, it had better."

He drank in the site of the blood flowing. He didn't even have to use spears this time. But of course he didn't. He was god in this place now, wasn't he? "This whole time...all your effort....and it didn't work. It never worked."

Walter could feel his heart chugging and squishing in an irregular rhythm that spurted the blood from him in uneven gouts. His flesh was already growing cold and ashen. Henry's shot had been a fatal one. Walter Sullivan would die for the third time in the room of his birth. In the Holy Mother's name. He supposed that as last acts went, it was one that he could be proud of.

But he was not yet finished.

Henry was close. In a red mist of pain and fury – the pseudo-Conjurer, the usurper, had spilled his blood on his Mother's altar! – Walter spun and lashed out with all his strength, missing Henry by a fraction of an inch and expecting at any moment to have blackness swamp him and feel his body sink lifelessly to the floor.

It didn't happen. He realized, too, that he was breathing fine. That the torrents of blood from his chest and back had stopped. His chest was coated with blood that had begun to cool and go sticky, but there was no bullet hole.

He stood tall and saw the uncertainty flicker across Henry's face. He knew the same thing Walter did – he should have been dead already. Unless they had both severely underestimated the lethality of the shot. Which, given that Walter had seen his chest erupt, did not seem likely.

Walter laughed, low and utterly self-contented. He was upon Henry before he could do more than take a single backward step.

"What-?"

And just like that, Henry was on the defensive again. Just like that, he was helpless. Again. He couldn't let that happen, but he was suddenly less strong, less fast...less everything. He felt tired.

His face twisted up in hopeless anger, an expression Walter had probably seen from Richard but never from Henry before. He twisted his wrist around, brandishing the sword in an attempt to keep Walter a small distance from him- any distance from him, really. But it was already too late by then. The sword was knocked away easily.

He had more bullets. He tried firing into Walter's torso, since that was the only thing he could even remotely aim at now. Somehow, Henry had much less hope this would accomplish anything.

Walter twisted in mid-lunge, hot lead carving a bleeding crease along his side.

Too late.

Fabric ripped. Nails raked across exposed skin. Hot, wet blood gloved Walter's hand.

Scarlet soaked startlingly vivid against pale blue, but there was something else that went with it -- a silvery-hot bolt that seemed to shoot from Henry’s gut up to his temples and down to his toes.

Walter's fingers dug at him and then they were in, gouging and rupturing, parting flesh like soft dough and widening the gashes and forcing themselves deeper into his torn abdomen.

There was just pain then. Henry tried to push those hands away. He hit at Walter with everything he had. But Henry's hands were weak, and pushing at Walter's was like trying to bend steel.

After a certain point, it didn't seem to matter anymore. Alessa, I'm sorry, he thought. He hoped that might reach her. His arms and hands went limp as he accepted the fate, merely twitching occasionally. Henry focused on not screaming.

He was able to keep to that, for now. He made plenty of choked, pained noises, but he didn't scream. He saw Walter's hands ripping their way into him, but luckily, his vision started to blur soon after.

Walter’s hand and forearm, slimed halfway to the elbow with blood and other substances never meant to see the outside of a human being, slid out of Henry’s body with a hideously wet sucking sound. It was followed by a slithery plop that was the coil of Henry’s intestine looping down to slap against the front of his jeans.

His free hand reached behind Henry's head and grabbed a fistful of shaggy sable, jerking down and back so that his glazing eyes met his own. With an index finger caked with unthinkable gore, Walter traced the numbers across Henry's forehead - 21121.

Henry wasn't capable of being aware of many things at this point, but Walter's eyes were something he couldn't avoid. Those damn green eyes swam in his vision, blurred by pain.

And despite not being able to feel anything but the hot pain in what used to be his stomach, Henry knew exactly what Walter was writing on his forehead. It burned like nothing else. "No..." Henry choked out.

He might've said more, but the blood came then, bubbling up in his throat and coming out of his mouth without any permission from him. And he stopped trying to do anything at all. He just let the blood come.

When that was over, the Receiver of Wisdom finally rested.

Walter watched as Henry's chest hitched for the last time and a runnel of blood flowed from the corner of his mouth. His eyes rolled up and he went limp, a weightless rag doll in Walter's grasp.

Henry Townshend, Final Sacrament, Receiver of Wisdom and pseudo-Conjurer was dead. Walter had avenged his murder, reclaimed what was stolen from him and completed the 21 Sacraments in one fell swoop.

But there was still one last matter of business to attend.

Alessa.

A faint smile tugged at Walter’s lips as he scooped Henry's remains up into his arms. Alessa was going to wake up to a very nasty surprise in the morning...

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