Log: Completed

[dresden4hire.livejournal.com]

When: Oct. 22 (evening)
Rating: Pg-13
Characters: Harry Dresden dresden4hire, X unknownandi
Summary:  X gets off the subway and runs into Harry, who's out looking for him.
Log: 

X tromped up the subway steps, in a rumpled suit and tie, dressed like... well, he couldn't quite remember where he saw the face he was wearing right now, pale grey eyes and short, shaggy dirty blond hair. He felt like he should be smoking a cigarette or something.

 

 But regardless of what he looked like, he'd made progress is setting up the next surprise for Envy in the tunnels below. That was something nice to think about, and try to focus on instead of his unease in the crowd, among all these people that knew who they were. 

 

 So, somewhat distracted, he headed for home, ready to sleep and eat and do all those mundane trivialities of life, plodding along at a relaxed pace.

 

Harry was out late again, this time trying to find the Serial Box Killer.  He felt bad about not working on the "case" for a while but the search for Jolly and his kidnapper had taken precedence since that problem was more fresh at hand.  It was important to start looking as soon as possible before potential clues vanished.  But he had hit a dead end with that as well and he needed a change of pace.  So it was back to searching for SBK.

 

 He held out the chain that the searching crystal hung on out before him, the one with the spot of blood on it from the killer, and pushed his magic into it.  After a moments hesitation the crystal jumped forward.  And it jumped strong.  Whoever and whatever X was, he was close.  Close enough that Harry could get to him if he hurried.

 

 Without really thinking Harry began to run in the direction the crystal was leaning, glancing up only every now and again to make sure he wasn't going to run into anything.  He knew he was nearing the subway, which made sense.  A lot of people congregated there, the chances that he would run into X would be good.  He just hoped this X "person" was not going INTO the subways.  Just a few more minutes and Harry would be close enough to spot him.

 

 X trudged along, the feeling nagging at him a bit. What if he was really a person who smoked? Maybe he should pick up a pack.

 

 Decision made, he paused once he was free of the subway crowds, pondering where to go. There was a convenience store somewhere nearby, wasn't there? Ah, yes, down just a couple blocks, he could almost see the sign from here. 

 

"'Scuse me," he muttered, brushing past a few people headed to the station, paying no attention to the person running straight down the road towards him. People did weird things in this city all the time, running along with a crystal on a chain was hardly the weirdest he'd seen here so far.

 

The killer was close, he could feel it.  Skidding to a stop, black leather duster whirling around him Harry surveyed the subway stop.  Now was the tricky part of the spell though; Harry had to try and figure out which one of these people was X.  Just running up to each of them with the crystal wouldn't be a very efficient method.  Instead, Harry just stood still for a moment, his eyes on the chain as he watched it slowly move to one said.  He looked up and tried to track the movements of the crystal and see if it matched any specific person.

 

 <i>There!</i>  The blond man in the suit and tie!

 

 "Hey, you in the suit!" he shouted.  "You freeze right where you are right now!"

 

 "Huh?" X blinked, glancing back at the sudden shout. The guy in the trenchcoat, nobody familiar that he remembered, was looking straight at him, so X stopped, his expression neutral . It seemed somehow appropriate for this face.

 

Harry fumbled in his duster for his piece of chalk.  If he could get a circle around this guy, then he could contain him.  Not that he really expected the guy to stand still while he did that, but it was worth a chance.  The image of the mutilated bodies came to mind and Harry burned with anger, the runes on his staff glowing bright with hellfire.  He would have just laid waste to the guy here and now, but he wasn't enitrely sure the blood belonged to the killer, or that the person who made the box was the only one involved in it all.

 

 Never loosing sight of the man, Harry knelt down on the ground a good ten feet away and began to draw the circle, slowly circling the man in the suit.  Honestly, the guy hardly looked like a killer, but Harry had been fooled by appearances before.  Just a few more moments and he'd have this bastard trapped.

 

 X's familiarity with his own world's popular culture wasn't exactly the most comprehensive. But he watched TV sometimes, and movies on the plane, and if those weren't runes and a magic circle in front of him, he didn't know what they were. Yet another thing that was new; for all the talk of magic and the supernatural in the city, he hadn't seen anything like <i>this</i>. 

 

 So he calmly walked to the edge of the circle and scuffed the chalk out with his shoe. It seemed the right thing to do. 

 

 "What're you doing?" he asked calmly, glancing over at Harry again. "You some kind of wizard or something?" 

 

Harry growled and stood up, his quarry obviously not going to let him finish the circle in time to seal it.  Oh well, it really was too much to hope for that the bad guy would just stand there and let himself get caught.  They never seemed to work that way.

 

 With a sigh he leveled his staff at the guy.  It didn't <i>look</i> as threatining as a gun, but it actually <i>was</i> more threatening than one.  He thought back to the body-soup that had been put in the box and he wasn't going to take any chances here.

 

 "Yeah, something like that," he said.  "And you're some kind of serial killer or something."

 

 X doesn't really consider the corny old lines that other killers might say, like 'what're you talking about?', or maybe 'that's preposterous' or something of that ilk. His mind works differently. Clearly he's been found out, there's no denying it.

 

 Instead, he gives Harry a more curious look this time, and scratches his chin thoughtfully, not making any real move to fight or flee. "How did you figure that out?" he asks, as casually as if he's asking how the weather is. "I know I'm not showing any trace of it."

 

X didn't really consider the corny old lines that other killers might say, like 'what're you talking about?', or maybe 'that's preposterous' or something of that ilk. His mind worked differently. Clearly he'd been found out, there was no denying it.

 

 Instead, he gave Harry a more curious look this time, and scratched his chin thoughtfully, not making any real move to fight or flee. "How did you figure that out?" he asked, as casually as if he was asking how the weather was. "I know I'm not showing any trace of it."

 

"Magic," Harry said.  He was going to leave it at that, but then decided he might have an opportunity to warn off anyone who might be working with this guy who might be watching.  "When you kill, it leaves a part of you behind, part of your essence.  I can trace that.  Each time you killed, more was left and the easier it was to find you."

 

 It was a long shot, but if it got a possible accomplice to stop killing then it wouldn't hurt.  Of course, with all the people in the City, he was sure someone would be able to get any such information from this guy.  He thought about accusing him of being a werewolf or something similar, but decided not to push his luck,  He didn't <i>know</i> that, it was just a really solid guess.

 

 "Essence? Hmm. What part of me is my essence, I wonder," X  wondered aloud, looking somewhat surprised as he mentally glossed over the tracking portion of Harry's explanation. What people were made of was much more interesting. "Do you have this 'essence' inside you too?"

 

 Maybe it was another thing common to everyone, like bones and teeth and fiber and organ and muscle, status and name and sex and age. It would be something else to look for, the next time he observed someone's insides. Maybe he'd even seen it before, and never knew.

 

"Everyone has it," he answered, eyes narrowing.  "Everything that exists has an essence, leaves some sort of imprint on everything it contacts."

 

Harry decided that was all the explanation he was going to give though.  It felt too much like explaining how forensics works.  Give the guy just enough information that he thinks he can't ever get away with it.

 

"Doesn't matter now though.  You and I are going to find the Warden and we're going to have you wait out trial in the island prison.  And no funny stuff, I will blast you to smithereens if I have to and I can always find you again."

 

 This city... there was no organized police force, no situation where dozens of people would be bearing down on him. X had seen it all across the network, how worried (or amused) the residents were by the anarchy. There were witnesses right now, other people on the street -- never a good thing. But X felt strangely confident suddenly. He had a new interest. He wanted to see what this essence was. And the man in the trenchcoat, he hoped, would help him.

 

 "Okay," X smiled, and raised his hands beside his head cooperatively, treating the situation as if he were at gunpoint now. "Can I ask you one more thing, Mr...?"

 

Oh this bastard was way too compliant.  Harry gripped his staff a bit tighter now and readied himself for some kind of attack.  Damn suit jacket he couldn't tell if the guy had any knives or guns.  Either way he shook his shield bracelet loose just in case.  Any weapon appeared and he would activate it.  This guy seemed to have no clue about magic, so he didn't expect some sort of a spell.  The wall the bracelet put up with block a gun just as well as magic though.

 

 "Dresden, Harry Dresden," he said, wincing slightly at how James Bondish that sounded.  Oh well, so long as he didn't start falling into any wizard cliche's he'd be okay.  "And yeah, you get one more question."

 

"Can I look inside you? I want to know... what it looks like." Compliant or not, the conversation with X was gradually getting stranger, bit by bit. And just as gradually, X had been getting a stranger expression on his face, wide-eyed, curious, intent. There might have been doubt in the beginning, but it was clear now that there was something very very wrong with this man.

 

"That's going to be a big no," Harry said, once again picturing the mutilated bodies inside of the boxes.  He knew just how this guy was going to "look inside" him.  "It's not something you see, it's something you sense.  You want to talk about this, we'll do it more while you're in prison.  I'll visit you ever day to talk about how much you can't see an essence."

 

"That's too bad."

 

X's movement was sharp and sudden. This shape, larger than the one he preferred to kill in, was a little slower and less nimble. But X didn't want to show off more than he had to to this person. Let them continue to guess at who or what X really was. He could fix it this shape to his advantage easily, still fast and strong enough to be something that surpassed humanity. And though he used them sometimes, he didn't need a weapon to kill. Not anymore. 

 

 The distance between them was hardly enough for anything fancy. So X only feinted once before coming at Harry straight-on, open hand reaching forward, intent on ripping clean through him.

 

The guy moved fast, a lot faster than anything human could move.  Harry was used to dealing with supernatural creatures but it still caught him off guard enough that the guy was too close to get his shield up.  And that hand, it was coming really fast, probably fast enough to smash right through him.  It was too close and fast for the wizard to blast him with hellfire so he did the next best thing... he took the blow as directly as he could on his left side.

 

 He felt the swat at him but the enchanting on his leather duster held and prevented the blow from crushing its way through is body.  That wasn't to say thought that the physical force of the attack didn't send him sprawling and tumbling across the ground.  He was definitely going to have some bruises and scrapes from this.  Damn it, why did they never go nice and quiet.

 

"Alright you bastard," Harry growled, already scrambling up and getting ready for the next attack.  "You're about to find out just how bad of an idea it is to piss off a wizard."

 

Hmm. Wizards were apparently very tough. X looked down at his hand, clenching it into a fist and giving it an odd look before glancing back up at Harry. "If you won't let me look inside you," X said, very seriously, "Then there's nothing else I can do. I'll have to make you show me."

 

 X wasn't going to stay in one spot long enough to make himself a target, though. He darted in again, on the offensive. This time he'd just smash the wizard's head into a pulp, he had decided. It would make it more of a mess, but that was alright. He'd just have to make sure he collected the biggest parts of it before running off. Hopefully it wouldn't make too much of a difference to his observations. And if it did, well, there were other wizards in the city, right?

 

Harry reached down and grabbed the kinetic energy he had stored in the rings on his hand.  Just like Tony's coat they charged a little bit each time he moved.  Since he hadn't had to sue them since coming to the City, they were fully charged.  He released a blast from one at the killer, as if a giant hand swooped out and delivered a backhand.  Harry didn't care how strong you were, unless you weighed as much as a car, a blow like that would send you flying.

 

 "Now stay down or I <i>will</i> hit you again and again and again until you stay down," he growled.  "You're fast and strong but that's nothing new to me.  I can play this game all day long where you don't get anywhere near me."

 And go flying is exactly what X did, another clear expression of surprise on his face for that brief instant as he sailed through the air, before his back slammed up against a wall across the street with a heavy thump. The wind knocked out of him for a moment, he still moved, scrabbling to his feet.

 

 "Ehhh," he panted, sucking air back into his lungs, all too quickly for comfort. "That's magic, then?"

"Yeah, that's magic too," Harry said, keeping his staff trained on the killer.  People were starting to get curious though, damn City.  People didn't run away like sensible people should when fights like this broke out.  Using hellfire here would be too risky right now.

 

 "Are you people insane?!" Harry shouted.  "Get the hell out of here!"

 

 The gawking spectators were a marked disadvantage to X, too. This was definitely, definitely in too public a location. Time to make an escape, and perhaps come back to have a look at this man's insides another day. X hated the thought of leaving this half-finished, just like he had with Envy. But he supposed that was to be expected. It had been the same with that creature, Neuro, back is his own world. And just like he was forced to make plans to try to kill Neuro, he would have to plan to kill the others, too.

 

 "Shouldn't it be more... eeeh... glow-y if it's magic? Oh well," X said, faking another shaky breath in of air and getting ready for the run. "Maybe you'll show me again sometime, Harry. Later!" The last was bright and chipper, inappropriate for the more mature voice X was using.

 

 And at that he took off at a sprint, straight towards the people that had slowly gathered around the scene of the fight. It didn't matter if they moved out of the way or not -- X was fast, agile, and fully prepared to trip up people to slow any pursuit.

 

Harry was about to give this X character a demonstration of the more "glowy" types of magic, namely a shot of some of that green crap that Ramirez fought with  Before he could though the killer got up and started running.  Of course, his running had to be just as fast as his hitting was hard.

 

 "Everybody get the hell out of the way!" Harry shouted again, already swinging his staff in the direction of the retreating assailant.  He had run right into the crowd of people though.  With a snarl of anger Harry took off after X, even though he knew there was no real chance of catching him.

 

 He had no real destination in mind. Obviously, home wouldn't be an option, not tonight, X thought as he ran. He turned off the main street and zigzagged his way through alleys, leaping up fire-escape steps in inhuman bounds and from there, across a couple rooftops and back down again. The wizard said he could track him by his 'essence'; X was prepared to see how far and how fast. Run, wizard, run!