tampered | (no subject)

(no subject)

When; Friday, September 11th
Rating; R - language and violence
Characters; Eddie Blake

lastpunchline and Adrian Veidt

caughtthebullet
Summary; Is it karma when you end up in the same cell as your enemy? Or is it the ultimate sitcom?
Log;

The most noticeable thing is that the bastards smelled. How they got the jump on the Comedian is something between Blake and the goons, but it helps that he was asleep and they had enough muscle to hold on; but why they were dragging him in, he doesn't know. As far as Blake knows, he hasn't committed any crimes in the City. His first thought is the warden, maybe the gook didn't like being called Hirohito, but then Blake dismisses that. He was too busy with stuffed animals and was barely doing the job, anyway.

The cell is small and there's already someone in the bed, and after Blake's shaken off the guards he looks it over. The person in the bed is passed out - for whatever reason - and for the moment the Comedian dismisses him as irrelevant. There had to be a way out of the prison, and Eddie was going to find it. He's inspecting the walls when suddenly he realizes who's in the bed (single bed, of which there is only one. What is this, hell?).

Eddie moves to wake Veidt and demand what's going on, but before he does he realizes. Ozy-fucking-mandias is passed out. Defenseless - for once. Eddie doesn't hesitate more than that, with Adrian it's death just to do that, and he aims his hands for pale man's neck.

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How Adrian Veidt got here no one will ever know. That is a far cry from saying he doesn't know. However it happened, however it occurred, is a secret he will take with him to his grave. Rorschach would empathize.

It takes a single breath for him to know a shadow is looming and fingers are looming even closer. Dressed only in pants, yes they are silk and yes they are purple, means little to him. He doesn't need his suit of armor to fight. If he did Ozymandias would never have made a name for himself.

His heel whips out to connect with his attacker's stomach, barely a hair's width of time before hands connect with his neck.

The fact that they're silk or purple is not something that passes through Eddie's mind, he's just grateful that there are there. He's almost got it, his hands just barely there, but maybe it was too much to expect that the bastard would stay asleep long enough for Eddie to actually finish the attack.

The heel to the stomach is something he genuinely didn't see coming. Veidt isn't the fastest man alive for no reason, but Eddie does outweigh him, at the very least. "Fuckin---" he manages, and he turns one hand into a fist to attempt to punch through Adrian's face.

If he makes contact, though, remains to be seen.

Look he could be aiming for that damn smiley face, okay? Count your blessings, Blake, or is that harder to do once you've been shuffled off this mortal coil? Hah. Ahem.

Where there was one bed for two unlikely cellmates, now there is possibly no bed if Eddie still has it in him enough to punch holes through walls. Adrian rolls off the edge of the mattress to put much needed distance between them. He'd never boast about their last fight--the one in New York--being easy because it wasn't.

"Blake," the blond hisses, accent missing.

Thank god for small favors. Blake is strong enough to punch through walls, and his fist goes through the bed in the place where Adrian's head should have been, but he pulls his fist back and crosses his arms over his bare chest. This was some kind of sick joke, and if the Comedian thought it was sick, it must have been fucking awful.

"Morning, sunshine," he says, wishing desperately that he had a cigar. Instead all he has are a pair of boxers and the person he hates most in the world (Sally's ex-husband notwithstanding). "Did you sleep well?"

Unsurprisingly, Eddie doesn't care how Adrian slept. What he does care is that they're both here, in a small cell, and not in their respective apartments where they can hate each other from a distance.

And they're both wearing only their sleepwear.

"Not that you care," he retorts flippantly because they both know Eddie doesn't. A look around the cell gives Adrian the quick assessment he needs. Getting out will not be easy, and that considered, if Eddie was willing to try and kill him does that mean Eddie was just as willing to lose his ticket out of this hole? His faith in the old man's skills is just that small. The other unanswered question is why they are in this cell together beyond the universe's idea of irony.

"You're still here. Either you have no way out or you've barely had time to consider it."

Whatever, Adrian. Eddie doesn't need you to get out of this hole; all he needs is his raw power and possibly a spoon. The fact of the matter is, he is not going to ask you your opinion on how to get out. He's more likely to die first. His jaw grinds together. He doesn't even have the frame of mind to crack a joke about how Adrian has no body hair. What kind of man is this guy?

"Five minutes. The goon squad just dropped me off."

He looks around again. First off if he has to spend the night here, it won't be the worst place he's ever slept, although it'll certainly rank up in the top 5 if only because of the company. "You didn't even know you were here, did you?" They must have really gotten the jump on the world's smartest man to achieve that particular feat.

Prick. Prick prick prick prick prick.

And, the kind of man who throws men who outweigh him through windows.

"Perfect. Vietnam may serve a purpose after all."

The remark is coolly sarcastic because he highly doubts any of Eddie's experience in war will come to good use in getting out. Fighting off more 'goons' while making an escape is another matter entirely and here even Ozymandias must acknowledge the Comedian is an asset. The kind of asset he can perhaps 'forget' to pull through when say steel doors come closing in, but they'll get to that when they get to that.

"I know I'm here now and I am still more disgusted than afraid. What does that tell you," he says with a look from toe to head over the other man.

He may be a prick, but he's a prick who tells it like it is. Cut through the fucking bullshit. Eddie looks around, under the bed, all the while making sure he has one eye on Adrian; there's no trust lost, here. He takes a look at the toilet and snorts.

"One crapper, you're too big to flush." There's no trace of humor in his voice; it's the bitter kind of joke.

It takes him another minute to answer Adrian's question - a minute he spends looking around the bare cell. He's pretty sure the sweatboxes that the POW's got in 'nam were bigger than this place.

"It doesn't tell me shit, Veidt. The last time you were afraid was when I was punching your face in back when you were a kid. Masks that get afraid don't fucking live long, you and I both know it." He takes a moment. He really wishes he had a fucking cigar. "God only knows how Dan managed. Keene Act saved his god damned life."

None of that was a compliment.

Droll and bawdy. Adrian doesn't even dignify it with a response.

However that memory he can do without and perhaps it's Eddie's intention to touch a nerve because losing control is the first step to losing the battle. Only his blue-green eyes narrow, and it's just slightly. They have more important matters to consider beyond what put the fear into Adrian Veidt the first time he lost a fight to the Comedian. The first and only time. He isn't a child anymore. One day in the City, complete with an unabashed question regarding his dead parents, doesn't count. He could aim for the same blow but Adrian chooses not to address Sally Jupiter. Or Dan. It occurs to him now the first man to figure it out is the same man who hasn't had the end result laid out for him here. If he knew, Eddie would have mentioned it already.

"You're impossible with change. It tells you I could give a damn."

Edward Blake, likely the only person in the world who can get under his skin.

"I'll leave alive."

It's not Eddie's intention to touch a nerve, but seeing the blond man's eyes narrow, even just the slightest bit, lets him know he did. Adrian may be the only man capable of reading Doctor Manhattan, but he is not himself unreadable, not for someone whose life has depended, before, on catching details of a person's body language. No one would ever call Eddie Blake subtle, but that didn't mean he didn't understand the the word.

That fight must have lingered in Veidt's head longer than he wants to admit. But the words out of the German's mouth (as Eddie will always think of him, the German, the Nazi) make him pause, just for a second. It's the kind of pause that would have let a cigar fall out of his mouth, if he had one.

"Yeah, you'll leave alive. And if you have your way, you'll kill me again." Blake may not have been the smartest mask, but he wasn't any kind of idiot, either. He takes a pause. There's a part of him that wonders if he likes cigars so much because he can hide thought in a drag. The night he died was because he had figured out Adrian's plot, but that wasn't the only reason. Veidt had waited for that moment. "You're not stupid. Two," he holds up a finger, "is better than one, when you're trying to dig your way out of a situation like this."

Eddie Blake doesn't like to be used, for all that he's been in the past fifty years.

Many things linger in Adrian's mind. A man who can take in several feeds of information at once is not a man who dismisses and shelves memories away, however minute, however seemingly unimportant. What's public record is public record because that's all there is to see, all he'll let anyone see. He was not joking when he went on to say the closest soul who ever gave him a feeling of kinship was a dead man. He isn't ashamed to ever admit that. Is it pathetic? He could care less. So being beaten by the Comedian once, thinking he had done away with Doctor Manhattan, allowing Nite Owl to break his face on his monitors, all of that he'll always remember. As Eddie seems to prefer cutting through the details with a machete Adrian prefers to weave and weave and weave into the entire world is fooled by his web. Whose way works? Who can really tell? One man is dead and the other got away with it. That's all that really matters.

It didn't matter if Eddie's awareness wasn't the only reason. Ozymandias got away with it.

"How much are you willing to follow someone else's lead now," he asks, having no diagram to speak of but he wasn't the one who questioned the very idea of his leadership. He'll keep from having Eddie killed if he can help it because he'll benefit from a show of restraint. It's far from making amends. It's just good business.

The fact that Eddie doesn't know that is something that keeps him from trying, again, to break Adrian's face in. In a closed room like this, quiet and "unbreakable," the two men could conceivably beat each other bloody. It wasn't something that was likely to happen, however.

Eddie sits on the bed, his arms crossed, his face in the same kind of doubt that, years ago, had registered when a certain diagram was brought to his attention. "You think that if I live, I'll owe you?" Business might be business, but Eddie likes to know where he stands. There's no two ways about it. If he owes Adrian Veidt, it'll be a cold day in hell where he'll ever repay that. There's only so much Eddie can take.

It will always be curious to Adrian Veidt how one Edward Blake can care for so little and still uphold a principle for a world at peace, without the sacrifice Ozymandias was willing to make. Contradictory, Adrian would call it, unlike the painful honesty of millions to save billions, and he made himself grieve for their deaths. That's the theory anyway, the truth of the matter remains his secret, plated under something stronger than kevlar armor. Adrian doesn't sit.

"No. If you live you'll have less cause for gaining sympathy from everyone else at the cost of my credibility."

He focuses on the corridor beyond their cell doors but keeps Edward Blake in his peripheral vision.

"Despite your recklessness and your bravado, you still have something to lose if you die," Adrian proposes before looking at the other man, "not that I know what."

It's a contradiction, it's a joke. Eddie believes in cynicism and that's his only truth, and maybe that's why the two will never see eye to eye. In any situation Eddie Blake is a realist, and realism doesn't allow for elaborate schemes like Veidt's - or maybe that's what Eddie tells himself. Either way he's not going to share his real opinion on it. He keeps quiet, instead, at least for a moment.

"I don't have anything to lose here," he says, "but I already died once so you could go ahead, and fuck if I'm doing it again." It boils Eddie down to his essence - sheer pigheadedness, maybe, the fact that he's not willing to give an inch. He's called the Comedian for his jokes, even when people are dying, and maybe his death was a laugh too, but this isn't funny anymore. He doesn't ask what the blond's plan is - not yet, anyway. Instead he stands and moves to look out at the same corridor, his arms still crossed over his chest.

"I don't need to," Adrian states coolly, exercising his own stubbornness though it's clearly a brand that's very different from Eddie's...or is it?

First they should figure out why they're here though he already has an idea.

Second they should figure out where here is. Adrian knows it must be the prison but he doesn't recognize this interior. At all. With no windows and no guards with loose lips that part might prove to be the hardest.

Has anyone noticed the network device under the mattress yet? They're fortunate Eddie didn't punch through it either.

Eddie hasn't noticed it yet. Instead he takes another look around, knocking a fist on each wall - not hard, just enough to hear the resulting sound. Eddie's black ops, and there's training in there, from that and from years and years as a mask.

But the walls are thick, too thick to give any kind of indication of material except for stone.

"If this is the same prison that they had before," he mutters, mostly to himself, but partly to Adrian, "Then it's in the middle of the god-damned monster infested lake." He can't read Adrian's thoughts, but they're his thoughts too.

"And it's not the mountain," he deduces because that would imply the place has a small subtle entrance but only one to transport many prisoners, some as dangerous as the Comedian and Ozymandias. Inefficient and unlikely. Also, that lake? First there's more than one and second the monsters in one of them? Not so monstrous. Honestly, Eddie, if you think a trilling blue thing is a monster... Ah, that reminds him. What to do about Bubastis, though her well being is admittedly not at the top of his list. "This isn't like the Warden either," Adrian adds, thinking aloud more than to Eddie, because pride won't allow them to openly speak to each other in anything outside snide remarks.

Eddie tips his head as he gathers that information. Eddie isn't so stubborn as to deny that Adrian could be right. There are places where even the Comedian is willing to admit some level of defeat, and there's no denying who the smarter man is in this cell. "You mean Hirohito? Man's not smart or efficient enough to orchestrate this."

He takes a moment to pause, though. "I don't know who planned this, but the goons that dragged us in were big, ugly, and not human." He keeps looking over the cell, and finally lifts the mattress. There's the Network device. He reaches to snatch it up, hopefully before the world's fastest man does.

Nice try, Eddie, but you said so yourself. World's fastest man and it's definitely no bullet. He ducks down to swipe the device first and immediately shuffles back to the opposite side of the cell. Really it isn't about who gets to use it before the other in terms of seniority, superiority, etc. Adrian would just like to get what information he can out of the thing before running the risk of the Comedian breaking it for shits and giggles. He does give Eddie more credit than that, but better to be safe than sorry, okay? Okay. Oh, and also...

"Gentlemen first," says the blond, the only reasoning he'll give aloud.

In his wildest costumed caper dreams, and there were a handful of down right insane, a jail break had for the longest time been nothing but a dream. Months ago in October, it was a gritty, liberating reality that made him feel like somebody. That freed Rorschach, but for what? The past's murky waters had no answers except that once again Nite Owl would bust a criminal out of the big house.

Two criminals actually.

That same glee that surprised even himself was not the same as the last. Releasing Rorschach was somehow the right thing. Helping Eddie Blake and Adrian Veidt was a grey area if there ever was one. To let them stay and be subjected to whatever fate waited would be cruel, yes. He could never call himself their friend or ally thereafter. This wasn't conducive to staying in a City forever. Crime and punishment have no meaning if humanity is lost. Perhaps they won't understand his compassion or the nostalgia in him for bygone times when everyone was on one side of the fence.

Goggleless and suitless, here he was right out of bed. Archie hovered steadily, working the same way with bare feet on the gas and break.

"Breaker. Breaker. Archie in flight." In case if anybody had a walky-talky, Dan kept the language sparse.

"Corner cell, 3rd floor, at five o'clock in relation to the front entrance," Adrian's voice cuts through the static, calm and cool though it's clear he's been running. Eddie is alive, don't worry, Dan will probably hear him in the background since Adrian has no intention of letting Blake have the device. He might break it and that would be a hindrance to this operation. "Drop your ladder, we're coming through the window," he states.

Now, how will two full grown men get through a single cell window? Well, needless to say, they've probably commandeered a weapon or two or ten.

Eddie wouldn't break the device, Adrian. He's not an idiot, despite all of Ozymandias' belief to the contrary. However he's too busy keeping things clear - okay, he's too busy enjoying keeping things clear - to really notice or care about what the blond man is doing, except that he knows that the blond isn't attacking him, which is what matters.

"Hey, did you bring me a cigar?" He manages to yell towards the device as he runs. God, it's good to be back in action.

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