Kite Morian, Sunnydale High Class of '03 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
formoftherapy) wrote2011-11-30 08:41 pm
formoftherapy) wrote2011-11-30 08:41 pm
Entry tags:
kingdom of welcome addiction - summer 2005
(Warnings for violence and the final appearance of Obadiah Stane for now)
Her first thought is that they were all supposed to be home.
But then Natalie called out of the blue with an invite to a club opening in LA; she knows the DJ, but she and Pepper are out of town, so would they like to--?
Sherlock politely declines, but kisses them both goodbye at the door.
They come home to a war zone.
The fact that Jarvis doesn’t already have the front door open for them quickly becomes irrelevant. Kite picks up the splintered remains of an entryway table and Tony already has his laser pointer out. Between the two of them, they clear half a dozen vampires before they notice what is most wrong with this picture.
There is a body on the floor by the piano and it is a body they know.
Tony lunges forward, Sherry’s name jammed in his throat, before Kite pulls him back, clocking Tony’s latest would-be assassin across the jaw with the table leg. “You die and he’ll never forgive you,” she snaps. Tony nods shakily in reply, flicking the laser pointer back on, and they get back to work.
When they can get to him at last, Sherry is still alive, likely through pure stubbornness. There are countless defensive wounds littering both arms, but his throat is a bloody ruin His breath hisses through gaps in the flesh. He has minutes, if that.
Tony is whispering to him, voice too low to hear; Kite cannot stop staring at the blood smeared across Sherry’s mouth. She has to ask.
“Did they feed you?”
Sherlock blinks once, slowly. It’s all the answer she needs.
“We’ll make it right,” she whispers and takes his hand. Neither she nor Tony moves until he’s gone.
She lets go of him slowly, fumbling phone from her pocket with blood-slick fingers. On the third ring, someone answers.
“Hello?”
“Pepper, how fast can you get to Malibu?”
“By tomorrow afternoon, maybe; what’s going on?”
“Don’t bother showing up before sunset. We...there’s been an accident. You’ve got the journals with you, yeah? The ones you borrowed?”
“Yes. Kite, what happened?”
Kite continues to ignore the question. “I need you here by sunset tomorrow ready to put a soul back in a vampire.”
“Oh, Jesus. Kite.”
“Can you do it, or am I going to have to call someone else?”
“I’ll be there. I will. Just...be safe until then, okay?”
“You, too.” She hangs up and tosses the phone onto the couch.
Tony doesn’t look up from Sherry’s body when he asks, “Do you trust her?”
“Absolutely.”
He nods slowly. “Okay, then.”
They pull down a blackout curtain from Tony’s long-neglected darkroom, draping it over Sherlock’s body and tucking the edges under. (They touch him carefully, as if he might wake at any moment Their hands linger on on his wrist and chest and wherever else they might have once felt a pulse.)
Between the fabric and the tint on the windows, he should be safe until sunset. Now comes the waiting. Tony is fidgeting inside of half an hour.
“I can’t just...I have to do something,” he says, raking both hands through his hair. “I need to go check on Jarvis, see if I can undo whatever they did. Will you stay with him?”
“Of course.”
Tony flashes her a thin, grateful smile, then heads for the stairs. Kite settles down on the couch and closes her eyes.
---
Kite jolts awake when she hears a key turn in the lock. The lights in the basement stairwell are on and she thinks she can hear music, meaning Tony is still down there. Whatever was done to Jarvis must be reparable after all.
Any relief she feels vanishes instantly, because there is only one other person currently living with his own set of keys.
She’s on her feet before Obadiah is fully in the house. Kite hurls herself at him, smearing blood and ash all over his ten thousand dollar suit. "They killed him," she says, voice cracking. "Oh my God, they killed him." Everything that she hasn't let herself feel hits at once. She starts sobbing, gulping for breath; Obadiah's arm slides around her. (He hasn't touched her in years; the resulting shudder is hidden by the way her shoulders already shake.)
He steers her back over to the couch, sits her down. When he turns away--to get her a drink or a towel or God knows what--she twists her fingers in his sleeve.
"Don't," she says, looking up through the curtain of her hair. "Don't go."
“Alright,” he soothes. He glances at the outline of the body under the curtain. “Where's Sherlock?"
It’s the guess she hoped he’d make; she lets her head rest on his shoulder. "Downstairs. They got to him first. They--" She sobs again.
“Hush.” Obadiah’s voice is a rumble against her skull. “I’ll take care of everything.”
She makes a low, wounded sound; he strokes her hair.
(Kite, who has never prayed a day in her life, starts now. He cannot know Tony is still alive. He can’t even suspect that the lights and music are more than just something she’s left on for hours, empty comfort in an empty house.
Sherlock would have seen right through it, she thinks, and for a moment, all she can smell is blood.)
Obadiah clears his throat. “Let me go make some calls,” he murmurs. “I’ll have someone...collect the boys, and then I’ll take you home.”
Kite hides her face against his throat. “No,” she whispers, her mouth just brushing his skin. “I don’t want to be alone.”
He winds one hand in her hair, lifting her head and steering her until he can look her in the face. She knows what she must look like--eyes still wet with tears but blown wide from adrenaline, mouth red and bitten. (He always did like her this way.)
“Is that right?” His grip on her hair tightens.
“Yes,” she gasps, and tries to forget about her dead best friend on the floor behind her.
“Even now?” It would sound chiding coming from someone else, someone without that smile.
“Yes.” Her voice breaks.
His mouth on hers is slow but bruising, the roughness of it a distraction she nearly welcomes until his other hand cuts off her air. She claws for his eyes; he lets go of her hair in order to backhand her.
“Just relax,” he says, resting his hand on her hip next, pulling her into the next kiss. “It’ll be over soon.”
Blood pounds in her ears; it sounds like footsteps on stairs and all she can think of is Tony, of him dying like this.
Her fingers brush the top of her boot, curling around something just inside--a knife of her grandmother’s. The switchblade flicks out with a soft click. Obadiah pauses, listening, his mouth still touching hers. Kite drives the knife into his neck.
She can feel his lips move, forming words that she doesn’t care to hear. (Sherlock couldn’t talk at the end; why should he?) She twists the knife, draws it free, then stabs again.
After the third time, she stops counting.
When his hand falls away from her throat, she draws a breath so deep it’s nearly a moan. Everything is so much clearer now. Blood spatter is warm over the bridge of her nose, tacky where it has glued the collar of her shirt to her skin. For one delirious moment, she has to fight the urge to lick her fingers.
Too late, she realizes that the sound she hears really is someone climbing the stairs this time. “Kite? Is your friend here yet? I thought I heard--”
She doesn’t turn to look. She hears Tony stagger from the room, then fall. The retching starts a moment later. She doesn’t go to him. (It’s not her he wants now. It may not be ever again.)
She climbs unsteadily off of the couch and takes a seat on the piano bench, her knees drawn up to her chest. The switchblade dangles loosely from her grip.
---
Pepper arrives an hour later. Obadiah never locked the door behind him, so Kite does not bother to get up.
“Kite, are you--” A tote bag is sliding off Pepper’s shoulder; she doesn’t bother to fix it, staring instead at the living room. “Oh, honey.”
“He’ll be awake soon,” Kite replies, her voice a rough monotone. She imagines the bruises are quite impressive by now. “Need me to get anything?”
Pepper shakes herself, then moves into action. “No, just...stand by in case this doesn’t work.”
Kite removes the blackout curtain, stuffing it beneath the piano bench. (Tony should be here, she thinks. Tony should be here, but she doesn’t dare go down into the basement after him, so it’s up to her to wait and see if this will even work.) Pepper arranges candles and burns herbs, copies a sigil onto the floor in chalk; she reads aloud in Latin, voice rising and falling. Kite stays crouched beside the body, a stake close at hand.
When Sherlock finally opens his eyes, he smiles up at her like she's the most wonderful thing in the world. She knows that she would be, for however long it took him to rip out her throat. She has just time enough to think yes, I would love you anyway before Pepper chants the final line, her voice pitched low and unfamiliar. Sherlock's head snaps to the side, eyes narrowing, but something bright strikes him right over his heart and his back arches against the floor.
When he opens his eyes again, he is a different person entirely.
“I leave for a few hours,” Sherlock murmurs, “and what do you do?”
He can smell it on her; if he sits up, he’ll be able to see it for himself. Still, she feels like she owes him an answer. “You’re just mad I didn’t wait for you,” she rasps.
“Only a little,” he whispers in her ear. She sways, off-balance for reasons that have nothing to do with her injuries, and Sherlock steadies her with a hand on her shoulder. “I think, perhaps, you can go home now,” he adds, louder. “If Miss--”
“Potts. Pepper Potts.” Pepper sounds dazed, although if that’s from working the spell or everything else that’s happened in this house, Kite can’t be sure.
“If Miss Potts will be kind enough to drive you, I should really see to Tony and...” Sherlock looks around the room, pointedly not looking at the couch. “...all the rest of this.”
Kite opens her mouth to protest, and is cut off by his smile, faint and almost pitying.
(If it were from anyone else on any other night, she would have hit them. As it is, it just wears away at her resolve not to cry.)
“No,” Sherlock says. “You can’t. Not now.”
The knowledge that he’s right keeps her from arguing further.
Kite doesn’t remember how she ends up in Pepper’s car, or the drive to Natalie’s house, or going inside. She slams back into awareness standing in the shower, fully dressed. She drops to her knees, dry heaving.
Kite doesn’t go back to Malibu for the rest of the summer.
Her first thought is that they were all supposed to be home.
But then Natalie called out of the blue with an invite to a club opening in LA; she knows the DJ, but she and Pepper are out of town, so would they like to--?
Sherlock politely declines, but kisses them both goodbye at the door.
They come home to a war zone.
The fact that Jarvis doesn’t already have the front door open for them quickly becomes irrelevant. Kite picks up the splintered remains of an entryway table and Tony already has his laser pointer out. Between the two of them, they clear half a dozen vampires before they notice what is most wrong with this picture.
There is a body on the floor by the piano and it is a body they know.
Tony lunges forward, Sherry’s name jammed in his throat, before Kite pulls him back, clocking Tony’s latest would-be assassin across the jaw with the table leg. “You die and he’ll never forgive you,” she snaps. Tony nods shakily in reply, flicking the laser pointer back on, and they get back to work.
When they can get to him at last, Sherry is still alive, likely through pure stubbornness. There are countless defensive wounds littering both arms, but his throat is a bloody ruin His breath hisses through gaps in the flesh. He has minutes, if that.
Tony is whispering to him, voice too low to hear; Kite cannot stop staring at the blood smeared across Sherry’s mouth. She has to ask.
“Did they feed you?”
Sherlock blinks once, slowly. It’s all the answer she needs.
“We’ll make it right,” she whispers and takes his hand. Neither she nor Tony moves until he’s gone.
She lets go of him slowly, fumbling phone from her pocket with blood-slick fingers. On the third ring, someone answers.
“Hello?”
“Pepper, how fast can you get to Malibu?”
“By tomorrow afternoon, maybe; what’s going on?”
“Don’t bother showing up before sunset. We...there’s been an accident. You’ve got the journals with you, yeah? The ones you borrowed?”
“Yes. Kite, what happened?”
Kite continues to ignore the question. “I need you here by sunset tomorrow ready to put a soul back in a vampire.”
“Oh, Jesus. Kite.”
“Can you do it, or am I going to have to call someone else?”
“I’ll be there. I will. Just...be safe until then, okay?”
“You, too.” She hangs up and tosses the phone onto the couch.
Tony doesn’t look up from Sherry’s body when he asks, “Do you trust her?”
“Absolutely.”
He nods slowly. “Okay, then.”
They pull down a blackout curtain from Tony’s long-neglected darkroom, draping it over Sherlock’s body and tucking the edges under. (They touch him carefully, as if he might wake at any moment Their hands linger on on his wrist and chest and wherever else they might have once felt a pulse.)
Between the fabric and the tint on the windows, he should be safe until sunset. Now comes the waiting. Tony is fidgeting inside of half an hour.
“I can’t just...I have to do something,” he says, raking both hands through his hair. “I need to go check on Jarvis, see if I can undo whatever they did. Will you stay with him?”
“Of course.”
Tony flashes her a thin, grateful smile, then heads for the stairs. Kite settles down on the couch and closes her eyes.
---
Kite jolts awake when she hears a key turn in the lock. The lights in the basement stairwell are on and she thinks she can hear music, meaning Tony is still down there. Whatever was done to Jarvis must be reparable after all.
Any relief she feels vanishes instantly, because there is only one other person currently living with his own set of keys.
She’s on her feet before Obadiah is fully in the house. Kite hurls herself at him, smearing blood and ash all over his ten thousand dollar suit. "They killed him," she says, voice cracking. "Oh my God, they killed him." Everything that she hasn't let herself feel hits at once. She starts sobbing, gulping for breath; Obadiah's arm slides around her. (He hasn't touched her in years; the resulting shudder is hidden by the way her shoulders already shake.)
He steers her back over to the couch, sits her down. When he turns away--to get her a drink or a towel or God knows what--she twists her fingers in his sleeve.
"Don't," she says, looking up through the curtain of her hair. "Don't go."
“Alright,” he soothes. He glances at the outline of the body under the curtain. “Where's Sherlock?"
It’s the guess she hoped he’d make; she lets her head rest on his shoulder. "Downstairs. They got to him first. They--" She sobs again.
“Hush.” Obadiah’s voice is a rumble against her skull. “I’ll take care of everything.”
She makes a low, wounded sound; he strokes her hair.
(Kite, who has never prayed a day in her life, starts now. He cannot know Tony is still alive. He can’t even suspect that the lights and music are more than just something she’s left on for hours, empty comfort in an empty house.
Sherlock would have seen right through it, she thinks, and for a moment, all she can smell is blood.)
Obadiah clears his throat. “Let me go make some calls,” he murmurs. “I’ll have someone...collect the boys, and then I’ll take you home.”
Kite hides her face against his throat. “No,” she whispers, her mouth just brushing his skin. “I don’t want to be alone.”
He winds one hand in her hair, lifting her head and steering her until he can look her in the face. She knows what she must look like--eyes still wet with tears but blown wide from adrenaline, mouth red and bitten. (He always did like her this way.)
“Is that right?” His grip on her hair tightens.
“Yes,” she gasps, and tries to forget about her dead best friend on the floor behind her.
“Even now?” It would sound chiding coming from someone else, someone without that smile.
“Yes.” Her voice breaks.
His mouth on hers is slow but bruising, the roughness of it a distraction she nearly welcomes until his other hand cuts off her air. She claws for his eyes; he lets go of her hair in order to backhand her.
“Just relax,” he says, resting his hand on her hip next, pulling her into the next kiss. “It’ll be over soon.”
Blood pounds in her ears; it sounds like footsteps on stairs and all she can think of is Tony, of him dying like this.
Her fingers brush the top of her boot, curling around something just inside--a knife of her grandmother’s. The switchblade flicks out with a soft click. Obadiah pauses, listening, his mouth still touching hers. Kite drives the knife into his neck.
She can feel his lips move, forming words that she doesn’t care to hear. (Sherlock couldn’t talk at the end; why should he?) She twists the knife, draws it free, then stabs again.
After the third time, she stops counting.
When his hand falls away from her throat, she draws a breath so deep it’s nearly a moan. Everything is so much clearer now. Blood spatter is warm over the bridge of her nose, tacky where it has glued the collar of her shirt to her skin. For one delirious moment, she has to fight the urge to lick her fingers.
Too late, she realizes that the sound she hears really is someone climbing the stairs this time. “Kite? Is your friend here yet? I thought I heard--”
She doesn’t turn to look. She hears Tony stagger from the room, then fall. The retching starts a moment later. She doesn’t go to him. (It’s not her he wants now. It may not be ever again.)
She climbs unsteadily off of the couch and takes a seat on the piano bench, her knees drawn up to her chest. The switchblade dangles loosely from her grip.
---
Pepper arrives an hour later. Obadiah never locked the door behind him, so Kite does not bother to get up.
“Kite, are you--” A tote bag is sliding off Pepper’s shoulder; she doesn’t bother to fix it, staring instead at the living room. “Oh, honey.”
“He’ll be awake soon,” Kite replies, her voice a rough monotone. She imagines the bruises are quite impressive by now. “Need me to get anything?”
Pepper shakes herself, then moves into action. “No, just...stand by in case this doesn’t work.”
Kite removes the blackout curtain, stuffing it beneath the piano bench. (Tony should be here, she thinks. Tony should be here, but she doesn’t dare go down into the basement after him, so it’s up to her to wait and see if this will even work.) Pepper arranges candles and burns herbs, copies a sigil onto the floor in chalk; she reads aloud in Latin, voice rising and falling. Kite stays crouched beside the body, a stake close at hand.
When Sherlock finally opens his eyes, he smiles up at her like she's the most wonderful thing in the world. She knows that she would be, for however long it took him to rip out her throat. She has just time enough to think yes, I would love you anyway before Pepper chants the final line, her voice pitched low and unfamiliar. Sherlock's head snaps to the side, eyes narrowing, but something bright strikes him right over his heart and his back arches against the floor.
When he opens his eyes again, he is a different person entirely.
“I leave for a few hours,” Sherlock murmurs, “and what do you do?”
He can smell it on her; if he sits up, he’ll be able to see it for himself. Still, she feels like she owes him an answer. “You’re just mad I didn’t wait for you,” she rasps.
“Only a little,” he whispers in her ear. She sways, off-balance for reasons that have nothing to do with her injuries, and Sherlock steadies her with a hand on her shoulder. “I think, perhaps, you can go home now,” he adds, louder. “If Miss--”
“Potts. Pepper Potts.” Pepper sounds dazed, although if that’s from working the spell or everything else that’s happened in this house, Kite can’t be sure.
“If Miss Potts will be kind enough to drive you, I should really see to Tony and...” Sherlock looks around the room, pointedly not looking at the couch. “...all the rest of this.”
Kite opens her mouth to protest, and is cut off by his smile, faint and almost pitying.
(If it were from anyone else on any other night, she would have hit them. As it is, it just wears away at her resolve not to cry.)
“No,” Sherlock says. “You can’t. Not now.”
The knowledge that he’s right keeps her from arguing further.
Kite doesn’t remember how she ends up in Pepper’s car, or the drive to Natalie’s house, or going inside. She slams back into awareness standing in the shower, fully dressed. She drops to her knees, dry heaving.
Kite doesn’t go back to Malibu for the rest of the summer.