Viktor Hargreeves (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fifthbeatle) wrote2021-01-29 01:27 pm
fifthbeatle) wrote2021-01-29 01:27 pm
Entry tags:
[for Sam]
"Hey there, beautiful."
The sound is coming from the left, but Vanya pays no attention. Even without sound-sensitive powers she would have heard it, but an entire life in New York City has taught her to neatly ignore this sort of attention. She's been told that the way she dresses discourages this behavior but, 1) that's an absurd and backward concept and 2) no, it doesn't. There are all kinds of lies that Vanya has been told about what will and won't subject her to this sort of attention. Books are, she has been assured, an absolute turn-off. Yet here she is, coming out of the library with a stack of them and this is still happening. She's annoyed, but at the people whose voices she can still hear telling her these things and at this dude that's trying to make his shit hers.
"Did you hear me??"
Of course she did, but she's also got the benefit of having her face firmly in a book. It's a book of music, an advanced book of violin exercises. After the first excited session where her fingers were finally reunited with bow and strings, she came away feeling complete and very, very rusty. Before coming to Darrow, not a single day passed where she didn't play, save for her time in Texas. With this little book of arpeggios and finger-stretching exercises, plus a few deconstructed pages of some classical favorites, she is feeling excited all over again, just like she did the day she saw found the new extension of her arm in that vintage shop. Nothing can bother her, she thinks. With her family and her music, she's finally starting to feel complete, again. Maybe for the first time.
"Hey! Don't ignore him!"
The voice is coming from the opposite side of the little alley she's found herself in. She lifts her eyes and sees that there are two men standing between her and the end of this stretch of space between buildings. At first, she's alarmed, disarmed and a little confused from the seismic shift of being inside the peaceful library brimming with potential knowledge and... this. There are few things that impress her less than displays of useless masculinity.
"I'm not interested," Vanya says curtly, though not entirely impolite. It's a stronger tone than she'd have used in the past, but she didn't know who she was then. What can the voices of these men do to harm her? Nothing. In fact, with her power, the sounds they make are more a danger to themselves than the are to her.
"Ohh, you think you're too good for us?" There's three of them now. Vanya swallows a little lump in her throat and tries to move between them. A hand stops her by the shoulder, just a little too close to her chest. When she looks all the way up at one of them, her eyes are burning. Two of them laugh.
Whatever is said next misses Vanya's understanding entirely. One hand shoves her back and another pulls from behind. She's focusing on her breathing, not the whine of the tuning fork that is threatening to piece her inside. She is stronger than them, but suddenly she can't remember that. It feels too much like something else. She doesn't want to remember what, but she does:
It's "Leonard." It's the men Leonard hired to touch and harass her so that she would blast out and fulfill what he believed was his destiny as the thing that un-ordinaried wayward Number Seven. The world is full of men like these that only want to manipulate and take. Their hands feel like others, like the tight, oppressive grip of her father's hand on her shoulder telling her no, you mustn't go because you are nothing.
The world is closing in - a feeling she used to associate with needed to take pills. All she wants is to close in with it, but the tone in her head is a shrill scream now. She can feel the energy bending around her as her hair is swept off of her shoulder in a nauseatingly tender gesture. At some point, the books have been knocked from her hands that are now in tight fists. They are trying to take control of her and it is working, just not in the way they think.
"STOP!" She bellows, and the world slows down. It's only when she can see three pairs of eyes open wide that she has any idea what is happening. Blue-white light shoots out from the center of her. One of the men is looking her dead in her blindingly white eyes as the blast comes tearing out of her in a devastating orb. Two of them are kicked back several hundred feet. One of them slams against a wall. The streetlight on the corner swings and shakes ominously. There is no satisfaction in her. They wanted to be the thing that scares her, but there's no terror like what Vanya fears for herself.
Before she knows it, she's tearing backward in a frantic half-run. She's almost at the edge of the alley, but something trips her and she goes down hard, skidding backward on her arm and ass so hard that the sleeve of her coat rips all the way through. She's tripped on the shoe of a felled fourth man. She crab-crawls backward, startled, as her fists clench in anticipation of another, more deliberate blast.
The sound is coming from the left, but Vanya pays no attention. Even without sound-sensitive powers she would have heard it, but an entire life in New York City has taught her to neatly ignore this sort of attention. She's been told that the way she dresses discourages this behavior but, 1) that's an absurd and backward concept and 2) no, it doesn't. There are all kinds of lies that Vanya has been told about what will and won't subject her to this sort of attention. Books are, she has been assured, an absolute turn-off. Yet here she is, coming out of the library with a stack of them and this is still happening. She's annoyed, but at the people whose voices she can still hear telling her these things and at this dude that's trying to make his shit hers.
"Did you hear me??"
Of course she did, but she's also got the benefit of having her face firmly in a book. It's a book of music, an advanced book of violin exercises. After the first excited session where her fingers were finally reunited with bow and strings, she came away feeling complete and very, very rusty. Before coming to Darrow, not a single day passed where she didn't play, save for her time in Texas. With this little book of arpeggios and finger-stretching exercises, plus a few deconstructed pages of some classical favorites, she is feeling excited all over again, just like she did the day she saw found the new extension of her arm in that vintage shop. Nothing can bother her, she thinks. With her family and her music, she's finally starting to feel complete, again. Maybe for the first time.
"Hey! Don't ignore him!"
The voice is coming from the opposite side of the little alley she's found herself in. She lifts her eyes and sees that there are two men standing between her and the end of this stretch of space between buildings. At first, she's alarmed, disarmed and a little confused from the seismic shift of being inside the peaceful library brimming with potential knowledge and... this. There are few things that impress her less than displays of useless masculinity.
"I'm not interested," Vanya says curtly, though not entirely impolite. It's a stronger tone than she'd have used in the past, but she didn't know who she was then. What can the voices of these men do to harm her? Nothing. In fact, with her power, the sounds they make are more a danger to themselves than the are to her.
"Ohh, you think you're too good for us?" There's three of them now. Vanya swallows a little lump in her throat and tries to move between them. A hand stops her by the shoulder, just a little too close to her chest. When she looks all the way up at one of them, her eyes are burning. Two of them laugh.
Whatever is said next misses Vanya's understanding entirely. One hand shoves her back and another pulls from behind. She's focusing on her breathing, not the whine of the tuning fork that is threatening to piece her inside. She is stronger than them, but suddenly she can't remember that. It feels too much like something else. She doesn't want to remember what, but she does:
It's "Leonard." It's the men Leonard hired to touch and harass her so that she would blast out and fulfill what he believed was his destiny as the thing that un-ordinaried wayward Number Seven. The world is full of men like these that only want to manipulate and take. Their hands feel like others, like the tight, oppressive grip of her father's hand on her shoulder telling her no, you mustn't go because you are nothing.
The world is closing in - a feeling she used to associate with needed to take pills. All she wants is to close in with it, but the tone in her head is a shrill scream now. She can feel the energy bending around her as her hair is swept off of her shoulder in a nauseatingly tender gesture. At some point, the books have been knocked from her hands that are now in tight fists. They are trying to take control of her and it is working, just not in the way they think.
"STOP!" She bellows, and the world slows down. It's only when she can see three pairs of eyes open wide that she has any idea what is happening. Blue-white light shoots out from the center of her. One of the men is looking her dead in her blindingly white eyes as the blast comes tearing out of her in a devastating orb. Two of them are kicked back several hundred feet. One of them slams against a wall. The streetlight on the corner swings and shakes ominously. There is no satisfaction in her. They wanted to be the thing that scares her, but there's no terror like what Vanya fears for herself.
Before she knows it, she's tearing backward in a frantic half-run. She's almost at the edge of the alley, but something trips her and she goes down hard, skidding backward on her arm and ass so hard that the sleeve of her coat rips all the way through. She's tripped on the shoe of a felled fourth man. She crab-crawls backward, startled, as her fists clench in anticipation of another, more deliberate blast.
no subject
"Look, I can't know what you're going through, but." He drew in a breath, struggling to find the words to distill what amounted to centuries of Heaven and Hell's bullshit into something that would make sense. "Something happened to me when I was a kid that gave me these... these powers, that I didn't understand or even know about for twenty years. And it was like... it was like I was suddenly everything that I'd been taught to hate. I was this freak, who couldn't control himself, and my own family thought they might have to kill me to save the world. And the only reason I'm not showing you now? Is because they're dormant. Maybe forever. Or maybe not, but if I want to find out, I have drink a lot of demon blood. So..."
He spread his hands, lifting his shoulders in an awkward shrug.
no subject
Twenty-seven years of numbness and neglect formed itself a mask over Vanya's face. Expressions come as little twitches in shifting angles. Time and revelation have begun to erode the thing. Another piece cracks away as she listens to Sam. Empathy rushes through the opening, creasing her brow, pulling down the corners of her mouth. Why do people do this? What is the benefit of deciding a child's fate and torturing them when they can't fit themselves into the false mold? How many more people have stories like her own, like her siblings'?
There is one markedly different part, and Vanya asks in what might be a squak if her voice weren't so low, "demon blood?" The question is out before she can stop it. Sam gives the most relatable shrug - uncomfortable, yet resigned - and she feels the same as him all over again. Her arms drop to her sides.
She adds, so as not to raise questions that she might be judging him, mouth quirked at the sides in a very small smile she cannot explain, "your family thought about killing you, too, huh?"
Suddenly, she doesn't want to have this conversation outside, anymore. It's cold and she thinks she can still feel the far away ripples of the destructive energy she's converted. She jerks her head toward the place and says, "come on. I think I owe you at least a coffee."
no subject
Too long, and he was relieved when she didn't immediately demand more answers. Huffing out a laugh, Sam nodded, reaching into the car to grab his phone and then shutting the driver's door.
"I'm sorry. About the call. I didn't mean to scare you," he said, offering her a sheepish smile as he followed her to the door of the diner.
At this time of night, it was nearly empty, and reminded him of every other diner he'd ever been in. The same booths. The same plastic menus. The same yellowed, fluorescent lights.
no subject
"Don't be," she reassures him as they reach the inside of the diner. There's something about the booths and the color scheme that reminds her of Griddy's with it's little four-tops and metal/vinyl chairs. A woman tells them to seat themselves and Vanya offers a little smile in return. She usually has more outward gratitude for a serviceperson. The evening's events have her off-balance. Perhaps this is why she selects a nearby booth without the fuss of consulting her new friend.
As she slides herself in, she places her music books down in the corner beside her and says, "maybe hold off making the crime call until after a person's out of earshot. For next time." Not that Vanya can really ever be totally out of earshot, but that's not important.
"You said your girlfriend is - um - a hacker?" She takes a menu from the corner of the table and passes it over to him.
no subject
He huffed out a laugh.
"Or, any world, I guess."
no subject
A man whose days consist of stealing records and drinking demon blood is also one that rescues tiny, scared death machines from wrongdoers and from herself in what world? His answer stands, she supposes: any.
"You, said that you were born with your powers? But they were dormant? What happened?" As much as she wants to ease into this conversation, he may have answers for her or some kind of clarity. He said he was okay to talk, and she has to trust him. Already the preemptive sting of rejection is working its way to the surface. All she can do is trust him - again - and hope that his word means something. Disappointment is something she can handle, if she needs to.
no subject
"I wasn't. Born with them. Well, it's... complicated." He winced. "I was born with the potential. But when I was six months old, a demon fed me its blood, and that did the, uh. Triggering, I guess. Which, wow, sounds... insane, but that's pretty much just the tip of the Winchester iceberg, so." He grimaced.
"But they didn't manifest until I was... twenty-two? I started having these dreams, at first. Visions, sometimes when I was awake, and they started to come true."
no subject
Yup, that makes sense: Reginald Hargreeves is a demon brings a kind of therapeutic clarity money can't buy.
"I'm... a little caught up in the demon part, to be honest," she admits, ducking her head a little. It's shameful because he's telling her about these parts of himself and she's stuck on what seems to be only a detail to him. This is a thing that shaped his life, that warped and recreated it, and she's in a selfish spot.
"We, uh, my family - adopted - we all have powers. We were born on the same day. Our Dad... this billionaire adopted us and raised us as superheroes, basically." Ooh boy, here's the fun part.
"Not me," she says with a dry, self-deprecating smile that would be sweet if it weren't born of a broken heart. "He couldn't control my powers, so he drugged me and made me forget. I found out I had powers about 6 months ago when I blasted these guys..." Kinda like Sam saw, so she guesses they're up to speed. Well, almost.
"I guess that's the tip of the Hargreeves iceberg. So." That little twist of the lips is back, like a smile that doesn't quite belong except that, maybe for the first time, she's talking to someone that knows almost exactly how she feels. It's strange, maybe even thrilling if it weren't so devastating.
no subject
And he had been, as a kid, first learning that monsters were real, and later, when demons and finally angels had come into play. Mostly, nothing surprised him anymore, but that hadn't always been the case.
"Your father drugged you?" He thought, not for the first time, that maybe he'd been a little too hard on John. "Oh, God. I'm sorry."
Folding his hands on the table, he said, "Finding out that I was the exact thing I'd been taught to hate? That I... had this thing inside of me that I had no idea how to control, let alone explain? It... it took a long time to even know who I was, anymore. And even longer to accept it." His lips twisted in a smile to match her own. "Definitely longer than six months."
no subject
She settles for tea, which appears in front of her as soon as she starts to wonder where the waitress went. She drops Sam's coffee off, as well. Vanya uses the space to think for a second.
"Can I assume your family didn't take it well? When your powers were activated?" She's got her hands curled around her mug like maybe she ordered a security blanket more than a beverage. She wants to be bold and put a voice to the questions she has while she has this kind book of a man open so generously before her.
no subject
He shrugged.
"Family's... complicated. Trust me, I get it. It's... I couldn't be who I am without my family, and that doesn't just include blood, but there's also been a lot of damage done. To each other, and to the people around us. We're... pretty screwed up," he admitted, if only because he had a feeling she could relate.