Struggle in Vain (El Rey/Closed)

Meridith sprinted down the slick concrete as rain poured down passing flickering neon and shops long closed. There was a chill in the air, her skin slick with rain and sweat was freezing from the cool night air. The rain fell in sheets but she pressed on, footsteps echoing out against the steady drum of rain. She exhaled hard trying to blink away from the blood that began to flow past her eye. She didn't think the Hollow got her, but a spray of concrete must have clipped her because she could definitely feel a sharp stinging gash on her forehead. Close. Too close.

Meridith was no stranger to close calls, this wasn't her first brush with death but a small bit of rising panic told her that it might be her last. It spurred her to run faster as the sound of pounding crashing steps behind her grew louder above the rain.

She slid across the ground virtually hydroplaning as she attempted to take a sharp left and sprint out of the alleyway and into the street. She had hoped the narrow passageway would slow it but all it did was serve to increase the property damage. She nearly slipped but caught herself and clawed her way back up into a run. Open streets.

As good a place as any for the last stand.

She desperately pulled the air into her burning lungs. She could run no further, not just because she was running out of steam but because she knew sooner or later it would catch her, and if it didn't then eventually they would show up and either way the game would be over. She had to gamble, win or lose, now.

She slid and turned in time to see the hulking shape slam into the concrete, shattering a power line and sending an arcing electrical line crashing into the streets. The lights flickered on the buildings nearby as it reared. She shut her eye, stinging from the blood and lined up with her remaining good one.

She reached up and ripped the shattered blade of a Quincy cross from her neck and thrust her hand forth. Between her fingers shone a brilliant blue light and within an instant the shape of a bow flared out and formed, shaped and burning bright with the reishi flowing through the air around her. The beast moved to launch forward but Meridith was ready. She drew her right hand back and formed a bright blue thin bolt of raw energy that crackled and hissed as the rain connected with it and burned away with a hiss of steam.

She poured forth her remaining energy into it as the Hollow moved to pounce upon its meal and finish. She let out a shout and loosed the arrow, doubling in size as it soared forth to consume the creature in a single shot. Her target shifted to get out of the way but it wasn't quick enough, though, in the end, it wasn't enough.

Maybe she just wasn't strong enough, maybe with one eye her aim was just a little off, maybe she just was unlucky enough to find an opponent hopelessly stronger. To her credit the arrow struck home and ripped the creature's massive arm off in a single strike, but it had another, and as it roared in fury, it had enough wherewithal to close the distance between them in a single pounce, its remaining arm reared for a fatal blow. It decided to trade the grievous wound for a fatal one and claim its reward.

Meridith stepped back in futility, and tried to focus enough energy for a second arrow but having poured all she had into the last, it was effort enough to remain standing upright let alone fight on. The shape of her bow wavered and threatened to go out.

She thought fondly of the retreating steps of the original target of this creature and knew well enough that at least it had not been in vain, that no matter what came next that they were safe.

The blow would never come.

He had watched the initial spirit on that forlorn street corner. A pitiful thing that would fill his belly to some extent, but it wouldn't be too long before he would have to hunt again. Then came the hollow. And the girl. It was only then that the hunt was on. Two souls competing over the fate of a single spirit. It was good bait. He would watch it again.

Maybe.

The girl had run. The rain was heavy, but he could smell the blood. And so could the hollow. It ran after her, as though pulled along by a string. The girl was potent. As potent as the hollow, but it was following her instead of going after the easier meal.

She was good bait.

He followed along at his usual distance. Far enough that his presence wouldn't cause the both of them to kneel before him. They might have the strength to remain standing, but that was not worth concerning himself about. The girl was doing something strange. She had stopped, turned, stood with aggression towards the hollow bearing down on her. Searing cerulean formed in her hands, and she attacked. And then she was weak. Bait once more, but good bait.

Good bait was hard to come by.

His teeth latched around the reared arm of the hollow, saber fangs at the front of his mask rendering his grip inescapable for one so wounded. He used his momentum against the simple beast, continuing forward and turning it onto its back. It roared at him when he broke it's wrist, and he released the limb and stood on its chest. Desperately it swung at him, at his mask. His head shifted from the blow, and then he shifted it back, throwing the limb back.

His teeth closed around it's throat, and his head reared back, taking the flesh with him. It yet still lived, as most hollows had no proper organs, but it mattered little to the new victor. Rip and tear until the deed was done, and his belly was full. The broken thing below him had hunted, and become prey.

Prey.

He looked up, and for a moment, the storm above them parted, allowing clean moonlight to pour over the both of them. The girl and the beast of bone and sinew. He stepped down off the carcass of the other hollow, taking three steps towards the girl. Great yellow disks peered over her, and his nostrils flared as he caught her scent through the rain.

"You are not dead. Merely close."

Meridith summoned the remaining strength she had to keep upright, to take whatever was coming head-on. The flickering light of a second reishi formed arrow began to glitter against the rain as it closed with her. She loosed it as death approached and fell to her knees against the solid concrete. The arrow struck air, soared into the night sky and burned out distantly like a glittering shooting star. She didn't die? She was unharmed?

She replayed the events in her head. Out of energy, struggling to remain standing, the Hollow closed in on her. She loosed a final arrow that definitely missed. Then there was a crash and...she turned her blurry vision in time to see it, a creature half torn apart, blood splattering across the street, spilling into the drains mingled with the flowing rain. She hadn't miraculously survived, she simply...delayed her fate. But why? And how? She had faced Hollow's before but two of them in a single city? What in God's name!?

She forced herself up, standing on two trembling legs, muscles running on a mixture of fatigue, adrenaline and honest to goodness healthy fear. Perhaps it had forgotten her in its feast? Meridith wouldn't suffer one of these creatures to live, but she wasn't above exercising the better part of valour. The rain let out finally, slowed as she made a half step back and the creature turned from its feast and fixed her with a stare.

She hated that look, she knew what Hollow regarded her as, prey. Food. Carrion. She pressed her teeth hard together and steadied her trembling right arm. She could form the bow if she had to, a surprise shot that could get her safely away. She just had to be careful, she just had to pick her moment.

But then it did something that surprised her. It spoke. A giant monster twisted into the form of a giant feline, a rumbling voice that caught her off guard because it existed at all. Hollow...could talk? She knew they had strange powers, she knew they were born of souls twisted by their long entrapment once departed, but she never thought she'd meet one that could speak. At the very least she never expected them to have an opportunity to share some words with her.

She gaped for a moment, but only a moment, she knew not to show any weakness and found herself shouting back. "Not as close as you might hope!"

She made no aggressive move, but in the moonlight, the Hollow might have spied the surreptitious gathering of reishi between her fingers in a fist clutched tightly around her cross.

"Hope."

He repeated the word in the manner of someone unused to language as a whole. Indeed, the concept of hope was one that held little sway over his day to day existence. He did not get any closer to the girl than he had already, instead sitting on his haunches and raising his front half to it's full bearing. The hole was on display in his chest, through which could be seen the slowly dispersing clouds and twinkling stars of the night sky behind him.

"I do not hope." he finally said, finishing the thought. "I merely observe. You are close to death, but have not passed the threshold. You still live, and can still run. Can still fight." His gaze dipped briefly to her hand. Yes, he did observe that she was trying something, and still he sat there, still as a statue and boring into her with that appraising gaze. "You are able to weaken those either stronger or luckier than yourself. And thus your attempted killer was a good meal."

His tongue pushed out from his mouth and beneath the mask, cleaning off some of the blood and viscera that still clung there after the rain passed. His tail flicked and swayed behind him while he considered her. "I am full." he spoke again, the line delivered as flatly as all the others. "For the moment. I can never be rid of this hunger, but it can be placated from time to time." His eyes flicked up at the sky, at the moon, and then back down on the girl. "In the time between, I learn."

The meal would give him plenty of time to learn. He focused on her eyes, saw the fury in them. The hurt. Fear. It was the look the other hollow had given him as he bore down on it. It was the look of prey resigned to death that would take as much of its predator with it as it could. His tail whipped around, crashing into a pothole caused by the lumbering of the larger hollow, and sending a not insignificant amount of water at the girl.

"You are good bait. I do not eat bait. I watch it, and wait for my meals to come."

She caught her breath and steadied herself, she stared down the predator, careful not to blink with her remaining good eye. The tremble in her muscles began to steady slowly as she prepared herself. She wasn't entirely sure right now what she was preparing herself for, just, preparing to do whatever it was when she had to do it. Messy. Everything about this was messy, she could already hear the voice of her instructor chiding her. She could only hope she'd get to hear it.

The way he said hope back to her cemented the alien differences between them. Even if it was once human, it was Hollow now, a monster with no real connection to the person it was, her sworn enemy and quarry on better days than this.

She watched as his gaze dipped briefly to her hand and felt a self-conscious twinge to hide it behind her back, she did not. He made no hostile move so instead, she simply condensed the reishi in her palm and left it like that.

She paused after he spoke and slowly pieced it together. He used her to hunt that creature. To conserve his own strength he let it chase her down. This was a level of intelligence she didn't think they were capable of. If she succeeded in killing it, would it have interfered to steal the meal? Would it have instead chosen her and let the creature go? Of the dozen or so Hollow's she had encountered this was by far the most terrifying, and it seemed to have no interest in her at all.

She straightened up, broadened her stance and continued to just breathe. No matter how terrifying the prospect was, she couldn't be entirely certain that if she bolted it wouldn't be on her and if it was content to talk she was content to let it and marshall her strength. She began to shiver.

She stared into the creature's eyes and felt a despicable fury within herself. She should kill this thing, she should free it from the pain to which she saw reflected in all Hollow eyes, intelligent or not. But she couldn't, she was too afraid, too weak. Intelligent or not to back away, that insecurity plagued her. She sprang back as a spray of water struck her from the thwack of its tail and landed uncertainly, poised between bolting and fighting. She stayed still, seeing neither.

Good bait...wait. Would it have chosen to harm her? Was that the struggle? She chided herself for naivety and resumed her broad stance, trying to match every part of hunter. Finally, she spoke back.

"Do you have a name, Hollow?" her voice rang clear and firm, only the barest quaver towards the end.

She was scared. No matter how much she might try to hide it, he could still see it in her face. Hear it in her voice. It was so . . .

"Interesting."

Not the best response to her question, and that was because it wasn't. Again, he merely gave an observation, delivered flatly and without bias. His pose finally shifted from the upright sitting. He lowered one end, lifted the other, and stepped towards her. One. Two. Three. And then it sat down once more, the motion without apparent motive unless she happened to look down.

He had reestablished the distance that had been between them when they first began to speak. Once more the hollow peered down at her, considering the question as one might an abstract sculpture placed before them. "Names are fragile things." He had, after all, lost his own. He knew he was at one point something like her. He reasoned a name must have been important to him then, at least as much as it was to her now. "But powerful." He was facing her. Looking at her. His eyes were fixed on her own. His voice directed towards her for there was no one else to speak to on this night. The only other possible participant rested within his gut.

And yet he did not speak with the purpose of playing the second half to her conversation.

"Do you fear a thing you have no name for?" His head tilted to one side, then the other, then returned to level. There was a small tensing motion that rolled through him, plainly visible as his musculature was on full display within its cage of bone. "There are those with swords. They name themselves shinigami. And they name all hollows. Even those who only contribute to the world through their death." He finally finished licking the viscera from his mask. Clean white bone once more. The last remnants of its existence no longer visible as by now even the body had faded into nothing.

"They name me. But they still fear. Will you, bait? They name me, El Rey."

The chill in the air held, the pause in the air stopped the rain but it didn't dry her off. Water continued to drip into the street abated.

He closed the distance between them a bit again, she observed that it was back to the distance they began with, perhaps specifically chosen. She recognized it, perhaps incorrectly, as the kind of distance it was confident it could close in an instant quicker than she could defend herself. In a small act of defiance, she shifted back a bit, not imperceptibly.

Mad or indifferent, Meridith couldn't tell. It didn't help that it didn't really have a face for her to read, alien. It was plodding and thoughtful and predatory. Appraising her but at the same time seemingly indifferent to the fact she was there. It spoke in response to her, but barely to her.

Her weight shifted back as the Hollow half responded to her question with one of its own, the muscles tensed and flexing as if it wanted to strike, but did not. She felt her own tension rise to match, was this it?

Shinigami.

Meridith was tense when facing the Hollow, afraid? Perhaps. She was uneasy and more than a little caught off guard, more than a little tense and tired. The mention of the Shinigami brought a chill down her spine. More than a Hollow cornering her in a midnight lit corner of Japan, Meridith was truly afraid of the black robes, of the blades they carried and the threat they represented. It was truly twisted that she would find kinship in that with a creature she was sworn to destroy.

What was the expression? 'Enemy of my enemy'? Bullshit.

If nothing else, it was a sobering reminder of why she had chosen to stand and fight the former Hollow now viscera on the mask of the second. Both Meridith and the Hollow were both on a timer because neither would survive if they were found here.

"I don't fear you, El Rey," she shot back, steadied now as the quaver left her voice. Though her teeth chattered between that and what she said next. "I'm wary and rightfully cautious, but not afraid." She stared him down as if suggesting he test her on that fact, even if she hoped he wouldn't.

She kept that energy held. "But afraid or not, I'm leaving, do you intend to stop me?" She half considered taking a shot here and now, but she knew it was stupid to take the gamble. She considered some parting dare or demand, but she'd entertained the thought of actually communicating with one of these creatures long enough.

Tick tock. Every second that passed brought them closer to annihilation. Her gaze broke with El Rey's towards the distance, how long did they have?

His tail whipped back around. Annoyance? Perhaps, though he made no other motion. There was no change in the expression of his eyes, nor his body language. No muscles twitched, no bones shifted and creaked. A single motion of his tail after she shifted back. Acknowledgement was the only thing that could be gleaned from it. He couldn't find a reason to form an emotion in response. A reminder that he was watching. And listening. But still there was nothing aggressive or even so much as untoward in his bearing with her.

"Shinigami."

He said the word again, and his gaze intensified briefly before softening once more. Though she broke the stare with him, he did not shift his gaze from her now. There was an understanding in his eyes. Something about her? About the shinigami? Both? Both. He understood something about both now. And yet again it was so very-

"Interesting."

There was a small motion now, in the forward half of his front limbs. A tensing, and then extension of claws from within the masses of muscle. The claws, then retracted and the tensing rolled up, along his forelimbs, through the shoulders, down his back and ended in a few spasmodic flicks of his tail. He was just stretching. Preparing for greater motion. For the first time in the exchange, he took a breath. Long, deep, loud, and slow. It had not breathed in order to speak. Its mouth had moved and words had manifested, but for that, the life in its eyes and the flick of its tail, the hollow had been a statue after it settled both times.

"You claim you do not fear me. But you fear those that do. Wary. Caution." The final two words in that string it spoke with a tone that suggested savoring. In much the same manner as it had spoken the word 'interesting'. "Fear by other names. Of the unseen present. Of the unseen future. Does fear stop at one, or does it transfer?"

It was truly not speaking to her now. Its eyes no more clouded, but the conversation was with something else. Someone else? Hard to tell. Control was there. Focus . . . waning. He did not lose himself. He would not lose himself for some time. He would think for some time. Speak, not much longer.

"You are good bait. Good bait is hard to come by. Good bait can become better bait if it lives?" He took another breath. Focus waned further. Thought sharp and clear. Focus dull, disparate. He had much to think. Much to know. Much to learn. Focus was luxury. "I do not eat good bait. I watch it, and I eat what follows. But I am full."

He got off his haunches, turned, and started to lope away. The further he stepped, the lighter the air became. Thinner. Not to the point of needing more to breathe but that it took less effort to breathe. It could be simple to shrug off, but it had always been there. If she wanted to think it, perhaps she would see it had been there the whole chase, and only now did it dissipate as the hollow left her to her own devices.

El Rey had his own concerns.

Her eyes flickered back to El Rey and kept locked as his muscles tensed, alert and ready, just like she. She reprimanded herself for looking away but could blame it easily on the fatigue that settled on her body. The rush of adrenaline was gone and now all she wanted to do was collapse somewhere warm and rest.

She held the energy in her palm none the less. El Rey, was, after all, her quarry. It would do poorly, even if it truly had no hostile intent towards her, let down her guard any further. She said nothing further, merely watched as it spoke, thinking out loud. A bit of both, in terms of fear. She was worried about dying here, she was worried she'd be the heart of a second inquisition against her family. Of the two, the second was a much more terrifying prospect than the first.

She bit her lower lip to keep from shooting back a retort. She'd be ready for this creature if it appeared again. She wasn't going to feed a Hollow, not with her labours. The very thought of it reminded her of her anger, a little bit of fuel to keep her focused. The idea that this thing would be following her, watching, waiting, in some twisted way...protecting? Well, to say she was uneasy was an understatement.

She watched as it turned away, became lighter, and then when she was confident it had gone she turned on her heels and sprinted back down the other end of the street, intent on being gone before anyone arrived.

Fin