Post by Wilhelm Opens-the-Way on Feb 9, 2010 19:20:41 GMT -8
Suggested Listening: E.S. Posthumus - IsfahanThe mind is a funny thing.
It seems as if time has stopped. Individual snowflakes hang motionless, glistening in the air. Hannibal Relays-the-Truth is nearly nude, save for a loincloth. His body hangs, impaled from his stomach on the horns of a massive, rearing twelve-point buck, in the middle of the snow and ice on top of a mountain. His blood is a violent red, hovering in timeless droplets above the trampled snow, trickling down the horns and spattering beneath him. The instant lasts forever, and all he can think about is the first time in Egypt that he almost died.
1997
Giza, Egypt
Just before sundown
The Jeep rolled over the old desert road purposefully, leaving a trail of dust flowing sideways behind it. It's driver was full of life, grinning, gaining simple pleasure from the road beneath him. The seventeen year-old was, as almost all seventeen year-olds are, invincible, fearless, and totally unsure about his future.
Hannibal was also just fine with that concept.
The Jeep was stolen. Han knew just enough about larceny to hotwire a car, and just enough electronics to know which wires to twist on the bulky late-90's GPS unit to connect it to the car's electrical without a cigarette adapter. Han knew a little about everything. With no formal education, travelling with his mother all over the world looking at ruins since he was walking, he'd learned how to sail a boat, fire a gun, gut an ibis, hide food from predetors in the Seringetti, navigate a Kabul marketplace and the right insult to make a southland preacher drop his gun and try to fight him bare-handed. Getting out of said fight without a shiner? That was different.
Raised by an academic, a constant roulette wheel of tutors, mercenaries, traders and guides, Hannibal knew a little bit about everything, which turned out to be just enough to get him into a lot of trouble most of the time. Today was no exception. The Jeep belonged to his latest tutor a man that Hannibal had decided he liked too much, which meant that he instantly had to 'take the piss out of him' which was his mother's Brit way of saying to give him no end of hell. It was the extended version of punching a buddy on the arm.
"Chuck" wasn't particularly personable, and the veins on his neck constantly stood out, and what the hell a full-blooded Pawnee American Indian was doing as a guide to dunes in the middle of literal bumfuck Egypt made no sense to Han at all, but he said he knew his mother, and had known his father, which was, right there almost grounds for disqualification as a likable human being since his father had abandoned him and his mother while Hannibal was still a child, but he had some pretty awesome stories, the kind that mercs liked to tell, about rebellions and 'holing up' and dusty towns out in the middle of Nowhere America at the sideboard of a carnie mess tent.
The worn green Jeep turned onto a less-travelled dirt track and headed out over the desert, the sun burning the edge of the world and throwing deep shadows over the dunes. It was stunning. Han was almost lost in the feel of the hot wind blowing past his face when the Jeep suddenly jolted to the right, the tire shredding in an instant, ripping the steering wheel from his hands. The Jeep veered off of the dirt track and up onto a dune, spinning sideways and tipping over before sliding into an obelisk of stone peeking out of one of the dunes.
For awhile there was no sound besides the ticking of the cooling engine, and the smell of oil and radiator fluid leaking into the arid, sandy hillside. Then the sound of jackals calling in the night, and the sound of a teenager groaning and pulling himself from the wreckage of a Jeep.
Han stumbled out of the cab. The sun had gone down, only the stars and moon lit the night, and eyes. Jackal's eyes, reflected in the moonlight, green hollows of irridescent lust for meat. His blood trailed down from his broken arm. His other arm reached for his boot knife, slowly as growls and yips of six jackals surrounded him.
They dodged in and out of his range, their jaws snapping at him, each time getting closer, until one of them seized his leg. he got a kick for his trouble, but two others moved in at the other leg, and another grabbing a bit of his shirt from behind, overbalancing him and bringing him to his knees as his wounded leg buckled. Another snapped at his neck, and Han was barely able to keep it away with the flourish of his knife. He was bleeding a lot. He was weak and tired from the heat. Dehydrated, at the edge of his endurance, and he was going to die.
Then he got angry. Rage filled his blood to burning, a roar ripped through his bruised chest as the bones of his ribs cracked and popped. As Hannibal watched in horror, his fingers stretched and elongated into claws, and his jaw stretched into a muzzle as every hair on his body grew coarse and long. His fury was a whirlwind, a dust-devil, a sandstorm.
His attackers fled, those that survived, yet the sixth hung back and leapt away at the speed of an eyeblink until his rage was spent. Then the last Jackal's eyes told him to rest, called him Cub, and Han watched blearily as his body lost it's hair and size and he returned to the tattered rags that remained of his clothing, and darkness. The human part of him thought he had died.
But the mind is a funny thing.
Mount Hood
Present day, weeks ago
The forever instant
Han screamed in defiance as the world returned to fast-time and struck again and again at the hide of the great buck with the short knife he'd been given. Each stab was in vain, the knife, slick with his own blood wouldn't stay straight in his hand, and the buck's hide was tough. The buck shook its head, attempting to dislodge the human impaled there, and Han's scream of defiance turned to one of pure pain. The horns moved inside of him, tearing apart his stomach and upper intestines like bone daggers.
He stabbed again. Again. Nothing. His hands in Homid were too weak, the angle wrong from above it's head. Han looked at the buck's eyes, white and wide and full of fury.
With each shake of the great buck's head he felt weaker, and the cold dug deeper into his skin. His breath became shallow.
Hannibal closed his eyes. For an instant snow was sand. For an instant cold was hot. His body flushed, it shivered. It had nothing to do with him anymore, he thought.
He reached out with the dagger one last time, felt the dull tug of it on the short fur of the buck's throat, and wondered if he would die from the cold, the loss of blood, or the promise that hung in the name of the Garou he'd hoped to impress, Kills-the-Weak.
Cold was cold again, Han's fingers numbed and then felt hot. Impossibly hot.
Ruby red arterial blood rushed out over his arm as the buck moved slowly to his knees. It splashed his legs, got in his mouth. Han opened his eyes to see the white snow around him soaked with the blood of the animal. His knife had found the soft spot beneath the jaw, and drawn forward to him, had opened the buck's throat.
The buck faltered and fell. Cold snow shocked the soles of Hannibal's bare feet.
It was a clean kill. The only cut he'd managed to make was it's death.
Han gritted his teeth and pulled himself off of the buck's horns slowly, grasping his innards to himself. Hot steam rose from the buck's body with it's spirit, before being led away by a ghostly-white stag into the winter mists of the northwestern forests and beyond into the Umbra.
"Will I die?" Hannibal had asked his father those many years ago in the desert, nursing his wounds from the dogs of the wastes.
"Gloriously my son," promised Khufu Leech-Blinder, "But not today."
((OOC - thanks to HST River for a great scene.))
