singillatim | (no subject)

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Who: Hickey & OPEN!
What: cave visits, exploring around town, making some booze!
When: through the month of December
Where: in town, Misty Falls Cave.

Content Warnings: Hickey's god complex, animal death & mutilation, usual warnings for the Terror boys (possible talk of body horror, gore, cannibalism, etc.)

in town
Hickey makes a point to be a good neighbor. Moving something? He'll help! Chopping wood? He can help with that as well. The more useful and helpful he is, the more he ingratiates himself with everybody, the more likely he'll have people on his side whenever one of the rest of the crew of the Terror decides to actually say something about what happened back home.

When he goes out to hunt, occasionally he'll return with a rabbit or a ptarmigan, something he'll happily cook up for whoever wants any. This time is different. He's brought back an animal, a rabbit that looks off, burns on the flesh but nothing more. He makes sure to drop it away from his house (we're not going to contaminate the food) before carefully, in the middle of what passes for his yard, Hickey starts to carefully vivisect the rabbit. It's certainly a sight, and he looks up at whoever might be passing or walking by.

"Have you noticed some odd tracks out there? Out in the woods, just outside of town."

Misty Falls Cave
You're exploring the cave. It's dark, cold, there's a moment where you think you might be the only person in here. It's trapped, kept away, a small, solitary place cut off from the rest of the world—

And then you hear a loud "What the hell?!"

It's Cornelius Hickey, further down one of the paths. And he's just run into a dead end. And is very annoyed about that.

closed prompt for March
There's a loud pounding on March's door, the sort of pounding of someone who obviously doesn't really care about things like 'social conventions' or 'the fact that people might be asleep. Hickey continues knocking, but as he does so, he calls out,

"Oi! This is March's place, yeah? I brought some sugar for the alcohol."

Turns out that horrible trip in that cave had some results!

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Creepy bastard. Hickey doesn't know what that mask is, how it does that (or hell, how he even sees through it in the first place), but it's unnerving in a way. Granted, it would probably be less unnerving if the person behind it wasn't, again, a creepy bastard who often hangs out on rooftops (why do so many people here do that? Break your leg if you're not careful). But the fact remains.

"Did you see what caused it? Tried looking myself but I came up empty-handed." There's a pause before, "Well, almost empty handed," said as he nods down at the rabbit corpse. "But this thing isn't telling me a damn thing."

Rorschach shook his head. "Never had to hunt animals before." Had he grown up in a more rural area, perhaps that would have been a skill he could have learned. As it stood, he was a complete and utter amateur in the ways of tracking down animals.

"Men are easier." Well, that wasn't a disconcerting thing to say at all. It was for reasons like this some in the town thought he was a serial killer and some were convinced he wasn't even human.

Hickey looks at Rorschach like a goddamn idiot before pointing out, "Men have guns."

Men are easier to hunt? No they're not! In the wide array of animals, there's more prey than predators. Also in the wide array of animals, none of them have opposable thumbs. It's easy if you take them by surprise, yeah, but that's a big if. And there were various times in Hickey's life where that big if was nearly nonexistent.

"Put me in a fight with a random animal or a random person, I'd take the random animal any day. They can't use weapons."

Rorschach caught that look and it irked him greatly. His flat tone shifted a little, holding some sarcasm to it. "Really? Hadn't noticed. Must be stupid, just not understood all the times I've gone up against criminals with guns." The multiple healed bullet wounds he was carrying around said differently. Weapons had never stopped Rorschach from doing what needed to be done. Maybe he wasn't fast enough to catch a bullet, not like Ozymandias was, but he could still outrun them if he had enough luck.

He shook his head. What a naïve way of thinking. "Men are animals too. Die just as easily as any other animal." He'd long since stopped thinking of evil men as belonging to the human race. They were like wild animals infected with rabies. All you could do with a creature like that was to put it down.

This odd man can be a sarcastic little bastard all he likes, Hickey still knows he's right. Men aren't easier. They can think, they can plan, they can counter you. Animals operate on instinct. If you wanna kill someone, you take them by surprise. Otherwise? You've instantly made things three times as difficult.

Still, all this isn't changing his first assumption: this man's a fuckin' weirdo.

"Talk like that will make a man unlikable." Hickey raises an eyebrow before pointing out, "Dangerous thing to be in a place like this."

"Don't care," Rorschach said so dismissively that it was clear the idea of getting along with people was so far down on his list of priorities as to be non-existent. "Not here to make friends."

He'd gone his entire life with exactly one person he trusted and respected enough to call his friend. That was enough for him. He didn't have to get along with people in order to protect them and frequently hadn't.

Hickey can't help but laugh at that. He shakes his head, looking over at Rorschach with that same 'you're a goddamn idiot' expression.

"Then you'll die here," Hickey says, like it's the most obvious thing in the world.

Yeah, he's also not entirely here to make friends. But there's a difference between 'having a large array of friends' and 'being likeable.' Situation like this, a man can't survive on his own. You'll need people to rely on, people who you can keep an eye out for you if you're hurt. People like his men, his mutineers back home.

He's smart enough to push down his true feelings for a higher chance of survival. Who knows if this man is.

Being laughed at made Rorschach's temper rise. It was easy to see, the way his gloved hands balled into fists and his whole body stiffened up. Still, he wouldn't hurt Hickey. As far as he knew, the man was just an innocent civilian, and being an asshole wasn't a good enough reason to kill someone.

"Maybe," he said evenly, his flat tone hiding anything he truly felt. Underneath his face, his blue eyes were glaring at the blonde. "Everyone dies. But not before you go first."

Hickey's eyes are sparkling with excitement. He touched a nerve? Good. Whoever this is, better he get all this information in his skull now, better he figure out what's going on and get his head in gear before he ends up dead in a ditch.

And also, Hickey just likes being a pain. Both of these things can exist at the same time.

"You think you'll outlive me? Big talk from someone who doesn't know what he's doing here."

"And you do?" Rorschach shot back, gesturing to the rabbit carcass with a contemptuous air. "That meant to be an autopsy or a massacre?" He assumed someone who actually wanted to eat the burnt beast would have been doing an entirely better job of things.

Hickey rolls his eyes before pointing out, "Doubt you'll be able to do any better. How well can you see though that ridiculous mask of yours?"

Because obviously this man can see somewhat. But how good? Hell if Hickey knows.

"Well enough to see a fool before me." Hickey wanted to give him attitude? Fine. He'd give some right back.

Surprisingly, Hickey had been the first person to ask how Rorschach could possibly see through two layers of latex with floating blobs of liquid sandwiched between them. Not that Rorschach was going to give him a straight answer with the way he was acting.

He can't help but let out a sharp little 'heh' at that. Yeah, he should have expected something like that. Hickey looks over at Rorschach, frown on his face, as if he could examine the man, figuring out what was going on just by staring and examination.

"How's that thing work anyway? Patterns on it move. No fabric does that."

He knew looks like that. People who thought he was a puzzle to solved just like the images on his face. He'd yet to find anyone in his life who understood him completely. Much like his namesake, peopled tended to see what they wanted to when they looked at him.

When asked about his face, Rorschach wasn't about to tell Hickey the truth, not with how annoyed the other man had already made him. "Magic," he said in such a deadpan tone it was impossible to tell if Rorschach was being serious or flippant with that answer.

"Bullshit," Hickey simply responds. The tone is deadpan, but Hickey knows Rorschach is being flippant. He doesn't know much about the supernatural, the worlds of people and what they used to do back home. But he knows that for some people, what they could do back home doesn't happen here.

After all, Kieren would have bit someone by now if everything was the same.

"Again, how's that thing work?"

This time, Hickey got a proper response from Rorschach, though his tone remained flat and deadpan. He simply rattled off the facts as if reciting a recipe. "Two layers of fabric. Liquid in the middle is heat and pressure-sensitive, reacts to body temperature. That's why it moves. Sealed the edges with an iron to keep it together the way it was meant to be."

Then he stopped, just as abruptly as he had begun speaking. He waited to see what Hickey's reaction to that information would be.

Well that's intensely weird. And confusing. Heat and pressure sensitive, yeah, but they're also in the middle of the fucking Arctic. Shouldn't that thing be freezing? Also, again, why would you wear a stupid little mask to begin with?

Hickey's frowning, looking over at Rorschach, like he'll somehow manage to piece out even more information by staring. There's a moment before he continues,

"Why even wear that in the first place? Probably murder to breathe in."

He shook his head. Some people here, like Kate, it had been easy to tell them why he wore his face when they asked. They understood, at least a little even if his reasoning sounded insane. But Hickey was not one of them and Rorschach was not going to subject himself to his continuous judgment.

"You wouldn't understand." This was one question he was not answering no matter what the other man said.

"So it's something stupid."

Look, it's an easy enough assumption to make. If this weirdo isn't saying why he wears the mask, then what's the most logical answer? He's embarrassed. He's self-conscious. He thinks that Hickey's simple and wouldn't understand the in-depth, actual reason of it.

As far as Hickey's concerned? All of those reasons are stupid.

"Still, no use trying to stop a man from doing stupid things if he truly wants to do so."

As he suspected, Hickey was either too judgmental or too ignorant to understand the reasoning behind Rorschach wearing his face all the time. Thoroughly insulted, he bristled at being called stupid.

But for once he knew just what to say. "Of course. You must know all about that firsthand." Sorry, Hickey, you walked right into that one.

"Oi, fuck you." But it's said with a lightness in his tone and a roll of his eyes, nothing harsh or accusatory (because yeah, Hickey knows he walked right into that one).

"There's plenty of people here doing things more dangerous than me. There's that kid who broke his arm and those idiots who spends time on rooftops."

He gives Rorschach an innocent little smile, knowing full well that this man is one of those idiots who spends time on rooftops.

Rorschach glared at the man from under his mask and the pattern which formed was of two parallel lines at all the major points on his face: eyes, cheeks, and mouth. It lingered there for a moment longer than the other other patterns had. "Only stupid if you don't know what you're doing," Rorschach shot back. Yes, he was one of the rooftop weirdos but that didn't mean Hickey had to be rude about it! Hmph! Rorschach hadn't fallen off one yet and didn't plan on doing so. He was an expert in this particular skill set and knew he'd be fine, no matter what the other Interlopers thought.

Then his attention turned back to the first part of that statement. "What kid?" There was a number of them in town and all of them held the stupidity of youth. Rorschach just wanted to make sure it wasn't one of those he found somewhat tolerable.

"You know, the one with the rabbits. Poor little rich boy who likes the sound of his voice."

What the hell was that kid's name...

"Tim! That's it, Tim."

Rorschach searched his memory. Was that the kid he'd met in the graveyard? But he couldn't be certain. See, this is where actually learning the name of people in the town would have come in handy.

"Talking is overrated." He snorted contemptuously. No surprise there given how little he talked in any given conversation.

"Nah, talking can save a man's skin," Hickey points out, with a little shrug. "Only those who are rubbish at it say that it's overrated. And, to nobody's surprise, you're more than a bit rubbish at talking."

Hickey learned very quickly that the ability to weasel one's way out of a situation is a more useful skill than some people realize.

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Re: In Town

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cw: gore

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