taxonomites | In Person [location: Taxon Forest Cliffs]

Entry tags:

In Person [location: Taxon Forest Cliffs]

Scott’s marker comes back onto the map with as much pomp and circumstance as it vanished.

More strangely, his tablet doesn’t join him instantly to broadcast his misfortune. It appears nearby, resting on a tree stump out of the way, but whereas usually it delights in showcasing these moments, it remains quiet now, when perhaps he needs it most.

Five days is a long time where he’s been. He’s pale and drawn, deprived of sunlight and enough food and water. He has dark circles around his eyes, a mixture of exhaustion and bruising.

There’s no awareness of being moved again. He’s simply regaining consciousness and feeling grass and dirt rather than the metal and stone of where he’s been held, a deep ache in his head and uncomfortable pressure in his eyes.

Slowly, he reaches up, feeling over his face and flinching as his fingers poke sore skin and no visor. He has to risk it anyway, bringing his hands to his face, fingers white knuckle laced as he flickers his eyes open.

Nothing.

No light. Not in or out. No warmth over his hands.

He opens them again, fully, but nothing reaches outwards. Nothing explodes, nothing is rent apart.

Everything is dark.

He can’t see.

He snaps his head up, eyes wide and unseeing, a solid, lightless red covering them from side to side.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Scott's head snaps around to the source of the sound, recognising the voice.

Of course, the video broadcast on Sherlock's end just shows the sky and some leaves, since it's still lying on a tree stump.

"Holmes? Where are you?"

A pause as Sherlock considers the picture and its implications.

"You can't see." It isn't a question.

Another pause, cogs whirring: "I'm transmitting a video broadcast through your tablet, which seems to be facing the sky through some oaks. Your tracker dot is located in Taxon Forest. If you can locate the sound of my voice, you might be able to find it. Are you injured?"

He stands up from his beanbag chair and starts getting dressed in preparation to take the tram to go find Scott, stripping off a T-shirt over his head and pulling on a sweater, but obviously this video broadcast is being viewed by exactly no one at the moment.

Is he injured? He's not sure. He hurts, he aches, but nothing has that sickening, heated stickiness of bleeding and everything moves when he wriggles it.

"I don't think I am." He shifts onto his knees, pointlessly closing his eyes to track the sound. He crawls, feeling his way with his hand to make sure there's nothing dangerous around. Finally, his hands find the stump and then the tablet, pulling it close and feeling the right way up. "Where in the forest? If it's near the cliffs, I can find my way back."

His eyes are still closed. It's habit. No glasses, no open.

"Don't," says Sherlock sharply, fixing the collar of the jumper and then tucking his tablet under his arm as he heads to his building's elevator. When he gets in he studies the picture further. Scott looks like hell, unsurprisingly; five days haven't been kind to him. He doesn't look like he's slept or eaten and his glasses are missing. "That would be irresponsible. I'll be there shortly."

At least he doesn't seem to be seriously injured; he looks tired and a little ill, but not anemic. His movements are clumsy and disoriented, but don't visibly bespeak broken bones.

The elevator goes ding at the ground floor and Sherlock leaves the building with his tablet in his hand, heading for his tram stop. "What happened?"

"Someone experimented on me."

He attaches the tablet to his wrist to free his hands and then pushes himself to his feet. He's been in worse situations and fully intends on helping to make his own way back towards town. Assuming he is where he thinks he is.

"I think they inserted something into the eye socket. There's a pressure, like contacts only much worse."

Sherlock makes an aggravated noise and drops the subject. Masculine pride as framed through the lens of civic responsibility is a truly aggravating thing, he thinks without a grain of irony.

Scott Summers has been experimented upon. That's... a bad thing? He tries to remember to assess things within a framework of sympathetic value judgments, arriving on this being a bad and potentially traumatizing thing and the situation requiring him to say something sensitive. Those are the worst situations. He makes a face and decides to offer sympathy the only way he knows how: by trying to solve the problem. "Is there still visual feedback?" he asks as he stands on the tram platform. "True blindness isn't blackness per se, it's -- blindness -- what I'm asking is, can you still see your eyelids or whatever's blocking them? If your optic nerve is still giving your brain some sort of feedback, you may not be permanently blinded."

"Don't patronise me, Holmes, I know a lot about blindness. I've been blind at various points of my life, I know the particulars. I can't see anything. No light, no shadow, nothing." His voice is snappish, the stress showing in his speech. "No optic blasts on the other hand."

"I am not patronizing you," says an irritable Sherlock, bumping straight into an Extra conductor without noticing as he boards the tram. "I am being thorough with no evidence of your knowledge or ignorance of the mechanics of blindness, and therefore no reason not to offer a very brief explanation. I don't patronize. You are being defensive, probably due to a combination of exhaustion, stress, and dehydration. It's very common."

He sits on the empty -- scattered with Extras, but empty -- tram car with his leg crossed carefully over the other as to not take up more than one seat. It's a Tube habit, difficult to break. He ponders Scott Summers's emotional state and how equipped he is to be a first responder in this circumstance: very ill-equipped, he concludes. "People have been worried about you," he says eventually. "Madelyne, Agent Smecker, Mr. St. John, a handful of others. They've been looking for you. Mr. Blood did a reading of some sort."

"I hate magic," Scott mutters. "Unpredictable, inexplicable damn," he cuts off with a hiss as he trips and catches himself on his hands. "Don't get Maddie. She'll panic and that won't do anyone any good."

"I am not getting Maddie. I am getting you." At least Sherlock lives near the forest. He's never been so grateful for Taxon's ridiculously overdeveloped public transportation.

He glances up at the station map, waiting for the tram to arrive at its next stop. "I am not responsible for any injuries you incur in the process of ignoring my advice to stay in one place until someone with the use of both their corneas finds you," he says. "I thought I should clarify."

"I have no intention of blaming you, I'm quite capable of taking responsibility for myself." To excessive levels, if had been said.

"I hiked across a desert blind, I can manage to trek back to town." Which was when he tripped on the root and went down again with a muffled curse.

"You are impossible," says Sherlock with another aggravated noise, trying to make the train go faster through sheer dint of will.

It doesn't. It does go, though, and soon it dumps him at the stop closest to the Taxon forest. He switches the transmission to audio for the time being -- not like it makes a difference to Scott, anyway -- so he can use the map. Yes, there's the dot labeled Scott Summers, stumbling along through the forest. Sherlock heads in that direction with the tablet held out in front of him like a map. "Concussions cause brain damage, however slight -- even ones incurred by tripping over roots," he says, glaring at the map like it's Scott's obstinate face. "Evidently you've tripped over more roots than I thought."

"I love the way you assume that no one can know the things you do," Scott snarls. "I don't have a concussion! I know what head injuries are like, just stop telling me!"

Scott's normally legendary control is precariously close to snapping. At Sherlock.

"It is called sarcasm. Sarcasm: a rhetorical advice sometimes employed facetiously -- f-a-c-e-t-i-o-u-s-l-y -- to imply someone is being an idiot with their own personal safety by pretending to give them advice on the subject of traumatic brain injuries, a topic with which they are clearly very familiar."

Sherlock is halted in his snappish reply by a. a large tree that threatens to give him a traumatic brain injury, as aforementioned, if he doesn't watch where he is going, and b. the realization that Scott is frightened and hurt and, well, panicking. There's no better word for it. Sherlock does have enough common sense to know that Scott Summers would like to be told that he is panicking about as much as he'd like to eat broken glass.

He takes a deep, deep breath, and summons what passes for patience in the person of Sherlock Holmes. "Scott Summers, you are panicking," he says flatly. "You are not an idiot. You're just behaving like one because you're frightened and you hate accepting help, particularly from a person you've already classified as relatively helpless. Calm down."

He turns off the tablet, as much for his own peace of mind as Scott's, and focuses on finding him.

~~~

It isn't difficult, at least. A blind person stumbling around in the forest is one of the loudest things present, generally, especially one as recently blinded and disoriented as Scott Summers.

Sherlock thinks better of touching Scott without warning, well able to imagine what kind of punch those arms could pack if surprised. He falls instead into walking alongside him about five meters to one side, enough to give him advance warning if Scott does anything sudden. "I'm not going to bother narrating what I'm doing, because I presume you can hear me," he states, looking Scott over a few times in the flesh -- he really does look like he's been tortured. "Stop. I need to have a look at you."

He steps directly into Scott's path, aware he might be unceremoniously shoved away.

"Then clearly you need more practice at it, since you just come off as a know it all child desperate to impress the world with his intellect," Scott growls at the tablet.

He hangs up on Sherlock when Sherlock hangs up on him.

~~~

In person, it's clear that Scott is dehydrated, which is what is probably making him confused and argumentative, battered and doing fairly well blind. He also stops as soon as he hears Sherlock, inhaling and tipping his head slightly. "Holmes. I don't need a look over by you. I need to get to Mick's place. He's an actual medic."

"I am determining if it's better to take you there on your own feet or call him to come here," Sherlock says, unruffled. He sounds as clinical and detached as he ever does; evidently the break from the conversation afforded him enough time to cool down. It helps that he's not injured, confused, or blind. "You're fine for walking."

He can't bring himself to say You're fine, because it's clearly untrue. Scott's eyelids look disturbingly misshapen, like he's undergone the torture that Sherlock knows very well that he has. He's dehydrated, bruised, and upset; should've brought along a juice box, but that's hindsight talking.

Sherlock almost holds out his hand and then realize that taking someone's hand is a horrendously precise motion to carry out unsighted, not without knowing exactly where it is. "I'm going to take your hand," he says after a pause, reaching out to do exactly that. "I walk quickly. You'll have nothing to complain about."

Scott turns and opens his eyes.

The red is blank. Featureless. And still more expressive than the glasses that normally hide his face.

"Don't touch me." He flinches back. "Stand still and let me find your shoulder."

Sherlock stares at the closest thing to a naked view of Scott's face he's ever gotten, fascinated and more than a little unnerved by the sight. He also has no real comprehension of why Scott's hand touching his shoulder is so different from Scott's hand touching his hand, but he complies anyway. Don't touch me is a sentiment he understands, at least.

"I'm going to call Madelyne," he says. "I'm going to call her on my tablet or on yours, before or after we get to Mick's house, but I am going to call her. It's up to you if you'd rather her find out from me or from you. But you're on the map again, so she is going to find out."

"If you try, I will flatten you." And he means it. Blind will not stop kicking Sherlock's butt. He trains blind for a reason.

He shifts around Sherlock's voice, laying a hand on his shoulder, the other on his elbow so that he'll be very clearly guided. "I'll call her after Mick has examined me and I know what's wrong."

Sherlock rolls his eyes at the threat, then remembers Scott can't see him rolling his eyes any more than he can sprout wings and fly off to Mount Olympus, and probably even less than that. So he just rolls his eyes harder, like it'll send out sixth-sense eye-rolling shockwaves. And it makes him feel better.

"I'm walking now," he informs him and then starts, one long step after the other. How ironic that Scott Summers is one of the few people in Taxon with a stride that remotely matches his. It's so tidy that it's irritating. "You're dehydrated, exhausted, hungry, bruised, uncomfortable, and generally miserable, and you have eye-shields of some sort that have been inserted into your eyesockets, maybe of ruby quartz, maybe not. I don't know. I'd have to have a closer study. I'm sure Mick can tell you what else is wrong with you."

He drags out a long, deep, you're-testing-my-patience sigh. When he finishes he changes the subject a little, though -- "Mr. Blood had a vision of you attached to a table, bleeding from the eyes," he says. "Madelyne knows that much, I do. I don't know if anyone else does. She sent a message to everyone when she realized you were missing. Mr. Blood and Mr. St. John were among those who turned up."

Scott keeps pace. He's fit, which is why, because he's in a terrible state and shouldn't be able to, but he just turns off that bit of his brain and tells himself to keep moving.

"Fine. Hang on." He focuses himself, eyes closed to help (it doesn't) and thinks outwards.

Maddie, I'm okay. I'm heading to Mick's, I'll call you once he's given me a check over.

Sherlock falls silent for the rest of the walk, listening to Scott's conversation with Logan with one of the tracks of his attention span and dedicating the rest to thinking about the situation: Scott's situation, specifically. There seem to be three relevant questions in all of this mess: what happened to Scott Summers?, how can he be restored to normal without endangering others with his unshielded eyes?, and what does this imply about our captors?

The first question is straightforward. In fact, Sherlock's fairly certain most of it has already been answered, and the rest will be answered with a cursory examination by Mick St. John. The second question, too, should be relatively straightforward: it'll take some doing, but with Scott's ex-wife the telekinetic and plenty of open space, Sherlock doubts it'll be a problem for long.

So he mulls over the third, but there's not much to be deduced from such sparse secondhand information. Someone decided to block Scott's eyes in a more permanent way -- was it punishment? Safety? Amusement? Scientific curiosity? Well, some of that should become evident from how they react to the removal, at any rate.

Sherlock breaks the silence when they're approaching Mick's house. "It's up ahead," he says curtly. "Far be it from me to assume anything about the biological particulars of Mr. St. John's species, but I should inform you that it's daytime."

Maddie notified, Logan... probably off cheering or marking trees or something, Scott is focusing on just getting to Mick's.

"I know. But I don't know any other medics here. I can wait until sundown to go and get him up." He has no idea what time it actually is, but he can feel the sunlight.

"I presume he's in the habit of leaving his door unlocked?" By habit, Sherlock's already examining Mick's house in a few glances for obvious points of weakness. It's not difficult to break into most Taxon residences; most denizens don't have much reason to keep things nailed down tight, Sherlock included. But he doesn't take Scott Summers for a trespasser, not even famished, thirsty, and in an atrocious mood.

In truth, Sherlock's not in the best mood himself -- not the sort of tightly wound upset that gets him snappish and angry, but the nebulous cloud of stress wrapped around any unsolved problem that isn't a game to him. There is nothing fun in this one. He's flustered; he's always flustered when he puts effort into something and it's not working and he doesn't understand why.

I thought to look. I noticed, he thinks. No powers, no great soft touch with crisis management, but genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains and no one else takes goddamned pains like Sherlock Holmes does. Does Scott think he found him by idly glancing at his tablet at the right moment? No. No, Scott's probably not thinking anything right now. Wishing for validation is juvenile, he reminds himself. Get ahold of yourself.

There is one tried-and-true way to get ahold of oneself. The sound of someone striking a lighter is fairly distinctive, as is the faint smell of a cigarette. "I don't imagine there's any point in offering you one," Sherlock says as an afterthought.

In ~~Moonlight canon~~ Mick's world, vampires are light sleepers for one very simple reason: if you aren't, you'll wake up with a stake in your chest and what's very probably your very own sending away party. Involving meat cleavers (in some cases) and bonfires (slightly more likely).

So, Mick sleeps lightly in his freezer chest on the lakeside end of his two stories high building.

Those with observant inclinations (and functional eyes), will note that one of the windows up there are boarded shut. From the outside, yes of course.

Edited (link to teal deer description of Mick's place - and a retcon of how many floors again?) 2012-09-28 13:04 (UTC)

[video] [locked]

[video] [locked]

[video] [locked]

[video] [locked]

[video] [locked]

[video] [locked]

[video] [locked]

[video] [locked]

Re: [video] [locked]

[video] [locked]

[video] [locked]

[video --> audio] [locked]

[video --> audio] [locked]

[audio --> location] [locked]

[audio --> location]

[location]

Re: [location]

[location]

Re: [location]

[location]

Re: [location]

[location]

Re: [location]

[location]

[location: Mick's place]