Merritt Mckinney (
the_hermit) wrote2016-06-15 12:43 am
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Entry tags:
For
nine_ofswords
Summary: In which Merritt fails his will save Merritt makes a stupid decision... In which this thread ends badly.
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Merritt goes still, something about him calming, and the smile that crosses his face is humorless. "That little 'stunt' was easy," he begins seriously, his tone becoming carefully measured.
"The Horsemen are my family, and leaving that man a drooling idiot was the very least I would do to protect them."
He's not close enough to actually, physically reach Ben, but he doesn't need to be. He swings, mentally, lashing out with a burst of magic designed to cripple.
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Merritt goes still, something about him calming, and the smile that crosses his face is humorless. "That little 'stunt' was easy," he begins seriously, his tone becoming carefully measured.
"The Horsemen are my family, and leaving that man a drooling idiot was the very least I would do to protect them."
He's not close enough to actually, physically reach Ben, but he doesn't need to be. He swings, mentally, lashing out with a burst of magic designed to cripple.
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It seems, for a moment, for ages more than, for both at the same time, that this is it, that Dylan honestly did leave him here to rot -- and then there's the sound of footsteps in the hall.
Whoever or whatever it is, they're obviously trying and mostly succeeding at stealth, but in an otherwise silent building, the sound still sticks out. They stop outside Merritt's door and, after a beat, the door rattles as whoever's on the other side tries to push it open. The deadbolt catches the door, stops them from coming in, and there's a growl of a swear, followed by what sounds, very vaguely through the wood, like Henley's name. Another pause and a hand pushes through the reality of the door, not a woman's, not Henley's, but like her, phasing through it. Fingers scrabble for the lock, find it, turn it open, and then the hand withdraws. The door opens in earnest less than a heartbeat after that, and Dylan steps into the room.
Not unlike the first time, he takes a few seconds to clear the room, this time, with a gun, found or created from the ether, and -- and he stops when he spots Merritt, recoiling as if physical struck. Despite the fact that he was just here, there's worry behind his eyes, fear and now horror, all of it out of place with the anger, the cold from earlier.
"Jesus Christ," he breathes, and then he's moving for Merritt and the chair, tucking the gun away as he goes.
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He counts his breaths to distract himself, to remind himself he can breathe, but when he reaches the thousands, he has to stop, the distraction turning into just another reminder of how trapped he really is.
By the time he hears footsteps outside the room, Merritt is staring blankly at a point on the opposite wall, defeated. For a moment, he doesn't register that there are footsteps - but then he hears the door jolt, and he has to force himself not to startle, to hold still.
Dylan's appearance is no relief, and he swallows again as best he can with a mouth left dry by the combination of his own panic and the conditioned air, slumping back into the chair, eyes refixing on that vague point across the room. He has nothing to say, and even if he did, he doesn't have the air for it.
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Not that he expects him to answer back, regardless, because yes, he does note the chain around his throat and how painfully tight they all are. It's as much for his own benefit (as well as, seemingly, someone beyond him and Merritt) as it is anything else and as he rounds the chair to look for locks.
He finds none, and breaking in his not-quite-prayer, mutters something about needing locks. A swell of magic follows, as does a metallic shunk, and a relieved breath as, while Merritt can't see it from where he is, a bouquet of them all but ooze out the back of the chair, along with the opposite ends of the Merritt's restraints. He flicks a glance over to Merritt, to make sure that hasn't put any more pressure on him (so far, so good), and then goes for the lock keeping the one around his throat in place, a set of picks, Jack's picks, appearing from seemingly no where as he reaches for it.
Beyond him there's a flicker of movement as his shadow, oddly not his own even when he entered, shifts and then shifts again. He ignores it as he works the lock, and a handful of heartbeats later, there's the sound of clicking metal and the chain around Merritt's throat goes slack.
"Don't try and move yet," he orders, distracted, as he moves onto the next. There's something like a dozen of them and he imagines this isn't too far removed from the chains that held him in place in his head, when Torre locked him away -- the more Merritt struggles, the worse it will get.
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When the chain loosens, he's just confused. A faint burst of something gets through his despair, the feeling of there being more people in the room than just him and Dylan, but he's exhausted and can't think what to make of it. He's not passing up the opportunity, though, and he sucks in as much of a rasping breath as he can against the constriction that remains across his chest, doing his best not to start wheezing. "Now what?" he manages after a moment, his voice still rough but not quite as painfully so. "Gonna feed me to those guys downstairs after all?"
Maybe Dylan decided to make this quick after all. That would be better.
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He heard him, he just doesn't understand.
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There's bitterness in his tone, now, but no heat; he's still defeated. Whatever Dylan's planning, he's resigned to be helpless to stop it - just like when Wade screwed him over.
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The temperature in the room drops noticeably. A spike of heat follows, like standing in front of a space heater on a cold day, albeit not one directed at Merritt, the feeling crashing around him without actually touching him, and then the cold flows back in. There's a sense of sickness to it, Dylan, whatever's beyond him, fighting with his equilibrium as his stomach rolls, and, to a lesser extent, something hard. This affects him; this infuriates him, touching down to the very real core of his temper.
Giving up on the locks, he rounds the chair to stand in front of Merritt, looking as torn between those extremes as he feels. His shadow flickers violently between several different forms, none of them his, and quietly, he puts words to it all. "He used me."
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Raking his tongue over his teeth, he blows out another breath through his nose, and holds up his hands, plainly in view of where Merritt's not looking at him. Nothing up his sleeve. When he lowers them again, he takes another step forward, his legs filling the space between Merritt's, and reaches for him slowly, leaning in as he does so. He hooks one hand around the back of Merrit's neck, gently, so gently, and guides his face up to his, forcing him to look at him as he presses his forehead to Merritt's. The only way he's going to get out of this, now, is if he closes his eyes.
"Merritt, listen to me," he starts, voice back to soothing, shaking. "The guy that trapped you here? That wasn't me. Me and the kids just got here."
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"He was you, Dylan," he breathes, and his use of the wrong name probably speaks volumes to how nearly broken he is by all this. "I know you, and..." he tries to go on but ends up just cutting himself off, and his eyes do slip closed, now, against the possibility of hope.
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It doesn't hurt that Ben was in his head, once, too. Between the two of them, he imagines it let him do a damn convincing impression, not to mention find the things that would hurt Merritt the most and use them against him. It's a miracle, in that instant, that the frost doesn't return for how angry that thought makes him. The only thing that stops it, stops him is the fact that he doesn't want to disturb too much here, for fear of hurting Merritt more.
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And again, he slumps, but there's a release of tension now, the doubt and fear fading as he lets his head tilt into Dylan's. His arms twitch faintly, fighting the currently impossible urge to reach out to him, just barely holding still against the threat of the chains tightening again.
"I'm sorry," he breathes, finally.
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He can't promise that he won't read him the Riot Act over this later, when Merritt has recovered, when the kids have, when he has, the terror he felt when he got that text message, when he found Merritt unconscious again cutting through any grudge he still held against him, and likely to cling, but he's not kidding when he says he understands. He would have done the same, if he hadn't been too busy grieving to think yet of going after their attacker. He might still, when the crisis is over and before his fury stills, despite having a first-hand example of how badly that might go.
"We're gonna get you out of here," he continues after a moment, as if that wasn't obvious.
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That said, he rounds the chair again, lock picks reappearing from where ever they disappeared to when he came to stand in front of Merritt. There's another flicker of movement off to his side, where his shadow falls, the dark shifting once again and settling into Jack's as he goes to work. The locks proceed to come off, not one at a time, but in pairs, another popping free on its own when he finishes with the one on the other side, and sooner rather than later, the chains go lax in entirety, dead, empty. They don't reach for him again.
Dylan, on the other hand, does, darting around the edge of the chair as soon as the last lock comes off. He puts a hand immediately to Merritt's shoulder, to catch him if he should pitch forward and as a presence beyond the fact that the room practically buzzes with a sense of him and the kids, the lock picks disappeared again. "We've got you."
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He doesn't quite pitch forward when Dylan frees him, but he does slump forward, pulling his injured hand to his chest as he takes deep breaths for the first time in what feels like days. Dylan's hand on his shoulder feels like four of them, and if his hands weren't all but useless, right now, bloodflow just starting to return, he would reach up to cover them with his own. As it is, he just leans into their touch, taking a moment to breathe.
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He does, however, clear his throat almost absently a second later before, in his own voice and just his own, offering, "When you feel like you can move, we'll see about getting out of here entirely." He's not going to rush Merritt, but they're not done here, yet.
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Slowly, he works his uninjured hand, real pain on his face now as the numbness starts to give way to pins and needles, the same happening with his feet as he carefully stretches out his legs, giving a soft noise of discomfort as cramped muscles protest the change in position, no matter how slowly he tries to take it. "It might be a minute," he both warns and agrees.
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He is, however, sorry that Merritt's in the state he's in, that they weren't here sooner, that he didn't realize something was up when Merritt went to bed in the first place. (He should have known; he failed, again, as a protector.) While he manages to keep it off his face, however, the thought still likely carries as if he'd said it out loud, and so the apologetic look that follows, finally, belatedly is genuine.
He looks away a moment later. "We got time."
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Obviously. But the guy really had been more of an asshole than he was expecting, and he couldn't let the threat go unchallenged, and then the guy had cheated, using Dylan against him.
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Clearly, the kids are giving him just as much shit, albeit only in a place where he can hear.
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After a moment, he mirrors the gesture, reaching up to rub at his forehead. His hand still feels odd, like his fingers are too big, but it's stopped hurting, thankfully. (His broken finger is another story, but he assumes that's a problem that will be fixed when he wakes up.) "So I'm guessing I freaked out the whole household," he begins guiltily as he puts that together with everything else he's noticed through this.
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When he woke up to the text, he'd gone immediately to Merritt's room and tried to pull him out immediately and by himself. It hadn't gone very well. Afterwards, he'd all but literally started kicking down doors, going room to room to wake the rest of their people. That, he figures, was just as much a rude awakening as the news he delivered once he'd had them all out of bed and together.
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"I know we've had our issues, lately," he starts, eyes dropping for a second, almost guiltily, before he returns his attention to him. "But you're still a part of this family. You're still a part of my family. That doesn't change just because I needed to be pissed off at someone, and I decided I was gonna go with the first people I saw when I woke up, like some retarded duck."
A meaningful look follows, as Dylan hopes Merritt noticed the use of past tense there. He really can't be pissed off at him, anymore. Not when he almost lost him, not when it was potentially his fault, his quiet upset at dinner the night before the straw to the camel. Not when all of it put the fear of God into him.
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