onlythebranch | (no subject)

Entry tags:

chuck hansen,
debut

(no subject)

He should've fucking known this was going to happen.

Laura Moon, dead goddamn bitch that she is, has him by the balls. Literally by the balls. Halfway up a wall in Ostara's home, squeezing every last bit of feeling out of them and he's not convinced she's not about to rip them right off his body.

"Which. Fucking. God."

"Me fucking god," he answers with a groan of pain. "I ran you off the road."

"See, here I thought I hit the gearshift with my shoulder. All this time I've been blaming myself. I guess now I have somebody else to blame, right?" She twists her hand to punctuate the question and Mad Sweeney feels a scream rising in him before he can stop it.

"That's right," he manages to grind out. "I killed you. I killed you fuckin' dead."

"No," Laura answers and he should have fucking known. Should've seen this coming a mile off. She's a right cunt, but she sure as fuck isn't stupid. "You are not a god. She said I was killed by a god. You are a lot of things, but you are not a god. Which fucking god? I will squeeze 'em straight out of the sack. It'll be like shucking peas. I swear to Jesus. He's right outside."

There's no avoiding it. Hell, he's not even sure why he would want to. It's not as if Wednesday has done him any favours recently.

"You know which god," he says.

"Of course I know which god. I wanna hear you fucking say it, so say it."

She squeezes again and Sweeney groans and he knows if he wants to keep his balls, he'll have to say it. And he very much wants to keep his testicles exactly where they are, so he grits out, "Wednesday."

And, blessedly, she lets him go. He'd like to collapse with some measure of grace, but instead he crumples to the floor, grabbing at his crotch and coughing as she paces the length of the hallway.

"Fuck that guy," she says. "Why? Why me? Why murder me?"

"You weren't murdered," he answers as he drags himself into a sitting position against the wall. "You were sacrificed."

It's all about Shadow. She knows it, he knows it, the only one who doesn't know it is old brown eyes out there, thick as he is. He hasn't had a goddamn clue from the start and Sweeney knows he hadn't tried that hard to warn him, but he'd fucking said it. He'd told him not to trust Wednesday and now here he is, in over his bloody stupid head, his dead wife about to shit a brick because her whole life has been torn to shreds by a god. For Shadow.

"Act of god?" she asks. "Just fucking with us to fuck with us?"

He almost laughs, but it's too fucking sad, and he tilts his head against the wall to look at her. Dead wife, her eyes all milky, skin as grey as the stone of her grave marker. She would've been pretty once, with that pale skin and full lips, but there's a hard, dark place in the pit of her and Mad Sweeney wonders what the fuck it is Shadow saw in her. What he wanted. If all he ever wanted was to save her from herself. He's sure as shit doing a pisspoor job of it now, if that's what it is.

"What do you think gods do?" he asks. "They do what they've always done. They fuck with us. They fuck with all of us. Don't take it personally." His mouth flickers into a faint smirk. "I don't. He needed your man. Needed him to be in a place where he had nothin' left in the world. Nothin' to lose 'cause he'd already lost everything."

It's what gods do. Wednesday would say it's a give and take, that someone has to give a little in order to get a little, but the truth is that mortals give everything they have, every last bit of themselves to these fucking gods, and get nearly nothing in return. Hell, Sweeney might not be a god, but at least all he asks for is some fucking cream and a bit of bread, and his return, when it comes, is like a bloody windfall.

He closes his eyes for a moment, gathering himself, waiting for the pain to fade, and then he climbs to the feet, sliding up the wall bit by bit. There's no question what she'll want to do now and he's none too pleased about it, but it's not as if he has a choice. Wednesday will know. He probably already knows and so Sweeney opens his eyes and is about to tell Laura they ought to head out for her inevitable confrontation, but he finds himself alone.

In fact, he finds himself somewhere else entirely.

"What the fuck."

It's dark and he fumbles around for the wall, looking for a light switch of some kind. There's nothing that he can feel and so he walks, fingertips of one hand trailing against the wall, keeping him steady until he comes to a door that he pushes open and when light floods in, he steps out into an alley, a beer bottle spinning away from him when he knocks it with the toe of his boot.

"What the fuck," he says again, squinting into the sun. It smells like Dead Wife is somewhere nearby, but he thinks that might just be the level of piss and shit in this alley, corners of it populated by huddled bundles of rags he assumes must be people. It's like a fucking homeless camp he's wandered into and Sweeney's luck might be for shit right now, but this is not going to be his last fucking stop.

It's not Kentucky, wherever he is now. It's not any city he's seen before, but he looks for a familiar landmark regardless, stepping out into the street and glancing around. It's as he's looking, still shielding his eyes from the sun, that a cyclist races by him on one side, making the tail of his jacket flap in their wake and he hears a curse called back at him. What he wants to think is he's damned lucky he didn't get hit, but he knows it's just the opposite. It's his bad fucking luck that he stepped out of the alley into the cyclist's path in the first place.

What he needs to do now is steal a car. Drive to Wisconsin, meet them all at the House on the Rock. Whatever the fuck just happened to him now, he'll blame Wednesday and go from there. It doesn't matter. What matters is getting where he needs to be and fuck the rest.

It's a shit area of the city by the looks of it and as he walks toward a rusted blue car, he figures no one's even going to notice him stealing it. And if they do, he'll just have to fight them for it. Might do him some good, after all, relieving some of this tension.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Chuck Hansen is not and never has been some sort of do-gooder. He may have devoted and then given his life to the Jaeger program and quite literally saving the world, but that's also all the more reason why smaller problems have seemed to him trivial, utterly insignificant. Besides, the last thing he just about ever needs is to get himself involved in some stranger's bullshit. It never ends well. He knows that, at least rationally, but while it's still light outside, he's already had a couple of drinks — not enough to be drunk, not yet, but enough that it's harder to listen to that sensible voice in the back of his head. Showing up here, fucking years ago now, gave him a lot less reason to try to act sensibly, anyway. There's no need for caution when he doesn't have to worry about needing to suit up to go fight a kaiju at a moment's notice.

So when he sees someone breaking into a car, it isn't that he's bothered or offended or about to call the cops or anything like that, or like he's concerned for the car's owner's sake. If anything, it's just that he's bored, and fairly certain this isn't a case of someone having just locked their keys in the car. "Hey," he says, all tipsy bravado, as he stalks over. "You go around taking a lot of people's cars?"

At least, unlike Salim-not Salim, this fucker doesn't have a gun as far as Sweeney can tell, but he still freezes where he's crouched just inside the interior of the car, his hands on the wires within the steering column. Just because there's no gun to cock doesn't mean there isn't some other weapon and given his utter shit luck lately, Sweeney doesn't think he wants to test just how far it might go.

Not five minutes ago, Laura Moon had his balls in her vise-like grip. They're still throbbing with pain and he doesn't feel the particular urge to follow that up with pissing himself because some asshole hits him with a bloody taser.

"Only when I need them, boy-o," he answers, finally lifting his hands off the wires and turning from his position to take in the man standing behind him. He's smaller than Sweeney, but then, most men are, and he smells like a barroom floor, even though he doesn't look like he's drunk enough to be knocked down by a stiff wind. That's where things get tricky, Sweeney thinks, when someone is drunk enough to get cocky, but not so drunk they won't be an easy fight.

Not that he ever really wants an easy fight.

"I need to get to Wisconsin," he says, rising from his crouch, leaning one elbow on the top of the car. "So I need the fuckin' car. Is it yours?" He lifts his other hand, plucks a coin from the air and displays the heavy, shining gold from between two fingers. "It's a shit heap, you ask me, but if your panties are in a twist, I'll pay you for it. Can't be worth more than two or three o'these."

Chuck has seen a lot of very, very strange things in his time in Darrow. Hell, even before he found himself here, he was in a world that was being ravaged by giant alien monsters coming out of the ocean, which he imagines would be, by most people's standards, pretty goddamn weird. Already, though, this is becoming one of the most unusual encounters he can remember having had here. The would-be car thief must have at least a foot on him, after all, and he isn't short himself. Wisconsin may as well be in another world from here, and he's never seen anyone pull gold — or something that looks like gold, at any rate — out of thin air.

Arms folded over his chest, he stares, brow raised, and then huffs out a laugh, shaking his head.

"A car thief and a fucking magician?" he asks, more amused than the situation probably calls for. He doesn't really give a damn about the car, though. Whether its owner loses it or not makes no difference to him. Still, he's involved now, and intrigued, for that matter, mostly because this is just so unexpected. "It's not my car. I don't drive. I can just tell it's not yours, either." He waits a moment, wondering if he should add the rest, and then decides to hell with it. Whoever this guy is, he'll find out sooner or later. "And if you're trying to get to Wisconsin, you're shit out of luck. There's no getting there from here."

"Suit yourself," Sweeney says, returning the coin to his pocket before he arches an eyebrow, looking amused himself. "You might not be able to drive, which is a weird fuckin' thing to hear, I must say, but I can drive just fine. Which means you leave me the fuck alone so I can steal this car and I'll use my fine motor skills to drive myself to Wisconsin."

There's nowhere in the entire bloody country he can't drive to Wisconsin from and although this guy sounds Australian, they're still in America. They have to be. No other place in the world feels like America.

But then, there's no way he walked out of Ostara's bunny puke estate to a homeless camp, so a little part of him -- the bit of common sense he's got buried under all his madness -- says maybe he ought to listen. But that bit is deeply buried and he hasn't been known to listen to it in a long time, so he reaches into the car again, all without taking his eyes off his new friend, and he twists the wires together, finally throwing the car into life.

"I'd offer to give you a driving lesson, but I feel like the ship's sailed on plenty when it comes to you."

Edited 2017-07-14 16:35 (UTC)

All Chuck can do at that is roll his eyes. He's never needed to learn to drive, a license nothing that would have done him any good at any point in his life, but there's no reason for him to say that to a stranger, or to try to explain why that's the case. There are bigger explanations that need to be given here, his patience too thin for most, if not all, of them. He shouldn't even give a shit if someone he doesn't know steals a car belonging to someone he also doesn't know. The smart thing to do would be to walk away. He's never been great at doing the smart thing, though, except when he's in a Jaeger, so he scoffs, not about to let an insult slide, anyway.

"Yeah, if I did want to learn, I think I could pull a stranger off the street and find a better teacher," he says. "Look, you can try to get to Wisconsin if you want, but don't blame me when you crash into some invisible wall. I'm telling you, there's no way there from here. For all I know, you're not even on the same fucking planet anymore."

For a time, Sweeney just stares at the man, trying to decide if he wants to write him off as off his fucking rocker or if there's maybe something to what he's saying. It doesn't feel entirely right, but it doesn't feel entirely wrong either, especially since he'd walked out of what he thought was Ostara's house just to find himself into an alley littered with the most broken parts of humanity.

She's a good egg, Ostara is, but he knows damn well she's not about to put up the homeless in her back yard.

"The fuck are you talking about, lad?" he asks, taking a few steps away from the car. He wants an explanation and he wants it now and he's willing to use his fists to get it if that's what it comes to. He doubts very much they're one another planet, but it's not Kentucky and it's sure as shit not Wisconsin and he's not even sure the idea of crashing into an invisible wall is all that surprising to him.

"I'm talking about the fact that by whatever weird twist of fate, you've left whatever world you were in and shown up here instead," Chuck says, voice heavy with impatience. That probably isn't fair, when it isn't as if there's anything easy about being told something like this and he can hardly blame someone newly arrived for being confused. It's a tedious thing, though, trying to explain the impossible, especially to someone who's resistant to hearing it, who, moments before, had been primed to steal a car.

Chuck really doesn't know why he gives a damn about a stranger's car, but standing by and letting it get stolen seems about as good as stealing it himself, and that just doesn't sit well with him.

"Congratulations. You're in a city called Darrow and there's no way out."

It's not fate. As soon as the words leave the other man's mouth, Sweeney knows exactly what's to blame for this.

It's his fucking luck.

He wants to break something. Someone's face, their legs, the fucking car behind him, and with a grunt of anger, Sweeney turns suddenly and puts his fist through the car door window. His knuckles split and bleed, glass embedded in his skin, but he takes no mind of it, because it isn't enough. It's not enough pain.

"I need to get to fuckin' Wisconsin," he grinds out.

"I keep trying to tell you, you can't get to fucking Wisconsin," Chuck retorts, unfazed by the broken car window. It seems like the sort of thing he would have done, in fact, though he likes to think he'd have had the sense not to take his anger out on someone else's car. There are walls or his own windows for that, when the punching bags at the gym aren't enough, when sparring doesn't prove to be enough of an outlet. He's used to fighting monsters; people, sometimes, don't do the trick, not least when it serves as a reminder of how purposeless he is here. "No matter how many windows you break, you still aren't going to be able to get to fucking Wisconsin."

Whether or not he wants to accept it, Mad Sweeney has heard it quite clearly every single time it's been said. He doesn't need the fucking repetition and hearing it said once again in that annoying as fuck accent, he's going to hit the man so bloody hard his teeth rattle.

Taking a step away from the car, his jaw clenched, Sweeney stares at the man steadily, practically begging him to take a fucking swing.

"Tell me again, cunt, that I'm not getting to fucking Wisconsin," he says in a low voice. He wants a fucking fight, he's humming with the need for it, because it won't help him make sense of what's going on, but it will feel good.

"You're not. Getting. To fucking. Wisconsin," Chuck says, the words paced out slowly, his jaw set. He's likely playing a dangerous game and he knows it. This ginger asshole probably has a foot on him and is pretty clearly spoiling for a fight, something Chuck recognizes easily with as often as he's been there himself. The very fact of that, though, just brings out the tension in him, and he's never been one to shy away from a fight or a potential fight. He isn't about to change that now, nor is he about to back down and start treating this gently. It's a fucked up, surreal thing and he knows it, wouldn't expect anyone to take well to it, but it's annoying in its own right to have to be the one to explain something so nonsensical. "Believe me yet?"

It doesn't matter whether or not Sweeney believes him, it doesn't matter whether or not he's right, all that matters is that he feel the press and give of someone's face under his fist. There's still glass in his knuckles and he knows he ought to pluck it out, knows it would be the honourable thing to do, but Mad Sweeney's not known for his honour and besides that, he wants the pain.

He wants his knuckles to split open further, he wants the glass wedge under his skin, cutting through to the bone. He wants to see the glint of white when his fist pulls back.

And so he swings without saying another word, a good, hard punch, right at the fucker's face.

"Christ, motherfucker," Chuck grits out through his teeth and the throbbing in his cheek and jaw. He'd been expecting it, practically braced for it, but for all the fights he's been in, he's pretty sure he's never been hit by someone who'd just, a matter of moments ago, punched through the window of a car. Judging by the way his face feels, there's still glass embedded in this asshole's knuckles — what he'd consider a dirty trick if he wouldn't have been so likely to do the same himself.

He may be a foot shorter and without glass in his hand, but a disadvantage has never stopped him before. If nothing else, he has plenty of training on his side that he can fall back on, practically an instinct even now. He doesn't even need to think before he hits back, having to punch up a little strange but not any kind of a deterrent. With the adrenaline coursing through him now, the familiar rush of a fight, the closest thing to satisfaction he's ever gotten here, he's not sure anything could be.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only