psychoshenanigans | GRATIA // PSL

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GRATIA // PSL

So, here's what Irahl knows.

He's alone in a dark, cold cave. He has most, if not all, of his gear. No one is guarding his location. As he heads away from the spot where he came to consciousness, no one tries to stop him, and no one gets in his way. The few people he finds down there seem human, and not about to approach the nearly-seven-foot man that comes stalking out of the lower tunnels. Honestly, everyone here seems a surprised and a little astonished about his... Entire scene.

There is a way up. It's a maze of twisting corridors and confusing passageways, half of which feel too small for him. It's bigger and bigger groups of people, some of which scatter like schools of fish, and some of which have to be pushed through to get anywhere. It's climbing up into streets lit with dingy lights, graffiti-covered hallways, warehouses, weird holes in stone walls that may or may not be windows. It's alarm bells, it's people yelling at each other down the street. It's just an absurd number of stairs. A couple of people make an attempt to stop him somewhere, and it goes poorly for them.

Elsewhere, events are being set in motion where Irahl cannot see. But he's on his way out.

Eventually, more people try to stop him. At the end of another long stretch of Underground city, a group of official-looking folks are putting a real effort into blocking off the obvious exit, and some of them have weapons.

Down a side alley, into another tunnel, and then the space opens up into a... Plaza, of some sort? The floor is made of stone. The buildings surrounding it are made of stone and are hard to distinguish from one another. At at least the ceiling (also made of stone) is a lot higher than before. Cavernous. There's some kind of sculpture in the middle of it, some impressive feat of geometric stonework that gives the illusion of defying gravity despite weighing literal tons.

This is where someone finally catches him. Sounds have been echoing unhelpfully down every passageway, making it hard to tell if people are coming or going - but this series of quick footsteps comes from an upward direction before someone hits the ground about five feet in front of Irahl.

His clothes are different. His hair is better-kept. Maybe if the situation wasn't quite so tense, there'd be time to see the ways in which his face is different, the way his eyes don't have quite as vicious and sharp a gleam as they used to. But whatever Irahl can take in of him, there is Robin, having hopped down from a rooftop to put himself between him and the exit again.

"...Holy shit."

Kind of weird that he looks absolutely shocked to see the person in front of him, though.

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This doesn't have to be a bad fight. It's not like they need to wage war until someone's having a medical emergency--they can just rough each other up for a while. They can just have some fun. Irahl's been trying to get him to come play like this all night.

"...Then I guess I gotta," comes his unhurried response, his expression momentarily one of unfettered fondness. He offers this out of love, implicitly trusting that Irahl will take care of him, and hoping that Irahl trusts him to do the same.

But with all that emotion aside, he does have to kick this guy's ass now, so his expression flits to a self-confident smirk and he does his best to quickly grapple that stupid arm and see just how hard it is to snap any of the bones contained therein.

It's probably a good thing that Irahl is both drunk and committed to not thinking, because he would likely spook himself away from this encounter if he stopped to think about how much he does in fact trust Vincent. Not only is he relying on the fact that Vincent won't cause serious damage to his dominant arm, but he's also tangling with him with all of his scales exposed, and is doing so on a bed. Any one of these factors on its own would be difficult for Irahl to imagine being okay with under any circumstance. Vincent is certainly a special case.

Irahl is about to get clobbered by a semi-human guy with super strength, and he has never felt more safe.

The other good thing about what's quickly unfolding here is that Irahl had not been bluffing about having tough bones. While Vincent had been able to crack a few while giving him a serious pummeling, his long bones are especially resilient. So, nothing snaps when he brings up a knee to brace against his attacker and starts hauling back, trying to twist his arm free.

One of the nice things about fighting with Vincent is that, unlike some people, he's never acknowledged the scales. And it's not like he doesn't know they're there; as Irahl wrenches his arm out from underneath him, Vincent grabs for the rapidly-disappearing hand, snags a wrist, and feels a little of their texture before that also slips away.

But there's no reaction, he just rolls away because he's sure he's about to get kicked in the back if he doesn't--and then he tries to sit up despite his sense of balance going a little sideways.

"Damn, dude!" Part frustration, part excitement, all grin, "Fuckin' slippery bastard..."

Gods, a bed really is the worst thing to be fighting on. He's not about to get his legs under him, that's for sure.

Irahl is feeling the fun kind of spiteful. He could let Vincent go, he could ready himself to fight, or he could just skip right to hitting him. But he has been in what is considered a rowdy mood by his own standards for this entire trip. Vincent has gone for his arm twice, and he feels like this deserves a little petty justice.

Before Vincent fully sits up and escapes, Irahl hears his parting comment and decides in that moment that he should show Vincent what a 'slippery bastard' he can really be--as well as punish him for his continued transgressions against his arm bones, which had only been minding their own business when they were attacked.

Suddenly, he grabs his friend's arm and goes to twist him into a painful wrist-lock.

This isn't the first time that he has done this. It's difficult to manipulate the limbs of someone as large and strong as Vincent is, but Irahl has succeeded a time or two in past sparring sessions. Whether he can manage it while on his back and drunk is another story, but he's going to try.

Well, this is... Already different. Where he'd been expecting something sharp like a punch or a kick, he gets grabbed and twisted instead. His reaction speed is way better than it should be, but he unhelpfully reacts in the wrong direction, punching out and giving Irahl plenty of arm to manipulate.

And Vincent is not the most flexible guy. He can't really wriggle away, even though he tries. Irahl gets to watch his face contort with acute discomfort as he attempts to swear his way out of his painful predicament. And then he just gives up and does what he always does, which is try to muscle through.

He'll try to just bodily roll away and drag Irahl with him. Barring that, maybe he can roll over Irahl and squish him until he lets go.

When it comes down to it, Vincent is bigger and stronger and Irahl has prioritized hanging onto the wrist that he's twisting, so Vincent is able to drag him around all he wants.

Irahl attempts to brace a leg somewhere to stay in control of the situation once Vincent rolls, taking him with, but it's hard to keep track of where 'up' even is when everything spins so much. He's finding that this whole spinning thing is a real weak point of his when trying to fight after drinking. So, he's still currently got Vincent's wrist lock in a bullying grip, but he isn't as in-control anywhere else as he thinks he is.

Irahl has miles more combat experience than Vincent could ever dream of, but Vincent does have one thing over Irahl that's serving him here... A wealth of practice wrestling unruly children into submission. Years of mindfully trying not to crush tiny limbs is probably the only reason he can remember that Irahl has a couple of off-limits injuries he needs to avoid.

With Irahl refusing to let go, Vincent's technique here turns into a combination of the two potentials--he rolls away, and keeps rolling, his swearing and pained sounds briefly muffled by the mattress as he goes face-down during his rotations. Irahl's arm gets pulled over Vincent, and then under Vincent, with the rest of Irahl's body slowly following.

He'll stop if he can flip Irahl onto his back and basically lay on him, face up--actually really similar to that attempted arm lock from earlier. He won't stop because he's afraid of hurting him, though, he'll stop because his pained sounds are being cut through with stupid laugher while he tries to bodily smush his friend.

It's hard for Irahl to keep track of exactly how he's oriented in space, but he's aware enough for a vaguely-alarmed grunt as he worries that he's about to be rolled off the edge of the bed... followed by a far more strained and muffled sound when Vincent's shoulder begins to come down onto his ribs and flatten them against the mattress.

It might not be the most comfortable move for Vincent's twisted wrist, but he's definitely gaining more control of the limb as Irahl's range of motion is limited. And he gets the satisfaction of hearing the effects of his good work as he squishes the air out of his friend's lungs.

"Gods... how many fries did you eat..."

Vincent gets to hear the air being squished out of Irahl's lungs, and Irahl gets to feel Vincent's rowdy laugh and the way it shakes his ribs.

"I'm a growin' boy!" he exclaims in his own defense, "That's how you get big an' strong, y'know? Now let go of my fuckin' hand..."

With his newfound range of motion, he tries to yank his fingers out of Irahl's very painful grasp, something that continues to prove way more frustrating than it should be. When he can't quite manage to break free, he wriggles around to try to get an elbow in his friend's torso somewhere.

Irahl's grip may be like iron, but it's drunk iron, it's working from a very bad angle, and it's now being elbowed in the ribs. It's only a matter of time before he feels his very big captive successfully muscling his way to freedom.

As soon as Vincent twists away and has his hands free, some very powerful instincts take hold of Irahl. Whether fighting monstrous enemies or particularly enthusiastic sparring partners, the moment that one wriggles free of a hold becomes extremely dangerous as it means that a mobile enemy is now suddenly too close.

So, Vincent does get his poor, bullied wrist back, but this discomfort is immediately replaced with Irahl squirming and trying to wedge powerful elbows up into his torso, in an attempt to buy himself some distance in which to defend himself from whatever he's imagining is going to happen next.

Vincent sounds so relieved when he finally gets out of that wrist-lock. However, the sheer visceral joy of being able to shake out his hand and not feel intense pain is a little dampened by sharp elbows in his back.

He grunts and rolls away. He tries to turn and face his opponent, hands up to catch any other strays. Like a practiced dance partner, he can tell the other's energy has changed, and he answers by trying to match it--even if his attempts are clumsy, off-balance, and end with him nearly tipping face-first back onto the mattress.

But he tries a couple of genuine moves, upping the threat of actual harm with a couple of strikes in Irahl's direction and another attempt to get into his space and pin the guy down. If some part of Irahl's decided he's a threat, he'll start acting like one.

Irahl isn't thinking about the fact that he's still injured, but some unconscious part of him is still keeping track of these extra vulnerabilities and the fact that Vincent's antics are a genuine threat to them. So, there's a fun extra jolt of adrenaline when the roughhousing becomes a little more intentional.

Even when sober, it's easy for Irahl to stop thinking about the point behind violence and just lean into it once it's started. So, when drunk and rowdy, he's very quickly fighting a grin and ramping up how pointedly he's blocking and returning the aggression sent his way.

Of course he's making sure to be a pain in the ass to fight. He's just as clumsy as Vincent is right now, but he isn't battling gravity at the same time. So, anything that he manages to block also gets shoved to the side, and he takes at least a couple of opportunistic pot-shots at whatever limb Vincent happens to be using to prop himself up with at the time, just to give his opponent a harder time than necessary. Just to piss him off.

It's not that he's not getting pissed off about all the pot-shots every time he puts some real effort into getting straightened out--but it's the kind of nuisance that keeps the fight feeling light-hearted even as he takes a mean kick just below the knee. It's why at some point he starts trying to grab and shove Irahl around just as much as Irahl is doing it to him, playing into the spirit of chaos they've invited here.

Just as he catches a jab that would have left an awful bruise the next day, he misses so badly with a wide swing of his own that he topples over onto his back with barely any help from Irahl at all. Confusing, but his only reaction is to laugh at himself and keep trying not to get decked anywhere that'll hurt a lot in the morning.

Irahl sees his opening in the wake of something that he finds himself surprised (even while drunk) he hadn't needed to actually be bracing for. Vincent misses and tips his own ass over in a way that Irahl can't help but be delighted by. He needs to capitalize on something that stupid. Violence is his way of laughing at his friend.

So, he follows after him, rolling and sitting up enough to try and trap Vincent's closest arm against the mattress. His injured shoulder is stiff and mostly-useless, but he's sure it will be fine to just brace his arm downward with it to pin his friend's limb.

The room is spinning too much for him to properly sit up and get control of things, but he only needs to be slightly less clumsy than Vincent. It doesn't really matter that he doesn't have enough room to take a good swing at him. He just needs enough room to sneak in a close-range jab at his opponent's face. Just enough to make a point.

He can't help it. Vincent is just really fun to hit.

Even as half of his defense gets pinned down against the bed, he's grinning. He struggles to try and push back with his shoulder, but he only succeeds at sinking further into the mattress. He doesn't realize how much the smell of fresh blood is distracting him. He doesn't catch his own half-formed fantasy about the other's open wound. He also doesn't catch the fist that sends a shock of pain across his face.

He's drunk. He thinks he's in more control of the situation than he really is. Even as his free arm shoots up, unbidden, to grab his friend by the face--it feels as natural as breathing to try to shove him back down, overpower him, get on top of him. Irahl escalates, and Vincent responds in kind once again.

Irahl is sure he's got this. Even as Vincent succeeds at pawing him over by the face because the only thing holding him up is his bad shoulder, he is confident that this is all part of the plan. Vincent spins the room in the other direction until Irahl's back hits the mattress, and he is sure that his drunk friend is playing right into something he has accounted for.

He hasn't. He just feels more in-control because he can't be knocked over any further than he already is. Yes, he can be capable of controlling a fight from the ground, but unbeknownst to him, this is presently not one of those cases.

At the moment, he is undaunted by being crowded and pinned down while extremely shirtless and half-injured. Still grinning, he locks his good arm with one of the limbs pinning him down... which does gain control of it, but not in a way that actually helps or hinders anyone. And his bad arm is the one he that starts trying to hit Vincent with.

Take that.

Vincent is vaguely aware that his arm is locked up in Irahl's, and that this is generally bad for maneuverability and strategy and all that, but he's having too much fun to really care. Maybe one day he'll actually voice how much it means to him to have somebody to let loose on every once in a while, but right now he's a little too preoccupied with trying to get that somebody to stop being such a pain in the ass.

He shoves down on Irahl's shoulder until he realizes it's the bad one. As a sloppy correction, he tries to get a leg up over him and winds up taking several hits in the process. The last straw is a particularly sharp blow to his jaw--which he returns with a mean left hook before he even has a second to think about if he's going too hard.

He means to call him a brat again, and he thinks it pretty adamantly--both out of frustration and absolute fondness. Instead, he completely forgets himself and presses forward, wedging his face near his friend's injured shoulder to get a good lungful of everything his friend smells like.

Ha ha, take that!

Irahl is unfortunately not braced at all for the sharp blow that returns his own not-very-nice strike, (which is weird, considering how much control he's still sure he has over this situation,) so there is a good second or two afterward that is spent only on struggling to reorient himself.

The fact that Vincent shoves down on his injured shoulder goes entirely unnoticed. However, as his ears ring and vision swims, he is at least vaguely aware of Vincent getting too close... and he's already beginning to shove very clumsily at his friend's shoulder when he suddenly realizes exactly how close he's getting. He fails to catch the reactionary way his claws curl and dig in a little when it registers.

In the very back of his mind, more little bells of familiarity are beginning to ring.

Vincent's face is too close to properly headbutt. So, unintentionally following a few more of the steps they'd danced through once upon a time, he tries to shove Vincent's face away with the side of his of his own to get him away from the touchy vicinity of his own neck.

It would probably be easier to push Vincent away if he would also let go of the arm he still has locked up, but that's too many limbs for him to keep track of at the moment.

What if he just bit him? It's a very tempting thought, and it nearly drowns out the fact that Irahl's trying to shove his face away. Vincent doesn't remember that this kind of thinking is almost exactly how things got out of control the last time.

But lucky for both of them, this isn't last time. Irahl's objections do get through somehow and he instinctually pushes back on his free arm to give them both a little more space. Before any of his human reservation can catch up to what's happened, he pretends he meant to be fighting the whole time and gives Irahl a couple of obnoxious thuds in the ribs.

Maybe he's doing it out of some genuine, deep-set respect for the other guy's boundaries, or maybe he's suddenly decided it's his turn to be the brat--but he waiting for Irahl to tell him what he wants, in one way or another. Even if he is preoccupied with the little bit of blood he knows is smeared on his cheek now.

Whatever the driving thought had been behind the small distance that Vincent puts between them, that hesitation is at least swiftly acted upon by Irahl. As he moves, it's hard to tell if it is a reflection of what Irahl wants or if it's just a response to being punched in the ribs, but Irahl's whole body starts twisting over.

If Vincent thinks that Irahl had been difficult to wrangle before, he hasn't seen him this drunk and keen on aimlessly retaliating for... whatever that had been a few seconds ago. Being sniffed??

With the little bit of extra room he has been given, Irahl anchors his own weight onto the mattress by pressing his shoulders back. Meanwhile, his lower body wriggles out from under Vincent enough to start kicking one leg over... and the more momentum that motion has, the more he shoves back with his shoulders (very much including the bad one,) to lever to both of them over.

It turns out that he's pretty good at twisting out from under bigger opponents and gaining the literal upper hand. This is not the first time that he has done this.

See? You give a guy an inch and he takes a mile. That human reservation of his finally pipes up in a very I fucking told you sort of way as he pitches sideways, torqued over by one of those snaky legs he'd originally been trying to keep Irahl from dragging up.

Suddenly he's on his back. It feels like the world keeps tumbling past him even though he's stopped moving. Surprise gives way to amazement as he realizes what's happened. It's not even a skill thing, he's just a big guy. Nobody ever flips him over.

Regardless of all the other feelings he may or may not have about his friend being on top of him, his instincts snap back to him a second later and he raises his only reliably-mobile arm to try and divert whatever violence is most assuredly about to come his way.

If Vincent had been in a state to have kept his weight better centered over Irahl, maybe had room to spread out and brace himself, or even been fighting on the floor instead of a mattress, Irahl would have had a much harder time flipping him. Even so, Irahl still feels pretty cool turning the tables like this.

See, he knew he'd had this under control.

It's with this little boost of ego that he does set into trying to beat up his friend for letting him get here.

He lets go of Vincent's arm, which is maybe not the smartest thing he could do, but in this moment he feels like it serves him better to have room to work with. He can sit back a little, knock Vincent's arms aside as they come for him, and choose his shots.

This is the theory, anyway. Whether or not it actually pans out is a completely different story. Some dark corner of his mind remembers that this kind of thing had once led to him trying to strangle Vincent, shortly followed by everything that had happened afterward.

The rest of his mind is busy thinking about how much fun he's having, though. He's finally riding on a good adrenaline high now, looming over Vincent and trying hard not to growl, because he can tell if he slips up now, he won't be able to make sure that it comes out as a human-adjacent sound.

Only time will tell if their shared ounce of caution keeps this from turning into the brutal slugfest it was last time. Right now, he feels more awake than he was a moment ago, but it's wholly thanks to a spike in adrenaline and not any of the choices he's made. He's still trying not to hurt the other guy too badly, but the other guy's made it pretty clear what he wants.

So he lets Irahl hit him for a while. Not that he could have done much to not get hit; at first Vincent puts all his effort into blocking those blows, but it's exhausting work and Irahl's got better aim than him even when the guy's shitfaced. Soon he realizes it's just as productive to take his licks and suffer the consequences, since it gives him the space to land a couple on Irahl in-between. He shifts every which-way he can under some pretense of making himself harder to hit, or maybe even wriggling out of there, but it gets a little aimless after a while. It slips towards moving for the sake of feeling what it's like when he moves.

While he's holding up extremely well to this mess, his supernatural resilience can't stave off everything. A string of sloppy punches ends when Irahl decks him a little too hard and a little too high. Something in his face pops on contact, he briefly thinks he sees a color, and he feels the familiar warmth of a nosebleed begin to crawl down the back of his throat.

He suddenly grabs and pins one of Irahl's arms against his own chest, letting out a quiet and dangerous laugh as he tries to roll them both over again with the motion.

Irahl is on a carefree adrenaline high one second, focusing only on penning in the wriggling happening beneath him as he beats up his friend a little, and then things change and he's abruptly trying to reorient himself to the whole world in the next second.

It all pivots around that one moment in the middle where he slips up and breaks something that he doesn't mean to. It's a testament to how highly he thinks of his friend that there's even a small hesitation after it happens. One slight pause catching him before his next swing, which is far more than he would normally afford anyone.

He almost starts thinking in that moment--halfway to wondering if Vincent is okay--before his arm is pulled and trapped against his friend's chest, his attention is very much hooked on that laugh, and everything spins.

Now, it's his turn to be surprised. Somehow, he hadn't expected this at all, and the fact of just how shirtless they both are very much gets through the veil of alcohol for the first time. It's hard to think about anything but that as he finds himself suddenly pinned under Vincent's weight.

That laugh really sets the tone of things. Irahl does begin fighting aimlessly for freedom, but in the wake of that dangerous chuckle, he mostly finds the situation funny. So, as Vincent successfully turns the tables, Irahl can't help a breathless and disbelieving chuckle of his own.

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GRATIA // PSL

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