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clxckwork-sun-n-moon · 1 year

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a touch prompt from @pure-plum

"5. feeling their pulse"

feat. @naffeclipse's Bounty Hunter!Eclipse and a sequel to this prompt. be aware this drabble contains violence and major injury

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Anyone who deigned to shake the rotten underbelly of the city was bound to get a target on their back. Small or large, constant or wavering like the river tide, there would inevitably be someone coming after you. Depending on how much shaking you did, you could end up with a small number of very dedicated guns trained on you, waiting for the opportune moment, or you could end up with a large number of people unaware of the danger they were about to run into.

Eclipse did a lot of shaking. Not large and heavy-hitting, like the vigilante, making the rot tremble and fall in their wake. He did his own swathes of small concentrated jabs, steadily burning weeds that grew from cracks in the concrete.

For the longest time, he had the benefit that anyone who decided that he had slighted them to the point of retaliation would only be coming after him. His brothers were, in a way, protected by the distance that they had built between themselves and their brother. Even as this distance was slowly being broken down, Eclipse maintained the illusion of separation. There wouldn’t be any involvement of that sort in his brothers’ lives, not in the past and not now.

There was also the protection that came with the way that he carried out his business. On a normal day, he would quite casually come out of a hole with blood across his hands. So if someone decided to hit anyone close to him, then his wrath would have been dealt exponentially.

It meant he wasn’t prepared for anyone to be ruthless and gutless enough to make a step after a figure that he’d allowed to be close.

So when he arrived at the mechanic’s door to find it loose and open, the cold shock of surprise punched twice as hard.

The inside had been tossed around, put mildly. A couple of the larger stools had been knocked over, a drawer of tools emptied on the floor. Most importantly, the room was empty of life. Eclipse took a step inside and his shoe skidded for a brief second, liquid underfoot. He glanced down, and found puddles of prismatic black flecked by splatters of red, all close within the immediate space of the door. His gaze slid up, and saw more red across the edge of the door itself. Fingers trailed up, smearing the beads of red along by the slow, methodical movement.

Everything was red in that moment. Red burning against his optics, red burning in his servos, overheating and whirring at furious speed. Clenching his fist, Eclipse slammed it into the wall beside the door frame, leaving brick dust to crumble like ashes.

He pulled back. Stared into the empty room, sweeping the surface with a cold gaze.

Considering the knocked over furniture, there’d definitely been a scuffle. At least two or three other people, enough to overwhelm the mechanic in little time. Maybe tossed over the stools to get to them, while they dumped the drawer to slow down their attackers, but to no avail. Too many, too quickly. The scrum was over and done with before more damage could be done. As they were brought to the door, they’d lashed out. An animatronic took the hit. With the amount of oil, it was a grievous hit or an old injury that easily split. But then the animatronic or one of the capturers retaliated on them, before they were taken outside.

Eclipse was quite good at putting threads together. He watched the picture unfold, saw a familiar face among the ghosts of events that had taken place. Quietly turning on his heel, he put the tiny ‘Closed’ card in the window and shut the door behind him, letting the locks fall into place.

This wasn’t even him going to work. This was him having to clock in overtime. And unlike the majority population that hated overtime, Eclipse intended to make the most of this for his own satiation.

The goon that answered the knocking door had the brief chance to look a touch surprised before Eclipse grabbed him by the face, dragging him into the dark outdoors and slamming him into the wall. His other hand snatched away the pistol from the goon’s shaking hand as he tried to pull it out the holster.

“Where’s my mechanic?” Eclipse asked, voice low as he leaned up closer to the goon.

“What?”

Eclipse pressed the barrel of the goon’s own pistol into his stomach and felt the breathing get faster over his hand.

“Th-They’re in the basement, near the boiler room. One of those spare rooms, but the guards will - “ The gunshot was muffled by the goon’s body, bullet ripping through his stomach. Eclipse pulled a handkerchief out of the goon’s pocket, shoving it into his mouth to stem the heaving pained wheezes, and dropped him on the ground before stepping inside. Maybe he’d still be alive by the time Eclipse returned. He knew he wouldn’t last beyond sunrise at the very least.

The building was barely metal beams and brick squeezed into mortar, bare walls carrying any trace of sound from one corridor to the next. Eclipse passed by empty door-frames with rooms of boxes, desks with stacks of files or papers, blank rooms of shelving waiting for smuggled goods or crates of fire-arms.

Well. Inevitably when word got back to the precinct, they would deal with the clean-up and reap the rewards of this gang hideout.

Another goon stepped out into the corridor, an animatronic with an unfortunately blank face that turned in Eclipse’s direction. He’d already raised the pistol he’d borrowed, firing twice into the animatronic’s torso and once into their face. The burnt out servo sizzled and spat before he stepped into the cracked porcelain, crushing any wiring and activity underfoot.

By now the gunfire echoes were rattling down every corridor of the building. Eclipse emptied the pistol cartridge and dumped it on the floor, casing and chunky metal clattering on the ground. Instead he unhooked the tommy gun off his shoulder, flicking off the safety and holding it at his hip.

Footsteps, hard and fast, made the telltale call of someone hurrying up from a turning ahead. The human fell quickly under a barrage of bullets, scattering red across the grey wall. Eclipse turned down that corridor, stretching the sanguine paint down the path behind him and casting another spray of ruby from the back of the next goon to step into view.

Two animatronics attempted to jump him from behind, failing to take into account how the sound bounced and warned him before they took their chance. One took three bullets to the neck, messily severing the head from the metal body, which Eclipse then used to slam into the face of their buddy. Stunned and reeling backwards, they were open to Eclipse swinging up a hard kick to the hinge at their abdomen and knocking them over. This time he separated the head by stomping down hard with his heel on the more delicate neck of this animatronic, listening to it crack apart as the exposed broken wires popped in the air.

The flight of stairs he found led both up and down. Any lighting down here was minimal and orange. As Eclipse started to descend, waves of hot air breezed up from below, making his coat swirl back in his trail. It reminded him of the way books and people spouted off about Hell and various peoples’ inevitable fall into it, as punishment for their wickedness.

It was possible that Hell did not exist for animatronics. He would make one if necessary.

There was just the one wide corridor at the bottom of the stairs. Eclipse paused, listening intently for any sounds of feet coming up behind him or shuffling out of sight from the further empty doorways. But all there was to hear was the faint rumble and hiss of the boiler room.

He shuffled forward. Moving slower, quieter. Yellow pupils flickered from doorway to doorway, searching. Hunting. Each stride carried past another empty room. His toothy grimace curved into a snarl as the red burned brighter.

And there they were.

Eclipse darted into the room, dropping down to one knee as he immediately lifted their head up within the palm of his hand. They were handcuffed to a pipe, one leg stretched out and a tourniquet of bloodied cloth tied tight around the limb. More blood had trickled from their head, dried in streaks down their cheek. Eyes shut and form uselessly limp, they moulded under Eclipse’s touch as he sat them up and pressed his fingers underneath their neck.

There. A pulse. Low and wavering, but there. He leaned his forehead against their’s, feeling the steady ticking of their life force under his hand as the waves of red started to recede from his servo. Only once he could lean back without the crushing desire to curl his fingers in and hold desperately, did he rock back on his heels and take one more look over them.

There was too much blood. They were positively drenched in it, a ruby scarf over their shoulders and sanguine painting their trousers, a ruined blush and faded lips. Rolling up their trouser leg, Eclipse eyed the thick red hole sunk into the skin, matched by an exit wound in the other side. Good, he wouldn’t be digging anything out of their flesh. But their coagulated blood still coated his hands and fingers, smeared on his coat as he reached up and snapped the handcuffs in two. As he lifted them up into his arms, he watched them shift and whine, more sparks of life through weak human noises. Like a newly born kitten. It was pitiful to watch, and he wanted nothing more than to have them back to squabbling, fretting, and laughing with him.

“I know you’re stubborn enough,” he murmured to them. “You won’t go down with a fight.”

“Eclipse?” Their eyes didn’t open but they heard him, knew him. His grip tightened, turning and sweeping out of the room.

A familiar face stood, blocking the stairs and flanked by several other goons. His painted face a leer, one of his legs wrapped up in bandages that showed black blooming stains. Eclipse had asked his mechanic to fix him, of course they would have known where to strike and make it hurt.

“I’m surprised you took so long,” the animatronic mocked. “We were wondering if-”

The tommy gun roared into the spiel, Eclipse cutting through any further acid dripping words with bullets that tore through the animatronic’s chest plate, shredding their finely made suit and ripping apart the metal below. He buckled and fell without further speech, limbs briefly jerking as Eclipse emptied the rest of his clip into the body.

In the hollow stillness that followed, he ejected the cartridge, lifted a new one out of his pocket, and slotted it into place. All still with his mechanic secure in his arms.

Eclipse’s blackened gaze swept over the goons that trembled in their places. They fell like cards, blown away by the wind. And bullet holes.

There was nothing to relish here. He’d come for what had been taken. He barely even cared how his bounty had already left the jail cells - some form of “good behaviour” in the shape of copious bribery, no doubt. He’d squandered his chance of a continued existence by putting his hands on what was Eclipse’s and spilling their sweet ruby red.

Stepping over the bodies in front of the stairway, Eclipse hurried up and through the corridors, retracing his steps back to the door he’d entered by. The man he’d left outside to bleed out had tried to crawl inside, and Eclipse didn’t care to check his stride as his foot crunched into the human’s hand on his way out.

Once more he shifted the body in his arms, tilting their head back so he could check their pulse. It was neither weaker nor stronger, a steady and faint rhythm. Slowly his fingers slid around the back of their neck, thumb still pressed on their pulse, pulling them in close as his shoulder dipped to curl around them.

Mine. The thought hit with such clarity that a shudder ran through Eclipse. A puff of steam spat out the back of his neck as he slowly straightened up, letting go of the mechanic’s neck to nudge stray hairs away from their face.

They needed immediate medical attention. The nearest hospital was an hour's walk. His brothers’ apartment was only half of that time in distance. They didn’t have the same equipment, but if Eclipse carried their mechanic into a hospital in his current state there would be more panicked questions than action. There’d be attention, possibly separation. But the hospital could be trusted to make sure his mechanic would be getting up by the next day. His brothers would find out one way or another about what he’d done to get his raven back.

Eclipse started walking.

#cw blood #cw violence #clockwork writings #offer of a toolbox #bloodstain fool #bounty hunter!eclipse #sleuth jesters #dcamv #dcaverse

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