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parigrin · 6 years ago

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He winced as he scrapped his knee against the side of the wall, his heavy drenched clothing squishing wetly against his white feathers. He smelled, he hurt, and he hadn’t eaten since that morning. If he’d eaten at all. He couldn’t quite remember, and it didn’t seem as important when compared to the sheer enormity of everything else that had happened that day. He got up and threw himself back into the task, scrambling to find enough space to press himself through the opening to the sewer drain. He’d seen a raccoon go down one of these before while waiting for a gig that had been canceled without notice and while he was no pesky procyonid, he was certain that If! He! Just! Through! Enough! Back! Into! It! He would somehow manage to get himself out. That or he’d be stuck down in the gutters for an eternity and he’d either go mad and start feeding on rodents to survive or meet some subterranean adolescent abomination with a thirst for pizza and a curious knowledge of ninjutsu. Whichever came first. He fell again, this time on his back and he gasped in pain, suddenly winded. He gave himself a minute to catch his bearings. Still hurt. Still Alive. Still needed to get out. He got up again, this time giving himself running space and hurtled himself up into the air. The pain of impact was immediate, fire breaking across his beak, he tasted blood where his all too sharp teeth had bitten into his tongue and a nearly overpowering crescendo timed with the beating of his own heart crashed over him, but above all that was a feeling of steely determination, because this time, unlike his other tries, he had managed to hook his hands out the opening. If he could just pull himself through, he’d finally be free of the dark and dreary tunnels. He pushed his arms out, wriggling and wreathing like a worm on a hook, scrapping his body this way and that, ripping feathers loose from their roots, breaking the exposed skin underneath those feathers in more places than he could count. He needed to get out. He couldn’t stay down here. The mantra repeated ad nauseum in his head. If there was a word that could accurately encompass exactly what was going through his mind, it escaped him. He felt the racing thrumming burning energy of his emotions coursing through his body, shocking him with the striking intensity of it, whatever “it” even was. He wanted it to stop. But a bigger part of it needed it to continue. He felt something creak dangerously around him and he pushed his face flat against the grown and tasting cloying dirt and gritty asphalt on his tongue, as he twisted his body up, kicking his legs against the walls below to give him some sort of leverage to help him maneuver himself out of his current predicament. It concerned him to know that despite the pain, despite everything else that was going on that he really should take more time to process, he was having more fun than he had in years. It was almost like he was on set again, and by the Late great Adam West did he miss the old show. He grunted as he carelessly scraped a foot against the unforgiving sewer walls. He’d kept in shape and was remarkably spry by most people’s estimation, but at his…mature… age perhaps climbing around in sewers was beneath him. He sighed, breathing deeply and went back to it. Jim knew he’d been in a rut for years; his feelings had been limited to boredom and anger and a desperate desire to free himself from one or the other. What he felt now, as he pushed himself agonizingly forward and rocked his hips to and fro until half of his waist was now successfully protruding from the mouth of the sewer, was none of the above. But though he might be enjoying himself, as much as he wanted to play the role of Darkwing, it just wouldn’t come to him as easily as he felt it should. Whatever emotion, whatever drive he now felt coursing through him was so unconnected with what he typically associated with his “Darkwing Persona” that it might as well have been from an alternate universe for all they had in common. It was angry and buzzing and he wasn’t entirely sure he liked it. Really wasn’t sure at all. But he reasoned, continuing to thrash about like hooked trout, it had still managed to galvanize him into action and that was more than could be said of anything he’d felt for more years than he cared to admit. The exasperation he felt as he tried to free his behind from the great gaping maw it was currently trapped in made him feel more aware, more present, more like the “old” him than he could honestly remember himself being since the realization had finally sunk in that no matter how many petitions his old fans threw together, there would be no miraculous resurrection from the grave of cancellation for his old show. He flailed against the cement holding him in place before he finally felt himself push forward, and the momentum of his thrusts carried him nearly all the way out. He’d caught his feet on the sides of the opening, but, by pressing his hands against the edges, he managed to finally remove one, then the other entirely. He let out some steadying deep breaths and hoisted himself on top of the curb to catch his breath. After gaining control of his bearings he scanned his surroundings and tried to piece together where he was. It was somewhere alarmingly close to the Beagle’s junkyard, he knew that much from having passed by the place before, but with the night shrouding everything in shadow, the specifics eluded him. He looked up at the cloudy sky above and pondered his new path for a moment, speculations on how often he’d be forced to pull himself out of sewers in the future were first and foremost in his mind, then shook his head. He wouldn’t go back to the way he was living before. He couldn’t, not really, thanks to the doppelganger. He had never really put much stock in the supernatural. His knowledge in its presence had come from the daily updated stream of Scrooge McDuck’s reign of capitalist tyranny as reported by one Roxanne Featherly. With so much evidence piled up. only an absolute fool would doubt its existence, of course. But the familiarity had been merely abstract, like knowing the Moon revolved around the Earth, it was a distant sort of knowledge that everyone knew but also never expected the information to be especially useful in one’s daily life. Now he knew better. It was said in old myths that finding one’s evil twin would lead to the original’s destruction, and after spending a mere day living with the knowledge of that hack’s existence he was inclined to believe the stories were true. How else could the knowledge of the movie’s existence fly under the radar of both his agent and himself for so long? He wondered for a moment if his agent had decided to throw in his luck with a newer model, then shrugged and picked himself off the ground. Thinking about his agent only brought up more negative thoughts, and if he was honest with himself, he wondered if any more negativity would make him explode. He glanced around the empty street and pushed himself off the curb, walking slouched with his hands in his pockets. He felt unnecessarily exposed, even with his face covered in the mask. Anyone could come by and see him, and, with his luck recognize him and then where would he be? He would like to say he could smooth talk his way out of any trouble but remembering his earlier embarrassment at the hands of the security guard, forced him to admit that acting did not, as much as he might vocally protest otherwise, come as easily to him as he wanted to believe. That was a blunt nail he’d had directors try to hammer into him for years, but it was not something he wanted to be embedded into the wood of his mental image of himself, and he had resisted as long as he was able. He’d tried to swallow his pride and find a new career, of course. He was Jim Starling, he did all his own stunts for his show. Surely talent agents would take note of that and he’d land a job as a stunt double at the very least? The years of bitter memories that told a different story than the one he’d wanted to believe said otherwise. He paused when he heard the telltale swish of a car moving through puddles and felt his heart race. It stopped at a stoplight two lampposts ahead of him and he began rapidly debating with himself over the desire to hide behind something to keep himself from being noticed or to keep walking and pretend there was absolutely nothing notable about the solitary figure of a man wearing a mask under his trademark wide-brimmed tando and sporting a fetching cape knitted into the collar of his double-breasted business suit. Honestly, the fact that he was by himself and strutting about at too dang late in the night not to be up to funny business at this hour o’clock for his evening jogs had made some of his more cautious neighbors tattle on him to the police call attendant more times than he could count. Harriette had once been a fan and had been inspired by Darkwing to join the local law enforcement. Meeting him had been a dream come true apparently, and then after the third time of meeting him at One in the morning when found he’d it difficult to sleep (though he had always insisted he was just doing his part to keep in shape), she had asked him to join a gym so they wouldn’t have to keep meeting as they had. By the fifth time, she had requested a transfer, all previous childhood nostalgia seemingly wiped clean by mere association with him. He’d met enough “biggest fans” who could no longer stand him that he had been desensitized to the phrase long ago. The car continued on its path when the light turned green and he absently hoped the fact that he was near Beagle territory made his appearance similar enough to the local canine crime family that the driver had been conditioned not to call the police at the first sign of a disguised prowler. He’d always been too optimistic. Whenever he’d shown his face for the part of a stuntman the same words had seemed to follow him. “Too clumsy.” They said. “Not enough finesse.” Others commented. There had been others still who had been less polite in their eternally helpful observations, and he felt their poisoned words flitting around his mind like horseflies biting into sensitive flesh whenever the opportunity prevailed itself. He shook his head like a wet dog attempting to dispel the water from its fur. He was injured and walking alone in the middle of the night with no backup with only vaguest inkling of his whereabouts. Now was not the time to have a midlife crisis, and it would him no good to reflect on the past. He’d wasted enough of his years feeling sorry for himself. Now was a time for action! He felt the urge to pose heroically and, had to temper it with a more realistic edge. He posed broodingly instead. Very dark. So very drama. His stance wilted a little when he remembered the itty bitty little problem with that was that he wasn’t entirely sure what action he should be taking. He was a little new to this “grim and gritty hero on the edge” scene. Obviously, he was going to experience some brain freeze while slurping down the slushy of frozen vengeance. The shows he’d watched before he could no longer follow the tales of capes and cowls without being weighed down by resentment had glossed over some immensely irritating hang-ups to the whole “pretending to be dead so he could catch the evildoer with his metaphorical pants down” ploy. The most obvious, of course, was that he needed to find himself some new threads until he could get his suit dry cleaned. He liked to think he had himself a strong stomach, but he doubted the common citizen of Duckberg could cope with parfum d'eaux usées évaporées with the same determination. A bath to rid himself of the aforementioned scent of sewage wouldn’t be remiss, either. This did, unfortunately, lead to the second most obvious problem: he was, temporarily at least, effectively broke. He sighed as he passed the first light post. With the news of his apparent passing, his bank account and assets would be frozen and without any family, friends, or hastily cobbled together fake identities to inherit his estate his effects would likely be seized in their entirety by the state. Some small part of him said that deliberately making the choice to go both penniless and homeless at the same time was taking this hero schtick a too far, but the thought was silenced by headbutting the second light post hard enough to dent the metal. He was not going to quit this thing until he had successfully ousted his duplicitous doppelganger and earned back the respect of his badly neglected fan. His thoughts turned to the young man he’d known for years without actually having met him truly as he stood considering whether to continue forward or cross the empty street, and he felt his stomach flare with the ache of very real guilt. Jim had not treated the younger man with the respect he should have meted out towards a true loyalist. Yes, he had been something of an irritation, he’d become very familiar with the weight of the man’s body crushing down on him after the fan had been struck with yet another fainting spell. But the fact dawned on him as he stood there under the green glow of the traffic light that this one fan had continued to come to his signings regardless of his own physical and psychological inhibitions. And that one detail should have told him more about the man than he’d thought to attribute to the pelican in all his years of knowing him. He decided to cross the street and waited impatiently for the light to turn red. Many fans had claimed to be his biggest fan but most had had only proven willing to come to his signing maybe one or twice before their interest in meeting him had ostensibly dried up into dust. But that singular fan, one Launchpad McQuack, had, for all intents and purposes, kept coming, even if it was just to faint on him yet again. He glanced around. There was no one out and about, not a single car to be seen anywhere, but he’d felt inclined to wait lest some cop trying to fill a quota tried to pull over a dead guy for jaywalking. He had nearly decided to walk across anyway when a single car sped by quick enough to almost clip him. ‘Seriously?’ He huffed in annoyance. ‘Was the universe itself out to get him? He hoped not. He was aware that, with the help of his double’s trickery, he had managed to badly damage his greatest fan’s regard of him, but he hoped with a wildness that worried him, that that sort of devotion his fan had possessed wasn’t the sort that burned away after a very awkward and embarrassing set of missteps he’d manage to make over the course of a single(how could it be only one?) very bad day. The light overhead turned from green to red and the white pedestrian signal flared into life. A car pulled up, and he laughed at the look of consternation on the driver’s face. He loved it when his misfortunes happened to others, it made him feel less singled out by fate. He began walking across at his own pace, and he’d nearly passed over when the light unexpectedly turned green without warning. The driver, a young canine whose path he now blocked blared his horn, startling Jim from his thoughts. He’d glared at the driver who had then proceeded to quite eloquently flip him the single-fingered salute. Now most days, he would have ignored it and gone about his business. He would have grumbled about the lack of respect he was given, but ultimately he would have done nothing. Today, with the strange sensitivity coursing through his veins, a mood he still had yet to name, he decided that today was not a day for inaction. Once that thought crossed his mind his body had stopped dead, practically of its own accord, and when the driver chose to slam his fist on the horn one more time, he sprang into action, moving forward and propelling himself up, up, and over the hood of the driver’s car and ramming himself through the open window of the vehicle and landing on top of the young man with enough force that his heckler was briefly pushed under the steering wheel. The driver, a young canine with a dark mane of greasy black locks that parted on both sides of his face, had a thing for the punk scene(or was it goth? Maybe Elmo? He found it difficult to differentiate between the fashion trends of the poetically minded, it had something to do with music, and poetry, and public safety ads, but really, they all looked like they shopped at the same stores, it wasn’t his thing, but he could respect the work they put into the aesthetics)and was well tailored if the clothing he wore was any indication. The skull clasp on his purple cloak fit nicely in his hand when his hands shot down to get a better grip on him. The two began a dangerous game of whack-a-mole, with Jim’s fists as the mallet and the dog’s face as a terribly tenacious talpid. He removed the keys from the car to prevent the vehicle from crashing into the light posts. The younger man then proved he possessed a rather strong set of jaws when he’d chosen to latch an impressive set of fangs onto the duck’s knee. The disgraced actor had sworn out a string of obscenities that would have immediately landed him in hot water with the censors and had bopped him in the nose, trying to get the pooch to remove the teeth from their agonizing hold on his sensitive joint. This only succeeded in causing him to sink his teeth deeper into the flesh of his leg. He was seized with the urge to use his own teeth on the tyke to show him what it truly meant to bite someone but managed to resist the temptation. As the older of the two, he would be a more civilized party and biting a young man to assert dominance was pressing the envelope a little too hard, even for him. His mind rapidly tried to think of a solution to his problem but kept coming up blank. What he really needed was a vial of pepper spray. Finding himself fresh out of pepper spray, he attempted to spit in the whelp’s eyes, figuring it could at least provide a decent distraction that would allow him to free himself from the kid’s muzzle. Unfortunately, the operating phrase in that sentence was ‘attempt’ because instead of a neat expel of saliva, his throat began hacking up mucus that bubbled from his mouth and clung to his chin. He tried a couple more times but was met with failure each time. Still, the move eventually did its job because when enough of the gathered spittle had begun dripping from his chin the dog’s eyes widened in horrified disgust and he released his leg with an alarmed “Oh my Go-” he was silenced by the duck’s vindictive kick, and the younger man’s body crumpled before it slid limply under the steering wheel and moved no more. Jim hastily scooted into the passenger’s seat and watched the dark form warily in the off chance that the canine roused from the place his body now lay and began taking deep breaths. He began to shake and shiver, all earlier bravado draining from his features as trepidation began to set in and his heart began to beat faster in what he recognized as the early stages of hysteria. While he could claim that he’d been provoked, it didn’t change the reality that the person he had just attacked was obviously a member of the Beagle Crime Family. He’d seen the boy in the news once or twice. Usually accompanied by similarly dressed littermates. He doubted the Beagles would give a tinker’s curse about at his motivations for attacking one of their own. All they would do was see what he’d done and rightly call a spade a shovel and he’d have the entire lot of them on his tail feathers the moment his actions were discovered. And, to toss an already burnt marshmallow on a stick and thrust it into the fire, he hadn’t even intended to attack the dog in the first place. He was used to intrusive thoughts(he was currently holding out against the impulse to lay all his cards on the table and enact various methods of ridding himself of his predicament terminally in ways both disturbing and physically improbable), but to the best of his knowledge, he had never acted on them. His thoughts had often disturbed him, especially when he’d been in the springtime of his life when his feelings had been more varied, and he hadn’t felt like his brain had been enveloped by an endless fog. The years of anguished apathy had deadened how very unsettling he’d once found them, but he hadn’t thought he’d start to treat them as if they were an innate part of his decision making. The truth that he hadn’t even notice before he was already in motion cast further shadow over the course of events. Now he had to decide what to do next. He groaned and eyed the dog again. The younger man was still lying face down, head twisted at an odd angle, from his placement on the passenger’s side of the car, he couldn’t make out whether the boy was breathing or not, and when he leaned closer he couldn’t tell whether to be relieved or not with the knowledge that the dog still lived. He glanced around suspiciously, searching his peripheral vision for any onlookers. Finding none he sighed and straightened, hand going to the door to open it. The specifics of what he’d done would scarcely matter if he was caught out in the open with the…victim (?) of his latest lapse judgment laying in plain sight for any kibitzer to take notice of his actions. He’d be placed behind bars just as quickly as if the dog’s own crimes had ceased to exist, and Jim had instead put the wraps on the near-mythical upstanding citizen who volunteered at homeless shelters in their spare time and would never have ever considered hurting a fly. When he reached the driver’s side, he made another surreptitious check of his surroundings. Finding them unchanged and just as empty as they’d been when this mess started, he opened the driver’s door and hauled the limp Beagle out by his arm sockets. Part of him felt he should be more concerned that he could brush off his earlier alarm just by focusing on what he needed to do next, while a second argued he was merely compartmentalizing his tasks to better organize his activity to avoid further indiscretion, while a third voice wondered if he was just pretending to give himself the third degree just to feel better about himself as a person. He decided he’d rather not ask himself any further questions after that, choosing to focus instead on the task at hand.

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